Urban Edge

Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

WA’s newest multi-arts festival is the result of a partnership between the City of Swan and Artrage. Last year it was a satellite festival of the biennial Artrage, now Urban Edge is going annual in Midland, one of the fastest growing urban centres in WA. The program—built loosely around a wild west theme of “an imagined place of unlimited potential where the unexpected occurs and regular laws don’t apply”—comprises theatre, sound, visual arts, a huge street event and the Video Head project. The latter is a new media community project involving all the schools in the region. Artrage artists are working with 500 young people creating new animation and video works. As well, images of heads will be projected onto large inflated globes, attached to the roofs and exteriors of prominent buildings creating a new media installation, “with 500 young people seeing themselves inflated to the size of gods”. In a populist-cutting edge blend there’s a sound program mixing country music and some of the country’s leading improvisers. Nexus is a sound installation with “layers of interviews and cultural and social statistics and histories gathered from throughout Midland”. Swerve is an animation program created by Disability and Disadvantage in the Arts WA members working with digital artists. Core Sampler is a huge experimental dance/electronic sound/ digital projection event staged in an outdoor carpark with dancers, new media artists. Urban Edge shows new ways for the arts and communities to join in celebration. Nov 8-22

RealTime issue #57 Oct-Nov 2003 pg. 27

The Buiders Association & motiroti, Alladeen

The second national Time_Place_Space intensive workshop in the professional development of hybrid performance practitioners is underway in Wagga Wagga and the third is already announced for 2004, relocating to Adelaide mid-year and focusing on developing specific works as well as the critical, continued emphasis on process.
The impressive lineup of facilitators for 2003 includes Marianne Weems (Artistic Director, The Builders Association, New York), Andre Lepecki (author, dramaturg, New York), Marijke Hoogenboom (co-founder and dramaturg, DasArts, Netherlands), Michelle Teran (Toronto-based performance, installation and online artist), Margie Medlin (Melbourne-based filmmaker, lighting and projection designer) and Jude Walton (Melbourne-based dancer, performance-maker and installation artist).

The 2003 Time_Place_Space participants are a diverse group of practitioners, ranging from hugely experienced to relatively new, all with credentials in hybrid practices: Michelle Blakeney, Shannon Bott, Sue Broadway, Boo Chapple, Rosie Dennis, Simon Ellis, Ryk Goddard, Jaye Hayes, Cat Hope, Nancy Mauro-Flude, Mike Nanning, Michelle Outram, Deborah Pollard, Hellen Sky, Sete Tele, Douglas Watkin, David Williams, Fei Wong and Yiorgos Zafirio.

As I talked to Marianne Weems, the sounds of hammering and furniture shifting and mention of Meyerhold’s constructivism texture our long-distance phone call—The Builders Association is in the middle of moving office. Building is the right word for this unique multimedia performance company—since 1994 it has built work through collaboration internally and across continents. It builds new technologies and communication systems seamlessly into its work and new cross-cultural ways of looking at the globalisation we are living out in the everyday. Hopefully Weems’ visit will not only share strategies for creation but also begin building a relationship between Australian and North American performance communities.

Weems is a co-founder of The Builders Association and has directed all of their productions. Over the last 15 years in New York she has worked as an assistant director and dramaturg with Susan Sontag, Jan Cohen-Cruz, Richard Foreman, and many others. From 1988-94 she was assistant director and dramaturg for The Wooster Group. The Association’s current production, touring internationally (and destined for Australia in 2004) is Alladeen, a large-scale cross-media performance created as a collaboration with the London-based South-Asian company motiroti, directed by Weems and co-conceived and designed by Keith Khan and Ali Zaidi, featuring a cast drawn from both companies. It combines electronic music, new video techniques, an architectural set, and live performance to explore the myth of Alladeen, better known as Aladdin. The company describes the work as: “drawing on the lives of citizens living in the hybrid, global cities of New York, London, and Bangalore… Specifically, the piece will look at the contemporary phenomenon of international call centres where Indian operators are trained to flawlessly ‘pass’ as Americans. The performance will explore how we function as ‘global souls’ caught up in circuits of technology, and how our voices and images travel from one culture to another…The performance will alternate the contemporary world of the call centres—a web of technology in which the performers are operators—with spectacular, colourful fantasy sequences drawn from the Aladdin story and using the aesthetic of the early Hollywood and Bollywood Orientalist films.”

How do you go about creating a work?

One of things that has always been key to the way that we construct the projects is that everyone has all the equipment there from the beginning of the process, from the first day of “rehearsal” and even long before that. The designers are there with their technology assembled and that becomes a really integrated part of the process and is obviously not something slapped on in tech week…The only way I can function as a director is to have the sound and the video present. It’s not something you can storyboard and imagine and then hope it will work later, just as a performer has to be there for you to be able to see if they can do it or not, what the palette will be, what the vocabulary will be, how it can be articulated.

What happens before that?

Usually there’s a very long conceptual period, sometimes as much as a year that is interspersed with workshops. Alladeen is being created in collaboration with motiroti, and started with me and key members of the company meeting almost monthly (or even more with those other artists) face to face or by intercontinental phone conferences, trading back and forth a lot of email and drawing ideas from sketches and dramaturgical research and videos. Then I would get together with the artists in my company for about a 10 day workshop once every 3 or 4 months and that’s when we’d bring all the media together and, really, just make a huge mess and fool around and see if there was anything of interest that would emerge, say in terms of software that might be developed that would then inform the project or a direction to go in…for example in incorporating animation or a video vocabulary. That would be developed alongside the deepening research, with the video guys going off to a residency at STEIM (Amsterdam) or another place.

What is your role—monitoring, keeping the vision together and developing?

Pretty much all of the above. I try not to monitor, but I’m definitely participating in and articulating what they’re doing and reminding them of how it fits into the project. As they come up with things they bring them back to me and we decide together what is of interest, what is superfluous, what might lead to some other avenue. But pretty much everything the tech guys come up with ends up some way in the project. [Laughs]

It is said that collaborators all perform in a Builders Association show.

The whole ensemble really is about performativity and the technicians are often on stage and the audience watching them work and interact with the performers is as important as watching the actors act–they can’t exist independent of each other, so the sense of them working together to create this spectacle has become a signature for the company–they get constumed and are very visible.

What is it about spectacle that attracts you?

It’s a dialogue that’s been going on since Meyerhold and before with theatre artists threatened by or engaged in a dialogue with mass media and it’s certainly undeniable that you have to come to terms on some level with what is dominant cultural language–television, film and mediamatic culture, it’s certainly not theatre. We certainly don’t have to but it’s part of my interest in the culture’s interest in screen culture, to investigate it on stage and take it apart as much as we can. It’s one of the great advantages of this kind of theatre to be able to look at the stage as a kind of laboratory where you can see what live entertainment still means, what performance is as opposed to mediatised performance and putting those things together in a kind of last gasp experiment of why is performance. I want to unpack all that onstage. I’m certainly not head over heels in love with spectacle in a naive way but like any other good American I have a love-hate relationship with the undeniable glory of spectacle.

How important is cross-cultural collaboration to the company?

We’ve done a lot of work in Europe and pretty much created our reputation and stayed alive by working live there over the last 10 years. We worked for 6 months or more in Switzerland in a cross-cultural collaboration-in many ways it was much more of a foreign experience than working with motiroti. But this our most significant cross-cultural collaboration to date because there have been so many artists involved all over the world, from India to Pakistan, Germany, Sri Lanka, Trinidad… One of the things that has been so heartening has been the ongoing scope of the project, that it continues to snowball. There’s more touring coming on board. There’s a website with many people all over the world logging on. There’s a music video we made which will be playing on MTV India in the Spring. And that was the whole point of the project, to get outside of the theatre as far as possible and reach people who have no real interest in or access to the theatre. It’s been a big step for us but the nice thing about it is that there’s been no compromising of our aesthetic or my sensibility. Our interest from the beginning, and motiroti’s, was not to fall into the conventional multiculturalisms of the 1980s, but to really try to define what a multicultural collaboration could do. I think we’ve achieved some of that.

RealTime issue #57 Oct-Nov 2003 pg. 28

Greg Leong, JIA

photo Andrew Charman-Williams

Greg Leong, JIA

Greg Leong is an established textile artist and designer. His inaugural performance, JIA (home) emerged from earlier exhibitions which explored his Chinese-Australian background through interweaving fabric and personal story. JIA is an ambitious move with Leong writing, performing songs, designing Princess Feng Yee’s costumes—including an original Peking Opera brocaded gown—and producing graphics incorporated into a panoply of screened images.Via chitchat and song, and through the personae of Closet Princess Feng Yee, Leong traces the emotional and intellectual hazards of his journey from Hong Kong to Tasmania. Directed by Robert Jarman, Princess Feng Yee stars in her own karaoke cabaret, with a theatricality that jibes and japes at the crude and the cruel. The targets are obvious, including Pauline Hanson’s racism looking for a policy, and the incipient exclusion each of us practices at different times in our engagement with the unfamiliar. Princess Feng Yee sings I Can Rrrrreally Rrrrroll My Rrrrr’s and we all sing along with Rrrrr’s rolling enthusiasm, laughing and wincing as we recognise our complicity.

Leong’s journey resonates with other iconic Chinese-Australian figures from public life and the arts, including William Yang, Dr Victor Chang, Bill O’Chee, Annette Shun-wah and Jenny Kee. JIA can be read as an implied paean to the success of these figures. It also uses elements of Leong’s own journey, tracing family connection and memory. Feng Yee revisits the old country in order to find out what and who she used to be. We “might be common, dowdy and so, so white” but this doesn’t prevent Feng Yee’s eventual return to Tasmania where she finally learns to call Australia home.

JIA incorporates diverse visual concepts imagined and created by Leong with technical direction by Andrew Charman-Williams. The audience is constantly drawn to the screen, in some cases necessarily so, after all this is a karaoke cabaret. The dilemma is that even the sumptuous and irascible Feng Yee is at times overshadowed by the constantly changing images. There are some wonderful visual moments including a shift from dense Hong Kong tower blocks pixellating away until the screen resembles the weave of cloth.

Through his hilarious, jostling commentary Leong continues to reflect and refract our dependency on tired icons. Feng Yee teaches us a Cantonese version of Click Go the Shears. We might be able to roll our rrr’s, but we are all at sea with Cantonese script romanised for our enunciation. Point made. We are bloody hopeless, and helpless with laughter. JIA is like nothing else we have seen or heard. Then again neither is Princess Feng Yee, who taunts with her basso profundo voice and fascinating on-stage costume changes. The culminating sequence is the Asianisation of Tom Roberts. Leong’s and other Chinese faces are superimposed on the hairy and sweaty shearers in Shearing the Rams, a classic moment of ringer/ring-in cultural inversion.

Greg Leong, JIA: a tale of two islands, Annexe Theatre, Launceston, June 26, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Sept 4-5, Nexus Multicultural Arts Centre, Adelaide, Nov 21, Midsumma, Melbourne, Jan 2004, Goldsmiths College, University of London, Feb 2004

Leong’s work can be seen at Gallery 4A, Sydney until Oct 19.

RealTime issue #57 Oct-Nov 2003 pg. 29

Anita Johnson, Underland

Brisbane-based Anita Johnson is a multi-disciplinary artist working with new and old media. With a background in graffiti, illustration and music videos, she has been integrating these formal and vandal art styles into contemporary and interactive videogame technologies. Curious about “faerytale vs impossiblity”, her work “re-contextualises (un)familiar fragments into virtual (3D) pop culture nightmares and wonderlandesque daydreams.” In June 2003, she participated in a candy-themed residency in Canada, where she began development of the first in her Underland series, an immersive 3D adaptation of Hansel and Gretel. Underland is currently being developed into an online 3D environment filled with secret lands; the next instalment will be launched in early October, 2003. Johnson is temporarily based at The Banff Centre, in Canada, where she is collaborating with a team to develop educational science toys.

http://anitafontaine.com/content/

RealTime issue #57 Oct-Nov 2003 pg. 29

Windmill Performing Arts is an important new Adelaide-based national venture with international ambitions. The company’s Creative Producer Cate Fowler has had a long and significant history of creating and developing festivals and performances for young people in Australia. Fowler expertly brings together different creative teams for each of the company’s productions. The latest is a version of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen celebrating the 200th anniversary of the writer’s birth. The concept for the show came from Wojciech Pisarek, the creator of the show’s virtual world, who writes, “The Snow Queen is a ruler of virtual reality and computer games rather than snow, frost and ice. We show 2 journeys and 2 different ways of gaining experience and knowledge. Gerda goes through the real world, Kay [a boy] through the virtual. It is not about which one is better, it is about a balance between them.” Based on his PhD research at Flinders University (see RT#52, p32 for a detailed account), “5 years of experimentation”, Pisarek says, “are to be tested for the first time in a commercial theatre production. The Snow Queen character is purely digital. Some characters will have both physical and virtual representation. All the 3D characters and the digital environment will run in real time–nothing is pre-recorded.” Pisarek describes this as “a scary exercise–we will have 2 independent computer set-ups to run the show, in case one crashes.” The Snow Queen is directed by Julian Meyrick, written by Verity Laughton, designed by Eamon D’Arcy and Mark Thompson, with music by Darren Verhagen. The eagerness of Windmill to engage with new technologies in works for new audiences is a sign of a healthy embrace of innovation.

Migrant writing, as Sneja Gunew pointed out some years ago, is often shaped by nostalgia, that psychic force that requires the subject to return repeatedly to the place of origin in the hope of recovering an identity that connects body, self and homeland. For the child of migrants, or those whose own memories are immature, the remembered country is secondhand, more or less a product of their parents’ nostalgia. If she returns to that place as an adult visitor, she must put together the childhood stories lived on the inside with a jumble of new languages, rhythms and sights that represent a different outside.

The premise of Vietnam: a psychic guide is that Vietnam can only be an imaginary location, as seen through the eyes of a young Vietnamese-Australian woman writing postcards back ‘home’ to Australia. “The journey of importance is not the physical one. The real journey is in the heart and in the mind.” Written backwards in a strange red book that becomes her tourist guide, this instruction is given to Chi Vu by a postcard seller. Her departures, her returns, from the City of Lakes, Halong Bay, Café of Babel, Hanoi or the City of Face generate poetic rhapsodies that attempt to capture fleeting impressions, to take snapshots or make song like the melodic tune of the plain brown birds. Indeed this performance began as a series of prose poems published in Meanjin. Although now in a stylish theatrical production complete with multimedia projections, the vignette-like format remains as the postcards are delivered–winged through the air by 2 chorus members at the beginning of each scene. Received by her father, played by older Vietnamese actor Tam Phan, and Jodee Murphy, as best friend Kim, Chi Vu herself appears as the narrator or as other kinds of cultural transmitter-postcard seller, motorbike rider, train traveller, café customer. Through them she carries the action—of discovery and excitement—whereas the other characters re-enact this different Vietnam, or with Murphy’s mime-dance style, animate the sensations of this new world.

In this committed bilingual performance, I enjoyed the musical, sometimes competing, layers of Vietnamese and English particularly when Tam Phan sings like an old crooner in both languages. A Vietnamese spectator noted that the Vietnamese was antiquated, far from the contemporary mix of North-South dialects and popular expression one hears in postmodern Vietnam. Perhaps the script reflects the proper speech of translator Ton That Quynh Du—also a long-term Australian resident—or that of the older male actor and thus its linguistics stand in for the 1950s voice of the father that Chi Vu knows. Rather than visiting a new Vietnam, it seems that the text oddly revives a traditional symbolic order.

By way of contrast, the computer graphics (Ruth Fleishman) project abstracted images of ponds, birdcages, or Oriental architectures as iconic shapes that slide up or down or open like barn doors. They flatten the landscape, leaving more space for the gap between a Vietnam lost and a Vietnam reconstructed to appear. This place remains overly idealised, and although we witness a momentary electrocution and the old man swallowing papers, it is difficult to locate this trauma either in her father’s history or in the young traveller’s streetscape.

While there is much experimentation with form, the performance never breaks from the circuit of nostalgia. Its structural repetitions give us too many beginnings and the endings tail away. I wonder if more speed or intensity could be accumulated by seeing where one image collides with another or whether the messages from Vietnam could psychically and physically disrupt the neat separation of ‘home and away.’ As a writer Chi Vu commands a delicate poetic register but this production makes me think that for each generation of migrant experience, the Greeks and Italians in the 1980s or the Vietnamese in 2000, the pleasure of returning might always be left in deficit rather than in credit. Particularly unless writing becomes a theatre of the present.

Chi Vu, Vietnam: a psychic guide, text Chi Vu, director Sandra Long, North Melbourne Town Hall, Aug 22-31

A graduate of the Canberra Institute of the Arts (ANU), Somaya Langley is a composer, instrumentalist and digital artist. She also collaborates as radio presenter and producer on Therapy, the national electronica show on 2XX FM. Her interactive work, Disjointed Worlds (2000) is an email fiction that gently plots the psychic space between separated lovers. As a composer she ranges ably and inventively across acoustic, electroacoustic and digital domains. Langley is part of the HyperSense project (with Alistair Riddell and Simon Burton), who perform compositions in wearable flex sensor suits. The group recently appeared on ABC FM’s New Music Australia.

Inside the Angel House (scheduled for a short season in November) is a new multimedia performance being developed by Theatre of Speed, a group of young performers with disabilities, as part of the Geelong-based Back to Back Theatre’s workshop program. The workshops, led by director Marcia Ferguson and animator/filmmaker Rhian Hinkley, are focused on the skill development in performance, improvisation, animation and photography. Just before he left with Back to Back for their European tour—he created the projected imagery that surrounded audience and players so powerfully in Soft—Hinkley wrote, “Theatre of Speed is an amazing opportunity to work with some of the most innovative and creative artists in Australia. The work that these guys create is unlike any other. I received a research grant from the Australia Council New Media Arts Board which has allowed me to spend more time with the group than I previously would have and to investigate the production of graphics and video that recreate Downs Syndrome…not as an actual representation of the syndrome, rather as an indication of the creative possibilities and benefits that genetic abnormalities can produce. The actors have had a chance to look at and use some great new technology which has been really exciting for all of us: a large Wacom tablet, a new G4 laptop, video projector, large screen TV, DVD players and burners. The actors take to new technology without any fear or preconceptions; this leads to really exciting levels of development that other groups don’t reach.

“The Wacom was really excellent for a number of reasons. Firstly, the actors loved the concept of being able to draw in multiple colours and with different brushes while using the same pen. Also the concept of filling areas in with a single click was something that really excited them. Another interesting element was the handwriting recognition with Wacom and OSX. This produced some really interesting translations and with a simple Applescript program I could make the computer translate their writings and then read it back in a number of voices.

“In producing the animations we used 2 processes. The first is hands-on, direct input and control by the actors. In this scenario the actors devise, create and animate the work. We did everything from basic cut-out and puppetry, from scratch animation directly on 16mm film to Flash from drawn animations. This produces raw and energetic pieces that are unpredictable and follow unique paths designated by the actors.

“The second process was to use myself as a tool and let the actors create works as directors or collaborators, giving them access to the full power of the technology. By directing me to make changes to their work or to create things for them we could work in 3D, and use software that is normally too complex to pick up within a short timespan. This resulted in works that have a slicker edge …but still retain the orginality of concept and direction.”

Here is a new event on its second outing, and of major significance for Australian live art/performance art. The intensification of the relationship between Australian and international performance scenes is building rapidly with the emergence of Time_Place_Space (see page 28), the Performance Space-PICA-Arnolfini (Bristol, UK) Breathing Space connection, and the visits of Blast Theory (2002) and Forced Entertainment (2004 Adelaide Festival). The welcome consolidation of this rich pattern of exchange is more than evident in The National Review of Live Art Midland, Perth’s international festival dedicated to the presentation and exploration of live art practice. Established in 2002, the NRLA Midland is a collaboration between the City of Swan and New Moves International (UK), producers of NRLA Glasgow, Europe’s longest running and most influential festival of Live Art.

This will be an unconventional festival, with works that will take you beyond the niceties of neat timetabling into the time-space loop of durational performances and installations offering contemplative experiences, new ways of regarding the body, movement and issues of the moment. The program includes Hideyuki Sawayanagi (Japan); sculptor and performance artist Richard Layzell (UK), also conducting workshops; Dutch choreographer Angelika Oei and sculptor RA Verouden (with <> “in which a spinning dancer causes notions of time to vanish”), lone twin (UK) and Alastair MacLennan (UK, Professor of Fine Art at the University of Ulster) in a 5-day durational performance/ installation. With Edith Cowan University's School of Contemporary Arts, NRLA Midland 2003 has also commissioned new works by Perdita Phillips, Gregory Pryor, Domenico de Clario, cAVity, Lyndal Jones and Geoff Overhew and Singaporean artist Chandrasekaran. Nikki Milican, Artistic Director of New Moves International, will be on hand as will Mary Brennan, courageous and incisive dance and live art critic for the Glasgow Herald, conducting a workshop with local writers.

Matt Warren is a multimedia artist who creates work for solo shows and collaborative pieces for performance installation and theatre. Awarded a Samstag scholarship in 1999, he completed a MFA at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He is currently a recipient of an Australia Council New Media Arts Board grant. Warren has recently returned from 8 weeks research in Germany and a grant from Arts Tasmania has enabled him to also work in the Czech Republic where he collaborated with a performance poet and an electro-acoustic composer to produce a performance installation for the Cultural Exchange Station total recall festival. Warren’s work has evolved from his initial explorations around the concept of absence, culminating in on the run (2002). His current concerns are exploring the ideas inherent in transcendence, the sublime and the supernatural. Sally Rees is a pop music fan who incorporates single channel video and installation in works that use autobiography and self-portraiture. Her recent video The Groove (2003) and research focus on popular culture through exploring the emotional investment of its consumer audience. Rees’ developing practice includes a newly discovered capacity to perform in her video projects. She aims to move beyond the constraints of the rectangular screen and develop richer ways of using and viewing the medium. Rees collaborated with Matt Warren on the theatre piece Pop for IHOS Experimental Theatre Laboratory in 2002.

I remember the video as intensely coloured and almost hallucinogenic in its rainbow effects. The idea of someone videotaping the sun has a pathos and strange logic that is a defining feature of Kajio’s work. Often an intensely colourful and multi sensory experience, Kajio’s work uses heightened video colour effects or coloured light reflections. In her 2002 exhibition Forest of Invisible Waves, at the Contemporary Art Centre of SA, installation components such as water showers, acrylic rods and mirrors were used to create an immersive space of reflected and multidirectional projected light. Sound was used throughout the space, further dislocating reality. Kajio writes, “Reality is not something that is perceived directly…My work usually plays on this abstraction or distortion to create a kind of space between the viewer and my piece, in which they can experience an alternative ‘reality’.” In 2003 Kajio curated Electtroni Nessun Senso, at Downtown Art Space. In her work for this exhibition projected light swims up the walls, LCD lights are refracted through a glass fish bowl with oxygen bubbler. One interpretation (there are several) of the exhibition title is “electrons with no sense of direction.” Yoko Kajio was born in Kyoto, Japan. Since graduating from the South Australian School of Art in 2000 she has exhibited in Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, CACSA, the Physics Room and the Experimental Art Foundation. Kajio has also been a core member of performance art group shimmeeshok since 1998.

Jodi Smith is a writer, photographer and filmmaker whose video Redux? Part 1 was in the recent showing of Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship 2003 finalists at Sydney’s Artspace. After working in Australia, New Zealand and the US as a camera assistant on such films as The Matrix, Smith has been accepted to study for an MA in Fine Art at The Slade School of Fine Art in London where she hopes to make a feature length film. Redux? Part 1 plays engagingly with our knowledge of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and the constellation of masculine values that gravitate relentlessly around it. Smith remakes the first 6 minutes of the film, blending the original with carefully constructed scenes that mimic it closely but with a different protagonist—a woman. The effect is much more surprising and enduring than you’d first imagine. Smith writes, “Over the last year I have been dealing with the history of war and specifically how gender roles both define and are defined by war. A key issue within my filmmaking practice is the issue of female subjectivity—particularly the lack of it within the cinema and how this is a reflection of first world society.”

Jane McKernan is best known for her work as one of The Fondue Set, which she founded with Elizabeth Ryan and Emma Saunders in 2000. McKernan’s solos work in a more subtle register, still confronting the audience but drawing us in to share delicate observations and actions. She performed in Mobile States last year in a powerful solo, I Was Here and took the ideas behind this piece to Dancehouse in July this year where she performed an improvisation at Dance Card, an informal season featuring 5 dancers each week. She also appeared with Eleanor Brickhill in Waiting to Breath Out at Antistatic 2002, at Performance Space in Sydney. McKernan currently has “a Sigourney Weaver thing” and is developing a piece with Lizzie Thomson called Working Girl.

Video was one of the strongest components in the recent showing of Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship 2003 finalists at Sydney’s Artspace. In his finely shot and beautifully edited Pablo Velasquez Shoeboard Remix, Matthew Tumbers’ anonymous protagonist does everything you’d like to do with a skateboard— without actually using one. Feet skid assuredly across surfaces, the body twists and glides with the trademark crouch and angularity, the camera goes closeup on the virtuoso ride. Is this for real? Tumbers writes that his video “mimics and parodies a form, namely skateboard manoeuvers with elements of ‘street dance’, creating a fictional form that could well be real and achievable.” It’s pretty convincing, but the pleasure beyond surprise is in the dexterity of the very making. It’s a witty variation on other skateboard videos doing the rounds. Tumbers is a COFA graduate who has exhibited solo at Block and TAP galleries and whose Gumnut Xanadu 3: Expanding Conglomerates opens soon at Kudos Gallery.

Why is bad theatre so excruciating? Why is it so much worse than bad film? This question vexes many of us who spend a reasonable amount of our professional lives sitting in uncomfortable spaces enduring the slings and arrows of tragic theatre. So when the word gets out that something good is happening, we are prepared to endure a stinking hot night and a venue renowned for back-breaking seating and zero oxygen. Who and what was the cause of all this selfless devotion? Blame Matthew Lutton, whose outstanding physical and truly absurd production of Ionesco’s The Bald Prima Donna, had audiences in raptures during the 2003 WA Fringe Festival. Not surprisingly, it was awarded Best Fringe Production.

Lutton has packed a lot into his young life. At a mere 19 years of age, his credits include director, writer and performer. As a performer, he has been clown, acrobat, puppeteer and actor. With his company, ThinIce Productions, he has adapted and directed several productions. In 2002, he wrote and directed the sell-out physical theatre piece Trading Fates at the Blue Room Theatre and presented a self-devised work at PICA during Putting on an Act. So far this year, Lutton has directed the epic masked production of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and worked as assistant director on Be Active BSX’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and Black Swan Theatre Company’s The Merry Go Round in the Sea. In 2004 he is looking to direct Bed, a new script by Sydney writer Brendan Cowell in a multi-dimensional, audio visual and visceral production at PICA. Lutton is definitely across the boards (sic). He has just been appointed Director of BSX, a company for young artists producing new and contemporary theatre works with professional support from Black Swan Theatre Company. Oh, did I happen to mention that Lutton is currently completing his 2nd year of Theatre Arts at WAAPA. Long live good art.

Melbourne has been a centre for muscular, bony and often violently articulated choreography. Stephanie Lake is not new to this scene. She has danced for Phillip Adams (balletlab), Lucy Guerin, and Gideon Obarzanek (Chunky Move), and the influence of all 3 choreographers can be seen in her own pieces. Now that the physical characteristics of this trend within Melbourne dance have become fairly well defined, there has been a return to theatricality amongst such practitioners and it is here that Lake’s distinctiveness is most apparent. Her work is closest to Adams’ in its movement style and dramatic, violent energies, but if Adams’ dramaturgy is as much defined by the juxtaposition of theatrical ideas and elements as by anything else, then his is arguably a non-aesthetic, rather than a style per se. As such, this broad field of dance leaves plenty of room for Lake to invent her own mad imagery and strangely funny, off-kilter scenarios. Lake’s full-length work Love is the Cause (2001) represents the summit of her independent career to date, while her short study The Loop was the highlight of Chunky Move’s recent Three’s a Crowd program (2003) and exhibited considerable potential for development in its wryly angular, contemporary ballet. Lake has also collaborated with James Brennan on his staged events (namely Piglet, 2001). In the spaces between theatre and dance, surreal comedy and the avant-garde, Stephanie Lake has emerged as an important and invigorating new artist.

Fiona Malone’s career is a model of multi-skilling . She’s worked in Australia and Europe in all manner of dance forms from folkloric to dance theatre to movement research with an abiding interest in live multimedia performance. Before joining the Australian Dance Theatre in 2000, she toured Europe for 5 years with Belgian multimedia dance and technology company, Charleroi Dansers directed by Frederic Flamand. Last year, as well as being nominated in the Outstanding Female Dancer category at the Australian Dance Awards for her performance in the ADT’s The Age of Unbeauty, Fiona presented her site-specific work Bamboo Bathing at the Contemporary Art Centre of SA. Recently she spent a month in Birmingham as part of the DanceExchange program working with choreographers Henry Oguike and Akram Khan on the research and development of new ideas and movement.

This year Fiona was awarded an Australian Choreographic Centre fellowship to develop The Obcell, an interactive dance/theatre/multi-media performance addressing issues of human testing, manipulation and solitary confinement. The dancer wears the Diem Dance System, a new sensor-based technology designed for the use of dancers and composers at the Danish Institute of Electro-acoustic Music. Stage 1 of The Obcell was presented in the Risky Manoeuvres season at Canberra Theatre Centre earlier this year. In September, Stage 2 manifest as a collaboration between Malone and 4Bux:Progressive Arts, another multi-faceted Adelaide outfit. Performed by Ninian Donald with sound and technology by Peter Nielsen and dramaturgical input from director-designer Ross Ganf, early response suggests that while the themes of The Obcell need some refinement, the use of multimedia in live performance makes this a team to watch.

Over the past decade Rachael Guy has worked across several disciplines. Formally trained as a visual artist, her voice has been in demand in contemporary music theatre circles and she has been a soloist in Ihos Opera productions. Writing is another passion. For a long time Guy has wanted to create a body of work that incorporates all these practices. She began exploring the concept of adult puppetry and in 1999 produced a series of erotic dolls with highly detailed porcelain heads and hand stitched lingerie bodies. Disquieting and fascinating to look at, these little figures became conduits for Guy's themes of transgression, appetite and ambiguity. Seeing them in an installation, or being held or regarded by people (usually with a mixture of curiosity, revulsion and humour), gave her the idea for Torrington’s Buttons, a solo show which will lie somewhere between performance art and theatre. The piece provides a vehicle through which Guy explores her experience as an adolescent, grappling with a sense of acute isolation in the suburbs of Launceston and how she dealt with this by forming an intense emotional and imaginative attachment to a deceased sailor (a member of the Franklin Expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1845-8). In 1986, the perfectly preserved remains of the young sailor, John Torrington, were exhumed from permafrost. His image appeared in the media and struck a profound emotional chord with Rachel Guy during a difficult adolescent period. She intends to tell this story of adolescent love survival through a theatre work that combines narrative, song and puppetry in a minimal theatrical setting.

Compared critically with brilliant artists DJ Shadow, The Beastie Boys, Tricky and David Lynch, The New Pollutants are making a big impact on the live arts scene in Adelaide and beyond. Featuring the talents of Benjamin Speed aka Mr Speed (vocals), and Tyson Hopprich aka DJ Tr!p (the 8-bit Wonder), The New Pollutants are intellectual hip-hop with an experimental edge. These guys have their own sound, it’s global and it’s local and it has evolved from who these artists are. In this sense, the experience of their work is intimate, leaving their audiences gasping—for air and for more! The New Pollutants recently

released their independent EP at Minke Bar in Adelaide—Urban Professional Nightmares, following their critically acclaimed debut album Hygene Atoms. These guys take lo-tech augmentation to the extreme, using the obsolete Commodore 64 S.I.D. Chip soundcard in the bedroom studio. The resulting sound is altered, embracing lo-fi technology with a familiar flavour. The New Pollutants are best experienced live, where the sensory atmosphere is addictive and the beats are phat. The live experience integrates visual experiments with original sound and a theatrical, interactive edge. The New Pollutants produce an honest sound with grounded ideas driving the creation of their work. There’s no doubt these guys are going to be huge, but only as huge as they want to be.

Pseudo Sound Project is an experimental fusion of DIY technology within performance initiated by SA-based media artist and event-architect Kristian Thomas. PSP has evolved over the last few years in a progression of rooftop performances, clubs, artist-run galleries, festivals and master classes, in collaboration with local and internationally-based video artists and musicians. With a love for the techno-aesthetic, Thomas’ performances are obscure and bombastic, slipping between glitch-pop, the moving image, hardcore electronica and rhythmic nature sampling. With a wide variety of electronic video and audio artists invited to PSP events, Thomas’ performances are chaotic, sublime and often grating, impressing upon his audiences a predilection for real-time experiences bordering on the spiritual. As a travelling performance sphere, the techno-playground of Thomas’ iconic mobile icosahedron rig stands in sharp relief against natural backdrops, yet with an obvious reverence for the chosen landscape. Nature themes have figured prominently within many PSP festivals and shows, with PSP no 8 featuring the successful planting of 1000 native trees. Pseudo Space is an interactive gallery and shop set up by Thomas and his partner Kerry Scarvelis, a cool-hunting nu-fashion designer. Pseudo Space is a home base for PSP events, outlet for local moving art, electronica and emerging designers. It’s also the sole distribution point for Thomas’ unusual beer recipes. Blends such as VegieGarden–a wheat beer with coriander and orange–notorious to the regular patrons of Pseudo Space opening nights, has recently caught the interest of brewers and local café owners. With a smattering of Epicureanism and an ardour for all things glitchy, Pseudo Space has added some vigour to the quickening pulse of experimental art, design and hospitality in South Australia.

Rainer Mora Mathews has exhibited as a cartoonist since he was 10. Now in his late 20s, he’s been working on Dead Lions (from the verse in Ecclesiastes: “for a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they shall die, but the dead know not anything”) for several years. It’s extraordinarily ambitious: a 300-page investigation of how we relate to our ancestors. The narrative stems from Mora Mathews’ fascination with his own ancestry: the experiences of his father’s family as Jewish Holocaust survivors and his mother’s Australian forebears’ role in removing Aboriginal people from their land.

Woven into this narrative is a series of archetypal myths from the Jewish and Western European tradition that reflect on ancestral relations. The comic form, which is a key creative paradigm for Mora Mathews (“this is not a novel nor a storyboard for a film”) enables a visual progression through which the ancestors or ‘dead lions’ take shape in the background, becomingly increasingly involved with the ‘live’ action in the foreground. This isn’t visual philosophy of the ‘Freud for Beginners’ variety but the telling of stories in ways that elicit philosophical reflection. The fusion is understandable. Mora Mathews’ mother, Freya Mathews, is one of Australia’s leading eco-philosophers. His father, Philippe Mora, the filmmaker, once drew comics, and his grandmother, Mirka Mora’s paintings seem strongly influenced by the comic form. Rainer Mora Mathews has hibernated north of Bendigo for the past 6 months, finishing his opus. Dead Lions is an epic of the Euro-Australian experience.

Frances Rings is an experienced dancer who is now emerging as a significant choreographer. She joined Bangarra Dance Theatre after graduating from NAISDA in 1993, 2 years after Stephen Page became artistic director. She performed in Page’s first full-length work, Praying Mantis Dreaming, and has continued to dance with the company, developing a remarkable onstage partnership with the late Russell Page. In 1995 she studied at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, an experience that has strongly influenced her dancing and choreography. Ring’s first major choreographic work was Rations for the 2002 Bangarra double bill Walkabout, a narrative piece including an inventive use of props. Her pieces in the recent Bangarra work Bush were standouts: Slither, Stick and her own solo, Passing. Clear and inventive choreographic themes combined with traditional subjects in Slither and Stick, the latter featured a very effective use of stilt-like props, while Passing read as a moving eulogy for her former dance partner. As artistic director, Stephen Page encourages his dancers to develop their choreographic skills and this is evident in the opportunities he has given both Rings and Albert David. Rings has 2 major choreographic projects lined up for the coming year and is clearly keen to continue developing her craft both inside and beyond the Bangarra fold.

SacredCOW (Dawn Albinger, Scotia Monkivitch and Julie Robson) is a Brisbane-based theatre ensemble that formed in 2000 to devise adventurous performance with strong physical and sonic scores. As they explain, “While touring and salsa dancing in the wild zones of Colombia, we dared each other to work together for 30 years.” And they’ve taken the dare seriously by establishing clear long term aims and direction for sustaining their fruitful collaboration. Inspired by “divas, lamenters, lullaby-makers and monsters”, SacredCOW became part of the Brisbane Powerhouse Centre for Live Arts’ Incubator program, designed to support local artists working on long-term laboratory style training and performance building. From here, the ensemble worked with Sydney-based director Nikki Heywood to devise The Quivering: a matter of life and death. SacredCOW’s creative partnership for The Quivering has since grown to involve Mount Olivet Hospice and the Creative Industries of Queensland University of Technology. With a history of assistance from Arts Queensland, the Australia Council and Playworks, The Quivering is scheduled for full production and a 2-week season at the Brisbane Powerhouse in November 2003. SacredCOW are also co-founding members of Magdalena Australia, part of an international network of women in theatre, and were coordinators for the recent International Magdalena Australia Festival in Brisbane.

Like Camilla Hannan, Thembi Soddell is a grit/throb/atmosphere artist whose compositions featured in the early work of RMIT’s ((tRansMIT)) collective, helping to establish the Liquid Architecture festival. Where Hannan’s sound and installation work often has a cinematic, foley quality, laid out within spacious, hissy caverns (eg 4-Way Dam in 360 degrees: Women in sound, 2003), Soddell’s is arguably more abstract and mysterious. Her most recent piece—the superb installation Intimacy (also in 360 degrees)—was characterised by sudden jumps and cut-offs in sound, stochastic drop-outs in volume which revealed, on subsequent listening, a pre-existing subtext of sound now rising within the mix. The setting of Intimacy within a dark, claustrophobic alcove, bordered by heavy, red felt curtains, exaggerated its erotic and, at times, genuinely frightening trajectories. Soddell’s CV reveals her particular interest in the subconscious, psychological transformation of sound and space, which she prompts in the listener using processed field recordings and by exploring thresholds of perception. From an apparently ‘silent’ audio space comes a terrifying point of sound which then vanishes before it reaches such a conclusion that allows tension to be released. Although Intimacy represents the summit of this approach, Soddell has been moving towards it in pieces featured in the Document 03-Diffuse compilation (Dorobo, 2001) and the gallery showing and recording Gating (West Space, 2002). In her frightening fluxion between the organic (processed water sounds, air, etc) and the electronic, Soddell incites tense listening.

In the text-based practice of Brisbane emerging artist Sebastian Moody there is a consistent concern with viewers and their reactions. With gestures both grand (such as the imposing statement “BUILT UNDER THE SUN” at Brisbane’s South Bank) and slight (the text “Primal man craves fire‚” posted in newspaper personal classifieds), Moody continually seeks a response, and considers each a little victory. However the response Moody seeks is never specific as his text works are fragmented, ambiguous and their precise intent continually debateable. What is important then, when encountering Moody’s work among the city’s landscape of advertising slogans, is the priceless freedom of choice that they wish to provide. In his most recent exhibition Generation: Point, Click, Drag, produced collaboratively with Craig Walsh as part of Moody’s 2003 Youth Arts Queensland Mentoring Program, the significance of the viewer’s response was again highlighted. Presenting gas masks and body bags emblazoned with the Nike logo, Walsh and Moody questioned the legitimacy of the audience’s, and also their own, ideological freedom within contemporary historical, social and economic contexts and the War on Iraq. Linking recreational sport and the war on terror, the show suggested the game of our current condition and the possibility that only a finite set of choices and responses exists. This gesture, intending to provoke a response, was not however predetermined as perhaps the response which commodity slogans endorse or games sanction. Rather, in his practice Moody seems to continually seek to conserve the reader’s free will in this increasingly authoritarian society.

Combining the warmth of analogue audio and video equipment with the calculated cool of their digital offspring, 4 Sydney artists explore a range of transitional/crossover/meeting points—between sound and image, personal and public, past and future, remembering and forgetting, observer and observed… Andrew Gadow, Mel Donat, Tim Ryan and Phil Williams emerged from Honours level electronic arts studies guided by senior lecturer Peter Charuk at the School of Contemporary Arts, University of Western Sydney. This year they will have an exhibition, Digital Decoupage, at First Draft Gallery, December 3-14. With varied interests, they work separately as well as on collaborative projects.

Gadow explores the translations from sound to vision and vice versa, generating pulsating video images from analogue synth keyboards, and making sounds from video footage. Most recently he exhibited in Tracking at Bathurst Regional Gallery. Gadow’s next appearance is at the upcoming Electro-fringe festival in Newcastle. Donat, working primarily in animation and installation, uses “subversion and contradictions to explore issues that may be considered disconcerting.” The installation—to be shown at First Draft—Memory Play Back, incorporates a hand-made soft toy rabbit, which operates as an interactive interface via which the viewer manipulates 3D imagery and sound. Donat’s experimental piece Trigger Displacement screened in the 2003 St Kilda Film Festival. Williams works mainly with sound in performance and installation, and for Digital Decoupage he continues with themes developed in the recent installation approaching silence at Casula Powerhouse, “a site specific meditation on the pursuit of absence.” Ryan’s work is a kind of minimal video. His Crash Media is currently touring New Zealand in the show Dirty Pixels. Ryan says the new piece, Future Proof, is concerned with ideas of obsolescence in the digital age.”[I]n this work I use defunct and faulty video technology to de-construct analogue footage.” Future Proof will show in Digital Decoupage in December, and, with Donat’s Bathing in A Warm Glow of Nothing will also be exhibited in Brainfeed at the Penrith Regional Gallery and Lewers’ Bequest, Oct 5-Nov 30.

In a small, darkened sideroom in Sydney's Artspace, 2 large screens face each other. You sit on a padded seat between, turning to take one in and then the other, adjusting to 2 close views of a man running slo-mo through an empty Sydney CBD. Because he’s running backwards and because the speed isn’t modified to the point of mere artifice, and because the man keeps turning his head to see where he’s been/heading, there’s a loping anti-gravitational lyricism to The Dead Zone that adds to the doomsday suggestiveness of empty streets and time undone. Or, as Moore notes, “this barefooted man is certainly terrified but perhaps he is in fact running from himself.” The work was exhibited at the recent showing of Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship 2003 finalists at Sydney’s Artspace and was Highly Commended by the judges. With relatively simple means, Dead Zone exploits our cinematic awareness to maximum effect, multiplying meanings in a short time and lingering much longer than its 3 minutes 30 seconds duration. We’ll be watching more TV Moore.

It is apt that, among other projects, theatre-maker Anna Tregloan is adapting the writing of Borges. Like Tregloan, he often employed spatial devices as metaphors for social, philosophical and literary ambiguities: a map so detailed that it covered the landscape it represented, the library as labyrinth. Tregloan’s most recent piece is the still-embryonic performance installation, The Long Slow Death of a Porn Star. Along with design commissions ftom Danceworks, Circus Oz and The Three Interiors of Lola Strong, Tregloan has been devising her own installation-like productions such as Mach (2000) and Skinflick (2001). LSDPS is partly a sequel to the latter, in that both employed a series of voyeuristic scenarios to produce wonder, unease, discomfort, pleasure and seduction. Context and conjunction produce the theatrical content here.

In Skinflick the audience charmingly and somewhat vulnerably observed the performance at eye level, with their heads extending to the height of the stage from beneath the rostra. The staging of LSDPS was less restrictive–the performance had no formal beginning or end, offering spectators several linked spaces to traverse, or rest within. At the top of a staircase, beyond a tight hallway, and through a doorway draped with bordello-esque beads, lay a snug viewing hall peppered with mounted illustrations. At the other end sat a foreshortened recreation of a 1950s/60s chic domestic interior. To one side lay a small, white room containing a mounted crayon, endlessly describing a circle. In the hall before entering, a sign signalled that all objects were for sale, with a description and price of each. Art as stylish sexual commerce.

Within the toy-like domestic annex, 2 women–saturated with a sublime ennui-idly posed, gazed vacantly outwards, or collapsed in upon themselves and 2 little chairs. Much of the ‘action’ was provided by David Franzke’s gently scorifying, contemporary musique concrète score, composed of sounds of breath, inflation, deflation, moans, crackles, laughter and something akin to male masturbation.

It has been argued that pornography is inherently avant-garde because, to infuse viewers with feelings of masculine potency, pornographers strive to represent female orgasm, allowing the viewer to fantasise that he has produced this reaction in the subject of his gaze. Femal orgasm is however impossible to satisfactorily represent visibly or audibly. Despite the apparent explicitness of pornography, what makes something pornographic is in fact precisely what remains forever absent but alluded to within pornography itself. Tregloan’s interaction with and referencing of pornography (presented in a book available within the performance space) was not particularly satisfactory, but in producing this sense of pornographic absence, both Skinflick and her newer project were wonderful successes. Sex is never visible in Tregloan’s works, but it is one of the themes she virtuosically recreates through staging an absence of overt action, associated with a dark, explicitly voyeuristic audience relationship. Her circle-drawing machine was, in this context, the quintessential pornographic object, its aesthetic frottage terminally spirally around issues of sex and the feminine grotesque.

The Long Slow Death of a Porn Star—The prequel, director/designer/concept Anna Tregloan, performers Caroline Lee, Victoria Huff, music/sound David Franzke, Hush Hush Gallery, July 23-25

On a balmy dry season Parap Market morning in August, Brenda L Croft (photographic artist and Senior Curator, Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art, NGA) opened Emotional Striptease and reaffirmed Christian Bumbarra Thompson’s status as one of the youngest and brightest ‘blak’ stars to emerge from the Boomalli ‘mother-ship’ into the galaxy of successful Indigenous photomedia artists including Destiny Deacon, Fiona Foley, Leah King-Smith, Tracey Moffatt, Darren Siwes, and, I would add, Croft herself.

