The screen divided

Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

Linda Wallace, eurovision

During the 1990s, the digital storage medium of the CD-ROM became a platform for artistic experiments in interactive form and participation. Accompanied by a boisterous technophilic rhetoric proclaiming the promise of liberation from passive media consumption, desktop multimedia (followed swiftly by the internet’s plethora of personal publishing systems) promised the digital avant-garde a new set of tools to cut up and into prevailing commercial narrative forms, as well as cheap, global strategies for distribution. Interestingly in the late 1990s, the consumer availability of digital video cameras and more recently the viability of large scale digital video storage through the DVD-ROM did not capture artists’ imaginations in the same way. Admittedly the libertarian hype about digital media has worn thin and, in many cultural theory and production contexts, given way to a more measured and critical assessment of the ‘newness’ of forms made possible by digital production. Nevertheless, there are relatively few examples of rigorous artistic investigations into the formal, technical possibilities and aesthetic implications of digital video.

Linda Wallace’s eurovision video work, completed in 2001, is a notable exception. Confounding genre specification and therefore implicitly resisting relegation to either digital or time-based media, it boldly announces its status as a ‘linear version of an interactive’ project. And it is precisely this montaging of form that allows eurovision to become an exploration of how visual digital operations—slicing images into each other, pulling them through the grid of the screen transforming them into information, and their slippery layering—might impact upon the temporality of video. Of course video has itself been subjected to a thorough temporal shakedown over the last 30 years, not least by the experiments with corporeal rhythm and duration by Bill Viola, Gary Hill and others. But many of these experiments have taken place against the backdrop of either the dominance or postmodern fading of linear narrative as a mass media form. eurovision instead investigates the productive possibilities for narrative by both interrogating and invigorating it through an interplay with digital aesthetics. The outcome is a new and exhilarating direction for spatial and temporal montage that no longer sees digital artefacts as mere simulators of film, the photographic image or other analogue media, but ushers in the possibility of what new media critic Lev Manovich has termed “digital cinema” (L. Manovich, The Language of New Media, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2001).

Where earlier computational experiments with narrativity, such as Peter Greenaway’s high definition video Prospero’s Books, failed to sustain narrative within the cumulative fragmentation of digital, visual layering, Wallace’s piece develops a kind of modular narrative that holds in place the splitting of the screen’s frame. eurovision is structured around 4 segments of songs sung by the Russian, Swedish, French and German entrants to the Eurovision Song Contest in 2000; each country’s contestant activating a different screen template for viewing a set of cinematic and photographic juxtaposed and sequential cut-ups comprising that sections’ module. Like a graphic mask that sits over the viewing plane, the screen is divided by blackness into smaller square and rectangular spaces that over time exchange their shape and scale and through which video and images stream at the viewer. Wallace was initially interested in imagining the piece for internet broadband delivery in which multiple streams of information could be delivered on the fly from a database of media stored on a server. (See Wallace’s artist’s statement: www.machinehunger.com.au/eurovision/statement.html.) But rather than some techno-utopian hankering after the promise of bigger and better, eurovision’s resulting linear meditation on the much proffered potentialities of speedier digital media gives viewers temporal distance from a world in which information incessantly streams at them.

The strategy of eurovision is not to substitute misinformation and chaos as a negative critique of the over-saturated and speed-obsessed arena of contemporary, global media consumption. Instead its formal experiments with the screen as a panel, almost an interface, distributes and resequences the internal coherence that the homogenisation of entities such as ‘the information age,’ cinematic narrative and European culture are presumed to possess. The vision of Europe we encounter in the video becomes increasingly situated historically and socially rather than remaining a singular, mythical entity suggested by a myopic European ‘vision.’ While the kitsch veneer of the performers and the consistently blithe pop melodies of the Eurovision song contest suggest a formula for a multicultural Europe, the filmic content playing through eurovision’s multiple screen frames, composed of cut-ups of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), offers us a darker sense of a more alienated and displaced Europe.

For an Australian audience the video straddles tensions between representations of European-ness: the Eurovision songs, perhaps a reminder of languages left behind in the process of migration or—to Anglo-Saxon Australians—sounds and cultures never heard; the subtitles of the French films—glimpses of an intellectual and arthouse cinema scene; the 1950s and 60s Russian space program footage in the smaller side frames challenging our familiarity with the US version. If the technical effect of multiplying and dividing the screen space displaces a unified viewing perspective, then so too do the disjunctive images of Europe offset any attempt we might make at constructing this culture as easily digestible and assimilable. Yet the remarkable achievement of eurovision is its sheer watchability. It elegantly realises just the right blend of fragmentation and repetition. The re-use of older media form and content has been a common feature of digital art and of digital media within advertising and popular culture. And yet this can lead to a kind of visual malaise in which the content of a piece is evacuated or else the audience’s affective response is caught up in admiring technical mimicry. Instead the cinema and television cut-ups in eurovision conjure memories of a nascent post-war European culture grasping at the beginnings of global and mass media culture; a culture out of which contemporary information cultures are born. The subtitles from Godard’s film replayed and multiplied across the screen and tempo of the video, speaking to us from the 1960s of the failure of communication are just as relevant for the state of global communications networks today.

The repetition and fragmentation of form and media in eurovision successfully holds the eye because it is not used as simple commentary on the repetitiveness or loss of meaning produced by digital culture. Instead the selection and replaying of only segments from the films or television footage indicate that the digital reiteration of other media can provide new ways of understanding forms such as narrative. Linda Wallace redeploys only subplots from the Bergman film revolving around the characters of the knave and the witch that deal with the way social groups produce outsiders. This focus on the space of the outside is taken up at a formal level by the video’s digital aesthetics, which investigate the production of narrative outside of a centralised coherence or structure. Against the expectation of a linear unfolding of plot driven by a single event or character, eurovision suggests narrative can be produced through techniques of recombination, moving the subplots or modules around, pulling them apart and fitting them back together again. Narrative can then be seen to rest not upon linearity and singular viewpoint but on the layering, combination and texturing that differently sequenced modules bring to events. It is here that works like eurovision offer us new and productive possibilities for digital video as it thoughtfully remediates the content, form and history of painting, graphics, photography, film and television.

Eurovision, video, Linda Wallace, 2001. www.machinehunger.com.au/eurovision/

RealTime issue #53 Feb-March 2003 pg. 22

Blast Theory, Desert Rain

“data [information] terra [earth] investigates not only the technological, but emotional, psychological and spiritual implications of the digital paradigm, and…delves into the advent and purposing of data mapping.”

dLux media arts flyer, November 2002

Birds are filling the skies again

Feather numbers are up and up. Graph spikes in what the birdologists refer to as ‘incidents.’ Witness the parklife across from Sydney’s Central Station. Abundance of beak and claw, a near liquid blob of feathery life force gathered, feeding ravenously. Can’t even see the footpath. People watch nervously from a distance, awed by the spectacle, daring not to think what such a mass might be capable of. Whispers travel around the perimeter—a boy in there somewhere, 8 years old.

dLux blurbalish

futureScreen02 data*terra was the 5th annual dLux X=ploration of new media meets cultural theory and emerging sci-tech. “Investigating the mediation of data across technological, cultural and physical terrains,” the event boiled down to: Data Conspiracy, a live debate over dinner (no spectators); The All Star Data Mappers, a survey and exhibition of database voyeurs and network fetishists curated by John Tonkin; Terra Texts, commissioned essays by Sean Cubitt, Dr Ann Finnegan, Bill Hutchison and Mathew Warren (www.dlux.org.au); Interalia, live thematic audiovisual assaults at The Chocolate Factory, Surry Hills; and Desert Rain, a large scale installation by Blast Theory (UK) at Artspace.

The man on TV

He said there was a major earthquake in Tokyo, Japan. SBS coincidentally, had programmed for that night’s viewers a cautionary tale about the inevitability of The Big One that’d shake Tokyo far beyond its state-of-the-art emergency services. And so it was with added resonance that the fragile, interconnected nature of our global economic electronic was emphasised one sober late 90s evening. Sever the Tokyo tendrils and the world wakes to a depression.

Joining the dots

The All Star Data Mappers mostly consists of websites clickable from the dLux homepage, so visualisation and data mapping enthusiasts can explore this fine selection of provocative datamapping tools months after the exhibition’s end. For me the Oz-gong went to the Firmament software interface for a radio telescope by Mr Snow and Zina Kaye. Josh On’s now infamous TheyRule.net slices through the Fortune 100 company connections with an incredible visual succinctness and Minitasking.com highlights the distributed backbone of the popular peer to peer Gnutella filesharing network.

Virtual warfare

As a large scale and much hyped Virtual Reality environment and interactive art installation, I expected to engage with Desert Rain at Artspace as a boy. Not that I’d be grinning because I was getting free trigger finger in textured corridor practice, just that I expected more technology than necessary. Somewhere amidst the gee-whizardy, the novelty, the gimmickry, the sheer cost of it all, I expected I’d feel like the kid who notices that the emperor isn’t in fact wearing any clothes. Once the impressive infrastructural veneer was peeled away, would it reveal a lack of substance at the installation’s core?

Real warfare

“If they do it, it’s terrorism, if we do it, it’s fighting for freedom”, said the US Ambassador in Central America in the 1980s when asked to explain how US actions like the mining of Nicaragua’s harbours and bombing of airports differed from the acts of terrorism around the world that the US condemned. Since World War II, the US has dropped bombs on 23 countries including: Korea 1950-53, China 1950-53, Indonesia 1958, Cuba 1959-60, The Congo 1964, Laos 1964-73, Vietnam 1961-73, Cambodia 1969-70, Guatemala 1967-69, Grenada 1983, Lebanon 1984, Libya 1986, El Salvador 1980s, Nicaragua 1980s, Panama 1989, Iraq 1991-1999, Sudan 1998, Afghanistan 1998, and Yugoslavia 1999.

Veneer peeling

Artspace. Spanky, Nick Eye-fi, The Lalila Duo and a little boy. All of us in the raincoats provided. In separate fabric cubicles, wearing microphone headsets and staring at screens formed by water dripping from the ceiling in front of us. Projectors glare onto the other side of the water, providing an almost blurry, ghost-like image to navigate. Finding our way around is done by leaning left, right, forwards or backwards on the small platform beneath our feet and by talking to each other through our headsets when we come within range in the 3D space we’re watching. With the sound of the constantly raining screens, each other’s muffled headset banter and the polygon war playground shining in the glimmery mist, it’s hard for a boy not to be impressed. We each have 30 minutes to find our target characters and collectively get our butts to a particular exit. But what does it all mean?

Oil-soaked birds

“…real events lose their identity…when they become encrusted with the information which represents them…As consumers of mass media, we never experience the bare material event, but only the informational coating which renders it ‘sticky and unintelligible’ like the oil soaked bird.” (Paul Patton tackles Baudrillard on the Desert Rain flyer.)

Desert guts

So I’m in this 3D Pac-man game and I’ve found my sticky ‘target.’ Eerily silhouetted in front of the projector, a character approaches the water screen from behind, then walks straight through it and gives me information about my target. Actors as soldiers have instructed us on our mission, guiding us to the cubicle and over a large quantity of sand to a mock-motel room, where our team learnt via video-recorded interviews that each ‘target’ had experienced the Gulf War in an unorthodox manner. This physical integration of people into its virtual environment and the evocative aesthetics of the physical space distinguish Desert Rain from most war-based computer games. This is just as well because Desert Rain’s simplicity means it couldn’t compete as gameplay alone.

Breadcrumbs

Ritual and sacrifice are understandable responses to larger forces we don’t understand. Daily breadcrumb dumpings were now occurring to appease the flocks. Thing was, a kid had been trapped under one dumping and, when the birds fluttered away, he was no longer there, just a distraught mother hopelessly scanning the empty footpath for some trace. As she looked up, about to cry to the heavens, she fell to her knees rubbing her eyes—the birds were flying in formation in the shape of her boy.

Motion Blur 75%

Blast Theory’s goal is to blur the boundaries between real and virtual events, “especially with regard to the portrayal of warfare on television news, in Hollywood films and in computer games.” This ‘mixed reality’ approach succeeds in part, hampered by the extent to which you are shepherded through the process and your lack of capacity to do anything meaningful in the installation—explore a maze representing a Gulf War bunker, find character and find exit. The Gulf was a resonant and important theme, but I didn’t really gain any new insights into its real or virtual nature through the game options I explored that couldn’t have been expressed through a simple website or pamphlet. Nonetheless it was a highly engaging experience, and Blast Theory’s next work on the streets and online using satellite tracking and handheld technologies should build on this and possibly appear in futurescreen:03.

futureScreen02 data*terra, www.dlux.org.au/dataterra, Nov 15-Dec 7. Desert Rain, Blast Theory, Artspace, Sydney Nov 16-22, 2002. www.blasttheory.co.uk

RealTime issue #53 Feb-March 2003 pg. 23

Kaoru Motomiya, California lemon sings a song

photo Megan Jones

Kaoru Motomiya, California lemon sings a song

What would you expect of an International Symposium on Electronic Art? It suggests Peter Stuyvesant—yout international passport to new media pleasure—sweeping views, gold jewellery and sophisticated fashion. A symposium is a formal intellectual presentation and/or a drinking party in the classical Greek style. Electronic art sounds a bit, well, nerdish, leaving you with…a Microsoft conference in an interactive chateau in Aspen?

ISEA 2002 was held in Nagoya, a regional centre 2 hours south of Tokyo. The official theme, Orai, loosely means traffic—comings and goings, contract and communication—and participants were encouraged to respond to this. The symposium’s program, which included exhibitions, academic presentations and performances, was located around a small harbour. Once the official port, it has been re-zoned as a public space, including an aquarium, small museums and a park. About 100 academic presentations were given across 4 days, and 57 installations were housed in 2 huge, disused shipping warehouses.

Kaoru Motomiya’s California lemon sings a song was a highlight of the exhibition. Lemons joined by wires to digital chips produced simple melodies generated by electrical currents from the fruit acid. The audience must kneel, remove the lids from coin-sized boxes on the floor and put their ears almost to the ground to hear the work. First installed at the Headland Arts Centre, California, the piece was made in the shape of a missile, at 1:1 scale, using the same number of lemons as people and dogs who worked in an adjoining former missile base. The missile was pointed at Japan, where the lemons were to be exported. In Japan this work built upon the strong atmosphere of the abandoned warehouses in which the exhibition was held.

Another highlight was Date and Time, a retrospective of Californian video artist Jim Campbell held in the Nagoya City Art Museum. Campbell’s work uses monitor-sized fields of LEDs, rather than monitors or projection, as the display stage of his video pieces. While this technique recalls pointillism, the grid is coarser, heightening the level of abstraction. In pieces such as Running, Falling the movement of a human within the frame becomes intriguingly ape-like, recalling the ambiguous humanity of the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The performance program favoured live sound/video presentations in the currently popular synchronised eye-candy style. Standing out from the crowd was Faustentechnology, a live audio/visual performance by Quebec duo Alain Thibault and Jan Breuleux. Their tight, minimal beat composition and video footage of abstracted land and cityscapes allowed for dynamic connections between the sounds and images, building on filmmaking techniques. Akiyo Tsubakihara and Yosuke Kawamura’s performance Ambiguous Senses/Misleading Feelings 2, also built upon established techniques, exploring video projection’s possibilities as a spotlight, highlighting small cropped squares of light on the dancer’s body.

Within the academic program, Alex Baghat’s presentation of the public-space noise works of Ultra-Red and Infernal Noise Brigade was engaging and well supported by documentary examples of the artwork. Shawn Decker’s brief talk illuminated his innovative sound installation practice, which employs low tech means in effective ways—using small motor and microprocessor units to trigger sound sculptures that display evolving group behaviours, and various resonators—such as metal buckets—acting as speakers. Decker’s work was inaudible amongst the soupy noise inside the exhibition space. Similarly compromised was Melinda Rackham’s engaging virtual space Empyrean and UK work, 32 000 Points of Light, a sound/video projection by Andy Gracie, Alex Bradley, Duncan Speakman, Matt Mawford and Jessica Marlow. The careful composition and otherwise seductive qualities of these soundtracks were also lost in the noisy setting.

Further serious problems existed—both with the local co-ordinating organisation, Media-Select, and the parent group who oversee the ongoing activities. ISEA is curated by committee, arguably allowing greater diversity and more artists who are less well-known into the program. This approach favours larger scale presentation, as a greater number of interests are represented. However, while a theme usually brings focus, in Nagoya the program was mediocre and half-baked. All the work in the exhibition suffered from overcrowding and most artists were disappointed by the result. By contrast the organisational style of the Multimedia Arts Asia Pacific (MAAP) resulted in a focused and dynamic event. Held recently in Beijing and curated by Kim Machan, MAAP was streets ahead of ISEA in its high standard of presentation, diverse works, artistic and intellectual rigour (see report in RT 54, April-May). Further, all the works in MAAP were operational and ready for public presentation, which could not be said of someworks in ISEA.

The massive number of installations, performances and presentations is an ongoing issue for ISEA and feedback from those who have experienced prior festivals indicates similar problems. Despite a huge production staff of committee members and volunteers there is simply too much, spread over too many venues. ISEA, contrary to its image, is poorly resourced—most artists sourced presentation costs independently. The million dollars necessary to properly mount ISEA’s ambitious program is not there.

More problematic, however, is ISEA’s context. Its original purpose to create international connections for artists in the emerging field of Electronic Art no longer seems relevant 14 years later. Roy Ascott, head of the CAII-Star post-doctoral research organization in the UK, suggested a name change from Electronic to Emergent Art, questioning the absence of work from bio-art, molecular and nano-technology, genetics, consciousness research and paranormal perception.

ISEA needs to shape up or ship out…but whaddya know—their next show is on a very big BOAT!—in the Baltic Sea, with the sharper figure of ex-ANAT Director Amanda McDonald Crowley at the helm as Executive Producer. Its organisational mechanism is already well underway.

ISEA 2002, 11th International Symposium on Electronic Art, Nagoya, Japan, Oct 27-31, 2002.

RealTime issue #53 Feb-March 2003 pg. 24

'There was always more in the world than men could see. The precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast, and a man…no harm to go slow, for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.'

John Ruskin, The Art of Travel

140 years ago, when one could see Europe by train in a week, John Ruskin was distressed by the speed at which we viewed the world, overlooking simplicity, subtlety and detail. These days, when the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts (ISEA) community jets into a global locale to hold their weeklong biannual exhibition and symposium, the desire to go slow is again relevant.

In one of ISEA’s opening dialogues, Japanese media theorist Hiroshi Yoshioka echoed this sentiment emphasising the need for slowness, subtlety, and contemplation when viewing electronic arts. This seemed strange from my gaijin perspective of Japan’s furiously paced technological evolution—its constant production of smaller, faster, cuter things. But there is a new social and cultural movement emerging in Japan, promoting an environmentally friendly, symbiotic lifestyle and discouraging mass consumption and waste. It’s not quite the slacker generation, but organisations like Sloth Club (Namakemono), whose motto is Slow is Beautiful, are embracing slow food and helpful technology. With this cultural insight framing my mood, I sought out the mediated aesthetic of being.

Japanese artist Kaoru Motomiya’s elegant interactive sound installation, California lemon sings a song, a rocket shaped floor installation of Sunkist lemons and traditional Japanese cooking pots connected by copper wire, generates its own electricity, becoming a fruit acid battery. Viewers can smell fresh citrus and hear sounds of greeting card size musical devices when they open the pots. Motomiya says that when she considers electronic arts, she thinks about power generation, not only consumption. The lemons also provoke us to contemplate globalisation, as we fuel our bodies, our own electronic circulatory system, with produce exported from around the world. Nature and technology entwine.

