New frequencies

Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

A lot of experimental sound happening in Sydney at present is appearing in somewhat unexpected locations. Sonic Alchemy, a series of afternoon performances, was held at the Brett Whiteley Studio in Surry Hills, set in front of Whiteley’s painting, Alchemy.

Experimental sound and music has long been associated with gallery spaces. The art world has often been more accepting of new and difficult sounds than the music world, especially in the name of art. However, in this case, the surreal imagery and explicit actions of Whiteley’s monstrous work, to my mind, are not at all in keeping with the improvised, minimal, experimental audio presented here.

The series of improvised trios has been curated by local musician Jim Denley, and includes a number of improvisers currently active in the Sydney new music and audio scene. For this afternoon’s performance the 3 musicians are set up without PA, each with his own amplification via guitar amps and a shabby home stereo.

Oren Ambarchi is the best known of new musicians to emerge from Sydney. He is a sought-after performer on the international scene, and is also very active locally. Using a heavily modified guitar and an array of guitar pedals, he pulls audio that has little causal connection to his instrument and actions. Less well known are Peter Blamey and Brendan Walls. Like Ambarchi, they use a series of feedback techniques to draw sounds from their analogue technologies. In both cases, this is centred simply around a mixing desk which has been ‘improperly’ patched and so draws different types of feedback. These sounds are often high pitched, extremely stripped back and minimal: sinewaves, squarewaves and the odd standingwave for good luck. Though not loud, these frequencies can be disturbing to the uninitiated. Casual visitors to the gallery quickly press fingers firmly into their ears.

The performance began quietly and minimally, the tones and frequencies in the high range making use of the reverberant space of the gallery, and ranged into a more fully textured and disjunctive style as the musicians let their individual voices play out. The key moment came near the end when a slow burning drone was initiated, the sound gradually building in volume and density. With no PA or sound engineer, the performers were free to take this to the limits—a wild card in this environment. Just as the volume reached the limit for many in the audience, Ambarchi created an extremely rich and dense audio. A slow fade to the end seemed inevitable but this was dramatically subverted by Blamey who continued playing after Ambarchi and Walls had clearly finished. Improv is usually about the group.

As with much new audio, the space plays an extremely important role in determining the outcomes. The variation this space creates is well worth experimenting with, and what better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than in an unfamiliar environment with new and improvised music.

Sonic Alchemy, curated by Jim Denley, artists Peter Blamey, Brendan Walls, Oren Ambarchi, AGNSW’s Brett Whiteley Studio, Surry Hills, Sydney, April 21

RealTime issue #49 June-July 2002 pg. 35

I’m off to the Judy for my first experience of Elision. I’d heard about them, I’d heard they were real quality, and I’d heard they were mainstream modernity—the classical avant-garde of the conservatorium. It was all true. The program drew on material from the last decade or two. Most pieces were by composers involved collaboratively with Elision.

The program opened with a solo percussion piece written by Richard Barrett and played on the vibraphone by Peter Neville. The performance was a stunner. He’s playing chords with a couple of mallets in each hand (a bit like playing golf with 4 clubs and 4 balls at once), and the piece must have thousands of notes—all sorts of chords, and it’s really fast. I’d love to see this guy working the chopsticks at a Yum-Cha. Neville made a couple of early mistakes (whoops—missed), but this is a failure rate any machine would envy. It’s easy to get used to the enormous polish that excellent performers have.

Two duets by Michael Finnissy for guitar and voice followed, with Geoffrey Morris on guitar and Deborah Kaiser singing. Great voice, especially low. Lots of medieval-style ornament. The guitar was a bit soft in the first piece, but came into its own in the second. This was followed by a solo piece written by Aldo Clementi. Morris’s guitar was assured, but the piece itself was a little incoherent for me. There’s that whole old school avant-garde thing—which of these two random sequences do you prefer? It’s an approach to composition that runs through the entire concert program. From an information/theoretic point of view, there’s a lot of information in random sequences. From a musical point of view, there’s none.

The first half of the program then finished with a bravura solo performance of a Richard Barrett trombone piece by Ben Marks. Once again the performance was gob-smacking. However, as a compositional strategy I can’t help but think that ‘new sounds for old instruments’ lost its cachet about 20 or 30 years ago.

After the break was the highlight of the concert, Timothy O’Dwyer performing his composition, Sige, for solo bass sax and prerecorded backing. The piece begins with O’Dwyer centre stage—rocker hair and Pelaco shirt—carrying a bass saxophone. Underneath, a low sustained drone changes up a fourth like a sluggish 12-bar blues is about to roll forth. Instead, the drone continues as O’Dwyer fumbles about with the sax, a few fitful noises, classic ‘just can’t get into it’ stops and starts. The drone stops for a brief moment and the process repeats. But with each repeat, O’Dwyer starts to play more, until we’re watching and hearing wild, Jimi Hendrix-meets-Mac-truck multiphonics, trills, grunts and squawks. It’s the archetypal sax solo. And he does this again and again and again. The playing is phenomenal, but it’s totally hermetic, the performer isolated in his own ecstatic space like a caged rat pressing the food bar over and over again, raising the question: Who’s a solo for?

Empire of Sound, Elision ensemble, The Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, Brisbane, March 24

RealTime issue #49 June-July 2002 pg. 35

Gideon Obarzanek

It’s been 7 years since the formation of Chunky Move, with 4 of those as Victoria’s state dance company, and Gideon Obarzanek is the first to admit that developing his craft in the public eye—and with the burden of associated expectation—has been challenging. This year, a move to a new studio with expanded facilities has helped stabilise the company’s local connections with open classes for professionals and

Maximise, a program offering space and promotional support for independent practitioners. After polling the public about their tastes in contemporary dance, Chunky Move are presenting the results in Wanted, a double-bill featuring Clear Pale Skin and Australia’s Most Wanted: Ballet for a contemporary democracy. Later this year, the company is touring to Sydney with the multi-media installation Closer, before heading off to Budapest and France.

Commissioned earlier this year to create a piece for Graz Opera Ballet in Austria, Obarzanek took the opportunity to meet up with European choreographers including Alain Plaitel and Wim Vandekeybus.

GO: Graz Opera Ballet was my first commission in 3 and a half years, and was both exciting and scary. After 3 years hard work in Melbourne, it seemed important to work with other people again. I was very happy with the work I did—it was an early version of Clear Pale Skin, and I came back and reworked it with my dancers. It’s good to travel but I have changed and need to work much more intensively, and with dancers who know the way I work. I don’t think you advance very far as a freelancer. But I did come back with enthusiasm and a lot more confidence, wanting to do more and do it better.

How did Wanted fit in with the work you have been doing lately?

In previous works [like Arcade], I have had an interest in the relationship with the audience. Then I came across a book by 2 Russian visual artists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who in 1993 conducted a survey to find out the ‘most wanted’ painting. I thought the discussions in the book were really compelling in regard to how a vision could be arrived at through the mechanism of a democratic process. Then we had the federal election last year, which I found simply demoralising—the 2 major parties were following the polls very closely and not taking responsibility for important decision-making. I remembered this book, and thought it would be interesting to make a dance piece about how a work could come together from the results of what people most wanted to see. The work of Komar and Melamid arrived at a style of painting from a period that most suited the answers—a Romantic landscape from the 19th century. While my work does arrive at the ‘most wanted’ work, the piece is close to an hour and is mostly concerned with the report itself and an analysis of the result—it’s actually performed to a reading of the report. So in a sense it’s a documentary, and not about dance but (a report which is) read through dance.

This, being a novelty or ‘gimmick’, is quite different to how you normally structure your pieces.

It’s very different. The report directs the work, and it’s split into sub-sections such as choreographic structures and qualities of movement, music, costumes and sets. So it’s like a series of small chapters, and there is a process of reducing each element down to the highest preference and then adding all the elements together at the end. What was difficult was not to impose my own idiosyncrasies on the work. It really became group-choreographed through a series of tasks I set, so I didn’t have much input into the actual movements or expressions.

It is interesting that you’ve arrived at this project given Chunky Move’s agenda to open up contemporary dance to new audiences—the idea of polling is almost the logical conclusion to that.

And that definitely began with Arcade’s format, a series of 6 choreographers and directors in 6 shops, with the works going on simultaneously. The audience could make a decision about what they did/didn’t want to see and how long they would stay with works—which also made the works somewhat competitive. As an artist running a major, state-funded dance company, you are very exposed to discussions about performing arts on a federal and state level. It seems in Australia, particularly since the Nugent Report, many of our conversations about art have been about who makes it, how much it costs, is it getting to the right people, and is it what people really want. This work is a response to the language, time and emphasis that is placed on the economics of art. And it’s certainly not an answer but probably another question. It’s an extreme response, but it came quite naturally.

You are constantly driven to make work that’s relevant to a large audience. What other things do you draw from? Last time I spoke to you, you mentioned film, music and cartoons.

I’ve always had a curious nature. When I was younger people thought I was too distracted from being a dancer, whereas now it’s an advantage in regard to making work. But I must say I feel a bit less connected to pop culture—particularly TV. I think I made signature works earlier on—things that came naturally to me about how I was placed in the world. But I don’t want to tell those stories anymore, and I’ve become more interested in the medium itself. So my works have become a little more analytical; they’re not story or character-based but about the relations between performance and people.

Regarding the themes of Clear Pale Skin, I recalled a conversation we had about the horrors of ballet school—is your past revisiting you in this work?

The whole ballet environment is a strong influence in this piece. It revolves around an obsession that one woman has with another, believing this other woman is extraordinarily perfect and that she herself is not. These kinds of distortions are certainly drawn from my experience at a suburban ballet school and then the Australian Ballet School in Melbourne. Seeing how obsessive and fanatical dancers can be about their training, the perceptions of themselves and the people around them, and the competitive nature of it all. So in this work there is a lot of faux ballet going on which is used to set up the relationship between these 2 women.

Did it ever become a problem having these dancers who are quite perfect and the piece becoming self-referential?

No, not really. Luckily most of my cast, and particularly Fiona Cameron, take an interest in the idea of the grossly imperfect and work on all their insecurities, letting them fester and come forth. You certainly don’t get the impression they are perfect when they do that. And the piece is not really talking about imperfect people but their perceptions of themselves, so the dancers can be quite amazing and beautiful.

The company has this great new studio—how has that changed things?

We started here 7 weeks ago when it was still a hard hat area. This building houses Chunky Move, Australia’s Centre for Contemporary Arts [ACCA] and Playbox’s set-building workshop. We have 2 studios where previously we had one. Previously too, the conditions of rental from the Opera meant that if they had rehearsals they could kick us out. One of the studios is enormous, like an aircraft carrier, and the other is much smaller. We are clocking a lot of hours because we can stay here all night. It’s great to have a home. We’ve also noticed that our morning classes, which are open to professionals, have increased in attendance and this year we’re going to have a lot more showings. Lucy Guerin is showing her work here later in the year, which will be the first time the studios will be used for a season. And we have a program called Maximise where choreographers can have studio space, technical equipment and some marketing for independent projects. We do have these resources and we like to share them when we can.

Working in other media—film, CD-ROM, installation—is an interest of yours. What have you got coming up in the future?

I have an installation with Peter Hennessy, Darrin Verhagen and Cordelia Beresford called Closer. It’s a projection in a room, the opposite wall of which is padded with sensors. People coming in are encouraged to ram their bodies into the wall, which effects the film. It’s not cryptic either—people learn very quickly which part of the wall effects which part of the film so it becomes a tool, a game.

We shot it on film but it actually uses video because all the information sits on a hard drive—but it does have a very rich filmic look. It focuses on a body and it is shot in close-up and extreme close-up. Working in a live context you assume that the body is viewed from head to toe, even in a small venue. The one thing that film or video has to offer, and which I like as a choreographer, is the close-up. Working with dancers in a studio you see a lot of interesting detail which disappears when you put it on stage—like tendons under the skin, and hand grips. One of the reasons I’m so attracted to the installation is the relation it has to moving bodies in the room, and the choreography emerging as people move around and ram the wall and make teams—that live aspect interests me most. Closer was commissioned by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image [ACMI] for its new building in Federation Square, but it’s not going to be open in time so we’re previewing it in antistatic at Performance Space in late September.

See Jonathan Marshall’s review of Wanted.

–

RealTime issue #49 June-July 2002 pg. 37

Julie-Anne Long, MissXL

photo Heidrun Löhr

Julie-Anne Long, MissXL

An orange light flashes in a corner of the Seymour Centre forecourt. A tinny recording of a familiar tune bounces off the walls. Suddenly a Mr Whippy ice-cream van emerges, appearing at first larger than it is. A bemused looking, genuine Mr Whippy drives. In the passenger seat is Julie Anne-Long in messy orange wig, her head moving left to right on a horizontal plane while her forearm, propped up on the window sill, moves up and down. Both gestures are precisely coordinated, surreally slow motion. As the van slides by, a grotesquely grinning Mrs Whippy is captured almost in freeze frame.

Mrs Whippy is one of 3 pieces in a dance-performance programme presented by One Extra Dance featuring MissXL, the performance persona adopted by Long whose body and spirit refuse to conform to balletic (or even postmodern dance) ideals. She is not the dutiful dancing daughter but a wayward woman conceptualising, choreographing and performing a contemporary and hybrid form of burlesque. In Mrs Whippy, MissXL “calls on her prestidigitatorial and pantomimic powers to expose a mother’s fears”; in Cleavage she “holds you to her bosom in a socio-erotic danse macabre”; and in Leisure Mistress she “discovers terpsichorean heights in a dancer’s demise” (program notes).

After introducing the audience to the delights of Giuseppe’s ice cream, Mrs Whippy transforms into stereotypically evil characters from children’s literature. With a long black beard she dances in front of the iron gates of the forecourt, hopping from one leg to another, one arm moving up as the other goes down, the rhythm awkward, hands balled into fists. Long skillfully manages the large open space as she moves through the audience on her way to each new performance place. At one point the audience is ushered into a triangular nook where we watch through a large window as she dances on a box wearing a long, crooked nose. Long’s final dance as Mrs Whippy is one of stillness. She stands on a box lit by the ice-cream van as moving images are projected onto her apron. Robert Helpman in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang entices 2 children into a playhouse on the back of a horse and cart. As the children move inside the house the exterior falls away to reveal the bars of a cage. At this point Long howls in pain, her body slumping forward as she clutches her apron in a fit of maternal anxiety.

Cleavage is performed in the Downstairs Theatre. The set is triangular with the base running across the front of the stage and the apex receding into a vanishing point at the far end. Stage left sits a reel to reel recorder. The recorded voice of a male paleontologist recites information on geological formations and rock cleavage. Long appears stage right, chatting informally with the audience while dressing in a brightly coloured bustier and performing dramatically exaggerated gestures of grooming. The reel to reel recorder plays throughout Cleavage incorporating a number of different voices—a young female change room attendant tells stories about fitting women with brassieres. Male voices discussing the look and feel of breasts are juxtaposed with those of women. Children’s voices delineate similarities between breasts and buttocks while a young boy asserts that he always draws pictures of women with cleavage! A dance theorist pontificates on the invisibility of breasts in dance. Babies suckle. Long skillfully interacts with these voices as the stories cue segments of her live performance. Cleavage is a consummate work. The recorded stories complement an intelligent and witty live text. Long’s versatile dance performance melds dramatic and performative elements. Cleavage replaces the brooding malevolence of Mrs Whippy, where the boundaries between good and evil merge, with an up front and often hilarious piece of dance-theatre about fleshy bits.

Long’s world-weary Leisure Mistress, modeled in part on Marlene Dietrich in her later performing life, is wheeled into the performance space by a faithful assistant (Victoria Spence). Dressed in blue chiffon with oversized faux diamond rings dripping off her fingers, the Leisure Mistress repeatedly tucks a wayward section of blonde bob behind her ear. Her first dance (she announces each numerically) is performed lying on her back. Only her hands and feet move in repetitive phrases in time with a perky musical track. The other dances are similarly compressed variations of the Diva’s once famous dance pieces now performed in absurdly reduced form. One dance is performed leaning against the side of the stage. As her legs continually collapse under her, the Leisure Mistress runs her hands down her thighs to re-straighten them. This correctional gesture becomes a key movement phrase in her dance of extremities. In the final dance (“the first she ever performed”) the Leisure Mistress undertakes a costume change which proves disastrous. In a hair net and an undersized dress which gapes at the zipper, she cavorts about the stage performing derivative contemporary dance movements in an attempt to remain relevant to her audience (having described herself as a “submerging artist” in the age of the emerging artist). Somehow this final image captures what Julie-Anne Long is so good at conjuring and performing in dance: the weird and wonderful world of the grotesque and the anxieties that form it.

Miss XL; concept, choreographer, performer, writer Julie-Anne Long; designer Rohan Wilson; music (for Mrs Whippy) Sarah de Jong; video Samuel James; dramaturg/co-writer Virginia Baxter; lighting Janine Peacock; One Extra Dance, Seymour Centre, April 3-13

RealTime issue #49 June-July 2002 pg. 38

Questions of space and time often arise in Shelley Lasica’s work. Space has been highlighted in a number of her Behaviour Series, with work being presented in very small rooms, in large auditoriums, in hallways, and in galleries. In those works, the viewer was often and variously made aware of the ways in which his/her body was implicated in the viewing relationship.

History Situation, like Situation Live (1999), presents issues in a sedimented manner. Its themes appear to be trapped beneath that which occurs on the surface. For example, there is a sense of narrative in both works. Dancers combine, interact and separate. There is almost a story to their actions but the nature of the story is never made clear. Rather it is treated performatively and according to kinaesthetic relationships.

Five dancers enter the newly refurbished Horti Hall, all in turquoise. Each takes off his/her cloak and rests it on the warm wooden floor. The space is wider than it is deep. A large translucent rectangle lies on a tilt at the back, lit in reddish brown. Two monitors show a series of images by Ben Speth. These are sparse public spaces; phone booths, atriums, streetscapes, banks—locations populated not by people but reminiscent of them. The locations may be deserted but their content suggests a virtual habitat within which human movement may be found, movement such as occurs outside the monitors.

The dancers are connected. They enter together and leave together. They wear the same colour and material, folded and pleated to suggest a degree of individuality but clearly they are of similar ilk. A delicate piano arises; the staccato rhythms of Jo Lloyd’s movement offers another music. The 5 form a number of beautiful tableaux—5 green bottles, all in a row. Not all the movement is elegant, dancerly; some of it is gestural, occasionally naturalistic. Jacob Lehrer and Jo Lloyd perform and repeat a duet. Deanne Butterworth and Bronwyn Ritchie move their hips in synch. The group gathers then disperses. Repetition, recognition.

The look of the Other plays its part in these comings and goings—bearing witness, signifying relationships. There is conflict, and opposition; referring perhaps to events within what is called the Source Script by Robyn McKenzie. The dynamics of 5,4,3,2 and 1 are quite complex in all their combinations, especially as there is a sense that each configuration means something particular, something that cannot simply be transferred from one body to another. And yet, the emergence of one body, one lived corporeality in all these dancers, is palpable. Although Lasica doesn’t perform here, her body is evident in the bodies of the dancers, an absent presence.

Francois Tetaz’ music assisted the sense of connection and buried narrative within and throughout the piece. Its ending was evocative, e-motional, allowing for personal speculation and imaginary dialogue. If this work was about time, the final moments of music and movement suggested a metaphysics of time, of lived time, human (inter)action, finite and focused. The dancers collect their cloaks and leave the space. Time is no more.

History Situation, choreographed and directed by Shelley Lasica; dancers Deanne Butterworth, Tim Harvey, Jacob Lehrer, Jo Lloyd, Bronwyn Ritchie; music Francois Tetaz; set and lighting Roger Wood; costumes Richard Neylon; source script Robyn McKenzie; images Ben Speth, Horti Hall, Melbourne, March 14-24.

Here. The place in which you find yourself. From the viewing level, the rear stairs of the Turbine Hall drop though 2 tiers like a medieval descent into purgatory and hell. Brian Lucas begins his story eye to eye with his audience, a story of victim/aggressor drawing on the impulses of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and lures us from safety into less certain waters.

Voice and movement embody his text, a recollection of events one cold New Zealand night. Our gaze travels down through this torch-lit temple to an intimate space—a dining table, a serve of raw liver, a romantic dinner date. The symbiosis of word and gesture set against Brett Collery’s aural backdrop of a girl pop group, returns us to another version of events. Repetition lulls, then puts us on alert. Danger intensifies, and Lucas disappears below as into the mouth of hell. Calmly, he re-emerges from the basement—as though oblivious to the ravaging animal that had just given vent to its most depraved desires.

Here/There/Then/Now, an initiative of director Cheryl Stock, brings together independent solo dance artists and their collaborators (visual, multi-media, lighting and sound designers). Four unique sites around the Brisbane Powerhouse were nominated for the creative response of 3 discrete creative teams who came together under Stock’s direction in the fourth space, the Visy Theatre, for Now.

There. We follow our guide and peer down into a concrete cell resonating with Nok Thumrongsat’s plaintive Thai singing. Choreographer Leanne Ringelstein relentlessly assailing the walls of their confinement. Trapped, neither acted upon the space in the way Lucas did, but instead made themselves subordinate to it, responding within the language range of their respective disciplines. Purporting to examine cultural responses to stress and confinement, There ended with its first action—the assertion of one individual against an/other, unfortunately leaving off just when it got interesting.

Then. Time past. Embodied in still life, a painting in 3D: Vanessa Mafe and Jondi Keane’s response to the theatre foyer site. Still life? And yet the dancer moves, exploring the installation—an arrangement of stoneware on a suspended glass table. Picking up, putting down, rolling around an orange. Ko-Pei Lin looked lovely in her orange-lined hoop petticoat, lovely in Ian Hutson’s stills that line the walls. So…why is she moving? Then might have worked just as well in a conventional black box for the dance added no new meaning, attempted no journey, held no dialogue with the place Ko-Pei Lin was in.

Beyond its visual design, Then was an aesthetic frolic within the language of contemporary dance as accumulated in the performative body of Ko-Pei Lin. (A smattering of oriental hand movements slightly enriched the vocabulary.) For director Stock, an aspect of the project was the way in which the body’s accumulated history of technique and culture inform creative outcomes. The exclusive physicality of these dancers’ histories sometimes seemed to remove them from the immediacy of the present. Ringelstein’s voicelessness in There seemed an unnatural gag on her expressive potential, where singer Thumrongsat moved with a natural fluidity (holistically) across the borders of discipline. Thumrongsat was actor/singer/dancer, her performative body providing sound, gesture and meaning.

Now. Where we culminate, where we converge. Stock speaks of the “site as a sparsely fragmented repository of what has gone before”, and of “stairs to nowhere, deep crevices with no purpose.” If the site began as a void of ambiguous negation, Now did little to fill it. Juxtapositions that are merely serendipitous can’t be relied on to engender new narratives. Floating objects—hoop skirt, finger cymbals, a candle—referenced the previous works as part of a sea of memory: amorphous and impact-free. Three discrete themes, woven together in time and space, never bore upon each other to produce a fourth element.

After a while though, a tableaux evolves. Girl eats orange, transforming still life. A story is retold, transforming the past. Finally, a step forward, into the unknown, into future stories. The re-action becomes action; relationships move beyond design and sensation and begin to initiate meanings for the spectator, allowing us to become active listener, not just voyeur.

Lucas’ creative response was both active and reactive. If the site was point A, his Dahmer text gave him point B, between which a productive tension took place. This tension forced him to apply conceptual (rather than corporeal) agility in order to command the given space to serve a greater purpose. After Lucas’ layered and multi-disciplined opening, what seemed lacking elsewhere in the program was an explicit intellectual response, an equivalent engagement with a resource of ideas. Here was where I wanted them all to be.

Here/There/Then/Now, director Cheryl Stock; choreographers Brian Lucas, Leanne Ringelstein, Vanessa Mafe, Cheryl Stock; dancers; Ko-Pei Lin, Leanne Ringelstein; singer Nok Thumrongsat; composer Stephen Stanfield; sound artist Brett Collery; visual artists Jondi Keane, Ian Hutson; lighting design Jason Organ, Brisbane Powerhouse, May 15-18

At a time when opportunities to experience seasons of contemporary dance works are thin on the ground in Sydney, events like the forthcoming The Action Pack season at The Studio at Sydney Opera House (June-July) and antistatic at Performance Space (September-October) are welcome indeed—as is the news that Robyn Archer’s 2003 Melbourne Festival will have a dance focus. Given the demise of the national touring organisation Made to Move, these days it seems easier for choreographer Phillip Adams to get to Mongolia (as he did courtesy of Asialink in 2000) than to Sydney (although this trip is with the last of Made to Move’s funding). The chance to see 3 companies of such high calibre as Adelaide’s Australian Dance Theatre, Melbourne’s BalletLab and Kate Champion’s Force Majeure performing in a mini festival is exciting enough. This, plus the offer of generous discounts (“a strictly limited offer” of $69 for all 3 shows), is almost too good to be true.

The Studio publicists have gone all out promoting the threesome as “fast, fraught with risk, breathtaking, the equivalent of white water rafting” and my favourite, “sex on legs.” Thankfully, they’ve also found a few column centimetres for the smarts, ie for “fresh” read radical approaches to dance and for “thought provoking” read personal, political and sociological. There’s even a warning about “adult themes.”

The last time we saw Phillip Adams’ Ballet Lab in Sydney was in the remarkable Amplification which, like a lot of Australian contemporary dance works, has made successful international appearances. The company’s new work, Upholster, is part installation, part deconstructed movement, part furniture workshop with live sound mixes by turntable master Lynton Carr. RealTime’s Philipa Rothfield has described Upholster as “intricate and detailed, manifesting Adams’ deep-seated interest in design. Hinting at the conceptual grounds of upholstery, it weaves an aesthetic web. On the surface, beneath the surface, questions are covered over, but they are there to be discerned as the work unfolds.” (RealTime#43, p33).

Sydney audiences went wild for ADT’s Birdbrain (RealTime 44. p37) which toured here last year with its witty and sometimes unbelievably vigorous dance vocabulary. This time they’re bringing their new work, The Age of Unbeauty, which premiered as a work-in-progress at this year’s Adelaide Fringe. Once again choreographed by ADT’s artistic director Garry Stewart, with sound design by Luke Smiles and video by David Evans, this is a developing work. Conceived at a time when world politics were making their own risky moves, Stewart describes the dark poetry of The Age of Unbeauty as “a highly personal response to the terror in man’s ability to act inhumanely…”

Once the word was out, it was impossible to get a ticket to Kate Champion’s Same, same But Different which premiered at this year’s Sydney Festival. Breaking new ground in the live/filmed dance genre, Same, same like all the works in The Action Pack season, showcases the work of some truly remarkable Australian dancers (RealTime #47, p6). And across the 3 works, you’ll also see a star lineup of collaborating artists—among them, filmmaker Brigid Kitchin, designers Geoff Cobham, Dorotka Sapinska, Gaelle Mellis, Damien Cooper and composer Max Lyandvert.

The Action Pack: The Age of Unbeauty, Australian Dance Theatre, June 25-July 6; Upholster, BalletLab, June 26-6; Same, same But Different, Kate Champion & Force Majeure; The Studio, Sydney Opera House. Bookings 02 9250 7777. www.sydneyoperahouse.com Forum: Champion, Stewart, Adams, The Studio, June 29, 5pm.

Having only just returned from Melbourne after 11 days of working with young writers on responding to an exhausting, exhilarating and innovative 2002 Next Wave, and having walked straight into helping get RealTime 49 to the printer and onto the streets, there’s been little time to think about an editorial. So this will be brief.

One of the saddest things about Australia’s refugee crisis is the widespread lack of empathy for those seeking a haven from war and persecution. This amounts to a major, in fact a national, failure of imagination. How rare it is to hear questions asked about what it would be like to be a refugee, how you would handle it emotionally, who you would turn to for help and, yes, what it would mean financially.

However, there are a growing number of artists who are addressing the issues, answering these questions through their art, direct protest and some quirky activism. Bec Dean’s “The artist and the refugee” describes the political fictions by which refugees are trapped (not just in mandatory detention centres), the many ways artists are trying to undo them and where you can turn to participate. Kerrie Schaeffer reports on a Newcastle youth performance written by an Iraqui-Australian about the refugee experience. In Melbourne I saw Platform 27 & Melbourne Workers Theatre’s The Waiting Room, a gruelling recreation of life in a detention centre.

The second notable failure of imagination comes from the Cultural Ministers Council in the form of The Report to Ministers on an Examination of the Small-To-Medium Performing Arts Sector. The document produces a classic double bind. Yes, the sector is the key innovator in performance and it is in financial surplus (kind of). But, yes, the sector is experiencing a serious diminution of its capacity to innovate for want of funds, artist burnout etc. The solution? Nothing much. Everything (business planning, clearer government expectations, inter-government cooperation etc) but funds. Like the visual arts (also subject to an enquiry already signalling no new funds), the small-to-medium performing arts sector desperately needs additional, ongoing funds and the suggested reforms to government communication. It’s not just that the sector is disappointed by the lack of funds at the end of this particular rainbow, the word was out about that a while back, but it is shaken by the shoddy analysis and the perpetuation, in fact, of the double bind which applauds the work and keeps it in firmly and exploitatively in check. KG

Disability, disability culture, and identity politics were just some of the themes and issues celebrated with passion and debated with rigour at the High Beam Festival. This festival offers a rich, colourful and at times, cutting edge program of theatre, music, film, dance and visual arts exploring the theme of disability. High Beam is not concerned with its marginalised status in the broader ‘arts as excellence’ arena, nor the spare seats and low profit outcomes. Its purpose is making the arts accessible to a group often excluded both from the arts and from the means of producing art. The ‘art as therapy’ model, or ‘medical model’ as some people call it, seems no longer acceptable as the modus operandi. While High Beam makes room for such art, its motivation is more closely aligned with a cultural development model that aims for an enriched and inclusive society where disability is not about being on the wrong side of ‘normal’ (as the medical model would have it). On the contrary, ‘coming out’ takes on a whole new meaning both within the festival productions and on the streets.

As other minority groups have staked an identity out of oppressive regimes of otherness, people with disabilities are making visible their bodies, identities, ideologies and sexualities, weaving personal narrative into works of theatre, comedy, dance and visual art and evoking new representations that challenge constructions of normalcy.

Caca Courage, presented by Access Arts and Queensland Performing Arts Centre, entertains, provokes and challenges the boundaries of ‘normality’. “Caca” is the French word for ‘poo poo’, and this work metaphorically ‘shits’ on the patronising idea that people with disabilities are so, so, courageous. This is achieved through a visually stunning production and a clever series of provocative moves that defamiliarises, in the Brechtian style of ‘alienation’, the ideologies of the ‘normal’ body.

Mat Fraser’s Sealboy: Freak moves beyond the personal narrative and juxtaposes 2 characters, one representing the historical genre of human freak show exhibits, and the other a contemporary actor with a disability struggling to eke out a career in the mainstream. Fraser uses the ‘spectacle’ of his body, at the same time as reclaiming the word ‘Freak’ in a deliberate attempt, in his words, “to shock people out of their complacency.” Fraser wonders whether he is in fact only read as a ‘freak that acts’, and not as a talented professional actor. Fraser worries that too often the audience responds with the ‘wow factor’ such as, ‘it’s incredible, what, with him having short arms and everything.’ Fraser’s show is a piece of realism yet he plays with notions of identity via postmodern pastiche, providing both entertainment and witty retort to straight culture through Rap-style music.

Most of It’s Queer is by Philip Patston from New Zealand, who describes himself as a gay disabled vegetarian, and who relates through comedy and in a very conversational style the everydayness of his cerebral palsy and life as an actor in a New Zealand soapie. Patston’s character and mannerisms add a charming quality to his stage presence. His contemplative, playful and yet often covertly serious material was well received by the audience. Patston claims, however, that he never goes on stage with the intent to educate people. “I’ve done that” he says “and an audience just sees right through it and goes, oh we’re being lectured at. So my work is to entertain but it comes through my life and my training as a social worker—that’s what makes it work—I’m taking the piss out of society.”

Aside from the performances—and perhaps more evocative—were the forums, workshops and post-show outings in which performers and artists came together to share conversation over food and wine. Often what goes missing in the reviewing of a production are these everyday spaces and unfolding of ideas. One may well imagine that in the difference of disability lies homogeneity, shared experiences and unifying ideologies. While on some level there is a sense of disability culture, many came to agree that indeed the word ‘culture’ could well be replaced with ‘culture(s)’ to reflect the real and surprising diversity amidst those who identify as people with disabilities. Debate raged over disability politics and the role of the arts. Some argued for the drawing of distinctions between ‘professional performance art’ and that which is described and experienced as ‘therapy.’ Whatever decisions are made for the next High Beam Festival, we can be guaranteed of a radical exposure to culture(s) of disability.

Sealboy: Freak, Mat Fraser; Most of It’s Queer, Philip Patston; Caca Courage, Access Arts & Queensland Performing Arts, High Beam Festival, Adelaide, May 3-12

For me the choreography is a vehicle that I use in performance…I feel like I’m more interested in using the material—going past the dancing, supported by technical foundations that I can move off from. I’m not concerned so much with being a good dancer—I’ve become interested in something on the other side of the dancing.

That is an issue—being the choreographer definitely effects the relationship. I can do what I want with it in a way. However, the material I’ve made with them has definitely come out of the dancers’ bodies too. The solos in traffic were worked out with them, were made on and with them. So the material itself is material that they do best. I think they ‘own it’ really well. We recently performed traffic in Melbourne at Bodyworks and that was one of the comments—that Katy and Nalina were right ‘in’ the movement.

Well it is what I’m interested in. I’m not sure that I am getting to the other side or going past doing the choreography well. Perhaps it’s a kind of different maturity…The dancers are concerned with looking good and that’s one of the things that makes them dance well, but I’m not concerned with that anymore. I think I probably was once. Now I simply use the material and the body I’ve got.

There’s always been a strong sense of performance when you dance—a presence and impression of spontaneity.

Years ago when I was doing more improvisation I think I probably did rely on my performance to pull it off, which may have developed a particular strength. But I’ve realised I really like working with the detail and that’s been a shift. Now I like to study the detail so that it’s very precise. And I’ve arrived at that without really knowing…Rather than creating freedom in the work itself, which can be a kind of trap in performance, I clean the choreography and I feel I have a reason to be out there. It gives me a different freedom—a space to listen and to be present to the moment. For instance, if it’s based on momentum, like the last section in traffic and some of the material in the new solo, there’s still a precision. Even if it’s very loose I can trace it and know it’s going to go through particular positions. I’ve got the template. There are degrees of improvisation and I’m convinced that the structure supports the improvisation I do.

Your work has been getting shorter recently and there does seem to be a particular challenge involved in creating an evening length contemporary dance piece.

It’s the tradition of being entertained as opposed to the tradition of the gallery for example. The length of a work can be a nice creative challenge. I’ve been commissioned to create a 30 minute solo. I’ve done an hour long solo back in the dim dark past and I like the challenge of creating something that long. However, 30 minutes is actually quite long for a solo, especially as I’ve been in this ‘moving-a-lot’ phase lately. I think I’ve been making shorter pieces because what is interesting me is paring the work back. I make copious amounts of material and then I’m very liberal with the scissors. Hopefully there’s enough repetition in different variations or movements through phases so that you do get enough to ‘read’ it. Although I do find it difficult with repetition as such—why you choose to do it.

So what’s the process of cutting back. Why is the choice to eliminate made?

I like to be focused around one idea—put it on the ‘coat hanger’ of one idea. Once that idea becomes clear, then it is also clear what movement is relevant. What I tend to do when I’m making new work is to take threads from the last work and spend a few months reprogramming my body and the other dancers’ bodies, trying to get into some new vocabulary and actually undo the last work. I’ll try and subvert the habits and the familiar pathways, redirecting and getting into some new territory. It’s about trying to create a new vocabulary each time. And of course it’s never completely new; there are always habits and histories. And when you reprogram, that becomes familiar and that is what you want otherwise you wouldn’t be able to create a phrase.

We spend a lot of time creating new vocabulary around some particular movement idea, a physical idea. I describe these ideas in words. I make up words like ‘anchoring’ where one part of the body is stable and things happen around it. Or it could be a relation around a joint, or a shape, then a shifting and rewinding or a change in scale. I find words to describe physical ideas that come out of improvisation and then use them as a score to develop material with. Then it becomes clear what’s in or out, what is relevant to that idea.

So there is a challenge to resolve between doing and talking about what you are doing?

A lot also happens through watching and osmosis. And a lot of words are used throughout the training process that I develop with the dancers, so there is a foundation to work with. You can see it in class—the difference between people I’ve been working with for a while and someone else who comes in and doesn’t have the same field of tools. There are layers of common ground created through training and improvising and watching and working on material: it’s not just about words although we do share words.

There is an evasion of the term ‘technique’ in new dance practices, to avoid locking things into patterns, so how do you describe this common physical language you share with your dancers?

I think there are tools and techniques. There are some things I would say are technical…like having weight in the pelvis and underneath support in the body, as opposed to “pulling up”. And I work with Contact Improvisation as a technique to get people in touch with their weight and have a 3-dimensional awareness of the body in space. There are lots of improvisational and choreographic tools which someone else may call techniques—like how to develop an idea, for example folding and unfolding as a score, shifting levels or speed or emotional quality or taking up more space. I think of those things as tools.

I guess it’s that opposition between technique and ‘original gestures’… the idea that you can evacuate the body of technique and have a blank slate. I always wonder where personal idiosyncracies are meant to go.

I think that’s really interesting. We’re so loaded up and the more technique we do the more loaded up we get. There’s no such thing as neutral body. It’s also just a use of words—you could take ‘emptying’ as a movement score. But getting back to the idea of going past dancing, it’s about how you use your history and the accumulation of sensation information. The older I get the more stuff I’ve got to use. My instrument feels richer all the time, and it will I guess until it starts emptying out…

The history in the body does seem to be a motif in recent Sydney dance performance.

I’m not trying to perform my history, but I’m aware that I am accumulating history. It may be more relevant in relation to my process rather than performance—what’s in my body, what this instrument does or is interested in, the way it works and the way I work it.

On another note, can you tell me a bit about Antistatic, the dance event— the impetus to set that up and how it’s panned out.

Angharad Wynne-Jones (then Artistic Director, Performance Space) set it up in 1997. Mathew Bergan was involved, Sue-Ellen Kohler and myself and Eleanor Brickhill, and others…It was quite a large group. In 1999, I curated it with Sue-Ellen and Zane Trow (the next artistic director). We wanted to bring to the fore dance practices that we felt were not given enough support here and to acknowledge the work of established practitioners who were doing amazing things in these areas and had been working away at it for years. We were trying to elevate their work and open up the notion of practice. It was definitely a choice for me to focus on the newer approaches to the body—Contact Improvisation, Body-mind centering®, release work and improvisation. It was very particular and I think that’s good. It didn’t take care of all aspects of dance, but there’s plenty of time and space for other events that do that. In a way I felt there was a need for positive discrimination.

I did feel very attached to Antistatic and it was difficult when the group was opened up in 2001 [there was a return to a large curatorial committee] and the program was dispersed throughout the year. I’m really pleased that it has gone back to the concise, intense model this year.

Now I’ve stepped out of it and Julie-Anne Long and Performance Space will take it where they want and that’s great. I’ve let go. I didn’t want to leave a half-baked vision for them to realise. I’m sure it will be completely different. I was looking forward to doing it with Julie-Anne. I chose her because I felt she brought another point-of-view and we’d bounce off each other. I also think the climate has shifted and I would not do it the way I did last time. We are not in that space; for example, there is a lot of work happening now that crosses over into text and physical theatre, probably more than there was then. The landscape’s different now and I’m sure they’ll respond to that as much as they can.

There’s a new ‘grooviness’ seeping into the lower levels of the Opera House. With the opening of the Opera Bar (live music on tap), extending the boutique bar strip from the Toaster almost to the forecourt steps, the possibility of a drink at interval—or sometimes during a show—is bringing a younger, hipper crowd to the hallowed sails. A proactive attempt to tap into this market is evident in The Studio’s programming of Dance Tracks #1 and #2—music/dance collisions between electronically based music outfits and contemporary choreographers.

There was a buzz in the foyer at Dance Tracks #1. Set up like a night club (with plastic bracelets for tickets), the crowd consisted of the softcore dance music lovers come to hear The Bird and B(if)tek and the contemporary dance crowd interested in the choreographic interventions of Kirstie McCracken, Lisa Griffiths and Michael Whaites, and host Lisa Ffrench. The music lovers went home well sated, whereas I suspect the dance crowd left with a queasy sensation that they had been short-changed.

B(if)tek is one of the more performative dance bands. With a baroque geek-girl persona there’s no pretence about how much of their sound is created live. They often leave their stations to daggy-dance to their own tunes. This was fortunate because the choreographed dance moments were few and decidedly uninspired. Michael Whaites’ doctors & nurses Carry On pastiche performed to B(if)tek’s (or Cliff Richard’s) hit Wired for Sound’ showed few signs of serious collaboration between musicians and dancers.

During The Bird’s set Whaites performed a quasi-aerial number which offered a few interesting transitions from ground to air but was rather tame. The highlight came from Kirstie McCracken and Lisa Griffiths in The Bird encore—a pacey piece performed with Chunky Move slickness, all angles and attitude—giving us a glimpse of the potential of the evening. The strongest element was the video work of Carli Leimbach and Kirsten Bradley, including a beautiful underwater dance sequence. There seems to have been more opportunity for collaboration between video artists and choreographers than occurred with the musicians.

Dance Tracks #2 showed signs of learning from program 1. Commissioned by the SOH as part of the Indigenous Message Sticks program it featured PNAU (Nicholas Littlemore and Peter Mayes with Kim Moyes from Prop) and works choreographed by Albert David, Jason Pitt and Bernadette Walong. Here, the focus between the music and dance was well balanced with dance pieces seamlessly woven into PNAU’s set and musicians actively engaging with the dancers. Albert David was great to watch. Moving between states of weight and weightlessness, grace and strength, percussive stomping followed by flowing twists and turns his work (both solo and with Lea Francis) was authoritative, poetic and enthralling.

The highlight of Bernadette Walong’s choreography was a piece in which dancers balanced on drinking glasses. Lisa Davis and Marne Palomares worked their way across the floor intertwining, swapping glasses and shifting body weight on these fragile axes, sensitively accompanied by PNAU and the ringing of the glasses shifting across the floor.

Jason Pitt also experimented with aerial action, creating a skilful work on silks performed by Sha McGovern and Aimee Thomas that utilised the Studio space well. His work on the ground, however, was too choreographically safe to satisfy me. Watching him on the side of the stage, groovin’ to the music as his dancers performed, I longed for some of this relaxed style to infiltrate the performance. As in Dance Tracks #1, the video by James Littlemore was well integrated, especially the piece using dancing brushstroke stick figures which was beautiful in its simplicity

Dance Tracks is an excellent model for integrating artforms that are naturally symbiotic yet so often separated, and it was good to see the progression of the idea from #1 to #2. Dance Tracks #2 showed that success involves a vibrant dance between choreographers and musicians, not just sidelong glances. I’m not sure the Studio will ever feel like the right place for a dance party, and they’ll need to be careful to avoid merely skimming the cream off well established cultural scenes, but hopefully the Studio will continue its commitment to producing original collaborations, collisions and confabulations.

Dance Tracks #1; musicians B(if)tek and The Bird; choreographers/dancers Michael Whaites, Kirsty McCracken, Lisa Griffiths, hosted by Lisa Ffrench, video Carli Leimbach, Kirsten Bradley; April 26-27; Dance Tracks #2; musicians PNAU; choreographers Albert David, Jason Pitt, Bernadette Walong, Video Jason Littlemore; as part of Message Sticks, May 24-25; The Studio, Sydney Opera House.

One of the things I like about Topology is their insistence on communicating with the audience. Their program guides have notes on every piece, and URLs for some of the composers and also for the band. Often one of the performers will speak a little about the piece they are going to play, but chatty, not too Adult-Ed. And because they premiere a lot of works (tonight is no exception) it is often useful.

Tonight the concert is about music and generative processes. Sometimes the process generating the music is maths, and obvious, sometimes it’s loose and subtle. All of the pieces are at least predicated on the idea that systems can generate worthwhile music.

A selection of Tom Johnson’s Rational Melodies provides a linking device throughout the night. These are the most overtly generative pieces of the night, and sometimes are a bit too simple to be interesting. Johnson works along the boundary of audification (direct mapping of data to sound) and music. Worth a go. You can try one at home. Play the first note of a scale. Play the first note, then the second note in the scale. Play the first note, the second note and now the third note…Keep going until you’re playing all the notes in the scale, then stop.

So some of the Johnson’s were better than others, and only a couple of other works didn’t work for me. Nyman’s Shaping the Curve was a little formless, and ended up having that ‘one thing after another’ effect. Same for Davidson’s second piece, Squaring the Circle.

However there were plenty of goodies. Bernard Hoey played the first two compositions from the 6 part Viola Sonata by Ligeti. The first, Hora Lunga, is based on the natural harmonics of C. Slow and lyrical, the unusual tuning works a dream—expressive, coherent and consonant, but not quite normal, not quite right. Perfect to convey longing and the melancholic approximation of ideals. The second piece, Loop, is fast, structured, virtuosic, double-stops all over the neck. A stunner performance. Big ovation.

Thou Shalt!/Thou Shalt Not! by Michael Gordon (from Bang on a Can) was another good piece with a performance to match. It’s a strange piece that deliberately prevents the building of momentum by interpolating stilted percussive sections into the larger ensemble performance. This gives a repetitive, disappointing air to the piece that somehow works without becoming monotonous. About half way through, Robert Davidson pulled out the electric guitars and started up a distorted chunky rhythm that sounded like a chicken playing the kazoo. Perfect.

Other memorable pieces. John Babbage’s jazzy Chop Chop, and Jeremy Peynton-Jones’ Purcell Manoeuvres. Based on Purcell’s Trio Sonata #7 in G Minor it still sounded like Purcell, even with all the algorithmic modifications to the old guy’s composition. As always, I came away from a Topology concert chatting away, thinking about buying a CD (the Ligeti), looking forward to the next one.

Topology, Rational Melodies, Powerhouse centre for the Live Arts, Brisbane, March 28

When is live, live? If it’s not live, is it dead? Can it be half-live? How much equipment can be used before it’s dead? These are questions arising from contemporary music/sound performance. Stelarc provokes considerations of ‘the body’ against ‘the machine’ in an obvious visual way—with half a ton of metal hanging off him. Musicians, however, have been sonic cyborgs since the coming of electronics to sound. With the current popularity of laptop computers as instruments, the divide between the performer’s body and the sounds produced is emphasised. Like the mouth and eyebrows of a guitar player which dynamically narrate the ‘hotness factor’ of the sounds at hand, the nostrils and corners of the eyes of lap-toppers dance a funky beat to the shifts of their controller data.

Melbourne digital media artist SEO (Jeremy Yuille) uses a games joystick to control the sounds coming from his laptop. The set-up includes the laptop on a music stand at about stomach height, and Jeremy standing about arm’s length behind it. Using the joystick as an interface allows his body, rather than just fingertips, to be involved in the performance. Jeremy’s face is alive with concentration: reading his controls on the screen and reacting to the sound from the PA. He shifts from one stance to another, moving with a slow grace. The scale of the movement is reduced—down from the 100% physicality of a drummer or dancer to a more subtle 10%, but the body moving with the music none-the-less.

Traditionally, musical energy flows from bodies. But with computers “you can just hit return and have 16 channels of anything” (Violinist Jon Rose, in Andrew Beck, “totally huge: it’s what you do with it”; RT # 43 p39). Taking this to an extreme is a Merzbow performance— Masami Akita seated calmly behind Powerbook, his mouse-hand twitching as if he is playing Pac-Man, as the audience is practically eviscerated by a barrage of searing white noise. Hrvatski, a U.S. drill and bass producer, admitted that his role when playing ‘live’ is to hit ‘play’ and ‘stop’ at the start and end of each song. During his set at the 2001 Electrofringe Festival, he jumped into the audience to dance to his own music. This kind of makes him a DJ. Putting electronic and particularly computer-based performers on a continuum with DJs is important in understanding what is going on in contemporary music performance.

The DJ has been accused of being an overpaid prima donna (the same accusation levelled at conductors), stealing the glory from the people who ‘actually make the music.’ They portray, however, a realistic relationship between technology, the audience and the performer. 99% of the music we hear is recorded, and the role of humans playing live is both optional and discontinuous—present in the same way the violinmaker is present in a recital.

Bands are the worst offenders, cherishing the live performance, the direct connection between their soul and the audience; but happily using pick-ups and mikes, effects pedals, amps, compressors (etc ad infinitum) and the PA —all of which is conceived and performed by faceless sound engineers. (To come clean here, my other life was as a faceless sound engineer). Who is ‘the Band’ trying to fool with its ‘honest’ live performance using ‘no digital sequencing devices’ (‘Area 7’, 1999) or ‘studio trickery’. If you want live, go busking.

SEO (Jeremy Yuille), Oven-Garde, Melbourne, April 1. Oven-Garde is a performance series held on the first Monday of the month at the Builders Arms Hotel, Melbourne, and is presented by the tRansMIT sound collective.

David Toop was one of the first experimental musicians I became aware of, as a wee tacker back in the 70s. He gave one and a bit talks at REV. Very personable, fireside-chat-like. The first talk was on his life in music (so far). It went Suburbs, Normal non-musical Mum and Dad, Radio, Comedy records, the Goons, Quatermass, all that BBC radiophonic stuff, Bo Diddley and homemade guitars. (I first heard of David Toop as the man who'd played the world's slowest guitar solo. Impressed me at the time seeing as this was 70s stadium big hair rock days ). In the 70s Toop became interested in the physicality of sound production and formed a long term friendship with Max Eastley, making and performing on large scale sound installations. Another consistent interest of Toop's has been constraint-based or scenario-based performance. Asking the question: What can I get out of this seed pod, a peg and a balloon floating away? An approach used now by people like Matmos.

Across both his talks, Toop returned to the relationship between technology and performance—particularly in the era of the laptop performer. Toop is not just wanting to spice things up (ie add a video wall), but asking what is the nature of human engagement with performance as perception and action, audience and performer (see also Paul Lansky). This is a critical issue with plenty of room for more exploration.

At the end of the second talk, shared with Scanner, a woman, the oldest person in the room, started talking during the audience participation bit. Oh no! Methinks: some irrelevant boring old granny reminiscences. Well, what a bigot I am. These few minutes of Joan Brassil talking about her work were a highlight of the festival, and not just for me. The audience, Mr Toop, and Scanner were more or less stunned as this elderly woman described the wonderful work she has made. Sophisticated, subtle, and humane. We keep hearing the world is full of amazing people, well one of them was there, sitting amongst us, a secret til she spoke. David Toop's response was “I must talk to you about the next exhibition I'm curating”. Yes he must.

Sound Body, David Toop, as part of REV, Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, April 5; Wave form versus liquid breath technique, David Toop & scanner, as part of REV, Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, April 7

Saturday night of the REV festival and a large crowd gathered for another instalment of fabrique at the Powerhouse's Spark Bar. Many punters had just emerged from the preceding Diversi A and B concerts and headed to the bar for a drink and a chat while others were drawn at the end of the day by the promise of high-profile international names. The previous night had been an exclusively Australian affair but tonight two UK sound artists were headlining: David Toop and Robin Rimbaud (aka Scanner).

First up though was Sydney-sider Oren Ambarchi armed with a highly customised electric guitar and a bag of effects units and floor pedals. His vibe at first was purely ambient/minimalist as now and then he plucked a single spare note on the guitar, barely seeming to move. Fed into long, cycling delays these notes formed lines of virtually imperceptible ostinatos that slowly accumulated into a shifting sea of tones. As the density of the tonal liquid increased so did Ambarchi's movement, leaving the guitar to manipulate effects and keeping the currents moving. Inexorably the guitar tones began to disappear and the oscillations and granulations of the effect devices themselves took over as Ambarchi focussed on turning up the level of energy until the grating noise machine seemed to choke itself to death. The performance was entrancing in its slow organic progression and proved to be the highlight of the night for me.

David Toop continued the axe assault by improvising on a Hawaiian guitar with various Inquisatorial torture implements including pieces of pipe, an electronic bow and a range of effects pedals. Toop's work was multilayered consisting mainly of ambient wefts on CD used as a bed for improvisation on guitar and flute with acoustic and electronic manipulation of the instruments. God was in the detail as Toop's improvisatory gestures responded to elements emerging from the intricately crafted background–at one point he even played a descant to microphone feedback using the flute! Unfortunately much of the detail required close listening which was generally impossible in the hubbub of the Spark Bar.

With the second UK artist, Scanner, the vibe shifted into club mode with more familiar harmonic structures and greater rhythmic energy which pulsed with the ambience of the venue. Scanner is one of the breed of laptop warriors and proved a crowd favorite as he extracted and convulsed material from Mini Disc and portable synthesisers with the aid of software on his Macintosh. At times he leaned towards a deconstruction of the bombastic stylistics of anthemic dance music and at others ventured profitably into areas of ambient glitch producing a very polished and structured performance set.

Amorphous Brisbane electronic outfit I/O comprising Lawrence English and Tam Patton finished the night on a postmodern note with improvised turntabling and more laptop action. As Patton scratched and droned with the vinyl, English sampled, fragmented and reconstructed the sounds in real-time using interactive looping software. In a departure from general DJ practice, rather than focusing on the prerecorded material on the records, the performance emphasised the grain of the medium itself.

Overall, perhaps what struck me about the night was that though fine music was being made nothing really new with regard to experimental performance practice or sound production was offered. All the artists worked with techniques and processes that have become part of the canon of electronic art music, whether it was Ambarchi's delay effects, Toop's tortured Hawaiian guitar or Scanner's deconstruction of dance club aesthetic. Is the revolution in electronic music over? Am I just nostalgic for some dubious thrill of avant garde unexpectedness? Of course it's inevitable that “new music” will become generic and that those genres will stabilise and become respectable (for want of a better term). Rather than being revolutionaries these artists are working now with the rich results of a revolution consisting of a range of mature and highly sophisticated techniques along with an accumulated tradition of experimentation. QUT Creative Industries' intellectual and capital investment in the REV festival as whole demonstrates that these genres and techniques are now pedagogically viable concerns. However much we might grasp at defining what is new music it's probably what slips through our fingers that will end up surprising and challenging us.

Though the REV festival has finished, fabrique continues throughout the year at the Brisbane Powerhouse under the guidance of Lawrence English and promises the chance to hear more Australian and international electronic acts continue a rich tradition of experimental music.

REV Festival, fabrique, performers Oren Ambarchi, David Toop, Scanner, I/O, Spark Bar, Brisbane Powerhouse, April 6

Sunday night for the last Roving Concert. A group of us are led about for a 10 to 15 minute performance from each of 5 groups. A bit of a taster, and it works well. First up is the Pyrophone (fire heats the air in huge organ pipes) from Steve Langton and Hubbub. It's outside, at the front of the Powerhouse: a designer-shabby industrial wall, flat slab, rough concrete, maybe 15 to 20 metres high. Up against are a few vertical stacks of giant exhaust pipes, steel tubes going straight up. There's a large crowd. The act is a bit corny-leather jerkins at the forge, reverence for the primordial mystery of fire etc-but the sound is massive, body-shaking, and the jets of flame make for great visuals. Crowd pleaser #1.We then troop off indoors for the Sarah Hopkins' Harmonic Whirlies. The clear, diffuse sound is generated by whirling plastic hose (think pool vacuum hose) around at various speeds in a cross between call and response folk dance and harmonic singing. Great exercise.

Next! David Murphy's Circular Harp. Vibrations from hammered strings are fed into bowls of liquid. This makes patterns which are projected onto a large screen. Real-time correspondence between the visual and the auditory. A bit like a physics lesson in dynamics, but with art instead of physics. After that come the massed handbells, more audience participation and clear sounds. Then Stuart Favilla's light harp and Joanne Cannon's serpentine bassoon. Good bassoon, but the light harp is not much. When you replace harp strings with narrow beams of light the fingers brush against nothing. This reduces the ability to make fine motor movements and articulate sounds—no anchor and pivot, no force feedback. That's the way our sensory and motor systems work. Exploit it, don't deny it. (see Gail Priest's alternate view of the Light Harp)

Last up is Linsey Pollak's ewevee, out on the Brisbane River played by Pollak and Jessica Ainsworth. A vertical set of bars are struck to trigger samples. The samples attached to each bar are changed, giving totally different sonic effects for each piece. A nice play between the physicality of the instrument and the virtual nature of the output.

Short sweet performances. If you didn't like one you'd like the next. If you didn't like any then you don't like music much.

Fabrication: the making by art and/or labour, an untruthful statement; to fake or to forge the process of manufacturing.
Macquarie Dictionary

A festival based on new fabrications, and “ideas” about music and sound (to paraphrase executive director Zane Trow) inspires much questioning, especially when it brings so many ideas people together. My brain started ticking when David Toop commented to me that performance was no longer a useful term for much of the electronic-based sound-making practices at REV. We are in a phase of transition he suggested, before expressing his deep disquiet about the validity of his own sedentary ‘performance with a laptop’.

Set the task to concentrate on fabrique, a cabaret of electronica and sonic electro-hybridity, and Silent Movie, a live jamming session of REV artists to Russian Dziga Vertov's revolutionary film, Man With a Movie Camera (1929), a number of questions occurred to me.

What do the interfaces to REV’s new media instruments contribute to the performative experience? For example, Greg Jenkin’s pluckable, sonic cacti spines, Amber Hansen’s jangly miked-up jewellery or the ubiquitous laptops utilsed by Pimmon/Scanner/etc. And should we need to understand them more fully in order to accept their roles in performance?

What are the issues of mapping that these new instruments imply? We understand the basic mapping of a grand piano as being a relatively clear relationship between finger velocity, subsequent mechanics, appropriate string tension, physical collision and focussed sound emission. We know what the performer is grappling with, so we focus on the sonics rather than the mechanics of the experience. But it’s much harder to know quite what these R(eal) and/or E(lectronic) and/or V(irtual) instruments are, and herein, maybe, lies a problem. We know that the computer long ago destroyed the relationship and fixity between inputs and outputs. Forever. Hence new performance tools based on computers allow deeply convoluted and dynamic mappings of input action and ultimate sonic response.

So, on that basis, what were the virtually invisible sound artists Scanner and I/O actually doing up there on the roof during the installation/performance Biospheres, Secrets of a City? Was it performative? Now you’d never ask that irritating question of the venerable Jon Rose. His virtuoso performance of an augmented string instrument, using the violin and bow as interface to trigger a bank of sound generators consummately succeeded in mapping action to sonic outcomes.

At REV it seemed that almost any device capable of either self-generating or responsively generating electrical impulses was being employed as a playable interface. For example, performance sense was made through the use of inductive, magnetic coils (Andrew Kettle) or through miniature microphones picking up surface textures (Michael Norris). There were the resolutely digital instruments triggered in the main by velocity sensitive synth keys, MIDI actuators or computer keystrokes (aka Pimmon, Hydatid, Rene Wooller etc). Somewhere in between lay a rather clunky fish-shaped device used to trigger granular-synthetics via MIDI (Tim Opie) and a performer in a Yamaha MIDI body suit producing, through rather mechanical movements, a broad range of sampled sounds ([de]CODE me directed by Lindsay Vickery).

All of these diverse forms of gadgetry were being used by their performers to create sounds for subsequent processing, or to actuate virtual banks of preset and ever changeable sounds. Then of course each performance’s sound mixer could completely re-affect the balance of almost everything before we finally heard it. All this became the means for generating REV’s new sounds. Needless to say, any attempt at reverse engineering on the part of audiences was largely futile.

So what might a performer do to help those of us who care, are curious or simply need to know? Should those players, lit only by their laptop glows, apparently devoid of fingers and face behind their flip up screens demystify their mappings, given their choice to perform rather than be downloaded? (In welcome contrast, REV’s accompanying installations each had an attendant on hand to explain and demonstrate, interface, mapping and intent).