From a Darwin perspective, both the timing and subject matter of the show were significant. Emotional Striptease coincided with the 20th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award–long dominated by contemporary Indigenous art from remote communities throughout the Northern Territory and Western Australia. In the current ‘future shock’ climate of new media art, work from these regions may be regarded as ‘traditional’—in style, medium and content—but historically its claims to country are as politically powerful as the most confronting work from the cutting edge of the metropolis. Concerned with the interplay of meaning between objects, space and history, and Western culture’s (mis)representation of Indigenous Australians, Emotional Striptease is a provocative rebuttal to any institutionally-prescribed notions or categories of ‘blakness.’ It highlighted a contemporary Indigenous art practice which has not, until recently, received the local institutional recognition and public exposure it deserves–and unequivocally demands.

A Bidjara man of the Kunja Nation (southwest Queensland), Bumbarra Thompson was born in Gawler, South Australia, in 1978. He is also of German Jewish heritage. His art school training was in sculpture and installation. He spurns art historical classification: “my work, like myself, is in a constant state of flux.” Study in Melbourne, where he resides, has had an obvious influence on the ideological underpinning of his art and the cosmopolitan rubric of his catalogue essays.

At 24HRArt, Bumbarra Thompson ‘performed’ his Emotional Striptease in an installation comprising 7 large-scale, hyper-real colour photographs, each depicting a young Indigenous man or woman (including himself), variously robed in chic Melbourne’s trademark black or in a variety of costume props reminiscent of Victorian stage dramas or historical paintings. In a series of carefully choreographed poses and hand gestures, each figure holds an exquisitely incised and ochred Aboriginal artefact—a parrying shield, fighting club, woomera or boomerang. Like Caravaggio, the artist has chosen ‘models’ from his own world: friends and colleagues living and working in Melbourne. Set against the architectonic backgrounds of Melbourne’s key ‘cultural spaces’ (Federation Square, the Melbourne Museum, ACCA), the figure-in-landscape compositions collectively create a new Melbourne—one that reclaims that city as a reconstructed site of ‘blak’ urban identity. Three larger photographs, depicting close-ups of architectural façades, comprise the theatre ‘wings’ of a highly charged mise en scène.

Although tilting at the 19th century studio practice of ‘capturing’ Indigenous subjects in picturesque landscape dioramas and the ‘scientific’ role of photography in colonial ethnography, the iconography of Emotional Striptease contains echoes of other, earlier sources, principally art historical. One female figure bears a parrying shield, her white-gloved hand resting above the abdominal swell of her black hooped skirt. She stares back at the viewer with the dignified stillness and ritual solemnity of Piero della Francesca’s frescoed ‘urban’ Madonnas. Of all the male portraits, the most powerful image is of Bumbarra Thompson himself. His eyes seek the viewer’s with the intensity of one of El Greco’s ruffled-collared courtiers, fists clenched around a hooked, ‘number 7’ fighting boomerang, bare arms raised against a black/red façade–the traditional colours of revolution and resistance. Like a ‘blak’ avenging angel, wielding a potent artefact from the archival past, he annunciates an unmistakable message of self-determination for the present and future: boomalli–to strike, or make a mark.

Emotional Striptease, Christian Bumbarra Thompson, 24HRArt Northern Territory Centre for Contemporary Art, Parap, Aug 16-Sept 6

A lot of art arrives in the mail at the RealTime office—on cards, disks, paper, acetate, vinyl, wood. We also receive key-rings, balloons, small packages (a tiny bag of sand arrived recently with the word “Escape” on a tag inside) and another day, a hand-painted box containing a pistol in papier-maché. Something about the moody postcard image from first site, a gallery with a strong commitment to emerging artists, stopped me opening mail this particular August morning. It showed the work of Irene Torres, a 22 year-old RMIT drawing student currently completing her honours year who featured with others in first site’s Recent Works exhibition. Torres speculates on the found photograph “as a representation of the experience of others in relation to [her] own.” She makes photocopies of these lost images and draws them (literally) into mysterious worlds. Occasional words and names are scratched into the grainy surface—“a gesso ground layered with various mediums, mainly graphite, acrylic paint, charcoal and pastels applied to pieces of MDF board.” Inspired by artists like Louise Bourgeois (especially her book of family photographs), Torres focusses on “the tension between the representation and the abstract space.” She uses the horizon line as a foundation for the image. The effect of distance and displacement is enhanced in the scale of these long, thin surfaces. Torres’ figures look like colonial time travellers caught in fragile, sometimes fearful landscapes.

Kate Stevens’ current paintings are energetic and evocative streetscapes. She takes photographs while walking: mundane, even dull, images tracing incidental everyday experiences of passing through streets or other urban pathways. She then re-photographs these snapshots using a digital video camera. The video can shift the framing of an image, or clip a detail, or return a virtual movement to the scene as the camera tracks across or zooms closer to the surface of the photograph. In this way the video produces something like a filmic sequence of images from a single photograph: often the source of the sets and series she produces. Stevens also frequently uses filters on the video camera lens to transform distance and distort colour relationships in the image. She rephotographs frames from the video screen, resulting in small prints that will be the reference and source for her paintings. Walk and photograph, video and photograph: the work of painting then begins. The lush, rich impasto surface and the high-toned colour of Stevens’ paintings are thus at a great distance from the impetuous gestures or fevered imaginings of the expressionist painters they might recall. They hold in the play of paint a trace of a photographic image and the play of paint is constrained by that image. In some, the blur and distortion is such that if the paint were not applied with a precise discipline, the image might disappear. It is important that this does not happen for it is through this process that the surfaces of her paintings enact or model movement and memory, remembering the experience of walking and looking–for the image to disappear would be to forget.

Kate Stevens graduated with Honours, Canberra School of Art 2001. She was awarded an ASOC Scholarship in 2002 to travel to Japan and an Emerging Artist residency at Canberra Contemporary Art Space 2003.

The second Last Supper was one of the performance highlights of 2001, unruly and discursive, full of outrageous gags, wit, alcohol, songs and political barbs delivered by a team of experienced and new players. From the same company, Version 1.0, comes Questions to ask yourself in the face of others (Performance Space, May 30-Jun 8). It’s trim and taut, a 2-hander postmodern, post-apocalyptic parable as performed by Adam and Eve who happen to be performance artists and scouts in uniform. In a mix of deadpan declamation and neurotic outburst, David Williams and Beck Wilson play out the frayed couple’s return to the scene of the ‘original’ crime (a burnt-out bourgeois paradise) generating an increasingly loopy re-mythologising of their fate, counterpointed with a physical struggle that stops barely short of violence. They tell their audience, a jury of peers briefly back from the dead, “We were prepared, like good little scouts, but we weren’t ready enough…We performed poorly.” They are, it seems, seeking a verdict, “are we responsible for the world being fucked?” But is it absolution they’re after? “We may not be innocent, but we cannot stand to be guilty any longer.” A sometimes uneasy hybrid of script-driven schematism and rigorous physical performance, Questions to ask yourself… nonetheless hits home as conservative and right wing politicians continue to consign guilt and compassion to the rubbish bins of political correctness and history. In its rare outings, Version 1.0 is an important addition to the Sydney performance scene—we need to see more of them. Their next show, CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident), scheduled for March 2004 is now in development with Danielle Antaki, Nikki Heywood, Stephen Klinder, Christopher Ryan, Yana Taylor, David Williams and Beck Wilson in collaboration with Paul Dwyer, Samuel James, Simon Wise and members of Perth’s PVI collective.

A Rising Tide is a visual journey akin to racing down a winding narrow street at 120km per hour except that the street has become a graceful snake-like conduit that receives your queries as images and pastes them in fragments onto its inner skin. The transparent blue of this 3D space provides the participant with a distant view of the oncoming journey, which slides with myriad similes from the image bank of the internet. The speed and rush of the postmodern city and its pulsating ability to feed information through signs and symbols is a visual language analogous to the spatial environment created by the interactive elements of Brisbane artist Tim Plaisted’s new work.

A Rising Tide—An Internet Surface Browser attempts to provide a new ocular understanding of how search engines (such as Google) operate on the world wide web. In this application the user is confronted by a tube-like interface in which the web link or object query entered into the pathway becomes a page that moves across the surface of a pipe. The page acts as a kind of skin to a 3D object that dives and plummets through the pathways of the net. Loading images, the user navigates the links. Plaisted explains, “this is not a case of creating independent virtual 3D worlds but about re-mapping the existing visual aspect of the internet into an environment that can be entered and traversed. In this way, the solids representing pages can be seen as a way to give volume back to the millions of body images which make up so much of internet network traffic.” Plaisted’s Surface Browser seeks to provide a 3D visual experience of surfing the internet-a process that is otherwise formless or perhaps invisible to us as users.

Browser intervention is a recent exploration in new media art and one that Plaisted has entered from the perspective of visual social engagement. Much of his earlier work interrogated the simulated process of communicated reality. In 24hr Coverage TV news broadcasts appear as if pause is being repeatedly pressed–a newsreader emerges in a moment of repetitive distress with a barely audible stammer. The absence of content is highlighted yet we understand the image as a vehicle through which we are usually informed. Plaisted questions how decisions can be informed if they are “…made in terms of a society’s response to ‘the events of the day’ without full participation of the ‘public’ in an in-depth debate” (unpublished interview, 2001). For Plaisted, A Rising Tide is a valuable encounter. As a 3D visualisation of information it enables the user to understand, albeit in a somewhat abstract manner, how the web operates by indicating the journey of an enquiry.

Joy and sadness. Giving shape to feeling. Heidi Lefebvre tackles things head on. Currently staging her first solo exhibition since graduating in 2002 with Honours from the National Institute of the Arts, School of Art in Canberra, she continues to engage with contemporary politics. Civilian Casualty at Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Manuka, in June, was the outcome of a NITA Emerging Artist Support Scheme (EASS) award, sponsored by CCAS. It represents a kind of ‘braving the world.’ Lefebvre knows now she is outside as she might put it, seeking opportunities, coming to terms with making art and making a living. Perhaps then the work speaks not only of these times, of itself, but of the positioning of the artist too, herself. Lefebvre’s exquisite works (a near sell-out) range across styles and media, from sketches and drawings to found jigsaw pieces, to bandages and blankets, to curious felt cutouts. The work evokes contrasting emotions; a sense of flight and trauma; comfort and shadows of grief; and as reviewer Russell Smith put it “a dream-like state where symbols of innocence contended with memories of pain or loss in the construction of a fragile sense of the self” (Muse Magazine, July 2003). A fitting start for any emerging artist.

A recent arrival from Perth, and graduate of WAAPA, Paul Romano has been working consistently, alone and with others. He has just completed Stage One of a collaborative choreographic project, Transitions (with Simon Ellis, Anna Smith and Eleanor Jenkins), supported by Chunky Move as part of its Maximise Program assisting independent artists. Romano’s work indicates a sustained exploration into the possibilities of movement. He swings between 2 poles: fast, jointed movements, perhaps linked to a string of actions which travel across space; and still, very slow shifts which traverse a variety of bodily positions. His moments of stillness suggest an internal registration of corporeal feeling. He is in touch with his head and spine and their flexible possibilities, using these to construct movement pathways. I have the impression that Romano’s movement is composed of a series of positions that have been strung together to create a fluid whole or rather a series of shifts from one position to another. The result of such conjunction is that the pathways from one position to the next seem more focused on their endpoints than on the passage between them. What could be done to flesh out these pathways? Perhaps further variation in timing, quality and bodily tone/content would enrich them.

Kate Murphy’s digital video Prayers of a Mother, 2001, featured in the remembrance + the moving image exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne (2003). Sydney-based Murphy graduated with honours from the Australian National University in 1999 and has been resident artist at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space and the Canberra School of Art. Fiona Tripp writes in the remembrance catalogue, “Central to Prayers of a Mother is the voice of Anne Murphy, mother to artist Kate and her 7 siblings. With great emotion, she describes the prayers she makes daily for her children and immediate family, expressing her hopes for their health and happiness, and specifically her passionate desire that they will all return to the Catholic faith. The mother occupies the central screen of the 5-screen installation, but rather than her face we see a close-up of her hands holding her prayer book and rosary, her gestures echoing the longing in her voice. On either side of this screen are 2 projections which show the children’s faces as they listen.” Prayers… is regarded by many as one of the most powerful video installation creations of recent times. Compared with the works of Viola et al, it is brief at 15 minutes but its potency is concentrated and the durably memorable. Murphy’s next work is eagerly awaited.

Ingrid Voorendt, Naida Chinner, Helen Omand and Astrid Pill are all making a significant impact on the South Australian dance and performance scene.

Ingrid Voorendt is developing her skills as a director in both theatrical and dance contexts. Using the setting of tasks, theatrical games and conversation to elicit material, she doesn’t impose movement material on those she works with, preferring to structure what the performers give her, thus foregrounding them. She works with both text and theme in this way. She is a warm, generous director, fantastic at structuring material using associative and visual logic. Her pieces are linked by a strong sense of spatial design, gestural language and playful games or physical tasks. Voorendt often contrasts spatial order with physically energetic improvisations that open out the space. She appears interested in metaphors and images that centre on but don’t ‘explain’ a theme and in the translation of ideas into visual, spatial design.

Naida Chinner is a choreographer and dancer with a background in gymnastics and contemporary dance training. She has a strong interest in the visual and often designs her performance environment. Her work lies somewhere between installation and dance performance and is marked by a nostalgia for innocence—childhood, dream love. She often uses love songs from the 40s, 50s and 60s. The work is almost romantic in the way of romantic comedies—laced with quirky, offbeat humour in the slapstick style of Doris Day and Rock Hudson movies. It also features whimsy, longing, dreaminess. In contrast, Chinner usually includes physical sequences that require considerable endurance and/or strength. This gives grit and abandon that offsets the whimsy in this very detailed and refined work.

Astrid Pill is primarily a performer but is also emerging as a writer of performance texts. She is a highly skilled singer, dancer and actor and moves fluidly between modes. Her texts are highly poetic in the manner of Jeanette Winterson. Pill is a classically trained singer with an enormous range. She is startlingly present and direct as a performer. A strong element is her capacity to move between song and speech supported by physical image or movement. Some experience in the Grotowski process and impulse work with Netta Yaschin plays a role. Pill is a highly intelligent and luminous presence, well versed in literary and musical traditions and borrowing from different genres.

Helen Omand’s performance interest is in improvisation and processes of moving. She uses contact and improvisational structures, likes the risk and chance of improvisation and doesn’t like movement work that has easy referents. She also enjoys ‘goofy’ play. Some of her work has been multimedia in which different texts run parallel—video, language, movement, light. Omand likes opening up questions rather than answering them.

Nalina Wait was a founding member of Rosalind Crisp’s company stella b. with Lizzie Thomson. She has since made her mark outside that company, performing with Danceworks in Melbourne and Sue Healey in Sydney. Last year she performed a self-devised solo work in Mobile States, a program of young and emerging choreographers at Performance Space in Sydney. kew was Wait’s first major solo, a finely articulated improvisation traversing back and forth along a shaft of light. Currently Wait is working with an improvisation group, Devastation Menu, which includes Thomson (recently back from Europe) and musician Clayton Thomas. Wait has also made a film, Sole, with director Andrew Wholley of Mackaroon productions. Using a development grant from the Australia Council, she collaborated with lighting designer Richard Manner to create a film of 3 parts, each defined by a particular lighting state which Wait ‘inhabits’, linking the film to kew. She also performed in Sue Healey’s most recent film, Fine Line which is premiering at the 2003 Melbourne Festival, and Healey worked with her in the recent Space for Ideas choreographic program at the Drill Hall (a new venue for dance rehearsal and workshops in Rushcutters Bay, Sydney). Nalina Wait’s next project will be a tour to Canberra and New Zealand with Healey’s Fine Line Terrain.

There’s no doubt community radio announcers, including those on Sydney’s 2SER107.3 FM, can at times be grating, keenly repeating their names, the name of the show, the name of the station as if they’re doing Radio Broadcasting 101. Cinnamon Lippard is one of the many antidotes—her viscous voice places rather than dissociates, she speaks softly, and without seeming to vye for attention, gets it. Like a good yoga teacher. Lippard co-presents Friday Overdrive (4-6pm) and produces a half hour national current affairs show, Undercurrents (Mondays 6pm). Nippard writes, “Unlike Triple J which uses playlists for the majority of its music programming, 2SER has a music policy, but no playlist—this leaves the presenter scope to play music they are interested in, including demos. We can break new music as soon as the artist makes it. Because we’re really involved in a variety of Sydney music communities, eg hip hop, electronica, acoustic, indie etc at the grassroots level, we’re constantly talking to artists and getting their work out there.” Nippard started at 2SER in 1998, co-ordinating activist market stalls for Freaky Loops (the 2SER fundraiser party). After 6 months she began co-presenting a breakfast show and producing stories. She also participated in the noise youth media arts festival in 2001, has produced radio pieces for SBS's Alchemy and Triple J as well as DJ-ing. Producing a show at 2SER involves an amalgamation of literacies, how does it all come together? “I’m interested in a lot of different things, I get excited about music and arts as well as social/cultural events, but also feel compelled to do interviews on political issues. I feel as much as I want to find out about the projects of creative people, I also want to make change in the world and let other people know about positive initiatives eg for environmental change. Often creativity and social action cross over eg the ‘we-are-all-boat-people’ campaign, which is great.”

Multi/inter/cross/hybrid are notions that intrigue and drive the work of Brisbane-based artist Luke Jaaniste. Having explored and experimented with diverse artforms, contexts and media since graduating in musicology from the Queensland Conservatorium in 1999, Jaaniste’s practice traverses the fields of sound installation, performance and public art. He has created work for concert hall, radio, CD, gallery, theatre, public sites and festivals using a broad range of materials including acoustic instruments, digital media, text, video, found objects, sculpture and the human body. Recent works have been presented at Small Black Box, a sonic performance event at the Institute of Modern Arts, and the Datum Video Show at Metro Arts. Jaaniste also co-directs the national composers group COMPOST, collaborates with Julian Day as juaanellii, and is currently Composer Affiliate with the Queensland Orchestra. The idea of space is central to Jaaniste’s PhD research in Creative Industries at QUT, which he began this year. “My key term at the moment is ‘making space’: physical, sensory, corporeal space, and cultural or communal space. Not ‘filling space’, which is a compositional notion (image within a frame, sculpture in a space, plot within a story, words on a page) but something more positional in actually composing the frame.” Jaaniste extends this approach to making space in his public and corporate work and in his many advisory roles in the industry: “I really enjoy thinking and discussing and planning on a policy development and ‘big picture’ level, and see that part of my future practice will be teaming up with others to make space for artistic practice to grow and flourish.”

When Experimenta director Liz Hughes and House of Tomorrow executive producer, Serafina Maiorano, visited the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in June this year, Tan Teck Weng’s work was showing as part of the Hatched National Graduate show. After some hasty negotiations, Teck’s gaming consoles, collectively titled Panopticon, have been included in the recently launched House of Tomorrow touring exhibition. Teck’s work deals with user interface and interactivity in both art and gaming culture. It is cleverly simple— constructing internal environments with some moving parts in tiny boxes that are recorded by an in-built camera and projected large, or connected to monitors with gallery environments. His boxes have an entirely functional aesthetic: they can be approached and picked up by viewers in many different ways, from gleeful abandon by enthusiastic children, to cautious and almost frightened anticipation by others. The ‘user’ in this case is able to “play God” (an apt description by critic Robert Cook) with the almost primal and childish motion of shaking the box. A recent graduate from School of Art, Curtin University of Technology, Teck is presently the web-master for the Biennale of Electronic Arts in Perth as well as working on some of his own web-based artworks.

Paul Zivkovich is a wonder to watch. He flies. He is unafraid. He’s got something to say, and not only as a dancer but now as an emerging choreographer. Born in Canberra, Zivkovich trained as a gymnast for 4 years and in 1999, aged 16, he began to dance with The Australian Choreographic Centre’s Quantum Leap Youth Choreographic Ensemble, as well as performing in Luke Hockley’s Folding On Forever. Last year Zivkovich completed his studies at Queensland University of Technology where he worked with choreographers such as Csaba Buday, Tiina Ali-Haapala and Anna Smith. During this time he also danced with Opera Queensland and appeared on singer Darren Hayes’ video clip Crush 1980 Me. This year Zivkovich joined the Australian Dance Theatre as guest artist to perform in Nothing, choreographed by Garry Stewart for the Womad Festival in Adelaide, and The Age of Unbeauty for the Adelaide season and Melbourne Festival. Circling back to his Quantum Leap roots, he is now commissioned emerging choreographer for The Australian Choreographic Centre (and the first Quantum Leaper to do this). Zivkovich choreographed The Pull of Weight for Quantum Leap’s season Out of Bounds at the Canberra Theatre Centre’s Playhouse in July/August. This delicate and sensitive moment of grace, near stillness, but with all the gravitas of knowledge, was beautifully rendered for and by the boys of the ensemble. It shone like a jewel, spoke volumes: there go I.

Perth is a city of skyscrapers that closes down almost completely after 5pm. Wandering the dead heart of its central business district may have provided the stark inspiration for Sam Fox, a young choreographer and creator whose most recent work to date has combined dance, music, and digital animation on the rooftops of Perth’s multi-storey carparks. The Tall Concrete Project premiered at the Artrage Festival in 2002, taking advantage of the deserted, open-air stages of the city. This collaborative work juxtaposed, improvised and prepared movement against the fractured glass skyline, accompanied by live electronic music and projected chaotic images of technology jarring against the body. Fox has recently been accepted into a mentorship program—through the Australia Council and Youth Arts Queensland he will undertake a 9 month professional creative development with Marcus Canning, the Director of Artrage. His work will focus on the development of a new hybrid performance, Concrete Junction, with his collaborators in the Tall Concrete Collective for the Midland, Urban Edge Festival, as well as the delivery of a program of contemporary performance at Artrage’s Black Box space. Fox’s pursuit of hybrid, movement-based theatre is grounded by a short, yet action-packed career. His education in different art forms began with a certificate in music theatre. Fox has performed works by artists and companies as diverse as Sue Peacock, Derek Kreckler and Kompany Kido, and choreographed Public Jargon as an emerging artist with STEPS Youth Dance Company for their season, Movement Safari.

Darwin audiences have been thrilled and uplifted by A Bowls Club Wedding, a recent production of TRACKS. Featuring the Grey Panthers, an older women’s performance group, this raucously amusing theatrical entrepot of song, dance and music enjoyed a sell-out season during the 2003 Darwin Festival. A Bowls Club Wedding successfully courted new audiences by using a local landmark as its venue–the historic Darwin Bowling Club. A humble example of 1960s architecture, this clubhouse has withstood the test of time, fashion and recent threats of development proposals. The undercover clubhouse patio provided the perfect setting for the quintessential Australian wedding function—including lewd telegrams, cocktail onions and a bouquet snatching flower girl—to transport the audience back to another time. The production used the adjacent bowling green as a counterpoint to the familiarity of the wedding reception antics. Flooded with light and choreographed to emphasise the grace of bowling, the green was used to depict the strategic bowling manoeuvers, intense club rivalry and in the case of the happy couple, the conquest of the heart over bowling club alliances!

A Bowls Club Wedding melded the polished performance talents of the Grey Panthers, with new and emerging Darwin dance artists, Joshua Mu, Julia Quinn, Mark Taopo and Byron Low. The pulse and verve of these young dancers juxtaposed with the grace and charm of the Grey Panthers created a work where dance, in various genres and forms, took centre stage.

From a spontaneous participatory audience round of the Pride of Erin to the unified glide of the Bridal Waltz by bride and groom (Audrey Gorring and Kevin Gould) all proceedings seemed well in hand. However, the happy couple was soon usurped by a lasciviously and technically adept tangoette performed by the self-absorbed flower girl (Julia Quinn) and debonair groomsman (Joshua Mu). Then, the pageboys turned proceedings upside down by dancing on tabletops, thrilling the audience with spins and gyrations as the wedding function lost all sense of decorum. Nonetheless the Grey Panthers made the point that they too can thrust, with bust and with dancers young enough to be their grandsons.

Dueling MCs gave some sense of order to the proceedings. Representing the Mindil Monitors—the bride’s club—was the taciturn Lori (Gail Evans). Officiating on behalf of the groom’s club—The Top End Terrors–was the bumptious Gil (Yoris Wilson). Throughout proceedings they vied for the “top” position with gags, putdowns and sly remarks threatening to overstep the competitive mark and destroy the newlyweds’ happy day.

It was the contrast between young and old–dance of the past and dance of present—that gave A Bowls Club Wedding its distinctive edge. With comedy and wit, different generations were united through the dance styles that mark their era, conveying the continuum of dance as a social form of expression and enjoyment. A Bowls Club Wedding was well received by Darwin audiences. The “dancing grannies” and “grunge ’n groove grandsons” made a potent cocktail that left its audience with a mellow afterglow.

A Bowls Club Wedding, TRACKS & the Grey Panthers, director & choreographer David McMicken & Tim Newth, Darwin Bowling Club, Aug 14-24

For the past 5 years hybrid video artists Mark Cornelius and Dianna Graf have been incorporating fine and digital arts to produce installations, sculpture, 8 and 16 mm film and computer animation for solo and collaborative projects. Their projects have included work with IHOS Opera (The Rapture, 1999, Tesla-Lightning in His Hand, 1999), Terrapin Puppet Theatre (Succulent, 2001) and in 2002 a 5-minute film, Thibaud and the Red Violin, for SBS Independent, which will be broadcast in 7 countries later this year. They both exhibited new media installations, Anxiety and Luminae, respectively, in a group show with Matt Warren and Sean Bacon, Immediate, (Plimsoll Gallery 1999). In 2000, an interactive digital collaboration from this show was exhibited in Stockholm and Belgrade. Cornelius has produced video and film installations, Somnambulistic Vision (1998) and Three Worlds (Hobart Centre for the Arts), working with Matt Warren who created soundscapes. In her solo work, Graf has primarily created immersive sculptural environments using film, video, sound and custom fragrance, produced with Jonathon Midgely of Damask Perfumery: Something Old, Something Red, Something Borrowed, Something Dead (1997) and Be Brave (1998). Cornelius and Graf are currently producing a short animated film with Tom Samek. Their work has been widely exhibited in Hobart and Brisbane, and internationally. illuminati explore the synthesis of art, science and technology in works examining hypnosis, illusion, history and fear.

There are 2 things you can’t afford to miss in Robyn Archer’s 2003 Melbourne Festival—a small cluster of important overseas works and a huge range of great Australian dance. For RealTime readers, top of the list of must-sees will be provocative artists with long track records and the capacity still to unnerve, excite and to rethink form. They are Belgian performance-maker Jan Fabre with I am Blood, A Medieval Fairytale, and, from Japan, multimedia performance virtuosi Dumb Type in Memorandum. Both have been seen in Australia before—Adelaide audiences walked out in droves or dared not go near Fabre’s The Power of Theatrical Madness in the 1986 festival (allowing others of us repeated viewings of great art understood as barely controlled violence) and Dumb Type packed us in at Sydney’s MCA in 1992 with pH where we peered down into a deep pit to watch a machine churning out projections, relentlessy traversing the space regardless of its hapless human co-habitants.

One-time Pina Bausch dramaturg, the performer, writer and choreographer Raimund Hogue triggers 60s recall using popular and classical music in the 2 hour reverie, Another Dream. Those who have seen Hogue in Edinburgh, and queued to see him again, warn us not to miss this show. Another Edinburgh attraction has been solo performer (and Robert Lepage collaborator) Marie Brassard in her cross-gender realisation, Jimmy, which she is presenting in this festival. A third solo, performed in an installation by Vera Rhom, comes from Catalan dancer and choreographer, Cesc Gelabert, in his reconstruction of the late German choreographer, Gerhard Bohner’s acclaimed In the (Golden) Section 1.

From the Schauspielhaus Vienna (see RT#56 p8) comes Barrie Kosky’s The Lost Breath, performed in English, German, Hebrew and Yiddish. The work brings together 3 stories by Franz Kafka, the reflections of escapologist Harry Houdini and the Robert Schumann song cycle, Dichterliebe in a music hall fantasia with Kosky himself on piano. Many will want to see what new dimensions there are to his work now that he’s based in Europe—and hot on the heels of his huge success with Ligeti’s Le Grande Macabre for Berlin’s Komische Opera.

From France, as part of the Franco-Australian Contemporary Dance Exchange, which last year showed Chunky Move, Gravity Feed, Rosalind Crisp and Tess de Quincey to Parisian audiences (see RT#53, p4-7), there are 3 works. Centre Choreographique National de Franche-Comte a Belfort present Trois Boleros, choreographed by Odile Duboc. Yes, that’s Ravel’s Bolero danced 3 times, to 3 different orchestral interpretations. Using acrobatics, dance and film, the young performance company Kubilai Kahn Investigations evokes the agony of the refugee and the homeless in Tanin No Kao. From Burkina Faso in West Africa comes Salia Ni Seydou, fusing traditional and contemporary dance, song and percussion.

On the Australian front, there’s much to relish. Archer gives top billing to Acrobat, all too rarely seen in Australia these days, the Australian Dance Theatre’s prize-winning The Age of Unbeauty, Chunky Move’s new work, Tense Dave (“as the stage turns, [the characters] are caught in the spotlight of unexpected scrutiny, performing acts that usually pass unseen”), the Leigh Warren-State Opera of South Australia realisation of Philip Glass’ Akhenaten and Stalker Theatre Company’s Incognita.

The key festival dance figure though is Lucy Guerin. Involved in 3 works in the festival, she is directing and choreographing Plasticine Park, a collaboration with visual and new media artist Patricia Piccinini; choreographing Delia Silvan’s performance in Stravinsky’s The Firebird (Melbourne Symphony Orchestra); and co-choreographing the Chunky Move premiere. Plasticine Park will be presented in ACMI’s Screen Gallery with 8 soloists working in projected spaces created by Piccinini, Stephen Honegger, Laresa Kosloff and David Rosetzky. Let’s hope that this festival commission is a prelude to more new media performance at ACMI.

Other Melbourne-based dance and performance works in the program all deserve attention. At the Malthouse’s Beckett Theatre, there’s a strong triple bill from Gerard Van Dyck (Collapsible Man), Christopher Brown (the return of his charismatic mass media idiot savant, Mr Phase, RT#49 p11) and Cazerine Barry (in her the new media dance theatre work, Sprung recently premiered in Adelaide). Choreographer Christos Linou and visual artist Robert Mangion screen their CBD interventions at fortyfivedownstairs in part 4 of their Intertextual Bodies series. At the same venue, Yumi Umiumare and Tony Yap, whose duets have developed impressively in recent years, appear with their new, unpronounceable Butoh company, “_”, design by Michael Pearce, in in-compatibility. Phillip Adams’ Balletlab always intrigues. In Nativity, at Dancehouse, the company invokes the museum diorama as a site for exploring the human/animal dichotomy. In another work about transformation (“from animal to angel, from gremlin to diva”), also at Dancehouse, the wonderfully inventive and idiosyncratic Ros Warby presents SWIFT re-frame, with design by Margie Medlin. At North Melbourne Town Hall, Kate Denborough directs Kage Physical Theatre in the premiere of Nowhere Man. a timely journey into the loss of meaning —“the story of an ordinary man’s transformation, where nothing feels familiar.” At the Atheneum II, Danceworks are celebrating 20 years of work with Symptomatic, which reads like a good companion piece for Nowhere Man—“characters struggle to negotiate competing demands on mind and body, never quite getting it right.” Transformation and breakdown are tellingly recurrent themes in these and other festival works, with bad old Humanism continuing its struggle to reassemble itself and the neuropathology of everyday life paralleling the distress of political disorientation.

Archer’s 2003 festival is a celebration of dance and movement. While it cannot make up for the sorry lack of a recurrent national dance festival, and can but hint at the range of Australian dance, it nonetheless does a mighty job. The vision of dance is enlarged by the inclusion of curator Erin Brannigan’s Body on Screen program. On screens inside ACMI and outside in Federation Square, the program ranges from Maya Deren’s innovative short films and Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia to Singin’ in the Rain, to films about the body at its performative limits, the disappearing body, the body as narrator and, in Body of Work, leading international and Australian choreographers as filmmakers. The program also premieres Michelle Mahrer and Nicole Ma’s Dance of Ecstasy, complementing the visit to Australia, and this festival, of the Whirling Dervishes. And there’s more, a series of forums providing dance artists and afficionados from across Australia the opportunity to meet for serious dance discussion.

There’s a 90 minute symposium on drama and dance in Asia (featuring members of Dumb Type and Cloudgate’s Lin Hwai-min), a 3 day forum on skills and choreographic training and the future of dance in Australia, and a day long “research forum on contemporary dance and choreographic cognition.” The Australian Indigenous Choreographers Project will bring together Australian and Asian artists. As well there are workshops with Kubilai Khan Investigations, Odile Duboc, Salia Ni Seydou, Cesc Gelabert, Chunky Move and Raimund Hogue. Not performing in the festival (a real pity), but running workshops are Sydney artists Tess de Quincey, Gravity Feed and Rosalind Crisp. Add to this a number of key dance presenters from around the world invited by the Audience & Market Development Division of the Australia Council and you have what adds up to a potentially significant moment for Australian dance.

There’s more to the program in music and theatre and works-in-progress. The visual arts program looks strikingly empathetic to the festival’s body theme. Last, but not at all least, there’s Neil Thomas and Katy Bowman’s The Blue Thong Club (Black Box, Arts Centre). From the Museum of Modern Oddities curators comes this “late night demi-monde”, a club where the likes of Paul Granjon (“hair technologist”), Paul Gazzola (“live art meister”), The Fondue Set, improvisers and dance artists will entertain and mingle in the context of the world’s “second largest collection of thongs.” Away from this nightly live art haven, the festival opens and closes with big public dance events. David Atkins will teach the steps, en masse, for Singin’ in the Rain on the opening night, and, on closing night there’s Bal Moderne, a well-tried European success, an evening of mass choreography at the Melbourne Royal Exhibition Building. You learn dances by Lucy Guerin, Kate Denborough and Gideon Obarzanek. This is a festival where you can see dance, talk dance and dance yourself silly.

Being nothing and everything Told via her clown-dag persona, Donna Carstens’ Thirty Years In a Suitcase is a litany of the trials of growing up as a girl who looks like a boy in the straight world of Brisbane suburbia circa 1980s. This one-woman show is about “not being black, not being white, not being gay, being forgotten, being remembered, not being funny, being nothing and becoming everything you ever wanted to be.” It is ultimately a feel-good story and Carstens knows how to charm an audience and keep them on her side.

In 2000 Carstens received a Lord Mayor’s Fellowship Grant from the Brisbane City Council and made her first international trip to study with several international artists (at the Del’Arte International School of Physical Theatre in San Francisco and festivals in Geneva and Frankfurt). This travel provides the light frame upon which she places her autobiographical story told as a series of flashbacks. Combining family snapshots, shadow puppets, juggling, the strategic use of music (including an unforgettable performance of Desperado on ukulele), Thirty Years In a Suitcase unfolds through a series of narrated stories and Carsten’s interaction with several suitcases that take on different roles.

The show doesn’t shy from the bleaker side of her life including Carsten’s initial estrangement from her mother after coming out, the domestic violence that shaped her mother’s childhood and the revelation that her grandmother, who was jailed for murder, was one of the Stolen Generation. Helped by its hometown audience whose recognition of local places helps to win them over, Carstens’ style of storytelling is direct and heartfelt.

Thirty Years In A Suitcase, Donna Carstens with Metro Arts, co-director/sound Tamsin McGuin, puppeteer Lynne Kent, lighting Veronica Joyce, projection Amanda King, audio Guy Webster, Brisbane, Aug 27-Sep 6

The project was part of MetroArts' The Independents program supporting emerging and fringe artists.

For the past few years, para//elo has been engaged in a series of collaborative projects with European artists on the theme of distance. These have included workshops, email conversations, a website, and sound and video compositions, culminating in the “live art experience”, In the Time of Distance. The Victorian-era Queen’s Theatre in Adelaide, little more than a heritage-listed shell of its former self, was transformed by James Coulter’s installation into an intimate and immersive space. Video projections covered most of one wall, soundscapes (by Scanner and Jason Sweeney) emanated from the opposite side of the venue, while a bar, computer monitors and television screens (peeking out from 1950s petrol pumps) completed the eclectic setting for this multi-faceted work.

The audience, seated on couches and chairs, were scattered around the centre of the venue. Performers moved freely through the audience, stopping occasionally to quietly impart fragments of the text (“days like this the simplest things fail to make sense”). Lines were delivered into microphones at the front of the space, with the audience hearing them from speakers at the rear. Hypnotically looped images, sounds, text and movement shifted slightly through every iteration, states of being changed gradually so that it was impossible to distinguish where one ended and another began. These techniques evoked the feeling of being inside someone’s head, their thoughts and memories washing over you, varying from lyrical evocations of a remembered Eden to chanted propaganda: “Be wary! Distrustful! On guard!”

One central theme of the performance was the nature of the migrant experience—alienation from the original culture, and from the new. Much of the subject matter depicted emotional responses to the changes brought by distance, especially those journeys that were forced or undertaken with mixed feelings. When emotions this fundamental to our nature are explored, some truths that result are necessarily banal, but no less true for our having heard them before.

In the Time of Distance was a lament, an evocation of the injustices of the past and present without offering more than a glimmer of hope in the future. Remembered stories of rape, torture, forced dispossession and imprisonment unsettled the audience and darkened the mood. This was a confronting and thought-provoking work distinguished by strong performances from Elena Carapetis, Irena Dangov, Astrid Pill and Jason Sweeney.

para//elo, In the Time of Distance, co-directors Teresa Crea, Laurent Dupont, installation James Coulter, soundscapes Scanner, Jason Sweeney), live image manipulation Lynne Sanderson, photography Peter Heydrich, Queen’s Theatre, Adelaide, Sept 4-13 http://www.parallelo-distance.net

Performed on a traverse stage, with a lucky wheel at one end and a changing room at the other, Wendy McPhee’s Private Dancer exists somewhere between an RSL and a sex club. Through a series of episodes and costume changes that highlight the ways we dress flesh, Private Dancer explores the commerce and social construction of female sexuality.

One of the first acts McPhee performs is a faux-lucky number spin-the-wheel sequence designed to split the audience according to gender. By the end McPhee is situated in the middle of a literal divide between the women and the men. From where I sat Private Dancer became a performance about women looking at men looking at the dancer. Men of all types, the beaming man, the gum-chewing guy, the old bloke who had to retrieve his glasses in order to read the instructions McPhee gave him and the young guy who, after slow dancing with McPhee, gave his female partner an apologetic shrug from across the room. Not that McPhee neglected her female audience: in one of the few moments of vulnerability performed to a cyclical voiceover she engaged them literally as her hand trailed across the front row of women.

The performance created a tangible complicity among the audience—both women and men wisecracked across the divide. In one sequence McPhee remained off-stage while each audience watched separate TV monitors. While our side laughed loudly at bad jokes like: “How do you know when your wife’s dead? The sex is the same but the dishes pile up”, the men stayed surprisingly silent. When one of the women snuck over to the men’s side and reported back that they were watching porn, the incongruous silence resonated.

Private Dancer is particularly successful as a demonstration of how the female body is packaged. With the nude sequences performed under full houselights, McPhee’s deathly pale flesh became a costume of its own. In a performance that employs masks of all kinds her commedia dell’arte-like dildo seemed highly appropriate. McPhee’s work may not be particularly radical (compared to someone like Annie Sprinkle it seems relatively tame), but there are moments where her particular blend of cabaret, dance, burlesque and striptease generates a unique experience for the audience.

Private Dancer (episode 2), softcore inc. in association with the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts & QUT Creative Industries, creator & performer Wendy McPhee, director Mary Sitarenos, designer Ina Shanahan, sound Myles Mumford, Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, Brisbane, September 10-11

Every year at this time we survey new work. Since 1999 our focus has been on new media arts both onscreen and performative. For 2003 we’ve taken a bigger, bolder step, selecting over 100 artists from all fields, mostly in their 20s, the majority working in the small to medium arts sector, their work exciting us, our contributing editors and writers. What is striking about these artists is their often direct, sometime provocative engagement with the world, the ease of their deployment of new media and the capacity to generate hybrid practices, and not a few adopt intriguing personae.

Any selection on this scale and across huge distances is necessarily impressionistic, and print space limits the number of new artists, companies, venues and events we can cover. However, beyond the artist/company profiles (a mix of critical appreciations, self-penned biographies and brief reviews) you’ll find more key names in reports on new filmmakers (p15,16), emerging film producers, the Time_Place_Space hybrid performance workshops (p28), and the recently opened Primavera at Sydney’s MCA (p21). Some of the new companies are ventures established by experienced art workers (Windmill, p29), some new works represent a mature artist (like Greg Leong, p29) moving in a new direction. Some regionally-based artists have been included but we’ll survey more in a forthcoming edition.

Although we’re surveying the work of young artists (a remarkably flexible category that has run up to 35 years of age for novelists since the advent of the Vogel Australian Literary Award decades ago) we don’t analyse the impact of youth arts policies as developed by the Australia Council and some state governments. We’ll do that at another time. However, even a casual reading of the artist profiles will tell you that there has been growing support for young artists, not big money but siginificant incentives, like the Australia Council schemes, Write in your face, Start you up, 2 EXCITE-U and Run_way (p24), along with various state government programs, Asialink grants and the many opportunities in film provided by the Australian Film Commission and state-based programs, like the NSW FTO Young Filmmakers Fund. Larger scale opportunities come via the likes of Samstag fellowships (Astra Howard, p14) and the Helen Lempriere Traveling Arts Scholarship (Paul Cordeiro & Clare Healy, p8) which have contributed enormously to the development of young artists. Often young artists gain most support from working with established practitioners in formal or informal mentoring relationships, or by being offered opportunities within companies, for example choreographing for the likes of ADT’s annual Ignition season or as part of the Australian Choreographic Centre program, or through the support of an artists’ collective (Christian Bumbarra Thompson and Boomalli, p40).

Putting SCAN 2003 together has been a challenging and exhilarating task. Thanks to our editors and writers and all the artists who responded to this opportunity to register the breadth and complexity of new Australian art. RT

Madeleine Donovan has performed in several Australian circuses and this year worked with the Womens Circus in Ghosts at the Melbourne Docklands. Her photographs featured in the 2002 Summer Salon at the Centre of Contemporary Photography, Melbourne. Based in Canberra, she is studying honours at the Australian National University School of Art and is a circus and physical theatre trainer/director with Canberra Youth Theatre.

Koky Saly, Untitled, lambda print from series How Much longer Will You Live Like This 2003/2004

Koky Saly is a Melbourne-based photographer who documents her Cambodian community. The series was shown at We Call This Paradise, First Site Gallery, Melbourne in August this year. Saly was awarded the Gabrielle Emma Hayne Memorial Award acquisitive prize for great potential in photographic art in 2002 and in 2001 was named Student of the Year in the Experimental Category by the Victorian Institute of Professional Photography. She is an honours student at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

In 2003 Tamara Dean’s work was selected for Art and About, an outdoor photographic exhibition of emerging and established artists in Sydney’s Hyde Park–and shortlisted for the 2003 Josephine Urlich Portrait Prize. Based in Sydney, Dean is a staff photographer for The Sydney Morning Herald. Friends was shown in Reportage, Sydney’s annual photojournalism festival, 2001.

David Wills, B3, 18 images of handknitted Bananas in Pyjamas found in Op shops, garage sales and markets

David Wills, from B3, 18 images of handknitted Bananas in Pyjamas found in Op shops, garage sales and markets.
David Wills has had several solo shows, most recently Bird Fancier at First Draft, Sydney 2003. His work has featured in numerous group exhibitions including Amnesty International's Faces of Hope at Womad, Adelaide in 2003 and Proximity at Chrissie Cotter Gallery in 2002. He is studying honours in visual art at the Australian National University, Canberra.

David van Royen’s clutch, gear and silence series (video and still prints) was exhibited at West Space Gallery in 2002 and features in the latest issue of Photofile. Based in Melbourne, van Royen did an undergraduate diploma and Honours at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology where he is completing a Masters in media arts.

Looking around and not really knowing where to find new documentary filmmakers (even though, I realise now, they’re all around us, except I don’t always think of them in that way—new/old etc—I mean, does that really matter?) I’m introduced fortuitously to a new series of half-hour documentaries on SBS called Inside Australia. All new directors, several with little or no broadcast or filmmaking experience, and a determined push to put them up the front of the schedule—7pm on a Sunday. What could be better? Let’s see…

Meet George from Aurora Scheelings’ The Trouble with George (the first film on the schedule) except he’s not really trouble, he’s a delight, albeit maddening, infuriating, a handful, 2 handfuls even. George is 81 with the mental age of a small child. Brian finds him living in a bus shelter so he takes him home to his wife, Jennifer, and they look after him. Now, several years on, Brian and Jennifer have parted but Jennifer is still caring for George. “Why?” you might ask, as this film does. George is a character but you know he’s hard work-imagine an irascible old man with a toddler’s temperament-although you can also see why he’s still with Jennifer after all this time. It’s an unusual relationship, partly mother/child but also one of companionship and mutual need, an irresistible emotional call and response. The film’s strength is that it makes sense of it all without wrapping it up too neatly–in the end, we don’t really know what will happen to George and Jennifer but that’s okay.

In Me Me Me and ADHD, directed by Shelley Matulick, Ben is a 21-year old with, that’s right, ADHD—he’s practically bouncing off the insides of my TV, so much energy pouring down the tube. Not that Ben is going down the tube, he’s right there dead centre—I mean, of course, there’s a documentary being made about him-who else? His family are there too, although rather more battle weary and circumspect. They don’t really come alive to the same degree as Ben but that would be hard to do anyway (only the boy who lives down the road, also diagnosed with ADHD, comes close). The film works because it doesn’t try to airbrush ADHD but manages, mainly, to show what it’s like to live with it on both sides, inside and out.

