Singing the unheroic hero

Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

Simon Meadows, Anna Margolis, Sally Wilson,
Mathew Champion, The Hive

photo Ponch Hawkes

Simon Meadows, Anna Margolis, Sally Wilson,
Mathew Champion, The Hive

The Hive is an adaptation by Nicholas Vines of Sam Sejavka’s play The Hive about the death in 1915 and posthumous fame of the Bloomsbury Group poet Rupert Brooke. The 1990 play was much lauded when it first appeared, winning the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Drama. Judging by the libretto for this version, the play is a wordy work, full of sharp exchanges and potent commentary. The opera takes the form of a series of vignettes that capture key moments from the death of the poet during World War I through to World War II, when England was again at war and the memory of Brooke was enlisted to encourage patriotic duty. Sejavka himself declares in the program note that his real concern is with ‘media hype’, the exploitation of the memory of Brooke for political purposes; a lesson that still has much to offer.

Chambermade’s production is for an intimate space–small stage, no wings, simple, well-chosen props–hat focuses on the performers’ delivery of the text. The backdrop is a clear plastic sheet with a green (starboard?) light behind, giving the setting an unworldly feel. The 5 performers, 4 of whom take multiple roles, are elaborately costumed, providing cues to their identities and the eras in which the action is set. The opera opens with the performers as crew members observing Brooke’s body on board the ship where he died, aged 27, dirging “Rupert Brooke is dead, Rupert Brooke is dead!” and hailing him as a fallen hero. “He died for his country”, they cry, mourning not only his demise but also the manner of it: “an insect bite, what a meagre end…” The blood poisoning induced by a mosquito bite was sometimes downplayed in the publicity surrounding his death. His so-called war sonnets were championed, and Winston Churchill in particular wrote an obituary that offered Brooke as a patriotic inspiration. At regular intervals the deceased rises from his gurney to soliloquise, at one point intoning: “I am a dead man but I suspect I have more living to do in the minds of men and nations.”

We meet publishers discussing the release of Brooke’s private papers, the executors of his estate, his friends and former lovers, including Bloomsbury Group members conducting a séance to try to contact his spirit. Insects permeate the work; Brooke was fascinated by them, hence the irony of his death, hence the opera’s title. Characters entering the drama create a kind of hive of activity around his memory.

In contrast to much other opera, The Hive is cerebral, discursive and philosophical rather than romantic or dramatic. Passages of involved discussion are periodically interrupted by Brooke rising and abruptly clapping his hands (as if killing an insect), slapping a book, declaring his observations. In the séance scene, the performers chorus, “Thank you, friend, thank you, friend!” while pondering his life, deeds and misdeeds. They query his sexuality, “Does he prefer man or woman?” and “Did he take Virginia?” Woolf rejects these claims with a melancholy reply, “Spirits can lie like the rest of us.” They analyse his poetry, his former lover Noel wailing. “Rupert, you confuse love with lust.” Those exploiting and judging him reveal themselves.

Vines’ score is fresh, lyrical and suitably edgy, ably supporting the unfolding dialogue. Using just two keyboard players, on synthesisers and a piano, his music is eclectic, flavoured with Romantic and contemporary styles to characterise particular moments. Well-known musical forms—a piece for organ at Brooke’s funeral and later the piano accompanied by a synthesised/sampled sound of a cello in salon style—build atmosphere. Douglas Horton’s direction emphasises the text and its interplay with the score. The actors’ movements on stage are economical, focussing attention instead on the aural elements. Baritone Simon Meadows creates a strong, introspective Brooke who is engaged, through an ongoing dialogue with his various acolytes, in an analysis of self and the world. As an opera, The Hive is a work with great potential, though sung lyrics can be difficult to interpret making the nuances of the text, and even the narrative itself, somewhat elusive.

Chambermade, The Hive, writer Sam Sejavka, composer Nicholas Vines, director Douglas Horton, performers Ben Logan, Sally Wilson, Anna Margolis, Simon Meadows, Arts House, Meat Market, Melbourne, Aug 23-Sept 10

RealTime issue #75 Oct-Nov 2006 pg.

Einstein on the Beach Part 1 & 2, (Leigh Warren) design Mary Moore

photo Tony Lewis

Einstein on the Beach Part 1 & 2, (Leigh Warren) design Mary Moore

There’s a sour adage coined by George Bernard Shaw many educators would be familiar with: “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.”

It’s a nasty jibe and one that is roundly repudiated by the professional lives of theatre practitioners currently teaching in Australia’s tertiary education sector who retain a commitment to working in the performing arts while mentoring the next wave of directors, actors, animateurs and designers.

Richard Murphet, VCA

For almost all his working life, Richard Murphet, Head of the Theatre Making Department at the Victorian College of the Arts, has combined his work as director and writer with teaching. He has reached a point where, while a permanent employee of the VCA, he can negotiate regular time off in blocks to work on his own projects. This is necessary, he says, because “I’m pretty obsessive, so if I’ve got a group of students, I get completely involved with their work. So it’s not just time, it’s emotional time as well—just getting your head clear.”

He won’t be taking time off from the VCA this year, but he’ll be relieved from teaching duties to act as artistic director and mentor for a project with DasArts, the Dutch performing arts training academy (RT68, p42). The scale of the work is daunting: 24 young artists from VCA and DasArts will travel to North Queensland where, 400 years ago, the Dutch first made landfall in Australia. The students and their mentors will stay with 3 Aboriginal communities in Cape York, before returning to Melbourne. The task is then to create a work based on their research and experiences to be performed as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival. Murphet likens the process to the Dutch explorers’ voyage all those years ago: crossing vast expanses of unknown seas, not knowing what awaits at journey’s end.

It’s the type of undertaking that being part of an educational institution can sometimes provide. Initiated by the VCA, the project, according to Murphet, demonstrates the commitment the institution has to educators who not only teach the arts, but do the arts. Teaching has provided Murphet with other networks and opportunities. In 1996 he received a National Teaching Fellowship allowing him to travel and establish enduring connections with fellow practitioners in Belgium and Holland. It was also through his work at VCA that he met one of his most crucial collaborators, Lisa Shelton, who was formerly head of movement there.

Mary Moore, Flinders University

Mary Moore, an established theatre designer who teaches in the directing course at Flinders University Drama Centre, has also found herself working on large projects with her institution’s support. Commissioned to produce Memory Museum (RT46, p37), for the Centenary of Federation, she asked the Drama Centre to be a partner in the project. Moore believes the project wouldn’t have been possible without the support from the university. Because of the “immense educational value” of the project due to its experimental nature, the university was willing to allow staff and students to participate.

Moore finds little conflict between her roles as teacher and artist; in fact they complement each other. “I always try and find ways in which [students] can access the industry.” If there are clashes between classes and a rehearsal she has to attend, she will often invite her students along to observe. This provides a definite benefit for her students she believes, giving them an insight into the industry from an insider’s perspective.

Tim Maddock, University of Wollongong

Tim Maddock is busy. He’s formerly from Adelaide where he played a key role in the 1990s theatre scene with Brink (including co-directing a wonderful account of Howard Barker’s The Ecstatic Bible for the 2000 Adelaide Festival). While a relatively new appointment to the position of Performance Coordinator at the University of Wollongong’s School of Music and Drama, he’s also currently immersed in pre-production for The Hanging of Jean Lee (RT 73, p34), a new music theatre work by Andrée Greenwell for The Studio, Sydney Opera House. “It’s proving to be a challenge to manage the time,” he admits, “and I suppose I’m reliant on the university having a flexible enough structure and valuing the notion that I maintain a professional identity in order to be able to continue working as a professional practitioner.”

His involvement in Greenwell’s project came as a result of his role at the university. Greenwell delivered a lecture and had gone on to mentor on a project in the Music and Drama School. Their discussions led to Greenwell inviting Maddock to direct The Hanging of Jean Lee.

Maddock came to teaching through a change in his personal circumstances—he’d had a child and could no longer be quite so casual about earning money. However, a regular income was only part of the attraction: “The proportion of my work being done in universities was increasing…I was supervising productions of plays by Sarah Kane and Martin Crimp and all this interesting stuff and thinking this scope of work and experimentation and creativity going on in the universities feels more alive and more engaged than a lot of the professional practice.”

Helmut Bakaitis, NIDA

Big projects outside the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) aren’t possible for Helmut Bakaitis, Head of the directing school there. Although impressive in Max Lyandvert’s production of My Head was a Sledgehammer in 2001, his commitments mostly limit him to “fairly small cameo roles in the odd movie and television series.” This has meant that his work as a writer has suffered. His drawer, he says, is full of unfinished scripts that he is determined to complete. “My dream is to retire one day quite soon and put down all the ideas in my head on paper or on the computer.” Not that he would want to give up teaching completely. Bakaitis has had a long involvement in youth theatre and continues to be inspired and invigorated by contact with young artists.

Teaching, he says, has helped him develop his skills, particularly as a director and a writer: “I think I was a bit of a touchy-feely type of person and now I’m much more able to be diagnostic and clear in what I want to achieve in conjunction with the artist, which is a skill that I’ve honed through teaching here…Dramaturgy was one of the skills I came with and I’ve continued to develop that through the playwrights’ studio.”

Angela Punch-McGregor, WAAPA

Angela Punch-McGregor was appointed to the role of lecturer in acting at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) at the beginning of this year. She has also taught at most of the other major performing arts institutions in Australia. While well known for her acting work in film and theatre, teaching and directing are her primary focus these days.

She values the support she has from WAAPA, who have a commitment to providing their students with educators who have a profile and standing in the industry. Punch-McGregor describes the interaction with her students as “joyous.” She is also looking forward to the connections and networking that will be available to her as part of what she sees as a global network of institutions teaching the performing arts. South-east Asia, especially, she believes, will provide opportunities for teachers and artists alike given the establishment of European-style performing arts schools in cities such as Hong Kong.

Interplay of roles

For all the interviewees, there was a significant interplay between their dual roles of artist and educator. For Maddock, teaching has made him more “compassionate” as a director as well as forcing him to clarify his communication methods. This is echoed by both Bakaitis and Moore, who, unprompted, also voice the view that teaching has clarified not only the way they communicate, but also their ideas. Bakaitis and Moore also derive tremendous inspiration from contact with their students.

Punch-McGregor finds the roles of teaching and directing are intertwined. As a director she is concerned with “what is going be to visually and audibly most effective…At the same time, if I’m not getting what I want, I have to instruct in order to get that from the performer.”

For Murphet, teaching and creating his own work provide a kind of balance: “I’ve always found they really feed one another fantastically. When I get worn out—just hitting my head against the problems of putting work out—it’s good to go back to teaching. And when I get drained from teaching, it’s good to go out and do my own work.” His students also reap the benefit of having artist-educators by getting an accurate picture of the realities of being an artist. Murphet says, “Every time I go to direct a play…I don’t know how to do it. I start at the beginning and I ask, ‘What’s directing about?’ and then I gradually find it. And that’s fantastic for (the students), because they feel they know nothing and that’s the state you have to be in when you’re doing art.”

Benefits for students

And what else do students gain from having artist-educators? According to Maddock it’s having teachers whose theatre practice is fresh and alive: “I think when you stop doing it, you calcify and your ideas about doing theatre become frozen in time.”

Bakaitis’ view is that it is crucial that performing arts students have educators who are also working in the industry: “All you’ve really got to offer the students is your address book and your contacts and if you can’t give them current contacts, then what’s the point?” Murphet also acknowledges the benefits for students if teachers can plug them into networks, but thinks it’s of greater importance to infuse them with the excitement of constantly interrogating theatre as a form.

For love or money?

Money is always an issue for an artist trying to survive by their art alone, but none of the interviewees would give up teaching completely if project funding came flooding in. Mary Moore, particularly, relishes her working environment: “This particular relationship [with the Drama Centre] is very special…It’s not really about the hours or the remuneration or any of those things. It’s like a company.”

Both Murphet and Bakaitis say they would like more time for their own work but they would grieve the loss of contact with bright, artistically ambitious young artists if they left their positions. Maddock, too, appreciates the university environment’s vitality and the openness to experimentation. For Punch-McGregor, money has simply never been a reason for choosing any particular path: “I regard it as a privilege to work in this industry.” These committed artist-teachers are nurturing students as colleagues, future collaborators and fellow travellers.

RealTime issue #74 Aug-Sept 2006 pg. 2

Mark Minchinton

This journey begins with my awakening to my Indigenous identity. This awakening has taken more than 40 years.

The awakening is performed…I walk from the place now known as Busselton—where my grandmother was known as black—to Kellerberrin—where my grandmother was known as white. I carry a pack with food, clothes and shelter. I also carry a digital camera, a handheld computer, a Global Positioning System (GPS) and a mobile phone. A modern nomad.
Mark Minchinton

Mark Minchinton

Twice a day I stop, take a GPS reading and 5 photographs and write about what I hear, touch, see, smell, taste, find, feel, think or imagine at the place I have stopped. Each day, I choose 2 of these photographs and send them with a text to a website.

After teaching performance full-time for many years at Victoria University, performer Mark Minchinton went half-time for 2 years working towards a 3 month artist-in-residency in 2003 at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia.

Minchinton spent lots of time mulling over his venture, one “with a number of agendas, personal, artistic and institutional.” Void: Kellerberrin Walking was a 6-week walking performance from Busselton, in the southwest, to Perth and then Kellerberrin via Wyalkatchem. The total distance traversed was “some 500-700 kilometres—there was lots of wandering!” Throughout the trip Minchinton wrote about what he was seeing and feeling and encountering, and relayed it to his online audience.

On the technical front he had to work out how to keep a growing audience (including many overseas) informed using a mobile phone as the tool for an early example of “the roving blog.” He hadn’t realised that every 3 days or so he could have stopped at small towns linked by a community Internet service, but his own way allowed him to transmit 2-3 times a day.

The experience was “fantastic, much better than sitting in university meetings…and I was paid to do it!” Minchinton discovered, among other things, that “humans are meant to walk long distances—and sleep in the middle of the day.” He slept incredibly well, a revelation for a life-long insomniac. Walking 6-10am was followed by camping and hammock sleeping and then walking again from 4-7pm.

For the first time Minchinton felt he was “bringing together concerns about my own identity and a political program I believed in…a fusion of the personal, the political and the artistic.” He revelled in the “everydayness” of a performance that coincided with his turning away from teaching undergraduates after many years. At almost 50 years of age not only did he feel jaded (“teaching the young is fine, but did they like being with me?”), but also he had a son almost his students’ age (“I get this stuff at home!”).

The experience of the 6-week performance confirmed more than ever Minchinton’s passionate advice to his students: “Forget worrying about form; deal with something that has real meaning for you. That will determine the form.” He likes walking in itself and as a form, and has another big adventure in mind.

Critically, Minchinton’s WA walking took him close to his Australian Aboriginal heritage, something that had been kept hidden in his family. The preparation for the venture, from 2000 on, had involved intensive research into his family history and determined that the performance would be in Western Australia, originally his family’s home.

Minchinton subsequently moved into half-time postgraduate teaching in performance and half time as Director of Moondani Balluk (“embrace people” in the language of Victoria’s Wurrundjerri nation), Victoria University’s Indigenous Academic Unit. Being one of the few senior staff in the university of Aboriginal descent, Minchinton says he leant his weight to such initiatives.

As for being an artist in a university, Minchinton thinks it’s an issue of how much you implicate yourself in university practices and how much you set yourself apart. It’s important, he thinks, to “work with colleagues to turn around expectations”, to assert for example that artistic practice in the university is research. “We teach artists and they do postgraduate work and we take their money, so we have to recognise what they do, and the university needs to recognise that its staff need to do artistic research.”

Above all Mark Minchinton sees teaching as playful and performance as “an embodied ethics.” Whether his own discoveries as he “tramped through landscapes known and unknown” or his students’ everyday encounters, “it’s a matter of observing and absorbing, of how you approach an Other, how you depart, how you make decisions. I don’t care if the student is going into television, performance art or real estate, at least they have a grounding in the understanding of others.”

Mark Minchinton, performance maker, is an Associate Professor at Victoria University and Foundation Director, Moondani Balluk Indigenous Academic Unit.

Although the online version of Void is no longer available, the background to the journey appears on a number of websites including: www.newint.org/issue364/born.htm

–

RealTime issue #74 Aug-Sept 2006 pg. 4

At the core of the 200-year old conservatoire culture is the aim of training a musician for a dedicated career as soloist or orchestral player. Because this is an unsustainable goal, behind it lurks the real prospect of a sense of personal failure for music graduates, many of whom have been forced to undertake what they have been led to believe is a lesser career as a music educator, or give up music altogether for some other pursuit. In the last few decades, the rhetoric about music careers has been slowly changing. There is a growing recognition that a typical music graduate is unlikely to have a career which is focused entirely on professional performance in elite musical contexts.

Educators now talk about “portfolio careers.” For music graduates and un-credentialed musicians with strong industry profiles, teaching part-time at a tertiary music school is an attractive element of a portfolio career. But what of practising musicians who pursue full-time permanent employment in a tertiary music school? How do they cope with the demands of a dual career? To find out I spoke to 4 composer/performers who hold permanent jobs in tertiary music schools about the benefits and challenges of this career choice.

Robert Davidson, QUT Creative Industries

Robert Davidson’s Brisbane-based ensemble, Topology, is the major vehicle for the dissemination of his works, although he has written for other combinations. Based at Queensland University of Technology’s Faculty of Creative Industries, he came to academia after years of believing it would not combine well with his career as a practising musician, a belief based on his experience of American musicians such as Steve Reich who adamantly avoided academia. He changed his mind after realising that many Australian composers he admired were full-time academics, and concluded that university teaching would feed into his arts practice better than the computer programming he was doing to supplement his income.

Jim Kelly, Southern Cross University

In the 1970s and 1980s jazz guitarist Jim Kelly had a lucrative career as a session musician in Sydney playing all styles of contemporary music. As popular music became more electronic he decided it was time to revive his live performance career. In the meantime, however, the cost of living had gone up but gig fees had stagnated, so as an additional source of income he turned to private teaching. Kelly found he had a knack for communicating his ideas about guitar playing and improvisation, and even wrote a book on improvising. In the late 1980s he was recruited by the Northern Rivers College of Advanced Education (now Southern Cross University, Lismore, NSW) as a full-time lecturer in its new contemporary music program.

Thomas Reiner, Monash University

Although Thomas Reiner sees himself as primarily a composer, he also has a background in systematic musicology (he has written a book titled Semiotics of Musical Time). Based in Monash University in Victoria, Reiner formed a group, re-sound, a collective of experimental performers and composers, in 1996. From this point his artistic practice shifted more from notated scores towards collaborative structured improvisations that evolved into compositions through workshopping and rehearsal. Reiner admits that his university position provides financial security but adds that his teaching and research have become integral to his creative practice.

Stephen Whittington, University of Adelaide

Stephen Whittington is based at the University of Adelaide but maintains a professional practice as a composer and performer. As a contemporary classical pianist he gives recitals but is also strongly involved in electronic music, installations, multimedia and film. Recently, for example, he performed live soundtracks to 4 films at the 2006 Sydney Film Festival with Ensemble Offspring. Whittington also enjoys the security of an academic position but says if he had to make a choice between teaching and his professional musical practice the latter would win out.

Learning from teaching

All 4 musicians were positive about the benefits of being artist-educators. Robert Davidson teaches a broad range of courses in the small Department of Music and Sound at QUT including world music, musicianship skills, composition, non-linear music for multimedia and cross-cultural music techniques. He commented, “It’s amazing how much you can learn by having to teach something.” This is a common experience amongst academics who are required to teach subjects they may not have any particular expertise in, and thus are forced to engage with the material in an intensive way to be able to explain it coherently and inspire their students. The trade-off for all the hard work is an increased understanding of the technical and aesthetic aspects of genres and techniques that can feed back into the teacher’s own art practice.

Learning from students

Because students come into courses with such varied backgrounds, skills and interests both Whittington and Davidson suggested that they learnt as much or more from their students as the students learnt from them. This was particularly the case with postgraduate composition students who typically come into a program with established professional careers, a significant body of work, and very varied approaches to musical creativity. Reiner suggested that rather than teaching postgraduate composition students about how to compose, his role was helping them “find a way to think of how their work is making an original contribution to knowledge.” This approach, expected for students undertaking creative projects at doctoral level, had filtered into his own approach to composition. As a result of his teaching he felt that his work had become more “grounded in a clear aesthetic outlook.” As an improvising musician, Kelly believes that it is important to “keep aligned with young people” as well as working with musicians of his own age. He cited the case of Miles Davis who kept his music fresh by performing and recording with much younger musicians. Working in a university context has allowed Kelly access to a pool of younger musicians to work with professionally. He is recording a duo guitar album with one of his students, Matt Smith, later this year, and has regularly played with non-guitar students, mostly drummers and vocalists. Whittington, Davidson and Reiner also cited examples of collaborative work with students. Reiner, for example has released Conversations (Move CD), an electroacoustic collaboration with students Steve Adam, Philip Czaplowski, Robin Fox, Russell Goodwin, and Peter Myers.

Inside and out

Access to fellow staff members as collaborators can be another advantage of an academic position. Kelly has regularly worked with all the performers on the Southern Cross staff, including d’volv, a guitar trio creative collaboration with Peter Martin and Jon Fitzgerald. Another example is Davidson’s work with colleague Andy Arthurs on Deep Blue, an ARC Linkage grant partnership between QUT and the Queensland Orchestra. Whittington, however, said he was more likely to collaborate with artists outside the university, especially from other disciplines.

The time challenge

There can be big challenges to maintaining an academic job and an artistic career simultaneously. In the era of diminishing government support for education and demands for increasing levels of accountability, music academics are increasingly involved in higher teaching loads, burdensome administrative responsibilities, expectations to apply for grants and sponsorships and pressure to upgrade their qualifications. Indeed the lack of time to devote to creative work and performance was a common theme explored by all four musicians. Jim Kelly said that although he was able to maintain an active local and national performance schedule it was almost impossible to tour. For example, he had to turn down the opportunity to do a month-long Australian and New Zealand tour with Manhattan Transfer because he knew that the disruption to the teaching program would be too great and that making up the classes when he returned would be exhausting.

For Reiner, the changing conditions of the workplace mean that it is no longer possible, as it was in the past, to put aside a month or 2 to work on a creative project. His solution to create enough time is to get up very early several mornings each week. Both Whittington and Davidson stressed the importance of maintaining a balance between the academic job and artistic activity, neglecting neither and giving full attention to both. This requires careful planning and excellent time management. Davidson believes that a very focused approach to composing and instrumental practice can produce good results in concentrated periods of time.

Research pressure

In addition to artistic output there is also an expectation for artist-educators to produce research outcomes from creative work, even to the extent of having to write research papers about creative work. This can be a challenge for artists who are not used to this way of thinking, and don’t have writing as their primary skill. According to Reiner there is a real danger in the intellectualisation of creativity, a danger that spontaneity will fall by the wayside, and this is often the assessment that the artistic community gives to music created in a university context. Davidson felt that we have to be careful that creative music doesn’t become like science as it has in certain American university contexts. Both Davidson and Whittington believe that a great deal of energy is spent arguing in the university context about the value of creative work as a form of research. There are also significant frustrations involved in the way artistic activities are perceived at the government level. Although, for example, all academic staff in universities are expected to apply for research grants, the Australian Research Council currently does not fund creative or performance activities.

Teacher as role model

The value to the students of having lecturers who are active professionals in the industry was stressed. Davidson emphasised the idea of the role model: that there was no other way to learn to be an artist apart from being around other artists. Whittington felt that “the artist as a teacher sets an example of what is required to be an artist: the dedication, the passion, the desire to communicate, the desire to create.” By involving his students in his professional work, Kelly considered that he was not only teaching his students how music should be played, but also how to behave professionally on the job. Reiner believes that he is able to encourage his students to become more reflective and more self critical about their work, an essential skill for career development.

Despite the frustrations of administrivia and other time-consuming demands of working in an academic environment, the career of the artist-educator appears from my discussions to be a stimulating and rewarding one in the music field. This is not surprising since there is a long tradition of very prominent Australian musicians holding down full-time academic jobs. Two composers (Barry Conyngham and Roger Dean) even became vice-chancellors and continued to be artistically productive.

RealTime issue #74 Aug-Sept 2006 pg. 6

One of Australia’s leading composers, Michael Smetanin, has held since 2002 the Chair of Composition at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, an institution employing a high percentage of artist-educators. Although he had taught part-time since 1988, this is his first full-time teaching role: for most of his career he received commissions and awards so frequently that he was able to devote most of his time to composing. He thus has first hand knowledge of the life of both freelance artist and full-time academic.

Sometimes you see the different ways students approach compositional problems. Not that I then do the same myself, but it’s good to see that different angle, it keeps you a little bit sharper. I suppose as you get older you can maybe get a little bit more confident in your own technique, and that might make you feel a little lazy. You can see that happening with a lot of composers, as they get older the music is not as interesting anymore.

Hopefully. I enjoy teaching. I like teaching composition, it’s quite good fun really. It keeps me perhaps more energetic, not as complacent, and it’s fun to be with younger people. And more than anything else it keeps you feeling happy with yourself: it’s not so much that it’s making a direct benefit musically or technically, it’s more psychologically, it keeps you on the ball a little bit more.

Compared with when you were composing full-time, are there advantages to teaching?

For so many years it was a struggle financially. Sometimes it was great, but I had some really tough financial times. So this job is a privilege and a luxury really. Sometimes you get stressed out about the difficulties of the institution and having to deal with a new set of problems, like the lack of funding for tertiary institutions. That takes its place.

I don’t write 3 chamber pieces a year anymore, which is a good thing. In some ways it’s good not to have that necessity to be churning stuff out, because I think you might find artists who, once they’re under the gun and making more so-called art than they really should be, the quality is going to suffer. In a way making a little bit less these days is a good thing because the quality is going to remain high, if not improve. I don’t feel as if I’m slackening off.

Largely no. I think that if I was to suddenly decide that I want to write 3 chamber pieces a year I’m sure I could. But from time to time I feel that some of the red tape can be a little bit of a nuisance. I think that more of the clerical work is being pushed onto academics.

In the past might it have been easier to produce creative work while holding a position like yours?

Yes, I think that the pressure on how much work an academic actually does has increased little by little for decades. In the early stages of a piece I really like to have consecutive days of peace and not be bothered by niggly bureaucratic stuff.

Generally. It’s best to start a piece in a break. I work better if I have a good number of days together, consecutively. It’s not so bad when I’m getting towards the end of a piece, I can pick it up coming home at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. But I don’t like working at night. When I am further into a piece I can work on a bit longer because I already know it. Most composers will probably tell you that they write the last few minutes of their piece much quicker than they wrote the first few minutes. So it depends on which stage I’m at with a project as to how fast I’m working and how easily I can walk into the studio and pick up on it.

As sound is a small but growing culture it is not surprising that a significant number of the leading practitioners across the country are also the key educators. The increased interest in sound practice over the last 5-10 years is directly reflected in a developing range of courses offered through art schools, conservatoriums and arts faculties. This article surveys 6 key artists who continue to play a significant role in educating the next generation of sound artists and explores the tensions and pleasures of balancing an evolving practice and educational responsibilities.

Dr Alistair Riddell, ANU

Alistair Riddell is Lecturer in Computer Music, Centre for New Media Arts (CNMA), Australian National University (ANU). He started his full-time teaching at ANU in 2002 after working intermittently in Melbourne and the USA.

“The roles of educator and artist embrace an interplay made up of many subtle components: concepts, knowledge, experience, creativity, aspiration, inspiration and pedagogical expectations. I’d like to think that teaching benefited my practice but I think it is more in terms of being in a positive position with respect to the arts. You want to feel that when you teach or simply communicate, you inspire.”

When asked how he balances personal practice and teaching Riddell replies, “The bureaucratic and teaching demands of academia are ever present. To at least attempt to ameliorate this situation I can teach what I practice and vice versa. That is certainly the mantra of ANU. However, the trick is to keep the pedagogy current and relevant…Teaching does clarify certain aspects of practice. There is nothing like teaching something in order to really learn it. You have to know what you are talking/thinking about much more than you might just by practicing it.”

It appears that the pivotal point for Riddell is the nature of the interaction with the students: “Educators need to be able to remove themselves from a discussion with students up to a point and just listen to how the student expresses their ideas and concepts…I am very dependent on students providing me with feedback on contemporary aesthetics, events and technology. I actively cultivate a bilateral exchange of information on an informal basis and attempt to organise, support or participate in student events if and when the opportunity arises.”

Philip Samartzis, RMIT

Now Senior Lecturer & Coordinator of Sound, School of Art, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Philip Samartzis’ role gradually evolved from being an AV technician at the Phillip Institute, while studying Media Arts, into teaching. He believes this allowed him to “look at issues from both sides to implement the most effective strategies, to resolve problems…Although I had aspirations to teach formally I felt I lacked the experience to offer students the broad perspective that would benefit them. However as I moved from undergraduate to postgraduate study I was offered more and more casual teaching until a full-time position became available in the Media Arts Program at RMIT.

“I have always considered myself an artist first”, declares Samartzis, “and an educator second…(T)he experience I have accumulated as an artist provides direct and longstanding benefits to my students. I often draw upon my own experiences to illustrate real world situations that are likely to confront students at different stages of their careers, such as how to secure cultural support, or how to develop publication and exhibition opportunities. However teaching has had a profound effect on my art practice. It regularly makes me question the choices that I make in the development and execution of a project, and to consider the benefits that can be derived from my work beyond my own personal aspirations.”

Like Riddell, Samartzis sees the interaction with the students as key to the productive interplay of artist and educator. “Teaching allows me to test ideas upon students in order to gauge reactions, and affords the opportunity to explain concepts and/or methodologies within a critical culture centred on robust debate.”

On the issue of balancing academia and practice Samartzis is positive: “I actually enjoy splitting my time between teaching and artistic commitments. I like the social discourse and academic rigour that the university provides, whilst simultaneously enjoying the time and support I receive for professional development.”

Cat Hope, WAAPA, ECU

Lecturer in Music (Composition), Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), Edith Cowan University, Cat Hope is a relative newcomer to full-time teaching. She has been working for over 10 years as a composer, bass player and more recently as a multimedia artist. She was invited to teach at WAAPA 2 years ago after conducting several guest lectures.

Hope sees the interplay of roles as “complex, intertwined and probably very personal…[which] is changing now with the introduction of the RQF [Research Quality Framework]. Fortunately I teach at a university that rewards artistic practice as it would research in more classic academic areas…but I think if you are passionate about a subject, students pick up on it with a similar enthusiasm and that makes it better for everyone.

“Teaching inspires my practice in that it provides facilities and access to performers that I could have only dreamt of before. I often come across interesting material while researching lectures or [finding] a focus for a student, and that leads to something new for me…Being back at university has made me look more into music, whereas I was heading in a multimedia direction…I’ve really got into research, it’s the part of university life I relate to most. I was doing a lot of that as an independent artist but now I get paid for it.”

In terms of balancing the demands of academia and creative practice Hope says, “You must make time somehow to allow yourself to grow and change…The research day for academics is becoming a thing of the past, which is a shame because that provides an invaluable window for artists.” In order to sustain her practice Hope also began a PhD in Sound at RMIT when she commenced full-time teaching.

Andrew Brown, QUT Creative Industries

Andrew Brown, Senior Lecturer, Music & Sound, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, turned to teaching quite quickly. “I had a teaching qualification and decided to use it after realising that touring in rock bands was not an attractive long-term option.

“It is important that teachers maintain an active artistic life, as this keeps them grounded in the experience of practice and the enjoyment of the art. It also helps keep them up to date with trends and changes in the field. It is also useful for artists to teach, because it requires them to reflect on and articulate ideas and techniques. This provides an additional clarity to practice and often assists in an artistic development with greater intention. Keeping connected to young people enthusiastic about music is also continually uplifting.”

To balance practice and teaching Brown tries “to blend them where possible so they don’t seem like separate activities. For example, performing as well as presenting papers at conferences, developing tutorial materials as a way of consolidating my own understanding, working collaboratively with students on artistic projects, and shifting teaching activities toward my evolving artistic interests.”

Garth Paine, UWS

Garth Paine is Senior Lecturer in Music Technology, School of Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney. He turned to teaching full-time in 2002 after a 16-year career working in theatre, dance and museums with his company Activated Space. “Academia seemed like an option that allowed me to offer something from my years of experience whilst continuing to grow creatively.”

Paine sees that the emphasis on research is one of the benefits of working within academia. “Creative practice is central to all my teaching and, within that, exploration, innovation and discovery are paramount. This approach makes the praxis between research/practice and teaching a real and vulnerable one. It’s where students are exposed to the nature of both the practice-based and industry research I undertake and how that informs both my own practice, my passion for experimental sound, and the framework in which I position my teaching.

“Maintaining a balance is very difficult. I have used ARC funding mechanisms and industry partnerships to grow my research workload in areas that are important to my practice, hence making more space for artistically relevant research within the academy. However, most of my composing and performing is done in my own time outside the academy, even though this is, to some extent, quantifiable as research.”

Julian Knowles, University of Wollongong

Prior to working in universities, Julian Knowles, Head of the School of Music & Drama, Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong, worked in post-production as a freelancer and for the ABC, spent time in England with the indie band Even as we Speak and was active in the electronic/experimental scene. In 1993 he was approached by Michael Atherton to consult on a new course being developed at the University of Western Sydney and was soon after appointed as a foundation staff member of a “contemporary focused music degree.” Eventually he became Head of the School of Contemporary Arts. In 2005 he moved to the University of Wollongong. He declares, “I can honestly say it was never my intention to teach…I probably landed one of only a handful of jobs in the country which provided scope to explore my musical interests in a contemporary focused department.

“I am a strong believer that those who teach should be actively engaged in practice themselves. This positions you at the centre of new developments and stops you from becoming out-of-touch…In order to educate professionals, you need to understand the details and dynamic of professional life…It is often said that Generation Y need convincing of the authenticity of a source of knowledge, therefore it helps in this regard.

“Whilst I hate the idea of teaching as a cloning program, I do bring fresh ideas from practice into the teaching context at a fairly swift pace. In this sense, my students become part of my own enquiry into where practice is heading. This conversation keeps us all interested in what we are doing.”

Knowles points out “working for an academic institution places a range of demands on you, so the ‘educator’ these days is also an administrator, manager, researcher, curriculum designer, community/industry links broker and so on.” In order to find some balance he has “taken some radical steps in the past, including moving a step or 2 down the institutional hierarchy in order to regain some space to be a balanced practitioner/teacher/manager as opposed to a manager. I’m embarrassed to admit I have only had one bout of study leave since 1994. I have spent a lot of my career in a climate of shrinking budgets and radical organisational change.” However he is keen to point out that the issue of balance is just as present outside the institution “given the state of funding in the small to medium arts sector.”

Good teacher, better artist?

Clearly my interviewees think that maintaining a practice as an artist has a very positive effect on their teaching. But in the long run, is teaching integral to their practice and do they feel it makes them better artists?

For Cat Hope, the answer is no. “There are opportunities at university that could benefit me as an artist (equipment, networks, research materials and funds), but that could never make you a ‘better artist.’ A wage could never make someone a better artist, but it may help him or her to create and experiment. And what better way to make a wage than working in an area you love?”

Andrew Brown believes that teaching is certainly influential but not integral to being an artist. “I think that if I were wholly devoted to being an artist I may be a better artist than I am. Being a good educator is also rewarding but time consuming…I would certainly be a different artist if I was not an educator because educational interests and interaction with students have influenced the direction of my creative practice (as have my interaction with others artists and other art forms).”

Philip Samartzis differs: “I don’t think I could operate as effectively as an artist without the academic community from which I have drawn much of my inspiration over such a long period of time. However in order for both my academic and creative aspirations to grow I sometimes need to escape the university environment to focus on my art practice for concentrated periods…Teaching is an integral part of my practice and I will continue to do it as long as I have the flexibility to move between my various academic and artistic commitments and interests.”

Garth Paine feels that working within the academy “allows me to be more conscious of my artistic development as research, and to make time and space for that maturation…The goal of working within the academy must be for it to serve both the artist/educator and students—for the praxis to enrich both parties.”

Julian Knowles thinks the roles of teacher and artist must be integrated: “Whilst universities function as de facto patrons of arts practice through the allocation of an unfunded research load, I am not comfortable with the idea of the university as a simple financial crutch. ‘Teaching as survival’ therefore does not appeal to me…I see it as a choice to work inside the academy and I find it stimulating to be part of a learning/research community. Teaching to me is about giving something back and interacting with young/emerging artists.”

Alistair Riddell muses, “I don’t think I could say that I’m a better artist for teaching. I might be a better person, whatever that means, but I’m not sure I could say that either…Perhaps, more than anything it is a process of living, a state of being lucid and exchanging with others a dynamic for living, a past for a present.”