Unfortunately, delicate work like this suffered in the Pier Warehouse Exhibition, where disparate installations were squashed together. The lack of discrete viewing and listening spaces was consistently a problem for my gallery-trained sensibilities. The subtly shifting soundscapes produced by navigating through Squidsoup’s (UK) Altzero multi-user-networked shockwave installation were swamped by surrounding works, as was US-based Beatriz Da Costa’s Cello. This normally well disciplined robotic cello player, which alters its movement and sound according to viewer feedback, reacted erratically to the almost market place cacophony and kept tuning the cello rather than playing through its repertoire.

Faring better, as it relied on touch sensors rather than sound, was Talking Tree, which postulates a posthuman relationship with nature, as Takeshi Inomata and Tsutomu Yamamoto (Japan) search for the intrinsic information on being via a piece of driftwood. Touching the exposed and vulnerable rings of the magnificent sawn-through Kiso River tree stump activates texts on the effects of the unmitigated destruction of the forests and images of the stump’s mountain origin, as a ghostly 20 metre animated tree shadow eerily sways to the sound of axes chopping into the trunk.

Our embodied relationship with technology was a recurring theme in the ISEA Symposium. Academic papers competed for listeners’ attention with the venue’s superb gold and silver flock wallpaper, mirrored ceilings, and intricate sculptural chandeliers. Slovenian artists Darij Kreuth and Davide Grassi spoke of incorporeal communication in networked virtual reality performance. In their production Brainscore, sensors are attached to the head of the performers who remain physically constrained, while their tracked eye movements and electrical pulses from brain waves control their avatars. The vaguely face-shaped avatars consume data from the internet resulting in slow changes to their form, colour, size and location. The changes in turn effect the eye movements and brain functions of the performers, providing a self-sustaining feedback loop between performers and software and generating a projected 3-dimensional choreography of colour, shape and sound for the audience. Boundaries of human and machine consciousness subtly merge.

Another unexpected delight was Jim Campbell’s (US) work, at an associated exhibition in Nagoya City Art Museum. Campbell’s unique style questions the subjective experience of technology. He creates a matrix of varying dimensions, for example 32×24 (768) pixels, out of LEDs on which simple black and white (or red) video images of a person walking across the screen are reproduced. The LED display transforms the visual information into a numerical code resulting in a hauntingly beautiful and simple mediation of analogue metamorphosed into digital. In other works he includes a sheet of diffusing plexiglass in front of the grid to produce a blurring effect, shifting the digital pixel image back to a continuous analogue film image. Simplicity is powerful.

So too in the Electronic Theatre with Patrick Lichty’s fabulous 8 bits or less, a short film on alien abduction. Shot on a Casio WristCam with music produced on Commodore 64, the work proved that lo-tech is every bit as compelling as high fidelity: intricately rendered realism. Slowness and subtlety were also the strength of Anne-Sarah Le Meur’s (France) animation Where It Wants To Appear/Suffer. Simple surfaces meet with slow movement; smooth or fibrous textures, subtle colour and minimal light give the impression of both microcosm and macrocosm. Animal, vegetable and mineral are condensed in underwater or intra-body environments.

Appear/Suffer is the first stage of a virtual environment project, Into the Hollow Of Darkness, based on the viewer’s desire to perceive, about which Le Meur spoke at the symposium. In large-scale projection she intends abstract visual sensation to produce a strange intimacy with the image. Nothing tangible is represented—everything rests upon the power of the images and the reciprocity of the power the viewer has over the images. Abstract representations move away from the viewers as they move towards them; the viewers gradually learn that by becoming passive, motionless, they can pause the forms, or “tame” them as Le Meur suggests. This slow dance of viewing the artwork gives the impression the forms are alive, even looking back at you. Slowness creates intimacy.

My meander through the exhibitions and conference presentations was refreshing, revealing works that seek to seduce rather than control the viewer, immersive and interactive on subtle levels, based on simple principles often backed by complex technology. ISEA aroused my desire for feeling, listening and slowness to provide a delightful respite from knowledge, action and speed. It’s nice to be reminded that contemplation is as valuable as manipulation.

ISEA, Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts biannual exhibition and symposium, Nagoya, Japan, Oct 27-31.

RealTime issue #53 Feb-March 2003 pg. 24-25

We are yet to see what capital can become. So goes the ‘new economy’ mantra as its proponents lay claim to the future, which is synonymous with the ‘free market.’ Mastery of the latter supposedly determines the former. Bubble economies—exemplified most spectacularly with dotcom mania and the tech wreck in April 2000, which saw the crash of the NASDAQ—are perhaps one index of the future-present where the accumulation of profit precedes by capturing what is otherwise a continuous flow of information. Information flows are shaped by myriad forces that in themselves are immaterial and invisible, as they do not register in the flow of information itself. The condition of motion nevertheless indelibly inscribes information with a speculative potential, enabling it to be momentarily captured in the form of trading indices.

Michael Goldberg’s recent installation at Sydney’s Artspace—catchafallingknife.com—combines software interfaces peculiar to the information exchanges of day traders gathered around electronic cash flows afforded by the buying and selling of shares in Murdoch’s News Corporation. With $50,000 backing from an anonymous consortium of stock market speculators cobbled together from an online discussion list of day traders, Goldberg bought and sold News Corp shares during 3 weeks in October-November last year (for background to the installation see RT51).

Information flows are at once inside and outside the logic of commodification. The software design of market charts constitutes an interface between informational nodes and flows. The interface captures and contains—and indeed makes intelligible—what are otherwise quite out of control finance flows. But not totally out of control: finance flows, when understood as a self-organised system, occupy a tense space between absolute stability and total randomness. Too much emphasis upon either condition leaves the actor-network system open to collapse. Evolution or multiplication of the system depends on a constant movement or feedback loops between actors and networks, nodes and flows.

Referring to the early work of political installation artist Hans Haacke, Goldberg explains this process in terms of a “real time system”: “the artwork comprises a number of components and active agents combining to form a volatile yet stable system. Well, that may also serve as a concise description of the stock market…Whether or not the company’s books are in the black or in the red is of no concern—the trader plays a stock as it works its way up to its highs and plays it as the lows are plumbed as well. All that’s important is liquidity and movement. ‘Chance’ and ‘probability’ become the real adversaries and allies.” (Interview with Geert Lovink, www.catchafallingknife.com)

Trading or charting software can be understood as stabilising technical actors that gather information flows, codifying these in the form of “moving average histograms, stochastics, and momentum and volatility markers” (Goldberg). Such market indicators are then rearticulated or translated in the form of online chatrooms, financial news media and mobile phone links to stockbrokers, eventually culminating in the trade. In capturing and modelling finance flows, trading software expresses various regimes of quantification that enable a value-adding process through the exchange of information within the immediacy of an interactive real time system. Such a process is distinct from “ideal time,” in which “the aesthetic contemplation of beauty occurs in theoretical isolation from the temporal contingencies of value” (Ed Shanken, “Art in the Information Age”, www.duke.edu/~giftwrap/ InfoAge.html).

An affective dimension of aesthetics is registered in the excitement and rush of the trade; biochemical sensations in the body modulate the flow of information, and are expressed in the form of a trade. As Goldberg puts it in a report to the consortium halfway through the project after a series of poor trades based on a combination of ‘technical’ and ‘fundamental’ analysis: “It’s becoming clearer to me that in trading this stock one often has to defy logic and instead give in, coining a well-worn phrase, to irrational exuberance.” Here, the indeterminacy of affect subsists within the realm of the processual, where a continuum of relations defines the event of the trade. Yet paradoxically, such an affective dimension is coupled with an intensity of presence where each moment counts; the art of day trading is an economy of precision within a partially enclosed universe.

However, the borders of a processual system are also open to the needs and interests of external institutional realities. The node of the gallery presents what is otherwise a routine operation of a day trader as a minor event, one that registers the growing similarities between art and commerce. Interestingly, the event-space of the gallery expresses the regularity of day trading with a difference that submits to the spatio-temporal dependency news media has on the categories of ‘news worthiness.’

A finance reporter for Murdoch’s The Australian newspaper reports on Goldberg’s installation. Despite the press package, which details otherwise, the journalist attempts to associate Goldberg’s trading capital with an Australia Council grant (which financed the installation costs) as further evidence of the moral and political corruption among the ‘chattering classes.’ In this instance of populist rhetoric, the distinction between quality and tabloid newspapers is brought into question. The self-referentiality that defines organisation and production within the mediasphere prompts a journalist from Murdoch’s local Sydney tabloid, the Daily Telegraph, to submit copy on the event. Unlike the dismissive account in The Australian and the general absence of attention to the project by arts commentators, Goldberg notes how the Daily Telegraph report made front page of the Business section (rather than the News or Entertainment pages), in full colour, with his picture beside the banner headline “Profit rise lifts News.” The headline for Goldberg’s installation was smaller: “Murdoch media the latest canvas for artist trader.”

Here, the system of relations between art and commerce also indicates the importance that storytelling has in an age of information economies. Whether the price of stocks goes up or down, profit value is not shaped by the kind of political critique art might offer, but rather by the kind of spin a particular stock can generate. Goldberg’s installation discloses various operations peculiar to the aesthetics of day trading, clearly establishing a link between narrative, economy, time and risk, performance or routine practice and the mediating role of design and software aesthetics. catchafallingknife.com demonstrates that it is the latter—a theory of software—that still requires much critical attention. And unlike most players in the new economy, Goldberg’s installation was a model of accountability and transparency.

catchafallingknife.com, Michael Goldberg, Artspace, Sydney, Oct 17-Nov 19, 2002. www.catchafallingknife.com

Of all the arts-centres-on-riverbanks in Australia, Brisbane’s Southbank is one of the most distinctive with its string of performing arts venues, a museum, a major gallery, shops, restaurants, a rainforest garden, cafes, a very popular pool and artificial beach, university faculties (including music and visual arts) and, just a block back, a stylish shopping and eating strip replete with IMAX cinema. There’s also the nearby entertainment centre and exhibition halls. And there’s still room for more growth, which will include the new contemporary art home of the Queensland Art Gallery.

Millions of people go to Southbank every year, just passing through, promenading, having an after work drink, on their way for a swim or to see a show or enjoy a street market. This is a great potential audience for the very latest in public art, something that in Australia has been pretty much limited in the public imagination to sculptures, and a fair few controversies among them. Southbank Corporation, which manages the area, has appointed Zane Trow, formerly Artistic Director of The Brisbane Powerhouse Centre for Live Art, as its Director of Public Art. Selected by and working to a brief from the Public Art Advisory Committee (visual artist Jay Younger, Queensland College of the Arts, art theorist Rex Butler, University of Queensland, both from Brisbane, and Melbourne architectural reviewer and design consultant Joe Rollo), Trow has embraced this unique opportunity with his customary passion, planning a 3 year program, the first stage of which will be launched in April this year.

Trow explains, “South Bank Corporation Public Art Committee has developed a policy and I’m the implementation. It will be a mixture of research into permanent works and a time-based temporary installations program, a lot of which is focused around the Suncorp large screen. This is work that will be in the public domain. It’ll be free, sophisticated work with high level production values. There will be 2 or 3 temporary installations a year involving sound and image with performance and durational components for some of the time.”

Trow declares that there are already very good local new media artists working in the direction he wants to go and with whom he is eager to work—artists like Keith Armstrong and Lisa O’Neill of the transmute collective, Igneous (James Cunningham and Suzon Fuks) and Di Ball, as well as international artists he’d like to have working on Southbank. For local artists, says Trow, “it will certainly give them the opportunity to work on a large scale.”

Although he won’t launch his program until April, Trow offers a taste of things to come: he’s bringing UK DJ and sound artist Scanner back to Brisbane, this time to present his large screen performance-remix of the soundtrack of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville with his own score, to be presented late night, outdoors. The event will be accompanied by a impromptu sound/image performance from local artist Lawrence English, I/O 3 and improviser Mike Cooper.

Trow also offers an example of a major work he is pursuing with Elision, Australia’s premier new music ensemble, and, potentially, UK composer Richard Barrett (who collaborated on the company’s Dark Matter in 2001) and leading Australian new media artist, Justine Cooper.

“Allowing key artists to come together to work on a large scale and allowing them access to a large screen and a performative environment,” says Trow, “is unusual in Australia. While there are large screens in this country, a lot of them are tied to special projects for festivals, or for open air film programs, or occasionally in museums. There’ll be one in Melbourne’s Federation Square, which I’m sure ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) will put to good use…but it’s rare to allow artists really playing with performance installations to get their hands on a resource like that. It’s in situ, a very good one, it’s digital—so it can take a line straight out of a laptop or a DVD player—and it’s mobile. There are about 4 locations for it I’ve identified so far, including floating the screen on the river on a barge for a river-based installation. Having it as an asset is fantastic because you don’t have to go to a ridiculously expensive commercial hire company and ask how much it’s going to cost a day. You’ve actually got the thing and a team of people here who know how to use it.”

Trow’s 3 year program includes works he’ll be commissioning, “a couple in partnership with existing events and linking to the Millennium Arts Project.

“That project is a major capital investment by the state into a renovation of the Queensland Museum and the State Library and the development of the contemporary gallery of the Queensland Art Gallery. That gallery will open in 2005 and will be a great opportunity to work within the precinct on ideas of contemporary culture and public space. It all seems to me to be very pertinent to think about the relationship of the public domain with the Feds circling around the idea of charging for admission to gallery spaces…Clearly the philosophy here at Southbank is about protecting the public domain, having a space in the city that is purely about relaxation and recreation, and creating art happenings in it for the interest and amusement of the general public.”

Trow is pleased to be working with a committee that is “thinking away from the idea that art is good for you or educational…We seek to place contemporary and broadly radical art in public space. It might even be easier putting such innovative work in the public domain, rather than sticking it indoors in arts centres and charging. It’s an opportunity to practically engage with ideas of contemporary art and popular culture. That’s what excited me, the prospect of being able to reach out into those areas with artists playing with communications and ideas.”

There are other aspects to Trow’s vision: he wants to encourage sound artists in particular, especially given there’s a new sound system going into Southbank soon. As well, he’s eagerly developing partnerships with festivals (like the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music). The Public Art program will also represent the Corporation in connection with the Percent for Art scheme, which requires developers to allocate funds for artwork on their sites, and the Melbourne Street development which Beth Jackson, formerly of Griffith Artworks, is working on for Southbank, planning permanent artworks.

Trow is looking forward to “twisting up the whole idea of public art” and getting past the inhibiting bureaucratic vision of it that Rex Butler has critiqued so well. “There’s no assumption in our policy,” says Trow, “that Southbank should behave like anyone else…It’s not an arts organisation. It’s a state corporation set up to manage a public space and the thinking here is about public culture and how you can change with the times, dealing with public art, with the business community, with tertiary educational developments…the mix of people is unique. There is a lot of good thinking about activating the river and integrating the entire precinct.”

Glare is a term that has contradictory or polar meanings. Used as a verb, ‘to glare’ is to fix with a fierce or piercing stare. As a noun, the word takes on different connotations. The glare is a strong dazzling light, an oppressive light that shines with tawdry brilliance. In the former sense, the glare fixes; in the latter it undoes fixity and creates dispersion. Jay Younger’s survey exhibition, Glare, at the University of Queensland’s Art Museum, plays with these contradictions. The tension between the expressed ideological intentions of the artist and the work’s blinding exuberance makes this exhibition rewarding and fascinating.

Glare is not a retrospective, but provides the opportunity to view and review the artistic output of one of Queensland’s most significant contemporary artists. Younger has played a formidable role in the development of contemporary art in Brisbane over the past 2 decades, not just as an artist, but also an educator, curator and mover and shaker in the arts. The social and political consciousness that has enabled her to contribute so profoundly to the development of contemporary art in Queensland also provides the central impetus for her artwork.

This impetus is most apparent in Younger’s installation works of the early 90’s. For Glare, she recreated the grotesque installation work Gormandizer (1993). In a critique of the inflexible concrete structures of masculinist culture, the artist coated a cement mixer in pink sugar. In her hands, this object becomes a great gustatory machine, chewing and dribbling forth a rich mucous of glucose and faux jewels. Other significant installations from that period, Big Wig and Charger (1995) and Trance of the Swanky Lump (1997), are included in the exhibition as video documents.

Big Wig and Charger is the most breathtaking and ambitious of Younger’s installations. It involved 30 women who, in turn, took their place (heads protruding through a hole in the floor of the gallery) beneath an enormous suspended Marie Antoinette wig. While it’s difficult for documentation to capture the immediacy of such an event, Younger’s video creates a powerful narrative that heightens the drama and suspense of the work. In editing the footage, she cuts between scenes of the vulnerable heads of the women, the wig, an idling Valiant Charger in an adjoining car park, and a third space in which headless bodies dangle from scaffolding. Through her focus on the tension of the rope holding the wig aloft, Younger creates a sense of impending doom. In this video documentation and in her re-presentation of Trance of the Swanky Lump, Younger is a consummate storyteller.

Whilst the work in the survey spans the period between 1987 and 2002, it provides the artist with the opportunity to showcase her latest photographic work, the ‘tropical noir’ series Ulterior. Using the glitter and glitz of 70’s kitsch tropicana, Younger has created a pungent tropical noir setting as a backdrop against which to revisit some of the notorious underworld stories and characters of the Fitzgerald era. For Younger, Ulterior aims to break through the illusion that Queensland is a carefree tropical paradise, revealing corruption as a persistent holographic presence.

Stylistically, Ulterior appears to have its genesis in the series of cibachrome photographs, Combust (1991), conceived during an artist-in-residency in the Australia Council’s Verdaccio studio in Italy. In this earlier work, the message is direct and simply composed. In Combust II (1991), a sparkling green pineapple rocket blasts off Las Vegas-style, leaving a trail of pink stardust, whilst in Combust III (1991) the burning letters N O come careening to earth. In the tropical noir photographs, the message is more obtuse with each image highly decorative and crammed full of signifiers. There is a vaguely uneasy feeling of trouble in paradise, but these stirrings don’t seem to unsettle the status quo. It is so easy to get swept up in the decorous glitz and celebration of a place where it is ‘beautiful one day, perfect the next.’ The ‘troubling signifiers’ in the photographs (images of characters from the Fitzgerald Inquiry era) appear as Christmas baubles on an overblown palm tree rather than characters from notorious underworld stories. Perhaps this is Younger’s point, to confront Queensland’s ‘cultural and political amnesia.’ However, the danger is that this meaning does not carry beyond the specific context of post-Fitzgerald Queensland. The works themselves become emblems of decadence and excess rather than a critique of them.

The magnificent full colour monograph that accompanies the exhibition comes complete with commissioned essays by Beth Jackson and Juliana Engberg, and extensive theoretical explanations of the individual works. It establishes the socio-political context for Younger’s work. Here lies the dilemma at the heart of any discussion of this artist’s work. The explanations enable the viewer to trace the political and theoretical impulses underpinning each of the works. Yet the contextual framing provided by the catalogue text tends to be didactic, prescribing in advance how the work is to be read, rather than allowing it to speak on its own playful terms. For example, Big Wig and Charger, Gormandizer and Trance of the Swanky Lump are claimed to offer a feminist critique of masculinist culture. In a similar way, Ulterior critiques what Younger sees as the political amnesia of the post-Fitzgerald era. However, at the level of the material and the visceral, the works move beyond political critique. In this tension I am reminded of Drusilla Modjeska’s claim that “art takes us not into political argument, or not only, but towards the ‘inviolate enigma of otherness in things and in animate presences’” (Modjeska, D, Timepieces, Picador, Sydney, 2002). Jay Younger’s work may be critique, but through it we are moved beyond critique into a realm of visceral corporeal pleasure.