Disturbing Dust (director Tosca Looby) is a very ordinary story in that it is about a woman, Robyn Unger, dying of cancer, an everyday occurrence for somebody, somewhere, and something that is oddly banal for all its awfulness. In this instance, Robyn has mesothelioma, which she contracted as a result of handling asbestos sheeting 25 years earlier. There’s understandable anger that an activity as innocent and matter-of-fact as building a house should lead to such painful consequences decades later, but it’s to the credit of everybody involved that this outrage doesn’t obscure the central, inevitable process of somebody dying with whatever dignity is allowed. In one scene, Robyn farewells her work colleagues who, watch wide-eyed and dumbfounded by what’s happening, even as Robyn chats matter-of-factly about her cancer. At times, Robyn and her husband, Peter, appear incongruously cheery as they prepare for death, in the manner of people trying to jolly themselves along in the midst of great pain because the alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.

There’s nothing lightweight about these topics and the rest of Inside Australia promises more of the same but on the evidence of the first 3 episodes, the effect is undeniably positive. It’s continually amazing–what people can do—and this is something the directors all seem to recognise and value. The episodes are pacey and taut as befits a half hour slot, no gradual unfurling or leisurely settling in-the subjects fill the space and the screen and the immediacy is an obvious counterpart to the intimacy between the directors and their protagonists. The filmmakers are savvy, as are the subjects.

Obviously, in half an hour, there are going to be elisions and lacunae–you sense there must be more to George and Ben and Robyn and their situations (there are hints of this in the films anyway)—but I guess we’re mature enough now in our viewing to understand that this is television and half an hour with these people is far, far better than nothing at all.

The 3 opening episodes, for all their differences, document the pressures of living together today, especially when those pressures are intensified by specific challenges; Inside Australia, in this instance, means indoors, in the family home, and the dramas played out in bedrooms and kitchens. Other episodes promise to take us outdoors, but the focus remains tight-individuals, families, small communities-as if these are the basic units with which to build an understanding.

‘New’ documentary, in this instance, means staying close to home and watching the daily dramas of people trying to get by in the extraordinary everyday. Perhaps these documentaries are a reaction to the seamless gloss of ‘lifestyle’ and faux reality where a simple makeover can seemingly make everything okay. Undoubtedly, too, it’s easier logistically to make these ‘home’ movies, especially for first-time directors. ‘New’ means something well-formed but fresh, a personal engagement that doesn’t necessarily equal ‘SBS documentary’ but ends up there anyway. It takes a fair bit of passion to make documentaries this way-why else would you do it?–but the results speak for themselves.

Inside Australia was commissioned at SBSi by Commissioning Editor Marie Thomas who is upbeat about the state of the documentary as exemplified by the directors in this series: “At the moment I think Australians have every reason to be positive about their industry. I think that it is on the move and we are on the crest of a new wave of creativity. Certainly at SBSi we feel that we have been allowed to renew our remit to invent and change. I sense that the industry is loosening its stays. There are a host of really bright, committed new filmmakers out there-under 35, full of fight, ideas and attitude. Just what an industry needs to thrive.”

Directors mentioned by Thomas as the ‘tip of the iceberg’ (not just new but emerging talent) include Aurora Schellings, Emma Crimmings, Melanie Byres, Zane Lovett, Kate Hampel, Shelley Matulick, Rebecca and Jonathon Heath, Sean Cousins, Tosca Looby, Faramarz K-Rahber and Anthony Mullins and producers Melanie Coombs, Anna Kaplin and Celia Tait.

The challenge now is to ensure that the ‘new wave’ translates into something sustained and sustainable for these directors, with enough impetus, perhaps, to push them toward more, bigger and better projects. Thomas believes that the local documentary scene has been playing it “a bit safe” lately, leaving it to overseas sources to develop new forms and reinvigorate old ones. “Worst of all, this conservatism isn’t bred by lack of funds. That’s fumbling with fig leaves. We’re the cause of it. Filmmakers and broadcasters alike,” she says.

“When I arrived in Australia, I was fresh from the frontline of the terrestrial UK market where a lot of the broadcasters’ time is spent considering who will watch and why, balancing ‘should-be-made’ with ‘it’s-what-they-want’ programming. On my arrival, I was shocked by the ‘bugger ‘em’ attitude towards the viewer that I found amongst filmmakers here. It seemed so counter productive.

“First and foremost, television is a medium that needs to be watched in order to be effective and second, we are dealing with viewers who have been watching television for half century and documentary for longer than that. To assume they can’t make informed choices seems to me to be arrogant. Good ratings don’t equal dumbing down-and yet that was the regular war cry I heard from all around.

“Recently SBSi and the independent sector have been given the thumbs up by the channel’s television management. Ned Lander, Senior Commissioning Editor, and I have been told to give our TV instincts and new ideas a go-ideas that perhaps a year or 2 ago may not have been seen to be fitting or ‘the thing’ for the channel to do. Personally I feel that we are being allowed to open the door to new players and fresh content and being given the opportunity to widen the vernacular of documentary output. From now on, programs can come in different shapes and sizes, as will budgets. We have been given the opportunity to play with light and shade in the schedule.”

Inside Australia isn’t going to change the scenery overnight but it is a good start. Stay tuned.

What makes an actor? What are the ingredients for a flexible performer who is able to cope with the secret business of directors and their methods of rehearsal? Some prolific directors offer their perspectives on working with graduates of actor training courses in the past 5 years.

“Over 5 years I’ve observed quite a number of graduates from training schools,” says Robyn Nevin, Artistic Director of the Sydney Theatre Company. “The STC employs quite large numbers from acting schools, predominantly graduates from NIDA, WAAPA, VCA. My great concern…is in the area of voice and text. It is very often a teaching situation in the rehearsal room since recent graduates have little understanding of the fundamentals of grammar and sentence structure, and almost none of the rhythm and music of language.”

This deficiency, says Nevin, stems from, “a different emphasis in the fundamental education [of] Australian children…I am such a dinosaur because when I was at school we did a lot of poetry and written and verbal expression. We learnt grammar, sentence structure, the way in which language is put together and why. Nevin believes that actor training courses fail to compensate for this lack of basic training in the uses and structure of language in the schools system. She also passionately believes, “If you can do the classic texts you can do anything. They stretch you emotionally, intellectually, vocally, and physically. There should be a greater emphasis on this aspect of the actor’s training, because at the receiving end you just wish they had that grounding.”

Michael Gow, Artistic Director of Queensland Theatre Company works with a training ensemble—4 actors “whose work has come to our attention through fringe theatre” have become staff members for a year. He stresses that the ensemble tends to be made up of actors who are not “straight from school.” Gow is interested in the graduates who have a mix of disciplines and approaches in their work. He observes, “people up here are susceptible to fads…they have to grab all these complex methods rather than simple things.” Gow notes that the Suzuki method is popular in Queensland at the moment, and that it is “great for a particular kind of performance, but it leads people to being incredibly self-conscious physically.” He prefers the “old fashioned conservatory course” such as the one at the University of Southern Queensland where students are given some basic skills and an indication of their strengths as performers “rather than playing with their heads.”

Wesley Enoch, a freelance director based in Melbourne, is disappointed that there are “so few Indigenous graduates from the main institutions [and] few graduates from non-Anglo backgrounds.” He feels there is a “house style” for each of the actor training courses. He doubts that “a 3-year course for teenagers will ever ‘create’ a good performer, but it can give a good introduction and grounding so that after a person graduates they can learn their craft in the field, observing, engaging with, working alongside more experienced performers.” Enoch criticises the “in-house” nature of training for actors and believes that “students should be exposed to many working methods” since the drama school house style “isn’t always applicable to every process.” Gow also refers to the fluidity of the process of making theatre, “I’d hate to be in a rehearsal room where everyone works in the same way. My job is to ‘sus out’ the differences between each performer and then create the structure, so we can just start working. At the outset I do make it clear that the way I work, we’ll go up an awful lot of blind alleys.”

Ros Horin, who recently retired as Artistic Director of Griffin Theatre after 12 years, feels that recent graduates are “usually brave and adventurous physically” but weak in voice training. However the graduates she has worked with “have all been great. I usually select very carefully graduate actors who are quirky and very individual. Horin believes that graduates don’t come out of drama school knowing how to use their skills in a range of styles. “I think they struggle with something that’s not naturalistic and with finding the truth in it, but…that ability comes with experience when you have worked across a range of styles.” Horin sometimes finds students are “so keen to impress and do the right thing that they try to do it on their own. They are so focussed on what they are doing and their actions that they don’t allow it to be free and relaxed between [themselves] and the other actors.”

Wesley Enoch also observes that “the practical application of skills is the hard thing [for young actors] and it takes time to discard [certain] things and to learn new things on their own terms—that is, to remove their teachers from the equation.” He also has reservations about the vocal skills of recent graduates, “…some vocal training focuses too much on the psychological blocks when good old capacity, vocal range and dexterity is what is needed.” Like Gow, Enoch wishes for more training on the traditional aspects of the actor’s craft. “Sometimes I don’t care about what an actor is going through to achieve a performance—instead I want them to focus on what an audience is getting from their performance and delivery. This can be difficult [for some graduates] when some training approaches require a strong internal life for a character but don’t provide the actor with skills to pass the story through feeling, text or physicality, on to an audience. There can be a level of self-justification and lack of respect for the needs of an audience.”

Gow says the training at some acting schools “turn[s] graduates in on themselves, rather than teaching them to listen and play as part of an ensemble.” He cites the graduates who have asked in a rehearsal process, “I haven’t cried yet, so is it valid work?” He believes that acting is about “reacting truthfully, rather than knowing what you are feeling.” As a director he is “not a puppet master—I like to know what people are thinking and where they are at.” A shift in attitude from “so you want me to do this here?” to “this is what I think” can take some time in a rehearsal process, he says.

How students of the various actor training courses survive once they have graduated comes down to a ‘nature or nurture’ argument. Nevin says she is “often reminded of how the passing of 3 or 4 years can bring about great changes in graduates. They audition, and 4 years later they come back and look completely different…unrecognisable. All sorts of things contribute to the maturation but…it depends on the individual, how they cope with the real world—the difficult world of being an actor is damaging to some and can be invigorating for others.”

Despite her reservations about voice and text training, Nevin enjoys working with recent graduates. “[M]any of the graduates I’ve worked with I find to be hungry and open to learning more. Then I get some reports from others that some are less open, in conflict with the director, and late. Often graduates grow out of these rebellious tendencies after a couple of years.”

Enoch thinks that if “a talented, politicised and switched-on person goes into one of these institutions more often than not they emerge talented, politicised and switched on with some more skills—but I can’t see how the institution has inspired them.” It troubles him that “graduates don’t know what companies are doing what! People make ill-informed decisions about which institution and working method would work for them, what companies and directors they’d be interested in working with, and what skills they’d like to develop. The institutions don’t articulate that they offer a house style, nor do they inform the students of their options.” Gow believes, “in an ideal world the training would include some sense of the world.”

Enoch says, “older artists are under-utilised as potential resources in the training of other artists.” He identifies the apprenticeship model as perhaps the most effective way to train an actor, but admits that the ‘how and where’ of this idea is vexed. “The major companies no longer use understudies, there are no repertory or company ensembles, and we as a culture still haven’t found a place for our elders.” He is most disappointed by “the inability [of graduates] to articulate their motivation” for being actors. However, he sees this as “a concern for the whole arts community. The question ‘why?’ isn’t asked enough.”

Playwright Ben Ellis’ latest biliously nasty satire reads like a manifesto on what relationships theatre can realistically and effectively have with the world. Since Tampa and September 11 critics have been crying: “Where are the plays on these subjects?” It’s like the ongoing call for The Great Australian Musical, or the now thankfully past calls for The Great Australian Play. Far from suggesting an effective response to contemporary politics, such demands stem from an attempt to enclose these events, to place them within a ‘Great’ fiction like All Quiet on the Western Front, and so enable us to move on, happy in having given them literary voice. Such an approach however, is inimical to theatre. The theatrical worldview is one in which things remain in a state of flux, in which change is continuous and final victory is elusive—or even illusory.

It is no coincidence that Bertolt Brecht worked in theatre, because a truly theatrical response to reality is necessarily systematic. Even the heroes of classical tragedy do not act alone. Their actions are dictated by a thousand forces embedded within the cosmic dramaturgy. The ‘Refugee Crisis’, important though it is, will not be ‘solved’ without addressing the myriad broader issues which brought us to this pass, from the inequities of international global capital to the changes in the nature of individual political engagement.

Judged in this context, Ellis’ work is a tour de force. His imagination is so profligate that he refuses to close off any of the wild exchanges that bubble away in this theatrical world. The depression of rural Australian society; a degree of self-interest and implicit fascism that makes even Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros seem kind; disease as a blight on human compassion such as makes The Plague seem humanistic; a denunciation of the innocence of children which surpasses Lord of the Flies; all of these worlds career madly together in a Swiftian comedy that combines the pessimism of 1984 with the violent, comedic lyricism of Brave New World. In short, both the weakness and the strength of Ellis’ world is its incredible richness, the many plays that collide within it. Like Terry Gilliam in Brazil, Ellis is unsure even how to conclude this work, offering at least 3 possible endings. The dark excesses of his writing represents a more realistic response to contemporary events, reflecting deep, structural changes in emotional life which have no single cause and which leave nothing untainted. Rather than The Empire Strikes Back, this is Alien, where the lack of genuine altruism among the victims makes them as guilty of their own fates as those explicitly in power. The disenfranchised of rural Australia fervidly mouth the doctrines of right wing economic determinism as they desperately fuck to the tune of the destruction of the world; a futile attempt to emulate their masters.

The dramaturgy of Falling Petals is as tautly ugly as Ellis’ dialogue. A world of graffiti and torn cardboard, the stage resembles a nasty, run-down backwater from the start. Aural bleed-through and fine grit compositions rise underneath the performance until the final heart of darkness emerges—which, as even Kurtz knew, was always to be found at home. Hanson country as a self-destructive, right wing Congo for our own times.

Falling Petals, writer Ben Ellis, director Tom Healey, lighting Daniel Zika, set & costume design Anna Borghesi, sound David Franzke, performers Paul Reichstein, Caroline Craig, Melia Naughton, James Wardlaw, Melita Jurisic, Playbox, Malthouse, Melbourne, June 27-July 19

Wearing a frock and stilettos, a woman is upturned. Over time, and to the discordant strains of a melodica, she rights herself and totters spasmodically across the space. It’s a disturbing image and an uncomfortable adjunct to the onscreen vision of a nocturnal bridge, silent headlights gliding along its embedded carriageway. Uneasy relations between iron and flesh, motorcar and mind, industry and humanity.

Bonemap’s Bridge Song aims to explore “the interrelationships of environment and moment within the precinct of [Brisbane’s] Story Bridge” and further attempts to extrapolate these to our wider understandings of being in the world. With an impressive array of collaborations and residencies to its name—including the first interdisciplinary Asialink residency in Singapore—Bonemap seeks to investigate interconnectedness through live art, installation and new media. Northern Queensland-based Bonemap’s creators, production designer/director Russell Milledge and choreographer/performer Rebecca Youdell, often work closely with other artists to produce “creative intermedia” with an ecological sensibility at the core. In Bridge Song, Milledge and Youdell partner with musicians Erik Griswold and Vanessa Tomlinson of Clocked Out Duo to create a series of “out-of-awareness” perceptions of time and place in a hybrid investigation of “daily life, flesh, earth and weather” using Brisbane’s Story Bridge as a focus.

The Story Bridge is an interesting choice. It is an urban icon linking South and North, attracting the tourist gaze, and sheltering a pretty good pub. While serviceable to pedestrians, it certainly hasn’t the popular foot traffic of bridges that link the CBD to South Bank, nor does it have the political capital of the William Jolly along which many a protester has marched en route to Musgrave Park. But in Bridge Song, the Story Bridge never looked so aesthetically intriguing, even if the wider metaphor of the importance of bridges in our fragile global ecology didn’t quite achieve the intended impact in this preview performance.

The work comprises 11 titled ‘responses’ to the bridge in which meaning is constructed and communicated through “a synthesis of mediated signs and sonic events.” In some episodes, this synthesis is achieved with creative clarity. In “Bridging the Gap”, 2 ropes tied at each end to drumsticks played by Griswold and Tomlinson on opposite sides of the stage provide a percussive literalisation of sound waves. As the drum rumblings evoke the splendid thunder of a Brisbane storm, the moving rope simultaneously creates an ephemeral canvas for the projected images of the river in flash flood. Equally evocative is the bird song created by the rubbing of Chinese ceramic bowls filled with water in “Edge of the Abyss.” In an inspired fusion of sound, image and movement Youdell inches her way across the space, tautly en pointe, while Milledge’s accompanying projection is meditative, animated with birds in time-lapse flight moving across the bridge’s webbed span. Episodes such as these provide a seamless merging of projected, corporeal and sound media, achieving the kind of synthesis Bonemap clearly aims for.

In the effort to transplant broader metaphorical resonances into these responses, Bridge Song sometimes loses its allure. For instance, the screen footage of a bridge warping and waving in an earthquake provides a stunning mirroring of built form with the natural kinaesthetic of flowing water. But as Youdell throws herself into a maelstrom of balletic movements in light of these astounding images, the synergy of body/projection loses impact. As she halts and exaggeratedly gasps for breath, it feels curiously disengaging. Then again, how can one begin to engage with the scale of such a powerful force? Later, in “Humanity”, the dancing body speaks for the first time: “I believe that the planet and humanity is unsustainable. …Now… now… now”. The statement is central to Bonemap’s philosophy yet, in this scene, fails to find a tension to equal its urgency. This section will undoubtedly become tighter in subsequent performances but, in terms of “extending the potential layers of audience empathy and engagement”, these broader parameters don’t quite arrest attention.

Many moments teeter on the edge of humour. At one point Tomlinson unexpectedly grabs Youdell’s leg in a flurry of percussion. And, as a static cartoon-like image, “Globe head” is intriguing with its social comment (a naked body sits contemplatively with a bleeding world globe substituting as an oversized head). But, for such a striking pose, it lacks a little of the irony or perhaps self-reflexivity needed to draw together this show’s ambitious amalgamation of the spatial, social, aesthetic and ecological.

In its first public outing, Bridge Song effectively spirited an interconnectedness between “moment and environment” with the specific iconography of the Story Bridge. And while the work’s conceptual global/personal divide is yet to be ‘bridged’ as seamlessly as its excellent production values, audiences can look forward to this work’s sustainable life.

Bridge Song, Bonemap in association with The Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, production design Russell Milledge, performer Rebecca Youdell, music Erik Griswold and Vanessa Tomlinson, Brisbane, June 12-14

Ever since Australia’s greying enfant terrible Barrie Kosky moved to Vienna, the Austrian capital has become a haven for his compatriots. Cabaret artist Paul Capsis, actor Melita Jurisic, architect-designer Peter Corrigan and expatriate puppeteer Neville Tranter have all passed through his company.

Together with Airan Berg, Kosky is co-artistic director of the Wiener Schauspielhaus. Kosky was in Berlin directing a production of Ligetti’s Le grand macabre when I was in town, but Berg warmly welcomed me in his absence. Kosky’s penchant for music theatre led some Australians to mistakenly assume that there was a period when founding artistic director Hans Gratzer staged classic Baroque operas. Berg insists: “This is a theatre company. Schauspielhaus means playhouse. We’re not a sprektheatre, nor a musiktheatre, nor a tanztheatre. Both Kosky’s and my definition of theatre comes from the original. Theatre is a unity of different forms. Theatron means ‘to watch’, so you have to see. My work and Barrie’s and that of the people we invite here has music, speech, dance, puppets, projections, whatever. We are in this sense a unique haus for Vienna.”

The vision that Berg and Kosky have for the company is that it acts as a staging ground for the interaction of different cultural and social elements, whatever these may be. This is not restricted to Kosky’s Jewish-themed music theatre and cabaret which he has continued to produce since leaving Australia, or Berg’s politically themed, imagistic work with strong use of video projection. Schauspielhaus productions also feature the on-stage collision and interaction of multiple spoken languages. Berg observes, “For Barrie and myself, international exchange, multi-linguicity and multi-ethnicity is everyday. We say we’re not multicultural; we’re normal.” The Schauspielhaus constitutes an overt, public staging of that which is often buried under the accretions of this former imperial city—that Vienna has been and remains a crossroads of states, nationalities, races and cultures.

The Schauspielhaus production I saw provided a fine example of this aesthetic. The Continuum: Beyond the killing fields was a fostered work, produced with TheatreWorks from Singapore. Even at the pragmatic level of programming, the Schauspielhaus is about the interaction of multiple forms, ideas, institutions and individuals. Continuum was part of the Myths of Memory season, focussing on ethnic cleansing and related atrocities. Throughout the season, behind the seating within the plain Schauspielhaus theatre, sat The Library of Ethnic Cleansing, a collection of video stations featuring films, interviews and documentary materials focussing on the wars of the nearby Yugoslav peninsula. Audiences could peruse these materials before, between and after the live performances.

The Continuum is heir to a tradition of ‘documentary theatre’ which flourished in Eastern Europe following the break-up of Communism. However, director Ong Keng Sen’s production dealt with 5 dancers of the Khmer Court style, 3 of whom were survivors of the Khmer Rouge’s Killing Fields of 1975-9. The piece was remarkable for the depth, layering and intensity sustained by its minimalist mise en scène. The performers came forward on an unadorned stage, knelt before the audience and plainly retold their stories in their own language. The house lights remained at a low level throughout and audiences were provided with printed scripts in German or English. Through this simple aesthetic, Sen produced, with far less fanfare, Brecht’s theatre of strong emotional engagement (provided by the honesty of the performers and the nature of the material), vitally combined with critical distance (achieved by forcing Viennese audiences to recognise that interpretation of this work required effort on their behalf).

This strongly affective defamiliarisation of forms, ideas and experiences was also visible in the staging of the dance and shadow puppetry. Musician Yutaka Fukuoka sat under gentle lighting at the side of the stage, visible to the audience—just as in traditional Khmer Court performances. However his costume was black and his instrument was a MIDI with a highly expressive, console-like interface. The dancers restaged traditional choreography in Khmer dress, but both the lighting and the music was ‘modern.’ Continuity and change; the recapturing of an all-but-wiped-out tradition with the full force of modern electroacoustic playfulness behind it; all played out on stage. Using this basic dramaturgical framing, Sen rendered ‘traditional’ dance eminently ‘contemporary’—or rather newly exciting and surprising, while retaining the poignancy of historical depth. Through such works, as well as Kosky’s own Yiddish, German and English amalgams, the Wiener Schauspielhaus acts, in Berg’s words, “like a window onto the rest of the world which Vienna otherwise lacks.”

Benedict Anderson calls nations “imagined communities”: arbitrary associations of individuals, places and symbols collectively willed into cultural reality (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, Verso, London, 1983). After a week at the 2003 Vienna Festival, I find this idea of Austria as a form of communal imagining irresistible. For all of the city’s apparent historical fixity, there has never been a time when Viennese cultural identity was self-evident. The Wiener Festwochen 2003 and Viennese cultural life in general are deeply immured in attempts to resolve this.

My overall impressions were summed up by seeing K, staged by Melbourne company Not Yet It’s Difficult. This re-imagining of the issues raised in Kafka’s The Trial of Joseph K constituted a self-conscious musing on the subversion of democratic freedoms during the 21st century. It began with the performers guiding and interrogating spectators as we wound our way through a “security system” (RealTime 52, p7). Director David Pledger’s text mixed alternating, rapid-fire political diatribes with audiovisual sophistications and menacing playfulness. The highly attentive Viennese audiences were polarised in their responses, one silver-haired man loudly booing as 3 younger spectators tried to drown him out with post-show applause. A mixture of cultural sophistication and intolerance; the almost suffocating weight of conventional history versus traditions of radicalism—Vienna is characterised by all of these.

Austria is one of the few EU members not part of NATO—neutrality is written into the country’s constitution. In 100 years, Vienna has changed from being the heart of the wealthy but repressive Hapsburg Empire, which collapsed during World War I, spawning fascism in the form of the Führer (the director of the Natural History Museum quipped to me that Austrians are brilliant because they convinced the world that Hitler was German, and Beethoven Austrian), endured Allied occupation and are now attempting to claw back cultural prominence. This is the weft of Austrian cultural memory. Even the trees bordering Alfred Hrdlicka’s memorial to the victims of war and fascism were reputedly planted by Kurt Waldheim to mask the deliberate slight of this sculpture being erected opposite his rooms. Viennese therefore resist any suggestion by artists like NYID that they do not know the hard lessons of repression and democracy.

Viennese cultural life reflects an ongoing conflict between the comparatively liberal municipal government and the more conservative national coalition (the latter having included Haider’s far right party). The 2003 opening of the Wiener Festwochen coincided with the Austrian government’s announcement that it would suspend its funding, though the festival can still depend on substantial financial support from the municipal government. Over 70% of the audience comes from within the city. While efforts are afoot to tap international audiences, the programming remains indifferent to the needs of non-German speakers, with English-language and dance performances sparsely scattered throughout. Who this Festival benefits—Viennese, Austrians, Europeans—remains a vexed question.

Reflecting these tensions, the opening spectacle Station Europa was a mix of masterful multi-screen projections, high art references (Chopin’s Nocturnes as a meditation on the Holocaust), and at times kitsch amalgams of popular and classical forms (an un-ironic, live-choral version of Kraftwerk’s TransEurope Express). The opening was constructed partly in opposition to tendencies within Austrian national cultural life, as a restatement of the interconnectedness of the city to other European metropoles. Images of Sarajevo, Budapest, Kiev among others, travelled across the screens; text below these elegaic visuals signalled each ‘station’ in a voyage through the pathos and vivacity of ‘old Europe’. This provided an audiovisual counterpart to official speeches stressing Vienna’s status as one of the great European stations, deeply imbued with the liberal multiculturalism this implied. Within such rhetoric, Vienna is a place of ongoing cultural sophistication and pilgrimage. The first week’s schedule of a Baroque opera and Peter Handke’s translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus in Colonos at Vienna’s monumental bastion of text-based, German-language theatre, the Burgtheatre, emphasised the continuity of traditional, classical high art within the festival.

As a witness to the self-conscious infusion of capital into “Great Culture” by former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett, I felt a sense of déjà vu. The more local politicians crow about Kultural excellence, the more one feels that this cultural realm is sustained only by its endless restatement by political elites. The need for such figures to remind the people of this former centre of an Empire which stretched from the steppes of Hungary to the borders of Turkey that the city remains multicultural, the more one gets the impression that it’s not in fact the case. The director of the festival’s performing arts program Marie Zimmerman shared with me the grim joke that some Viennese behave as if the Emperor is only away on holiday. For all of its immense—one might say oppressive—history, Austria is in fact a younger nation than Australia, its current borders dating from 1950.

The continuous negotiation of national identities is epitomised in the way Vienna is addressing the greatest shame of Austrian cultural memory: the Holocaust. During the fin de siècle, Vienna was one of the great European Jewish cities. By 1900, the Viennese Jewry had become an important and apparently well-integrated facet of cultural life. With a speed inversely proportional to the centuries over which Jews had accumulated cultural respectability, this population was then wiped out. The city of Vienna is now going to great efforts to reinstate, or at least acknowledge, this past.

One of the festival highlights was the Jewish Museum exhibition Quasi una Fantasia, chronicling the ambivalent position occupied by the many prominent Jewish musicians from the mid-19th century until 1938. Although best known as modernist or avant-garde composers (Mahler, Schönberg etc), Vienna’s Jews were heavily represented within every musical genre, from Yiddish music theatre to popular Austro-German film. A sparse exhibition style coupled with a rich audio guide permitted a simultaneous survey not only of the history of Viennese Jewish culture, but also of the histories of Austrian music, anti-Semitism and Austrian cultural modernity generally (a wonderful art nouveau salon designed after Josef Hoffman was featured, for example). Like many of the simple yet text-reliant Viennese museums (Schönberg Museum, Freud Museum), Quasi una Fantasia did not so much inform patrons as encourage them to consider the often contradictory connections between different aspects of cultural life. The recent arrival within the city of Australian director Barrie Kosky, with his anarcho-Yiddish dramaturgy, is timely in light of such developments (see page 8).

Vienna is therefore a city of omnipresent, German-language high art, underpinned by less evident, subversive counter traditions. Although Wiener Festwochen focuses upon the former, the latter are also present. During the 1960s, Vienna was a centre for performance or “direct” art: works painted onto the body with blood, paint, dust, clay and slaughtered animals. This “anti-tradition” largely imploded under its own shocking excesses, but allied practices linger on in such institutions as Tanztheatre Wien. Within the Festival itself, the shrill madness of Heidi Hoh 3 was informed by such concepts. Though I was uninspired by the 3 female performers sitting on grotesque 1970s retro furniture while screaming at each other until their neck veins throbbed, director René Pollesch’s insistently untheatrical, almost tangible, aesthetic was intriguing.

The most striking work I saw was a rehearsal of composer Wolfgang Mitterer’s opera Massacre. To a shattering, not quite atonal score of dense percussive chaos, electroacoustic grind and isolated, discordant orchestral flourishes, director Joachim Schlömer offered a lesson in the staging of abjection and humiliation, meted out by one charismatic performer on another. Characters wandered about the stage, stripped, painted and blindfolded as the next symphony of arbitrary violence erupted. Though adapted from Christopher Marlowe’s play about the 1572 St Bartholemew’s Day Massacre, Schlömer’s production drew a direct line between this event and the arbitrary nature of contemporary identity. Unlike so many of Vienna’s cultural artefacts, Massacre invited one to see Western civilisation as a form of wishful imagining.

Station Europa, director Roland Loibi, Townhall Square, Vienna, May 9; Quasi una Fantasia: Jews and the music metropolis Vienna, concept/implementation Werner Hanak, design Christian Prasser, Judische Museum Wien, May 14-Sept 21; Oedipus in Colonos, by Sophocles, translation Peter Handke, Oedipus Bruno Ganz, director Klaus Michael Grüber, Burgtheatre, Vienna, May 11-June 9; Heidi Hoh 3: The interests of the company cannot be those of Heidi Hoh, Künstlerhaus, Vienna, May 10-12; Massacre, composer/librettist Wolfgang Mitterer, director/choreographer Joachim Schlömer, Ronacher, Vienna, May 19-24; Wiener Festwochen 2003, Vienna, Austria, May 8-July 16. Further details (in English & German)

In a self-consciously self-referential performance, Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus’ anyway i’m not alone employs the metaphors evoked by the stuff of circus. The tricks you do, the applause you crave, the daggers that get thrown at your door, the stuff you drop and the things you keep doing over and over again until you get them right.

Exploring the ways people encounter each other and how connections are made, the performance presents the audience with moments that are carefully built and then quickly abandoned. The opening sequence introduces the 4 performers and exploits the discomfort of circus performers seeking applause for every trick. It is an opening with some memorable moments. Perhaps the most psychological features a man juggling while a woman clings to his body. Rockie Stone’s act of balancing 4 chairs while simultaneously narrating each moment is compelling for a different reason, its self-referentiality celebrates the live act performed in real time.

The highlight of the performance is Andrew Bright’s beautiful trapeze work. Slow and precise, with the ghostly figures of the other performers moving through the space beneath him, it is an exquisite composition. Even the crying baby in the audience seemed a perfectly orchestrated component of the mise-en-scène. It is later revisited with the addition of Chelsea McGuffin. Here the formerly clinging woman is allowed to fly and the piece successfully recasts its spell.

In design and structure the work refuses any unified or clearly articulated world. According to the program notes “nothing can mean anything very much” unless “we discover what Freud called ‘afterwardness’—the way some things acquire meaning after they have happened.” This cannot substantiate a certain aimlessness (as opposed to randomness) that characterises this performance. For example, the sequence featuring McGuffin and her hulahoops and David Sampford juggling in the nude is either undercut or overwhelmed by Stone’s monologue about verbs, but even ‘afterwardness’ fails to illuminate it. And yet ‘afterwardness’ does its job in the following piece, where Sampford’s determination to juggle 6 balls takes the audience so far beyond their patience that they end up on the other side, rooting for him.

The final long sequence is performed to an aural and visual soundtrack that evokes travel and the passing of time. In it we are carried away via a series of disparate images, the highlight of which is McGuffin walking a tightrope en pointe. Her final monologue starts as a tirade upholding the virtues of partnership on the domestic front and quickly moves into a celebration of the possibilities created through teamwork, everything that we have just witnessed. Maybe we don’t need the monologue to tell us what we’ve just seen in the flesh. Maybe the “sheer fact of someone doing something,” as the program suggests, is not quite enough to ensure that the audience and the performance intersect. Just when you’re trying to decide, the show finishes as it began—in the discomfort of them staring at us and us staring at them.

anyway i’m not alone, Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus, director Yaron Lifschitz, composer Steve Reich, musical director Zane Trow, performers Andrew Bright, Chelsea McGuffin, David Sampford, Rockie Stone, costumes Anna Illic, lighting Jason Organ, Richard Clarke Brisbane Powerhouse, June 27-July 5

Singapore is known as the Lion City. But in our new-millennial, post-colonial, post-postmodern world, perhaps it is more of a chimera: the head may be that of a lion, but the rest of the beast is a composite of opposites.

Singapore is an island, a city and a country; an ever-changing landscape of new skylines and landfill-expanding coastline; a Chinese/Indian/Malay multiculture with a strong identity in the Sino-world; an international centre that strongly promotes its “Asian Values”; a vigorous arts/performance scene that draws extensively on its traditional cultural forms while embracing exposure to contemporary practice and influence. And since 2001, it has been the home of the Theatre Training and Research Programme (TTRP)—a 3-year actor training course drawing students from around the world and offering a chimerical blend of contemporary practice and traditional Asian performance styles.

TTRP’s premises are a warren of labyrinthal corridors and brutal modernist rooms in the midst of an international business park renowned for its advances in computer technology, most famously the invention of the Soundblaster. Its establishment was the logical next step for Practice Performing Arts School (PPAS), founded in 1965 by choreographer/dancer Goh Lay Kuan and Kuo Pao Kun. Poignantly it has become the culmination of Kun’s vision and also his memorial, following his tragic death from cancer in 2002. The shock and mourning for his passing is still deeply felt within the Singaporean arts community, by staff and students at TTRP, and also in its ramifications for the school’s future directions.

Playwright, director and theatremaker, Kun is respectfully and warmly acknowledged as the “father of Singaporean theatre.” There is scarcely a theatre company or organisation with which he did not have a direct association, whether in its foundation—as with The Substation, or through his nurturing and support of young artists—such as Theatreworks director Ong Keng Sen and the late director William Teo. He also enjoyed a close association with Australia, beginning when he was a NIDA student in the early 1960s.

Over the past 38 years, PPAS has introduced many new ideas and methodologies to Singaporean theatre and dance, has generated and inspired significant groups and venues, and been the training ground for many of Singapore’s leading directors, choreographers, playwrights, actors and dancers.

TTRP was the logical next step for PPAS—a training school for professional actors, where an international staff nurtures students from around the world through contemporary methodologies and traditional techniques. Why in Singapore? Because the contemporary methodologies reference global influences, and the traditional techniques are grounded in significant Asian theatre forms.

Thus, in their first 2 years of study, students receive training in the standard foundations for the global actor (Western-influenced movement, voice, acting technique, improvisation etc) as well as concentrated physical and vocal training in 4 Asian classical theatre systems—Chinese Beijing Opera, Indonesian Wayang Wong, Indian Bharatanatyam and Japanese Noh theatre (one form per semester).

Concurrently, in classes such as Improvisation and self-devised Individual Projects, the students draw on their training from the traditional classes, applying them as their creative vocabulary for contemporary performance practices. In their third year, students further apply this training through public performances of established Western or Asian texts, as well as devised work.

This is the vision—and the experiment which is currently being rigorously analysed and assessed as the first intake of students undertake their third and final year. Of course, after one intensive semester in each form, TTRP is not training pure classical performers. Rather, the aim is to embed in the body/mind/spirit of each student a vocabulary of aesthetic sensibilities, techniques, philosophies and performance repertoires experienced within the selected classical Asian theatre systems, which the performer then draws on to create new and dynamic means of expression throughout their own creative life.

TTRP’s distinguished international consultants include Ong Keng Sen, Rustom Bharucha and Richard Schechner—all of whom through their own work remind us that cross/multi/inter-cultural training and creative product are well-established within contemporary performance. It is not unusual for the West to draw upon Asian traditions for its training methods—whether it’s Indian yoga or Suzuki stomping. Indeed, in the supposed equal weighting of the sharing of such techniques in the exploration of hybrid forms, questions of appropriation and Eurocentricity have often arisen. Intrinsic to the TTRP experiment, therefore, is the strategy to celebrate the traditional forms by positioning the training back in an Asian geographical context.

And as with all attempts at cultural hybridity, while the vision may be exciting, the practicalities throw up interesting challenges.

Any time allocated for actor training will always seem too short, because of the many differences between individual students. With TTRP, this is intensified because of the differences in spoken language and cultural variations in body language and expression. So too, each teacher must be constantly aware of his or her own cultural assumptions and subjectivities, and how these may impact upon a class.

Performance is intrinsically concerned with communication, and a core challenge for TTRP is language—teacher to student, student to student and teacher to teacher. Though predominantly Asian (but not from a single linguistic group) the teaching staff is drawn from around the world—including Australia’s Robert Draffin. The current student body is predominantly from the Sino-world, but also includes Japanese, Philippino and Polish (the 2003 intake is yet to be announced, but auditionees included several Australians).

The need for the student to work in his or her own language is acknowledged and encouraged, but English is the official medium for instruction and administration (or Chinese where the linguistic profile of the class allows it). Students, however, have varied fluency in English.

Robert Draffin has changing strategies for dealing with this linguistic difference. In his first teaching semester he spoke English very-slow-ly-and-care-full-y…only to find the rhythm and momentum of the studio learning was suffering. Next, he experimented with speaking passionate gibberish supported by expressive and precise body language, to very positive effect with the students. Now, he teaches in English with expressive body language, but within his classes the students are encouraged to train, improvise and explore in the language with which they are most comfortable. However, it is undeniable that when the eventual public performance is in English, there are further challenges to overcome for those students for whom English is not their first language.

But at this early stage of its development there is a far greater challenge facing the school—how to manifest the original grand vision within the pragmatic compromises of budget, time and personnel.

The boldness of Kuo Pao Kun’s vision for the school, coupled with his ability to inspire those around him, means that while TTRP is in more than capable hands, his absence has come at a crucial moment in the school’s development. There are interesting times ahead as the world watches how the grand vision is realised and the cultural, linguistic and creative challenges of that vision are resolved. TTRP is, in all aspects, a chimera. Its experiment is still in its early stages, and providing its own synergies and dilemmas. Time will tell if it is indeed a “fabulous beast.”

Professional recognition can be both advantageous and restrictive. Levinas once wrote of the “guardedness” of recognition: “To communicate is indeed to open oneself, but the openness is not complete if it is on watch for recognition. It is complete, not in the opening to the spectacle of or the recognition of the other, but in becoming a responsibility for him.”

In January this year, CREATE (Culture Research Education and Training Enterprise) Australia, released its first “Scoping Study of the Performing Arts” to invigorate discussion about the development of a national training package leading to nationally recognised qualifications.

The study, carried out during 2002, had 4 objectives: to determine the application and scope of an Industry Training Package for the performing arts industry; to identify the vocational education and training opportunities available to performing arts professionals and ways that education and training might help standardise skill and knowledge levels and improve employment and career options; to identify new and emerging employment opportunities, career and training pathways for performing arts professionals and the competencies that will assist them to take advantage of those opportunities or create new ones; to identify a qualifications framework for the sector which will provide flexible pathways for new entrants into the sector.

CREATE, the national industry training advisory body for the cultural industries funded by the Australian National Training Authority, specifically develops and coordinates cultural industries training across Australia. Its training packages apply only to the vocational education and training sector which cover the many occupations not covered by university training. The study identified certain vocational concerns that emerged during State and territory based consultations and a national focus group (consisting of representatives from NICA, Ausdance, Accessible Arts, MEAA, NSW Ministry for the Arts, NIDA, Arts Queensland, Fuel4arts, Actors College of Theatre and Television, Sydney Theatre Company, NAISDA, ATQ, and Terrapin).

Vocational concerns emerging from the study included the growth of casualisation, short-term employment and project-based arrangements, as well as significant changes, both nationally and internationally, in information and knowledge technologies, globalisation, popular culture and the “need to balance commercial and artistic imperatives.” In its recommendations, the study advocated the design and implementation of a National Training Package, particularly to prioritise Indigenous participation, the articulation of the creative process, and “the relationship between artform, genres and techniques.”

It should be acknowledged that, in any form of “curriculum” modelling or workplace context, certain identities, forms of knowledge and professional workers are privileged over others. It may be just more clearly delineated with competency-based training (CBT). Dr Pauline James (University of Melbourne) in an article, The Double Edge of Competency Training: contradictory discourses and lived experience cautions that despite the extensive use of CBT little empirical research has been undertaken in Australia on the consequences for the many stakeholders involved. She notes:

“While CBT seems to be meeting the requirements of its many stakeholders very effectively, there is a shadow side…in the ways in which certain enterprises, workers, worker identities and forms of knowledge appear to be privileged over others. Some of these processes of marginalisation, while apparently helpful to enterprises in the short term, may be detrimental to their long-term interests.”

There is already a privileging of certain ‘categories’ of performance in the various definitions of ‘performing arts’ elicited from stakeholders in the study who commented, “In a general sense, the performing arts is an industry centred around the communication of ideas, with a focus on human performance and interaction with an audience. This clearly distinguishes it from object-based artforms such as the visual arts.”

According to the report, “Performing arts [occurs] when skilled and crafted artists present various forms and fusions of creative expression in a performance to fee paying individuals as audience, spectators or onlookers. Performance [is] a three dimensional representation whereby artists/entertainers seek to engage and stimulate the audience, spectators or onlookers by evoking emotions through use of multiplicity of sensory and cognitive provocations…”

Such attempts to define the performing arts may ‘misrecognise’ that as Bourdieu puts it “…the definition of the writer (or artist, etc) is an issue at stake in struggles in every literary (or artistic, etc) field.” Thus, in spite of appearing to be a unified field, the performing arts ‘industry’ is really a site of struggle over who determines the dominant understanding of necessary activities, abilities and aptitudes.

The study also acknowledged an important debate concerning the suitability of CBT for “‘creative’ performing arts vocations.” While competency standards might be developed for ‘hard’ skills, such as production and technical work, it would be difficult to establish standards for the teaching and assessment of ‘vision’ and creativity. Furthermore, there are characteristics of a performer that are intrinsic and therefore cannot easily be learnt or assessed. Some believed that certain “building block skills could be taught and assessed and that these would assist the development of other ‘more elusive skills’.” In the national forums, researchers argued that judgements on aesthetic performance were always based on criteria whether implicit or explicit, while forum facilitators suggested that standards could assist in describing these more explicitly. Even within the rubric of a competency-based market-response model of training, a kind of ‘excess’ or ‘intangible’ experience or encounter was acknowledged as part of what contributed to valued performance.

Teachers of performance, artistic directors and agents are constantly looking to recognise explicit or implicit ‘signs’ of this intangibility. In the Western Australian submission, stakeholders agreed that,“…there is an element of being a performer that cannot be described and that is the talent or the ‘unknown’ which makes a performer a good performer. Whether you can then describe a performer who doesn’t have this ‘je ne sais quoi’ as competent is debatable as this is what makes a performer able to satisfy audience requirements.”

This illustrates another potential “misrecognition.” ‘Talent’ is predominantly understood as the ‘givenness’ of the performer rather than as experience of something unique ‘generated’ through encounter between performers and audiences. The difficulty is that these experiences and apparent skills are elusive to discuss. There is a sense of everyone making intuitive choices and ambiguous judgements. However, there is a moment when all this is rendered concrete and very real. For example, when ‘acting’ bodies perform for other ‘expectant’ bodies. The actor and audience ‘resolve’ all this ‘in the moment’, through a massive, synthetic, forgetful embodiment. Moreover, this is not simply a matter of an isolated agent ‘solving’ an acting problem, etc. Rather, such artistic practice is fundamentally and irreducibly, inter-actional. It operates across and between people, or more explicitly, between bodies, rather than residing in or emanating exclusively from only one stakeholder, such as the actor.

Opportunities are needed to discuss such misrecognitions. James concludes in her study of CBT that, “locating spaces within the workplace to incorporate and encourage alternative discourses, meanings, knowledges and perspectives on training, in the long-term, as well as the short-term interests of the many stakeholders involved, is important professional work.”

“The Performing Arts Scoping Study” is worthy of much critical reflection and dialogue between practitioners, employers and educators, as CREATE awaits responses to the study from the performing arts communities. The study can be downloaded from the Reports menu on CREATE’s website, www.createaust.com.au

Surely there can’t be much more to say about the life of the modern pig. As Beatrix Potter wrote, “they lead prosperous uneventful lives and their end is bacon.” Yet the pig occupies an interesting position in our culture. We cannot simply embrace the pig for what it is. It is almost as if its base and irrefutable pigginess makes it a prime candidate for a little bit of cultural cooking.

We make symbols of grown pigs, give them allegorical significance, make of them moral tales. And of course, we sentimentalise them. The juvenile pig, the piglet, is not easily digested. We are programmed to adore cubs, kittens, and cute little pink things. In order to allay the dreadful knowledge that piglets (and by extension our children) will grow up and die, we write anxious stories about pigs. We change the endings: think of all those stories about little pigs that manage to escape (what they escape is usually vague and non-specific, as it should be). If that doesn’t make us feel better, we banish time and the spectre of endings altogether. We bring on the Über-Babe, the misunderstood and overlooked little Piglet, whose good deeds so often go unremarked and who will no doubt struggle on in endless Disney sequels for centuries to come, always in the shadows of silly Pooh and grumpy Rabbit.