Cat Hope is currently in Singapore on an Asialink residency at Theatreworks. Philip Samartzis will present Immersion 4, improvised live collaborations between Australian and German artists at Interface: Festival of Music and Related Arts, Berlin Sept 14-Oct 6. Andrew Brown’s current projects include building generative music software for children, in particular jam2jam software, http://explodingart.com, and live coding performances, http://runtime.ci.qut.edu.au/pivot/entry.php?id=8#body. Garth Paine, in collaboration with Michael Atherton, will be releasing the Parallel Lines CD through Celestial Harmonies later in 2006, and his Meterosonics project can be viewed at http://www.meterosonics.com. Julian Knowles, in collaboration with Donna Hewitt will perform at the 2006 International Computer Music Conference in New Orleans, USA November 6-11. His sound design can also be heard for Michael Riley’s Poison (1991) exhibited in Sights Unseen, National Gallery of Australia until Oct 22. Alistair Riddell is presenting FyberMotion, an installation in collaboration with textile artists Belinda Jessup and Lucie Verhelst, Aug 1-11, Belconnen Gallery, Canberra.

High profile, practising artists are not employed full-time in dance courses as readily as you may find them in visual arts, music and literature departments. This is partly due to the time-consuming training regimes and maintenance of practice that dancers and choreographers must undertake along with touring commitments that require chunks of time off. It’s also partly due to the stigma attached to ‘educational choreographers’ in this country.

While full-time appointments may be scarce, an abundance of artists supplement their working year with casual teaching in tertiary institutions, which offers practical support, teaching experience and a chance to try out ideas. Bernadette Walong points out that the University of Western Sydney “has provided employment and research-related opportunities to NSW-based and interstate artists such as Kate Champion, Rakini Devi, Julie-Anne Long, Dean Walsh and Kay Armstrong.” Other dance artists who have worked itinerantly in courses around the country include Gavin Webber, Sue Peacock, Tracie Mitchell, Sue Healey, Claudia Alessi and Chrissie Parrott.

Four professional dance artists working in universities offer their views on the relationship between practising their art and teaching, how the university benefits their practice, and how students and institutions benefit from artists.

Bernadette Walong, University of Western Sydney

Bernadette Walong is a choreographer, performer and consultant on dance and education. She has worked with Bangarra, Meryl Tankard, Dance North and the Australian Ballet, and has created dance films in collaboration with Michelle Mahrer and Richard James Allen. Walong has been an Associate Lecturer in Performance at the University of Western Sydney since 1999 and is one of 2 dance staff there.

I teach at UWS on a part-time basis. This allows me a certain amount of flexibility to accommodate my work as a practitioner. Annual leave is dedicated to any international activities. In the past, and prior to the current workplace agreements, larger blocks of time away were easier to negotiate with the option of making up time lost by working additional hours/days.

My role as an educator impacts on my practice and vice-versa. The 2 contexts involve different playing grounds, but they emerge from the same foundations. Of course my expectations of a student are not entirely the same as those of a professional. I like to call them “professional students.”

Teaching has definitely strengthened the facilitation skills I bring into my practice. My communication and inter-personal skills have benefited as I am forced to be clear in my approach. And I am more conscious of the value of the individual—it expands the possibilities within a creative situation because I am able to entertain a much wider variety of perspectives.

As an independent artist I have been extremely lucky to manage part-time work and my practice. Tertiary dance courses fill the gap that our lagging industry has created for independent artists. Working in this environment has also enabled me to refine my choreographic practice and research both conceptually and physically as I can play/experiment with ideas over longer periods of time.

The benefits that UWS gain are mainly through connections to industry practice. Being employed part-time means I am continuously updating information relating to the field of practice as passed on to students. Secondly, students who have applied to the course have been aware of my work as a choreographer/performer prior and external to UWS—many students had studied Ochres (co-choreographed for Bangarra) as part of the HSC dance curriculum. This influenced their choice of institution.

I can genuinely say that students want to believe that they are getting the real deal, that is, learning from people they know have a professional track record. Learning from practicing artists—living and breathing, not simply documented in a textbook—means they have a direct connection with their field of study. This is a valuable and important tool for tertiary institutions because education should not be isolated from practice. The issue is research and creative learning, as opposed to the institutional trap of regurgitated knowledge.

Judith Walton, Victoria University

Judith Walton is a Senior Lecturer in Dance at the Department of Human Movement, Recreation and Performance, Victoria University. She is one of 5 staff in Performance. Her recent works include no hope no reason, a multimedia performance as part of the 2004 Melbourne International Arts Festival, Lie of the Land, a Gateway commission in Adelaide with visual artist Aleks Danko, and Project Eudemonia, a series of interventions with Rachel Fensham for the PSi10 (Performance Studies International) conference in Singapore in 2004.

In recent times I have taken leave without pay in the need for artistic autonomy—to be independent of the institution and its rapid transformation into a business. This has been my ‘strategy of freedom’ that François Deck articulates: a way of removing myself from the economic function of the institution (in Brian Holmes’ Artistic Autonomy and the Communication Society).

I don’t divide myself, only the time I spend on different activities. Everything that I have gleaned from making and performing is available when I teach and vice versa, and the whole of my life experience obviously informs both activities.

I perceive my art practice as separate from the university that has, nevertheless, supported it financially through my wage. That is, my job has indirectly funded my art practice. There is a general awareness of the growing control exerted by the institution on artistic and cultural production and the very real danger that art making can become harnessed to function, productivity, economic viability, and used as a justification for the institution’s claim to the fostering of a civic society. In a small and perhaps inconsequential way the removal of my art practice from the institution is a resistance to the dominant urge for art consumption, and a conscious reclaiming of the self-governing, playful, open, unknowable, experimental situation that, for me, art making requires.

In short, there is an incompatibility between the making of art and the ideology of the university. In my role as an art educator, these concerns form part of a continual critical debate that informs my strategies and tactics for maintaining an environment conducive to art education.

Performance is understood through the thinking and practice of performing. Art education should set up systems of inquiry to precipitate the making of art. This encompasses the identification and creation of theories, discourses and practices that enliven, extend, question, interrupt, disseminate, challenge, confirm, fail, reinvent, and disturb the making of art. A fundamental principle of Performance Studies at Victoria University is the involvement of practising artists in the teaching of performance.

Cheryl Stock, QUT Creative Industries

Cheryl Stock is Associate Professor of Dance at Creative Industries, Queensland University of Technology (QUT). She has had a successful career as a choreographer and academic and was a founding member of Dance North in Townsville, Queensland. Her most recent work, Accented Body, is presented as part of the 2006 Brisbane Festival.

I guess I’m really an all or nothing person, so for me to do my practice as I want to, I do it very rarely. With Accented Body, I was given 4 months professional development leave. The preparation had to happen outside of that of course. But teaching and creative practice are actually really integrated for me. For example, I draw on my skills as an artist and as an academic in working with the research students. But it is hard to do your own practice, especially as head of department.

With Accented Body I have had access to the most amazing technology through the institution and have been able to bring in international artists. It is a cutting edge project and this is due, in large part, to the facilities offered by the university and my exposure to the work of artists and staff in other fields here. That exposure has actually shaped the project into what it has become. So I don’t mind spending all of my time being Head of Dance if once every 5-7 years I can do a project like this, which wouldn’t be possible without the institution.

Because of the focus on practice as research at QUT, and given my experience in the professional field of dance, I have taken on a role facilitating the work of other artists by encouraging them to take on higher degrees. So I have become more of a creative producer/director—and that applies to the Accented Body project as well—drawing together staff, students and artists across a variety of fields of practice.

It’s important for the students to know that the people they are working with do have a practice… They are very nurtured in this tertiary institution. They are supported by postgraduates who come in and tell them about ‘the real world’ and show them by being role models. And we support those artists through their research at QUT. If we didn’t have that nexus our course would be irrelevant.

Michael Whaites, WAAPA

Michael Whaites is a choreographer and performer who has had an impressive career working with choreographers such as Twyla Tharp and Pina Bausch. He returned to Sydney in the late 1990s and has pursued a career as an independent choreographer and dancer. This year, Whaites became Lecturer in Contemporary Dance at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts and Artistic Director of LINK, WAAPA’s graduate dance company.

Three quarters of my time is spent with teaching and administration. At this early stage teaching and working full-time at a training institution (6 months into the job), I am finding that dividing my time between teaching, organizing the company and being creative is quite a challenge.

I take the opportunity to reflect on my own work by teaching composition and improvisation. But ultimately, imparting knowledge and information, trying to be clear and concise, is really at odds with the kind of receptivity and intuition I use in creating my own work.

The financial stability of teaching benefits my practice, and teaching [provides] an ongoing relationship with performers. To be able to plan and create with consistency is the most appealing aspect. This is a relief given the difficulty of securing funding in the sector as an independent practitioner wanting to work with a group, and the additional problem of time lag when you do submit an application.

From an artist WAAPA gains professional experience, knowledge and connection to current practices and industry professionals. For example, I have recently negotiated the acquisition of repertoire for the company from Twyla Tharp—a first in Australia. We will be able to perform 7 of her early choreographic works, which I believe are some of her best, showing the beginning of contemporary dance as we now know it. I have also organised a tour to Europe and Russia for the company with the dancers spending 2 weeks at P.A.R.T.S in Brussels, the dance school associated with Ann Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Rosas Dance Company.

I offer a practical understanding and real sense of the industry which helps students inform their choices when they graduate. I am also providing them with opportunities to connect with the industry. That places them in a much better position once they are out there looking for work.

The view from outside might suggest that artists as educators enjoy a somewhat privileged position in that they have steady incomes, access to facilities and networks not readily available to many artists, and perhaps also studio access and professional development opportunities as a part of their employment conditions. They also enjoy the company of peers and connections to professional networks. To cap this off, many receive research funds and professional advancement through exhibiting their work, which they can still sell on an open market in which they might also compete for public and private commissions.

The view from inside is somewhat different. Increasingly these days artist-educators have heavy demands on their time, many of which are not related to their artistic or even directly to their educational practices. Full time tenured positions are the exception, not the norm, and training for most must now continue to PhD level if they are even to be considered for an assistant lecturer’s position. For casuals and many part-timers, pay ceases altogether during non-contact times such as semester breaks and alternative employment must be sought to cover these periods. Against all of these demands the artist-teacher must maintain a viable and respected practice. What for many people might be considered ‘free’ time is more and more absorbed by the competing demands of the studio and the institution.

Five artist-educators practicing within the photomedia field were invited to consider a range of questions about the importance that their teaching practice has for them as artists and the issues, both positive and negative that arise as they maintain a balance between the roles. Central to the discussions was the degree to which their practices as artists and educators were mutually supportive and stimulated each other. The artists responding were: Martin Jolly, Head of Photomedia at the Australian National University School of Art; Kevin Todd, Senior Lecturer, Studies in Art & Design at the University of the Sunshine Coast; Helena Psotova, Lecturer, Photography Studio, Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania; Mark Kimber, Studio Head of Photography and Digital Art Media at the South Australian School of Art; and Matthew Perkins, Studio Coordinator Photomedia, Department of Multimedia and Digital Arts at Monash University.
Helena Psotova, Basel II, 2002, from the series True Fictions

Helena Psotova, Basel II, 2002, from the series True Fictions

The real thing

Engagement with students seems to be a source of constant stimulation for all respondents. Most cited the continual engagement and debate with students on issues in and surrounding the arts as a source of inspiration, increasing and encouraging a self-critical attitude and maintaining a flexibility in their approach to their own development. No doubt it remains true that students want to engage with a teacher who is aware of issues relating to practice through being engaged with practice. This goes far beyond mere technical issues. Mark Kimber declares that “as an educator and an artist I cannot ask students to take on challenges and risks in their work unless I am constantly doing that myself”, while for Helena Psotova, “the passion for art seems to be validated in [students’] eyes by having a teacher who is active in making art.” Martin Jolly makes the point that the commitment to “the seriousness and importance of art” can only be demonstrated if the teacher is also an artist whose practice remains personally challenging and is more than “just going through the motions of exhibiting.”

Another benefit of engagement with students is the pressure that they exert on a lecturer to maintain contact with technological and cultural changes. Mark Kimber stressed the “sense of energy that invigorates (his) practice that comes from constantly being surrounded by people…discovering the thrill of art for the first time,” something a solo artist can very easily lose sight of.

A model artist?

Some respondents stressed that they did not use their own practice as a base for teaching or as an example for students. This is important because it cuts across the possibility of emulation (always an issue)—students developing an expectation that work like the lecturer’s will be preferred. Issues of maintaining objectivity in relation to the educator’s role are generally foremost in the artists’ minds. Kevin Todd remarks, “I don’t use my own work for teaching as I feel it is important for me to keep that in the studio and to allow for a ‘professional distance’ from students.”
Kevin Todd, (re)creating nature, forms#1 and 2.

Kevin Todd, (re)creating nature, forms#1 and 2.

Part-time artist

There would seem to be 3 vital requirements for maintaining a healthy visual arts practice—time, resources and energy. Rarely are the 3 available together at appropriate levels. Ironically, the maintenance of one may militate against the other.

The competing pressures for the time of an artist-teacher effect the nature of their studio work in a number of ways. It can mean that the practice is “necessarily sporadic, ‘part-time’, project-driven”, says Martin Jolly. Most only get the opportunity to concentrate fully on their ‘studio’ practice during semester breaks and professional leave which can reinforce the primary identity as artist first and foremost. Some responses suggested that the demands of the institution were too great for the maintenance of practice at the level desired, having become “competitive and time-demanding.” Add personal priorities and this can become a “frustrating and exhausting combination”, says Helena Psotova.

Matthew Perkins says, “The situation where you do not have the time and the energy to dedicate to your practice to the best of your ability can be incredibly depressing.” This is a serious issue for the artist producing work which he or she feels may be below their best, and yet is still under the obligation to exhibit. He goes on to say that at least working within an institution allows him to focus more effectively than a collection of part-time, often non-art jobs had in the past.

The positives

The primary values of working in institutions are tangible and probably quite predictable. They include such things as: a salary; access to equipment and sophisticated technology (vital to the media-based artist); contact with professional networks within and across disciplines; visiting artists and writers; research and curatorial opportunities; travel opportunities and so on. A key but less tangible benefit cited by all was constant contact with peers. Todd said, “I found working full-time as an artist isolating.” The value of an income is obvious but also allows artists the chance to develop independent projects at their own cost, over time and to pursue and develop personal major projects. The institution also allows artists to engage with people in other disciplines on a technical and conceptual level so the resources available often extend beyond the art school.

In some institutions there is a strong recognition of studio-based research. New knowledge and methodologies in practice then ‘trickle down’ into the teaching environment and into the formulation of critical theory. Also educator-artists are constantly involved in self-education; the profession requires this discipline if they are to be relevant and perform at their best. This is inherent in the artist-educator’s situation in the university and may not be so pressing for artists outside of it.

More promotion, less art

On the downside, artist-teachers said that promotion to management level almost always meant that policy planning and administrative duties tended to tip the balance away from maintaining a healthy practice and, in any case, were not part of contact with students, which the artists really enjoyed and found relevant to their practices. Another issue cited was pressure to fit into bureaucratic definitions of research and output in the context of higher degrees and grant funding. Mention was also made of policies that affect the art-training environment, such as a move to more vocationally based training. New priorities for funding universities may not impact well on art schools, so there is some anxiety about what the teaching environment will become. At all levels the increase in administrative work was reported as “steady and constant.” One of the worst aspects of this is that contact time with students is often the first casualty.

The multi-skilled artist

In terms of identity, it is clear that being an artist today is almost never a single activity. Artists tend to be involved in curation, historical, theoretical and critical writing, with artist groups and running spaces, as well as being socially engaged. In this sense the artist-teacher is just another example of the multi-faceted role of the artist.

Balancing act

Some respondents have considered moving from full to part-time to better pursue their practices but, conversely, part-timers stressed the high expectations of the institutions as somewhat unrealistic, including often lower classification and rate of pay for part-time work. Such a shift is only realistic where their practice is generating sufficient income to sustain the balancing of roles, but this point may not arrive until the mid-life of the artist-educator.

Matthew Perkins sums up the artist-educator role thus: “I am equally passionate about teaching as I am about practicing art…It is great to be in a position where I can talk about, in a very passionate way, what I am passionate about. Many professions take this for granted…If I took away teaching and could just practice art then I could achieve so much in my practice just because of time and focus. But teaching is a very satisfying profession. It affects your personal growth in unseen ways—confidence, communication, your ability to critique…It’s a bit of a chicken and egg type equation…To me [the roles] are integral.” This view is doubtless true for all artist-teachers who tolerate the tensions and stresses that accompany teaching for the benefits it continues to bring to their practice and personal growth as artists.

Filmmaking, more than most creative pursuits, is not only a collaborative medium; it can also be a very expensive one. Of course, it’s possible to make short films, and these days even features, on the smell of an oily rag, using what Tropfest founder John Polson once described as “a digital camera, some friends and a free weekend.” But those with more vision and ambition need to go through much more preparation, writing scripts, seeking development funding, creating working partnerships and raising the money. And filmmakers, more than most, are used to disappointments and hold-ups: projects are knocked back, people go on to other work, and finances fall apart.

IN FOR THE LONG TERM

Margot Nash, UTS

To get a film into production can take years; take one of our filmmaker teachers as an example. Margot Nash, who teaches at the University of Technology, Sydney, began making films in the early days of the feminist film movement of the 1970s and 80s with We Aim to Please (1977); she was one of the makers of the seminal documentary on women’s work, For Love or Money (1983), with Megan McMurchy and Jeni Thornley; and made her critically acclaimed first feature, Vacant Possession (1995). After a number of years with several projects in development, she was asked to direct Call Me Mum (2006, see review, page 23), which premiered at this year’s Sydney Film Festival. At the first screening, she explained how she had taken a 6-month leave of absence to direct the film, but when the finances fell apart, she went back to teaching half time. Second time lucky, she took 6 months off and made the film, but when she returned to work she still had to finish the sound post-production, so worked three-quarter time while doing that.

Leo Berkeley, RMIT

Film production is a complex, multi-layered activity, and one that some filmmakers are admirably suited to teach, although their reasons for doing so may also be complicated. Leo Berkeley teaches in the School of Applied Communication, RMIT University in Melbourne. His first low budget feature, Holidays on the River Yarra (1991) was critically very well received, but he then spent years working on several follow-up feature projects that never got off the ground. As he explains, he got into teaching as a way of earning a regular income at a stage of his life when he really needed one, and found it occupied most of his time. Recently however, frustrated by the standard processes, he has made Stargate, a 300-minute fully improvised drama with a cast and crew of friends which was screened at last year’s Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF), in the “extreme narrative” strand, while his 12-minute Machinima work screened at the 2005 Machinima Film Festival in New York. (“Machinima, where real time 3D computer gameplay is recorded as video footage and then used to produce more traditional linear videos.” Berkeley, http://conferences.aoir.org/viewabstract.php?id=564&cf=5). “I enjoy teaching film and TV production because students keep you on your toes”, he says. “I like passing on the things I have learnt through experience and my reflection on that experience, and it gives me access to equipment and facilities that are central to my creative practice.” So, is the filmmaker a teacher, or the teacher a filmmaker?

BETWEEN ROLES

Margot Nash tells of “a wise teacher friend of mine (who) once responded to my question, ‘what makes a good teacher’, by saying `I think it helps if you are learning something too.’ Certainly my experience as a screenwriting teacher means I’m constantly learning about film and the craft of screenwriting and this in turn feeds back into my own creative work. I’m a writer-director and I teach screenwriting at UTS which means that I am always on the lookout for interesting films to teach and for new approaches to screenwriting. Reading and analysing scripts and finding constructive ways to respond to student work in order to encourage good work to develop means I am constantly exercising my critical faculties (like exercising the body, one’s critical and creative faculties need to run around the block pretty well all the time to remain sharp). This kind of work can only help me as a practicing filmmaker. I feel very lucky that I am teaching something I am also practicing so I am constantly in a learning situation.”

Trish Fitzsimons, Griffith Film School

Trish Fitzsimmons is a filmmaker and writer on film who is a senior lecturer in the School of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Griffith University, Brisbane. Her films include Retreat (1990), Above Water (1991), and (with Mitzi Goldman) the documentary Snakes and Ladders: A Film about Women, Education and History (1987), and she’s currently working on several projects. She explains, “It’s only by continuing with my own practice that I can be an effective teacher. For me, a hallmark of university teaching (compared for instance with high school teaching) is that one is teaching from a constantly expanding fund of knowledge based on one’s practice in whatever field (from Latin to film and all points in between) and on knowledge/scholarship of what others in the field are up to. Teaching in a university I also feel that an important part of my job is to theorise practice and to be involved in producing an historical record of practice, so the job description becomes very wide indeed.”

Ben Ferris, Sydney Film School

Ben Ferris is director of the relative newcomer, the Sydney Film School, and a pioneer of the global resurgence in “one take” cinema. His film The Kitchen screened alongside Russian Ark at the Inaugural One Take Film Festival held in Zagreb, Croatia in 2003. In 2004 he went on to win the Grand Prix at the same festival for his one-take film Ascension, and has been invited back this year as an international jury member. He sees the interplay between the roles of filmmaker and teacher as fundamentally harmonious. “As a filmmaker, I view teaching as a very important process in the development of my skills. As a teacher of film, my practice as a filmmaker keeps my ideas fresh and relevant.”

AHEAD & BEHIND

“One advantage is that one can more easily take on long term projects”, explains Trish Fitzsimons. “For example, in the mid to late 90s I made a doco that observed a group of male prisoners taking part in a set of workshops, and then followed them for 3 years afterwards. This kind of project would be very difficult with conventional documentary funding structures. And currently I have funding from Film Australia and the Pacific Film and Television Commission to develop a doco that again follows characters for a period of a couple of years. From a permanent tertiary education position one can take on projects that are less commercially oriented, and that have a strong research dimension, that would not be easily possible without a full-time wage coming in. The disadvantages are certainly that you produce work more slowly and that in teaching and working across such a wide sphere it is easy for hands-on skills to slip.”

For Margot Nash the disadvantages are to do with time. “When I was a fractional appointment and not working full-time I managed to carve out enough time to develop scripts, script edit other projects and work on developing projects as a director. Now I am full-time it is almost impossible: teaching full time in real terms means over 40 students writing short film scripts I’m reading, plus another 20 or so starting to write long form drama, plus 6 post-grads, and 2 of these submitting full length feature scripts. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. The net result is I haven’t looked at my own creative work for months—although I do think about it a lot.”

Pat Laughren, Griffith Film School

Time and time are the issues for Pat Laughren who teaches in the School of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Griffith University, and is the maker of social and film history projects. His very extensive filmography stretches from Exits (1980) to Stories from the Split: the Struggle for the Souls of Australian Workers (2005), an oral history documentary treatment which premiered at The Great Labor Split 1955—Fifty Years Later Conference in April 2005, in Melbourne. (His other films include Queensland’s Silent Films: the Newsreel years 1910-1930 (2004), The Fair Go: Winning the 1967 Referendum (1999) and from 1994 Red Ted and the Great Depression). As he says, “there is time to work on projects which may not be able to be supported otherwise in such a sustained way. But of course there’s little opportunity to respond immediately and ‘lose’ yourself in a production. There’s always a class, meeting or other commitment to be factored in. That’s not a complaint. Just a description.”

“One of the most exciting things about teaching for me”, explains Ben Ferris, “is when the students challenge me about my process. This keeps me on my toes, and forces me to constantly examine my approach to filmmaking. This is what excites me as a filmmaker: to question the status quo; to challenge conventions; to investigate the creative process. The only disadvantage that I can see is not having enough time to do both properly. It’s a delicate balancing act and if tipped the wrong way, focus on one can easily compromise the other.”

A SENSE OF COMMUNITY

Being an independent filmmaker can be very isolating. As Margot Nash says, “There are so many of us hunched over our computers trying to get films made and competing with each other for small amounts of money. In the old days when we had the Filmmakers Co-op I had much more of a sense of community. When I started working at UTS I think it was both the contact with students and with the academic community that gave me a sense of community again. The students…keep me up to date with what’s happening out there.”

For Ben Ferris, practising filmmaking is a more communal experience than most other art forms, “however, having a community of practitioners, teachers and students around you on a daily basis is exhilarating. It forces dialogue about the inexhaustible aspects of filmmaking on a regular basis, and allows your ideas to be tested and provoked, rather than letting them sink in a vacuum. Personally, while I am prone to be intensely private in the development phase, I like working with people, and it is one of the great attractions of filmmaking as an art form.”

DO STUDENTS BENEFIT?

Margot Nash thinks that students engaged in creative study benefit if their teacher is actively engaged in creative work rather than teaching something of which they have no active first hand knowledge . “It makes everything more real and much more lively. I know my students appreciate my industry knowledge and contacts as they always say so on student feedback forms. I take a very practical and pragmatic approach to teaching screenwriting, as well as a creative one. I bring technical knowledge and a current understanding of the Australian film industry to the classroom and I also write references for students and often try to find work experience for them.”

“I’ve always felt that when I’ve completed some of my own work that it is a buzz for our current students,” says Trish Fitzsimons. “My teaching is certainly constantly informed by practice. As far as possible within the Griffith Film School, we bring in other current practitioners, especially graduates, so our students have a sense of being part of a creative community. And whilst I never employ students for free on funded elements of my projects, it can be good for both parties to get students doing some exploratory work.”

Pat Laughren believes that it’s for the students to say what the benefits are, although he’d like to think it’s a sense of contact and engagement with issues beyond the strictly assessable. But for Leo Berkeley it’s that students recognise the value of the knowledge that comes from the practical experience of making a film. “Teachers who have both extensive and current film production experience have a lot to offer students, so in my opinion if filmmaking is to be taught in universities, there have to be opportunities for university teachers to keep making films.”

TEACHING TO SURVIVE?

“Unfortunately the kinds of films I have chosen to make have never made me a lot of money and I have never enjoyed being a ‘gun for hire’, making films I’m not interested in”, explains Margot Nash. “So even though I love teaching and get a lot out of it, it has always been connected to survival. I do not see it as integral to practice although it certainly enhances my practice. However, on reflection I wonder if I would have continued as a filmmaker if I had had to do something else to make a living, and had not had the option to continue to practice and develop my craft in the class room.”

For Trish Fitzsimons, being a doco filmmaker/social historian working in an audiovisual mode, university teaching is a huge privilege and a very satisfying career. “My goal is to take a long view, to keep growing creatively and intellectually and that that will also sustain me as a teacher. As part of this I am currently doing a Doctorate of Creative Arts, with Ross Gibson through UTS, and I’m off to Brazil in early August to give a theoretical paper about documentary voice at the Visible Evidence conference. That kind of professional opportunity is certainly valuable to me and should help me to guide my students in future, especially postgraduates.”

“Given the sort of projects I’ve been working on over the last years (essentially, social and film history projects), the students challenge my comfortable assumptions about what’s worth doing. And how it might be done”, comments Pat Laughren. “I hope I offer them some of the same. One trick of the trade is to find some serendipitous union between a project you want to do and the conditions in which you can approach it. The university/film school is still a place where a certain amount of disinterested research (in terms of topics, forms and techniques) can prosper and an agenda can extend beyond the limits of, say, the broadcast schedule.”

Leo Berkeley has some strong opinions, and some demanding questions. He believes that teaching is integral to practice if teaching is connected to research. If a filmmaker is developing their own experience and pushing the boundaries of their practice, then this can feed productively into teaching, the way it does across most other university disciplines. At the present time, however, he believes that “universities are moving away from an environment where active filmmakers can get involved in any meaningful way with teaching. The increasing focus on research has a related focus on postgraduate qualifications for people working in higher education, and not many filmmakers have a Masters or PhD degree. This increased focus on research raises a number of interesting issues for filmmakers who are already working within the university sector as teachers. There are growing possibilities for screen production to be included as the major, if not sole, component of a higher degree by research. More and more productions are occurring as ‘research’ within Australian universities, yet their status at the present time is quite ambiguous. These productions are often made by experienced practitioners and are specifically developed to extend the boundaries of that individual’s creative practice or the field they are in. It seems strange that this potentially significant sector of the industry has so little visibility or status.”

ADDRESSING THE ISSUES: ASPERA

Concern over the status of screen production courses within the education sector and the relationship between the screen production education sector and the wider Australian screen industries led to the formation in 2004 of the Australian Screen Production Education & Research Association (ASPERA), now the peak discipline body of Australian tertiary institutions teaching and researching film, video, television and new media as screen based production practices. It represents 16 institutions offering degrees at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, including bachelor, master and doctorate, in various screen production disciplines. By playing an active role in shaping quality education for those planning to or working in research and production for the screen, addressing issues of concern to the sector, and liaising with industry, secondary and TAFE sectors on matters of mutual interest, it aims to lift the profile of the screen-based industries within the wider economic, social and cultural development of Australia.

In fact, tertiary education institutions do seem to be finding a new place within the screen production community. Trish Fitzsimons remarks, “From a broad perspective I think that universities are a vital source of documentary and creative arts practice that might not happen with the same depth and integrity if all the work was produced with the pressures of freelancing.” Pat Laughren comments, “In terms of the wider industry, we may be the last refuge of a certain kind of institutional filmmaker that once inhabited places like Film Australia or the public broadcasters. Privilege indeed!”

Alice Springs-based Beck Cole, of the Warramungu and Luritja nations, is an Australian Film Television & Radio School (AFTRS) graduate and has worked extensively on Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) productions. Her documentaries include The Lore of Love (2005), about 18-year old Jessie returning to her Pintubi homeland to learn the lore of love from her grandmothers, and Wirriya: small boy (2004), a moving portrait of a 7-year old boy, Rocco from a Central Desert community. Wirriya won best film at the 2004 Women on Women Film Festival in Sydney. Cole’s short drama Flat (2002) was shown at the Sundance and Edinburgh Film Festivals in 2004. The suspenseful short drama, Plains Empty, screened at Sundance in 2005 and other international film festivals. Lisa Stefanoff interviewed Cole in Alice Springs about her career in documentary and drama filmmaking.

I actually didn’t think that I was going to be a filmmaker. I started training as a journalist. After a few years of studying journalism I discovered that the degree of stories that you can investigate were quite restricted in that they were often set in the present, in a current affairs sort of world which I didn’t find hugely exciting, or hugely creative or visual. So I began to explore the documentary genre, primarily in the field of radio but later on film and video. And that of course became a huge interest of mine and began the journey that I then went on.

I actually began working in the media when I was 16. I got a cadetship at Imparja Television. I would go to high school during the day and I would finish there at 3 and I’d work at Imparja from 3.30 until 8.30 at night in the newsroom. [After] about 6 months I started writing and presenting stories and then I began working as a news presenter and weather reader, which was very fantastic for a 17 year old girl from Alice Springs. Lots of fun! Going to the hairdressers’ every day after school—very glamorous!…I specifically enjoyed writing stories. I finished school and went to Charles Sturt University where I studied for 3 years—Batchelor of Arts in Communication and Sociology. [Then] I went and worked at ABC Television in the Indigenous Unit, and that’s when I started making films.

I’d been doing that for a few years and applied to AFTRS to do documentary directing, which was a really tough year but fantastic, experimenting. It’s like being in a big toyshop, you know? Shooting documentaries on film, and meeting new people and making some sort of wacky way-out films which you’ve got to get out of your system…And also, on and off, [I worked] with CAAMA.

Did you see anything at film-school, or were you taught by anybody, that had any major influence on you?

I think the best thing about going to film-school, for me, was exposure to films from all around the world and to filmmakers, Australian documentary filmmakers—Dennis O’Rourke, Tom Zubryzci, Pat Fiske. …Pat was a really large influence on me because—well I guess the men were as well—but she shoots and does sound and directs and was happy to go off on a motorbike and make a film about women with breast cancer, and that really excited me. With no money she sort of managed to do that and they’re such beautiful films.

I made one about a fighting, kick-boxing coach/priest, Anglican, called The Good Fight. And he was just a great character. He works with homeless kids…and troubled youth in Dulwich Hill in the western suburbs of Sydney. [It’s] sort of a character study film. And the second one’s completely different. I’d won a grant on the first film from Kodak for stock and processing and it was enough to make a 10-minute film on Super 16. We designed this whole concept for a documentary about a haunted house in Junee and the family that lives in this house and, you know, the ‘ghosts’, and the history of the house, and the place, which was really fun. I worked with a female DOP on that, which was really an interesting experience, and primarily a female crew too, which was good. [It] was really stylised and shot on film and really, sort of, controlled. But it’s a fun film. I enjoyed making it. It has a huge score. We had like a 35 piece orchestra come in and do the score, and incredible titles, and you know, it was just completely indulgent, but I learnt so much on that film, The Creepy Crawlies. The Crawlies is the name of the family. The woman of the house was part-Aboriginal and would cover herself in white powder and keep herself and her kids out of the sun so they wouldn’t, you know, tan up. [S]he was ‘touched with…a speck of tar’, or something really ridiculous. [Laughs]. That sort of sparked my interest in the story.

Two of your recent documentaries made at CAAMA—Wirriya and The Lore of Love—are very intimate films and they’re about families. Not your own families. There’s a striking balance in them between observational material and your main characters’ narration of themselves in action on screen. How have you developed that style?

I didn’t realise I had developed that style [laughs] until you just pointed it out… Well, look, I think it’s important that the subjects in the film have a voice. Often in observational documentary it can be really easy to interpret it as a filmmaker, but if you involve the central characters in writing the narration, which I always do, and voicing the narration and of course therefore controlling what they say and how they represent themselves, to a degree, I think it just helps create an intimacy in the film and a connection between the central character and what an audience is seeing happen in their lives. It gives them a more interesting point of view, I think, and particularly for a half-hour film it really makes it more succinct, and helps you join the gaps.

The other thing that’s striking to me about Wirriya and Lore of Love is that the narrators are young people, and they’re telling stories about their place in a world where their elders are quite important to them.

I’m interested in what young people think about culture, and I’m interested in what young people think about family, and the challenges and pressures of living in a contemporary lifestyle with Aboriginal heritage, and Aboriginal customs that you have to deal with as well. They’re the things that you don’t hear people talking about and you don’t get an opportunity to ask kids about very often and if people find those films interesting, that’s probably the reason why, because it is a fresh voice.

In Wirriya you reveal young Ricco’s boredom, his cheekiness and his care for [his aunt] Maudie, his adventurousness. In The Lore of Love, Jessie’s older, so I guess there are more sophisticated emotions like jealously, and love and shame…[T]hey’re almost themes in these films, these emotions. Was that your intention?

That’s a very deep question Lisa…[I]f you depict a character really well an audience will emotionally connect with them. And if you are close enough to the subject, and spend enough time and they trust you and you trust them and you’re working together, well then you are emotionally connected with them and they do say things and they do, you know, open up to you. That’s what’s so important to me about those films, that I had really fantastic relationships with both of those kids, Ricco and Jessie, and their families. We connected emotionally, and that’s represented in the film.

You’ve also moved very deftly and fluently between documentary and drama. Has documentary been a training ground for [drama]?

Writing scripts for documentary is so difficult that it’s like scripting drama. I do like to have realism, [drama that] could be interpreted as real life, like documentary. Like Flat, for instance. A professor of documentary has put it on the cover of his book thinking that it was a documentary, which is really peculiar. [Laughs].

Flat’s about a young girl living in a block of housing commission flats in Alice Springs, Central Australia, who gets a handycam and just films a day in her life. She lives just with her father, who’s largely absent, and she’s the primary carer of her little sister, and is also experiencing a budding love relationship. So it’s a mixture between what she shoots with the camera and the static shots of the world in which all this unfolds.

When you talk about realism and making your films feel as real as possible, in a drama, what elements are going to conjure ‘the real’ the most?

For me it’s the way people interact with one another. I find a lot of films way too dialogue driven. I sit at home and we barely talk to each other! We grunt, or things are said through gesture largely, and I like the communication of gesture. I think it’s really a big thing in Aboriginal language. And things are left unsaid, but things happen.

You made Flat as part of a series of shorts funded by the AFC’s Indigenous Branch initiative Dreaming in Motion and you went on to be supported by the AFC to make a half-hour drama film called Plains Empty.

Plains Empty has sort of been with me for a while, on many different levels. [A] large part of my ‘youth’ has been sitting around talking about ghost stories and country and travelling and being in remote places. I guess it’s a film that has all of those elements, which are all things that I find really fascinating. It’s a ghost story, and it’s a fun way of representing history, and in this case a female history. Also I’m just playing around with the genre and challenging myself. I wanted to use special effects and CGI. I see these initiatives as a training ground for me to work with people in different departments and learn various skills.

It’s set in Coober Pedy, the opal mining town in South Australia. It’s about a young Aboriginal woman who moves out to a mining camp with her man. She’s left alone for long periods of time and begins to see strange things. So it’s a film about isolation and discovering ghosts and finding closure. [She meets an] old miner who lives nearby and the town isn’t welcoming for women—it’s a really sort of dangerous place, because there aren’t many women out there.

How do you work with a cinematographer like Warwick Thornton to translate your vision onto screen.

…[Y]ou have faith that they’ll interpret it the way that you want it to be interpreted, and will bring their own elements to it. Warwick and I have worked together on and off for years now and we spend our entire lives talking about films, looking at books, at films and, you know, we understand our styles. …We work really well together, and it just sort of gels. It’s a great working relationship.