Glare, Jay Younger, installations 1987-2002, Art Museum, University of Queensland, Dec 7-Jan 18, 2002

In her video installation, Lineage of the Divine, Monika Tichacek weaves a complex and visually sumptuous narrative. The protagonist, New York personality Amanda Lepore, is trussed in a salmon-pink, 1950s tailored suit, blonde hair in a net, lips overripe and gleaming, feet squeezed into precarious high heels. The figure paces a room with small, delicate steps, arms crossed, striking a pose in full awareness of being on display. This fetishistic assertion of archetypal femininity raises suspicions about the ‘true’ gender of the figure: is this really a woman or is ‘she’ just acting out? The figure appears to scan the gallery space, which also screams feminine cliché with its walls of studded pink satin, recalling a padded cell as much as the frou-frou bedhead that might grace a girl’s suburban bedroom. The feminine symbolism is interrupted by unmistakably phallic antlers that protrude from the wall, reinforcing the fetishistic yet sexually ambiguous ambience. The antlers, cast in resin in various sizes, evoke a dangerous male sexuality, but also look like children’s sporting trophies.

Close-ups and slow pans fragment and confuse the viewer’s perspective of the figure and the room, although it eventually becomes clear that there are 2 almost indistinguishable personae. The central figure is contemplating another, who lies sleeping, attired in identical clothes and make-up—this is the artist herself. A panning shot reveals that the 2 are conjoined by their hair—a blonde switch that snakes around the room, like an umbilical cord. The first figure slowly comes to touch the other, takes the other’s head in her lap before kneading her face and waking her. All the movements are slow and deliberate, choreographed actions intended for public view not for intimate exchange. Under her pink suit the artist wears flesh-coloured prosthetic casings on her limbs and torso that appear to be attached by strings and hooks to her skin. The first figure pulls these, scratching between flesh and plastic as if to manipulate, or liberate, the other. This scene is underscored by a video image on the facing wall that depicts the artist in prosthetics almost entirely still, breathing shallowly as though in an effort to control pain. She appears compelled to witness the scene opposite, over which she has no control.

Tichacek’s tableau recalls Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits, where the painter often expressed her sexually and culturally conflicted identity through the representation of physical pain, integrating the prosthetics she needed to contain her ravaged body into her compositions. In The Two Fridas, the artist represented herself as 2 women, separate but inseparable, sharing blood and holding hands, but riven by cultural contradictions (one wears indigenous Mexican garb, the other the high-collared lace of Spanish dress). Kahlo exquisitely aestheticised her pain and incapacity, her prosthetics and broken spine are as much a literal depiction of her experience as metaphors for her condition as a Mexican woman of a certain class. This aestheticisation, and extreme feminisation, of prosthetics, pain and incapacity, of dependence and strictured movement, also has a strong presence in Tichacek’s work, as does the metaphor of a divided self. Indeed, the symbolism in Lineage of the Divine crosses well into the bounds of overkill, though it is clear that this excess, this hysterical accumulation of charged signs, is very much the intention of the artist, as she forces us to confront the cultural phenomenon of femininity as well as the process of artistic creation. In seeking to articulate both art and sexual identity, the artist necessarily falls back on the language and gesture of cultural stereotypes. This sense of the need to speak with a borrowed tongue is echoed later in the video’s loose narrative, when the first figure lip syncs and shimmies a la Marilyn Monroe to Secret Love, Doris Day’s hit song that later became emblematic of closet lesbianism. The figure appears fated to perform this ritual of celebrity sexual tease; unable to speak her own language, she is forced to communicate through cliché.

However the overall effect of Tichacek’s installation is neither clichéd, nor a familiar exercise in parody and pastiche. Rather, what the artist has created is a seductively claustrophobic but moving evocation of the self-imposed strictures of identity, particularly but not exclusively, those of femininity and the artist. Like the central character in Bergman’s Persona, Tichacek’s protagonist discovers herself through and exploits her muse, is entirely beholden to and relies on her for her very survival, but rejects her, recovers the power of speech through her muse’s confessions but keeps her most intimate thoughts for others. She is one and the same person, but also entirely estranged from herself. Lineage of the Divine powerfully captures this complicity and estrangement between the authentic self and that reliant on cultural stereotype for realisation.

Lineage of the Divine, Monika Tichacek, part of group exhibition Cerebellum for Sydney Gay Games, curator Gary Carsley, The Performance Space, Sydney, Nov 2002. www.performancespace.com.au

Air Kiss’s glowing jumble of deep blue and red light globes dangle in clusters and loop along the walls. Heavy and lovely, lolly-coloured, mouth-shaped, they bloom from the top of columns and drape in strings across the space. Marshalled in corners, each gleaming bulb is linked by a series of wires that spread like secret commands. Yet while they seem to speak of fairs or parties, of Christmas trees and celebrations, beneath their ostensibly cheery appearance courses a vaguely disturbing energy. Contrary to initial impression, the globes are not necessarily celebratory: they could as easily belong to the corpse of a party freshly abandoned as to one waiting to happen.

Traditionally used as decoration, the coloured light globe here is transformed and elevated. As the sole constituent of the work, the globes do not decorate anything—there is nothing to decorate. They enhance nothing, and embellish only empty space. Thus we are welcomed to a floating world of appearances, of deceptive substantiality and ultimately hollow expression. Steven Carson treads a fine line, but successfully. Referring to a world in which style is favoured over substance, he neatly avoids the obvious pitfall of recreating such façadism.

The periodic interruption of the otherwise silent space by an interval of tumultuous music functions to further heighten the viewer’s sense of alienation. All excitement and fanfare, the clamorous crash of bright, harsh, disco-brashness seems to herald some impending event which remains unrealised, its promise unfulfilled. Cut short as unexpectedly as it begins—and before the viewer’s heartbeat has time to calm—this sudden interruption causes the quiet space to reverberate. Its subsequent and abrupt termination results in a resounding disquiet, leaving the space as echoingly hollow as that superficial gesture of affection—as empty as an air kiss.

Such uncertainty enriches Carson’s exploration of the peripheral spaces of mainstream culture and his subsequent manifestation of these metaphorical spaces into literal space. In considering the sub-fields that exist within social life and creative activity, it is to these fringes that both the arts and gay communities—this work was part of the 2002 FEAST Festival—are often relegated. Air Kiss, with its edgy atmosphere of ambiguity, connotes nightclub, brothel and the back alleys of illicit deals and encounters. The sense of seedy glamour—an ambience evoked by its illumination in shades of make-out-room red and druggie-deterrent blue—makes it a place where such ‘alternative’ lives could-can-be lived.

Air Kiss, Steven Carson, Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, Nov 21-Dec 20 2002.

Friday nights in February in Canberra, The National Museum of Australia will be the place to be from 7.30pm till midnight as the Museum hosts Sky Lounge, a unique showcase of Australian and international animation, DJs, VJs, electronica, multimedia and graffiti art.

Sky Lounge gives young artists a chance to share their work in a spectacular venue with a national profile and provides young Canberra audiences with greater access to some cutting edge urban culture. It’s also an innovative venture for a museum more usually frequented by an older or family audience. Let’s hope it’s the first of many, with copycats in the form of other nocturnal events in museums and galleries across the country.

Each program combines live performances by some of Australia’s top electronic artists and DJs with animated films on the big and sky screens, projected art, multimedia interactives and graffiti.

Malcolm Turner (Animation Posse) has assembled No future, no past…only present, a collection of 50 animated films from young international filmmakers including work from the Amateur Developers Handbook; Tout Va Tres Bien, a unique take on 3D imaging from France’s Soo-Mi Sung; “cool music, cool tools and cool ideas” in S-Crash by Lindsay Cox and Victor Holder (Australia); Drawing the War, a kerbside view of urban warfare by Lena Merhej (Lebanon); and Pandorama “a camera-less film” by Nina Paley (US).

Visual artist, curator and writer David Sequiera has gathered his Future Projections from well-known as well as emerging multimedia artists. Images by Anne Zahalka, Mark Kimber, John Nicholson, Matthew Higgins, Mike Parr, Anne McDonald, Justin Andrews and David Stephenson will be projected onto the walls of the White Cube in the Garden of Australian Dreams. ANU’s Australian Centre for Arts and Technology is putting together an interactive artwork using multimedia created by students.

You can watch the walls of the White Cube further transformed by some of Canberra’s best graffiti artists (Sinch, Kiosk, Atune) whose work will morph and evolve over the 4 weeks of Sky Lounge. And if you’ve got a minute, you can design futuristic vehicles and buildings and see your creations come to life in a 3D theatre in Futureworld.

Seb Chan from the seminal Sub Bass Snarl curated the Hip Hop program which includes The New Pollutants from Adelaide specialising in “a mish-mash of 8-bit hiphop, beat-driven electronica, funk-laden breaks and dark-themed soundtracks for 80s computer games and film scores” and hiphop with “Australian flava” from Sydney’s The Herd.

Two other Sydney bands put in an appearance: Prop combine minimalism, jazz, funk, trance, dub, techno, classical and groove; Katalyst draw influences from hiphop, funk, soul, soundtracks and jazz. Local hiphop act Koolism is also on the bill along with Toby 1 from Adelaide, self-professed makers of “the laptop rock of the future, creating tracks and processing vocals and instruments in real time.” International guests include DJ Scanner and Tipper (UK) and Andrew Pekler (Germany).

The programs are organised into themes (Retro Future, February 7; Beauty, Feb 14; Hip Hop, Feb 21; and Abstract, Feb 28). The artists are different each night but every program has a mix of live electronic music, film and projection. So choose your vibe or go for the lot. After suffering all that smoke, Canberra deserves a Sky Lounge. RT

Narelle Autio’s series of 6 colour photographs, Faith, reveals the dual aspects of her theme—as blind people are led through Sydney streets by their guide dogs, light suddenly illuminates each scene as if uncannily choreographed from above. Autio’s work is part of PhotoTechnica’s She Saw, an exhibition of documentary photography, which contains both recent and older works from well-known and emerging women photographers.

Deep and dark, as if shot at twilight, and full of elongated shadows, the images in Faith contain sharp lines, cones or pinpoints of blazing light, which briefly illuminate the sometimes claustrophobic city settings. These moody cityscapes suggest the shadowed, or completely dark experience of moving through the chaos of the city with no, or limited sight. Some of her subjects, Autio says, can just make out bright casts of sunlight, or feeling the heat of a sudden shaft, will sometimes ask if she took a shot at that moment.

Faith—that the blind invest in the dogs who lead them on their regular routes—is central to these works but so is the examination of public and private space. Guide dogs require a clear box-shape around them to work, which means Autio had to keep well away from her subjects while working, in order not to confuse the dogs who’d grown familiar with her scent. Despite the often crowded settings there is a spaciousness in her composition: footpaths appear like welcome clearings in a crowded grove, train tracks stretch into the distance, suggesting other journeys.

Jackie Ranken photographs places from a great height, and virtually upside down. Ranken’s 8 silver gelatin prints of her home town of Goulburn were made during near-acrobatic manoeuvers in her father’s plane. Prohibited from acrobatic flying above the town, Ranken’s 74 year old dad has perfected the art of tipping his Tiger Moth’s wing to the ground without flipping it so his daughter can capture her evocative shots of the town’s geography. Including both manufactured and natural structures shot from the air, and therefore lacking horizon lines, these Urban Aerial Abstracts take a while to decipher visually. In this sense, like Autio, Ranken prompts us to consider what we take for granted in our ways of seeing, to become aware of how we scan a photograph, assuming we’ll rapidly discover its direct connection to the real.

In Ranken’s work, what looks like a series of boxy houses divided by roads turns out to be a graveyard bisected with paths and then, stepping back, a flag. The circular formations of rose gardens or dams look more like urban forms of crop circle, all their detail miniaturised and made strange; the overlapping roads of the Goulburn bypass become a marvellous spirograph that leads the eye around its curves.

Ranken’s approach lovingly transforms everyday structures into something new. The sweeping lines and textures here remind me of work by some Indigenous artists (Rover Thomas for example) where bold shapes describe features on a 2D landscape. The flatness of Ranken’s style gives the work an appealing abstraction in a show of mostly realist documentary photography.

Moving even further into the stratosphere is Spaced Out at the Australian Centre for Photography. Part of the Sydney Festival, this collection of international and local works examines both real and imagined deep space, space travel and humankind’s continual search for new territory, or life beyond the earth.

In the ACP foyer William Eakin’s series of pigment inkjet prints memorialise the Russian cosmonauts of the early years of space travel. Eakin’s (Canada) series includes space memorabilia—A US Moon Landing Badge and a Japanese collector card featuring cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Beside these are several sepia head shots of other Russian cosmonauts; in circular frames they look a little like Russian icon paintings, or faces peering from portholes in antiquated rockets, or from space helmets. These once famous men stare out from black backgrounds pocked with tiny white stars. Eakin’s work reminds us how quickly what was once revolutionary can pass into the frozen zone of kitsch.

Also referencing popular mythologies of space are Ronnie Van Hout’s inket prints in the gallery proper. Each print contains a suitably discomforting concept in the form of white lettering—ABDUCT, UFO, CREATURE, HYBRID—against differing, spookily green landscapes. The word STRANGER appears to melt, morph or pulse before your eyes, and though it’s a trick of the dim gallery light, this animated quality effectively evokes the sci-fi schlock cinema of the 50s which Melbourne-based Van Hout references. While the exhibition notes claim The artist’s work is “less about outer space than the caricaturing and dramatising of cold war insecurities” the oversized white lettering and the hilly backdrops in his MONSTER shot also suggest the mythical land where such films were created, reminding me of the HOLLYWOOD hills where silicon enhancement and Botox are spawning new forms of life but not as we know it.

Juxtaposed against David Malin’s astronomical imaging, South Australian Holly Wilson’s fabricated galaxies and starbursts look remarkably convincing. Reminding us that our fantasies of space are often at least visually linked to reality, Wilson conjures the pocked, rough, corroded surface of a blue planet, the white explosion of a starbirth, by manipulating chemicals on pieces of film.

I find I can only make sense of photographic scientist Malin’s brightly coloured images by imagining them as something closer to home. They make me think of our own deep spaces. A brightly coloured swirling galactic mass looks like something protozoic, something possibly internal; a crimson webby expanse appears more like the surface of the womb shot with a surgical camera than anything out there.

Russian Yuri Batourin turns the camera back to earth from space, revealing the blue curve of our planet, the white-flecked oceans that cover most of its surface. Cited in the notes as a “21st century version of snaps from the plane, the hotel, the conference centre,” Batourin’s work captures the kind of views most of us will never witness. However, a quick search on the Internet reveals that for the wealthy, space travel is now a possibility. For a mere $US20 million (plus 6-months to a year of training, possible nausea while aboard and backaches after landing) you can spend 8-days in the International Space Centre and souvenir your own shot from beyond our universe. Spaced Out makes me wonder how soon it will be before the moon, now colonised, photographed and souvenired; mapped, charted and traversed becomes simply another (expensive) suburb of Earth.

She Saw. Australian Women Documentary Photographers, curated by Karra Rees, Photo Technica, Chippendale, Jan 18-Feb 15

Spaced Out, curators Alasdair Foster & Reuben Keehan, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney Festival, Paddington, Jan 10-Feb 1

LOCATION: As a co-founder of Squatspace, the artist-run gallery that operated from the Broadway squats in Sydney in the 90s, Lucas Ihlein is a veteran negotiator of the use of public and private spaces. For the duration of their latest exhibition, BILATERAL, Ihlein and collaborator Jane Simon negotiated to live in the Experimental Art Foundation (EAF) gallery in Adelaide. This challenges the dominant mode of exhibitions, where the artist simply installs the work and leaves, rarely taking an interest in its multiple effects and reinforcing the idea of art and the gallery as a kind of placeless, autonomous world. Although the work is a response to Adelaide, it brings other places into tension with the gallery: 3 exhibited works were made on the 1999 Artists Regional Exchange Project (ARX5) in Perth (dream narratives on typewriter rolls), Hong Kong (business cards with gnomic pseudo-proverbs in English, German and Cantonese) and Singapore (copies of a small booklet, My Typewriter Only Speaks English, featuring found and original images and texts).

MATERIAL: BILATERAL makes use of old and new writing/inscription technologies: nostalgic and playful, slow before fast, paying attention to everyday, seemingly inconsequential remainders. Rubber stamps, silk screen prints, stencilled letters and Letraset reference 60s and 70s network art practices, while contemporary technologies are used in refreshing, ordinary ways. A VCR suspended in a net throws an oblique projection of an aeroplane flight path over Sydney across 2 walls and above a bed. SMS messages form the basis of textpadpomes, for example, CAN’T READ/SCREEN CRACKED and POLAROID HAS GONE BUST SO STOCK UP ON FILM CAUSE THEY WON’T MAKE IT ANYMORE. As postcards these sell for $1 each—here in Adelaide there aren’t too many buyers. The touch-ability of the work and its invitation to participate is unusual and meets with resistance as well as engagement. A couple of people I ask think the sign “please buy” doesn’t mean what it says, that it’s some sort of trick, part of the ‘art.’ The use of discarded and found materials draws attention to the processes of making. The gallery becomes a workshop, or a sweatshop (I spend ages ironing T-shirts, others carefully/tediously stamp textpadpome postcards). Cheap white cotton T-shirts are stencilled with national stereotypes: ALL-DANES-ARE-HYPER-CONFORMIST-FASHION-VICTIMS; ALL AMERICANS ARE OBNOXIOUS; ALL AFGHANS ARE QUEUE JUMPERS. The blackboard invites guests/visitors to add more stereotypes eg south australians only have 4 types of love. Ihlein prints some of these during the exhibition, adding to the extensive collection.

INTER-ACTIONS: The work generates several special events and day to day interactions with gallery visitors which involve collaborators, ring-ins, and chance encounters. For instance, a screening of films about film (Samuel Beckett’s Film and Gustav Deutsch’s Film Ist) is introduced with a parodic discussion between local and interstate Beckett scholars (with EXPAT and EXPERT stencilled on their T-shirts) littered with false information, pretentious misreadings and spurious pseudo-debates. The screening is then ‘interrupted’ by a rare performance of AM Fine’s Piece for Fluxorchestra (1966)—24 performers recruited from local likely suspects. In the tiny Iris cinema (40 stuffed-tight leather seats) the work performs itself during the interval and is completed by unscripted interjections from a baby in the front row. In Event for Touristic Sites the exhibition takes to the streets during the Christmas Pageant, with Ihlein and collaborators bearing T-shirts stencilled with national stereotypings and armed with a digital video and Polaroid camera. Ihlein makes strategic use of local resources, from people to venues and events, in return making himself available to all and sundry, from dream researchers to community arts network meetings, to a local activist who also squatted in the gallery using it as a resource to make papier mâché guns.

IMMATERIAL: “The only 3d work I do is farming.” Artist statement. Contact letters fixed to the wall.

JUDGEMENT: The scattering of books and journals from the EAF library, along with Ihlein’s notes, work as a kind of open manuscript of work-in-progress showing sources and influences. The practice is performative and pedagogical, spontaneous and historical. From one of the typewriters:

6 crates filled with assorted reading materials ferdinand pessoa poems, ferrara poems, sausage roll 2.20 by simon barney, Dangerous Darwinism (‘i aint descended from no ape’), the chinese literary scene by Kai-Yu Hsu; Spine 3; Mafia for beginners; Audio on Wheels; The Australian Friday November 5th “free Trade Fight Against Terror” WTO in sysdney pic of a protestor (mid twenty sometting-backpack) being wrest hauled away by three police—one looking particularly peeved.”(sic.)

“To settle on private land without pretence or title” is one of the more archaic definitions of ‘squat.’ The works and events at the EAF are fuelled by Ihlein’s engagement with the everyday politics and practices of squatting on disused private properties. In turning the gallery into his own ‘borrowed’ personal space, interactions with local artists and writers, gallery visitors, students and staff become key elements of the ethics and aesthetics of the event: Ihlein offers coffee and biscuits to gallery visitors and makes himself continually available for questions and discussions. It could sound horribly worthy but somehow he brings a light, playful tone that sidesteps the moralising often associated with activist art practices. He says the whole experience of living in the gallery and interacting continually with visitors, often for hours at a time, though productive, is also profoundly disconcerting and exhausting. There is a major ambiguity in this gesture: on the one hand, Ihlein’s desire to be present and to monitor and intervene in audiences’ responses to the work could extend the notion of artistic control by manipulating the reading of the work. However, it also involves gestures of hospitality, generosity and vulnerability: a politics of networked exchange and encounter. Plans for future work include screenings of the Expanded Cinema [pioneering new media and multimedia] films of the late 60s and early 70s.