Many might be asking by now, is this line of questioning simply a cul-de-sac? Is the desire/need-to-know actually a major barrier to bringing new, electronically mediated forms to a place worthy of the tag ‘performance'?

This question is integrally tied to how we choose to make the transition to new performance forms. I for one hope it will be towards the ‘transactions’ so characteristic of performance forms that acknowledge their audiences as integral.

Toop is right and, by the way, REV is definitely pushing the right combination of buttons to get there.

There is no doubt that the arts can seem unimportant—even trivial—in the wake of traumatic events, including September 11, the refugee crisis, the war in Afghanistan and ongoing but pressing Indigenous issues in our own country. In truth the arts have suffered for years from the perception that they are unimportant. Our news and media outlets fill their entertainment and lifestyle sections with little but celebrity gossip and box-office grosses. And if we indulge in entertainment when the hard times take hold, it is because it offers the security of escape.

However, that ill-defined thing called Art is not so easily dismissed or perhaps as easily welcomed into our lives. Yet, confronted with the equally urgent, if less overtly spectacular (because hidden) abuses against humanity taking place in this country, I found myself extremely grateful for my experiences at the 2002 Adelaide Festival of Arts. While the outcomes were compromised and many of the processes flawed, it was nonetheless, an essential experiment establishing a radical interface between art and community in a previously inconceivable context. By including many previously disenfranchised artists and attempting to speak meaningfully about issues of fundamental relevance to all Australians, the festival achieved something unique, even if many chose not to take up the invitation.

Many complaints around the festival focussed, somewhat bizarrely it seems to me, on the apparent role reversal between the Adelaide Festival and the Adelaide Fringe. In the end, I’m not sure that distinction mattered (except maybe to the accountants). By taking advantage of both programs, it was possible to have your cake and eat it. I ran myself ragged but still missed far too much. That Katrina Sedgewick, Artistic Director of the Fringe, did an outstanding job is indisputable. That the Fringe provided not only entertainment but also productions and events of substance is also true. What interests me, however, is the fact that several big-ticket international acts were able to take place in the Fringe, without apparently receiving the subsidy typically guaranteed through a major festival. Maybe they didn’t need it?

As Karen Meehan, writing in Dramatic Online (March 13, 2002) noted, “by far the most important debate around the Sellars’ ‘myth’ or ‘legacy’ (depending on whether you agree with him or not), is actually about the structure of a major festival—a debate the Australian media [and many in the Australian arts community] seems to have bypassed” , except to be offended by the very notion of community or the positioning of Aboriginal peoples centre stage (sic). Meehan, is the only Australian journalist I know who has undertaken in-depth interviews with the much maligned Associate Directors, in particular the Indigenous Artistic Directors, Karl and Waiata Telfer (March 20, 2002). Did no-one feel that the views of Indigenous artists, participants in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital program or audiences at the Parkes Community Centre, were worth canvassing? Does anyone remember the Saatchi & Saatchi Report?

Equally bizarre is the suggestion that incoming Artistic Director Stephen Page will have nothing left to do as the Indigenous stuff has already been done. A similar notion was touted following Brenda L Croft’s groundbreaking Biennial exhibition, Beyond the Pale for the 2000 festival. The inclusion of Indigenous people is not a one-off event but a way of life. And as for spending relatively big money (in arts terms) on community based (low) art events instead of real (high) art, the screams of outrage could be heard across the country.

If those who say they love the arts really believe that art can define our times and probe our societies in ways that speak across continents and even millennia, then why were so many of them ungenerous and unwilling to take the risk? Surely it is the much touted ‘universality’ of art that has been so celebrated by those who prefer their art classical and their heritage European. Of course, it’s precisely this long reach of art—so incompatible with the immediate appetite of the news machine or the entertainment industry—that may have made the festival’s aspirations so unpalatable to so many.

When I experience a unique and profoundly moving opening ceremony like Kaurna Plati Meyunna, see a film like Ivan Sens’ extraordinarily beautiful and devastating, Beneath Clouds; an oratorio like John Adams/Peter Sellars El Ninño, or visit the Parkes Community Centre where Urban Theatre Projects worked with a bunch of kids from diverse and often disadvantaged backgrounds, I am privileged to enter into other worlds of experience created by artists, offering new ways of seeing and understanding. Their content and their approach to the particular and peculiar effects of time and place, of structure, form and media, suggest, against the odds, real change might be possible.

The Intertwine program, which took place at many venues around Adelaide, has emerged as one of the real success stories of the Peter Sellars/Sue Nattrass Adelaide Festival. Comprising a series of loosely affiliated weaving workshops, public forums, and exhibitions of woven art works from Australia and beyond, Intertwine was a genuinely community-based, grassroots, cross-cultural and collaborative event. It perfectly exemplified the original Sellars vision for the festival and its themes of truth and reconciliation, cultural diversity and ecological sustainability.

Intertwine brought together Indigenous weavers from the Top End of Australia and from Ngarrindjeri country in and around the South Australian Riverland. Senior Maori weavers also participated, along with other community artists from all over Australia. Included in the latter group was the high profile Queensland based artist Pat Hoffie who regularly works on collaborative projects with weavers in the Philippines.

But the Intertwine program was most definitely not about promoting stars or lionising the achievements of individuals. The level playing field approach evident in this collective enterprise seems to have been a deliberate ideological decision on the part of the organisers. In a similar vein, Intertwine’s focus has not been exclusively on the end product, on the woven object as either artistic creation or object of desire, but equally on (re)establishing a sense of community among practitioners. Talking with the other participants about weaving practice and creating space to share stories or simply yarn have been integral to this communal—and process-oriented program.

Accompanying the workshops and dotted around Adelaide’s inner and outer suburbs were a number of exhibitions and installations of the weavers’ work. This attempt to cater for audiences outside of the CBD was also consonant with this festival’s more regional focus. For example, the Prospect Gallery in Adelaide’s suburban north, played host to a wonderfully engaging and beautifully realised exhibition entitled Weaving the Murray, featuring works created by non-indigenous and Indigenous weavers including prominent Ngarrindjeri weaver and language expert Rhonda Agius.

In recent years Ngarrindjeri weavers have revived the traditional Ngarrindjeri craft of coiling rushes and sedge grasses native to the Murray so that many young Ngarrindjeri have become confident and skilled practitioners. In addition, classes are now held on a regular basis for non-indigenous people who want to learn this ancient art. This revitalisation is a truly remarkable achievement on the part of the Ngarrindjeri. The pressures of colonisation in their region dealt such a severe blow to traditional processes of intergenerational knowledge transmission that the practice of weaving came perilously close to disappearing.

Woven in traditional Ngarrindjeri style and suspended from the ceiling, a large communally-woven Ponde or Murray Cod, itself a threatened species, is without a doubt the piéce de resistance of the Prospect Gallery exhibition. It is a visually appealing work with a cogent environmental subtext.

Concerns about the environment also figured prominently in the Intertwine workshops. Participants spoke later in almost rapturous terms about the sense of esprit-de-corps engendered by this unique program. The quality of the relationships forged while taking part will be one of its enduring legacies. Integrated events like this one have a real capacity to build social capital and sustain community as well as produce artistic outcomes. Maybe down the track, when the dust has settled, Adelaideans will remember this as a festival we had to have for precisely such reasons.

Think about Maralinga. What does the word conjure up? A mushroom cloud, probably, hanging malignly in the air; no land, no people. That was very much the line of thinking entertained by Lynette Wallworth, one of the Adelaide Festival’s Associate Directors 2 years ago. Shouldn’t we all—especially in Maralinga’s nearest capital, Adelaide—know more about the land and its people below the cloud?

And that radical way of thinking was/is intrinsic to the Peter Sellars’ Festival. If only he and/or the limp administration had been able to deliver on such original promise.

Mind you, that Maralinga idea has thrown up a pretty rich harvest. The proactive side of the notion involved sending the English video artists, Mongrel, out to work with the kids there on telling their stories with the latest technology and offering the Tjarutja elders, newly returned to Maralinga the idea of painting their experience. Victorian artist Lance Atkinson demonstrated techniques of acrylic painting at the elders’ request. This required the festival to conjure up its own visual version of what it did to take to Oak Valley, to appoint an arts adviser and set an arts centre in train. The paintings produced are a challenge—often combining a traditional dotted background with almost Pop art images of the Cloud and, in one case, an upside-down roo flying through the irradiated air. They hang outside the theatre where The Career Highlights of the Mamu is playing.

Mamu was a separate project in WA, eagerly seized on by Wallworth—because it involved the Wankatja people, who’d gone West rather than East when missionaries passed on the heartless government message that the land they had stories for, going back to the last Ice Age, was going to be irrevocably polluted by the British atom bomb test. They—at least the survivors amongst them—ended up around Kalgoorlie after a 300km walk through the Great Victorian Desert.

Twenty-seven-year-old Trevor Jamieson was born in Perth to Wankatja parents and describes himself as “hungry for the truth” about his origins. He envisaged a one-man show and began working with writer Scott Rankin, experienced in such story-telling through his work on Box the Pony with Leah Purcell. Somewhere along the line though, Jamieson’s family had a better idea and now all 17 of them are on stage round a campfire with 2 musicians and 3 screens at the back showing painted images, photos, documentary interviews and surtitles. Putting it baldly, the original show has not yet grown to encompass all these accretions, despite dramaturgy from Nick Enright, direction by Andrew Ross (the man who got Bran Nue Dae and the Jack Davis trilogy so right), a choreographer and 2 assistant directors.

But then, such documentary theatre encompassing a range from ancient dances to Super 8 interviews with elders out at Maralinga, is a pretty complex form. And one of the most affecting moments involved Trevor’s Auntie using language that was barely translated to tell of her parents and 2 siblings dying from radiation poisoning and/or the effort of walking through unknown desert country to Kalgoorlie, while a live camera revealed every emotion on screens behind her. Trevor had just told us how the men of the tribe had attacked the rolling radiation cloud with spears, identifying it as a Mamu Devil Spirit. At the other end of the theatrical spectrum, we’d also heard the tale of the first train sighted, scared off with spears: one hero had shat his pants, which he admitted to his mate in language. “You can’t say that”, his mate responded, “we’re supposed to be naked!” “Not to worry, they can’t understand what we’re saying”, the surtitles told us meta-theatrically!

Such a blend—that also ranged through powerful Hiroshima poetry and Country & Western sentiment—is always going to be dangerous. Where does a commissioning festival come in, trying to get it all right? The lesson of the Marrugeku Company’s chaotic Crying Baby is instructive. Revelations during the Performing Arts Market suggested that both Perth and Sydney Festival Directors had been fobbed off when querying its development with the line, “You don’t understand how Aboriginal work is made”, suggesting that as much rigour is needed in this important area as in any theatre-making.

Desert Oaks, a painting project by the Oak Valley Community, Maralinga Lands. The Career Highlights of the Mamu, Trevor Jamieson & Scott Rankin, director Andrew Ross, Black Swan Theatre, The Space, Adelaide Festival Centre, March 2-5

El Niño, the ‘centrepiece’ of Peter Sellars’ 2002 Adelaide Festival, is the product of a collaboration between Sellars and legendary American composer John Adams. El Niño suits Sellars’ concept for the festival—an event of community and cultural interaction, reconciliation and storytelling, whose official opening was a night of Indigenous song and dance in Adelaide’s Victoria Square.

First staged in 2000, the oratorio El Niño recounts the Nativity, the moment from which we count our millennia. Sellars has transferred the Biblical story to a present day Latino setting. In the way Shakespeare productions are often updated, this transfer emphasises the power and timelessness of the story. Building a libretto from the texts of past and present writers, and including fragments from the Apocrypha, suggests all generations and all people own the story. Texts by Hispanic women, such as 17th century Mexican nun and early feminist Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, emphasise women’s perspective. The rich moral tales are cleverly drawn out—how the Infant is born into straitened circumstances, how dependent He is on the enduring faith of those around Him, how fear corrupts the morals of (great) men and provokes violence and oppression. These observations are directly relevant to our present world.

Adams had wanted to write his own Messiah, and this work seems a homage to Handel as much as his own celebration of the Nativity. Formally, El Niño is more than an oratorio, and includes a video, screened above the performers. The audience must follow the action on screen, the surtitles above it, and the complex polyphonies and competing rhythms of Adams’ mesmerising score. This version of El Niño omits the live dancers of the initial concept, but there are dance excerpts on screen.

Sellars’ video grounds the work in a way that no stage performance could. Looking as if shot with a hand-held camera, and set in an apartment, on a beach or in a car, it’s like a silent home movie, making the oratorio immediately accessible. We see a Hispanic Mary and Joseph driving around, cops as guardian angels, the Infant swaddled in a Mickey Mouse blanket, and “Jesus”, dancing, with a streetlight behind Him forming a halo. The movie is not overtly a depiction of the Nativity—these could be any people, and we make the association with the Nativity because of the symbolic content. Do we read more into Biblical tales than is really there? Rather, we should read more into life, which is itself a miracle. The themes, the mythology, are universally applicable.

This production involved Artistic Director Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices—a mixed chorus of 20 or so seated on stage behind the fabulous soloists: Shu-Cheen Yu (soprano), Kirsti Harms (mezzo) and Herbert Perry (baritone), and 3 countertenors. The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, occupying the pit, was nicely directed by Alasdair Neale.

El Niño , director Peter Sellars, composer John Adams, director Paul Hillier, Theatre of Voices, Festival Theatre, March 2-6

Central Market is probably the most diverse site in Adelaide; a rich array of cultural practices operate here. Para//elo has exploited its ambience and pace to make connections between migration experience, trade, exchange and consumption. Stories From the Market Place engages with performance, installation, testimony and tourism to think the place of home. Homelessness at home. “We all leave and arrive from somewhere.”

Drinking coffee or tea is the thing one does while waiting, meeting or simply sitting. Lucia’s is legendary for its consistently good brew. We are offered an espresso cup painted with ships, sea and sky. A waiter fills it with a dark brew and gives us crisp sweet bread. Customers (audience) and performers mingle amongst the (as usual) closely packed tables. Over there someone is writing her shopping list, it’s Susie, we say hello across the tables. A stranger sits at our table near the small door. His coffee hasn’t arrived yet, the waiter assures him it’s on its way. Lucia’s always works at its own pace. The operatic score swells behind us and the customers/audience laugh as waiters signal the switch to performance with slow accentuated movements, out of place in the bustle of 7.30am pre-work chat. I’m glad this doesn’t last for long—this place is too small to be displaced in.

The man sitting at our table (Juha Vanhakartano) lays out 4 sugar cubes in a neat line, pours the recently arrived coffee into the saucer, puts one cube between his lips and proceeds to drink via the sugar filter. In between he tells us this is a Finnish practice. “Finnish coffee is bitter…one is always falling onto ice.” In this way the performers talk to those at their tables, across tables, tell stories; waiters bustle, wipe, collect, as waiters do. It’s a bit like the real thing but we are in it and the performers are performing. Susie (Fraser) is performing too. Her movements slow as the music/mood shifts to something approaching disquiet. It works. The talking stops.

We (we are a group, from beginning to end) are bustled out of the cafe door by a beckoning tour guide (Jason Sweeney). It’s all rather garrulous, as tours are reputed to be. We are shuffled along Laneway #5. Performers weave in and out, carrying luggage. Do those who flee always have time to pack? We arrive at a place adjacent to the Korean sushi stall. Headsets dangle around 3 long rectangular slabs. Like good audience members we climb up to sit on the stools, don the headsets and gaze, stunned and a bit awkward. These seats are high. The tables turn out to be vitrines lined with newspaper clippings, marriage certificates, photos and cartoons. Iconic things arranged down the centre represent the interweaving of 3 traditions, Islamic, Christian and perhaps Buddhist.

The visual aesthetic stops one thinking about this mix of otherness. More successful is the audio (Scanner aka Robin Rimbaud with Jason Sweeney), an ambient and disturbing mix of market sounds and story fragments. These images don’t settle quickly. A man from Iraq and another from Afghanistan offer small sweet things and fragrant tea in gold rimmed glass tumblers. To eat, to serve and be served are perhaps the things we first have in common.

Stories From The Market Place, Para//elo, creative director Teresa Crea, performers Irena Dangov, Susie Fraser, Antonio Gorgone, Jason Sweeney, Juha Vanhakartano, Adelaide Central Market, Gouger Street, March 2-9.

Red Dust Theatre’s first ever production wasn’t part of the original Sellars’ conception for the Adelaide Festival—but it well might have been. For it offers a no holds barred portrait of Black and White relations in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) with a rich vein of metaphor, poetry and song. Steve Berkoff goes up the Alice! But it has a discontinuous narrative that never quite stands up, and a cast that’s young in performance and don’t quite deliver on the promise of Watts’ text.

Throughout, the train is a vital image. It’s the dragon that the young Black Ulysses sets out to kill; it’s a comedic element (as in The Career Highlights of the Mamu) at which ineffectual spears are thrown; it’s the Rainbow Serpent of the White Man’s Dreaming; and, most important of all, it’s the driving, masculine force that gives train-driver Ed, the White villain of the piece, his power. So why symbolise the train with a wheelchair—the ultimate image of disablement?

The use of a name like Ulysses, of course, raises certain expectations. But his role in the play seems not to be the endless journeying as punishment by the gods of the Greek original, but the pursuit of Ed—corruptor and brutaliser of his daughter Violet, Ulysses’ only beloved. Ulysses might succeed in rescuing Violet from the River (the notorious, dry Todd riverbed—another strong image in the play), if only he has time. For it’s there that Mparntwe’s castoffs (including Ed’s wife Molly) go for the nirvana of booze and sweaty, indiscriminate sex that briefly allow them to forget the pain of living. But will he get there before the rains come to wash the town’s detritus away? Or will he be fatally distracted by the hunting of Ed?

And are we distracted from Watts’ metaphysics by Hodder’s lively rapping and Nampatjinpa Castle’s raw balladeering? There’s a rich brew here which is poised to explode. I wish it well in finding the balance that will light its fire.

Train Dancing, Red Dust Theatre of Alice Springs, writer Michael Watts, director Craig Matthewson, performers Steve Hodder, Jacinta Nampitjinpa Castle, Roger Menadue, Barbara Saunders, Space, Adelaide Festival Centre, March 3-9.

Morgan Lewis, Bernadette Regan, Shannon Williams, Charles Russel, The Longest Night

“It’s about generated fiction that’s based in reality”, said director Alicia Talbot of The Longest Night when she was interviewed (RealTime 47, p 33) in February. My first taste of Urban Theatre Projects was initially clouded by that “generated fiction” idea of the expectation of a more rounded and complete theatrical experience that established the problems of dislocated kids/young adults, and then tried to craft some solutions. After all, UTP hadn’t only been working with Adelaide’s Angle Park community (and Sydney’s High Street Youth Centre in Parramatta), but had had the constant presence of youth and social workers as well.

But the word “protocols” was much in evidence at the Adelaide Festival. It produced a marvellous sense of ceremonial respect at the opening Kaurna Palti Meyunna; it was the excuse for Koori film activists to approve of Ivan Sen’s explicit Beneath Clouds and to mount a campaign against the much softer Australian Rules; and it perhaps accounts for UTP not taking their plays outside the input offered by the primary community they’re working with.

Bernie would love to find a way out of the trap she’s in. Her kid’s in care, and she’d love to be able to prove to the bitch who robs her of him half way through his birthday party that she’s freed herself of dependence on alcohol, drugs and the ‘friends’ who used to share an empty life based around them. But that gut-wrenching loss of her son would weaken the bravest soul. The comfort blanket comes out; Carlos comes in to mend the loo—and the scene is set for some heavy back-sliding.

Where UTP really hit their straps is in making this back-sliding look great fun (at least the first time round); Bernie’s black dog might genuinely have been let off the leash—within the limits of house rules about banging-on only in the unmended loo and no whacking up. But Carlos (Charles Russell) is dealing, Shannon (Shannon Williams) is rapping to oblivion, Lucia (Lucia Mastrantone) is simply twitching for a fix, and Morgan (Morgan Lewis) has the film-making delusions of Cecil B de Mille. As Bernie (Bernadette Regan) withdraws inexorably up the wall, they simply trash the place, and her good intentions.

It’s a really imaginative use of the space; and there’s a strong sense of a Legs on the Wall-style physical theatre to enhance the text. But the problem is that it all happens twice. Second time round it seems as though everybody’s banging a door as they fail to conclude yet another illogical argument. And the music gets louder. Only the front row of little Nunga girls lying on mattresses is still giggling.

It had been lovely to see these girls earlier working with the UTP company in the community centre square—girls tumbling, boys rapping, everybody line dancing. All wore Access All Areas/Artist tags; they were on the team. The audience wore coloured ribbons, denoting a group to be taken on tour by one of the community participants on the project. Ironically, single mum Karina seemed a whole lot better supported by the resources of the Parks Centre than Bernie. Maybe a way out is possible?

Urban Theatre Projects, The Longest Night, director Alicia Talbot, sound Rose Turtle, The Parks Community Centre, Angle Park, Adelaide Festival 2002, March 2-10.

The only real hope for a sustainable future involves a creative synthesis of the arts and the sciences to develop new ways of meeting our needs and our hopes.
Ian Lowe, “Bringing Art and Science Together”, conVerge, catalogue, Art Gallery of South Australia, 2002.

Lowe’s words are lettered on the wall of the conVerge exhibition highlighting the theme “Where art and science meet” and emphasising the role of artists as explorers, commentators and mediators of technology and its impacts. It declares an interest beyond the simple theme of art influenced by science, and focuses—in theory at least—on the benefits of cross-disciplinarity and the advantages of collaboration. The accompanying catalogue essays all advocate attempts to transcend the traditional boundaries between the 2 fields as they are usually perceived, that is, as opposing and mutually exclusive. This, it is ambitiously proposed, will aid in the development of a more complete understanding of the world we inhabit and the complex interrelationships at work within it.

This holistic approach is illustrated by the inclusion of the large Ngurrara canvas 1 and Marrawarra and Jila by artists of the Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency that introduce the viewer to the exhibition. They are neither visually nor conceptually what is expected in an exhibition about ‘science.’ Characterising “Indigenous Knowledge” as a “science engagement” initially seems a contortion. Their incorporation however makes more sense in light of this conception of science as a culturally specific knowledge system rather than a discrete field of knowledge, although the commitment to such an approach is belied (and the works possibly reduced to tokenism?) by the other works in the exhibition which do not take such a conceptually broad approach.

Many of these works utilise elements associated with popular conceptions of science: light and sound effects, computer-generated images and robotics. The scientific theme is therefore most apparent in execution and their overly technological ‘look’ tends to reduce them to illustrations rather than excavations of their respective issues. Adam Donovan’s Perimetry involves a tripod-mounted camera, sensitive to movement, that swivels to follow visitors as they move around the gallery. It might speak of surveillance and control, but its straightforward presentation, and the fact that it was produced as the result of Donovan’s residency at the Defence Science and Technology Organisation, renders the instrument gadget-like, more suited to the curiosities of a science centre. Pig Wings, by Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr and Guy Ben-Ary, is a recreated laboratory in which pig bone tissue is being grown in the shape of wings. Pertinent as the issues it raises are—the cloistered laboratory could easily be cultivating animal organs for use in humans—the work seems to be merely the simple transplantation of equipment from a scientific location to an art-specific one. Fascinating though the experiment is, the focus remains prosaic.

Patricia Piccinini engages with similar issues in her work Synthetic Organism 2 (SO2): The Siren Mole, though she bridges the art/science divide more skillfully. Her invented creature, the blind and lumpy Siren Mole, is presented in a museum/zoo-style display case, complete with droppings and an artificial backdrop. These specimens are accompanied by 3 large photographs that document the creature in a laboratory, which, as the catalogue notes, is its natural habitat. A (literally) constructed animal, the Siren Mole is presented as a consequence of genetic manipulation, not an abstract “what if?”, but its result. Piccinini has brought the technology to life, and in doing so withdraws the luxury we now have of being able to speculate on our reactions to invented life.

The majority of works are based on current controversial issues. Martin Walch explores the aftermath of mining in Over written/Under written, which profiles the landscape of the Mount Lyell mine in Tasmania. Whilst Walch is more interested in the apocalyptic scenery as the “new wilderness” than an explicit condemnation of the associated degradation, the photographs he exhibits are as strong as environmental campaign images. Their presentation, however, avoids such documentary sensationalism: peering through eyepieces at the illuminated stereo photographs, housed in wall-mounted packing cases, the viewer is transported by the vivid miniature detail of the enclosed world. The convergence of man and nature is undeniably illustrated in the ‘wilderness’ that is left after human intervention.

In a time when emotions have been reduced to chemicals and personality is determined by genetic sequence, Justine Cooper’s Transformers is a dynamic and mesmerising exploration of identity and individuality. Various constituents that distinguish a person—faces, fingerprints, DNA—are projected on the 2 sides of a long tent like structure. These are combined with poetry and statements that explore personality and the factors that act upon it: “I feel more Chinese because I am phenotypically Chinese”; “I believe that over 60% of our personality is determined by genes.”

The predominance of technology-based works mean that certain others do not fit. Jason Hampton’s small illustrative paintings such as Kidney Problems in Aboriginal Australia have now Reached Epidemic Proportions, combine intricate Aboriginal imagery with computer graphics. Although his illustrations of a biological analysis of Aboriginal health are engaging, the works are too small and too detailed to be carefully considered amongst the many large installation works. Fiona Hall’s Cell Culture is also in alien surroundings, with its quiet, expressive and decidedly un-technological exploration of DNA modification. Hall has created beaded and plastic animals whose various body parts have been replaced with Tupperware containers, highlighting the focus on ‘usefulness’ that directs much research.

The disparate nature of the works undermines the coherence of the exhibition, though this is possibly the result of its being organised by an 8-person ‘working group’ (rather than curators). While the stated focus is both pertinent and commendable, the works fail to accord with it. It is interesting, and enlightening, to compare the 2 disciplines, their associated structures of knowledge and methodologies, and to realise the potential that collaboration offers. In conVerge, however, the meeting of art and science remains conflicted.

Adelaide Biennial, conVerge: Where Art and Science Meet, Art Gallery of South Australia, March 1 – April 25

OTIS looks like a piece of glorified junk. Soldered out of salvaged scrap metal, it is an instrument that epitomizes analogue in the raw, demands to be played and necessitates the gesture of performance. Yet as musician mik la vage begins to draw his electric drill towards the iron strings, it is the hidden mechanics that reconstitute the sound we hear, replayed and looped with delays and harmonies created out of sight. This is analogue-metal-machine-noise: stretched, tortured and affected by technology. It was one of the more graphic images of the Analogue 2 Digital (A2D) Electronic Music Conference in Adelaide Fringe 2002.

Machine sounds, whether music, noise or function, have infiltrated the sonic landscape in the way that Front 242 back-ends a Nutrigrain advert, the Rolling Stones have sold out to Microsoft and before you know it Dead or Alive have given a motorcar manufacturer the rights to their one-hit wonder, You spin me right round baby. Too many TV ads can spin anyone’s ideas around, but where the soundtrack to our lives ends up cannot be taken for granted.

A2D explored not so much the where or the why, but how electronic music got to be where it is. Running over 3 days at Adelaide University, it was divided into forums (Talk the Walk), artist presentations, (From Blips to Beeps) and workshops (Digging in the Digital Dirt).

If one were to create the soundtrack to A2D, held at a tumultuous time in Adelaide’s cultural calendar, it must include the shiver of the visiting Queen’s wave, the stomps of Indigenous dance performers on the Adelaide Festival opening night, the whoosh of the stunt trapeze and the beer-swilling rock rumblings of university Orientation week.

The presentation by participating artist Kaffe Matthews emphasised even more these all-encompassing elements of our acoustic space. During her improvised performance, the boisterous O-week enthusiasts could be heard loudly through the cinema walls. Whilst the audience were obviously distracted by this ‘interruption’, Matthews finished by explaining that she hoped her mikes had picked up the sounds and incorporated them. She creates her performances by taking minute recordings of her surroundings, whether they be Danish squats or London art galleries, effecting them live using a laptop and LISA (a program created at Dutch music institution STEIM) and creating lush sonic soundscapes permeated with crackles and techno-esque beats.

Matthews spoke about her journey through music, from her early MIDI violin performances to her collaboration with acoustic pioneer Alan Lamb and her current work. She has been ‘playing’ LISA since 1986, and despite only working with a laptop, has been ‘studying her instrument’ just as one would an acoustic instrument.

A recurring and, for many, redundant topic was: can electronic music be played live and debated in such forums as Attack of the DAT? Kate Crawford put it well when she said electronic music demanded to be appreciated as a new aesthetic. But for most of the already tech-savvy audience, machine-made music is not a lightbulb idea, and certainly not fleshy enough to be debated for an entire session.

A more interesting area of contention is the changing nature of the recording and mastering process in the digital age. Stephen Wittington, Eyespine and Jesse Reynolds discussed this in a Digital Sound Formats forum, pointing out that the process of digital recording has, on the one hand, eliminated the mistakes (or glitches), yet numerous musicians are still hell bent on recreating the hiss of a faulty speaker or the crackle of vinyl. Many fetishists out there are still obsessed with incorporating the ghost in the machine.

Wade Marynowsky gave a refreshing presentation of his audio-visual software created using MAX and NATO. Performing as Spanky, his sounds are accessible and beat-driven, triggering images of post-apocalyptic environmental destruction, colonial bravado and mutated textures. Here we can see the music.

Wax Sound Media and Andrew Kettle joined festival hopper Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, in the Soundscapes discussion about audio installations and sound ‘art.’ I was lucky to catch Scanner’s Stories form the Market Place commissioned for the Adelaide Festival. With performance group Para//elo, Scanner captured the energy and vitality of the Central Market, a wonderful piece of Adelaide’s cultural history.

The forum Collectives with Kate Crawford, The Bird and Kenny Sabir, discussed issues addressing the culture of music. In places such as Sydney, rivalry and politics can lead to the sad demise of many inspirational music initiatives, but the Adelaide participants felt their city was small enough to not necessitate any formalised electronic music collectives. The forum debated the rapid rate at which tools, especially computer-based programs, are created by large companies. Are the people who create these products actually using them? Do composers have time to become proficient on them before the next model is churned out for a quick buck?

Far from breaking any rules, the Electronic Concert Series, held in the stately Elder Hall, showcased the diversity of electronic musical instruments from an almost historical perspective. In a fantastic collaboration, Brisbane’s Topology and Loops combined an orchestral piece with recordings of radio transmissions, tracing the medium backwards from seminal voice recordings of Lindy Chamberlain, Nelson Mandela and Winston Churchill to Marconi’s 1901 broadcast: contact through the ether.

Another ‘historical’ performance, synapse, dating back to 1976, used a PDP-11 computer ‘interacting’ with a live performer. Composed by MIT founder Barry Vascoe, it was an interesting precursor to his current project audio spotlight which projects sound and image onto the viewer from a narrow spotlight. Other performances included wish, by Stevie Wishart and her hurdygurdy, as well as Tristam Carey, Jon Rose and synergy by Martin Ng and Jim Denley.

It was at the closing night party, 2002AD, at Adelaide’s Minke Bar that the current state of digital music was ultimately celebrated. Held in collaboration with the trickster VJ class, the night showcased over 20 acts including Scanner, The Bird, Ollie Olson, Spanky, Sub Bass Snarl and a host of Adelaide acts such as DJ trIP, froST and Kristan Thomas. During a dance performance a few days later, the speaker exploded three quarters of the way into the piece. To be honest, I didn’t really notice. I just thought that the composer had succeeded in replicating speaker hiss exceptionally well. Long live the new flesh.

Analogue 2 Digital, Electronic Music Conference, Adelaide Fringe, Feb 28-March 2.

Originally conceived of as an annex to the more ‘legitimate’ Adelaide Festival, the Fringe has this year seemingly surpassed it in both popularity and visibility. While the Adelaide Festival had attracted controversy since it announced that there would be no specific visual arts program, the Fringe’s visual arts content was, as usual, plentiful, dynamic and varied. Though its all-welcome policy can result in a notoriously hit-and-miss program, in which the works are as diverse in standard as in content, the anything-goes atmosphere aroused a sort of undiscriminating enjoyment in which critical analysis became almost redundant.

Fringe exhibitions were hosted in unorthodox locations: hotels, cafes and pubs, public spaces, shop windows, attached to the bars of carparks, the gardens and driveways of people’s homes. Oscar Ferreiro’s Skidmarks was based in various suburban service stations, where viewers directed by a list on the internet could examine patterns of tyre marks left by speeding cars. The Driveway project involved private driveways and backyards displaying works viewed on a walking tour. Held over 3 weekends, viewers visited houses around Adelaide, watching artists cutting the lawn with scissors or transforming garden sheds with lightboxes and webs of plastic.

In its own version of the lonely hearts database, Fringe organisers connected prospective exhibitors with venues—the ensuing assignations ranged from successful to dubious. Hindley Street and its surrounds were the focus in the city, which is demonstrative of the success of recent pressure to re-create the formerly seedy west end as the “Arts End.” Not for white cube devotees, exhibitions were held in hotels, shops and clubs, in the cinema and in shabby, disused buildings. Results were mixed: a venue such as the Novotel was eminently suitable for the classy Passion Pop, a collection of ceramics and glass, as well as the beautiful Anangu Pitjantjatjara silks that floated in its foyer. In contrast, the many cafe and club settings, as they often do, tended to undermine the artistic merit of displayed works, relegating them to decoration.

The Fringe’s ability—and willingness—to incorporate a variety of work saw it encompass such diverse showings as the Helpmann Academy exhibition of art school graduates, and From The Inside, a collection of works by Aboriginal people in jail. Exhibitions such as the rigorously theoretical, concept-driven photographs of Polyopia’s Mise au Point contrasted with the emphasis on technique and naturalistic aesthetic of the many craft-oriented shows. All the exhibitions reinforced this sense of diversity, as the viewer indulged in an almost gluttonous consumption.

Having already revealed her circus talents in the Lunar Tent at the Garden of Earthly Delights, Sue Broadway, one of the founding members of the internationally celebrated Circus Oz, now takes us back through the generations of her vaudeville family. The show is part tribute and part parody. As her great-great-aunt Elsie used to say: “A mistake is an opportunity.” There are lots of those, and lots of manifestations of the versatile ancestor appearing as the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and tripling as Miss Muffet, the spider and the tuffet.

Elsie, Australia’s own Lola Montez, shone during the Gold Rush days of Bendigo, and in a variety of tights, boots and unusual corsetry, Broadway makes her entrances and strikes an attitude. Here we have an elaborately laced Black Swan drowning in her crinoline to the strains of Tchaikovsky, only to emerge from a tent metamorphosed into a saucy little beach-belle. Jeff Turpin plays straight man, or in this case horse, to her increasingly outrageous antics. She balances peacock feathers on her nose, makes her belly do awful things and starts the juggling acts and ‘object manipulations’ which are the show’s core.

But it’s when she strides on as a horned Valkyrie with a few additions from Oxford Street that schoolchildren, sober matrons and scribbling critics howl with laughter, a collective fit only increased by the appearance of Jeff in similar gear styled for gents. Together they make wicked music on their steel naughty bits, Sue teasingly tickling a tin breast to make it chime, and Jeff innocently experimenting with the number of cones he can remove from his phallus until they fly though the air and get a good juggling. The combination of Mozart and Fellini produces lovely echoes of Papageno and Giulietta degli Spiriti. It also reminds us just how vital the tradition of music hall has been. The stage set, a lush little affair of red velvet curtains and peacock feathers, readily adapts into a screen on which other great vaudevilleans strut their stuff. George Wallace does his celebrated falling dance. Roy Rene crashes Society. Little Tich performs his marvellous leaning routines, and Broadway demonstrates how he did it with his special shoes. Slides of her own family on the road also blazon out the trademark name, besides alluding gently to personal pains and cute little mothers with bobbed hair.

The penultimate act is a tearjerker from another dimension, where primly costumed housewives pour themselves tea from pots, saucers and cups on the head, predictably ending up with brown liquid pouring in a fountain-effect over the face. The slightly miffed performer consoled herself by taking no chances with the sugar bowl. I’d say she got in at least 2 lumps before politely offering iced vovos to the audience. The WOW FINISH deserved its name, with both performers animating the whole stage with spinning plates, flying clubs, magic dishes and their pure Variety.

Sue Broadway & Jeff Turpin, Eccentric Acts, The Union, The Hub, Adelaide Fringe 2002, February 22 – March 16

Director-General of the Arts. It’s a grand title. Its possessor, Roger Wilkins, doesn’t, however, sport epaulettes but rather, a bow tie and a quiet, urbane demeanour. He once studied and taught law and philosophy. His burning arts passions are music, mainly classical and jazz. He learned piano and the pipe organ. He has a particular interest in German literature, poetry and plays. He is Cabinet Secretary to the NSW Government and Director-General of Arts, heading the NSW Ministry for the Arts. My primary interest in meeting Wilkins is to gauge his awareness of the health (or not) of the arts in NSW and to see how policy shapes the government’s vision for the arts. It seems I’ve come to the right man.

Policy & action

“My pre-eminent background is in public policy,” says Wilkins. “I’ve been head of the Cabinet office for about 7 years and I’ve worked across a huge range of public policy issues for the last 10-15 years, from policy on greenhouse gases to health and education. In the Cabinet office I have special units on biotechnology, on drugs strategy, salinity and branches involved in social policy, legal policy, justice, competition.” What excites Wilkins about his role is “the capacity to influence major directions in terms of the future of Australia and New South Wales…If I didn’t I would have gone back and practiced private law or something like that.”

Wilkins still reads philosophy: “I’m excited by ideas and my interest in taking over the Ministry for the Arts was precisely that. I approached the Premier and said I wanted to do this job…I think it’s an index of civilization how the arts and culture fare in a society, and governments, particularly in this country, haven’t recognised the centrality of arts and culture. By that I mean not simply some of those arguments about increasing gross domestic product and economic activity, tourism potential, getting more people through the gate and so on. You’ve got to drill a bit deeper to understand…The arts really is the forum in which important values and ideas play themselves out and that’s a bit of an imponderable, difficult to explain to Treasury.”

Mapping the arts

Clearly Wilkins thinks he can do something for the arts: “it’s an issue which over the last 12 months I’ve been talking to a lot of people about, pre-eminently the Premier of course, as he’s Minister for the Arts. The first thing you need to have is some fairly clear sense of direction. That doesn’t mean you sit on your hands for 3 years while you plan, but it does mean that you need to rebuild your boat while you’re floating a little. You need to develop a framework for action. The arts is no different from a lot of areas of policy which I see from where I sit. There’s a degree of the ad hoc, a degree of isolation from other activities in society just because people build boundaries around bureaucratic territories…

“So, it’s important to build better frameworks for policy so that when you intervene…for example, do something about the MCA or Performance Space…it’s not simply because somebody came through the door with a problem. You need to understand how that fits into a much larger picture…what the issue was that they came through the door about. Ostensibly it might be a question of money but that’s the symptom. You need to understand where that’s coming from and how it fits into a total picture. So I think the challenge for arts agencies is to get that picture. What I’ve been doing for the last 12 months is trying to understand the topography of these issues a little better.”

Whole of government

Perhaps then, thinking of maps, Wilkins’ role as Cabinet Secretary gives the arts a better route than it’s had before between ministry and minister? “I don’t think that’s the point of it. Evan Williams [the former Arts Secretary] and the Premier were always closely co-operating. The value I think I can probably add as a Cabinet Secretary is the ‘whole of government’ approach, which means that for whatever reason I probably have better entree to other CEOs and I can readily talk to and get co-operation from people like State Development, Education, Planning and even the Justice Department. You can begin to examine areas of common interest and mutual benefit. You can begin to build joint programs and to think, for example, are we really making the best use of the money that we’re spending in the arts from an educational point of view and vice versa.”

Wilkins sees his position as presenting opportunities to explain that the arts is not simply for an elite and is not marginal to government policy. He points to the Premier’s crime prevention initiatives emerging from analysis of specific problems in different communities: “a lot of the solutions don’t just come from more police and better law enforcement, they come from a variety of programs designed to address a whole bunch of social issues…part of which is getting people more involved in cultural and artistic activities and using that as a lever of policy. Not that I’m advocating a purely utilitarian approach to the arts but there are areas where you can get a win win.”

Initiatives & policy

I ask Wilkins where arts initiatives emanate from and how they relate to policy. Western Sydney received $23.6 million earlier this year for the arts, primarily in capital development—refurbished theatres, arts centres and galleries, new multi-arts spaces—building on earlier funding and paid for this time from a stamp duty surplus.

For Wilkins, policy development has many sources. “Initiatives about arts and culture almost inevitably do come through the Ministry but that doesn’t mean that the Ministry necessarily thinks them all up. You might be responding to some problem, the Premier and the Premier’s office ring down and say that they want something to happen. They may come out of Cabinet. They may come out of the Parliamentary system and the Ministry system, from the private sector…or the arts and culture sector.”

Wilkins sees the Ministry as providing a framework in which these initiatives can operate, where the ideas behind them can make sense. The Western Sydney initiative he sees as “a nice mix…it’s policy opportunism in a way but it’s informed by the fact that you had done your homework and you did understand what infrastructure was required out there. And people in the Ministry had done that [work] over a period of time. Policy development—and I’ve seen a lot of it—is having a good appreciation of the topography, having a framework of policy within which you want to act, but then spotting windows of opportunity and when you see them, you go through. That’s very important. There’s a degree of entrepreneurship and opportunism in policy.”

In Sydney’s west it must also involve new levels of involvement of local councils in the arts, especially once the new facilities are up and running and require content. Wilkins sees the initiatives as providing leverage to encourage local government not only to make sure the venues are used, but to be involved in cultural planning more generally: “So it gives you entree into a whole extra level of policy development.”

At this point in the conversation I’m sensing an apparent gap between, on the one hand, the broad principle that the arts is good for a society and, on the other, the pragmatic responsiveness of arts initiatives. There are countries that have arts, even artform policies (as Denmark has for music), realised as acts of Parliament. Wilkins is disapproving: “there is a danger in hankering after what’s called ‘the arts policy’ as if it’s some tablet handed down from Mt Sinai. That’s not the way good policy develops. [I’ll give you] a couple of good examples from outside of the arts area, both with this current government. One is natural resources policy. The Premier has actually pushed a lot of initiatives on things like salinity, native vegetation clearing, water reform…In a sense, they start off as separate instances of initiatives that people want to embark on. You begin to see that they come together. There’s something that all these things have in common. There’s a story you can tell about how they coalesce into a coherent policy which then drives further work. So there’s a type of iterative process between doing sensible things in particular areas, then drawing them together and saying, hey there’s an overall direction we want to move in. This has been successful. We want to push it further. Very rarely do you see it…

“With the drug strategy, it was ready to happen, if you like. It was ready when people and politicians started talking about the demand side rather than the supply side of the drug problem, which is what the Drug Summit was all about. That’s how policy gets made. It’s sort of like a big jigsaw puzzle where you begin to discern what the puzzle is about and then you begin to discern what the gaps are about. The major difference from a jigsaw puzzle is that it’s not static, it’s dynamic. It keeps moving about.”

Giving direction

“Having said that, I think there is a need to give leadership and to articulate policy directions…It would be to say, for example, that we think we really want to spend the next 5 years concentrating on all aspects of the performing arts. We want to actually get that jigsaw of problems and issues and opportunities sorted. If you give that sort of signal, a lot of people will start coming out of the woodwork, talking to you about it. Opportunities will begin to make themselves. Particularly if someone like the Premier gets behind it. I just use that as a hypothetical example. So it’s a question of giving policy direction more than anything else. And you do it by example. You don’t just say things, you do things.”

A Ministry for the job?

The question then arises, is the Ministry for the Arts sufficiently well equipped for Wilkins’ vision of responsiveness and policy-making? He thinks so: “It’s an impressive organisation that I inherited. What I’ll say about it is not a criticism. It’s actually just saying where I think we could crank things up a notch. First of all, I think it should be basically about policy, and good public policy. It probably is a bit short of staff. It has been preoccupied with processing grants at the expense of people having time to spend on policy. I think it needs to be a little more active in terms of making an agenda…at a national level…and within State government, across portfolios.” Wilkins would like the Ministry “to get interested in curriculum and syllabus and what the education department is doing. I think we need to do a lot more work with local government in terms of looking at the opportunities there to broker regional cooperation. I think we need to talk to institutions and give them more strategic leadership in terms of the government saying what they expect…” He is concerned that without precise time frames and numbers “you end up with memoranda of understanding which are sort of motherhood things.” He would also like relationships between the Ministry and clients to be on a firmer footing: “I don’t see in a lot of cases why we don’t have longer term funding arrangements with people. Once again, that’s another example of where things are a bit ad hoc. People come in year after year and get a little bit of funding and they don’t know even one month before the end of the year whether they’re going to make it. That strikes me as an odd financial arrangement if nothing else.”

Artform survival

While federal and state government initiatives in areas of youth, touring and regional and suburban development have been significant, there has been no increase in funding for basic artform activity for many years. In effect there are insufficient funds for survival let alone growth, with greater and greater gaps between projects for many artists and infrastructure organisations becoming less and less capable of offering support. It’s something that the late Richard Wherrett, who sat on the Ministry’s Advisory Committee, felt very strongly about; that basic artform funding had come to a standstill for a decade. Although sympathetic to the various initiatives (and some participating in them), many artists feel that support for research and development, the work in the laboratory, is an area governments are not interested in; it’s simply not politically opportune. Is this true?

Wilkins is sympathetic. “In essence, I agree with you…On any analysis of the way in which artforms prosper and develop you have to say that if the R and D end of the spectrum, the laboratory, if you like, is having problems, then the artform has a problem. So I think when you ask does government understand that, I certainly understand that and I think the Premier appreciates that. We understand where the R and D end of the spectrum fits into the overall health of the artform and how it can contribute to a pluralism of ideas and of activity.

“What you do about the current problems is fairly clear cut. And in another sense, that would just feed into a conventional government funding program. What you need to do, for example with the performing arts, is to look at infrastructure—but it’s an expansive concept. It means basically making sure that everything from the space in which to perform to organisations to help produce, organisations to help create marketing opportunities and audience development, that all of that is in place for people to take advantage of.”

A case in point: Performance Space

“And you know we’ve been talking to [Artistic Director] Fiona Winning and Performance Space [about the future home of the organisation]. It’s about finding some key organisations of that sort [to work together] which you then say, well, we are comfortable that you know what you’re doing and we’re going to back you on this. And I think that that is really one thing that government should be doing, and one thing that we are trying to do.

“We’d like to do something about Eveleigh [the former railway Carriage Works in Redfern including Technology Park and an undeveloped site formerly managed by Company B Belvoir and now temporarily housing some small performance companies]. I think the boss will be keen to do something on that. It’s a question of money, of budget priorities. I can’t forecast…But we’re certainly keen to do something about it if possible.”

Recently, Rupert Myer, who is chairing the Visual Arts Inquiry, announced that there would be “no pot of gold” at the end of the inquiry. Similar noises have been coming from the Small to Medium companies and organisations inquiry. There have been more than hints that the solutions to arts problems will be found in improved networking, improvements to infrastructure (did any mergers come out of Nugent?) and tax deals for artists. While these could be valuable, I insist to Wilkins that they simply don’t address basic artform funding levels. While it might be good to have a new building for Performance Space and other organisations dealing with the contemporary arts (Wilkins interrupts: “Not only a building, Keith. I would like to see them playing a much more active role in the development of that sector”) the issue currently is what work can Performance Space program when so many projects go unfunded?

Falling between governments

For Wilkins this raises a key issue, the relationship between the Australia Council and the state arts ministries. Once upon a time the former looked after the product and the other the infrastructure, but those lines have long blurred as the states have taken on more and more arts responsibility. The pressure is on for the states to make up for what the limited budget of the Australia Council can’t do and there’s widespread feeling, especially in NSW, that Council and the states are quite out of sync. Wilkins thinks that “there needs to be an accommodation, an agreement at federal level. The Nugent Report was an example of the first time anyone’s thought, in a sense, about the roles and responsibilities of different levels of government in relation to arts practice. So it’s a move in the right direction. You need to get some sort of arrangement or agreement like that in relation to the small to medium companies and in terms of the visual arts as well…At the moment, you have inefficiency between different levels of government. And I’ve done a lot of work on federalism in a lot of policy areas and I’ve got to say that at its best it’s a whole bunch of people sitting around and saying they should cooperate more. At its worst, it’s a whole bunch of people sitting around saying they’re not going to cooperate…If [the states are to provide] infrastructure, there’s got to be some arrangement about the production and the projects that are going to be given life through that infrastructure.”

Although he won’t be drawn on what plan of action he’ll recommend if the various inquiries come to nought, Wilkins thinks “it’s probably true that the answer lies in doing things more efficiently between levels of government and some injection of extra funding…At a state level we’re looking at getting more money into the grants system. That’s going to be an issue worked out through the budget process. So I don’t know if there will be extra money, but really the critical thing I come back to is public policy, good frameworks and an understanding of what you want to do.”

On the plight of small to medium dance projects and companies in NSW (a distinctly sensitive pressure point in the federal-state relationship), Wilkins pinpoints the issues of sufficient studio space and “the capacity to allow the development of choreography in this country. So probably we need another 1 or 2 small dance companies where people can get more opportunities…That probably won’t break the bank…A propos of that, what you find in arts and cultural policy is how much you can actually achieve with a very small amount of money compared with a lot of the other policy areas I work in.”

Off the map

A little buoyed by some of the possibilities that Wilkins has hinted at I say, “So we can look forward to art that nourishes and challenges and is not only sustainable but grows?” Wilkins reply is interesting, if unexpected, taking us back into unmapped terrain—what can be done for the arts outside of direct funding. In his experience in other areas of public policy “the point of funding people is normally not so they just stay on the government teat. What you normally would try and do would be to find some way of setting them free. I would have thought especially in the arts more than anywhere else that people would be suspicious of government funding, given the track record of some regimes. So it’s a question, Keith, and I’m not talking about withdrawal of funds or making the pie smaller, of how should we interact in terms of grant funding? I’ve said to my people we’re sort of picking winners…One of the things I’d like to investigate without threatening anybody is to look at what other models there might be. I don’t feel comfortable choosing what people put on.”

This takes us back to the arts map and how to read it in order to make the most of it. It’s something that Terry Cutler, the Australia Council Chair, raised in our RealTime interview with him [RT45 page 6]. Cutler’s involved in the federal government cluster study of new media infrastructure and networking in Australia. Wilkins says that, “One of the people who’s impressed me in the last few months is Simon Roodhouse [Research Professor, Faculty of Arts Science & Education, Bolton Institute] from the UK. He came out here and talked about what seemed interesting to me at the time…Looking at the [arts] topography, audits of artistic or cultural activity…you begin to find that there’s a great deal more activity than you actually understood was going on. Then you can begin to see ways in which people can cooperate to their own mutual benefit. And we don’t do enough of that here. We don’t do enough lateral thinking.”

The good news

A few weeks after I’d interviewed Roger Wilkins, it was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald (Bryce Hallett, “Railyard becomes arts central as theatre companies roll in”, March 21) that, “The Eveleigh Carriage Works in Redfern is to become a new inner city performing arts hub with the State Government’s announcement that it would buy the site from State Rail for $15m. The Carriage Works and blacksmith’s shop will become a permanent home for companies such as Legs on the Wall, Theatre Kantanka and Stalker Theatre…In addition to offices and rehearsal studios, a contemporary performance space is also planned for the site.” This is exciting news for the performance community, now eagerly waiting to hear what kind of role Performance Space might play in this significant development.

Kathryn who is thirteen years old, is staying after school at her grandparent’s house. It is nine o’clock on a November evening. She has escaped the company of her grandparents to play with her grandmothers’ cat, which is a queen named Lucy, by moving into the sunroom of her grandparent’s house. After some minutes of happily petting the cat it has turned on Kathryn, penetrating the skin of her left index finger with its fangs and raising three lines of skin on her left wrist with the claws of its left paw. In response to Lucy’s attack, Kathryn has grabbed at the cat in an effort to disentangle herself from it. She has been fortunate enough to find the cat’s collar with three fingers of her right hand. This has allowed her sufficient purchase on Lucy’s slippery form to remove the cat to the carpeted floor of the sunroom. Kathryn has placed her injured finger in her mouth so as to contain her pain and her blood. She has then recognised that she has wet herself and has, simultaneously, taken the finger from her mouth. 2001. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Artist Profile: Kristian Burford

Burford makes life-size, hyperrealistic sculptures of figures, installing them in often painstakingly constructed ‘sets’, usually creations of domestic settings. These figures typically appear naked or only very partially clothed, and might all…be seen as having in various ways lost or given up, if only for a moment, their self-control. ….

So far as Burford wants us to look at his work as if it is life, rather than art, he places us in an awkward situation, witnessing, discovering typically private sexual acts in an intimate situation. Still, it’s hard to think of this as voyeuristic since the depicted figures do not answer, even unwittingly, the gaze of the voyeur with their own. They are self-possessed, their awareness is directed inwards. Michael Newall

Kristian Burford received an Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship in 1998 and is currently undertaking the graduate program at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. He was a finalist in both the inaugural Helen Lempriere National Sculpture award in 2001 and the inaugural National Sculpture Award at the National Gallery of Australia. He was recently included in Morbid Curiosity at ACME in Los Angeles and will be exhibiting at New York’s 1-20 Gallery in April.

Excerpt and biographical note from Michael Newall, “Kristian Burford: Wish Fulfilment”, Broadsheet. Vol 31. No 1, March-May, 2002. Reproduced with the permission of the author and the publisher, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia.

The 2002 Perth International Arts Festival (PIAF) was the third in Director Sean Doran’s quartet of themed festivals based upon the elements (Water in 2000, Earth in 2001, Air in 2002 and Fire completing the cycle in 2003)—a somewhat banal thematic structure, but one broad enough to allow for lateral interpretation. This year’s theme of Air inspired the title Slipstream for Visual Arts Manager Sophie O’Brien’s second consecutive PIAF visual arts festival.

O’Brien faced a considerable challenge curating a program relevant to a city whose visual arts scene is currently suffering something of a lull, due in part to a severe lack of art criticism combined with a dearth of exhibition spaces after a year fraught with gallery closures. In keeping with the general state of all-pervading apathy, Slipstream was the least-hyped visual arts festival in several years, but perhaps the most ambitious in terms of content, with a focus on research-based projects and ephemera. O’Brien seemed to have interpreted the theme primarily in terms of space—the marginalised and changing social spaces we inhabit and the space between things.

Slipstream featured a marked focus on large-scale audio-visual installation, headlined by War and Peace, at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery. Comprising 2 installations by Lyndal Jones— Aqua Profunda, produced for the 2001 Venice Biennale, and 1996’s Spitfire 1,2,3—the exhibition was so good it’s difficult to believe the works were not created to be shown together. This was my first encounter with Jones’ work, and I was blown away by the sheer scale of the undertaking, combined with the relative novelty of an audio-visual installation requiring more of its audience than passively watching a screen. Spitfire 1,2,3 demands its viewer engage physically with the space in order to switch between 2 alternate soundtracks (one ambient music, the other spoken word) heard through headphones. Featuring dizzying aerial footage of the British countryside taken from the cabin of a Spitfire fighter jet, the work is remarkable in drawing the viewer’s attention to their own body in space. Aqua Profunda’s footage of constantly shifting reflections on water and the vertiginous bobbing of ferries, contrasted with intimate imagery of a woman speaking abstractedly of love and desire, effectively renders any single reading of the work impossible. Rather, Jones creates a space for shifting meanings, an abstract meditation on states of desire.

Research-based projects inevitably run the risk of falling short in a gallery context, as was the case with Multiplicity (Paris-Perth) at the Moores Building, part of European collective Multiplicity’s ongoing documentation of the changing use of urban environments. Despite only having 4 days in WA in which to work, the group successfully tapped into some of the specific racial tensions of Perth’s surrounding suburbs. In particular, a series of surveillance photographs following an anonymous Asian man from a non-descript suburban house, across town to his workplace in an industrial area, cleverly played upon the contradictions of racial otherness in a city that is closer to South East Asia than the rest of Australia. Ultimately, however, the cavernous Moores Building seems to have proven simply too vast a space for the group to fill in 4 days.

At PICA, Elvis Has Just Left the Building explored contemporary urban legends. I was disappointed by the show, given the subversive potential of the theme in a climate of post-September 11 global paranoia. Despite an intriguing mix of international exhibitors and highlights such as Ann-Sofi Siden’s mock horror-movie preview, The Clocktower (presenting her iconic protagonist, the Queen of Mud in an inner-city setting), the exhibition as a whole was not especially engaging.

Slipstream proved notable in showcasing emerging West Australian talent, with the majority of local contributors still in the early stages of their careers. Parallel Worlds, showing consecutively in an inner-city high-rise office space and International Art Space Kelleberrin in the WA wheatbelt, primarily featured recent graduates. Whilst the 2-venue curatorial premise was intriguing, I felt the show was unresolved in contextualising its venues—the capitalist associations of the metropolitan venue worked well, but there was something a little obvious in setting this up in opposition to a country town. Despite this, exhibitors produced some of the best works of their collective careers. In particular, Susan Flavell’s mattress landscapes and Pearl Rasmussen’s collaboration with illustrator Danny Armstrong were some of the most ambitious works yet produced by these artists.

The high point of my festival was unquestionably The Divine Comedy at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, which juxtaposed the work of 3 highly disparate artists: Francisco Goya, Buster Keaton and William Kentridge. Curated by AGWA’s Curator of Contemporary Art, Trevor Smith, the exhibition successfully linked 3 artists who really have very little in common, bar the project of social critique through surrealism. AGWA and Smith wowed the masses last year with their Robert McPherson Retrospective, but wisely chose to go low-key for 2002. The Divine Comedy was an intimate exhibition, reliant upon subtle juxtaposition (the raucous musical accompaniment to a Kentridge animation providing a weird soundtrack to Keaton’s silent films projected in another part of the gallery, for example). The exhibition was a major curatorial accomplishment.

As an integrated visual arts festival, Slipstream proved a somewhat flawed, yet remarkably ambitious undertaking in the context of a festival (and city) that has traditionally held a performing arts focus. A slipstream is “an air current”, O’Brien tells us in the festival guide, “one that moves in a forward direction behind and with a moving object, creating an airflow strong enough to pull you in its wake.” While a more cynical writer might suggest that being pulled along blindly in a cultural vacuum is an apt metaphor for the current state of the visual arts in Perth, there is much to be said for the sheer ambition of Slipstream, and with O’Brien moving on to new projects this year, I hope that the legacy of her vision will be evident in the Fire festival next year.

Slipstream: 14 exhibitions across 12 venues: War and Peace, Lyndal Jones, curator John Barrett-Lennard, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Feb 8-March 31; Multiplicity (Paris-Perth), The Moores Building, Feb 2-24; Elvis Has Just Left The Building, curator Boris Kremer, PICA, Jan 25-Feb 24; Parallel Worlds , curator Kate McMillan, Carillion City Arcade, Jan 20-Feb 24 & International Art Space Kellerberrin, Jan 20-Feb 17; The Divine Comedy, curator Trevor Smith, Art Gallery of WA, Feb 7-May 26; 2002 Perth International Arts Festival, Jan 26-Feb 26.

One of the innovations of this year’s Adelaide Festival was the inclusion of a number of new Australian films. The major triumph in the season was undoubtedly Ivan Sen’s first feature Beneath Clouds, one of the strongest and most deeply affecting films produced in this country.

The success of the film at the Berlin Film Festival, where it won awards for best debut feature and best new actress (for Dannielle Hall), signals Sen’s rapid ascent to international prominence. This rise has not been unearned, given his body of short and medium length works that also screened in Adelaide and provided a rich background for the feature film.