A filmmaker needs to always challenge an audience, to make them think about things and see things that they might not get to see, or might not have been exposed to or have thought about. …As a woman it’s really important to give women a presence on screen, especially Aboriginal women…on screen, as characters, and behind the scenes as well. I guess to make an audience watch and interact and respond to your film you need to entertain them.

Do you feel that as a heavy responsibility, to make films that are speaking to Aboriginal people and filling the gaps of all those stories that have never been told?

I don’t think I’ve ever seen it as a burden…For documentaries I’m initially making that film for the family I’m working with and it’s really important to me that they like it and their families like it and it can be passed around on DVD and the whole community will watch it. And you know, that’s going to happen anyway. Well, you hope that will happen anyway. But if you think about that sort of thing too much it becomes really daunting and…you’d crush yourself. You have to just be free and an audience will find the film, it will find its audience. That’s sort of my philosophy! I think it’s true, I think that happens.

It’s a feature film project, part of the AFC’s Long Black initiative. We’re up to second draft now. My film’s called The Place Between and it’s about a young Aboriginal woman in South Australia who is released from gaol and has to rebuild her life. So it’s a character piece and it deals with the prison cycle, and family and sexual abuse, and friendship and love. It’s ultimately a love story. [Laughs]. A love story set in Port Adelaide, which I’m very excited about, I have to say.

Well, I spent a lot of time growing up in Adelaide and around Port Adelaide, It was always sort of ‘the Aboriginal area’ of the city and it’s such a fantastic location. Really, you know, it’s a port, and it’s dying, and it’s going nowhere, even though it’s a port! It’s just a great location, and Adelaide’s a really fascinating place to make films I think.

I’m working as a writer and director on a documentary series called First Australians [writer-directors Rachel Perkins, Beck Cole, writer Louis Nowra], It’s 9 one-hour episodes exploring the history of Indigenous Australia. It’s being made with SBS and others. It’s basically a history of black Australia in a really well-researched, well-funded capacity. Yeah, it’s going to be one of our largest documentary series.

What do you call it—dancefilm, dance on camera, video dance, dance on screen…? Whatever it is, it was the topic of the first Screendance, State of the Art Conference held at the American Dance Festival (ADF) in Durham, North Carolina.

And within which critical discourse does it sit? This vital question was raised by Douglas Rosenberg, conference convener, keynote speaker, dancefilm-maker, and professor and founding director of ADF’s Dancing for the Camera in his opening address. Rosenberg’s multiple titles were typical of the conference participants and attendees, most straddling at least 2 areas of making, teaching, curating and theorising this fastest growing form of creativity in dance. The question of critical discourse proved to be the crucial one, underpinning all of the debates about name, form, structure, production processes, aesthetics, purpose and future of…whatever it’s called.

Papers, screenings, and workshops pushed us to consider, for example, dance on camera in academia (presented by a panel of 5 academics who have done heroic work in bringing the form into universities in America): cinematic visions of Butoh (Daniele Wilmouth, filmmaker and academic); popular film and dance (Karen Backstein, film theorist); and the range of cinematic and artistic possibilities offered by the apparatus of the screen (Alla Kovgan, filmmaker and curator, on choreographic cinema). Olive Bieringa, director of The Body Cartography Project, examined generating video material kinesthetically; Evann Siebens and Keith Doyle, ‘dance media artists’, explored improvisational shooting techniques; Daniel Conrad, filmmaker, considered the techniques of getting dance off the stage; and Billy Cowie, filmmaker and research fellow at University of Brighton, looked at framing; and more. Other presenters brought us ideas about new media (Harmony Bench, UCLA PhD candidate, in a paper on Hyperdance); about motion capture (by Michael Miles, motion capture developer); dance film in conjunction with live performance (John Crawford, assistant professor of dance and media arts at the University of California, Irvine); and even “new models for knowledge transfer between practicing collaborative and cross media artists” in the form of a report by Katrina McPherson, video dance artist and author of the recently published Making Video Dance (Routledge, 2006), reporting on her own “Opensource” conference in Scotland.

Australians contributed 3 papers. Filmmaker Tracie Mitchell, spoke about her own developing ability, and that of dancefilmmakers at large, to “move fluidly through the lands of dance and film”, describing her art as “like a visual poem rather than a linear story.” Her film Whole Heart, which has been screened widely and shared a prize in Australia’s 2006 ReelDance Festival, demonstrated her premise, by moving coherently between the naturalistic and the expressionistic. Whole Heart’s widespread acceptance in the Australian film community (AFC funding, Melbourne Film Festival and Dendy Awards screenings at the Sydney Film Festival) indicates that at some level, our “film industry” is really all art house.

Richard James Allen described this ‘art house industry’ phenomenon in his screening and paper on dance and drama hybrids in Australia/New Zealand dancefilm. He pointed out that dancefilm-making offers a potential escape from the stifling and unimaginative aspects of our ‘industry’-wide insistence on naturalism, and called upon Australian filmmakers to work with the fantatistical, the physical and the vertiginous possibilities of the choreographic sensibility. His screening of Cordelia Beresford’s The Eye Inside, Shona McCullagh’s Break, his own Thursday’s Fictions and Madeleine Hetherton’s Together demonstrated the potential of dance drama hybrids to be cinematic, provocative and engaging experiences.

My own paper on ‘Editing as a form of Choreography’ came from a perspective which is as deeply influenced by training, teaching and creating in cinema as it is by my 20 year professional career in dance. My challenge was around the question of understanding the cinematic potential of editing as well as its choreographic potential—a challenge which was not taken up materially so much as it was philosophically through the question: “Is dance on screen a dance art, a cinema art or a visual art?”

This question ultimately produced the critical framework being sought by the conference. Animated discussions between myself, Rosenberg, Kovgan, McPherson, Allen, Professor Ellen Bromberg of the University of Utah, the conference “Respondent”, dance film producer and chair of South East Dance, Bob Lockyer, and the formal and informal contributions of all attendees, lead to a diagram of 3 overlapping disciplines: dance, cinema, and visual art. Unlike the typical result of these models, it was determined that the ‘ideal’ screendance production was not necessarily a mix of all 3. Rather, each approach and each overlap provided a way of comprehending a given work:

A dance on screen which prioritises dance as its central discipline will foreground the composition and exhibition of the danced movement.

A dancefilm that is working in the overlapping areas of cinema and dance will prioritise the directorial vision and emphasise the collaborative coordination of all of the elements of cinematic production from script to mise-en-scéne to sound mix.

A video dance that is based in the thinking of a video art maker, a performance art maker or a visual artist will have its effect through techniques, schools, theories and premises of those disciplines.

As Rosenberg hoped, determining this framework for critical discourse through the distinctions within these approaches has an immediate and profound impact on all other areas of discussion. Educational programs can identify whether they are built around the study of one, 2 or all 3 of these approaches and their attendant histories, aesthetics and production processes. Festival directors can articulate whether their interests lie in the ‘art’ film approach of a visual experience, the dance aspect of dance film, or the cinematic realisation of ideas. Or, if the festival embraces a ‘successful’ film in any combination of the 3, they can determine how a given film ‘succeeds’ within its approach. Critics can likewise respond to work from within an articulated and informed framework of either their own perspective of what the form should be or their informed reading of the maker’s intentions.

Most importantly, the articulation of the framework for critical discourse around ‘screendance’ (which is ultimately my term of choice since it embraces film, video, new media, installation and future media) allows artists to identify their own priorities and to educate and develop themselves within and around the history of their own approach and mix of influences. Identifying and knowing our frames and histories may save us from the danger Lockyer warned us of in his summary of the proceedings: that as the form matures, unless we know our own history, we are doomed to rewind and repeat our steps.

Karen Pearlman is co-artistic director, with Richard James Allen, of The Physical TV Company, whose award-winning cinematic dance films have been seen in festivals and theatrical or broadcast screenings around the world.

Lee Whitmore’s The Safe House deservedly won the 2006 Yoram Gross Animation Award in the Sydney Film Festival Dendy Awards. It’s a luminescent recreation of a pivotal moment in Australian history as experienced through a child’s eyes and ears. Whitmore, the animator, writer and director of the film has drawn on her recollection of the Petrov affair of 1954, specifically the Russian couple’s taking refuge in her neighbour’s home, the safe house of the title, after their defection.

The voice-over narration (Noni Hazlehurst) is of the adult Lee looking back to 1954, but the visual structure is focused very much on the child Lee’s world—the joys of play and eating threaten to drown out important news on the radio, and the holiday reunion with friends governs all. However, newspaper photos, more radio news, local gossip, the sound of Evdokia Petrov crying in the night and glimpses of the couple through a hole in the fence constellate to suck the children into the popular conception of the Petrovs as spies, which they act out as a grim little game.

What Whitmore has so ingeniously done is convey the child’s limited view of the world, either through not understanding or picking up prejudices or being deliberately locked out of adult conversation. However the story depicts the gradual erosion of those limits. As Whitmore says in a Film Australia press kit interview: “I think it aroused my curiosity about things outside our home and our street, and caused me to sense perhaps for the first time that all was not well in the world outside” (www.filmaust.com.au).

Above all, the power of The Safe House resides in Whitmore’s consumate talent as an artist. The images look like they come straight from a beautiful children’s picture book but moving with simple ease and constantly transforming—from bright sun into the dark blue of night, in brush stroke rain on the window or a gust of wind through a child’s hair. The children’s joy in water is vivid, in a backyard canvas pool, under a hose, in the bath or looking out over the glittering night time harbour. Scenes are animated with cinematographic verve, again often emphasising the child’s perspective, or taking us far above to an aerial view of the cozy island of suburbia where Whitmore lived and the Petrovs hid.

Whitmore also effectively deploys black and white imagery. The film begins with glimpses of the terrified Evdokia Petrov, focusing on an image of her lost shoe amidst the airport turmoil. Later in the film we see in full Whitmore’s versions, like stark animated woodblock prints, of press photographs of Evdokia Petrov agape at flashing cameras, struggling to board an aeroplane, held tightly by USSR officials, the camera focussing on the hands and that lone lost shoe. Then we see the image of the shocked face in the young Lee’s mind when she hears Evdokia crying. At the film’s end, when Lee recalls that nothing was ever quite the same and that the family soon left the suburb, she imagines the Petrovs living out their years of refuge walking their dog in darkened suburban streets—it’s a haunting scene.

The Safe House is full of wonderful details: glimpses of Whitmore’s father at work (he was a freelance illustrator and commercial artist); the family all ‘in class’ drawing neigbour Ted dressed like a Roman emperor; there’s a walk through lush greenery to a creepy harbour-side cave; and an awesome steam train filling the sky with billowing smoke. This is a world writ sensually large as seen by a child, if recalled by an adult. In her Film Australia interview, Whitmore says that she’s always preferred to draw from memory.

The period feel of The Safe House is central to the film’s success. I was about the same age at that time and can vouch for the accuracy of much of Whitmore’s detail as well as the impact of the Petrov affair. The radio news broadcasts, although freshly recorded (except for the actual report on the Sydney Airport drama) also sound just right. Whitmore says that she made a model of her street, drawings of her old home (“very big drawings in pencil based on old photographs, of every conceivable angle, rather like the sketch perspectives architects make”) and “a lot of research on period detail: the look of cars and trains, the details of newspaper headlines and postmen’s uniforms, the furniture and the phones and the clothes of the time” This came easily says Whitmore because she started out in film as a production designer on Stephen Wallace’s Stir (1979) and John Duigan’s Winter of Our Dreams (1980)

The self-trained Whitmore works traditionally, making her work on glass and filming it as she goes, “a process of animating the moving elements in a shot…rubbing out and painting in the new position and re-painting the background that had now been exposed.” However, for the first time she worked with digital technology, allowing her to immediately review what she’d done and “to do much more complex and detailed animation than would have been possible using film technology.” The Safe House preserves the best of traditional animation techniques not only aided but extended by digital technology. Even so, the film was 4 years in the making.

Lee Whitmore, the maker of other wonderful animations, Ada (2002) and On a Full Moon (1997), has created a gentle, acutely observant film with moments of tension and dark images that linger. It’s a film for children, and adults too, in which childhood, history and politics can come seamlessly together, a rarity in Australian film.

The other contenders

This year’s Dendy Award Animation Award nominees also included strong contenders, Carnivore Reflux (directors Eddie White, James Calvert, producers Huy Nguyen, Sam White,The People’s Republic of Animation, 7 mins) and Gustavo, director Jonathan Nix, producer Andrew Etheridge, Cartwheel Partners, 4 mins). The hilarious Carnivore Reflux is a richly coloured fantasy in which humans ingest every conceivable living edible and then, rapidly losing their gross fat, vomit it up into fantastic living creations. It’s largely a meat-eater’s nightmare, meticulously realised, funny at every step with some of the feel and look of the Terry Gilliam Monty Python animations. Gustavo is another fine work from Jonathon Nix in which he takes the vibrating line drawing common to one tradition of screen animation and turns it to surreal advantage as a lone man grapples with his rampant hairiness. Nix subjects his audience to some vertiginous point-of-view perspectives in this grim comedy of the personal. Had The Safe House not been in the running, Gustavo would have been my best bet for winner by a hair.

The Safe House, animator, writer, director Lee Whitmore, producer Denise Haslem, Film Australia National Interest Program produced in association with SBS Independent. 26 minutes.

Great political films don’t express one-dimensional certainties, but rather explore the complexities of life under various systems of power. They are both specific in what they tell us about a particular time and place, and universal in their exploration of human-made suffering. It’s too early to say whether Mohamed Al-Daradji’s Ahlaam will join the ranks of great political films, but its depiction of contemporary Iraq reveals a specific reality of unimaginable misery, while also making a more general point about the nightmarish consequences of arbitrary, absolute power.

The film shares more than a little ground with another classic tale of human endurance under conditions of war and oppression—Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945). Like Rossellini’s Neorealist classic, Ahlaam was shot on location in the immediate aftermath of war, with the cast and crew living very much in the shadow of ongoing violence and fear. The title translates as ‘Dreams’, an ironic comment on the shattering of Iraqi people’s lives and hopes, and a level of daily horror in post-war Iraq so extreme it has taken on an almost surreal quality. But while the tribulations of the population in Rome, Open City are underpinned by a belief that they are fighting for a better world, Ahlaam contains no such consolation, illustrating a key difference between 1945 and our contemporary situation. Ahlaam offers no political or philosophical redemption for the suffering we witness on screen; the ‘liberators’ here are as ethically and philosophically bankrupt as the government they are displacing.

Director Mohamed Al-Daradji returned to Iraq in the wake of the US-led ‘liberation’ having fled his homeland following the murder of his politically active cousin in 1995. He was deeply disturbed by what he witnessed in post-war Baghdad, particularly the sight of numerous psychiatric patients wandering the streets, their hospitals destroyed in the US bombing. It was his experiences assisting a friend to round up some of these patients that inspired the story of Ahlaam.

The film begins in a Baghdad psychiatric hospital the night US forces begin pounding the city in preparation for their invasion. Bombs rain silently from the sky, racking the city with concussive explosions. Two hospital patients—a man and a woman—pace their cells with fear and gaze at the flames from their barred windows. As the electricity fails and the building is plunged into darkness, a young doctor attempts to calm the patients and restore power.

From this opening the film travels back in time to trace the paths that brought these 3 characters together. Their tales traverse a range of class and social divisions, but each one’s life is marred by the brutality of the Ba’thist regime. The least developed story concerns Doctor Medhi, whose university career is interrupted when his application for postgraduate study is refused due to his dead father’s communist affiliations and he is conscripted into the Iraqi army.

The second narrative strand focuses on Ali, the male patient we see fearfully sinking into his bed as the bombs fall on Baghdad in the opening scene. Like Doctor Medhi, he is an ex-draftee, formerly posted to a desert outpost near the Syrian border. We see him on leave in pre-war Baghdad, and journeying back to his post with a neurotic friend and fellow soldier. Ali and his comrade dislike military life and are appalled by the cruelties of the military police, who keep a watchful eye over the army of mostly reluctant conscripts. His friend talks of desertion, but Ali argues that sitting out their service and the Ba’thist regime is a less risky option.

Radio news broadcasts form an aural backdrop to the quiet of their desert outpost. From one of these we learn UN weapons inspectors have been expelled from the country. Soon after, Ali and his friend sit on the ground eating their evening meal. Ali rises to make tea, stepping into a small bunker to boil some water, the peaceful quiet of the desert hanging heavy over the scene. The calm sense of waiting is deliberately protracted, not to build tension—there’s a bleak sense of inevitability about what is to come—but to illustrate the remorseless logic of the game that the Iraqi, US and British governments are engaged in. Men in safe, faraway capitals engaged in a war of words, while violence rains down on ordinary people caught up in the machinations of global power play.

When the strike finally comes, it’s sudden and almost without sound; the ground trembles and Ali is deafened by a blast, his hearing returning only as a muffled rumble overlaid with piercing tinnitus. He stumbles from the bunker into a landscape suddenly plunged into night. The camp is strewn with men cut in half or missing limbs; his comrade lies riddled with shrapnel. He picks up his friend’s limp body and stumbles into the desert, walking for hours until he is tackled by a jeep load of military police and arrested for desertion. Confused, deaf and utterly shell-shocked he is sentenced to mutilation and incarceration in a psychiatric institution by a military court. In one of the film’s most horrific scenes, the terrified Ali is strapped down and his ear severed without the use of anaesthetic, before he is cast into a hospital for the insane. Nothing in the film conveys the brutality inflicted on the Iraqi people by the Ba’thist regime quite like this sequence of swift and arbitrary ‘justice.’

Ahlaam’s third narrative strand centres on the title character, a young woman we see living an apparently idyllic life in pre-war Baghdad. She spends much of her time with her fiancee, dreaming of their future life together. He is an opposition activist, however, and their wedding is rudely interrupted by plain-clothed police dragging him from the celebration. Ahlaam is left sobbing in the dust. She is still wearing her dress when we see her in the hospital—a mocking reminder of the ordinary life she once imagined for herself and her husband.

Al-Daradji’s film is unflinching in its depiction of the reality of life in Saddam’s Iraq, but circumstances actually worsen when the story returns to the present and the psychiatric hospital is struck by a US bomb. The patients stumble through holes in the walls into a city that has gone from a state of repression to one of violent anarchy. Looters pillage shops and homes, and gunmen roam the streets. Into this scene come the first American troops, waving their rifles in the face of every Iraqi they meet and barking orders like parodies of professional soldiers. The bewildered patients endure abuse, rape and sniper fire as they roam a cityscape devoid of compassion, dignity or hope. In this chaotic environment Doctor Medhi’s efforts to protect his patients and treat them with some degree of kindness come to nothing.

Ahlaam concludes on an utterly despairing note, but the film is not a condemnation of any one group or even one specific war—it is a deeply affecting cry of pain from a people who have been bombed, betrayed, abused and had every atrocity imaginable perpetrated upon them. The film allows no position of observance, or emotional or intellectual distance. It is not a piece of analysis. It makes every viewer live through this trauma to force them to ask how this could happen.

The film’s pessimism was no doubt sharpened by the conditions under which it was made—conditions that directly reflected the situations dramatised on screen. The cast and crew were unable to travel anywhere in Baghdad without an armed escort, and one of the policemen providing protection was killed during filming. Despite the police presence, members of the crew, including the director, were kidnapped by Ba’thists during the shoot and were beaten and threatened with execution before being handed over to the Americans for a week’s Abu-Ghraib style “interrogation” (to quote the director). The 18-year-old sound recordist was shot in the leg during the initial abduction and the director’s 15-year-old cousin (and the film’s boom operator) has allegedly suffered long-term mental problems from the abuse and humiliation he suffered at the hands of US forces. In the final credits we are informed that the actor playing Ahlaam’s father was killed soon after shooting was completed.

Ahlaam is an unrelentingly harrowing experience, but it is redeemed from charges of excess by its grounding in a reality that is beamed into our lounge-rooms every night. It is an important film not only because it confronts us with the depravity of a conflict whose duration and sheer awfulness has rendered most of us numb, but also because it serves as a warning about the potentially apocalyptic end point of our current global political course.Ahlaam, writer/director/producer Mohamed Al-Daradji; producer Atea Al-Daradji, performers Aseel Adel, Bashir Al-Majid, Mohamed Hashim, Iraq/UK/Netherlands; 53rd Sydney Film Festival

Details of Ahlaam’s production were taken from the author’s email correspondence with the director.

Margot Nash’s new feature film, Call Me Mum, premiered at the 2006 Sydney Film Festival. Nash is one of the filmmakers who appears in Tina Kaufman’s contribution to our feature in this edition on the artist as educator (p17). She lectures in screenwriting at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS).

Nash started out as an actor in theatre and television, moved into photography and then cinematography and editing in the independent film sector. She’s made short films and documentaries and in 1994 she wrote and directed the feature film Vacant Possession. With Pamela Rabe in the lead role, this intense film about race and dispossession premiered at the 1995 Sydney Film Festival and was nominated for Best Directing and Best Original Screenplay in the AFI awards that year. From 1996 to 2001 Nash ran documentary workshops in the Pacific for Island women.

Engagingly intimate, Call Me Mum requires its audience to listen as attentively as it looks as a string of interlocking monologues addressed to camera unfold, alternating between locations: an aeroplane cabin, a hospital ward and a suburban home. The audience becomes confidante for the protagonists, but in discretely different ways for each of them.

Nash sticks adroitly to her formula—the protagonists never come face to face. We glean meaning from their recollections and expectations, overlapping narratives and symbolic parallels, for example around the word ‘mum.’ Even on the plane mother and stepson sit separately, occasionally glancing in each other’s direction, refusing to answer yelled slights.

Kate (Catherine McClements), white and formerly a nurse, and foster son, 18-year old Warren (Dayne Christian), are on a plane to Brisbane. He’s determined to be returned to his Torres Strait Island mother, Flo (Vicki Saylor), but risks being seized by the state and institutionalised. Kate rescued him from one such place when he was a child and condemned as irredeemably brain-damaged. She gives him a life for which, with his tunnel vision, wicked wit and abrasive sociability, he is never grateful, announcing to a TV news show that Kate stole him.

Kate addresses us frankly and assertively; she has nothing to hide, neither her love for Warren nor her anger at his betrayal. She is determined to keep him free. However, she is caught between Warren’s fantasy of reuniting with his real mother and her struggle with her own parents, Dellmay (Lynette Curran) and Keith (Ross Thompson), who live in a fantasy world of conservative righteousness (which has no place for familial loyalties).

If the aeroplane cabin looks real enough, Dellmay and Keith’s home is all floral prints and pastel lighting, cozy and self-contained, though there are moments of pained reflection and bickering over social class and bog Irish origins as well as dismay at their “mad” daughter’s adoption of Warren.

Meanwhile, Flo, propped up in a hospital bed gradually and quietly reveals to us the appalling story behind Warren’s condition, growing more honest as she goes, admitting guilt over years of alcoholism and sexual betrayal. There are moments of respite as she sings songs from her island home. She hopes to bond with Kate, to offer her a sea shell symbol of sisterhood, though she fears she will be once again be seen as ‘that rubbish.’ Finally, the hospital room around her turns lushly tropical as she yearns for her birthplace. But does the son she’s not seen since he was a baby have any place in this fantasy? Even if he does, we have just witnessed the conclusion to his journey, a nightmarish vision out of David Lynch, a cinematic jolt that removes us momentarily and shockingly from our intimate attentiveness and the pleasant cutaways to tropical island waters.

The writer of Call Me Mum is Kathleen Mary Fallon. An adventurous practitioner in experimental fiction and writing for performance, Fallon wrote the bracing, feminist novel Working Hot which won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for New Writing in 1989. Her opera, Matricide—the Musical, with composer Elena Kats Chernin, was produced by Chamber Made Opera in 1998 and in the same year a concert work for which she wrote the text, Laquiem—Tales from the Mourning of the Lac Women, was produced, composed and directed by Andrée Greenwell and performed at The Studio, Sydney Opera House. Fallon teaches writing in the Department of English at the University of Melbourne.

Fallon originally wrote Call Me Mum as a stage play, the much workshopped but unproduced Buy-back: Three Boongs in the Kitchen based on Fallon’s 30-year experience as the foster mother of a disabled Torres Strait Islander boy. The tough content and Fallon’s penchant for the surreal and the overtly political seemed to have scared off directors and producers. What was next intended as a set of 4 discrete monologues based on the same material for SBSi thankfully became a feature film in which Fallon’s vision has been subtly shaped by Nash’s own, closing in on the characters and defining their realities through Andrew de Groot’s camera and Patrick Reardon’s production design and their carefully scaled gradation of these worlds from the real to the almost illusory. This nuancing is inherent in the writing, in Kate and Warren’s stubborn directness, Flo’s lyrical, confessional musing and the bitterly and wickedly funny dueting of Dellmay and Keith.

The performers handle the language more than ably with Christian and Saylor excelling and Curran and Thompson capturing the curious poetry of righteousness with admirable restraint (Thompson’s “not sorry” tirade is both in writing and performance unnervingly beyond satire). McClements has the hardest job, the plainest and most expository text and, in delivery, sometimes borders on the theatrical. But eventually she draws us in, especially in the rare moments when her love is glimpsed and we learn how fighting for her foster son has made her “the monster Warren says I am today.”

Margot Nash is to be applauded for taking on Kathleen Mary Fallon’s unique story and giving it a very special life. The apparent simplicity of the multiple monologue structure belies many subtleties and transformations, most markedly in Flo’s growing revelations and DellMay and Keith’s developing motivation for their betrayal, while Kate and Warren appear the sorry if sometimes obtuse victims of others’ fantasies and failures. These complexities can be read in many ways. In a narrow, naturalistic feature film culture it’s critical that other voices be heard, other visions seen. Call Me Mum is a finely crafted and disturbing venture into the politics of race and the possibilties of filmmaking.

Call Me Mum, director Margot Nash, writer Kathleen Mary Fallon, producer Michael McMahon, director of photography Andrew de Groot, editor Denise Haratzis, production designer Patrick Reardon, composer David Bridie, Big and Little Films, 76 minutes.

“They’ve sold out.” “They’ve got it easy.” “They’re working too hard.” Some of the new media educators interviewed for this article felt this was the way non-educators regarded them. Have they sold out, do they have it easy or are they working too hard? And are these the sort of questions that will bring us closer to understanding a new media educator-artist in Australia circa 2006?

An artist getting a day job is nothing new; an artist getting a job teaching art isn’t either. So what is new about a new media artist choosing to move into education? Johannes Klabbers, Course Coordinator and Senior Lecturer, BA Multimedia Arts, School of Visual and Performing Arts, Charles Sturt University, vividly recalled his motivation for moving into education many years ago:

There were trucks full of incontinent sheep thundering down the main street (the campus is in a regional town)…but it was when I saw the Macintosh 8100AV with 128MB of RAM with all the software you had ever dreamed about, which I could access 24 hours a day, that I signed on the dotted line.

Klabbers, who has worked with photography, video installation art and then with “all forms of media new and old that are available to an artist: image, text, sound, performance”, also had the “idea that facilitating the learning and development of creative people would be fun.” Likewise Mark Cypher, Senior Lecturer and Program Chair of Multimedia, School of Media, Communications and Culture at Murdoch University, who uses computers as a “new sculptural medium”, enjoyed teaching “immensely” and “discovered [he] was getting paid for it.” Hugh Davies, Lecturer, Digital Imaging and Manipulation and Multimedia Production, Photography and Screen Department, Adelaide Centre for the Arts, TAFE, is a sculptor, film and “alternate reality experience” artist who also found “teaching to be very infectious…the more you do, the better you get and the more you enjoy it.” For Troy Innocent, Deputy Head (Research), Senior Lecturer, Multimedia and Digital Arts, Art and Design, Monash University, who has been exploring the “language of computers” through virtual worlds, academia provided an “opportunity to both reflect upon and articulate my approach to new media arts to others.”

For last year’s RealTime Education edition, new media postgraduates were asked how they chose their institution and department (RT68). They unanimously cited the supervisor as a critical factor in their decision-making. For the majority of educators interviewed for this article, however, the experience was quite the opposite. Cypher exclaimed, “You don’t choose the institution, the institution chooses you!…and the reasons are never really clear for why you get or don’t get lucky.” Ann Morrison, Lecturer, Information Environments Program, School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Queensland, who works with installations using various media, added that positioning herself in an IT school was an intentional environment choice to “implement more technology into [her] own art practice” and selecting a “university that valued research” was so that the “teaching loads were lighter.”

Exhibiting more or less?

All the teachers gave positive responses to the question of whether academia has effected their exhibition output. Innocent is exhibiting “more or less the same—as [he is] based in an institution that recognises art practice as research activity.” Davies and Morrison found their practice slowed at first but picked up again once they, as Morrison put it, “learnt how to ‘work’ better within a university system.” Both Klabbers and Cypher feel that less is more now. Cypher concentrates on “making 1 or 2 really good works a year and then spends the next year or 2 pushing those works internationally.” A perennial problem, regardless of how supportive a department, is the need for academic credit for creative works. But in addition to this age-old, discipline-wide issue, is that of peer recognition of new media.

New what?

Cypher has observed a “lack of understanding about new media, both theoretically and practically from…both within art schools and in the general humanities areas.” In an attempt to circumvent such misunderstandings Morrison takes a multi-lingual approach: “I speak IT, Interaction Design, Humanities and Visual Arts/New Media Arts speak depending on who I am discussing my ‘research’/ artwork with.” On the topic of new media curricula, Innocent laments that although there is an improved synthesis of practice and theory “we are still dealing with the legacy of new media arts study as largely an activity involving the acquisition of technical skills.”

Although access to technology, to ‘grunt’, is a factor in new media artists choosing academia as a job, it was also noted that universities are not early adopters. Despite blogs being a few generations of net-phenomena behind us, students at some institutions are unable to be even introduced to them due to bans, not to mention prohibitions on citing web-based material regardless of their peer-reviewed status. Davies highlights the point that many of the technical skills being offered in tertiary education, even at third year levels, are now being taught in most high schools. Education, he adds, is not keeping pace with technology.

Misunderstanding extends to the students too. Younger students, Davies observes, “are often not concerned about creative development but high grades.” Cypher and Klabbers are both concerned that students are more focused on attaining employment than developing creativity. This approach is ironic, Klabbers continues, since “most prospective employers are more interested in finding people to work for them who are flexible, who are problem solvers, who can apply creative ideas in a range of contexts, than in which version of the software they are familiar with.”

Then what?

UK media performance group Blast Theory recommended in their Adelaide Thinkers in Residence report, New Media, Art and Creative Culture (2004), that the outcomes required for R&D and cultural funding should be broadened to facilitate blue sky thinking; something that universities are ideally poised to actuate. Innocent concurs:

New media arts study can effectively work as a research lab to nurture a synergy between concept development and technical/production skills. There is the opportunity and time for students to take risks and play with possibilities within the relatively safe environment of the university. These opportunities are less likely when working within the industry or in an arts practice that may be limited by access to gear, expertise, space to play etc.

Morrison recommends that universities “be prepared to allow experimental machines with admin access and no firewalls.” Davies wants to see teaching through new media rather than just about new media, using “game-based learning and web research based assignments.” Innocent champions a hybrid space of a lab and studio environment that facilitates a more creative space. Ideally though, Innocent muses, it would be best to have the students acquire skills through independent research “so that the studio can focus more on other issues such as concept, interaction design, language, theoretical background, context etc.”

Teaching vs practice

Morrison found that referring to her works-in-process to her students caused them (her works) to stall because the students started implementing them. Now Morrison invokes her own works only when they are a “fait accompli.” Cypher observed that he found it more difficult when he was teaching in exactly the same area as his art practice “because the last thing you want to do when you come home after talking about art all day is to make art.” Now that there is a slight difference in what he’s teaching he is more freed up. All of the academic artists acknowledge that the long hours they’re working do affect their practice, but just as much as anyone with many jobs. Red tape and internal politics were also listed as being stifling, as one interviewee succinctly relayed it: “Money. Cynicism. Money. Fear. Money. Laziness. Bureaucracy. Money. Bean counters.” However, ongoing financial support relieves the mind of thoughts of pennies, leaving room for pixels and punch cards.

Networking

Interviewees also cited collegial networking as a benefit of academia. Davies comments that he has “access to opportunities that come with the networks of other artists and, being within an institution, I also think that there is a certain prestige that being an educator holds that being a mere artist does not.” For Klabbers too, the contacts he has made through his work at the university have facilitated projects such as the Wagga Space Program and the UnSound festival (RT 64, p10). Klabbers explains that in “a small city like Wagga the university is very important to the economy and the wider community, especially the arts community.” Cypher has “most definitely benefited from being employed by a university [because now he has] a truly international practice and [is] lucky enough to work with the smartest people…constantly engaged with ideas that have been the prime motivating force of [his] professional life”.

Potential artist-students

Davies recommends, “[a]rtists should be more involved with universities but it’s a 2-way relationship. Universities must also support artists and allow and encourage students to work with artists. Mentorships should be more readily available to students.” Klabbers recommends artists become students “for developing your critical faculties.” Morrison offers tactical advice, specifying a degree-agnostic approach where you “[s]hop around and don’t necessarily do a whole degree, but choose some courses from one, and some from another to gather the skills you need to do your own work.” Likewise, Innocent champions a faculty-agnostic approach and cites the Master of Electronic Media Art (MEMA) at his institution that “is open to artists, designers, computer scientists and software engineers”, which facilitates “interfaculty supervision across Art and Design and Information Technology.”

And as for new media artists teaching new media art? All recommended it, with the caveat that it is not for all. It depends on the person, and whether they can live with a “growing together of diverse elements into a newly evolving entity, that never fully congeals” (description on Mark Cypher’s website of his work Concrescence, Beapworks, 2006). It is probably prophetic that when the internet was being developed that although the creative exploits of the medium, such as Will Crowther and Don Woods’ Colossal Cave Adventure (1973-77), were rife they were created in addition to official research. Funding went to strictly academic and military investigations and not to art. Perhaps in the current arts funding crisis and with the help of the new media artists cited in this article, academia has the potential to offer a new home for new media art.

In Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), the protagonists are trapped in a realm of extra-theatrical consciousness. Between fleeting moments of purposeful, deliberate action in which they perform their minor roles as footmen in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, these forlorn characters are consigned to limbo, pondering the nature of reality and the parameters of their autonomy. In moments of intense role-play, the characters are malleable and compliant, driven by some inexplicable, pre-determined set of rules they are simply doomed to enact. Outside of these episodes, they lack purpose and agency, and are equally condemned to consider the futility of their existence.

I was reminded of the play by Adam Costenoble’s recent exhibition at Firstdraft gallery, The Passage, which invites participation through a number of mechanisms that evoke similar themes. As with the artist’s former projects, The Chamber and The Mountain (both 2005), The Passage aims to reconfigure our experience of audio-visual installation by making large-scale, structural elements a central component. Installation here is more than a tokenistic reference to a technicality of display, instead drawing overt attention to the relationship between spatial and perceptual encounters in a gallery context.

In The Passage, the idea of literal confinement explored in earlier works is expanded to incorporate psychological and philosophical dimensions, resulting in a doubling of interior/exterior dynamics that demands self-reflexive and physical engagement on the part of the viewer. Upon entering the darkened gallery, one meets what is effectively a room within a room. Its long narrow design (like a hallway, complete with doorways) heightens this relation to domestic scale, as does the volume of its interior, but moreso in the way it is pressed against the gallery’s far wall. This leaves the rest of the space as a voluminous void, impersonal and generic in contrast to The Passage’s intimate zone of engagement. The gallery, then, becomes the first of 2 thresholds to be crossed. Through a translucent scrim that forms the facing ‘wall’ of the installation, 2 projections radiate light from either end of the enclosure. The shadows cast by single bodies inside create a further screen-image on the partition as they move around, suggesting a distinction between active participant and idle observer, but one that is immediately negated via the relationship such partial visibility establishes between watching and being watched.

This initial confusion of agency and acquiescence is further elaborated once inside. Fixed in a linear sequence along the floor are a series of push buttons that activate different video tracks as you move along the space. On each screen a duplicate image of a male figure hovers in a nondescript, composite landscape of endless dirt and ominous rolling clouds. Facing off against one another, the first of these figures holds a rather large and menacing gun. Constant static interruptions, jump cuts, and the flickering, shifting boundaries of the bodies foreground the volatile, fragmented relationship between physical and psychological states, the real and the virtual.

With each advance a narrative unfolds: the screen figures progress through phases of boredom, agitation and finally violence, at which point—in a conflation of murder and suicide—upon the participant’s prompt, one shoots the other. Inserted between the video channels, and activating this sequence of events, the participant is apparently complicit in the scene they are perpetuating. Upon turning back and re-activating each stage, the sequence restores itself in reverse, with each of the figures returning to their original jaded disposition.

In a dystopian contradiction, this performative scenario collapses states of progress and retrogression, transformation and inertia, in on themselves. Though conceptually complex, its development is nonetheless truncated in accordance with The Passage’s condensed physical space. Indeed, a more nuanced, elaborate disclosure of the characters’ opposing temperaments (passive/aggressive) and our ambiguous relationship to them would be more effective. Regardless, The Passage astutely renders the categories of protagonist, participant and spectator indistinct. The sameness of the screen figures—copies of the artist and of each other—is one element that accentuates genericism and arbitrariness: multiplied and infinitely consumable, they are locked into a cyclical enactment of death and restoration. The participant, by means of their spatial positioning and interactive engagement, is wholly implicated in this cycle. Beyond the facade of independence, empowerment and reciprocity, a system of repetition and limited potential is revealed. Like Stoppard’s hapless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the pre-determined trajectories of both the virtual and ‘real’ entities in Costenoble’s theatrical domain throw into relief questions about our ability to intervene in the world at a large, and the potential for any genuine autonomy.