In Raymond Cousse’s well-known monologue Strategy for Two Hams, a confined Pig endures the regulated rigours of fattening up, quite aware of how the story ends. In this excellent Deckchair Theatre production, Kelton Pell is sublime as the Pig. He snorts, spits, scratches, reclines, struts and preens, forcing between the contracting bookends of his life a suitably eloquent and poignant justification for his own death. Despite the glorious babble, fear is never far away. Time marches on. The story must finish. Death lurks in the stainless steel pen, the cold fluorescent lights, in the regulated dispensing of mush at meal times, in the complex self-justifications, the irony of getting one over the keeper.

Even an eloquent Ham is still a pig, and he struggles with his obvious singularity and his undeniable generality. Off-stage, other pigs squeal as if they are having their throats cut (which they no doubt are). The physicality of Pell’s performance butts the body right up against the mouth. Wonderful ideas emerge from that mouth, but so does regurgitated vomit and slop. There is no mind-body split. This is no disembodied intellect on stage; rather, the intellect is stitched back into the body where it truly resides, struggling to fill the final days, hours, minutes with eloquent words addressed to an other.

The Pig gobbles up more slop. One or 2 people walk out. Someone else gets the giggles. But I can’t take my eyes off Pell. He is elegant, funny, and narcissistic. Neither he nor I can help but be seduced by the sight of his own fat, juicy hams. And then it’s over.

Afterwards, there is not much to say. It is closing night. There will be no more Pig. My friend and I know that we have had the privilege of seeing an extraordinary performance. We are so full of the poor Pig we have no need for conversation. Outside it is freezing cold, and raining cats and dogs.

Strategy for Two Hams, by Raymond Cousse, director Mark Howett, performer Kelton Pell, Deckchair Theatre, May 24-June14

As was revealed in “A wild space” (RT 50, p37), our 2002 survey of university departments that teach performance, artists mostly find their way into performance after they complete their degree and often regardless of the discipline they studied at university. It’s not unlikely however that some will return to post-graduate work in performance. There are few courses in Australia focused on training for performance. These can be found at Victoria University, University of Western Sydney and the Victorian College of the Arts where performance-making can be pursued in practice and theory to a greater or lesser degree. Sydney University’s Department of Performance Studies and the Theatre, Film & Dance Department, University of New South Wales offer opportunities to study the field. Doubtless NICA (National Institute of Circus Arts) will fuel the performance scene sooner or later.

We emailed a small group of established artists working in performance seeking their attitudes to recent graduates, what role the university has to play in this complex interdisciplinary field, and what sustains performance practice. It quickly became clear that they saw the university as only one step in the process of making the artist and as not always in touch with performance’s interdisciplinary character. Key words like ‘community’, ‘ensemble’ and ‘apprenticeship’ recur, with a strong emphasis on physical rigour and embodiment. It’s interesting that most of these artists also teach through workshops, training young artists to work with them. Opportunities are few, but where they exist they are vital for the continued development of a field that provides the most innovative work coming out of Australia.

David Pledger

For David Pledger, Artistic Director of Melbourne’s NYID, “the bone of contention is the real distance between curriculum and contemporary arts practice.” He thinks the educational adherence to discrete artform practice constitutes a failure to understand what it means to develop an interdisciplinary, intermedia approach. He sees this as a refusal to acknowledge that the contemporary world is intertextual. It is time, he says, that mission statements for training in tertiary education should commit to interdisciplinary practice. Pledger suspects that the university is not the best model for teaching performance. He’s impressed by the Giessen School of Arts, Germany “with its fantastic combination of theory and practice, a balance thrashed out in the creating of the work. Its graduates move out into arts centres across Europe.”

Training is not about skills alone. Pledger describes contemporary culture as “elusive and less and less prescriptive. Artists have to learn the dramaturgy of the ephemeral—how to meet and read the world on a daily basis and how to incorporate that into the way they work. In pre-rehearsal meetings we talk about the politics of the everyday…the landscape is articulated, made known and added to by everybody and parts of the work are then made on the floor.”

NYID runs its own training programs in the form of an annual workshop which attracts performers, videomakers, choreographers and dancers. The focus is on working with the body and voice “as well as developing a vocabulary through discussion for mediating performance.” Does the prior education of workshop participants inhibit their response? Not at all, says Pledger, “they know our work, they’ve made the commitment to come and they’re curious.”

As for the future of performance, Pledger is not anxious about any shortage of graduates eager to engage with performance. He is critical of the focus on the growing ‘star’ system in the major schools but is nonetheless impressed with WAAPA (West Australian Academy of Performing Arts) graduates. “They seek you out and want to know how things get done…they want to make art and they believe there are many ways of expressing themselves, not just one way, which is almost impossible to unpack.”

Tess de Quincey

Performer and choreographer Tess de Quincey also focuses on the value of the training that happens outside the university, although she sees the academy as having a vital supporting role to play, if, sadly, a declining one. She reflects, “When I look back over my own practice and its development, I realise that I’ve absorbed knowledge and experience and been brought up by a series of families via a system of apprenticeship. Like anyone’s, it’s a wonky history filled with crooked turns, winding paths and strange niches. I have no tertiary education qualifications or certificates and have learned instead in the field within a variety of schools of discipline (dance, visual arts, theatre, music and martial arts) and, after a crisis of belief, found myself becoming more ensconced in eastern performance practices.” Min Tanaka’s Body Weather training in Japan gave De Quincey “the depth of philosophical cohesion and lucidity which has provided for me the pivotal base with which to act, with which to embrace instability, allowing an exploration of multiplicities and of exchange.” Like David Pledger, De Quincey sees a role for performance in dealing with contemporary ephemerality.

Detecting a change in attitude towards creativity in Australia, De Quincey writes, “In 1988 when I first came to work in Australia there seemed to be a flourishing environment, a lively bank of quirky suspects investigating arts practices…through a mixture of both institutionalised learning [and] a wide range of workshops and other methods of exchange. There’s been a drastic shift since then. From my position, I see a dominant, sanitised and politically correct march of institutionalisation…” There are havens of support. De Quincey is full of praise for Sydney University’s Department of Performance Studies for many years—“I couldn’t have done it without them.” She says of Performance Space that “against all odds, this amazing and vibrant community is continuing to provide a home and a framework for new generations…I was embraced [by that community]. That was the pivotal point that enabled me to develop a practice.”

Ira Hal Seidenstein & Frank Theatre

Performer and director Ira Hal Seidenstein, who is writing a PhD thesis on “creativity’s impact on professional learning in acting” responded to our survey with Jacqui Carroll and John Nobbs of Frank Productions, a Brisbane company inspired by the methodology of Suzuki Tadashi. They acknowledge that graduating students are often skilled, but question, “What is beyond and underneath the skills?…Perhaps the learner/actor in a university course…is not focused on the phenomenon of what they are actually doing, in real time, in their body, in physical action including vocal action, which is also a physical phenomenon. If the actor, novice or experienced, is not fully physically engaged in body, voice and mind then the possibility of ‘ensemble’ is ethereal and not grounded in technique and shared training, and therefore not a realistic goal.”

They write, “…it is rare to see a commitment in curriculum or teaching that addresses embodied acting, in an embodied way. The university education lacks training. That is, specific, daily, learning of one or several techniques over three-years of study.” They suggest that most courses are samplers rather than focused training. The Suzuki Actor Training Method is their ideal because “it supersedes the liminal gap between teaching and embodiment.”

Ryk Goddard

Goddard, Artistic Director of Hobart’s is theatre ltd, recalls a time in Tasmania when “performers used to be developed through regular employment—this is increasingly rare.” As well he feels that, “The relationship between (arts training) schools and the field seems exceptionally weak. Where students of technical theatre spend their last year in secondments, forging relationships and experiencing a range of workplaces, performance courses tend to actively discourage people learning or making work outside of their institutional framework.” University courses, Goddard thinks, are good for helping with career choices and theoretical underpinning. “They are ‘jumping off’ places but do not provide depth or practice.”

In Tasmania training and performance opportunities, says Goddard, are few, and they are dependent on a handful of companies like IHOS Opera, Terrapin and is theatre ltd who run their own training programs. “Consequently, when we make work, we have access to experienced, practising local artists to draw on. If you want to do any kind of show here, you have to be the trainer as well as the producer. The people developed through these processes are now making their own work for festivals and fringes and returning value to the community which developed them.” Goddard says of these process that “they are more like apprenticeships than tertiary trainings.”

Nikki Heywood

Performance director Nikki Heywood discussed a range of graduates including Benjamin Winspear and James Brennan, describing them as “extraordinary artists who would stand out” in any teaching institution. Winspear, ex-NIDA, is directing for the Sydney Theatre Company’s Blueprints program and performed impressively in Richard Foreman’s My Head Was a Sledgehammer and Kate Champion’s Same, same But Different. Brennan, ex-VCA, is the creator of the award-winning Piglet and The Glass Garden (see page 45). Heywood says of these artists that they have “unique talent”, “wild imaginations.”

James Brennan wrote to Heywood after he saw her Burn Sonata and let her know he was graduating. Now she’s working with him and with Agatha Goethe-Snape on a new show, and as dramaturg with Karen Therese (VCA) and Karina Stammell (UNSW) who both have works in this year’s Carnivale. In the past, she’s worked with David Williams (UWS) and Matthew Whittet (NIDA). All of them, she says, have a “proactive attitude” and most have approached her to work with them. Heywood is also impressed by their flexibility and openness and the way they can switch performance styles on demand. She’s not sure how they manage it and knows that some have found it challenging. She thinks that the VCA’s Animateuring course has shown some interesting results. “I also can’t speak highly enough of companies like PACT Youth Theatre and the great start they give with the training they offer. Costa Latsos who’s currently at UNSW I first met there.” Also, the expertise of teachers with backgrounds in contemporary performance like Clare Grant (UNSW) and Yana Taylor (UWS) is invaluable.

Heywood’s main gripe is that in general tertiary education courses “lack the rigorous physical training that gives people tools to make new works.” She has also encountered a lack of passion in students and is surprised that they don’t get out and see what’s happening in the artworld they aspire to. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell why they’re studying contemporary performance.” Others, she senses, are eagerly looking around for methodologies they can work with. She points out, however, that experienced artists can sometimes be reluctant to share too freely the skills that are their bread and butter. There are exceptions, for example, she notes the “incredible generosity” of Margaret Cameron in her workshops with writers.

The relationship between universities and performance will continue to be a challenging one when it comes to the issue of training. The kind of commitment to rigorous physical programs sought by the artists in this survey would not fit easily into current curricula. However, there is no doubt that the growth of performance studies has been invaluable, not only for the theoretical support it has provided and, sometimes, the practical space, documentation and room for experiment offered.

“Documentary is a constant stylistic, conceptual and referencing point for me,” says Glendyn Ivin who won the 2003 Palme D’or for Cracker Bag. “Everything I have done has, at some point, been affected by my interest in documentary…Cracker Bag has been described as a ‘documentary after the fact’, which I quite like.” Ivin is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts documentary course, one of the many tertiary courses available in Australia since 1996. Where are these courses? What are they like? And what difference have they made?

The ‘elite’ schools

Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) in Melbourne and the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) in Sydney are Australia’s best known and well-funded film schools. The choice of school depends on the style of documentary a student wishes to make.

Set up by Peter Tammer (Journey to the End of the Night), the VCA course has a history of specialising in observational documentary. Graduate Carmela Baranowska (Scenes From an Occupation, 1999) says of studying there: “We were pushed all the time to think, feel and film our own documentaries. We were taught that observational documentaries were what we should all aspire to; and that they were the most difficult, complex and aesthetically amazing achievements in the documentary canon. When I arrived in East Timor in March 1999 I had received the best possible training to film the last 6 months of the Indonesian occupation.”

The AFTRS course, set up by Trevor Graham (Aeroplane Dance) has a history of specialising in more produced and scripted documentaries. AFTRS and UTS documentary graduate Melissa K Lee (A True Story About Love 2001) says of studying there, “I learnt a lot about myself as a filmmaker—what kinds of films I want to make and how I want to make them. I see AFTRS as a significant part of my film training journey, but not a beginning nor an end. I don’t ever want to stop ‘learning’ about filmmaking.”

There is a myth that obtaining a place in one of these schools is as hard as winning Tattslotto. For the documentary strand this is untrue. It’s no secret that both AFTRS and UTS (University of Technology Sydney) are actively seeking more applicants for their documentary courses. In the end not enough people apply. The crisis for Australia’s top documentary schools is that they can’t be as choosy and ‘elite’ as they would like.

Brisbane: the contender

There is a vibrant and active documentary community in Brisbane, financially maintained, in part, by the Gold Coast studios and the prevalence of reality television. State bodies fund both QPIX and the documentary group QDOX. Not even Melbourne and Sydney have a funded QDOX equivalent. But, as yet, there is no dedicated documentary film course with the reputation of VCA or AFTRS.

Brisbane needs to think seriously about establishing a well-funded top of the range documentary postgraduate course. The federal and state governments should both contribute funding. Top quality documentary schools burn a lot of cash to train a student. Producer Melissa Fox says of her undergraduate film course at Queensland University of Technology, “I would have liked the opportunity to specialise in documentary in a deeper way, a lot sooner. I knew right from the start that I wanted to study documentary, yet the structure of the course forced me to take a lot of general media subjects and drama production courses. When I got to the final year documentary production subject, I was really disappointed at the lack of commitment and enthusiasm from those students whose passion lay in drama.”

With the 2004 merger of Queensland College of the Arts and Griffith University film departments, perhaps this new documentary school will become a possibility. Both departments have a record of promoting documentary, for instance, Peter Hegedus produced his multi award winning film Grandfathers and Revolutions (2000) as an honours project at QCA, and Griffith has similar success stories.

The bad news

If you are a budding documentary maker in Adelaide, Hobart or Darwin, leave now. If you’re planning to attend a documentary course, go to Brisbane, or failing that, Perth. Despite organisations such as the excellent Media Resource Centre (Adelaide) and the fact that some documentarians of international repute live there, these cities continue to exist outside the current debates in documentary.

Flinders University is Adelaide’s main film school and it’s linked to a drama department. Alison Wotherspoon, a lecturer in the film school, says despite the fact that a student may specialise in documentary at honours level (it’s also taught in 3rd year at the undergraduate level) no one in recent memory has made a documentary film as their honours project. Because students receive funding to make their final film, she says, they make more expensive short dramas. Money isn’t the only issue; student choice reflects the environment created by their teachers and it appears to be more conducive to drama.

In the smaller cities there is less opportunity to discuss the documentary form. Flinder’s graduate Alex Frayne (The Longing, 2002) described the Adelaide film industry as “sole traders who all want to make Citizen Kane.” There is no documentary group in this city. And according to Philip Elms from MRC, current documentaries by emerging documentarians revolve around the refugee issue. These are made by self-taught documentarians who have emerged from the activist community, such as Anne Glamuzina.

Westward ho!

Producer Sanchia Robertson describes camaraderie in the Perth documentary community, partly generated by its isolation from the rest of Australia. Perth has also made a decision to focus on TV and this is good for documentaries, which are primarily shown on the small screen.

However, ScreenWest workers had trouble naming young people who specialised in making documentary. It’s evident that the local film schools at Edith Cowan, Curtin etc had not developed a strong relationship between their documentary students and the local industry funders. Funding industry people in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne are on the whole aware of who their graduates are and where they studied. Robertson said that a top documentary course would help to stop the flow of students “to the East” and therefore help keep filmmakers and create documentaries in WA. At present the WA industry talks about the success of a course in terms of its ability to be a feeder school to AFTRS, not necessarily a bad thing.

Alternatives

There are a few shorter courses and mentoring schemes around Australia aimed at specific groups in which documentary is a big part of the scheme, for example Warlpiri Media (Bush Mechanics CD-Rom) which works with Yuendumu Aboriginal community in Northern Territory, and the remarkable BIG hART (Hurt) which works with disadvantaged young people. These groups often employ documentary graduates as tutors or mentors.

Industry heavies such as Film Victoria’s Steve Warne and Open Channel’s Liz Burke are among many who are very interested in what Victoria’s secondary college, Footscray TAFE, is doing. Amiel Courtin-Wilson (Chasing Buddha, 1999) studied there and at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Courtin-Wilson’s comments on the growing number of documentary courses reflect a different problem facing the industry. “Documentary training at film school has led to an increase in documentary makers and that in itself isn’t a bad thing—the only problem is that there aren’t enough broadcasters to sustain a rapidly increasing community of documentarians.”

Broadcasters & commissioning editors

Marie Thomas, from the UK, is the Melbourne-based commissioning editor for SBS Independent. At a recent conference in Perth she said, “I have been here for a year and so far I have not received many pitches that are exciting.” Her comment raises 2 important issues. While most film schools invite industry people to guest lecture and for seminars, except at AFTRS the art of pitching is rarely an assessed part of the course. This important skill is underdeveloped in Australia. Lee’s A True Story About Love deals in part with the ability of US documentary makers to discuss their work in a gripping way that’s far more developed than that of their Australian equivalents.

The flipside is that the skills and brilliance of Australia’s commissioning editors on the whole leave a lot to be desired. In the publishing industry, commissioning editors are trained, they have studied at ‘elite’ editing courses at institutions such as RMIT. Australia needs more well trained career filmocrats who have a highly developed sense of where they are taking the industry and how to do this in conjunction with the filmmakers. Surely spending at least a year of intensive post-grad training in thinking, discussing and understanding what that job really means can only improve Australia’s documentary industry?

Round-up

Amiel Courtin-Wilson says, “At best, documentaries can be complex, beautiful works of art that resonate with audiences far longer than many narrative films. Unfort-unately I don’t find many television documentaries that inspire me as a filmmaker—their subject matter may inspire me as a human being but the actual filmmaking is at times underwhelming.” It’s encouraging that graduates are tackling issues of how to make profound documentaries with difficult subject matter. Without a doubt, the documentary schools are responsible for the improved filmmaking skills and higher production values of graduates like Courtin-Wilson.

Anxiety about the impact of a free trade agreement with the USA on our culture, especially on film, television, music and literature is escalating. Government agencies, like the Australian Film Commission, and peak organisations such as the Australian Society of Authors and the Music Council of Australia, along with leading artists have made clear their hostility to an agreement that puts culture on the negotiating table.

Geoffrey Atherden, acclaimed writer of Mother and Son and Grass Roots, delivered the following talk at the Small screen BIG PICTURE Conference in Perth, May 9, 2003.

Here’s a photograph of my family. This is my grandmother and grandfather with 4 of my uncles and my mother and it was taken in the year of my mother’s birth, 1915. And this photograph was taken not far from here, in Fremantle.

There’s something pretty interesting about my family. My grandfather was born in Adelaide. My grandmother was born in Launceston. And no one in the family has any idea how a young builder from South Australia and an orphan girl from Tasmania—she was raised in a convent when her parents died and no one else in the family would look after her—managed to meet, get married and wind up over here in Western Australia.

It’s a long time since we’ve had a family saga on Australian television and I don’t see why I can’t use my family as a starting point. At least I know who’s likely to be upset.

I’m going to step slightly sideways though. In a recent survey, 86% of people said that if entering a free trade agreement with America meant giving up our pharmaceutical benefits scheme, they’d rather not have free trade agreement (Hawker Britton UMR Poll Results of telephone survey conducted by UMR Research of 1000 Australians over 18 years of age).

…As a result of this kind of survey, the government has taken the pharmaceutical benefits scheme off the table, despite it being something the American drug companies were very keen to get, not just to get a bigger piece of the Australian market, but because our PBS scheme is being copied in other countries.

How interesting that I should have come to the Small screen Big Picture conference to talk about medical drug policy.

Here’s another piece of interesting information. In the same survey, people were asked if they’d still want to be in a free trade agreement with America if it meant less Australian content on television and 71% of people said no. It seems that 71% is not enough, because at the moment, the regulation of Australian television is still on the table.

And we understand that the Americans are very keen that we agree to deregulate our television. They want it on the table. They want us to give up our content quotas, they want us to give up rules relating to cross media ownership and foreign ownership, and they want us to leave e-commerce free of regulation so that the use of the internet as a part of broadcasting remains unregulated.

I need to make an absolute declaration here. I’m going to be saying a lot about America, and even about some Americans, but this is not an attack on America. Like most people, I love American films and television programs. How could you not? It’s a very seductive culture and no wonder some people in some parts of the world are afraid of it. And with Six Feet Under and West Wing and The Sopranos and for me, one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time, Punch Drunk Love, I love American culture. But I feel even more passionate about Australian culture and Australian television and Australian films and I don’t want to trade our ability to tell our stories to our own audience and to audiences around the world on a promise that we might sell more lamb or leather to the United States.

We’re very fortunate to have, lying not far from our eastern coast, a brave little country, New Zealand, which for some time led the world in applying the principles of free market economics by deregulating just about everything. Finance ministers from New Zealand were able to puff their chests out at international trade meetings and boast about how far they were in front of the rest of the world.

One of the effects was that a lot of New Zealanders were very unhappy as their social services collapsed about them and their economy didn’t boom. And they noticed that New Zealanders and New Zealand stories disappeared from their television screens.

When their current Prime Minister, Helen Clarke was running for office, one of the things she promised was to restore regulation to New Zealand television. That proved to be very popular and was probably one of the things that got the last government thrown out and Clarke’s government voted in. Now that she is in office, she’s finding that fulfilling this election promise isn’t easy. The problem is that once you deregulate, reregulating seems to be against international trade law. And the only way you’re allowed to introduce what are seen as new barriers to trade, in order to pacify anyone who might think that you’re being unfair to them, is to offer to liberalise something else in compensation. This is a problem if you’ve basically liberalised everything.

Mexico is also worth looking at. Before Mexico entered NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico had a thriving film industry. They had chains of local cinemas and they made about a hundred films a year, Mexican stories about Mexico and Mexicans, for their own people. Only a few years after entering NAFTA the production in Mexico dropped to about 8 films a year. Why? Because, using the liberalised laws on cinema and production ownership, the American chains moved in and bought up all the Mexican cinemas and used them to show American movies. In other words, what they did was to absorb Mexico into the North American market and increase the audiences for the films Hollywood was already making.

In January this year, the Mexican government introduced a 1-peso levy on cinema tickets. The levy was part of an initiative to boost local film production and the cash raised would be channelled directly into production. The levy was hailed by local producers and directors but met a wave of heated reactions in the US. Mexico is a country that represents in volume and earnings the 4th best market for US films worldwide.

The President of the MPA, Jack Valenti, wrote to the Mexican President, Vincente Fox, and told him that, “the adoption of such a measure without previously consulting the MPA could force us to cancel our backing for the Mexican Film industry…this also would cause difficulties to our mutual relations” (ScreenDaily.com, “Valenti’s Mexican Standoff”).

In late January, Steve Solot, the MPAA senior vice president, met the Mexican Minister of Culture, Sari Bermudez, and told her, “Every peso that that does not enter at the box office is a peso lost for a US film,” (ScreenDaily.com, “Valenti’s Mexican Standoff”). Some years before NAFTA, the French Canadians in Quebec had tried to bring in a similar system—a small tax on cinema tickets to finance support for a French language film industry. This is modelled on the system in France, which has been successful in underwriting a considerable amount of film production in that country. But when the Americans heard about the Quebec plan, they sent in their tough guy—Valenti, and with support from the American government they threatened the Quebecois out of it. They threatened that if the French Canadians put any kind of tax on cinema tickets they would cease to supply Quebec with American films. They would get nothing. And since, in Quebec as everywhere in North America and much of the rest of the world, Hollywood films are a major part of box office, the local cinemas in Quebec couldn’t afford the boycott and so the government dropped its surcharge plan.

It was probably with this as background, that when the Canadians negotiated their way in to the North American Free Trade Agreement, with the background of the nationalism of the French Canadians and the caution of the Anglo Canadians, they took culture off the table. They wanted to protect Canadian film and television production, and in particular, to protect Canadian local content rules. I think most people know that film and television production is pretty big in Canada, even though most of what we see from Canada is made for the US market and looks, sounds, smells like US product.

In fact, there’s a great story which I think kind of sums up the Canadian US relationship. The Toronto Globe and Mail ran a competition a while ago. Everyone knows the phrase, as American as apple pie, but how would you complete the sentence “As Canadian as…”?

There were many entries, but the winner was, “As Canadian as possible under the circumstances.” Canadians feel the presence of the US, even more than we do. After all, something like 80% of the Canadian population lives within 80 kilometres of the US border.

I do just want to pause here and say again, I am not anti-American. And here is one of the reasons. While the American negotiators are pushing us in the Australia US Free Trade negotiations, and almost everyone else through the GATT and GATS and the WTO to deregulate, the opposite is happening inside America. There is a very strong push for regulation of broadcasting.

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is the largest body of professional screenwriters in the world. It calls on the American government to increase the regulation of television because, it argues, the free market has failed. In the February edition of the WGA (West) Magazine, their president, Chuck Slocum writes:

“TV is not something we want to produce at the lowest cost—the stories we tell ourselves are more important than that. Economics is not the best social mechanism to govern everything.”

The WGA is a member of CCC, the Centre for the Creative Community, which aims to “safeguard and enrich the vitality and diversity of our nation’s culture.”

Here is part of a submission to the US Federal Communications Commission made by the CCC. “Rapid consolidation of network and cable television ownership in the hands of a few corporate conglomerates has significantly harmed free expression, quality, and creativity in television.”

And “When 5 companies: AOL/Time Warner, Viacom/CBS/UPN, GE/NBC, Disney/ABC, Fox/News Corp both produce and distribute the programming seen by the vast majority of Americans on broadcast and cable, Americans ultimately hear only the ‘voices’ of those 5 corporate leviathans, no matter how many channels they receive.”

Unfortunately, in June this year, the US Federal Communications Commission decided not to listen to those arguments and further deregulated broadcasting in the US.

The Australian Writers’ Guild has a strong position on this. The AWG has stated that it believes firmly that cultural policy measures can co-exist with a commitment to free trade. However, given the dominance of countries such as the United States in cultural services sectors such as the audiovisual industry, cultural diversity cannot co-exist with a commitment to a completely free and open market economy. This is because the American Film and Television industries are not just big, they’re gigantic. They combine to be one of the biggest industries in the world.

The creative industries in America, that is film, television, home video, DVDs, business and entertainment software, books, music and sound recordings, contribute more to the US economy than any other single manufacturing sector.

In 2001, the copyright industries, as they’re called, contributed US $531 billion to the US economy, and achieved US $88.97 in foreign sales and exports. Here are those figures again, translated into Australian dollars—A $850 billion contribution to the US economy and A $141 billion of exports.

By comparison, in 1999/2000, our copyright industries were worth A $19.2 billion to our economy and brought in A $1.2 billion in export sales. In the same year, we spent A $3.4 billion on our imports of foreign copyright goods and services, almost 3 times as much as we export.

The American population is roughly 15 times bigger than ours. So you’d expect a bit of a difference between the size of our industries and the size of theirs. But their copyright industries are more than 40 times bigger than ours and their exports are almost 120 times bigger than ours.

The argument here is not just about free trade. It’s about fair trade. When they are so much bigger than we are, is it reasonable to expect that free trade can ever be fair? Would we ever send a little Aussie wrestler, weighing in at 19.2 kilos, and put him in the ring with an American who weighed 850 kilos and expect it to be a fair contest? I don’t think so.

The support mechanisms we have in place are no barrier to trade, because our market is one of the most open in the world. The amount we allocate to Australian content when it comes to drama and comedy, children’s programs and documentaries, is only a very small part of our total broadcast time.

The local content rules require each commercial television network to broadcast about 2 or 3 hours of first release Australian drama in prime time. That works out to somewhere between 6-10% of our prime time viewing. When you look at our commercial television stations, they all have a lot of American dramas and comedies. How much more do they want?

In 2000/2001, almost 60% of new television programs were from foreign sources. This compares to about 8% of foreign programs in the United States. You see, it’s not about free trade. Americans just don’t watch foreign programs. They just don’t. Never have, never will. So by allowing the Americans to grab that last 6 to 10% of our prime time programming, we stand to gain nil in access to US markets. As a further comparison, in the UK, foreign sourced programs count for about 10% of the total. As I said, Australia is already an open market.

In film, the picture is just as dramatic. Every year in Australia about 250 new films are released. About 10% are Australian. About 70% are American. The rest are from the UK, Europe and Asia. But with the muscle of the giant US distributors behind them, the Americans are able to turn their 70% of film releases into 83% of the Australian gross box office. How much more do they want?

The argument is that measures such as Australian content rules for free to air commercial and pay television, direct government investment in production through the FFC, the AFC and so on, indirect government investment through tax concessions, the regulation of entry of foreign entertainers, the regulation of foreign ownership and investment and cross media ownership rules are all inhibitors of free trade and should be eliminated or reduced by Australia.

The Americans are very serious about this. They’ve told our trade negotiators that without considerable concessions in the audiovisual sector, there won’t be any concessions on their side on lamb and steel and beef. According to the MPAA, “The negotiation of a Free Trade Agreement between the United States and Australia offers unparalleled opportunities for the American filmed entertainment industry” (Screendaily.com).

This is Valenti again. He is a very powerful man because he heads a very powerful organisation. The MPAA is a trade organisation representing the interests of 7 of the largest producers and distributors of filmed entertainment: Buena Vista International, Columbia Tristar, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Warner Bros. It represents one of the biggest industries in America and is a very powerful and effective lobby in Washington. On its website, the MPAA states that it is “often referred to now as a ‘little State Department’.”

Should we be worried? After all, several of our government ministers have made strong statements declaring an intention to retain all the current mechanisms that support our film and television industries.

In July 2001, Peter McGauran, assisting the Minister for the Arts, said during a debate on the SBS Insight program, “…it’s a cabinet declaration that cultural identity and national interest will be prevalent and in fact dominant in any trade negotiations. …[Trade Minister] Mark Vaile is not putting culture on the table…. And it is hard, if not impossible, to imagine when or where this government would trade it off.”

Last year, in November at the SPAA conference in Melbourne, Senator Kemp, who by that time had replaced McGauran, told the audience, and I was there to hear him, “Last year, my predecessor, Peter McGauran, gave you an assurance that cultural support mechanisms such as local content rules would not be traded away. Let me repeat his assurance here today.”

He got a good round of applause for that. It was very reassuring. But culture is on the table. And in a recent interview with Maxine McKew, reported in The Bulletin, Vaile said, “We’ve got it on the table. We’ve left it there because we want to argue the case.”

The Bulletin article also reports that when Geoff Brown, president of the Screen Producers Association of Australia met the American negotiators, they put forward an interesting proposition. Would SPAA agree to dump local content rules in exchange for increased funding for the ABC?

And when Vaille was asked by McKew whether the trade negotiations might affect our public broadcasters, or whether public broadcasting was non-negotiable, he answered, “I can’t say it’s non-negotiable.” So why not take it off the table now? He answered, “It’s tactical.”

What is the worst that could happen? Suppose our government decides that, despite its assurances in the past, given in good faith at the moment when they were given, trade in agriculture is more important than local content rules.

This is certainly the view of The Australian, expressed in an editorial on March 17 this year. It said, “Of course the US negotiators will demand a trade off in terms of improved access to the Australian market for their manufacturing, services and entertainment industries.”

The editorial went on, “Mostly it will be in our interest to concede on these areas, notwithstanding the predictable protest from the… ‘cultural’ protectionists.”

And in another edition, the date of which I’ve lost, columnist Mark Day accused us of being wimps, of not being able to see the wonderful opportunity we would have by being forced to give up our government subsidies, improve our product and make something the Americans would want to see for a change.

If we do lose our content rules and funding support and other mechanisms, what will happen? I don’t think there’ll be a cliff that the industry will fall off and in a short time, it will all be over. It’s more likely to be a long and slippery slope, but a downward slope, and after some years, the amount of Australian drama and comedy on our television screens and in our cinemas will be much less.

Existing programs which are attracting good audiences won’t be axed, at least not straight away. But new dramas and especially new comedies will be harder and harder to get up. They’re always a risk. There’s always a failure rate. And it’s much safer to buy a road tested product from America, and, more importantly, it’s a lot cheaper. This is not just a whinge about job security. We all know that in the modern world, no one has job security.

Many [of you] will have heard many of these arguments before. Some of you are already engaged in arguing the case for culture to be taken off the table in our discussion on a free trade agreement with the US.

What I would like to make is a plea for more people, for everyone to do something, even one small thing to send a message to government. We do not want our culture traded away.

We can see what can happen by looking at New Zealand. They lost their voice in their mass media. And they didn’t like it. They took it out on their government. And if we find that Australian faces disappear from our screens, and with them, Australian voices speaking in Australian accents, then we will lose something vitally important of ourselves. We lose a large part of our identity. Our children will grow up with is the idea that there are no Australian heroes. That exciting things happen to people in other countries, but not here. That we have no place in the world. And with that, we’ll lose our knowledge of ourselves.

I don’t know whether there’s a story in my family or not. But I do know that there are stories out there about other families, Australian families with ties that go back through generations, Indigenous families, immigrant families, refugee families, and all of that creates a mosaic which adds up to us.

We’re a small country in a big world. It would be very easy for us to become invisible. In many parts of the world, we are already. Try finding something, anything about Australia in the Miami Herald. But the worst thing would be if we became invisible to ourselves.

The annual Message Sticks Indigenous arts festival at the Sydney Opera House provides Sydneysiders with a fascinating cross section of contemporary visual arts, performance, music and film by Aboriginal artists from around the country. The New Blak Films night comprised 2 13-minute shorts: Turn Around and Shit Skin, directed by Samantha Saunders and Nicholas Boseley respectively, and a 45-minute mini-feature, Cold Turkey, directed by Steven McGregor.

There is no doubt that the most challenging local cinema in recent years has either come from Indigenous Australian filmmakers or dealt with Indigenous stories. The painfully slow lancing of the wound created by Australia’s repressed history of race relations seems the only topic that can provoke even the mildest form of political engagement or formal experimentation in Australian filmmakers.

With this in mind, it was interesting to hear director Saunders introduce the evening’s first film, Turn Around, claiming she doesn’t think of her work as “Indigenous film” but rather as “girl fantasy.” This seemed a little disingenuous, given the context in which the film was being presented, but after viewing Turn Around her comment made more sense. While it is, of course, important that Indigenous films tell the big, representative stories about Aboriginal experience, Indigenous directors also need to be as free as anyone else to put prosaic tales of everyday life on screen. Although primarily a simple love story, Saunders’ film pointed the way towards an Indigenous cinema of the everyday, in which cultural identity forms part of the story’s milieu, rather than its thematic focus.

In contrast, Shit Skin was firmly in the ‘big picture’ vein, exploring how the traumatic experiences of the stolen generations continue to reverberate for Indigenous people in the present. The weight of historical narrative at the heart of the film’s drama seemed a little overwhelming for Shit Skin’s 13 minutes, and left little room for the development of the characters’ emotional journeys. In the Q and A session following the screening, director Boseley was asked if a story about a member of the stolen generation finding his or her family had ever been considered for a feature film. The question reflected my feeling that only a feature-length work could really do justice to the historical, political and emotional complexity of the subject matter.

Following a discussion with the directors of the 2 shorts, McGregor’s Cold Turkey provided the centrepiece of the evening. McGregor hails from Darwin, and has been involved in film production for 15 years, 10 of which he has spent with the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) in Alice Springs. He has directed several documentaries, including Marn Grook, the first by an Aboriginal director to be sold to a commercial television station. Although Cold Turkey is his first drama, McGregor’s film production experience was evident in his assured handling of the film’s fragmented narrative structure and the complex relationship between the 2 main characters.

Cold Turkey focuses on 2 brothers living in Alice Springs who embark on a final night of drunken revelry before the youngest, Robby, leaves for a job in Coober Pedy. Robby wakes the next morning in a police cell and the body of the film focuses on his attempts to reconstruct the night’s events through shards of hazy memory distorted by alcohol and his brother’s mind games. Although Cold Turkey effectively depicts a set of social problems that beset many Aboriginal communities, the emotional heart of the film is the complicated relationship between the brothers and the way that familial love can sometimes play out in the most twisted, hurtful way imaginable. It will be fascinating to see if McGregor can sustain his flair for formally challenging storytelling across a feature-length film. Hopefully he will be get to flex his talent in this way in the near future.

Events such as the New Blak Films night are important in giving exposure to what is still a nascent Indigenous filmmaking culture in Australia. It is also important, however, that these films are not side-lined or marginalised from the rest of Australia’s filmmaking culture. All 3 directors on the night stressed that they think of themselves as filmmakers first and foremost, and hoped their future output would not be forcibly limited by expectations of what Indigenous filmmakers can or should produce. The films screened deftly illustrated the range of possibilities being explored by young Aboriginal directors, and further reinforced the impression that Indigenous stories are currently providing the cinematic narratives that engage most powerfully with the faultlines running through Australian life.

Message Sticks ’03: New Blak Films, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, May 27

“The white man can’t tell our stories about our people, we’ve got to get out there and do it ourselves.” Bonita Mabo

“A gathering to celebrate Indigenous screen culture” was staged in Brisbane’s South Bank Piazza by Uniikup Productions/ Murriimage throughout NAIDOC Week. Unlike the current 12th Brisbane International Film Festival, which this year has no Aboriginal films, the relatively small-scale Colourised Film Festival actively engaged audiences through art, dance, song and filmmaking. Even more distinctively, public admission to the festival was free.

‘Murri-style’ screen culture has little to do with the Tinseltown image of Queensland’s film industry. Community-focused, family-oriented and above all personal, the Colourised Film Festival showcased Indigenous filmmaking in several genres while fostering non-indigenous people’s understanding of ‘Aboriginality’ in all its forms.

Providing about 30 hours of continuous screenings over 3 days, with a production seminar and screen forum; student video workshop; a special tribute to the late, respected journalist and activist, John Newfong and a closing night awards presentation, the autonomy, scale and quality of the free community event was impressive and instructive.

Loss and recovery of identity and relationship was a common theme in many of the short dramas and comedies screened in the circular, multi-purpose South Bank Piazza on the large daylight screen. Ivan Sen’s stylish, black and white noir piece, Warm Strangers, opened the festival. Its tense treatment of the last desperate minutes in a young Aboriginal man’s life set the tone. Sen’s other early films-Wind, Tears and Shifting Shelter 2 were also shown throughout the week. Sen’s achingly beautiful first feature, Beneath Clouds, was given the honour of closing the festival on Friday night. Black Man Down (Sam Watson) and Round Up (Rima Tamou) added to the range of perspectives in the non-documentary section. However, Wayne Blair took the honours in the 2003 Indigenous Film Awards for his hilarious Kathy, a clever spoof about a lovable but nutty middle-aged woman who thinks she’s Cathy Freeman. Also directed by Blair, Jubulj (which means fair-haired Aboriginal woman) effortlessly narrates a complex, psychological story of a young woman whose Aboriginality suddenly ‘wakes up’ inside her. Black Talk, by the same director, was also screened.

Selected mainstream documentaries included 2 films by Danielle MacLean, Bonita Mabo: For Who I Am, and Turning Tides of the Brisbane River, Leah Purcell’s Black Chicks Talking and the Human Rights Commission’s Bringing Them Home.

“Mirror, Mirror…How do images of Aboriginal people impact on society?” was the title of a forum facilitated by well-known local Murri academic and activist, Mary Graham Kombumerri. A panel consisting of Colleen Lavelle, Douglas Watkin and Jeannette Fabrila, discussed ‘the image’ as a process of both mystification and demystification of Aboriginality. Some key distinctions between Indigenous and non-indigenous production styles and audiovisual priorities emerged, demonstrating the potential and need for further public discussion.

The closing night ceremony included a multi-layered music-video of the recent Sorry Day March across the river from City Hall to Musgrave Park in South Brisbane, produced as part of 4AAA Murri Radio’s Video Workshop by young Indigenous media trainees. Founder and director of 4AAA, Tiga Bayles, underlined the need for “positive images of Aboriginal people” and confirmed that “we’re very much committed to next year’s festival, and the year after that, and the year after that.” Representing the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, whose Myer Family Indigenous Scholarship has assisted the careers of Sen, Blair, Perkins and other award-winning Indigenous film makers, Alex Daw was equally optimistic about the future of the event. Similarly, Zane Trow, Artistic Director of South Bank’s Public Art Program, was “happy to be working with Chris Peacock, having been involved since the early stages of the project.” He hopes the festival “will grow and mature over the next 3-5 years to become a significant national event.”

The cultural success of the Colourised Film Festival was primarily due the fact that it has established the basis of a working organisational formula and a positive, cross-cultural public presence on which to build.

Colourised Film Festival 2003, Screen Change, South Bank, Brisbane, July 8, 10, 11

Avant-garde filmmaking rarely involves looking back. The emphasis is on being at the cutting edge, on leading us kicking and screaming into the new historical moment. But paradoxically, avant-garde works often need historical contextualisation to explain how their textual forms arise in response to contemporary ideas and practices. Thus the value of The Plastic Pulse season, curated by Jon Dale for the Media Resournce Centre in Adelaide.

Avant-garde cinema may have enjoyed its first flowering in France and Germany in the 1920s, but the next focus of sustained creativity came in the United States between the early 1940s and the 1960s. The Plastic Pulse provided a rare opportunity to see works from influential figures such as Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow and Maya Deren and to consider their links to the present.

The most anticipated event of the season was an evening concentrating on the works of New York composer/filmmaker Phil Niblock. Niblock’s The Magic City abstracted a performance by Sun Ra’s Arkestra, exploring the possibilities of synaesthesia between abstract imagery and dissonant jazz composition. With his new work Guitar Too, For Four, Niblock has shifted to foregrounding the dialectical relation between music and image.

This was a classic piece of minimalism counterposing a split-screened video of an ethnographic documentary with a composition played live consisting of electric guitar feedback moderated by synthesisers. Small shifts in the music arise both from the feeding back of ambient sound (the pick-up of each guitar ‘hears’ the other guitars as well as its own output) and tonal shifts made by the performers, who were led by Oren Ambarchi, one of the forces behind SBS’s Subsonics program. Harmonic tones and overtones emerge, until they are overtaken by other developments.

The listener shifts attention between these voices—the emergent harmonics and the primary sounds—and then from aural to visual cues. The image is referential, repeatable and discontinuous in contrast to the continuous, improvised change within the music, which responds only to its own abstract structuring.

Music theoretician Stephen Whittington took up the connection between film and music when he introduced a collection from the recently-deceased Brakhage, emphasising the films as “continuity arts” in which patterns of succession were central. Whittington also stressed Brakhage’s concentration on seeing differently, a point borne out by the different parts of Dog Star Man (1963-64) in which we are invited to see both film and flesh differently by an emphasis on their textures, and by The Wonder Ring (1955), in which a train journey offers the raw material for a visual abstraction of reflection and refraction, of shade and framing.

Brakhage’s famous Mothlight (1963), made by pasting moths’ wings on to transparent stock, points to the adventure of process as much as product and to the ways that representation can emerge momentarily out of abstraction. Theo Angell’s Jackie-O Forestry Centre (2001) works similar territory, delving into the frenzied complexity of the video image and nature. You might not be able see the forest for the trees, but this is only a starting point when you’re interested in looking within the tree.

The avant-garde typically leaves its dead by the side of the road, but Dale gave us a valuable opportunity to see films known for earlier, braver transgressions. Sexual and formal transgression is at the heart of Ken Jacobs’ Blond Cobra (1959-63). The film confronts us with the multiple scandals of Jack Smith’s improvised narration consistently veering off into pornographic fantasy, associated with a blank screen, randomly staged and assembled shots of Smith and assorted comrades in drag, and even the random interpolation of whatever’s on the radio at that moment. There is a sense of freedom in imagining that anything might get sucked into the mix.

Smith’s own magnum opus Flaming Creatures (1963) is a whacked-out appropriation of popular genres such as the musical, the orientalist melodrama, and the horror movie, which allows the perverse and violent sexuality at the heart of these genres to bubble to the surface. John Waters suddenly seems to be only stating the obvious.

Other old favourites included Deren, the Lara Croft of Jungian terrains, and her Girl’s Own Adventures in the unconscious, and Sidney Peterson’s The Lead Shoes (1949), a delirious mixture of Dada, stoned jazz, women in nighties and men in diving suits.

Sheldon Rochlin’s Vali: The Witch of Positano (1965) provided a local perspective. In this documentary Vali Myers, who died recently in Melbourne, works through the possibilities for a Sydney girl in the 1960s to reinvent herself (and Australia in the process) in line with old-style new-age witchiness. If one theme of the contemporary avant-garde is the nature of technological materials with which we live, Vali addressed herself and her own fantasy life as among the most enduring forms of material.

Plastic Pulse, curator Jon Dale, Mercury Cinema, Adelaide, May 28, June 11, 18, 25

Having been shielded during the bad old days from the filth thrust upon them by Joyce, DH Lawrence, Pasolini and Michelangelo, Australians are once again experiencing an eruption of banning from Attorneys-General across the country. The most recent is the Federal Attorney General’s refusal to allow the screening of Larry Clark’s Ken Park at the Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals. In this Daryl Williams was supported by the Office of Film and Literature Classification and a board of appeal consisting of 3 people known neither for their knowledge of cinema nor their expertise in matters of censorship. It must be said in defence of the Government that Australians have a history of censoring themselves. Our sheep-pen, xenophobic conservatism makes many Third World and authoritarian countries look like Rabelais’ Abbey of Theleme.

Ken Park has already been sold to Singapore, Hong Kong and Brazil. It is a serious study of a pressing problem, beautifully performed, precisely edited and responsibly directed by Clark and Edward Lachman. The 5 Californian skateboarders whose lives it highlights at crisis point might come hurtling over the hill at Bankstown, St Kilda or Fremantle. All are over 18 and any child pornography exists only in the minds of fundamentalists. I find car advertisements more offensive and films which feature nothing but explosions and racist hatred more deserving of X, Y and Z classification.

So I’ve seen Ken Park? Yes, along with thousands of others before it passed to its next venue. No longer are we stultified by the reverence of Empire on the one hand or the insularity of the Jindyworobaks on the other. We are part of a global, sophisticated society. If the bans on Lawrence and the seizure of Michelangelo etchings now seem laughable, the last gasps of conformist bigotry, so is the ban on Ken Park already unworkable. This is due to many aspects of our changed society. The first is networking. Those who have traveled to festivals in Telluride or Toronto know how easy it is to screen a film in a barn or media centre at a day’s notice and by word of mouth. Prints can be couriered thousands of miles easily for critics’ previews.