Lucas Ihlein, BILATERAL Residency and Exhibition, Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, Oct 25-Nov 16, 2002

We are 19 artists from around the country. We have entered ART CAMP—a hothouse in a cold place, an engagement with strange new processes and eccentric new people, shacking up in buildings so identical that they could only have been built by the military.

We are in Wagga Wagga. (So good they named it twice, a joke Andrew Morrish told at least twice every day. Only he could pull that off and still be funny.) We declare interests in hybridity and collaboration. Aided and abetted by 6 artist/facilitators, several project staff and a regular flow of visitors we pursue the game plan: operate in close quarters, exploit provided equipment and stir like crazy.

There’s a 20-minute walk from the accommodation to the studio spaces. Distance makes surprising things possible. There are conversations to be had, alliances to make, happenings to plot, dinner and drinks to contemplate, hangovers to nurse, people to meet and places to imagine. There wasn’t enough time in today’s workshop to debrief, to regroup, and to imagine beyond the scope of that last exercise. What happens next? Can anyone suggest what can be done with 3 balaclavas, 4 walkie-talkies, a couple of video cameras, and an explicit body or 2? Let’s make a show, quick and dirty. It’s not such a big ask, and there’s no pressure, but as she leant on the bar one night, co-curator Sarah Miller firmly requested a revolution. Our time starts now.

For the first week Melbourne dancer Ivan Thorley and I watch the late news every night, waiting for a declaration of war on Iraq, waiting for World War 3, wondering what will happen here in Wagga Wagga in response. Will this elite artist think-tank come up with an effective intervention strategy—a performative weapon of mass distraction?

Week 1: We get into workshop mode for a few days. Technical and technology workshops (hardware and software) and performance workshops offered in response to our developing interests. A grab bag of ideas, exercises and ordeals, introductions into the aesthetics and personalities of the facilitators—the exquisitely rambling improvisations of Morrish, the laconic wit and DIY approach to projection of Margie Medlin, and the strategically timed eccentric pronouncements and lateral speculations of Derek Kreckler with his ever present camera. In these early days we meet the other artist/inmates on the floor in a controlled environment, steered towards new options to stock up the performative toolbox.

The performance workshops asked difficult questions—interrogate everything you think you know. Why do you do what you do? You have 60 seconds. You’re not convincing enough. Why is what you do important? What would you die for? Face the provocation and terror of the impossible task and HAVE A RESPONSE. Face the fear and make it constructive; turn it into art. Get rid of all of that prepared statement, it’s rubbish. It doesn’t mean anything here and now. Be honest. Be real. What would you die for (how do I address this question in the performance act)? Find a better answer. You have 10 minutes. Your time starts now.

Under the interrogating eyes of Robert Pacitti, Helen Paris and Leslie Hill (RT51, p21) the first week’s workshops weren’t always pretty or fun. It was intense, and sometimes I wasn’t sure it was constructive to face these demons. What sustains us? Are we building a culture of sustainable practice? A different question, equally difficult to answer: are we building alliances here, or are we scoping out the competition?

This intensity needed an outlet. The night of the balaclavas—trouble that was itching to happen. We needed to slip out of the reach of the helpful guiding hands, go crazy and meet in the space that only madness makes possible. It was sweaty, wild and stupid and signalled a turning point in hybrid performance. At least I think that’s what the signal meant—there was no peripheral vision through the balaclava eyeholes, and the walkie-talkie people were speaking in code. Or maybe it was gibberish. There’s a fine line—is this a performance about stupidity, or are we just being stupid? In this late night drunken performance art event gone wrong I gathered a partial view of art making practices across the country. It was exciting, unexpected, and dangerous. This was new territory. The opposition was smart, organised and focused. They obviously know how to secure funding, how to play the game to win. They were up against the drunken individualists, few of whom were playing the same game. The diversion (a beautiful performance by Paul Gazzola) drew us far beyond the point of sense, to the place at the collapse of language; to the question—is this still a game? Meanwhile, saboteurs from the other team rearranged home base—a performance re-installation, an act of domestic deconstruction. An aside—what does it mean that we bonded through enacting a terrorist scenario? What stories were we telling ourselves about ourselves here? Were we filtering the zeitgeist so literally?

Week 2: There’s not much time—make as much as you can. Go crazy. Go beyond what is possible. And we did. This event was not product-orientated, but we had several nights of showings, sometimes 4 or 5 pieces of collaborative work per night. Overload. Breathless debriefs and late night alcohol-fuelled critiques. We needed to stop and reflect. (This was after all, a space outside of the production necessities that destroy the possibilities of reflection, a space for fuelling up, taking stock and projecting into the future, something we didn’t often allow ourselves time for). But with the results of 20 artist collaborations and experiments to experience, time for discussion outside of the informal was impossible. The hybrid practice we stopped talking about after the first few days finally arrived. No one saw it coming, but suddenly it was here—the difference engine was fuelled up and ready for a test drive. Is this hybrid performance—the point at which aesthetic difference is transformed from an obstacle to be surmounted into something important and necessary—difference as a site for investigation, difference as the engine that drives the work, that makes this investigation not just possible but vital? Is hybrid performance always this unexpected, this strange, this unnameable?

Suddenly the last drop of wine has left the bottle and it’s time to hit the long road home. One last shared meal at a restaurant for the condemned and we disperse across the country like a virus, taking with us the seeds for hundreds of potential projects, a network of future collaborators and a support network par excellence. I’m ready. I’m ready like I’ve never been to begin the serious work. We’ve just arrived at the important bit of the conversations. We’ve got past the first names, past the need for politeness. This is the juicy stuff. Something worth fighting for, and yes, if necessary, dying for. We’re still waiting for the war, and we’ll facilitate the revolution slowly. We’re stocking up new ammunition as I write. This is a beginning.

Time_Place_Space 1, Facilitators: curious.com (Leslie Hill and Helen Paris), Derek Kreckler, Margie Medlin, Andrew Morrish, Robert Pacitti; participants: Keith Armstrong, Steve Bull, Mick Byrne, Anna Davis, Leon Ewing, Ruth Fleishman, Brian Fuata, Paul Gazzola, Scott Howie, Catherine Jones, Kelli McCluskey, Russell Milledge, Jason Sweeney, Karen Therese, Ivan Thorley, Chi Vu, Julie Vulcan, David Williams, Rebecca Youdell; co-curators: Sarah Miller (PICA), Julianne Pierce (ANAT), Fiona Winning (Performance Space); Project Manager: Jacqueline Bosscher; Technical support: Simon Wise; Wagga Wagga, September 15-28, 2002 www.performancespace.com.au

red message service is a Hobart-based improvisation ensemble comprising is theatre ltd director Ryk Goddard and physical theatre performers Martin Coutts and Laura Purcell. The group creates a full-length improvisation performance—not theatre-sports games, but full-on physical theatre. They create lush, absurdist, minimalist performance in a self-organizing space while the ensemble is conversely configured by that space.

On a virtually bare stage 99 white balloons, inflated to the size of light bulbs, pulsate with eerie promise. Cradled in Coutts’ arms the balloon-bulbs are held in an ambivalence of capture, containment and embrace. There are no explanations or revelations. The performers co-exist in the space, insistently building images of association and dissociation through the interplay of movement, text, light and sound.

While running in slow motion the performers register amazement. Their quick-fire-language suggests, yet equally denies, explanation or revelation. Purcell engages in the erotic lunacy of tasting clouds on a rainy day—a movement and message for unstable times. The audience is denied any chance of tying the performers into the tired meaning systems of old codes.

Four strands of illuminated blue and red strips stretch across the space. The challenge for the performers is to find their own footsteps and negotiate the potential of each line. red message service responds by offering a user’s course guide, creating instances of intimate alliance and rupture via a domestic clothesline, a cable car to Mount Wellington and a line for carrying a digital global message.

red message service appropriates elements of life in the digital age, showing alternate possibilities for thought. Paradoxically, each improvised situation requires a semblance of resolution before generating the next response to that resolution, producing a continuous folding of reaction and response.

“Into each life some sweet rain must fall,” sings Billie Holiday while Coutts, Goddard and Purcell explore contemporary addiction to the banal promise of the 7 steps to happiness. The balloon-bulbs invite sensuous contact and the performers oblige, holding them against their lips in a scrabble of lust and squeaking.

The entanglements of human life recur throughout the performance. They erupt in Goddard’s dexterous self-gagging, Coutts’ percussive washing-machine stomp offset by the Washington Machine, Goddard’s self-demeaning inner voice, and Purcell’s ability to extend movement into potent dance statement. The performers cling to each other like static electricity before their 2 against 1 triangular pattern segues into childhood ostracism and bullying. The excluded becomes the excluding. Instantly the energy aligns differently, everything implodes and the configuration changes.

The laundry line is replaced by a folding of cloth. The performers sit with shrouds over their faces, accentuating their visible, yet invisible features. We gaze through the cloth to an outline of promise. red message service ensemble challenges the audience to create different thinking of and for themselves.

red message service, performers Ryk Goddard, Martyn Coutts, Laura Purcell; lighting design Jen Cramer; lighting operator Jody Kingston; sound Sarah Duffus; Backspace, Hobart, Nov 22-23

Listening to the plaudits from participants, the first Time_Place_Space hybrid performance workshop seems to have been a success, so much so that the second is announced to take place from Sept 21 to Oct 5. Time_Place_Space is a unique opportunity for Australia’s contemporary performance makers to test their ideas, visions and plans against those of their peers and mentors from home and abroad. The vital element, says co-curator and Performance Space Artistic Director Fiona Winning, is the 2 weeks of isolation that the workshop provides in a rural setting and without pressures of public showing and fast tracking. “We’ll be in Wagga Wagga again, hermetically sealed, enjoying a very potent time, honoring a precious opportunity but not being too ambitious about what can emerge. The model will be similar to 2002 with some artists overlapping and maybe one of the previous facilitators.” Winning and co-curator Sarah Miller (Artistic Director, PICA) are keen to get more experienced participating artists at all stages in their careers into the mix for 2003, “so that it’s not just the dynamic between facilitators and artists that’s at work but between artist and artist.”

Winning explains that “the focus of Time_Place_Space is on performance—hybrid performance. The live body is an essential part of everybody’s work, but some of the participants aren’t performers or performance makers but have a link with it through installation, film, design…”

The 3 overseas facilitators in the first Time_Place_Space were UK-based. Winning says that was incidental but admits “the appeal is of a strong live art community and practice in the UK. It’s diverse and interesting and has good teachers and facilitators.” She says there’ll be a broader international presence in future. The first to be announced for 2003 is a Time_Place_Space coup: Toronto-based artist Michelle Terran, a leader in collaborative digital performance and installation works with a focus on mediated relationships. As she writes in her artist’s statement this is about “the paradox of amplified intimacy to somebody who is far away, mediating or hybridizing spaces (physical and internet space, physical and screen space, public and private space, local and global space) and experiencing what happens in between.”

A visual artist who has moved into the digital, Terran describes her practice as involving “live performance/installations using technologies that address issues such as social networks, presence and the interplay between (media) spaces. My work covers live installations, online performance, telepresence, live art, video, networked collaboration, lab spaces, art and social play.” Terran’s vivid and playful work is informed, she writes, by gaming since “gaming is less about work as work and more about work as play. The artworks produced are less about physical manifestations and more about the language and rules involved in social interactions. A system is set up which then has the possibility of being activated, or played.” For example, the work titled _interference_interaction entails a game board mapped onto an city zone utilizing wireless cameras, video receivers connected to televisions found in local businesses and bicycles.

For images, yellow bicycles were rigged with wireless cameras and used by anybody entering the play space to record the path they take as they move through the area. Live video from the moving cameras was distributed over several monitors throughout the city zone. Video receivers were attached to television sets at local businesses, making it possible to view the action from inside a bar, gallery, furniture store, bank, coffee shop and/or restaurant. The cameras transmitting on the same frequency interfere with each other, causing live on-the-fly editing of the video on the monitors. Interference in flow between people and hardware and the effect of cross signals resulted in a continuous spatial-temporal state of change.

Another work, AFK was “a series of online performances involving sending a SMS message in front of ‘public’ webcams within the context of the local landscape.” Grrls Meet in Different Ways Now is described as an “ongoing online visual jam using hybrid mixes of ICQ, IVisit, Nato and KeyStroke” with a Norwegian collaborator. Examples of Terran’s works are documented at www.ubermatic.org/misha. The artist has an impressive curriculum vitae of Canadian and international residencies, commissions and collaborators, and has worked on a project similar to Time_Place_Space at Canada’s famous arts hothouse, Banff Centre for the Arts.

Time_Place_Space is an important initiative from Performance Space, PICA and the New Media Arts Board of the Australia Council designed to support hybrid performance artists to develop their practice and particular works. RT

Time_Place_Space 2, curators Sarah Miller PICA, Fiona Winning; Performance Space and Julianne Pierce ANAT with the support of the New Media Arts Board of the Australia Council. Wagga Wagga Sept 21-Oct 5, 2003. Expressions of interests are now being accepted www.performancespace.com.au

We have 2 companies to thank for giving Australian theatre an Australian accent, the Australian Performing Group (APG), or Pram Factory, in Melbourne and the Nimrod in Sydney. Together, they comprised the ‘New Wave’ of Australian theatre. Though both groups began early in the 70s, they are products of the 60s and share that decade’s concerns for uniting art and life and for pushing the boundaries of what could be said by challenging censorship. The brash and joyous vulgarity for which they are remembered was part of an attempt to define a distinctly Australian performing style.

These companies provided a nursery for many important Australian writers and performers. About 90% of the plays in the early Nimrod and the APG seasons were Australian. David Williamson, Jack Hibberd, John Romeril, Alex Buzo, Alma De Groen, Peter Kenna, Stephen Sewell and Louis Nowra are among the writers whose early careers were encouraged by those companies.

Despite their cultural importance, no substantial history of the APG has been published and only one exists for the Nimrod, Julian Meyrick’s See How It Runs (Currency Press, Sydney, 2002).

The Nimrod and the APG were founded by a generation of clever young guns in conscious opposition to the mainstream and Meyrick begins his history by examining the division between the generations and in their theatrical and wider cultural loyalties. As he tells it, there was an older Anglophile generation and a younger generation more influenced by nationalism and US-influenced youth culture. But, while he defines the lines very clearly, Meyrick is rightly suspicious of too neat a division and discovers blurred areas and crossovers. For instance, the popularity of new wave writers led to their being picked up by mainstream companies and many in the new wave happily accepted government subsidies.

Nimrod grew from Sydney University connections, principally between Ken Horler and John Bell and the availability of a cheap space, an old stable in Nimrod Street, Kings Cross, its first home. Later, the company moved to the old Cerebos salt factory in Surry Hills. (‘See How It Runs’ was the Cerebos motto.) Much larger than the Kings Cross premises, the new space afforded more performing areas, a main theatre, Upstairs, and a smaller space, Downstairs, as well as a foyer. The building is now the Belvoir Street Theatre. Finally, and disastrously, there was the move to the theatre complex at Sydney University, the Seymour Centre, in a misconcieved attempt to attract larger audiences.

Meyrick examines 3 productions to evoke the theatrical and wider cultural milieu at the birth of the Nimrod, Oedipus Rex, Hair and The Legend of King O’Malley. Allegedly epitomising the staid and backward-looking mainstream offerings of the time is the Old Tote’s pompous and ponderous production of Oedipus Rex, directed by the imported English high priest of high art, Sir Tyrone Guthrie. In the opposite corner was another import that demonstrated how theatre could replicate ‘life’ in its style as well as by what it represents. Hair had expressiveness, relevance and, seemingly, spontaneity. Michael Boddy, Bob Ellis and their collaborators took those ingredients and gave it a local, nationalist spin with the Old Tote’s homegrown The Legend of King O’Malley, the brashly confident foundation production of the Australian new wave. Audiences and critics greeted it enthusiastically. Its ‘rough’ staging, loosely structured narrative and presentational acting set the production style most associated with the Nimrod. Though there were darker offerings from directors such as Rex Cramphorn and Jim Sharman and interpretations of serious plays by Shepard, Bentley, Berkhoff and so on, the Nimrod keynote was fun. This is especially true of the 1970s’ productions, the decade bookended by Biggles and a rumbustious treatment of Goldoni’s The Venetian Twins.

Personality is obviously important to a theatre history and especially important to the Nimrod in the early years. In the absence of a guiding manifesto or obligations to subscribers and government agencies, programming was an ad hoc arrangement determined by the enthusiasms and availability of directors and performers. The outcome was eclecticism. Meyrick observes something like a 3-faceted aspect to the early Nimrod seasons at its Kings Cross home, new wave plays in ‘popular’ or realistic interpretations, revisionary interpretations of the classics and productions drawn from the international avant-garde. Under the loosened constraints of censorship, there seems to have been a preoccupation with sex running through the repertoire and a tendency towards breezy good feeling. With the election of the Whitlam Labor government in 1972 and a partially concomitant nationalism, “Nimrod was ready to credit itself with something like the national equivalent of the Midas touch: everything it touched turned Australian.”

A successful combination of government subsidy and business sponsorship, including Rupert Murdoch’s, created sufficient funds for the company to move to bigger premises in Surry Hills. At this stage, there were 3 artistic directors, John Bell, Ken Horler and Richard Wherrett. Lillian Horler served as general manager until her resignation in 1976. Meyrick concludes at the end of a revealing description of the artistic leadership, “Wherrett needed Horler’s spark and Bell’s egotism as much as they needed his craft and diffidence.”

The late 70s and early 80s were not a happy time for the Nimrod. When the Old Tote collapsed in 1978, the Nimrod tried to become the state theatre company for NSW. Instead, the Sydney Theatre Company was created. There was an uncomfortable turnover of artistic directors and general managers, especially the rancorous departure of a founding figure, Ken Horler, at the end of 1979. Perhaps fun was under threat more generally too. In June, 1979, Luna Park was badly damaged in a fire that killed 5 boys.

David Williamson’s Celluloid Heroes opened the Nimrod’s second decade and in its self-absorption and inability to sustain a narrative drive Meyrick suggests a reflection and prognostication of the Nimrod’s troubles. One review of it was headed, “The Fun Just Petered Out” and the play went on to die a lingering death at the box office in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.

Though Nimrod fun survived in the small-scale shows Downstairs and in the foyer, things were definitely turning dark Upstairs. According to Meyrick’s analysis of the first 3 years of the 1980s, all the plays staged Upstairs, whatever their genre, were concerned with serious aspects of “conflict, breakdown and violence.” He also notes greater sexual modesty and cleaned up language. Pointing out the middle age of the major participants and their audiences, he observes, “Where once they may have sided with embattled, feisty, put-upon youth, they now reserved residual sympathy for guilty, implicated, anxious maturity.”

Meyrick’s story of the bumpy slide of Nimrod towards its folding in the mid ‘80s fuses trading deficits, distrust between management and staff, factionalism, staff control and then board control, rescues from bankruptcy and the disastrous move to the Seymour Centre. Meyrick handles the complexities in the painful dénouement of the Nimrod’s history as well as he depicts the company’s rise to triumph. Throughout, he effectively teases out the many strands that knot around the Nimrod without losing a sense that the intricacies are essential to the telling. The narrative is also well served by photographs, tables and chronologies.

See How It Runs is a disciplined, thorough and canny history, the outcome of assiduous work toward a well-deserved PhD and a very useful foundational treatment of the Nimrod. Now that that has been achieved, a lush and juicy, even gossipy, account would be nice. I hope someone is aiming at that by next Christmas.