It is precisely the pivotal element of a foregone conclusion that dismantles the problematic of pseudo-interactivity the work initially seems to raise. The interactive component of The Passage is superficial; however, this ineffectuality is knowingly indexed to the work’s conceptual concerns. Rather, it is at the level of functional dependency that The Passage founders. For example, a critical aspect of The Passage’s manifestation hinges on the screens playing static while the structure is unoccupied, so that work lies in chaos when it is 'dormant' (its protagonists consigned to extra-theatrical limbo elsewhere), and is activated by the presence of a participant. The push button immediately encountered upon entering the work controls this function. At first touch it triggers the initial video track so that the virtual figures appear, but relies entirely on the participant depressing the switch a second time before they leave to reactivate the static track. When this is overlooked, it significantly skews the work’s dynamic, since the screen protagonists are always ‘present’ and visible from outside the empty structure, which confuses the notions of contingency and purposelessness on which The Passage turns. Furthermore, over the duration of its display, the intended experience of the work was undermined by the malfunction of technical components after several weeks.

Given this first exhibition of The Passage was identified by the artist as an early iteration in the project’s development, initially made possible by the Firstdraft Emerging Artist Studio Residency, my comments are less about identifying ‘failure’ than considering the work in relation to the increasingly popular practice of user-testing in exhibition contexts. The repositioning of this phase of artwork development—out of the studio or laboratory and into the gallery—challenges preconceived notions about the function of spaces and frameworks for public display in a manner that accommodates the shifting paradigms of interdisciplinary methodologies. Embedded in this schema of continual development, perhaps a future version of this thoughtful, provocative artwork might also incorporate the possibility of rupturing the absurd confines of prescribed existence identified here—a hopeful alternative. In the absence of such potential to escape the cycle of a hopeless reality, The Passage stubbornly refuses to offer any false consolations, resolutely displacing hope with despair.

Two recent shows in Brisbane highlighted the breadth and diversity of practice in the arena of digital culture. Innovation and some novel interpretations of interactivity figured in both The Harries: National Digital Art Award, and physical theatre company Zen Zen Zo’s latest show, Sub-Con Warrior 1.

The Harries National Digital Art Awards

Special Commendation, Janice Kuczkowski for Emperimentations in limits of tolerance #1

Founded last year, the Harries emerged from a unique partnership between the arts community and a branch of the Queensland Government, the Skills Development Centre. During the initial building of the Queensland Health-funded SDC, Arts Co-ordinator Jade Walsh says, as per Government policy, they were required to spend a percentage of building costs on art. “Being a centre for innovation, SDC staff decided that they could contribute more to the art community than by purely procuring art and decided to develop and coordinate an annual National Digital Art Award, with science being the link between health and art.” An advisory board of professionals from the arts community was established and 8 months later they launched the inaugural The Harries: National Digital Art Award. This year’s award attracted numerous entrants across a range of digital formats, awarding 3 prizes across the categories of static, dynamic and best emerging artist.

As you enter the dynamic (moving images) exhibition, to the right is a set of black cubes from which to view the videos. Frustratingly, these are only shown in excerpted form; however, even truncated, several works stood out. Trish Adams continued her delicate investigations into biomedical art originated from her own cells. Her Harries entry, the video Changing Fates (2006), like previous works, features time-lapse video-micrograph digital images of stem cells in Adams’ signature deep red, this time juxtaposed with material objects linked to Adams’ grandmother, Mollie—photographs, an elegantly inscribed fountain pen and writing samples. The concluding image, showing both Mollie’s portrait and the beating cluster of Adams’ stem cells (now cardiac cells), speaks poignantly about the cathexis of objects in family relations, while continuing Adams’ contribution to the contemporary conversation about such medical research.

Appropriately for a show that “aim(s) to be living proof of [the] art-science nexus”, biomedicine features in other works, including Michele Barker and Anna Munster’s Struck, a multi-channel video and sound installation exploring medical imaging. Featuring a ghostly figure on a blue-black background (resembling Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and intermittent white text referring to neurological damage and hysteria, Struck received the award for the Dynamic category ($8,000). While it does little to dispel the feeling that text on screen tends to detract from rather than enhance imagery, there are beautiful touches (the tendrils of white liquid unfurling in space and the complex layered soundtrack of muffled shrieks and gasps), and a clever connection with the popular obsession for medicalised, forensic displays of corporeality.

The back wall is given over to large multiple projections showing works in their entirety. Magda Matwiejews’ lush digital collage animation, Insect, is the most striking, which is fortunate, since its central position means it dominates the field of vision. Insect features a very beautiful young woman naked and floating through a series of Baroque tableaux on gossamer wings. Associations can be made to both the fruity imagery of Pipilotti Rist’s Homo sapiens sapiens installation and the darker, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch side of human-insect relations as the key character mates with various plants and an amorous dragonfly.

Genevieve Staines’ interactive installation, Time Space Frames, was located in a small side room at the far end of the exhibition. As you approach, it appears as though the old-style single lens reflex camera is pointed at the wall, but peering through the viewfinder, we see that there is a hole in the wall, through which the video can be seen. The video features landmark Brisbane buildings ‘processed’ through a range of digitally animated architectural interventions; blinds, cracks, windows and bricks appear, then disappear. The integration of these techniques with the existing aesthetics of the buildings is seamless; the ‘new’ facades look real, if improbable. When the viewer depresses the button, the ‘shutter’ closes and re-opens (complete with shutter sound-effects) to reveal a different video sequence. Time Space Frames playfully collocates old and new technologies. Through the viewer’s ‘use’ of the old analogue camera to reconfigure urban landscapes, Staines reflects on the role of photography in ordering memory and perception and demonstrates a critical, exploratory approach to animation and interactivity. Staines won the Emerging Artist award ($2,000).

Linda Dement won the Static Prize ($8,000) for White Rose and Janice Kuczkowski received a Special Commendation and $1,500 for The Limits of Tolerance.

Zen Zen Zo

The phone call came the morning of the show. “Hello Danni. This is Sub-Con Warrior Electra, contacting you on behalf of the Gamemaster. I have a few instructions for you…”

I was told to come early, dress warmly and wear comfortable shoes “as the terrain of the Sub-Con can be unpredictable.” Appetite whetted, I turned up to the secret location where I was greeted and ‘processed’ by eager Sub-Con cadets attired in the heights (or is it depths?) of geek-chic. A coach pulled up and disgorged a seemingly endless payload of excitable teenagers on excursion. The performers, clearly loving their roles as library nerds and chess club refugees, waxing lyrical about ‘the game’, were utterly charming and soon put the roiling mass at ease. Their impeccable role-playing and outfits—from spectacles bound with band-aids to lemon cashmere twin-sets, too-snug knitted vests over check shirts, pants cinched unhealthily high and sensible shoes—drew guffaws, and easily disarmed both sarcastic teenage comments (theirs) and evident discomfort (mine).

After some opening group callisthenics, we were herded into a hall where we heard from the Gamemaster (Rob Thwaites) and teams then self-selected based on the desired level of participation: Alpha (high participation and ‘danger’, perhaps surprisingly a hit with the teens) and Omega (low participation and ‘puzzle solving’—me and some bemused parents and teachers). We all donned yellow plastic raincoats (‘assimilation suits’), the purpose of which presently became clear. Entering the game proper (Sub-Con), we were faced with our opening challenge—to neutralise the fire spirit with ‘water fruits’ (water-filled balloons in fruity colours). From that splashy opening (unsurprisingly, another huge hit with teens), we were shepherded through a series of ‘worlds’ simulating those in computer games.

Our guides through these worlds (a carpark, an inner-city street, an apartment) were more spectacularly dressed characters, embodying classic computer-game clichés. In a fun twist, the high-tech blue-haired warrior, the dreamy prophet, the butch commando, and steely gladiator were all played by female actors who ramped up the burlesque and won hearts with cheeky attitudes and snappy dialogue. Hunter, the lantern-jawed commando replete with camouflage stripes and beret, complimented her ‘boys’, saying, “That’s hot!” (to much giggling) at every available opportunity. My guide, Asimov, was an energetic ‘scientist’ bedecked in forearm computer/telephone and chest-mounted video screen, which was integrated well into the performance (though I couldn’t help but be reminded of Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik’s TV-Bra antics).

Six other key characters emerged—warriors Rush (Katie Hollins), Spill (Dave Sleswick), Mercury (Carly Rees) and Frost (Kevin Kiernan-Molloy), the child, Andi (Aideen McCartney) and Big Boss (Co-director, Steven Mitchell Wright), who presided over proceedings with devastatingly acid camp. These, too, were instantly recognisable as assemblages of computer game clichés—the deadly black-clad vixen, the pink-haired flirt, the funky street warrior etc—and also played with great gusto and skill. Jagged haircuts and futuristic makeup held up well during exhilarating fight sequences. The opening contest, where participants chose their ‘fighter’ was both familiar and strange; as doubtless intended, it was just like playing Streetfighter with human characters. Only these were no ordinary humans. Zen Zen Zo is famous for the superb athleticism of its performers, and their impressive physical feats elicited gasps and cheers. We were herded into cars to shelter from a zombie attack (genuinely unnerving), and then led to another world where the interactivity extended into new territory—the introduction of a reality TV element. Some of the audience watched others perform challenging moves on closed circuit TV in a successful but underdeveloped experiment. This was only touched on in the 4 audience-performances on the night, but has further potential for expanding the boundaries of interactivity in physical theatre.

The attention to detail in the costumes, keenly observed gestures (eg the praying mantis-like back-and-front jig that signifies ‘waiting’ performed by many a computer game character) and comic repetition of character phrases, demonstrated a masterful engagement with game conventions. Though the Big Boss’s lightning fast comebacks visibly withered some of the more insistent attention-seekers, the teens’ general reaction was positive. To evoke genuine mirth rather than sarcastic sniggers in teens, as Sub-Con frequently did, is a genuine achievement; the sassy attitude and ironic play with these gaming stereotypes was perfectly pitched for this tough crowd (skimpy costumes and gorgeous girl and boy performers probably didn’t hurt either).

Sub-Con Warrior-1 is a dance between celebrating and critiquing computer game culture. The challenge of representing computer games in the ‘real’ world has been met with a production that takes the concept of ‘immersion’ literally. The lost-child narrative and some rather heavy-handed dialogue on the ethics of gaming brings the production into the murk of the media effects debate, which fortunately is leavened with frequent humour and the bonhomie of pantomime. The Directors’ Notes, by Lynne Bradley and Steven Mitchell Wright, point out that while there are disturbing phenomena related to computer game culture (such as the hikikomori or self-isolated in Japan), “it’s easy to be self-righteous…gaming represents a highly creative and educational space.” Elaborating that space to include interactive physical theatre, Zen Zen Zo has concocted a show oozing with enthusiasm and excitement, and created much anticipation for the 2007 re-staging.

Poet, choreographer and filmmaker Richard James Allen’s new book, The Kamikaze Mind, is an alphabet of lateral definitions, home-made and re-vamped aphorisms, mini-poems and micro-narrative fragments that add up to what the writer calls “a dictionary of a floating mind.” Whether encountered on a sustained reading or casually dipped into, the entries are fleeting glimpses of the mind of an astronaut who has “launched himself into a black hole” where everything is in flux, everything relative, where truths crash into their opposites and, if you’re lucky, something transcendent flies out of their fusion.

The entries comprise quips, absurdities, plain silliness, jokes good and bad, short-lived profundities and (to use poet Richard Tipping’s term) “zen bombs”, unnerving koans to linger over in a litany of uncertainty. As in an adroit musical composition, theme and variation deliver readers from the maelstrom into a quasi-Buddhist calm. However, falling into the black hole of this literary astronaut’s mind can at times be distressing. Where does the relativising stop? How can the astronaut be so irritatingly quaint, cute and obvious when he’s also so smart, witty and wise? It’s that kind of trip, the kind of challenge that Allen offers. And, dancing in and around the entries, are photos of the writer tumbling through page space.

In her launch speech, poet Judith Beveridge applauded the publishers, Brandl & Schlesinger, as innovative and courageous for taking on a unique work: “The Kamikaze Mind occupies that ground where a lot of good, enchanting and powerful writing resides—in the chinks and spaces between established genres. …This is a dictionary that prides itself not on a defensible construction of meanings, but on eccentric, almost capricious, floating, unbounded explanations, definitions that are filtered through experiences and feelings rather than explanations imposed from a literary or intellectual distance.”

The ‘kamikaze’ (Japanese for ‘divine wind’) of the title is perhaps a worry with its connotations of suicidal wartime murder. The astronaut may be in free-fall but unless you take exception to the book, he’s no killer. However, Beveridge suggested the title “could be interpreted metaphorically as explosives come to disarm us, shake us up—then, perhaps, simply to disintegrate, go back into the void once they’ve been expressed…What is Richard proposing—a militaristic Buddhism perhaps, or Buddhist militarism? This book is constantly playing with definitions, even as early as the title.”

The Kamikaze Mind is Allen’s ninth book and received the 2006 UTS Chancellor’s Award for Best PhD Thesis. Next for Allen is the premiere of the film adaptation of his last book, Thursday’s Fictions.

In the era of the emergent e-book, many publications have lives beyond the printed page. The Kamikaze Mind comes as the complete digital package with downloadable animations, wallpapers and ring tones. The images are by Karen Pearlman and the excellent, gamelanish ring tones by composer Michael Yezerski. The Kamikaze Online Mind Project is “conceived as an ongoing interactive digital arts event…a multiplatform meeting of creative minds” and promises updates, new ring tones, animations and “wearable quotes” as well as reader responses (www.thekamikazemind.com.)

Richard James Allen, The Kamikaze Mind, Brandl & Schlesinger, 2006, launched at Gleebooks, Sydney, May 11. Cover and book design Andras Berkes-Brandl. www.thekamikazemind.com

Intimate, quirky and running late, First Run, a new Perth multimedia, film and performance art initiative, began its visual offering in the dark space of the Bakery Artrage Complex. The unexpected fits in well here: moody, under lit, the floor dotted with beanbags and chairs, strewn with artists, filmmakers and an assortment of other viewers, there’s a blend of the familiar and the disruptive which complements the experimental expectations of an event like this.

In the juxtaposition of short documentaries, animation, features, music videos and performance art, there was nothing thematic, apart from their localness, about the multimedia work on view. The audience was given the rare opportunity to engage with a range of works without the usual sensitisation. It’s here that microcinema and performance art are at their most profound, thriving on the fragile relationship between viewer and media. For instance, the short film Spell Me Freedom (director Dean Israelite), deals with the situation of asylum seekers through the story of one man’s escape from a detention centre. His subsequent journey to the city and the decision he faces between attempting to survive in an alien environment or returning to imprisonment and his best friend is a kind of visual protest. Cut through with grainy flashbacks, the film’s rapid movement between camera angles, its harsh lighting and eerie soundtrack capture the desperate situation of asylum seekers. Israelite’s production crew included 3 former refugees, and the rawness of this film forces us into unexpected discomfort that is tempered by the space he offers for a response: any response.

On the other hand Tim Watts and Wyatt Nixon Lloyd’s Greed For the Animation (Weeping Spoon Productions) is a comical, purposely unwieldy 2D animation that satirises consumerism and obsession with possessions through the adventures of a would-be filmmaker. Inventive, fun and even surreal in parts, Watts and Nixon Lloyd’s farcical animation also pokes a little fun at the profundity with which we approach these kinds of artistic endeavours, while managing not to take themselves too seriously either.

During the intermission, the flashy, toothy, spoken word performance of Tomas Ford’s Cabaret of Death, preying on audience passivity, appropriated the glam of pop for humour and ultimately drew attention to the strangeness of the audience-performer relationship. The sometimes excruciating vulnerability of Ford’s performance, which was interrupted by a few technical difficulties, reflected my own as I silently hoped his next act wouldn’t involve me.

The breadth of First Run’s presentation and the informal experimentalism it offers audiences suggests that it has the potential to provide an important forum for the development of media arts in WA. As the First Run organisers have noticed Perth lacks a thriving experimental media scene where artists can gather, create, experiment and get their work out there on a regular basis. I’m sure that these monthly showcases will change that.

Anoma Wijewardene’s Quest, promoted as Sri Lanka’s first digital art exhibition, was shown for 3 days in June at the National Art Gallery in Colombo. The foundation for the work is a set of digital photographs Wijewardene took when she visited the north of the country after a ceasefire agreement in early 2003, halting the civil war.

There has been a brutal separatist war with the Tamil Tigers fighting the Government forces for a separate homeland. But with the ceasefire, the road to northern Sri Lanka opened up and people travelled to towns that had been out of sight for 2 decades. Wijewardene also took the journey to the other end of the island and, like so many others, was devastated by what she saw. Documenting her travels using a digital still camera, her experience became the catalyst for Quest.

“From the initial photographs, it took a long time, maybe a year and half or so to actually evolve in to the idea of a digital art work”, says Wijewardene. “I had been looking at a lot of video art around the world. I found some of it very powerful, and I wanted to do it. But how do you do it? I didn’t think I could.”

Wijewardene questioned the possibility of making the work in Sri Lanka. Could she get the necessary technical help? “I knew I couldn’t do it without the funding,” she recalls. The nature of the project required creative people with different talents.

Though working in digital art is a new experience, Wijewardene is an established artist who has exhibited and sold her work internationally, including in Sydney. Her previous works have been more abstract, but with Quest, there is a clear purpose. “It’s the least subtle of anything I have done”, she acknowledges, “but it doesn’t necessarily mean that’s how I am going to continue. But maybe for this subject matter, that is how it was meant to happen.”

By August last year, she had raised the necessary finance to make the work. International non-government organisations and Sri Lankan businesses contributed to the project. The exhibition was held in 2 separate spaces at the National Art Gallery. The first space contained prints of stills that had been digitally manipulated, arranged around the walls. Next to each print was a quotation—inspiring words from a diverse group of people including writers, political activists and human rights defenders.

Though the digitally altered stills and the quotations were interesting, the experience provided in the second space, which contained the video art, was much more powerful. Each of the 4 walls had different projections and an evocative soundscape tied the work together. Sequences were created from the quotations and stills found in the first space. The text moved over images that showed the destruction caused not only by 20 years of ethnic fighting, but also by the recent tsunami. The application of digital filters over the images enhanced their presence, conveying a sense of destruction and tragedy, while the quotations offered hope and optimism.

The multiple projections enabled the text to be presented in the 3 languages spoken here: Tamil, Sinhala and English. The appearance of the different scripts within the same space was an important acknowledgement of the multicultural make-up of the island.

“All my paintings are some kind of a quest”, Wijewardene says about the title of her exhibition. “It was ‘questing’ why we are at this point in our lives in this country. I am questioning why this country is self-destructing in an un-winnable war…I have no answers.”

Wijewardene claims her art is “dense with many allusions and suggestions.” This definitely applies to her digital work also, especially the video installation. “There is an interest in fusion.” she says, “and not just fusion of mediums and ideas, but a fusion of cultures, of nations and of races. It’s to do perhaps with my background. My father’s half-English. My mother and he are of different religions, different castes. And I went to the temple and the church as a child. I went to school in India and art college in England. I am interested in the need to belong. I question what is home.”

“Needing to fly flags is very natural”, she adds, “but it also comes from a place of such fear and isolation. I couldn’t figure out where on Earth I belong and finally I realised I didn’t belong anywhere. I don’t belong and I am fine—I am comfortable with that. But it took a lot of agony before I could accept it.”

It is the idea of a home, of “needing to fly flags,” that is perpetuating the conflict in Sri Lanka. Though there is a ceasefire in place, there are killings occurring every day. And there is an attitude among many people that another round of war is inevitable. In this context, Quest became an important intervention.

In Sri Lanka, there is little sense of public expression or outrage about the senseless violence and death the conflict is causing. Life continues, as does the killing. Quest provided a timely space for audiences in Colombo to reflect, on an emotional level, on what is happening to their small island. That space lasted only for a short period of time. Nevertheless, it was a necessary space from which something positive may grow.

Anoma Wijewardene stresses that the intention of Quest was not to make a statement about Sri Lanka’s tragic situation. “I am not trying to pass a message on. I want to explore these issues of loss, of identity, of grief for myself. I am exploring my heart, and clearly it reaches out to other people’s hearts too.”

Kate Champion has created 2 major dance theatre works with her company, Force Majeure, Same, same But Different (2002) and Already Elsewhere (2005). The company has been invited to take Already Elsewhere to the prestigious Biennale de la Danse de Lyon in September, one of the largest dance festivals in the northern hemisphere, programming some 50 dance events over 3 weeks. The festival program includes works by Needcompany, Les Ballets C de la B, Kim Itoh, Compagnie Marie Chouinard, Pockemon Crew and many others from around the word. All the works focus in some way on the city and urban life and Already Elsewhere, with its images of suburban trauma, is no exception.

The invitation is a coup for Force Majeure and for Champion’s vision of creating innovative large scale works where her design collaborations with Geoff Cobham have been magical and her choice of performers from around Australia first class. The Managing Editors of RealTime are also guests of the festival and will report on their experience of it, and on the European response to Already Elsewhere, in the December edition of the magazine.

Kate Champion’s extensive career includes solo works, performance and rehearsal direction for London’s DV8, choreography for numerous Australian dance and theatre companies (including Company B’s Cloudstreet) and commercial choreography. Her work for Dirty Dancing is touring internationally, often taking Champion with it—and she’s rightly proud, she says, to have convinced the dancers to play to each other rather than just to the audience. Champion is also the winner of substantial peer recognition: Helpmann Awards for her solo show About Face and for Same, same But Different in 2002.

Already Elsewhere is in part inspired by the photography of American artist Gregory Crewdson. The scenario entails a series of images reminiscent of Crewdson’s ultra-realist, sometimes surreal cinematic vision of suburbia. Something appalling has happened, possibly an earthquake, perhaps worse, rendering inhabitants and neighbours dazed, bored, impatient, violent and damaged. With some of the eerie resonance of the alienated communities of Don Delillo’s novel, White Noise, or Werner Herzog’s film Heart of Glass, Champion’s Crewdson-inflected vision has a peculiarly Australian feel, of playfulness even in the face of disaster.

Oh, huge. It’s what I initially wanted to do but I’d had trouble raising the resources to be able to direct group work. But it didn’t fulfil itself until a combination of things took shape—returning from DV8, receiving a creative development grant, Brett Sheehy of the Sydney Festival being interested and commissioning it. The aesthetics of my solo shows helped give me the confidence to do Same, same….

By naming it, the work can be perceived as if it’s a new thing. I actually worked with (sound designer) Paul Charlier, (designer) Geoff Cobham and my brother (performer Stephen Champion, then ex-Circus Oz) on a show called Suspense at the Seymour Centre in 1983. It was like a precursor to Legs on the Wall—a circus show with dance and words and an immersive environment. Same, same… and the company confirmed that work. I think it’s just something we always knew. It was just getting the opportunity to have a public forum for it to be real.

In the Macquarie Dictionary “irresistible compulsion” is the first definition. I really responded to that in terms of artistic compulsion, how it feels like something you almost don’t want to do but have no choice. It’s also defined as “acts beyond one’s control”, which is how I feel as a director sitting in the theatre watching the work, which I didn’t used to feel as a performer. And in legal documents, because of terrorism and other man-made acts, ‘force majeure’ has been added to ‘acts of God.’ And I found that related to my sense of being labelled—you know, is it dance, is it theatre? Whatever else we can’t explain we’ll stick into ‘force majeure.’ The negative side is people think it’s a wanky French name that means major force, which wasn’t my intention.

The company offers you continuity, for example working recurrently with Geoff Cobham and Roz Hervey.

They’re both associate directors and we’ve decided to take a difficult Australian geographical situation and see it as a strength. It’s quite expensive to fly and accommodate more than a third, often two-thirds, of the company in Sydney but my long-term relationships with the artists is at the core of Force Majeure. There are performers in New South Wales I’m interested in and may work with in the future but there’s a shorthand, a history with these artists that can’t be replaced. Jeff and Roz are in Adelaide, Veronica Neave in Brisbane, Byron Perry and Kirstie McCracken are in Melbourne. It’s quite a commitment to maintain it.

Back in 2001, you talked to RealTime about your solo works About Face and Face Value (RT42, p6-7). You were interested in just how many selves are in oneself. In fact you said that you didn’t know which self you would be that day.

I feel like that every time I go for an interview. And I think there’s something about being observed: the object being observed alters its behaviour.

This idea is most obvious in the solo works and certainly in Same, same, But Different it manifests itself in different ways. Already Elsewhere scarily evokes ephemerality.

That’s true. It’s a limbo piece. The idea of self was definitely less at the forefront this time. I was thinking more about the moment—that sense of an unexpected event altering one’s state of being. So, you may be many selves that you’re familiar with and how they fluctuate. But a rupture of that entity when you can never be the same again because of that event, when you yearn for what was before or can’t go forward to a new sense of self or selves—that can be excruciating, a timeless place.

It sounds like depression, but it’s a state that I think until you’ve experienced it, extremely and intensely, you can’t understand. You end up perhaps not recognising yourself or discovering new things about yourself. There are people who live through disasters and never adjust afterwards, not always because they’re traumatised but because they can’t let go of that moment.

In About Face a woman was stuck in a room, unable to remember who she was. And for me, that’s similar to the limbo state of Already Elsewhere. Until someone or something can penetrate it, you’re stuck there. It can be apocalyptic—within your own body. And it can last a lifetime. I’ve seen people haunted by it. I have relatives who’ve lost an 18-month old child to SIDS, and my father died by accident. I don’t feel in that state any more but I can see in people’s eyes the sense of being haunted and stuck when they’re in that state. There’s a connection I think you make, for instance, if I met a stranger whose father had died in the same way, I would feel a phenomenal familiarity that I might not feel towards someone closer to me.

Theatrically it’s a difficult thing to deal with because it doesn’t necessarily have a dramatic arc and I really tried to resist that. I never wanted it to be narrative but it was interesting to sustain, to truly go into the state of being, to honestly stick to it to create an overriding, hovering mood.

There are a number of micro-narratives that may or may not have a middle or an end or a clear beginning.

The very subject matter was the inability to be released from that state. And not everyone is in the same state of inability.

You were inspired by the work of US photographer Gregory Crewdson. You saw these images and thought, that’s where I want to go?

You’re often looking for triggers for the work. I’m working on Peribanez [by the 17th century Spanish playwright Lope de Vega] for Company B at the moment. It’s so freeing when you work on a devised dance theatre work compared with a play structure. At the same time, I’m very interested in how you can bring that sense of narrative into a poetic work. It’s such a fine balance.

Starting with a story in a dance theatre work can make it terribly banal or almost sitcom-like. And I found Crewdson’s images really exploded this sense. I could sense an incredible story before and the potential aftermath just from that one image. The collaborators all had that same sensation when we looked at these photographs and were mutually inspired. We have often found photographs more useful for inspiration to begin work than something like a story.

The submerged house is such a strong image. It could be anything: post earthquake, post bombing.

There were burnt trees at the back, but we weren’t specific. The tsunami happened while we were rehearsing. The roof was like an archaeological time capsule with stories emerging from it episodically but as a continuum, without blackouts.

The set must have been quite an investment. It’s a substantial piece of work.

It’s a strong commitment we have. I have a real aversion to dance pieces where you see that the set is an afterthought or it’s had to be cleared away because more dance space is needed. Give me less dance space, I’m happier. We had to rehearse with the roof from the beginning, with height, dirt and water—you want to exploit every aspect of the set so the performers can live it.

First of all waiting to see if everyone’s available. Thank God they can all do it. You can’t deny that getting an invitation from such a prestigious festival bolsters you, gives you more energy to push through the difficulties of presenting it. We’ve got 5 days to re-rehearse it and we haven’t done the work for 18 months. The text has to be translated, and the set has to go ahead of us so we have to rehearse on a mock set. We’ve added it up and the opportunity outweighs all the problems. All those presenters who could never make it to Australia, you can invite them. It’s like the ultimate showcase and the Australia Council understands that.

I have toured a lot with DV8 both in 1992 and 1998-99; I’ve taken work on Lloyd Newson’s behalf to Russia and Scandinavia; and there are not many countries in Europe I haven’t performed in. I think, if you can generalise, the audiences are definitely more literate in non-narrative, atmospheric, poetic, non-linear, even foreign language work. They see more of it and understand it better. I’m really looking forward to seeing how we’re received. And I’m thrilled that we’re the first Australian company to be included in the festival!

Force Majeure, Already Elsewhere, Le Toboggan, Sept 13-15; Biennale de la Danse 2006 Lyon, Sept 9-30, www.biennale-de-lyon.org; www.forcemajeure.com.au

When Francesca Rendle-Short saw Tanja Liedtke’s Twelfth Floor in its first version, fresh from its creation in a residency at the Australian Choreographic Centre, her account for RealTime (“Words for escape”, RT 60, p44, 2004) caught the audience’s rapidly growing sense of involvement, immersion and complicity:
We’re stuck on the twelfth floor, somewhere, nobody knows. What’s going on? Does it matter? From the second the lights go down, as sound score and movement begin, we are caught, arrested, transfixed. Choreographer, Tanja Liedtke, doesn’t let us go until she decides to. Soft-footed, funny, athletic, delicate, violent in places, and violating, Liedtke knows how to pull us every which way: and it works, although we hold our breath, suck in air, so close does the performance come to very nearly imploding, with us, the audience, as co-conspirators.

What was engrossing above all, and just as breathtaking when I saw the work at Performance Space during its national Mobile States tour, was the assuredness of Liedtke’s vision, so thoroughly through-choreographed, so virtuosically danced and enacted, with a highly integrated design and soundtrack. Details were attended to meticulously (the words that a big man writes on the walls in chalk and on the object of his tender desire) and sustained; the one window to the outside world, high on the wall, glows with the normal flow of time and weather as opposed to the unstructured time of this room on the twelfth floor.

The setting for Liedtke’s dance theatre work is an eerily ambiguous space. Is it a state of mind, an institution for some damaged goods or just your standard, dangerous high-rise accomodation? Any of these, all of them? In an interview for RealTime (RT 72, p39), Liedtke told me that what emerged from the Canberra workshop was “‘a work about human interaction and confinement, small people in their own small worlds.’ …The result: a show about a group of people confined in an unidentified institution, withdrawing, dreaming, surviving.”

A big man, seemingly barely out of adolesence, writes carefully in chalk on the walls in words and long lines, closed in on himself. Two boys hoon about, at play in exquisite team work, dance with their heads in buckets, casually defy gravity. A stern woman, a mother or institutional authority figure with a prima ballerina presence, allows a girl into the room, but first takes away her shoes. The girl is playful, unconsciously sensual, a lyrical figure amidst the sharp-edged athleticism of the boys and the rigid tottering of the woman. She and the big man gradually and intimately bond. Meanwhile the boys’ attention is elsewhere, on their sexual fantasies, masturbating against a chalk drawing and soon, in a wrenching scene, transforming their hostility to authority into a violent assault on the assertive woman. The boys exit. The girl climbs the wall, and disappears. Is she free?

Liedtke feels that “a lot of Australian dance is very nice, but that’s not enough, I want to get to the underbelly, to see people as complex—affection and hostility are such great physical premises for dance.” Twelfth Floor gives us both and it is a credit to Liedtke that the binarisms that drive her scenario and steer her dangerously close to cliché are kept in check by the sheer power of the performance and the totality of its vision. However, once you step outside this twelfth floor room, the sense of complicity that Rendle-Short refers to takes hold. Yes, Twelfth Floor is ‘not nice’ but it is not complex. The older woman is power embodied in a uniform and the gestures of ballet pitted against the free modern dance spirit of the girl. Her rape is horribly realised in performance but is not nice in the worst sense, that she should be punished for the sins of power that doubtless lie elsewhere. The girl (although wonderfully danced by Kristina Chan to reveal sensuality, intimacy and a capacity for flight) is a cipher for freedom: we have no sense why she is in this place except as captive. The big man is rescued momentarily from his interior world by the girl and that entails a wonderful physical release from his weight—again a simple binary (if a more effective one). And the boys? Wonderfully vivid, funny, seductive and finally gross, but their exit is a blank in the scenario: they are tools of the plot, symbolic ciphers.

Given the sheer power of Liedtke’s theatricality and the choreographic and design intricacies of Twelfth Floor it might appear churlish to ascribe to it cliches and a crude thematic dynamic. You might think it PC of me. But the work derives not a little of its power from these very elements with which it propels its narrative and its expression of the extremes of affection and hostility. Liedtke’s capacity to express something more is doubtless in her reach as a rapidly maturing choreographer and director of dance theatre. A different kind of power in Twelfth Floor resides in the richness of its observations of play and intimacy, stillnesses and waiting, its evocation of interior states. Many a dance theatre director has avoided using narrative to structure their work (see the interview with Kate Champion, p31). It’s understandable, because narrative brings with it many obligations, many traps, and what can appear simple and effective as story is too often empty, or replete with exhausted values.

Thanks to Mobile States, Twelfth Floor has introduced a significant talent in Tanja Liedtke to audiences around Australia. The work was almost always breathtaking (even if the seductive viscerality of the experience was tempered by reflection) and inspired thoughts for a greater future for Australian dance.

Twelfth Floor, concept & direction Tanja Liedtke, choreography Liedtke with performers, creative consultant Solon Ulbrich, performers Anton, Kristina Chan, Julian Crotti, Amelia McQueen, Paul White, design Gaelle Mellis, lighting Gus Macdonald, sound artist DJ Trip, video Closer Productions; Mobile States; Performance Space, May 24-27

‘Mid-career’ isn’t the prettiest term. In dance circles, it usually connotes an independent artist who has been around long enough to prove their worth, but hasn’t joined one of the professional companies as a permanent member—no longer a bright young thing, but not an established icon. It can also act as a discrete euphemism for ‘underemployed.’ And the sad truth is that there aren’t many opportunities for mid-career artists. There’s the occasional commission, perhaps, and the tiring process of applying for funding. There’s often a great degree of isolation. In all of these areas, With a Bullet: The Album Project is a collaboration so obviously valuable that one wonders why something like it isn’t a permanent staple of the dance calendar. Bringing together a group of independent choreographers to work together on a series of pieces, each responding to a common theme or working through a shared principle allows experienced artists who often work individually to pool their knowledge, bounce off each other, retain their distinctive styles or test out somebody else’s. Luckily, With a Bullet is also terrific fun.

The choreographers involved are Simon Ellis, Luke Hockley, Gerard Van Dyck, Shannon Bott, Phillip Gleeson, Michelle Heaven, Jo Lloyd and Natalie Cursio, who initiated the project. The general brief given by Cursio was to create a work for any number of dancers using the first song to which they ever choreographed a piece, whether it was as a child dancing around the lounge room or as a mature artist. The task was not to recreate that initial experience of dance, but to respond to it, reinterpret the song, or devise an entirely new encounter with it. The results are massively varied in character and style, but all in some way offer a retrieval of the innocent love of sheer movement and playfulness, which is often the spur to dance.

Simon Ellis’ piece opens the evening with an ironic take on Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Ironic (though this aspect didn’t seem to trouble audience members laughing at the track’s kitsch value), in that it offers a pair of disenfranchised women clearly undergoing some kind of loss, unable to connect with each other and quite evidently not having a lot of fun. It’s a subtle work, but an intriguingly multi-layered way to kick off proceedings. At the other end of the evening, Jo Lloyd uses Yes’ Owner of a Lonely Heart as the soundtrack to recreate the sense of pleasure of a group of 8 year-olds cavorting around the house. But here it’s pyjama-clad dancers at the peak of their talents. Being able to reconnect her performers (including herself) to the artless and uninhibited side of childhood is certainly a triumph for Lloyd.

Cursio’s own contribution (set to Leif Garrett’s disco hit I Was Made For Dancing) is a highlight: a catapult ride through a sex-and-crime filled narrative that alternates between soap opera, action film and pulp noir. It’s clever, catchy, and laugh-out-loud funny, three qualities that really do define With a Bullet as a whole. It’s far from the arch seriousness of much contemporary dance, while never losing a sharp, knowing edge.

Body Corporate: With a Bullet: The Album Project, concept Natalie Cursio, choreography Simon Ellis, Luke Hockley, Gerard Van Dyck, Shannon Bott, Phillip Gleeson, Michelle Heaven, Jo Lloyd, Natalie Cursio, performers Shannon Bott, Natalie Cursio, Simon Ellis, Jo Lloyd, Jacob Lehrer, Gerard Van Dyck, designer Matt Delbridge; Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, June 22-July 1

Are there really It and Other? Or really no It and Other.
Zhuangzi, Inner Chapters, 4th century BC

Two bodies, David Corbet and Jacob Lehrer, traverse the darkened space from separate sides of the room. There are qualities that reflect the dancers’ histories: the studios of Melbourne, London, Sydney and companies such as Strange Fruit, DV8, and Born in a Taxi. Their bodies are marked—and marked very well—by these practices, bullets marked by the calibre of the barrels through which they’ve been fired.