The second change is the Internet. DVDs are available on E-bay, VHS copies from Amazon.com. There are even sites from which you can download the entire movie, a snap if you have broadband. Since one of these involves piracy, I won’t give the URL. The present Act of Classification doesn’t work on the Net, though I wish it did, since the hate sites are as psychotic as violent video games, which are deplorable. Here we are talking about film, an art that has become the major representative form of this century. Those who love it are outraged that the classification system evolved to guide adult consumers is being misused. The excuse, as usual, is the possible psychological harm to children. Can you see an 8-year-old fronting up at the box office being admitted to an R rated film? It’s easy, however, to imagine the same kid hacking away unsupervised at some Ninja webpage from hell. That’s something to explore.

I repeat: we are concerned with film. As adults we have the right to see, hear and read what we wish. We need a drastic revision of the act, and the presence of film professionals on boards of classification. The ‘Free Cinema’ group has been set up by members associated with the initial appeal. They include television critic Margaret Pomeranz, ABC Radio National’s Julie Rigg, directors Albie Thoms and Tom Zubrycki and writer Frank Moorhouse. In Adelaide, Scott Hicks, Rolf de Heer, Craig Monahan and Adelaide 2005 International Film Festival Director Katrina Sedgwick have lent their instant support. So have the city’s top academics and critics. As the current holder of the Pascall Prize, my formal citation is “to help the greatest number of Australians experience aspects of their culture with increased knowledge and perception.” In circumstances like these it becomes not just a description but a patriotic duty and damn any government that tries to stop us taking our place in the world. The movement will grow. The film will be seen.

At this year’s Sydney Film Festival, FTO (NSW Film and Television Office) showcased short films funded through the Young Filmmakers Fund. Specifically targeting emerging filmmakers aged between 18 and 35, the fund has provided over $1.6 million to 71 film productions since its creation in 1995.

One of the stand out shorts in the showcase was Avoca, written and directed by Nerida Moore. The film focuses on the director’s experiences growing up in Avoca after her parents moved to the beach-side suburb to pursue the Australian suburban dream. Drawing on her family’s Super 8 archive and ironic recreations of post-war newsreels espousing the virtues of suburban living, Avoca is an intriguing meditation on the role filmic images play in forming and refracting our memories. As the voiceover delves into Moore’s fractured family history, Avoca also effectively conveys the parochial narrow-mindedness that formed the darker side of the sunny post-war suburban dream. The film concludes with Moore returning to contemporary Avoca with a video camera. Ironically, she’s given the same kind of wary reception that her parents received several decades earlier.

Avoca stood out from the other YFF films screened at the Festival for its formal and thematic sophistication, and reflexive rumination on the relationship between personal memory and filmic representations of time and place. The film earned Nerida Moore the Emerging Filmmaker Award at the 2002 Melbourne International Film Festival.

Avoca, director Nerida Moore, Young Filmmakers Fund Screenings, 50th Sydney Film Festival, Dendy Opera Quays, June 13

In 2000, the Australian Film Commission released a study into the problems faced by Australian films during development. One weakness identified in particular was the lack of investment in this phase, and the resulting tendency for Australian films to be pushed through script development and into production before the scripts are ready.

In an effort to improve this, the AFC and the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) designed a program for script development partially modelled on the well-established formats used by Sundance in the USA, eQinoxe in France and Moonstone in the UK.

Called SPARK, the program involves a selection process (to identify 8 film projects with high probabilities of success) followed by a week-long workshop retreat for the writers, working over the stories with a team of internationally respected advisers, including producers, directors, writers and creativity coaches. Halfway through the week, the directors and producers for each project join the process. At the end of the retreat, each team is given a 4-month funded period to complete another draft, which is then looked at by members of the advisory team. In the final stage, the projects are given some assistance to develop a strategic financial plan.

The last edition of OnScreen (RT 55) carried a report from Blake Ayshford on his experiences as a participant at a similar program run by the NSW Film and Television Office. In this issue, OnScreen speaks with the writers, directors and producers for 2 of the projects selected for SPARK. The projects are: Unlocked (writer Christine Rodgers, writer/director Jo Kennedy, producer Clare Sawyer); and Untitled (writer Tania Lacey, writer/director Steve Kearney and producer John Brousek).

Steve Kearney Well, AFC funding is hard to get. There was an advertised workshop component too, which was extra, and therefore we might have expected more interest. I suppose that everybody submitting hoped that nobody else knew about it.

Christine Rodgers I don’t think so, but I’ve been writing for a long time. Certainly getting so many people’s input in quite a concentrated form was really helpful for a particular piece of work.

Jo Kennedy You don’t actually write while you’re there, it’s about ripping things apart and putting them back together. So in a sense it was just like what we do every week, done in a larger context and it was fantastic and invigorating because we’d been going over the material in our script for a couple of years. Just to have that input at that level, with people who’d done a lot of work, was incredibly exciting.

Christine Rodgers Our script was up to the 3rd draft, and we really needed to be kicked up the bum. Although we were really rigorous, we just needed a fresh eye, which was fantastic, because I think you can get to 3rd draft and you’ve got a lot of great ideas, but something’s still not quite working. And I think in Australia a lot of scripts are funded at that stage, where you think they’re just not quite there. We knew that about our piece and it was the perfect time to have a spotlight shone at it.

Getting someone to read your script is quite a big ask. It’s half a day to a whole day just to give proper feedback, and we’re all working trying to make a living. So that was the wonderful thing about SPARK. Those people were paid to give feedback.

Steve Kearney I worked in the US and over there I knew I could always take a script to a studio or pass it around the writing community…it keeps you going.

Christine Rodgers It seems like over there everybody’s looking for a good idea, and I don’t get that feeling here. They say “oh no, not another script.”

Steve Kearney The whole grants industry here is geared towards independent people with money. I have to get 5 grants a year—at least-—just to pay the bills. In the US my friends spend a year doodling around with their spec script because they’ve just got $500,000 for the last one. And that’s how they can develop their scripts for so long, and so intensely.

Jo Kennedy And you need that time-—it just takes time. It needs all those periods of pain, and leaving it and agonising and going back to it. That’s all part of the process and you need to be paid to do it, otherwise you can’t do it.

As writers, how well do you feel able to remain in the driving seat while all these high-profile experts are pushing and pulling at it?

Jo Kennedy There were moments when I felt daunted, when someone would tell you that your idea won’t work. Then I thought “Bugger that, I can do this scene like this if I want.” And I found I liked being put in the position of having to defend my ideas.

Clare Sawyer It was a brilliant way of getting the ideas to incubate over a substantial and focused period. Getting that range of opinions was fantastic—there was a sense that every possible tangent could be explored.

Jo Kennedy Yeah, it wasn’t like you only had the one adviser, who might not empathise or have any affinity with your kind of work. Before we went to SPARK, Christine and I sent the script to someone in the States who said basically “what a load of crap” and told us to change the whole thing. If we hadn’t had some good feedback at that point we would have been very despondent for maybe 3 to 6 months [Laughter].

Christine Rodgers And I think we might have taken it in a [direction] that could have been really bad for the work.

Jo Kennedy Ours didn’t change so much as distil. It would have taken us a year to do what we’ve done in 4 weeks. It was that valuable.

Now that you’re coming to the end of this process, and you’re about to hand in your completed drafts for final comments, do you feel that it puts a stamp on your individual projects and that it gives potential funders—beyond the AFC—a greater confidence to know that a team of heavyweights has gone over it with a bat?

Clare Sawyer We have had interest here and there from people who know about the project. I reckon this highlights our film; something that makes it stand out at least a bit and creates a buzz.

John Brousek In those terms, the success of this program is something none of us will really know for another couple of years at least. It’ll take that long before the current crop of films can get out there to be judged. If it works, then audiences, and funders, will take notice.

Rolf De Heer’s Alexandra’s Project opens in beguiling style. Gliding effortlessly through the calm of leafy suburban streets, we finally come to a halt outside the innocuous, red brick wall of a contemporary townhouse complex. The morning sun strikes the brick wall in that pure, unadulterated way only early light can. This is arguably the only moment of equanimity in De Heer’s 10th feature film.

As with the opening scene in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, the benign suburban setting in Alexandra’s Project belies the nightmarish scenario that unfolds. Though clearly in more of a realist than surrealist register, De Heer’s potent mixture of thriller and family psychodrama is, in many respects, no less disturbing than Lynch’s 1986 film.

Alexandra’s ‘project’ is to disabuse her overbearing husband of his complacent belief that their marriage is satisfactory. On his birthday, Alexandra (Helen Buday) presents Steve (Gary Sweet) with a home video, a singular work that redefines the ‘home movie’ genre. Unwittingly made a prisoner in his own home, Steve is forced to watch. A gauche striptease, by way of birthday greetings, is followed by Alexandra’s increasingly acrimonious litany of complaints. Her final revenge comes in the form of a meticulously planned and devastatingly effective act of schadenfreude.

It has become something of a truism to observe that Rolf De Heer has a predilection for characters who are in some way marginalised. His films have explored the plight of individuals who are isolated by social circumstance (The Quiet Room, Bad Boy Bubby, The Old Man Who Read Stories), disability (Dance Me to My Song), race (The Tracker) and even intergalactic adversity (Epsilon). Many of De Heer’s protagonists, unable or unwilling to lead conventional lives, are nevertheless extraordinary characters.

In this context, Alexandra’s Project is less typical of the director’s oeuvre. Steve and Alexandra have 2 children and the standard trappings of middle-class life. It is their very ordinariness that marks them as anomalous De Heer characters. However, the central premise in Alexandra’s Project—individuals at emotional and psychological cross-purposes—is a theme that has fundamentally defined the director’s work on screen.

De Heer has been equally consistent in exploring the communicative difficulties underpinning troubled relationships. From the mute young protagonist of The Quiet Room to the aphasic heroine of Dance Me to My Song, De Heer’s films are frequently preoccupied with the profound inadequacy or outright failure of language as a means of communication.

The pre-linguistic manchild in Bad Boy Bubby negotiates the terrifying world outside his home by mimicking the speech of others. As a form of communication, Bubby’s mimicry has a peculiarly refractory and tellingly ironic effect. In Epsilon, an intergalactic traveler falls to earth. Her uncompromisingly literal understanding of English leads to a series of exchanges with an earthling marked by misapprehensions and misunderstandings. The Tracker is characterised by minimal, often oblique exchanges between the central characters. Action, gesture, the expressive power of music and the still, painted image prevail as the most forceful means of communication.

While Alexandra’s Project is conspicuously dialogue-driven, it is nevertheless concerned with a relationship crisis precipitated by the fundamental failure to communicate. After decades of unhappy marriage, it is telling that Buday’s Alexandra is only able to talk frankly to Steve via the mediated forum of videotape. As Alexandra’s invective gathers momentum, Steve, by contrast, is rendered increasingly and uncharacteristically mute. Made literally speechless by the events unfolding on screen, his only recourse to action is the remote control.

Where numerous De Heer films have foregrounded communication problems and the shortcomings of language, most nevertheless close on an optimistic note. One of the most moving scenes in all of De Heer’s films comes in the final moments of Dance Me to My Song. Julia’s ecstatic wheelchair dance when reunited with Eddie is a pure and poignant expression of that optimism. By contrast, the unremittingly bleak denouement in Alexandra’s Project makes this arguably the most fatalistic of the director’s recent work.

Alexandra’s Project equally represents the director’s elucidation of space. With some exceptions—most prominently Epsilon and The Tracker—the mise-en-scène in De Heer’s films has been dominated by oppressive, urban interiors. And the archetypal De Heer interior is the family home. Protective and potentially threatening, the home in De Heer’s films sometimes affords shelter, but is more likely to be the setting for traumatic events. In everything from The Quiet Room to Dance Me to My Song it becomes a profoundly ambivalent space.

The most extreme representations of this are found in Bad Boy Bubby and Alexandra’s Project. While Bubby is incarcerated in a filthy, claustrophobic space that is more hell than home, it is a location from which he eventually frees himself. In De Heer’s latest film, the family residence, with its state-of-the-art security system, becomes an inescapable fortress. The bland, beige interiors of Steve and Alexandra’s contemporary townhouse are transformed into a dark and sinister space. A captive audience of one watching in horrified fascination, Steve is thrown into noirish relief by the dim, penumbral light from the television screen.

The grim mise-en-scene of married life in Alexandra’s Project extends the dystopic representation of the family found in other De Heer films. Unlike The Quiet Room and Bad Boy Bubby, Alexandra’s Project is presented from a surprisingly blunt feminist perspective. In its unadorned style and sentiment, the film recalls classic feminist films including A Question of Silence (1982), the work of Dutch filmmaker Marleen Gorris. As with that film, De Heer makes clear that Alexandra’s ‘project’ is, to invoke a time-honoured catchcry, both personal and political.

The feminist polemic in Alexandra’s Project conforms with what could be described as the director’s broadly politicised approach to his characters. As writer or co-writer of all but one of his feature films, De Heer engages with diverse genres and situations. What informs all of the director’s work, from the pro-environment discourse of Epsilon to the reconciliatory agenda of The Tracker, is an unequivocally humanist point of view. While Alexandra’s Project borders on the didactic at times, De Heer’s genuinely humanist perspective ensures that character doesn’t degenerate into caricature, or opinion into Fatal Attraction-style hyperbole.

As such, Alexandra’s Project not only makes an interesting addition to recent, more considered examples of the ‘woman’s revenge film’ (Shame, Mortal Thoughts and Thelma and Louise) but is a worthy contribution to the burgeoning body of mature Australian psychodramas, including The Boys and Lantana, released recently.

Alexandra’s Project, director Rold De Heer, distributor Fandango Australia/Palace Films.

New media art education—are curators happy with it? I emailed several of them with questions about regional and institutional differences, the use of various media forms, the re-use of media and attitudes to collaboration and experimentation. Replies were quite varied, sometimes contradictory, sometimes convergent, and ranged from the very specific critique of local scenes and issues to more expansive overviews. The following responses come from curator/producer and RMIT lecturer Keely Macarow; former Creative Director of ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) and now Research Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at UTS (University of Technology Sydney), Ross Gibson; ANAT (Australian Network for Art & Technology) Director and 2003 Primavera curator (MCA, Sydney),Julianne Pierce; curator of the e-Media space at Melbourne’s CCP (Contemporary Centre for Photography), Daniel Palmer; and Director of PICA (Perth institute of Contemporary Arts), Sarah Miller.

Difference

Do you feel it is possible to speak of differences in terms of regions, cities, or even at the level of various art institutions? And what of ‘media’ institutions as opposed to more traditional art schools?

Keely Macarow I feel more confident and indeed more interested in the work by students coming out of tertiary departments that are dedicated to an organic and interdisciplinary media arts education. Art schools that are steeped in Victorian ideals that compartmentalise (and therefore thwart interdisciplinary media) arts practice seem to continually push out students who have little real grounding in media arts culture and history. This maxim leads to the production of work that can be somewhat vacuous and lazy on conceptual and theoretical levels. I am not suggesting that all traditional art schools are like this, but I do find myself drawn to the work that is discursive and aware of its place in media arts culture. Similarly, artists who obsess with technology at the expense of ideas quite often also produce problematic and naive work. And to be honest I’d be wary of anything that pushes the catch-cry ‘new media.’

Julianne Pierce I think that there are very distinct differences emerging regionally. In many respects it depends on what resources are available to students. Art schools and other institutions that are well-resourced are producing some very interesting new media artists. Some of the stronger works are coming out of other sorts of disciplines and institutions, for example, institutes of technology, design, and computer programming courses. The benefit of art schools is that students have access to artist-lecturers and theory—this is perhaps where the most interesting works are being generated. Unfortunately, some art schools are struggling to offer resources for new media practice, and I think that this is having an impact regionally.

Ross Gibson I reckon people are just doing whatever they can with whatever they can get their hands on, wherever there is a cache of hardware and software. In this way it’s not such a different situation from independent film and video scenes of previous decades.

Sarah Miller While there are a number of more mature artists [in Perth] working with technology and distinct initiatives such as SymbioticA, BEAP (Biennial of Electronic Arts Perth), pvi collective and so on, I don’t know that emerging artists in WA are really engaging with new media in a very substantial way. It may be that they’re nervous about approaching PICA…but we do a lot of proactive work with the art schools getting graduating students into shows and studio residencies so it’s not just that. The other issue is that the [new media] courses are very young—2 to 3 years old at the most—which means that it will probably be a while before we see the impact of those courses/graduates in the broader community. I’d also note that in WA these courses haven’t developed in the way that they did in say Melbourne or Sydney—out of a history of installation, performance art and consequently film/video and photo media…Nor do we see a lot of work coming from graduates of ‘media’ institutions. I would suggest that this is because they are more vocationally driven and there tends to be an emphasis on computer sciences.

Trends

What trends do you see emerging in the work of younger/emerging artists, what kinds of mediums and how novel are their approaches?

KM The most important thing in my mind is that people keep experimenting with content and the sonic and visual properties of media art…I have seen some amazing video and sound works recently that completely overhaul our expectations of ‘new’ media art. I am talking about works that are glitchy, messy and raw, and quite unlike the derivative cyberish gloss that plagued much late 90s digital art.

JP Video and sound are very strong areas at the moment. These are technologies which artists can have in their studios or at home. Access to production facilities is quite crucial, and these sorts of ‘portable’ mediums are proving to be very popular. I’m noticing less interest in interactive works; definitely CD-ROM production is declining, as is the use of authoring tools such as Director. Younger artists seem to be more interested in using video and manipulating images in After Effects or customised animation tools. I’m surprised that the web isn’t being used more for creating art—once again the strongest use of the web is in sound. Perhaps the art fraternity sees the web as too lowbrow…realistically however, it is difficult to exhibit web-based works, and I see a shift away from monitor/terminal works to projection and sound pieces. Performance is also a strong area at the moment, especially amongst younger female artists who are working with performance and video installations. Gaming is having a huge impact, and we are seeing artists using game engines and game style graphics to generate video works. Once again, hardly any of these are interactive—I think that there is generally a decline in interactive media, unless you are associated with a university or research institute who can support the ongoing development of interactive media.

Daniel Palmer At CCP we regularly show Australian and international artists working in digital screen-based forms. Most regularly, although also modestly, the e-Media Gallery shows an ongoing program of monitor-based work…This was established in 1997 as a dedicated space for the display of CD-ROMs, and has evolved to include net art and DVDs. For a variety of reasons (not least being scarce resources for curating), we tend to work on a proposal basis. But to be honest I have been a little surprised at the small number of e-Media proposals I have received from Australian artists. My sense is that most have bigger ambitions than the single screen display, but it may also be that students are not trained to get their work ‘out there.’

I have been impressed recently with artists using archival and stock lens-based ‘footage’, artists using gaming models and also the growing use of interactive video. It seems that most of the best artists using new media are aware that for work to be really engaging in a ‘gallery’ context, it usually needs a sculptural/installation element.

SM …[I] certainly don’t see much interest in gaming, internet art or interactive writing although Murdoch University runs a hypertext course within their creative writing department and I believe that there is a lot of activity around that.

RG People are working in multi-channel ways—several screens, complex soundtracks, often with algorithms or complex rule-systems underlying the ‘synthesis’ of the visual, textual and audio materials that comprise the ‘display’ at any particular moment…In the context of education, I find that the best work is coming from graduates who have been encouraged not to obsess about technical wizardry…. Younger artists tend to want to show off their technical chops, but the well-advised ones learn to go past that, to the much more difficult and rewarding issue of conjuring and communicating ‘worlds’ of emotions and ideas…These are transcendent of normality somehow—you go through alteration as you encounter them. Your received beliefs change. This idea that technology is a system of devices for transcending the limits of one’s received, quotidian ability and comprehension…that’s about the only thing that’s compelling, per se, about technologies, regardless of whether they’re new or old.

Making the market

What notions of ‘professionalism’ and levels of sophistication are apparent about the art world/art market? What kinds of ambitions? Do graduates seek institutional verification or are they mainly involved in artist run initiatives?

JP The younger artists I am familiar with, who are working with new media, are really a bit detached from the art world. They generally don’t pursue a gallery to represent them; they spend their time focusing on international new media festivals and residencies, and the occasional exhibition in Australia with a new media focus. However, there is a high level of professionalism amongst them. They are often well traveled and familiar with international trends in media. They organise events and participate in organisations such as dLux, Experimenta and ANAT—generally they are quite motivated and active.

Regionally, the highest level of professionalism, in regard to the process of curating would be in Sydney and Melbourne. There is an awareness in these cities of how to present to a curator, they have business cards and give you packages of their work when you go to the studios. This of course occurs in other cities, but not at the same level. I think living in a competitive city creates competitive practices—and this is important to a curator. When you get home with your list of potential artists, the package makes a real difference, it enables you to make considered choices.

How experimental?

Within these differences, if any, is there more or less ‘experimental’ work?

RG There is some work that professes to be ‘experimental’ because it is ‘about’ the new technology, so much so that the user generally can’t engage with issues other than the medium-specificity of the technology. This kind of work is experimental inasmuch as it tests the limits of the tools, but it’s not especially deep or groundbreaking, and it’s rapidly exhausted in terms of intrigue and ‘something to say.’ Technology-focused [work] doesn’t tend to test the limits of the relationships between the tools and the mentalities that always emerge from and outreach the dictates of the tools. Merely testing the limits of the tools is the easiest and most easily exhausted procedure in all art practice. It needs to be a component of all art practice, but I would invite an artist to pause and re-consider if they are finding that the limits of the tools have become the subject of the work.

Working with curators

From my own experience as an independent curator (an endangered species in Australia, few can live in such precarious circumstances and on miniscule project budgets) I would certainly agree with Julianne Pierce’s observation that in Sydney and Melbourne young artists have the most ‘professional’ approach. There are all sorts of criticisms one can make of this understanding of the art system as a treadmill, but it does make it easier for the often under-resourced curator. I would suggest that young artists actively seek out curators and keep them informed of their latest works—that they develop a relationship with curators, and not just those in the large institutions. For example, whenever Emile Zile from Melbourne sends me a tape he has just made, he also sends more bits and pieces—flyers, posters and the like—that set the scene for his work and that of other Melbourne artists. Lastly I would urge emerging artists to creatively use email lists and the internet, not only as a tool for information dissemination, but as a global site for ideas to come to life.

Linda Wallace is a Queensland based artist, curator and director of the media arts company, machine hunger www.machinehunger.com.au

Encountering the Brisbane art group Arterial’s TRACK installation is like stepping suddenly into a collective dream. As you approach the alcove, random sounds and images emerge unbidden, mutate, and disappear. Even from a distance, the artwork’s mysteriously illogical idle state flickerings evoke the evanescent imagery of the mind’s ‘dream screen.’ A triumph of non-linearity, this complex fusion of historiography and site-specific art is permeated with a pervasive sense of reverie.

A fabulously industrial interface—chunky metal levers and thick, buttons housed in a metal case and set into the building’s infamous distressed concrete—summons multiple audio and video tracks telling histories that are at once shared but unknown, or at least (until now) undocumented. The console enables the participant—for there are no mere ‘viewers’ here—to navigate some 40 video and several thousand audio tracks investigating the history of the venue. The iconic Brisbane Powerhouse is both matrix and nexus for this ambitious project, which, in contrast to the frequently unmet promises of much new media art, succeeds demonstrably.

Projected diagonally on the wall of the alcove, 3 distinct video tracks dramatise the history of the space, charting its trajectory from pre-European invasion, through its industrial phase, to post-industrial live performance space. These spatio-temporal histories interweave and refer to each other via well-planned associational links, which produce a hoop-like sense of time, a collapsing of past, present and future; the eternally present moment. Sound, ranging from quotes to recovered conversations to music, is embedded in a few video works, permitting virtually endless permutations of sounds and images. Many of the heterogeneous video works, particularly the totemic and songlines pieces, are rich in hypnogogic imagery; the experience of these enhances the sensation of dreaming while awake. The simultaneous, non-linear remembrance of histories is significant: no one narrative is privileged, and history is construed as contingent, deeply interrelated and ongoing.

This ‘drifting’ has sometimes been criticised as insubstantial skimming or browsing, but in TRACK’s case, the hypermediated journey develops an organic, accreted understanding of the space. The effect for the user, of this intentional wandering through vestiges of the Powerhouse, is an art experience that mimics the associative processes of the unconscious and dream ‘logic.’

The product of a 3-year artistic inquiry, TRACK is, in many senses, a community artwork. It converses with other successful new media projects hosted at the Powerhouse including its Arterial precursor Elektrosonic Interference and the recent Temporal Intervals. It draws together the work of numerous video and sound artists, documentary makers, editors, actors, performers and information technology specialists in a complexly interrelated, communally-authored whole that sublates the twin art myths of both the singular creative genius, and the difficulties of reconciling multiple and divergent artistic talents. Most significantly perhaps, TRACK hinges on community involvement.

Though its idle state fascinates—the sudden eruptions of random soundscapes have surprised a few passers by—it is in the interaction with the machine that the artwork is made meaningful. By delivering the documents to the viewer via self-directed use of the console, the contemplation of the artwork is no longer abstract, but a material experience. The result is that, by means of the proficiently computerised interface, the staging of multiple writings is largely determined by the user, who thus acquires a more prominent status. Though in new media practice, this kind of co-authorship is sometimes more interesting than successful., in TRACK, the relations between artists, community and artwork produce a powerful fusion.

The interactivity in successful new media installations such as this one both entails and impels direct action on the part of the user. These actions are both physical—touching, pressing and cranking—and intellectual, with the invitation to make sense of it by self-directed exploration of the various representations and associations of narrative nuclei.

TRACK takes the stories of the place and transforms them into both an aesthetic and pedagogical experience. A tribute (not only, but particularly) to producer/director Therese Nolan Brown’s ability to cohere a project of such scale; to Andrew Kettle’s time-travelling soundscapes; to Chris Davey’s exceptional programming skills, and to the Powerhouse, a protean place in the city’s consciousness, TRACK is a visionary experience.

A brief history of publishing…In 1476 the English bookmaker William Caxton returned to England to start his own press, having mastered the new techniques of printing in Germany and Flanders. Jump cut to the mid 1960s. Maverick thinker, Ted Nelson, conceives a radical publishing model of electronic distribution, of screens and something called hypertext. Wipe to early 90s digiculture. Alt-X network begins publishing digital books online, texts specifically designed for new electronic reading interfaces such as Ebook and Palm Pilot. The network’s founder and contributing author, Mark Amerika, is lauded by Time magazine as an innovator, a visionary taking the world into the 21st century: a thinker for the digital age, giving us a glimpse, a snapshot of what the future of publishing will look like.

Fade to Kailua beach, Hawaii, 2003. Here we find the digital thoughtographer himself, strolling on the beach, pondering Borges, books of sand and the Coen Brothers film The Man Who Wasn’t There . Scanning his shadow he reflects on its outline, the way it traces him, leaves his mark on the sand, like writing. This trace, he reflects, this “not me”, is nonetheless an insinuation of himself, “an alien life form whose shadow Other is always on the verge of disappearing.” I manage to catch his attention, or at least his trace, before it vanishes.

Remarkable. As with all things virtual and continuously refuted by time, it feels elusive yet enduring. As Borges reminds us, “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”

Alt-X has been called the “publishing model of the future.” How would you evaluate its success as a new distribution paradigm?

When I first started the site a decade ago as a gopher site, before the world wide web was even graphical, it began as a kind of conceptual art project, where an internationally distributed network of like-minded artists, fiction writers, and theorists could build a niche audience of “interactive-others” who would see what we were doing and, if they felt at home, begin participating in the project themselves. When the Mosaic GUI-browser came out, we had to shift gears and evolve a more visually provocative and hypertextually-inclined publishing model, which was a great challenge and one we took on with pure pleasure (and here I should thank the then teenaged Knut Mork, whose father came from Ork, and who found us on the web from his terminal in Oslo, Norway).

For a while, we were inventing this new “network publishing model” and updating our content and design on a weekly if not daily basis. In some ways the mainstream media must have been right referring to us as the “publishing model of the future” because soon after we began gaining notoriety in the web culture, I’d say from 1995 and after, lots of other network publishing ventures began developing their own projects in cyberspace—and a lot of their content and strategies looked quite a bit like ours. Now, I’m not suggesting that Alt-X was one of the early models of dot.com hyperbole—in fact, we were constantly manipulating the vibe that came from that side of the commercial culture—but it’s funny, because that “future” that we apparently modeled became grossly perverted by the speculative market of the late 90s and so we had to once again adjust accordingly.

We could have gone one of 2 ways: either accept venture capital and become something that we were not, or blow off all offers and further problematise the discourse network. Of course, we chose the latter and soon began challenging the concepts of “online publishing” and “writing” themselves, no longer content using the web as just a visually appealing hypertext delivery system for content that reflected book culture, but that viewed the medium more as an exhibition or network installation model that expanded the concept of writing to include streaming media, experimental artist ebooks, net art, mp3 concept albums, “invisible” theory, and electro-poetics.

In this context, Alt-X does have a reputation as a niche publisher for the digerati. But it does have the potential to be a modifier of culture, as well as a distributor of culture. Do you see a role for yourself as a latter day Gutenberg, contributing to the dissemination of a digital literacy?

Sometimes I feel more like a latter day Cervantes, or Quixote as the case may be, and the windmills I keep chasing are really avatars of the tortoise. No matter how fast I go, I can never catch up with that ‘other’ thing that seems to slowly lead me toward the finish line and that somehow always keeps its distance from me. But I will get there one day, Darren, mark my words!

I really like Alt-X’s tag as a distribution platform for “unclassifiable writing.” Given the critical zeal of new media theorists to name and categorise new writing—ergodic, hyperfiction, cybertext, interfiction etc—how can Alt-X retain its edge as a purveyor of the inscrutable?

We don’t seek to publish or exhibit work that would fit into the mold of an easily digestible academic theory. True, our popular Electronic Book Review new media forum is a place to debate all of these terms, contexts, sub-contexts, and historical plays. The actors who participate in the “edified conversation” at ebr—not the least of which is the executive editor Joe Tabbi—are some of the most provocative thinkers in new media culture. But we still believe it’s socially more responsible for all of our writers, whether breakthrough fictioneers, biomedia net artists, or politically-incorrect critical theorists, to experiment with the form and content of actual creative practice, to use what Matthew Fuller once termed “word bombs”—that is, an interventionist phraseology—to hack into reality by way of a Burroughsian strategy of “storming the reality studio.” In fact, a new Alt-X tag for the next decade should be something like “real sites, fictitious media.”

Alt-X is clearly still going strong. What do you have planned for its future?

A huge 10-year anniversary party. Announcement will be in your email box sometime in the early Fall. No need to RSVP; just bring your body and a desire to work it all out.

There are times, I suspect, when we’ve all felt a serendipitous synchronicity, when everything we encounter seems somehow oddly connected in ways we’d never anticipate. My participation in this year’s Digital Arts and Culture (DAC) conference was one such moment. And the point of coalescence, surprisingly, centred on ‘the game.’ Everywhere I look at the moment people are making or playing or talking about gaming.

I say ‘surprisingly’ because gaming has registered only a minor blip on my cultural radar. Aside from a spell of pub time-wasting playing Galaga and Space Invaders in the 80s, a minor obsession with Super Nintendo platform games like Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros and the occasional family game of Scrabble or Monopoly, the obsession with games has passed me by.

Computer games are, of course, a multi-billion dollar business. According to the Financial Review (May 20, 2003) sales of games hardware and software in Australia leapt by 31% last year to $825 million. This report predicts that online gaming will grow nearly 50% each year for the next few years, with US revenue climbing to $US 1.8 billion in 2005 from $US 210 million last year and UK research firm, In-Stat/MDR believes the market will be worth $US 2.8 billion worldwide by 2006. There is no question that the gaming industry is having an impact on the financial sector. The impact on academics and cultural critics appears somewhat more muted.

Many presenters at Melbourne DAC, however, were very interested in the effect that gaming is having on digital arts and culture. The conference theme, “Streaming Worlds”, was intended to attract participation from a broadly cultural palette, yet more than half the papers reflected in some way on games and gaming.

In particular, the Scandinavian conference delegates seem to spend an inordinate amount of time immersed in the world of Everquest, a game that allows for the simultaneous participation of 500,000 players. Their interest in gaming is not surprising given that Scandinavian, Espen Aarseth, the keynote speaker at this year’s event, was the first chair of the Digital Arts and Culture conference series. Aarseth also runs the recently established Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University in Copenhagen.

In his keynote address, “Playing Research: Methodological approaches to game analysis”, Aarseth was quick to indicate that computer games research, as a nascent field of inquiry, is somewhat underdeveloped and under-theorised. This was evident from many papers presented on the topic, which bordered on description rather than analysis. It was often difficult to see how research into computer games was substantially different from well established sociological and psychological approaches to gaming of all kinds, not just those on computers.

The conference format contributed to the paucity of detailed analysis. All papers were made available to conference participants (and are still available at http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/ – no longer online) to be read before attending the sessions. Presenters were then only allowed 15 minutes to talk to their papers. Both audience and speakers struggled with these constraints. Conferences, however, are far more important for allowing people to socialise and this was the real strength of DAC which provided plenty of opportunities for delegates to network.

There’s also a tradition within DAC of bringing together artists and theorists to encourage and support the development and discussion of creative digital art. +playengines+, held at Experimedia in the State Library of Victoria and supported by the Digital Arts and Culture conference, was curated by Antoanetta Ivanova of Novamedia Arts. The exhibition featured 24 Australian and international works, opening in tandem with DAC.

This was the first exhibition of its kind in the new Experimedia Project space, an extraordinary area fashioned from the former exterior of the old Museum of Victoria. The original bluestone of the old museum forms one feature wall and the space is dominated by a large wall-mounted plasma screen and a specially commissioned sculpture by local media artists Martine Corompt and Ian Haig.

Most works featured in the exhibition have already exhibited elsewhere: notably Troy Innocent’s Semiomorph, the Lycette Bros’ Not my Type IV, Mark Amerika’s Filmtext, Kate Richards and Ross Gibson’s Life After Wartime, Stuart Moultrop’s Pax, Mez Breeze’s [ad]dressed in a skin code_, and Michelle Glaser, Andrew Hutchinson and Marie-Louise Xavier’s Juvenate. However, the proximity of the exhibition to the public spaces of the library meant many audience members were exposed to this kind of work for the first time.

Here lies the greatest strength of the exhibition and, more generally, Experimedia. Rather than attempting to attract a sometimes bemused public to a gallery to view new media art, Experimedia and +playengines+ placed the works in the path of a public who may not ordinarily visit other gallery spaces, therefore attracting a new audience. Elderly people wandered over, taking a break from their genealogical research; students tired of studying; families passing through and itinerant readers and writers of all varieties mixed with conference delegates and artists. This gave the exhibition and the space a real sense of vibrancy, adding to an already successful conference.

Melbourne DAC, 5th International Digital Arts and Culture Conference, RMIT, Melbourne, May 19-23; +playengines+, Experimedia, curator Antoanetta Ivanova, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, May 19-June 23

Points of Entry sets out to challenge the well-worn expectations of interactive art and upend ideas about freedom of choice and technology. Co-curated by Nina Czegledy, Deborah Lawler-Dormer and Robin Petterd, the exhibition resulted from a groundbreaking collaboration between Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Tightly woven, Points of Entry rewards the curious with an engaging selection of digital and new media work. Viewers are not only lured into “touching” the work, but so subtly enticed that they hardly know they’ve been seduced until it’s too late. A lesson in exploring the periphery, and the ideological centre of space, place and object, Points of Entry coaxes us to step beyond our aesthetically distant comfort zone to see and experience more.

Presented simultaneously in 2 galleries, much of the work is object based; few rely on the performative complexities of intricate technological gadgetry. Three dimensional sculptures, screen projections and sound works successfully combine with hauntingly elegant moving images and suggestive conceptual installations.

True to the show’s title, which alludes to the numerous possibilities of interaction between the viewer and the work, each piece in Points of Entry prompts a different instance of exchange: listening, touching, sitting, seeing, imagining.

Nestled into rectangular cavities above the hip-height wooden box that is Canadians Simone Jones and Hope Thompson’s Studies in Compulsive Movement: Anxiety Box No 1 are 2 small flipbooks featuring sketches of a human figure laboriously getting on and off a chair. Removing these books sets off the suspenseful jerks and high-pitched lilts of a Hitchcock-style soundtrack, occasionally broken by a woman fearfully whining, “something’s wrong.” An accessible work that requires your full physical involvement to come alive, Anxiety Box pushes the boundaries of the artwork’s uneasy intimate space.

Contrasting in size to the compact Anxiety Box, Yuk King Tan’s (NZ) mixed media work, The New Siteseer, contains 3 elements, each representing a journey. The launch, flight and descent of 100 camera-mounted rockets, erotically charged in cornflower blue and playfully jaunty in their expectation of flight, is documented in video projection, sculpture and photography. Delicate in their hues and random composition, the photographs exude a quiet grace compared to the sharp force of the determined rockets fizzing into the sky on screen. A work that captures the spirit of aesthetic play and the scientific and conceptual significance of the rocket as object and explorative machine, The New Siteseer celebrates the rapturous act of flight and the beauty of imminent descent.

In their empty solidarity, 2 marble-like benches welcome the viewer to sit and observe Canadian Jon Baturin’s arresting installation, Doukhoubor Communal Bath, Age 5. Tied with thin black rope to the spindly spokes of an oversized umbrella are several images of naked men, photographed from the neck down. On the reverse, their faces, wide-eyed and staring, screwed up in anguish or serenely soft in repose, look larger than life. Interspersed between these are pictures of plastinated human flesh, dissected and dismembered, exposing the membranes of amputated limbs, cross-sectioned torsos and skinless genitals. Converging in the centre of the umbrella, the black ropes stretch to the floor to cage a teddy bear rotating on a small platform: a poignant symbol of innocence incarcerated. The voyeurism of watching the images gently turn from face to naked body to flesh ripped open, subtly pulls the viewer in to feel more like a participant; vulnerable, exposed and watched.

Intriguingly, Points of Entry removes itself from the digitally abstract to merge new media with a heavily conceptual ideal. Currently touring Australia, the exhibition poses the question: how comfortable are we in our own space, and is it really ours?

“I’ve been playing this for hours and I’m the winner” said a little voice from the terminal beside me. This was Max, an 8-year old Dutch boy who spoke perfect English, and had decided to show me how to play Blast Theory’s Can You See me Now, an online and on-the-street chaser game at The Dutch Electronic Arts Festival (DEAF).

“Please, can we stop now and come in for a cup of tea?” came a crackled plea from one of the walkie talkie transmissions. “No, keep playing”, typed Max. “Okay, okay 10 more minutes, but that’s it Max,” said the shivering Blast Theory crewmember from outside.

A winter’s evening in Rotterdam can be extremely cold, so spare a thought for Blast Theory, who for art’s sake had spent 8 hours a day, for the last 5 days running around the Kop Van Zuid (the Rotterdam docklands) in less than zero temperatures. Can You See me Now is a game for up to 10 online players who use the arrow keys on their keyboards to move a simple avatar around a maze of virtual streets while chatting to other players by typing messages. Outside on the real streets 3 ‘runners’ from Blast Theory use walkie talkies to communicate while trying to track down the online players, whose virtual positions are relayed via satellite and the Global Positioning System (GPS) to wireless networked palmtops they all carry. If a runner manages to come within 5 metres of an online player’s location then that player is ‘seen’ and out of the game.

Computer games tend to stress me out and I wasn’t really sure what I was doing when “Hey, nice ass!” appeared in my chat text box. I turned around; it was just Max and I playing. “Was that you”? He just smiled cheekily and kept typing. “Yep, and look out that runner is going to see you!”

And that was it; I was out of the game. After a few more attempts, and a personal best of 10 minutes, I was left wanting more. I wandered out of virtual Rotterdam and onto the ‘mixed reality’ streets. I wanted the palmtop; I wanted to be running around like a maniac chasing phantoms in the freezing cold! It seems like I might not have long to wait because Blast Theory’s latest project Uncle Roy All Around You allows the public to do exactly that (updates can be found on their website at www.blasttheory.co.uk).

After trying to console Max, who couldn’t believe that the game he loved so much was really over, I began thinking that there was something about the DEAF03 exhibition that reminded me of a futuristic playground. This is not to suggest that the works were immature in content, but rather that many works at DEAF were simply a lot of fun and as I observed many times throughout the festival, very appealing to younger people. Sometimes these playful interfaces were the colourful wrappings of a darker, more political core and in others the simple act of engaging with these works became the core itself.

Interacting with Zgodlocator, Herwig Weiser’s magnetised sculptures of crushed and granulated computer hardware, was like playing with a big musical toy. Lying in semi-darkness on a soft, carpeted surface, visitors could peer down through perspex covered holes to strange alien-like surfaces, while low vibrations rumbled up through their bodies. Adults and children alike seemed hypnotised as metallic landscapes pulsated and mutated to the rhythm of electromagnetic signals that they were sending using various midi controllers in the space. Particularly satisfying was the feeling of shared interaction, as 5 or 6 people could ‘play’ Zgodlocator at once and generate patterns and sounds only possible through their cooperation. Web of Life by Australian Jeffrey Shaw provoked similar squeals of delight as people donned those silly looking 3D glasses to interact and explore this colourful and highly immersive, networked 3-dimensional space. When entering Web of Life a visitor can place their hand through a simple metal relief onto a screen, which then scans their palm. This process extracted a series of ‘unique’ lines from each hand and then, to the obvious enjoyment of everyone (including myself), these same lines would suddenly appear to be floating in front of you and then magically fuse with the other lines already hovering in space, becoming part of the Web of Life network.

This installation was one of many linked elements to a project that exists at up to 5 different locations at once and also includes a book and a website. A somewhat darker work was PoliceState by Jonah Brucker-Cohen, which at first glance consisted of 20 toy police cars driving around a playpen in chaotic patterns. In fact this was a motorised visualisation of data traffic using ‘Carnivore PE’, a public access version of the FBI’s software used to pick up on ‘terrorist threats.’ Whenever someone typed a word on the FBI ‘blacklist’ (which seemed to occur every few seconds) PoliceState used the ‘CarnivorePE’ software to convert this information into a corresponding police code that triggered the radio-controlled cars to drive around in choreographed patterns, while a loudspeaker announced each new threat. Although undeniably cute at first, PoliceState was a disturbing visualisation of our increasingly surveillance-obsessed society. As little malfunctions caused the cars to breakdown or crash into one another throughout the festival I was reminded again of the many failings and consequences of this kind of institutionalised paranoia.

In another room a keyboard on a pedestal was happily clicking away as if being used by an invisible typist. If you approached, the typing faltered, then stopped. If you typed something, the Poetry Machine_1.5 by David Link, activated a corresponding stream of associations from your words, projected live on a screen above. If the program didn’t recognise any of your words, it sent out ‘bots’ (autonomous internet seaching devices) to find corresponding texts on the internet where this word occurs. This process could be seen on a plasma screen which beautifully visualised the intricate patterns and linkages that were constantly occuring. By the end of the festival the Poetry Machine’s language had deteriorated into repetitive babble, seeming to have regressed to the vocabulary of a young child, which may have said something more about the audience’s input than the Poetry Machine itself.

DEAF03, Dutch Electronic Art Festival. Data Knitting, organised by V2-Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Feb 25-Mar 9

Living in Australia in 2003 is an everyday cross-cultural experience, but as a nation we’re forgetful. Crisis induces racism. Scarcity provokes cultures of exclusion. Hence the importance of regularly reminding ourselves just who we are in, among other things, celebrations of cultural diversity. For Jorge Menidis, director of this year’s Carnivale, multiculturalism in Australia is a “given” and, to be effective, he believes the festival needs to reach the broad population.

I can think of no better experience of cultural shape-shifting than a night out at THE LIVING MUSEUM: of fetish-ized identities. I saw Part 1 of this extraordinary work at Performance Space 2 years ago and it’s back in a new incarnation for Carnivale 2003. Created by San Francisco-based Chicano performance artist collaborating with a group of Australian artists, the Museum offers a wildly immersive experience of living, sometimes grotesquely mutating human exhibits. The audience cruises this array of ethnographic dioramas and is at turns seduced—intellectually or actually—to take part. Should you decide on the latter, there’s even an empty exhibit with costumes and a camera to record your spontaneous creation. This is playful, sexy, sometimes risky performance. “Like partying your way through the Apocalypse,” says the publicity. And they’re right.

A number of the performers from the first Museum had no hesitation in signing up for this one. Born in the Philippines and with a theatre background, actor Valerie Berry came to understand that in this work “your body is the artwork, you are the story.” Each of the performers works on a manifestation of his/her own identity and then on a version of themselves based on their beliefs about the interpretations of others.

Beyond individual identity, The Museum confronts the ways dominant cultures reflect on minorities. Borders, hybridity and the future are the subjects of Gómez-Peña’s enquiry and his skill, says another of the participants, Samoan-Australian Brian Fuata, is in making powerful political statements without necessarily using words. Working on Mk 1 was “an experience of totality…of fluidity and timelessness” as the warm-up, physical training and the talk that seemed inconsequential all became part of the emerging performance.

For Chilean-born Rolando Ramos “the whole experience was liberating…We saw in different ways from our different cultural/artistic experiences… It was a great space to be. And in that space a different language emerged.” THE LIVING MUSEUM is rich, visceral performance territory where performers and audience become participants in a ritual. The new version can’t help but take in recent world events (The Tampa election, September 11, 2 wars) that have thrown up a whole new collection of fetishized identities.

If the LIVING MUSEUM gives you a taste for border crossings, Carnivale offers plenty more. On the dance front Little Asia Dance Project presents a series of solos by 5 independent choreographers—Abby Chan (Hong Kong), Motoko Hirayama (Tokyo), Chan Yu-Chun (Taipei), Ju-Hyun Jo (Seoul), and Kay Armstrong (Sydney). Niels “Storm” Robitzky is a teacher and guru to German and French hip-hoppers. He and Karl “Kane-Wüng” Libanus from France are bringing their blend of hip-hop acrobatics and video projection to Carnivale’s headquarters at the Seymour Centre. In Flamenco Rocks, Flamenco meets not only rock music but jazz and a DJ, losing no authenticity in the translation, according to Richard Tedesco, leader of Melbourne’s Arte Kanela. Gerard Veltre presents Remember Me, a dance/physical theatre performance using hip hop and projections.