Julian Meyrick, See How It Runs, Nimrod and the New Wave, Currency Press, Sydney, 2002.

Behind a duo of classic tiled pools is a backdrop of rolling hills with trees swaying in the breeze like a receptive audience. In the foreground is a kiddy-sized wading pool with a jade seahorse adorning its bottom. Behind is the diving and lap zone. Together, they echo the show’s theme, moving from small to large pool like the transition that underpins Stompin’ Youth’s latest project Joyride, the shift from child to young adult.

It’s dusk and the heady aroma of chlorine gets the memory working overtime—thongs, Speedos, lawns, Zinc, hanging out with nothing to do but preen, look bored, play up. The Launceston Swimming Centre becomes an ambient lounge with dj bluff’s blend of trance, house, hiphop, and something that suggests Olympic heroics. The mix moves from sensual to industrial, reflecting the show’s themes of adrenaline and the ever-present tension between conformity and individuality.

Young dancers evoke a hangin’ out vibe on the lawn. The group thickens and moves, at first minimally and then in slow unison—one or 2 bursting free.

The ensemble disperses, leaving 3 forlorn, ragged figures conjuring wind-up ballerinas in jewellery boxes; later, concentrated hand movements evoke drumming bears; both strong childhood images. Voiceovers hint at self-expression, being brave. The audience is presented with a montage of kids playing up—smoking, a bit of aggro shoving, building to the thrill of the joyride. Sharp, jerky movements; the bip of radar; the sound of something being singed—the atmosphere is edgy with a tinge of sexuality.

Finally in the water, li-los, flashlights, clean, sensual movement and the wondrous Bjork create a lovely sequence of play, swoon, splash and glide (and of course, the mandatory Esther Williams-inspired domino freefall)—the joys of being part of the group.

Each transition: from twilight to night; the group’s sprawling then shrinking into a tighter ensemble; movement from small to large pool; and edgy soundscape becoming soothing, supports the thematic binary between fitting in and the risks of self-expression.

Joyride is the first stage of a show called S.Y.N.C (Stompin’ Youth Nautical Crew) to be presented as part of the forthcoming Ten Days on the Island festival, training 24 young people from all over Tasmania, many of whom were new to performance. Luke George, Stompin’s co-Artistic Director sees S.Y.N.C. as a stand-alone show as well as the natural continuation of Joyride. The former will be more about clashes between the young and old and will feature more synchronized swimming as the show explores an older, more rigid form articulated in a new and funky way. S.Y.N.C. will tour 8 regional towns in Tasmania throughout the festival.

I leave Joyride appreciating a program that encourages young people to use and delight in their bodies so skillfully, the spirit generated by their work still palpable.

Joyride, Stompin’ Youth, choreographers Luke George, Bec Reid and Stompin’ Company, Launceston Swimming Centre, Dec 21-22 2002; S.Y.N.C. as part of Ten Days on the Island (see p44), March 28-Apr 5 www.tendaysontheisland.org

From the centre of a wide screen, images of telephone poles split and flip right to the edges of the performing space, rhythmically evoking the small markers of a long journey. The video invites memories of childhood trips from farm to city while the repeated sequences and the softly pulsing soundtrack echo the flashing centre-lines of the road, drawing the viewer across the distances between the 2 ‘centres’ of the Wide Open Road project.

Outback Theatre from Hay in the far west of NSW and PACT Youth Theatre in inner city Sydney worked together over several months with a strong creative team to make this powerful and elegant performance. The final workshops were held in a woolshed at Tupra station on the Hay Plains where the first presentation took place. Together the 2 groups created an imaginative landscape that encompassed the breadth of both city and country spaces while remaining strongly located in the present performance space. This is one of the few productions I have seen that has managed this difficult transition.

Perhaps some of the incongruities of the creative process helped. One of the participants described making theatre at one end of the woolshed while at the other end a mob of ewes were being artificially inseminated.

The training processes, held separately but at crucial stages together in both Sydney and Hay, produced a steady focus, an easy physical presence and a common sense of place and relationship to the performance material in the widely divergent group of performing personalities. The show’s montage style and intelligent construction accommodated a range of aesthetics within its theme of movement across place and time. The idea of direction, whether towards or away from the country/city or more abstractly into an ambiguous future was heightened by the ‘diary ‘ form of much of the verbal material—we are in someone’s journal, inside both a memory as well as a kind of present experience.

As we enter, a young woman searches the air for mobile phone contact, groups hang out on hay bales and sometimes we hear a voice calling ‘hello, hello’, reaching for an ‘elsewhere’ while the audience is captured very clearly in the here and now. The confident and present bodies of the performers create a milieu that is immediately transporting. Surrounding us are the opening segments of the soundscape of light rhythmic sounds, cut across with mobile interference, and the diverging and melding telephone poles.

A back wall of corrugated iron makes a wide horizon and a long streak of light running diagonally across the stage activates another plane. Seamless shifts of place and delicately orchestrated movement through song, simple actions and clear strong voices harmonising fill the performance area and bring an experience of the bush to the city. Perhaps in Tupra it may have seemed like the city going to the bush. It’s here (and there) in the imagination of the audience and performers. The dissolves are almost filmic as sounds of the wind cut across images of both city and country. The time is the present.

Samuel James’ camera is equally comfortable sweeping through urban space or hovering above some minute detail in a wide, “empty” landscape. The images neither illustrate nor explain the actions on stage but sometimes lead and sometimes follow the stage action. The depth of field in much of the camera work brings the breadth of the geography into the awkward length of The Studio space to help create beautifully seamless and sweeping transitions.

Sound and light echo the movement of the camera and create a space that exists in the sensibilities of the young performers, anchored in place through their lyrics, spoken text, the use of icons of the outback (Akubras, hay bales) along with key objects (mobile phones, handbags). These are almost incidental on stage, products of reverie and contemplation in the space itself, as itself, and not part of a pretend place.

Through collages of imagery, we learn more of the lives of these performers than would be possible in a conventional narrative. The structure of images creates constant movement in the physical staging—there’s a stillness that is never static; voices come from all corners.

While the video images are powerful, we are never allowed to forget the presence of the performers in the space. In one of the strongest transitions, the live voices of the performers ‘hanging out’ on stage evoke the sounds of outback space. An Akubra is discovered on the ‘roadway,’ an ironic light flashing on it. We become slowly aware of a tiny figure far away on the deep-red-to-blue horizon on the screen. He is wearing an Akubra ‘for real,’ walking slowly towards us and growing, like a mirage, becoming the farmer whose slow-mo walk declares his certainty in the place. He moves steadily forward till he walks larger-than-life off the top edge of the screen, leaving only the horizon of red earth against the soft blue of the sky. Maybe it’s my memory of my farmer father, but the image is one of the most evocative I have seen in a while, its effect heightened by the precision and humour of the return to the physical presence of the performers.

Thirty or so disparate personalities working across large distances have found a common performance language and created a dense and vivid work.

Wide Open Road, direction Regina Heilmann, co-direction Alicen Waugh (Outback Theatre), Chris Murphy (PACT), video Samuel James, sound Nik Wishart, lighting Shane Stevens; PACT Youth Theatre and Outback Theatre produced by The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Dec 4-7 2002

Directed by Susie Dee and written by Wayne Macauley, The Teratology Project demonstrates the power of context in presenting complex ideas. Delivered with ease and wit by great performers from the Institute of Complex Entertainment, the work was staged at the former Preston and Northcote Community Hospital. Teratology is the study of monsters, fashionable at the turn of the last century. The Teratology Project reveals science itself to be monstrous and vanity its champion.

After submitting a DNA sample on entering the hospital, the audience is divided into 3 groups. We wait in the ward where The Doctor (Brian Lipson) informally shows us some exhibits—pictures of cloned babies, a life-size cast of a cadaver. Then we are separated and move to the first room where the performer Maria Theodorakis waits. She tells us she is one of 4 sisters, all born to different women; she is the only one to whom their biological mother gave birth. We meet 3 of the sisters in 3 successive rooms, none similar, each reacting differently to their captivity. In the fourth room we encounter a body covered by a bloody sheet. The mother enters and explains that she has bred her ‘children’, 28 in all, to provide a supply of youthful exteriors. She has just lifted the face from the fourth clone and masked herself with it.

The doctor guides us through the corridors stalked by an ambiguous figure in a fashionably retro brown suit carrying a portable record player. We are left to wait in the autoclave room and told not to touch anything. In a fish tank is one dead mouse, which has made the whole room reek. We are then guided to a wardroom with a bed enclosed by curtains. The Doctor reveals an old man (Bruce Kerr), who at 168 years has been kept alive in a hospital bed connected to an external fish tank containing a pig’s heart. The old man tells us that he has lost all his memories. They have tried to implant some pleasant ones but none stick. All he can remember is a field of cows but he doesn’t know if it’s his memory. The man in the brown suit enters and plays a strange waltz on his record player. The old man gets out of bed and dances with Death—but the Doctor drags him back, reviving him again. Death wanders off down the corridors.

The Doctor then reveals a woman (Sally Hildyard) eating bananas and with the most enormously pregnant belly propped up before her. The Doctor inserts a lipstick camera into the belly and we are introduced to the child. Angus Cerrini plays a recalcitrant clone of Jesus Christ, conceived in a test tube from an ancient drop of blood on a sliver of the cross, and who at 32 years old continues to refuse to be born. The symbiotic relationship between mother and child is more erotic than maternal.

The whole audience is then gathered together. We watch Death and the old man waltz off together, Death finally triumphant. But the Doctor has a surprise. He tells us that his life’s work has been to destroy Death. He brings Death in strapped to a wheelchair and is about to kill him with a hypodermic needle when we are interrupted by a man, Etienne Grebot, in full French gumshoe regalia. He demands that the prisoner be read his rights and proceeds to argue the defence, producing pictures of cute babies as evidence that the final removal of Death also removes any hope of new life. Finally Death is released and waltzes with the Doctor in a last macabre number.

Institute of Complex Entertainment, The Teratology Project; writer Wayne Macauley; director Susie Dee; former Preston and Northcote Community Hospital, Melbourne, Nov 26-Dec 7, 2002

This is a show you’ll either love or hate depending on your expectations of physical theatre. There have been a number of subversive moments in the genre over the last decade with some key works by Legs on the Wall, The Party Line and others where physical theatre and contemporary performance merge to produce something beyond a parade of tricks. But there’s always a tendency to go back to circus roots for the sheer fun of it, pleasing the audience or re-energising before tackling the dark stuff once more. Brisbane’s Rock’n’Roll Circus do it both ways in their Rock’n’Roll Circus

Inspired by the Mozart-da Ponte opera, The Marriage of Figaro, an adaptation of Beaumarchais’ original play regarded as revolutionary for its brazenly comic critique of artistocratic power, Figaro Variations is what it says it is, a set of variations responding to themes from the opera and subsequent history. It does not reproduce the plot of the opera to any extent, except quite laterally and, occasionally, musically. Although a physical theatre work with not a little clowning and some striking displays of skill, this is no circus. In fact it shifts with determination from rude comedy to stark symbolism, from lively clowning to the distressed stillness of contemporary performance, from the complex and optimistic gaiety of Mozart to the mournfully ironic portrayal, in the music of Shostakovich, of revolution betrayed, and on to silence and reconciliation.

Act 1 is a world made up of routines and gags, visual piss jokes and of relationships, passions and tensions writ large. Cherubino’s dancerly swooning on a very tall pole is brutally interrupted by the Count, a langorous, red-nosed testicle-fondling clown (plenty of ball jokes and juggling), who brings his servant right down to earth. A sustained sequence where he rides his bicycle in a perpetual circle while his servants leap on to shave and to dress him from top to bottom completes the Act 1 picture of casual power and subordination. The slipping between Mozart and a kind of ragtime in Act 1 gives way, after a protracted stillness and silence, to Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No 2 in Act 2 . Figaro is now a revolutionary hero and comedy gives way to images of increasing oppression—struggles, headlocks, dark feats of strength, of threatening knife juggling and dangerous imbalance. In Act 3, Forgiveness, stark images (a gasping Cherubino descending on a red rope looks like something from Francis Bacon), reversals physical and emotional, and final unions slowly unfold in elegaic elegance—too ponderous and too still at times for the good of the work’s overall dynamic, but you can see what director Yaron Lifschitz is getting at. Such restraint in physical theatre is rare.

The whole concept of Figaro Variations is a bold one and not easy to pull off. It’s not always easy to follow the show even if you know the opera’s characters. Given those physical theatre audience expectations and the movement from fun to increasing abstraction, stillness and seriousness, Rock’n’Roll Circus takes a substantial risk—of being accused of pretentiousness (not helped by the title) and confusing its audience. If the audience were palpably bemused the night I saw the performance at The Powerhouse, they were nonetheless attentive and appreciative. Ably directed and engagingly performed physically and musically, and a confident step forward from the company’s last major work, Tango, Figaro Variations is to be applauded for the risks taken, the seriousness ventured.

Figaro Variations, Rock’n’Roll Circus, director Yaron Liftschitz, musical director Paul Hankinson, music Mozart, Shostakovich and Hankinson, costumes Anna Illic, lighting Jason Organ, choreographer Nathan Tight; Brisbane Powerhouse, Nov 29 – Dec 7

Adopt a codename. Fill out the identification form. Sign the disclaimer. Then get on the bus.

That was the drill for the audience of 22 passengers as they arrived at Artrage’s Breadbox gallery for the PVI Collective’s latest crossover performance extravaganza, TTS: ROUTE 65. And you don’t argue with an enormous, pissed-off looking bouncer named Daddy.

A tour-de-force, TTS: ROUTE 65 was a unique bus tour of Perth, taking the audience to various ‘strategic’ points around the city where they alighted to be confronted with cleverly-layered monologues and performances that were dynamic, absurd, confronting and thought-provoking. TTS furthered the Collective’s continuing investigation into how everyday life is mediated, interrupted, monitored and messed with by technology, surveillance and the mass media, with a new focus on the much-hyped phenomenon of ‘terror.’ As the microcosmic renderings of local spaces and sites in TTS unravelled and Perth was slowly scrutinised and pulled apart, connections to the macrocosm of global Western culture (and paranoia) became evident.

Discourses of terrorism and tourism crashed head on (with some pop history and market research) in the monologues delivered by our deadpan, hilarious and terrifying on-board ‘guides.’ These explications merged mythologies, potentialities and public representations of each site from their strategic weak points and tactical significance to their aesthetic values and visitor statistics. The mixture of meticulously researched fact, outrageous lies and lucidly imagined fiction challenged the audience to unravel an impossibly layered, tangled web of ideas and narratives, revealing the gaps and inconsistencies in the ways we understand and exist in our immediate environment.

Meanwhile, under the cover of night, we were passing through a city growing stranger and less familiar and loaded with shadowy facts and shady figures. Performers chased, serenaded and moved around us, while passers-by looked delighted and confused. By the time we were waved off the bus at Parliament House and herded past a series of wildly gesturing figures with masks and almost-legible profiles attached to their chests, reboarding within a 2 minute time limit, it became even more apparent that PVI is less interested in acts of terror than in the cultural machine that drives our understandings and representations of such phenomena.

The seamless fusion of methodical, astute research and conceptual rigour with equally compelling and challenging performances continues to be PVI’s strength. Core performers Kate Neylon, Chris Williams and James McCluskey as usual delivered intelligent (sometimes literally), commanding and—especially in McCluskey’s case—extraordinarily athletic performances. For TTS, they were joined by Jackson Castiglione (who did a spine-chilling job as our first, ever-so-slightly deranged tour guide—cue nightmares of kindly yet distant men with bloodied teeth) and a strange, chorus-like ensemble of performers who appeared and disappeared in several guises throughout the tour. Melbourne-based electronic outfit Pretty Boy Crossover’s soundtrack was by turns atmospheric and absurd. This expanded line-up and collaborative approach resulted in the most resolved PVI performance in recent memory.

Given the increasing obsession with ‘terror’ in popular Western culture, particularly those strange sound bytes and television commercials which have popped up in the Australian media, hazily warning us to “stay alert” and “look out for anything unusual,” TTS was an intelligent and welcome intervention, delivered to a highly appreciative, if slightly shaken, audience.

TTS: ROUTE 65, PVI Collective, devisors Kelli and James McCluskey, Steve Bull, Chris Williams, Katherine Neylon, Christina Lee, Jackson Castiglione, music and soundscapes Jason Sweeney aka Pretty Boy Crossover, Artrage, Dec 5-8, 10-14, 2002

Once regarded as a short term pop phenomenon, hiphop has multiplied into communities across the world and a multi-million dollar industry that powers on, showing no sign of fading. As with anything on this cultural scale and complexity and its association with race and dignity, power and defiance, controversy is ever present. There are moments however when hiphop opens up to debate and analysis. In Sydney the time is ripe with the Eminem movie 8 Mile currently showing, the imminent release of Mike Broomfield’s documentary, Biggie and Tupac (about the murders of US hiphop rappers Tupac Shakur and Christopher ‘the notorious B.I.G.’ Wallace in 1996), a new show at Performance Space by local exponent and hiphop teacher Morgan Lewis in April, and a season of works by UK break-dancer Benji Reid at the Sydney Opera House’s The Studio in March. Hiphop is a popular artform—in some bodies more artful than others.

The award-winning Reid, who has toured the world with Soul II Soul, will combine his “body-popping, b-boy style and poetic text” in 3 works at The Studio over 5 nights in March after running workshops with young dancers from Sydney’s western suburbs.

After taking up dance to combat school bullies, Reid quickly became skilled at robot dancing and break-dancing, trained at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance then joined a Scottish company and TAG Dance Theatre where he combined text with movement. Later he worked with Soul II Soul, featured in pop videos and studied mime with the David Glass Ensemble. In 1996 he won the European body-popping championship and came second in the World Dance Championships Manchester-based Reid’s current work samples texts from Kung-Fu films and cartoons and features the illusionary movement of body-popping. He will perform The Holiday with Jim Parris on double bass, The Pugilist about a retiring boxer and his ring-side confidante and Style 4 Free, a slapstick, improvised work inspired by jazz with text and muffled beats. RT

The Fondue Set have rocketed to semi-stardom almost overnight in Sydney, moving from small beginnings in local pubs to well received showings in Anstistatic at Performance Space and Dance Tracks#4 with Endorphin at the Opera House Studio and now they’re about to become the glistening stars of their own first full-length show at Sydney’s Seymour Centre. So, who are these 3 young dancers, Elizabeth Ryan, Emma Saunders and Jane McKernan? Are they really just facile twits, heterosexual stereotypes in red tulle and boob-tubes who just want to pick up men and have fun?

Starting out

Emma: Jane and I met at Omeo Dance Studio, and I thought Jane was a bit of alright, I liked her skirt, and her brain too, that was okay. Elizabeth and I were at uni together and I thought she was a bit of alright too, so I put us all in a room together. I thought, if it works it works, and if not, well…After that it became very clear that it was the 3 of us making the work. We’re really fortunate, and I feel privileged that we’re still happy to work together. We try to look after that.

Jane: Firstly we wanted to make dance that all our friends would love to see, which wasn’t about the audience having to be there on time, because my friends never turn up on time. We thought about performing in pubs, and went bar crawling.

Emma: The 3 of us had plenty to deal with, spending a lot of time dancing around, being idiots, having a good time, drinking a lot of beer, actually getting to know each other. That’s a major part of what we do: our work really does reflect our lives, and that is its spirit.

Jane: We have friends in bands, so we thought to use bands as a model: wanting to make something, but you do it with your friends and it’s very local and easy to make and a lot of people come and see it because it’s about socialising. The themes for the shows came out of that.

Emma: What interests us most is when the movement communicates something, where it’s meaningful. That’s what we struggle for. Modelling the group on the bands took the seriousness out of the process—although people see our stuff as not so serious, it was clearly there in our approach to crafting work and it couldn’t have been that funny without that seriousness.