Each performer dances within a certain aesthetic style I find I either like or do not. I find myself even wishing they would NOT dance certain things. And then suddenly the process lifts itself into a different qualitative place. The 2 bodies begin to merge and roll, intertwine and release—territory familiar from contact improvisation. Mellifluousness like honey takes over. The question of who is one or the other loses grip and for me, the real performance begins: like the eye circling a Mobius strip, they and I become both without and within.

The best of contact improvisation always teases at this fabric. Within such intimacy, who can draw the distinction between acted, or acted-upon? This is as complex a relationship as that between foot and earth, mother and child, mouth with atmosphere. One dancer leans into, shares skin with another; a dancer walks, talks, bounces off/with/in the room.

In Excavate, Corbet walks sideways along the walls. He climbs up Lehrer’s body as if it were a mountain, or an elephant, or a set of steps. High-seated as a rajah, he blinds Lehrer with his hands and steers his face; yet Lehrer also self-directs, propelling the double-bodied monster into the audience. A masterful moment: threatened with collision, my own body merges with the event. Have we all together, in watching, playing, dancing, been becoming a new beast, a new consciousness, from the very first steps?

My responses thence become twofold. I marvel at the elasticity and liberties their process allows, but also wonder at the restrictions that arise within the distinct narratives that emerge.

There’s plenty of “men’s business”: noir fights, jamming fists, back-alley brawls. And just look at the publicity stills! Bam, Smash. Pow. But what troubles me is not the violence, but what inhibits their investigation during these actions. I feel the world go small.

It’s quite reasonable to argue that clear narrative markers are necessary to link an audience to a work—ah, now I know where I am, even if only for a moment. But in these very moments, the hard edges become somewhat static. For instance, where do these men’s hands go and not go. What and how do they touch, and not touch. What is more violent than completing a violent action. What multitude of qualities, dialogues and choices is in those hands before they smash the other player into the wall?

Reality is more complex than this. After the performance, when I ask “What stops you there [from going further, from going elsewhere]?” Corbet looks deeply thoughtful, but at the time can’t find words to respond.

In Melbourne in the early 1990s, I remember seeing Libby Dempster’s Whisper Corraggio—a piece about political incarceration—and whilst there wasn’t a rough hand laid on anyone, nonetheless one left the theatre devastated.

Of course, this is a different piece. But I wonder what other tendernesses, irritations, teasings there might have been, within the very enactments of the violence. I am thinking also of how the room itself might respond: in this performance, we sometimes have the performance environment (walls, spatial dimensions, projection, sound) acknowledged as animate and co-creative, but often not.

Lehrer responds with an obvious answer that of course they wouldn’t go so far as to smash each other’s brains. A fair response, but, frankly, nobody’s been fooled; and interestingly, on the night I attended, un-dance-educated members of the audience knew that was not the question.

The partial reality Corbet and Lehrer smash into when they dig does carry its own beauty and risk. And movement between fluidity and edges, expansion and stasis, is perhaps inevitable. But perhaps too, at this stage in their prolific creative partnership, the “next thing” might rest in further un-limiting their questions.

Excavate: A two-man dig, David Corbet, Jacob Lehrer; Australian Choreographic Centre, Canberra, May 16-20

Chunky Move: Singularity

We enter a cavern, large, deep and dark, filled with 6 enormous squares. Some are like small stages, others large cots. Each contains a person. As we mill expectantly, a young woman screeches, asthmatic animal breathing, pacing her square in choreographed lunges and pelvic thrusts. Her sexuality repulses. A man in a suit stammers his way through a series of micro-movements, clever clockwork. He is shy and inadequate. Each square in turn gives way to the repeated performance of a solipsistic mantra. A young woman falls backwards again and again; a man moves sections of his body as if they were separate, independent of the whole. Quiet violence erupts. The audience swarms around the action, and then drifts away.

Dysfunctional is too weak a word, too close to functional. This work attempts to depict that which is beyond sanity. But for the hysterical breathing, the madness presented here was almost aesthetic, the 6 performers assuming the shape of insanity rather than its lived experience.

The large squares move, slowly joining, bringing our introverts into contact with each other. How would these introverts interact? Some patterns were inhibited, others augmented. When this gave way to the group it was somewhat disappointing. Perhaps a group of such individuals was bound to amount to little, a slow decline towards the entropy of the floor.

One of the strongest aspects of Singularity was its reinsertion of each individual into some context of the everyday, whether in lifts, at a party or on public transport. These moving tableaux were wonderful, adding the social, the normal, to that which is not. My favourite section was a party scene that alternated between bubbling interaction (normal state) and complete exclusion (the girl’s perception of an evacuated humanity). A girl, radically alone, at a party full of people. This was stunning, scary, like the vision of a psychopath. It would have been great if all the everyday settings were likewise elaborated to contrast the individual’s experience with the social norms of everyday life.

Some parts of Singularity worked better than others, some bits could have been cut, and others developed more physically and emotionally. However, its general thrust, to represent and recontextualise pathological forms of experience, had real integrity.

Kage: Headlock

In the absence of dialogue physical theatres can sometimes look odd in their mute reinterpretation of everyday life. In depicting a primarily physical relationship between brothers, Headlock evoked a fairly realistic field of action, barely announcing itself as physical theatre. Three boys hang out, playing their favourite fantasy of championship wrestling, sometimes literally, sometimes through sibling rivalries. Competition borders on aggression. Each boy has a distinct personality, always framed in relation to the others. One boy, Matthew, is deaf. The others protect and taunt him in turns. We come to realise that these are memories, that time has intruded upon childhood. Another brother, the eldest, has died—we don’t know how exactly, though we know he was the ringleader. Perhaps he skated too close to danger. Perhaps his fearlessness turned to self-destruction. In any case, there are now only 2 boys, one of them going to prison.

Headlock was measured in terms of a single night, Shane’s first in prison. It moved imperceptibly slowly, signalled by a digital clock looming larger than Melbourne’s landmark Nylex clock. Time does not flow here. It jumps, then freezes. Shane’s despair is softened through the intercession of flashbacks and the appearance of his dead brother offering advice, provoking memories. To what extent did memories help Shane survive prison life? Or was memory a means of escape? Headlock created a strong contrast between the trio of siblings as an ensemble and the isolation of adulthood. The status of Shane’s memories is thus ambiguous.

The strength of Headlock lies in the relation between the 3 boys and in its stark contrast with the reality of prison life. The physical nuances of their play established the jouissance of their relationship. I watched Headlock with an audience of school children. Their attention reciprocated the action onstage; they understood the sheer stuffing around, killing time of childhood.

Headlock raises issues of childhood and danger, play and destruction, aggression and love. Its exploration in a largely physical domain worked very well where class disadvantage vies with the creativity of children in the generation of 3 life histories.

Body Corporate:Chunky Move, Singularity, choreographer-director Gideon Obarzanek, performers Kristy Ayre, Antony Hamilton, Paea Leach, Kirstie McCracken, Carlee Mellow, Lee Serle, designer Dirk Zimmerman, sound, Darrin Verhagen, lighting, Niklas Pajanti; Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, May 12-28

Kage Physical Theatre, Headlock, director Kate Denborough, performers Luke Hockley, Byron Perry, Gerard Van Dyck, text David Denborough, design Ben Cobham, Andrew Livingstone (Bluebottle); Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, May 18-June 3

This new work by Brian Lucas is a shocker, in the very best sense. It is a mesmerising and unpredictable turning away from the stripped bare aesthetic of his previous solo ventures in dance theatre. Rather than completing an autobiographical trilogy that includes monster and the book of revelation(s), Underbelly is a thoroughly theatrical diversion, sumptuous and totally saturnine. It is a kick in the guts from an artist who has hitherto delicately dealt in philosophical nuances, often wickedly funny but always tender to the human condition. Here an underlying steel is revealed, and Lucas as performer is less removed. The artist himself seems surprised: “Originally, this piece was called Body Begat, and I thought it was going to be about my mother. But somehow I have arrived at the point where a cold-blooded, psychopathic corporate bitch is about to use a poor fucking baby to keep herself young and beautiful…it could at least have some redeeming features.”

A baroque gilt-edged frame, luminously sketched in by looping rope lights, is suspended in space. While this fulfills the function of a stage within a stage, its metaphorical lustre denotes, as Lucas makes explicit, the performer as fetishised object: “There are a lot of stake-holders—people who have made an investment in you—and they demand tangible outcomes. They want a return for that investment. I mean, after all, it may be art, but it’s also a commercial transaction and you have to deliver. You have to deliver the goods.” ‘Back stage’ Lucas coolly scrutinises himself in a mirror. The anonymous box set reveals a murkily foreshortened perspective as if under intense pressure. Something is threatening to burst out.

A child is immaculately conceived by a hag who dies giving birth. The child is seized by a beast and borne off to its lair. He is rescued by a prince who slays the beast but, disclaiming responsibility, hands the child over to a priest. Glorifying himself by baptising the child, the priest in turn makes a commercial transaction with the asbestos blond in her tower. This corporate horror spills the child’s lifeblood in order to renew herself, but her tower is cast down by the terrors she has visited on others so that she spirals to her death. This ferociously comic, post-apocalyptic fairy story provides Lucas with the opportunity to perform himself as other to himself, or at least ‘to run with the idea’.

This is the most evidently collaborative work by Lucas, and he pays tribute to his ‘dream team’: Brett Collery (soundscape), Bruce McKinven (design) and Morgan Randall (lighting design and operation). By building character to fit the designer’s sculptural, eerily independent replicant shell (as opposed to putting on a costume) and by exploring similar physical patterns, repeated movements are de-familiarised in different contexts. Lucas unites the visceral and the cerebral with sometimes terrible immediacy in an economical format, which builds meaning from all elements of the production. For instance, the monstrous conception takes place to a transcendent, Gaelic version of Silent Night.

Underbelly is part of an ongoing inquiry into the nature of performance, an investigation in which Lucas appears implicated this time round as the criminal. If this is a story about making stories, the creative process is portrayed as brutal, and there is slippage where self-irony seemingly elides into self-disgust: “Repeat after me: I am a mid-career artist, I am a mid-career artist!” But Lucas is a border artist, taking from both zones, acutely aware of the purely contingent nature of subjectivity both in and outside art. In a world where politicians are makers of signs without substance, the predicament of the artist is forlorn indeed. Brian Lucas (a superb mid-career artist) courageously alerts us to the wounding truth central to this Byzantine performance.

Underbelly, creator-performer Brian Lucas, soundscape Brett Collery, design Bruce McKinven, lighting design Morgan Randall; Brisbane Powerhouse, June 21-24

Tanja Liedtke's Always Building<BR />front: Jason Lam, left to right: Tanya Voges, Kyle Kremerskothen, <br />Trisha Dunn, Joshua Thomson”></p>
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Tanja Liedtke's Always Building
front: Jason Lam, left to right: Tanya Voges, Kyle Kremerskothen,
Trisha Dunn, Joshua Thomson

Established in 1981 as Australia’s first dance-in-education company, TasDance has over the past 25 years broadened its role to include theatre-based performance, dance development and dance in community, in the process earning a national reputation for innovation and its repertoire of contemporary Australian work.

Earth is a given beneath any dancer’s feet, regardless of nationality, training or stylistic imperative. Tasdance’s anniversary program, The Earth beneath our feet, features works by 3 choreographers: As the Crow Flies by Nanette Hassall, Always Building by Tanja Liedtke and A Volume Problem by Byron Perry. These pieces offer diverse perspectives on the connections between earth, space, place and the body.

Hassall’s As the Crow Flies is a seminal work from 1988. Using cartography as a starting point, the choreographer explores perspectives of the earth viewed through satellite imaging juxtaposed against the mind’s internal landscape. The dancers engage in a complex physical cartography through hold, lift, fall and counterbalance. The shifting pattern of the dancers’ bodies corporeally represents the images of a satellite earthscape shaped by sand, wind and tide.

The dance is set to Shaker Loops by John Adams. A distinctive feature of the performance and a mark of each dancer’s finesse is the impetus from a push, touch or gesture initiating a new movement sequence. This pattern of devised solos, duos and trios depicts a variety of avian and human perspectives and inter-relationships within a landscape. The trio dance is particularly fluid and sensual, complemented by controlled strength and power. There is little time for the eye to linger as the dancers confidently grapple with the demands of Hassall’s choreography.

Always Building is a work that addresses construction and destruction. Choreographer Tanya Liedtke uses Lego pieces as a visual metaphor to portray aspects of building—a constant cycle of destruction and renewal of individuals, cities and civilisations. Audience members are invited to join 5 dancers each seated at a table. The tables represent the temporal nature of the substrate on which different buildings are already constructed. Each volunteer helps assemble blocks of a particular colour to continue the building. When the completed structures are tipped and the tables are used to sweep pieces to the rear of the stage, we hear a resonance of collapsed and shuffled plastic. Dancers segue into corporeal building blocks, falling, rising, creating and destroying. Lego pieces are used to demarcate the individual, group and society.

One dancer personifies ennui. Working as a controller she listlessly points an arrow to direct the pattern of movement. The Lego blocks remain the constant connector, a metaphor for the continuous cycles of structural and emotional exchange involving patterns of encroachment, construction and collapse.

A Volume Problem is choreographed by Byron Perry in collaboration with the dancers. Lit by a single spot, 2 speakers glimmer like the eyes of a shining temple god resting on a grassed earth cube. In a mesmerising opening sequence 6 dancers move their fingers across, over and around the plinth, animating the speakers.

A static charge from the speakers animates the dancers who p(l)ay homage to the sound source. In a strange inversion it seems that the speakers are dancing the dancers who move in sculptural clusters of twos and threes, emanating a strange beauty. This iconography of speakers, with their ear-phoned, switched on, jacked in sound worlds, assumes life and power. This is a familiar world bent into the unfamiliar. It is riveting viewing.

Luke Smiles’ sound design is an ordering of noise into sense. This accentuates the dancers’ exploration of the speakers’ allure. In response to the static charge and each speaker’s strange potency, the dancers portray the shifts and connections of attraction. Their fascination gives way to separation and isolation as each moves into the lonelier place of recollection and memory.

In the final sequence Darren Willmott’s lighting design accentuates larger than life shadows as the dancers crowd onto the grassed cube. With feet anchored and backs turned to the audience, the group responds with a surreal energy. In one segment only 2 remain on the cube, revealing the possibility and contradiction inherent in patterns of volume and noise. One dancer responds with total passivity, the other with frenetic movement. A Volume Problem is a quirky work of elusive familiarity.

TasDance, The Earth beneath our feet, dancers Floeur Alder, Trisha Dunn, Kyle Kremerskothen, Jason Lam, Joshua Thomson, Tanya Voges; As the Crow Flies, choreography Nanette Hassall, lighting Darren Willmott; Always Building, choreography Tanja Liedtke with dancers, composer Jason Sweeney, set & lighting Ben Cobham, Bluebottle; A Volume Problem, choreography Byron Perry, sound Luke Smiles, Motion Laboratories, lighting Darren Willmott, design Anita Holloway, costumes Alice Richardson, Odette Arrieta-Shadbolt; Collegiate Performing Arts Centre, Hobart, June 29-July 1

Play on Earth

Whilst 4 days isn’t nearly long enough to come to grips with this small island republic of 4 million, on first impressions Singapore is an exhilarating mix of people and cultures, high and low-rise, heritage and contemporary architectures. Mandarin, Malay, English and Tamil are the official languages, and ‘Singlish’ I’m delighted to say, is alive and well, lah. And then there’s the food! Singapore is rightly famous for its fantastic mix of flavours. Given that Perth has a strong connection to both Singapore and Malaysia, I still can’t believe that this was my first exposure to Peranakan cuisine, a Malay Chinese hybrid. On the other hand it has to be admitted that the world is divided into those who adore the durian fruit and those who do not; I have discovered that I definitely fall into the latter category.

I was in Singapore with journalists from Thailand, the Philippines, New Zealand and Australia to experience a few days of the Singapore Arts Festival, to learn about the arts and arts infrastructure in Singapore and experience some of the city’s urban revitalisation. For a decade Singapore has dedicated itself to becoming a distinctive global city for the arts, and to making the arts integral to peoples’ lives. Perhaps it’s the compact nature of this island state, not to mention the passion and enthusiasm of local artists, art professionals and bureaucrats, but there is no doubt that the arts in Singapore are flourishing with initiatives that range from secure accommodation for artists and companies, including the fabulous refurbishment of the National Museum of Singapore, to programs of support for artists and companies, and an international outlook and focus. It was great to visit the National Museum of Singapore, which reopens in December following a comprehensive renovation. Spaces are being opened to the public in a carefully staged program of events, both as a means of road-testing the new spaces as they come online as well as promoting the new facilities. Our tour of the building allowed us to experience the international touring exhibition, The Scenic Eye: Visual Arts and the Theatre, curated by Wolfgang Storch. Inspired by René Block and his connections to Fluxus, the exhibition invited a range of artists including Rosemarie Trockel and Thomas Schütte and sound designer Hans Peter Kuhn, to create works that reflect on theatre through installation, sculpture, photography, drawing and interactives.

Festival hardware

The Singapore Arts Festival is certainly the nation’s premier arts event but it sits alongside an ongoing range of programs supporting local artists and companies, and other special events including the Writers Festival and the inaugural Singapore Biennale in September. So if the hardware (buildings) are not only functional but also stylish, I’m delighted to say that the software—to extend the metaphor—is complex, richly textured, quite tough in terms of content and formally sophisticated. The festival itself is extremely comfortable in positioning local art and artists within a regional and international context.

It was quite extraordinary to experience the standard of housing offered to artists and companies, not to mention the calibre of performing arts centres ranging from the purpose-built: the Esplanades—Theatres on the Bay and the recently relocated Drama Centre in the National Library Centre, for instance, to the incredible restorations of heritage buildings such as TheatreWorks’ new home 72-13 and The Arts House. The latter was originally built as a private home in 1827, becoming Singapore’s first Courthouse, then Parliament House before re-opening as a multidisciplinary arts and heritage centre in 2004. While much has been written of the Esplanade Theatre with its acoustically perfect concert hall and outstanding opera theatre, other venues similarly reflect a concern for the highest standards of presentation and great working conditions for artists. Our tour of the new Drama Centre was a case in point. It holds a 615-seat proscenium arch theatre and an intimate black box space with a seating capacity of 120. Equipped with state of the art lighting, rigging and sound systems, the seating is comfortable and the acoustics excellent. I know, because I had the great pleasure of seeing The Necessary Stage’s Mobile there.
Mobile

Mobile

Co-directed by Alvin Tan and Tatsuo Kaneshita with Haresh Sharma as head writer, Mobile is a unique collaboration involving artists from Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines and Japan. This was fantastically provocative, utterly relevant theatre, which illuminated the power dynamics of migrant, often unskilled labour—Thai sex workers and Philippino maids for instance, as well as Buddhist monks and Japanese businessmen—in a global market place. The creative process began more than a year ago and involved 4 playwrights from each of the countries working with Haresh Sharma and the script developed through extensive fieldwork. In Japan, interviews were conducted with various NGOs, activists and academics involved with foreign workers. In Thailand, the creative team visited women’s shelters in Chiang Mai and conducted interviews in Bangkok with NGOs involved in the protection of sex workers and their rights. In Singapore the creative team interviewed migrant workers from various organizations. Mobile has thus been an international collaboration of some complexity and has evolved into a political and intercultural theatre of wit, empathy and intelligence that extends the company’s ongoing fascination with the contemporary realities of what they have described as “multiple Asias.”

Not all aspects of Mobile were equally successful. The play’s framing device of 2 women delegates at an NGO conference had some hilarious moments, but was cartoonish compared to the emotionally complex interior scenes, and the closing scene was disappointing. On the other hand, the ‘play within a play’ portraying migrant workers at an NGO’s conference, was hysterically funny (reminding me of Australian Chris Lilley’s outrageous mockumentary, We can be heroes). What distinguishes this work is the generosity of the exchange between forms and cultures predicated on openness to the potential for change. This richly theatrical provocation moved beyond simplistic notions of accountability and blame into a much more complex space where the tragic and the comic are reframed within the everyday experiences of mobility, labour, social disparity and discrimination. I hope it tours to Australia.

Play on Earth

In late 2005, TheatreWorks moved into the recently renovated 72-13, a converted rice warehouse. This beautiful space—light, airy and modern—is flexible enough to function as a gallery, a cinema and a theatre and could happily inhabit the pages of Wallpaper. So it was fantastic to experience the conceptually and formally ambitious theatrical experiment, Play on Earth, by Station House Opera (UK) in collaboration with TheatreWorks (Singapore), Philharmonia Brasileira (Brazil) and Newcastle Gateshead Initiative (UK) at 72-13. Projected live from 3 corners of the world onto screens above the actors, a narrative unfolds that is immediate yet remote, familiar but unpredictable, alive but discontinuous. The narrative is not really the point but there is a story of sorts tracing the strange and discontinuous nature of relationships across time and place. I was mesmerised by the play between the live (immediate) and live (remote) performances, even when it was something as apparently naff as passing flowers from one continent to another or waving cheerily at audience members on the other side of the globe, but then I’ve always been a sucker for a good trick. This was a remarkably ambitious experiment to be programmed within an international performing arts festival and testifies to the sophistication of the Singapore Arts Festival.

Hotel Modern, The Great War

Another highly imaginative and politically resonant work was the Netherlands-based Hotel Modern’s The Great War. In this production, the audience witnesses in miniature the reconstruction of the landscapes of the Western Front of 1914-18 laid out on tables using sawdust, potting soil, rusty nails and parsley for trees. Rain falls from a small handheld sprinkler; an aerosol jet firebombs cardboard towns; a peaceful field gradually mutates into a sea of toxic mud. Inside a fish tank, ships are bombed by torpedoes and sink; flotsam and bodies bob to the surface. The performers, using digital and mini cameras film and edit live through a vision mixer, which is simultaneously projected onto a large screen. The results are larger than life, and staggeringly and shockingly real.

Composer, Arthur Sauer, brings the narrative to life with an outstanding live soundtrack created by using contact microphones, distortion and amplification. A knock on a table for instance sounds like a grenade on impact; the striking of a match like escaping mustard gas, while a vibrator run over a small tin of marbles sounds chillingly like tanks. The performers constantly construct and reconstruct the experiences of war before our eyes. This live animation is also accompanied by readings drawn primarily from eyewitness accounts, as well as from found letters sent home, written by a French soldier to his mother during a long stay in the trenches. A descriptive excerpt from All Quiet on the Western Front is also used. These readings are replete with the small daily practical issues, intimate details and personal experiences of men in the trenches, lending the production an incredible poignancy and reminding us of the utter waste, horror and stupidity of war.

Compagnie Marie Chouinard

The openness to collaboration and experimentation, the humanity and poignancy of Mobile, Play on Earth and The Great War exposed the potential limitations of a purely formal approach. Canadian Compagnie Marie Chouinard’s bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_variations was a physically rigorous and virtuosic work, utilising—as its title suggests—an interpretation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations as performed by Glen Gould, remixed by composer Louis Dufort. The remix included vocal samplings of Glen Gould speaking in a 1981 radio interview and the resulting composition distorts into something menacing and strange. This somewhat literal approach was reflected by the movement vocabulary. Bodies are distorted, extended and remixed through various prosthetics including crutches—often shortened or attached unicorn-like to the forehead or other equally unexpected body parts—as well as ballet barres, ropes and harnesses. The dancers were further handicapped, often wearing only one pointe shoe with one bare foot, the other often worn on the hand, so that their performances were inherently off balance. Moving sometimes on 2 limbs and sometimes on 4, crouching, rearing, liberated and fettered, they appeared like strange cloven-hoofed creatures, some new hybrid brought into being through arbitrary acts of cruelty.

Ballet barres turn into the appendages of a struggling duo. Crutches protrude unexpectedly, turning movement into something alien but always dancerly. Often, the dancers perform en pointe creating perverse shapes and exploring an inventive gestural language. Nevertheless at 100 minutes (including interval) I found myself getting increasingly restless. The after-show discussion confirmed that this was a formal experiment exploring ‘constraint and freedom’ that sought no reference points beyond its own polished amalgam of crafted capabilities.

Local, regional, global

The theme of this year’s Singapore Arts Festival, “One Season: Many Faces”, was reflected in a growing list of co-productions and a commitment to a form of internationalism that is distinctly Asian and which celebrates the local. Festival Director Goh Ching Lee’s commitment to supporting artists in the making of their work is palpable. With such an outstanding program, it will be interesting to see what Singapore’s inaugural Biennale of Visual Arts delivers. Having adopted the conceptual framework of ‘Belief’, the curatorial team led by Fumio Nanjo, the high profile Deputy Director of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, have assembled a rich and varied selection of artists to exhibit. The Biennale, like the Singapore Arts Festival, is sure to be both self aware and sophisticated, political but not didactic and to embrace the local as well as the regional and the international.

Sarah Miller thanks her hosts, the National Arts Council and the Singapore Tourism Board for their generous hospitality. She also thanks Real Time’s Managing Editor for sending her in his stead.

What was great about the fifties is that for one brief moment—maybe, say, six weeks—nobody understood art.

I kept hearing people describe Australia culturally in terms of the ‘tyranny of distance’ and geographic isolation which made me think, yes all those things are true, but they’re ideas that have no poetry in them and it limits what I was actually experiencing. When Georgia O’Keefe left New York at the height of her career to go to New Mexico so she could paint, she would sign off her letters, “From the faraway nearby, Georgia.”

What is that faraway nearby that is here? Places that are supposed to be the most familiar to us, whether it’s our home or our country, or even ourselves in a way, can become far away, or unfamiliar, very quickly because of various forces at work. I don’t make a theme for the festival, as you know, but I do try and find cohesion. A lot of what the artists are dealing with in the festival is about place and home—how you long for the very thing you have in front of you; how you belong—in terms of national identity, cultural identity…So there’s a lot of work in the festival either celebrating a sense of home and place through tender little personal histories, or a really deep questioning—what does it now mean to me to be part of this place, or finding a place in language.

In the 51st (dream) state, the black American artist Sekou Sundiata asks very rigorous questions about language, how it is essentially colonised either in the corporate sector or political speech. Certain words that we used to be able to use now have new meanings or are harder to use—like “radical” or “family.” How does one reclaim that language, because if you don’t you’re silenced slowly. Sundiata’s kind of giving a State of the American Soul Address, questioning empire. He’s also questioning it from his own sense of self. What does it mean to me to be American? What does it mean to be an African-American poet/artist/musician? He’s such a wise man.

We saw him perform blessing the boats at the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow this year, which is also in MIAF 2006. It’s a fabulous performance—very present but also reminiscent in form of work from the early 70s. Ngapartji Ngapartji (RT70, p8), the Big hART show that you’ve developed over these 2 festivals, is a very different look at language in which the audience becomes seriously participatory. It’s also focused on place with Trevor Jamieson’s account of the effect of nuclear testing in the 50s on his South Australian homeland and his people’s dispossession.

Imagine trying to fill out grant proposals for Ngapartji Ngapartji! So many people absolutely thought that it would be impossible for them to pull it together. And, of course, when that sort of thing happens, my instinct is that it’s only not possible if we don’t engage.

Artists are typically having to function across multiple countries. So what does home mean for an artist who’s Australian but collaborating internationally? How did the Indonesians win Robert Wilson? He developed that work (I La Galigo) in different parts of Indonesia for many years. You can see there’s a lot of engaged cross-national/cross-cultural collaboration just to pull these projects together. Bill T Jones’ cast is very international. What is it that drives artists to seek across such huge divides? For me this is the hopeful side of globalisation.

Dumb Type’s Voyage basically starts out with the question of where we are and where we may be going. They always have very strong connections to the natural environment versus the urban hyper built environment. It’s at its clearest in the scene where there’s an astronaut-like figure looking down at the Earth. Robert Wilson uses the ancient Sureq Galigo text of Indonesia’s Bugis people. The work is sung and chanted in Bugis with English surtitles. These people hardly speak that language any more. So it would be akin to Homer’s Iliad. But it’s valuable for the culture: they use it for predicting weather and what they should eat. It’s like a bible, it has a creation myth and the whole text is about how humans try to restore balance and order in the world.

Tragedia Endogonidia (RT 66, p37), Romeo Castellucci’s epic voyage around Europe, is another response to place. There are 11 full-length theatre works built in the cities they’re named after. Some of them could only happen once in a location, others are more mobile. It’s a modern tragedy of what happened in each of those cities. He’s not addressing World War 1 or 2 or any of that. They’re the small things that end up in the back of the papers that can then evaporate, disappear and be done with. But they leave a mark on the place and the culture, especially the culture’s ability to sweep it away instead of dealing with it. So Castellucci really grabs you by the throat and asks you to have a look at something that is horrifically tragic, unexplained and then disappeared. When you look at him aesthetically, it’s almost like he’s layering Renaissance painting and really rigorous symbolism and gesture into a theatrical world. It’s a series of slow tableaux that are quite overwhelming. This is a project that is certainly not for the faint of heart.

How do you see the place of Australian artists in the festival? Richard Murphet is collaborating with Dutch artists from DasArts in a work that takes them to northern Australia to the first point of Dutch contact in 1606 (see Murphet in our education feature p2), and Aphids are collaborating with Swiss artists. What about dance artists Lucy Guerin and Ros Warby who are presenting major new works?

There’s a double bill from Lucy Guerin and Japanese artist Kota Yamazaki, Chamisa 4°C/Setting, but we’re also doing the premiere of Guerin’s new work, Structure and Sadness. She’s using the collapse of Melbourne’s Westgate Bridge in 1970 and principles of tension and suspension, torque and collapse as a means of getting at the choreography. It’s also a metaphor for those forces that are in our bodies, even if we’re not dancers. Westgate Bridge had been so embedded with hopefulness and tremendous engineering but it collapsed due to human error. So she explores that and the tragedy of the people who died, but also the resilience of human beings that makes you dust yourself off and say, we have a job to do and you do it again and this time you succeed.

In a very different physical language, Ros Warby’s Monumental also explores simultaneity, looking at the swan from ballet iconography and the regimentation of the soldier. In her work, she’s constantly unlearning in order to get to a different vocabulary and presence. Metaphorically, she’s addressing the impulse for humans to want to fly, and the gravity that keeps us grounded. And beyond that how tremendous beauty is happening alongside great trauma, How does the spirit both fly and stay grounded?

I’ve also put together a program with Sally Ford called Second Home with first or second generation immigrant Australians performing. What you have running through Second Home is a lament, often for the homeland but also a real celebration of it. It’s really about engaging with the audience and saying these are Australian musicians. They are contributing a great richness to Australian contemporary music but at the same time they’re not being looked at in world music programming inside Australia. Murundak, with The Black Arm Band, a 21-piece ensemble, is very different because first peoples’ issues are radically distinct from immigrant or multicultural issues. Murundak has traditional songs from different parts of the land that are laments for it, and music for healing practices, but it’s also stylised with jazz overtones with a variety of other contemporary musical forms.
Peter Greenaway, The Tulse Luper Suitcases

Peter Greenaway, The Tulse Luper Suitcases

Peter Greenaway’s festival work, which he refers to as “a personal history of uranium”, represents an adventure in form and media, with new feature films, DVDs, a website and an interactive game.

After Greenaway did Prospero’s Books there was a radical drop in his presence in the international scene. But even before DVD he completely anticipated the technology and the viewing behaviour where you would go home and push pods and see multiple screens and layers. A lot of what he’s been doing since is this project, The Tulse Luper Suitcases. The trilogy can be screened in cinemas but also set up as a game installation (The Tulse Luper Journey, ACMI Games Lab). As you go through a layer of the work online you download a minute of the next film. There are 92 layers, the isotope of uranium. And you become the holder of his next film. It’s just astonishing.

Schallmachine 06 looks like another unique combination for Aphids who have that willingness to connect internationally and make a life for themselves beyond their home city. And the work is situated in the underworld beneath Federation Square, each performance designed for very small audience.

It’s a beautiful work and it is complex, a collaboration with local group Speak Percussion and the Swiss-based percussionist Fritz Hauser and architect Boa Baumann. One of the things I love about Aphids is the profound commitment to an intimate engagement with audiences: they’re not trying to reach 5,000 people in one go. That’s not their ambition. There can be a tremendously meaningful, resonant exchange among 5 of you.

There’s much more to look out for in MIAF 2006 to stretch the imagination and deepen reflections on time and place, including American actor Tim Robbins’ direction of an update on Orwell’s 1984; composers Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto in concert; Kota Yamazaki’s dance works Fluid hug-hug and Rise:Rose; leading European experimentalist Jérôme Bel in his dialogue with a Thai dancer, Pichet Klunchun and Myself; Canadian chameleon Marie Brassard in Peepshow (acclaimed for her Jimmy in 2003); and New Yorker Richard Foreman’s surreal Now that Communism is Dead my Life Feels Empty, wonderfully realised by Sydney director-composer Max Lyandvert and actors Benjamin Winspear and Gibson Nolte. It’s a festival that celebrates the rich new possibilities of 21st century art and where not everything will be understood but much is to be felt and learnt.

Claudia Patricia Sarria, one of 5 artists of the collective Helena Producciones, meets me at Cali Airport, Colombia. She guides me onto a bus and we talk in the velvetine seats—me in my shuddering Spanish and she in her interpretive English. She draws the curtains back to reveal the sugar cane fields, the sustaining industry in this city.

In the extraordinary artist-run Festival de Performance, artists working in Central and South America bring their collective energy to a small city, made semi-legendary by sugar, salsa and 80s cocaine. The VI Festival de Performance in Cali runs on its own timetable, when it can raise resources through a generous network of local and international sponsors.

The festival is born of a small group of artists who create work internationally but are bound (by choice or the exigencies of nationhood) to live in Colombia. The predominant aesthetic is of ‘direct action’ and collaboration along with direct participation by the public. Helena Producciones invite a range of experienced artists and theorists to attend the festival and also place an open call throughout Colombia for proposals for live works. The young artists who respond always yield new worlds, keeping the festival risky and playful. The 5-day festival’s scale is modest, the work raw and immediate and this year drew more than 70 artists from Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba, Spain, Australia, England, France and from all over Colombia.

I arrived as a low-key ambassador for Australian works, intending to explore the possibility of exchange with this inventive artist-run group, to learn from their resourcefulness, conceptual clarity and the pleasure they generate. I also wanted to meet the others who support the festival.

Each day there were workshops, street interventions and talks held in various cultural centres, an artist-run space, plazas and disused buildings. The flavour of the festival was infused with the politics of participation, underscored by the workshop program.
Festival de Performance, Cali

Frederico Gúzman, a Spanish artist from Cevilla, ran a workshop in Cali’s main cultural centre, next to the city library. Gúzman lived in Colombia for some years during the 90s and was a key member of El Cambalache based in Bogotá. For 2006, he created an open workshop called Copilandia, a space to play with ideas of free intellectual copyright, trade, barter, hybrids, thievery and sharing. This lead to an ‘action’ that trained a lens on the Free Trade Agreement Colombia is about to sign with the USA.

Gúzman encouraged participants, mostly local artists, to use tactile tools (stencil, ink block, photocopy and web-design) to recast materials and make new meanings. In the background people contributed to a large mural of a steamroller, covering it with graffiti and stencils, peopling it with miniature soldiers, pineapples, texts from lovers, statistics about the distribution of wealth and an array of colour against the bald propaganda image of the green machine itself.

This work resulted in an action on the final day of the festival. The artists from Helena Producciones hired an old industrial steamroller and purchased a mountain of the most luscious Colombian fruits. Gúzman and his workshop participants laid the fruits out in a huge circle. At midday, with crowds gathered, the machine headed towards the mound of fruit. People laughed and yelled at the driver, looking like a toy proletarian or gringo stooge replete with paper hat. The steamroller headed mercilessly for the fruit as the people chanted and squealed for it to stop right at the edge of the cornucopia. With a great cry and immediate chaos, the crowd in a display of pleasure, greed and necessity seized the fruit. This action had an incredible lightness and ambivalence that resonated, with people sharing pineapples and passionfruit into the evening.

La Escuela de Esgrima de Los Machetes was a workshop hosted by masters in the art of machete fighting. The old men and masters of the form, mostly in their 70s, demonstrated and taught this art of jousting to young people for 4 hours each day. Using wooden poles rather than large knives, they spoke about the history of this dance-art form, handed down from over 400 years of black slavery to liberation in Colombia. These men were as nimble as children and laughed as knives glistened around their heads. The technique is based on a hybrid of Spanish sword fighting from the 1600s and cane fieldwork. As they danced to the slapping of machetes, discussions were lead by Abelardo Miranda, a criminal lawyer who talked about the current justice system (a judge-only system), the history of colonisation and living conditions in the city of Cali. Using this loose and eloquent format, the workshop became a history lesson in a hybrid meld of cultures and performance forms.

Throughout the festival a guerilla TV station, El Vicio TV, invited passers-by into a disused bazaar to perform their skills for the camera. In this rich temporary zone people offered up everything from master cocktail juggling to examples of still life painting, creating an atlas of Cali to be screened on national television later this year.