Another viewing context was the festival’s emphasis on Indigenous films and films on Indigenous issues. Beneath Clouds is a road movie dealing with the unlikely travelling companions Lena, a young woman running away from her Aboriginal background in search of an idealised Irish father, and Vaughn, a young Aboriginal man who breaks out of detention to see his dying mother. Over the course of little more than a day, they hitchhike from Moree to Sydney.

Sen is clearly conscious of his status as an Indigenous filmmaker, though he is also anxious to position the film as broadly accessible. He refers to his Aboriginal background as “something to be proud of, but also just a tag, a hook.” While his films represent a strongly personal and coherent insight into the experiences of Aboriginal youth in country towns, Sen also wants to generalise beyond this. He claims to be “always interested in people searching for something that makes them believe they belong somewhere.”

In discussions after the screening, Sen emphasised his interest in a sympathetic emotional engagement with characters: “I find it easy to see other people’s point-of-view,” he said, adding that his starting point for the film was that he “felt very close to both characters.” His aim was to “intensify the emotional journey of the characters to such a level that the audience will have no choice but to join them.”

The explosive emotional response to the film bears out the power of his filmmaking in bringing home the ways in which racially-derived pain is internalised. Sen says that, “I knew I wanted to create an emotion at the end of the film, but I didn’t know what the emotion was.”

Sen spoke of Beneath Clouds in terms of personal history and catharsis. Lena’s denial of her racial background has an autobiographical element, Vaughn’s character draws on the experience of a cousin. Themes, narrative fragments, and stylistic elements return from the earlier short films in a tightly condensed fashion. The 1998 film, Tears, features 2 characters named Vaughn and Lena walking a country road while the camera tracks laterally beside them. Sen wrote the feature script 4 years ago, and the retrospective of his shorts showed us the ways he has been sketching around it and honing the power of his craft.

Everything about Beneath Clouds speaks of sparseness and strength of vision. The characterisations are simple but unyielding. Lena and Vaughn suffer no bullshit. They have the close-mouthed scepticism of those on the margins. Anger chokes other emotion, but the project of the narrative is to ripen that anger to include emotions that will help the protagonists to re-find the possibilities for life.

Given the state of the world, and the way it leads you to withdraw from it, there is no neat or hopeful ending here, but there is the ability to understand your pain. This film emphasises the relevance of this to an understanding of Aboriginal youth culture: it also wants to help a broad audience imaginatively inhabit these situations and emotions.

In this light, Sen is clearly achieving work that is much more important than the liberal guilt melodrama prominent in some other recent films on Indigenous themes.

Stylistically, the film is equally uncompromising. Sen’s filming of conversation demonstrates his sureness of touch. No wide 2-shots, no over-the-shoulder shot-reverse shot. He symmetrically juxtaposes big bold close-ups. You access this film through faces. In discussing his casting decisions, Sen keeps on returning to the look of the people, their non-verbal aspect. Like Pasolini, or better yet Bresson, it’s an effective way of dealing with non-actors, but it’s also a strategy that’s about direct honesty. There is nowhere to dissemble or conjure away the harshness of the truth.

Those who have seen Sen’s 1999 film Wind, will know that he has the strength (rare among Australian filmmakers) to substitute a single reaction shot for 10 lines of dialogue. He refers to the substitution of other elements such as looks or diegetic sounds as a wish to “start simple before you introduce dialogue,” so that dialogue emerges as “a focused substance.” The 1997 AFTRS short, Warm Strangers, is the clearest example of this, building to the point where a single word is uttered at the climactic moment.

There is perhaps something of Sen’s own behavioural style here. The quietly-spoken director likes to tell the story of his High School yearbook that summed him up thus: “Ivan saw all, heard all, said little.” The publicity materials for Beneath Clouds source his interest in film to “the ability to represent the complexity of life in a whole different realm to that of the word.”

When pressed to generalise about his formal methods, Sen spoke of avoiding contrivance to achieve a more direct realism, but then qualified this to say that he was interested in forms of contrivance which produce something uncontrived.

The productiveness of this paradox is evident in his handling of landscape. He plays with the angular abstraction of the wide-angle lens, and compositions with the horizon ostentatiously low in the frame. The opening titles sequence, shot by Sen himself (he was also composer and musician for the soundtrack, as well as writing and directing), lays out this interest in finding patterns in land and sky in order to see it afresh and emotionalise it. He has pared down his methods of achieving abstraction from those found in earlier films which included fast motion, dissolves to an unmoved camera position and the manipulations of colour balance which are so striking in Wind.

Ivan Sen’s success is doubly important if it provides evidence that institutional policies aimed at producing new filmmakers in this country are working. He comes out of the Australian Film Television and Radio School, where he has become the central figure for a group of collaborators. These include cinematographer Allen Collins, producer Teresa-Jayne Hanlon and editor Karen Johnson. Sen and Collins, in particular, have built up a strong rapport. This has resulted in a very quiet set, according to Sen, where “our language becomes as simple as a look.”

Australian filmmakers rarely get such a chance to work consistently, and while we hear a lot about development pathways for emerging filmmakers, it is encouraging to see such a resounding example of success in development policy. This validation was particularly important given the controversy surrounding Australian Rules, which also premiered at the festival. We all know the problems of a film industry administered by government institutions, but it’s important to remember that every now and then the system works.

Sen is not so much shy as self-possessed. He has detailed plans for the future, which include several films to be shot in the US, and which he promises will be “totally different” now that he has emptied his sketchpad with this film.

Beneath Clouds stands as a summation; a moment when a group of people working with a sureness in their art have come together to produce something fine and deeply moving.

Beneath Clouds, writer/director Ivan Sen, distributor Dendy Films, premiered Adelaide Festival, Her Majesty’s Theatre, March 3-4, released nationally May 23. Also screening as part of Message Sticks, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, May 14 – June 2.

This year’s Adelaide Festival premiered a number of films hotly contesting a range of issues including, implicitly, whether white Australians can make truly representative films about Indigenous subjects. Australian Rules has been particularly controversial but this subtext is also read in Rolf de Heer’s The Tracker and Phil Noyce’s Rabbit Proof Fence. In our Watchdog column, Jane Mills takes a critical look at the latter and its relationship with Hollywood filmmaking. Director Phil Noyce and Indigenous filmmaker Darlene Johnson (director of the insightful making-of documentary Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence, screened Channel 9, Sunday Feb 3, which should be seen alongside the film) offer their perspectives on the issue. In WriteStuff, Hunter Cordaiy interviews Christine Olsen, who adapted the original story to screenplay, about the film’s evolution and the commitment and obsessiveness that was part of the process.

Ivan Sen is Australia’s finest maker of short films with a series of outstanding and award-winning works including Tears, Dust and Wind behind him. Now he has won the award for best debut feature film at the 2002 Berlin Film Festival for Beneath Clouds, which continues Sen’s exploration into young Indigenous people living outside cities. In an incisive report Mike Walsh looks at the new film in the context of the earlier works and what Sen has to say about his work.

Keeping track

In Sydney and Melbourne it can be hard to gauge what’s happening in film in other states. OnScreen keeps up with reports on the WA Screen Awards, digi-docs (digital documentaries at the Adelaide Fringe) and the South Australia Zoom Awards. Plus there’s my take on the My Queer Career Awards which featured a strong field of shorts screened as part of Sydney’s Mardi Gras Festival. We also introduce a new mini-review section, critical bytes that encourage you to see new Australian and international independent films doing interesting things on celluloid. This time we include Walking on Water, The Tracker, The Circle, Mulholland Drive, Promises, No Man’s Land and Paul Cox’s eagerly awaited Nijinski, based on the dancer’s diaries and featuring Adelaide’s Leigh Warren Dance Company.

Digital profiling

RealTime+OnScreen is the only Australian publication that regularly profiles digital artists and keeps you up to date with events and conferences. This time we turn our attention to WA artist Michelle Glaser. Juvenate, on which she collaborated, was co-winner of the prestigious Mayne Multimedia Award at the Adelaide Writers Festival. We visit Tasmania’s Maria Island for the Solar Circuit gathering and continue to look at works that cross the film/digi boundary including the already mentioned Digi Docs conference. Emma-Kate Croghan (Love and Other Catastrophes) takes her Desire to the web and David Varga looks at opportunities for filmmakers using DVD distribution. We also introduce a new section where artists describe their digital works-in-progress, a snapshot of ideas in development in the digital arts arena.

Exit

And with that smorgasbord, I bid you adieu. This is my last OnScreen. I’m leaving RealTime for a position at the Australian Film Commission. It’s been a wonderful 4 years (with 2 as OnScreen editor) and I’d like to thank, in Academy Awards style, Managing Editors Keith and Virginia, for offering me the opportunity to commission some of the finest writers working in the arts in Australia, and for keeping the standards of RealTime so high. Thanks also to Gail Priest, Designer and Sales Manager, for always being positive, capable and willing to lend advice and a hand with anything. And thanks to all the OnScreen editors and writers who continue to make this section of the magazine an insight into what’s happening in film, screen culture and digital media nationally. Where else can you get this critical information, and where else can you get it free? I look forward to receiving it on my desk at the AFC.

How many South Australians does it take to change a light bulb, how many to change a government, how many to make a film industry? All good questions as we gathered for this year’s election night Zoom! awards, designed as the centrepiece of SA’s film development policy.

Despite continuing problems of defining what constitutes an SA film, the good news is that the awards brought together a solid collection of contenders. Most of the winners impressed with their intelligent understanding of the possibilities of the short film. Rather than Big Themes Hammered Home or Smartarsefest gags, we saw filmmakers discovering what they can do with stylistic tools—light, framing, staging, sound—in order to explore the power of creative imagery.

The main prize of the evening went to Jack Sheridan for Day Dreams. Sheridan’s previous film, Solipsis, also featured in last year’s Media Resource Centre craft awards. It was good to see the SAFC encouraging a filmmaker who is working consistently in an environment that gives little support to his kind. (When people describe SA as the driest state, they are not just talking about water.)

Sheridan’s film also won craft awards for screenplay and performance. The protagonist is ferociously bent on self-destruction to the exclusion of any distractions in the real or imagined world. Even when these coalesce to conjure up an attacker, none of it impinges on her heroic daze. Sheridan’s sureness of touch matches his dark humour.

If last year was marked by women’s successes in these awards, this year the boys were back in town. It was a coincidence that the second-place encouragement award went to another film in which women were targets of sexual assault. Having said that, Zane Roach’s Dark City combined a keen sense of the strange economies of guilt and redemption with an eye for the pleasures of low key lighting and noir mise-en-scene.

The most striking film of the evening was Matthew Bate’s Turbulence, which took out the award for sound design. (Sound people are on the money with films about the hearing impaired, just as actors can count on roles about the mentally ill to put awards on the mantelpiece.) The film deals with a boy’s realisation of the violence within him and of the forces that separate and then reconnect him to the world.

Christian Keefe’s The Worst Day of My Life won the Best Design prize. It treads familiar territory in dealing with the anomie of the salaryman, but it works this terrain with rich visual inventiveness, converting the protagonist’s spiritual isolation into a formal game of spatial manipulation. Underplayed performances combine with careful staging and inventive use of off-screen space to explore the texture of alienation rather than simply the narration of it.

As ever, the minor part of the awards happens in the present. The terror of the future looms over the evening. Let us enjoy the moment and commend the winners to the savage and indifferent gods who rule the lives of young Australian filmmakers.

Zoom! SAFC Filmmaker of the Future Awards + Media Resource Centre Craft Awards, Mercury Cinema, Adelaide, Feb 9

Even before I’d seen a single frame of Rabbit-proof Fence I was drowning in a sea of marketing spin-offs and moral blackmail.

First there was the book by Doris Pilkington Garimara, the daughter of Molly Craig—the oldest of the 3 Aboriginal girls to walk the 1500 miles back home from the River Moore Settlement to which they’d been sent in 1931 by AO Neville, Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia. Then came a film tie-in edition (interestingly called “a fictional account” by the publishers) with the cover showing the, by now, familiar sepia-tinted still of Molly (Everlyn Sampi) carrying her younger sister Daisy (Tianna Sansbury). The legend ‘A True Story’ appears just above the girls’ heads and under the author’s name, the inevitable ‘Now a major film…’

You’ve read the book, seen the film and yes, there is a T-shirt. There were also 2 trailers, a website, a ‘making of’ documentary by Indigenous filmmaker Darlene Johnson, a massive Channel 9 promotion that included free tickets for 1500 competition entrants to meet Noyce at a Fox Studios special screening, a study guide for schools from Australian Teachers Of Media (ATOM, supported by Qantas), free postcards, posters, the CD of Peter Gabriel’s score, and Christine Olsen’s screenplay from Currency Press (see interview p16).

I was reluctant to write about the film partly because I felt uncomfortably close to several people involved: I’d met Noyce socially, Olsen is a friend of a friend (we also share the same publishers), and Johnson is a former student and now friend. Mostly, however, I had grave misgivings about Noyce as a filmmaker.

I admire his early Australian films—Backroads, Newsfront and Heatwave—which skilfully critique aspects of Australian society by their formal marriage of innovative style with radical content. But I find his more recent Hollywood action-thriller movies—Clear and Present Danger, Patriot Games and The Bone Collector—uninspired, politically conservative examples of a genre I normally enjoy. The Bone Collector is a particularly nauseous combination of necrophilia and misogyny.

Everything about Rabbit-proof Fence sounded so worthy that my bullshit antenna was working overtime. Mambo was giving a percentage of the T-shirt sales to the Jigalong community where Molly and Daisy still live; a trailer stressed that OA Neville had the Aboriginals’ best interests at heart; first-time scriptwriter Olsen wrote how privileged she was to meet the girls and grannies of Jigalong; stories abounded about how both Noyce and international star Kenneth Branagh had accepted massive income drops and/or deferred payments because they were so moved by the story.

Was this another representation of Aboriginals as victims to assuage whitefella guilt? The quote from Noyce on the cover of the tie-in book summed it up: “This is a marvellous adventure story and thriller, celebrating courage and the resilience of the human heart.” This sounded straight out of The Player, Robert Altman’s parody of Hollywood manipulation.

I could not have been more wrong. I saw the film and was profoundly moved by the politically thoughtful approach taken by its white screenwriter and white male Hollywood director. I saw Johnson’s documentary and was profoundly moved all over again. I now believe the whole package that Rabbit-proof Fence has become offers a site to explore reconciliation from a place where emotion, truth, fiction and fact all merge.

Noyce thinks in an ideal world the film would be made by a black woman director who would have said something different to another audience. But he wanted to reach black and white audiences about a contemporary need for white Australians:

When I make a film [on a political subject] I wet my finger and put it up to the wind. Will it be blowing in my direction when the film comes out? In this case the wind was already blowing. The audience wanted a vehicle…to get beyond the rhetoric, the politics. I hope it is part of the reconciliation.

It’s no longer possible to…sweep it all under the carpet. It was genocide…it has to be genocide. It was deliberate and people were once in denial about it. But, since Bringing Them Home, there’s been a sufficient martialling of opinion opposing the view that the general population were simply confused. We almost destroyed Australia’s greatest resource. There is a need for white grieving.

To achieve this, Noyce admits to something seldom openly included as part of film art:

Hollywood knows how to reach audiences. I’ve learned the lessons in marketing and casting that Hollywood teaches. Now I have to use these skills to sell an Indigenous story into the mainstream. It’s not overtly political, but covertly. Hollywood can do this and can do it well…

I’m a sort of ‘migrant worker’ in Hollywood: you’re tolerated as long as you service the big machine…Rabbit-proof Fence is an antidote to what I’ve done in the USA. That was ‘escapist entertainment’ first and foremost. [Rabbit-proof Fence] has a story that could be the best of any Hollywood movie. Basically it’s an escape movie.

Noyce’s description of his film as a genre movie helps explain its potential for widespread appeal: here is a movie about a long denied subject using film language filmgoers are familiar with. But how to attract audiences reluctant to face up to historically repressed facts? This is where Johnson’s finely-wrought documentary enters the scene:

Phillip’s film is an emotional journey about a basic human right to be with your mother and live in your own home. My film is about getting a bigger audience for Rabbit-proof Fence.

Johnson focuses on the transformation of the 3 young actresses to mirror the transformation of the 3 girls who rejected the role of passive victim to white man’s well-meaning but racist designs for them. She made a bold structural decision to end her documentary not with the post-production process as many ‘making of’ films do, but with the filming of the scene where Molly, Daisy and Gracie are forcibly removed from their mothers. It makes this scene more emotionally distressing than it is in Noyce’s film where it takes place near the start, before we are attached to the characters. Johnson took this decision because she hoped it would deliver viewers to Noyce’s film.

Cinema plays a role in winning the hearts and minds of the Australian people to accept, understand and ultimately reverse the consequences of white assimilationist policy. In their own ways, Charles Chauvel’s Jedda and Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries, A Rural Tragedy also do this better than documentary, perhaps because they’re fiction and, unlike documentary, rely upon the mimetic for audiences to become absorbed and incorporated into the narrative. Johnson agrees:

Rabbit-proof Fence is better than a documentary which is always too actual, and can be too confronting. Fiction allows people to identify better. It makes for emotional attachment. Fiction uses storytelling devices…it allows us to get caught up in the story emotionally in a way that documentary doesn’t.

This slippage between fiction and actuality is too hard for some. Tabloid journalist Piers Akerman attacked Noyce for “playing fast and hard with the truth” (The Sunday Telegraph, March 3 2002). Responding, Noyce quoted Doris Pilkington: “Recognise what happened to us, so that we can all be healed.” Paradoxically, recognition requires the understanding that comes with the sort of emotional assimilation that Hollywood cinema can offer its audiences.

Paradoxical because, as Laleen Jayamanne points out in a thoughtful essay (“Love me tender, love me true, never let me go: A Sri Lankan reading of Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy” in Toward Cinema and its Double, Indiana University Press, 2001) the definition of ‘assimilation’ is: “to make like, to adapt, to absorb and incorporate, to convert into a substance of its own nature; to absorb into the system.” For audiences, the mimetic, involving assimilation in a way that makes it an essential element of fiction, can lead to awareness of truth, rather than a denial.

By exposing cinematic mimesis, Johnson’s reflexive documentary reveals how Noyce uses the cinematic experience of audience assimilation into the emotions of a fictionalised narrative to arrive at a recognition of what really happened. This way grieving is possible for white Australians, and greater understanding is possible for all.

Rabbit-proof Fence, writer Christine Olsen, director Phillip Noyce, distributor Becker Entertainment, currently screening nationally. See page 16 for Hunter Cordaiy’s interview with screenwriter Christine Olsen. Darlene Johnson’s Follow The Rabbit-proof Fence, a companion documentary to the making of the feature film, was screened on Channel 9, February 3.

Christine Olsen’s documentary production credits include Riding the Tiger and the award-winning Hepzibah. Her screenplay for Rabbit-proof Fence is an adaptation of Doris Pilkington Garimara’s book about her mother’s story, Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence. For Olsen this a double first—a feature film as co-producer and her first screenplay.

Rabbit-proof Fence is an adaptation from a book. To write the script you were confronted with one text and then had to turn it into another—can you describe how that process worked?

I knew that the book would provide the story for the film—it seemed to me to be a classic story; 3 little girls taken away from their homes decide to run away and walk back home. A very simple structure, and I think these stories make the best films.

It was like a classic fairy story actually, even down to the number 3, which you quite often find in fairy stories—3 sisters, 3 brothers, 3 witches—and it was about 3 little girls stolen from their home by the wicked witch and taken to her house where everyone is under a spell, and it’s a spell of forgetting. The longer you are in the house the stronger the spell becomes. It was imperative for the girls to get away as fast as they could before they fell under that spell.

This is the first screenplay I’ve ever written and now, looking back on it, the process of writing is the process of finding out what that story really is…and what you have to do is find out what that story is within you, why is it that you are completely obsessed…being completely taken over in your mind…constantly making notes, having thoughts about it at the kitchen sink, and why that strength of story carried you through 3 or 4 years of writing.

At various points I thought I knew what the story was—yes, this is what the story is, it’s a classic fairy story—you keep working on it and then you think…maybe this is an escaped prisoner story, a world war story; this is a script about a land taken over by invaders, they’re now reaching far into the hinterland and are stealing the children and taking them back into their own territory to train them as domestic slaves. The children escape as in any prisoner of war story and make their way home through enemy-occupied territory. Then this becomes a layer within the story. I think when I finished the script I knew this was film about home and what home means.

From there you developed the script and you weren’t necessarily being faithful to that original text?

Not at all…I felt completely free to do whatever I wanted with this story…there’s very little drama in the book and I didn’t know how to make a film about 3 little girls walking along a fence…But the moment I realised that the central idea is an argument between Molly and Mr Neville—who said ‘I know what is best for you’ and Molly says no, ‘I know what’s best for me’—I had my dramatic argument.

The book was told very quietly, almost passively, and I knew instinctively that I actually had to work out why this film was important to me, why it obsessed me, and what drove me…

This suggests that writers must engage with a story on a very deep and personal level in order to sustain the vision.

Absolutely, otherwise…there won’t be any lasting interest. If a story is going to reverberate with people, that’s where it must come from…there’s something there that is universal, the extreme becomes the general.

So the process involves a couple of years of writing, and then you send the script off to Phil Noyce in LA and wait…How do you keep the writer’s obsession with the project over that length of time?

I did heaps of research…historical research. I went to Perth, I read everything I possibly could about the Stolen Generations. I knew that the key to this was actually going up to Jigalong and spending time there, and until I had nailed down Molly and Daisy I was going to be writing a white person’s film based on the whites in the film…I always thought I knew those people…they are our grandparents…they’re my family but I didn’t know the little girls.

I’m very proud of the way we handled the Indigenous issues in the film, consulted with the Jigalong people. We were very careful to take notice of their concerns, and their major concern was who would be playing Mardu people on screen. That process has enriched the film and it’s been such a positive thing to have done…it’s easy…it’s important to tell people it’s not hard to do this properly…you just have to listen.

Is there something about the production process that threatens or supports the holding of this writer’s vision?

One of the things I did was to be co-producer…and this meant that I was there the whole way through…

No, but because I had my experience as a documentary producer I was determined to have a creative input. And one of the things that happened that was vital to this whole process was that in June 2000, when Phillip had committed to the project, we spent 10 days working on the script.

I think what happened was that we heightened the story…he was always saying ‘take it as far as it can go and if it’s too far we’ll pull it back’…that was his mantra. And also because he is such an experienced director he could say what we didn’t need and how things could be done…it was an immense learning curve.

In the last shot of the film we see 2 of the women whose story it is, and you suddenly come out of the fiction to living people…was that abrupt change always in the script?

Yes…in a sense that image says it all…we are still here and living in this land…what’s happening is that you’re confronted with a multitude of emotions at the end of the film and the lasting one is that these people have survived.

Rabbit-proof Fence, writer Christine Olsen, director Phillip Noyce, distributor Becker Entertainment, currently screening nationally. See p15 for Jane Mills’ commentary on the film and Darlene Johnson’s ‘making-of’ documentary.

The WA Screen Awards (WASA) have moved from the wintry months of the last couple of years to a summer date. It is a time when balmy evenings beckon, international travellers succumb to summer’s lure and outdoor screenings are de rigeur in the West.

The move scheduled WASA hot on the heels of the national touring short film festival, Flickerfest, not to mention the newcomer on the WA short film circuit, the Grass Roots Short Film Festival. This gave the dedicated filmgoer the opportunity to soak up international, national and local short films, and come to an understanding of where WA filmmaking sits on the international stage.

Grass Roots ended up with a shortlist of mostly comedies while the exquisite cinematography and serious themes of the WASA entrants were more representative of the skills and depth of WA filmmaking. It appears that the judges of Grass Roots recognised this and the beautifully crafted and stylish film by Christopher Kenworthy, The Dreamer, took out first place.

Stump (which won 3 WA Screen Awards) is a comedy with a ‘gag’ ending but still a stylish piece of cinema. The film looks superb, the cinematography taking full advantage of the clear light of country WA. Structured in meticulous detail, each frame serves the final purpose, building to the payoff. Writer/director Robert Forsyth has an eye for detail and for what will work in a tightly written comic piece: the final product engagemed powerfully with the audience. It was no surprise that the film took out Best Short Film Under 30 Minutes, Best Writing for Forsyth and Best Acting for Talei Howell-Price (who also performed in The Dreamer).

Chris Frey, who has worked hard for years creating films that challenge the viewer, has done it again with Sol, a complex journey of spiritual investigation and confrontation. Rather than forcing a narrative on the viewer, he creates a montage of images. His strong focus on film as a medium outside conventional narrative made him a deserving winner of the best directing award. Sol also took out the best editing award for its seamless construction, but the strangely captivating Civilian Maimed must have created some great editing challenges for Ian Reiser which saw it deservedly shortlisted. However, it was the richly evocative work of Glen Knight which eventually won Civilian an award, Best Sound Design.

Pierce Davison was WA Young Filmmaker of 2000 and this year, with his brother, won the award for Best Animation and New Media with The Cows Side; unfortunately their equally bizarre My Mrs Tingwell didn’t make the shortlist.

Sue K’s Daz07/02/012038 was voted Best Experimental Production but was somehow overlooked as an entrant in the editing category, surprising given that the editing actually creates the film which is a series of stills cut together to create movement and the passing of time.

The John Butler Trio are a dynamic band who could make a video worth watching just by sitting around performing. That John McMullan took their song Pickapart and made a video for only $1500 speaks volumes about their dynamism. The shaping and the droll humour evident in this award-winning music video makes you appreciate what can be achieved with a great song, engaging performers and a man with a camera.

There was no chance that Sophie McNeill’s film, Awaiting Freedom, winner of the Triple J Independent Spirit if Award, was going to be allowed to pass unnoticed at WASA. A high school student, Sohphie knew a good story when she saw it, and created an Australian Story-style documentary about East Timor. She won Best Student Film and, with the strength of documentary filmmaking in WA, she will be in a position to pursue a career with some great mentors.

Bad Cred & Aliens is a detective story with a difference, and the production design by Shari Amber Finn (which took out the Open Craft section) sets the mood with precision. It seems strange that a film called Sightless should win Best Cinematography. The story of a blind man, April Ward has not shied away from the difficult shot, choosing darkness and reflection to create an uneasy feeling in the viewer with the warping of perspective.

This year, Andelko Jurin was named Young Filmmaker of the Year after receiving the Australian Writers Guild Award for writing in 1999 for Redman and the WASA for directing in 2000 for The Ballet’s Floor.

The diversity of subject matter and the uniformly high production values in the shortlisted films and the winners at this year’s WASA augurs well for the future of short filmmaking here.

WA Screen Awards, finalists’ screenings, Princess May Park, Fremantle, Feb 18-19; awards night, Novotel Langley, Feb 20, www.fti.asn.au

The Mardi Gras Film Festival has grown into a massive event examining existing trends in queer cinema. One of the highlights this year was My Queer Career, a short film competition open to gay and lesbian short films from Australia and New Zealand. What’s best about the screenings is the option of seeing either all 42 of the shorts submitted or the judge’s shortlist of 8 films. I go for the latter—and it’s one of the strongest lineups of shorts I’ve seen in recent years. Themes have moved beyond coming out stories or tales of teenage whimsy, to stories of generations (father/son relationships highlighted in particular) and drag queens after the lights have dimmed; no Priscilla triumphs here. Surprisingly there’s no stories about women—the lesbian component is entirely absent—and no finalists from New Zealand. This is a real shame and hopefully will be turned around next year.

Everyone’s born naked and, after that,
everything is drag

Tales From the Powder Room is the tragic tale of a drag queen who’s hit rock bottom. Directed by Darren Burgess and shot on 35mm, its animated hero/ine starts off high-camp bitch and spirals into a drug-induced self-delusional monologist, remembering glorious bygone days of stardom, juxtaposed with the POV of witnesses who were ‘really there’. Witty, nasty repartee flashes back into animated home movie footage of inauspicious beginnings—mother moans: “he’s just about sucked my tits off”—and a small boy’s smiling face as he dons a floral hat. And then his father gives him the boot. As Lola Lick stares, glazed, into her past, there’s a great musical segue from Twinkle Twinkle to Kylie’s Confide in Me, and you almost feel sorry for this tough bird with a heart of steel. But not quite. Darren Burgess’ animation is imaginative and his writing at perfect pitch.

VCA filmmaker Mark Robinson takes a similar theme but moulds it with a gentler touch. Sweet Thing starts in a caravan park: children abused by a drunken mother heading off to their school to talk about her non-existent career; bullies behind the sky-high fence taunt a young boy. We enter the caverns of a drag queen, Tom Candy (Iain Murton), living in this trailer city surrounded by masks and wigs, dresses, mannequins and feathers. The bullied Jacob (Brock Jays) finds family here, someone who can play the roles of both mum and dad, cooking him a well-balanced meal, then belting out Marcia Hines’ I Got the Music in Me. In a whimsical ending he masquerades as Trent’s mother, dressed in Dorothy-checked-pinafore, escorting him to school. The placement of this fantasy makes the film disappointingly anti-climactic, as if the funding suddenly ran out.

It’s good to see our tertiary students well represented in these screenings: Dale Burke’s (UNSW College of Fine Arts) Pillion was my favourite on the night. A strange, melancholy, at times erotic, meditation on male energy and aggression it reminded me most of Claire Denis’ Beau Travail: actors-as-soldiers camouflaged and choreographed, their lovemaking and fighting ritualistic and almost beautiful. Technically, it’s the most innovative of the films, with clever use of splitscreen, highly stylised performance and a great sound design by Debra Petrovich. A scene of men skulling huge stubbies of beer while shaving each other’s heads under glowing neon signs and graffiti is unnerving: sensual, moody, affecting, getting to the heart of men’s intimate spaces, what they share, but not with the world. This film puts you off balance, crossing that no-man’s land between pain and pleasure; a kick in the guts.

You don’t have to clean up after him any more…

Saturn’s Return and Tanaka explore similar themes of death and reconciliation. SBS’s Hybrid Life series has been significant in demanding that families be shown in all their illuminating complexities. These shorts don’t just tackle gay issues but inter-cultural and generational ones as well. There’s so much going on here. From the opening moment of Saturn’s Return—a hand floating on air currents out the window of a moving car—the late-twentie-something viewers know where they are. Isn’t this the archetypal image of a filmmaker on a road trip? If you’ve had a camera in your hand, on the open road, you’ve probably done it. The title too carefully targets a certain viewer. I once worked with an astrologer who talked endlessly of Saturn’s Return, a moment that occurs around the ages 28-29, which she blamed for life-changing yearnings and being unsettled in those few years approaching 30. As Barney (Joel Edgerton) and Dimitri (Damian Walshe-Howling) hit the road from Melbourne to Sydney, there’s clever dialogue about intercity rivalry, and the chance to drop in at Bonegilla (a migrant camp where Dim’s Greek parents met and where my own grandparents experienced harsh conditions). As we reach Sydney we meet the parents, ageing products of the hippie generation. It’s not all rosy: Barney’s father is dying of AIDS, both parents have been heroin addicts, and Barney was given LSD as a birthday present when he was 13. Like many of his generation, Barney grew up feeling responsible for the welfare of his parents rather than the other way round. But there’s no moral judgment here. Writer Christos Tsolkias’ usual fine touch adds a dash of sympathy to every character and highlights similarities as well as differences. In a pivotal scene, Sheila (Barney’s mother) says that she would like a grandchild and her expectations aren’t so different from Dim’s Greek parents. The combination of superb acting by Edgerton, Walshe-Howling, Harold Hopkins and Tina Bursill with excellent direction by Wenona Byrne shows just how much can be achieved in a short film.

Tanaka, directed by Clayton Jacobson, also has an interesting premise: a Japanese man, Hiroshi, dies in Australia after living with his male lover, Ron, for 30 years. Ron writes to the brother in Japan inviting him to the funeral and Hiroshi’s nephew Mori arrives in his place (the transition from back of a cab in Japan to back of a cab in Australia is particularly effective) armed with the firm belief that his uncle is heterosexual and married. Struggles are played out between traditions and cultures in subtle ways: Hiroshi wants his ashes to be scattered in Australia while his nephew is expected to take them home; Ron has a previous family including daughters and sons (making it even harder for Mori to understand the homosexual relationship). As in other festival films, the importance of home videos within the short is fundamental, contextualising Hiroshi’s love and life, changing him from phantom to family man. What I particularly like about this film are its compromises: little deceptions, things done for the sake of obligation, with evasive action often a necessity; and a winning ending as Mori smiles in the backseat of a cab on his way back home.

Other strong contenders among the finalists were: Into The Night, director Tony Krawitz, somewhat topical in its depiction of a rich older man cruising the streets for a rentboy, or maybe a son; and Turn Me On, director Catherine Chauchat, an exhilarating documentary on the history of the vibrator (did you know it was the 5th electrical appliance invented, well before the vacuum cleaner?). High Street Love Story, director Rob Leggo, about unrequited love on the streets of Penrith, seemed somewhat anachronous and needed a lot of work. Overall, the My Queer Career selection was excellent, revealing a maturation of short films as a genre of their own. Keep an eye out for them on the festival circuit, and hopefully at the Dendy Awards and Flickerfest this year.

My Queer Career, Australian and New Zealand Queer Shorts, Mardi Gras Film Festival, Palace Academy Twin, Sydney, Feb 19 & 22, www.queerscreen.com.au

The recent re-release of Emma-Kate Croghan’s short film Desire didn’t raise an eyebrow compared to the hype generated in the promotion of her 1996 film Love and Other Catastrophes. Prior to the release of the latter, oversized posters were pasted across available city surfaces, ringing scaffolding on building sites and lurking in the half-light beneath bridges. The gigantic font announced the release as an event not to be missed. But it was not only our eyes that were targeted in the promotion of Croghan’s first feature. The film is mythologised as every independent filmmaker’s dream come true. Financed initially by credit card, it was rescued by a last minute investment. In contrast, Desire is a low budget film that slips into the viewer’s home unheralded. It travels via the magic of communication cables, making itself available on the computer screen with the click of the mouse. The exhibition of Desire on the internet potentially allows it to be viewed by a global audience.

Desire is one of the films screened on the Atom Films website. Parent company, Atomshockwave, is an independent entertainment provider with an archive in excess of 2000 films, animations and games. It lists Ford, Intel, Warner Brothers Online, HBO and Showtime as sponsors and syndication customers. A look at its homepage gives an idea of the eclectic collection of films on offer. Categories include animation, comedy, drama, documentary, extreme, thriller and world films. In the animation section you can click on flash or stop motion categories and watch short films like the intriguingly titled Osama Sissyfight. Desire can be found beneath the Australian film banner in the World Films category.

Conventionally, film viewing is characterised by a voyeuristic distance between the viewer and the big screen, offering a cathartic connection through identification and immersion in the fantasy. But how does this experience compare when watching films on computer screens? With films like Desire available online, viewing becomes more immediate and controllable. Whilst the dimensions of the screen are obviously smaller, the distance between the spectator and the screen is also diminished. Watching Desire on the small screen offers an uncanny sense of disjuncture. Disguising itself as early cinema, its exhibition on the computer screen produces a collision between the ultra-modern and the primitive. Originally shot as a silent film, Desire could be viewed on plasma.

Desire is cinematic, highly stylised and filmically literate. The flickering images are contrived to replicate the effect of silent cinema. Desire is without dialogue, primitive in its elliptical narration and Croghan uses rounded iris framing reminiscent of silent film. In the place of dialogue a soundtrack underscores the suspense. Croghan also infuses her films with an elegance and suspense characteristic of film noir. Her romantic, card-like title sequences remind us of the aesthetic decadence of the American studio system when even the fonts were art. The central unifying force is desire signified by the gaze. Furtive glances bind the anonymous characters, but are rarely returned. Whether it is in the carriage of a train, or in a laboratory, the atmosphere is charged with longing. Croghan highlights this with the inclusion of a scientist who analyses minuscule particles through the lens of a microscope, but who lacks perspective in his immediate environment.

Even though Desire appears to be a homage to the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, in the insistence of unrequited love and the link between children and danger Croghan’s film is clearly influenced by Fritz Lang, most particularly M (1931). This is acknowledged with the inclusion of a spiral-patterned ball, a motif that associates childhood play with danger in the adult world of both films. This clash of eras, styles, influences and technologies is utopia for a postmodern theorist.

Efforts have been made in recent years to elevate short film beyond its association with student experimentation. Tracey Moffatt enjoyed success as a short filmmaker before being financed to make a 90 minute feature film. She overcame this expectation by splitting beDevil (1993) into 3 discrete parts, effectively producing a trio of short films that combined to exceed the duration of a feature. Jane Campion attempted to change exhibition protocol in linking the first release of Sweetie (1989) with Alison McLean’s dark noir short film Kitchen Sink (1989), introducing her compatriot New Zealander to an Australian audience. But it is on the small screen that Australian shorts are finding an alternative home. The success of Desire at Atom Films is an encouraging sign extending the range of exhibition possibilities for short films to the computer screen.

Mulholland Drive

a smouldering david lynchian film-take on the starlet time|grind machine. the film presents the viewer with a dream|character-crossed plotline divided decisively according 2 a saccharine 50s vs a gritty late 90s version|comment on the hollywood circuit|circus, focusing on the twinned character incarnations of Australian actor Naomi Watts. Think: an amnesiac alice-in-wonderland plot constructed via de chirico detective-story-drenched cinematography.

The Circle

A tightening loop of restrictions and oppression as we trek along Tehran’s streets with women shackled but strong, evading brothers and fathers and policemen and lovers and doctors, men who must sign to guarantee these women’s dreams. Signs of rebellion link them: letting their traditional headwear drop to reveal lively intelligent faces, smoking cigarettes desperately in the night. A woman abandons her child on a busy city street, crouching behind a car, desperate. We flow slowly, evenly, from one character to another, with Panahi’s elegant linking narrative device beautifully revealed at the film’s end.

Writer/director Jafar Panahi, distributor New Vision, currently at Dendy Cinemas, Sydney, other states to follow.

The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky

Jane Mills
Based on one of the best accounts of the experience of entering psychosis ever written by a major artist, this often glorious synaesthetic mix of poetry, dance, music and movement tiptoes round the edge of the romantic nonsense of the ‘mad genius.’ Like Cox’s film about Vincent van Gogh, this is neither documentary nor drama but a genre of its own and at times reaches extraordinary levels of beauty and compassion.

Australian Rules

Mike Walsh
The controversies surrounding the production of this film find their parallel in its thematics: the triumph of the Sensitive White Guy is central, while black people suffer nobly around the margins. The recessive Aussie protagonist gets another workout, as does the country town as vision of hell. Mix two parts Black Rock with one part Wake in Fright.

Director Paul Goldman, writers Phillip Gwynne, Paul Goldman; Shedding Light, Adelaide Festival 2002, March, national release mid-year.

No Man’s Land

Mark Mordue
Set in a trench in ‘no man’s land’ during the Bosnian War, the film focuses on 2 soldiers—Ciki, a Bosnian and Nino, a Serb—playing cat and mouse with each other in between uneasy recognitions of a common humanity. Tanovic worked as a documentary maker for the Bosnian Army and much of his work was used internationally as news footage, so he knows how to capture the clumsy needs and dark banality of the war experience: a fog where no one can see, a kicked metal bucket, a cigarette without a lighter, a soldier who wears glasses, the sweaty frustration of what should be a serene summer’s day in the countryside. As Ciki and Nino, Branko Djuric and Rene Bitorajac argue their way towards nowhere much at all, a circus of media sensations and international politics dances around them. Tanovic’s perspective is bitter but darkly humorous (“Rwanda, what a mess,” observes one soldier reading a paper) and the acting in this mostly stunning two-hander is extremely tight and convincing; a fierce display of prejudices and cynicism triumphing against all common sense. The hopelessness is mitigated by Tanovic’s taste for laughter, often absurd, finally sour, and a deeper, restrained sadness that lingers in the film’s last hovering image. No winners here.

Walking on Water

Brendan Swift
Drawing on personal experience, Roger Monk’s confronting script tackles the big questions—grief, infidelity, jealousy, and betrayal—without being pretentious enough to answer them. Interspersed with touches of black humour, the film captures the struggle of Charlie (Vince Colosimo) and Anna (Maria Theodorakis) after they help a terminally ill friend die; a journey ably complemented by the naturalistic direction of Tony Ayres.

Writer Roger Monk, director Tony Ayres, distributor Globe Film;Shedding Light, Adelaide Festival 2000, March; national release mid-year.

The Tracker

Mike Walsh
Rolf de Heer’s The Tracker addresses itself to the contradiction between land and history in Australia. Natural beauty c alls forth cultural ugliness, and epic landscape produces a banality of cultural response on the part of European settlement. The film is unfailingly beautiful, but the insertion of paintings at moments of violence suggests that the aesthetic is what we invoke when we can’t bear to watch.

Writer/director Rolf de Heer, distributor Globe Film, Shedding Light, Adelaide Festival 2002, March; national release mid-2002.

Promises

Promises brings the opposing discursive histories of the warring sides of Palestine together, distilled through the experiences of children. While Hasidic Jewish boy Moishe quotes the Torah to legitimise Israeli occupation, Mahmoud the Hamas supporter offers title deeds. A documentary that subtly subverts humanistic optimism, revealing the intractable nature of the Palestinian conflict.

Directors Justine Shapiro, B. Z. Goldberg and Carlos Bolado, distributor Ronin Films.

The REAL: life on film festival has finalised its program for 2002, and has been given extra oomph from new director Hilary Blackman, who has worked previously with dancer Cazerine Barry and as digital media coordinator for the Melbourne International Film Festival last year. The festival now tours to Melbourne (May 2-8), Sydney (May 9-15), Perth (May 16-18) and Adelaide (May 23, 25, 27) and focuses on innovative documentaries, Australian and international—mostly premieres, and rare to see on the big screen.

This year’s meaty selection includes Dark Days, Marc Singer’s underground film about the underground, the lives of NYC’s displaced people living beneath Penn Station (winner Audience Awards at Sundance 2000); Melissa Kyu-Jung Lee’s A True Story About Love (see our feature interview with Melissa, RT47 p15); Darlene Johnson’s documentary about Ray Cott’s personal discovery tour, Everyday Brave—Stranger in My Skin; and Catriona McKenzie’s profile of leading Aboriginal activist Naomi Myers, Everyday Brave—Jetja Nai Medical Mob. Other highlights include Megan Spencer’s guided tour through transgressive documentaries such as The Annabel Chong Story; and doco legends Pennebaker, Hegedus and Doob’s celebration of the acclaimed soundtrack to the Coen Brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou in Down From the Mountain.

Qld TV series tackles new technology

Queensland producers, Tracey Robertson and Nathan Mayfield (Hoodlum Entertainment) are working on Fat Cow Motel, a 13-part multi-platform mystery series in the style of Twin Peaks. The show will be delivered to its audience thought Austar cable TV, radio, mobile phone, email, snail mail and dedicated websites, and is the first of its kind in Australia. Throughout the series, participants will be sent SMS messages giving clues to weekly mysteries.

Robertson commented on the writing process: “The challenge is finding writers who can do it. Firstly, they have to bear in mind all the platforms while writing the script. Then they have to not only write the material for each of those platforms but also co-ordinate the writing of all those platforms so they link together in the most effective way possible” (PFTC news). For more info visit www.hooligan.com.au/media/fatcow/.

Asian feast

Short Soup, a national short film competition offers filmmakers a cash prize and the chance to have their work shown on SBS’s Eat Carpet. Part of the Sydney Asia Pacific Film Festival, the competition is open to documentaries, animations and experimental works by, or about Asian Australians. The films can be up to 26 minutes

All the films entered in the competition will be shown throughout the festival, which runs from August 8-17. The finalists’ films will be screened on August 8.

Eat Carpet’s executive producer, Joy Toma says that by encouraging films from both Asian and non-Asian directors, the festival acknowledges that, “It’s not just Asian Australians who can tell stories about Asian experience. In multicultural Australia there are a wide variety of stories and telling them is part of our lives.”

At least one film will be purchased and screened on Eat Carpet. Last year 5 winning films were screened, including Linden Goh’s richly coloured drama My Old China depicting the joys and strains of cross-cultural schoolyard friendships.

Entry deadline May 30. Application forms and entry conditions available at www.sapff.com.au or by post: Short Soup Competition Co-ordinator, PO Box 339, Darlinghurst, NSW 1300.

Rachel Griffiths rules

For anyone who hasn’t caught it yet, don’t miss Six Feet Under. Written (and produced) by American Beauty’s Alan Ball, and featuring the same caustic humour, it is a breathtaking, surreal genre piece on all the good things: death, honour, love, sex, loyalty, family—in the funeral business.

Rachel Griffiths, in her winning speech at The 2002 Golden Globes, called her producers “you crazy bastards” for trying to get the show off the ground, and you can see why. This series breaks the mould, more like Dennis Potter than any US show I can recall. It is harrowing and funny; and Griffiths does a gorgeous contemporary turn as the woman who won’t commit, spouting psychobabble to ward off any advances: a sexually charged, strong and just damn cool female character. More please!

Six Feet Under screens on Channel 9, Monday nights, around 10.30pm (but usually about half an hour late). Hopefully it won’t be bumped around too much like The Sopranos. KK

Juvenate (Michelle Glaser, Andrew Hutchinson) was 2002 co-winner of the Mayne Award, the Multimedia category of the SA Festival Awards for Literature, and was recently exhibited in the Perth International Arts Festival Celestial City Visual Arts Program. It has featured in several other showings internationally including the 2002 Ninth New York Digital Salon (touring internationally), and the European Media Art Festival 2001, Osnabruck, Germany. Felena Alach spoke with Michelle Glaser.

What was the genesis of Juvenate? How did your role as a writer sit within that process—especially given that it’s not a text-based work?

I was co-curating an exhibition called techne some years ago, and Juvenate was presented in an early form by Marie Louise Xavier and Andrew Hutchinson. It came out of an experience of serious illness, and provided a way of working through that experience. I became involved as a writer from there.

We were seeking to find a way to tell a story, without relying upon any spoken language and using minimal written text. The work is essentially about celebrating the ordinary, the extraordinary in the ordinary, so we wanted to keep it domestic, homey and familiar. As you move through the work you have that binary opposition of moving towards morning/summer/health/vitality or moving into evening/winter/sickness. We tried to recreate that fevered sense of reality that you have when you are ill, where memories and reality start intermingling, so you are not quite sure at what point in the experience you are. Also the images are very hyperreal, as if in response to certain drugs, or as a response to the feeling that life is finite and the most has to be extracted from each minute.

So in working with such polarities that guide the flow of the work, what are the bonuses and the difficult points? How do you find writing towards a less linear narrative within interactive screen-space?

Basically the writing is about the structuring of ideas and images and putting them into play, writing them into existence. You use language where it needs to be used, or images or sound or even an event (like the home delivery of art in Pizza Surprise)…I like working with interactivity, because the formula isn’t set the way it is within the existing forms of linear narrative, so you are really free to explore, and you feel like you are an adventurer in a new realm of storytelling. With each new project I feel like it’s a new game for all the collaborators to play. You have a project that everyone brings their ideas to and it becomes a much richer and better project for all those ideas. Whatever input you have is only ever a part of that final work.

What’s hard is that you actually don’t have a map yourself. So it’s trial and error. You are often a long way in before you can figure out whether it’s working or not. I found doing Juvenate that although it works in many ways, in terms of navigational paths it’s really hard to keep track of where the audience is, and whether you are delivering them a really satisfying experience in terms of continuity between scenes, or an experience that includes highs and lows…I like the sense of a structured experience with stages in the work that you pass through.

With interactive media, because you can’t tell the satisfying linear story that audiences are used to, you need the big narrative hooks that the user can fill in. You need a simple but strong story or premise where they can fill in the gaps themselves…learn to navigate the work, and relate the various elements to each other. And there’s the question of what your viewer might bring to the work, because the thing with interactive work is that it opens up many cracks…for as much story or information as it ever gives you, it opens up many more questions. If it’s an engaging work the user should be bringing a great deal to that work. The hard part of making interactive work is putting the lights along the landing path that create a strong sense of journey and outcome for the user, that they’re going to get something that’s not going to be a clickfest where they won’t know what they’re actually triggering, or like an IQ test that’s too hard to pass.

One of the hazards of much multimedia work is the loop, unintentionally getting stuck in the sense of ‘hang on…I’ve been here; hang on, I’m stuck; hang on, I’m sick of this…’ and you can lose your viewer.

Exactly. Unless you use really obvious menu systems to let them know where they are going and what they are doing, but you can’t weave that into a work usually, and it’s not a very satisfying answer. The idea of ‘intuitive navigation’ is not that satisfying as a solution either, because what you think is obvious is never obvious to someone else.

The new interactive project you’re involved with is Dr Pancoast’s Cabinet de Curiosites (developed with Nic Beames and produced with Mia Lalanne, Marie-Louise Xavier and Chris Wells). What are some of the interesting features of this 19th century phantasy?

The essence of Dr Pancoast is that it’s a work for the child in the adult, it appeals to that furtive sense of seeing-what-you-shouldn’t-see. It’s also picking up on the fun with images you had when you were a child, when things were just gorgeous and glorious for you to look at and play with and use to tell a story yourself. We’ve tried to make it really physical, so that everything you operate you drag and touch and do, rather than an abstracted intellectual process…it’s very tactile and highly textural rather than digital in feel. Something we’ve also had lots of fun with has been 19th century games like rebuses, labyrinths and all sorts of little gimmicks. It’s been good to revisit those technologies that started in the 19th century, like the early computer, photography etc. It features illustrations by Helen Smith, Gina Moore and Richard Giblett (see RT41). Also, the time machine featured in the work actually exists, and has been made by Philip Gamblen. So, for exhibition, the idea is that it’s not just a cold little work on a computer, but we can actually make much more of the space, where the time machine is a ‘working object’…

Another way of looking at the work is as an exploration of the colonising of sexuality: that process in the 19th century where sexuality became categorised. It’s also about the procreating couple, and where sexualities became defined in terms of acceptable and deviant sexualities. It’s quite text-heavy as a work, but while the text is intrinsic, it’s designed so that there are a lot of keywords, so that you don’t really have to read it all through. If you glance at it you’ll get a sense of what the text says. The expectation is that lots of people don’t like to read, but it’s a richer work if you do read the text.

Recently Perth saw the Pizza Surprise project, where you and fellow curator Katie Major (a delivery team known as Art To Go) were serving up pizza-box art-packages for a mere $19.95 (see RT46).

The idea of it was to do something that would take art out of the gallery and make it more accessible to a much wider audience than the usual arts public. Thanks to media coverage on Triple J and the like, it did reach a much wider audience who really hooked into the idea of art priced and sold like a pizza…We were in the front line delivering the work, so we saw how the work actually functioned as an object for people…What was funny was that a lot of people thought that $20 actually covered our costs. I couldn’t believe it…that it would cover the costs of paying an artist…Without grants to pay people we wouldn’t have been able to do it. But what’s great is that where there was nothing there’s suddenly all this work being made, and all these people, the audience, hooking into that idea…On the strength of the project we got an Asialink residency, so we’re going to be doing a joint project between Taiwan and Perth, which will develop the same ideas of commodification and taking art out of the gallery, direct to the audience.

How does the sense of work as a surprise sit in how you are delivering art to the people? How does this intersect with your interests in creative work?

That’s multimedia too isn’t it? You just can’t control what’s going to happen, you have to hand it over and let the chips fall where they may…I think essentially I’m interested in surface appearances, and the contrasting underside to those appearances, like with Pancoast where there is a polite surface and a filthy underbelly. Pizza Surprise is much the same thing: on the surface it’s a very simple gimmick about taking work to the public, and underneath it’s actually much more about how we view artists, the artists themselves being sold as a kind of brand, as well as the commodification of art, where structures in the art world decide how much a work is worth. The neat little surface and the seething mass underneath…I like projects that have an accessible face but have other levels to enjoy. Works that are accessible in a way that the general public can enjoy…but then maybe get hit in the face with another layer. I mean, that’s every storyteller’s dream isn’t it?…that they convey something that on the surface is very simple, but has levels of complexity that build toward something greater. That’s the hope.

The other joint winner of the Mayne Mutlimedia Award was Poems in a Flash on the Stalking Tongues website by Jayne Fenton-Keane, www.poetinresidence.com

The 2 day symposium conVerge—where art and science meet was developed to complement the 2002 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art of the same title, part of the Adelaide Festival 2002. In the words of the organisers, “the intention of the symposium [was] to broaden dialogue, generate ideas and raise awareness of the contributions both artists and scientists can make to the larger challenges of our times.” To facilitate this, a series of 6 significant topics were identified, with each headlining a 2 and a half hour session delivered by key speakers and followed by extended discussion. I must declare my vested interest, being both a speaker at the symposium and an artist represented in the 2002 Biennial.

The sessions ran under the banners of Partnerships, Bioeconomics, Genomics, Image and Meaning, Knowledge Systems, and Ecology. The depth and diversity of the material presented generated strong debate and the range of discussion included bio-ethics and representation of the human body; analysis of the relationship between art, language, empirical science and nature; transgenics and gene-environment interactions; social justice as individual responsibility; as well as the impact of GM technologies and the universality of DNA as code. Significantly, a strong grounding was maintained through insights into the ethical responsibilities inherent in indigenous knowledge systems and cultural values, and the importance of recognising and respecting the inseparability of a culture from the environment in which it is embodied.

Running as an under-current to the symposium was an interrogation of the structure, function and results of collaborations between artists and scientists and their industrial and institutional patrons, and an investigation into the ways artists and scientists may contribute to culture through “project-based organisation of multi-disciplinary contributions” (Dr Terry Cutler, Chair, Australia Council for the Arts, “The Art of Collaboration”, conVerge catalogue essay).

In an era when the arts are reforming themselves into an industry which must now “duke it out” with the rest of corporate Australia on a level canvas, much can be learned from the experiences of creative people already working as double-agents in the empirical world. From their insights it appears that in the techno-mad “noughties” there will be new and expanding opportunities for artists and the arts in general, particularly as science works to re-establish its aesthetic kinship with art in order to lift its flagging public profile—and expand its access to funding.

It also appears that in order to survive long term in the new research environment, funding availability will only be maintained if the arts can learn new ways to evaluate their outcomes and provide empirical proof of the value of their cultural research. Such a detailed approach to understanding the ecology of culture would also increase the value of the public perception of the artist and their training, qualifications and experience, and deliver a strong argument for providing realistic budgets for artists and their projects. Artists must now also learn to negotiate contracts which clearly define the role and responsibilities of the artist and co-contributors, and which also adequately protect them and their access to the intellectual property they create. Sadly some artists have lost access to equipment and expertise when a good idea evolved into a good earner.

From experiences recounted it seems that developing face-to-face working relationships with co-contributors is a key element in the long term success of any project, and that strong and open channels of communication are essential to successful art outcomes which avoid the artist functioning simply as a window-dresser for glamorous new science and technology. Australian society faces a number of significant ecological and environmental issues over the next few decades, and artists and scientists are uniquely placed to make major contributions to public awareness through non-linear approaches to the visualisation, analysis and eventual solutions to these issues. I am convinced that opportunities have never been better for real collaborations between artists and scientists that produce great art and great science, and also demonstrate that, just as artistic practice is a mode of research that evolves through experiment, so too science employs processes that may be driven by aesthetic considerations.

Information about the conference and speakers is available through www.adelaidebiennial.com, which will also host an ongoing forum aimed at extending, developing and maintaining the debate.

New media artists recently gathered on Maria Island, off Tasmania, for Solar Circuit.

Maria Island: Frying the Solar Circuitry

Understandably most hairdressers are psychic. Hair is your cosmic antennae after all, only one head-click away from the information supergooey. Yet monks are bald, so one has to wonder about the benefits of separation, of cutting connections with the rest of the known universe.

The rest of the known universe

Tasmania’s Maria Island, as visiting new media artists find out quickly, is without easy net access. Options include park ranger seduction, or tapping into the global hive while dodging all those pesky Californian patent-pending pop-up banners. Tassie’s East coast more than makes up for this of course, with raw disk island power. Easily enough to feed the 30 or so Solar Circuit artists gathering to mesh their southern and northern hemisphered antennae in this data wilderness.

In this data wilderness

Used to connecting machines with fun(k), the deeper opportunities of a remote residency seemed to be the chance to synthesise new thoughts/approaches to the triangle of technology, culture and ecology. And maybe the lush location lured a little too. Great place to kick zen outta beta. As we drift towards the great global uncontrollables, wondering whether radical preservationism or sci-tech ecology management will save the day, perhaps remembering our own place within it all, can provide the clarity we need.

The clarity we need

As the days revealed the layers, an exquisite collection and calibre of people and projects emerged. Introducing the mountains of Europe to the mountains of Tasmania, spanking machines (Tulle Ruth), solar powered insects sound-blurring the natural artificial soundscapes, jobless robots (Ken Gregory), light painting in the midnight forests (Lalila), stretching the Tassie devil’s growl into sub-satanic terrain (Spanky), inventing languages derived from the local surrounds, convincing a village to do nothing for a week and making a film about it (Mex & August), retracing tales and journeys of Tassie Aboriginals, the redcoats and the Tassie tiger (Leroy Black & others), and so on. Eco-themes were well threaded through these projects, and the tailors were soon out sampling the island raw with camcorders, mini discs and all-weather microphones. Mood-capture on the island happened slow, but even with lazier heartbeats, most itchy kids were soon ready to remix.

Ready to remix

Verandah tea stories at some point revolved around plans to reintroduce the Tassie tiger with the preserved DNA of a foetus in the Tassie museum. A museum representative on hand relayed the plans, related camps of thought and its slim likelihood of success. Better perhaps than the 2 convicts chained to each other who tried to swim to freedom from Maria Island, one drowning halfway and the other taking a literal dead weight to the other side only to die himself from exhaustion. Better, but still slim.

Still slim

Did a lot of walking on the island. Stretches of beach, forest paths, mountain trails. Isolated places. Wild places. Is this wilderness? What is wilderness? At the remotest point of the island, chewing a fish caught by Spanky from Sydney, soaking up the fire and ambience, we were reminded of the human touch in all places as a satellite passed overhead in the dusky sky. Hours later a fishing trawler echoed its engine through the evening, undoubtedly a few short of their catch quota from legal fishing areas. Park rangers boasted the availability of electronic tracking methods that could trace a penguin to within a metre. Cost enough to buy a small car every week or so, but it added to a gradual sense of awareness that nothing is untouched despite its seeming isolation or rugged good looks.

Rugged good looks

Someone emailed me the other day: “Do you think a productive new media arts residency would involve a structured exchange of skills and technologies? Or do you feel that a more informal, friendship-based exchange of language, culture and ideas is sufficient to create a productive residency?” Solar Circuit was definitely the latter, though I felt it could have benefited from some on-site provocation with debates, forums or presentations to tickle each day’s exploration. To measure the productivity of an informal residency we should look at the long term conversations begun, the (re)combinations of cultures, skills, styles, experiences. But in the short term there was a snapshot available, Hobart exhibitionz, screeningz and island-glitchez.

Solar Circuit is an International New Media Arts Workshop and residency comprising workshops, WILD 2002 new media exhibition, forums, the OUT@NIGHT experimental film festival and a 10-day residency at a wilderness location with 35 artists from around the world. Project conceived and produced by Antoanetta Ivanova in partnership with the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, School of Arts and CAST Gallery, Hobart; Jan 29-Feb16

Interested in the future of Australian documentary? Curious about the worlds of hacktivists and viewsers? The 2-day Digi Docs event was the place to be. With sessions costing less than the price of a Tuesday Cineplex ticket, Digi Docs broke new ground in bringing together, for the first time, a range of new media practitioners, broadcasters and critics to explore the effects of the digital revolution upon the world of documentary. Co-funded by the SAFC, the AFC, the Canadian Consulate and DFAT and curated by documentary maker Heather Croall (with assistance from Chris Joyner), Digi Docs was underpinned by two assumptions. One is that there exists an underexplored yet fruitful relationship between documentary and digital media, whereby the social impulses of the former are served by the participatory capacities of the latter. As became increasingly clear throughout the weekend, many digital practitioners are already behaving in ways that documentary practitioners always have–for example, acting as watchdogs over processes of information dissemination. The second assumption was the power of the national funding bodies to drive changes in the current Australian mediascape.