Bollywood on Bondi was the site for one of Sydney’s best dance parties at last year’s Carnivale. This year Bollywood Off Broadway reprises the event with a program of films curated by Safina Uberoi (My Mother India) and another big dance party, this time at the Seymour Centre. Carnivale’s film program also incorporates the Francophone Film Festival; 10 to 1, a season of short films and rarely seen first works by some notable Australian filmmakers; and Enter the Dragon in which filmmakers from Sydney’s southern suburbs document their stories.

The complexities of cross-over are given a serious seeing-to in the visual arts program, and especially in Artspace’s The Mask, curated by Nicholas Tsoutas, in which contemporary social prejudices are “inverted and ultimately debased.” At the same venue, in The Island Adrift artists explore “relationships and obligations inherent in living on an island adrift in a sea littered with impediments.” At Gallery 4A Aaron Seeto curates Jia, an exhibition documenting the experiences of Asian-Australian artists in “the lucky country.” In Sound of Missing Object at Performance Space Gallery, Panos Couros, Ilaria Viani, Jonathan Jones (recipient of last year’s Ministry for the Arts Indigenous Artist Award) and others turn an everyday wooden cabinet into an experience of sight and sound.

Among the big ticket items are China’s National Peking Opera Company on their first visit to Australia presenting one of the classics of the repertoire, The Legend of White Snake. The Mikis Theodorakis Popular Orchestra is coming. Guitar virtuoso Slava Grigoryan teams up with Bobby Singh on tabla and Joseph Tawadros on oud.

The theatre program features some intriguing scenarios. In a play from Turkish-Australian playwright Gorkem Acaroglu “the original Romeo & Juliet (Leyla & Majnun) meet Shakepeare’s characters in a performance that takes place across artistic media, spiritual planes and states of existence.” King of Laughter from South Africa “tells the story of an elderly TV technician who prepares laugh tracks on his last days on the job, having just met the young Vietnamese boy who’s replacing him.” Lest we forget, there’s also an Irish play, Gigli directed by John O’Hare.

Last year, Sidetrack pulled a rabbit out of the hat with their production, The Book Keeper, based on the work of Fernando Pessoa, one of Portugal’s most prolific writers and as strange as Kafka and Borges. It’s great to see Carnivale re-mounting this magical production for the wider audience it deserves. Also from Sidetrack comes The Paragon, a new work by the soulful Adam Hatzimanolis about his life as an almost-famous person—“the one he would have been had he actually managed to burn down his father’s fish and chip shop…or had his almost-opportunity to bed Nicole Kidman resulted in a long and steady relationship.”

Among other performance works are Sivan Gabrielovich’s The Cool Room directed by Deborah Leiser-Moore (a controversial hit at La Mama last year) and Sydney artist Karen Therese in Sleeplessness—“part mystery, part documentary and part revelation” based on the life and death of her Hungarian grandmother. Some works in development airing as part of Carnivale’s Rough, Raw and Read project are Lina Kastoumis’ Fat Sex, Kirina Stammell’s Preserving the Apple, Dono Kim’s The Bell of Korea and Prodigal Jack by Con Nats.

Classical Indian music and dance meet cyber Mother India in india@oz.sangam created by Western Sydney’s Indian community with Urban Theatre Projects at Parramatta Riverside Theatre. If only half of the publicity promises are true it’ll be worth a visit. Think “Parramatta River exploding with the sound and light of a Bollywood film shoot…Diwali lamps, saris on Hills Hoists and fusion dance bringing Mumbai to Western Sydney…live links to India in the foyer…and a Bhangra dance party erupting in the courtyard.”

As well as concerts at the Seymour Centre, substantial sections of the music/sound program will be presented in collaboration with The Studio, Sydney Opera House. There’s a new episode of the enormously successful Audiotheque, “a cinema of sound”; a tribute to Vasilis Tsitsanis and Greek Rebetiko music by Melbourne’s Rebetiki; Slava Grigoryan teams up this time with electronica’s acclaimed Eric Chapus aka Endorphin and Dancetracks goes global in a blend of live performances and drummers beat-matching DJ sets.

There are workshops and forums and a comedy debate to really get your teeth into (Is Mama’s Cooking Better than Sex?) and the Carpet Lounge, the essential festival club with performances and films and space for artists and audiences to meet—one of the most important functions of a festival.

Expressing the everyday experience of multicultural Australia requires a diversity of forms and these days the hybrid arts offer some of the most potent possibilities. Both serious and celebratory, the Carnivale 2003 program includes many such works that take us across cultures, media and artforms.

Contemporary dance-making in Australia comprises a robust yet personal set of approaches to the process of making and performing work. There are probably as many ways of working as there are choreographers. Consequently responses from choreographers, artistic directors and programmers to questions about recent graduates were distinct. What follows is a snapshot of some areas of agreement, and some diverging opinions. There are clearly 2 different directions that graduates are following—the path to company member, as a dancer in one of a small number of funded companies, or participation in the independent dance scene, principally as a dance-maker/performer.

All choreographers agreed that a strong physical training was the bare minimum required from graduating students and most felt that institutions were providing that to some degree. However opinions were divided on what sort of physical training is offered and how it’s taught—suggesting perhaps the very different approaches to dance-making by the choreographers themselves.

Obviously what each choreographer is looking for in potential dancers will depend on a number of factors. These may include: the physical skills and experience needed for executing the work; the process that the choreographers use to make work and the level of input they require from their dancers in that process, necessitating an ability to think, respond and compose; and the emotional resilience required for participating in the process.

Garry Stewart, artistic director of ADT (Australian Dance Theatre, South Australia), is the only choreographer I interviewed who consistently takes newly graduating students into a company. He finds most of them through a national audition process and looks for dancers who demonstrate strength, dexterity, confidence and a physical understanding of the body and how to use it. They also have to be willing to undertake further specialist training in order to perform his work. Stewart talks of the importance of tumbling, a high level of yoga and contact improvisation as the sorts of training that are imperative for the execution of his work. Most of these would not be part of a mainstream dance training program on a daily basis. Stewart sees that part of ADT’s role is to extend training into areas that underpin the very nature of the work, which is highly physicalised, often high risk, sometimes aerial.

Gideon Obarzanek (Artistic Director, Chunky Move, Victoria) on the other hand, does not regularly audition, as he doesn’t find it relevant or useful. He mainly finds dancers by attending performances or hearing from colleagues teaching at the colleges who alert him to promising students. Obarzanek works with a small core group of dancers, adding company members on a project basis.

As Chunky Move is not set up to train but to make new work and perform existing repertoire, Obarzanek finds that he is mostly attracted to graduates a couple of years after they complete their studies. By this time they have working experience outside an institution, which requires a level of maturity and understanding. Obarzanek’s dance-making requires a high level of contribution from the dancers, which puts a lot of responsibility on each individual. And he finds there are 2 different skills required: performance of existing repertoire and making new work. Both require “an open mind, strong rigour about picking things up. At Chunky Move you are asked to do many things very quickly.” Sometimes Obarzanek will employ a dancer to learn a role from repertoire for a tour before asking them to participate in making new work. Through this process their appropriateness for continuing with the company can be assessed.

Rosalind Crisp (dancer-choreographer, Director, Omeo Dance, New South Wales) mostly becomes acquainted with potential dancers through residencies at dance colleges or from those that seek her out by attending her classes at Omeo Studio in Sydney. She has seen a cross-section of graduates from around Australia and is concerned about the lack of inquiry that many of them have on graduation. What she looks for is a sense of curiosity, an interest in making work, an understanding of release and contact improvisation, and an open-mindedness about engaging with something new. These are not always areas of training or experience that students are encouraged to follow during institutional training, and she muses that many graduate without realising that this is just the end of the first step in their dance training. Crisp is concerned by what seems to be a lack of interest and adaptability to different ways of working. Some colleges, she suspects, are training the dancers for jobs, rather than educating them as intelligent artists—with a sense of what they can do with their training.

Both Obarzanek and Crisp are interested in dance-makers rather than dancers. Obarzanek looks for “a natural thirst and passion for composition”, while Crisp says she would much rather work with dance-makers, “they make more interesting dancers, they are part of the process…[which leads to a] greater longevity.”

Maggie Sietsma’s Expressions Dance Company (Queensland) has a dance and education arm, which is generally the first step for graduating dancers joining her company. This is a very small ensemble that performs repertory suitable for primary and secondary school students across the state. Sietsma looks for graduates with a strong and solid technique and a determination to maintain it under very difficult circumstances—on tour and with only a handful of others. “They need to come with a creative excitement but with the ability for me to imprint my own style (on their bodies)”. Because of the grueling touring schedule (up to 8 weeks at a time) and difficult conditions—different sorts of performing spaces, different levels of support from the schools—these dancers either have or develop an emotional resilience and maturity to make it through.

Precision and consistency in the performance of repertoire are of utmost importance to Sietsma’s work and she laments the loss of emphasis on this in current training. She sees this particularly when placing dancers into an ensemble where reproducing movement the same way each time it’s performed is paramount. She wonders if this is a result of so few existing dance ensembles and the imperative for the institutions to prepare dancers for work as part of the independent dance scene where ensemble work is not so important.

Dancer and choreographer Marilyn Miller, the newly appointed general manager of NAISDA (National Aboriginal & Islander Skills Development Association, based in Sydney), expects that their graduates will leave with an ability to adapt to many different ways of working. Their physical training incorporates a range of western dance forms as well as working with cultural tutors who share traditional cultural practices. NAISDA training reinforces a cultural identity and an understanding of traditional cultural practices, even if they are not specifically the student’s own. This encourages students to explore particular relationships with their own regions. She believes that graduates are well equipped for a range of outcomes including joining dance companies, particularly small to medium-sized companies as well as initiating community cultural dance projects.

Melbourne is perceived to have the most active independent dance community and attracts dance graduates from around the country. Helen Herbertson’s experience as director of Dancehouse, has shown that these graduates know how to show their independence. “They are used to working on their own, or inside their own teams. Dancehouse tries to respond to the needs of these graduates [with programs] that fill the gaps…help people step up.” Herbertson believes that the professional development courses now being offered as part of students’ studies have helped to give a realistic understanding of what is needed for planning and implementing a successful independent event.

Herbertson thinks that the first couple of years after graduation are the biggest test for independent dancer/choreographers. Away from the structure provided by an institution, the graduate must be able to manage their own body maintenance as well as furthering their work. Sarah Miller, Director of PICA (Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, home to the dance event Dancers Are Space Eaters), describes the positive aspects of STRUT, which supports emerging dance artists with administrative and marketing support, providing opportunities for making and performing short works several times a year. Set up by Sue Peacock and Gabrielle Sullivan and AusdanceWA, “it creates a supportive community who are constantly making work,” says Miller.

Flexibility and adaptability to different ways of working were the elements most often discussed by the choreographers. The challenge for the institutions is to provide a training that turns out educated or “intelligent” dancers. What complicates this is understanding the sorts of intelligence choreographers are looking for. Although all choreographers stress a strong technical background as a base, for some the purely physical aspects are the most important, for others the intellectual input and others require a level of life experience and maturity. Most probably it will be a combination that provides the dancers with the skills and experience they need.

Then there is the ephemeral element—something more difficult to define. All the choreographers talked about looking for what Obarzanek calls “charisma”, Sietsma “excitement”, Stewart “panache.” It’s the element that draws you to watching someone. Is that something that can be trained, or will those who have it be obvious whatever the circumstances?

The Victorian College of the Arts’ dance course has long supplied local choreographers with some of the finest performers (marginally surpassing those graduates from Deakin University). The annual Dancescape productions display the divergent and impressive choreographic talents that VCA students are exposed to. In 2003, works by Neil Adams, Brett Daffy, Leigh Warren, Phillip Adams (balletlab) and Sandra Parker were showcased. Warren’s pleasing, simple series of duets and tango-esque ballroom dances (Let’s Do It) were performed to a great collection of Cole Porter hits sung by Ella Fitzgerald. Eschewing depth, Warren’s choreography revelled in old-style Broadway playfulness.

Phillip Adams meanwhile, directed another of his schizophrenically alogical associations of props, bodies wrapped in fabrics (somewhat clumsy, puffy sleeping bags here) and aggressively tortuous physical manipulations. In a typically bizarre program note, Adams cited the Thredbo landslide as having inspired this piece of dead-pan stupidity—in the sense that Warhol’s art was self-consciously ‘stupid’—but it was nevertheless hard to see either much Pop criticism or postmodern distance here. As Homer Simpson said: “There is no moral to the story. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happens!” Even so, Adams’ Greta Im Filz was worth watching just for the moment of inspired hilarity when a tacky, remote-controlled toy zeppelin suddenly, and for no reason Adams could propose, meandered noisily above the performance. In the words of gonzo reportage: “Bad craziness.”

Amid all of this purposeful silliness (or just plain silliness, in the case of Brett Daffy’s indiscriminate vomiting of media images and sounds with his SWARS), it was little wonder that Sandra Parker’s nasty, sexy little study Yard took on even more stark power than its tremendous minimalism and cultivated disinterest suggested.

For some time Parker has been moving into a more ‘theatrical’ or pseudo-narrative realm; her last piece Fraught drew mixed responses largely because of this. A hovering between elements of Expressionism and the blank-faced performance of much postmodernist dance perhaps characterises most contemporary dance since the 1990s, but the articulation of quite what this space might be remains various and distinctive. Adams’ main response is to populate his works with objects, which often take on personalities or choreographic functions in and of themselves. This, combined with a wicked sense of humour and a truly unique sense of Surrealist associations, characterises his often installation-like pieces. Parker, by contrast, is still developing her novel aesthetic. The lyric nature of her early choreography has not disappeared, but the harsh manipulations and potent sexual charge her work shares with peers like Adams are an increasing feature.

Parker’s current theatrical interest is on struggles for power and domination. Her choreography therefore constitutes a dramatisation of what is implicitly at stake when one dancer puts a hand on another. There is more than an element of sadomasochism here, but this is indirectly alluded to through the oppressive atmosphere that enfolds both the performance and the work overall.

The most striking feature of Yard compared with Fraught was the lethargic ennui of every pose and movement. There was something even more wilfully mean about these interactions—none of the characters seemed particularly interested in them, content to play schoolyard victim one moment, oppressor the next. A girl’s body lay prone, watching with boredom, her feet swinging idly behind her back. A third, long, naked leg scissored between the limbs of the lying figure and quickly flicked out the legs of the first, roughly abusing her autonomy. A wonderful selection of lowercase glitch and hiss recordings created a sense of spatial placelessness, emotional indifference and irregular temporal rhythms, echoed by the sharp, staccato actions that scattered under each blot of light, or away from the wall on which the dancers languidly leaned.

Yard was partly a continuation of Parker’s work from Fraught and no doubt previews her upcoming production Murray-Anderson Road. Most choreographers reuse ideas from previous shows in their VCA commissions. Adams has worked with cloth and folding in Amplification and Upholster and model flying machines or nutty connections in Ei Fallen and Endling, while Leigh Warren has built on Broadway styles and popular tango before. Interestingly the younger VCA dancers gave a fleshy, ‘soft-body’ nuance to the often tautly muscular choreography of Parker and Adams and their peers. In short, VCA Dancescape provided both choreographers and dancers a chance to workshop ideas, while still producing often startling results.

Dancescape 2003, choreographers Sandra Parker, Philip Adams, Leigh Warren, Neil Adams; dancers 2nd & 3rd year VCA students, VCA School of Dance, Gasworks, Melbourne, June 5-14

be/leaving past/present by John Utans, is quite terrific. Take 20 minutes off it and it would be outstanding—tight and engrossing. Solos are not necessary, for example—it’s more ‘electronica’ than jazz as a form. And that is its beauty.

The grammar of the dance is familiar; everyone lined up against the side walls, waiting, on show, actors. I still like this, it means your eyes are peeled and you must skim across the overall surface from time to time. You have to take in the ‘scene.’ And here it means projections, an intriguing and eclectic soundtrack, lighting that is part of the performance, ‘the set’ of old-fashioned ‘school slide-screens’, and the combinations (and narratives) of the dancers (a group of richly differing shapes; only 2 males among the cast of 18, and they and one woman took off their clothes and offered their bodies generously).

The work is about leaving. Yet for me it was about ‘arriving’—as leaving can only come about from arriving. And arrivals were occurring over and over; everyone seemed always to want to arrive.

Throughout the performance there is imagery projected: artworks and artists; especially, for me, Picasso, Warhol and Duchamp (heady references; and ones I didn’t care for in the context—was it catering to another sensibility—I don’t care, these are serious touchstones), as well as other iconic historical (renaissance) works. A scene from an interview with Warhol is featured, he’s sitting in front of the Elvis work. The whole piece begins with a voiceover about a ‘concert’ that’s about to begin of John Cage’s (perhaps with David Tudor); Utan’s references are wonderfully present though, like bones. They don’t condemn the work, they infiltrate it in their own way becoming part of the (new) work —as if they, in the case of Cage, are existing sound, and in the case of Duchamp, are ready-mades, and in the case of Picasso, are all fractured and seen-at-once.

The work is like a moving visual art installation, it has this quality, which is impossible in the gallery. I-did-not-like: the quotes from Matisse and others (too overstated). I-did-like: the text, not from the ‘masters’, that appeared on the back wall: “rain falls/ and at night/ he whispers to me/ all is lost/ by the sea/ they danced into the night/ the rain falls…”

I had a sudden flash with the text and the dancers’ despair (as if children) of Doris Lessing’s Memoirs Of A Survivor. It’s the small things: “There came a day when Emily walked across the street and added herself to the crowd there, as if it were quite easy for her to do this” (Lessing, Picador, 1980). She arrives, somewhere.

There is the hope and feverish work of being young, and of coming suddenly into the light, as one ‘character’ does; she sensuously works her way along a wall, never moving out of the light, until she walks off, leaving the light behind. But she had arrived first, she plays in the light, she is ‘become’ by the light. She’s not innocent. Throughout there is this lack of innocence.

You cannot use these iconic art references, this assured lighting, this soundscape, without already knowing the horror of being awake. And there lies the strangeness of the work. It takes a while to ‘awake’ to it, but it comes like a storm: this is delicate dance. The dancers’ bare feet touch the ground in a strange way. It is not hesitance, it’s as if they ‘care’ about, or worry for, something. This causes a slight imprecision, but also a kind of mercy or humaneness. They are not machines, they do not do perfect. But their feet are my concern here, something about their feet, their just behind-the-beatness. A degree of fear. A sense that arrival and departure is tentative—and fleeting and final.

I suppose I haven’t created a ‘mental-picture’ of this work. It’s a student-performed work, but it functions outside this category. It’s a bit like the projected Warhol interview—it’s a sophisticated innocence, but in this case the innocence is of another order—genuine and life-full. It’s a complex work—almost like watching a movie—it assumes a lot about its audience in terms of art history (but that’s a good thing, and that’s why I disliked the didactic quotes); its form (dance-theatre-visual art-movie-sound) is a wonderful one; a multi-textural work that worked (in the best sense of ‘worked’—a work of art).

be/leaving past/present, John Utans, performers, Adelaide Institute of TAFE, July 2

Shaun Gladwell, Storm Sequence, 2000, digital video still courtesy the artist and Sherman Galleries, Sydney

Ten—even 5 years ago—photography seemed to dominate contemporary art, not just in the presence of its multifarious image forms (which remain pervasive today) but also in the fervent discussions about its status within and as contemporary art. Now it’s video’s turn. Everybody’s making it, everybody’s showing it, everybody’s got an opinion about its place within the sphere of art.

Locally there are several signs of video’s ubiquitous presence across gallery spaces, from major art museums to artist-run ventures. In Melbourne, Susan Norrie’s massive, multi-screen Undertow opened at ACCA, while at Federation Square the first new contemporary project at the Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia was a new video, photography and object-based installation, Sandman, by Patricia Piccinini. Next door at ACMI is Ross Gibson’s 2-part Remembrance, a film/video installation event. In Sydney, the major institutions have embraced video in its grandest projection forms (Doug Aitkin and others in Liquid Sea and Ugo Rondinone at the MCA; Denis Del Favero and Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky at the Art Gallery of NSW). One of the country’s premier commercial spaces, Sherman Galleries, recently showcased 2 extraordinary performative videos by young Sydney artist Shaun Gladwell. (Others, such as Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, have been committed to video work since the 1980s, while Scott Donovan Gallery presented several video programs during its incarnation in Liverpool Street.) Video has become the stock-in-trade of contemporary art spaces, with recent Artspace showings in Sydney. The Shangrilla Collective, organised by Maria Cruz, featured music performance videos by about 30 female artists and Emil Goh’s recent Remake triptych featured 3 versions of the same iconic cinematic narrative.

Of course, some of the most innovative initiatives have come from artist-initiated activities—the Serial 7s and Projekt video catalogues from Sydney and Melbourne respectively, or the Emil Goh-curated international video show at Gallery 4A of 2001 (where the audience programmed the screenings themselves from a shelf of tapes). And there’s Chewing the Phat, video screening and discussion nights at Phatspace, Sydney and the new video-configured The Kings Gallery in Melbourne (co-founded by Brendan Lee of the Projekt video catalogue series).

So video, with photography, has become a new default setting for contemporary art and associated criticism. But as with photography, this hardly makes ‘video art’ an easily definable, even recognisable field of practice. For every parallel between the 2 forms, there are significant representational and historical differences between them. In considering the once contested condition of photography within contemporary art, can we identify some of the forces behind, and likely trajectories beyond video’s current status?

As with photography, there’s a distinct branching in video’s history as an art practice. We can trace one genealogical strand back through the history of experimental film within modernity—a media-specific set of practices laden with particular formal and conceptual concerns and languages. But more recently, video has become inextricably intertwined with the dispersed frameworks of conceptual art: primarily as a mode of record and documentation—a means of accessing and presencing the everyday, exploiting its link to real time documentation.

And so there’s a tension between contemporary video work as a distinct, self-contained practice and representational language, and the form’s centrality to contemporary art as a trans- or post-media specific activity. But this tension is perhaps not as overt as that which recently surrounded Australian photography. A modernist model of photography as a discrete art form predicated on illusionary notions of social and representational truth competed with ‘postmodern’ conceptions of photomedia or photo-based contemporary art to produce a tension between art photography (and photographers) and photo-based art (and artists).

There are a couple of other historical branches that must be acknowledged. One traces video’s development through its function within ‘multi-media’ structures of experimental performance, theatre and dance. The other wraps tendril-like through everything: in modernity, high and low culture is collapsed in the ‘new’ forms of mechanistic analogue (and now computational digital) representation. Video is now central to the commodification of contemporary life outside the art world, ranging from everyday personal home video to digital television, video phones, reality TV, the public architecture of video advertising, commercial cinema and so on. Video as art supposedly offers access to these representational registers, but also envelops these worlds in the critical discourse of contemporary practice.

Video, like photography, has been profoundly impacted on by (and been influential within) the postmodern pastiche and appropriation associated particularly with 80s art, as well as current conceptions of digital or new media art. Both have reached a moment within which a form of ‘low-rent’ performance documentation style coexists (sometimes even in the same work), with extraordinary high-end technological developments in the form. And this is just one tension that has raised questions among practitioners, curators, critics etc and in public fora such as those organised by CCP/ 200 Gertrude St in Melbourne and this year at Sydney’s MCA.

Is there a video art distinct from the incorporation of video in post-media art practices? What forms of critical languages are needed to adequately encompass the range of practices and tensions in video art? Do they need to be cross-media, societal in epistemology, cross-cultural? Is there a language that can encompass both primarily visual/spatial and narrative practices? How as viewers can we move between narrative-based (filmic) screenings and immersive, more overtly multi-sensory experiences? (Particularly when both are encompassed within the framework of a single exhibition such as Remembrance?) Can individual works survive such translations in presentation structures across theatre screenings and gallery exhibitions? (Where in the former the relationship between work and viewers is fixed and primarily visual, and in the latter fluid and spatial; where in the former the relationship between multiple works is primarily temporal, and in the latter spatial; where in the former an ‘audience’ contracts to a fixed viewing time, whereas in the latter they may flow in and out of the timespan of the work.) As video becomes a more dominant form of visual art, these questions are thrown into relief by the difficulties involved in trying to view an exhibition such as Remembrance which encompasses both multiple time-based narratives and screening programs (where the viewer sits, inert), such as d>Art and Future Perfect organised recently by dLux media arts at the Sydney Film Festival.

Issues of presentation (along with those of distribution and sale) have therefore become central to both artistic and curatorial practice as the range of options between fixed, immersive installations, mix and match ‘interactive’ programs, screenings, projection or monitor formats etc increase exponentially. So too have issues of production value. How possible or important is it for video ‘art’ to match the production values of commercial video (advertising, television, cinema), or to mimic its narrative structures? Does this simply risk its willing absorption into contemporary spectacle culture as another form of visual product? What are video’s points of critical resistance to its commercial overlords? What does video ultimately offer art and artists? And vice versa?

I offer no answers here, nor more than a handful of some of the more crucial questions. Many others—artists, curators, institutions writers etc—are asking them with greater acuity as we experience an accentuated, slow-motion collapse of fictional and actual world performance into an entirely screen-based conception of the real. The questioning is crucial, as is an awareness of the histories being drawn on here, for these may point to the potential impact of all this video on the future condition of art itself.

The RealTime-Performance Space free forum, Video + Art Equals…?, is on August 18, 6.30pm at Performance Space. (See transcript here)

“The generation going through tertiary education now is going to live through a period of more rapid technological change than [any] other in the history of the species. If you believe some reports they may, by the time they are in mid-life, already be post-human.”
Alasdair Foster, Director, Australian Centre for Photography.

How are current teaching practices dealing with these rapid technological changes and other challenges facing today’s photomedia students? I asked curators and teachers from around the country about the quality of photomedia schools and their perception of recent graduate work.

Alasdair Foster says, “It’s no longer enough to teach current skills and assume that occasional retraining will suffice to keep the individual up to speed. I believe strongly that education has to be more about learning how to change and adapt than learning specific information or skills.”

While many curators and teachers note a shift from teaching traditional ‘wet’ photographic processes to new technologies such as DVD, net art and video, some suggest the importance of teaching more traditional skills.

Curator of Contemporary Australian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) till 1999, Timothy Morrell suspects, “…the craft of photography is not taught so thoroughly now as it was in the middle of the last century. Many of the photographic processes currently used by artists are visually seductive because of advances in technology. Camera and darkroom skills are becoming quaint and outdated ideals. It may be that the demand for greater technical training that painting students began to make roughly a decade ago will be repeated by photography students.”

Martyn Jolly, Head of Photomedia at the Australian National University’s School of Art says this technical training is already occurring at ANU where the school has “…made a massive re-investment in [its] darkrooms.” While ANU students are taught digital photography, video installation, animation and the web, Jolly says, “…chemical processes, particularly in the areas of the ‘fine print’ and the contact printed alternative technique have a big future, particularly within the studio-based teaching ethos of the ANU School of Art. We have begun research into digitally producing ‘lith negatives’ to be chemically printed in the darkroom.”

Curator of the Northern Territory University Art Gallery and lecturer in photography at NTU, Judith Ahern believes the ideal teaching model is “a learning environment where the student has access to traditional modes of creating photographic images along with knowledge of the new processes…Most institutions are working in this kind of space at the moment, and attempting to work with both and understand the differences and potentials in both modes of production.”

Timothy Morrell believes the art schools “have responded properly to the changes in contemporary culture brought about principally by photography and the electronic media. Since the 1980s the theoretical basis of the teaching in art schools, for all students, not just photographers, has been strongly informed by the mass-media, in which photography plays a major part.” However he warns that the sheer range of relatively new photographic processes “and the expanded notion of what constitutes a photographic practice, has allowed students an almost bewildering freedom.” The resulting difficulty of “making so many choices quickly sorts out the determined and motivated students from the less focussed ones, who lose their way.”

Outgoing Director of Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography, Tessa Dwyer sees, a “shift towards multimedia practice in photography and photomedia courses. Where once students might have mixed digital and analogue techniques in the production of still images, they are now moving into a variety of other screen and digitally-based mediums such as video, DVD, CD-ROM, net.art and sound art. The change in an institution like the Victorian College of the Arts is quite noticeable. These days, students have access to a wide range of mid-career and established practitioners working in a variety of mediums.”

While students will often seek out particular teachers in determining where they choose to study, Foster wonders “if artists always make the best educators. To be an artist is, to some extent, to be self-absorbed, to be focussed on your work, to have a heightened engagement with a particular set of perspectives. That’s a very necessary thing. The best art grows from a sort of obsession. This does not always sit well with giving time to helping to encourage nascent ideas of the student.” The best education for emerging artists balances “exposure to practitioners, contact with educators whose aim is to facilitate and guide the idiosyncrasies of the individual’s vision and, perhaps most important of all, peer interaction…,” Foster says.

Most concur that the main difficulty for students is being able to afford to produce the kind of work they’d like to. Morrell says “…most schools are, like the students, strapped for cash. Students live in and are influenced by a media culture that is based on massive corporate funding (advertising, movies, music video). They can’t hope to have the resources to work at the same level as the practitioners who for many are their principal influences.” This means that students may base their choice of where to study on the range and quality of facilities offered by particular schools.

Jolly says, “Of course the cost burdens of such a technologically based medium are a real problem….[I]nevitably costs will be transferred to students. Students will need to have budgeting skills and earning capacities as never before.”

Despite these constraints and challenges, the curators I surveyed are generally impressed with the work emerging from institutions like NTU, Sydney’s College of Fine Arts (CoFA), the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) and the Queensland College of Art (QCA) to name a few. Many see a relationship between certain schools and the work emerging from them.

Morrell thinks that “the connection between art photography and cinema is strong at the moment, probably influenced by Tracey Moffatt and possibly Patricia Piccinini…A really important influence on students now is an awareness (I think produced by their education) of the social significance of photography in such areas as security surveillance, journalism and science (especially anthropology). The ability of photography to create its own version of the truth is even more significant in an age when manipulating information has become so sophisticated. Good art schools make the students think about this, not just how to get a fine print.”

As a teacher and curator Judith Ahern sees a range of graduate work from around the country and is always impressed by “…the strength of concept and the way that is reflected in the work…” She sees evidence of their training in the work of some Northern Territory graduates. Examples include, “Karen Neville, whose Type C portrait series RDH documented patients and visitors at the Royal Darwin Hospital. A strong documentary emphasis is part of the teaching practice in the photography department at NTU. Jo Gerke is producing colour images based on her experiences in the Territory. Cherie Kummer is producing landscape-based work in colour and black and white that has a lovely lyrical angle on landscape photography. Peter Eve produced a very powerful documentary essay based on the life of the ‘long-grass’ people called Long Grass, short life.”

Thinking about QCA graduates over the past 5 years, Morrell says, “it’s good to see that sensitivity to traditional values such as composition, mood and light is still fostered in a photographer like Annie Hogan. An interest in the constructed narratives of movies is evident in Paul Adair’s work.”

Dwyer finds it hard to “pinpoint specific artists and their influences” but sees “strong work” from Media Arts and Interactive Media Departments at RMIT and VCA. “Recent graduates such as Paul Batt (VCA), Madelaine Griffiths (RMIT), Rebecca Ann Hobbs (VCA), Paul Knight (VCA), Philip Murray (RMIT), Selina Ou (VCA), Sanja Pahoki (VCA), Koky Saly (VCA) and Van Sowerine (RMIT) are some examples.”

Curator of Sydney’s Phototechnica Gallery, Karra Rees says, “At a time when everyone seems to be a photographer, photomedia artists need to work at discovering new ways to look at things. Often, at student exhibitions there are similar works on popular themes or current trends…the works attempting to create something different usually interest me. She regularly attends art school photomedia shows to keep up with work from emerging artists. “Although the quality and appeal of [this] work can vary, I have generally found these exhibitions to be refreshing and innovative,” she says.

Rees cites impressive work from CoFA’s 2002 graduation show: “Charles Gordon’s exhibition series White Suite 2002 is part of a larger body of work entitled The Dream House Project. This work explores the intricate connections between migration, dislocation and memory…You couldn’t miss Lisa Anne’s series Home, they are huge, colourful and seemingly unreal.” She also mentions Georgia Walker’s Transfiguration series. Rees says these “creepy, soft digital images of her sculptures made out of stockings, hair, and what appears to be golf balls, as well as other assorted items in mute tones…really stood out in the [CoFA] exhibition, not only as remarkably different in style, but also in process and concept.”

When asked what needs improving in the current approach to education for photomedia artists, it seems a thorough understanding of the history of the form is vital to offset an obsession with the ‘now.’ “…[S]tudents need to be encouraged to remain critical of fashions and trends, while not denying their importance…to keep asking questions, challenging assumptions and retaining their personal vision,” says Tessa Dwyer.

For Judith Ahern it’s vital students are “aware always of the extraordinary history of photography and the way it has shaped and continues to shape contemporary ideas and art practice” and that their teachers should “keep teaching the traditional modes of making photographic images, [and] to look back as well as at ‘alternative’ processes as offering new ways to approach old ways of making images with light.”

Martyn Jolly says, “It is an interesting phenomenon that photography has become the prime concern of many other art school departments: painters paint ‘the photograph’, printmakers also deal with digital reproductive technologies, everybody is making videos. [ANU has] encouraged a renewed exploration of documentary traditions in photography, with a critical underpinning and by engaging with new technologies.” This approach “has been very successful, it is a way of getting the students off campus, and getting them engaged with local communities and related institutions.”

This community interaction is essential Alasdair Foster believes, because “…broader relevance is a difficult thing to achieve when a ‘market forces driven’ educational system is under pressure to deliver discrete paper qualifications in highly defined disciplines in order to succeed financially…Art as much as science desperately needs its pure research and its exploration of ideas for their own sake. Otherwise we will find ourselves forever behind the 8-ball.

“Art cannot afford to be left to the art world. We need to find ways to educate that ensure a breadth of understanding of many aspects of life…If we do not, we are in danger of evolving an art language with less and less relevance to the wider community.”

The work of Dadang Christanto reaches beyond specific references and personal suffering to reflect on the universal. In Count Project, begun in 1999 and triggered by millennium celebrations, Christanto appeals to his audience for a more honest assessment of the past 1000 years.

Christanto, formerly from Yogyakarta, Indonesia, has lived in Darwin for 5 years since becoming a Lecturer at the Art School of the Northern Territory University. Count Project opened in early May at the NTU Gallery with a collaborative performance by local cellist Rebecca Harris. The exhibition featured large-scale works on paper with drawn, painterly and calligraphic marks in ink. These are new materials for the artist; a significant shift that he attributes to his passage from East to West in moving to Australia, experiencing an increased awareness of Orientalism and a new sense of his own identity. “Here I am Asian,” he says.

In Australia the principle theme of his work has been counting the victims. His work is testimony to systematic violence and challenges the enforced silence of all those who have been victimised throughout the 20th century. For Christanto, whose family lost a patriarch as a result of government orchestrated brutality, the rationale is intensely personal. There’s a sense of urgency in his mark-making, bolstered by a skilled play of positive and negative space. Everywhere gestures seem to scratch against the page and outline the heads of numerous victims. How many wounded humans in the 20th century are there to count—not the victims of plague or natural disaster or famine but those who’ve died because of systemic violence?

The artist’s process is evident everywhere in this exhibition. In part the work appears as a record of a performative, cathartic event. The heads of victims are rendered as if through semi-automated unconscious drawing. Christanto maintains control in the creative act in a deliberate attempt to distance the process and work from simplistic documentation or reproduction of violent acts. Intriguingly the marks are reminiscent of the energy of expert batik making, said to be a meditative act. Like many Javanese women of her background, Christanto’s mother traded cloth. As a young boy, his first awareness of art was in the batik textiles she sold.

Every work calls on a dynamic aesthetic that utilizes a limited palette of red, black and brown. A red or black line marks the head, the site of the body where memories are kept—Christanto refers to the memory of his father’s abduction as a darkness that he must carry in his head. In 1965 and 1966 countless suspected members and sympathizers of the PKI (Communist Party of Indonesia) were abducted and massacred in purges driven by the military. Their stories and those of their grieving families have been systematically silenced, and people connected with them strategically stigmatised as enemies of society. Increasingly Christanto’s artwork is driven by this historical event of which very few photographs exist.

Click, click, click. The sound of the military boot on hard ground holds a very particular resonance. It is the sound that comes before the abduction. In the Christanto family home the sound still creates a wave of anguish. In the artwork the military boot stamps dominant in the central field of the image. The boot carries with it a sea of disembodied heads. Images like these have become devices for preserving shared memories and honouring a collective history that lies beyond the scope of words. Christanto’s work is driven by a confidence that visual art can heal social and personal wounds.

Dadang Christanto’s work is showing at the School of Art Gallery, ANU, August 7-31; performance at The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, August 8. His major work, They Give Evidence (1996-97) recently acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, will be the key exhibit in their new Asian Galleries opening October 25.

Count Project, Dadang Christanto, Northern Territory University Gallery May 6-16

You know when you’re approaching Pine Gap, the American defence facility 30 kilometres south of Alice Springs, says a friend from the Northern Territory. Before you catch sight of the huge silver radomes at one of the world’s largest satellite stations, you notice their effect—suddenly you have impressively crisp mobile phone reception.

Despite facilitating communication, Pine Gap has a more ominous place in the public imagination because of its role in intelligence gathering. To John Pilger, Pine Gap is an American spy base, a “‘giant vacuum cleaner’ which can pick up communications from almost anywhere”, and a nuclear target (A Secret Country, Jonathan Cape, London, 1989). The official line? It’s a joint Australian-American operation supplying the West with information about missile developments in what George Bush hokily terms “rogue states.” What no-one refutes is Pine Gap’s ability to intercept a host of signals from ships and submarines to private telephone conversations.

Merilyn Fairskye illustrates the eerier aspects of this global interception in her recent exhibition, Connected, at Stills Gallery in Sydney. Fairskye’s 11 photographs on rectangular, translucent surfaces, suspended at a short distance from the wall, depict life-sized figures hurrying from view. In this very contemporary version of street photography, Fairskye’s subjects rush toward their futures; they’re faceless, yet each has a distinctive ‘character’ in their gait, clothing and shape. Shot from behind, each person appears to be talking on a mobile phone, and though connected, they appear oddly disengaged from the busy urban environments in which they’re pictured. Connected suggests the paradoxical isolation that occurs despite telecommunication. The photographs, with their sharply defined or shadowy forms, avoid didacticism, but Fairskye prompts us to consider the unintended ramifications of our contemporary state of hyper-connectivity with her accompanying film on Pine Gap. Because you can hear the DVD’s surround sound while looking at the photos, the images accumulate more sinister dimensions. This sense of ‘overhearing’ something occurring in another room is a neatly reflexive (though perhaps unintended) design feature that comments on the exhibition’s themes of secrecy, gossip and intrigue.

Fairskye’s 25-minute film deftly illustrates Pine Gap’s place in the public imagination and in the local cultural and social life of the Territory. Snippets of rumour, electric currents of intrigue, inventions, myths, anecdotes and speculations about the mystery and possible functions of the facility are voiced in this work. The flows and circuits of local, everyday intelligence gathering are beautifully contrasted with the arguably ‘factual’ and ‘official’ information snared and processed at Pine Gap. From the soundtrack, between the hiss and crackle of line static, I caught grabs of chat about September 11; an Aboriginal man saying “this is my land”; someone commenting “it was clear he had no idea what his father does”; talk of a “Pine Gap Husband” and rumours of radiotechnicians diagnosed with cancer. The soundtrack is juxtaposed with abstracted footage, shot using a “Pine Gap modus operandi.” Fairskye films “from the air and from the ground—Anzac hill; the airport; the Pine Gap exit; Ormiston Gorge; Hermannsburg Mission; Kata Tjuta—to create a sense of a town and a landscape inhabited by shadows, mirages and secrets” say the room notes. Shadows move across the parched earth of the Aranda people, above stretch dramatic cloud-streaked skies, figures walk backward through a street and aerial shots render the landscape painterly. All reinforce the sense of a place in which connections and information have become disembodied; a space where, says a voice in the film, “actions and stories and events disappear into the landscape…like dust.”

These competing discourses on communications prompt questions that the photographs alone might not: do the advances in technology that ‘enhance’ communication give us greater freedom, or does the flipside of this—spying and phone tapping for example—actually erode our liberty? Do modern technologies increase our connectedness or supersede and therefore diminish our ability to interpret the intangible codes and signs of actual human contact? With the spectre of Pine Gap looming over the exhibition, Fairskye suggests the tenuous divide between the private and the public, and hints at potentially apocalyptic scenarios that might result from listening-in.

Despite their contemporary, cool feeling, the smudgy, primary colours of city signs, neon lights, and the energetic, harried feeling in the stills, each figure has a poignant solitude. Moody and translucent, the first 2 subjects are dark shapes in which you can see your own reflection. Another shot is blurred to the point of abstraction, more painterly than photographic. In appearing both rushed and stalled, these exposures are more like fast grabs from a moving image than artfully contrived portraits. And though the settings are recognisably urban, there is little to tell us exactly where these telecommuners are located, which is, cleverly, the point. Telstra spends a fortune pushing the fantasy that once we’re connected, geographic and physical boundaries dissolve, the world opens up; that we can be in more than one place at one time. But this requires a necessary disconnection from our immediate surroundings.

Fairskye’s photographs eloquently chart this dislocation: her prints seem detached, they hover on the walls; the figures are accompanied only by their shadows, dark pools on the polished concrete gallery floor.

“If all the music institutions closed tomorrow, music would still continue.”
Raffaele Marcellino, composer & educator

It might not be a very positive way to begin an investigation into the state of music education, but Raffaele Marcellino’s sentiment recurs when discussing formal institutions. Among dedicated contemporary practitioners—curators, producers, composers and performers—there is an all-pervasive sense that music institutions cannot, or will not, do enough for the cutting edge performer.

There is, it seems, a fundamental problem with teaching contemporary music which can be chased back to the realisation that it doesn’t fit traditional models of learning. It’s not a problem unique to music: dance, theatre and visual arts have all grappled with how to deal with creativity in an academic or pedagogic environment. However, it seems particularly acute in the field of music, perhaps because there are some deeply entrenched models which do fit, and can take up most or all of the existing institutions’ energies, if allowed to do so.

The magnificent canon of classical music, for instance, keeps musicologists busy for at least 3 years, probably without venturing far out of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. And “getting your chops” aka acquiring a rock-solid technique to master this repertoire to a standard where one could perform professionally can swallow up, say, 6 hours a day on an ongoing basis, for one’s entire undergrad and postgrad study. So much to do, so little time…

Asking contemporary practitioners their views on what the music colleges offer seems to touch a raw nerve and spark a torrent of philosophising about what could and should be done. However, educational philosophies aside, there are some specific and practical conclusions to be drawn.

First, the universities. These are, surprisingly, given fairly short shrift by most new music advocates. While loath to make direct attacks, most find the academic framework of a university system incompatible with creative challenge. There is a sense that music performance and creation does not fit into a humanities model of study because it relies on subjective as well as objective assessment, a state-of-play which universities, it is suggested, find profoundly unsettling. So where are the good new musicians coming from? Given the existence of a strong traditional offering from the flagship schools such as the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (the Con) and Queensland Conservatorium of Music (QCM), it is less surprising that most practitioners nominate other institutions. Says Marcellino, “…Places like the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), the Victorian College of Arts (VCA), and the University of Western Sydney (UWS) are starting to grapple with what it means to deal with creativity. The established places still tend to work from your classic composer/performer divisions, whereas the others see a blurred line.”

Saxophonist and composer Timothy O’Dwyer agrees. Of the Victorian options, VCA is the most obviously flexible course, he says, and also cites the work of Thomas Reiner at Monash University and Philip Samartzis at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). “[T]he students coming out of there have a really good sense of relevance and there’s a thriving kind of scene happening.” However he says that these centres of activity tend to be based around electronic, rather than acoustic music. In Western Australia, Tos Mahoney, producer of the Totally Huge Music Festival, sees some interesting artists emerging from the West Australian Academy for the Performing Arts (WAAPA). “[Composer] Lindsay Vickery is there and is dedicated to new music.” He also observes that as a multi-disciplinary establishment there is much healthy cross-fertilisation between new music, art and dance. He mentions in particular the head of visual arts, Domenico de Clario, who has set up an off-campus exhibition space called Spectrum which hosts regular events and exhibitions. However, he cautions “…it is not secure, in the sense that it is reliant on one or 2 people.”

Performers also point out that the music schools are still an important resource—they are a haven for students undergoing that intense period of training where they learn instrumental technique and musicianship. As O’Dwyer says, “…they’re doing an OK job. You gotta give people the fundamentals.” However, he is not alone in lamenting that the conservatoriums tend to lack the time, money or inclination to go beyond the basics. “If [students have] only got the fundamental skills,” he continues, “the sound world is smaller, the palette is smaller. For composers to awrite challenging music becomes more and more difficult.” He concludes, “it would be great if there was another year at uni….”

Most practitioners seem to have mixed feelings about the musical hothouses in the capital cities, which have been dubbed “orchestral sausage factories.” Alison Johnston, who runs the Sydney-based contemporary vocal ensemble, Cantillation, says, “…the trouble with going to an opera school is you will spend a lot of time developing the skills to be a principal, which means, almost by definition, you’re not developing ensemble skills.” While it is rare for her to recruit singers who are untrained, Johnston needs qualities that are not emphasised in formal vocal studies. “They need really good voices, [and must be] very, very fast readers. They need to be excellent musicians as well…and an ensemble voice as opposed to a solo voice…The best training institution I know is Sydney Children’s Choir, because Lyn [Williams, artistic director] is amazing at creating confidence and an incredibly high level of skill. If they then take that forward into singing lessons they stand a better chance than anyone else of having the right kind of skills.”