The culmination of the festival was at La Licorera, a defunct alcohol depot comprising 3 massive warehouses located on the edge of the city. From 10am until late into the night there were consecutive performances from over 70 artists, a skating display, murals, DJs and bands. All the elements of this smart, beautiful arts event were activated by the audience.

For my talk, I brought with me documentation of 5 Australian works, showing extracts from Divide by John Gillies, Back Home by Urban Theatre Projects, Wilcannia Mob, a collective music project by Shopfront Theatre, Small Metal Objects from Back to Back theatre and Victoria Hunt and Brian Fuata’s Day of Invigilation.

My selection of works was grounded in their use of public space and intervention and the exploration of the ‘colonial encounter.’ The audience bopped to the “Down River” hiphop sounds created by the Willcannia Mob and reeled at the violence in Back Home, confused by language and wondering about Pacific realities. The response to this small selection of Australian work got knotty amid the translation of language and context and caused a wave of debate.

The main questions that arose were around the means of production, the imprint of ‘funding’ on ideology, content and choice of representation, and the role or ability to translate local realisms, ironies and allegories. Although I offered a context for an Australian experience of colonialism as seen through some of the works, our deeply different histories of war, religion and economics means issues that Australians take seriously are not on the table in a place like Colombia. Attending this festival, I had the chance to engage with artists who grapple with ossified government and the explicit recklessness of capitalism, writ large in the pleasures and chaos of everyday life in Cali.

The home base for talk during the festival was an artspace established privately by the artist Oscar Muñoz and his partner Sally Muñoz. El Lugar a Dudas (“Place of Doubts” or “Room for Doubt”) is a gallery/talk/library space used by young artists for screenings, building, filming and networking. It has a twin flat out the back for artist residencies and the best of the collection of international art books in Spanish and English that the Muñoz’ have collected on their travels. Over lunches at El Lugar a Dudas I tuned in with my meagre Spanish to debates about state supervision of aesthetics and the paradox of funding and control. The Muñoz’ response to this has been to create a micro-hub that can surf zones of uncertainty without scrutiny and can transcend the local means of production for art through international exchange.

Another fascinating organisation that came to my attention during this festival was The Triangle Arts Trust, established in London through the philanthropic support of Robert Loder. Alessio Antoniolli is the Director of Gasworks in London and is also the key organiser for the Triangle Arts Trust, established to initiate and facilitate an international network of artist-led workshops and residencies. Alessio travels the world to meet with artist collectives who want to extend and consolidate their regional connections with other artists. The VI Performance Festival de Cali was in part supported by the Triangle Arts Trust and Alessio’s presence at the festival had knock-on effects, harnessing energy and support for the next wave of actions, artworks and conversation.

VI Festival de Performance-Cali, Colombia, April 25-29. Helena Producciones:
www.helenaproducciones.org; Triangle Arts Trust: www.trianglearts.org

Eldorado

In RealTime 73, Benedict Andrews described German playwright Marius von Mayenburg’s Eldorado as “a luminous nightmare” (RT 73, p15). Andrews has realised his vision of the play for Malthouse in a superb production where the various windows between us and the world are made both literal and transformative, and always grimly revealing.

We enter the theatre viewing ourselves in a huge dark glass window the width of the stage and from behind which a ghostly face appears. Aschenbremmer, a businessman (Robert Menzies), describes a city at war. He presses a button and envelops himself in a white cloud out of which emerge other performers. They too are behind the glass, close to it and head-miked. We hear them acutely. They can play every nuance the script offers. They are near but far. So is the war. It seems like one in a Middle-Eastern city but is happening in the West. The characters nonetheless go about the business of relationships, art and property. Andrews commented in his RealTime interview that “The play was written March to May 2003 when Bush and company were invading Iraq and we were submitted to a constant stream of war pornography in the media, bringing the war near but keeping it far.”

Variations on this near and far dynamic are realised constantly as Andrews, his lighting designer Paul Jackson and the performers work the window. It accumulates finger prints and spittle, it’s leant on, slid down, faces are flattened against it. It becomes a mirror, a window onto an imagined garden, the viewpoint from a skyscraper office. In a very funny street scene Anton (Greg Stone) watches lobsters in a tank through what we imagine is a shop window. Oskar (Hamish Michael) joins him and comically mimics the crustaceans. Max Lyandvert’s sound score takes us outside this window on (or window closed to) the world with a burst of city noise or the rumble of war. The glass itself transforms, magically cleansed of human imprint by dextrous reversals in Jackson’s lighting.

Eldorado commences with war and a crime. In war, opportunists can transform ruin into gold. Here a crime will turn lives to dross. Anton has embezzled his boss, Aschenbrenner. He’s found out and sacked. He hides his dismissal from his newly pregnant wife, Thekla (Alison Whyte), a disaffected concert pianist belittled by her property dealer mother, Greta (Gillian Jones). Thekla’s piano playing goes into decline: art cannot fare well when a secretive husband and a war fuel her paranoia. Anton has sold land to Greta at extortionate prices and hidden the revealing documents which are sought by Greta’s young boyfriend, Oskar. Anton dooms himself, losing his wife and his sanity. Sketched thus Eldorado sounds like soap opera, but Mayenburg’s spare, imagistic writing and his lateral way into and out of scenes (magically segued by Andrews and his stage, lighting and sound designers) constantly open out a narrow bourgeois world into something more frightening. The challenges the characters face, or fail to face, are symptomatic of global phenomena, a world we are already experiencing as increasingly strange. We can feel far from these men and women, the moments of nearness are few, but we recognise the fears and vulnerabilities of Anton and Thekla in particular as purpose and connection drop away.

As it progresses, the play’s proximity to the real gives way too to fantasy. The characters suddenly assemble to sing Blondie’s Heart of Glass (a lateral reference perhaps to Werner Herzog’s film of the same name about a town driven mad?). Aschenbrennen suicides. Anton is haunted by his ghost and soon hangs himself. As Anton’s world disintegrates the heavens rain fine gold foil, in a seemingly endless soft shower, the luminescent nightmare ending with Aschenbrenner’s ghost announcing the city lost but the world still full of stock, still ripe for investment, its inhabitants golden skinned. Eldorado is always around the corner, no lessons have been learnt.

The performances in Eldorado are uniformally excellent, admirably meeting the demands of head-miking, acting through glass and embracing Mayenburg’s lateral language. Lyandvert’s score is sparely incorporated, making subtle use of the piano playing of Thekla’s world and adroitly propelling us into anxious or alarming spaces. My only complaint about the production is that the 2 hangings are too elaborately staged when compared with the excellent economies of gesture elsewhere. In Anton’s case it makes too much out of what should be a moment in a world unravelling.

Benedict Andrews’ consistently inventive direction, the boldness of his vision and its realisation in performance, in Anna Tregloan’s striking design and Paul Jackson’s lighting, is a credit to Malthouse. The association between von Mayenburg and Andrews looks set to continue through Malthouse while Andrews’ relationship with Berlin’s Schaubuhne further develops. This is a bringing together of the near and far that can richly benefit Australian theatre.
Lally Katz and the Terrible Mysteries of the Volcano

Lally Katz and the Terrible Mysteries of the Volcano

If Eldorado moves inexorably towards nightmare, Lally Katz and the Terrible Mysteries of the Volcano is a dream from the word go, dream laid over dream over dream as the fantasy worlds of Alice, Peter Pan, Sherlock Holmes and the Lion from the Wizard of Oz merge into a less than seamless but nonethess magical theatrical whole. Characters bleed from one layer into another with a change of name or costume, and some even bleed into each other, the detective Mr Lally Katz is played by the same actor playing Miss Lally Katz.

For all that it appears to be a wonder world for children, Lally Katz… is full of alarming adult things. It’s an adult version of a rites of passage, looking back over its shoulder with sex on its mind and not a little spiralling relativism, defiling elderly literary fantasies concocted for innocents, and very funny for it too. A big deal is done, Wendy is sacrificed, Lion is a panther inside, Canberra is blown up by a volcano, Greg (whoever he is) has an eternal erection he cannot relieve (nothing is safe from him), but when he does, it is believed the volcano will erupt and the universe will be opened (is that a good thing?). I can tell you no more (it would take too long) save that in Chris Kohn’s more than able hands and with fine and rightly eccentric performances from the brave actors the great baggy Lally Katz… is made almost coherent (and it’s better that it’s not). Adam Girdnir’s staging ranges from intimate doll’s house to the theatre stripped bare, the whole done out with not a few deft theatrical tricks, cunning projections and a soccer goal mouth (the World Cup was on, reason enough). Composer Jethro Woodward on guitar creates an aptly eerie ambience and, with Kohn on drums, some fine song accompaniment.

Stuck Pigs Squealing have done Lally Katz’s rich, sprawling imagination proud, plumbing its depths in a memorable theatrical spectacle that amost tips us over the edge of the known world of theatre.

Michelle Outram, Not the Sound Bite!

At Speakers’ Corner in Sydney’s Domain, the site for decades of soapbox oratory on every conceivable subject, Sydney performer Michelle Outram occupies a perspex box decked with nifty speakers and ‘channels’ speeches by politicians from 1929 to 1992. Jessie Mary Grey Streets’ speech of 1949 was a declaration of independence from a Labor Party averse to even a succesful woman member. The recording has been treated so that Street is silenced from time to time. Outram similarly appears to have a mouth full of water, gesturing as if wishing to speak, occasionally stroking her long hair as if distracted from a daunting task. Paul Keating is allowed a smoother run in his famous Redfern Park speech of 1992 where he acknowledged white oppression of Australia’s Indigenous peoples. The gestures are of cradling, the hands reach out, the head is bowed and the sound is textured with a soft tolling and passages of gently running water. Simplicity and clarity of movement and a sensitive balance between voice and added sound make this an affecting performance. James Henry Scullin’s 1937 ‘Top of the Hill’ speech sends Outram in her speaker’s box into a slow dance of rise and fall to the politician’s soporific intoning. Not the Sound Bite! uses Speakers’ Corner not so much to evoke its specific history (no anarchist, anti-abortion or animal rights speeches here) but to conjure voices from the greater Australian political sphere and put them back into public space.

Briefly…

With Eldorado performed behind glass and Not the Sound Bite! in a perspex box, it was an entirely synchronous pleasure to at last see Brian Lipson wonderfully self-contained in his little room on the Playhouse stage of the Sydney Opera House in A Large attendance in the antechamber.(June 27-July 16). The tiny room is a magical theatre machine, densely decked with foreign objects, arcane scientific equipment, candles, gas ring, an antique projector and Lipson himself, a consummate writer-performer who scarily brings to life Sir Francis Galton with all his prejudices and insights, trumpeting the beginnings of statistical analysis and its nasty bedfellow, eugenics. Meanwhile next door in The Studio, Meow Meow in Beyond Glamour: The Absinthe Tour (as part of the alt.cabaret season) was also doing something outrageous—trying to hang together a show with the help of her audience who do amazing things for her as she beautifully undoes wonderful songs (June 30-July 8). But more of Meow later when we interview this globetrotting, post-everything chanteuse
in RT 75.

Marius von Mayenburg, Eldorado, director Benedict Andrews, translator Maja Zade, performers Gillian Jones, Robert Menzies, Alison Whyte, Bojana Novakovic, Greg Stone, design Anna Tregloan, lighting Paul Jackson, sound Max Lyandvert; Malthouse Theatre, June 10-July 2; Lally Katz, Lally Katz and the Terrible Mysteries of the Volcano, director Chris Kohn, performers Christopher Brown, Margaret Cameron, Tony Johnson, Brian Lipson, Luke Mullins, Jenny Priest, Gavan O’Leary, designer Adam Gardnir, lighting Richard Vabre, sound Jethro Woodward, video Chris Kohn, Stuck Pigs Squealing, Theatreworks, St Kilda, June 2-18; Michelle Outram, Not the Sound Bite!, Terminus Projects; Speakers’ Corner, The Domain, Sydney, June

The feel on the street is that these are exciting times for independent theatre and performance in Melbourne. Opportunities are opening up through new creative development programs such as Full Tilt at the Arts Centre and Culture Lab at Meat Market. The Malthouse Theatre is programming remounts of independent shows and commissioning emerging artists and the Australia Council and Arts Victoria are providing indirect support through new producers’ initiatives. In addition to this, festivals such as Melbourne Fringe and Next Wave are facilitating a thriving performance scene, providing vital professional support, enabling theatre makers to create the partnerships required to put their ideas to the public. Independent artists are widely acknowledged by funding bodies and producing organisations as a vital part of the arts ecology, who need support to achieve sustainability and growth. The mainstream press, perhaps responding to the buzz, also seems to care about what is going on outside the main stages.

As Alison Croggon noted on her excellent blog last month (theatrenotes.blogspot.com), the nurturing role offered by larger organisations such as those mentioned above can only succeed if there is something to nurture. I have to admit that at times I have found myself despairing at a lot of what is created by independent theatre makers in Melbourne, with a tendency towards reproducing, on a small scale and on the cheap, the unambitious and uninspiring artistic goals of the larger, ‘flagship’ companies. Thankfully, while this is one dominant tendency, there are also plenty of new companies emerging, making their mark by expressing particular artistic visions, not based on commercial, ‘cover band’ models but on inspiration, passion and need. The latest such company to emerge is The Black Lung.

The Black Lung is an appropriately bilateral name for a new 2-pronged entity, a theatre company and performance space located above Kent Street, a bar in Collingwood’s Smith Street hub. It also has 2 co-Directors, Thomas Henning and Thomas Wright, the former an actor, the latter a writer-director. Black Lung announced its arrival on the scene with an opening night party in April. Through a guerilla campaign of text messages, ‘appropriated’ email lists and word of mouth, the organisers drew a huge crowd to the little bar, exceeding its capacity by 200. The company put on an evening of music, performance and visual art, although the density of the crowd in the small venue meant that the focus was on talking, drinking and celebrating, even if no-one knew yet quite what they were celebrating. The bar and upstairs performance space were decked out with a grungy, garage sale aesthetic that has since become Black Lung’s house style. The crowd was heterogeneous but mostly young; most were in their early to mid-20s, and not your familiar opening night theatre crowd. This is not surprising, as Henning and Wright are themselves in their early 20s and their interests go beyond those of mainstream or independent theatre into visual and performance art. This opening blast was not a one-off. In the 3 months since this grand opening, the theatre has sold out most shows—a sign that it is clearly fulfilling a need.

Henning and Wright have managed to set up this space on very little money, lots of hard work and the goodwill of artists and the owners of the bar which hosts them, and to whom they pay no rent. They have shown great maturity in the process, consulting widely with the independent theatre and visual arts community in order to set up a space that will serve its future stakeholders. Posted on the company website is a clearly articulated manifesto which is focussed on its key interest in creating an environment where the members of their own company and visiting artists can develop and expand new works experimental in form and deeply collaborative in nature, and present these to audiences in an affordable and supported environment. Ticket prices have been set at $10, making it an inexpensive and low-risk option—important for attracting new audiences.

This thoughtful, consultative approach has resulted in keen interest from the theatre-making scene. The directors have found themselves immediately in the position of enjoying a demand for their space, which outstrips their capacity to supply. This means that they have been able to curate works based on artistic criteria rather than scrapping around for what’s available. According to Wright, the decision-making process has been based on personal interaction and discussion with prospective companies, keeping process and concept at the centre. “We’ve had a lot of interest from people and we really feel for the time being that it’s very difficult to source people who have a similar concept of work. We’ve kept it really small, and approach people individually. The whole ethos has been to simplify.” The performance space could not be simpler—a tiny white room above the bar with no fixed seating or technical equipment. It seats about 30 at a pinch and shows have to contend with noise transference from the DJ downstairs. This calls for a style of performance that is able to work with these immediate constraints, and the programming so far has reflected that.

The first show in the space, created by the resident company, was an inspired piece of theatrical excess entitled Avast: A musical without music. Written and directed by Henning and featuring Wright in a leading role, as a statement of purpose for the venue it was an excellent choice. Ushered upstairs, we were crammed into a tiny foyer, barely lit, with a television by the theatre door playing static, partially obscured by a cheap devil’s mask. On entering the theatre, we were greeted with a nearly naked man (Wright) playing a character in a heightened state of anxiety, ready to burst out of his skin, on which statements were painted such as “Viggo Mortensen is a cunt.” Wright quickly gave context for this in a wild-eyed, maniacal retelling of The Lord the Rings, with theme music from the film series blasting behind him. I was later informed that this text had been added into the previous night’s performance, by which time they had obtained the soundtrack for added impact. What followed was (barely) a play about 2 half-siblings (Wright and Gareth Davies) arguing over an inheritance, with obscene interjections from a mysterious dark clown (Dylan Young). It was insanely fast-paced, witty, artfully arhythmic, metatheatrical—a breathtaking combination of precision and chaos. The actors created an atmosphere of immediacy and real crisis that I have rarely experienced in theatre and, with the help of the best audience-plant work I have ever seen, a palpable feeling of panic and unease. I was reminded of the work of New York companies Radiohole and NTUSA (RT66, p36), which have a similar practice of blurring actor/character distinctions in order to create a theatrical world that is utterly self-contained and therefore immersive. It wasn’t really “about” much, except for the experience of being there in the room with this thing that we had to deal with—and that was plenty for me. I left feeling drunk on theatre, intoxicated on the experience of simply being.

The next show presented at the Black Lung was Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon, the second show by the young 3-member ensemble and exponents of ‘junkyard theatre’, Suitcase Royale. Joseph O’Farrell, Miles O’Neil and Glen Walton have a close affiliation with Black Lung’s founders, having seen each other’s works on earlier occasions and instantly finding that they shared similar artistic interests. Suitcase Royale, who had met as students of theatre at Deakin University, were coming off an enormously successful first show, Felix Listens to the World, which saw them winning Fringe awards, touring North America to packed houses and presenting as part of the Melbourne Festival. Chronicles had been developed as part of the Next Wave Festival’s Kick Start program and featured in the festival, although by all accounts, including the company’s, it had not reached its full potential in that season, and was significantly reworked in the interim.

Having enjoyed the inventiveness, heart and assuredness of Felix, and with the exhilarating memories of Avast fresh in my mind, I had come to the show with high hopes. I was happy to discover that the show expanded and deepened many of the ideas explored in the previous work. The story revolves around 3 characters who populate a tiny outback town and who are known only by their trades: the Butcher, the Doctor and the Newsman. The very simple plot—part horror, part murder mystery, part Jules Verne-style adventure —functions as a way for these multi-skilled performer/designer/writer/musician/directors to engage their formidable theatrical imaginations. The centrepiece of the endlessly morphing set is a subterranean vehicle run on cow’s blood, constructed from an old wardrobe on its side, barely large enough to fit the 3 actors, full of hundreds of tiny props, many of which are transformed into characters or perform various roles in creating the world of a gothic Australian outback.

This is theatre by accumulation and aggregation. In one moment the actors form a country folk band (they are very good musicians), in another they are operating lights and sound (there is no offstage operator) while creating 3 distinct spaces in a very small room. It is also, most satisfyingly, self-contained theatre. It is clear in the form that the artists who make up Suitcase Royale are all that is needed to make the work. The lack of artifice is empowering, as it demonstrates, live and in front of the audience, that the power of theatre lies in its alchemical quality, the fact that worlds can be created out of thin air, with some imagination and dedication to the work. The show will soon be touring to Sydney.

Avast and Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon are 2 highly satisfying, assured pieces of work, well-suited to the tiny confines of this new theatre space. The Black Lung has renamed the month of August “Thursday” and will be presenting a wide range of theatre, performance art, music and visual arts. Shows and workshops have already been programmed for most of the year. I’m looking forward to following its development.The Black Lung: www.theblacklung.com

Suitcase Royale, Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon, Sydney Aug 4-6 & 9-13, Lanfranchies Memorial Discotheque, 144 Cleveland St, Chippendale.

The Suitcase Royale

Suitcase Royale bill themselves as “junkyard theatre”, scouring the scrapheap and assembling sets and props from the refuse of industrial society. The centrepiece of their most recent work, Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon, is an upended, tricked-up wardrobe jerry-rigged with trapdoors, lamps, cow-horned steering console and all manner of oddments. The rest of the stage is littered with debris, each item slowly revealed as essential to the narrative though rarely employed for its original intended purpose. It’s fitting, then, that the work delves into the sludge of discarded performance modes and generic forms to cook up a narrative gumbo. B-grade horror, science fiction, outback tall tales, murder ballads, pulp mysteries and slapstick are thrown into the mix. The result is a tale of a journey beneath the earth in a “cow submersible”, a machine powered by bovine blood and piloted by a mad scientist and his strange crew.

The protagonist is a reporter known only as Newsman, who through fate and circumstance finds himself joining the mad Doctor on his quest to map the world beneath the Earth’s surface. Also pressed into service is the towering, bearded figure of the Butcher, a proudly homicidal figure who punctuates his sentences with a barked “DEAD!” while slamming his chopping knife into a nearby object. The story, meandering and shaggy, is matched by constant switching from live action to puppetry, miniatures, animation, film and radio recordings. This doesn’t have the slick, commodified “channel surfing” effect of fragmented texts subscribing to the MTV-aesthetic; nor does it reproduce the alienating effect of stagings which juxtapose competing media in a coldly calculated way. There’s a homespun, organic feel to Chronicle’s bricolage, a localised ambience not simply due to the relocation of diverse generic conventions into an outback setting. It helps that the performance I attended was in a tiny theatre above a Fitzroy bar, trundling trams audible as they passed, and the occasional tipsy holler filtering up the stairs.

The performers, Joseph O’Farrell, Miles O’Neil and Glen Walton, possess a vitality that ensures proceedings rattle on at a terrific pace. They pack more into an hour or so than many shows manage at twice the length without overloading their audience’s senses. The balance of light and shade is admirable, the Butcher offering a believably lethal counterpoint to the Doctor’s laughably impotent dreamer and the Newsman’s cynical outsider. At times, the trio’s relative youthfulness oversteps itself through rushed or garbled dialogue, but this rarely staggers the show’s impact since it never seems at odds with the loose, cobbled-together style of the narrative itself. Theatre of this kind is messy and disjointed, but The Suitcase Royale have chosen not to conceal this by attempting to offer the image of a slick, seamless product devoid of cracks.

The Suitcase Royale don’t seem to do things the way they do just because pastiche is popular, or cool, or even original. It’s merely the only proper way to express a tale as ingenious as its creators, as inventive as their tools and as enjoyable as stumbling through a crack in the fence to find yourself in a junkyard paradise. (For more on Suitcase Royale and The Black Lung see p43.)
Caroline Lee, La Doleur

Caroline Lee, La Douleur

There has been a surge of solo shows produced by Malthouse Theatre of late, and the reason for this is quite simple. Though a quick glance over Artistic Director Michael Kantor’s CV is enough to suggest that he’d prefer more large scale ensemble productions, in the economic climate of Australian theatre today this quite simply isn’t tenable. And if the Malthouse can’t afford to mount more than a few large-cast shows each year, it doesn’t bode well for smaller independent companies.

On the plus side, this has allowed a number of one-handers the opportunity to reach a larger and generally appreciative audience. Caroline Lee’s masterful performance of Marguerite Duras’ semi-autobiographical novella La Douleur is a case in point. Directed by long-time Lee collaborator Laurence Strangio, the work was first presented in the miniscule surrounds of the pub-cum-literary hub, the Stork Hotel in Melbourne. It’s difficult to imagine the creative challenge this setting must have presented after viewing the piece in the considerably more expansive space of the Malthouse’s Beckett Theatre.

The audience is split in 2, divided by a raised stage upon which the only items available to Lee are an ornate chaise longue and a spot lit telephone. Lee’s performance carries our visual interest for the entire work. Of course, she is working with an immensely potent text: the narrator awaits news of the death or return of her husband in Paris just after the cessation of hostilities during World War II. Duras creates a moving portrait of grief and the hidden casualties of war. Her central figure is a walking spectre, haunting the stage and whispering to us across half a century. This otherworldly quality to the text is perfectly matched by Lee’s assured, delivery, which denies easy access into the interiority of her character while maintaining an intimacy that rarely falters. We are drawn into her world, but are no more able to make sense of it than she.

The suspended mourning of the piece creates a stasis which lasts for at least half of the show’s duration, but when the first major narrative twist finally emerges we realise how much we have been involuted into the protagonist’s mind, unable to envision the possibility of resolution, of gaining some final knowledge of death or hope. This change brings life, but with life comes a more keen awareness of the reality of death. What was merely a theoretical possibility suddenly strikes home as brute fact, and the final sting in Duras’ tale is a stunning reinvention of what has come before as well as a remarkable commentary on compassion as something grander than simple love.

David Franzke’s sound design is commendably subtle, often noticed only after the fact. Birds, hushed conversations and low rumblings underscore much of what we see, but are so unobtrusive as to appear entirely incidental. It’s a perfect fit since as far as an audience member is concerned La Douleur’s focus at all times must be squarely on the performer. Lee has repeatedly proven herself more than capable of inhabiting complex, daunting roles and in Strangio has found a director able to channel her abilities in a way that maintains the ebb and flow of an original text’s dramatic thrust.

Rebecca Clarke, Unspoken

Rebecca Clarke’s Unspoken is a more raw piece than La Douleur, but carries with it an equally strong confidence in the delivery of intimate, autobiographical material. Clarke has created a frank, almost unnervingly open portrayal of her fraught relationship with her intellectually challenged younger brother.

The piece opens with an evocation of Clarke as a child, shortly before the announcement of the birth of her brother. Clarke’s performance here is unfortunately at its weakest, not so surprising given the inherent difficulties adult actors seem to face when attempting to incarnate themselves as children. Shifting forwards several years, however, Clarke comes into her own as a flighty teen leaving the nest and travelling to university, her sublimated resentment of her sibling sidelined by the fledgling relationship she begins with the “Clown” she meets there. These are the two dramatic poles of the work: Clarke’s long and ultimately failed relationship with a man who eventually reveals his own troubled side, and the transformation of her feelings of anger and resentment towards her brother into something quite other. Director Wayne Blair (the director of the award-winning film, The Djarn Djarns) has coaxed from Clarke some quite remarkably candid moments of self-reflection while restraining any temptation to indulge in histrionics or self-therapy onstage. Once her audience is willing to go on the journey, we’re taken to some deeply affecting territory indeed.

Genevieve Dugard’s set is suggestive of a bayside pier, a raised boardwalk bordering the space and surmounted by wooden pylons and a draped sail. Clarke’s early memories of the beach, sailing in her father’s boat and running along the shore assume a pivotal role in the design. Sculpted sand curls around the pier’s base and becomes a tool for Clarke to express various states, scattering it, tracing lines, sweeping it in violent arcs or euphoric sprays. The final sequence sees the nautical sail providing a second purpose, drawn up to act as a screen for a projected video of Clarke and her real brother.

Unspoken has toured well, thanks to the assistance of Performing Lines, and as part of the Malthouse’s new Tower program of independent works scheduled throughout the year bringing a welcome and fresh addition to the venue. While in many ways quite a different work to La Douleur, both pieces share a commonality too. Each demonstrates simply the ability of a powerful performer to involve an audience in a fragile human story, devoid of theatrical tricks or convention.

The Suitcase Royale, Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon, performers Joseph O’Farrell, Miles O’Neil, Glen Walton, co-directors Thomas Wright, Thomas Henning; Black Lung Theatre, June 2-18; La Douleur, performer Caroline Lee, director Laurence Strangio, design Anna Tregloan, lighting Richard Vabre, sound design David Franzke; Malthouse heatre, June 29-July 3; Unspoken, writer-performer Rebecca Clarke, director Wayne Blair, designer Genevieve Dugard, lighting Stephen Hawker, music/sound Basil Hogios; Performing Lines; Malthouse Theatre, July 11- 22

This year’s Art of Difference at Gasworks in mid May was a trailblazer in its approach to disability arts. Steered by a committee of local artists and arts workers, almost all of whom have a disability, the conference/arts event attempted to create “an inspirational catalyst for professional development change and debate.”

Though the term ‘disability arts’ may conjure for many a scenario of passive recipients being lead into ‘happy clappy’ therapeutic arts experiences by non-disabled artists, this event was to some degree successful in dispelling the stereotype. The event drew professional overseas, interstate and local artists with disability, as well as people interested in art as recreation. The program comprised performance, exhibitions, workshops and sometimes heated debate on key issues.

The disability arts community in Melbourne is small and close-knit, though it also has many connections with the local world of mainstream and fringe arts. It was therefore healthy to have disability arts activists from overseas present, to lob a provocative stink bomb or 2 into the debate. Julie McNamara, performer and disability activist from the UK and Phillip Patston, comedian from NZ, obligingly took on this role during debates on the politics of disability arts. Patston, also active in gay politics, remarked that you would never see a room full of heterosexuals in leading roles at a gay conference. Traditionally and still today, non-disabled administrators, directors, and teachers fill the majority of these roles in disability arts. This mildly radical comment caused quite a stir. There was discussion about how change from this traditional model could come about, as indeed it has in recent years in the UK.

Julie McNamara, UK

There was a small but strong performance program. Some shows were open to the public as well as conference goers and attracted good crowds. Julie MacNamara (UK) performed her one-woman show, Pig Tales, the confronting story of a female child raised as a boy, brutalised by organised religion and the psychiatric system. The sometimes grueling narrative, a miasma of chaos and cruelty, was leavened with wry, bawdy, black humour. This was quite a workout for McNamara, skilfully performed and cleverly staged. Steering clear of didactics, the production integrated issues of gender and disability into the personal story of a likeable, confused, mistreated human being.

Ramesh Meyyappan, Singapore

In complete contrast, Ramesh Meyyappan, a deaf mime artist from Singapore performed his physical theatre work, This Side Up, a light-hearted visual narrative about one man’s battle against the urban sprawl. Using traditional mime theatre, an elastic face and expressive eyes, the artist hilariously conveyed a surreal, cartoon-like vision of the mundane world of work. Deaf signing was adapted through mime artistry to become an eloquent set of signals for any audience. Perhaps the experience of deafness has contributed to the intense physical expressiveness of this performer. His show has travelled the world with humour so light and universal it can appeal across borders. Ramesh also lead a very successful series of workshops in physical theatre at Art of Difference.

Phillip Patston, NZ

New Zealand comedian and disability activist Phillip Patston performed with Sue-Ann Post and graduates of a stand-up comedy workshop, run as part of the conference. Patston delivered a wry, ironic take on the experience of disability with sharp insight into living daily as part of an oppressed caste that is still marginalised in many subtle and not so subtle ways. Being downtrodden can be a rich source of humour.

Dance, music, visual arts…

There was a joint work in progress from members of Restless Dance Co from Adelaide and Weave Movement Theatre from Melbourne, which gave useful insights for the many artists and arts workers attending into the genesis of dance performance involving performers with a range of disabilities. There were performances also from Louis Tillett, internationally acclaimed singer-songwriter from Sydney, and Michael Crane, a Melbourne writer who incorporates a wide range of musicians in his performance pieces. Local music artist Akash presented a striking installation. All these artists identify as having a disability, though they do not restrict their work to a narrow preoccupation with disability issues. Other human preoccupations may often seem a more interesting source for art.

The visual arts were well represented in works by artists such as Ross Barber from Queensland, the Colour Gang from Gippsland, Richard Morrison, Glenn Sinclair and Arts Project Australia (www.artsproject.org.au). The local disability visual arts scene is a thriving one, producing much impressive work.

Leadership, access, recognition

There are ongoing political debates to be had around disability arts. Why should it be segregated from the rest of the arts? This mirrors broader social questions around disability and segregation, in general still alive and well, despite slow advances. Why aren’t more people with disabilities in positions of power and leadership in the arts? Why aren’t more people with disabilities accepted into arts training institutions and so on?

Art of Difference has taken a step away from routine ways of looking at disability arts and has given a brief insight into the wide spectrum of artists and arts activity identified with disability. Maybe this can shift perceptions a degree or two. From recreation to high-level creation, art functions in many ways for people with disability, as for the rest of the community. At the same time, there are still many doors to be opened to achieve full access and recognition for these artists and the work they create, work which emerges from a unique viewing platform on the theatre of humanity.

Janice Florence participated in Art of Difference as a dance artist in the Weave-Restless project and as a speaker in several panel discussions.

CARNI (Contemporary Artist-run New Initiative, Melbourne), is not paradise. On this damp Thursday night in winter, the fabric of the former tannery feels rather desolate. But the audience for Paradise 2—the incessant sound of a falling tree is not at CARNI, or the place and its limitations are incidental: the performer’s first line shifts the scope of our setting straightaway to a vast and conceptual horizon. “We are in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, the Earth, more exactly at latitude 37°49’S and longitude 144°58’E.”

In Paradise 2, Rosa Casado introduces herself as “a human being, a European woman”, “in front of you, standing.” To objectify herself in such reductive, irrefutable terms produces a few smiles and someone laughs. Yet Casado’s audience discovers that she is open to risking absurdity. Her aspiration is not to disguise but to practise the possibility of being undisguised and, more broadly, of unmasking that which may seem self-evident. Paradoxically, she remains, somehow, inscrutable.

Written in Spanish, and translated into English by Elvira Antón, Paradise 2 is Casado’s first ‘fixed’ script for solo performance. Insofar as it is motivated by a precise regard for efficient communication, the work might be described as an illustrated lecture. Its rhetorical quality follows especially from the succinctness and sometimes awkward terseness of the lines: many feature definitions sourced in the Royal Spanish Academy’s ‘official’ dictionary of Spanish.

The spoken lines alternate with the execution of a drawing of the earth and other planets of the solar system, in chalk, over the extent of the concrete floor. Casado squats to do so, pulling a small construction lamp as its electric chord allows, lighting the ground and only occasionally her face. Her approach to the drawing and its style are as deft and stark as her use of spoken words. By a methodical repetition and variation of these elements, reflections on a holiday in West African Mali open out, steadily, into reflections on subjecthood in the global context. “I am a foreigner in Mali; a foreigner who travels for pleasure is a tourist.” And Casado brings the preconditions of her own journey into narrative, spatial and, so, perceptual coincidence with that of Ibrahima Boyé. This man is personally unknown to her, but “a biped, mammal, Senegalese”, and “a foreigner in Spain; a foreigner that travels to a country to stay is an immigrant.”

There is an island at the centre of the room: a hollow, elongated sculpture about 20cm high made from dark chocolate, and dotted with chocolate palm trees. Lit by a single, bare bulb, this island is implied as the sun of the solar system that Casado is sketching. Its shape is based on that of Fuerteventura in Spain’s province of Las Palmas. Amongst the 7 Canary Islands, Fuerteventura is considered the oldest in geological terms, and its sweeping beaches are the longest. For these reasons it has been perhaps most insistently mythologised as the place in the Atlantic Ocean where sensory delight and perfect gratification are guaranteed—indefinitely.

Although the choreography of Paradise 2 telescopes to conclude at the chocolate island, Casado does not begin there. She visits it intermittently: having used a word related to economic thinking or analysis, she breaks and chews through one or more palm trees. Thus speaking, drawing and eating, Casado treats distinctions between tourism and migration as a pattern of assumptions about money and consumption, freedom and responsibility.

Together the palm trees amount to nearly 400 grams of chocolate. As each is taken, the sampled sound of a falling tree is set into reverberation. Casado’s chewing and swallowing is unhurried, yet resolute, her gaze never faltering from the possibility of direct eye contact with members of the audience. This eating is neither private nor necessary, but nor is it powerless, or defensive: it is a highly controlled display of over-gratification. The quantity of chocolate that passes her lips becomes abject, as does the denuded island, though Casado herself does not. Even so we must hear the tree trunks splitting relentlessly. Over the 35 minutes of the performance, these accumulate into a soundscape that suggests a collapse of any difference between the depletion of natural resources and of human dignity—and we are all complicit.

Casado works without (both lacking and outside) a proscenium. Yet the premise behind Paradise 2 proves highly traditional, in the sense that she undertakes to recreate an image of the world; in this case, the world as a matter of ordinary words and gestures—and desires that the capitalist marketplace makes ordinary through constant justification and fulfilment. Now having witnessed Paradise 2, I am aware of a new desire: to be confronted and stimulated by Casado’s next work.

Rosa Casado has trained in ballet, studied physics at the University of Madrid and theatre at the University of Theatre, Istituto d’Arte Scenica. “Her current artistic work is centered on rewriting reality by means of de-contextualizing ordinary daily acts to explore new ways of “thinking” and “doing” and on developing interdisciplinary spaces to promote contemporary artistic practice” (magdalena.actrix.co.nz/guests/rosa.html). She performed and conducted a workshop at Magdalena Aotearoa, New Zealand in July.

Paradise 2—the incessant sound of a falling tree, Rosa Casado in collaboration with Mike Brookes, CARNI (Contemporary Artist-run New Initiative), Preston, Melbourne, June 8. Presented as part of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies’ interdisciplinary panel series Performance and Politics.