Friday’s events, entitled “Through Australian Eyes”, especially looked at this theme, with presentations from SBS, ABC, AFC, FFC, Channels 7 and 9 representatives about developing opportunities for practitioners, like the scheme for soon-to-be-completed on-line docos from ABC and the AFC. Issues practical and philosophical were hashed out, such as the role of the public media re: the digital divide and the real meaning of “interactivity” (more, presenters insisted, than the mere clicking of a button)–all of which I took as a sign of the still flexible state of play in both digital media policy and function.

If “Through Australian Eyes” was long on national developments, Saturday’s sessions surfed an international wave of digital arts, information, and activism. Co-curated by Banff Executive Producer for Television and New Media Sara Diamond and documentary practitioner Peter Wintonick (director of Manufacturing Consent and the more recent Cinema Verite), “Windows on the Real” identified 4 prevalent new media themes: the participatory culture of new media, surveillance, activism, and the potentially disruptive agency of some digital practitioners. New media showcasing old agendas were foregrounded (for example, the Witness site, www.witness.org; the Universal Rights Network, www.universalrights.net), while DIY and tactical sites also attracted attention. Want to put together a new flag (call by netflag.guggenheim.org/netflag/)? Or perhaps psychoanalyse your harddrive (visit, at your peril, www.maryflanagan. com/virus.htm)? Sites were shown evidencing these and other activities, as well as one that apparently re-directs Disney visitors to a local porn site (check out www.RtMark.com, though that site’s as much about future interventions as it is about realised ones—so you may have trouble finding it). Indymedia’s yet-to-be-launched Woomera 2002 site, which will automatically turn ordinary citizens’ telephone reports into printed text and then record the reports on to the site, promises to take notions of interactivity into brave new democratic terrain. Semi-autobiographical work by YH Chang (www.yhchang.com/), Melinda Rackham (www.subtle.net), and Sara Diamond (www.codezebra.net—with John Tonkin) rounded out the day, all in all making for an excellent and informative bringing together of what is arguably Screen’s very oldest formation with its very newest one.

Adelaide Fringe festival, Digi Docs, curator Heather Croall, Union House, Adelaide University, March 15-16

CD-ROM, once the medium of choice for ‘multimedia’, has lost much of its lustre in the past 5 years. In a catalogue essay for the MCA’s 1996 show Burning the Interface, curator Mike Leggett held out the CD as bronze sculpture for the 21st century; a new and replicable form for artistic expression. At the time, technological novelty, marketing hype and creative energy melded into a flurry of activity which quickly subsided. A new technological form caught hold: the net, and in particular the web—and the idea of the CD as the new coffee table book, drawing a paying audience of domestic digerati, proved too good to be true. The CD was revealed as just another storage technology, and not a great one at that: only moderately capacious, and slow, too slow for high-resolution video or really dense hypermedia.

Now the hot disc is DVD, and the CD is an everyday utility item, having survived because it’s still the cheapest and most convenient way to publish a large, static, self-contained chunk of data. Phone directories and reference books work well on CD. As an interesting consequence, a space opens for creative practice as the new Macquarie Dictionary and Thesaurus on CD shows. It includes Roget’s Circular, a work by Tasmanian artists Lisa Roberts and Melissa Smith. Not just filling spare space on the disc, the work is tightly knitted into the Thesaurus, such that Macquarie bills it as an “illumination.” An appealing thought, why shouldn’t all our databases—search engines, encyclopedias, phone books—be digitally illuminated? Digital art weaving itself into the grids of everyday, utilitarian computing, gold leaf and curling vines gone hyper.

Roget’s Circular takes the form of a collection of fragmentary images and texts, derived from the artists’ travels and correpondence over 2 years. The fragments are filtered through Roget’s own 12 categories of meaning, the architecture of his quest to order and organise the chaotic tangle of the language; the Circular is a personal network of memory, experience and association which is entwined with the officially constructed network of the Thesaurus. Another appealing idea, yet it just never takes off. The fragments are often beautiful, and sometimes interesting, but the networks of significance are mostly obscure and the urge to keep clicking wanes quickly. The work’s integration with the Thesaurus proper is mostly effective; portals to and from the Circular are linked to relevant entries. A shame, though, that the massive hyperstructure inherent in the thesaurus, the network of links from every word to countless others, goes unexploited by either the thesaurus itself or the Circular. (For a counter-example, see Plumb Design’s Visual Thesaurus, http://www.visualthesaurus.com/)

Roget’s Circular, Lisa Roberts and Melissa Smith, as part of Macquarie Dictionary and Thesaurus on CD-ROM (PC only).

The Tissue Culture & Art Project

Following the Pig Wings Project, where we grew pig’s bone marrow stem cells in the shape of the 3 evolutionary solutions to flight in vertebrates (Bat, Bird and Pterosaurs), we would now like to animate them using muscle cells (from IGF-I transgenic mice as well as cardiac cells) as actuators. Besides the difficulties to do with aligning the cultured skeletal muscle cells and their use as actuators, we also have to modify the wing structures in order for the tissue to be able to animate the whole construct. The use of IGF-I mouse tissue, which is more efficient in its use of energy in comparison with its mass, will make this endeavour more achievable.

Animated Pig Wings will look ‘more alive’ and further challenge the audience perceptions of our Semi-Living Sculpture as evocative objects that blur the boundaries between what is alive/non-living, object/subject, and body/constructed environment.

The other research we are conducting is the development of a bioreactor for artistic purposes. Developing an interactive bioreactor (the ‘vessel’ which imitates body conditions for the cells to grow and be sustained alive) will enable us to present our Semi-Living Sculptures in non-specialised environments (such as art galleries) with no need for constructing a whole tissue culture lab. An interactive bioreactor will enable the audience to directly interfere with the environment in which the tissue grows and take an active part in caring for the Semi-Living Sculpture.

The research will be mostly conducted in SymbioticA—the Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory, School of Anatomy and Human Biology, University of Western Australia. Anyone interested in this research can contact Oron at oron@symbiotica.uwa.edu.au.

Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr

Machine Corporation

www.machinecorporation.com [link expired] Machine Corporation is a satire about corporate websites and networked utopias. It uses Flash and action scripting to create an interactive user experience incorporating elements of character-driven narrative.

Machine Corporation offers a series of software products for free trial. In return users submit some very harmless information about themselves that Machine Corporation will respect and not on-sell to porn sites or marketing companies.

The authors hope to explore the possibilities of virtual space as the parameters for online narrative. The complexities of incorporating interactivity into this environment are handled by structuring and designing the narrative based on the familiar concept of interactive forms that are commonly encountered on the web.

In the tradition of culture jamming, part of the satire is corporate anonymity; therefore we refer to ourselves as faceless man 1 and faceless man 2 rather than identifying ourselves.

In his book Blue Fire, experimental psychologist James Hillman finds a spiritual meaning for graffiti in the modern metropolis. Random, indecipherable scatterings of information are inscriptions of soul: markers of resistance.
Marks in public places put a face on an impersonal wall or oversized statue…the human hand wants to leave its touch, even if by obscene smears and ugly scrawls, bringing culture to the walls and stone…
Hillman, A Blue Fire, Routledge, London, 1994

The cyberspace of the future, being hardwired now by marketing and PR professionals, is a landscape deserving of such effacement. Yesteryear’s digital revolution catchcry, “information wants to be free”, has been seemingly subsumed into corporate monoculture. The push is on to wash the internet clean of civic and social possibility. Copyright, 300 years old in 2009, is again the tool of monopoly control for the traditional owners of cultural intellectual property: the publishing, entertainment, and distribution industries.

The 1998 US Digital Millennium Copyright Act attempted to regress the public enjoyment of digital materials to pre-web levels. The entertainment industry, aware that video files can be pirated like MP3 music files over the internet, successfully lobbied the US government to provide the legal framework to allow complete control over the technology of digital audiovisual media. The DMCA forbids the distribution of any technology that can bypass copy protection schemes. This is akin to telling consumers if you own a CD player and cassette recorder, you’re guilty of music piracy.

Jon Lech Johansen, a 16-year-old Norwegian boy was charged for breaking intellectual property laws by publishing on his website DeCSS code for decrypting DVD technology. Johansen and his friends were not intending to infringe copyright, they claimed only to share the code to create a Linux platform DVD player. Emmanuel Goldstein, publisher of 2600 Hacker Quarterly, was charged under the DMCA for the same offence, and was accused by entertainment industry lawyers of “endangering the future of American movies.”

Regardless of the aggression of the new US laws, a quick scan of what’s available on the gnutella file sharing network makes it clear copyright (as we know it) isn’t going to live long beyond its 300th birthday. Hollywood blockbuster films like American Beauty are waiting to be downloaded in a cracked, DVD-compatible format.

As the saying goes: “every new law creates an underclass.” The DMCA has generated nadirs of flourishing subterranean hacker cults and legally evasive file sharing communities. These groups, like graffiti artists in the city, deface with their program codes the monuments of copyright control: with new hacks and cracks that are conscious, romantic, acts of resistance.

Free information advocates believe that copyright protects the economic interests of publishers and distributors, above the artists and communities who would benefit from a liberalised information marketplace. Nobody is saying artists should not be paid. What is argued is that peer-to-peer file sharing networks over the internet herald a step towards a new cultural economy, one that will greatly benefit artists and audiences in the long term.

Music file sharing, an example of what may happen with future film distribution, demonstrates new possibilities for musicians: a direct relationship between audiences, a form of ‘radio’ not mediated by the recording industry, global in reach, and communal in practice. No royalties are given to artists through free downloads, but the ability to distribute music outside the record company monopoly is itself revelatory. MP3 files can be sent around the world, at virtually no cost, with next-to-no effort, and without respect for jurisdictional boundaries.

Last year, on the Kazaa network, I found a bootleg of an obscure song that was not available for sale. Because of the rarity of the find, I investigated my host’s shared music library further (a feature most P2P programs share), and selected titles from the musicians @@@@. I’d luckily found a likeminded person randomly through the digital hook of an obscure piece of music: the file sharing community acted as the educational resource, leading to an exchange of ideas and music that did not require the music industry to play its usual role as controlling taste-maker. With little or no profile on local radio for @@@@, it was copyright infringement that led to my money reaching the artists. I purchased their album and paid another $50 to see them on their Sydney tour.

Clearly, the argument that free P2P file sharing does nothing but exploit artists is more complex than the entertainment industries would have us believe. The music industry itself was never able to conclusively prove that Napster or other MP3 file sharing networks did anything but increase record sales.

As bandwidth increases and compression programs improve, digital media will inevitably become a primary distribution mode for film. What online digital distribution represents for Australian short film, already starved of exhibition possibilities, is the opportunity of reaching online film community networks globally. The Australian and international festival circuit for short film is limited: only SBS’s Eat Carpet broadcasts short films on television nationally. The potential reach of the file sharing networks, and their ability to create a community of ideas about film, can only increase the profile of Australian short films locally and internationally.

Sites like Atom Films (http://www.atom.com/ [updated link]) have successfully exhibited short film for several years now, focussing on one-liner comedies and simple, net-friendly animations, boasting 16 million unique visitors each month (see “Small screen desire”, p19). While it’s a good example of a thriving commercial model of short film distribution, it lacks an awareness of film beyond broadly consumable entertainment.

Thankfully, it might be the hacking community that finds a way to make the distribution of film on the internet simpler, faster, and determined only by audience interest. While a post-DMCA environment will affect the availability of digital media sharing technology, the law can only ever be a minor variable in the future dissemination of audiovisual intellectual property.

Perth International Arts Festival Director Sean Doran showed an alarming prescience when establishing elemental themes for his 4 festivals. The 2000 festival was themed ‘water’ and sure enough, it began with an unseasonable deluge that drowned out the Philip Glass opening night concert. The 2001 ‘earth’ Festival was-given the financial excesses of the previous year-much more down to earth! This year’s ‘air’ festival, despite a couple of nervous moments at Sticky—the opening performance spectacular in the far northern suburb of Joondalup—appeared to have escaped the literal elemental connection. Sticky relied on thousands of feet of sticky tape for its effects, so the mildest zephyr could be perilous. But this surprisingly beautiful spectacle moved without incident to its ambient and pyrotechnic conclusion.

360° in the shade

At the festival’s closing event, a freezing southerly buster made the experience of Amoros et Augustin’s 360° in the shade acutely unnerving. The show involved the installation of a huge projection screen, stage and rig on Cottesloe Beach (on possibly the windiest coast on the planet). The appalling weather made it hard to concentrate on anything but the risk to performers’ life and limb. This was a pity because there were fascinating moments in this performance which evoked a history through familiar and resonant images, from the cave paintings at Lascaux to the shower scene from Psycho; from sand paintings in the Navajo Desert to the photographic experiments of Thomas Muybridge and the paintings of Aboriginal desert people. To create these images the performers used a mix of live video feed, shadow theatre, action and sand paintings, mirror writing, live vocals and percussive beats: both astounding and ingenious.

While there were no instruments, the stage was constructed like a huge percussive instrument using a network of microphones, cells and sound sensors, distributed over the performers’ bodies, the screens, the floor and stage structure. The tightly scored composition was not to my taste and some of the images verged on the generic and overly romantic-often the case when European artists address Indigenous cultural traditions-but nevertheless it was a fascinating and committed performance by an extraordinary group of artists. My anxiety regarding the appalling weather was borne out on the second, equally windy night, when one of the performers slashed his hand and was dashed to hospital. The theme for the 2003 Festival is fire-I might just have to leave town!

Fire, Fire, burning bright

Some performances are highly polished, seamless theatrical events, constructed and informed by modern and postmodern tenets of capital ‘A’ art and the European and North American cultural tradition. Other work, while cognisant of those traditions, is recast in the vernacular of local influences and histories. Other performances are a gift-an opportunity to see, hear and witness the very different performance traditions-no matter how uncomfortable. This was certainly the case with the extraordinarily confronting Fire, Fire, burning bright (Marnem Marnem Dililb Benuwarrenji), written by Andrish St Clare and based on the traditional dances and songs of the Gija people and a true story told by Paddy Bedford and the late Timmy Tims.

Presented outdoors on a sandy stage at Belvoir Quarry, surrounded by trees, Fire, Fire tells the previously “hidden” story of the massacre of a group of Gija and Worla people murdered by white station workers and owners for killing and eating a bullock during a break from station work. The performance is a contemporary rendition of a traditional east Kimberley joonba (or corroboree) created for the stage. As such, this joonba, named and endorsed as a new style by the traditional owners, adheres closely to oral histories and incorporates the traditional songs and dance of the original sequence. St Clair explains, “the traditional performative culture of Australian Indigenous people is not primarily narrative. All the people in the community from Elders down to children usually already know the story, or at least the outside version which is open to all members of the community, so the need for narrative is absent, or coded very loosely…” (program notes). This means that the original joonba does not tell the story directly, but instead concentrates on what in western terms would seem to be peripheral details-in this case-the journey of the murdered men’s spirits.

From the shocking opening image of a corpse crackling on a fire, to the appearance of Gija people in ‘white face’ performing the roles of station owners, workers and police, this extended performance presents us with many extremely confronting images from our shared history. Despite considering myself reasonably informed about the atrocities committed in the name of colonisation, I was surprised at how disturbing it was to witness the Gija people telling this story. It was profoundly shocking to watch the whited up Gija men depicting the abusive language (“ya black cunt”, “bloody nigger” etc) and murderous actions of their white bosses.

The “hidden story” occurs earlier in the production. According to Peggy Patrick, (Company and Creative Director, singer, performer and Law) it was hidden because “people who were still working on stations were scared that if white people saw this joonba or realised what it was about they might all be shot themselves.” The latter part of the story presents the original joonba, the spirits’ journey, and contains audiovisual projections of country and traditional songs and dances with voiceover to explain the journey. Ironically, it was this part of the production, furthest from the concept of western theatre, that many of the non-Aboriginal audience were most uncomfortable with, finding it extraneous to the narrative drive.

The act of colonisation was ugly and brutal. Healing can only occur through a significant striving and an ability to bear witness to the violence enacted against Indigenous people in Australia. The listening can be painful and the truth uncomfortable. As Patrick says, “We want people to look at the show, to enjoy the song and dance and to learn what happened to our people in the past. Before, Aboriginal people were really frightened of white people. Now we hope we can all be friends together”.

One Day in ‘67

Yirra Yaakin Noongar Theatre’s production, One Day in ‘67, written by Mitch Torres, tells yet another story about Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal history, this time focussing on a tough but close knit relationship between a mother (Ningali Lawford) and her two daughters (Irma Woods and Ali Torres). One Day in ‘67 refers of course to the historic referendum in which white Australians voted overwhelmingly for Aborigines to be included in the national census, effectively giving them-somewhat belatedly-citizenship rights. The referendum forms a schematic backdrop for what is primarily a domestic drama-a heightened piece of kitchen sink naturalism. I thoroughly enjoyed this lucid and often funny production, which included outstanding performances by Lawford and Woods in particular, and Humphrey Bowers making the most of his role as the radio man playing the ABC’s signature tune on a ukulele.

The dramatic tension revolves around the relationship between the mother, Ruby, and her two daughters, one of whom is heavily pregnant. The first half ambles along in what feels like real time. The second half erupts into an enormous brawl between the two sisters. One sister has grown up with her mother in the mission, while the other was ‘stolen’ because of her lighter skin and given the ‘advantages’ of a white upbringing in the city. Torres adeptly negotiates the relationship between the 3 women to explore not only generational but cultural differences. Ivy (Woods) is determined to take up the cause for civil rights and shames her mission bred sister, Maudie (Ali Torres). Maudie sees her sisters’ adoption of a more confrontational mode as an implicit rejection and diminution of her own more traditional upbringing. There are some unbearably poignant moments in this play, offset by the sheer energy and cheeky humour of Lawford and Woods.

Shadows

PICA hosted three solo performances on behalf of the Festival, including William Yang’s memorable and moving, Shadows. I became quite accustomed to arriving at work and finding yet another PICA staff member in tears following the show. Whilst much of it was extremely poignant, there were also moments of hilarity, from the opening images of garden parties at Government House for the 1980 and ‘82 Adelaide Festival of the Arts, to an ostensibly artless statement on censorship, delivered deadpan, while a large flaccid penis is projected on screen. Yang’s work always appear artless, when of course, it’s highly constructed, drawing many apparently disparate threads into a tightly woven whole that comments acutely on our humanity, or lack thereof.

Plastic Woman

A particularly interesting performance Plastic Woman, presented by Thai Community Theatre Group, Maya, told in an endearing mix of Thai and English (and surtitles) the story of a “plastic woman” constructed by scientists to be the perfect sex machine. With the bare minimum of lights and props, the only set was a table to which was clamped a cheap and nasty plastic mannequin’s head wearing a truly dreadful wig. The script, originally written as a solo performance for a woman, is performed by a man, putting a very different spin on the performance. Thai TV star Asadawut Luangsuntorn’s compelling physical and occasionally sexually explicit performance conveyed the hypocrisy of a society that projects its own sexual fears and pornographic fantasies onto the figure of the desired woman. At the very end of the show, when the appalling statistics about the sex tourism industry (particularly with minors) start to scroll down the screen, we understand that this Brechtian style parable has an Australian audience well in its sights. The majority of the 5.4 million sex tourists who arrive in Thailand each year are Australian and German men. Something else to be proud of.

Failing Kansas

Not everything in this festival was to do with challenging content. At the high modernist end of the spectrum were two very different works—Mikel Rouse’s solo opera, Failing Kansas and the performance installation for fifteen voices, An Alphabet, by John Cage. The former was an hour long “tragic” opera very loosely based on Truman Capote’s renowned In Cold Blood, which explores the events surrounding the murder of the Clutter family in Holcombe, Kansas. The connection escaped me completely. I do not mind opacity, but having established the formal parameters of the work ten minutes would have sufficed. As it was a late night show, I took the opportunity to catch up on a bit of sleep.

An Alphabet

However, I loved An Alphabet, adapted from John Cage’s radio play of 1982. For me, Cage is a seminal 20th century figure and his ideas have informed much of my thinking about art and performance. Presented as an almost sculptural installation, the play assembles the luminaries of the avant-garde modernist tradition: James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Rose Sélavy, Henry David Thoreau and Erik Satie as well as Robert Rauschenberg, Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham and a 9 year old Mao Tse Tung. Their conversation comprised quotations from theories, lectures, manifestos, novels, freely adapted historical material and lines Cage simply made up. The dialogue is both live and pre-recorded and juxtaposed with fragments of musical and pedestrian sound. Cunningham gives a brilliantly understated and charming performance, playing not himself but Erik Satie. Mikel Rouse is James Joyce, and an utterly virtuosic John Kelly is the narrator. The performance also included local “celebrities” such as State Gallery Director, Alan Dodge as Rauschenberg, Alistair Bryant, Director General of the Department of the Culture and the Arts as Buckminster Fuller, and Channel 7 newsreader, Peter Holland. Though adapted for the stage after Cage’s death, this performance truly inhabited the world of Cagean aesthetics. Set on a stair-step structure, the cast, with the exception of the narrator, remains relatively static. The performers shift only at precisely choreographed moments, striking intermittent poses in a slowly evolving tableau.

Sticky, Improbable Theatre, Joondalup, Feb 2, 3; 360° in the Shade, Amoros et Augustin, writer Marie Jones, director Ian McElhinney, Indiana Tea House, Cottesloe Beach, Feb 15-17; Fire, Fire Burning Bright, The Quarry Amphitheatre, Feb 6-10; One Day in 67, Yirra Yaakin Noongar Theatre, director David Milroy, Subiaco Theatre Centre, Jan 28-Feb 16; Plastic Woman, Maya-The Arts and Cultural Institute for Development, director Santi Chitrachinda, PICA, Feb 5-8; An Alphabet, director Laura Kuhn, Playhouse Theatre, Feb 14-16; Perth International Arts Festival.

Like the feast day after which it is named, the Midsumma festival is an unruly, hedonistic celebration, including events as different as The Festival Jack-off and the launch of Andy Quan’s Calendar Boy. Cabaret, monologue and deferred biography provided the 3 main trends that the arts events engaged with. Cabaret has a long association with queer aesthetics, the self-conscious performance of gender, identity and sexual allure offering a vision of society beyond the straight world. One must nevertheless question the inclusion within the festival of relatively ‘straight’ cabaret like Hell in a Handbag or the New Age lecture Imagining the Pleiades (unlike the pataphysical, stream-of-consciousness cabaret of the same month, Dilapidated Diva). Even Warhol’s dry, ironic persona was more dangerously camp than some Midsumma works.

Though ostensively a para-literary event, the Word is Out program had a cabaret ambience too. Writers recited texts in some cases written for performance in a relaxed manner, amongst the barely theatrical surrounds of a former Trades Hall meeting room. Love is the Cause for example included Richard Watts, schooled in the spoken-word scene which thrives amongst the back rooms of Melbourne’s pubs and clubs (Watts helped establish the nightclub Queer and Alternative). He has an endearingly rough-and-ready, almost improvised style, employing relatively simple language as he read from dog-eared pages. Kylie Brickhill echoed Watts in her rough comic approach, slamming on her guitar in an unaffected manner as she performed exerpts from her show Pick Me. She was delightfully naff, sending up her past as a young, newly-out lesbian who joined a band to “pull chicks.” Both seemed relatively weak however beside the 2 published authors on the program, a less than ideal juxtaposition of forms and styles.

Merrille Moss recited a tight—albeit slight—published monologue which at once mocked—while covertly celebrating—the indulgent self-pity of a recently dumped young lesbian. Andy Quan’s selections from Calendar Boy on the contrary were rich, expressive passages wrought from the simplest of elements. He employed a relatively unadorned, observational style which kept the emotional content at a certain remove. This proved intensely affective though in his study of the dangers of love, following a character who only barely avoided an abusive relationship. There but for the grace of God go I, seemed to be the message.

This perplexingly moving objectification of the personal was also exhibited in William Yang’s writing. For Yang however this occurs on a scopic level as well. The projected photographs that went with his words possessed an intimacy paradoxically accompanied by a sense of disinterested remove. As Yang himself explained when discussing images of his lovers, or how his camera enabled him to mingle with the lesbian community, the photographic lens offered him a way to get close to these figures while nevertheless remaining apart. Although Yang’s work has often been described as autobiographical, he provides too little information about himself for this to really be true. Friends of Dorothy is only autobiographical inasmuch as Yang’s persona can be described as that of the watcher—engaged yet detached, loving yet coolly documentary.

The most surprising aspect of Friends of Dorothy was how uncertain a speaker Yang is. Although he has been touring slides-and-text for years, he still tends to falter, before quickly picking himself up again. Here audiences once more found themselves in the intriguing, shifting sands of informal cabaret performance.

Melbourne is indeed home to a thriving cabaret scene, spreading from the queer clubs, to swish cafes where slick groups like Combo Fiasco perform, right through to La Mama. Theatre-maker John Bolton has provided a common departure point for the more theatrical manifestations of this form, drawing upon street performance, French clown and Jacques Le Coq. Hell in a Handbag (featuring Bolton-trained Merophie Carr) strongly exhibited the self-deprecating ‘theatre of naff’ style found amongst Bolton’s associates (Four on the Floor, Born in a Taxi, Kate Denborough). Handbag was not the best example of these approaches though. It compared poorly to coincident manifestations, like the more dreamy, melancholy, Calvino-esque ‘tales-of-a-city’ show Sailing on a Sea of Tears. It seems somewhat churlish however to criticise Handbag for its inconsistency given the free-form cabaret format widespread throughout Midsumma overall.

Although Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith produce highly charged, multifaceted works, their projects are characterised by a discipline elsewhere lacking in the festival. Finucane has been performing various characters she devised with director/dramaturg Jackie Smith for nearly 10 years in clubs. Nine were first brought together for The Saucy Cantina in 1999. More performance-art style figures like the Dairy Queen (spraying milk outwards and onto herself in an over-the-top, hyper-sexual game) have become infamous through guest appearances, yet Finucane’s rich, neo-Romantic, Gothic text work is less well known. Her dark, Edward Gorey/Mervyn Peake-style Expressionist melodrama Phantasmagoria (2000) failed to win the attention it deserved. Her Word is Out performances however demonstrated she and Smith have more stories and characters to offer. Their next project—Gothorama—is sure to be extraordinary.

The Smith/Finucane collaboration was the most threatening work within the festival. Sauce-Girl in Saucy Cantina was exemplary in this respect, a fiercely controlled yet minimally twitching woman staring into space as she squeezed a leaking sauce bottle. Her bizarre lust took the logic of gay and lesbian liberation to a frightening level. If all forms of sexual desire should be equally free, then Sauce-Girl represents desire for desire itself, a character who does not need another individual or even a particular fetishistic object. The work of Smith and Finucane is therefore more concerned with the exploration of emotion, desire and ritual behaviour, than with promoting particular sexual identities. Finucane’s characters are typically defined by a fragile beauty, a power and elegance bordering on fragmentation and death. Her Love is the Cause monologue painted a rich yet frigid picture of a deserted, frozen mansion where 2 siblings waited for “him”—presumably their father, but Finucane allowed no certainty here, only deeper mysteries—who bicker and protect each other in equal measure. Finucane delivered the tale with her characteristic tall, cracked, physical grace. It is indeed impossible to imagine Finucane’s works as purely written text, a trait that lifted her above her peers.

Her second Word is Out appearance featured her exuberant Latino-goddess: La Argentina. In Saucy Cantina, Finucane was ritually cleansed before transforming from Sauce-Girl into La Argentina, who described a food-market in which sexualised wares fell over themselves to proclaim her beauty. In Oceans Apart however La Argentina spouted a tale of ludicrous proportions, a rollicking, insane story of life with polar bears, kidnapping and gypsy-pirates. La Argentina is the only unambiguously life-affirming figure in the gallery of Smith and Finucane, a proud woman whose “firm arms” and “heaving bosom” metaphorically embrace the world.

The most suggestive aspect of the Word is Out program was the Auslan interpretation. Signers Lyn Gordon and Tanya Miller imparted a literally palpable sense of drama, offering their own distinctive inflections which undercut the writers’ authority, even as the latter read their texts. Gordon ‘spoke’ with a sense of shrugging melodrama; a rapid rim-shot approach of punctuated physical expression. Miller however had an easy nonchalance. Compared to Gordon, she almost slurred her physical speech. Her movements rolled out, tapering off into thoughtful poses.

These idiosyncratic physical dialects highlighted the tension at the heart of both the readings and authorship itself. One could actually see entire phrases collapsed into single, eloquent, nuanced gestures. Other relatively straightforward words engendered a flurry of physical activity, changing the emphasis of the text. Miller and Gordon dramatised how the meaning and expression of a text changes as it leaves the author. In Word is Out, the quicksands of physical cabaret sucked at the writers’ feet.

Midsumma: Hell in a Handbag, performers/devisors Shirley Billing, Merophie Carr, directors Vanessa Pigrum, Rebecca Hilton, Jan 22-Feb 2; The Saucy Cantina, director/co-creator Jackie Smith, performer/text/deviser Moira Finucane, performer Sandra Pascuzzi, Jan 22-27; 4Play, including Pick Me, performer/deviser Kylie Brickhill, Jan 15-19; Friends of Dorothy, performer/deviser/photography William Yang, Jan 31-Feb 2, Blackbox; Word is Out: curators Crusader Hillis, Rowland Thomson, Auslan interpreters Lyn Gordon, Tanya Miller, Trades Hall, Jan 26; Sailing on a Sea of Tears, performers/devisors Fiona Roake, Jesse Griffin, Terra Paradiso, Jan 29-Feb 15; The Dilapidated Diva + her Tight Three Piece Outfit, performer/deviser Emma Bathgate, director Barry Laing, Dante’s, Melbourne, Feb 7-23

Arts festivals in Australia are going through a process of renewal. In recent years we’ve seen Barrie Kosky and Robyn Archer significantly increase the volume of Australian content in their respective Adelaide festivals in contrast to the standard model operating elsewhere. There’s been greater emphasis on innovation, aided by collaborations between festivals. And there’s been the regional reach of recent Adelaide festivals, Tasmania’s 10 days on the Island and the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music. Access has become a major issue, not only for new and broader audiences but also for artists—witness the Indigenous drive of Peter Sellars’ vision for the 2002 Adelaide Festival. There was an also an increase in the number of free events. Next Wave has long been about access, for young people to create and enjoy art, but this year it’s taken the concept to new heights.

Young people, new work, community engagement, contemporary issues and access are central to the 9th Next Wave Festival. From 17 to 26 May more than 70 digital, dance, online, performance and public art events by, for and with young people will invade venues in, around and above Melbourne. And for the first time it’s all free, a surprising and significant development in an era of enduring economic rationalism.

There are large scale events, exhibitions and other showings that won’t require booking. However audiences still have to book if they want to see performances and participate in forums and workshops. Money will not change hands. Simply register online and request what you want to see. Doubtless, sessions will fill quickly, so booking early is critical.

The 2002 festival sees itself as a collision of art, pop culture, new media, social action, environmental concerns, healthy dissent and, this is interesting, “extreme sport”, and a blurring of the boundaries between audience and participant. The program’s embargoed until the mid-April launch of the festival, but here’s a glimpse of some of the highlights from the 70 premieres created in partnership with young people.

One of the big events will take place on the last day of Next Wave—the planting of 11,000 trees in the suburb of Westmeadows followed by a party in the CBD. The site for the event is an important water catchment area and the planting, part of a 10 year plan, is being produced by Tranceplant, an independent, environmental dance party co-op, in collaboration with Melbourne Water.

As ever new technology plays a substantial role in the festival. Sydney-based sound artist Sophea Lerner will present The Glass Bell, a work 3 years in the making which has been described as a glass waterwall with projections where touch affects sound and image. There’s also interactive martial arts in the shape of Kick the Fractal and VR workshops in art spaces.

Interdisciplinary work will predominate. One of these is a hitchhiker-inspired installation, Human/Machine/Landscape, the result of a collaboration between a visual artist and a documentary filmmaker. The experience will be like a walk-in movie cum sculpture at 45 Downstairs, Melbourne’s newest performance venue (beneath Span Galleries). Another walk-in work will be an inflated chromosome!

Screenings at Cinema Nova include the Megabite Digital Film Project, with help from the ATOM Awards (Australian Teachers of Media). The response from young artists to the call for entries for Megabite has been enormous with more than 150 digital films submitted.

On the performance side of the program, the work is extremely physical, featuring some 25 productions. There’ll be Indigenous dance and The Difficult Company from New Zealand will explore notions of “anti dance.” Look out and look up as one of Melbourne most recognisable architectural and arts icons is invaded by Y Space Company for the 10 days of the festival in a radical outdoor aerial dance event.

In the realm of text there’ll be a focus on comic books and a serious look at independent publishing. Forums covering all aspects of the festival will feature overseas as well as interstate and local speakers.

Next Wave is about access and involvement for individuals and groups. It is also working on a larger scale—towards genuine community engagement. There will be a dozen large public art outcomes which will be unavoidable. These include young people at risk working with artists through long term exchanges in regional and metropolitan Victoria. The resulting installation works move, glow and inflate. Next Wave 2002 looks unique on all fronts.

RealTime/Next Wave

As part of the 2002 program, RealTime editors will work with a team of young writers to produce quick turnaround responses to the festival each day, online and at festival venues on computer printouts. See RT49

Next Wave Festival, Melbourne, May 17-27. For more information go to www.nextwave.org.au

The young and talented cast of Kiss My Fist were Brian Fuata, Hannah Furmage, Shelley O’Donnell and Karl Velasco—the Peripheral Vision Company. The context and theory were queer, as was made plain by the apologia in the program—“The title hints at the duality of the good/bad power to transform identity…” etc. Fortunately the work was also inflected with performative values. In the postmodern manner, Kiss My Fist was able to traverse its territory by invoking modernist dramatic traditions.
All the performers presented a character field: a lesbian who longed to be raised to the heights of serial monogamy by a straight woman (O’Donnell); a young Asian man dealing (à la Shirley Bassey) with the break up of his relationship (Velasco); and a Dorothy Porter-type serial killer/detective in a Working Hot world (Furmage). The locus of Fuata’s contribution is less easy to suggest, something he might care to consider; in any case he appeared as a rather anachronistic suburban dad with Elvis longings.

All were powerfully distressed. The audience was initiated into this by Mr Sixties Suburbs (Fuata) taking our tickets in an ecstasy of self-doubt and ushering us onto Ms Wannabe Serial Monogamist barbecuing her ex’s cat (I do hope it was actually a butcher-bought rabbit). We were not allowed to our seats until Mr I-Believe-in-Gay-Monogamy (Velasco) had finished dumping his rage on us.

And so Kiss My Fist continued—with perspicaciously placed ensemble work giving the production a unified dynamic.

It did however seem to enact existential aloneness—Sartre’s characters trapped in the nothingness of hell hurling their anxiety and rage at us like La Fura dels Baus offal. The business was bathed in a glow of Absurdist mania. The always already has been imminent, or some such, was excitingly in process.

The seating was flanked by a screen that threw up slides, comments and eventually a black Cadillac careering across plains and deserts, substantiating the sense announced in the program of the characters ‘hitting the road’. The audience was corralled and moved on, controlled. This lent Kiss my Fist an unnecessary comfort in which the too-easy satire participated. The sniping at gay targets was particularly facile.

By the time we had been advanced through the space to the red velvet proscenium, Kiss my Fist was really ready to confront us. In a theatrical coup, Velasco as a flailing Asian boy puppet related his tale of escape from the sweatshops and his cannibalistic journey as a refugee. The teetering balance of the comic and distressing was most acute at this point and I am not sure Velasco got it right. But then this was the principle on which this clever and accomplished production worked.

Kiss my Fist, consulting director Nigel Kellaway, performers Brian Fuata, Hannah Furmage, Shelley O’Donnell, Karl Velasco, sound designer Gail Priest, video Peter Oldham, lighting designer Clytie Smith, Mardi Gras 2002, Performance Space, Sydney, Feb 14-24

Rosalind Crisp is a Sydney dance practitioner whose Omeo Dance Studio has become an important and influential fixture in a city that lacks both physical space for contemporary dance practice as well as tangible networks and community support. She has recently returned from a trip to Belgium, France, Germany and America with her company stella b. where she made contacts that were both inspiring and beneficial. She returns there in May for at least 12 months, moving between Belgium, Paris and Berlin, and joined from time to time by her collaborators. Erin Brannigan talked to Crisp about travel and its challenges, her current practice and the future of the Omeo Dance Studio.

The idea for the trip started when I went to Glasgow for the new moves (new territories) dance festival in 2000. I went on to Belgium after that to visit some people I used to work with there in the early 90s. They were really interested in what I was doing and then a residency came through at the Monty Theatre in Antwerp. It’s quite a new studio above the theatre, curated as an international residency space. I received support for myself and my company, stella b. [currently Nalina Wait, Katy MacDonald and David Corbet] from Monty and from the Australia Council. So when I knew that arrangement was solid I built some other connections and what evolved was a 2 month tour with stella b. beginning with La Biennale du Val de Marne in Paris to showcase traffic, then back to the residency where we showed the results of the research we had done there. Then we returned to Paris and the Centre National de la Danse where we performed traffic and presented the Monty research in a forum. We went on to Berlin and did the same at Tanzfabrik and then I went on to London to do some teaching. Finally I went to the Improvisation Festival in New York then to LA to do a lecture/performance at the University of California, Riverside where dance theorist and practitioner Susan Leigh Foster is based. She invited Andrew Morrish and I to come over and she’s keen to have us back so maybe something else may develop there.

It was just incredible—I didn’t expect anything but was kind of hoping people would be interested in the work and they were. So it was very exciting and we received lots of invitations. Venue producers from Paris who came to see some showings are interested in commissioning me to do new work and I managed to find a manager in Paris who is helping me to get that together. And a lot of things came out of it artistically—especially the residency. It was a fantastic time to be really focused, away from Omeo, board meetings and that sort of thing…I felt really challenged and inspired by the questions they were asking. So it was about getting exposure and stimulus.

What kind of pre-conceptions do you think people had about you as an Australian contemporary dance practitioner?

In Belgium I felt there was a great interest in where I was going personally and the type of inquiry I’m interested in. They’re kind of unorthodox in a way…not so held by ballet and what’s technically correct. There’s a lot of experimentation there and I felt very inspired by that. And in Paris some people said “We’ve seen this…we don’t think it’s new but your personality in the work is really different.” And I thought, “is that Australian or is it me or what?” They were very intrigued and France is where most of the offers have come from for next year.

And then the response in Berlin was completely different again—I felt like they were overwhelmed by the work, as if they hadn’t seen any dance that wasn’t dance theatre. I didn’t feel the same critical engagement with the work. Perhaps the form I’m working with isn’t as familiar…Also, it seemed that there is a lot of interest in work that isn’t being promoted from the Australian end, and not a lot in the Australian work that is being promoted there. But I can’t profess to represent the European perspective. It’s really complex…I felt strongly that the critical dialogue is in Belgium and France and that’s what really attracted me—much more than in Berlin and America. In Brussels I met a couple of ex-students from P.A.R.T.S, the De Keersmaker school, and they’re very inquisitive—their feedback on the work-in-progress was just fantastic. They interrogated us in a genuinely interested and respectful way and were armed with so many tools.

There’s a limited audience here and you’ve been addressing it for some time. Does it feel like time to take your work to new audiences?

It seems quite hard for me to grow here anymore at the moment. I don’t feel that I can get the exposure and the dialogue that I need to challenge me…And the gigs—there’s just not the work here. And that does something else, having a lot of performances. Katy and Nalina grew in leaps and bounds while we were away. It takes a year over there to get the equivalent of 10 years here, so it speeds up the process. I don’t feel negative about Australia. It’s just what’s right at the right time. Being isolated has been fantastic—it’s really allowed me to develop my own voice.

However, there are differences between Australia and Europe that need to be addressed. The decentralisation of funding for dance in Europe means it’s possible to develop the connections that I have made and the networks of interest and support. This is unlike Australia where there is basically only one decision-making body, the Australia Council, deciding who gets to make dance each year. The European model is that funds are given to the venues to distribute. This encourages diversity and a sense that there will always be a place for your particular kind of work. The arbiters of taste who have the power to define what dance is in Australia are very few. And those few producers with money in Sydney, the Opera House Studio and the Sydney Festival define a very limited field through what they support. I do think this situation puts a stranglehold on the development of dance practices here.

What came up in Monty was that there was material that I needed to go further into—on my own body—before I could communicate those ideas to the other dancers. And that’s tended to be my process, working through physical ideas on my own, getting clearer in my own body and then communicating it to the others, then developing it further with them bouncing to and fro. I found at Monty that it felt premature to make work with them when I felt my body was shifting to another place from theirs, so I felt I needed to pull out for a while.

It’s not that I’ve moved away from the ensemble work, it’s just that I’m doing a solo at the moment. I’ve seen my company stella b. as what I was doing, and in a way it still is. I’m working with the same composer and this solo will be performed with another group work. But I needed to make the shift from the training aspect for a while. Maybe that never goes away—perhaps I’ll find that I’ll always be in a situation where I need to train people. I’ve also been encouraged by some of the French producers to work with some European dancers and see what that does to the way that I’m working, and I find that invitation exciting.

I took on a studio in Annandale in 1994. That was a huge risk—I thought ‘my god, how am I going to find this rent?’ I got through 18 months there and cut my teeth, so it wasn’t such a huge leap to then take on the Newtown space. Omeo Dance Studio is an interesting phenomenon. It’s just evolved without me even noticing it. And I suppose my funding status was reasonably good. I took Omeo on when I knew I had a funded project that had a budget for studio hire. But the first 2 or 3 years were pretty hard and I used to ‘pray’ for money. I lived on nothing really until the Australia Council bestowed a fellowship on me.

Well I work at least 12 hours a week in there for it to run, so that’s my labour in exchange for the space. I don’t really want to be the administrator of a venue so I keep it as streamlined as I can. I incorporated it 18 months ago with Andrew Morrish and Silver Gabriel Budd, but it also means we’ve taken on more work because we can. And it’s not just the work on the phone; it’s listening to people, welcoming them and responding to their needs. I did enjoy that in a way because there were a lot of conversations…It does feel that it’s a distraction for me now. I came back from Europe and I realised I’d been like an outrigger ship, dragging all these people along with me—so much effort. But of course I’ve got a lot out of it.

It is a business to the extent that it makes the money that it needs to run. It’s totally non-profit and nobody has been paid for the work that’s been done for the last 6 years. You could rent it out for high rates like other studios, but then it’s just a studio for hire and it doesn’t generate a community. I’ve made the decision to have a sliding scale so people with a ‘studio’ practice can use it for longer hours. So it’s all very tentacled around what I’ve done there. There is a vision—things I’ve decided to do and not to do, and having people contributing to the rent who are people I really want to support.

I now feel I want to keep it going, partly because of the people who want to use it and partly because I actually want to come back and work there. It’s also a structure for me to continue working within, to be able to reconnect with a part of what nourishes me. And I do see things occurring between here and Europe. I don’t feel like I’m going and that that’s the end of it.

I’m still not sure how that will happen but the amazing thing is that Carol Dilley just turned up and I asked her whether she would be interested in managing Omeo and she said she was. She has run a company in Barcelona and she is organised and mature and smart and wants to get to know the dance scene in Sydney…And she wants to keep the studio going and she respects its history, which is great. And it’s also perfect because it’s not exactly a financial concern, but it seems there’s something for her to gain from it. It needs that reason to keep going…so that’s what has happened. So it will still be Omeo Dance Studio.

Not only do people move in very different ways, their choreographic construction methods and priorities are also quite diverse. Phillip Adams’ Ending #1—part of a major work-to-be, shown in its infancy—afforded a forensic perspective on constructing dance. Whilst some might build a piece through the development of movement, Adams appears to work with an almost fetishistic use of objects, a strong musical presence and an enduring commitment to design, that is, the look of the piece.

Ending #1 begins with a toy plane wiggling along fishing wire the depth of the stage, to the sound of Ligeti’s signature piece for Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey. Whilst the music suggested an event of great moment, the plane looked absurd in its precarious journey towards the back of the room. A similar tribute to the object occurred when a glow-in-the-dark toy was reverently studied by the performers, then wobbled towards the ceiling.

I had a sense that the movement in Ending #1 was not developed anew but drew upon a now-familiar kinaesthetic which Adams recalls and reworks to fill in the spaces. Adams and Toby Mills danced about in g-strings with fox furs draped around their necks, whilst Brooke Stamp seemed to hang about onstage most of the time—until Adams and Mills enjoined her in a trio which looked faintly pornographic, suggestively lit by a bare light bulb swinging back and forth. I found the piece pretty witty despite its state of choreographic undress. Supposedly about extinction (God knows how that entered this version apart from the dead foxes, and a luminous dinosaur), Ending #1 signals a beginning rather than an ending. I look forward to its evolution.

The second half of Bodyworks Program 3 included performances by 2 Japanese artists, Masami Yurabe and Eme Suzuki. A striking feature of both pieces was the way in which neither drew upon any familiar lexicon of movement. Developed and repeated in a series of poignant movements, Suzuki’s Fragment for Children was very clear, simple yet powerful, her kinaesthetic persona a young girl facing life, dealing with the world in emotional terms. Beginning tentatively, expressing fear and anxiety, the work finished with a series of bows that presented a self at peace. Suzuki’s sincerity and commitment to her theme gave the work its dignity.

Yurabe’s Witness was a very different kind of work, less personal, subject to greater change. Witness begins and ends with a chair. The start was almost clownish but, by the end, the chair became less of a prop and more an object of existential moment. Yurabe’s movement was also quite variable. From comic, anarchic interaction with the chair as a means to enter the performative space, the movement took on a more dancerly character. There was an incredible elegance about his body in motion, also a presence and aliveness which suggested a degree of improvisation. The program notes mention improvised Butoh performance. I felt by the end that I would like to see other works by Yurabe; he has a performative edge that could go many places.

The inclusion of Maryanne Lynch’s film Pyjama Girl in the latest offering at the IMA in Brisbane was an astute and successful curatorial decision. A particularly powerful film in its own right Pyjama Girl also provided a catalyst, that set in motion a dialogue between the 4 exhibitions on show.
I may have missed the pivotal role of Pyjama Girl if it had been showing when I first visited the IMA in early February. It is easy to miss such curatorial decisions, since in the most remarkable of exhibitions, the hand of the curator is invisible to the eye. We experience it as ‘just right’ and question no further. However, on my first visit to the IMA, everything was not ‘just right’. The exhibitions of Anne Zahalka (Fortresses and Frontiers), Anne Wallace (High Anxiety) and Annette Bezor (Blush) were up, but there was a strange and strained silence in the space. The projection room was locked and the only indication that Lynch’s work was supposed to be part of the show was a small sign on the door, Maryanne Lynch—Pyjama Girl.

In this context, the work of Zahalka, Wallace and Bezor appeared as a series of 3 independent exhibitions. At one level this impression was understandable. Each show was essentially a solo exhibition. Yet it didn’t quite add up. The combined catalogue and the advertising suggested that there was a greater connection within the show than all the exhibitors sharing “Anne” as part of their name.

Second time round, discordant mechanical sounds seeped from the screening room creating a sense of unease. Zahalka’s light box images of Sydney became more alienated and Wallace’s paintings attained a state of high anxiety. Lynch’s Pyjama Girl had escaped the confines of the projection room and implicated itself in the life of the other work. In this, Pyjama Girl set in motion a powerful dialogue, not just between the works within each artist’s exhibition, but also between the different exhibitions. Bezor’s work, alone, remained aloof to the pull of the Pyjama Girl.

Powerful filmmaking has the potential to collapse the viewer into the medium. In her nonlinear expressionistic narrative of the life and death of Linda Agostini, an Italian immigrant murdered by her husband in the 30s, Lynch’s film implicates the viewer in the drama through being shot from the point of view of the murder victim. In this tightly edited and taut short film, Lynch produces a dread and palpable anxiety that isn’t easy to shake off.

This sense is carried through to the work of Wallace. Borrowing from the tradition of film noir, her paintings are like film stills and in them we experience an unfolding drama. Stylistically, Wallace’s paintings have a strong resonance with Lynch’s film and, at their best, produce a similar psychological tension. In this context, I found myself creating a narrative linking the 2 shows. In the slightly smudged lipstick and vacant expression of the woman in The Indifferent (2000), death seems to lurk. I am transported back to the dramatic life and death of Linda Agostini. But then again, perhaps the character in The Indifferent is precisely that: indifferent. Here the work follows another trajectory—it aches with the loneliness and the isolation of contemporary life. Wallace’s work takes up a conversation with the photographs of Zahalka.

The dislocation and isolation felt in the characters of Wallace’s paintings pervades Zahalka’s work. In her photographs of Sydney, she provides us with iconic images of alienation—isolated human figures overwhelmed by the immensity of the urban landscape. In these light box images, the noise of Sydney is muted and the figures appear to move aimlessly in a strange hyper-real light. The sense of foreboding in the images becomes magnified as the eerie industrial sounds of Lynch’s film insinuate themselves into the space.

The mood of Bezor’s paintings contrasts with the tension created through the rest of the show. Her monumental self-possessed women swell beyond their frames filling the gallery space with a great calm. Given the serene and enigmatic quality emanating from her paintings, it may at first seem odd to program Bezor’s work alongside Lynch, Zahalka and Wallace. However, I found it took the petulant self-possession of Bezor’s paintings to break the psychic tension created in and between the work of the other three.

High Anxiety, Anne Wallace; Pyjama Girl, Maryanne Lynch; Fortresses and Frontiers, Anne Zahalka; Blush, Annette Bezor, IMA Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Jan 31-March 5

There’s an emerging niche of visual and sound artists in Melbourne who are actively influenced by computer games and what they represent in contemporary digital culture—which isn’t surprising when you consider the popularity of gaming and Hollywood’s relentless plundering of its imagery; or follow art-game trends in new media art internationally.
Stephen Honegger and Anthony Hunt have worked with the theme of game culture for several years, collaboratively and individually. Soon after graduating with Honours in Painting from RMIT, they installed a Sony PlayStation on a platform at Grey Area, just-out-of-reach, played by whoever was minding the gallery (Gameplay 1998). Hunt has presented facsimiles and ‘doubles’ in various media, while Honegger has sampled game landscapes in his videos, and in Final Fantasies (2002)—with Damiano Bertoli, Amber Cameron, Chad Chatterton and sound artist Julian Oliver—fitted out Gertrude Street contemporary art spaces with 3D sculptural forms lifted from the gaming world (such as concrete blocks and Mario Bros love hearts).

Container, a large-scale sculptural installation at Gertrude Street contemporary art spaces, offered a highly original and sophisticated use of the game logic. More experimental than the form of critique often associated with Australian new media art, Container was more interesting as a result. Entering the gallery, we encountered an object that seemingly didn’t belong: a full-scale rusted metal shipping container, complete with insignia. Container was originally conceived as a 3 screen video projection, but as Hunt confessed, “we were going to have to build lots of walls to make the space dark…and realised a container would be ideal.” Such an imposing art ‘clue’ and a mysterious droning sound from within compels us to look closer. Upon inspection, we discover the container is fabricated entirely from wood, meticulously constructed and painted to match our idea of what it should look like—and precisely matching the iconic image of containers which feature so ubiquitously in computer games.

The dark interior of the container reveals far more, as a video projection immerses us in a narrative generated from the game software Worldcraft. This follows a trend amongst gamers—popularised by mega-games such as Doom (1993) and Quake (1995)—to create and extend existing games using freely available source code (‘shells’) and software. It’s good for the software companies—whole communities develop around their games— fans do the research and development for free. Thankfully, the outcomes aren’t always predictable. The DVD loop in Container begins at night with a first-person perspective onto a detailed, 3D-rendered, pebbled alley at the rear of a warehouse. It’s an aesthetic immediately recognisable from any number of computer games. Clean, jerky camera moves create the sensation of moving through this simulated space. But as the character breaks into the building, we come to realise that what looks like scenery pulled from the latest computer game is, in fact, the gallery itself. What follows is an enticing virtual prowl through the empty upstairs corridor spaces of Gertrude Street artist studios—well known to most visitors.

It’s extraordinary how much mood and realism can be generated from game software. What almost looked like some extraction of hand-held video, as Hunt explained, was all painstakingly modelled in 3D over several months. “It started with the architectural floor plan, and measurements to the millimetre: the door heights, the corridors…everything we needed to know. And then we took photographs of all the surfaces…With modelling, you’re generally just building boxes, and then sticking on a digital image [for texture].” Gertrude Street was the ideal environment for such virtualisation, its corridors and stairs adhering perfectly to the syntax of game modelling. Honegger, who is open about his ambition to work in the game industry, admits that you wouldn’t be able to ‘play’ or interact with Container in its current polygon-inflated form. The point was, “to push it for our own purposes, to do something different with it.”

The narrative moves into surreal mode as we glide down the stairs into the gallery at ground level. The origin of the shipping container is disclosed when the ceiling magically opens and the virtual container slides gently down. The character stalks into the gallery office (complete with rendered versions of the computers, chairs, and catalogues) and collects a handgun foolishly left in one of the office trays. Entering the virtual container, another figure stands—just as we are—watching a screen (now blue and flashing ‘PLAY’). Thus armed, our identification with this character is put under duress. The game has become a ‘first-person shooter’ and it’s too late to intervene: shots are fired, shells pour onto the floor, the figure collapses and blood splashes on the wall. A ‘badly painted’ wall, now revealed as a trace of this gangland-style execution, was the overlooked clue.

Container preserves the basic narrative structure of commercial games—the survival objective and competitive aims—and in this sense is no critique. Yet, experienced alone, it evokes a chilling psychic and temporal displacement reminiscent of one of its inspirations—David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999). Simultaneously alienating and delicious, it adds a rich new dimension to the idea of site-specificity, the gallery, and indeed to the tradition of participatory art.

Container Stephen Honegger & Anthony Hunt, Gertrude Street contemporary art spaces Feb 1 – March 2.

Simon Wilton, Lucy Taylor, Mark Minchinton, Natasha Herbert, Margaret Mills, Felicity MacDonald, rehearsals for Still Angela

Still Angela premieres for Melbourne’s Playbox in April. Some of the collaborators, writer-director Jenny Kemp, composer Elizabeth Drake and performers Natasha Herbert, Margaret Mills, Lucy Taylor, Mark Minchinton, Ros Warby and Simon Wilton met Mary-Ann Robinson to discuss the evolution of the work.

Some of the team have worked together before on projects such as Call of the Wild (1989) and The Black Sequin Dress (1996). Is this piece is a continuation of earlier work?

Kemp From a writer’s point of view maybe it is…We’ve still got the sense of a woman who is passing through a period of transition and we’ve got once again 4 women playing one woman. Also that sense of an inner and an outer landscape or location, an inner and an outer world and a disjunction between those worlds. And the putting together of the 3 disciplines of sound, choreography and visual theatre.

Minchinton One of the things that’s changed since Call of the Wild’s that the Delvaux [Paul Delvaux the Belgian artist whose work figures in Kemp’s creations] stuff has sedimented. It’s not so overt. And the spatial relationships have changed.

Drake We could say that The Black Sequin Dress is like a transition between Call of the Wild and this work, because that was where Helen came in and worked with the actors in a generic way, to actually construct on the floor. It seems that in this one the movement is the driving force, possibly more than the text.

Warby I would say that the text is still the driving force. It feels like it went through a transition from the text to the initial development in which the focus was sort of, throw it on the floor and doing lots of impulse work. Now that the piece is being formulated, with the framing becoming much more refined, that balance has shifted again.

Kemp We are having to behave quite choreographically now in order to place text and movement alongside each other. Even though we are not doing expressive dance movements as such, we’re doing movement that revolves around spatial and temporal choices…because in many of the scenes there are about 5 grids operating. By grid I mean layers of reality or experience happening simultaneously and they are all actually slightly disjunctive in relation to each other. It’s quite complex making the spatial choices so that’s clear to the audience.

Warby Between the spatial and the textual, the layers are quite sophisticated and there are a lot of people on the floor.

Mills I feel that the action, or the movement, or the spatial plan that we are working to is given far more precedence in this one. I think that in Black Sequin there were more discrete events in the text.

Herbert With the ratio of those that speak and those that don’t, at some stages there are 3 characters that aren’t verbal. Helen has provided another language that’s happening non-verbally. At first, as an actor, it’s hard to be aware of all of that because you just want to hook into speaking, but we’re having to stretch that out and be aware of the other language that’s going on.

Kemp Your cue might be someone on the other side of the room doing something…

Herbert Which is nothing to do with the scene that you place yourself in. But it is of course, in another way. The challenge I found was when speaking and engaging in domestic scenes my character is on the move—there’s a certain pace to her and yet I’m having to move fast slowly because you have to react to whatever else is happening.

Kemp Because we’re working with scenes about emotional memory and actual memory, there are times when the actions of the figure Natasha’s playing are being examined by another character and that’s what’s interrupting her, or slowing it down. It doesn’t actually change the nature of her energy but we’re pulling it apart so it can be looked at because it’s being remembered. So that is a really particular task for the performer. Helen said the other day that the girl is not even there in a way, but it’s a slice of the girl, a fragment of a memory of something. And yet there is actually a person out there, a whole person, and they have to be that. But the way we perceive them, or the way they become a part of what’s happening, is as if at times it’s in the back of the brain. We’re trying to get the rhythm of a transition or a catharsis or some inner work that might be taking place.

Warby It’s like trying to get the rhythm of one character through 4 people and 2 languages—choreography and text.

Kemp Directing is very complex because one can only direct or be in dialogue with one layer at a time, so there’s been some discomfort in people not being attended to. That’s why when we’re all in the space Helen might be talking to one layer of it and Elizabeth can be talking to another layer of it. We’ve had blocks of time through our creative development when we were all in there and all able to speak.

Herbert We’ve had to discover what it is we’re doing and that has come through our relationship to one another.

Taylor My experience of finding my Angela is that I can’t find the text until I’ve found the physicality. But I can’t find the physicality without text. And then there’s the relationship to the space and everybody else within that. So it’s quite delicate. I’m trying to be patient with myself because it’s quite complex. I’ve got to be conscious of the fact that I’m a memory and someone’s remembering me. I’m in my kitchen—am I remembering me? In the end, I think I just have to be in the kitchen and the form and the content will support the idea.

Kemp Everyone else is this one person, Angela, and Simon is the other person, Jack. What’s that like for you, Simon?

Wilton It shifts according to the different Angelas. It’s not as complex, because I deal with them one at a time and they’re very clearly written scenes, very true situations, very easy to click into.

Taylor It’s wonderful sometimes because you think, am I addressing all aspects of my personality and character? But it doesn’t matter because I’ve got 3 other people to do that for me. I don’t have to do it all.

Kemp It is actually Angela at 3 ages, but we only need one Jack because the Angela’s 3 ages are mutable within her at one age. The younger self is still there as an older self is forming. We’re looking inside Angela and at the outside of Jack. In real terms there might only be one Angela sitting in a kitchen until she gets out and goes on a train journey. And the whole thing could be remembered. There are a number of narrative grids that are activated. They actually do coexist slightly, so people might decide that it means something different to the person sitting next to them, or not be quite sure whether she actually goes to the desert or actually gets off the train. A little bit like in Black Sequin Dress, there are those moments where you’re preparing for the future and you imagine the future. In imagining it, you’re preparing for it.

Robinson Elizabeth, can you tell us about the music, in particular the carousel and the carnival link.