Elizabeth: Yesterday, we had a photo shoot and that became this big performance in itself, being specific about how you’re moving, or how your face is moving. That ‘look’, that discipline about how you’re doing that ‘look’ is much more dancing than acting.

The mini-manifesto

Emma: There’s joy in having our mates enjoy it as well and we clearly began with wanting our audience to have a good time. Now we realise there’s a power in that audience and we can begin to play on it a bit. We deny ourselves nothing really. As long as it has real meaning, then we’re happy. And us being happy is probably the main thing.

Jane: We’re actually much more aware of what we do than we were 2 years ago, so that this new work is coming more out of that awareness.

Elizabeth: We also think more about what the audience might have come to expect, and we want to play with that. If people expect to laugh, do we give them that, or do we give them something that is slightly different, something not so funny?

Blue moves

Emma: The ending of the last show [Blue Moves, Antistatic 2002] was a bit different from what we usually do [“from frenetic comedy…to slow motion ugly humour…to the dark pathos of attempted seemliness”, RT 52, p24], and that reflects where we’re heading. The new one has the same name because we’re working with some of the same material.

Elizabeth: There were lots of ideas that we didn’t get around to performing, that were just on bits of paper. [At Antistatic] it was all pretty fresh, a case of just putting it out there to see what happened. Now we want to expand on that material, to look at the richness that’s there.

Jane: There are also new ideas. Our other shows, Evening Magic and Soft Cheese, were in the same mould: girls on a night out, and Blue Moves still has that element. But now we’re thinking about what happens to the girl on her way home. Lots of people are working in that area—spookiness, horror or thriller—we’ve seen the work of Cindy Sherman and Vanessa Beecroft, the woman alone or woman as object. Almost any B-grade film has an element of sexism there, women being victims. We’ve already set up our characters as fun-loving girls, so we want to look at other facets of that. What’s our responsibility to those girls, what’s their power, their intelligence? And how are people seeing that?

Emma: We’re moving away from our own experience, looking further afield. We’ve set up our own archetypes, a mix of a lot of ideas and now we’re trying to break them open, to see what they are. We’re questioning the idea of a victim, a woman on her own—she’s either a helpless victim, or a helpful victim. She’s not sure. That victim lets us begin to look at who’s in power here, to subvert those roles. She’s on her own journey here and she quite likes it. The woman is more than one archetype.

Jane: What kind of sexuality are we portraying? It’s obvious that we’re heterosexual and that we want to pick up men, but are we talking about this absent man thing all the time, or that girls who are wearing very little are saying fuck me, or just enjoying what they’re wearing?

Emma: We’re also clearing up some archetypes, really focussing on them, taking to an extreme everything that we’ve been setting up, so those archetypes get a bit thicker and a little more artificial. This gives us room to come in as normal individuals, even if we’re dressed up.

Jane: I became uneasy about putting out these crass images of women all the time and also wanted to take more responsibility for who The Fondue Set is by saying, ‘We recognise that you might think these women are foolish, but we’re also saying that we, Emma, Jane and Elizabeth, are women, and these are our experiences.’

The 3-way thing

Jane: As individuals, Elizabeth and I probably aren’t as outgoing as Emma, but the dynamic in the everyday process is much more collaborative.

Elizabeth: Inevitably you get a 3-way thing. One person has an idea, and that gets tried out by all of us, and we each bring whatever we bring to that idea.

Jane: It’s going to be interesting now, because we’ll be working with other people: a set designer, Imogen Ross, and a dramaturg. [The Fondue Set recently did some intensive work with UK dancer-choreographer Wendy Houstoun.] Our ideas need to become stronger so we know what we’re presenting to other people. And I’m not sure how much of a hold we really have on it either. People will see stuff that we don’t see, because we don’t necessarily view ourselves in the same way as others do.

Elizabeth: We’re looking at that in terms of, say, layering up with costumes and makeup. You’ve got all these do-dads and tulle and wigs and necklaces. Is that more revealing or does it hide more?

Eleanor: It sounds likes its all good, all a celebration of women and being who you are, choosing to reveal things or not. Is there anything you wouldn’t care to reveal?

Jane: Actually the construction of The Fondue Set almost protects us from doing bad theatre, because it all gets written into the script and becomes part of the material. Someone described Blue Moves as a reference to all those gang rapes that were occurring. I got worried that people thought that’s what we were saying: women are asking for it if they wear these tiny dresses. So there are always mixed messages. While we’re trying to be empowering, saying you can wear whatever you want, there’s the opposite happening: actually you can’t run very fast if you’re wearing high heels. It’s easy for someone to totally misread what you’re doing. So that makes it scary.

Emma: In Blue Moves there was a section where we struggled about what we meant. Elizabeth had a kind of character, but Jane and I weren’t sure. So we made that uncertainty a part of it. We were quite happy to reveal that we’re not sure, so it’s not so slick, not so tight.

Elizabeth Ryan and Emma Saunders are graduates of the Dance Department at UWS (Nepean) and Jane McKernan of QUT. Elizabeth travelled and performed in Scotland and studied dance as meditation in India. Both Emma and Jane have worked with Rosalind Crisp. All 3 are regular contributors to Sydney’s burgeoning impro scene and have performed in collaborations with other local dance artists. Jane has also been successfully pursuing a solo career (see review of Mobile States, p.41).

Blue Moves, The Fondue Set, One Extra Dance, Seymour Theatre Centre, Mar 6-8, 13-15, 2003 www.oneextra.org.au

Of late we’ve seen a number of interesting projects bringing audiences into closer interaction with artists and at the same time attempt to solve the problem of inadequate support for meaningful development of new work. Australian Dance Theatre’s 2002 IGNITION project was a good example. And in another innovative SA venture, the Adelaide Festival Centre (AFCT) has launched In-Space, a project involving new audiences even more directly in the developing work of contemporary artists.

Unlike current programming structures where audiences only see finished products (and often not so well-finished), In-Space provides opportunities for audiences to communicate with artists through stages of the works in progress. The engagement between artists and audiences is a primary function of the program, not simply an auxiliary ‘value add’ activity. As well as participating in forums and interacting with artists during work in development, participants will also be involved in ongoing dialogue with artists and the AFCT through a website (www.inspace.com.au), interactive online workshops and regular e-newsletters.

The aim is for audiences to share in and contribute to the artistic process. Armed with detailed information on artists’ goals for developing or completing a work, the hope is that a deeper level of understanding of artistic processes, a greater appreciation and connection with the works and with the artists, as well as with the AFCT as a venue will be realised.

The AFCT will provide the structure (through venues, administrative, production and artistic support) for artists to present their work at different stages of its development cycle.

The first In-Space project of the year was Ingrid Voorendt’s Time She Stopped in January performed over 2 nights by the multi-skilled Astrid Pill. In the interview above, Ingrid Voorendt talks about the work whose further development was jointly supported by Arts SA and the AFCT program. Voorendt says, “The In-Space program has given us a rare opportunity to rework, develop and refine Time She Stopped. While retaining the original essence of the work and its raw appeal, the impact of having Zoë Barry on board creating a live and recorded score [was] huge.”

February 8 sees Brink Theatre’s The Rope Project in its first airing in the form of a theatrical seminar. The project takes as its starting point the text of Rope, written as a play by Patrick Hamilton in 1929, and adapted into a screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s film in 1948. The original play tells the story of 2 Manhattan socialites who set themselves the intellectual challenge of committing the perfect murder.

Brink Director, Sam Haren says: “We will splice and juxtapose Adelaide’s dark history with the story of Rope, creating a metaphorically ‘forensic reconstruction’ of those real and fictional events in order to examine the connections, similarities and differences between them. At the same time we will develop a unique performance style for the work, investigating dance and contemporary performance techniques as well as fusing the language of cinema, that has editing and camera movement, with live performance”.

The forum will examine the ideas behind The Rope Project, its themes of masculinity, sexuality and violence as well as the thriller medium and Brink’s ongoing interest in the interconnection between filmed and live performance and the translation from one to the other. RT

Forthcoming In-Space projects include Gorge, 3 nights, 3 new writers, 6 performance companies and a fish tank; a physical theatre event on May 13-17; and Kate Champion’s Face to Face. Read more about In-Space activities in RealTime 54.

Growing up Greek-Australian in the suburbs of Adelaide did not give Christos Linou much social cachet. Never mind that Greece was the cradle of Western civilization, migrants are rarely credited with the achievements of their forebears. Not anticipating the middle-class nature of dance (an irony since most dancers are poor), he was nevertheless impelled to study at the Centre for Performing Arts in Adelaide. It took the encouragement of Jo Scoglio (formerly of Australian Dance Theatre) for Linou to feel entitled to choreograph work. Fifteen years later, he now relishes his role as a director in theatre, opera, performance, film and dance.

In 1989, Constantine Koukias, Artistic Director of IHOS Opera, saw Linou perform a “mad night” of film, spoken text, live music and dance. This led to several collaborations including Days and Nights with Christ (1997), performed in Hobart and Sydney. In that work, a counter-tenor hung upside down on a crucifix, over a mountain of salt. The imagery was not unlike that in Linou’s Fiddle de Die (1998) which had him up a ladder, suspended and slightly unsafe in a work on AIDS and drug addiction. Linou also makes experimental films, sometimes projecting them onto the walls for his performance pieces.

Having spent time at community centres in his youth, Linou insists that the work he has made in such contexts is contemporary art. In 2000 he received Australia Council support for a choreographic residency at Footscray Community Arts Centre. His question, posed through the lens of cross-cultural dance, was whether it was possible to develop a national dance form that Australia could call its own. His short answer—no. Merging Chinese, Greek, Irish and Eastern European circular dance formations within abstracted gestures of contemporary dance, seeded a framework for a possible identifiable Australian dance which Linou imagines is a few generations away.

Linou’s continuing interest in political and social issues is evident in ongoing collaborations with visual artist Robert Mangion. Their work began in 1999 with a life drawing class run by Mangion in which Linou performed slow-motion Butoh, trance and ritual dances with suspended projectors that generated images by Mangion, Man Ray, Picasso, Duchamp and Dubuffet. Their idea was to challenge themselves and the class, educating one another about crossing boundaries between visual art and performance. Their current project, Intertextual Bodies, works with the abrasive possibilities of disruption.

Linou and Mangion have created a number of Melbourne-based city actions. Linou calls this work in public spaces an “aesthetic protest,” though one of its strengths is its inability to be clearly identified. For example, The Act of Being Inside Out was staged on the concrete forecourt of the County Court of Victoria. After establishing a pathway from the court’s front door to the pavement, Mangion wrapped and safety-pinned Linou in a black cloth, rolling him along the ground. Fully expecting to be arrested, Linou was the temporary object of intense security interest. Then he was ignored. A resident alcoholic offered helpful advice throughout, while some passing junkies mimed a kick to his immobile body. Placing himself in a position of abject vulnerability, Linou refers to those bodies most at risk from the administration of justice.

Further actions, planned for the Stock Exchange, the Immigration Museum, the steps of Parliament and Flinders Street station, are variously titled The Act of Site Intervention, The Act of Subversive Ritual, and The Act of Refusing to Dance. Though lacking in obvious entertainment value, such works still need to gain the attention of passers-by. In one event Mangion posed as a decoy, tripping over Linou’s body and dropping a sheaf of papers. People stopped to help, then found that Mangion had disappeared. For Linou and Mangion, these acts take studio space into the public sphere.

Not all city spaces are alike, nor are they constant over time. Public and institutional perceptions of safety, security and threat are currently in flux. It will be interesting to watch these future acts and the kinds of bodies they put under construction. While Christos Linou calls these “social scientific-art experiments,” they are also civic interventions of an uncertain kind. Inasmuch as they are experimental, their outcome is unknown. Linou feels mature enough now to be, in Buddhist terms, empty-minded and open to the possibilities provoked by these works.

Sometimes it’s nice to be seduced. In The Morning After, the Night Before, performer and choreographer Shannon Bott invites the audience to a collective assignation, from a soap box in the foyer of Performance Space—a charming kind of spruik—her body and voice advertising an open ingenuousness with a touch of taut sleaze. She has a remarkable face, dewy and bold, like her initial invitation full of cliché and innuendo and she works with sentiments expressed in the worst women’s magazines which we love to deride but recognise enough to raise an embarrassed giggle. She invites us to meet her inside the theatre, to participate in her illusions of wide-eyed love and naked lust. She tells us stories: The Princess and the Pea, the one about the bartender and several other guys who end up in her living room. The work sets out to illuminate this fusion: a cockeyed sentimentality both mawkish and unavoidably human and Bott’s vocal and facial expressions take us a long way. Her energy is joyful and buoyant like a cocker spaniel puppy, with dance material that is choreographically uncluttered and rhythmically foursquare. Yet I found myself wanting those clichés about relationships to go somewhere really illuminating—but maybe that’s what illusion is about—constant expectation doomed to fall just short of transcendence.

Jane McKernan’s I Was Here takes us to a different place altogether, not quite so amusing, probing a woman’s lapses of consciousness, trying to make visible that moment where awareness slips insensibly into void, a place of simultaneous degradation and release. Under a blue light, she dances, drained of colour, but held fast by a suffocating disco beat. Another figure lies mostly unnoticed, with her back to us, fallen and very still; on the other side of the stage a video shows a perpetually falling man, about to slip out of the screen but never quite disappearing. At times McKernan shifts her weight, totters, slides, falls. On the ground in skirt, stilettos and ankle socks, she is both a hopeless drunk and an unselfconscious child, a helpless scrap of humanity trying feebly to regain her feet, but so unaware of her own struggle she maintains an unexpected kind of dignity.

Nalina Wait’s improvised KYU circumscribes another kind of territory, with a sparkling clarity and complexity that makes the work look simple. She defines her dimensions and trajectories across a progressively illuminated diagonal, a well-used and effective design, an increasing corridor of light lengthening as if she’s pushing its far boundary with her body. After stretching to the farthest point, the energy draws her back like a retreating wave, leaving the wash of light. Her limbs are articulate and neat, the lines of her body sharp and clear, sometimes expressing mere quivers of sensibility, but there is a sense of progression and development which surpasses the simplicity of the score. The rhythms of her movement are complex, unexpected and pleasingly uneven.

Naida Chinner devised and performed Once Bitten (directed by Ingrid Voorendt), a work with a similar theme to Bott’s—a battle between romanticism and cynicism—but the place she takes us is a bit less glitzy, much less glamorous and definitely more squishy. It probably had to go last on the program because of the squashed tomatoes on stage at the end—way too difficult to clean up in a hurry. The movement is chunky and full-bodied. Being succulent and organic rather than textbook material, the choreography serves the dance well. Tomatoes, ripe and juicy but with a soft and easily broken skin, are used as a symbol of all the horrible things that love can do. Does anyone survive intact being stepped over, fallen on repeatedly, chewed up and swallowed, squashed, thrown, picked up and dropped? Chinner’s world becomes progressively littered with broken, leaky flesh to the unforgettable strains of Roy Orbison’s Love Hurts.

Mobile States 2: The Morning After, the Night Before, performer Shannon Bott, choreographers Shannon Bott & Sue Peacock (WA); I Was Here, choreographer and performer Jane McKernan (NSW); KYU, improvisation Nalina Wait (NSW); Once Bitten, choreographer and performer Naida Chinner, director Ingrid Voorendt (SA); producers, PICA & Performance Space; Performance Space, Sydney, Nov 20, 2002

It’s hard, amidst the incendiary alarm of Canberra, to settle down to write. I imagine the ceiling catching fire, the intolerable heat, getting the children out in time. Of course, for many, this is not an act of imagination: I feel a strange guilt queuing at the shops beside a couple who have lost everything, their clothes still charred, their bodies carrying the stories of what’s been lost.

To see, to have seen a performance in these circumstances—particularly one about landscape and identity, soil and soul—puts pressure on the work’s tone and meaning; perhaps all theatre events, to be deeply of relevance and value, need to match and meet this pressure, meet circumstance. We are already asked to see more than enough. Sometimes, in performance, we are asked to see too little. The endurance of seeing too little is sometimes as difficult as viewing too much.

In Constructed Realities we are led, ostensibly, inside-out, through the theatre’s back-end and bowels. The question “What is it to be Australian?” is answered in images ranging from mounds of ochred soil, to a tea party, city buildings, squares of grass, an immigrant’s remembered garden. Verbal answers are also given via videoed interviews: young faces cite coast-hugging cities, blank interiors. “My country’s soul is a stranger”, writes the quoted poet. I wish the work that follows would seriously critique the lack of depth in these replies.

This is a work at once so resolutely anthropocentric (consider the 95% of the bush reserve’s animals that died) yet sets up the human subject as mere outline: ballgowns, suitcoats, shadows chalked on the floor. We are not singing up the land here, nor digging into our psyches; we may follow in a dancer’s footprints as we promenade behind her, but the parameters are as strictly drawn as the tidy wooden bevels holding in the sand. A dancer’s grief at the burnt-out shell of her house is played like a model walking benignly through some strange decor. And though we are sprayed with water simulating a rainshower, the timing of our sensory experience is strictly limited and controlled. We walk past, through and around vignettes that are not given the chance to grab us, touch us, envelop or confront; this is landscape, like a zoo, behind bars.

This would not be so troublesome, perhaps, if not for the aspirations indicated by the program quotes by Stephanie Radok, Randolph Stow and most problematically, David Tacey, whose Edge of the Sacred is a highly-regarded tome that pleas for White Australia to stop ignoring both the landscape and its own unconscious. In Constructed Realities ideas of edge and interior are maintained rather than challenged, much as the answers given by interviewees reflect on the fun of the shore and the “too big” question of the inside.

I find another paragraph in Tacey, one not so useful to the choreographer’s goal:

‘Australian settlers have to feel unsettled; that is the beginning of our maturation process and the seed of real cultural wisdom. It is only by feeling unsettled that we begin to feel the psychic gap between society and nature, between our rational conscious attitudes and our more elemental…forces.’

This signals disruption, syncopation, arrhythmia, at the very least, surprise; instead we are given evenness, regulated viewing time and all too often the coy steadiness of a model’s smile.

There is no punctum where the unconscious or landscape really penetrates, activates, transforms (bodies, words), assaults, disappoints. The attractive dancerliness to most of the actions, a consistent separation of voiceover and action and the fact that the landscape is implicitly feminine (an all-female cast, except one male on video) need serious interrogation. I desperately want something fresh in this work: soil-mounds and taped interviews are already well known and indeed superlatively executed in both the National Gallery and the Museum. Of all places, why be imitative of something so well done in the city’s permanent, long-standing exhibits? It doesn’t make sense. What are the real questions being asked here?

That said, the piece is gently, if not deeply, evocative of simpler and more obvious aspects of landscape, with some pleasing and technically skilled sequences that cohere into an even-toned, unified aesthetic. But that is not the cry of my “strange soul” (Stow) trying to know itself anew, particularly not in this city, in these times.

Constructed Realities, New performance work/promenade theatre; concept, choreography and direction Clare Dyson, lighting Mark Dyson, landscape geologist Steve Hill, performers Avril Huddy, Katie Joel, Tammy Meeuwissen, Lisa Faalafi and Fez Faanana, lightbox Susan Lincoln, writer Gordon White, sound Kimmo Vernonnen, costume Bianca Seville & Loraine Meeuwissen; Canberra Theatre Centre, Jan 9-11, 15-18

Take the stairs to the top of the old Salvation Army Citadel. At the third floor, 3 doors open onto a narrow landing. Opposite, a small twisting staircase spirals up into the darkness. Even at midday this passage requires an electric light. At the top is a small square room, your traditional artist’s garret. But the artist in this garret is not struggling to find her muse: Rachael Dease works here.