In this stark and disquieting solo, Adam Broinowski presents the body as the broken remainder of discourses of war and terror that seek to erase and remove it from vision. With war reduced to triumphalist rhetoric and video game images, what remains of the body? At a ‘safe’ distance from the suffering of others occurring in our name, how are images of war internalised in the bodies of democratic ‘free’ citizens? As the late Susan Sontag observed, “there is no ‘we’ when regarding the pain of others” (Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003). In the breakdown of the democratic ‘we’ produced by the relentless progression of images of violence and suffering, Broinowski intervenes by performing his intimate nightmare visions of the body politic.

First vision. From behind tensed crossed wires that surgically quarter the stage (a dissection? a rifle sight? a cage?) and covered in grey fur (a scruffy and broken koala-like beast with a melted face of clay) Broinowski glides onstage glowing fluorescent green. This strange, clearly damaged human/imal twitches awkwardly under the night vision green, the kind of light in which so often we watch other humans violently erased in ‘smart bomb’ footage. The sheer misery of Broinowski’s broken animal brings to mind Steve Baker’s thoughts on “botched taxidermy”: “a fractured, awkward, ‘wrong’ or wronged thing, which is hard not to read as a means of addressing what it is to be human now” (Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal, 2000).

I imagine tracer fire across this wrong(ed) animal body as he disturbingly thrusts fingers into the eye holes of the mask as if to tear off his ruined face, or as if, like Oedipus, he has been forced to see far, far too much. Beneath the mask is a flesh-toned skullcup that also erases Broinowki’s face, smoothing it out, leaving him eyeless and hairless. In his mouth is embedded a small wireless camera, through which he looks out at us in the dark. He looks without seeing, yet records everything. De-humanised, he becomes a seeing machine, with the technological apparatus that produces an image literally hard to swallow.

Second vision. The stage is drenched in red fluorescent light, a photographic darkroom for this dark time. Shorn of his fur, Broinowski re-enters dragging a bulging balloon that wobbles amusingly yet pathetically. He’s unable to tame the beast that is the balloon, its sheer stubborn excess of materiality escaping the flow of the rhetoric of violence.

Third vision. The subtitle “animal reflections” is here literalised, with a large mirror that slides painfully down the performer’s back. Later, it becomes the reflective ground upon which he kneels, giving this warring body a long hard look at itself. This body is at war with itself, with the animal within, and with the framing discourses of terror surrounding, demeaning and erasing the human. For the first and last time, he speaks:

There is no animal as cruel as human
There is no animal as bright
A thousand suns, each one brighter than the last
A desert full of empty shells
All is gone, all is gone, all …

The being that Adam Broinowski presents looks without seeing, and kills without either touching or caring, possessing a cruelty far beyond any other predator.

In the end all we have left are images of ourselves recorded earlier, blindly, from the mouth, a reflection of the strange and frightening animal we have become: the audience.

Vivisection Vision: animal reflections, performer-director Adam Broinowski, lighting Stephen Klinder; Performance Space, June 1-3

In the latest work by Perth based collective pvi, reform, audiences accompany its elite taskforce, the loyal citizens underground—self appointed vigilantes in the fight against the lewd and crude on the streets of Northbridge—on a kind of semiotic scavenger hunt. There is an urgent tenor to our mission as we set out to take the pulse of contemporary Australia. Armed with absurdly inadequate decoys such as newspapers and champagne glasses for cover, we head out to find out just how badly we are in need of reform.

It is worse than we could have ever imagined from the polite confines of nearby PICA (Perth’s Institute of Contemporary Art). James Street, Northbridge is a tough strip with a lot of emotional code strewn on the street. On a Friday night, it is hard to distinguish between outreach, collusion and coercion and the district’s carnality can easily inveigle an unsuspecting audience without the moral compass of the loyal citizens underground to guide it. What a zoo! Littering, crossing against the lights, dressing provocatively, carrying a condom, begging. Such things will not be tolerated.

reform brings to mind a pub-crawl, a progressive dinner or a kerb crawl. Tuned into a live broadcast, we dip in and out of James Street establishments, weaving through the cruising traffic and taking in the rhythm of Northbridge with its cast of bouncers, taxi drivers, clubbers and drifters. A woman queueing at an ATM asks if we are sociologists.

As we head to the Tom Cruise Room at the back of the Pot Black snooker hall for a briefing, the prospect of audience participation is weighing on our minds. Just how far will the loyal citizens underground go? We allay our discomfort by assuring ourselves that everyone on James Street seems to be wired and that props like ours worked for Maxwell Smart and Agent 99. Added to this, Jason Sweeney’s enveloping soundscapes have a cumulative, cocooning effect so that by the end of the show I am staring back at the taxi drivers.

With all pvi’s work you do have to sign up or you won’t get the most out of it. The group’s working methods do not privilege discrete performances over other practices and techniques. The live elements in pvi shows, whether scripted or ad-libbed, are experienced by audiences as inserts in an agitated stream of sound and image. reform’s performances swing between compelling squad formations best viewed as part of the streetscape through to deadpan vox populi interviews played for laughs.

reform is less ambitious than the group’s most recent show, tts: australia, which I saw in Sydney last year, but its finer structure does provide a more satisfying experience. Sweeney’s soundscapes bring coherence to the patterns, slogans and manoeuvres of the work without resolving the disjunction between what we are seeing, hearing and thinking…People don’t seem too badly behaved—but hang on, there are standards to be upheld.

Carried forward by the soundscapes, we venture further and further into Northbridge, as the patrol’s demands upon its denizens grow more and more ludicrous. Insisting that people pick up rubbish on the streets or brushing off a pesky beggar is one thing but hectoring a woman about how inappropriately she is dressed is something else. Despite our best libertarian credentials, the patrol’s ghastly sincerity rubbing up against this woman’s rising aggravation is very funny and we catch ourselves, on edge, laughing. Our reform is complete, we see her flagrantly disloyal and anti-social behaviour for what it is, and our conversion to model citizens at the hands of pvi has been enacted. Only on our return to the haven of PICA are we able to confirm our suspicions about who on the street was a plant and who passing trade.

One of pvi’s hallmarks is a passion for research, so much so that in preparation for tts: australia, 2 of its members undertook an Australian Army Reserves recruitment trial. The group’s commitment to research and its members’ progressive-left politics could generate work with such an interrogative tone that it might feel laden. This is particularly so since the collective’s aim “to question the darker side of technology and the various forms of social control that we live under” has led to a sustained engagement with paramilitary organisations of all persuasions. For audiences, the play of the vocabulary of surveillance and deterrence throughout the group’s work is simultaneously farcical and chilling. I can report, however, that thanks to the humour and humanity of reform, Northbridge’s reputation as a place for perving is secure.

reform, devised & performed by pvi collective with Jackson Castiglione, Ofa Fotu, Ben Sutton; soundscapes Jason Sweeney, production manager Mike Nanning; researcher Dr Christina Lee, on-site performers Chris & Michelle Atkinson de Garis, Alee Bevlaqua, Andrew Bretherton, Michael Ford, Belinda Massey, Sarah Wilkinson; presented by PICA, Perth, May 25-June 4

PICA’s annual Putting on an Act program encourages artists to stage short works of any genre or style, eliciting some of the best (and worst) “one-shot” performances of the year. Fresh from teaching the history of Fluxus and performance art, I particularly warmed to the more unstructured pieces.

Throughout the 1960s, John Cage, Yoko Ono and others composed works by penning a series of instructions (“Enter space containing a radio and 3 musical instruments. Roll a dice to determine which station to tune the radio to and which instrument to play in which order” etc). The point was to defer the artists’ status as authors of something aesthetic and so make everyone a potential artist and everything a potential aesthetic object—the aesthetics of the everyday. Cage himself though was often lax in detailing the power play involved in handing out such obscure directions to his acolytes. Instruction Art Space from Clyde McGill and Mark Parfitt constituted in this sense a re-interpretation of the idea whereby instructions became potentially oppressive, exhausting and often nonsensical, endlessly thrown out to us by authorities as varied as train station announcers, advertisers, bosses and cops. One-word instructions were read out over the sound system (“Rotate!” “Think!” “Run!” “Tangle!”), while another set was projected on the back wall with additional confusion provided by the 2 performers shouting their own instructions at each other. The pair then struggled to respond with what they had to hand: a tube, some rope, 2 chairs and 2 small tables. They charged around, producing a predictable but thoroughly enjoyable, unstable chaos of flying furniture, shouting, clambering about, bodily contact, arm-locked whirling and other flailing attempts to keep up with their orders. As one exclaimed while the lights dimmed, “I’m buggered!” or as that great authority figure Malcolm Fraser quipped, “Life wasn’t meant to be easy.”

A more considered approach was offered by Greg Burley’s Second Law of Homecoming, a superb monologue about his slip into insensitive monomania during a period of share housing. Obsessed with the first few bars of one of Neil Young’s songs, he related how he had played this 10-second refrain hundreds of times a day to allay a gap in his mind (thoughts had ceased to come to him spontaneously, a phenomena which did not have the calming effect some might attribute to it) and to cope with his intimidatingly stoic, unresponsive housemate. At the finish of this encounter, Burley explained how he had finally understood and empathised with his housemate at the very point that the latter had calmly, sadly and without malice asked him to move out. Although the narrative itself was delightful, its true charm came from Burley’s deliberately un-aesthetic delivery. Words and explanations were lingered over, giving them a poetic beauty and ambiguity, while Burley’s unhurried, simple vocal delivery and slightly halting presentation imparted a sense of the everyday. Burley himself remained beguilingly opaque.

My third pick of the season was the more overtly theatrical monologue Running, from writer-performer Kym Cahill and director-animator Tim Watts. Cahill re-enacted her childhood terror of being abandoned in broad daylight, far from civilisation, in an old graveyard as her school bus with her best friend sped away. As though laying out a lifeline, Cahill began by coiling a rope from the seating (the bus) to the rear of the stage. She then walked the curves of the rope while relating to us her dubiously ‘educational’ task of identifying the dates on the graves she passed. Then, as the bus threatened to leave, Cahill’s voice rose, her chest heaved and quaked. Behind her a simple animation flickered on the back wall: empty desert sands and an increasingly tilted, far horizon. A rolling pattern of horizontal lines in the brown earth established the fervid dynamism of her dash for the bus. The disorientating affect of this exaggeration of distance accompanied by Cahill’s escalating gasps was effectively emphasised by the inversion of foreground (the projected sands on the wall) and background (Cahill moving towards the audience as though through molasses), before her character fainted.

For my own part, after also enduring Tomàs Ford’s Unpleasant Tone (literally that: a single tone played and tweaked to an empty stage) and a work by Abe Sada (massive rumbling bass feedback played underneath the seating), as well as the more than 28 other pieces over a 4 day program, I felt like fainting myself!

Putting On An Act, Instruction Action Space, concept/performance Clyde McGill, Mark Parfitt; Greg Burley’s Second Law of Home Living, concept/performance Greg Burley; Running, by Weeping Spoon Productions, writer-performer Kym Cahill, director-animator Tim Watts; Unpleasant Tone, concept/performance Tomàs Ford; Abe Sada (Chris Cobilis, Katerina Katherine Papas, Bassta! Pex, Cat Hope), concept Cat Hope, Andrew Ewing; PICA, June 13-17

The precinct surrounding Brandenburger Tor looks a mess, as always. It’s not a giant building site anymore, but Adidas has, in compensation, installed a giant football directly in front of the ungainly monument and the square is seething with the same tourist crowd (wearing their Goretex jackets, bumbags and disorientation like a uniform) who populate the centre of every major city.

Directly to the left of the mammoth ball is the gleaming glass facade of Günter Behnisch’s new Akademie der Kunste, the main exhibition space for Berlin’s second Sonambiente. The first was organised by Christian Kneisel 10 years ago to mark the 300th anniversary of the Akademie and attracted diverse luminaries from Laurie Anderson and Brian Eno to Nam June Paik. The resuscitation of the festival by his assistant, Matthias Osterwold, coincides with the rather less solemn occasion of the World Cup, and perhaps has trouble competing with the mega event (in spite of this year’s lineup including Pipilotti Rist, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller).

The 2006 festival features some 40 international artists as well as the work of 20 students from the Akademie itself, and is spread across 5 major venues alongside a host of ancillary facilities, from subway stations to glass recycling bins. It’s an ambitious festival, and one that takes the architectural fragmentation of the city as a core theme, which goes some way to explaining how visually rich this audio festival is.

It’s the hungover day after opening night, and out of a doorway that we cannot directly see through emerges snatches of opera, fragments of a voice. We’re at the entrance to Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s enormously impressive installation Opera for a Small Room. Inside stands an unmarked wooden box, reminiscent of a shipping container, set at an angle to the walls. Light streams out from windows cut into all 4 sides, and on closer approach we see that this little house is packed: crammed with old records, faded Turkish rugs, dented school furniture, 8 record players, a crooked chandelier and an empty chair sitting in the middle of all this comfortable chaos.

The chair looks recently vacated, so it is faintly unnerving when the arm of a record player swings of its own volition and plays an aria from an Italian opera that sounds familiar. A north American voice growls over the song, “she was walking down the road with her shoes in her hands… where the fuck was she going?” and from that moment on we’re lost, mesmerised, nailed. From 24 antique speakers littering the room and jutting out from the walls a story unfolds in stops and starts—made up from fragments of opera, waves of orchestral music, footsteps, pop songs and the corruscatingly lonely voice. It’s as much theatre as installation, a radio play built into a museum diorama. Our ears adjust to the low fidelity vinyl played through horn speakers, the voice mumbling from a space only a few feet in front of us, so that we are delightfully confused when the precise and vivid sound of a rainstorm breaks over our heads. Involuntarily I step back and look up to see if it is not, in fact, raining on the roof of the gallery, only to glimpse high definition speakers bolted up on the walls. It’s a clever trick that plays on suspension of disbelief: the mistake is that assuming “everything here in this box is not real” implies that “everything not in this box is real.” But the finesse of the piece is not merely technical.

The power of illusion that Cardiff and Miller’s work carries is set off by their rich sense of narrative and association. Their art verges on filmmaking, as Atom Egoyan once observed during an interview with Cardiff (www.bombsite.com/cardiff/cardiff.html), and this piece is driven by a few biographical fragments, real and imagined, about R Dennehy, a man who collected records. The immediate sensuality of the work—you can smell the dust on the carpet—is a relief after all the snap, crackle and abstracted pop of the Rice Krispy theorists that one sometimes associates with experimental sound art.

Another sort of memorial to an absent figure is constructed by the Adelaide born artist Jo Dudley, whose Tom’s Song was installed in what looks remarkably like an indoor basketball court in the now vacant Polish Embassy on Unter den Linden. As in the work by Cardiff and Miller, we are presented with a blank wooden box standing at the centre of the room, although higher and narrower, more like a coffin for an elephant than a garden shed. Inside, on the floor, are 16 record players arranged geometrically. The space can be traversed via a raised walkway, and above hangs a similar arrangement of simple music boxes fed by punched paper scrolls. The entire structure has been delicately synchronised to perform as a giant music box a croaky and dulcet love song originally recorded by the artist’s grandfather, who sings “It’s June in January because I’m in love.” There’s something inherently creepy about those lyrics when we know that the dead man’s song was recorded in the southern hemisphere, probably in the suburbs of Melbourne, but in Berlin the covertly morbid implication is contradicted by the high summer outside the gallery. Instead of really listening to the lyrics, we find ourselves sort of fascinated by the precision with which the voice flutters first from one corner of the room to another, and the tidiness with which the various simple analogue instruments are orchestrated with each other, although the illusion of rudimentary technology is dispelled when we learn that the entire system is computer controlled and the music boxes are fitted with optical sensors.

Skip forward a couple of days to the launch of Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani’s new films to a packed audience at the Volksbühne on Rosa Luxemburg Platz.

In 1956, Alain Resnais made a short film on the Bibliothèque Nationale, a loving architectural homage to the building as reservoir of all the knowledge in the world, as an archive and simultaneously as a sort of power station driven by thoughts. Fifty years on, Fischer and el Sani show a split screen film of the same building. Now, due to the relocation of the collection, it’s an abandoned space as thoroughly decommissioned as Battersea Powerstation, and queerly reminiscent of it. There’s a melancholy to the slow dolly shots that scan ranks of unoccupied desks and empty bookshelves, sharpened by Patrick Catani’s (who has collaborated in the past with Sydney’s System Corrupt) haunting soundtrack, that buzzes and blisters across the room like a geiger counter accompanying a picnic in Chernobyl. The film is more like the documentation of an abandoned space station than an institutional critique in the style of Candida Höfer, and so in hindsight it should have been no surprise to see this work paired with a recreation of the most famous scene in Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), this time shot in an abandoned radio hall in East Berlin, and accompanied by live music by Robert Lippok and Johann von Schubert.

In spite of the extraordinary strength of these works, along with persuasive installations by Kris Vleschouwer, Julian Rosefeldt and Candice Breitz, there is an impression that the festival lacks the depth and breadth of its forerunner a decade ago. Pippilotti Rist’s musical collaboration with Gudrun Gut seems haphazardly installed, as if the artist didn’t have the time to carry out the installation herself; Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s work had already been exhibited as a solo show at Kunsthaus Bregrenz in 2005. And there were some dubious curatorial decisions—such as the wall of footballs that vainly tried to tie the exhibition in to the frenzy of the World Cup.

Sonambiente Berlin 2006, directors Matthias Osterwold, Georg Weckwerth; Akademie der Kunste and other venues, Berlin, June 1-16, www.sonambiente.net

The Elision ensemble’s 20th birthday offering was presented in Brisbane, Sydney and on ABC Classic FM in a concert of Australian works, each exhilarating, challenging and consistently realised in virtuosic performances from various permutations of the ensemble in partnership with musicians from Germany, USA, France and Finland.

Chris Dench’s Agni-Prometheus-Lucifer (2006) for a 15-strong ensemble, celebrates the immortals, those figures in mythology (Vedic, Greek, Christian) who are neither humans nor gods and are variously associated with fire and light. In his program note and a brief talk at the concert, Dench noted the key role of percussion in the 10 works he’s created for Elision and embodied in the playing of Peter Neville. This new work commences with a carefully phrased percussion passage suddenly joined by the disparate voices of the ensemble who just as quickly become one. The violin takes the lead, lyrically but quietly, firmly in the body of the ensemble, the first of many voices to rise up, either gently or impatiently and passionately. A series of crises follow, perhaps indicative of the aspirations and the failures of the work’s subjects, or their overwhelming luminescence, interspersed with passages of transcendent delicacy figured in a warbling recorder or, finally, in a delicate entwining of flute and violin against quietly shimmering percussion—a fading of the light. Was it a settling for something less than immortality, or simply acknowledgment of the beauty of the quest for transcendence?

John Rodgers’ Amor (1999/2006), for “intertwined flute (Paula Rael) and oboe (Peter Veale)”, as the program notes put it, made its first appearance in Elision’s spectacular realisation of the composer’s Inferno in a Port Adelaide warehouse at the 2000 Adelaide Festival. The 70-minute work with large-scale instrumental forces fused concert with installation, climaxing with flautist and oboist playing instruments made of ice that melted their way to the work’s conclusion. Here the 2 instruments are real and remain intact, but once again the music expresses the painfully enforced togetherness of Francesca da Rimini and lover Paulo for eternity in Dante’s vision of the Inferno—simply for the sin of lust. The score demands seriously entwined playing, much of it quite theatrical and suggesting a passionate dialogue, furiously paced and full-bodied as bursts of breath, sighs and whispers are wrung from the players and their instruments. The musicians read from the same score, playing cheek by jowl until, facing each other, the flute finds its way into the mouth of the oboe. The final sustained, quietening notes suggest perhaps a post-orgasmic escape from torment, just as the melting of the ice instruments in the installation version seemed to propose release from a hell that was, after all, only a cold religious conceit. Whatever its dialectic, Amor stood on its own as an entrancing, dramatic duet.

Timothy O’Dwyer’s Gravity (2006) for solo improvising saxophone and oboe, trumpet, percussion and viola, gave us the remarkable playing of UK saxophonist John Butcher. Here is a player with a truly distinctive voice combining purity with power, forming utterly distinctive crystalline aural shapes and earthed guttural rumblings, sustaining and working them for long periods without recourse to the frantic gearshifts common to many inheritors of bebop and improvising traditions. O’Dwyer adroitly places Butcher’s improvisational language within his own compositional framework, allowing freedom for the soloist against scored and semi-improvisational responses from the ensemble. After a quiet percussive opening that aptly (for a work titled Gravity) entailed the clatter of dropped mallets, Butcher’s tenor sax fluttered its way breathily into high, sustained notes. The oboe warbled with a Middle-Eastern cadence, the percussionist’s wire brushes swiped the air, the viola slipped into a deep glide and a drum roll presaged the entry of full bodied sax play, a mellow gurgling morphing into staccato phrasing and, over the oboe’s ‘kissy kissy’ outburst, sailing into the stratosphere. In brief, the ensuing episodes yielded a wonderful totality of soloist and ensemble sounds. In the final movements, enhanced by trumpet, the sound world opened out even further, the saxophone evoking horns both French and fog, the cosmos vibrating to flights of percussion and Butcher’s ethereal playing. Gravity, as O’Dwyer’s program note reminds us, is not just about things that fall, but “the ‘tendency’ of 2 objects of mass to accelerate towards each other.” Gravity’s strength is not only in the anti-gravitational push of Butcher’s playing and the rich moments of freefall, but in the push and pull between soloist and ensemble—subject to the score and to the less predictable forces of players and conductor, all given the freedom to improvise. Gravity was an engrossingly vertiginous experience.

The major work of the concert was Liza Lim’s Mother Tongue in its Australian premiere after a first performance at the 2005 Festival d’Automne in Paris where it was performed by Ensemble InterContemporain, co-commissioner of the work with the festival and Elision. Written for soprano (the Finnish artist Piia Komis, who also sang in Paris), 15 instruments and a text by Melbourne poet Patricia Sykes, Mother Tongue is an ambitious work, metaphysically and musically. Lim told her Sydney audience that she’d been inspired by a linguist friend who had worked on the revival of the Indigenous Yorta Yorta language of north-eastern Victoria. The connection of language to the land and its expression of intimate human relationships are central to both the poem and Lim’s music. As she foretold, the instruments whisper and sing with the soprano in Mother Tongue. They certainly do—language and music are as one.

The complex, imagistic poem with its English text and 5 words taken from other languages celebrates language but also fears its destruction, portraying it ecologically, subject to the forces of nature, economics and politics (a poetic companion to Louis-Jean Calvert’s Towards an Ecology of World Languages, Polity Press, 2006). But musically, where Lim has a great capacity to make words dance, the work reminds us of possible origins of language in song and movement (as argued by Stephen Mithen in The Singing Neanderthals, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2005). Piia Komis is called on to mine every aspect of her vocal capacity, committing herself to it with passion and remarkable precision. Lim’s writing suggests a pre-language requiring Komis to leap from Sykes’ words into howls, yips, growls, sudden pitch shifts and huge glides, from guttural surges into bird trills and pure soprano flights. Mother Tongue is above all dramatic, operatic even, an expression of a great range of feeling both restrained (passages of serene beauty, especially in the glorious 3rd movement with its opening sea imagery and ‘boy soprano’ voice from Komsi) and unleashed (Lim knows how to make a chamber ensemble sound like a full orchestra and Komsi knows how to ride with and over it). As ever, Lim’s orchestration is utterly distinctive, whether eerily plumbing the sonic depths or creating waves of percussion that rattle like rain or sing like talk.

Mother Tongue is a magnificent work, and as demanding as you would expect from Lim. Absorbing it in one sitting is simply impossible, and even after several listenings, thanks to excellent ABC Classic FM streaming, there is much to assimilate. For a work about language and nurturance, the first 2 movements are often fiercely vigorous, exploring every dynamic of voice and ensemble. I keep returning to the 3rd movement, Longitude of Loss, where Sykes writes and Komsi sings, “my oar is my tongue”, and the work ends quietly with the plangent, “I am hanging by my mother tongue.”

The job of corraling Elision’s birthday riches into one wonderful gift fell to conductor Jean Deroyer, a regular with the great Ensemble InterContemporain and an ideal interpreter. No piece was less than demanding and Deroyer and the ensemble played as one, showing off every work at its best.

Mother Tongue, Elision 20th Birthday Concert, Verbrugghen Hall, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, June 11

Clockwise from top left: Kevin Blechdom, Singing Sadie, Suicidal Rap Orgy, Justice Yeldam

My last tax-deductible expense for 2005-2006 was the entrance fee to record label and twisted empire DualpLOVER’s End of Financial Year Party (although I didn’t think it appropriate to ask for a receipt). The event not only celebrated the turning of pages on a ledger but also 10 years of survival for this most independent of independent labels.

Over the years DualpLOVER has had 31 releases, their artist stable including Garry Bradbury, Sweden, Alternahunk, The Funky Terrorists, Singing Sadie, Nora Keyes, Toxic Lipstic, Suicidal Rap Orgy and Abela’s various manifestations. The label covers a schizophrenic mix of styles ranging from electronica, hiphop, folk and noise to some completely ineffable genres. On top of this DualpLOVER also includes a brokerage for CD and DVD duplication and print production. But it all began in 1994 with the recording of Lucas Abela’s beloved Kombi. Its dodgy wiring amplified any noise made in the van via the stereo. After spontaneous driving concerts he decided to record it. But no one seemed to want to put it out…

Lucas Abela: I showed it to the local experimental labels back then which were mostly in Melbourne—Dorobo and Extreme—but they weren’t really on the same tangent I was aesthetically or musically and I don’t think they really understood what the A Kombi album was. Many people still don’t understand the importance of the A Kombi record [laughs]. But 2 years later Damian released the Hiss album. It was a bit of an inspiration to me so I forked out the money and put out A Kombi and got some really good feedback. The first people to write back to me were Gregg Turkington from Amarillo Records, a mentor label to me, Merzbow and Yamataka Eye. Banana Fish magazine, which is like the noise music bible, wrote back to me for an interview and ended up doing a 12 page spread. So I decided to make a proper go of the label. At that point Swerve approached me…

Swerve: I’d just got back from overseas and I moved into a house with Lucas. I was in a noise band called the Burning Spastics. In the 90s we used to play at the Waterloo Tavern to about 3 people on average. I had to clean out my bank account to get on the dole so I said to Lucas, why don’t I chuck all this money in and I could be the shifty silent partner-slash-financial backer. And then we put out Alternahunk. It was around that time that we started the brokerage…

LA: Initially we just wanted to consolidate labels. There was Sigma Editions, and Jerker Productions with Oren [Ambarchi] were just starting up. I was doing Rebirth of Fool 1 and Peeled Hearts Paste, so we thought let’s put all those jobs into the factory at once and get a cheaper price…I guess news of that spread and more people started asking us and then we started doing things overseas. The CD and DVD brokerage side of the business has come to offset the label side of the business so that we feel we can take more risks in releasing music we are interested in.

First we released bigger overseas acts like Merzbow and Yamataka Eye who I love dearly but who [now] I don’t feel I need to promote. As a label I am more interested in things nobody knows about, bringing new things into the world.

S: They’re not some carbon copy of something else. Sometimes they are trying to be something else but they’re just not and that’s pretty cool.

LA: Acts that have a certain sense of otherness to them. They don’t really fit in with the scene generally. I like things that sit outside movements, or even if they are in a movement they are a step aside of it. They are doing something new with it, or they’re trying to fit in but they can’t.

How much does shock value play in it—what is the ratio of shock value to sound?

LA: Depends if it works with the act. Suicidal Rap Orgy is pretty much the most shocking act we’ve put out—penises on stage, wanking, the most revolting lyrics you can possibly think of…

LA: Quite disgusting debauchery. But we didn’t pick it for its shock value. I just thought it was funny. The reason I was attracted to Suicidal Rap Orgy is because there was nothing else like it. There still isn’t!

S: The most shocking thing at any of our gigs is the audience. People get so fucked up… they go berserk… all manner of chaos and the feeling that we’ve totally lost control, just whipped them in to a frenzy.

S: It’s uncharted waters. People can’t find anything to cling onto and go, ‘Ah this is like a rock gig where I stand there and rock on my heels, this is somewhere where I go and dance, or this is somewhere where I sit on the floor and listen.’

LA: I think we’ve got an intelligent audience as well. In terms of experimental or new musics in Australia, we put on the only shows that are highly visually entertaining and I guess that, as well as the audio being really good, brings a new dimension to the way they react to a show. I always try and book colossal line-ups. A gig is a festival to me.

S: The very, very far future, the end, will come when one of us dies, ‘cause we’re both stubborn…I’ve started organising this zine fair along with a guy from the Goulburn Poultry Fanciers. It’s 2 fairs old now, but with the next one I want to put on a drive-in theatre and, if that works out, then we’ll start having a short film festival…

LA: Rebirth of Fool 4 is going to be a DVD, so people can send strange, weird footage to us, found footage.

S: A CD-R label as well. Instead of doing 500 runs of the more accessible music that we release (laughs) we could do short order CD-R runs.

LA: We’ve just published Swerve’s zine, probably doing more zines and publishing. I’ve made one film. I want to make more films…whatever we do creatively will be done as DualpLOVER, so it’s not just a label it’s a family of businesses.

In the near future we’ve got the Kevin Blechdom tour. She’s a singer songwriter [USA] with electronic backing and banjo and keyboard accompaniment and one of the best shows that I’ve seen. Really good songs. If she wasn’t on Chicks on Speed I’d sign her in a second…she’s doing electronic music so differently to everyone else.

As an afterthought, I emailed the lads about how they saw the future of music, with the rapid development of MP3 download culture.

S: I think downloadable MP3s are probably only around 5-10 years off as far as taking the majority market share. But during the transition I think people are going to be doing shorter runs at home on CD-R to begin with and moving up to the 500 minimum for pressed CDs. This is for the market we work in, which is pretty small.

LA: It’s hard to say. Some people will always want a tangible product but that mindset is quickly disappearing with a new generation of kids raised on downloads.

The future of music is, as always, live music. That can’t be downloaded so we’ll keep moving into touring acts and promoting as well as doing the label, which may become completely digital one day soon.

Kevin Blechdom is presented in association with Straight Out of Brisbane (SOOB) and, August-September, will be touring Brisbane, Lismore, Newcastle, Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Wagga, Wagga, Medlow Bath, Wollongong and Canberra supported by various dualpLOVER artists including Justice Yeldam (Abela). www.dualpLOVER.com

Rob Muir and I are standing on his front porch before what looks like a gigantic, buffed metal loud-hailer, over one metre tall. He can’t remember what this soon to be installed giant is officially titled, so we nickname it “the proboscis” (we later establish that it will be called transMUTE when it’s set up at the new East Victoria Park Station, due to open 2008). There is a strange gurgling echoing through its depths, then Rob claps sharply in front of it and it goes silent… “Reset”, Muir explains. I lean forward and scratch on the point of its central protrusion, tap around the amplifying cone and speak harshly to it. My voice comes back to me as high speed bird twitters and chipmunk talk and the same sequence is repeated in big, slow, bassy waves, rumbling within the profundity of the cone and its associated sub-woofer.

transMUTE is the latest in a line of collaborations authored by Muir—here with sculptor Stuart Green and programmer Dave Primmer. The list of Muir’s associates is impressive. He’s worked several times with ruined piano maestro Ross Bolleter. His recent pieces with Cat Hope under the moniker of Metaphonica have extended the aesthetic possibilities of the mobile phone while in 1989 he produced with Rainer Linz one of the many radiophonic programs he has put together over the years for organisations such as WA University’s 6UVS-FM (now RTR-FM). Muir has also collaborated with various performance artists, as in his 1993 piece with Mike Nanning at PICA, Wigwam For a Goose’s Bridle, in which various electrical devices were ‘played’ using a dimmable lighting board, much as one would play an electronic piano—only here engine whirls, clicks and flashes of lamplight made up the ‘notes.’ In 2003, Muir also contributed a selection of audio grabs as inspiration and accompaniment for the improvised performance, Rest In Silence, by performer Tony Osborne at the Blue Room Theatre.

With output ranging from theatre scores to rock band recordings, and the early years of Evos New Music (now Tura Music Events), Muir’s work is difficult to categorise. Musician Cat Hope initially introduced Muir to me as a “sound archivist”, and this seems a fair characterisation. While he no longer works with the extremely detailed tape cut-ups for which he was renowned in the 1980s, he retains a passion for unearthing lost or hidden sound universes. Like Bolleter’s work with aged, neglected instruments—which Muir composed into an evocative, melancholy sound world on their CD, The Night Moves on Little Feet (1999)—he still seeks the neglected, the old and the marginal from which he crafts recordings that are at once novel and yet rich with the sonic and emotional patina of time and space. For example in New Teeth for the Mrs (2003), a piece composed for Club Zho, Muir provided melodramatic musical accompaniments such as one might have heard on daytime TV to an edited audio letter originally recorded in a 1960s home and which Rob had found on an old reel-to-reel tape player. Suffusing this odd and sadly ironic little study is the sense of the absence and presence of the aged couple who are documented on the recording, and their unfulfilled longing for immediate communication with their physically distant children for whom they are composing the tape. One catches glimpses of the family, of intense feuds never fully resolved, but whose details remain opaque, lost in the mists of time and in the airwaves—much as the couple who made the recording have themselves now disappeared from this mortal, aural coil.

Rob Muir’s sourcing of the sonic marginalia of contemporary life is not however purely historicist. His project is also social and spatial. In 2001, for example, he entered the at times alarming world of kids who passed through the suburban Community Centre of East Victoria Park. This included not only children enjoying nearby sports equipment, but also street kids, youth gangs and other groups. The artist collaborated with this community to collect recordings for use in an installation entitled Giving the Kids a Voice. The final work featured a selection of randomised compositions played through a set of headphones located near the community centre. The result is a truly amazing selection of highly processed, distorted and seriously thumping bass beats, hip-hop rhymes, youthful play and sometimes disturbing conversations (in which one unidentified young woman notes that she, her mother, her sister and her best friend are all currently pregnant—but that in 2 days she would not be pregnant anymore). Muir’s moulding of gleeful beat-boxing, masculine posing, and discussions of the aesthetics and dangers of tagging and graffiti creates a hard sound realm of ridicule, threat, urbanism and angry, pleasurable vigour. While Muir concedes that it was not easy to get the kids to talk to him, various strategies—such as placing the earphones onto his subjects’ heads so that they could hear his distortion tricks and other effects to render them anonymous or amusing—enabled him to overcome their resistance.

Muir cites as a particular highlight of recent years his 2002 collaboration with Alex Hayes, Project 44, temporarily installed at Mount Magnet, WA. The piece featured 20 44-gallon drums fitted with speakers that resonated with a range of field recordings and sound art referring to the containers’ histories (industrial noises, oily, glutinous exclamations, gentler watery plashing and so on). Though sonically and musically complex, Muir was particularly satisfied with an incidental phenomenon whereby the vibrations within the drums meant that any dust, sand or dew lying on the lids created intricate, often apparently gravity-defying patterns changing as the compositions played. Many audience members camping at the site brought their children over to observe this entrancing, early morning dance of moisture and grit.

It is a strangely visual anecdote coming from Muir who otherwise insists that sound artists should prioritise the sonic over the visual. But it is indicative of this artist’s embracing, holistic approach. Whether working with other artists or with audiences, Rob Muir remains committed to producing multi-disciplinary work that is rich with the emotional, spatial and sonic fullness of a parallel world, complete with its own memories, patterns and terrestrial tremors.

transMUTE, sound/concept: Rob Muir, sculpture Stuart Green, programming Dave Primmer; main platform, East Victoria Park Station, from 2008

There is a new and vibrant energy boiling in the underbelly of the Melbourne art scene, repositioning the body with the political. It has been on the rise for sometime with artists such as Catherine Bell, Andrew Atchison, Ash Keating, Alex Martinis Roe, Penny Trotter and Sarah Lynch reigniting the powerful medium of performance art.

The evening of Thursday July 7 was an important night. This energy seemed to be in the air with a powerful and brave performance by Timothy Kendall Edser at West Space and Danielle Freakley’s one night project, We Must Support Ourselves, at Spacement Gallery where she strategically exhibited the artists with their art.

Edser’s Tension 10, part of a series of performance based works, transformed West Space into a New York-style gallery with stark fluorescent lights cast over a large white catwalk-cum-plinth in the centre of the room and partitioned by a wall in the middle. At the far end of one side Edser stood completely still, wearing only underwear, vulnerable, facing the wall.

It was immediately interesting to observe a typically conservative Melbourne audience navigate their way around the artist whose simple act made people huddle at the back of the room or cling to the gallery edges in small groups. There was a sense of anticipation. As in the works of Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Mike Parr and Clinton Nain, the mere presence of the human body generated a potent energy.

Edser appeared like a Ron Mueck figure and as the evening progressed he seemed to assume an even more sculptural presence. Then at 7 o’clock, having remained absolutely still for over an hour, he ran towards the wall dividing the plinth and with 2 charges forced his body through the barrier to the other side.

As he lay shivering in the rubble of his own construction, the gathering stood in silent shock unable to establish an appropriate response to something more than a performance. Edser had obviously injured himself. His back was scratched, and he appeared to be in a state of physical and mental trauma. The documentation of the performance is held at Westspace, however the real art of the performance—the narrowing of space between work and creator, between vulnerable performer and awkward audience—had already been realised.