Drake I’ve tried not to follow the text too much but I’m definitely influenced by a certain tone of the language. There’s something quite particular about this work, something kind of pure and raw. So I didn’t want to do something that sounded too sophisticated or too romantic. I wanted it to be just happening over there (in the corner). And the carousel I have worked through because of the connection with horses, and the fact that it exists in a carnival, a setting which is outside our ordinary lives, the place of dreams and dreaming. Mark was also interested in the carnival as a place where things turned upside down, where things aren’t quite what they seem.

Mills The whole thing about the world of nature—rain and earth, mother and memory—there is this layering of meaning in the script that is really strong.

Kemp It’s good that you mention the greater landscape, the sense of the place in nature, the feeling of being connected to the air and trees and sky, as well as being connected to a person. In some ways the play looks at what that is. Quite often when we’re very young, connectedness is attached to another person and there’s not necessarily a strong sense of autonomy. The play is looking at that shift towards autonomy and towards connection with place, or greater landscape. Not that that would cancel out connection with another person, but it’s opening up those possibilities. A kind of rite of passage.

Still Angela, director-writer Jenny Kemp, designer Jacqueline Everitt, composer Elizabeth Drake, choreographer Helen Herbertson, lighting designer David Murray, script consultant Mark Minchinton, film Ben Speth. Creative development and direction in collaboration with Natasha Herbert, Felicity MacDonald, Margaret Mills, Mark Minchinton, Lucy Taylor, Ros Warby, Simon Wilton, Playbox,. The Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse, Melbourne, April 10-27, 8pm; Mon-Tues at 6.30pm.

Blak Inside, a series of Indigenous plays from Victoria, performed at Melbourne’s Playbox to sellout crowds. It’s a vote of confidence in the medium that these writers chose to craft their stories for theatre. I saw 3 of the 5 productions.

Belonging by Tracey Rigney is a story told simply and clearly. Cindy is 13, on the edge of womanhood and not sure where she belongs in her river town. She has friends and she has Pop, a solid, calm old man. Belonging stays with Cindy through a few days of upheaval at the brink of life-changing events. Cindy’s cousin Janice comes to town, looking to party. Tough, seemingly hard, but only 14, Janice does any kind of drug, looking for any kind of fun, hurt and reeling, throwing her body hard at a world that hurts her. She risks great pain to help her feel she can’t be hurt again and she drags Cindy along, needing to tell her how bad, how hard the world is, what a shitty future they have. Cindy’s internal battle is played out simply at the level of what happens to who, but the threads are long and knotted and the story compelling.

Jadah Milroy uses more complex poetic and surreal elements blended with humour to weave together stories of people lost in the city. Crow Fire is the story of Dayna. Raised white, and a public servant, she is frustrated with life and unable to make a difference. Dayna is drawn to Crow, a spiritual force, a big black survivor. Donning her crow costume, she tries to generate a fire in the people she encounters—a politician and her disillusioned banker husband; Yungi, who has come from the desert to the city seeking help; and Tony, her friend.

Casting Doubts explores the question of Aboriginality as it is recognised and performed for broader cultural consumption. A casting agent seeks Aboriginal actors for film roles. Writer Maryanne Sam develops a series of threads around the legitimacy of Aboriginal culture, whether it is denied or embraced. She explores the deep sense of betrayal sometimes felt when working in a cultural industry that insists on a narrow fantasy of the perfect Aborigine—trackers in loincloths, domestic servants who say ‘Sorry missus’ with downcast eyes. To get the job you play the part, but when the ‘trackers’ are in the waiting room, they’re on their mobiles—serious, contemporary dudes. The ‘domestic servant’ is gorgeous, worrying about wearing concealer and crocodile shoes. Are they Aboriginal enough to fit the crap parts written for them? “Him one big hebby pella…me go no furda, boss.” Then back on the mobile and into the suit to resume real life as an Aborigine. Oh well, there’s always Othello. This cleverly constructed play leads us, laughing, through layers of perception about race and image.

Conversations With the Dead is a giant of a play, performed at full stretch over 2 and a half hours by a powerful cast supporting Aaron Pederson in the performance of a lifetime. Richard Frankland’s script and direction drag us to the edges of suffering and pain through a series of conversations with those whose files and stories he worked on during years with the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Just when you can take no more, he eases back with music, some smart jokes and then takes you deeper into the unrelenting pain of Aboriginal deaths and the effects on families across Australia: the suicide attempts, the slashings, the chroming (solvent sniffing), the funerals every week, the disintegration of family life. From the inside, drinking and violence make sense at the end of a long line of breathtaking provocation and grief, the result of being pushed beyond what is tolerable. This is an extraordinary play with not only powerful material but also an understanding of the medium, the use of image, music and non-verbal waves of emotion flooding the audience.

These plays all speak the rich language of people not represented well in Australian culture. The language is tough, quick, hard, Australian, Aboriginal: lots of ‘deadly’ and ‘fullas’ and ‘cuz’. Not a lot of glamour, but lots of humour, some soft, but a lot of it hard, bleak, bitter. Still bloody funny though. These stories cannot be told by outsiders. Insiders in the audience just lit up, amazed to finally see it all up there, life reflected back in full colour.

Belonging, writer Tracey Rigney, director Lauren Taylor; Casting Doubts, writer Maryanne Sam, director Kylie Belling; Crow Fire, writer Jadah Milroy, director Andrea James; Conversations with the Dead, writer-director Richard J Frankland. The season also included: Enuff by John Harding and I Don’t Wanna Play House by Tammy Anderson (see RT46 p38). Blak Inside, Playbox Theatre and Ilbijerri Arboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Theatre, designer Robyne Latham, lighting Rachel Burke & Michele Preshaw; composer Peter Rotumah, sound David Franzke; CUB Malthouse, Melbourne, Feb-March.

It began in the foyer, crept up on us crabwise—them filming, us filming them—and before we knew it (you could feel the audience holding its breath) we were following the faux princess willing us to join her in a journey out the front door and into the garden. The Red Cabbage 8 (RC8) ensemble was inspired by angels and we were brought face to face with lost dreams of white picket-fence suburbia and the toil of life—mowing, measuring, making babies. “You’ve got to get the horsey ride when you can and another ride after that.”

We wanted to love this one, really love it. And we did, just about. RC8’s principal creator and ensemble director is Louise Morris, partner of David Branson (who died tragically just before Christmas). And here we were so soon after at The Street Theatre, home to much of Branson’s work over many years, focus of the Canberra arts community’s outpouring of grief. The faces in the audience were the same ones that had bid him farewell. Half Full of Happiness—“a little token of remembrance”—was fat (full to the brim) with particular poignancy.

The 8 installations explored the concept of ‘invasion’ (according to the notes) in a dreamscape search for happiness through live music, multimedia and movement: outdoors, indoors. The installations that worked a treat engaged the audience, had us by the throat, laughing, expectant. Such as the swinging angels raining ice-cube tears. Such as the cackling trolls from the underworld throwing mud and spraying real water from real garden hoses to challenge any nascent arty-fartiness.

The in-between spaces were best. Navigating tight squeezy places. Crawling head to butt along sand tunnels (difficult for those in opening-night frou-frou). Reaching out to build our own sandcastles just about. Visually, Half Full of Happiness was full of impact. It was tactile, visceral. Our tongues licked ruby champagne. We were overcome by pesticide fumes. We immersed ourselves in something/anything half-full/half-empty with happiness.

It had echoes of ACME’s goldfish-pond sculptural installations at University House (National Festival of Australian Theatre, 1997). It was grunge extravagance, albeit on a smaller, domestic scale. It was a reflective, brave performance—of the moment. Even so (and I hesitate in saying this), there was something missing.

It ended all too abruptly, the ending arbitrary at that. For all our longing to get our teeth into it, feel grit, eat flesh, it was gone, quite finished (only just an hour) with the last of the performers brushing past nonchalant passersby and disappearing into the dark shadow of, as it happens, the Australian Family Court. Did we, at that moment of departure, step into the frame of the theatre, our action/inaction somehow becoming the muscle of the work?

It was as if Half Full of Happiness was a prelude to something not yet made, something grand and delicious but un-present, un-conceived, yet. But perhaps that’s the point…There is something ready now to be born.

Half Full of Happiness, Red Cabbage 8, conceived by the RC8 Collective: Tania Smith, Anna Grassham, Louise Morris, Kirsten Prins, Zita Whalley, Anna Hamilton, Katie-Jean Harding, Clint Dowdell, text by Anna Grassham; The Street Theatre, Canberra, Feb 26-March 2

Nigel Kellaway is a survivor—one of the few mature artists still working in contemporary performance in Sydney, such is the unnatural attrition of the field. But for how much longer? After directing, administering, performing in and consulting on a string of demanding shows over the last year (Little George, The Song Company; Interview with The Virtual Goddess, Rakini Devi (Perth); El Inocente, The opera Project; The Berlioz—Our Vampires Ourselves tour, The opera Project (Hobart & Brisbane); The Audience And Other Psychopaths,The opera Project, Sydney; Fa’afafine, Urban Theatre Projects, Sydney; Kiss My Fist, Performance Space, Sydney) his latest work, entertaining paradise, could be the last for quite a while. He really needs a break but the astonishing failure of the Theatre Board of the Australia Council to support Kellaway’s work for the third time running means that he has no major support for his key venture, The opera Project, over the next year. Welcome funds from the NSW Ministry for the Arts have always been anticipated to supplement those from the Australia Council, but recently they have become the company’s only source of support—and there’s no more of that for the balance of 2002. So make sure you catch entertaining paradise before Kellaway becomes yet another premature archival Australian arts object. While this country’s investment in the young, the emerging, the multicultural and the regional has revealed a broadening arts sensibility and begun to meet some important needs, our attention to the ongoing development and survival of the mature artist has been shamefully negligent. The current shortage of Australia Council artform funds means that there is never enough to go around. Too often we hear of artists being told that they were judged on their most recent work. This is ridiculous when dealing with artists with a substantial lifetime of work. Of course not every work can be a success or of the same high calibre, but artists like Kellaway prove themselves over and over with surges of invention and brilliance. Such is the nature of creation.

Kellaway’s enthusiasm for entertaining paradise is undimmed by his straitened circumstances. Inspired by the material and especially the structure of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Pre-Paradise Sorry Now, he is collaborating with sometime opera Project cohort, performer Regina Heilmann and, for the first time, the improviser Andrew Morrish. The Fassbinder, described by Kellaway as “a classic piece of German anti-theatre” was taken up around the world in the 70s and realised in wildly differing versions. “There is a kind of narrative made up of mobile, fluid scenes including part of the story of Moors murderers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady—from how they met as young people and up to the first 2 murders. There are 9 pas de deux dialogues between them. There are 20 contra scenes each with 3 people. They’re all about 2 people ganging up on a third, for example 2 prostitutes versus a transsexual prostitute; 2 fag bashers versus a homosexual…The scenes can be performed in any order. There’s a sense of scenes being replayed or re-assessed as information recurs in different ways.”

Ever one for a challenge, Kellaway is fascinated with “how to make a show working from limited information and with how a small kernel of an idea can develop.” Having Morrish in the team is another kind of challenge. Although Kellaway always sees the process of making work as improvisation, the prospect of having a professional improviser on stage, in performance, is another matter. Kellaway has a meticulous sense of structure which firms as the work emerges. Fortunately he’s found in Morrish a like-minded collaborator—an improviser preoccupied with structure. “I’ve never met anyone who can jettison material as fast as he can…if it’s not working he jumps to the next moment…an extraordinary facility for self-censorship. He’s very intuitive. I’m more calculating—I think before I do. Regina does, thinks and then does again differently.” Kellaway and Heilmann have been working as Hindley and Brady “with Andrew intervening quite left field…then we respond and rewrite our material and eventully jettison the Fassbinder text.”

While the Fassbinder has provided a formal springboard for entertaining paradise, Kellaway feels that the German writer’s preoccupation with the roots of fascism in racism, homophobia and cultural paranoia still warrant exploration, and we’ve had plenty of evidence recently in this country why this should be the case. The Moors murderers “were the products of Glasgow and Manchester slums—their limitations were forced on them. Brady did reform schools, jails. But he did well—he was a bookkeeper in a soap factory and wore a tie. He and Hindley met there, products of the class system. But the work is not about the Moors murderers. It’s about a neo-Nazi mentality—they talk endlessly about superior forms of life and those with no right to be here. It’s about the massive insecurity that makes people go for the weakest, that’s fascism.”

This is an opera Project venture, so what role does music play in the scenario? “High art is very scary for Ian and Myra and therefore is everything they fear. Especially when the singer is a counter tenor and Indonesian. This is paranoia about the elite artist.” Eleven songs make up 35 minutes of the show. There are Purcell art songs, an aria from Handel’s Rodelinda—“a burst of extreme energy”—and the 1910 Alban Berg Early Songs—“lush, decadent, cabaret quality and pre-serial.” Of Purcell’s “Sweeter than Roses”, Kellaway enthuses: “it’s like a Restoration soundtrack for a hard core porn movie, the foreplay, the sudden cum shot (“and shot like fire all over”) and then, marvellously post-orgasmic. It’s onomatopoeic, it’s in-yer-face, it’s the rattling-in-the-dark world of Hindley and Brady—not that they’d recognise it!” They cling to an Elvis songbook.

Kellaway, Heilmann and Morrish are joined by the remarkable young counter tenor Peretta Anggerek and the accomplished pianist Michael Bell in what promises to be a grimly thrilling experience, where the pleasures and horrors of decadence tangle, exploring, as Kellaway puts it, “the obscene limits to which intimate relationships can degenerate.”

The opera Project & Performance Space, entertaining paradise, Performance Space, Sydney, April 19-27.

Next door to Hibernian House, home of the Frequency Lab and monthly sound event impermanent.audio, is a pub called the Evening Star. In the 80s and early 90s it was called the Evil Star. I vividly recall as a terrified 18 year old in flowing Stevie Nicks robes being dragged into this den of all things loud, grungy and just right out there. The Evil Star is now the Evening Star again and features art deco table lamps and faux leather booths, and not a soul in sight. It gives me a sense of great nostalgia, and joyful anticipation as I climb the decrepit stairs of Hibernian House to discover that there is still a little hidden corner of Sydney real estate where the warehouse performance event can live and make a racket. There’s something gloriously lo-fi about the multitude of leads snaking across the floor and power boards piggybacked to the ceiling, the lighting setup that’s turned on and off by pulling out the fuse and the old car seat I’m sitting on. There is nothing lo-fi about the sounds we hear.

d.Haines and Vicky Browne take us on a tidal wave of tones. A constant swathe of sound is established, layers of tones added, some settled, some shifting around us. As the frequencies are tuned and retuned various objects in the space begin to rattle—a live percussive response. It’s a solid, clean block of sound with internal undulations and fringes of static. A sonic snow storm textured by tiny bleeps, like blinking lights, chasing each other around the speaker system. I hear a child’s voice, is that part of the mix? No it’s an unplanned addition, but intriguing—tiny, warm, barely emerging over the tops of the huge waves, adding a disturbingly earthy and innocent texture. I would have liked to hear the unconscious duet expanded on, but the set came to an end abruptly—rupturing the audience reverie.

Stevie Wishart’s performance is gratifyingly “live”—her sound production and sources embodied. Plucking on the strings of her violin, we hear the dry sound which is then sculpted—delayed, pitch- and shape-shifted into myriad new timbres. Vocal evocations, barely heard when first uttered, erupt in full glory curling around the space, mingling with the morphed violin. There is no longer one performer—there’s the live Wishart and all her other imagined selves. Her sibilances shimmer around the space, colliding, bouncing and finally merging into a harsh buzz. Coaxing that buzz into a pulsating drone, Wishart produces the hurdy-gurdy for a duet between her live presence and her processed emanations. Grinding, plucking, and scraping, the treated emissions form rhythmic loops—sounding like otherworldly circular breathing or the creaking of a ghost vessel. Wishart carves a space where the analogue and digital flow, meld and then break apart with an enlivening tension.

UK artist Kaffe Matthews’ set is a hypnotic journey through deftly crafted electronic atmospheres. Sending out a series of loops into the system, she then snatches them back from the live mike near a speaker and reprocesses them, creating a growing, evolving entity. It’s a curiously fleshless sound—pure electric and digital emissions. This entity has no imaginable form, just energy. Yet all the sounds are honed, specific. A click with a cavernous echo hooks us in, morphs into a burble, into an air-swatting chopper, into a morse code bleep that sweeps through the stereo channels, dynamic and surprising. I can’t help wondering what other audience members are visualising. Me, I see the electric transmission beaming out into the ether and Matthews catching the loops in a digital butterfly net. I get a real sense of the structure of her improvisation—sending the sound out there, and then plucking it back, remolding it, sending it out again. She has a light touch, mixing only a few chosen elements, teasing them out, dropping them. All her butterflies beautifully controlled and musically combined create an intense and rewarding sonic vision.

caleb k’s impermanent.audio is a vital addition to Sydney’s live music/sound scene. It is a serious and immersive listening environment, devoid of distractions—no talk, sometimes no light. Not only is it creating a regular space for live play but it’s also training up a whole new audience in active listening. I was suprised at the size of the audience and its reverence. Listening in such an environment becomes a creative act—honing in on elements and structures, remixing in your mind, imagining. It gives me hope for a thriving artistic underground burrowing away beneath the rip-it-down-and-renovate Sydney and its double glazed, reflective surfaces.

Some books are educational. Others are an education. Richard Vella’s Musical Environments is one of the latter. So many of our experiences of music and especially sound events now fall outside the concert hall, and even there we can encounter miked chamber orchestras, electro-acoustic ensembles, djs and new hybrids. Conventional musical notation has been inadequate for at least half a century for describing or recording the new sound worlds we increasingly encounter on CD, in clubs, galleries, sculpture parks and in live dance and theatre. In performance, composition and sound design are no longer mere mood-setting accompaniment but an integral and often visual component of the live performance, the actors or dancers miked and often accompanied by a through-composed score. But what are we hearing and how do we describe it? Writing on music, as in most artforms, has long been a mix of the technically precise and the evocatively impressionistic. However, as new experiences, new instruments and new forms emerge, a fresh look at our vocabulary is called for so that we can share and understand our responses.

Vella’s book was published in 2000, but it’s never too late to alert those who might have missed it, and especially in the context of an ever-strengthening sound culture in Australia. Witness the articles and reviews in this edition on the Totally Huge music festival, Make It Up Club, impermanent.audio, Machine for Making Sense and Stevie Wishart, and keeping in mind the REV new music event in early April at Brisbane’s Powerhouse (RT 47 p31). Melbourne sound artist Garth Paine has been snapped up by De Montfort University (UK), sound writer Douglas Kahn by an American university, and sound sculptor Nigel Helyer recently won the $105,000 Helen Lempriere Sculpture Prize. In the next edition of RealTime, John Potts will review sound artist Ros Bandt’s impressive large format 2001 book (with CD) on Australian sound sculpture—along with the Vella it’s another must-have.

Musical Environments is subtitled “A Manual for Listening, Improvising and Composing.” For me it’s primarily a valuable book about listening, “tuning the ears” as Vella calls it, turning constantly to the companion CD with its dozens of brief, incisively selected examples. Occasionally though I found myself tapping my way through an improvisatory task until a point hit home, or rearranging the room. Not being formally educated in music or sound, I can’t offer an acutely serious critique of Musical Environments but I can say what it continues to offer me after several readings and many a dip into it: a great introduction to many aspects of sound production and reception I’d never thought about or hadn’t entered my experience, let alone my vocabulary. It is an educational book, consequently the layout is formal and possibly off-putting for the curious general reader. However, the same layout in fact makes it an easy book in which to find your way about. Alongside careful, concise non-technical explanations of topics (integrated by the author’s pervasive focus on time and space), Vella’s collaborator, Andy Arthurs, has provided many of the excellent Special Topics—brief introductions to music history, cultures, inventors, machines and the musicians who have expanded our sonic awareness. And there are extensive reading and listening lists appended to every chapter, that like the CD can take you off in new directions or, as I often found, jolted the memory and situated, for example, a popular song in a larger cultural map. The formality is more apparent, and convenient, than real. The tone is relaxed, the writing pithy (given the constant need to define) and often anecdotal.

If you write about music and sound, then Musical Environments is a handy manual for checking the accuracy of your vocabulary or even its foundations. The chapter on texture (and “blendings”) is a very good discussion of the role of metaphor as a way of describing what you’re hearing or making. Once you begin to get the terminology under your belt, there’s pleasure to be had in the author’s brisk elucidations: “Prominent characteristics of [traditional harpsichord] music are rapid note movements as exemplified in the ornamentation of melody, and the vertical collision of notes to form particular harmonic relationships.” As well as focussing on various minutiae, larger views are established and illustrated: “The history of instrumental practice is essentially the history of instruments extended beyond their normal practice.”

The unleashing of instrumental timbral qualities to explore and liberate sound is the predominant feature of music in the second half of the 20th century. Sound shapes and particular types of timbral articulations become motivic units; and development is achieved by the juxtaposition and variation of sonic shapes. Often the traditional concept of melody is gone completely. The instrument becomes the source of an outpouring of new sound. This is what made Jimi Hendrix a unique guitar player in the 60s.

This passage is accompanied on CD by an excerpt from Vella’s Tango (1990): “the clarinet plays glissandi, multiphonics (2 or more notes at the same time) and extreme register leaps.” The next example is from Jim Denley (“he explores different types of blowing sounds and accents, multiphonics, and the instrument’s harmonic series by whistling into it”) and there’s a great discussion of saxophonist Albert Ayler’s remarkable technique: “(he) incorporates pitch blends, pure timbral eruptions of colour, register leaps, squeaks and textural bursts. The instrument moans and wails like an animal.” Precise terminology and evocative metaphor merge.

You can find your way carefully through a rich vocabulary that includes the familar: timbre (“The timbre of a gong…is a rich soup harmonic and non-harmonic tones, noises and other elements”), register, dynamic, frequency, pitch, resonance, amplification, overtones, staccato, legato, tenuto, glissando, portmanento; and many less so: flanging, blending (“where individual components lose their identity in unified sound”—the unison playing in Thelonius Monk’s Criss-Cross, or the “vertical blending” in Elena Kats-Chernin’s Deviations and Scarlatti). Articulation “gives the musical surface a sense of physicality and shape”: the various symbols used to convey it on the score are detailed and Miles Davis is the exemplar. There’s a brief section on the microphone (“a controller”) and what kind of “transients” it produces and how it shapes space. Cut up, textural and rhythmic cells, montage, sound mass, stratification and simultaneity are all there reflecting the impact of sound and avant-garde cultures on music, performance and multimedia.

On the CD and the reference lists, Vella and Arthurs cast their cultural net wide catching folk, pop, avant-garde, electronica, liturgical and many other idioms. Australian composers and sound artists are particularly well represented: Kats-Chernin, Bandt, Rik Rue, Robert Iolini, Alan Dargin, Greg White, Alistair Riddell, Linsey Pollak, Liza Lim, David Chesworth, Amanda Stewart, Greg Schiemer (and his “improvising machine”—an interactive computer instrument that “entices performer response to a constantly changing musical situation”) and many others.

As the book progresses, the discussion of the impact of new technologies becomes central. Arthurs writes: “The expanding opportunities for interaction between real-time performance, improvisation and electronic music have allowed us to throw away the strict division between pre-programmed and pre-recorded, and spontaneous performance. Techno has broadened the appeal of acousmatic music, creating a new, widespread listening paradigm shift.” There’s also a valuable 8 page history of electroacoustic music from 1877 to rave, techno rap and multimedia: “(Rave) was in many ways a popular embodiment of the musical philosophies of the avant-garde movement, and John Cage in particular, where music ceased to be harmonically based, being more defined in terms of organised sounds….this music was preoccupied with sound and texture…”

As a young school teacher in the 60s desperate to find a way to poetry for my students I encountered R Murray Schafer’s When Words Sing, a simple introduction to sound poetry and related material. Around the same time there was the chance purchase of Stockhausen’s remarkable Gesang der Jünglinge, a bit later The Beatles A Day in the Life and Number 9 had their impact, and Stockhausen in Australia demonstrated his work to a grumpy, tweed-jacketed Adelaide male audience. Something had begun, and it’s good to find an accessible book that puts one’s own listening history into the perspective of a very large cultural map. And there’s something distinctively pleasurable about the way that Vella and Arthurs so economically, sometimes wittily, describe the world and the machines of sound: “The sound sampler is a hybrid gestural instrument which plays the ‘voice’ of another musical instrument with the gestural characteristics of the keyboard.”

Richard Vella, with additional topics by Andy Arthurs, Musical Environments, A Manual for Listening, Improvising and Composing, Currency Press, Sydney, 2000. ISBN 0 86819 544 8

This year’s Totally Huge New Music Festival begins over the Easter break with Drums in the Outback on Wogarno Station, a working sheep property 600 kilometres north-east of Perth. This is the second mini-festival at the station, following last year’s successful Violins in the Outback which featured Jon Rose performing and conducting his Violin Factory. This year sees a further commitment to regional performance with Hannah Clemen and Steve Richter conducting percussion workshops amongst the locals. The results will be incorporated into the main performance line-up on the Saturday evening.

The highlight of the weekend will be Clocked Out Duo (Vanessa Tomlinson and Erik Griswold) in collaboration with Chinese composer Zou Xianping and choreographer Zhang Ping, both from Chengdu in China’s south-western Sichuan province. Tomlinson and Griswold returned from Chengdu in February this year after working with Zou and Zhang for 3 months. This collaboration has yielded a cross-cultural, cross-genre perspective on contemporary performance—incorporating video, electronica, traditional and modified instruments, dance and mock ma jiang.

Over the past month the country media have been carrying “wanted” ads for distressed pianos. Ross Bolleter plans to revisit his improvised vocal and percussion piece based on the Ruined Piano of Cue. Bolleter’s performances, which range from avant-folk to hauntingly and reverberantly intimate, will contrast with the massed percussion of Freo Samba’s forty strong group of drummers, dancers and pyro-acrobats.

Other artists performing throughout the weekend are to be scattered across the countryside surrounding the homestead at locations like Lizard Rock, Blue Hill and The Wires. New installations by Alan Lamb, Rob Muir and Alex Hayes will occupy the outback landscape/ soundscape.

The Perth component of Totally Huge follows in April. While not themed there is a definite weight towards percussion in the programming which includes: Tetrafide; Nova Ensemble (in company with the pipe organ of St Peter’s Basilica); a significant part of the Clocked Out Duo, Zou and Zhang collaboration, and Ross Bolleter’s piano dissections. Balancing this program’s inclination are the contemporary chamber music ensembles Magnetic Pig and Elision. Previously in Perth Elision have performed Richard Barrett’s Opening of the Mouth at the Midland Railway Workshops amongst a Crow installation of decaying vegetables and moulding milk. This time they will be in concert mode performing works by Heyn, Desapin, Veltheim and others at the more anodyne space of the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

The composer-based ensemble Magnetic Pig will be celebrating their 10th anniversary with new works by members Cathie Travers, Lindsay Vickery and newcomer Jessica Ipkendanz. Travers will present 2 works from her Motion Algorythm series and Vickery will present Dialogues with Nobody and Improbable Games. Violinist Ipkendanz premiers her solo work Obsession. Travers will also be performing a solo show The Modulator where she abandons her usual electronic keyboard and effects in favour of piano accordion.

Moving from percussion and chamber music to electronica, John Gough, aka Pimmon, for the first time this year exposes Perth audiences to his dynamic electro-audio accretions. Also, Hannah Clemen has curated an immersive environment of sonic journeys. Seven hours of soundscapes, ambient and deep listening can be heard for free in the mathematically named ‘Function Room’ at the Paradiso cinema.

On the other side of town at the Claise Brook inlet off the Swan River there will be installations by Alan Lamb and Rob Muir. For Project 44 Muir is collaborating with visual artist Alex Hayes. A speaker is to be placed in the depths of each of an array of 44 gallon drums, playing its sonic history, real or imagined. The listener moves through the array physically mixing the many stories as they go.

At the river end of the inlet Alan Lamb will string 6 high-tensile wires across the Claise Brook; one end anchored to a huge eucalypt, the other terminating above the Holmes á Court gallery on the opposite bank. This work, Wires in the Sky, will use transducers to feed the constantly changing harmonies and transient impacts of the wires into the gallery below. In the gallery, visitors can listen, mix and record their own compositions.

Although this year’s Totally Huge is not as ambitious or as diverse as previous festivals, and many artists reappear throughout the program in different guises, Artistic Director Tos Mahoney is about to deliver another satisfying festival of new music to the audiences of Perth.

Totally Huge New Music Festival, Perth, April 12-21; Drums in the Outback, Wogarno Station WA, March 29-31 www.tura.com.au

Melbourne is home to a music scene which can genuinely be described as underground. Artists and camp-followers gather for erratic, sometimes will-o’-the-wisp events (Sean Baxter’s La Basta! being perhaps the most terroristic of these). The Make It Up Club has proven a durable feature of this scene—an all the more remarkable feat given its focus on improvisation. The fourth year of MIUC was celebrated with 2 nights of what artistic director Tim O’Dwyer calls “freeformance”, unified only by open-structures which defied standard notation. Artists employed materials ranging from prepared acoustic guitars (Ren Walters) to real-time electronic processing (Stevie Wishart). This confronting diversity cheerfully liberated the audience of any firm critical position. Who is to say for example that Tom Fryer’s aggressive, intermittently explosive, extended guitar technique was ‘better’ than Candlesnuffer’s otherworldly, yet somehow orchestral, guitar-activated sounds which seemed like they came from an experimental Theremin? As someone schooled in performance, I was most impressed by more overtly performative musicians. Indeed, the ghosts of Fluxus, Cage, Marinetti and Tzara were present throughout.

Concrete poet Amanda Stewart was a particularly striking performer. Though an established Sydney artist, Stewart is rarely seen in Melbourne. Her visit fortuitously coincided with the tour of Tess de Quincey’s awesome avant-garde movement work Nerve 9 (in the Bodyworks season at Dancehouse), partly scored by Stewart. Stewart regaled MIUC with several pieces, covering some of the same ground as Nerve 9 (see RT44 p35). When I spoke with de Quincey, she reflected that Melbourne audiences were particularly attentive to references in the piece to feminist psychoanalyst Kristeva. Seeing Nerve 9 alongside Stewart herself, this came as no surprise. Stewart acted as a living epitome of the corporeal feminine language championed by Kristeva. She highlighted the extremely physical quality of speech using stuttering rhythms and glottal stops, onomatopoeia and arhythmic, breathy consonants. Stewart’s work was moreover highly political, revealing the absurd babble underlying political and economic discourse, as well as the serious politics underlying our struggles at communication. Stewart herself proved a mesmeric, joyful presence, rising and falling on her toes in unison with the rush of air in and out of her chest and throat. Her gestures were not melodramatic, but every part of her body offered a symphony of sympathetic reactions to the squeezing of air through fleshy passages.

Although Vanessa Tomlinson employed an entirely different sonic palette (mixed percussion and found objects), she had a similar deportment to Stewart. Both exhibited an attentive curiosity, between openness and control. The improvisatory character of MIUC overall was in fact highly varied. While mad guitarist/performer Greg Kingston and saxophonist Tim O’Dwyer gave themselves almost entirely over to the free play of spontaneous noises and actions, Tomlinson and Stewart represented the more structured or definitively scored end of this spectrum. Each played works or fragments they had performed several times before. Although Tomlinson produced quite a din at times, she has a light touch. Her frame remained gently poised over her kit throughout, arcing through the air. When she dropped wind-up toys on her drum-skins it solicited sympathetic laughter. She performed with a sense of mirth and possibility, not belly laughs.

The almost slapstick insanity of Kingston and O’Dwyer was similarly memorable, offering a charging ride of guitar scribbles, fragments of 4/4 rock, literally breath-taking open-mouthed saxophone and sharp, brassily stoppered notes. It concluded in a wonderfully comic moment when, during a lull, the sweating Kingston dropped a towel and the assorted toys with which he had been abusing his guitar, and simply stated: “I’m a bit shagged out after that.” Baxter provided an even more complete break with seriousness in his somewhat limited but extremely funny demonstration of how to use a home stereo badly as DJ Arsecrack, leaping about in mock seriousness like a bogan Moby in between providing harsh, intermittent heavy metal explosions.

The work of electronica artists Anthony Pateras and Robyn Fox was particularly remarkable. They generated an extraordinarily dense range of noises, which could be likened to a hyped version of the Forbidden Planet soundtrack. Deep metalo-plastic crunches and violent screaming sheets buffeted in and out of more discrete noises which had the distinctive, rapid, rising attack and slow, dubby delay pattern found in so-called ‘spacey’ music. Miniature pillow-mikes were chewed, exhaled, slapped and simply enclosed within hands or mouths to help generate the score which Pateras and Fox then shredded with effects. It was a windy, hissy composition, rich in feedback and ‘bad audio’ noise. A mixture of new software and old equipment used at high gain levels meant there were times one could almost hear the springs rattling in the more elderly echo mechanisms. This provided a suitably rocking, hard punk conclusion to an extremely diverse festival.

Make It Up Club Festival, featuring Erik Mitsak, Rex Johnson (aka Tim Pledger), David Tolley & Ren Walters, Amanda Stewart, Greg Kingston & Tim O’Dwyer, Tom Fryer & Will Guthrie, Vanessa Tomlinson, DJ Arse Crack (aka Sean Baxter), Jim Denley & Stevie Wishart, Candlesnuffer (aka David Brown), Anthony Pateras & Robyn Fox, Planet Cafe, 386-388 Brunswick St Fitzroy, Melbourne, Feb 25-26. MIUC continues 8:30pm every Tuesday at Planet Café. makeitclub@yahoo.com.co.uk

Ting! (starts small)/minor vocal explosions/gurgling sax/digital grumbles. Who’s doing what? Everything makes a sound different from the one it should. Sax is percussion/breath is text/text is texture.

Gong! IIIEEEEAH! Something peaks, becomes part of the whole. Knowles, the mixer-in-the-middle, plays the pings and squeaks, the electro buzz/insecticidal hum.

Denley on woodwind, mike strapped to his larynx plays his own breath/breath like water/breath like buzz. The machine is breath.

Voice, text, breath, flesh—disparate elements merge, split again.
(A few walk out.)

Wishart & Stewart vocal play, tones and aspirances intertwine melding in cavernous effects. (Young art school couples kiss.)

Stewart all plosives and fricatives performs epic tracts. Receiving fragments and texture: words rise to the surface—”object”, “absurd”, “consciousness”, “98% junk”, “black hole”. Sense is sensing.

Wishart & Denley—duet for flute and frequency tweaking. Voicing and playing, he has a conversation with himself. He gutters/sputters, all spittle and bubble. She tunes him. He holds a note for an eternity.
They play the negative space.

Rue’s manipulations break free. Deft grabs of found sound sliced and woven. It’s loud, chaotic, subsonic, yet even the digital snatches are earthed, embodied. Stewart plays with scraps of Rue’s melodies sampling the samples. The machine is flesh.

Wishart winds up again. Plucks, struts the hurdy gurdy, all creaks and tuned static, reverberating scratches, and drones and buzzes/Denley bubbles/Stewart utters/Rue rumbles…then again, silence

The machine creates spaces, each moment unknown yet deliberate. The machine well aware of its parts senses itself shifting, morphing, evolving—balancing on the delicate edge of ego. The machine is greater than the sum of its parts. The machine is organism.

Machine for Making Sense, The 20th Century Never Happened, Jim Denley, Julian Knowles, Rik Rue, Amanda Stewart, Stevie Wishart, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, March 15

The Sydney Festival offered Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin in the Opera House this year – the 1976 Soviet restoration of the iconic film accompanied by the SSO playing a Shostakovich score based largely on his Eleventh Symphony – The Year 1905, inspired by Eisenstein’s film. What was dispiriting about this otherwise splendid festival event was the tittering that accompanied the first 15 minutes of the film; an otherwise intelligent and appreciative audience revealing its ignorance of the film and its genre.

For Barrett Hodsdon-who wasn’t there because the Opera House context was “so wrong” for any possibility of understanding what Eisenstein was saying about the Russian Revolution-this sad ignorance was a direct consequence of Australia’s failure to nurture film culture anywhere near as enthusiastically as it nurtured a film industry. “I’ve seen a melodrama by Max Ophuls heckled at the Sydney Film Festival by young film-makers who thought they were superior to that sort of stuff. It shocked the overseas presenter. No wonder a Sydney Festival audience was unprepared for Eisenstein’s great art, his invention of montage in Potemkin.”

As someone who grew up in Britain, I saw Eisenstein at school, the French New Wave at uni, and could always dip into the British Film Institute’s cinemateque or publications when I worked in London. According to Hodsdon, I’d have had most of the same opportunities in Australia. His study of film culture in the 60s reveals the same student earnestness about film-”Queensland Uni had a Douglas Sirk retrospective in 1970, 2 years before Edinburgh discovered him.” But no BFI emerged. Sydney and Melbourne Filmmaker Co-ops made, showed and distributed consciously avant garde films in the 70s; declining to Super-8 capers in the 80’s-categorized by Hodsdon as “The age of cultural abundance-signs without meaning.”

He doesn’t even bother to consider the 90s, ‘The Time of Tropfest’, “when an independent film-maker-which used to refer to an outsider like Albie Thoms, the Cantrells or Paul Winkler relentlessly doing his own thing for 30 years-came to mean a beginner aiming for Hollywood via a gag film at Tropfest!”

The feisty Hodsdon was, of course, involved in all this. “He made a cineaste-referential film, Beyond Fuller in the early 70s”, according to his CV, before moving into specialist film culture research at AFTRS, the Film, Radio and TV Board of the Australia Council, the National Library and the Australian Screen Studies Association. He has (so far) vainly sought to establish a cinemateque at the MCA in Sydney. And he has a doctorate from UNSW-his thesis entitled, Retheorising Classic Hollywood Narrative.

Despite all of which, he can say with some bitterness, “I’ve devoted my life fairly futilely to serious criticism. But without a serious film culture, I’m lumbered with entertainment.”

It all started to go wrong in the 70s. In a somewhat belated paean of enthusiasm for the full gamut of film culture on page 129 of his book, Barrett Hodsdon barely draws breath: “The emerging base of film culture was more complex and nuanced than the high flown nationalist rhetoric (so essential to trigger the new Australian cinema in the political arena) and its conventional film industry assumptions permitted. The breadth was wide indeed-from low budget features to abstract avant-garde filmmaking, from critical debates about film culture entities to abstract controversies over screen theory, from the strident activism of new film organizations to groping attempts to formulate cultural policy, from radical agitprop filmmaking to documentary social exploration, from specialized historical screening gestures of the NFTA to the new hipsterism of repertory cinema.”

That’s what might have been. If only nationalism had not got in the way of bonding with the wider world of cinema (though it surely needed more than a derivative pursuit of Cahiers du Cinema auteurism). If only the Australian Film Institute hadn’t supplanted the braver and more coherent national screening systems of the National Film Theatre of Australia with a glossy awards priority (which itself now looks stuffed). If only academics didn’t have to spend all their time holding on to their jobs, replacing film cultural studies with “the rampaging of cultural studies.” If only the magazines that might have supported “serious” film criticism hadn’t folded – unsupported by institutions like the Australian Film Commission which has had an overview at least of the spending of $3 billion of public money in 30 years on a production industry that “tells our stories” to about 7% of Aussie film viewers in a good year.

All sadly true. But I think I beg to differ from Hodsdon on the fundamental value of film culture. While he sees it as an end in itself, involving “the wider film community”, I see film culture as, amongst other things, a means to the desirable end of making better Aussie films which reach and engage the other 93% of local film-goers. Reach them, reach the world.

Which makes Baz Luhrmann a key man for me – but not for Hodsdon. Dismissed by Barrett as a tool of Fox and “not cine-literate in any sense I know”, I see Luhrmann’s work as more ‘cultured’ than anyone else working at the moment. The range of references is huge – visual, aural and literary; though the speed at which they’re offered obviously terrified the older Oscar voter! Of course, Luhrmann has no film education; coming to cinema from the stage.

Which raises questions about the cultural education at institutions like AFTRS and the VCA Film School. It makes one wonder whether film culture would have suffered less under the Australia Council’s FRTV Board – which lost out to the “market-place orientated” AFC because of the supposed technical complexity of film. And I suppose it makes me wonder whether Hodsdon is merely harping nostalgically back to a cottage industry film clubland that would be utterly irrelevant in the multiplexes.

In his densely stylish way, Barrett Hodsdon has started a good debate. Whether it’s the one he intended, I’m not sure. His strongest material lies in the area of criticism; and that’s a disaster in just about all artforms in Australia. Neither the artforms themselves nor the public will support magazines offering what Hodsdon calls “second level reflection”; so we’re left with the dumbing down of the Murdoch and the comfortable nirvana of the Howard. Back in the 1930s a European politician told his country that “we should not be concerned with values, but should confine arts reporting to description so that the public can make up its own mind”. That was Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister!

Barrett Hodsdon, Straight Roads and Crossed Lines, The Quest for Film Culture in Australia Since the 1960s, Bernt Porridge Group, 2002; $45 plus $8 postage from 35 Doris Street, North Sydney, 2060.

Sylvia Lawson’s new collection of essays and stories, How Simone de Beauvoir died in Australia, is a brilliant and timely book that examines the complex, tangled relations of politics and culture in our personal lives. It subtly moves across different settings—Australia, East Timor, Britain, Indonesia, France (especially Paris) and West Papua—and different art forms, genres and disciplines-cinema, journalism, literature, cultural theory, philosophy-listening and reclaiming the marginal cultural and personal voices and experiences that our postmodern metropoles ritualistically ignore.

This is an important hybrid book that refreshingly confounds our received wisdom concerning who we are inside and outside of Australia-over the last half century or so-in the context of global media culture. Lawson’s multifaceted ability to construct a work that is a dazzling combination of fiction, essay, history and memoir suggests someone who is acutely aware of the intricate connections between national and personal identity and how all forms of cultural production are anchored in place, time, gender and society. Furthermore, in an era where our cultural, film and media journals are rapidly disappearing and the dissenting voice in a post-September 11 world in Australia under John Howard’s Coalition Administration is becoming rarer by the day, Lawson’s courageous, self-questioning book resonates so tellingly.

Lawson demonstrates, time and again, that it is essential that we speak up for ourselves, for the local, in order to keep open our culture, history and identity. And also appreciating that continuity, rather than a boundary, exists between the personal and the political. Lawson’s welcoming ironic and perceptively heterogeneous voice attests to the pressing imperative that books, all kinds, may speak of many diverse things, but they can’t speak for themselves. Consequently, as Lawson’s vividly told autobiographical pieces suggest, books need to be frequently argued with and fought for otherwise “they die.”

It is this fierce and independent spirit of concern for writing and thinking that animates the author’s life as one of our most invaluable critical essayists and journalists working today in print and broadcast journalism. In the book’s fine extended title essay, Lawson’s discussion of Simone de Beauvoir’s often misunderstood oeuvre and relations with Jean-Paul Sartre, Nelson Algren and her lesbian lovers refers to the fearless and erudite pre-1968 critic, scholar and activist Dorothy Green and her exemplary role as a public intellectual. Green always contested canonical lists of artists and authors and often contributed to small magazines.

All the essays and stories in their respective ways are concerned with how one’s own understanding of what represents the national is a set of local issues that is elaborately enmeshed with another separate set of issues that are located outside one’s country. Given the “nation-building” rhetoric attending the Sydney 2000 Olympics and the Sydney Harbour Bridge Walk for Reconciliation (including other bridge walks throughout the country at the same time), Lawson mobilises a markedly persuasive case that Australia is a highly conflicted and complicated place whose people accurately read its symbols. In other words, Australia is in constant argument with itself-a veritable theatre of symbolic action-a country whose past, Lawson argues, belongs to us and is not another country. But it is also a country, whose once acclaimed social democracy, is on the retreat.

Debates about a post-Mabo Australia becoming a republic, globalisation, land management, censorship, immigration (in the wake of the children overboard and Tampa affairs), human rights, women’s work, media in a digital epoch etc, take place in mainstream press and national broadcasting and our run-down universities, the visual arts and small theatres. These debates have, over the years, been characterised by right-wing columnists as being “political correct” and driven by “the chattering classes”, “the Balmain basket weavers” and “the cappuccino set.” Such a cultural landscape of stifling ideological conformity either indicates our silent complicity or the necessity to argue back, to defend dialogue itself, and to construct our own local narratives in our own terms.

Earlier on in the book, Lawson re-evaluates in a majestic essay Raymond Williams’s legacy as a social theorist, novelist, and teacher in the English speaking world-especially in certain circles in Australian thinking. Williams, who died on the bicentennial Australia Day, explicitly advocated a view of culture that emphasised processes, rituals, objects, performances and lived experience in the social fabric of everyday life. Although Williams’ particular pioneering form of socialist humanism was not embraced in the postmodern academy, his constantly questioning, defining, oppositional voice in Anglo-American cultural theory spoke of hope, patience and his faith in the long revolution towards a better society. Lawson deftly illustrates how Williams’s legacy has still much to offer to us today in the new millennium.

In “Budgerigars, and Positions of Ignorance”, one of the book’s earlier stories, the author is in Alice Springs negotiating (from point zero) “the undulating red country of the Centre” and its original peoples with their many languages, customs, art and desert communities trying to figure out how all of us can share Australia without perpetuating Western stereotypes and values.

In Lawson’s 1988 fictional piece “Putting the books away with Jack” we encounter the cross-disciplinary enterprise of unpacking one’s library in the context of questions around nationality and our continuing relations with other countries in our region and beyond. Relatedly, these questions are further taken up around the imaginary of national boundaries and our ongoing understanding of who we are in the following two engaging essays “Sidelined” and “Against Oblivion.”

The former deals with the suppression of poet-editor Goenawan Mohamad’s magazine Tempo in the new Indonesia and, in the latter, we see how a 1990 Amnesty-produced series of video shorts (directed by Jean-Luc Godard/Anne-Marie Mieville, Alain Resnais, Henri Carter-Bresson, Costa-Garvas and others) delineates the complex links between human rights, imperialism and global media.In particular, Lawson focuses on how the Godard/Mieville self-reflexive video illustrates our own complicity in West Papua as exemplified by the case of the independence movement figure Thomas Wainggai-who was in December 1988 sentenced to 20 years of imprisonment.

This is an inspiring, optimistic and a far-reaching book that speaks of our life-long adventure of making sense of our world, here in this island-continent of ours. This means nothing less, as Lawson eloquently reminds us, than a perpetual open-ended questioning of our Eurocentric beliefs so we may find “out what it means to be here.” Above all, all of us who care for a republic of a self-enabling citizenry and letters, are ideally always clearing the ground for a better world so we may live in.

Sylvia Lawson, How Simone de Beauvoir died in Australia, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney 2002

Stevie Wishart Solo is a phantasmogorical sonic experience, the primary source the transformations of the mediaeval hurdy-gurdy aurally and visually—and on strikingly different planes. The focus is not on the performer. She works quietly, head down, over her instrument or at her sound desk at the centre of The Studio floor, or moving slowly between the scattered rostra we’re seated on, or half-watching the large video screen while she plays. Although the concert commences with violin, the hurdy-gurdy becomes the instrument of choice, most powerfully and mesmerically in the long post-interval composition Drawn on Sound: HG Roll.

For fans of Wishart’s Azeruz CD with its clever pop leanings and short tracks, this concert was to be a very different experience, intimate, reflective, our eyes closed (ears open to the rich complexities of the score) or fixed on the big screen with Joan Grounds’ sublime slo-mo video on the form of the instrument, its strange mechanics and, even, its feel—Wishart’s hand (tattooed for the filming with Guido of Arezzo’s musical scale) hovering, plucking, strumming, dancing ethereally over the strings. Although live playing and screen action do not correspond literally, their relationship is never disjunctive—a curious harmony of sound and image envelopes the audience.

As an incidental and unconventional introduction to the hurdy-gurdy, the concert moved through the musical and sonic possibilities of the instrument on its own and in various mixes, evoking at various times, without being imitative, organ, sitar, string quartet, orchestra, sometimes seeming to amplify the workings of its own innards—like the creaking of an antique timber sailing ship. Wishart’s compositions entail mergings of jigs, dark marches, dirges, bursts of white noise, thunderous sonic wrap-arounds, long winding chords punctuated by emphatic bass notes in meditative passages as well as her own integrated vocalisings. Each hurdy-gurdy work unfolds with care and intensity, with moments of beauty and surprise.

soft silk…rough linen is the title of an emotionally charged, simply staged (a small orchestra including 2 singers playing traditional Vietnamese instruments, 2 speakers and slide projections) work from City Moon and The Seymour Group. It is expanded in the program notes to the aphoristic “never dream of soft silk…never despise rough linen.” The fusion of text (Vietnamese poetry from the 18th century to the present and current political statements about refugees) and music (traditional Vietnamese and contemporary Western) creates rather a nice dialectic (rather than simple opposition) between the smooth and the rough, between the simple and the sophisticated. The poetry is elegantly imagistic next to the rawness of the politics of refugee-bashing, while the traditional components of the music speak with immediacy and strangeness amidst the more familar language of modernism. The music is by Ngoc-Tuan Hoang. The process of compositions sounds intriguing:

I did not “write” the music as a conventional Western composer would do, but I was working with the ensemble to “make” the music…In our workshops I gave to the ensemble some musical materials (a Vietnamese folk tune, a poem sung in different ways due to different dialects, a note with different timbral changes due to linguistic inflections, for instance), and we together explored possibilities on the Western instruments and experimented with how to create a suitable soundscape for the Vietnamese poetry chanting.

The Seymour Group and Ngoac-Tuan Hoang (performing with Dang Lan) carry off this synthesis with verve, while the show’s director and librettist (and speaker with Phong Do) Bruce Keller marshalls the poetic and political texts with a mix of delicacy and didactic fervour. The litany of statements from politicians and observers of the growing international refugee crisis are given an additional charge by being chorally recited by the performers. Although fundamentally effective this is one component of the work where the linen is, for me, a bit too rough-the collective choral skill of the company simply doesn’t correspond with the instrumental and solo vocal abilities. Even so, the commitment of the company to these unaccompanied passages is never in doubt, and the construction of the first is striking in its spatial deployment of voices.

soft silk…rough linen is an engaging cross cultural experience, a fruitful cross-artform collaboration and another example (coming soon after Richard Vella’s Tales of Love in the same venue) of a concert work enriched by the layering of simple performative and visual elements. The participation of 3 Vietnamese refugees, including the composer, in the performance lent it poignancy.

The Seymour Group & City Moon (Vietnamese Australian Contemporary Theatre Company), soft silk…rough linen, Parammata Riverside Theatres, March 2, 8pm

The appeal of a nice night at home, one’s own, never seemed more attractive than when witnessing the brutality in someone else’s—the loungeroom bourgeois bloodbath of STC’s Mr Kolpert and the warehouse underclass savagery of UTPs’ The Longest Night. As nice nights in the theatre, they were, however, excellent. Something to take away and worry at in the comfort of…one’s own home.

Sydney Theatre Company: Mr Kolpert

A wide, shallow, low-ceilinged room, all pinewood veneer, drab carpet, one wall-phone, one framed photo of the Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge (that occasionally distracts the characters), a door to a bathroom, a door to the apartment building hallway, access to a kitchen, a clutch of toys in a corner, a large trunk at the centre of the room. We’re in Benedict Andrews’ land—cinemascopic, spare, distorting, abrasive, intensely physical, sonic (a dj at work to one side). Set and toys are reminders of the other German play he directed for STC,Fireface, but the wide dark slit and pit of that play with its multitude of huge dolls is here a starkly lit room utterly devoid of furniture.

In Fireface, emotionally repressed parents are finally murdered by their psychotic children. The parents are the target of a long tradition of anti-bourgeois German film and theatre. The children belong to a line of fictional and very real psychotics and terrorists. In Mr Kolpert, by David Gieselmann, we are faced (the actors largely play at us if not to us) with 2 couples, one invited by the other to dinner. But quite unlike their stage predecessors, these adults (late 20s, early 30s) are not repressed, certainly not in the usual sense. The veneer of good manners quickly cracks, the restraints of civilised behaviour are barely sighted as insults and physical abuse and confessions (usually the stuff of revelatory final acts in most plays) escalate into very bloody murder. In fact the hosts already have a previous victim somewhere in the house—in the trunk? Other than some insistent vomiting there is little sign of shock let alone remorse. The tears at the play’s abrupt end suggest release rather than remorse. The wife peeing on her husband’s body another kind of release. And all this without an interval or a moment of reflection, as pieces of pizza fly into the auditorium and the savaged delivery boy falls offstage before the front row of the audience to be stomped to death by one of the wives.

In this wickedly preposterous comedy of bad manners the playing, appropriately, has only 2 levels, a droll lack of affect and savage outburst. It makes for a suspenseful night out, and a messy one. Bourgeois behaviour at the very first seems as emptily formal as the room it inhabits, but it is dangerously eruptive. It soon looks unrepressed in its frankness and its volatility, these adults are not far removed from the psychotic children of Fireface. In that play, the parents’ refusal to deal with their offsprings’ problems is clearly a social failure, the evil of the children though is less clearly a social outcome, especially in the son. Mr Kolpert, on the other hand has no metaphysics. It’s a vicious social satire of a barren middle-class life with little style and no substance, an ideal recipe for fascistic behaviour (the murder of the boss, Mr Kolpert, for murder’s sake, and the subsequent ganging up on one of the husbands) replete with indifference to the suffering of others. What is frighteningly contemporary is the smugness and aggressiveness with which bad behaviour and mindless evil are enacted and indifferently justified (if at all). Sadly, this is a play of the moment.

Once again Andrews succeeds in creating a unique and consistently realised nightmarish world. His performers, Felix Williamson, Sophie Lee, Simon Burke and a striking newcomer Rita Kalnejais (with the best role in the play—the meekest and the most murderous), maintain a consistency of tone (a rarefied social voice), physical bravery (fight director Kyle Rowling), and a refusal to plump for conventional psychological nuancing. Fiona Crombie’s set design is chillingly stark in its unyielding totality (framed by a tube of show lighting accenting the sometime cabaret-ish dimension of the production) and Mark Pennington’s abrupt change of colour washes make for disorienting A-effects cum sudden mood swings. Peret Von Strumer aka Mako provides a sound score that often quietly, sometimes explosively, unnerves.

Andrews’ productions for the Wharf 2 Blueprints program and his The Three Sisters at the Opera House have offered Sydney theatre audiences a true rarity-an unfolding vision and an uncompromising, developing theatrical framework for it, dismissed as ‘style’ in some quarters. Better his explorations of the banality (and complex strangeness) of violence and social manipulation than the banality of the well-mannered perpetual motion machine of most straight theatre.

Sydney Theatre Company, Blueprints, Mr Kolpert, writer David Gieselmann, director Benedict Andrews; Wharf 2, Sydney, opened Feb 5

Urban Theatre Projects: The Longest Night

A disused warehouse in a dark, semi-industrial street in Granville, western Sydney, is home to the production of The Longest Night and home to the central character, Bernie (Bernadette Regan). No suspension of disbelief or virtuosic set design required here. Nothing in this neat but depleted house works—the TV, the CD player, the microwave, and the toilet’s in a state of repair. Nor does Bernie’s life work—she has limited access to her child, taken away on his birthday by a government official early in the night before our eyes. The pathos is intense, real time realism as mother and child reveal their casual intimacy. By living on her own, away from temptation, Bernie has the opportunity for redemption. However, in a familiar but very real scenario, she might lose her child to the law, and her integrity, when a group of friends take over her home and the long night, bringing with them unresolved tensions, drugs and cruelly learnt misanthropy. Bernie gets through this long night, but barely, and is once again alone, her former friends restlessly exiting, young adults locked into a perpetual adolescence of escape, thwarted energy and anger. They have flashes of humour, resolve, creativity—sustained bursts of mock filmmaking, role-playing, rapping and skilled hiphopping-and moments of generosity, painful sensitivity and apology. But in the trap of homelessness and unemployment these virtues are uncertain, possibly not good for survival in a culture of toughness (so sparely and graphically portrayed in the director Alicia Talbot’s The Cement Garage with some of the same characters).

If the narrative of The Longest Night is predictable (the relationships that won’t work, the job fantasies that can’t, the competition for loyalty, the disruptiveness of sex, the group breaking up), its modus operandi is not, story counting for less than the power of the moment. Partly improvised, the production often focuses on a particular action, a gesture or utterance and runs with it, sometimes with astonishing momentum. The outcome is a show that moves in waves, blocks of energy, passages of calm or twitchy restlessness, giving the work a nervy realism that it might not have achieved by plain scripting. The 2 big surges of energy, release and destructiveness that are central to the night (and Bernie’s fear of being condemned to the loss of her child) are like fantasies, such is their totality for the characters-lighting, sound and theatricality take us all onto another plane. Bernie eerily walks up a wall, the hip hop is virtuosic, the danger is palpable. The first time this happens, it’s messy and distressing, but often fun and inventive, despite Bernie’s resistance and subsequent hostility. The second time it’s a nightmare of anger, destructiveness and self laceration-one of the characters, Carlos (Charles Russell), taping his head and eyes tight with masking tape, pouring boiling water over himself, crawling towards us, an inadvertent performance artist. The Longest Night is at its strongest, as was The Cement Garage, in the suggestiveness of its imagery (reinforced here by composer Rose Turtle’s often quiet anxiety-inducing sound score and Sam James’ lighting). The dialogue is variable, though to give it it’s due there is some sharp humour and there are moments of power and quiet insight, for example between the 2 women as Bernie begins to believe in Lucia’s (Lucia Mastrantone) sisterly fantasies.

The performances are strong, especially when anchored in the momentum of the production or a particular image. Bernie’s quiet hostility towards her former friends and her swings between resistance and weakening find focus in her desperate need for support as her court appearance looms. She won’t get it. Carlos, the lover (or is he?) and the dealer, is a pragmatist with an aura of control and confidence belying something deeper-seen when he hurts himself—or innocent, when entranced by a model helicopter. Morgan (Morgan Lewis), the would-be filmmaker is all energy and camaraderie (expressed in the heightened synchronicity of rapping and dancing with his mate Shannon [Shannon Williams]) until a dodgy looking relationship gets in the way and he nervously edges out of a friendship. Lucia is a junkie in the making, ever on edge, kidding herself and friends with fantasies of work and committed friendship. Lucia Mastrantone’s edgy performance is chilling. Shannon Williams, already a noted rapper, proves himself a stage natural, creating a calm but threatening presence, but for all that one bewildered by the turn of events and the loss of a friend. Director Talbot choreographs the collective performances in the big scenes of wild release (and the subsequent burnout) dexterously, grabbing and splitting our attention, making the rampage all the more disturbing.

The Longest Night originated in sustained workshops in suburban Adelaide and western Sydney and in consultation with the very people it’s about. In its commitment to a semi-improvised format and in the absence of a writer (but not a dramaturg) it’s not surprising that even though well-shaped it’s a rough work, lending it a certain rawness, a valuable sense of unpredictability moment by moment. It means that given it’s a character-based play, with a plot and, for the most part, a solid fourth wall, that it’s not going satisfy the demands of motivation and outcome for every viewer. Me, I let that go, and went with those waves of energy, invention and image that suggested more than the words often could.

Urban Theatre Projects, The Longest Night, 2002 Adelaide Festival commission, director Alicia Talbot, space, video & lighting design Sam James, sound design Rose Turtle, dramaturg Caitlin Newton-Broad; Granville, Sydney, March 22-April 7

From Wollongong to Hollywood
Company Physical Theatre: Landed

A long shiny, skeletal, metal tube, a couple of metres in diameter, dominates the stage. In the course of the performance it will roll forward and back, reveal classroom blackboards, hoist performers high or deliver them to the stage. The actors manipulate it with ease, creating new spaces, dynamics and tensions. Above, a parallel screen angles out at 45 degrees over the tube, capturing colour, projections and sinister objects placed on an overhead projector. There are no trapezes or like devices for Company Physical Theatre to cavort about on-director-designer Carlos Gomez has built a tight framework for his performers and he exploits it thoroughly, using its simple possibilities elegantly and recurrently to return us to various narrative strands. Consequently physical skills are embedded in the set and the narrative with the performers deftly lifting and tossing each other about and generating some curious (and comical) shapes. It makes for a taut theatrical production with plenty of focus on the personalities of the various characters engendered by a strong cast playing multiple roles-Ed Boyle, Stephen Klinder, Kym Vercoe and Larissa Chen.