This alternative route, via non-institutionalised, pre-tertiary or complementary courses, attracts much praise. The Australian Composers’ Orchestral Forum, the Australian Youth Orchestra’s New Voices program (QLD, with Elision) and the Club Zho project (WA) are singled out by musicians as inspiring, although sadly isolated, examples of contemporary practice development.

The Sydney Conservatorium’s answer to these types of activity is its composer/performer workshop program. Con graduate Damien Ricketson, now composer and artistic director of Ensemble Offspring (which is made up almost entirely of Con graduates) says, “…despite being an inherently difficult subject to manage, the composer performer workshop is quite a unique program. It provides the best possible feedback for composer and performer.” Beyond this however, Ricketson acknowledges a certain frustration that arises from occupying the periphery of an institution’s primary activities: “It is a challenging proposition to convert the loose enthusiasm of individuals who cross paths in an academic environment into tangible policy initiatives.”

Perhaps, in the end, loose enthusiasm and crossing paths is what it is all about. For what seems to unite contemporary practitioners far more than where they went, or who they studied with, is their own personal attributes. Elision’s Daryl Buckley, says, “What’s needed is a high degree of enthusiasm, and a preparedness to commit yourself to working out really quite difficult things. …[W]ithin contemporary practice there’s a large amount of ephemeral activity which doesn’t necessarily require traditional music training. A lot of performance may occur with destroyed keyboards, electronic toys, antennae, midi triggers…a lot emerges from people who have lived in a culture of experimenting with gadgets. It’s not something that can be catered for comfortably in an institution. If it can be, the institution is often behind the times—it can only be reactive, not proactive.”

Buckley says, “For a lot of contemporary practice it is important that it’s not located within an institution. Traditional music-making is fundamentally aware of its own practice, has a sense of its own tradition, a canon. It is constantly referenced, recorded and re-recorded. There are ways of evaluating and measuring performance…there are also courses, such as those offered by the Institut of Sonology in Den Haag that historicise and deal comprehensively in developments with sound art and electronica…But it is important to recognise that a lot of recent contemporary practice is still, of necessity, ephemeral. It occurs in small scenes, 10 or 20 people in a lounge room who do not find it important to be connected with an institution. There is a sense of play; maybe it is brought on by 15 minutes of glory, or maybe by being sexy to some friends. Institutions find it inherently difficult to relate to that kind of activity.”

So what does make a contemporary practitioner? Buckley has the last word: “Ultimately, it’s self-generated. Whether it is a composer or a performer of some kind, using any kind of technology, whether a violin, sampler or self-made pedal, you have to have that obsessional ability to block out most of the world and pursue your own thing to the nth degree.” With Marcellino and many other colleagues, he concludes on a not entirely negative note: “[Music education] institutions are a relatively recent development. Debussy hated them and thought nothing good would come of them. …To some degree [the work] will happen in spite of them.”

The first time I encountered Christine Johnston (accompanied by Trent Arkley-Smith on cello) she was wordlessly vocalising the shape and texture of random hairstyles among the audience of The Crab Room, a short-lived but legendary artists’ space in Brisbane in the 90s. Wearing her high-necked, Edwardian cape-gown and exaggerated but immaculate nest of hair, Johnston’s handsome, slightly melancholic, straight-faced and straight-backed clown was as mesmerising to watch as to listen to: she could sing—really sing—and unlike most clowns, she was terribly funny.

That same evening at The Crab Room we’d all been thoroughly spooked by performer Lisa O’Neill whose porcelain persona and minimalist movement could fix time and space head-on with the ferocity of a strobe. Later, a taciturn fellow patiently arranged and set off dozens of noisy tea-bag jiggling devices he’d ingeniously fashioned from found mechanical objects and, as we sipped hot tea deep into the night, a couple of story-telling hombres turned up and baked (180 degrees for 45 mins) and served up an array of cakes. These were very same cakes, they explained, which had silently featured during tête-a-têtes, grievings, seductions, unholy confessions and domestic farces with which they now regaled us—using Daisy Buchanan dropped voices to make you lean forward, cake and cup in hand, to overhear the marvellously scandalous codas. I’d been living in Brisbane only a short while and I remember thinking how relieving was the artfulness of strangers in the face of suburban exile.

Soon after, Wesley Enoch invited Johnston to create a soundscape for his Queensland Theatre Company production of Louis Nowra’s Radiance with Deborah Mailman. The sense of place and dramatic colour of Johnston’s off-stage vocal evocation of birds, frogs, insects and the mud-gurgle of tidal mangrove was simply staggering. Never just a mimic, Johnston makes theatre in her throat.

With creative consultant, Lisa O’Neill and dramaturg Louise Gough, in Decent Spinster, Johnston re-works some of her familiar cabaret style vignettes and conceives the journey of the Spinster into a full length show joined by a trio of fine musicians (Trent Arkley-Smith, Peter Nelson and Owen Newcomb), as easily at home with Schubert as with Black Sabbath or Dead Can Dance. With a simple set comprising screen and curtain (and an assemblage of adapted home appliances), Johnston invites us first into her Super-8 childhood where she is a trike-riding gatherer of chooks, insects and detritus. She is alone, wordlessly befriending and exchanging secrets with the feathered, the taxidermed and the inanimate and, haunting her birthday party even then, the ghostly band who escort her with flashlights into the playing space.

In this surreal biopic, the Spinster obsessively reads, documents and sounds the world back at itself with absurdist detachment and unsettling if comic curiosity. She is in the world and out of it and employs a host of narrative devices to keep the audience engaged—she is a consummately generous performer—but also at bay. With projections of simple but witty snaps that supernaturally glide her from foregound to middle ground, from voyeur to unlikely participant, we track the Spinster’s journey from the semi-rural suburbs of Brisbane into the traffic dominated inner city—roller bladers, cyclists, scooter riders, skate-boarders and hot rod racers—regularly cadging a lift in the process. We know she loves contraptions and it is the machine not the person that she seduces. Later, there are scenes where the Spinster pleasures herself with the belt of a weight loss machine; a guitar descends from heaven (those ghostly musicians pulling strings again?) and the Spinster lets loose; while her musical duet with the ‘man-sized’ saw (no-one touches Johnston when it comes to saw playing!) is completely riveting.

Not simply the ingenue, she also insists on lecturing us with her soundings—the singing of graphs and charts, interpreting for us through the dead language of song, Latin, the bleating bumper stickers of suburban tribalism. Yet these are also some of the funniest moments of the piece, eg Comedo Magi Bubbum—“Cops Are Tops.” And Johnstone knows just when to move on. Decent Spinster reminds me of Martin Amis’ Martianism, where to be an observer is to be imbued with what is observed, but never to leave yourself free of escape. In the spaces between we can only be grateful for the artfulness of strangers—the Spinster sings: Stella Porni.

Interest in things sonic has dramatically increased across the arts. While there has always been a certain level of activity, often sporadic, the last few years have seen a development of what could be described as scenes, particularly in the electro-improvisational area, growing out of regular events and gatherings. In Melbourne there is Liquid Architecture, an annual festival of sound-related arts and Anthony Pateras’ Articulating Space along with a range of gallery and installation-based activities encouraged by the likes of WestSpace. Brisbane has Lawrence English’s Fabrique and Small Black Box set up by Andrew Kettle, Scott Sinclair and Greg Jenkins. In Sydney there’s the what is music festival (including a Melbourne component) created by Oren Ambarchi and Robbie Avenaim, and caleb~k’s impermanent.audio. These have recently been joined by 2 monthly Sydney events, Shannon O’Neill’s Disorientation and Jules Ambrosine and Aaron Hull’s 1/4 inch.

So where is all this sound coming from? And are universities and institutions playing a role by responding to the current cultural trend? During the recent tour of Liquid Architecture to the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music, I caught up with English and Mowson, and later in Sydney spoke with caleb~k about the kind of education that makes a sound artist.

But is it music?

The debate in music circles on the status of sound art as distinct from music grinds on with borders blurring and lines and, occasionally, swords crossing. However while the gatekeepers dismiss whole avenues of audio art as bad music, or refuse to acknowledge the form at all, the opportunity exists to define this beast as a different species, related yet feeding on different aesthetic grounds. While a large proportion of artists within the sound area, may well be musicians they are not primarily trained as such. Mowson says of the artists in Liquid Architecture, “we just don’t seem to get people from that [traditional music training] background simply because they just don’t seem savvy enough about the culture. That kind of repertoire-based learning doesn’t seem to serve them in the context of reflecting on contemporary issues.” English concurs, “most of the music courses are geared towards people being competent players not necessarily conceptual thinkers, or exploring their craft in less conventional manners…”

caleb~k believes that certain leading music institutions still have difficulties aligning with and incorporating movements like Fluxus and artists such as Alvin Lucier into their theoretical training, so there’s very little to encourage sound art practice as a viable form. For English, it depends very much on the people teaching at the institution—“not necessarily the universities themselves saying hang on a minute let’s turn out sound artists, but more a group of staff members interested in that area, and recognising that there is a potential within students to be interested and it generally snowballs from there.”

Aesthetics and/or technique

When asked about what he looks for when curating his program caleb~k says “self awareness is quite important…people who do the most interesting things have an overall concept of their project or approach…[and] focus and direction both in terms of total output and in terms of a piece.” Mowson says “the people who are coming to us and contributing really good material may have gone to university or not, but they’ve got a professional outlook—good material and high standards seem to go with having a strong critical faculty, reflecting an engagement with what’s going on.”

So is this something that universities and training institutions are providing? caleb~k believes that it can be encouraged and developed, but it takes more than a year or even 3 “…which is why schools have honours years. By 4th year students start to do their own work as opposed to development.” Mowson believes that a strong focus of tertiary education “is to widen people’s knowledge base. Most people have an area of music that they’re passionately into…but what’s interesting is when people fill that out [and] develop a broad frame of reference. Then they’re not constantly coming up with stuff someone’s already done better—not that they should necessarily change but rather learn from this.”

Many of the artists working in the area presently have no formal training in music or sound. However, caleb~k suggests that “in an art school or university there’s a conversation…you have more reason to develop because you’ve got people to talk to, technicians and peers.” Mowson concurs that one of the really important things that comes from study is finding a peer group and people with whom you continue to work and develop.

So where does technical training fit in? It appears to be taken as a matter of course. I suggested that perhaps universities offer facilities that young artists may not otherwise have access to, but all 3 are sceptical, suggesting that as technology becomes cheaper, more accessible and more ‘intuitive’, this is less of a lure. However Mowson believes that good recording facilities and audio visual synched editing is still a drawcard. caleb~k thinks that “obviously it’s going to be much quicker to create work at a school…you’re going to find better ways of doing things…but more important is learning aesthetics, history, conceptual approaches and critical engagement.”

The attractions of education

There are now schools addressing sound (RMIT, UWS, CoFA, QUT) either through specific media-based courses in universities and elsewhere, strands within art schools or more expansive programs within some music departments. There are more and more practising artists and curators working in these courses (all 3 interviewees have lectured in universities), strengthening the connection between development and practice. Can we expect a plethora of young sound artists? caleb~k believes that it’s a bit too early to tell, as most of these courses are still in their first few years and hitting their stride, though he is seeing some increase in the number of artists in 3rd and honours years producing interesting work. There are also artists who have been practising for a while and choosing to go back to study now that there is more of a conducive environment. As English describes it, “they’re returning to get a better understanding of how different artforms work, how to amplify their ideas.” But all 3 agree that in the end, the quality and success of the sound artist comes down to conceptual rigour and, as Mowson concludes, “that seems to come from individuals. Courses may be able to facilitate that but not create it.”

Gail Priest is a Sydney based sound artist and is co-director of Electrofringe 03.

impermanent.audio opened as an experimental music venue in Sydney in 2000 and lately releases material by local electronic artists. The label’s output seems largely informed by the Japanese Onkyo scene (the no-input sampler/mixer work of Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura for example) and lower case sounds of practitioners like Bernard Günter, Francisco Lopez and Steve Roden. Contemporary sound art practices are reflected through a focus on sound’s inner workings. The sonic minutiae of texture, frequency and rhythm are highlighted, performance is shifted from physicality, instrumentality and theatricality and reduced to austere, small gestures and low-volume sounds.

Live performances of various combinations of the impermanent roster were held recently in Melbourne. The Make it up Club hosted the first night and the Stasis Duo (Matthew Earl and Adam Sussmann on no-input samplers and guitar) began the tour proper with locals Will Guthrie and Arek Gulbenkoglu. Their set started gently with a simple oscillating tone at a barely perceptible volume. Intricacies in the fabric of the sound, which might normally be overwhelmed by volume or density, were allowed space and time to develop and dissipate. The interplay between the duo samplers, with Guthrie’s percussive and textural embellishments and Gulbenkoglu’s prepared guitar, was restrained and quiet, slowly and gently unfolding in a languid, linear arc.

Peter Blamey and Daniel Whiting followed, using mixer feedback, delay and rhythm devices. Their set built incrementally from pulsing feedback, sibilant hiss and simple permutations of delay, to sheets of white noise and wave-like surging drones. Just when they seemed to reach critical mass, the set abruptly ended. A pity, as this rhythmic and textural density had many levels of complexity that could have been pursued further.

Feedback is an inherently unstable system and to use it in live performance is to flirt with chaos. Tiny adjustments and parameter tweaks can have totally disproportionate results, causing cascading, systemic effects, which can end in extreme noise or total loss of signal. Performing this way is as risky as more traditional musical improvisation, perhaps more so. Peter Blamey’s performance at RMIT’s Kaleide Theatre was a good example of this. His set of no-input mixer feedback started with an insistent rhythmic pattern building in density and then ending suddenly when he lost the feedback loop. In silence, Blamey worked the desk to restore the signal, slowly gathering momentum and volume as he continued his performance. Although the audience couldn’t see much action on stage, it was a volatile and engaging set.

Stasis Duo and Philip Samartzis’ performance in the same venue was so quiet that the tapping of keys and buttons was often audible over the music. Samartzis played prepared CDs and an ancient Moog synthesiser, while the duo relied again on emptied samplers and tone generator. Many of the same sonic signatures were present: delicate sine tones, insectile chirruping and muted bass teased at the edges of audibility. Although they hadn’t played together before, the trio’s considered use of silence, space and timbre was well-matched.

Joel Stern ended the RMIT session with a solo laptop performance using contact-miked cowbell and other objects. Combining these sounds with gestures, Stern offered a physicality and interaction often absent from laptop performances. Using a palette of harsh metallic sounds, crunchy scrapings and busily panning cross-rhythms, he segued into a droning gentle ambience to finish the night.

A final evening at the Westspace Gallery featured further pairings of impermanent. audio performers. The improvisational approach of all 3 nights focused on tiny gesture, subtle dynamics and contemplative performance. Whether this was a reaction against more traditional modes of improvisation or our everyday sonic overload, this self-effacement left little for the audience to observe as “performance.” Attention was diverted from watching to zeroing in on the inner workings of sounds, their placement and relationship: plenty of worthwhile opportunities for focused listening.

Make it Impermanent, Make it up Club, May 20; Impermanent Records and ((tRansMIT)), Kaleide Theatre, RMIT, May 23; impermanent.audio, Westspace Gallery, Melbourne, May 24

impermanent.audio’s caleb~k will be presenting the i.audio festival featuring reknowned vocalist Ami Yoshida, (winner of the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica 2003), and Taku Sugimoto guitarist and improvisor along with Australian artists. The Sydney end of the festival will also include h.phone, a selection of soundworks by artists for headphones and Variable Resistance: 10 Hours of Sound from Australia curated by Phillip Samartzis, Sept 12 & 13, exhibition Sept 12-20 Performance Space, Sydney; concerts Sept 17-18, Footscray community Arts Centre, Melbourne.

Ros Bandt, Silo Stories

National sound art festival, Liquid Architecture, has just completed its 4th incarnation at several Melbourne venues. Under the direction of Nat Bates and Bruce Mowson, the event featured 30 Australian and international artists, including French musique concrete/acousmatic pioneer, Bernard Parmegiani and San Francisco noise merchants, Scott Arford and Randy Hy Yau. Parmegiani’s presence was a real coup, bringing into sharp focus the rich heritage of sonic art. But could the festival deliver on its claim that we would “hear the world through a different set of ears”?

Randy Hy Yau

RMIT’s underground car park was the venue for performances from Arford and Yau, with Australian sound artists Phil Samartzis, Laurence English and Mowson. The night began with a set by Machina aux Rock—Philip Brophy on drums and Bates on electronics—a loose, percussive attack reminiscent of Krautrock legends Ash Ra Tempel. Amusingly, a couple began to dance at the back of the car park, only to be stung into submission by the segue into Yau’s solo performance. Yau played the “MegaMouth”, a battery-powered children’s toy “rewired for maximum overdriven output.” In this altered state, the toy became a potent conduit for scorching feedback, transforming simple vibrations and movement into fierce electronic overdrive, a banshee wail that seemed to erupt from Yau himself. His performance was intensely physical as he caressed the MegaMouth against speakers, against his mouth, against the concrete floor. With each twist and turn of the device a different, dissonant timbre emerged, seemingly catching the artist by surprise, jerking his body into spastic contortions; if a man could willingly subject himself to high-powered electrocution, it would look and sound like this. But even so, Yau’s effort was surprisingly musical, with some melodious moments among the throbbing squall.

During all performances, the car park’s sonic signature came into its own as frequencies bounced crazily off the rear walls—punters up the back were turning their heads, as if unseen speakers were propelling startling, unearthly tones in and out of the mix.

Bernard Parmegiani

Parmegiani’s vast, elegant body of work was presented in various forms over the festival weekend. First up was a wide-ranging discussion, including an overview of his acousmatic (“listening without seeing”) theories and his work with Pierre Schaeffer in the 1960s. When asked about his earliest sonic influences, Parmegiani needed clarification: did his interrogator mean after birth, or before, he wondered. Listening to his mother’s body in the womb, he stressed, was his earliest sonic influence.

Of the 3 GRM (Le Groupe de Recherches Musicales) film shorts scored by Parmegiani and presented at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the pick was L’Ecran Transparent (The Transparent Screen), a bizarre 19-minute work from 1973, also directed by Parmegiani. With a set design resembling 70s sci-fi films like THX 1138, it featured an earnest, bearded intellectual dressed in black and offering McLuhanesque theories on the “electronic human, who lives faster because he is forced to see and hear everything at once.” Then, as the film dispensed with the increasingly shell-shocked narrator, it spiraled into an extended synaesthetic exploration, with flaring video effects and heavily warped sound design amplifying the film’s central tenet: “The eye can see what the ear cannot regard. At the point where the senses meet, there is a kind of no-sense.”

On Sunday night, Parmegiani presided over a “Multispeaker Diffusion” presentation at RMIT Storey Hall. Playing his impeccably prerecorded works from CD, Parmegiani flung soundscapes all about the hall, using mixers and a battery of strategically placed speakers. Sounds “ticked” and “scrunched”, some “flipped”, some “scribbled” and some “cracked”; all edged in and out of consciousness. There’s no adequate vocabulary to describe how Parmegiani psychologically sculpts the sonic qualities of everyday objects—never has a rolling ping pong ball sounded so terrifying. The performance capped off a memorable weekend and Parmegiani was deservedly rewarded with a standing ovation.

360º: Women in Sound

A series of installations created by female sound artists, took place at first site and Westspace galleries, curated by Arnya Tehira and Sianna Lee who see gender focus as necessary to highlight the under-representation of women in sound art.

Ros Bandt’s Silo Stories was my pick. Recorded snatches of conversation echoed around and inside windy rural wheat silos. As an “audible mapping of a changing culture”, the work offered an evocative reminder of a diminishing lifestyle; stylishly presented, the installation was accompanied by barrels of overflowing wheat and mysterious photographs of silos adorned the gallery walls.

Another standout was Thembi Soddell’s Intimacy, using surround-sound speakers in a curtained-off space. For the gallery-goer sitting on the low stool within the pitch-dark enclosure, the effect of Soddell’s layered, peak-and-trough waves of sound was absolutely cathartic. Other installations featured minimal visuals and “computer chip” music and there were enigmatic, immersive quadraphonic presentations using found sounds and ritualised street textures.

And so it went that as I emerged from the first site gallery the sounds of the street became enhanced, super-real: creaking doors took on an extra dimension, as did the flushing of a public toilet, the snippets of conversation stolen from passers-by and the groan of a tram as it rounded a corner. All seemed slaves to a system of weird harmony, confirmation of some uncanny, grand design; I wandered the city centre for a good 2 hours, listening to my no-longer familiar world with a “new set of ears”— just as Liquid Architecture promised I would.

For our annual survey of arts education this year we’re taking a bold new approach. Instead of asking university departments and training schools what they’re doing, we’ve asked our writers to approach established and often innovative theatre, performance and music directors, choreographers, curators and programmers what they think of the calibre of graduating students over the last 3 to 5 years. How skilled are these graduates, how inventive, how flexible, how collaborative, how in touch with the world and with the markets they are becoming part of? There are all kinds of interesting responses to be found in these pages. Of course, they’re bound to be impressionistic, but they’re professional opinions and no more or less subjective than a teacher’s claims as to the effectiveness of their methodology.

Overall, it seems that the relationship between training institutions and the arts industry is a mutually supportive and sometimes uneasy one. There’s plenty of praise for graduates in all fields and, occasionally, specific institutions. There are specific criticisms, for example Robyn Nevin, Artistic Director of the Sydney Theatre Company is frustrated at graduates’ poor grasp of language: “[they] have little understanding of the fundamentals of grammar and sentence structure, and almost none of the rhythm and music of language.” She is also concerned, as is director Wesley Enoch, about vocal skills. Enoch feels that the focus on ‘internal’ states has reduced the young performer’s ability to reach out to their audience, “to pass the story.” Like Ryk Goddard, Artistic Director of Tasmania’s is theatre ltd, in our survey of contemporary performance training, Enoch laments the lack of an apprenticeship as part of the training of the performer. Enoch also wants graduates to be able to say why they are performers: “The question ‘why’ isn’t asked enough.” New media artist and curator Ross Gibson wants graduates to ask of their creations, ‘why?’ and David Pledger, Artistic Director of NYID, and Alasdair Foster, Director of the Australian Centre for Photography, both look for an ethical and political responsiveness.

In contemporary performance and sound art the issue of training is complex. Key practitioners like Tess De Quincey have developed their practice well outside and ahead of the universities over recent decades. There has been significant ‘catch up’, with a small number of courses evolving here and there across the country. However, these are rarely in the position to offer full-time 3-year courses with the focus on “embodiment” and technical skills and with the resources and skilled teachers that experienced practitioners would like to see.

What is most evident from the responses gathered here is that once your tertiary education is complete your training as an artist is just beginning. RT

It is a frequently overlooked truism that the primary elements that performance shapes are time and space. Like the watery realm evoked in the protagonist’s dream, The Inhabited Woman represents a floating world, a disconnected place in which both audience and on-stage figures drift into dreamy, atemporal states, before one suddenly catches one’s breath and lightly steps forward into the next, deliberately artificial, theatrical realm.

Richard Murphet is primarily responsible for the text of this production. He claims that the piece depicts “the space that a woman makes and fills” and asks “how can that space exist as a core of its own from which the other aspects radiate?” This confusion about where and how feminine identity is centred is rendered dramaturgically by Ryan Russell’s stage design, a giant framework cube bordered by Mondrian-like, discontinuous squares and light mesh screens, fixed on a central pivot. Early in the production there is a key transition from the completely timeless, disconnected, almost fog-like experience of the protagonist’s dream, to a point where she emerges from her bedroom to find her domestic space already scripted for her. Like Kim Novak in Vertigo finding James Stewart marking out her new identity, or Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman finding identity and memory suddenly opaque and difficult to determine in Spellbound. At the moment of this crucial thematic change, the entire set rotates, lights and all, morphing into yet another gilded cage of slight signs and slants of light that define this new world. In each of these places, the protagonist is disturbed, off-balance, ill at ease. She cannot find a firm centre in her own spatiotemporal existence akin to the one that the literal performer (Leisa Shelton) keeps crossing over within Russell’s stage design.

The spatiotemporal plasticity of this work makes it disconcerting for the audience as well. There is no central organising rhythm to the piece, no primary dramaturgical style (installation, projection, physical performance, poetry) to fix your attention. No sooner do you find a wisp of ‘narrative’ to follow, than the box rotates and Shelton moves from speaking, to building a cairn from river stones and flowers on a table.

Like tide lapping at a shore, the production beckons and captures the audience before releasing its grip to leave us resting again on the soft surface of a dramaturgical shoreline. In the finale, the journey of the work is revealed. The protagonist has not been seeking her true self, but rather her double, her shadow, her alternate life, led in sordid 1950s style motel rooms and on the crest of a great, ocean wave. As Katie Symes’ beautiful, immersive 4-way sound design coalesces into a heightened field-recording of a cataclysmic crashing of salty waters and its blue-green visual textures pour over Shelton’s inhaling body, the character reaches a consummation that seems to evoke both death and a contented, centred return to life. A female Christ or Buddha perhaps, who had to gaze into a watery film screen to find her centred state.

The Inhabited Woman, performance/concept Leisa Shelton, text Richard Murphet, projection Ryan Russell & Elspeth Tremblay, sound Katie Symes, Jethro Woodward, stage design Ryan Russell, lighting Matt Britten, North Melbourne Town Hall, June 27-July 19

Genevieve Lacey’s ambitious and seductive Melbourne Autumn Music Festival offers genuine surprises while retaining its familiar focus on early music. The event’s original incarnation, the International Festival of Organ and Harpsichord, was established in 1970 and celebrated the deep repertoire and often outstanding virtuosity of early music performance in the familiar context of the concert series. Lacey’s festival builds on this tradition of repertoire and technical excellence while revealing her concern for exposing, questioning and proposing how we listen (and perform) in the moment.

Lacey’s early music program, which is occasionally presented through radical interpretation, is loaded with works from the 15th to 19th centuries, but, experienced alongside recent and contemporary works, has the effect of collapsing time. Or, perhaps more accurately, of creating time by connecting us to the heart of the matter: the experience of creation and the creation of experience, whether inhaled by our ears or exhaled through our playing bodies and instruments.

Two central events in this festival were Astra Choir and Aelfguyv, a new performance work by Jane Woollard and Stevie Wishart. The Astra Choir (directed by John McCaughey), presented a generous, complex and immediately penetrating concert, Scenes and Epigrams, based around Carl Loewe’s intimate Passion Oratorio (1847) and intercut with recent and contemporary works by Paul Dessau, Hanns Eisler, Helen Gifford, Martin Friedel and Elliot Carter. As a form, the Passion traditionally collides musical styles from previous periods in a self-conscious reflection on time and experience. McCaughey’s extension of this idea and the themes of personal suffering and revelation through further collisions of text, sound and performance was extremely effective and profiled the substantial talents of the choir, its performers and instrumentalists.

Most memorably, Dessau’s richly eclectic settings of Brecht’s War Prime (a poem cycle in response to wartime photographs) brilliantly shadowed Loewe’s concern with the malleability of humanity and the individual stories that are central to any epic, as well as Brecht’s great dramaturgical contribution-”each scene for itself”-played out in McCaughey’s program. Arnold Schonberg’s stunningly conceived and beautifully performed Peace on Earth, tolling for peace, was a highlight, as were Gifford’s dramatic Catharsis and Carter’s March for Four Timpani.

Like all commissioned military histories-before and since 1066 AD-the Bayeaux Tapestry is a remarkable propagandist artefact. It is also intensely and immediately beautiful, and the inspiration for Woollard and Wishart’s Aelfguyva. Embroidered onto easily rolled and transported cloth 20 inches high and unfurling to well over 200 feet, the tapestry’s colourful, cartoon-like scenes with occasional Latin text depict William of Normandy’s conquest of Harold, the Anglo Saxon claimant to the English throne following the death of King Edward.

Writer and director, Woollard, in collaboration with Wishart, take as their muse the mysterious figure of Aelfgyva (performed by Margaret Mills), one of only 4 women who appear in the tapestry-and the only one named. She appears hovering above the ground between 2 ornate columns and is being struck, or admonished, or entreated, by “a certain Cleric”, given the name Aelfwine by Woollard (performed by Colin James). Aelfgyva’s actual existence can only be speculated but she is charged by many scholars as having whored the succession in a previous generation and her story is certainly notorious enough to require no explanation for the creators of tapestry. Woollard’s Aelfguyv is not an attempt to argue a biography, rather Aelfgyva is a haunted meditation, a purgatorial figure coursing through Wishart’s time-collapsing soundscape, forever freeing and weaving herself into Amanda Johnson’s imaginative tableaux set.

Woollard’s not always clear narrative surrounds Aelfgyva’s passionate seduction of Aelfwine who first succumbs and then abandons her and the material world for God. At the sound of the foreign hooves Aelfwine enlists in the war and is quickly killed on the battlefield. Aelfgyva’s land and culture are violated and in the face of vanishing certainties she descends into the earth to retrieve Aelfwine’s body. Time and culture collapse and ultimately the only thing we know in spite of the tricks of time and culture is that we know nothing.

Woollard’s strangely neutral idiom of flattened period English often thuds with cliché, as though Aelfguyva and Aelfwine are stock characters in a medieval melodrama and the effect is distinctly distancing. Aelfguyv is not in the mould of a mystery play but nor does it seem to explore a language dynamic enough for a dream in which the seams of history might be joined. Notwithstanding the undoubted strength of the music in finding these seams, in a work where action and intent substantially depend on the spoken word, a more anachronistic (or genuinely archaic) approach might have been more effective.

The constant references to embroidery and use of a physical performance language based on the gestures, attitudes and stance of figures in the Bayeaux Tapestry also tended to dull rather than energise Aelfguyv’s mysteries. The extreme style of the embroidered figures creates a dramatic, image-based tableau in the tapestry, but it is untranslatable in performance-the decision to effect a series of poses in quick succession (several times) almost risked comedy as the performers’ bodies jerked themselves from one pose to the next like a stop-start martial arts lesson. Incorporating this gestural language was possibly an inspired idea but demands extended physical rehearsal to finesse into something performative and effective. Notwithstanding these production mannerisms, Margaret Mills is a dexterous performer who gave much to the role of Aelfgyva.

The Narrator, a neatly conceived role sung by the charismatic Carolyn Connors with accompaniment by harpist Natalia Mann (also an occasional and effective chorus), is cleverly neither in the story nor apart from it but provided energy and connection between the themes and action. Connors addresses, comments and contextualises as though permanently revisiting a disaster scene with all the prescience and exasperation of a Cassandra-a role strongly supported by Wishart’s vocal score which seemed to resonate and test our familiarity with medieval sound drawing us into another, more eternal and sensual memory place.

Throughout the work, Wishart literally layers her live and pre-recorded sound in a sustained meeting of flesh and mechanics deftly engineered by Michael Hewes. Wishart’s collaborative achievement is to create an aural dimension which, like the “hairy star” (Halley’s Comet) dominating Johnson’s backdrop, strikingly reminds us of our bodily and mythical connection to the communities of 1066 AD; the experienced and the remembered; the mortal and the immortalised; the living and the dead.

Five hundred years after the Battle of Hastings, Mary, the imprisoned Queen of Scotts, worked her needlepoint in an interminable present of loneliness recounting her own history to herself and making gifts for friends she was forbidden to see. Over time, she evolved subtle variations in motif and technique and used these coded messages to secretly communicate, fatally as it happened, with her Catholic defenders. It is argued that while the Bayeaux Tapestry was probably designed by just one male Norman, it took the hands of many Anglo Saxon women to execute it. Subtle variations in needlepoint technique, figurative representation and scenic composition suggest that the embroiderers practised their art knowing that their scenes might be discernible within a censored collaboration. It is also possible that these idiosyncrasies are communicating private messages hidden from our understanding but nonetheless present. While perhaps still a work-in-progress, Jane Woollard and Stevie Wishart’s Aelfguyva is an imaginative affirmation that what is hidden from us is usually right before our eyes and already resonating somewhere in our ears.

Michael Kutschbach, strawberry ut's (trudy's turn), animation still, 2003 Greenaway Gallery

Michael Kutschbach’s friendly anthropomorphs have come out to play again, in the form of stanley, beatrice and friends. In multiple guises, they appear as shapes cut out of laminated MDF, plaster and acrylic globules, adhesive vinyl outlines and computer-animated figures. Pastel-pretty, stanley et al colonise the smooth cold concrete space of the gallery, swarming across the floor like the chalk scrawls of children’s games and clustered on the walls in chewing-gum gobs.

A large projection on a far wall animates the figures in a complex and continuous state of permutation. Like an oversized, mesmerising screen saver, we see one shape morphing into another, colours constantly changing, new nodes swelling as new divisions appear. This projection integrates the separate figures ranging across the space, binding them via their infusion with the vitality of the projected image. The space is colonised and made wholly their own, XY’s accompanying sound installation—a kind of scratchy static punctuated occasionally by annunciatory notes—functions as a soundtrack to their implicit lives.

Pretty colours, soft folds, and a focus on detail-free and impenetrable surfaces will always raise the suspicion that mere attractiveness is all that’s on offer. Yet the works’ high finish demonstrates deliberate and careful methods of production. Kutschbach’s investigations could conceivably be validated by the methodical exploratory processes of their meticulous realisation, though whether such a grounding is acceptable or (conceptually) unsatisfying depends on one’s viewpoint. Or perhaps these modes of production are merely secondary.

Kutschbach has obviously become fascinated with this shape, discovered accidentally while painting, and in bringing it to 3D realisation. The characters have been continually reinvented, toyed with, drawn out in different forms. Do we realise now, as essayist Jim Strickland suggests, that Kutschbach “has been nurturing a wonderfully eccentric personality within his blob”? This must count for something: personality is, after all, what matters in the art world. Enough personality to stand alone? Well, no, but they don’t have to, given that their very substance draws on their inherent relationship to all things shiny and pretty and consumable, that is, their embodiment of the qualities valued within our society. Enough personality to stand ‘the test of time’? Let’s just not mention inbuilt obsolescence.

stanley, beatrice and friends, Michael Kutschbach, Greenaway Gallery, Adelaide, June 25-July 27

Among the clutter of a media infested world, grief is found breathing at Sydney’s Performance Space. I remember 1948 is an exhibit of time-based and mixed media works by Arab artists. In this journey into silence and memory, artworks narrate continual acts of erasure. Although the state of Palestine has long been associated with a killing field, its culture remains alive, and its people are constantly searching for truth and a home in which to nurture it.

Many Palestinians still carry around their necks the keys to their homes in Palestine, which they were forced to leave and cannot return to. Al Nakba or “The Catastrophe” is what Palestinians call May 15, 1948 and refers to the day 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes, forced to live in refugee camps or massacred. Al Nakba remains in the Palestinian consciousness as the time when their freedom ceased and it’s yet to be returned.

Many works in I Remember 1948 represent processes of dispossession and disembodiment. The absence of questions in contemporary discourse about the place of the Palestinians is well deliberated by the artists. Walking through the exhibition, I recognised that art was one of the few spaces left for a suppressed but alert and proud people to express themselves. Destiny Deacon's archival footage of her mother's life in Postcards from Mummy at Roslyn Oxley9 fused themselves in my mind to Alexandra Handal's ongoing installation, RememberOnce. In this piece, Handal retells personal stories of early and first wave Palestinian war victims by writing them over Israeli tourist guides. Patrick Abboud's olive-filled map of Palestine resonated with Fiona Foley's chili filled floor piece recently shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Aboud’s installation consisted of a floor map of Palestine covered with olives, with small lights marking the old cities. Above, video projections on muslin of olive trees and branches offered the viewer a channel for hope and peace. The soundscape–of Palestinian voices reciting names and street addresses signaled the role of memory in the healing process.

The scope of media used by various artists signified the disparate roads they came from to reach I remember 1948. A Flash animation by Fadi, of Nazareth, gave the viewer a subtle invitation to “think” while the animation was loading. His use of the tedium of waiting, so often encountered with computer-based work, projected Fadi’s political stance into the conceptual. With the mesmerising blinking of the word “Think”–a rare act in a consumer-based society–Fadi gently asked us to question our assumptions.

The mixed media wall work of Fatima Killeen used segments of corrugated iron from the walls of refugee housing in Palestinian camps. At its centre, a perfected plaster key contrasted with the rusted and misshapen iron. The immediacy of these materials created a tension between time and distance, as if prompting the viewer to anticipate and wait for the key to become a useful/used object instead of one of hope.

Poetry glazed onto canvas by Wadee Al-Zaidi ushered in the importance of the written word and the textural. Well-known poet Nizar Al-Kabani’s poem, Please forgive us was an affirmation of solidarity and the empathetic experience of pain. Soraya Asmar’s installation of fluoro drawings mapped out a journey accentuated with boots, houses and more keys. This symbolism merged with narratives which flowed along the highly visual and sensitized road of alienation. Asmar’s installation comprised of images constructed by a hand-manipulated thin wire glowing under black light. The visual text was accompanied by a soundscape of hooves, personal histories and traditional songs. The darkened room, in which erupting images shimmered in the dark, ushered in a dreamscape of memory and yearning.

Other pieces also told stories of alienation and displacement and, like Indigenous artist Gordon Bennett's Watch Tower piece in the Isle of Refuge exhibition at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, they offered hope. Here kinship might help avert a future that, left unchecked, will continue to erase the histories of a people’s dispossession and of the confiscation of their homes.

“Moist is a video created using light microscopy. I use blood, phlegm, pus, cervical mucus and tears—fluids with emotive qualities—to translate out the biological self into meteorological or interstellar geographies.”
MAAP in Beijing 2002 catalogue

Justine Cooper is a leading Australian new media artist who has been working productively at the nexus of art and science with some outstanding creative results. Back in 1998 an image of her foot, scanned using Magnetic Resonance Imaging in the work titled RAPT, appeared on the cover of RealTime 26. RAPT attracted great attention (Cooper writes about the work in the Tofts, Jonson & Cavallaro collection, Prefiguring Cyberculture, Power Publications, 2002). She has subsequently created a number of significant works and exhibited internationally in over 30 shows in 12 countries across 5 continents, most recently as part of MAAP in Beijing 2002 with the large scale video work Moist, and this year at the International Center of Photography, New York and the Earl Lu Gallery, Singapore. As well 2 of her videos have been exhibited this year at the Julie Saul Gallery in New York. Reduction, a striking video work for 2 performers was part of the Another Planet collection of Australian video curated by Keely Macarow (see review RT 54) and shown in Chicago and New York.

It’s fascinating to see you working in a variety of formats from gallery installation to animation, with performers, to creating components for use in live performance. How have you arrived at such a diverse way of working?

My first encounter with the collaborative process was at the age of 5, in the surgery room of my parents’ veterinary clinic. I opened sutures, squeezed the bag on the anaesthesiology machine, powdered gloves and kept my eyes open. It only took another 25-30 years before I went back to the ‘theatre’ for a collaborative work called Tulp with Elision [the Brisbane-based new music ensemble] and composer John Rogers.

I was commissioned to be the visual director. But in general I try and match an idea to a medium, and that’s partially led to working across disciplines. I like the sense of alchemy that comes from combining varying sets of skills and fields.

The more work I make the more I begin to see my own patterns or themes returning in different incarnations. Sometimes the connection is fleeting, but it gives me a sense of the matrix I’m working within. I think there is an aesthetic of pacing. The rate at which elements move and unfold has a certain consistency, even when one piece is quite abstract, and another one is more narrative.

You have been strongly associated with science in your work. What is the connection and the inspiration for you—awe, critique, the artistic potential?

My interest in science has evolved. RAPT used a medical technology, it didn’t use science. That’s a distinction not always made—science versus the technologies of science. RAPT came out of an interest in trying to map a shift in the way technologies (not science) affect our concepts of space and time. That was a rather large supposition to make. But I’m not doing science, I don’t have to prove anything, I don’t have to have consistent results. I don’t have to ask how? Rather I can interpret in anyway I choose: I can ask why?

So I attempted to define that cognitive shifting through the prism of the body. What I mean is that we are accustomed to the physical boundaries of our physical selves, and they are fairly consistent from one individual to the next. So it was a natural starting point. I then exploded that physical body via technology. RAPT both disrupts time—in the animation the body is built and dismantled—and space. In the installation you can walk through my thorax, for instance. So I saw the artistic potential, and it was a natural fit to use a machine (MRI) built for bodies. Scynescape and Moist used other forms of imaging—SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy) and light microscopy, respectively. Both ‘processed’ and created the content through imaging systems used in science. Scynescape maps the external body at high magnification while Moist used bodily fluids, but both rebuild a corporeal landscape that is unfamiliar.

I absolutely think there is an aesthetic quality to these visualisation tools. If you talk to histologists [cell and tissue scientists] many would say they were attracted to the field in the first place because it is so ‘aesthetic.’

If I were to talk about more recent work, like Transformers, there I actually start to build content that engages with ideas from science, particularly molecular biology and genomics. And the body that I’ve been using all along stops being my own (as representative of a universal one) and starts becoming a body with individuality—an identity.

There is a more critical element to Transformers because the subject is loaded. How is identity a merger of science and culture? There’s an element of intangibility and contestation there. It can’t be locked down into a percentage. There’s not an empirical assessment process. Any time you broker a relationship between two or more entities there has to be a real assessment of what’s at stake, what the benefits are, where’s the added value?

How did you go about creating your video work, Reduction, with the performers and with what technology?

Reduction was a collaboration with Joey Stein. We had access to a thermal infrared camera, which registers heat. If you look closely you can see the tracery of veins and arteries running beneath the skin. While it is a camera, it must be connected to a computer to actually interface with it. We needed to control what was going on within a very prescriptive framework. So that was one consideration in making a performative piece: we could choreograph it.

Each performer was shot separately with the idea that this could actually be a 2 channel work, the channels on side by side monitors or screens. That type of presentation would accentuate the ambiguity over whether the characters are trying to communicate with the audience or each other. The ‘language’ they use is pretty responsive and primal. Originally we were looking at dead or near extinct languages, and then ended up layering another ‘aural performance’ over the visual track, where the sound is created by recording the performers responding with a small delay, which was then re-aligned in post-production.

New York is difficult in terms of accessing facilities; or rather it takes longer. However it does have a much stronger tradition of philanthropy and corporate giving. A work like Reduction can be done at little cost, but the projects I am interested in developing now are more ambitious, involving public spaces and large technical and equipment costs. My hope is that I can make them happen. I didn’t come to New York simply because there is more money here—the cost of surviving here is considerably higher after all. There are opportunities, though, and I feel I’ve been very fortunate in both Australia and New York. I see my path as more of an orbit, moving through both places on a regular basis, working on projects in both countries.

As I dragged myself from Susan Norrie’s eddy, my gait was little more than a palsied geek boy shuffle. The art world equivalent of sitting through Das Boot, the experience of eddy was posture-damaging heavy, it mooched around my body like some endless, sticky largo. Later, as it started to sink in, the experience changed in tone. With time to mull over how this 3-part show spoke to itself and out to broader cultural shenanigans, a surprising lightness glimmered through. What was cool about eddy was its sneaky, perverse mix of rhetorical and emotional density with a maxi-skip load of light-as-a-feather interpretative aftershocks. Maybe all this reveals is the difference between literary and somatic responses—the somatic is a direct punch to the breadbasket, the literary (or the exhibition-dream-work, take your pick) a deferred detonation.

Though I felt the effect of the readerly last, it was signalled up front in the juxtaposition of text works on 2 facing walls of Perth’s Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery. On the left were 2 large paintings, one grey, one a blacky maroon with under painting showing through. The texts are partially covered, partially readable; we scan these braille surfaces, our bodies set at a distance (thanks to museum conventions) and aching to reach out and confirm how the letters feel. This teasingly off-limits word play was mirrored by a slice of text from Ang Lee’s flick The Ice Storm. The segment we read is at the beginning of the film, when Toby Maguire sits on the train flipping through his Fantastic Four comic. He’s just had a kinda kooky weekend culminating in not having sex with Katie Holmes (of Dawsons Creek). (Always a plus in my opinion and, oddly, he had the same experience in The Wonder Boys). Anyway, the text is about the ways families hold us down like sludge and it’s impossible not to hear Maguire’s voice as we read, triggering all the resonances of this marvellous film (the interplay between the frozen ice and Christina Ricci’s intensely free bicycling figure, for example). The significance of this only becomes apparent, however, when we hit Norrie’s majestic Undertow. At the start it’s a pop cultural curve ball that gets you thinking about reading the surfaces of gallery walls, your own family dynamics, and whether Ang Lee’s Hulk will be as good as the hype.

The show’s other important segment is the thin rectangular room of black paintings from Norrie’s Inquisition series. The painterly equivalent of a floor-full of scurrying cockroaches, some are like scenes from one of Kossoff’s oily nightmares. Some are behind glass, Cornell boxes posted from an endless night. One is not really a painting but a concertina-ed fan of paper-geisha girl noir. Regal, elegiac, these also constitute a macabre theatre of the 2-D that gnaws at the gristle of formalism and the more dainty elements of the monochrome tradition. Their viciousness is amplified in the majestic Poisonous Fly Paper, good enough to mix even more metaphors about. A freaky, groovy Venus Fly Trap of a picture, it threatens to kiss you deadly, leering at you, aesthetically seducing you like a praying mantis out to bed some cute mantis tail. Okay, I wasn’t really that spooked, but in this beautiful, small room there is the feeling that Norrie is upping the ante in terms of the emotional and intellectual force that painting can offer at the interface of abstraction and representation.

It’s the sumptuous cinema of Undertow, however, that is the show’s lynchpin. Like walking into a Holmesian fog, the room is dull, lit only by the screens. Standing amidst them, we finally realise the Screen dudes were right: we’re part of the apparatus too. On one screen a young girl bobs along on the shoulders of a man. She’s watching the early bloom of the cherry blossom, thanks to global warming. On another, 2 guys fill a balloon and let it go. They treat the balloons the way Paul Celan treated stones—with reverence, awe and a movingly opaque symbolism. Other screens show aspects of environmental degradation, burning oil, cormorants stuck in oil, etc.