Dease’ latest work, The Scoundrel Becomes an Outcast, which she performs (piano and vocals) with the Schvendes Ensemble, premiered in the restored finery of the Old Midland Town Hall in October last year for the Artrage festival. The Scoundrel reflects her recent departure from predominantly chamber music oriented work. A “song cycle”, composed of 12 interwoven sections, it illustrates Dease’s recent explorations into jazz, blues and country and western. The slide guitar work of Schvendes Ensemble member Jonathan Brain lent a haunting tenor to the melancholy of the penultimate minutes. Dease says, “You throw something like a slide guitar in and you just can’t escape it. And it was played brilliantly; it certainly wasn’t played in traditional style…There is no way the other performers can escape how they are going to react when there is an explosion of lap steel.”

At 53 minutes this is more than twice the length of her longest piece pseudopop-for-fragile-insomniacs. The creation of The Scoundrel marks a maturing of Dease’ sense of authorship and compositional control. How did this occur? “It’s really hard as a director [of Schvendes Ensemble] and as a composer to work with a group of people and keep giving them what you want them to play when you know that they know their instruments a lot better than you do. Respecting them as musicians is a pretty big thing…I mean it was pretty controlled to a certain extent, what they actually did, but they did have a lot of freedom, more freedom than they would have in another group. I think their playing reflected that.”

Her use of controlled improvisation in The Scoundrel has resulted in “…playing that was a lot more emotive, organic…Quite a lot (of the Ensemble) are jazz musicians…they all received the same sheets so everyone knew what everyone else had…all of a sudden I was using, basically, jazz charts instead of classical scoring…and the Ensemble interpreted that in a completely different way and they played differently.”

When I remark that the second performance, at PICA, was noticeably different from the first, Dease smiles. “I wouldn’t have it any other way…I don’t know if I could get up at the moment and perform the same piece exactly the same way.”

Dease looks about the room, smiles, then laughs, “Maybe I lack discipline. I really like that element of rock music and jazz and blues. It would almost be a disappointment if performers from those genres got up and performed something exactly the same way that you heard them play it last time.” Surprise and spontaneity are part of Dease’ directorship of Schvendes Ensemble. Above the table where we are talking is Club Zho’s annual new music award (a Zhoey Award) to Dease and the Ensemble for “consistently rehearsing for major performances at the last moment.” This is not a lack of professionalism, it’s just logistics. In the case of The Scoundrel Dease says, “It was hard to get 7 musicians in the one place for a 3 hour rehearsal [late in the year].”

Before a full house in the theatrical space of the Old Midland Town Hall, in a glow of sidelight and bathed in the backwash from the video projection behind them, Dease and Schvendes Ensemble constructed The Scoundrel for the first time in its entirety.

“Because I work with Tristen Parr, the cellist…he knew the pieces. We worked together on them beforehand so [his] being in the string section was pretty concrete. He was able to lead. When we were performing I was directing Tristen and he was able to bring the string section in and out. And the string quartet reacted to his playing…Also Jonathan Brain, the guitarist and I had worked through some of the songs before. So it wasn’t completely blind, Definitely the whole show was unfolding before our eyes. It was the most enjoyable show I’ve ever done.”

Two weeks later The Scoundrel was performed at PICA which, she says was “…extremely enjoyable. I think in some ways the music was better. I think in both shows what was really amazing was the way the musicians fed off each other and what they were given. And they were able to explore genres like I had.

“The good thing about the Midland performance, about the Ensemble not really knowing the piece from go to whoa, was that they were really, really on the ball. There was no room for just sitting back and so they were thinking really hard about what they were going to do. The second time they were more relaxed and less worried, they knew how the piece was going to unfold and could therefore experiment a lot more but they were still very much on the ball.”

Dease is so pleased with the PICA performance that she has thrown out months of studio recordings in favour of that performance for the CD release of The Scoundrel.

Given the combination of her compositional talents, working methodology and the diversity and depth of ability of Schvendes Ensemble Dease says, “It’s hard not to get a unique sound.”

The Scoundrel Becomes an Outcast, Rachael Dease and Schvendes Ensemble, Artrage, old Midland Townhall, Perth, Oct 25

Constantine Koukias, composer and Artistic Director of IHOS Music Theatre, has a thing for big sheds. It’s one reason for his repeated staging of epic scale operas. His Hobart based company is currently gearing up for its production of Tesla, Lightning in his Hands, an opera with 51 performers, which opens the Ten Days on the Island festival on March 28. Commissioned by the West Australian Opera the work was originally performed in a developmental stage by IHOS Music Laboratory in Hobart in 2000 (RT 41, Feb-March 2001).

Nikola Tesla, the opera’s protagonist, invented the Alternating Current (AC) electrical system all modern cities use today. On the surface he’s a little known, vastly under-credited figure, though, Koukias has been surprised to learn how many people have come across his brilliant and colourful subject, either through science-based study, practising a trade that evolved from Tesla’s discoveries, or simply through wide reading. Because of this we can expect a fair quota of engineers, science boffins and sparkies in the audience alongside IHOS devotees.

Tasmania’s biennial Ten Days… festival celebrates island cultures from around the world, so audiences attending Tesla will be even more varied than usual. With this in mind, Koukias has tried to create something for everyone while remaining true to his vision. There are what he calls the ‘blockbuster elements’, including an ingenious representation of Niagara Falls using ‘lots of sand’; and the scale of the production, alone, will draw some who might otherwise give opera a miss.

There is plenty to keep them occupied, not least a large Tesla Coil on leave from Scienceworks in Melbourne. This mechanism—or high frequency step-up converter, to be precise—creates voltage that comes off its top as a corona, after striking the Faraday Cage that encloses it. The result is effectively a bolt of lightning.

Organisations such as Telstra have long emulated this model to test their telecommunications systems in the event of actual lightning. The Coil takes 2 people 7 days to set up, and in charge of this highly specialist process will be Telstra’s retired head physicist—the aptly named Dr Lightning.

The potential impact of the lightning generated in the show is widespread and must be regulated closely. The Marine Board will be notified just before the Coil performs its magic, as radars might be sent haywire. It’s not surprising, then, that pacemakers and other internal magnetic devices could be affected. Because of this Tesla is contemporary in more than style—it bears a health warning referring people with any form of electric, mechanical, magnetic or metallic implant or prosthetic to an information line before purchasing tickets. The level of noise or thunder generated by the Tesla Coil alone could interfere with any of these devices, causing medical complications.

When I met Koukias, he spoke with the clarity of a screenwriter who has whittled his story down to its bones and finally to one simple idea: Nikola Tesla dreamed of giving free energy to the world. It is this desire which influences many events in his life: the long-term struggle with Thomas Edison who swindled him out of patents and money; his alliance with George Westinghouse on projects including the Niagara hydroelectric plant and phased AC electricity; and ultimately the seizure of his life’s work by the FBI.

Tesla invented fluorescent bulbs and speedometers for cars. He discovered X-rays and the basis for radios, stereos and computers—in all, the foundations for most of modern industry and technology. Yet some of Tesla’s inventions are wrongly attributed to Edison in the Smithsonian Institute and patents are still being turned over to his estate.

Tesla’s character is as extraordinary as his inventions: more comfortable in the company of pigeons than women, he named his main 2 (of 30) secretaries Miss 1 and Miss 2. His affection for feathered vermin is all the more surprising given his terror of dirt. He was a close friend of Mark Twain and himself a beautiful writer.

The opera’s design is elemental—all sand, (a ream of) paper, (gothic quantities of) dry ice, steel (generators), (a flock of) pigeons and, of course, lightning. Yet for all of its ‘blockbuster’ volume, scale and explosiveness, Tesla has a minimalism about it, reminiscent of Koukias’ first opera Days and Nights with Christ. The music often reflects this simplicity, holding the audience in a loop of one-word choruses; at one point, savouring and playing with the word ‘electricity.’

In a venue the size of a few urban warehouses, the audience’s focus must be deftly managed. This is done via directive lighting and the selective use of speakers—with the audience seated either side of the action, as if at a tennis match.

Clusters of glowing light bulbs held forth like a chalice or host at high mass, cages, typewriters, lockers and lamp-lit desks carrying Van der graff generators recreate an intense and surreal laboratory. Haunting images of Tesla’s inventions, including the electric chair, are projected throughout and the Niagara Falls project becomes a gorgeous conclusion to the first act—with the Falls projected onto a stream of falling sand, through which the chorus exits. In the spirit of Tesla, the work is innovative in both sound and set design.

What Koukias likes about big sheds is that things can seem so close, or really far away—creating a cinematic distance. But most of all, the sound is beautiful. Think of the resonance of a cathedral sermon or hymn, even for the unconverted. Music has to be written specifically for large spaces. Crisp and succinct doesn’t work, so Koukias has gone with a lyrical and melodious approach, wed with a chamber ensemble that includes bassoon, oboe and theremin—a nice counterbalance to the deliberate harshness of other aspects of Tesla’s soundscape. The composer has used Tesla’s own writing for some of the opera’s lyrics, and Dvorak’s New World Symphony is alluded to given the composer’s close friendship with Tesla.

What was it about a mad pigeon-loving inventor that inspired a composer to construct one of his famously big operas? Lightning was probably the starting point, Koukias suggests, and that famous photo of Tesla sitting at his desk, oblivious, while the Tesla Coil sets off its spectacular explosions behind him. These lead Koukias to the sad and heightened story that so lends itself to opera.

Tesla. Lightning in his Hands, IHOS Music Theatre, music & director Constantine Koukias, technical director Werner Ihlenfeld, conductor Jean-Louis Forestier, production design Maria Kunda, sound Greg Gurr, artist in light Hugh McSpedden, lighting Damian Fuller, costumes Feruu Seljuk; Ten Days on the Island, Princes Wharf No. 1 Shed, Castray Esplanade, Hobart, Mar 28-Apr 1 www.tendaysontheisland.org

Adviser to the Artistic Program, Robyn Archer, and Executive Producer, Elizabeth Walsh, have rounded up another bunch of unique and often quirky talents from islands around the world for the second Ten Days on the Islandfestival. Again much of the island, its artists and general populace, will be in reach of the festival as works by locals and internationals are presented in Hobart, Launceston and 36 towns across Tasmania. Islands represented in the 2003 festival include New Zealand, the Faroe Islands, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, Re?union Island, Guadeloupe, Cuba, Sicily, the Greek Islands, Manhattan & Staten Islands and Venice.

Tasmanian companies in the festival are IHOS Opera (see above), Stompin Youth Dance Company (see p35) and TasDance, who will premiere new works by Nathalie Weir and Phillip Adams. Terrapin are bringing back their much admired The Dark at the Top of the Stairs puppet show for adults. The Tiny Topfea- tures magic, clowning and eccentric cabaret. Playwright Scott Rankin, like film star Errol Flynn, was born in Tasmania. Rankin’s new one woman, multimedia play, Beasty Grrrlis about a South Sea Island descendant of Flynn played by Paula Arundel. Leading Australian singers and choir directors, Mara and Llew Kiek, will conduct community choirs from across the state with 300 performers in Choral Island. From the big island to the north come Circus Oz with its magnificent new 1400- seat Big Top, playing in Campbell Town, in the heart of the island, and WA’s Deckchair Theatre with a show about a sig- nificant island a little further north again, Mavis Goes to Timor. The Royal New Zealand Ballet will present UK-based cho- reographer, Javier de Frutos’ Milagros, set to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. De Frutos unsettled Sydney locals a few years back at the Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras with some striking work.

From islands much further afield come the Cuban band Los Tres de la Habana, who kick off the festival at free outdoor parties in Hobart and Launceston. Guy Klucevsek, one of the world’s greatest accordion players (a star of Archer’s 1998 Adelaide Festival) will give concerts around the island and also perform with master puppeteer Dan Hurlin in award-winning The Heart of the Andes, a must-see. Also on the impressive program are singer Franc?oise Guimbert from the Re?union islands, the ensemble Al Qantarah performing medieval music from Sicily.

Jacques Martial performs Martinique- born Aimee Cesaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. New Zealand’s large scale street puppets, Urban Safari, looking at times like like fun versions of the creations from Walking with Dinosaurs.

There’s much more, of course: exhibi- tions, installations, community and food events, all ensuring that Ten Days on the Islandadds up a thematic and cultural totali- ty that should be the envy of other Australian festivals. RT

In a very brief skip through Berlin a couple of years ago I picked up a postcard for a dance work with this title. The phrase has haunted me ever since. And I’ve been thinking about the temporal a lot lately in the otherworldly post-Christmas zone where time seems to expand with the heat. So the 2nd NOW now festival of spontaneous music was like a sonic manifestation of my present state of mind.

For 6 nights the gloriously dilapidated oversized loungeroom of Space 3 was home to myriad explorations of music composed in the moment, produced by all manner of sources from your more conventional woodwind, piano, double bass and harp to penis gourd, computer, sampler, amplified pane of glass and dead chicken. The results of these explorations ranged from youthful indulgence to mind-expanding brilliance.

The festival opened with an undisputed master of Australian improvisation, Jim Denley. Starting with his bass flute in pieces, he gently ground the bits together, sometimes blowing into the mouth piece. He moved through woodwind instruments filling the transitions with mouthmusic, creating an imitation of digital decimation so faithful that I looked for the hidden computer. Even the squeaky floorboard was integrated. Denley is at the point where he barely needs his tools: alone he is a finely tuned instrument, a kind of sonic chameleon. Drawing all the pieces together (both compositionally and of his bass flute), he concludes with a haunting suite of dual tones and whispers that are so engaging even the traffic racing up Cleveland Street stops to listen.

The second act of the evening introduced some of the New Zealand contingent with Anthony Donaldson on percussion, Darren Hannah on double bass, Maree Thom on accordion and locals Daniel the wizard on violin and Neill Duncan on sax and little instruments. This had more of the sound I expected, a kind of consensual chaos. Waves of impulses flowing through each musician, were interpreted, sent out and reinterpreted, a growing feedback loop. These musicians employed a whole bodied listening, every cell alert to the next possibility, every gesture integral to the sourcing of the sound. This summoning was also evident in the exploration by Melbourne’s David Tolley on double bass and Dur-e Dara on percussion. They seemed to be working in 2 different sonic territories, Tolley utilising sustain and space, Dara filling all the gaps with a seemingly endless collection of percussion, bells, buckets, chains and glockenspiel—looking like she was whipping up a culinary storm (she is in fact a restaurateur). My initial desire was for her to pare back, provide more space and explore things for longer, but her methods were cumulative, so by the time the cymbals tied to a stand crashed to the floor, the 2 approaches had achieved an agitated union.

My desire for space was sated by the combo of Reuben Derrick on woodwind, Richard Johnson (ACT) on gourdophone (more specifically penis gourd) played like a reed instrument, Johnny Marks on a fantastically ancient analogue synth that lit up and Peter Blamey on feedback loop and mixing desk. Beautifully subdued, the sustained electronic ping and crackle and the warmth of the quiet reeds was surprisingly symbiotic. Blamey and Marks provided background texture, underpinning the analogue mobility of reed players. They never managed to move the piece to the next level, but for one sublime moment they all came together in a swathe of sustained tones, where the sense of time was manifest, each molecule of the moment felt fully. That made the evening for me.

This trance like atmosphere was maintained by the final ensemble. Having just met each other when they walked on stage, Belinda Woods (Melbourne) on flute, Chris Burke on tenor sax, Matt Earl on emptied sampler, April Fonti on cello and Amanda Stewart on vocals created a ‘right moody’ piece. With a beautifully layered textural palette it seemed that everyone was making each other’s sounds—the cello breathy like a sax, the sampler scratchy like the cello, guttural barks and hacks providing a baseline. Stewart’s vocal summonings and Fonti’s sparse and sensitive playing wove around each other, thankfully emerging from the sometimes overly fussy flute and sax to float like sonic incantations.

The second evening began with the incredible Chris Abrahams on piano. With phantom fingers he called forth torrents of notes, overtones outringing the fundamentals—was he hammering, plucking, how many hands does he have? An anomaly in the pattern emerges, is integrated and the pattern mutates. Then he stopped dead and it felt like your soul had been ripped out through your ears. Just for a second, and then the cascade continued. It was amazing and frightening in its complexity and beauty.

The evening also featured the masters of electronic improvisation with a set by Torben Tilly, Robbie Avenaim and Oren Ambarchi on multiple electronics. Spacious and subtle, with infinitesimal shifts they created a kind of sonic wormhole: I try to grasp it, but it slides in and around me like air, I can’t pin it down. Ambarchi appeared again in Scott Horscroft’s all-star version of Chug-R-Chug, along with Chris Abrahams, Clayton Thomas, David Aston and Scott Barr. The musicians play one note which Horscroft processes, conducting and moulding the tones into a mesmeric symphony that was almost weepingly gorgeous. Thanks to a computer crash, it ended with a wrench instead of the more predictable denouement.

An earthy contrast was provided by the ensemble of Will Guthrie (Melb) on percussion, Jeff Henderson (NZ) on sax, Tim O’Dwyer (Melb) on clarinet, Clayton Thomas on double bass and Adam Sussman on electronics. No subtle background texture for Sussman (of Stasis Duo), he ripped the time-space continuum with blasts of fuzz and static, mostly pushing the energy for the better, allowing Thomas to go hell-for-leather in praying mantis fashion on bass, all rhythm and percussion. Guthrie’s contribution suffered for the timbral similarity of his miked percussion and Sussman’s electronics, not to mention the sheer volume that actually had the PA speakers glowing with overload. Though loud and chaotic, the players all seemed to be in the same territory, interpreting the same moment, aware of the piece as a whole.

Unfortunately not something that could be said for the earlier ensemble of Matt and Aron Ottignon, Cameron Deyell, Tom Callwood and Felix Bloxsom, relying on more of a jazz sensibility and suffering from a kind of youthful enthusiasm that railroaded awareness. (Just because you have 3 instruments doesn’t mean you have to play them all.)

The only other appearance of exuberance over-riding subtlety was the trio of Matt Clare and Martin Kay on alto sax and Josh Green (Tas) on percussion on Friday 17. The sax players wound themselves so tightly around each other that there was no place for the percussionist, who eventually (though, it seemed, cheerfully) sat down and just watched the boys blow.

Also on the slightly dominant side was Greg Kingston (Tasmania) on guitar with Tim O’Dwyer on woodwinds and Will Guthrie on percussion. Kingston seemed to channel some inner demon, all twitches and agitation. The ultimate showman, he rummaged through his bag of tricks to produce a transistor radio or a Barbie doll which he placed on the pick-ups of the guitar; even towelling himself off became part of the piece. He provided an excellent introduction to the final act of the Friday night, a strictly noise affair including Lucas Abela on his amped and effected pane of glass, and Nylstoch, a mysterious man in a very ugly mask playing a tapeloop through a crucified chicken. The sound, well it was loud enough to make a window leap out of its frame. Not that all of Friday night was show and bluster. There was also a gentle and extensive exploration by Stasis Duo boys gone analogue on well-worn guitar and percussion, Jim Denley and Jeff Henderson on woodwinds and reeds, and festival co-curator Clare Cooper on harp. This was completely absorbing in its thoroughness.

When I interviewed Clayton Thomas about the NOW now (RT51), I was a little sceptical of his almost religious fervour. But immersed in 3 nights of the festival I realise it is hard to avoid. Each night I dreamt the event afterwards—the atmospheres, the processes and tactics. Improvising is a valiant and foolish attempt to capture each moment, feel each slice of time as it passes over and through you. To do it right you have to surrender completely to the whims and vengeance of the temporal as many of the ensembles in the NOW now festival succeeded in doing for, well, fleeting moments, once registered, already gone. So the chase and the mantra goes on—jetz ist jetz ist jetz…

the NOW now festival , curators Clare Cooper, Clayton Thomas, Space 3 Redfern, Jan 13-18

Fortnightly spontaneous music nights continue at Space 3 from Feb 3. www.theNOWnow.net

How old were you when you had your first cup of coffee? This rhetorical question establishes the territory performed by IHOS Opera Laboratory. Five young men walk on stage and sit behind school desks. Sean Bacon’s video images of coffee froth spiraling and melding in a green cup provide a striking visual backdrop. Each performer tastes his cup of coffee—a metaphor for the addiction to lyrics of pop music. Devised by Sally Rees and Matt Warren, Pop explores the potency of seemingly inconsequential pop songs to imbue memory with a snatch of melody or words years after the song’s hit status has passed. “In my head the song goes on forever” exists as a measure of time and a trigger for memory. “Not a trace of doubt in my mind” from Neil Diamond’s I’m a Believer plays on a suspended cassette player. The line is incessantly repeated even after the player is destroyed.