Another integrating aspect of the production is the live sound score played by composer Marianthe Loucataris on a reconstructed piano, an upright where she has direct access to the strings, to strike and bow them, amongst other things. Loucataris’ through-score is finely tuned, responsive to the rhythms of the performance and suggestive of cultural otherness and the odd experiences had by newcomers to Australia.

The shape of Landed entails a series of symmetrical shifts between English language lessons for new arrivals, dramas of trying to fit in, struggles to stay connected with where you’ve come from (you still might have a child there waiting to join you in Australia), and painful memory flashes. In the middle of a testing language lesson a student relives being tortured in his home country. Another endures the vivid memory-cum-nightmare of a Kafka-ish visa application interrogation by Australian officials in which projected images of hypodermics suggest real torture. A woman endures the company of her husband’s insensitive and untintelligible friend—what begins naturalistically soon turns surreal as the woman stands on her guests, mounts the table, pours drink over herself, such is her sense of bewilderment and abasement-they, of course, never notice. It’s a fine performance from Larissa Chen. Other moments are simple recollections: someone notes that a neighbour who tried to kill them in the home country also lives here now.

This is deftly performed and directed theatre. Occasionally it runs too close to old theatre-in-education formulae but it’s rich idiosyncrasies and pervasive physicality rise above those. The dialogue and brief monologues are often well-observed, although the drab language lessons are much less convincing. Doubtless there are still pretty bad experiences to be had in such classes, but there are many good teachers including, I hope, the staff of the Warrawong Intensive English Centre for whom the show was produced. With its powerful musical score, its clever integration of design and physical performance and its sensitive elaboration of the complexities of what it means to arrive in Australia and to learn to be here and to speak here, Landed is engaging theatre. Gomez’ direction is some of his best to date.

Landed, devised by Company Physical Theatre, director & designer Carlos Gomez, musical director Marianthe Loucataris, lighting Sydney Bouhaniche, researcher/co-writer Vanessa Badham; A PP Cranney Production for the Warrawong Intensive English Centre; Merringong Theatre Co, Illawara Arts Centre, March 20-23

PACT Youth Theatre: The Starlet Twins

Artistic Director Caitlin Newton-Broad’s final production for PACT is a reminder of the strong sense of design, stage craft, acting commitment and choreographic direction she brought to the company. The Starlet Twins is exemplary in all these respects with strong, sustained performances from a large cast of young actors not a few of whom at first glance seem unlikely contenders but quickly convince.

With a theatrical style that’s always bigger than life and quite rhetorical, it’s not surprising that Newton-Broad decided to venture into music with this production, not quite a musical but through-scored by Michelle Outram at the piano and with a handful of songs. However, in an odd way, its opera seria rather than the musical that The Starlet Twins reminded me of—a set of scenes with minimal narrative drive, in each of which a condition, an emotional state or moral dilemma is explored musically with elaborations and variations-here imbued with a great deal of physicality beautifully executed with the help of Chris Ryan and Regina Heilmann. Musicals before the 50s could be like this, before songs and dance numbers became part of the narrative machinery of a show. The reason for this is probably to be found in Lally Katz’ epic script and Newton-Broad’s commitment to it. Twenty-three year-old Katz’ biggest investment is in the elaborate evocation of a fabled pre-50s Hollywood-like city, replete with gangsters, Gothic horror and star ambition, anchored in the tale of twins separated at birth, doomed to meet again when one might unwittingly take the life of the other. Sadly, the focus on the moment at the expense of momentum means that while the realisation of scenes and performances could frequently be admired, the show stopped too often in its tracks, and not with showstoppers. A more economical version of the script, one which allowed the director and performers to do more of the work with less words might have helped. And as for the songs, however good they were the cast weren’t up to them. Occasionally Outram’s writing was just that touch too demanding, some with jazz nuancing; more often the singers simply couldn’t sing.

Packed with characters and curiosities (like the collection of the living heads of starlets in one twin’s basement), country hicks and crooked film producers, The Starlet Twins revels in kitsch, creating a fantastic, self-contained world, both satirising and adoring its fatal fantasy object, Hollywood, not the actual but the imaginary of its own dreaming re-written by a young playwright and doubtless many more to come. It’s a strange trap. That the playwright is originally from the USA explains some of it, but the fascination with kitsch, like the nightmare of economic rationalism, seems to endure, widespread and unabated. And last, possibly pointlessly, many a play starts its narrative too early and ends it too soon: I would have liked to have seen the twins together, the next chapter in their lives; the play, after all, makes so little of the nature of twindom.

All complaints aside (my problems not yours), The Starlet Twins was brave, frequently bracing, liberally dosed with high drama, expressionist touches and poetic fervour, confidently busy and sometimes richly comic. Having served youth so well, it’d be good to see Newton-Broad working with experienced performers. A fine writer herself, perhaps she’ll script something for herself to direct?

PACT Youth Theatre,The Starlet Twins , writer Lally Katz, director Caitlin Newton-Broad, designer Lisa Mimmocchi, sound artist Michelle Outram, lighting Simon Wise, dramaturg Francesca Smith; PACT Jan 24 – Feb 3

Richard Grayson, the Artistic Director of the Sydney Biennale 2002, originally from the UK, has been based in Australia as a practising artist since the mid-1980s. He is perhaps best known here for his directorship of the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide from 1991-1998. This is his first foray into ‘Biennale world’ as a curator.

How did you come by the theme of this year’s exhibition
(The World may be Fantastic) with its evocations of fakery, fantasy and the supernatural?

The exhibition has been floating in my head for a long time. Partly it’s come out of my own practice, which is about alternative histories, partly out of the practice of such artists as Suzy Treister (my partner)-whose Rosalind Brodsky project posits alternative worlds and delusional realities-and Susan Hiller’s work, particularly Witness [Hiller was on the biennale’s advisory panel along with Janos Sugar and Ralph Rugoff]. There’s a common concern here for subjectivising the objective. These influences immediately informed the rationale. But also, there’s the fact that I read too much science fiction as a kid, and later too much Borges! And then on top of all that, there’s a slight boredom and annoyance with a whole lot of art at the moment that seems rather unambitious. A lot of the current rhetoric seems to fit very easily into established discourses on art. This is particularly so with Australian practice, even more so with East Coast practice. There’s a lack of juice and joy and risk, a kind of desiccation. The fun factor is missing. In fact, I think Australian art is not larrikin enough at the moment. At the same time, I see a lot of art that is buckling under expectations that it be radical, transgressive-I think there should be a ban on the words ‘transgressive’ and liminal’! Much critical rhetoric does a massive disservice to art. It becomes further and further unattached, to become a form of nostalgia.

So I came up with a rationale that I thought would be interesting, not really thinking that I’d get the gig, looking at artists who were working with modelling hypothesis, and not necessarily engaging with the discourses of art, even though their work may be art. I was drawn to stuff without performance indicators that didn’t fit onto established art historical boxes…art that in a sense was awkward. I am also interested in those things where you’re not quite sure whether they’re primary production or art production…things that are lumpy, awkward, undigested, that are on the edge of the law, outside, not recuperable.

Do you think there may be something particularly timely about the theme of subjective realities, fictions and alternative histories?

Yes I think so, although I can’t take any credit for that; it’s come about purely by chance. I’d never really been close to a zeitgeist before, but this time I think I may have tripped over one. One of the reasons I thought that the theme might be interesting right now was because of the tedium that’s set in with this hegemony of economic rationalism, where there seem to be no alternatives. That grey uniformity may force us back into the spaces of the imaginary. At the same time the collapse of communism has removed the anchor that used to make the political the real, so that in a sense politics has been reduced to the fantastic, the hallucinatory. Also, there’s the way technologies of the digital and virtual are challenging ideas of the real. Yet another factor is that theory has somewhat disenfranchised practice, be it writing or art. The grand narratives are no longer possible, even the statement is no longer possible, and everything sinks into this inferno of equivalence. However, some artists and writers, without rejecting all that, are saying, ‘Yes, I know we can’t do grand narratives any more, but let’s pretend we can’. So the aim becomes a pretence, a very self-knowing one, to provide a way out of that endgame. I think this return to narrative, be it knowing although not ironic, is in some ways inevitable, because I believe humans have a fundamental desire for pattern-making grand narrative, be that scientific, artistic or occult. It is hard-wired into us. Finally, in terms of the privileging of the subjective, there’s the fact that in the Western world now we are in thrall of the most subjective interpretation of phenomena by way of fundamentalist religious belief. All these might be reasons why the return of the fictional, the subjective, the idea of modelling hypotheses might be particularly timely.

How did you go about curating the show? Were you concerned to maintain a certain thematic coherence?

The process was very, very partial and subjective. There was no intention (or ability) of making a definitive statement, or of even being global. The exhibition is a proposition rather than a definition. I put together an advisory panel and we spent 3 days’ solid talking and brainstorming, and then I just wandered off and the rest was happenstance. The theme is not an envelope. If anything it is a table where you can stick a whole lot of different things and let them stand. But there are riffs and tropes, so abstractly, yes, it does have its coherences. But it probably will look like a dog’s dinner!

No idea! I don’t think that for contemporary art-as opposed to historical art which is necessarily more academic-it’s that different from making a party tape. Some people are very good at making a party tape and they have something that is able to pull you onto the floor, as well as allowing you to engage with something you’ve never heard before. And other people are not good at making party tapes. People who make good party tapes tend to be fans, so something as unsophisticated as being a fan is useful for being a curator. I also think it useful to hang on to the idea that the curator is not the primary producer, that the artist remains the primary producer, no matter what the curator says. Then there is that thing of trusting your instincts. Sometimes you come across a piece of work and you say ‘I have no idea what that means, but I think it’s really good!’, and other times you say ‘I have no idea what that means, but I think it sucks!’ And you have no clear idea why. I think it’s partly about the conviction to follow that intuition, but to also be able to remain fleet of foot enough to change your mind. I think there must be a bit of unfashionable connoisseurship in there too. When I curate, I presume that I am the audience, so if works for me, it will work for the audience I want for the show.

Neither as an artist nor as a curator have I been a very frequent visitor to ‘Biennale world.’ But having been swimming in that goldfish bowl now for over a year I realised I was very glad to be working for the Biennale of Sydney, because unlike other Biennales it seemed to me to have a very clear role and function. The other 59 Biennales are getting into all sort of existential crises, ‘What are we here for?’ Here, it is very simply to get some good work in that may or may not be part of larger conversations, and it is to save each member of the visiting public about $3000 in airfares. If you’re doing a Biennale in Europe, on the other hand, it is a very different proposition. There, the exhibition is playing more the role of contemporary art spaces (like Artspace in Sydney) and driving for novelty.

These artists are included to suggest links. This show is very partial and very subjective and it is not about the ordering of the great and good. It is about people who are doing interesting work in specific areas. You could do it without Australian participation if Perspecta was still running. It might be nice to have a show just of international artists in Australia. But Australia is a bit lacking in events that allow it to look at itself nationally at the moment. I think it’s extraordinary that outside the Adelaide Biennale, with its limited audience, and Primavera, with its handful of artists, that Australia does not have an exhibition where it can look at itself as Australia. Not that I think the Biennale should pick up that role. Rather it should use what little power it might have to encourage other initiatives. It is difficult enough doing one brief, to do two imperfectly would be an absolute disaster!

Part of it is history-the trade fair and all that. Part of it is ambition, inasmuch as the curators want to make a global statement. And I think part of it is habit. And possibly, it is actually pernicious. In many ways Biennales have turned into exactly what they didn’t want to be, the great levellers. There is a lot of rhetoric that claims Biennales are great Utopian spaces where we can set up resistance and critiques of globalisation. That’s actually absolute bollocks! This show is less global, partly because that didn’t start off as the position, partly because I am not in that circle of international curators whose everyday knowledge includes what is going on in Beijing at the moment. But also because of the theme: the fictional and fictive, with their strong literary and linguistic underpinnings, tended to favour artists within my language group, so that there are more Americans and Britons than there might otherwise have been. Then that became the position: if the project is openly partial, why should it be global? Fragility and subjectivity are what I wanted to foreground.

How do you think being a practising artist has inflected your curating of the Biennale?

I think perhaps what I bring to curating as a practising artist is a greater willingness to accept contingency (even though I do not accept that curators are artists). I am willing to be more fluid and more floppy, not wanting to make the authoritative statement. To me, curating is far more like making a piece of work…that is, ‘What happens if?’, rather than, ‘This is.’ Perhaps there’s a greater willingness to-’take risks’ is not quite the right phrase-rather, a sense of being on the outside of curating as an institution, and therefore not ruled by the need for authority, or overwhelmingly concerned with the immediate placing of the exhibition. Artists are just curators who don’t know as much as curators.

The Biennale of Sydney: The World may be Fantastic Sydney, various venues, 14 May 14-14 July

Donna Bailey

In the unfolding series of photographs of her daughter Zoë shown at Stills Gallery last month, Donna Bailey makes no claims to narrative. Something is happening here but no drama. In its place is the infinite variety of Zoë’s personae expressed in an intimate photographic diary-—Zoë as petulant Venus up to her knees in murky water, starkly serene in a bath with a baby, Zoë non-commital in a desultory backyard, deadpan in a doorway with siblings snaking round her legs. One minute she’s oblivious and the next, brazenly staring down her photographer mother. Zoë, her family and friends have the look of being looked at and of looking back. Donna Bailey has been photographing them, and especially Zoë, since 1998. Her photographs combine a compositional precision with an ease that make them look like casual documentation. The agenda in this study has to do with the delicate and evolving relationship between this mother and daughter as seen through the lens. Something is happening here but we don’t know exactly what it is—nothing more than a life unfolding and that in the hands of a photographer in a true collaboration with her subject is really something.

Currently showing at Stills, 2 remarkable photographers show us their very particular views of a city. Narelle Autio working in colour and Trent Parke in black and white push their chosen formats to extremes to give us not literal accounts of reality, but heightened, almost painterly images that bring out the fantasist in this viewer.

Narelle Autio

Walking tours of the Harbour Bridge have proved better than a little earner for the people who came up with the idea. Sydneysiders have grown used to the sight of the row of tiny figures in overalls hooked together and traipsing up the arch and standing triumphantly aloft. I expect Jeffrey Smart to paint them soon. Meanwhile Narelle Autio, stakes her claim for below, photographing—from directly above—people on the lawns relaxing for free in the shadow of the bridge. Not of this Earth is a series of 16 inkjets printed on canvas. The saturated colour, the texture of the surfaces are almost garish. There is some of the feel of candid snaps but with her customary keen eye Autio makes playful geometry of the things we do with nothing to do, mapping out the casual exhilaration of leisure, the shapes of indolence. The effect is vertiginous, exhilarating. Limbs tumble into focus, out of shot, arrange themselves in unselfconscious tableaux. A dog on a leash unwinds a careful line. A small girl rolls across the grass to the edge of the frame. Two pairs of legs, one female, one male erotically peep from beneath a tree. Three small figures and a dog move horizontally as their taller shadows upend them to vertical. Some appear flattened as if they’ve fallen to earth. A woman lies eyes closed, arms extended and dreams the bird above showing her how it’s done.

Trent Parke

There’s equal serenity and more than a touch of the gothic in Trent Parke’s shots of Sydney city streets (Dream/Life & Beyond). Partly it’s the scale (100 x 138 cms) but also the gravity of huge slabs of black with white slicing, shimmering and occasionally blazing through it. The photographer’s experience of this city is of its “underlying sadness” but as I walked through the exhibition Parke’s subjects turned the tables—someone made a mad dash from one side of the photograph to the other, to catch the thin strip of light right in the centre of the frame. A man waiting at a George Street pedestrian crossing watched with the photographer the silver white flecks of rain hitting the shiny street. And in the middle of a crowded public place, a ghost revealed himself for a second.

Donna Bailey, Zoë, Feb 13-March 16; Narelle Autio, Not of this Earth, & Trent Parke, Dream/Life & Beyond, March 20-April 20, Stills Gallery, Paddington, Sydney

As the gates to Victoria’s Werribee Park open for the Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award (won this year by Nigel Helyer), the portals to the NGA Canberra’s National Sculpture Prize close. A fundamental difference between the latter, the Lempriere and Sydney’s Sculpture by the Sea is that the NGA Prize is not for outdoor or site-specific works. Finalists, some newcomers, others well-established artists, each given $2000 to initiate and complete an idea or refine and extend an earlier work, often saw their works assembled for the first time at the exhibition opening. Each piece here effectively can relocate itself, and, because of this, the exhibition provides both stimulation and a kind of jarring in its eclectic array of discrete pieces made to be viewed in quiet white-walled rooms.

Whilst down the corridor Rodin’s 19th century works, Rodin: A Magnificent Obsession, clutch at their individuated despair with a solemn grace, it strikes me as provocative that the inaugural contemporary Sculpture Prize has gone to a figurative work. Ah Xian’s Human, Human-Lotus, Cloisonne. However, in contrast to Rodin’s muscled agonies and surging sexual vignettes, it is ethereal and meditative, like a form both smoothed by and surviving burial beneath water, its fine flowered and veined cloisonne-work embedded in life-size porcelain a technical marvel, its aloofness from “all kinds of political struggling, fighting, power gaining and the endless wars that exist in the world” initially taking some adjustment to sit with in the room. Like Keats’ Grecian urn, it is a “foster child of silence and slow time,” the figure emulating the quietude of a sacred vase, or pond.

By contrast, Geoffrey Drake-Brockman and Richie Kuhaupt’s Chromeskin, with its passive naked chromed male mannequin standing before a telephone-box sized prism, is a computer-interactive work where viewers’ gestures, body positions and approaches towards the box affect and reshape the gestures, turns and colours of the animated version of the mannequin within it, “an encounter between two aspects of human agency-the physical and the virtual-arranged en tableau”.

I am not sure which of these two works issues a deeper challenge. The recognition that all looking is an interactive encounter, and that many tableaux (of culture, of experience, across timezones) are activated in proximity to sculptural works, can be overshadowed by languages that almost strip the delicacy from this awareness. Human, Human is perhaps even more a political act than are the games pieces by Liu Xiao Xian (pitting indigenous against introduced animals on a chess board; the British Royal Family versus iconic indigenous Australians-and Christ, and B1 and B2-on a flattened Aboriginal flag/Australian map). These seem ideologically overworked and perhaps sculpturally underdeveloped, even and especially next to his own fine bone china castings of quirky Victorian cutlery, an elegant and excessive roll-call beside a single pair of fine white cast china chopsticks.

Other works hinge on the pulls of memory and grief (Pamela Kouwenhoven’s Shrine to Memory, discarded cemetery flowers almost quilted into complex spiritual icons; or Rosslynd Piggott’s Japanese-silk rolled pillow resting on a lean black plinth, a tear-bubble falling out one ear); on domestic familiarities (Lena Yarinkura’s metal-cast dogs, forlorn, on-heat; Donna Marcus’ walled snake-trail of aluminium teapots; Ruth Downes’ gorgeous, funny, sexy array of some 30 hand-made plinthed teacups playing with textures and ideas of odd meetings at mad hatters’, government house and community teas-a barbed-wire amnes-tea; gold-coined GS-tea; golf-teas, par-teas, various novel-teas). Others expose cultural decadence: Louise Paramor’s deep-and darkly-coloured, folded-paper Lustgarten sofa/chandelier, made during her Berlin residency, is as sharp and exposing of cultural undertows as were George Gross’s scratchy, dirty WWII drawings; whilst others still are lyrical contemplations of philosophy (Bronwyn Oliver’s winding, wall-mounted, woven copper calligraph, tackling Derrida’s idea of trace by tracing the movement of writing itself as pen is drawn across a page); of martyrdom (Linda Ivimey’s hessian-clad, hooded dolls both pregnant-like and child-like in shape, challenging the fetishising and making-saintly of deep embodied suffering); and of social inequalities-what street-tramp might be saved within the false-hope shelter/mobile aspirin of Richard Goodwin’s bicycle-stretcher?

Lionel Bawden makes sculptures out of coloured pencils look like they’re made of woven cane. Neil Roberts’ wall-mounted vaulting-horse clad with a leaded-glass rendition of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim ceiling window is disturbing both in its relocated masculine force and its pulling of parameters from both floor and ceiling to wall. Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley’s Wall Unit (Origin of the World) is a series of peepholes into birds’ nests already destroyed by casting into bronze, a wall-mounted collection that yet survives fetishism (as body-memory, our remembered relationship to our origins does). Timothy Horn’s Glass Slipper (Ugly Blister) highlights the symbiotic relationship between Cinderella and stepsister, gewgaw and glassmanship in an interesting telescoping of the usually divided layers of craft-and myth-making. Sebastian di Mauro’s Clip, a floor-mounted, astroturf-clad pair of giant hedge-clippers, kindles and satisfies the garden-lust of would-be suburbanites too busy, too tired, or too often at the Art Gallery to tend or own their own hedge.

National Sculpture Prize, 2001, Inaugural Exhibition, Coordinating Curator Elena Taylor; curator Beatrice Gralton; judges Brian Kennedy, Julian Beaumont, Dr Deborah Hart, Professor Ian Howard, Neil Dawson. Finalists not covered in this review are: Geoffrey Bartlett, Kristian Burford, Matt Calvert, Peter Cole, Kevin Gossner, Fred Fisher, Matthieu Gallois, David Jenz, Gunther Kopietz, Ari Purhonen, Sarah Robson, Heather B Swann, Ken Unsworth. NGA Canberra Nov 30, 2001-March 10, 2002.

After three intense years working at PACT I am leaving, on adventure unknown, intending to loosen up, grow up and momentarily shirk the responsibilities of running a small arts company.

PACT is a resilient beast, surviving almost 40 years so far, with a constant influx of independent, inventive young people/artists who fuel its creative life and have this uncanny capacity to renew stuff, while testing out the precious spectrum of da cultural gatekeepers….At PACT, I have been supported by a whole cavalcade of generous professional artists, theatre workers, media writers, Board members and volunteers who are the lifeblood of the place…Particularly, my partnership with Company Manager, Lucy Evans was rewarding—as we egged each other on in a game of 'doggedness', sheer will and poor theatre invention.

The next team to work at this remarkable little cultural space is the accomplished performer/director duo Regina Heilmann and Chris Murphy. I would like to welcome them to PACT, as they hit the ground running. This move is a transition to full-time for Regina after years of contributing to PACT's various creative programs and a complete, absorbing new world for Chris after her work with Theatre Kantanka. It should be a blast!

The death of an artist

Just before we went to press we were shocked and deeply saddened to hear of the accidental death of Neil Roberts, a fine artist and a wonderful person. Roberts was based in Queanbeyan. His death coming so soon after that of David Branson in Canberra makes this an even darker time for the ACT arts community. As some of you will know, we were to publish in this edition of RealTime an interview with Neil’s partner, the performance artist Barbara Campbell as a prelude to a retrospective of her works at Sydney University for the Department of Performance Studies. The interview has been held over. An obituary for Neil will be published in the next edition of RealTime. All our thoughts are with Barbara.

RealTime & festivals

Our absence at the Adelaide Festival this year was noted. Thanks for the many wish-you-were-heres—it’s nice to be missed. A few wondered if we’d abandoned the festival. In previous Adelaide Festivals and at LIFT97 in London, the 1999 MAAP-Asia Pacific Triennial, the 2001 Queensland Biennial Festival of Music and other arts events, RealTime had been on the official festival programs. We weren’t invited to the 2002 Adelaide Festival and our limited budget couldn’t stretch to an on-the-ground team. It’s a very expensive and labour intensive business. Our commitment this year is to Next Wave, the festival for young artists and audiences in Melbourne (see page 27), where we’ll be working with 10 young writers turning out daily responses to the festival online and in print. Watch out for these on online, May 17-26.

Farewell Kirsten Krauth

Our invaluable Assistant Editor and OnScreen Editor, Kirsten Krauth, has left us after 4 years to work full-time at the Australian Film Commission. Her quiet thoroughness, her considerable writing and editing skills, and the warmth of her relationship with RealTime staff, editorial team members and writers will be greatly missed. To find someone with all her skills and interests is going to be quite a challenge. We wish Kirsten well in her new position.

NSW Arts—the future commences

As you’ll read in the last paragraph of the fascinating interview with Director-General of Arts, Roger Wilkins, there has been a major arts development in New South Wales. Following the considerable investment in arts infrastructure recently in western Sydney, it was announced that the State Government has purchased the Eveleigh Carriage Works in inner-city Redfern to house performance companies like Legs on the Wall and a new performance space. Although the issue of sustainability still dogs most small to medium performance companies and has to be seriously addressed, the needs in respect of working spaces and performance venues are being tackled by the government. The extent of the investment (what kind of facilities in the new centre and whether or not Performance Space will play a key role) is ever on our minds.

A birth

Our fondest congratulations to long-time RealTime contributor and editorial team member Zsuzsanna Sobsolay and partner Tim Moore on the birth of Ruby Saffron.

Young & emerging?

Perhaps Ruby Saffron will be interested in the Australia Council RUN_WAY and Start You Up! funding programs for new artists. Our most recent survey showed that 19% of our readers are aged 18-25 years: it’s interesting that they didn’t substantially figure in earlier surveys. RUN_WAY, a program of the New Media Arts Board, is aimed at under 30 year-olds, encouraging them with grants of up to $5000 to explore interdisciplinary/new media arts practice in any number of ways (Reed Everingham, 02 9215 9132, 1800 226 912 or r.everingham@ozco.gov.au). The Theatre Board is also offering grants of up to $5,000 but the age limit is 26 and the goal is for new artists to create small works for public showings (Gemma Pepper, 02 92159301, 1800 226 912, g.pepper@ozco.gov.au). A similar program, 2ExciteU, has been initiated for new artists under 26 from non-English speaking background (Michelle Kotevski, 02 9215 9030, 1800 226 912, m.kotevski@ozco.gov.au, see advertisement, p40). It’ll be interesting to see what effect these small seeding grants will have on the development of new artists and whether or not some of the cost is going to fall on established companies and organisations as the artists search for support, venues and credibility. RUN_WAY is in its second phase, so we should see some results. In an era of initiative-driven arts funding, suspicion of pragmatism and opportunism is inevitable. Let’s hope that these new programs deliver in the longer term.

Charlie Victor Romeo is “riveting”, says promotional material from the Perth International Arts Festival. The work originated in New York, where it began off-off-off Broadway (just how off can you get?) before going on to scoop all sorts of awards.

I too was riveted, but in the original sense of the word-beaten over the head and fastened to my seat. The experience was not pleasant. As someone afraid of flying, I am the last person in the world who ought to have seen this depressing and pointless production. Depressing, because even though it was born in 1999, it cannot help but milk that moment in September. Pointless and depressing, because beyond the frame there is death. Hundreds of people died in the six ‘dramatised’ catastrophes that form the basis of CVR. The whole thing appeals to the worst in us, like slowing down to look at a bad accident on the freeway.

The set is minimal: only the cockpit is represented (so real is the production, we learn in the program, that it is used in training for pilots and disaster management courses). In this illuminated space sit captain and crew, their attention on the console before them. Each ‘case study’, drawn from ‘real black box transcripts’ is introduced by a slide. We learn the name of each flight, the number of crew and passengers aboard, and the nature of the problem that will be their downfall: engine explosion (Sioux City), multiple bird strikes (Alaska), incorrect altimeter settings-the whole bleak spectrum of things to fear, from the banal to the catastrophic. At the end of each ‘case’ we are offered another slide, and an enumeration of casualties. I quickly realised there was no point hoping for a happy ending.

From the outset we are subject to an aural assault. In our own little black box we throb, vibrate, gather in the static of radio communication, gloss over the buzz words, tumble into the groan and roar of the machine as it accelerates towards what becomes an inexorable narrative of unavoidable tragedy. The sound design by Jamie Mereness carries this performance, and rightly so, because as anyone afraid of flying will tell you, the ear is the organ of fear.

This theatre of ‘real life’ can only trade in death, and it is the most serendipitous, most spectacular, most horrific of airbound incidents that make it into this cauterised space. I wanted to leave, but I could not. I was, remember, riveted to my seat. But unlike those poor people strapped into their seats on the other side of the cockpit, my situation was never life-threatening. No one dies in a simulator. It is possible (cf September 11) that a being might enter the simulator and train themselves to die, and in doing so kill others. Is this why we are all here, at this performance? Learning how we might die? And having died, end up as a statistic on a projection screen at the Octagon Theatre, Perth. How depressing.

Charlie Victor Romeo, Created by Bob Berger, Patrick Daniels, Irving Gregory of Collective: Unconscious, Perth International Arts Festival, Octagon Theatre, March 25.

Dear Editors,
For 7 years I have worked for Urban Theatre Projects, the company which produced Fa’afafine, reviewed in your last issue (RT47 p38). As you know, I have never complained or taken issue with any review of any UTP show appearing in RealTime (nor any other publication). There have been negative or mixed reviews of our work in the past. Most of these I have agreed with. The rest I saw as valid assessments which I happened not to share. I would never dispute your right to publish them.

Well, yes. A response that reads as sneering, patronising and utterly unprofessional. No wonder its author didn’t have the guts to run it under their real name.

The clear implication is that Brian Fuata doesn’t need an audience, he needs a therapist. This is dressed up in a kind of why-should-I-listen-to-a-tired-self-indulgent-recitation of “his prose poems about his mummy” because-aren’t-we-all-over-personal-narrative world weariness.

Okay, so it’s trying to be funny and perhaps I’m missing the humour. To publish this opinion in an anarchist zine or an undergraduate paper would probably be mildly amusing. And perhaps a little levity, a little iconoclasm wouldn’t go astray in the oh-so-serious world of contemporary performance. I shall wait with interest to see if this is a sign of a new editorial policy for RealTime. Because at the moment every other article but this one takes itself and its subject seriously. So why is this show singled out for clumsily camp satire?

And why is it published under a false name? You write that “RealTime allows the use of pseudonyms where the writer might be placed in a difficult position in respect of their employment and/or the community they belong to. It is not treated lightly.”

Difficult position? Have I missed something? I know the political climate is grim right now, but are there secret police files on reviewers? Contemporary performance death squads, perhaps? An opening night blacklist?

Call me old-fashioned, but whatever happened to standing up for your opinions? Engaging in public discourse carries responsibilities, as the Heffernan outrage has just shown. Is that too difficult a position for you, “Will Rollins”? And RealTime editors, what were you thinking? No other worthwhile journal would allow such a piece to be published pseudonymously. (The last time it happened at the Sydney Morning Herald was a decade ago—and the writer was sacked.) Imagine the (justified) uproar if I, as the producer of this show, had written in praise of it, under a false name.

I welcome critical dialogue around our work and always have—I’d just like to know who I’m talking with. Brian Fuata, aged 23, had the guts to state his position(s). “Will Rollins”, who are you? From what position were you reading this work? Why don’t you let the readers in on the secret? And don’t tell me it’s not relevant—if that were the case, you’d have published under your own name. I know you well enough to know that.

Response

Harley Stumm’s letter includes reference to our response to his first message to us. The relevant points are reproduced here:

1. We think you have misinterpreted what is fundamentally a supportive if idiosyncratic review, hardly the “why-should-I-listen” response you portray. We see the writer as attentive to the words, in fact wanting to focus on them more clearly.

In our reading of Rollins review, we saw it as taking pleasure in Fuata’s performance, especially his new persona, praising the director for shaping that persona, astonished at the extremes of what the performer describes, and critical only of the disjunction between Fuata’s delivery and the staging of it.

2. RealTime allows the use of pseudonyms where the writer might be placed in a difficult position in respect of their employment and/or the community they belong to. It is not treated lightly.

Throughout the ‘Rainbow Region’ of the Far North Coast of NSW, cars are adorned with stickers that read like epigrams…Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Beauty, Free Tibet and Magic Happens. Magic recently did happen and it happened in the theatre. And it didn’t come from one of the big name theatre companies that visit us from Sydney or Melbourne, but from a local community theatre. The local Women’s Health Centre produced Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues for International Women’s Day. A week later the audience are still affected by it, and talking about it. We’ve heard and read about this show’s power as it trailblazes around the world…from Kenya to Hong Kong, Iceland to Venezuela, and Pakistan, where it’s currently on show. But what makes it so magical?

According to US feminist Gloria Steinem, who wrote the foreword for Ensler’s play (Villard, 1998) hundreds of years ago female genital symbols were worshipped in India as more powerful than their male counterpart, a belief that carried over into Tantrism. Tantric Buddhism still teaches that Buddahood resides in the vulva. However Indian yoni worship is a long way away from contemporary Western attitudes to women’s bodies? Words like ‘vagina’ feel clinical. ‘Cunt’ has been demonised and demeaned, and ‘pussy’ is, well…it’s all right.

This production achieved a rare feat in the region, selling out Lismore’s 390-seat capacity Star Court Theatre 10 days prior to performance. And still they clamoured outside to get in. Not even our local award-winning performing arts organization, NORPA, achieves that very often.

The monologues range from celebration to catharsis, and this version included two new pieces, Under the Burqa, an Afghanistani woman’s experience of drowning underneath the Taliban-enforced cloth, and My Short Skirt…”My short skirt and everything underneath it is Mine. Mine. Mine”. Got it? Women entrusted Ensler with their most intimate experiences, from the act of conception to birth, from the undeclared war against women to newfound freedoms. The narratives were gathered from more than 200 interviews and turned into poetry for the theatre.

In Australia there were 15,600 cases of reported sexual assault in 2000 (Australian Bureau of Statistics) and those working in the field say this represents only 10 percent of actual cases. In the US, figures are as high as 700,000 each year. In South Africa one in two women can expect to be raped in their lifetime. One elderly woman in the Lismore audience had been raped and severely bashed at 59 years of age in Johannesburg.

While claims continue that theatre is dying, that young people don’t ‘do’ theatre, this regional audience comprised young, old, straight, dyke women and men. Magic happened, which begs the question, what do contemporary audiences want to see at the theatre? If the power of these monologues was anything to go by, I’d suggest they want powerful, real, honest, present-tense stories that stir us to engage with ideas and issues that matter to us now.

The Vagina Monologues, writer Eve Ensler, director Cathy Henkel, performers Punita Boardman, Marika Cominos, Nikki Fuda, Many Nolan and MC Zenith Virago; March 8.

In her catalogue essay, Ann Finegan examines Margaret Roberts’ work in terms of the deepest experiences of the body, of habit and forgetting, and of the nature of mind to seek in time-place-speed coordinates a method for grounding our consciousness in place. Roberts’ installation sets up an experience akin to what I would term “architectural theatre”.

The Mirror Room construction occupies, in the territorial, colonial sense of the word, the largest of Artspace’s three exhibition areas. The room is not, as one might first expect, full of mirrors, nor is it in any overtly apparent way a reflection or inversion of the containing room itself. It is a fantastically simple piece of work. An idea which can only be understood in the experiencing, and is therefore performative. Performative because it had to be built to be understood, performative because it forces the viewer into motion. Roberts’ statement that “the viewer…may see that it is their presence that completes the work” resonates with my own philosophy of practice: the work is also read in terms of the bodies present within it at any given time.

Walking the Mirror Room passageway is an experience that references the best in architecture and reminded me in some ways of architect Daniel Liebeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. In both cases one is kept moving and fascinated by the sensation that something is askew.

In her room notes Roberts references the inside of the white cube (the purpose-designed gallery space) and the parallel, concealed spaces beyond this indeterminate absence. On the one side, a section of gallery floor and heavy timber pillars, on the other, actually beyond the display walls to the external structural boundary walls of The Gunnery building itself, moves the outside world of traffic, business, pedestrians. Roberts also references the arbitrary placement of gallery space within historical walls; The Gunnery building had a former life in the Australian Navy and a subsequently purposeful existence as an artists’ squat.

Roberts has set up a space that demands participation and ambulatory pondering, a pacing out. This necessary circumambulation is reminiscent of the ritual practice of walking around a buddhist stupa, always in a clockwise direction, whereas here the layout inclines one to the anti-clockwise. In buddhist practice the movement sets in motion the mantras/prayers being recited. In the gallery space it sets the work into motion.

The work is simply 4 huge white walls, floor to ceiling, constructed by contractors to Roberts’ design. The placement of this shape is deceptively simple. To create the footprint Roberts has marked the midpoint of the four prominent wall sections which enclose the rectangular space, and brought those 4 single points out from the wall by a doorway width. She then joined the dots, arriving not at a diamond configuration (which would occur if you simply took the measurements from each corner of the room) but at an irregular slewed shape.

As you walk around to inspect what is there, you discover what is not. Space advances and recedes, expands and contracts, it slowly revolves as a room within a room. It is a piece about the movement of architectural space. Anne Finegan notes that “The mirror reflection, which folds the very walls of the gallery back into this structure, ensures that there is no ‘outside’.”

Walking around the hollow monolith, we naturally search for a doorway, a way in, but the interior is not forbidden to us, rather, we are already inside. The viewer, in this reflected gallery space, is in a wanderland, contained behind walls, on the other side of which other-dimensional viewers may be looking back. Contained within the void and waiting exhibition-space, our eyes move behind living portraits.

It is a satisfying experience, taking only a minute or 2 to negotiate, yet leaving one perplexed, confused, unnerved. Four-walled everyday reality has somehow been upset. One has entered a matrix, the coordinates of which are both the gallery itself and the most basic pattern of our everyday life.

Melissa Kyu-Jung Lee only has one VHS copy left of Soshin: In your Dreams, the documentary she made about her parents coming to terms with her decision to become a filmmaker. Her parents have given all the rest to friends. From a strained relationship, leaving home at the age of 15, she has done them proud, graduating from the Australian Film Television and Radio School with the Film Australia AFTRS Graduation Award and Community Relations Commissions Award for her documentary A True Story about Love. Her films are winning prizes in Australia and abroad, and she is regarded as one of the bright new talents of Australian filmmaking.

Her 3 films produced while at AFTRS have a common theme of peeling back layers to seek the truth. In Secret Women’s Business, women shed the accessories that construct their public identities when they bathe naked together at the Korean bathhouse in Sydney.

Lee’s most intriguing documentary yet is A True Story about Love. Ditching the planned project about Korean-American documentary filmmakers, she instead returned from the United States with material which ended up as a documentary on her personal relationships. She did not dispense entirely with her interviews; their comments throughout the documentary provide critical perspectives on her relationships and the ethics of her filmmaking. While Lee is at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival meeting filmmakers celebrating an Asian-American identity, in her personal relationships she is discovering the complexities within that community. She has an affair with one of her subjects, Richard Kim, a Korean-American documentary filmmaker, then later becomes involved with his friend, the Japanese-American actor Mark Hayashi. She is torn between her sense of “coming home” in being with a Korean lover, and her mixed feelings about falling in love with a Japanese man, a relationship she knows her parents would disapprove of.

You work through your relationship with your parents in Soshin: In Your Dreams, and come to an understanding, but the way they view you is obviously still an issue.

Oh, it’s ridiculous, because I’m 30 and I still can’t tell my parents a lot of things because I’m scared I’m going to get into trouble.

Yeah, they are very proud, but at the same time that puts this new pressure on me to be what they want me to be, a successful, ethical and politically correct filmmaker.

A True Story about Love brings to mind comparisons with the ethical dilemmas in documentary filmmaking which were raised by Dennis O’Rourke’s Good Woman of Bangkok.

Our conversation revealed even more complex layers when Lee told me that 90 percent of her documentary was re-enacted.

I didn’t decide to make the film until I actually left San Francisco. I was still having a relationship with Mark long distance but I was in New York to interview some other filmmakers for my original idea and then I thought, oh, I can’t do this, this is so fucking boring, I’m just sick of talking about identity with filmmakers, and I thought what had been happening in my personal life with Mark and Richard said far more about identity in a really personal way.

I was in New York and I thought, okay, I’m going to forget about this project that I’m doing, I’m going to make a film about what happened to me in San Francisco. So then I rang Richard and Mark and asked them if they’d help me make the film and then I wrote a script and Mark was actually my script editor. I’d write the script, email it to him, he’d give me his comments, I’d email another draft etc etc. Then I flew back to San Francisco and shot all that stuff that you see.

In the documentary you’re seeing things as they evolve, but that’s not exactly the case; in a sense you’re replaying what happened and looking back at it from a different position.

It’s a different level of truth I suppose. All that stuff happened but I wasn’t shooting it as I was going along, it’s just presented that way and so the bit where I’m in bed with Richard, I mean how would I shoot that, and so Mark shot it.

You must have known more than 2 people in San Francisco. Did that make it more confrontational?

Well I did know other people in San Francisco but Mark wanted to learn more about cameras, so he and I were the production team.

It was hell. I had a really bad time. It was just the worst experience I’ve ever had, to the point where I cried every day. I had abandoned that (original) project so I was coming back with a completely different film and I didn’t know whether that was acceptable or not and I was really in love with Mark and the filmmaking process was putting enormous strain on our relationship.

My impression was the opposite because of the comment you make about questioning your intentions in getting together with Mark.

Well that was also in my mind. I think that in the film I paint myself, my character, as more of an exploiter, I play up that side of it. But there was this whole other side of it, I was feeling really vulnerable, I was really in love with Mark and didn’t want to lose him but also had the pressure of coming back with the film.

In the shoot were you mainly re-enacting things that happened or shooting what was happening then and there?

It was a kind of combination. We were shooting to a script and we’d say, okay, we’re going to do that scene where you got jealous about Richard and you got really angry and told me to leave. And we would start that and just improvise and sometimes it would take us on another tangent.

Richard called me one day and he just joked about it. Mark thought it could have gone deeper into the issues. My external supervisor at AFTRS showed it to a friend of hers who doesn’t know me and her response was “What a bitch.” I can understand that people might have that reaction, but in the end I think once [a] film is made, it has a life of its own. One of the most exciting things about A True Story about Love for me is that people hopefully end up with questions at the end of the film rather than answers.

Going full circle back to your parents—how do they feel about A True Story about Love?

I’ve been putting it off, I’m still trying to find the right time to sit and show it to them. I mean they won’t be happy about it. My sister saw it at last year’s WOW, [the film festival organised by Women in Film and Television] and she said, “I think it’s a good idea you don’t show Mum and Dad” (Laughs).

A True Story about Love, director/writer/producer Melissa Kyu-Jung Lee, Australian Film Television and Radio School, featured in competition at Flickerfest short film festival. It has won a range of awards including the Zonta Emerging Filmmaking Award at WOW (see Virginia Baxter's review), and First Prize (Ogawa Shinsuke Prize) in the New Asian Currents section at Yamagata Documentary Film Festival in Japan.

There’s little I like more than disagreeing with mainstream movie critics, and nothing I like less than writing a review of a film that has contributed nothing to my love of cinema or, in my view, to cinema as a dynamic artform. More bluntly: I don’t see the point of a review that merely endorses or, conversely, negatively criticises a cultural product or artform when the nation’s print media provide so little space for the cultural appreciation of that artform, particularly when its provenance is Australian.

By all accounts, in a column dedicated to critical writing about the Australian screen, I shouldn’t be writing about Gillian Armstrong’s Charlotte Gray at all, since I found it disappointingly nondescript and it’s not even strictly speaking Australian.

It’s impossible, however, to ignore the number of Australians in key creative roles: director Armstrong, editor Nicholas Beauman, director of photography Dion Beebe and star Cate Blanchett. Whether they contributed something specifically ‘Australian’ by virtue of their geocultural backgrounds is, in my view, dubious. But it’s probably why many Australians will see it.

It’s also why I saw it and, while finding it both dull and forced, it offers a useful place from which to enquire into the relationship between the dominant and national cinemas.

The aesthetic contributions of the DOP, editor and lead actor make it possible to avoid the auteurist trap of analysing it only in terms of ‘A Gillian Armstrong’ film. Its mixed production and financial provenance (Scottish, British, US) provide a distance from indulging in either of the two dominant modes of Australian film criticism which Tom O’Regan terms “debunking” and “remythologising” (Australian National Cinema, London & New York: Routledge, 1996).

In her informative monograph, The Films of Gillian Armstrong (The Moving Image, ATOM, St Kilda, 1999), Felicity Collins writes that these 2 modes of criticism result in creating Australian cinema as the “bad” or “good” object. The former longs for our national cinema to resist the gravitational pull of the dominant aesthetic field. The latter, as practiced by Jocelyn Robson and Beverley Zalcock in their book Girls Own Stories: Australian and New Zealand Women’s Films (London: Scarlet, 1997), involves appraising Armstrong’s films as progressive reworkings of classical Hollywood movies.

Charlotte Gray is, potentially, a crowd-puller. A beautiful, young Scottish secretary (who types the words of others—geddit?) is strong-minded and therefore sexually appealing. In 1943, as a result of her liberal, middleclass upbringing, Charlotte has Romantic, Francophile sensibilities: she knows her Stendahl and Proust, despises the Vichy Government and identifies strongly with heroism in the form of the French Resistance.

The quest for her first and only true love gives rise to her desire for self-expression. She volunteers as an agent and is parachuted into occupied France. Here she makes some literally deadly blunders, fails to save 2 winsome young Jewish boys, and falls for a handsome Communist resistance fighter (Billy Crudup). All with fake accents that beggar belief (wouldn’t the Nazis have noticed a group of French people incapable of speaking French?).

The film is not unremittingly awful. I admired the cinematography (Dion Beebe), one of the performances in particular (Anton Lesser), and liked the plot (woman finds her own voice risking life for love as an historically sanctioned terrorist) and the underlying idea (subtly risk-taking, anti-sentimentalising director transforms ultra-safe, sentimental novel).

Many movies have offered less and yet provided far more—Brief Encounter, for example. To be fair, there are also movies that have offered much more and delivered even less—The English Patient springs to mind. Less is often more. This is a lesson that filmmakers ranging from Frances Coppola’s first cut of Apocalypse Now to Rachel Perkins’ recent bittersweet One Night The Moon, seem to know almost instinctively. The concept does not inform Charlotte Gray.

Armstrong is not incapable of subtlety. In Little Women, a film that gives nostalgia a fine name, she successfully resists cliché, wresting the story from its literary roots and, as Collins explains, quietly says something “about cinema’s appropriation of authorship and voice, writing and performance, genre and style.” She can draw upon a knowledge of both dominant and national cinemas to offer films with their “own ways of seeing and thinking and feeling.”

This is not evident in Charlotte Gray, which drums up a storm with Blanchett’s gale force performance of a woman lacking the introspection that we know she can deliver from films such as Elizabeth, Oscar and Lucinda and even The Shipping News (in which she is superb). Blanchett’s solo performance leaves a vacuum in a film requiring an ensemble approach that is rarely filled.

Sebastian Faulks’ novels (Charlotte Gray is the third of a trilogy) are intensely romantic stories written by someone who appears to lack an understanding of Romanticism, which featured new forms and structures, especially those that challenged readers’ traditional expectations. Julien Sorel, the Romantic hero of Stendahl’s The Red and the Black that we see Charlotte reading in the opening sequence, was certainly aware of the void created by his moral indeterminacy (neither black nor white, but grey, you might say).

This spills over into Armstrong’s film with its heroine who claims “good must triumph over evil” but which disconcertingly lacks awareness of its absent moral centre. All that the world-shattering events represented or referred to ever signify is a series of episodes in the pages of Charlotte’s personal book of self-discovery. Both Hollywood and national Australian cinema can achieve more than this.

Charlotte Gray, director Gillian Armstrong, distributor UIP, opens nationally in May

DV soothsayer Peter Broderick’s key-note address at SPAA Fringe left the audience savouring the taste of New Digital Freedom while swallowing the hyper-syncretic rantings of a peachy preacher who didn’t seem attuned to the irony that Independence is now a Hollywood by-product. President of US-based Next Wave Films, Broderick channelled a course through the recent history of digital cinemas, assimilating a disparate collection of films and filmmaking practice into the general rubric of New Digital Cinema (for list of films see: www.nextwavefilms.com/ulbp/bullfront). A self-help guru for filmmakers disenfranchised by the American Studio system, Broderick’s motivational lecture celebrated the impact of DV on traditional filmmaking models without exploring the more problematic aspects of self-financing and access, essential tenets of DV practice as upheld by Next Wave Films.

A company of the Independent Film Channel (managed and operated by Bravo Cable Network), Next Wave Films is a decidedly sticky phenomenon. More a leaking, sugar-syrup residue than a wave, it offers an “alternative universe of filmmaking” in a paradigm that posits New Digital Freedom in an antithetical relationship with Hollywood (see: www.nextwavefilms.com/metaphor). Next Wave simultaneously (and in contradiction) presents itself as a training ground “created to help exceptionally talented new filmmakers launch their careers” through that dreamed-of portal to Universe LA.

Unlike the Danish movement Dogme 95 (which inspired it) there is nothing renegade about Agenda 2000 (Next Wave’s digital cinema funding program). As the difference in nomenclature suggests, Dogme was/is a philosophised, collective approach towards a new filmmaking practice made possible by technical developments, while Agenda is a commercially driven response to Dogme and other DV practices that have subsequently emerged. Next Wave’s focus on scouting for new talent, providing finishing funds and promoting output, suggests a simple motivation towards maximising profits while minimising investment. As an operational mode, this hardly embodies the spirit of New Digital Freedom.

The Independence-is-Next-to-Godliness attitude which sustains the cult of the new and emerging filmmaker is widely supported in Australia by the activities of IF Media (publishers of IF Magazine/Inside Film and producers of the IF Awards), Popcorn Taxi, Tropfest and various other short and long film festivals. Despite aligning themselves with the spiritualism of New Digital Freedom and the dirty glamour of Guerilla filmmaking, these organisations also sustain a filtering system that benefits funding agencies and industry (SPAA) proper. If the multitude of wannabe filmmakers are conveniently encouraged to self-fund, using unpaid cast and crew etc then the agency or producer (like the Hollywood Studios) is free to perv from the wings, ready to assimilate “exceptional talent.” In this framework Independence is complicit with (or a by-product of) the commercial industry.

SPAA Fringe contributes further to the filtering process: pitching itself in the language of Independence, “invent your future”, while producing a conference in which the “telling it like it is” approach overshadows the “imagine how it could be.” The conference brief, to “demystify the fundamentals of development, funding, production, post-production, marketing and distribution” provides limited scope for innovation and is designed primarily to re-institute current practice. Ironically, as the conference progressed, Broderick’s oracular pop-fizz (of which he was veritable fountain as both panel and audience member) became a progressive, refreshing antidote to the acerbic, anecdotal dryness of the same-old pantheon of local experts whose prime purpose is to tell all the wannabes to be just like them.

“HDTV: the future is now” convener John Collette (Digital Media, College of Fine Arts, UNSW), in a brave attempt to counter the religious zeal of the oracle, contested “The future is never now, now is only ever now.” His fellow panellists John Flemming (AAV), John Bowering (Lemac), Martin Gardiner (Planet X) and Dominic Case (Atlab) seemed determined to prove that “now” should only ever attempt to emulate the past in a session that never made it beyond high technical definitions and ruminations over HD’s capacity to replicate film. Any genuine engagement with the possibilities of the new medium (aesthetic or otherwise) or discussion of HD’s position in relation to the low-fi end of Revolution DV was sadly absent (as Broderick pointed out from the audience).

The documentary panel was supposed to focus on the very relevant topic “new technology and new markets: exploring the future of documentary.” While John Hughes (then Commissioning Editor, Documentary, SBS) articulated the changing scope of new documentary forms with a concrete example and Rob Wellington (producer of the Native Title Revolution CD-ROM) discussed the potential of forms which encouraged “the user to find their own stories”, the response from other speakers was surprisingly tepid. Facilitator Susan MacKinnon’s (Film Finance Corporation) final summary of the discussion was a disappointingly retrograde: “the technology is irrelevant, what matters is a good story.”

The funding bodies did their annual show-and-tell on recent policy and funding initiatives. The AFC’s National Digital Access Initiative, a program designed to supply mobile digital production equipment through the Screen Development Organisations in each state, is a proactive attempt to address issues of access in relation to DV. It also conveniently overshadows equally pressing issues to do with the ever diminishing focus on short film funding and the move away from active, responsible development of entry level production. ScreenWest was the only agency, Federal or State, to articulate a position which remotely encapsulated the spirit of New Digital Freedom and to provide a funding strategy for the development of DV production.

The panels that attempted nothing beyond “telling it like it is” were ultimately the most satisfying (which of course says nothing for our capacity to “imagine how it could be”). Simply pitched at an audience of filmmakers who need concrete information and case studies to inform their own practice, “Know Your Music Rights” and “Marketing Tools” were engaging and relevant forums. Vincent Sheehan (producer of Mullet) did an excellent job of facilitating the potentially dry discussion on music rights in a manner which encouraged the audience to be very active (few of the panels left adequate time for questions, a big oversight in a conference designed for new and emerging filmmakers).

The most invigorating moments of the conference spanned the spectrum of emerging (the Fringe Pitch) and established (Jan Chapman’s closing discussion). Craig Palmer’s truly inspired (and winning) pitch for Wheeler & Bent, a television series about 2 physically challenged cops, was a bitter, sarcastic take on the whole pitch process and cleverly gave very little away about the actual project. Palmer’s perfectly sustained comic critique of standard commercial practice was echoed in Jan Chapman’s intelligent and generous conversation with Laurie Zion that closed the conference. For Jan, “Independence is something you fiercely hold onto.” It is not, in other words, a place you hang out until you find that elusive portal to Universe LA.

SPAA Fringe 2002 needs to work on its pitch: provide a productive training model which sustains industry entrance, or actively and aggressively pushes for new forms of Independent filmmaking. Both these options can be packaged and sold without recourse to the easy and overused hype of New Digital Freedom and Guerilla Glamour; and without exhausting Peter Broderick’s welcome by using him as a key guest 4 years in a row.

SPAA (Screen Producers Association Australia) Fringe, The George Cinema, Melbourne, Nov 12-14. www.spaa.org.au

The Golden Eye Awards at the University of Technology, Sydney, for student work from the media arts program, is always an enjoyable event. The awards for last year, held in late October, featured lots of guests, impressive judges, an entertaining MC (director Graham Thorburn, just announced as Head of Directing at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School) and some good speeches. And the films were great. The program was packed and the range of production was exciting, from serious documentary through to wacky multimedia, everything made with a sense of experimentation, inventiveness and love of the medium that more than made up for the obviously tight budgets. Innovation, film knowledge and resourcefulness were there in equal measure. There was even a full length documentary, Jewel in the Garbage (Janine Jones), made in the Middle East with a sense of great commitment. Prizes were awarded for drama, documentary, experimental, and new and convergent media, and for direction, cinematography, soundtrack, art direction, editing, and script, and organisers had obtained sponsorship for prizes, mostly in kind. It was a good night.

Meanwhile, the juggernaut that Tropfest has become rolls inexorably on. A full-page story in the Sydney Morning Herald on some of the filmmakers working on this year’s entries mentions that organisers are confidently expecting over 600 works to be especially made for the event this year—600 that will be narrowed down to 16 finalists. There have been some changes of personnel; festival founder John Polson has taken a sideways step, with Fashion Week director Simon Lock coming on board as executive director, but everyone seems happy, the publicity machine’s in full gear, the sponsorship drive is reaping results, and the audience keeps getting bigger—more than 100,000 people watched the festival either live or in simulcast last year, and they’re talking 300,000 by 2004. Well, perhaps not everyone’s happy—there have been a number of comments about the sameness and predictability of the films leading to audience burnout, and with sponsorship not meeting its targets last year, this year might be even tougher.

Tropfest is not only the biggest and best publicised of a raft of such short film events, it’s also the biggest generator by far of films. It sometimes seems as if every suburb, organisation, major event, and even neighbourhood cafe is running a short film festival—IF magazine has just compiled its calendar for the first half of this year, and has between 40 and 50 short film festivals, awards and competitions listed. There’s the 15×15 Film Festival (make a 15 minute film in 15 hours), White Gloves, Quick Flicks on the Central Coast of NSW. Most of these events attract 40 or 50 entries.

Paul Harris, director of the St Kilda Short Film Festival, says, “we get a lot of films from Tropfest and they’re mainly sketch comedy films—they tend to be the kind of films that are made by friends as a lark—and they have a certain house style, a quirky, offbeat one theme-ness, a certain sameness.”

He believes that Tropfest is potentially a fantastic idea for a short film festival, but thinks that to encourage better quality films and more diversity there needs to be the perception that it’s a festival that takes in all sorts of filmmaking practices. “But perhaps there’s something about the event, that huge audience, everyone out to have a good time, that’s conducive to the success of the one-joke film, conducive to watching a comedy. Even the judges seem to be having the same kind of night as the audience, and they don’t really take the films seriously. If you screened more serious or subtle films you’d probably get people calling them boring.”

The St Kilda Film Festival is Australia’s oldest stand alone short film festival, and this year will be its 19th. In the last couple of years the festival has received about 500 entries, from which about 150 films are selected for screening over 6 days. “We probably see about 200 to 220 that we’d like to screen, and it’s that last stage of the decision-making process that’s really hard. We select on quality, and there are quite a lot of films that are good without being excellent,” says Harris. He estimates that about 100 films come from students at AFTRS, Victorian College of the Arts, UTS and other film courses, and is pleased that there’s some particularly exciting documentary work appearing. “Every year we get about 8 or 10 productions from the Footscray City College, where they have been made using very scant resources, but they show a lot of potential.”

Then there are a substantial number of films made by established or up-and-coming filmmakers with the assistance of state or federal funding bodies (there’s some good work coming out of South Australia, he believes, where the SA Film Corporation appears to be very supportive), and another large group made entirely independently, often on credit card, including about 30 to 40 films which come from Tropfest. “There seems to be a circuit of these sorts of films, but it’s a bit harder to tell if they were made for some of the other competitions, or just made.”

The short film awards that have been part of the Sydney Film Festival have been sponsored by Dendy Films for 14 years (previous sponsors in their 32 year history were Benson and Hedges and Greater Union), and the numbers of films entered have been growing every year, with 268 entries last year (entries close this year on February 18). The fiction category has been the main area of growth, and had to be divided into short and long fiction in 1995 to try and cope. Last year there were 136 entries in the short fiction category. Jenny Neighbour, Manager, SFF Programs, estimates that Tropfest films make up from a third to a half of those entries, “but we get a lot of student films, and a number from more established filmmakers as well,” she adds. “The entry fee of $25 is probably a bit of a deterrent. We also get about 30 to 40 films entered in the festival proper, where there’s no entry fee, that are probably Tropfest or other such competition films.”

“You realise there is this explosion of low budget short filmmaking happening when you see ad after ad in every Filmnet, of people looking for free crew and free cast members. We’ve even had calls from people wanting to know what kind of film to make to get into the festival!”

This year, for the first time, the Sydney Film Festival will be pre-selecting in some categories of the Dendy Awards. “The numbers of entries we’re getting make it very difficult for the judges, who give us their time and enthusiasm, to do a proper job—there’s just so many short films you can see over a weekend, the way these awards are structured. It’s asking too much, so pre-selection just has to be the way to go.”

Once upon a time people wanted to become filmmakers because they had things to say; now it seems that they just want to become filmmakers. And the digital camera has made filmmaking more accessible than ever. But it takes more than a camera to make a memorable film; that’s why a night like the Golden Eye Awards holds so much promise for the future of filmmaking.