The final (or first, depending on when you find it) screen in Undertow features a scene from Orson Wells’ The Trial. The shot shows Anthony Perkins watching Naydra Shore carrying a large suitcase over the nondescript badlands. Perkins carries his own lighter box, and is relatively unfettered. From seeing the film and reading the book we all know that Perkins’ K is guilty, intrinsically so, bafflingly so. He is confused, though, because he thinks he’s a clean skin. Presented within Undertow, he is unburdened, the oil doesn’t touch him and we see him as a jerk, unaware of anything around him. Norrie is using K (as Kafka did) to stand in for all of us—we are all on trial for our slow-mo, first world terrorism against the planet. And we are jerks too when we fail to realise this.

However, what Norrie’s mobilisation of The Trial shows, is that our guilt is attached not only to environmental issues, but to our structural make-up—it’s part of the super ego. Here psycho-dynamics and enviro-dynamics are intimately entwined. Here’s where the importance of The Ice Storm kicks in. The undertow is intrinsic to us. We are glued in place by so many layers—family, spectacle, aesthetics, desire, gravity. There is no escape, and Norrie lets us know this while encouraging us to question this and question the hopelessness of this questioning. Which is to say that this is a Freudian show that turns on the logic of the death drive, the irreversible plunge back into the sludge and crap we came from when the dopey game of evolution began. When Norrie makes a plea for us to swim against the oily tide, she also makes it damned clear that to do so is impossible. It is this that saves it from being a one-dimensional “woe is the state of the world” exhibition. This makes it, strangely, even more thrillingly pessimistic.

I’m only skimming here. There’s a book-length commentary possible on eddy, in the same manner that Barthes did a job on Balzac’s short story Sarrasine in S/Z. Issues to consider for extra credit might be: whether it’s a coincidence that The Fantastic Four was the first comic to introduce a black character as a staple—the Black Panther. How does the work relate to Gary Hill’s Tall Ships— are we ghost ships in Norrie’s sea of screens? What are the precise connections between The Trial and Ian McEwen’s The Innocent? And how is film used as a substitute for theory?

How was evolutionary theory articulated in performance practices of the 19th century? That these apparently disparate spheres had a symbiotic relationship is the provocative thesis of Jane Goodall’s latest book, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order. She argues that performance traditions as diverse as theatre, circus, ballet and even the rage for black and white minstrels not only reflected the developing scientific culture but engaged it in an active, if sometimes facetious, dialogue.

Consider the career of P T Barnum, that “master of humbug” and proprietor of The Greatest Show on Earth who was born in 1810, the year after Darwin, and established himself as the definitive showman-capitalist of the 19th century. In his multifarious ventures, Barnum famously exploited traditions of the fairground and freak-show, assimilating all sorts of heterogenous acts and exhibits into increasingly corporatised spectacles.

In some respects Barnum resembles the great entrepreneurs like Ford and Edison, his mastery of American hype and know-how guided by an almost intuitive understanding of his epoch. Barnum’s fame and influence extended with the railroad and the printing press. As a manipulator of what we now call ‘the media’, he demonstrated prototypical canniness.

The entertainment empire Barnum unleashed was uniquely adapted to the geo-political empires of Europe and the trade routes of the United States. Goodall relates how, in his later years, nothing less than the panorama of diverse humanity became his spectacle. In 1884 he first exhibited the “Ethnological Congress of Savage and Barbarous Tribes” in which Zulu warriors, Afghans, snake charmers, “high- and low-caste Hindoos”, Aztecs and “Nautsch dancing girls” battled for attention in the show ring. Later, whirling Dervishes, Cossack riders and Aboriginal boomerang throwers (kidnapped from Queensland’s Palm Island) were added to the mix, jousting and competing in athletic displays of Olympian grandiosity that Barnum, in an awful pun, proudly promoted as the “races of the races.”

The spectacle of interracial competition and even the reference to ethnology (a synonym of sorts for ‘anthropology’) is indicative of Barnum’s attentiveness to the emerging “science of man” which, in the Victorian era, was irrevocably influenced by evolutionist assumptions. But Barnum’s engagement with science pre-dated the Ethnological Congress by decades. A defining moment occurred in 1841 when he completed negotiations to manage the ailing American Museum in New York and rapidly filled its galleries with dwarfs, flea circuses and anything else that was “monstrous, scaley [sic], strange or queer.”

To “startle the naturalists and wake up the whole scientific world” was one of Barnum’s professed ambitions. With a dry restraint that allows her wonderfully rich material to convey its generous endowment of humour, Goodall describes Barnum’s purchase of the “Feejee Mermaid”, a zoological assemblage, that in 1825 had been profitably exhibited at London’s Bartholomew Fair and even then dismissed by scientists as a hoax.

Barnum’s introduction of this rather shopsoiled fraud to the American market indicates his genius for publicity. The event was pre-empted by a cunning press release that hinted at the mermaid’s scientific credentials, verified by a “London naturalist”, one Dr Griffin, who had conveniently arrived for an American tour. Dr Griffin was Barnum’s stooge Levi Lyman, who had cultivated the role of expert scientist in various ruses. When the mermaid toured the US in 1843, a South Carolina naturalist called the bluff in a newspaper article, describing how the mermaid was constructed. Characteristically, Barnum managed to turn even this setback to advantage, recalling the exhibit to New York, playing up the “scientific controversy”, and inviting the public to come and judge it for themselves.

Goodall shows how Barnum monitored and exploited developments in evolutionary theory. The American publication of The Origin of Species in 1860 precipitated the revival of an exhibit titled “Barnum’s Incredible What is It?”, a creature purportedly captured in Gambia and promoted as Darwin’s missing link. This might be seen as straightforward repackaging of older traditions of the freak show and carnival, but Goodall points out that the primal fascination of such human or quasi-human ‘monstrosities’ was never the exclusive domain of the showground. Naturalists had long been interested in ‘curiosities’ and peculiar ‘productions of nature.’ Theories of evolution put the spotlight on freakishness and grotesquery, bringing new attention to phenomena that had long been the bread and butter of carnival and showmanship.

Not only Darwin but also his predecessors like Saint-Hilaire and Lamarck (both evolutionary theorists) had brought special attention to natural variety, arguing for a vision of nature in which forms were not fixed but subject to constant mutation and transformation over time. Royal Academicians certainly sneered at vulgar spectacles like freak shows, and would have applauded the 1840 legislation that outlawed theatrical entertainment at Bartholomew Fair—a pivotal event in the modernisation of London which suppressed ribald and supposedly subversive performances: traditions that dated from medieval times.

But science was imbued with its own codes of display and showmanship. Surgeons practise in theatres because an audience of students or colleagues was once de rigeur for an operation. Some appeal to theatricality was essential if the budding scientific institutions were to attract the masses, let alone be pedagogically effective. Museums provided talks and entertainment to spice up otherwise lifeless exhibits, while zoological gardens never entirely shook off their relationship with the circus—nor could they afford to if they were to maintain the flow of paying customers.

While much in this book is side-splittingly funny, Goodall’s ambition is serious. She contests a monocular view of the 19th century that developed in the 20th, a position in which, “…evolutionary theory came to mean Darwinian theory. It no longer encompassed a range of competing analyses and interpretations, and was accorded monolithic status as one of the great paradigm shifts of modern intellectual history.”

Goodall’s astonishingly agile tour through music halls, opera houses, theatres and circuses is an admirable demonstration of the remarkably heterogenous ways in which performers and audiences dealt with the new ideas about themselves that evolution threw up: the connection with apes, the loss of certainty about the human form, the terrifying prospect that primeval forces might lie secreted in the ‘modern man.’

Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are literary works that explore and exploit these anxieties. Dracula’s creator, Bram Stoker, was the manager of the acclaimed “beast actor” Henry Irving whose arresting movement from the “diabolical to the divine” (Auerbach) inspired the blood-sucking aristocrat—“a stalking category crisis” as Goodall calls him.

All this substantiates her contention that a history of performance provides a paradigmatic understanding to the culture of evolution. No other form is so intricately concerned with the fullness of corporeal possibility. Curtailed by bodily limits, yet seeking constantly to extend and redefine them, the floating qualities of the ballet dancer or the versatility of the ‘protean’ mimic who could embody a member of any class, race or creed and then dissolve like magic into someone else, encapsulate not only the hopes but the culture of anxiety that accompanied all this conjecture about what people are and what they might yet become.

This is a book that covers considerable ground in little more than 200 pages: a history of performance which, in the tradition of Richard Sennett and Greg Dening, pans the stage, the audience, and the forces that combine to give them a dazzling frisson. Although I enjoyed the gallop, there were times when I wished for more. Perhaps it will come in future books.

Jane R. Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order, Routledge, London & New York, 2002, ISBN 0 415 24378 5

Jane Goodall is Research Director at the College of Arts, Education and Social Sciences at the University of Western Sydney.

According to founder, Jill Greenhalgh, the international Magdalena Project emerged from anger at the suppression of women’s voices and frustration with the consequent lukewarm quality of their theatre. This fuelled a desire to create not ‘a women’s theatre’, but a forum in which women could cultivate greater discipline and rigour in their work and develop performance that would “compel the listening.”

That was almost 20 years ago and at the recent Magdalena Australia Festival at the Brisbane Powerhouse this aim was clearly still alive although anger seemed to be a less central motivating force. The annual Magdalena festivals have been likened to trade union meetings, lacking a secure funding base and geographic home, they’re hosted by artists with a passion and heightened sense of responsibility. In this case, actor Dawn Albinger conceived the colossal Brisbane event with her tireless Sacred COW performance collaborators Scotia Monkivitch and Julie Robson. With a steering committee and Indigenous working group, they aimed to ensure that Australia’s first Magdalena Festival was artistically engaging, culturally diverse, and grounded in the values and traditions of Indigenous peoples. For 10 days, delegates shared their work—at varied stages of development—and proffered performances, workshops, yarnin’ circles and debates. And while the Magdalena mantle may have changed considerably given the feminist impact on contemporary performance over the past 2 decades, the organisation continues to be driven by the work that women create, rather than by the ideologies that fuel it.

Coordinated by Kooemba Jdarra, the Indigenous program included workshops in contemporary movement and gospel choir, a screening of Black Chicks Talking with Leah Purcell, a dedicated Indigenous women’s meeting place, and a series of afternoon yarnin’ circles covering topics such as Indigenous protocols and intergenerational work. During the opening ceremony, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women shared stories and dances; a highlight was Aunty Delmay Barton’s extraordinary operatic voice singing us forward onto the festival proper. Similarly, the final yarnin’ circle in New Farm Park with Murri elders Aunty Vi McDermott and Aunty Ruth Heggarty enabled a spiritual and symbolic closure for delegates, providing sacred space to reflect on the past and give voice to the future.

The festival’s public performance program featured over 40 shows and offered all the pleasurable intertextualities and associated frissons that more generously funded and slickly-curated theatre festivals try so hard to provide. For the most part, the theme “Theatre-Women-Travelling” was interpreted metaphorically, with personal and spiritual journeying featuring in a number of pieces. Various approaches to stage-managing multiple truths in solo work created interesting generic points of reference, and debates about the ontology of theatre and corporeal presence filtered into a variety of performances and discussions.

Dah Teatar

An undisputed highlight of the festival was the poetically provocative Cirque Macabre by Belgrade’s Dah Teatar. Literally a circus dance of death, it was at once playful and violent, comedic and sinister. The misplaced hopes of the 20th century are embodied in 5 travelling players who create their arena—a wall-less circus tent—and deliver the cheerless refrains of a passionate and bloody era. Clad in evening wear, variously accessorised with army jackets and business suits, dance performers Aleksandra Jeli and Maja Miti march, writhe, distend and fall to the ongoing strains of piano accordion, double bass and violin. They perform dark tangos and “obscure circus acts” of lost balance, human powerplay and “double direction”, while the sombre and beautiful musicians are the ever-present observers, often suffering collateral damage as they counterpoint the dance or mark historical moments. The performance refuses stasis—each episode draws us inexorably into another of equal surprise and allure. With army boots balanced on shoulders, Jeli and Miti engage in a vigorous dance-off that reaches knife-edge agitation. The violinist lies down to play, without losing a beat. A routine facial shave is meticulously executed during a roll call of international commissions for conflict resolution and peace. Listed one after the other, the meetings “all account for nothing” while voice-overs of Bertolt Brecht and Martin Luther King ground the paradox of it all. Truths shimmer and dissolve in Dah’s work as we are instructed “it is only in the dark, that the stars are best seen.”

Cristina Castrillo and Margaret Cameron

“I didn’t want to do a show. What shall I call it? A performance, a thing…a…?” Umbral means threshold and is the title of Cristina Castrillo’s solo work which enthralled with its self-reflexivity and quiet parody on the process of conceiving theatre. Part narrative, part demonstration, Castrillo (of Teatro delle Radici, Argentina/ Switzerland) seamlessly merges the 2 modes with remarkable stage presence and wit. She embodies her dictum that “realness cannot just be found in verisimilitude”, demonstrating for herself and her audience-guests “how to be real and true without [producing] a single truth.” It was a life and art-affirming work that made me yearn for repeat viewing. As did Margaret Cameron’s Knowledge and Melancholy, a revelatory performance in its manipulation of the time/space/body of memory-truth. Shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Louis Esson Prize for Drama in 1998, the piece is a testament to the value of ongoing creative development and repeated outings. Further complexities have been mined as a result of Cameron’s collaboration with American dance teacher Deborah Hay on the choreography of her solo character’s lyrical and evocative journey through landscapes of absence and grief. Another so-called “lecture/demonstration”, the autobiographical work is rich with striking textual play and underscored with a sense of curiosity that balances its potentially disarming darkness. Cameron’s character is at once stoic and vulnerable, personifying the vexed state of melancholy.

Stace Callaghan

Personifications of a different kind were found in Stace Callaghan’s Between Heaven and Earth drawn from the experiences of St Teresa of Avila, Hildegard von Bingen, Freda du Faur and Muriel Cadogan. Callaghan skilfully tensions the physical with the metaphysical by centring these pioneering women’s narratives in the disjunctions of their obsessions and quests—for spiritual enlightenment, a sense of achievement, love. The accompanying video text, which features Callaghan scaling the grafittied cliffs of the Powerhouse with measured calm, provides a resonant contrast to her onstage shamanistic convulsions and punishing callisthenics. The shocking revelation of the fate of lovers Cadogan and du Faur at the hands of medical and religious establishments brings a highly charged sense of the political to a piece centred in experiences of the heart and soul.

Julia Varley

The much anticipated Dona Musica’s Butterflies by Julia Varley was another solo narration, but one that failed to ‘compel the listening.’ Directed by Eugenio Barba (Odin Teatret, Denmark), Varley plays Dona Musica, a character whose originating text (and reason to exist) is soon to be no more. Three personas—Dona Musica, ‘the actress’ and ‘Julia’—deliberate on the causes and consequences of this situation, with treatises on subatomic particles, illusion and transformation flitting through the text like Varley’s ever-changing prop of the butterfly. By all accounts Varley has been performing this piece for a very long time and, to many, it simply felt tired.

New media performance

More high-tech in its interface with notions of multiplicity was Swim—An Exercise in Remote Intimacy, a “raw work” showing by Avatar Body Collision. Performed live by “globally distributed performers” Helen Varley Jamieson, Vicki Smith (NZ), Karla Ptacek (UK) and Leena Saarinen (Finland), Swim was an investigation of intimacy and its discontents when devoid of physical proximity. As Varley Jamieson, the lone corporeal presence on stage, opens her laptop and logs on, she seeks intimacy with distant friends. She initially experiments with remote voyeurism by undressing for the webcam while some of her mates—whom we see simultaneously on screen—return the favour, an act witnessed in mechanistic time-delayed fragments. Together, they then enter ‘The Palace’, an online environment, adopting avatars and playing out mythical lovers’ fantasies. Admittedly disengaged once the avatars took over, I nevertheless caught myself empathising with Varley Jamieson’s lone figure left at performance end once the screen darkened and the laptop was folded. Less focused but more ambitious was S/W/ITCHES’ The Physics Project (Leah Mercer and Amantha May), which used simultaneous remote performance to trial the application of physics to the soft science of relationships. Like Swim, this work-in-progress was fettered by generally awkward webcam technology that is yet to successfully translate simultaneity. Yet it was this very limitation that created unexpected delights such as ironic slippages of action and response-time in the remote feed. It is difficult to know how history will treat these early experiments but, as Performance Space Director Fiona Winning commented in a festival forum on the topic, many new media artists internationally are grappling with similar difficulties. And while many at the forum failed to be convinced of the viewing pleasures of this kind of work, it provoked interesting debate on what is meant by ‘presence’ in live performance.

And more…

There was, of course, much more to the festival: Vulcana Women’s Circus’ seriously sexy new community show, the spectacle of Taiwan’s Uhan Shii Theatre and Teatro Nomad’s poignant Landless—7 Attempts Crossing the Strait. There was a range of engaging works-in-progress such as Geddy Ankisdal’s politically sassy theatrical concert No Doctor for the Dead, Sacred COW’s The Quivering, Angela Betzein’s Wicked Bodies for Zen Zen Zo, and an insightful improvised demonstration by Sarah Cathcart and Amanda Owen of their collaborative work processes. “Aotearoa Day”, inspired by traditional Maori rituals of encounter and hosted by members of Magdalena Aotearoa with Tii Kouka, was a celebratory feast of traditions, new work and cabaret, while off-site Christine Johnstone and Lisa O’Neill presented their gloriously gothic cabaret concert, Pianissimo at QPAC and Sheila’s Shorts showcased 4 darkly humorous new works by young Brisbane artists at Metro Arts.

Last mention, though, to an unlikely feature with an enduring effect. Waiting Not Drowning formed a treasured double-bill with Cirque Macabre early in the festival. Originally written by Sue Broadway in January 2002 as part of the Australian Women’s Clown Project, this version was devised with director Therese Collie and Fleur Evans. Collie’s pre-show ushering/security lazzi made way for the classic clowning of Broadway and Evans whose characters contrasted delightfully in appearance, temperament and acoutrements. Two people waiting, 2 people fronting nameless authority, 2 people eventually stripped of all possessions (including big shoes, fake nose and polyester Tom Jones collar). For a brief moment, the clowns morph into faceless travellers (or are they refugees?) alone yet not…waiting, waiting. For me this downtime was just long enough to recall images of the Tampa alongside all journeys of indefinite destination. As the characters reluctantly parted, Waiting Not Drowning encapsulated the multidimensionality of the festival theme but, perhaps more central to Magdalena’s creed, it compelled a special kind of listening—the kind that’s enabled best through laughter.

Magdalena Australia Festival, Theatre-Women-Travelling, International Festival of Women in Contemporary Theatre, artistic director Dawn Albinger, executive director Scotia Monkivitch, forum co-oridnator Julie Robson, Brisbane Powerhouse, April 6-16

Performing Lines and Performance Space will be bringing Margaret Cameron’s Knowledge and Melancholy to Sydney in August.

Anthea Davis, Eugenia Fragos, Daniella Farinacci, Miria Kostiuk, The Telephone Exchange

The word ‘asylum’ once meant a place to withdraw from the pressures of the world to ponder, as in a religious retreat. Later it became associated with psychiatric institutions. Although the Women’s Circus’ Ghosts grew from outrage at Australia’s rejection of asylum to boat people, the production retains this dual sense of the word.

About 60 women with various degrees of training occupied a set that evoked institutions ranging from those established by the Japanese in Singapore and Malaysia, to Nazi concentration camps, Australia’s current detention centres, boarding schools and orphanage dormitories. A row of bunks ran down each side of the set—beyond this, cyclone fencing and towering, Tampa-esque shipping containers enclosed the rear. The space was as ambivalent as those described by survivors of the above: highly gendered (here feminine), oppressive and clearly demarcated, but also a site of mutual cooperation and support against the forces pressing through the wire.

Ghosts is the first Women’s Circus show from Artistic Director Andrea Lemon after last year’s Secrets (by outgoing director Sarah Cathcart, scripted by Lemon). This work has had a mixed reception, largely because of Lemon’s greater use of abstraction and massed choreography. Although the performers were occasionally overstretched, the use of canons (half of the cast beginning a sequence once the others were 2 steps in) masked imprecision in all but the opening and the finale.

Criticism of the piece seemed a result of audience expectations of prescriptive snappy skills and tricks within a dynamic narrative. Personally, I’m tired of high-energy tricks, even if they’re linked to theatrical plot. Though ostensibly a ‘circus’ director, Lemon is largely uninterested in a traditional approach. Abstract, dreamy physical theatre is a better description of her aesthetic, and it’s more distinctive and challenging as a result.

Much of my pleasure came from observing the women on the beds silently watching their peers when not performing themselves. Through this simple, Brechtian device Lemon drew the audience in to share moments of happiness and pain, liberation and entrapment, which were often densely intertwined. A sequence of the women doling out food from rough tin pots beautifully encapsulated this, creating a sense of hardship, of struggle for resources limited by unresponsive, absent authorities, yet also of generosity and affection between the women as they looked from plate to plate to compare their servings. The show occupied a space outside of time, a purgatory, but also a true asylum. Rather than producing a sharply focused, didactic work, Lemon created an abstract space within which issues of survival, feminine strength and communion were played out, leaving temporal or thematic resolution for outside the theatre. Ghosts represented a moment apart, yet was no less political for that.

The design of Ghosts helped achieve a temporal stillness. By contrast, playwright Samantha Bews’ The Telephone Exchange struggled against a clumsy design of irregular grey forms which the actors wrestled to rearrange between scenes, while unremitting, direct light-sources hindered the dark hallucinations, memories and desires expressed by the characters between more naturalistic scenes. Despite such shortcomings, Bews’ play had a subterranean density. Four women work 9 to 5 at a 1950s Melbourne telephone exchange, their brittle patter giving way to disturbing intrusions of sexual, ethnic and social fantasies and occurrences, which gushed in a series of intercut monologues, moving the characters into a surreal state close to delirium.

I later learned that all 4 dream figures were intended to represent aspects of the character played by Daniela Farinacci, but the relationship between various events and individuals was confused in performance. One character (Eugenia Fragos) rhapsodised about the avenging sword of the Archangel Michael piercing her with divine lust while recalling stolen moments with her deceased fiance. Another (Miria Kostiuk) endlessly rehearsed her dream kitchen, appliances and husband. A third (Anthea Davis) related her fantasies of enriching her drab Anglo experience through befriending her exotic Eastern European neighbour (a Russian princess fleeing the Reds, perhaps?) while the fourth (Farinacci) had a Mediterranean lover whose dark presence was both displaced and enhanced by the image of her mother hanging by the neck in an air-raid shelter. Untangling the precise details intended by these allusions was beside the point, as their indeterminacy evoked a dense, psychosocial world broiling beneath the veneer of 1950s Anglo-Australia.

Meredith Rogers’ direction of Peta Tait and Matra Robinson’s Breath By Breath produced a more successful interplay of racial and ethnic tensions through a meditation on the works of Anton Chekhov. Robert Jordan played Chekhov’s gently homoerotic muse, resembling a sympathetic Mephistopheles or Iago, while also playing a young Jew living at the edge of the Russian Pale of Settlement just before the 1880s pogroms. In this context Jordan’s blackness was surprising. Though one could suppose he was a displaced Ethiopian Jew, the effect when combined with his lightly mannered performance, was to render him a classic representation of otherness for European intellectuals such as Chekhov (and the mostly white audience). The mise en scène did not however exoticise this foreign racial presence. Rather, Jordan appeared as a perplexingly intangible, yet destabilising, unfixed influence—like a wisp of time or forgotten event, hovering delicately on the margins of this otherwise typically Chekhovian world with its focus on love and loss.

The staging of Breath By Breath was based on a Brechtian version of the play-within-a-play, tempered with a spartan realisation of Stanislavski’s original writings on performance. The overall effect was to sketch a parallel between Chekhov’s gesturing towards the beauty of moments of love lost in time, and a similar melancholy on the loss of history, on how events such as pogroms are only indirectly evoked, never fully grasped, like snow falling on one’s hand. The comparison is problematic; history surely has a solidity, specificity and urgency that Chekhovian emotions don’t need. Irrespective of one’s position on such debates, Rogers’ production was a sublime exegesis of these issues, all the more remarkable for its gentle, melancholy ambience. Like Ghosts, the political was addressed by withdrawing into an asylum offered by self-conscious performativity.

Ghosts, Women’s Circus, writer-director Andrea Lemon, choreographer Teresa Blake, musical director-composer Andrea Rieniets, sound Dawn Holland, lighting Gina Gascoigne, set Trina Parker, rigging Franca Stadler, costume Amanda Silk, Shed 14, Docklands, Mar 14-Apr 5; The Telephone Exchange, writer Samantha Bews, director Lawrence Strangio, dramaturg Maryanne Lynch, lighting Gina Gascoigne, set Meg White, sound Ben Grant, musical director Geoff Wallis, 45 Downstairs, Mar 5-16; Breath by Breath, writers Peta Tait, Matra Robertson, director-set designer Meredith Rogers, music Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey, lighting Bronwyn Pringle, performers Neil Pigot, Anastasia Malinoff, Robert Jordan, T’Mara Buckmeister, Bob Pavlich, Bruce Kerr, Adrian Mullraney, Carlton Courthouse, April 24-May 10

Three weeks before she begins rehearsal of her new work, The Inhabited Woman, Leisa Shelton and I are talking about timing. When she announced it, some colleagues wondered why she would be leaving her teaching at the VCA now, after 4 and half successful years. Surely, this is where it all pays off? Then there was her decision some years back to have a baby at which time friends said, “Why would you do that now, when your career is taking off?” And again, in 1989, after training in Europe for 6 years, she decided to return to Australia, she asked herself: Is this the right time? As worlds were opening—Bausch, Kantor, Mnouchkine? Then again, this was a good time for Australian performance—Lyndal Jones’ Prediction Pieces, Jenny Kemp’s Call of the Wild. Having chosen to stay, she looked around to see talented dancers working up solos in scout halls with no opportunities to perform.

But for Leisa Shelton each decision has turned out to be in some way timely. She feels a sense of achievement having been at the VCA in an era of shared vision with a team that included Richard Murphet and Robert Draffin, under the directorship of Lindy Davies. Her response to the Sydney artists’ dilemma in the 80s was to start Steps a curated program of physical performance at Performance Space which showcased the work of an extraordinary generation of performers including Roz Hervey, Kate Champion, Matthew Bergan, Sue-Ellen Kohler, Nikki Heywood and Anna Sabiel. And the baby? Well little Audrey is the envy of her playgroup. How many other kids have kept time with de Keersmaeker from their mother’s lap?

LS My background has always been physical theatre more than pure dance which is really what Steps was about and working with Meryl Tankard in Canberra (1990-93). If I was going to be called a “dancer”, I wanted to push open a bit what I knew dance as being from my training and work in Europe…And in Robert Draffin and Richard Murphet’s work the language is derived from the physical state or the physical manifestations of the being inside the world.

I see the training of an actor as being, from its base, physical but the approach is very wide and it’s internal far more than external …the internal is affected kinesthetically and physiologically. Ultimately the one thing that all good theatre training eventually comes back to is the breath and the breath is a physical act. It’s still a contentious issue—what is physical and what is vocal. Breath belongs in different areas in different ways. It’s a bit like water in the world.

Which is extremely contentious—apparently we’re in for a bout of water wars. In 2000 you collaborated with Richard Murphet on Dolores in the Department Store (see RT43). Does your new work together spring from that?

In the form, yes. The Inhabited Woman is a concept that I’d started work on when I was awarded the Rex Cramphorn Scholarship. (1993) The originating question remains: What are the voices and worlds that inhabit a woman as she wakes?

At that stage I was in my early 30s and it was an almost preoccupying focus for me to have a child. The whole process was very fulfilling. But as I came out of the early baby time, the reality of having a certain career trajectory or momentum and being the mother came into real conflict….The ability of the 2 to function together I found was a myth. I started to read about other women….I became caught in what this was about, this expectation of “having it all” and the reality of, in some ways, being left with nothing.

While someone like Simone de Beauvoir set up a context in which contemporary women could see their lives, and could claim self again, in order to do that and to uphold her place in the mythic relationship with Sartre, she paid a very high price. And I guess between 35-40 [for me] a lot of things changed very quickly. That became a time to question what you can and can’t do any more and how you find the point of balance, the moment when you can say it’s enough. I am this good a mother. I’ve done this much work that I’m proud of….I can personally sit with that. Then I have these moments when I’m caught in or overwhelmed by a certain perception which says, Ah but…what you could have done!

We started with a series of provocations and from that Richard has written the language…The metaphor has come from some reading I’ve been doing about the death of Virginia Woolf, her drowning, which I always found fascinating—that a woman could walk into a river, lie down and stay there.

A few. But not enough to hold her down. The water was very shallow, thigh high. She put herself under the water and lay down and drowned. The will and the need for that release was so intensely present in her that she could do that.

So the piece begins with a dream of walking into a river and submerging and staying under. The river returns throughout the piece and remains the metaphor for the woman’s desire to be something other, to go somewhere other, to inhabit a watery underworld. And the desire which the river continues to force forward and out of her, the sound of the river, the memory of the river, the return of images from the dream [all] force this desire inside her, out and into her home.

I wanted very much for this to be about the internal world of a woman which can be calmed and nurtured, or its difficulty be enhanced, by certain circumstances. But I wanted the woman’s world to be good. She is with a good man. She has a small boy of 3 who loves her. She has a beautiful home. She has all she should need and want. She should be happy. It’s enough. And for her it’s not. And it’s not about being in an abusive relationship, or difficult financial circumstances. It’s about a world inside her which is being denied. And the river forces it out of her. And she has to leave that world and find herself. She checks in to a hotel where she could be anyone and there she meets herself.

You have a team of young artists on the production working with film (Elspeth Tremblay) and sound (Katie Symes) and architect Ryan Russell. How do those elements work within the piece?

The river is entirely sound and image. At the moment, the film occupies the woman’s internal world or the perceptive world from outside. The dream is shown in film. Her imaginal world is projected in the space on a variety of surfaces at the same time as her inhabited state is present in the room. One of the ideas we’re working on is that when she finally does enter the domestic space—in which there is no man and child, just the voices of, sounds of—the film will show how the man sees her move through the room. The other side will show how the child sees her. In the middle is the woman who is neither one nor the other.

It’s like in Asian theatre when men play women because they understand them. They’ve witnessed them, watched them. Obviously the women that Richard Murphet has been in continuous contact with have affected what he’s witnessed…The writing for the women in Dolores… was glorious. His ability to write the minute detail, the complexity of the internal world is one of the layers of [his] Slow Love [1983, 2000] that I love. I always found it surprising that a man had written that. And The Inhabited Woman is very provocative, contemporary feminist writing, written by a man. And some people may have a huge issue with that. But I actually love it that a lot of that language hasn’t come directly from me. I’ll interpret it in a world in which we’ve chosen the elements together.

It’s inside a lot of men too. I don’t think it’s a mid-life crisis point but I think it affects a generation of women who are having children later, who have tasted a certain level of autonomy and self-driven life choices who find it very difficult. It’s a big thing for a woman to walk out of a family. So the struggle is to find a point of equilibrium. And I don’t think the examples are there. It’s ‘give in entirely and be this’ or ‘let go entirely and be this.’ But if you’re trying to tread the 2, then you’re just disappointing everyone.

Personally I feel like it’s an area that we’re not managing to cater for together at all as women because it’s layered with a certain level of guilt and desire to prove we can do it. And it’s all getting bottled inside us as we all try to make it work. Everyone’s watching to see who’s managing to make it work or failing to do so. And for others it’s the not-having-had the child that’s the constant….so that having had the child seems like you did the good thing without realising what it means to have had the child. So there’s no easy ground…And this is not an autobiographical piece—much as it terrifies me to realise how close, particularly over the last 3 years, the material of this work is—some of it is absolutely not my experience…I wanted to investigate the other, not go to the autobiographical place…and I have no answers. This piece unfortunately doesn’t answer things for anybody (WE LAUGH).

When the young P T Barnum bid for the Scudder family’s natural history museum in New York, he referred to it as a collection of “stuffed monkey and gander skins.” No doubt his intention was to discourage rival bidders, but it would have been a fair description of most private natural history collections of the time, which was 1841. The remnants of dead animals: how do you make a show of them likely to appeal to anyone other than a fellow collection freak? “Wonderful variety”, as Darwin called it, is a wonderful concept, but when it comes to hundreds of rows of bottles containing assorted coils of beige slime, or thousands of dusty fur corpses with glass-eyed stares, or millions of spiky insect corpses pinned on boards, who really wants to get lost in the wonder of it all?

Barnum’s genius was to organise a co-habitation of the stuffed monkey and gander skins with a noisy and vigorous assortment of live creatures and to have the entire ensemble choreographed into a provocative wonder show that set out to confuse the difference between real and fake biological forms. Maria Fernanda Cardoso’s work, with its performative interweaving of live and dead forms, maintains a knowing but detached relation to this tradition. The first works you meet on entry to her new exhibition Zoomorphia at the Museum of Contemporary Art are the Mating Ball (petrified) and the Cardoso Flea Circus (alive and hopping in this video version of the internationally toured show).

The first of these is a basketball sized tangle of red-sided garter snakes in plastic replica, accompanied by a curious narrative. In the mating season, the males of this species converge en masse on the females, so that each female becomes surrounded by a writhing ball of would-be mates. Seeking to steal an advantage over their rivals, some of the males secrete female pheromones and so masquerade as females in order to get a place on the inside. But “on close inspection” researchers at the University of Texas have discovered that some of the mating balls contain a counterfeit female and that in 29 out of 42 tests, the impostor was indeed first to reach the genuine females. With its particular scientific credentialling and its improbable imagery, this is just the kind of story Barnum loved to make up. He called it the art of humbug. The narrative could be as fake as the plastic snake bodies, but Cardoso says she never makes up stories. Her genius is to identify natural phenomena that behave like sideshow acts.

The fleas in the circus are real. Cardoso feeds them herself, from the blood in her hands and arms. Throughout the action, they are shown in magnified simultaneous projection so that every detail of their minute forms is visible, and at the end of the show, children are invited to watch up close. What the fleas perform, though, is pure human fantasy: high wire acts, high dives, flights across the arena suspended from personal kites. There’s a cross-species joke going on here that belongs quintessentially to circus humour. Of course, height is no problem for fleas. The difficulty is in getting them to imitate human high-wire performances, and so evoke the classic fiction of a world of miniature beings surrounded by miniature artefacts and replicating all the sophistications of the human social world.

More sharply disconcerting is a large ring of frogs posed like black-face minstrels, with heads thrown back, hands splayed in front of them and knees bent in wide plié. But they are held together by a wire skewer that passes through their bellies, and they are as dead as the proverbial doornail. If they remind you of a chorus line, they also remind you of all the lovingly tortured small creatures that make up the natural history collections of the world.

Cut flowers, impaled grasshoppers, tiny lizards twisted into a crown of thorns, preserved snakes knotted together around a pole they will never climb all contribute to this impression of violated rather than suspended animation. There is violence in the traditions of animal show business as well as those of natural history, but in acknowledging this, Cardoso’s work also maintains an ironic distance from it, displaying above all an affinity with the natural poseurs and tricksters of the animal world. The chickens whose extravagant crests look like the off-track competition on Melbourne Cup day; the red-sided garter transvestites; butterflies that perform sudden disappearing acts through their “uncannily perfect” camouflage techniques. “The vanishing butterflies pose more questions than answers,” says the caption. How come to look dead might be a good thing? Suddenly, one of the common facts of natural behaviour turns into a vortex of speculation.

Zoomorphia, Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, April 9-July 6

Jane Goodall’s new book, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin review by Martin Thomas

Speaking to women at the wheel of 2 national women’s arts organisations, I sense they’re comfortable in the driver’s seat and that the road ahead is as important as the roadworthiness of their vehicles.

Vitalstatistix: Maude Davey

Embarking on her first year with Vitalstatistix, Australia’s only full-time women’s theatre company, Artistic Director Maude Davey wonders whether seasons of plays are the only or indeed the best way to debate and circulate ideas within Waterside Hall, the heritage building the company occupies in Port Adelaide. “In some ways theatre companies are dinosaurs.” While mindful of the expectations that Vitalstatistix will produce a number of plays each year, Davey who has worked for over a decade in the “independent” sector is also in favour of more flexible approaches to performance as reflected in Vitalstatistix program for 2003 and beyond.

Work that deals with “technology, politics and biology” interests her and especially “how these fields are impacting on the status of the corporeal human creature.” In her own work, she has been concerned with the mediated body—“the impression that the body you wear makes, in spite of you,” she says. Being a twin (her sister is physical performer Annie Davey) might have something to do with it. While heavily pregnant recently, Maude performed The Pickle or the Pickle Jar in which she appeared as herself but was also played by other people who materialised on TV monitors. “It’s weird being inside that body. Suddenly you are regarded by others as something other. You are what you represent. You are a mother-to-be.”

She’s fascinated by debates around reproductive technology. “It’s easy to say it’s about wresting power from women to enhance male domination, but I prefer to look at how interesting, how difficult, how horrifying and how amazing the technology is—all at once.”

Vitalstatistix 2003 season opened this month with Davey’s production of Parallax Island co-written with partner David Pidd. A 2-hander performed by Pidd and Astrid Pill, it’s described in the press release as “Not so much a play, more a performance about the performance of gender.”

In July the company embarks on Playgirl, a 4-week intensive play development project with open readings of works scheduled for production in 2004. With some notable playwrights on board, Davey is eager to play with possibilities. Catherine Zimdahl’s Wharf at Woolloomooloo is about a visual artist. “Visual art excites me more than theatre,” says Davey. “What is it about our attention to a work of visual art and what can it say about our attention to performance?…Melissa Reeves has written a musical about crime celebrity matriarch Kath Pettingell and we’d like to bring the musical into some new territory.” Davey is interested in the culture developing around computer-generated sound/music making. The night before we spoke she’d just seen New Pollutants at the Exeter Hotel. “They’re great….I’m looking for the female equivalents.” Valentina Levkowicz has written about a group of actors from the 70s whose guru returns to create a new work with them in the 21st century. Here Davey sees the potential to examine what’s changed in performance practices in that period.

The program also includes Part 1 of Davey’s Future of the Species series. Directed by Anne Thompson, it takes on society’s ambivalent attitude to the maternal body and is set inside a uterus. Part 2 will focus on the smallest social unit (which could be a family but not necessarily) and will take the form of a physical theatre piece. Part 3 will be created as a site-specific, community collaboration.

Also commencing in July is the 21 Days Journal Project initiated by writer Rosan Chakir and composer Lucy Jones in which women living on the Le Fevre Peninsula will be invited to help create a work by keeping daily journals for 21 days. The diaries will

provide the basis for a play and also manifest in part as a radio program in which each of the contributors will read a minute of her day.

In September a co-production with the Adelaide Festival Centre Trust’s InSpace program will see the next incarnation of Cazerine Barry’s multimedia performance work, Sprung. “The thing about technology that interests me,” says Davey, “is how to make it truly performative…The ideas it throws up are interesting to think about, not necessarily to watch…Cazerine Barry has made the mix dynamic, the live body still central.”

“We’re reinventing the world around us, how we live, how we die…” says Davey, “we have to reinvent our theatre as well, how it looks and how we look at it.”

Playworks: Francesca Smith

After a pause in proceedings following the departure of former director Anna Messariti for the top job at ABC Radio Drama, Francesca Smith has been guiding Playworks since February and looks set to take on the role permanently. She too sees the importance of opening up organisational structures in order to elicit work of vitality and relevance.

In 2003, says Smith, “the focus is less on assessment of early scripts and more on catching the ball that is already in the air; less on workshops and more on strategically designed development. We’re using resources in more flexible ways. This involves everything from managing the dramaturgical development of promising works so they reach their best possible form in production to taking on a fabulous idea which has no play yet, just a new writer whom Playworks believes can pull off the project.”

Smith is particularly keen to expand Playworks’ Indigenous Dramaturgs Traineeship Project this year by offering the possibility of actively mentoring gifted Indigenous theatre artists through the process of writing their own work. Playworks has been working in 2002 with Nadine MacDonald (Kooemba Jdarra), Irma Woods (Yirra Yaakin) and writer Jadah Milroy. They decided that the best way to discover how dramaturgy works was for each of the would-be dramaturgs to write a play.

Playworks is commissioning short works on particular themes in collaboration with organisations such as Playlab, Brisbane Writers Festival and the Australian Script Centre. They’re also involved in a partnership with ABC Radio conducting radio scriptwriting regional workshops with writers such as Noelle Janaczewska in Tasmania and Janis Balodis in Lismore assisting local writers over 2 months with production as one possible outcome.

Still taking shape is an idea of Smith’s for a collaborative writing project with Islamic communities. “When the war was at its height, I had an urge to organise a responsive writing project to stimulate creative ideas,” she says. An overarching desire is “to encourage works that situate performance writing as important.” She wants to nurture strong voices, “to fan flames that are already glowing…[to see that] something actually happens in response to what we do…I don’t want to denigrate the private but these days I’m more interested in work that engages with the world.”

As a practicing dramaturg, director and teacher, Francesca Smith had reservations that taking on an administrative job like this might take her too far out of the creative plane. But 3 months in she’s discovering that “an organisation can be a creative entity. And flexibility is the key. Opening up. Not locking into things. Playworks is no longer bound by the page. Words are part of a spectrum. Music theatre is a special interest. We even have an opera in the pipeline. We receive videos, DVDs. What matters is that there’s clarity on the part of the writer about what she’s doing and what she wants in the way of assistance.”

Kerrie Schaefer and Laura Ginters are gradually updating the valuable research done by Colleen Chesterman on the working patterns of women writers in Australian theatre in Playing with Time (1995). “It’s hard to be a playwright,” says Smith. “It involves invisible ways of being. Networks are crucial. This has been important for the success of all those hot young things who are still more often male than female. You need relationships and access to getting things on. As always an important role for Playworks is fanning the flame, strengthening the commitment, enthusiasm, the love to keep going.”

There is an obvious aesthetic comparison to be made between the cultures of contemporary S&M fetishism found in glossy magazines such as Skin Two and global fetish clubs, and cyberpunk fantasies of the last 2 decades, spawning their own sartorial techflesh codes. In fact spaces such as Sydney’s infamous Hellfire Club and those within popular culture (The Matrix films for example) already exist and testify to the regular meeting and interchange of postindustrial, cyber and sexual fetishism. It seems odd, given fetishism’s entry into the mainstream, that we have had to wait until now for the kind of sustained cultural analysis of this phenomenon found in Amanda Fernbach’s Fantasies of Fetishism. It is this very proliferation of forms of fetishism that provides fodder for her academic investigation, which simultaneously acknowledges the publishing industry’s demands for fetishisation: it’s presented as a hybridised cultural studies coffee table book. The book provides just enough theory to titillate, while a range of large format black and white photos offer glimpses of club freaks; features objects of worthy art criticism such as Stelarc; and provides some free advertising for New York’s professional dominatrix community.

Although Fernbach’s book should provide a much needed cross-subcultural study of the pervasiveness of millennial fetishes, most of it is a diatribe against the psychoanalytic theory of fetishism. In classic Freudian terms, the fetish provides a mechanism of both acknowledgement and refusal; a disavowal that the male subject uses to hide his traumatic sighting of the female genitals. The fetish, such as fur, lace, whip or cane, is the last thing he remembers seeing before his moment of horror and so he clings to it ferociously, worshipping and adoring it above all else. As in many post-Freudian feminist readings, Fernbach suggests that Freud sustains a phallic sexual economy in which women are always seen as lacking and threatening to male sexuality.

Her contribution to a more nuanced understanding of the contemporary fetish comes through suggesting other forms of fetishism that can come to terms with the transformative and transgressive qualities of present fetishistic fantasies. She introduces new and old alternatives for understanding posthuman, S&M, technopagan and cyborgian fantasies. These range from decadent fetishism, in which she compares fin de siècle culture with millennial crises of disintegration, to magical and pre-oedipal fetishism. This strategy proves useful when she undertakes a reading of, for example, Stelarc, suggesting the many competing fantasies at work in the man who needs his body to interface with the technology he claims is overcoming it. However her overall analysis is haunted by a naïve desire to always configure the cyberpunk, the dominatrix, the club kid as radically transgressive, whereas anything mainstream, such as the cosmetic industry, remains trapped within classical Freudian fetishism. Ultimately this has the effect of holding onto the Freudian fetish as an object against which we should fight the good fight until the very last of the book’s 230 pages.

There is something lacking academically in Fernbach’s conceptual apparatus that I found surprising in a book that stakes so broad an interdisciplinary theoretical claim. For the fetishism lacking in Fantasies of Fetishism is contemporaneous with both Freud’s and our time: the commodity fetish. There is a corpus of theoretical work as rich as the psychoanalytic understanding of the fetish from Adorno, Benjamin, Baudrillard and beyond, that analyses consumerism as a culture of the commodity fetish. Here the commodity, like Freud’s fetish, disavows the social relations of consumerist exchange that provide the fetishised object with its value. And yet this hardly rates a mention in Fernbach’s book. If it had, it may have proved more difficult for her to paint the technofetishist and commercial S&M world as necessarily transgressing subjective norms. For the utopian, pre-dotcom crash desire to remake the self via the gadgetry of cybernetic hard and software, along with the belief that the commercial dominatrix is a figure autonomously choosing her professional destiny, belong to the fantasy of individual freedom that is the bedrock of consumer fetishism. The libertarian philosophy of both subcultures can be found strewn across the glossy pages of Black and Blue (advertorial for the US commercial S&M community) and Mondo 2000. Fernbach’s failure to acknowledge consumerist culture in the structuring of contemporary fetishisms, and her dated choice of material for analysis, keep the book in a kind of mid-90s bubble of longing for the coming techno-queer cultural revolution.

Amanda Fernbach is an Australian writer who has published widely on the subject of feminism, and lives in New York.

Amanda Fernbach, Fantasies of Fetishism: From Decadence to the Posthuman, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2002, ISBN: 0748616160

Find