The performers’ incantation of the words “verse” and “chorus” provides a humorous take on the pop song’s formulaic structure and a clock counts down the song’s length. Sound and video operator Stefan Morton screens talking head images of pop stars onto the school desk lids. Their songs leave a residue of pop a-cappella in the mind.

A Lizard Between her Breasts explores fragments of 3 tragedies by Lorca. It is an intense piece of music theatre composed by Raffaele Marcellino, directed by Anna Messariti and designed by Michael Bates. Impressively performed by the IHOS Music Theatre Laboratory, Lizard is set in the archetypal territory of a village community where life is harsh, moral codes are contradictory, and the hour of blood is never far away.

Lizard opens with a wedding procession. Two trumpets sound and the bride enters trailing an avenue of tulle. The deliberate tearing of the bride’s gown dramatically changes the mood. The whispering and hatred commence. This is the province of old, dark bloodlines. We can already anticipate the trials of the human condition—the wife’s barrenness, the husband’s mistress, hypocrisy, misery, rejection and the affirmation of a child. The husband is like a lizard basking in the sun.

Central to the power of this production is Michael Bates’ use of 3 backlit screens where the poses of the main characters are seen in silhouette, visually enhancing the narrative. Video sequences are projected onto the rock wall of the Peacock Theatre. The hem of a bridal gown drags over rock. A man and a woman joyfully run through a forest.

The work of Dmitri Ac on guitar, percussionist Ben Smart and the tight vocal response of the IMTL soloists and chorus are also integral to the power of the production. Despite heavy Catholic imagery such as anguished hand-wringing, the crown of thorns, stigmata on the mistress’s palms and the bride’s entrails drawn from her wedding frock in the final scene, Lizard is accomplished and exciting music theatre.

IHOS Opera Laboratory, Pop, directors Sally Rees, Matt Warren, designer Sally Rees, composer Matt Warren, video production Sean Bacon; A Lizard Between Her Breasts, director Anna Messariti, musicians Dmitri Ac and Ben Smart, composer Raffaele Marcellino, design & production Michael Bates, costume Sandra Alcor. For both productions: lighting Don & Reuben Hopkins, sound & video Stefan Morton, movement Jindra Rosendorf; Peacock Theatre, Hobart, Dec 12-15

Andrée Greenwell occupies a special place in the musical culture of Australia. Her distinctive compositions sit uniquely at the nexus of folk, opera, pop, jazz and avant garde trajectories. Her new show, Dreaming Transportation, Voice Portraits of the First Women of White Settlement at Port Jackson, is an inspired, 16-strong song cycle for 5 singers and 7 musicians. Given that the work is about women living in prisons, in towns and on the land in early 19th century Australia, it’s not surprising that UK folk music in its various modes is the dominant stylistic strand, sometimes plainly so but often more complexly composed as well as counterpointed dramatically by instrumental scoring that is vigorously of our own time.

The songs often work by juxtaposition, a relatively simple, sexy folk-like melody, for example, is followed by David Hewitt’s taut, deep drumming introducing Deborah Conway’s impassioned song to a rapist that swings into cabaret (with accordion accompaniment) without ever losing its folk rock impulse. Text and music offer quite an emotional journey in which women suffer prison (sometimes going mad) and emerge from it seeking livelihoods; an adventurous independent woman fights for and wins land; in a drought, a voice “hope(s) for a less desolate tomorrow”; and in a marvellous diary, a mother of 12 (“members of my little jury”) writes “My heart is a town.” Women write of missing their homes in Britain, their lovers and husbands (with a fine sensuality), and, in a grim litany, of missing their identity.

Just as Greenwell found an ideal writing partner for the earlier Laquiem in Kathleen Mary Fallon, so she has chosen wisely again. Jordie Albiston’s Botany Bay Document-A Poetic History of the Women of Botany Bay (Black Pepper Press 1996 nla) takes the letters and other writings of a range of women from early settlement and arranges them on the page into an embracing poetry, true to the women but also Albiston’s own poetic voice. Greenwell’s settings of a selection of these is achieved with deceptive ease, such is the match of words and music.

Dreaming Transportation is a multimedia work with slide and video projections, documentary touches and bits of acting, but the best thing about it is the music. In this Greenwell is served very well by her singers. Sopranos Christine Douglas and Miriam Allan not only provide an operatic lyricism and intensity (and a sublime duet) but also occasional portraits of the upper classes. Actor-singers Amie McKenna and Justine Clark offer simpler but emotionally rich voices and are especially adroit in the folk idiom. Deborah Conway fuses folk and her own brand of pop-charged energy bringing an extra weight to the show. That such voices can co-exist in the same space is a testament to the totality that Greenwell has created.

Theatrically however Dreaming Transportation is an uneasy totality, held together by the music but otherwise threatening to fragment. Essentially the show is a series of songs in concert format (the composer asks the audience not to applaud until the end of the show). There’s no through-narrative, which is fine, it is after all a collection of portraits. Sometimes songs are supported by visual imagery. Sometimes they are bridged by spoken text or brief, acted scenes. The singers are simply costumed and, for the most part, enter and leave casually. They are framed by a semi-circle of musicians. All of this is superficially satisfactory, but various inconsistencies and failures to follow through rob the show of the power it could and should have. The most striking of these is in the visual material.

Dreaming Transportation begins strongly and immersively on the 3 tall screens behind the musicians, with camera shots of a late 18th century ship filmed close to its timbers, the mast and the water flowing past. The strength of this kind of imagery and the later film of a body being punished (in Parramatta’s infamous Female Factory), of a head shaven and then, powerfully, of different parts of the body (hands, lungs, feet) is that it is evocative rather than simply illustrative and that it has a consistency of visual style. Other images projected in the show were doggedly literal (slides of cartoons of Newgate prison), or pointless (Sydney forming over 200 years on the banks of its harbour) or, like some of the interpolated text (lists of facts which thankfully seemed to run out), ploddingly documentary. The overall effect was of pickings from a ragbag of imagery, an educational cut and paste. Andrée Greenwell is an accomplished filmmaker—someone should commission her and her collaborators to visually through-compose Dreaming Transportation.

Part of Laquiem’s power was that it exploited the concert format. Greenwell’s decision in the new work to costume her 5 singers in early 19th century style dresses pushes the performance into an uneasy place between concert and theatre. Perhaps it would have been better to stay away from costume, especially since at one point the non-costumed Greenwell steps away from her conducting position and sings centre stage. As for the theatricality of the piece, sometimes it’s deft, funny and moving, sometimes cutely illustrative. Again, there’s insufficient consistency of vision. As well, any text added outside of Albiston’s contribution to the songs should be given to her to adapt in the spirit of her poetry, if it’s needed at all.

What was consistent was the audience’s rapturous response to the music, if in some doubt about other elements of the work. Greenwell-Albiston should have a winner on their hands. The show is being recorded by ABC Radio this week and hopefully ABC Enterprises will have the wisdom to see that a CD of Dreaming Transportation could sell, such is the calibre of Greenwell’s superior tune writing, its excellent scoring for a small group of virtuosic musicians and, not least, the presence of Deborah Conway. Dreaming Transportation needs another stage of development and then it should be ripe for touring, everywhere.

Dreaming Transportation, composer & artistic director Andrée Greenwell, poet & librettist Jordie Albiston, staging director Christopher Ryan, dramaturg Francesca Smith, digital artist & set designer Katerina Stratos, video artist Toby Oliver, costumes Jenny Irwin, lighting Sydney Bouhaniche; consultant producer Anna Messariti. Sydney Festival, Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, Jan 22-25

The Melbourne Electronic Music Festival has come up with something visually unique—a film festival celebrating electronic music around the world. Not only that, the festival will feature Midnight in Melbourne, Australia’s first documentary on the local drum and bass scene. Directed by Mark Bakaitis, the 40 minute film features interviews with DJs and promoters, a soundtrack of local and international artists with live performances from local and overseas acts including Grooverider, Optical
and Ed Rush.

Electronic music-based documentaries, film clips and shorts from around the world will be screened at at E2-E4, North Melbourne. The program includes:
Ulkomaat (Foreign Lands), a 4 minute “grey road movie” from a Finnish electronic lo- fi lounge producer and video artist Samuli Alapuranen; Pump up the Volume, a 4-part history of UK house music directed by Carl Hindmarch (120 minutes); S-Crashabout the neighbourhood perils of a rehearsing DJ directed by Melbournians Lindsay Cox and Victor Holder (3 minutes), and the 2 hour Hang the DJ, “a disc-jockumentary” from Canada (directors Marco and Mauro La Villa).

The annual MEMF includes workshops, conferences and exhibitions on arts asso- ciated with electronic music and culminates in a free outdoor event at the week’s end- MEMF Sound Off.

Melbourne Electronic Music Festival: various locations, February 9-16; MEMF Film
Festival, E2-E4, 170 Abbotsford St, Nth Melbourne, Feb 12-14, 9.10pm nightly

You open the first edition of RealTime for 2003 in anxious times. Australia is actively complicit with the USA in premeditating murder, a pre-emptive strike against Iraq, a brutal move contrary to the fragile but sometimes effective restraints developed in the wake of World War II.

Infinitely less publicised is the free trade agreement our federal government is negotiating with the USA, and which poses another kind of threat to Australian integrity.

This edition of RealTime features the work of artists, producers, government agencies and overseas partners in marketing and touring of the Australian performing arts. Consistent outcomes are very hard to achieve, but the determination of all those involved and the many successes in recent years suggest that a dream is on the edge of being realised.

All of this assumes that while we build international demand the supply side of the picture is safe. However, the example of New Zealand’s decimated domestic TV drama production under the terms of their free trade agreement is frightening.

On January 15, a host of Australian cultural organisations banding together as the Australian Coalition for Cultural Diversity (ACCD) and representing artists and companies in theatre, film, music, dance, television, libraries, museums, literature, book publishing, and visual and multimedia arts called on the Howard Government to support Australian culture in the forthcoming free trade negotiations with the USA. ACCD will be officially launched in February 2003. Some of the member organisations are Arts Law Centre of Australia, Ausdance, Australian Guild of Screen Composers, Australian Interactive Multimedia Industry Association, Australian Screen Directors Association, Australian Society of Authors, Australian Writers Guild, Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance, Museums Australia, Music Council of Australia, National Association for the Visual Arts, and Screen Producers Association of Australia.

ACCD has made a submission to the Department of Foreign Affairs Office for Trade Negotiations urging the Government “to negotiate a broad exemption for cultural industries, to allow it to continue supporting and fostering Australian cultural expression unfettered by the constraints of a trade agreement.”

Dick Letts, Chair of the Music Council of Australia and spokesperson for ACCD writes: “We believe that pressure will be applied by the US in forthcoming negotiations to restrict Australia’s freedom to act in support of its cultural policy objectives. The US Trade Representative, for instance, has been openly critical of measures such as Australian content rules for television as barriers to free trade. But while this is one of the most immediate issues at stake one must also bear in mind the potential impact of trade commitments on the whole range of cultural expression, and the extent to which such commitments could limit the Government’s ability to support Australia’s cultural industries in the future.”

Ian David, President of the Australian Writers Guild, is quoted by ACCD as saying, “To some this may just be about trade, commerce and access to markets. To us it’s about our heritage, our identity, our livelihood. What will be unique about being Australian if our songs, stories, pictures and ideas are crushed under the weight of a boot made somewhere else?”

The ACCD notes that the USA already has it pretty good in this country: “Australian government support for culture is open, measured and does not pose any real threat to the ability of the USA to sell its cultural products and services in Australia.” But as we well know, the fundamentalists of freedom prefer it for themselves, not others.

RealTime 54 (April/May) is titled BOOKish and will feature reviews of a wave of new Australian books about performance, digital arts and cultural issues. RT

An extraordinary collaboration between 2 major players in Tasmania’s contemporary cultural scene, is theatre ltd and CAST (Contemporary Art Services Tasmania), White Trash Medium Rare is a fusion of several art forms, a vehicle for some of the most ingenious and original artists working in the state. As well as attending performances, audiences could view illuminating open rehearsals and explore the set as an installation.

The performance asks what it is to be white and Anglo-Australian in the 21st century. Its extended title is “If Australia is the lucky country, how come we always cheat at sport?…A night of laughter to make you celebrate and question the place where you live.” Director Ryk Goddard leads a troupe of 8 performers as well as sound artists, dancers, actors, physical performers and visual artists working in hybrid technologies in a show devised by members of the is theatre company.

The audience enters the performance space to be interviewed and videoed before being seated. The space is the CAST gallery, dexterously converted with tiered seating along 2 walls and projection screens at either end, one serving as an entry point through which the performers access the ‘stage.’ Above the performance space is a grid from which athletic and acrobatic physical performance is woven into the show.

White Trash Medium Rare is a unique theatrical experience, a full-on onslaught of iconic Australian projected images, instantly recognisable and often amusing, evocative soundscapes, daredevil physicality and seamless vignettes portraying white Australians, including, movingly, the experience of post-World War 2 immigrants. Performers morph, frequently before our eyes, into archetypes and stereotypes of the white Australian experience, exploring the realities and quirks that make it what it is, accompanied by the fusion of media and artforms that characterise the piece.

The work is essentially unscripted and never the same 2 nights in a row. Working with so many different and skilled artists makes it “impossible to speak with one voice” about the show’s theme, says Goddard and no one voice can represent any group experience in this era. The result is a series of interpretations and experiences of what it means to be Australian. It rejoices in the fact that there is no singular, uniform version of living in this country, but many different and intricate ones.

One of is theatre ltd’s intentions is that the audience find the work as amusing, alarming, provoking and novel as the company found devising the work and examining white Australian selfhood and existence. They have achieved their aim of leaving viewers “thinking differently about how we live in this country” (Goddard).

White Trash Medium Rare, director Ryk Goddard; is theatre ltd and CAST (Contemporary Art Services Tasmania), CAST gallery, installation Oct 2-27, performances Oct 10-26, 2002

Time She Stopped is the second one-woman show directed by Adelaide choreographer Ingrid Voorendt. Astrid Pill performed the piece in January this year at Adelaide’s Space Theatre as part of the Adelaide Festival Centre’s innovative In-Space program. Naida Chinner featured in the 2002 work, Once Bitten, seen in the Mobile States program for emerging dance artists see in Perth and Sydney (see p 41).

On directing one woman works, Voorendt says, “I’ve known the performers I’ve directed as friends and…I’ve worked with [them] for quite some time. I can’t imagine entering into something like this with someone I didn’t know or didn’t have a connection with…The thing with Astrid and Naida is we are excited and curious about the same sort of things and we trust each other implicitly.”

I assumed Voorendt elicited material from each performer and then arranged it, but she views the works as “conversations” in which her own experiences, thoughts and feelings are present with those of Pill and Chinner. “I begin rehearsal by brainstorming with the performer using all sorts of questions and tasks. The beauty of working with someone like Astrid is that she will go home with a question or task and come up with performance ‘treats’ for me the next day and she is brave and imaginative about form. Astrid doesn’t censor. She allows herself to play and does the judging later. That’s a real skill. We collect texts and songs and movement ideas and end up with a thick pile of material. Then I get to arrange it. I love structuring material. I approach that in a very choreographic way. I’ve learned through various experiences about a more narrative approach but I come from a completely different place. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I guess it’s montage. A turning point in my process was a piece I made based on my sister’s writing. This was the first time I had worked with text and I began to focus on creating images rather than making sequences. ”

Voorendt loves images that appear strange but are true, and journeys that lead you to surprising places. She found her way into dance theatre instinctively; then discovered her way of working was being explored in Australia and overseas. She began dancing at 16 and soon became inspired by the Graham technique. After completing a BA in dance at Adelaide University she returned home to New Zealand and spent a year “in depression and self-doubt about her chances and her body and ability.” As a way forward she returned to South Australia and worked in Whyalla teaching dance to young people. There, she began collaborating with theatre director James Winter writing performances and experimenting with ways to “get people dancing.” To do this she had to relinquish the “teaching phrases” model of dance instruction. She invited Sally Chance, then Artistic Director of Restless Dance Company, to run workshops with people with disabilities in the community. Chance then asked Voorendt to lead workshops with the Restless dancers.

When Voorendt saw the Restless show, Sex Juggling she “absolutely lost [her] head over it…[I]t affirmed what I had hoped and wanted to believe, that you didn’t have to have the perfect dancer’s body or look or technique to be able to move people.” After seeing some of her devised work, Chance then asked Voorendt to direct the company where she says she found her niche. “I’m not interested in myself as a performer. I’m not interested in my body and my phrases. I like moving and other people might find my movement interesting but I’m much more interested in other people’s movement. [The work with] Restless was a confirmation of the way of working I had been developing in Whyalla without having a context for what I was doing. Then I went back to University and wrote a paper on collaborative processes discussing the work of Restless Dance Company, DV8, Ballet C de la B, Pina Bausch. I wrote about facilitation and directing and [it] helped…clarify what…I was doing and where I was going. I love responding to other people’s ideas. I like to pass their material through my head rather than have a piece coming only from me. I’ve always known that I didn’t want to be formulaic as a director. What keeps me on my toes is working with different people.

Time She Stopped was devised with and performed by Astrid Pill, an astounding contemporary performer. Strikingly present and equally skilled as a singer, dancer and actor, she seems able to swap medium or genre without blinking. In Time She Stopped she danced rolled up in a rug, danced with a rug, sang the rollicking blues number, Black Coffee, told stories against herself, dreamed, pondered, explained stain removal in great detail, let her hair down and danced with wild abandon in a party frock, raged against past lovers, dismembered gingerbread representations with originality and fury, exploded into speech or song or dance, pulled herself together, drank and drank red wine and sang a bittersweet, haunting song by Grieg to end. I was spellbound.

Time She Stopped also featured skilled musician Zoë Barry who has a history of interesting collaborations with dance and theatre people. Barry shadowed Pill’s performance—marooned on her own carpet square, she played cello, sat or lay lost in thought, sang snippets of songs and gave us a full rendition of the haunting ballad, 26 years. Her performance was a stripped back, skeletal version of Pill’s but her cello produced rich veins of music that underscored Pill’s emotional states and singing.

Time She Stopped is a treatise on the woman home alone at the end of an affair. Like much contemporary dance theatre in form, it features a montage of events with an associative logic: carpet stains, love stains, salt the stain, salt the wound, blot out stains, block out memories, pour, drink, break the wine glass, break with the past etc. The work is threaded with stories of one woman’s unsuccessful attempts to ‘be beige’, to ‘fit in and go unnoticed.’ Although frailty and despair are present in the central image and feelings confessed, I was struck by the sheer force and vibrancy of Pill’s performance. It reminded me of footage of Jackson Pollock’s action painting: abandoned yet focussed.

The work doesn’t add up or arrive at a point—its focus seems to be the pleasure of the ride—familiar, absurd, poignant, disturbing, astonishing. Voorendt described discovering the classic Harold and Maude and her work contains the angst of the likes of Donnie Darko and American Beauty, films that seem to capture the contemporary conundrum of ‘innocence’, meeting ‘desire for love’ meeting ‘not belonging.’ Sometimes you get closer to the way life feels through bizarre and/or startling images and stories that don’t add up. This work does just that.

Time She Stopped, performer Astrid Pill, devised and directed by Ingrid Voorendt, music Zoë Barry, lighting design Gaelle Mellis & Geoff Cobham, design Louise Dunn, lighting and production Ben Shaw, Inspace, Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, Jan 17

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