Golden Eye Awards, University Hall, University of Technology Sydney, Oct 19; Tropfest 2002 screens nationally Feb 24

Morphologies took not only the form of an exhibition of new works of art for show, it consisted of a series of aesthetic propositions. At its most challenging, Morphologies sought to suggest that moving images were viable within the realms of fine art, whose static and spatial nature traditionally distinguishes it from the more linear, temporal arts of music and literature. The 3 presiding questions with technological and new media arts is first, whether it is a passing fad, and second, whether it is a separate genre, or third, whether it simply continues aspects of previous genres in a new way. Bridging, or solving this—at least for the short term—is interactivity. The question is, is it really as inclusive as we would have ourselves believe? More than any institution in the world so far, ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie), the gargantuan centre for new media arts in Karlsruhe in Germany, has been responsible for enabling media arts and its attendant debates to flourish. While staking ambitious claims for a still emergent genre, Morphologies represented the institutional nexus between ZKM artists (including 2 of its directors, Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel) and Australians who have recently worked there.

In the Black Forest region near the Swiss border, Karlsruhe is situated in the region of Baden-Württemberg whose capital, Stuttgart, is home to Daimler-Benz, and one of the wealthiest regions in Europe. Karlsruhe, a relatively minor city, is nevertheless graced with several significant collections and buildings to house them, beginning with the state museum, a rococo palace completed in 1785. The art academy in Karlsruhe is remembered as the place where Anselm Kiefer was a student and where Baselitz once taught painting and Stephan Balkenhol sculpture. And the argument for a centre for new media arts was no doubt bolstered by Karlsruhe having one of Europe’s largest institutes for computer sciences. By virtue of all these factors the founding director, Heinrich Klotz, persuaded the city to put up DM 154 million (at least 165 million in today’s Australian dollars) for the renovation of a former munitions factory built in 1919. Dreamt of in 1985, realised in 1988, the structure redesigned by Peter Schweger is so large that the megalomania of Wilhelmine Germany is not forgotten: the facade alone is the length of 6 Olympic swimming pools.

ZKM houses the Institutes for Visual Media and for Music & Acoustics, a Media Museum whose purpose is to show recent examples of new media experiments and historical antecedents side-by-side, and a Museum for Contemporary Art whose main purpose is to place examples of new media together with those of painting, sculpture, photography and object-installation. For a long time, by policy and example, this museum was unmatched in its vision to reorient and restructure visual awareness to the increasingly digitalised future. The main departments are complemented with a variety of visual and audial reserves embodied in the Mediathek, boasting comprehensive interdisciplinary material that links art, music, literature and the moving image. Finally, ZKM has offered long, short and intermittent residencies for artists to develop their work and to take advantage of the sophisticated equipment and assistance. The collaboration SKAN shown in Morphologies began with 2 Australian students developing their practice in this environment. They are the youngest of a great many Australian artists who have availed themselves of the technological milk and honey that ZKM appeared to have in abundance. Only funding constraints of late, and some internal wrangling between the 2 museums, has slowed the progress of such programs.

Klotz envisaged his ‘Digital Bauhaus’, as it has been called, as the place that elided and renegotiated fixed ‘isms’ and laid the ground for the established definition of new media as a fluid and boundary-disrupting tendency. Whether this is so is open to question, but I am inclined to the idea that too much openness in certain hands has its commensurate dangers. Klotz repeatedly insisted that the essential criterion was quality—needless to say; but with a policy of openness this can be a standard devilishly hard to monitor. And this unresolved, gapingly open area contributed to Klotz’s downfall.

The principal hallmarking of Morphologies is not only technological art (because, depending on where and when you are in the world, new media can mean a voluminous amount of things—a catch-all for all that breaks with the norm), but interactivity, a principle that seems to be gaining notice. Now, I am genuinely guarded, if not sceptical, about interactivity—in an exclusive and an overarching sense. I might ask artists and curators (and an acquiescent public) at this point whether they are drawn to the notion of interactivity as a result of economic rationalism which says that we need to seek out avenues that openly encourage and involve public awareness (since we are all now ‘accountable’ in one way or another). This is a philosophy of enforced inclusion, something of a draconian democratisation.

More often than not, with interactivity, viewers are lulled into believing that they are creating something for themselves, when the permutations conceived of by the artist are relatively limited. In such cases, the success or failure of a work can be determined quite quickly for the way that such limitations are taken into account and woven into a tight aesthetic fabric. At worst, the choices themselves, constrained as they may be, can inhibit the work’s cohesion and cause it to disperse and founder, the viewer giving up early on this random choosing, not knowing where choices and combinations may lead. Artists and curators need to keep in mind that the inclination of the viewer to participate in a work of art can be limited. Making art is about choices—intuitive, refined and reasoned choices all at once—and everyday viewers are perhaps not that interested in integrating their own choices along with the work they have come to see and consider. On the other hand, interactivity can be a powerful tool to penetrate an artist’s personal logic of assembly. The viewer literally moves within a variety of frames, much like inhabiting the artist’s dream for a short while. The feeling of being active brings with it an unusual degree of confidence; viewers are led to believe that they are partaking directly in the artist’s methods. With the viewer presumably responsible for shuffling through frames or images or structuring the work’s tempo and rhythm, so far, interactivity involves 2 approaches: the installation modifies according to specific triggers activated by a viewer’s movement; or, through voluntary prompts, the program—and supposedly the work of art—is the raw material for the viewer’s own realisation. Overall, Morphologies largely enabled the latter.

The 3 works that stood out were by Susan Norrie, Agnes Hegedüs and Ian Howard, for they clearly exemplified solutions, problems and strategies which interactivity has provoked and inspired up until now. All 3 suggested very strongly that interactivity is a form of collage but whether the artists discerned this intentionally is another matter; the 3 works shared the political intent which made, and still makes, collage—with its collapsing of spaces, languages and styles—so sympathetic. Hegedüs’ Things Spoken was a series of identities coupled to their favourite or most meaningful objects, whetting the viewer’s curiosity, ultimately remarking that the personal importance of things is both arbitrary and permanently foreign to anyone else. It was the most literary work, better suited to a website. As a CD-ROM, it sat rather coldly within the gallery. (The exhibition was accompanied by an independent publication dis(LOCATIONS) with DVD, intended as a portable, personal, digital micro-exhibition.)

Ian Howard’s SweetStalking was an elaborate grid of images each in a recessed frame comprising other distorted images. Each frame was an emblem for a brief scene, so that the viewer could independently compose a broken sequence. The overly disjointed nature of the work was compensated for by the intriguing and, in places, poetic nature of the scenes.

Susan Norrie’s Defile was a cogent piece, surprisingly harmonious with her non-time-based works. The line between political and non-political work is always anathema, since the most oblique can carry the most forceful message, delivered by stealth. Norrie’s work is characterised by a dramatic coupling of the most obvious with the most abstruse. On one level, it was about birds that had been incapacitated through damage done to the environment but, on another, the viewer was made into a kind of vivisectionist, a clinical observer, allied to technology rather than nature. Since the viewer was made to skip and edit the work and was given the power to alter the speed of the scenes, a certain push-and-pull was inescapable: the necessary abstract uselessness of art vs the moral imperative in images that are provocative and emotive.

As a kind of climax to the entire exhibition was Dennis Del Favero’s Angelo Nero or dark angel—about the Sydney boy, agonised by his father missing in service in the Balkans, who brought a gun to school—that inescapably spelled out the media arts to be ‘hot’ in McLuhan’s sense of the term, wrapping viewers up in its mysteries and, in this case, arresting them within a psycho-sexual drama that we willingly repress or ignore. If the eeriness of Warhol’s Death and Disaster series lies in alerting us to how desensitised we have become (thus ‘cold’) to tragedy processed by the media, then Del Favero mobilises an authentic terror withheld by the media, one that we prefer to relegate to the realms of fiction.

Morphologies, curators Nicholas Tsoutas & Nick Waterlow, Artspace & Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney, Nov 22-Dec 15

Peter Weibel, Panoptic Society 2001
interactive DVD-ROM, ZKM & Interactive Cinema Research, UNSW

Over the past few years, one is increasingly able to detect the emergence of empirical approaches to the study of new media as the current dominant paradigm. The empirical desire to fix all that is virtual into concrete is coextensive with a certain weariness or distrust of the excesses of ‘postmodern theory’ that came to characterise much work in media and cultural studies and contemporary art during the 80s and 90s. Work carried out in sociology, international relations, and architecture has also taken this empirical turn.

These fields all share a desire to ground their objects of study, to retrieve them from the ravages of speculative ‘theory’ and, in doing so, perhaps begin a process of reconstructing disciplinary identities. Arguably, all of this coincides with the perceived displacement of national and local communities wrought by communications media such as satellite TV, the internet, and the mobile phone. Very real displacement across social scales accompanies the structural transformations of national and regional economies in a post-Soviet era in which populations have become increasingly mobile at transnational levels as professional or unskilled labour, as refugees, or as tourists.

It is the task of empirical studies to describe and analyse these various transformations, yet to delimit such work to the scholastic mode of production is to overlook the ways in which such research corroborates the interests of capital which, in the corporatisation of universities, finds the current empirical paradigm as the new frontier of rationalisation. Researchers, or information workers, in many instances are providing data analysis that has commercial applications in ascertaining consumer habits and, in the case of new media studies, there is the attempt to foreclose the myriad ways in which users engage with media forms and content. It’s all quite desperate. And it’s all related to a quest to capture markets.

What, you may ask, has any of this got to do with (dis)LOCATIONS, a conference on new media, aesthetics and culture? Well, quite a bit I reckon. To dislocate something is to put it out of joint, but this movement corresponds with a relocation in some other place, space or form. Herein lies the commercial interest in new media. The speakers at (dis)LOCATIONS all conducted an empirics of new media in so far as they engaged in describing the various forms, objects, experiences and artworks that constitute new media. It was at the level of analysis, however, that my doubts crept in, for here I saw the key problem of an empirics of new media aesthetics: the failure, in a number of instances, to understand that the aesthetics of artworks, software applications and technologies are conditioned by social relations as well as the theoretical paradigms through which analysis proceeds.

Continuing his work on media archaeology and post-media or software theory found in The Language of New Media (2001), Lev Manovich (see interview) focused on a very particular idea about what constitutes the materiality of new media, and hence aesthetics. In excavating a history of the present for new media, Manovich’s work is important in that it maps out recent design applications, animation practices, and compositing techniques, for example, that operate in discrete or historically continuous modes. However, his approach assumes form as a given yet forgets the socio-political arrangements in which media forms are necessarily embedded in, and which imbue any visual (not to mention sonic) taxonomy or typology with a code: ie a language whose precondition is the possibility for meaning to be produced.

The aesthetic that constitutes a code is only possible through a process of articulation with modes of practice, of interpenetrative moments, of duration. The political dimension of aesthetics is manifest in the power relations that attend such processes, and in order to undertake an analysis of such assemblages, attention would need to be paid, as Manovich intimated, to the institutional settings of new media and their uses, be they in the office, at home, or in networked gaming arcades, for example.

The papers by Anna Munster and Darren Tofts provided exemplary instances of locating what I would call a processual aesthetics of new media. For Munster, this consisted of situating the internet within “an ecology of contagious information” of “glitches” and “relays” that constitutes net affects within “networked or distributed culture”. Her thesis on hate sites on the web was particularly fascinating in that it contested the doctrine of fluid identities that still characterises much theorisation of cyberculture. Munster gave an account of the way hate sites reproduce the institution of the family, with different members possessing generational literacies of hatred. At one level, the sites perform a pedagogical function for younger members of a family not inculcated into a culture of hatred against others. At another level, a literacy of design emerges as users distribute the symbolic codes and language of hate within a network of secrecy.

Tofts, more than any other speaker, displayed an acute sense of the presence of an audience within the conventions of a conference setting. This was no slap-dash paper, but a finely executed performance that extended the architectonics of a 45 minute paper segued with 6 tracks—Captain Beefheart, John Zorn, and the loony toons of Carl Stalling, among others—into the realm of the audience, creating a poetics of recombinatory, co-evolutionary aesthetics that are dis/integrated within “disjunctive media”. The filing card system used by Nabokov can be situated adjacent to Beckett’s “oxymoronic tension” and Pierre Boulez’s “multi-linear system” of (re)composing music; the “calculated discordance” of Beefheart with Zorn’s “block structures”, all relocating as lessons in not just a prehistory of digital media but a recombination of a media continuum, or what Tofts calls the “Zurbrugg effect”: that which mines “a trans-historical rather than epochal model of the avant-garde.” (See Obituary: Nicholas Zurbrugg, p12)

Roaming the stage with a clip-on mic, James Donald brought it all back home in the closing session, invoking Walter Benjamin on aesthetics as disorientating and the limits of the communicable as one experiences the kaleidoscopic affects of metropolitan life, conditioning the need for (new) media forms such as cinema in Benjamin’s time, or text messaging in ours. Finally we were reminded—and it was a pity other speakers weren’t around to hear this—that media as a technology is not determined by technical developments, but when technical possibilities coincide with other economic and social imperatives. Here was the much needed antidote to Chairman and CEO of ZKM Peter Weibel’s earlier satellite delivered paper which, quite bizarrely, maintained a transmission view of communication coupled with peculiar ideas on neuro-electrical perception as the basis for best understanding new media technologies. Weibel’s technically impaired audio delivery was further corrupted by the noise of old technology: a sliding semi-legible overhead transparency along with the jittery distractions of the Karlsruhe located camera operator.

As unfashionable as it may be, I do like a sense of closure to public fora. I find it handy if at least a few of the threads of a conference can be recombined, and I think such a practice presents a pleasant challenge to speakers. Instead, the final word left me (and I think others) with a sense of having been hijacked from a discussion that could have been, but did not happen. Ian Howard chaired the session and for one reason or another (probably the dictates of a last minute program amendment) decided to invite Jeffrey Shaw up as a respondent, but then proceeded to ask him to summarise some of the key intentions and aspects of his art practice and experiences as Director of the Visual Media Institute at ZKM. Given that he was in many respects the showpiece of the event, we’d heard and seen quite a bit from Shaw throughout the symposium, and even he looked rather indifferent about such a request. Here was a man on the brink of being relocated.

(dis)LOCATIONS, The Centre for Interactive Cinema Research at College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, in conjunction with Cinemedia /Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Melbourne and ZKM Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; Cinemedia at Treasury Theatre, Melbourne, Nov 30-Dec 1 2001

I try to opt out of definitional disputes by telling myself, and a succession of po-faced sceptical students, that it’s the interpretive mode, not the hotspot clickability—the writing/reading processes, not the networked product per se—that makes stuff hypertextual. Living in Aphasia is a case in point.

Lucy Francis has used the most transparent of interfaces: a top frame with each letter of the title hyperlinked, each node with 2 sections of differently-typeset text squashed round the screen’s edges by a large Flash (more/less-) interactive animation. So far so unhypertexty.

But it uses the documentary-collage history of a fictional South-East Asian country, in a fugue of ironic voices, to allegorise aphasia, a mental disorder where language comprehension and memory—vocabulary, syntax, semantics, contextual cues—are impaired, and the reading experience is hyperhypertextual. Interpretation, translation, culture (toxic-)shock, xenophobia, hystericised stereotyping, postcolonial historiography, and the Kristevan abject are all mobilised and linked here. The styles and genres slide between pidgin Kontiki-tour-brochure to nostalgic oral history, from national/folk mythologies to affectless diagnostic notes.

These are dangerous territories (aside from the gratuitous if delicious possibility of One Nation as a confederacy of Wernicke’s aphasics). Mawkish didacticism lurks and occasionally intrudes, the riptide tonal shifts of satire and empathy are sometimes mismanaged and some of the collisions don’t work. For instance, when an over-lyrical poem is juxtaposed with major head injuries (okay, some creative writing teachers would appreciate the connection).

More often the result is a deft catachresis in 2-ply writing: the fictional voice, then clinical/medical commentary or exegesis, each metaphorising and sabotaging the other, played off in the central interactive animation. It’s prismatic with allegorical connections and layers, but from compact, simple writing, mostly eluding the pitfalls of didactic overstatement or hectoring, overburdened metaphors. It’s not possible, as an engaged reader, not to track extensions of colonisation practices to the psyche and mental illness as discourse and discipline (Foucauldian too)…discovery, naming, mapping and proprietorship, institutionalisation, expropriation, the vicious circles of disempowerment, demonisation, alienation, etc.

Yet the visuals and animations are picturebook naïf and slick-smooth-perky, the language satirically disclaiming depth. Almost incidentally you begin to notice the chilling aptness of some of the animations, like the jail cell with its erratic monocular vision, skittering across the screen, peristaltic, preventing full context, language devolving and twisting, exasperatingly on the edge of always-deferred coherence.

This is often a reader’s first impressions of Mez, who is—um, yes, well, er, a prolific multimedia poet and net artist? “Net.wurker” is her own term. She writes in a cryptic-but-decodable, fissured, Joycean-cummings and rhizomic language dubbed “mezangelle”, forcing the reader to puzzle out and open up possibilities even before any technical interactivity/multimodality a la Flash kicks in. A brief taste, where she writes about her initial web encounters:

this net.wurked reality ][& by this i’m n.ferring a state of passive flux, where my hands first crab-crouched a keyboard & slid ova a su.Pine mouse, waiting 4 a con][cussive][nection hit][

Java Museum is showcasing a cross-section of her work 1995-2002. The scope and depth, the reflexive prescient analysis, and the sheer intricate, exquisite, evocative, enigmatic verbal nanotech—extraordinary. Explore it. She’s woefully under-reviewed/funded/analysed and oddly underappreciated in Oz. Check out her new work, Monitored. It’s a kind of condensed manifesto: the corporeal in (not just versus) the machinic, the visceral emotion phrased in coded calligrams, the vividly-dramatic underneath the fixed text. It consists of crossword-Scrabbled diagrams using individual keyboard letters, which on rollover unfold into poetry, soldered on circuit/chip schematics in glorious Mondrian colours. The word-total’s tiny but the rabbit-hat trick with interpretations and proliferating readings is amazing, clued in by the sonogram/ultrasound pulse and the expanded-title “S][ervo]all Monito.red][heart] [Beats”.

The essay is the antonym of mezangelle. Both Linda Carroli and Adrian Miles have produced work that makes thermodynamics out of critical-versus-creative writing, despite the often-reductive textualism of academic discourse (linguistics as a critical Esperanto) and its limited set of rigid ratified teleological print genre types.

Carroli plays more ‘traditionally’, intimating a simple book-ness with “Contents”, which turns out to be a word-cluster, each activating a pop-up with text-chunks from a digressive Montaignesque ‘essay.’ They seem self-evidently closed but are networked by hotlinked words and cross-indexed footnoting, and by the ruminative voices that thread in and out of narrative, quotation, allusion and modulating rhythms of imagery (poetic and graphic).

More radically, Miles is attempting an interactive research poetics, using the model of blogs (web-logs) and essayistic structures but using “vogs”: low bit-rate networked videos that assume and anticipate interactivity within the video stream/s, using Quicktime. With a Scandanavian straight face, he’s also set out a praxis manifesto. The goal is to take the torsion between text and multimedia and instead of limiting their relationship to one of illustration, explanation, formatting, digression or scaffolding, to make it genuinely synaesthesic, unpickable. It’s ‘writing’ towards an interactive desktop video vernacular, the written, verbal, visual, sonic cinematic, multipath and narrative elements in flux: personal, experimental, performative, self-aware in all senses.

Again, the logistical design is familiar, intuitively modular and simple, but the relational layerings, the densely-allusive and cumulative diaristic associations, the competing timelines and analogic (I made that up: argument by concretised analogy) powered by an intriguing verbal-visual interactivity…these are both complex and addictive. It’s capable of sustaining voyeuristic narrative and Oprah confessional pleasures as well as the mise-en-abyme meta-critique, close-focus film analysis and essayistic forms of his Glenn Ford Searching project.

PS: For a productively focused list dealing with net.wurk art/writing, complete with international guests and scaffolded discussion topics, join empyre, set up by Melinda Rackham

There’s a kind of Virilio-vertigo acceleration that virtuality lends to a developing online community…and if its remit is also its language is also its constituency is also their profession…then you add academia’s Blakean-mill publishing pressures, plus a core of prominent voluble new media thinkers and outworkers, you end up with, well—fibreculture.

It was founded as a mailing list in January 2001 by David Teh and Geert Lovink to allow critical/speculative and ideologically-engaged debate around new media arts, theory, politics, policy, education and culture. As the year went on, it expanded its subscription-base (300+) and phase-shifted at fast-forward through list, website, archive and editing/feedback forum, then offline into a public debate, conference and book publication.

As a discussion venue, it’s been hyperactive, capacious but also determinedly on-topic, threads unspooling with unusual focus, measured and generous with argument, references, snapshots of current research, useful forwardings and painstaking feedback. It’s impossible to convey the range here, but it can flip, in one day, from competing histories of independent anti-globalisation media, through to the usefulness of Slavoj Zizek’s uber-psychoanalytic pomo-postcolonialism for analysing multicultural rhetoric and systemic racism in Australia. Go visit the archives: it’s an exceptional cumulative resource.

Towards the end of 2001 the list convened itself as a peer-review forum for participants to post articles intended for collation in the Reader, shifting up several gears, ploughing through more compacted academic text than an overdue-thesis-ed doctoral student on speed. The process lasted 6 weeks, the editing 2, printing the Reader only another fortnight, during which time a full-scale debate and conference was organised. Any given component of fibreculture’s proliferating activities would be welcome, but given the momentum and quality of the outcomes, the whole shebang (to use the technical term) is a remarkable achievement.

fibreculture being such a paradigmatically virtual network, most of the fibreculturalists (fc-ers?) only met for the first time at the Public Debate. This may explain a certain logistical flux, and perhaps, at a stretch, Victor Perton, who is the Victorian Shadow Minister for Technology, Innovation and Glib Technodeterminism. Before he said “we could talk about this all day” (at which point I fled), he gave a very-slightly reheated generic Powerpoint presentation, overstuffed with utopic rhetoric, featuring both an un-ironic use of a Bryce Courtenay quote and the apparently-conclusive evidence of his Mum, who lives in Doncaster (plush and Tory) but nevertheless did herself up a website chronicling her recent trip to India, bless her. Dale Spender as Jehovah’s Witness. Got people talking though.

But this was an aberration: the majority of the papers (and the interleaving formal-but-brief responses, setting up a dynamic that could have been usefully extended into more effective wider discussion to give the word ‘Public’ in ‘Public Debate’ some scope) were solid. Matthew Allen on the uses, abuses and recuses of virtuality was coruscating, and fortunate in Esther Milne as his respondent, who was elegant-structured, deft, and witty in suturing Allen’s critical issues to her doctoral focus on email as epistolary remediation. Tom Worthington, as the self-proclaimed un-academic anti-jargon geek with Palm Pilot, responding to Perton, was admirably decorous in addressing all the issues Perton should’ve. The Arts/Culture and Education sessions were as pragmatically realpolitik as the earlier ones were intellectualised and thematic, working as complements and sketches for the conference and Reader to fill out.

The conference per se was more like a series of unexpectedly-well-organised postgrad seminars, informal and structurally-fluid, with core groups of speakers addressing set themes, drawing from their peer-reviewed papers but not rehashing them, followed by whole stretches of actual, real, live discussion of the kind that’s always promised at Big Time Conferences but then evaporates. The opening session was my favourite, with everyone introducing themselves and their areas: a new-media-academia version of a Babylon 5 council, gathering for the first time a galactic diaspora of ex-alien and once-anomie-ed species, all going Oh my god, I’m not alone!

The publication (echte print, complete with early-edition typos), springboard for the conference, final stage in the peer-review process, is a bit Gutenbergly overdetermined: it’s a “Reader”, it’s the “Inaugural fibreculture Conference Proceedings” and it’s “An Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory.” And yes, irony aside, it is. One of the most focused and functional texts to come out in Australia to provide prismatic analyses, rather than just a snapshot, of the topography across the different competing disciplinary and theoretical territories. Trying to yank out any given piece for more-detailed critique or especial praise makes me feel like a conflicted eisteddfod judge.

It was officially launched by Lev Manovich, the recently-lauded author of The Language of New Media (see interview), who adroitly maintained his Slavic Wellington-bear persona throughout, albeit while magisterially slicing through debate. The Reader, fortunately, preserves something of the flavour of this debate, and the listserv interaction, by including collaborations, manifestos, interviews, position papers and dialogues (as well as reproducing quoted posts on the flyleaves), the articles (subsequently?) more condensed and concentrated than the usual over-anxiously over-footnoted loquacious fare. A cross-section? McKenzie Wark, Anna Munster, Sean Cubitt and Scott McQuire are all their usual rigorous, risky, incisive selves, Ned Rossiter is terrific on analytic borderlands, agonistic polities and discursive historiography, Guy Redden is devastating on utopic deterritorialisation and net.activism, Chris Chesher’s superb at typographies of institutionalisation and disciplinarity in media studies. Oh dear, perhaps I liked the book too much. Incipient nationalism?

The inevitable ‘What next?’ session and debriefings continued online after the meeting wound up, canvassing: soliciting a wider diversity of new media producers, artists and activists to leaven the academica; stepping up policy advocacy; a further series of Readers; a free ‘un-academic’ uni-distributed fibreculture newspaper; curatorial or logistics support for a net.art forum or online exhibition; setting up or facilitating collaborative and community-based offline projects; developing a directory of courses about, or using, new media; and liaising with existing organisations to construct a portal web database of current artistic and research projects.

Regardless which matrices of these divergent possibilities it decides to develop, fibreculture’s agenda already constitutes an overdue, productive, politically-engaged, theoretically-informed and critical—in all senses—intervention.

fibreculture, “Digital Publics: A Debate”, Melbourne, Treasury Theatre, Dec 6, 2001; Inaugural Meeting, Melbourne, VCA, Dec 7-8; Hugh Brown, Geert Lovink, Helen Merrick, Ned Rossiter, David Teh, Michele Willson (eds), Fibreculture Reader: politics of the digital present, 2001.

In 1997, as the result of a successful campaign by Aboriginal activists, the preserved head of an Aboriginal man once displayed in a British museum was returned to Western Australia. Considering this triumphant restoration, Derek Kreckler made the logical progression to a new consideration: where was the body? It could be, he thought, anywhere—underfoot somewhere in Perth, perhaps buried by a roadside waiting for unsuspecting council workers to dig a little deeper…This uncanny notion translates to Kreckler’s ostensibly sunny pictures, most literally in the nature strip and roadside series. Whilst the viewer is not alerted to the story of the souvenired head or the discarded body, its associated unease is hinted at within the odd occurrences of the carefully staged images. In nature strip’s overgrown lot, 2 council workers stare at some discovery hidden to the viewer; whilst working on roadside’s median strip, some event causes one to take a stagy swing at the other, an odd altercation that nevertheless goes almost unnoticed amongst the oblivious passing cars and picturesque bottlebrush.

More blatantly disquieting are the occurrences of the paired bookshop 1 and 2. In the first image, a young Aboriginal woman reads aloud to 2 attentive children as other patrons browse the shelves. In the second image the children are gone and the patrons are felled, one prostrate man oddly attired in heavy boots and pink satin slip. The young woman is seemingly the cause of the destruction: her back to the others, she pulls a book from the shelves with a knowing smile…The more commonplace scenes of brightly-clad council workers engaged in desultory activity also exhibit this sense of narrative, which is particularly enhanced by the arrangement of the photographs in relation to one another. In nature strip 1 the shovel-clasping worker turns towards the other to inspect some discovery yielded by their excavation; in the second photograph he has turned away again and stands, shovel in one hand, the other held over his chest, in traditional gravedigger’s pose. The 2 images work according to classic Eisensteinian montage theory: that which the viewer sees in the first image they then project onto the following, ie, having seen the workman study the hidden find, his subsequent pose is interpreted as reflective. If, as Kreckler originally planned, the images were reversed, the ‘contemplative’ image becomes merely a picture of a council worker standing idly, important only as a foil to the action of the adjacent photograph. Such thoroughness characterises all Kreckler’s images, from their careful composition to their deliberate arrangement and display. It is the artfully staged shots, faultlessly rendered detail—maintained over a considerable depth of field—and the intriguing tableaus that present intimate takes on the seemingly everyday that relates the images, rather than their being merely a presentation of odd occurrences.

For not all the images suggest strange stories: in freezer and salon, the same young woman who appeared in the bookshop series now selects produce from a supermarket and visits a hairdresser without any attendant disasters. The decidedly ordinary events do contrast the obvious peculiarity of the bookshop photographs, and the viewer wonders at the possible relationship. A plausible though tenuous and simplistic correlation seems implied by the exhibition’s title—The Looking and other outcomes—and it is tempting to rely on the explanation this seems to offer, to read into all the photographs something to do with ‘looking’ (scouring the frozen foods, scrutinising a shampoo label). Yet this act is not such a simple one, suggests the title, which posits the act of looking, of searching, as an end in itself. This idea is befitting Kreckler’s carefully composed world where foregone conclusions are overturned and the very idea of conclusion foregone.

Interestingly, it might seem that looking has come to a conclusion in White Pointer, an installation work which draws on the scientific practices of examination and discovery, and its structures of classification and explication for both its themes and substance. In contrast with the sometimes obscure photographs, White Pointer draws determinedly on the factual, its subtitle explicitly explaining to viewers: “you are listening to the sounds of humans observing fish at the New York Aquarium.” The work displays spotlit wall panels copied verbatim from the original explanatory texts of the aquarium, listing the common and scientific names of the housed sea-life, physical descriptions, and the locations in which they might be found. Through 2 white-draped, wall-mounted speakers, recordings of people viewing the creatures in their ‘home’ in New York are transmitted. Thus the very people who were initially inspecting a collection of sharks become in turn the objects of interest for the audience of Kreckler’s own White Pointer. There to inspect the natural curiosities that were collected, organised and displayed for their interest and edification—and according to the same structures that once placed a man’s severed head on display—the aquarium visitors became curiosities in themselves. No recording equipment was visible, but whether the “sounds of humans observing the sounds of humans observing…” features in a subsequent Kreckler work remains to be seen…

Derek Kreckler, The Looking and other outcomes, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia (CACSA), Adelaide, Nov 2-25

Banks are not defined by their aesthetic savvy, are they? Okay, sure—there’s the bucolic green withdrawal slip, clearly referencing 19th century evocations of the picturesque; those richly synthetic hues and fibres of branch carpets which quote from pop-art celebrations of plasticity; and not forgetting that sublime moment of transcendence when one finally hears a human voice while phone banking. But irony, startling colour and the pathos of narrative make this form of banking a properly aesthetic encounter. The Bank Book, as Helen Frajman’s foreword remarks, is not a collection of film stills. Rather, the project began as an invitation from the film’s producer, John Maynard, “to engage with the making of the movie” in a less commercially driven manner than usually the case with the film stills imperative. Through the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Maynard invited 4 photographic artists onto The Bank set to document, intervene with and comment upon relations between the media of cinema and photography. As Daniel Palmer notes in his introduction, “we do not need to have seen Robert Connolly’s film to appreciate these photographs. They exist…as a parallel project, with the photographers operating in the classic artistic role of ‘outsider.’” So although The Bank Book is not about adaptation—‘the book of the film’ in a Jane Austen/Amy Heckerling sense—it is about translation. Indeed, a visual arts review is always a translation since it is produced by that tricky process of ekphrasis: “the verbal representation of visual representation” (W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

Matthew Sleeth’s beautifully rich and cinematic images function simultaneously to pique and confound ekphrastic desire. In particular, the first photograph in his Light series makes expression a central trope by foregrounding a pair of gesticulating hands. Yet, straightforward communication is rendered problematic and the aporia revealed as (literally) veiled meaning since a billowing curtain obscures the backlit figure. Sleeth’s images—all chiaroscuro aesthetic and film noir sensibility—self-consciously explore the complex relations of photographic media, narrative construction and film genre. Instead of dames with slash-red mouths posing in cinched-waist dresses, Sleeth locates the technology of film noir as the object of scopic lust: long slender flood lights; dark ‘alleyways’ of thick cable; cameras bathed in shadow and reflectors drenched in rain.

Reflection is a dominant motif in Danielle Thompson’s intriguing yet incongruously named Brevity series. Bringing fresh perspective to reflection as one of photography’s oldest semantic devices, the first photograph is a study in screen iconography. Actors David Wenham and Greg Stone are shot through a car windscreen appearing fractured and fragmented. In a lovely metaphor for the filmmaking process, Thompson’s image is not so much concerned with reflecting the realism of narrative cinema, as it is to critique its underlying assumptions. And her photographs look beautiful. While the term ‘brevity’ captures something about the spontaneous nature of Thompson’s work, this title belies her lyrical articulation of very different rhythms. Measured and mediative portraits of the actors function almost in counterpoint to other blurred and ephemeral images. As if to dwell on the temporality of this series, one photograph foregrounds an inverted ‘SLOW’ traffic sign.

Translation as re-presentation is a central thematic of Peter Milne’s (no relation, just an ex-husband) photographic art practice generally and is specifically at play within these images. His witty collaboration with Helen Frajman titled Amended Shooting Script is a re-working of The Bank’s original screenplay. The film script has been physically chopped up and juxtaposed with flash-lit black and white photographs of the cast and crew at Anthony LaPaglia’s farewell party. By superimposing snippets of fictional narrative onto ‘real’ interactions, Milne and Frajman bring 2 spheres of representation into uneasy collision. A tension emerges between those who would translate print into image (the cast & crew) and those who attempt to interpret the interpreters (The Bank Book photographers). And as always with Milne’s photography, this series has a haunting quality: an initial laugh followed by what Roland Barthes calls the ‘punctum’: those unexpected and disquieting moments of photographic art.

One of the troubling and compelling aspects of Max Creasy’s work, as Palmer notes, is the almost total absence of the human form. The series Flats subverts key assumptions about the generic demands of narrative realism by leaving out ‘characters.’. Instead, Creasy gives us a self-referential and playful translation of the ontology of character itself. In one of his images, black and white PR shots of the stars are taped to a wall inviting us to join the game of the mise en abyme (photographs of photographs of photographs ad infinitum). In place of the usual stability we expect of realism, Creasy gives us vertigo: the metaphor of infinite regress is enacted by the refracting and reflecting mirrors, screens and windows appearing in his images.

The screen as translation technology functions as an overall thematic for The Bank Book. Yet, as is always the case with ciphers, this is not a transparent or innocent process. A point dramatically made by Thompson’s image of David Wenham and his stunt double, these artists have produced an enigmatic study of photography and its others.

The Bank Book: Photographs by Max Creasy, Peter Milne, Danielle Thompson and Matthew Sleeth, edited by Helen Frajman with an introduction by Daniel Palmer (M.33: Melbourne 2001), 104 pages, 260 x 240mm, $55.00, ISBN: 0 9579553 0 8. Ordering information: email, tel 02 9319 7011.

Words can barely do justice to sense-alias, a medium-scale 2-person installation displayed recently at Sidespace. Tricky Walsh’s specially created, meticulously constructed objects are unique and laden with rigorous symbolism. Equally important is Boo Chapple’s integral soundscape which incorporates, as discrete elements, everyday sounds recorded around the Salamanca Arts Centre—traffic noise, oral history on the centre’s previous incarnation as a jam factory and its inception as an arts centre, plus recordings of footsteps on the centre’s wooden stairs.

A prosaic collection? By no means. These sounds are engineered with skill and imagination: the data quantifies the traffic flow in adjacent areas over 24 hours: it is mixed and overlaid with foghorn sounds, musical versions of these timbres played on clarinet and cello, and sounds from a nearby building site. Fastidiously recorded and processed with the technical expertise and creative awareness these women share, this work is surprisingly subtle, insinuating itself on one’s consciousness.

The oral history recordings that emanate from Walsh’s sometimes anthropomorphic sculptures are very engaging: the tales, the class issues that emerge, the idiosyncrasies of speech, plus the occasional engineered slow moment or swelling up of sounds. The footstep noises, combined and amplified, are broadcast intermittently and sound like a troupe of very busy tap-dancers. All these sounds are “little fragments of history” (Chapple).

Visually, the installation’s groupings of Walsh’s 5 complex sculptures represent a “condensation of the senses” (exhibition notes). A large latex lung, seemingly ‘breathing’, investigates breath, pulse and smell. A striking ziggurat of wood and lenses encapsulates visual stimulus. A third work, in muslin and resin (this is a truly multimedia exhibition) examines pulse and electrical impulse as the transference of the sensual. Then, fabric and speakers form the internal recording device for information overheard: “the inner monologue of the space.” Lastly, plaster ‘bones’ are the symbolic receptacles of information.

As Walsh explains, “The sculptural elements deal with sensual interchange with our environment and the way our senses take in experience and store it as memory. This experience is then relayered onto our understanding of the present in a perpetual reciprocal cycle.” sense-alias expresses place: specific places as well as a more general sense of place. It operates as an entity that filters, responds to and transforms place through sound. It is an installation/exhibition that attempts many things and succeeds at most. It is not necessarily, at first viewing, easily read, but this is because there are so many ideas being explored, some in deeply philosophical ways. There are so many subtleties and nuances that the work repays a second or third viewing. It is not conventionally aesthetic and is certainly not installed like a typical exhibition. It is gloriously disconcerting, bathed in an evocative red light that is just sufficient to enable you to negotiate the gallery space.

sense-alias, sound sculpture by Boo Chapple & Tricky Walsh, Sidespace Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, Nov 26-Dec 1

Globalisation is creating a world economy and global popular culture that breaches borders and nation states. In its latest production of The Antigone Sketches Part I and slip synthetic spaces, IHOS Music Theatre Laboratory (IMTL) slips between myth, historicity and Marinetti’s Futurist Theatre movement to convey the impact of psychic repression and social exploitation in the nation states of Thebes and Elizabethan England.

The Byzantine Orthodox tradition of form and aesthetics dominates the movement, sound, colour and voice of The Antigone Sketches. Directed and designed by Jindra Rosendorf and Constantine Koukias, this piece situates the audience in Thebes as we engage with the contemporary ethical resonance of Sophocle’s tragedy.

To begin with the end. Antigone hangs herself. Creon (Alfie Lee), the king of Thebes, has declared Antigone’s slain brother Polynices a traitor and left his body outside the city walls. Creon has forbidden his burial and orders the death of any citizen who defies this edict. Antigone has secretly given Polynices a ritual burial transgressing King Creon’s authority.

The story is conveyed by a chorus (Matthew Dewey, Alex Dick and Tom Hogan) commenting and interpreting the drama. Bare-chested and in white boxer shorts they sit in separate bathtubs, hands red-lit to the wrist. They orate, intone and betray, although a lack of unison in relation to the leader’s voice indicated under-rehearsal.

In the maelstrom of Antigone’s story, Antigone Missarvidis’ dramatic voice rises as a high pitched counterpoint constituting both question and threat to Creon’s edict. Image projection provides fragments of Greek text. Safety resides in uniformity and the complicity of the chorus, alternately seduced and intimidated by Creon’s authority.

When Antigone hangs herself the chorus ritually lights candles, announcing her death in an explosive bathtub percussion. This is a powerful scene. The sound assaults our senses while the stage is swathed in mist.

Damien Wells’ strong lighting design is steeped with blood and menace. The tragedy of Antigone is the compliance of a self-same populace, who deny her dissenting voice and action. Compassion is silenced by laws and sanctions issued by the powerful.

Guest director Christos Linou continues the theme of state-sanctioned repression and its impact on populations in slip synthetic spaces. Hugh Covill’s edgy, electronic sound design is thoroughly synthetic in its encompassing intensity.

Textual excerpts from Shakespeare’s sonnets and the activist Emma Goldman present Elizabethan England in a period of global expansion. The populations of nation states are coerced or usurped by the bureaucratic machinery of empire and mercantilism. Elizabeth the First (Georgina Richmond) strides her stage with stylised pomposity. Her all encompassing authority will not tolerate subversion or questioning of the corporatism and class structure which maintain her royal power. “God is everything. Man is nothing,” Elizabeth intones, accompanied by Glenn Schultz’s flugel horn and Joe Cook’s trombone.

This is not anarchist theatre in the tradition of Marinetti’s Futurists. The production is overloaded with metaphoric images reflecting the great divides of power, gender and wealth emerging as a consequence of 16th century globalisation. Seljuk Feruu’s scenography and costume design enhance Linou’s metaphors: hessian poverty, slaves compulsively jumping to exhaustion, imprisoned frogs, a sausage necklace, blank pillow-faced executives and a cage of steel spikes, recalling Kafka’s In the Penal Colony with the machine’s tortuous inscription of state laws on flesh.

Hugh Covill’s sound design is a highlight of this production. The score’s resonant silences make way for other sound sources including the queen imperiously banging her staff while the barefooted or rag-bound feet of slaves provide a shuffling counterpoint. The queen’s notion of free speech competes with the babble and hearsay/heresy of the streets.

The concluding sequence of discordant plate shattering; a queen dispensing red paint with bodies falling into this spill of red; grey-suited corporates, their necks weighted with ingots and the crashing of stage-flats, left the Peacock performance space a wreckage.

slip synthetic spaces takes the neuroticised territory of despotic monarchs anxious to maintain their authority as the starting place for score and story. This production is a poignant reminder of the consequence for subjects refusing obeisance and our implication in the choristic conformity of the heralded economic benefits of globalism’s advances.

This latest production provided an opportunity for the IMTL to extend their theatrical experience in association with a visiting composer, director and scenographer. While strong in theatrical effects, the question remains: does slip synthetic spaces generate any frisson, new momentum or insight into contemporary music theatre practice?

To paraphrase the frontispiece of Antigone, these questions are to be continued…

The Antigone Sketches Part One, designer/director Jindra Rosendorf & Constantine Koukias, performers Craig Wood, Alfie Lee, Jack Benson, Antigone Missarvidis, Matthew Dewey, Alex Dick, Tom Hogan; slip, director Christos Linou, composer Hugh Covill, performers Benson, Georgina Richmond, Dewey, Wood, Dick, Rachel Guy, Hogan, Holger Saile, Ainslie Keele, Debra Jensen, Rhonda Niemann, Madeline Swann, Peacock Theatre, Hobart, Dec 7-9, 2001

1996 FBi Benefit. A group of painfully young boys loaded a marimba and vibraphone onto the stage and attempted to compete with Silverchair belting out from the Hordern. I feared for their safety. The punters were at first bemused but by the time they ripped through the theme from The X-files there was moshing and general uproar and the band Prop had arrived.

Since then Prop has added members to the line up and fine tuned their unusual aesthetic to become one of the most interesting live electronica acts in Sydney. Highly skilled musicians, the boys from Prop fluidly slip in, out and around genres, using everything from jazz, funk, classical, dub and muzak. But what gives Prop its idiosyncratic sound is the ways in which they exploit the connection between minimalism and electronica (trance etc). At last, 2001 saw the release of their debut CD Small Craft Rough Sea (Silent Recordings).

Small Craft Rough Sea could be perceived as a concept album—each track guiding the listener through a musically speculative, if boyishly idealistic, journey in space. Track one, Nebula, is aptly named. With a beguilingly simple melody, the vibraphone creates a heady feeling of suspension, supported by a liquid baseline, lightening gravity’s hold on our aural world. Track 2, Landing, undercuts this nebulous world with earthy tones and swings into easygoing action playing with textures of dry marimba, a drippingly fluid vibraphone and icing sugar glockenspiel. With Mount Zero we have liftoff, Prop at its best. With Reich-like repetition, the piece builds on itself, overlapping marimba, vibraphone and keyboards, with a satisfying consolidation when the drum and base kick in, magically building into a high energy burst of rhythmic, mesmeric hammering that Prop does so well.

It feels like the tuned percussion is de-emphasised in the middle tracks, making more use of electronic sounds and drums. Care for Them (also found on the Silent Recordings Sampler) offers an easy-listening interlude, with rhythm responsibilities falling to a unfortunately tinny drum track, but offering the tuned percussion more melodic freedom, yielding a hyped muzak feel. Solo Trip is a real highlight in its satisfyingly solid fusion of genres—creating a jazz/funk/fantasy/noir track that shows real compositional strength.

We return to a more traditional minimalism in Low—an 8 minute piece based around a marimba riff, seemingly repetitive but subtly ever shifting. Magnetic Highway/Remora is an energetic 13 minute epic, with pulsing base, soaring synths, driving drums and electronic glitches, topped off with splashes of tuned percussion. Magnetic Highway is an excellent frenetic dance party piece which rhythmically drains itself to become Remora, a rockdrumming chill out number. Portal is the fast and furious culmination of all the energy of the album, with RSI inducing high-velocity hammering and a repetitive synth horn line, like Phillip Glass on speed. The final track, Sirius, as if completing a cycle, is gentle and undulating, calming and conclusive, if a little functional and less inspired than its precursors.

Having seen Prop perform, I eagerly awaited the album. The physicality of the musicians playing the tuned percussion live is fascinating and produces an unusual energy. The recording process offers Prop more opportunity for blending between the acoustic and electronic instruments, for tweaking and fiddling, particularly as pieces were recorded in a studio and then worked on over a period of time in the group’s various home set-ups. They judiciously manage to stop just short of overproduction, though I found some of the synth sounds a little too charged with 80s sentimentalism—amusing in a retro way but veering the space journey somewhere known rather than to a place of limitless sonic possibilities. However, the journey that Prop takes us on is a captivating and rewarding one, with beautiful compositional shifts, rhythmic roller coasters and mesmeric moments.

Small Craft Rough Sea, Prop; Dave Symes, Jared Underwood, Jeremy Barnet, Julian Hamilton and Kim Moyes; Silent Recordings. Prop will be appearing in Sydney at The Basement, Feb 15, Bellingen, Feb 28, Byron Bay, March 1, Brisbane at Zoo Bar, March 2; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, June 9, 2pm & 6pm.

With a 17-year career as a dance artist in the UK, an MA in Arts Management, 2 years as Program Manager at the London Dance Umbrella Festival, and then 3 working in theatre and dance at The British Council, Gregory Nash needed to keep moving. In January 2001 he took up the position as Director of Ausdance NSW.

Overseas, Ausdance is perceived as a very sophisticated organism, a dynamic network of professional service organisations working hand-in-hand with the profession. On arriving I found that it’s not so well integrated and in fact there is quite a lot of variation in management style and programs between offices. Ausdance is a pretty unique organisation nonetheless. The NSW office is the largest in the network and the best funded ($150, 000 from the NSW Ministry for the Arts in 2001). When I arrived there was a full-time staff of 4 great people and a very diverse portfolio of projects: a regional outreach program, the Dancers etc employment scheme, publications, and conferences.

But it became quickly apparent that we were in major financial trouble, so much so that we looked likely to close on May 31. The board and I needed to work quickly on a survival strategy and to convince the Ministry that we could continue to deliver a service, but within more pragmatic parameters. The Ministry awarded us a one-off stabilisation grant on condition that we restructure. I spent most of 2001 dealing with the implications of that —and with all of the instability and lack of security that comes with that process.

Since July 2001 we have had to make 2 staff members redundant, one of whom was the manager of outreach projects. In doing so we needed to communicate that the outreach work hasn’t stopped. Our 2 principal outreach projects in Western Sydney and Northern Rivers are now at the stage where they can be locally managed. Meanwhile Broken Hill Arts has made an application for funds to take on the project begun in the Far West by Jeff Meiners and Virginia Ferris and an Ausdance team last year.

Once I had a chance to really look at the organisation’s work the biggest surprise was that the independent dance sector didn’t really interface with Ausdance NSW—other than the ones employed by Dancers etc—and perceived it to be an organisation for teachers. The Ministry funds Ausdance to be a service provider for dance in the broadest sense. It is not an education organisation and, if it were, it should surely be funded by the Department of Education and Training. The difficulty is that it began as an association of dance educators and the stated aims and the national constitution are still largely biased towards education. Given that the Ministry for the Arts is the largest stakeholder in what we do, and its expectations are in relation to artistic activity, it’s time to revisit the mission and do some work on perceptions.

I always understood education as participation in artistic projects across the entire community spectrum, not specifically schools, although I never got a good feel for where Ausdance’s focus was.

That’s a classic Ausdance scenario: what does it do and who does it include? The answer so far has been anything, anywhere and anybody. It was clear to me that we could not sustain that financially, and an organisation without focus cannot realistically deliver against objectives. How can we possibly focus our work and aim to demonstrate integrity, thoroughness and rigour if our program is just a free-for-all?

One of the ways we have developed in the last year is by bringing on new board members. The board of 12 is elected from and by the membership every year and provide skills (legal, financial, strategic) that complement the existing dance expertise. At the July AGM last we had 30 members turn up—more than 3 times the attendance in 2000. They had a lot to say, which is great. I have no problem with being challenged and find this level of discussion and confrontation a very stimulating process. Out of that meeting has come some new connections, ideas and directions for the organisation.

I’ve heard people say that you’re a very talented, personable man in the wrong job.

I guess that’s a kind of compliment. Curious that no-one says any of this stuff to me! I spent my first few months here asking for feedback to what we were doing, creating consultation. The people in the dance community that I hear are upset with the directions we’re taking don’t tend to call or write. They seem to gather to mumble in corners. We had a series of consultations in May last year and the best attended—and with the most feisty interactions—was the one targeted at independent artists. I suspect that my biggest critics are the people who have sat on the sofa for years moaning about this or that but never really doing anything pro-active themselves. These people are not a dynamic force in the organisation or in the constituency and I am an advocate of action not rhetoric. Interesting that there’s a perception that the directorship of Ausdance NSW is not a job for a talented or personable man…

You’re quoted as saying that independent dance is a priority for you. How do Sydney Dance Company and the Opera House fit in to the picture.

Well firstly, the support of infrastructural development for independent dance is Ausdance NSW board policy in 2002, not my private whim, although it does sit well with me given my background. The independent dance sector in the UK is politicised, organised and well regarded by the mainstream.

I have worked at our relationship with Sydney Dance Company (SDC) because they too are members of Ausdance and have equal rights to attention as anybody else. The company is an important and influential player in the NSW and international dance community. And I don’t believe that independence needs to equal isolation. It’s surely time to move on from the separatist politics of the 80s. I have worked at building a rapport with companies like SDC, Bangarra and the Australian Ballet because their disengagement from Ausdance ultimately works against the development of new and independent work. SDC has partnered with us on a 2 week choreographic development workshop for professionals in December and will support this substantially by giving 4 studios rent free. This collaboration is as much about their wish to interact with the wider dance community and to nurture the development of talent within the company’s ranks, as our wish to provide a great professional development experience in an ideal setting.

Similarly, I have been talking to the Opera House about dance programming. Any time I appear to be ‘sleeping with the enemy’ I’ve actually got an eye to the rewards we will all reap from greater collaboration. I suppose there’s the fear that this will become so apparently glamorous that our work will only align with what one of our members wittily described as ‘consecrated artists.’ But I think there has to be a certain amount of that, because you need the people who get public attention to in turn bring attention to the artform or the work of the organisation.

Have you noticed any significant differences between dance in Australia and the UK?

The area of policy-making for dance just isn’t as advanced. Ausdance, for example, has aims and objectives that were written 25 years ago which have never been reviewed. We’re formulating a dance policy for Ausdance NSW which will hopefully inform a dance policy for NSW and I see Ausdance NSW as a principal conduit between artists and the funding agencies. Dance UK, a kind of sister organisation to Ausdance, is frequently contacted by the Arts Council, the regional arts bodies and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, to consult on policy. It feels confident in doing so because the membership of Dance UK is the artistic community of the UK—although it too has to represent too many different constituencies. I think that sort of role has been seen as being too audacious for Ausdance and there is a tendency here to keep your head down and not make too much noise in case it’s perceived as vulgar and pushy.

In 2002 the Ministry funding will support a minimal staffing structure—me and 2 part-time admin staff. Money that’s released from full-time posts will be used as seeding for 5 specific projects. Thankfully there’s no let up in people coming to us with ideas, but not all of those ideas can work—our projects this year have to be clearly focused on agreed objectives and have tangible outcomes. We get a lot of requests to organise one-off workshops. I turn these down as the time and resources they consume do not justify the poor take-up. But if, for instance, somebody came with an idea for a performance project over a 3-month period, targeted, say, at carers of small children, and the long-term aim is to set up a performing company of parents and children, that’s interesting because it has longevity, legacy and develops a specific area of practice.

In 2002 we’re running a series of twice-monthly admin training workshops for dance artists looking at budgeting, basic employment law, contracts etc. We’re also presenting a monthly seminar called Talking Dance (March 7, Spreading the Word with Karilyn Brown Director/Audience and Market Development, Australia Council) where key figures in the arts will talk about policy and current issues. We have to make sure there’s a regular platform for artists to learn, contribute, discuss and develop. We have turned the newspaper from a bitty community bulletin into a bi-monthly magazine which is informative and promotes the concept of networking regionally, nationally and internationally. The feedback has been really good and advertising has doubled, so clearly more people are seeing it as a way of getting their message across. Responses from some key cultural providers, like Sydney Festival or the Opera House, has been particularly good as this is a new engagement. I get emails from presenters and artists overseas saying they had no idea this really interesting stuff was going on in NSW.

I talk about creativity being the central spine of our work, and then the spine radiates these other wonderful things like community participation, educational interface and audience development. We’re working for and with a broad constituency of theatre-based dance artists, community-based dance artists, innovative teachers and others who, if they are moving their work forward, are carrying the whole constituency forward. By doing so they provide access and opportunities for everyone along the route, and that has to be a good thing.

Ausdance NSW, Pier 4 The Wharf, Hickson Road, Walsh Bay, 2000,
tel 02 9241 4022 fax (02) 9241 1331

Garth Paine is a Melbourne-based sound artist whose recent ‘immersive’ audio-visual environment, Gestation (exhibited at RMIT Gallery in December), is a development of work he undertook as the Australia Council for the Arts’ New Media Arts Fellow at RMIT University in 2000. Paine has a long history of developing responsive installation works, having designed sound and interactive exhibitions at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre and the Immigration Museum, while his installation work Reeds (with Chris Langton) was presented by the Melbourne International Festival in 2000. He has also been commissioned extensively in Australia, the United Kingdom and Germany, producing compositions and sound designs for over 30 film, theatre, dance and installation works in the last 10 years—including Belvoir Company B and Company in Space.

Gestation is a playful work, using real time sound and vision generated from the movement patterns made by visitors within the installation. There are no mouse clicks here, only pure sonic viscerality. In an empty room, you wave your arms, move your elbow, run around, and the resulting sounds are like aliens breathing (thanks to software the artist has written which uses video sensing to translate light intensity onto sound algorithms). It’s a kinaesthetic experience, this ambient-generative sound space, turning the body into a forcefield of energy. And it doesn’t stop there: a secondary gallery displays a large video projection of real foetuses in the frame of an ultra-sound grid (from videos collected over 5 years, and animated by Kat Mew and Clint Hannaford). Enough dynamic visitor activity in the sound chamber generates ‘new’ foetuses.

There are 2 legs to my practice: the compositional work, less improvisatory and more considered in its forms, and the interactive installation works. I’m interested in contextualising new media in the human domain, and especially in placing the human body as the central ‘controller’ of the generation of any output. Furthermore, while I define certain aspects—the aesthetic and the general scope and functionality—the work creates an individualistic and momentary response. I’m interested in interactivity not as a triggered response of pre-made content, but in content made in real time, responding as streamed data, constantly changing according to the input it’s receiving from your behaviour.

In order for new media art to become culturally important, it has to reflect something about the human condition. And to be relevant enough to be collected into cultural institutions and have broad public exposure, the technology should be transparent (at international festivals of electronic arts you see a lot of technical feats without any point). Gestation is actually an explicitly humanist statement—it moves beyond the sense that your behaviour patterns are generative of your environment to those behaviours actually generating ‘new’ human life. It’s a statement about the connection between responsive and interactive work, and the human context in which it’s placed.

Is there also a connection to the ‘docile bodies’ produced by surveillance? After all, the work uses security camera technology.

No, there’s nothing recorded so there’s no capturing of the body for observation in another environment. I think of the body as the central ‘catalyst’ from the perspective that in our lives if we want to express something we use our body. Since sound is such an abstract and emotive form, I would hope that Gestation produces external and internal reflection; which is what I think art should do.

Are the sounds in Gestation entirely produced ‘on-the-fly’ in real time, or does it use samples?

The more recognisable—the baby giggle and breath—are generated from spectral analysis files of original sounds, resynthesised and reassembled for particular activity in the space. There’s a light level of evolutionary sound; a level of memory generates slight variations when it comes back to rest. A little movement of the arm creates a nuance that’s specifically yours.

I understand the work is not a commentary on technology and reproduction, so I’ll gloss over the sexual politics or any unintended foetus-fetishising in the act of viewing the ultrasounds. Nevertheless, it’s striking that unlike a lot of contemporary art, there’s no sense of your work trying to alienate the visitor—it’s a comforting, utopian space, dare I say pre-oedipal.

The sound chamber is supposed to be womb-like. The mind-body split is so embedded in our culture—their interrelationship is more interesting to me than deconstructing. Sound is the most wonderful and powerful medium in the sense that it’s fluid and viscous, so you sort of mould it. It’s about densities and textures, you can pull it apart, form it into shapes. I think of it as quite a physical, visual thing. And yet, rather than an image, a detached and abstract thing, the sound physically enters your body, it enters your ears and vibrates your organs. You are not separate from sound but totally immersed in the ‘fluid.’

Fluxus artists Earl Brown and Morton Feldman and others were interested in making their sound work very plastic, establishing a structure as a composer where every performance would be different. Similarly, I’m interested in getting out of the way, not imposing pre-made content on people, but creating a set of mappings that allow each person to generate their own performance—their own experience.

In Gestation, sound is the media of connection between the sound gallery and the video. With ultrasound, sound is applied as a way of visualising the otherwise invisible ‘information’. So in this case, the activities that create this audible environment in turn allow you to visualise the lifeform you’ve created in the second gallery.

Finally, what about your experience of being a sound artist in Melbourne?
I find it frustratingly impossible to get support for exhibiting here in Australia. There are the equipment challenges, and so on, but my works are exhibited overseas quite a bit. In 2002, Gestation will be shown at Florida State Art Gallery, and I have a show in Paris (people seem to tune in). We need a research centre that supports the exhibition of sound art and the development of techniques and approaches to sound art. Sound is the most innovative of the digital arts—an entirely new genre that can’t draw on the patterns that existed previously (it’s only since Cage that ‘found sound’ has become acceptable as a compositional object). We’ve had to find ways of exploring digital sound—textural density and so on—whereas in visual multimedia, the paradigms have continued within an essentially filmic model.

Gestation, Garth Paine, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, December 10-21 . Garth has just been appointed Lecturer in Music Technology at De Montfort University in Leicester.

Last December, Brisbane’s South Bank and the Queensland Conservatorium provided a relaxed, hospitable ambience for the 2001 Visible Evidence Conference, a 4-day event that brought together 60 documentary theorists from North and South America, the UK and Europe, New Zealand and Australia. Organised by Griffith University, convened by Dr Jane Roscoe from Griffith’s School of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, and sponsored by the Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy (CMP), Visible Evidence IX was a rare opportunity to participate in a challenging multi-disciplinary discussion about an international screen genre as old as the cinema itself, one that continues to excite passionate minds.
Leading the charge, Michael Renov, Jean-Luc Lioult, Malin Wahlberg and Gillian Leahy traced the discursive boundaries of the documentary avant-garde. The challenge of combining creative experimentation with documentary authenticity (Lioult), the “expressive and phenomenological impact of temporalisation in non-fictitious films” (Wahlberg) and the legacy of pioneer avant-garde filmmakers in Australia (Leahy) served to contextualise Renov’s assertion that through an act of critical reclamation, “the documentary field can be enlarged and re-energised.”

A way of transcending the old dichotomy between lyrical and didactic documentary schools was outlined in John Hookham and Gary MacLennan’s paper, “Magical Transformations: Aesthetic Challenges for the New Documentary”. It proposed a renaissance of magic realism and the poetic documentary tradition’s attempts to “discover” the genuine complexity of life-as-it-is, and to express it with “exuberance and sincerity.” Novelist Beth Spencer advocated the cross fertilisation of fictive and factual in the research and writing phase of her work as a highly experimental stratagem which aims “to explore the place where emotion and intellect are inseparable.” In an historical paper, “Captain Bligh’s Chronometer”, Daryl Dellora (The Edge of the Possible, A Mirror to the People) revealed his current research findings for a fascinating historical documentary work in progress.

Evening screen seminars included Norwegian scholar Gunnar Strom, and artist-filmmakers Lee Whitmore and Dennis Tupicoff’s presentations on the irrepressible capacity of animation to distil the essence of the actual. A conversation with documentary filmmaker John Hughes and US documentary theoretician and author Michael Renov at the Tivoli Theatre was another highlight.

Finally, one evident sign of a real paradigmatic shift in documentary form emerged—the work of the Labyrinth Project at USC’s Annenberg Centre for Communication. The research initiative, directed by Marsha Kinder since 1997, is pushing the creative and conceptual boundaries of interactive (non-linear) narrativity in new, evocative directions. Mysteries and Desires: Searching the Worlds of John Rechy and Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill both demonstrated the existence of largely uncharted psychological and cinematic potentials of interactive interface design to inform as well as ‘touch’ the seeker.

By integrating the visual principles and narrative experiments of early film avant-garde (Vertov, Ruttmann, Lye, etc) and the temporal distortions of French new wave auteurs (Resnais, Rivette, Marker, etc) with unpredictable, sensual forms of interactivity, the Labyrinth Project is consciously reclaiming the dream state as a primary model and mode of multi-dimensional, reality-based, cinematic communication.

Despite the cultural and commercial implications of Big Brother and its ilk, anyone who attended Visible Evidence IX would be hard to convince that we are entering a ‘post-documentary’ era. The weight of submitted evidence suggests that, more probably, the ongoing hybridisation of the documentary medium is a response by filmmakers not only to new technology but to more inclusive, emergent, definitions of ‘truth’ as the living synthesis of intimately related environmental and human events.

The more we see the screen as a mirror
rather than an escape hatch, the more
we will be prepared for what is to come.
Hugh Gray, What is Cinema? Selected essays by André Bazin (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1967)

Visible Evidence IX Conference, Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, Dec 17-20, 2001

Busy, overworked artists will feel like tearing out their hair before they finish page 5 of a new publication from the Australian Business Arts Foundation (AbaF)—called Business Arts Partnerships—because it is long-winded, repetitive and poorly presented. Resist! Buried in the bureaucratic language is a great deal of very useful information about how arts organisations can win cash and in-kind support from Australian companies.
Many artists and arts companies have tried and failed to get businesses to back their activities. Their failure is hardly surprising. AbaF’s executive director, Winsome McCaughey (a former Lord Mayor of Melbourne) points out in her foreword that business support of the arts in Australia is “abysmally low”, with just one per cent of companies supporting the arts, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The most recent figures put the amount at $29 million, compared with $281 million in sponsorship for sport.

AbaF’s job is to increase business support for the arts. AbaF evolved from the Australia Foundation for Culture and the Humanities created in 1995, following a $3 million donation from the man who started Australia’s biggest private company, packaging giant Visy Industries, Richard Pratt. Pratt, whose personal wealth is $3.3 billion according to Business Review Weekly (May 2001), is a well-known arts supporter, in the past spending an estimated $10 million a year on personally selected arts organisations. AbaF operates at arms length from the government within the portfolio of the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts.

For arts companies that do manage to secure corporate partners, the results can be spectacular. In 1999, after Global Arts Link (formerly the Ipswich Regional Art Gallery) teamed up with Queensland Government-owned electricity company, CS Energy, visits to the centre jumped 460% in 12 months, from 16,000 to 90,000 a year! The chief executive of CS Energy, Richard Cottee, is also delighted with the benefits of the partnership. Cottee says: “We have offered money and in-kind support, and in return we have gained brand recognition. More importantly, we are demonstrating what kind of business we want to build—business that develops relationships with the community.”

The Australian Chamber Orchestra and computer giant IBM also have had a successful partnership, as have MICMusic (Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition) and car-maker DaimlerChrysler.

The booklet promotes the idea of partnerships—not sponsorship—between cultural organisations and businesses. Sponsorships are one-sided relationships, essentially a donation that typically pays for a one-off project, according to AbaF. Partnerships are reciprocal, long-term relationships based on benefits for both sides.

The booklet builds its case for taking a partnership approach to raising money from businesses. It then outlines how cultural organisations can build up their own business case to win a partner, suggests how to find an appropriate partner, how to present the deal and, if successful, how to manage the relationship.

In the centre of the guide are some very helpful examples of what the authors of the guide (who are not identified) are talking about. This is especially important given that the writing in the guide is sometimes complicated. Take, for example, business needs, defined as: “the requirements that must be met for an enterprise to be able to produce business outcomes.” Then, business assets: “the resources that the enterprise uses to meet its business needs so as to achieve its business outcomes.”

What is missing from the definitions, and from the guide as a whole, are more actual examples taken from arts organisations themselves, of what the authors are trying to explain. While there are a few inspirational quotes from company CEOs and arts organisations, the publication would have been brought to life (and made easier to understand) with the use of case studies: short real-life examples summarising the experiences of arts companies that have successfully attracted partnerships.

And the guide could stand much less foreshadowing of what is to come in the next section or paragraph. That said, the guide’s overall structure is good, and the information presented is well thought out and comprehensive, such as the section about managing the partnership.

Despite the difficulties, skim-reading this guide is NOT recommended. Important—nay, astonishing—facts are among its paragraphs, essential information for anyone planning to embark on a corporate partnership. Take this little bombshell sitting quietly at the bottom of page 7 about the “real” cost of raising private funding: “Some experienced [arts] organisations report that it can cost up to $5 for every $6 of private funds raised.” That fact certainly jerked my highlighter into action.

At the back of the booklet are some useful appendices, including further reading and relevant websites, and some statistical data about the arts.

Hopefully, the companies targeted by arts organisations for support will have read AbaF’s companion publication, The Business Case for Cultural Investment, prepared specifically for the business sector by Australia’s fifth largest accounting company, Arthur Andersen.

For more information and copies of Business Arts Partnerships, visit
their website

Nicholas Zurbrugg, academic and poet, born February 1, 1947, died Leicester, England, October 15, 2001.

Nicholas Zurbrugg, who tragically died of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 54, made an invaluable contribution to contemporary art and cultural theory, and more specifically, to the study and promotion of the postmodern multimedia avant-garde. Nicholas, as an academic, critic, poet and a tireless promoter of postmodern creativity and thought, was a peerless innovator and contributor to our local cultural and intellectual life.

But Nicholas’s inestimable legacy as a highly energetic and groundbreaking author, conference organiser, curator, editor and artist needs to be measured in substantial global terms. Such were the dazzling and prolific aesthetic, cultural and theoretical interests of his life and oeuvre. He was someone who touched many different people in many different contexts.

Nicholas’s sudden death left many of his friends and peers with the painful realisation that no longer will our lives be graced by his playful pun-encrusted erudition, compassion, lucid and self-questioning intelligence and zany, surreal humour. Nicholas’s horizon-breaking quest to explore the experimental arts in their own terms suggested a courageous and far-reaching capacity to connect fluxus artists with theorists, language poets with sound artists, video artists with filmmakers, performance artists with philosophers.

Born in 1947, and educated at the universities of Neuchatel, East Anglia and St John’s College, Oxford, Nicholas was a brilliant student and a generous and popular teacher who consistently refused to observe the niceties of the modern university. Whilst he was a student in Switzerland, Nicholas was the editor of his own cult journal, Stereo Headphones, which was dedicated to concrete poetry. Between 1978 and 1995 he was an academic of comparative literature at Griffith University, after which he became Professor of English and Cultural Studies at De Montfort University, Leicester, England. There he also became Director of the Centre for Contemporary Arts.

At Oxford, Nicholas did his PhD on Proust and Beckett, which was published as a book in 1988. Among his other numerous publications were The Parameters of Postmodernism (1993), Jean Baudrillard: Art and Artefact (1997), The ABCs of Robert Lax (co-edited with David Miller, 1988) and Critical Vices: The Myths of Postmodern Theory (1999). Forthcoming are William Burroughs and the Postmodern Avant-Garde and Positively Postmodern: The Multimedia Muse in America: Interviews with Contemporary Avant-Garde.

Despite his popularity as a teacher and colleague, after 17 years at Griffith University and 4 frustrating attempts to become an associate professor, his pioneering achievements were recognised abroad at De Montfort University. There, like here, Nicholas endeavoured through lectures, conferences and exhibitions to unite critical theory with creative practice. He always strove to forge new connections between generations of artists and artforms. In this context, he was unique.

He loved to mix with artists, poets and novelists as he felt a profound affinity with them. No-one, to my knowledge, personally knew so many artists, thinkers and writers central to the unfolding narrative of postmodern techno-creativity. Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, JG Ballard, Jean Baudrillard, William Burroughs, John Cage, Henri Chopin, Orlan, Michael Snow, Stelarc, Bill Viola and Paul Virilio were among his friends. Nicholas perfected the interview form as a means of appreciating the complex ideas and forms of the new media arts.

He continuously and equally supported both the more established and recent figures of the new experimental arts: he was always loyal to his creative and theoretical peers and open to exciting new cyber artists like David Blair and filmmakers like Ned Zedd.

Throughout his career, Nicholas was always interested in exploring the deeper meanings embedded in modernism and postmodernism as they relate to the ways artists use new technologies in their work. He exhibited, time and again, much critical valour in championing unfashionable academic and curatorial causes and a pragmatic speculative knowledge of the new media arts that was truly comprehensive in scope and experimental in nature.

In his recent books, especially Critical Vices, Nicholas advocated the compelling necessity to define a new criticism of postmodern technological creativity. He rightly criticised the theorists of the 1970s and 80s who were limited by their inappropriate critical languages, pessimism and non-reflexive critical laziness. Nicholas wisely urged the necessity of returning to the demanding tasks of analysing, observing, interpreting and evaluating the multimedia arts of today in order to appreciate their significance in our lives.

All of us will dearly miss him. He was a very good friend of mine. A brother, a mentor. I will miss his contagious laughter, sparkling intelligence and abundant generosity of spirit. There is not a day that passes that I do not think of him.

Obsession, catastrophe, haunting—contemporary dramaturgy turns on an event which subverts the system of things. A rupture in which the contours of the incident—its wave frequency—replay interminably without repetition. This is not merely a psychological condition but the inverted theatricality of social disaster.
The Secret Room project of Cuoccolo/Bosetti risks representing the catastrophe of the female subject and her disastrous existence. Its recent production Room of Evidence is the prequel for the successful and prolonged season of The Secret Room (RT40 p12), a dinner party performance of confessions. A prologue has however its own dramaturgy. We meet the characters, locate the settings, hear of the subplots and likely scenarios. It is also an event.

Room of Evidence begins with a journey through the city in a mini-bus. An enigmatic driver takes a small group of 8 through streets that he resites in the realms of history or myth. Here is where a grandmother gave birth to 12 children; over there is where the flooded river turned back the army. And through a lighted window in a charming Carlton cottage we can see where the hero spurned his young mistress. On one night, this was the room in which a woman on the bus watched her unsuspecting boyfriend in front of the television. This is the mise-en-scène of discovery, the mapping of unsuspected territory.

Then there is the arrival—an empty house, the CD player, a nature documentary on television, books and other personal possessions scattered around the different rooms. It is a modern house, white and sterile—objects have not quite found their home. The adventurous ones proceed upstairs to survey the horizon. OOPS—there is a shower running! Someone is in the house!

The emergence of the woman is primal. She of the white bathrobe, the image of Psycho interrupted. “Who are you? What are you doing in my house?” she demands. Invasion, violation, threat—we are all guilty. This event re-enacts the violent meeting of viewer and subject. Over the next long while, we negotiate our relations as audience to her, the female actor performing the woman at home. She is beautiful, tense, provoked and yet, gracious. She accommodates our awkwardness.

There are 3 more stages—the room where she shows us the family album, the photos, the old school books, the scrawled letters, the coded messages from an older man to a woman he has shamed. The script is already written. The performer Roberta Bosetti is strangely detached through this scene. As a moment in dialogue with the audience however it opens up collective associations with childhood.

Then there is the room with the bed. My favourite part of this more private encounter is the bicycle wheel whose dynamo revs up an illuminated Madonna. It recalls my first night in Italy when my boyfriend and I were given refuge in a church hall that we shared with a similar icon through the night. Even without this personal memory, there is something peculiarly ironic about the sexual pulse of a young girl being relayed through the luminosity of the Holy Virgin. But this is not a room of sweetness but of disclosure. Particularly for my group: very tentative, incomplete and a little embarrassing. There is too much left unsaid, but then that happens too.

The final scene of parting occurs in a room of paired shoes. Here the woman can try on her outside personas. There are many possibilities. She will escort us to the door and wave good-bye. She looks wistful.

Director Renato Cuoccolo talks of this project as a new theatre, where the boundaries of life and art are blurred. Can you imagine having a performance with a small but paying audience in your home every night? And he also talks of the precision with which different audiences reproduce their response to the drama of a woman alone. By crushing perspective, we are implicated in the figure of Bosetti as the feminine, whether lover, muse or enigma. The project reminds me of Ingmar Bergman and his relationship with Liv Ullman—there is the same intimacy of observation, the same stuttered telling and the same tension of suspended desire. It is as if the theatre has become simultaneously cinematic and unconscionably personal. And our role in the woman’s story remains an open question, to be further tested as The Secret Room becomes a trilogy later this year.

Room of Evidence, director Renato Cuoccolo, performer Roberta Bosetti, secret address, Carlton, Melbourne, opened Nov 12, 2001

The performative history of terror was first rehearsed in thought as myth. Hesiod…describes the birth of this terror from a curious union: the marriage of Kytheria and Ares, eros and war. The conjunction bears a malignant fruit, the twins Panic (Phobos) and terror (Deimos), the stage stars of the theatre of war…
A Kubiak, Stages of Terror

I have over the past few months been haunted by 2 images. One is predictable enough: ‘Ground Zero’ it came to be called, the compacted remains of the World Trade Center towers. I did not experience it at first hand. The image that haunts me has been mediated by TV, framed by it, reduced to a manageable size, and was repeated sufficient times over the days succeeding the attack to ensure that it lodged securely in my mental image bank. (For a time CNN used it as a bridge to sashay out of the latest instalment in its ‘War Against Terror’ and into an ad break.) Still it was an image of undeniable potency: shot from above, the tangled mass of steel, concrete, glass, and presumably, though invisibly, human remains were swathed for weeks in a mist of smoke and dust, such that it looked like an ancient marsh filled with rotting material but seething with emergent life.

The second image was more particular but has recently begun to conflate in my imagination with the first. The Wooster Group’s production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, opened in Melbourne only 5 weeks after the September 11 attack, while the wounds were still red raw. It took place in a metal construction 2 levels high, which surrounded, dwarfed, and finally trapped the humans working within it, much as the metal remains of the Trade Center trapped the bodies of the workers within, or indeed much as the once-standing towers trapped the humans who worked within them in the ceaseless engine of production.

Yank, the protagonist of The Hairy Ape, believes that he controls the machinery of the liner on which he is chief stoker:

Hell in de stokehole? Sure it takes a man to work in hell. Hell, sure, dat’s my fav’rite climate. I eat it up! I get fat on it! It’s me makes it hot! It’s me makes it roar! It’s me makes it move! Sure, on’y for me everyting stops. It all goes dead, get me? De noise and smoke and all de engines movin’ de woild, dey stop.

The ontological contradiction at the heart of the play is there unknowingly in that last sentence. A man may think that he moves the engine but it is actually ‘de engines’ that move ‘de woild.’ It was the ensemble skill and the conceptual brilliance of the Wooster Group that they were able to use the very illusion of representational theatre to reinforce that essential paradox. All aspects of the production—choreography, sound design, lighting, stage management—worked to develop the illusion that the metal construction could be made to move, could be shifted, could be ‘worked’ by the humans working on it (a couple of times, Willem Dafoe as Yank with seeming superhuman effort ‘lifted up’ the enormous grid with a roar of triumph—the reference was of course to King Kong and his even more illusionistic filmic brethren). In fact the set remained implacable, unchanging throughout and what we were most aware of was the sheer skill necessary for the actors to survive on this dangerous construction.

What did change, however, were the locations that the set represented throughout the play: stokehole, promenade deck, Fifth Avenue New York (the World Trade Center once occupied the bottom end of Fifth Avenue), a prison and finally the monkey house at the zoo. Wherever Yank went, whatever aspect of the world he encountered it had the same shape, made of the same material, needed to be negotiated in the same way—so that finally the set became experientially what it already was conceptually and metaphorically; an image of the world itself, the engine that will seduce us to believe in our own power but will finally trap us and crush us to death.

In the November issue of Interview magazine is a remarkable photograph of Ground Zero by Bruce Weber. The mound of rubble towers above the firemen, policemen, ambulance men (the current working class heroes—the Yanks) most of whom stand, for this moment at least, immobile, facing the impossible task of peeling back the girders and concrete that have crushed their fellow humans. In the surrounding mist, almost indistinguishable from the skyscrapers that hover in the background, are a series of tall wooden scaffoldings lining the skyline. Are they part of the original construction or have they been placed there to hold the rubble in, to stop it spreading across the city? They are Brechtian in their insubstantiality, bits of stage machinery to remind us of what had been there and of how unreal the whole sham of the specular actually is. Two pages earlier at the start of his photo essay, Weber has a view of Manhattan from the sea, as we remember it, the twin towers still dominating the downtown skyline. Now it is here, now it is gone. Presence/absence.

The relationship between these 2 states is what Anthony Kubiak sees as “the implicit dialectic of the stage.” And the heart of that relationship, the shift from being to non-being, he names as “terror”.

Terror, the threat of non-being, is what calls life into question and so gives it its reality.
Terror is what, in the catharsis of danger and pain, re-presents life as life.

Kubiak’s book is called Stages of Terror (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana). It was written in 1991. It is an attempt, no less, to write a history of theatre as terror. More than that, it argues that theatre’s ability to name that terror at the base of life has always been one step ahead of the society in which it has played. That the culture of perception which it has engendered in all its forms has, far from mirroring its society, found ways of developing for that society an understanding of the terrifying interplay between power, production, coercion, ideology and identity—an interplay that is based upon the application of terror and its close allies, violence, pain and panic. This may seem to be a bleak reading of theatre and of history itself. I don’t think so. It is bracing to witness with clarity the powers that cloak themselves in all sorts of coercive masks within our society and it is true that theatre above all is the artform that can, that has and that should reveal those masks—even if it does so (as in Restoration comedy) by applying them even more rigidly.

Terror lay at the centre of The Hairy Ape. The visit of the rich society girl to the stokehole of the ship is a moment of ontological terror for Yank, the stoker—simultaneously he becomes aware of who he is, of who he isn’t, of who made him what he is, and of how hoodwinked he has been. None of this operates at the conscious level; terror this deep is unsignifiable, unspeakable (captured acutely in the Wooster production in a moment of long silence in which all that moved on stage were Dafoe’s eyes as he tried to register the implications of her presence) but it is there and it drives him to his own futile terrorist attack against New York and to his final annihilation in the zoo, crushed in the arms of the ape. One imagines that for Eugene O’Neill that form of death suggested a man succumbing to the fatal strength of his own primal power. In the Wooster production it is clear that it is Kate Valk (who played the girl) who wears the monkey suit—here, the real power over life and death lies in the hands of the oppressor, and whatever is repressed will return to destroy you.

Four days after the attack on the twin towers, Patti Smith wrote: “Once, in another century, I penned with arrogance, ‘I am an American, and I have no guilt.’ Now I feel compelled to utter, ‘I am an American artist, and I feel guilty about everything.’ In spite of this I will not turn away. I will keep working. This I perceive as duty. As I pray to God that in days to come, I will not awake and rise with the blood of the Afghan people dripping from my hands” (Interview magazine).

Well, we have witnessed how little effect her prayer has had. State terror has launched all its self righteous power pitilessly against a people redefined as the enemy because their home was the supposed source of an act of anti-state terror. At the time of writing, the central protagonist, ‘The World’s Most Wanted Man’, has slipped through the holes in the net, which is to be expected because we need to ‘want’ him more than we need to have him.

All this is constructed reality, pretence, feeding our desires for Violence while it distracts our attention from how much the new world order is oppressing us too. Theatre has foreseen this pretence: “The history of theatre also seems to tell us quite plainly that what is seen is in essence false because what is seen is inessential. The ‘ocular proof’, then, is always a lie, because it is always infected by the desire to see, and to see what one desires” (Kubiak).

How can our theatre respond to such bleak times? With empathy? “I’m not persuaded by those who insist that theater’s proper corrective to these ultra-ironic times is a return to empathy” (Alisa Solomon, “Irony and Deeper Significance”, Theater, vol 31, no 3, New Haven Connecticut, 2001). With harmony? “Even when the purgations of terror are explained in terms of the pleasure they produce, the final result of that pleasure more often than not seems to be something like stasis, stability, or harmony (Harmonium, sister of the terrors), a ‘harmony’ that functions as a cloaking of violence” (Kubiak). It is, finally, the excoriating force of theatre’s perception of the masks of terror that is our truest ally in confronting them. “Just as pain and terror both cause and effect each other, so, in its articulation of terror, theatre operates as both cause and resistance to that terror and oppression” (Kubiak).

The Hairy Ape, Eugene O’Neill, The Wooster Group, Melbourne Festival, The CUB Malthouse, Oct 19-Nov 6

Four recent Melbourne productions dig into hot political issues around diversity, exploitation and conflict. Using humour and acknowledging complexity, this kind of work reinvigorates contemporary, issue-based theatre.

Beyond the Gate of Heavenly Peace centres on young Chinese people in Australia trying to study, work and survive. Some are ‘illegals’, with expired visas. They change names to make it harder for immigration officials to locate them. ‘Johnson’ and ‘Lincoln’ share a flat with 2 young women. Amongst them moves an older man, the spirit of China, the Australian goldfields, the past of all Chinese.

The writing is strong and phrases are memorable: “The Chiko roll was invented by a Chinaman out for revenge.”; “Maybe we are better people in a foreign country.” There is no simplistic veneration of freedom or democracy contrasted with the repression of China. Characters are complex, not good, not what they seem, apart from some 2-dimensional Anglo characters.

Judy, a self described “Chinese princess”, lost a lot when she came to Australia to make something of herself. She collects the rent, does the shopping. She has contacts. Yet Judy tips off immigration when one of the others has an expired visa. Why? There’s less competition when there are not so many of us. She is ambivalent about returning to China, but cynically founds a ‘Melbourne-Chinese Pro-democracy Movement’, to which she has no commitment. As a result, she is accepted as a legal migrant. Playing the system works.

The rhythm of Beyond the Gate is the slow, regular beat of conventional theatre, with few changes in pace. However, a striking live music combination of violin and electric guitar works with the performers and video backdrop of Tiananmen Square, soldiers, and Melbourne freeways in the rain, to yield an insight into lives lived quietly, out of sight. This was director David Branson’s last work [see Obituary page 12].

Polyglot’s High Rise—a puppetry adventure was based at the Carlton Housing Commission flats. High wind and belting rain drove Sunday night’s outdoor event indoors. Many performers and the bigger puppets remained outside. A lot was lost in this transition but the energy and engagement of all those involved was infectious, the audience drawn into a world of coping with adversity. Outdoors in Melbourne is like that.

A crowd of mainly non-residents jammed into a smallish space to see this classic community theatre piece: stories collected from residents dropped into a narrative device. A child chases her scarf one evening as it blows through various flats in the high rise. Stories are told by local gems like Johnny Shakespeare and Ernie Sims. Clusters of school children with wooden pigeon-puppets flap by as the scarf blows on to the next point. Brightly coloured wooden boats sail through as stories of dislocation from all over the world are told. The same old stories, but fresh and intense because they are true. You know the child is telling his mother’s story of walking across Somalia. You know he was born on that journey and his mother really lifted an abandoned child from the road and placed it under a tree because she couldn’t carry two. (A collective cringe as this child says his mother will never forget what Australia has done for her. So grateful. We’re probably all thinking of the others, the ‘queue-jumpers’.)

High Rise—the music, stories and puppetry—seemed to be owned by these people. Few teenagers, but that’s a different project. Perhaps the next step is to build something beyond these narrative devices which allow the telling of individual stories. Is there a new story that can be built and told through a project such as this?

Melbourne Worker’s Theatre’s Magpie program notes suggest another classic community project, earnest and didactic: a “reconciliation play”, exploring contact between Indigenous and non-indigenous people. However, beginning with loud Mambo (Mabo) music and jokes, the audience is drawn into a complicated world of hilarity and blackness, past and present.

There’s Captain Cook in full naval regalia, standing pompous in braid and hat, gazing into the distance, completely naked below the waist. Elsewhere, children prepare for an Australia Day parade. Little Moses wants to carry a spear. The teacher insists on clapping sticks. His friend ends up in a grass skirt, the ‘gentle natives’ amongst the awful cardboard tall ships and swagman’s hats. As we watch these snatches from times past and hear jokes from the MC—the black/white Magpie—we hear a terrible story. A middle class man (Henry) and his wife stumble into their lounge room, half drunk, in shock. He was driving. They hit someone. They panicked and fled. He drinks more. Should they call the police? They are immobilised by guilt and fear of the consequences of the terrible thing they have done. They left a young black man dying in the gutter. They try variations on the story: I wasn’t drunk. He stepped in front of the car. He was dead before we got to him. Someone else will stop and help.

Two stories interweave. This haunted couple react to the accident as we learn about the man killed. He was Moses and he had a life.

The action takes place in numerous sites, at times diluting the intensity through its distance from the audience—not so for audience members dragged on stage to sit in the “cheap seats”! Magpie generally avoids clichés. Moses does a stretch in prison, but just as you fear the vision of him hanging by a sheet, there’s a surprising turn. He argues with an inmate who wants a cigarette. Moses says the man should say sorry first. He refuses. They banter and fight. Fucken this, fucken that. Resigned, Moses hands him the cigarette packet. He takes one and then chucks the packet on the ground. They look at each other. The white guy picks up the packet, throws it at Moses and mumbles “Sorry.” These were electric performances pushing old arguments and tensions in new directions. The depth of exploration of these urban Australian lives includes full black/white humanity in what could have been political diatribe. Even the Anglo characters are interesting.

Secrets is the annual performance of the Women’s Circus. Eleven years on, people come out on a cold night and pay to sit in a big windy shed to see a play about sexual abuse. What does that say? We can handle politicised theatre when it is like this. A row of old offices high up at the end of this huge shed is painted as a little set of suburban kitchens. Doors slam. We hear shouting and see the peeking through blinds, seeing what goes on but saying nothing. Keeping secrets.

Below, the huge space fills with masses of women belting around at full throttle. Chants and songs blend the wildness of kids’ music with that sinister edge to childhood innocence in a world of dark secrets. Two beautiful clowns are old style ‘50s Mums’, trying to get on the trapeze without showing their undies, clutching handbags and gloves: feminine modesty as a historical joke, a physical gag. There are the benign, friendly adults on stilts towering above the kiddies in gingham dresses in the schoolyard. Then there are the other adults who come at night, in the dark: “There is a small spot on the ceiling and I am not here.” Women’s stories of abuse are told simply and elegantly in narrative or physical form. Stunning images include black figures hanging from blood-red tissue, spinning in huge space. Another image is of a woman climbing the backs of others and falling, defeated. A later mirror image of this event shows a joyful ascent and release as her body is supported, thrown into space, trusting, caught and held by others. Even the riggers and techies bring a physical beauty of their own in the fast and easy competence with which ropes are flung, dropped and caught up again. This circus has always been physical and political, but is developing their style of sophistication and patterning, evident in the writing and performance of Secrets.

To roll along on waves of laughter as you understand the losses of urban Aboriginal people; to bounce with joy at the physical exuberance of women who have been abused and told their tales and learnt to fly like children again. Old-style didactic theatre is too heavy handed for this stirred-up cultural mix. A newer, politicised theatre has caught up with the present again.

Beyond the Gate of Heavenly Peace, director David Branson, writers John Ashton & Jian Guo Wu, performers Lorraine Lim, David Lih, Warwick Yuen, Virginia Cusworth, Minming Cheng, Phil Roberts, Fanny Hanusin and Ronaldo Morelos, Carlton Courthouse, Nov 7-24; High Rise, a puppetry adventure, Polyglot, Carlton highrise flats, Nov 17-18; there will be a version of this project performed at North Melbourne Town Hall in 2002; Magpie, writers Richard Frankland & Melissa Reeves; director Andrea James; performers Lou Bennett, Richard Bligh, Syd Brisbane, LeRoy Parsons, Bernadette Schwerdt, Maryanne Sam, Melbourne Worker’s Theatre, ArtsHouse, Nov 15-Dec 1; Secrets, writer Andrea Lemon, director Sarah Cathcart, Women’s Circus, Shed 14, Melbourne Docklands, Nov 22-Dec 8, 2001

Fiona Winning is Director of Sydney’s Performance Space at one of the most difficult stages of its provocative history as home to artistic practice that doesn’t fit the standard categories. Winning was a theatre worker and actor in Queensland working with the Popular Theatre Troupe and La Boite, moving towards a more community-based practice in the mid 80s with Street Arts. Sydney became her home in the 90s. She worked as Artistic Co-ordinator of Death Defying Theatre (DDT) from 1990 to1995 collaborating directly with culturally diverse communities in Western Sydney. Winning also made connections between the company and members of the performance community working at PS. After freelancing she became Artistic Director of Playworks, the national women performance writers network. And then in 1999…

I believe that it’s an important conceptual and physical space for the development of hybridity. The community around PS was a vital culture I wanted to work with, be an integral part of.

I’ve learned a lot in the job about making strategic choices because the reality is that there’s less money than there used to be and prices, like rent, have increased at the same level as the rest of the world. So we’ve had to make choices about focussing our resources on particular areas of practice, like performance, which has such a history here.

The other learning curve—and one I hadn’t expected to be so important—is the political arena that you have to operate in. The DDT thing had a far more specific agenda than a national organisation like PS. For example, at PS you’re not just responding to the Small to Medium Performing Arts Sector enquiry, but also to the Myer Visual Arts Enquiry and Marketing for the Visual Arts research and to a range of others because there are all these worlds we operate in as well as performance—new media, visual arts, community, satellites like antistatic and Pacific Wave.

We’re mostly dealing with the representatives of politicians. We’re not a large cultural institution. We don’t have the profile or kinds of colleagues and friends who are powerful in the business or political sectors. We have an active board involved in talking to a range of people—it’s partly about a series of networks that interlock into a bigger conversation. What I love about it is the diversity. It’s certainly argumentative. I like the engagement. While I have to take responsibility for a lot of things, I don’t have to take responsibility for making the art. The artists do that.

Some people might say I’m a meddling producer. So I care about the outcome and how they got there but ultimately it’s the artists who….

There’s lots of good stuff coming up but one of the issues about where we are now is the number of artists who are operating under extraordinarily difficult conditions. A lot of experienced artists are struggling to get 1 project up a year, so imaginations and practices are inhibited and diminished by the current economic climate. Rosalind Crisp (choreographer, Omeo Studio) talks about a time 10 years ago when a community of dance practitioners who lived on the dole or part time work could sustain their training and subsidise the work that they put on at Performance Space. It’s much harder now with the expense of living in this city for young artists to do that.

And the performance world has shifted. There are less opportunities for training and with that comes diminished opportunities for developing new work. For me, the PS is now at a point where we’re trying to offer strategic interventions for people to practice given that they’re not necessarily able to find the funds to produce work.

A residency program, which I’ll fill you in on later. There are a couple of programs that are specifically about professional development and training. Doing things like The Museum of Fetisihised Identities (2001) which engaged local artists in a different kind of process with Guillermo Gomez Pena. There are the forums that we’ve done jointly with RealTime that invite people to come and converse on a practical level around particular issues. This means they’re feeling part of a culture, in touch with what the issues are, and it means that they touch base with other practitioners and talk. They’re small interventions. They won’t solve the problem. It’s like a Depression. Keeping people fed. One of the other interventions is more and more co-production agreements with independent artists and small companies. Not only do we want to support artists but it’s good for us because we want to have good works in our program.

If these artists are getting less funding, less often, what ‘s the impact on PS?

It’s hard to have a high profile program. There’s less on, and when it’s on its only on for 3 or 4 days instead of 2 or 3 weeks as it once used to be. There’s the impact on audience development but also the technical challenge of getting things in and out within a week. More of a worry is that it makes it harder to compete with everything else in town. We can say we have this fantastic work that’s exploring contemporary ideas in new ways and all of that but it’s hard to make a splash when you’ve got a marketing budget of $1,000 and a short season.

One of the ways the PS used to run was that there was nearly always something on, so people would think, oh it’s Friday night, what’s on at PS? Last year we did manage to have a very busy series of seasons. This year it’s tougher to do that so we’re having periods that are specifically seasons of work, over 6 or 8 weeks, and then there’ll be periods where we’re not anticipating putting anything in the theatre other than developmental works. So the space will always be active.

In an ideal world you’d have 2 spaces, one for development and one for productions. What is missing in a year? What would it take to make a difference?

5 more projects that got up, but they need to get support from both levels of government. One of the things that’s happening to a lot of artists is that the different visions of the Australia Council and the NSW Ministry for the Arts means that in any one round some artists are getting one but not the other grant. So they’ve got half of the money or less to realise something. Sometimes they’ll wait till the next round to try to get the extra half. In the case of the NSW Ministry that’s only once a year so you might be putting a work off for 18 months for another opportunity to pitch it. That’s often when we co-produce.

So 5 more fully resourced, ie $50,000 or up per project, performance or dance works a year would make a difference. And some commissioning money to produce a couple of works a year. The other thing that would make an enormous difference would be for us to create a touring circuit between contemporary performance venues in Australia. We’re seriously impoverished in not being able to see some of the work that’s coming out of PICA or Powerhouse or Dancehouse and vice versa. It’s just madness. It’s not just a matter of money to get the touring thing working. But it would be great if each of, say, 4 organisations was able to tour 1 thing, ie 4 things between us per year and that would mean that we were getting 4 extra works in our space: it would make an enormous difference to us and the artists. That’s also the case for the visual arts sector, sharing exhibitions between contemporary art spaces.

This year we’re waiting on money that the government might provide for our rent. They’ve committed themselves to working with us on finding a space. That’s great. The question is how and when it’ll happen. They’re likely to respond to a range of urgent requirements by housing a number of organisations together. That’s a fantastic opportunity. The question is where, and who will the other organisations be. It makes good sense in terms of audiences for us to be in the same precinct as other contemporary art organisations.

We don’t want to be in a position though where we’re venue managing a beautiful building with lots of multiple spaces but lose our programming and producing roles. It’s essential we continue to mount an extensive and meaningful program that is designed to support artists and artform development and audiences.

There’s the antistatic dance event this year. There’ll be another Intersections—they’re both training and talk events—and a really exciting initiative called Time_Place_Space 1 which is a hybrid performance workshop we’re doing in collaboration with the New Media Arts Board of the Australia Council, Charles Sturt University and the city of Wagga Wagga.

There’s also the Performance Space Residency Program. Six inter-media collaborative teams of artists have been awarded residencies. Each group is posing conceptual and technical questions. Some are new collaborations testing an idea, others are pre-existing, pushing into new dimensions, some will culminate in a work-in-progress showing, others are researching a process.

Layla Vardo and mik la vage will build a multi-timbral, MIDI activated, marimba-style instrument that’ll be designed to produce acoustic sound, trigger samples and control a number of stand alone electronic devices. They’ll explore the potential of real time audio/visual performance with this.

Lalila is a new collaboration between electronic sound composer Etienne Deleflie, digital artist Katherine Gadd and performer Bronwyn Turnbull. During the residency they’ll investigate the improvisational possibilities in the real time mixing of sound, video and physical performance. It’s a 3-way dialogue following a narrative of memories and re-occurring daydreams.

Trash Vaudeville and Azaria Universe will explore the interactive possibilities between large projected animations, live bodies in aerial motion and spoken word. Live, sound and visual media artists Victoria Spence, Jas Sweeney and Andrew Forster are investigating the use of digital technologies in live work driven by the urge to keep live art alive and vital. Version 1.0 ,who did Second last Supper here in 2001, will continue to develop their improvisational process as they make their new work questions to ask yourself in the face of others. Video artist Samuel James and performance group Shagging Julie will develop a performance installation using public environments as a theatrical platform.

Other work coming up includes Gary Carsley curating an exhibition with performance artists Monica Tichacek (RealTime 43, p12) and the King Pins creating works for that. We’ve got Robert Gober and Gilbert & George works in there as well. We’re continuing the collaboration with festivals wherever we can—Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, Gay Games Cultural Festival, Carnivale.

So, with all this nurturing and creativity but against the odds of underfunded artists, an over-expensive building, the suspense of waiting for additional state funding and the saga of the continuing search for a new home, how does 2002 look for PS, in a word…or two?

It’s a make or break moment for us. But I have to say I feel very optimistic…a year of good art, strategic work and big results.

Alicia Talbot makes passionate speeches with a fluent, bright-eyed fervour, head cocked, a touch of defiance, brisk. Unapologetically she self-edits anything that sounds like missionary zeal, ‘healing’ for example, when talking about performance with and for a community. Her pitch is determindedly political, with a hint of Western Sydney-upwards-inflection? Or somethiing rural? Performer, director and Artistic Director of Bankstown-based Urban Theatre Projects, she is hard at work, shuttling between Sydney and Adelaide, working on the Sellars’ dimension of the 2002 Adelaide Festival: her productions with UTP, The Longest Night and Cement Garage.
The Longest Night is about Bernie the homeless young woman from Cement Garage having her baby and getting a housing estate house. One day her friends rock up to say hello. And they stay and they stay and they stay. And it is one long night…I guess if Cement Garage is about survival, The Longest Night is about change and day to day challenges. I remember some people who didn’t like the Cement Garage felt that the characters started off as homeless young people and ended up that way…there was a cycle without every really filling in the gaps. For me, that’s kind of the point. But I thought, well let’s give her the resource of a house and a pension, and the responsibility of her child and getting on with her life.

We originally devised The Cement Garage in collaboration with High Street Youth Health Service in 1999, and there was a Western Sydney tour in 2000 co-produced by Urban Theatre Projects and HSYHS. Angharad Wynne Jones, Associate Director Adelaide Festival saw it, and suggested we make a proposal for Adelaide Festival 2002.

We pitched the idea of The Longest Night to the festival and asked them to fund the production of a new work by Urban Theatre Projects. The team would create the work in-residence in an Adelaide site that was populated by disadvantaged young people…They matched us with The Parks Community Centre…it was a really great match, to have The Cement Garage in-residence in a homeless service and then to make The Longest Night in-residence in a housing estate, apparently the poorest postcode in SA. We also got a Western Sydney Artists Fellowship to do a creative development of the new show at High Street Youth Health Service [Parramatta]. So that knocked down the amount of residency time we’d need in Adelaide. Then confirmation came for the festival commission. We met up with the Parks community in late May 2001 and spent a couple of days meeting the community.

The Parks Community Centre covers 4 suburbs. It’s a whole 70s conglomeration of Whitlam-Dunstan-inspired buildings and initiatives which includes a health service, youth service, arts and crafts complex. When we knew we were coming we set the agenda, and found out who the key people were, the managers of the different services we’d be working with and set up a number of meetings with them over 2 days, just to get a snapshot of the place. After those 2 days we realised there’s no way we could do this project on the time line set out for the Adelaide Festival. These services don’t necessarily collaborate on site. They have different operating philosophies and agendas. This is not to say that they haven’t worked together in many ways but we wanted to work with the community centre as a holistic entity.

What we try to do before bringing the [creative] team in, is to build a really strong foundation where people know who we are and what we’re doing and know we’re on this journey and that we’ve got this finite deadline. And not just the young people but also the staff, security, cafeteria, the cleaning and the grounds people, the site manager for council—the team has made connections with them all.

There’s a large African community at The Parks: Somalian, Ethiopian, Sudanese. The first time it was arranged for me to meet those young people in May, nobody came. The second time I went and we set up a meeting, 5 young men came. Then the third time I asked them, what would you like to do, how will we get together. And I said, what about a meal? The next time I came we advertised “Dinner with Alicia” and we cooked a big halal pot of beef and then had to order vegetarian pizza and I think 30 young people came and it turned into a bit of a dance, a blue light disco. So the next time, we set up a blue light disco. On one visit Shannon Williams, one of the performers from Sydney (an MC in the hip-hop band South West Syndicate) did some rapping and some workshops. And the next time the whole team came. We also ran a full day drama workshop because they’re so interested. In one corner there’s all these people breaking with Morgan (Lewis) and Shannon. In the middle of the room there are young African women doing acrobatics with Lucia (Mastrantone) and Bernie (Regan). Carlos Russell, Rose Ertler and Caitlin Newton-Broad are out on the dance floor. Celina McEwen, a researcher from the University of Technology Sydney, Centre for Popular Education, was leading capoeira in another corner.

So what comes out of that process? Are you focussing on their lives, their needs, their problems? Or is it focussed very much on what you’re going to do.

I don’t think we can solve social problems. I’m not a welfare worker. I can support and listen to young people and encourage them to hook up with one of the youth or health workers who are also closely involved with the collaboration. The aim within those environments is to come in with this artistic process that goes, we’re here now, this is where we’re going and these are some of the steps we’re going to take. I think I’ve worked out the process takes about 9 months so it’s kind of like a baby, I reckon, the gestation period.

I have a framework of questions. Generally we don’t work on personal stories. We work on a common interest based on some sort of popular culture. Rather than saying, oh you’re in detention so let’s do a show about life in jail, or, you have a mental illness, let’s make a show about that, it’s more like, what are you listening to, what are you interested in? And that’s the point we come together. As one young man said to me recently, as I tried to explain how we worked, oh you’re interested in my social and political opinions and ideas about the world. We consider them to be experts and dramaturgs in the process.

To me it’s like Sigourney Weaver in Alien. She’s just an ordinary girl on her spaceship doing her own thing with an ordinary group of people. And then this extraordinary thing known as an alien comes along and she responds in an extraordinary way. In a community, the people I’m working with have extraordinary circumstances that fluctuate in and out of their everyday lives. The way they respond is to be extraordinary people and develop coping mechanisms to get through each day and negotiate their lives.

It’s not about the moral judgements of right or wrong or can you please do this so I can show you the error of your ways. We start on a one word conceptual brainstorm and go from there. And I guess people do talk about their lives in some form of disclosure. But we aim to set it up really clearly so they can protect themselves in the discussion. I can’t remember who coined this phrase but I’ll repeat it: “It’s about a generated fiction that’s based in reality.” So together, the artistic team and the young people who are involved in this collaboration generate something that is without back story but is very much focussed on now and where you’re going and looks at how you negotiate your way through everyday life.

From the very first day of rehearsal we start with a formal consultation. That’s when we have about 10 to 12 young people who are paid for their time and expertise because they’re consulting and they’re coming up with ideas. So 20 people are sitting around the room, an artistic team of 10, and 10 young people. We’re all paid to be there so it is some kind of level playing field. We might start with a concept like ‘belonging’ and ask “what do you understand ‘belonging’ to be?” And I’ll ask them to just come up with one word. Someone may have written “housekeys”, or “my cap” and might say “my cap makes me feel like I belong because it’s the only thing I know is mine.” And then more and more words come up. And inevitably there are numerous drugs up there. I’ll go okay, why does dope make you feel like you belong? And people start to talk about the relaxation and the freedom. I ask, why is it good and all these words come up and then we’ll maybe talk about what’s not good about it, and another pile of words comes out. And before you know it we’ve got whiteboards full of words and images. We take that into the rehearsal room next day and we set up some kind of improvisation that, for example, might start with your centre of gravity. Where is it? Is it really low. Think about what substance you might have taken. Does it take your head up high or does it take your weight down low. As the performers start taking that imaging through it starts an action, an exploration from the team on stage. And they’ll start to make some offers. From that process a huge amount of material will be generated and maybe one kind of direct set of actions. And we might call that block “Substance Night” or “Waiting” or it might even belong to the original word, say, “Housekeys”. Boom. Up it goes

The next time we see the young people in a formal capacity it could be 2 days or a week later, depending on how much money we’ve got. If I could I’d have a formal consult twice a week. Usually, it’s once a week. But at least one or 2 of the young people will have been around in the rehearsal room while we’re developing stuff and they’ll feed back directly. And it’s all dramaturgical questions. People will stand up and say, I don’t understand the relationship between Carlos and Bernie at that point. And they start to feed ideas and details and characters’ paths into the process. Or I’ll say, what’s happening here? And they’ll explain it. But at some point we always tussle too because it’s a collaboration. We don’t go with everything they suggest. Just as everything that we create, they don’t go with. And for me the process is this: you take an artistic team and put them in residence. That destabilises your artistic team if they’re really working in residence, and it’s an open door. The young people or the community are also destabilised because there’s this new, wacky kind of, force—you know what teams of artists are like. Neither group has a platform they can hold onto. And within that we have to go forward in a real collaboration. That’s the process that we try to encourage and support and facilitate.

Someone offered to show us the theatres—you know, they’ve got these 2 beautiful red velvet theatres—and I said I’ve heard that from the Wingfield Dump you can see all of The Parks. Why don’t we go there? We drove up there and decided it wouldn’t work. But after walking around, The Parks with Harley Stumm [Executive Producer Urban Theatre Projects], Janine Peacock [Production Manager, Community Liaison for The Longest Night], Mathew Ives [The Parks Arts and Function Complex Coordinator] and Jeff Creek [Site Manager of The Park Community Centre], we zeroed in on the Motor Maintenance Workshop. It’s got lathes and a vehicle hoist and stuff so we’re taking those out. It’s a very long building. Half of it will be the performance area and in the other half we’ll put in raked seating. So you’re in this one long lounge room. Outside the workshop is a big carport and garage in a big wire enclosure—so Cement Garage outside, Longest Night inside. The staff of The Parks Community Centre, the Parks Community Health Service, The Parks Youth Service and the Parks Arts and Function Complex and Adelaide Festival have all played a role in negotiating the use of the Centre as a hub for Adelaide Festival 2002 activities, and in particular the site based residency for The Longest Night.

The South Australian Department of Human Services in association with Adelaide Festival have also contributed extra support to assist with additional hours for youth workers throughout the process.

Is that because in the process people’s problems manifest, and they have to be dealt with?

The artistic process we undertake generates a great deal of fictitious material about day to day living for a group of friends in a housing estate in Adelaide’s Western suburbs. Some of the images may reflect aspects of young people’s lives and lived experiences, and this can be confronting for them and they may need support such as transport, or half an hour for someone to find them a bed for the night. The process has to be flexible and well supported by the staff of the collaborating services and agencies. These workers become integral to the process, both in the support and facilitation of young people’s participation, but also within the creative and logistical organisation of the entire project.

I love Urban Theatre Projects. I’ve never worked in an arts organisation. All I’ve ever wanted to do was to make theatre. I only went into directing because I knew I couldn’t make a living as a performer getting my gear off. It didn’t sell well in rural Australia, in fact it nearly caused a riot in a bar in Tasmania. I love Western Sydney and I thrive on making work in collaboration with communities and artists, it pulls together into an exciting and challenging process. I love the variety of the work and the diversity of the people who make up the many parts of each process. I certainly feel the weight of the responsibility: the work before me that Fiona Winning, Harley Stumm and John Baylis created in collaborations with team of artists and communities over the last 10 years has been quite astounding, as well as the long and impressive history of the company.

Our big community participation project later in the year has the working title Mechanix and it’s a collaboration with Joey Ruigrok van Der Werven [set engineer with Stalker and The Marrugeku Company] Simon Wise and Richard Montgomery [both widely experienced production managers and lighting designers] and all the miracles and illusions that they generate, along with acrobatics and movement from Lee Wilson, and sound and music from Liberty Kerr and Reza Achman. This is building a show that is designed not only for performers and artists but for tradespeople and tinkerers and older people in Western Sydney, and for inventors and the CFMEU. We’re looking to do a show which asks: what if you could engineer your identity with the perfect contraption, something that constantly evolves and changes, what would it be and what would be your place within that? It’ll be a bit of a wild journey. I really am interested in big spectacle.

Urban Theatre Projects, The Longest Night, March 2-10, 7.30pm; The Cement Garage, March 6 & 9, 11.00am; Machine Maintenance Workshop, The Parks Community Centre, Adelaide Festival 2002

Virginia Hyam was Artistic Director of the Melbourne Fringe for 5 years. She’s now the Executive Producer of the Sydney Opera House’s The Studio, an intimate, flexible, ultra-comfortable venue located between the Playhouse and Drama Theatre on the western side of the building. It’s a venue with great potential, something only occasionally realised in its first couple of years. However, with the full-on commitment of the Opera House and the considerable energies of Hyam and her knowledge of the innovative edge of Australian performing arts, an ongoing program has been curated that should draw new audiences to the building and create a viable space for the increasing number of Australian artists on the road. A lot will depend on making the Opera House attractive to younger audiences, which involves issues of access, staff attitudes, places to gather after shows, foyer ambience and, especially on developing a personality for The Studio. Hyam’s program for the first 6 months of 2002 is a strong one, filling a significant cultural gap in Sydney’s artistic life between the mainstream and the cutting edge of Performance Space. But what of the character of the program?

Accessible, fun, high quality, diverse. I’m really trying break down the whole notion of what The Studio is in respect to artform. It’s actually just about contemporary work. So it has a pretty eclectic personality. Some work like that of Machine for Making Sense has a niche audience, but I’ve tried to go for a broader audience base and hopefully develop a crossover in taste—you know, ‘I really enjoyed that cabaret work, I think I’ll give dance a go’.

You could say that it’s a diverse audience you’re after but that’s not quite right is it?

The investment that’s gone into The Studio is to offer an alternative inroad into the Opera House. So a younger audience who go to clubs or to movies but who might not think to go to theatre—I’d be hoping that we’d attract that sort of crowd. Certainly the work is targeted in that sort of 18-35 demographic. But it’s also about attracting the early-30s age group. And, in line with that, the prices are kept as low as possible. So you can say, ‘I’m having a night out at the Opera House and my ticket is costing me $25’.

As we move into the second half of the year, there’s a focus on Asian work and the music series. The aim there is to attract that more diverse cultural audience as well with the style of work.

Well, comedy is really accessible and that’s why I’m really keen to have it in the venue but I’m also keen that it doesn’t turn into a stand up comedy venue because it’s such a beautiful performance space. I’m more interested in theatrical comedy, like Russell Cheek and Paul Barry’s show, Tall-Dog and the Underpoppy. A show like Meshel Laurie’s Whore Whisperer you could put into the cabaret or comedy category. Sleepless Beauty will certainly have a comedy element to it. It would have to with Christa Hughes!

There’s an audience who might be expecting a different sort of cabaret than you have here with shows like Paul Capsis’ Capsis vs Capsis.

That’s why we’ve written “No Show Tunes” on the publicity for Sleepless Beauty. Another function of the cabaret program is that it’s a chance to involve people like Imogen Kelly (Gurlesque) who performs more on the underground circuit.

Good to see Melbourne choreographer Phillip Adams’ Upholster in there. The Dance Tracks season hosted by Lisa Ffrench with choreographers Kirstie McCracken, Lisa Griffith and Michael Whaites is heavily music focused.

It’s electronic or live music. Again, I’d be hoping that people who come along to Dance Tracks will then think, I’d like to see Ballet Lab.

When The Studio was set up there was quite a strong emphasis on new music and contemporary classical. New music remains an important part of your program but unless it’s Synergy or Taikoz, who are both in your program, it’s very hard to sell in Sydney. You’ve got everything from the Tibetan singer Yungchen Lhamo through B(if)Tek, Machine for Making Sense, to prominent British sound artist Matthew Herbert.

What started out with new music is now new music and a whole range of other things. I’m just trying to integrate it into the rest of the program and hopefully enthuse people to look at it in a different way. So a group like the [contemporary classical] Ensemble Offspring I’ve incorporated into the Studio Music Sessions on a Sunday side by side with Matthew Herbert.

Great to see they’re playing works by Finnish composers Kaija Saariaho and Magnus Lindberg. The Finnish revolution goes on.

The Prop (see page 32) and Pivot collaboration is a really interesting one, part of the program of collaborations that we’re trying to do. We’re trying to explore different mediums of music and to find a point of contrast to what’s already going on in other venues around Sydney.

In your brochure you say “Swing with The Studio scene.” Now, a scene is a very difficult thing to establish especially within the formal constraints of The Opera House.

The first step is being able to take drinks into The Studio. That’ll make it easier. Changes at the Opera House over the last 12 months have already been quite radical anyway, just with the change of caterers. And all the new bars that have sprung up around the Opera House are going to help too. As well as other Opera House programming, we too are looking at front of house and getting to understand our audiences better. It’s not like The Studio is working in isolation, it’s one stream of that change, building accessibility and making it less of a highbrow place to be. Of course, it will always be that for some people—and that’s fine. It’s just opening it out as well.

You’ve also got the website and “opportunities to sharpen your critical knives”—what’s that about?

We’re building up a membership base which gives you the benefits of all our sponsor partnerships of course. But there’s also the opportunity for critical feedback on the website and the chance for people to feed in to the direction The Studio is going. I think what we have to do to be successful is to be current, relevant, to be responsive to a degree so that people can write in and say, look I saw this amazing band in Newcastle, have you heard of them?.

Then you’ve got the ticket packages. How important are they in your strategy?

You can buy 5 tickets for about $100. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes. We don’t see The Studio package as some kind of subscription series and we don’t want to go down that road.

What’s in it for artists, do you think? There are people in the program who are well-known and a lot who are not.

The key thing I’m trying to do with artists who are not known is to provide a higher profile and to support their work, whether it’s in development, or giving them presentation funds to actually put it on. You’re supporting artists to get their work out to the best production levels that we can provide. I’m interested in using the space to its absolute capacity. At the moment it’s a testing ground to see how we can accommodate artists within the space. It’s not just a place to put on a show. I’m hoping it’s more than that.

It’s a curated program in which some shows are pre-existing but with others you’re playing a producing or co-producing role. For example, Gretchen Miller’s In Four Four.

Really important. Dance Tracks 2 (Albert David, Jason Pitt & Bernadette Walong), Christa Hughes’ show—they’re new commissions. Then there’s producing works with other partners. There’s one coming up in the future which The Studio, the Brisbane Powerhouse and a Melbourne organisation are co-funding. So, we’re really trying to build a network. Christa’s show is also going to the Adelaide Cabaret Festival. As many arms as we can have to further opportunities for artists to present their work, the better.

It is a big role. But that’s what’s exciting about the job. I think if it was just about running a venue and putting on shows, it wouldn’t be to the capacity The Studio’s up to. I guess though what I have to break down is the notion of people coming to me and going, “We hear you’ve got a million dollars in there, just give us $50,000.” And I’d say, “Well I’m sorry I can’t quite do that.” The way that I’m working the budget is in partnerships and supporting people as they’re going for funding which is crucial for these shows to be able to get up.

I guess the work I did at the Melbourne Fringe has been a great informer of what I’m interested in, the work of independent artists. Prior to that I was Project Manager at Carclew Youth Arts Centre in South Australia. So emerging artists were very much my focus there. I worked too with the Adelaide’s Come Out Festival. My interest has always been at that developmental end and seeing ideas supported and nurtured to realisation. I guess this position is a bit of a combination of those two and now the opportunity to work with artists who are really well established and doing amazing work.

Robbe-Grillet is considered one of the most innovative novelists of the 20th century, challenging conventional narrative modes and abolishing fictional elements such as character, plot and chronological time in favour of repetition and absence of emotion. His novel Djin is inherently subjective, lacking any one specific point of view. Time expands and contracts within this changeling tale, exploring themes surrounding the dislocation and disorientation of the self, identity loss, multiple personalities and recovered memory. As the audience is encouraged to grapple with these relatively complex ideas explored through an almost impenetrable plot, it gradually becomes apparent that in the Lindsay Vickery opera Rendez-vous, based on Djin, and its characters refuse to yield their secrets readily.

Fragments of the plot are gradually revealed through comical stories and far-fetched tales of intrigue and strange occurrences. As the stories become wilder, the audience grows suspicious, not only of the characters (especially those who relish a good lying competition) but of the synthetic and deceptive nature of the narrative itself. It is left to the audience to piece this puzzle together and construct their own version of the plot, potentially changing their role as passive consumers to producers of meaning. While it is sometimes difficult to keep up with the twists and turns of this tightly woven story, one can’t help but feel part of an elaborate mystery. After all, apart from the monochromatic darkness, paranoia and romantic pessimism, the first thing one expects from homage to film noir is taut, if tortuous, plotting and Rendez-vous certainly delivers!

Led by a fine, burly-toned saxophone and languorous cello, the prologue sets the scene as a foreboding male voice resonates through the hall. An uneasy yet fascinated audience begin their journey into an intriguing Parisian underworld guided by the crooked characters that dwell in its seedy ambience, shadowed by an industrial horizon. Anticipation builds as the prologue ends with a sense of melodrama from piano accordion and violin, gradually moving into some interesting percussion work. The sound of a dripping tap echoed by slow chromatic scales performed on piano cuts icily through the still and intense atmosphere. The expressive power of the common chromatic is made evident in this mesmerising sequence. One feels almost afraid to breathe.

The range of vocal styles explored (from naturalistic dialogue and heightened speaking, to unaffected singing and finally to full operatic delivery) helps translate the text by placing emphasis on specific phrases of the dialogue. As the pace and depth of expression change erratically, the audience is less likely to de-focus. In an impressive display of range and flexibility, all 3 performers switch seamlessly from one vocal technique to another. This is in part due to Vickery’s skills as a librettist. His adaptation of Robbe-Grillet’s novel proves that subtext, ambiguity and the limitations of language can be effectively explored in musical theatre.

Dressed to kill in the archetypal noir dress code of trench coat and trilby, beneath a furrowed brow and through his resounding baritone, Andrew Broadbent gives a brooding, charismatic performance as Simone Lecoeur. Simone, also known as Boris, the bewildered schizophrenic anti-hero, is an iceman melting as the structure of his world begins to disintegrate. Kathryn McCusker plays the mysterious and alluring Djin with dramatic intensity, balancing a lyrical tenderness with mild robustness to great effect. Finally, Taryn Fiebig in a striking performance, captures the chameleon-like character of Marie to perfection. Her voice and personality range from hilarious, spritely wild child to enchanting, cabaret songstress.

The virtual set was constructed by Vikki Wilson and Rick Mason of Retarded Eye. Taryn Fiebig, Borivoje Kandic, Jett Black and Maxwell Vickery were photographed in gritty, black and white footage intimating European history and French noir, adding another dimension to Rendez-vous’ surrealist world. Through what appears to be a blend of archival and original footage, Retarded Eye’s creation is bewitching and bizarre, filling the hall with its haunting ambience. B-grade sci-fi images and fairground ferris wheels add to the cold and intense images of industrial machinery, typewriters, deserted alleyways and cryptic photographs. This virtual world blends well with Duncan Ord’s lighting which, in keeping with the style of film noir, creates a strikingly sharp contrast between light and shadows. Lawrie Cullen-Tait’s set and costume design melds elements from different genres and plays with the duality between new and old, drab and colourful, real and surreal. The industrial scaffolding ablaze with dripping candles is a striking centre piece, reminiscent of David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti’s Industrial Symphony. The single projection gives a clear sense of the world being explored, however, to be fully submerged in this dark fantasy does still require a stretch of the imagination. Several screens (smaller if need be) could be erected to create an extra dimension to the work. Director Talya Masel plays quite freely with the allusions and illusions of the theatrical/filmic medium with humour and a literate imagination.

Rendez-vous is a gripping theatrical experience. Vickery’s creation is a unique and intrepid fusion of artforms and genres supported by his cutting edge musical score.

Rendez-vous: an Opera Noir, Rechabites Hall, Perth, Nov 21-25. See our interview with Lindsay Vickery

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