News of the death this month of Bronwyn Oliver saddened us deeply. The enigmatic work of this artist always surprised and inspired. (Bruce James once called her “Queen of the Uncanny”). Though she was prolific her sculptures took time to emerge and appeared on our radar intermittently. It was always a particular pleasure to come upon a new piece, or one we hadn’t seen before, to feel the antigravitational pull of her organic shapes, the perfect combination of delicacy and strength inherent in the eerily familiar objects she made, like missives from nature itself. Though we had hoped to meet her but never did, in 1991 for Writers in Recital (curated by Martin Harrison and Jonathan Mills) we came close. In a performance entitled Small Talk in Big Rooms we created a misguided tour for an audience on the move interacting with some of the contemporary works on display in the Art Gallery of NSW. At one point, we came upon Bronwyn Oliver’s Unicorn and though it appeared both fragile and forbidding, we felt compelled to approach and then to lie alongside it, to enter its powerful force-field.

An exhibition of Bronwyn Oliver’s work is currently showing at Roslyn Oxley Gallery, Paddington until Sept 2. www.roslynoxley9.com

Art Basel is the largest and richest art fair in the world, a weeklong face-off amongst prestige galleries in the cavernous halls of the Basel convention centre. It’s an obligatory appointment for collectors and dealers, very much the business end of the art market. However aside from all of the dour deal making of the central fair, Art Basel offers some extraordinary secondary events. Art Unlimited is a subsection of Art Basel that specialises in unusual, outsize and complex works. It provides a forum for works too ambitious to be accommodated in the small booths that fill the exhibition hall, and caters to a different sort of customer: the public institutions that can purchase an installation of, say, 12 x 8 metres that generates as much noise as a small building site and has energy requirements that are measured in kilowatts. Also, unlike the main fair, Art Unlimited is curated as a stand alone exhibition, so that the large works ‘communicate’ with each other, as curators like to say, rather than simply jostling for attention. This year’s Art Unlimited comprised work by 74 artists from 26 countries and was curated by Simon Lamuniére.
Martin Kersel, Tumble Room (2001)

The absence of constraint and the desire to create a spectacle turn Art Unlimited into a sort of amusement park for middle class adults. It’s crowd pleasing stuff: as the Danish scandal artist Kristian von Hornsleth said, “Unlimited is cool. We sense the budgets and the freedom attached.” The fairground impression is reinforced by the monumental entrance provided by German artist Julius Popp’s Bit.fall (2006). Bit.fall is an interrupted waterfall in which short streams of water are precisely released via electronic gates so that letters are formed, printed onto open air. Words and phrases tumble down: “Airbus Execs fear Investigation”, “Peace hopes for Iraq.” The content was fed live from Internet news sites. Popp has effectively created the world’s largest and wettest news ticker.

Not quite as big, but louder and at the centre of the hall stood Martin Kersel’s Tumble Room (2001), a typical Californian bedroom for a teenage girl, a space of pink walls, posters and innocuous furniture. What sets this bedroom apart is that it is set in a large circular steel frame mounted on industrial ball bearings. The entire structure spins around its horizontal axis: the floor and the ceiling sickeningly and lurchingly swap roles. It moves slowly at first, so that the teenage girl who inhabits it can clamber about—as an associated video attests—but then faster and faster. By the end of the exhibition the piece seemed to have more to do with the trapped violence of Chris Burden’s The Big Wheel (1979) than Alice through the Looking Glass—the imperfectly glued down furnishings had long since broken free of their moorings and smashed each other to kindling, turned glass into shards, tore posters to shreds. The work had effectively destroyed itself, a concrete mixer full of the refuse of family life. The piece takes itself to its own logical conclusion, starting as the embodiment of a child’s fantasy of the inversion of the everyday through to a nightmarishly literal illustration of the parental exaggeration: hey, it looks like a bomb has gone off in here.

Off to one side I enter an unmarked entrance, because the weird schadenfreude of the people staring at the trashed bedroom is giving me the creeps. A mistake. Douglas Gordon won the Turner Prize in 1996 for doing spooky work and it has gotten spookier. Black Star (2002) is a darkened hall punctuated geometrically by fluorescent tubes giving out ultraviolet light, so that, not for the first time in a gallery, we feel like we are wandering in an abandoned space station. Our teeth glow and our dandruff shimmers. Other lingering visitors give us blinding Cheshire Cat smiles. Over the top we hear Gordon read from the gothic novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (James Hogg, 1824), a tale of schizophrenic breakdown or satanic possession, depending on your point of view, recited in a mordant Scottish brogue. Is this futuristic archaeology, are we aliens investigating the ritual beliefs of 19th century Protestants? We didn’t know, but we liked it.

Luca Pancrazzi’s extraordinary Il paesaggio ci osserva (2006) (which according to the whimsy of catalogue babelfish translates to “the landscape observes to us”) reminded me of how much I’ve always admired men who play with train sets. A blank doorway leads us into a maze punctuated by a couple of surveillance monitors showing a blurry, nondescript landscape. A couple more turns and at the centre of the maze we discover a model city built at eye level. The miniature town is bisected by a river, and on one side what appears to be an industrial estate is made entirely of old computer components that, when arrayed in rows, provide an impeccable precinct of Bauhaus and international style structures. On the other side of the river is an old city composed of typewriter and linotype parts, set off by the frob of an IBM golf ball printer suggesting the dome of an urban nuclear power plant squeezed in amongst the slate roofs of a 19th century central European city. We leer over this landscape like Godzillas, delighted by the simplicity and inventiveness of the diorama, and it is only then that the security monitors make sense. They are filming the city. I almost run back to look, only to see a shadow of movement above the town. The cameras themselves are embedded in the city, but so small that they are almost impossible to find: presumably medical cameras, endoscopes—the things used for colonoscopy. It was as if the journey through the maze had made me bigger, much bigger, and here I was, looming like a giant predatory reptile over a terrified Lego town. Oh, what art does to us.

Romeo Castellucci's Societas Raffaello Sanzio has astonished Australian festival audiences, lovers of contemporary performance above all, with Giulio Cesare in Adelaide and Perth in 2000 and Genesi, from the museum of sleep in Melbourne in 2002. The company is returning to Australia for the 2006 Melbourne International Arts Festival, bringing with it the unique opportunity to see films of the whole cycle of Castellucci's most recent work and to hear him speak about it at the end of the Sydney screenings at NIDA and in Melbourne at ACMI.

In “Castellucci: theatre of remnants” (RT66, p37), Max Lyandvert wrote that “in 2001 Societas Raffaello Sanzio embarked on a major new project, a cycle of 11 episodes/productions called Tragedia Endogonidia, an open system of representation that, like an organism, changes and evolves with time and geography, with the name ‘Episode’ assigned to each phase of its transformation. This system forces a radical re-thinking not only of creation, but also of the whole theatrical system. The aim is to represent a tragedy of the future….Tragedia Endogonidia has developed over a period of 3 years with a total of 11 episodes in 10 European cities, each an interdependent episode but a complete production in itself. …Tragedia Endogonidia connects with each city where the work is presented, the focus being on the tragic remnants of the community’s relationship with life on Earth, and even the possibilities of a future on a new world.” The 10 cities are Cesena, Avignon, Berlin, Brussels, Bergen, Paris, Rome, Strasbourg, London and Marseilles.

The makers of Tragedia Endogonidia film cycle, Video memory, Cristiano Carloni and Stefano Franceschetti studied animation and painting in Urbino. Since 1993 they have been working together in the field of electronic arts by making videos and video-installations. They have said that they are not out to document Castellucci's vision but have used their “digital marquetry technique” to capture the essence of the work, “to create other objects of contemplation.” They have been described as involving Castellucci's works in their videos “by means of an artisan technique very similar to [using] the chisel: every single frame passes under their hands in order to be carved and assembled.” The films stand on their own but also serve as a document of a remarkable series of creations.

Max Lyandvert tackles the difficult task of describing the effect of Castellucci's work when he writes: “The arresting power of the imagery and the sound of Castellucci's theatre invites rich psycho-emotional reaction, happily bypassing rationalism, plunging the viewer into a space which is at once foreign and familiar, a space which is a type of core, a fundamental where the intellect and the senses are neutralised.”

Sydney performer Jeff Stein (who has worked with Max Lyandvert and others on their performance collaboration, Ilya in Castellucci's studio) has formed a partnership between Performance Space, RealTime, NIDA, UNSW Media Film & Theatre and the Italian Institute of Culture in Sydney to bring the films and Castellucci himself to Sydney with the support of the Melbourne International Festival of Arts.

Although many members of Sydney’s performance community will make the pilgrimage to Melbourne to see the Brussels episode of Tragedia Endogonidia, here’s an opportunity to immerse yourself in the epic cycle to which it belongs. RT

Tragedia Endogonidia, video memory by Cristiano Carloni and Stefano Franceschetti, music Scott Gibbons, director Romeo Castellucci, Societas Raffaello Sanzio,
www.raffaellosanzio.org, Parade Theatre, NIDA, 215 Anzac Pde, Kensington; Session 1 (Films 1-6), Thurs Oct 5, 7pm; Session 2 (Films 7-11), Fri Oct 6, 7pm,; Sat Oct 8, 8pm, Romeo Castellucci talk

The abandonment of David Hicks & social democracy

As we go to print Nigel Jamieson’s Honour Bound is premiering at the Sydney Opera House as part of its innovative Adventures in the Dark program. The quest for national security as part of the ‘war on terror’ has become an excuse for a radical reduction in human rights by governments around the world, most blatantly in the case of the US incarceration of David Hicks. Consequently, Hicks has become a living symbol of what could happen to any citizen given the draconian nature of Australia’s anti-terror legislation, and that includes the special place it holds for journalists, cartoonists and artists, all less than assured by John Howards’ ‘Trust me.’ Australian artists of many kinds and in many media have kept their audiences alert to the issues pertaining to refugees, political spin and the escalating erosion of social democracy. Filmmaker Curtis Levy’s documentary The President versus David Hicks has been widely seen. Now writer-director-designer Nigel Jamieson, with ADT’s Garry Stewart, sound designer Paul Charlier, video artist Scott Otto Anderson and co-designer Nick Dare, brings a mutimedia performance perspective to one man’s plight and the ramifications for social democracy.

ARTIST [AS] EDUCATOR

Our 2006 Education and the Arts feature is revealing about the advantages and the tensions embodied in the dual roles of artist and teacher in tertiary arts education. Some of the artist-teachers interviewed by our writers see themselves as artists first who enjoy teaching and the benefits it brings (contact with students, academic networks, salaries, paid research). Others who started out as artists have become full-time teachers but have managed to take time out to pursue artistic projects to regain a sense of wholeness and authenticity. Most don’t see the artist and teacher roles as exclusive, after all some make art within the university with student and staff collaborators and they find their practice-led research deeply satisfying—that’s if they can secure it and if not swamped by increasing bureaucratic responsibilities. There is also a feeling that in institutions and departments that are producing the practising artists of the future it is vital that students have at least some contact with artist-teachers who work beyond the university. Teachers in dance and film, in particular, emphasise their up to date knowledge of the field and the contacts they can provide students.

A recurrent theme in our survey is the importance of research, respondents feeling that it’s where they can sustain their practice while teaching and fulfil their obligations as academics. Not surprisingly the balancing act metaphor frequently comes into play, but it’s not just between being an artist and a teacher, but a 3-way creative tension between artist, teacher and researcher. The pressure is on universities and government to recognise artistic practice as research and not just in postgraduate degrees but as part of the teachers’ ongoing academic life. Another interesting dimension to this issue was raised in the articles on the artist-teacher in new media art and film. Pat Laughren observed that film schools have increasingly become the home for sustained practice of documentary film making. Despite proliferating, as many articles in this edition attest, new media art is going through a hard time on a number of fronts. While artist-teachers have played a key role in its development, Christy Dena sees the university more than ever as a vital home for the field.

Unleashing art as research: SPIN

In 2005 our education feature, Postgrad [R]evolution, focused on creative doctorates and practice-led research degrees, revealing the challenges to traditional academic notions of research, problems of assessment and resources, but also the joy of having one’s work recognised for the knowledge it provides the world. In this edition, QUT’s Richard Vella announces the launch of SPIN (Speculation and Innovation: Applying practice led research in the Creative Industries) in collaboration with RealTime (p10). SPIN is an online, peer-reviewed journal that includes papers and artworks and is aimed at giving a public profile and much deserved credibility to artists whose research will develop their own and inform the practice of others globally.

Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) is an iconic reminder of the postmodern experience of shopping. Faced with an image that proffers repetition without difference our eyes ceaselessly scan the surface, never able to find a place to rest or a point on which to focus. This is supermarket glaze.

Enter new!shop, a new media performance installation by the Sydney based duo spat & loogie, supported by a dedicated cast including the talented and po-faced Mr Teik-Kim Pok. Part of the 2006 Next Wave festival’s Empire Games, new!shop is a cheeky, ironic event that pits our everyday experience against a taste of the near future where branding alone will be deemed sufficient to fulfil our shopping desires. “Wanna buy some air?” says the crook to a gullible Bert in Sesame Street. As he takes the stopper out of the bottle and pours nothingness into Bert’s open palm, he continues, “I’m not sellin’ the bottle.” This is the experience of new!shop.

new!shop is a cross between supermarket jaundice, 24/7 and Play School, a place where shoppers of the future cut their teeth, repeating and reiterating the habitual behaviours of their parents. The press blurb reads:

Enter new!shop…An ‘unretail’ space where shopping is encouraged but buying is not.…Play the sport of market research. Fill your basket and find your destiny.

In new!shop shoppers find themselves at the mercy of the shopping machine. As scanners set up a background rhythm, shoppers, eyes glazed, glide around the aisles as if on wheels, murmuring demurely amongst themselves as they select this and that from the goods on offer. They fill their baskets to the max. Promotional stands tout their wares, loud and blurred. PA announcements make no sense, alarms go off but shoppers being shoppers keep shopping. In the world of self-service the attendant sentinels practice indifference and shoppers busy themselves scanning goods and trying on wares with no expectation that there might be service here.

A hapless customer knocks over a display. She moves away in embarrassment, hoping against hope that her faux pas will go unnoticed. A dour and resentful shelf filler is called to fix the mess. Paranoia heightens; an alarm goes off as I try a Fear Mask for size. Caught on camera I am frogmarched to the front of the store where I face humiliation as the inscrutable manager (Teik-Kim Pok) conducts a thorough body search. The whole shop rubbernecks to see ‘who done it.’ Crisis over, the muzak re-asserts itself and shoppers return to the shopping glide and glaze.

I take my booty to the checkout and have it scanned: Achievement, Irrational Desire, Bright Future, Power and Authority and a DIY Botox Kit. Achievement builds a collection that makes you stand proud; Irrational Desire gives you all the love that you can buy and the Bright Future sun glasses provide the ultimate prophylactic to protect you from the store itself. What I buy predicts my consumer fortune. “See the blinding light,” my docket promises. “The patterns and routines in your world may become hostage to an overwhelming 800 watt glow. Now it’s time to take charge. Beware of empty slogans offering potential life improvements. To keep your mental environment in check, breathe deeply and keep moving beyond the superficially seductive. Expect great rewards if you keep on track.”

And for being such a sucker, the bell tolls and suddenly I am in the limelight: shopper of the hour…or something to that effect. The attendant sentinels slowly surround me smiling their vacuous smiles. I am topped with a crown, a Polaroid is taken and all returns to normal.

new!shop, creators spat & loogie, performers Teik-Kim Pok, Kenzie McKenzie, Naomi Derrick; sound The Toecutter; software developer Benhamin Meneses-Sosa; Meat Market, Arts House, Melbourne March 22-April 1

Jo Lloyd and Phoebe Robinson presented 2 short pieces at Lucy Guerin’s Studio as part of Next Wave. Whilst Robinson’s The Emperor’s New Guns was a quiet solo presented in half light, silhouette and shadows, Jo Lloyd’s threesome Not As Others, shattered the peace with conflict, violence and drama. Which is odd really, given that Robinson’s work was concerned with the spaghetti western, a genre seething with conflict, violence and drama and Lloyd’s recalled the ‘innocence’ of childhood.

There was a certain peacefulness about Robinson’s movement which you might think failed to engage the supposed action associated with westerns. And yet the crucial elements were there: epic humanity, space, light, darkness. The epic character of the piece was suggested by its being a solo—the dramatic lived pathway etched by a lone entity. Plus the finale—death—a slow rolling, receding towards the back, fading into the shadows with only a cutout horse for companion. The floor furnished a sense of dry sand, of grit layered between body and floor offering the sounds of feet sliding on wood, the texture of space.

A girl and her horse in the sun grappling the elements. As with all animals onstage the horse did at times upstage the human. Ben Cobham’s masterful manipulation of lightscapes focused upon the horse, amplifying Alex Davern’s balsa wood cutout into an assertion of equine proportions.There was a deadpan quality in Robinson’s movement choice and execution, serial distal moments strung together in modular forms of association. Not so much torso, more jointed action of the limbs. Quiet, delicate. A nice diagonal sequence travelling backwards achieved a sense of flow, of activity traversing space. Similarly a rolling sequence covered ground; creating the ground.

There was for me an opacity in Robinson’s movement that made it difficult to enter her experience; the subjectivity of the cowboy, if that is what she was. What feelings, sensations were there, were felt? There is a parallel here, perhaps intentional, with the masculinity of the cowboy; determined, external, lacking interiority, lonely even. This pith of humanity is subject to her environment, responding to, even dwarfed by Cobham’s dramatic lighting changes. Perhaps this is the epic loneliness of the long distance cowboy, a rereading of the image of self sufficiency spawned by icons such as John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson.
(L-R): Alison Currie, Sarah Cartwright, Ana Grosse

(L-R): Alison Currie, Sarah Cartwright, Ana Grosse

Jo Lloyd’s Not As Others was a completely different kettle of fish, manifesting a violent intensity more familiar to the cowboy genre than relations between femmes. That said, Anna Kokkinos’s film Only the Brave (1994) put paid once and for all to the idea that girls don’t fight. Not As Others drew on the fact that three’s a crowd, working and reworking dynamics of inclusion, exclusion, and persecution. A mixture of dancerly precision and emotional drama, Lloyd used her energetic style to make trouble. Although the piece began with clearly defined roles of dominance and subjection, these were later blurred in the complexity of relational movement.

The floor was a faded patchwork of linoleum sutured by tape. The women traversed this quietly broken narrative with their own cross-hatching of lunges, twists, plaits and pairings. Can difference be tolerated? What does it take to incur suffering within the intimacy of relational play? Does simple exclusion imply oppression? Not As Others stopped short of imposing any narrative closure or moralistic resolution, provoking instead interpretive questions around changing relations of force between the three dancers. Mostly the kinaesthetic timbre of the movement worked seamlessly to suggest and create human dynamics. One step grated however, just one moment where someone extended a pointed, tense leg into a deep second position plié (in ballet’s lexicon), which made me think about the way in which ‘the dancerly’ functions in relation to narrative. Something about this plié reminded me of the way movements are used in traditional dance forms (classical ballet, Bharatanatyam) to suggest storyline. I’m not sure the plié was meant to ‘say’ anything in particular but it worked against the flow of movement—human dynamics that the rest of the work embraced—reminding me of the conventions of traditional dance. That move was a relic poking out of the sand, a not-yet fossil from dancing days gone by, grating against the athletic modernism that comprises Lloyd’s distinctive style.

The Emperor’s New Guns, choreographer, performer Phoebe Robinson, lighting Ben Cobham, sound Felicity Mangan, installation Alex Davern; Not As Others, choreographer Jo Lloyd, performers Sarah Cartwright, Alison Currie, Ana Grosse, sound Sacha Budimski, Duane Morrison, Byron Scullin, installation Sasha Gribich, costumes, Shio Otani, Next Wave Festival, Lucy Guerin Studio, Melbourne, March 29-April 2

Graffiti writers versus public artists. Funding legitimacy versus community legitimacy. The fractious arts community versus itself. Private Commonwealth Games security guards versus the customary streetlight. The very environment makes it hard to ignore that the street art component of Next Wave is on disputed turf, and some of the best works in the program have harnessed contention to their advantage.

Taking no prisoners in the battle against saccharine public art is the arresting Clean, championing the city’s homeless people and graffiti artists, both of whom had been made more unwelcome than usual in readiness for the Games. The stencil-art mainstay of Hosier Lane is infested with the ghosts of the repeatedly evicted street dwellers, in the form of sensor-triggered audio recordings. The always cringe-inducing “You don’t have any change, do you?” drops like an epitaph in this little space, as it starkly and suddenly illuminates the mass deportation of the city’s poor. The surveillance state paranoia of officialdom is cheerfully inverted, as Big Issue vendors and drunken teens harangue you from above, in place of the silent police cameras. (Hosier Lane in fact sports a blanket and bottle that some hapless sleeper has abandoned, I like to imagine, in their irritated flight from the self-fulfilling prophesies of the sound-art work made to mourn their passing. But anyway.) Under Clean’s umbrella of official art approval, or perhaps just the usual surrender to the cult stencil status of the lane, graffiti here is largely unmolested by council cleanups, densely layered as always, and Clean’s own small street decorations (parodic wallpaper with a repeating council wall-buffing motif) are already vanishing beneath a layer of fresh scrawls.
Clean

Emile Zile’s New Ruins is placed a little more ambivalently in the public space contention. Graffiti scrawls from the interior of the City Watch House are recontexualised in blue capital letters on an LED display, the sort usually used to announce street detours and miscellaneous public works, on the front of the Watch House itself. Things like “J 4 H 4 EVA” scroll in the firmest of public service announcement fonts across the grim facade. It’s classic detournment, questioning even its own origins in the debates over graffiti as art, just a tad affecting to boot, and it made me laugh until my obligatory Melbourne coffee came out my nose.

Zile’s work is in 100 points of light, a night-time program of diverse small scale intervention flavoured works in sundry nooks of the streetscape of Melbourne, in a kind of perturbing nocturnal under-layer to the city’s ascendant Shiny Public Art aesthetic. There are about 30 works at peak periods, though a couple fewer if you are checking immediately after the demolitionary weekend crowds.

Brydee Rood’s 3 pieces, Natural Selection 06, have drawn the short evolutionary straw more than once, and it’s hard to find the works in a functional state. Eventually spotting one makes it all worthwhile. Rood has fashioned images of furtive urban scavengers, rats and the like, in LED pictures embedded in wheelie bins. The diodes’ yellow glow transforms dead-end urban crannies into dens for the esoteric process of the wheelie bin life cycle. The effect upon the unbriefed punter, if you’re stumbling on one unawares ducking round the corner for a drunken piss, must be delicious.

Which is irritating. You wish you’d just stumbled on this stuff, and that privilege is denied you as you stamp about with a festival program-and-bonus-map clutched in your hand. Half of the pleasure of half of these pieces is the wistful longing not to know what is going on. It’s hard enough to find the things as it is, though. Placements range from prominent, to cunning, all the way to impossible to locate even with a map and description. Emilio Fuscaldo’s Birdie, for example, takes a couple of walk-bys and a double take before you have it nailed. The neon-sign work, perched above the second storey in quantised serenity on a rare space of empty wall on a Chinatown alley, is a transmission of oddity almost invisible against the background neon noise of dumpling joints and wine bars. (“Above the pavement, the sky.”) The buzz of suspecting yourself the only one in a crowded street who has captured this detail… gets me right there.

Tim Webster’s Block embeds another neat detail in the landscape outside the Victorian State library. The perforations in the library bins have been transformed into the backlit windows of a miniature skyscraper. It’s toadstool housing for the bourgeois faery-on-the-go. Or perhaps evidence of the fractal self-similarity of the city. Or architectural models for a disposable lifestyle. It’s probably the least sinister piece on display—the cheeky silhouettes on Tim’s tiny windows (mostly domestic, interspersed with occasional spear-bearing hunters and what have you) can sit congruously in the Public Art camp. Or at least, the humour is less indignant than the rest of the series. After a long day’s outrage at the co-option of the urban environment, as strident as the Games city it critiques, in fact, it’s an antidote of comforting, vicarious domestic bliss.

Clean, Nic Low, Stephen Mushin, Jim Moynihan; Hosier Lane; March 15-April 2; 100 Points of Light, LED, Emile Zile, March 15-26; New Ruins—Natural Selection 06, Brydee Rood; Birdie, Emilio Fuscaldo; Block, Tim Webster, design Nicole Dominic, electronics Paul Webster; Next Wave; March 14 – April 6

Operation isn’t just one of the most dynamic works at this year’s Next Wave festival; it’s easily one of the most intriguing pieces to have recently played in Melbourne in any context. The first show by new company Blood Policy, it combines puppetry, microvideo, sound and performance to create an intricately unfolding mystery of terrorism and redemption, spectacle and intimacy.

For a production in which words and text play so little part, Operation speaks volumes. The audience is guided through a space filled with tiny map-covered podiums upon which rest shadowy objects: a miniature helicopter, a chair, a rubbish bin. Once seated, we become aware of the body lying upon an operating table at the far end of the room, a projection screen hanging above. The performance begins with a video image on this screen: a point-of-view shot of someone entering the space, as we have, and lying down on the medical table.

A doctor enters and moves to the lifeless body below the screen, now revealed as a lifesize articulated puppet. He attempts to obtain some sign of life, and this is signalled when the mannequin opens its eyes: what it sees is now shown to us through the projected video above. We’re suddenly confronted by a doubling of space, a reciprocal perspective in which we see ourselves being seen by the object of our attention, and this is just the beginning.

Operation is the story of a dying man’s journey to the medical theatre in which he now lies: the doctor, also our puppeteer, opens up the patient’s body to extract tiny versions of his subject which then play out dramas of his life on the various miniscule stages scattered across the space. A camera mounted on the man’s head offers us an extreme close up of the homunculus as he journeys from a war-torn third world country to the banal ignominy of a first world existence of servitude, before being dragged into a terrorist resistance by a figurehead who reveals the degraded existence into which he has sunk. All the while, the constant layering of both narrative threads and visual fields creates an energy and dynamism which is entirely absorbing. Operation is worth any chance you have to attend.

Jacklyn Bassanelli’s Pink Denim in Manhattan is another power-punch to the sensorium, a 25-minute performance which delivers as much affect as many full-length works. Clambering through a narrow tunnel, the audience settles inside an inflatable snowdome detailed by the unmistakable New York skyline, and towered over Liberty Statue-esque by Bassanelli in pink tailcoat, hotpants and mirrorball heels. Her impassioned monologue is a love letter to the city, the iconic metropolis available not directly but only through the many incarnations in film and song which have given the city its mythic status. Snatches of text from popular movies and Broadway tunes weave together with Bassanelli’s original dialogue to form a tragic-ironic plea to a city which cannot return her affection; she finds herself gutterbound, another victim of an urban infatuation which is destined to death. The spectre of 9/11 pans out as a shadowplay, a model aeroplane heading towards the twin icons of legs held skyward; and the tiny, final image of a glowing heart ascending the Empire State Building is a charming nightcap for a piece all-too-brief but more than satisfying.

Works by emerging artists too frequently betray their youthful innocence; Australian works especially have seemed beset by historical amnesia, unconscious of the history of performance which has come before. It’s deeply encouraging, then, to view the sophisticated way in which Ming-Zhu Hii presents her homage to Yoko Ono, a performance artist whose significance for later generations is worth revisiting. Y is not a conventional biography, since the iconoclastic position of Ono would render such a depiction paradoxical, but is instead a performance of the figure, producing her image through emulation but not impersonation.

Hii makes accessible the kinds of performance art so often derided by reactionary critics: throwing eggs upon the floor, apples rolling from the wings, a succession of matches lit and extinguished, slowly adding to the pile of burnt stubs at her feet. It’s all too easy to see these gestures as signifying nothing more than their own lack of significance, but Y contextualises these moments in a history which seeks to regenerate the heady moments of the late 20th century avant-garde. The personal, political, fiction and fact are interwoven in a way which doesn’t result in an undifferentiated miasma but instead produces the sense, if not the logic, of an artist frequently written off as a relic of counterculture aestheticism.

Blood Policy, Operation, co-director, puppeteer Sam Routledge, co-director, media artist Martyn Couts, sound Aaron Cuthbert, puppet & props Andrew Mcdougall with Zoe Stuart, spatial design Alison McNicol, The Croft Institute, March 15-30; Pink Denim in Mathattan, writer, performer Jacklyn Bassanelli, original concept Danielle Brustman, Jacklyn Bassanelli, director Clare Watson, choreography Peta Coy, design Danielle Brustman, music/sound Kelly Ryall, lighting Luke Hails; Artshouse Meat Market, North Melbourne, March 23-April 2; Y, writer, director, performer Ming-Zhu Hii, co-director Gerard Williams, lighting, Bronwyn Pringle, designer Alo McNicol, sound Jacqueline Grenfull; Artshouse Meatmarket, March 23-April 2

This year’s Next Wave was bursting at the seams with projects including a small show titled Mind Games at Conical Gallery. Curators Kerrie Dee Johns and Fiona Bate brought together a body of works in a collective dialogue to realise the overarching methodology of the project.

Mind Games is an interactive show, but in the most unconventional sense. It invites viewers to immerse themselves in an alternative, fantastical reality that nevertheless has a complex history.

In the work of Ry Haskings, everything appears innocent. However, his irreverent use of materials and composition introduce us to an illusory world. In his video, World Stab, we see a spinning globe stabbed with a knife, tomato sauce pouring from its interior.

There’s something melancholy and sarcastic about this work that comments on the superfluous structures that operate in the art world on a global scale. A distinct absence of special effects reveals Haskings’ sullen engagement with that art world: modular wooden hands giving the finger; a severed arm wielding a dog leash; an axe in the wall; a flaccid candle in its pseudo baroque holder; a drawing of a vacuum cleaner and easel mounted on giant balls of Bluetak. Commonplace art references and Haskin’s resistance to participate make for a unique work, pathetic and triumphant.

Sydney duo, Ms and Mr, share something of this absurd quality. These artists transport us into private worlds that contrast with the more familiar realms in which we digest contemporary art. Their irreverence to the outside world is tactical.

Ms and Mr make us complicit in Sensory Perception Experiment, their matrimonial collaboration cum carnival magic show. Works on paper against maroon velvet backgrounds see the artists acting out their experiments which, again, like Haskings, expose nuances such as sketching ‘no hands’ with a severed hand, or Mr donning a garment with the text, “I visited Salt Lake City and all I got was this Mormon underwear.”

Each of the works in Mind Games provides us with an internal reality through which we ponder our own. The work of Brie Dalton is like a family tree sprawling across the gallery wall. However, both the public and private worlds of the artist inform her characters. Dalton presents us with an intricate map connected by strings of plastic beads and pearls, glue, sequins and wire. We see a white whale constructed entirely of false fingernails, circuit boards rewired with gum and razor blades and oyster shells framing cutout portraits of teen songbirds, Beyoncé Knowles, Britney Spears and Pink.

Brie Dalton’s work highlights a lack of faith in the idea of aesthetic special effects in which art (so momentary in its superficial guise) is packaged and marketed as product, in which we are bombarded with images, each as shallow and fleeting as the next. Her genealogy unveils something of a tormented fusion of popular references and literary characters. Dalton gives us a real ‘feminist action’—the infrastructure but not the answers.

Mind Games suggests a real sense of possibility and enquiry. Gabrielle De Vietri’s Idea Catalogue Headquarters invites viewers to contribute to a document which includes ideas from de Vietri herself such as “Give people a government-funded holiday” and the Sorry Expo relating to the Australian ‘Sorry’ phenomenon—not such a bad idea!

Scottish collective, Something Haptic, disrupt the space with segments of a church bell mechanism placed in Conical’s rafters. The pieces offer an historical, structural reference, a mechanism usually of a swinging momentum instead becomes a juncture within the existing framework. This work reminded me of Terri Bird’s 1999 Melbourne International Biennale installation. It generated some of the same subversive power by intruding into the physical and historical timeline of the space.

Something Haptic offer a proposition and a problem: the mechanism is stifled in the rafters and, not unlike Brie Dalton’s self-portrait in Parade, constructed from what looks like left over feathers and balsa wood from a Mardi Gras festival, her image inscribed into a wooden panel as she prances in line, feathers spewing from her headress.

David Keating’s installation generates an austere presence with a series of works on paper splayed across a white MDF wall constructed in the space and, as with the work of Something Haptic, the internal workings are exposed. Keating’s drawings reference pre-fabricated model homes and juxtapose a sense of the possibility of the ‘dream home’ with the question, “Whose dream?” His voyeuristic exposés of formalized European architecture give us an insight into the world of his mundane characters, performing pseudo rituals in regimented lines and in gestures like the architecture itself. Keating allows his audience to peer inside his drawings of dream homes, his unlikely characters such as a green blob man and a native American totem pole suggest a time shift or perhaps a conflict between the conventional and spiritual worlds.

These quietly subversive works are gently loaded with ritual in aesthetic, spiritual and fantastical modes. Keating challenges the trite packaged designs of life, love and faith through the systematic adoption of the same tactics.

Mind Games challenges contemporary curatorial methods because it identifies the artist’s disappointment with the real world of art. It offers instead to the audience an intimate exploration of our own fantastic worlds, without the special effects.

Mind Games, curators Kerrie Dee Johns, Fiona Bate, Next Wave, Conical Gallery, Melbourne, March 10-April 2

“Ideally a festival like Brisbane’s offers something for everyone.” For a moment, first time Brisbane Festival Director, Lyndon Terracini, sounds dangerously like the men who used to run such events as Brisbane’s Warana, Melbourne’s Moomba or the early Sydney Festivals. But the man who has sung more avant garde music than he’s had hot dinners, as well as founding the radical regional NORPA Festival and taking Queensland’s Biennial Music Festival to new levels of engagement from Barky to Thuringoa, quickly qualified his remark: “For me, accessibility is about great variety rather than simply dumbing down.”

So, there is a central arts core to the July event which will look and feel comfortingly familiar—Strauss’ great opera Salome in a concert performance starring local Lisa Gasteen, conducted by her friend Simone Young; Johnno, the great Brisbane novel by David Malouf, staged by Brisbane Powerhouse in a version by English theatre man, Stephen Edwards, who’ll take it on to Derby; a new QTC play by RealTime contributor Stephen Carleton, set in pioneering days on Cape York, Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of Somerset; Cirque Eloize, probably the best of those Canadian companies that modelled themselves on Circus Oz; and Cloudgate Dance Theatre from Taiwan, masters of contemporary Orientalism.

But on either side of that comfort zone there’s the challenging material you might expect from Lyndon Terracini—or maybe not. Who’d have thought he’d roll one of those trendy festivals of ideas into an arts event? But the Artshub website headlines its story about the festival, “Mikhail Gorbachev to appear at Brisbane Festival.” Terracini seems to have tapped into the zeitgeist. Gorby (plus Beattie and sundry Nobel prizewinners) sold out in a day! “It was like a pop concert”, recounts an amazed director, “selling out the first of the ‘Earth Dialogues’ before the festival brochure even hit the streets. The subject of resource management has just grabbed people—the latest Vanity Fair has 12 pages on it, for heaven’s sake—and they really want to talk about it.”

It helps that the man who invented Perestroika, who cost $1000 a ticket to hear when he was last in Brisbane in 1999, comes free this time thanks to his role as chair of Green Cross International—described as “a Red Cross for the environment.” Terracini believes that artists need to take more responsibility for issues of such moment: “Verdi used to in operas like Nabucco; and what about Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, encouraging the French Revolution? People like Sting in the pop world do it; perhaps at the high end we’re too arty-farty?”

Well, one answer is to match the pop world in the size of your ambition, your use of technology and, dare I say it, in the truculant use of the title, Winners. This one-off world premiere brings the words and musics of survivors of great tragedies together on screen in Brisbane, directed by Terracini. 9/11’s Ground Zero was just yesterday compared to Ayuthaya’s 18th Century destruction in Thailand. Dresden was incinerated in 1944, Maralinga atomised in the 50s and Sharpville shot down in the 60s. But the experience of survival produces common cause, it would seem, epitomised by blind Yami Lester, interviewed by Terracini in the blinding desert, declaring his happy acceptance of all that happened. “How much more important is that than our jingoistic joy when we beat the Solomons in the Commonwealth Games”, says Terracini. And his challenge has been taken up by the Pompidou Centre in Paris, who’ve bought Winners for next October.

Another answer is to get down a bit. And just as Terracini was determined to prove that “every city has its own culture” in the Queensland Music Biennial: “first identify it, then bring in professionals to help illuminate it.” He’s now trying the same for Brisbane’s suburbs. “I’d like to have done something in every ward, but we can only afford uniquely chosen events in 10 of them. It’s a really interesting question for me as to why people live in a particular suburb, why it’s right to have opera in Brookfield and a skateboard musical in Coorparoo? And I don’t think that reflecting these differences is ghettoising cultures as the old Shell Folkloric events tended to. People can always go from one to another.”

Interestingly, Energex, which used to be the naming rights sponsor of the whole Brisbane event in previous director Tony Gould’s day, has now accepted Terracini’s decision not to sell the festival’s name but to put its name to the “Positive Energy Across Brisbane” program rather than either the high or experimental arts.

It’s in the latter area that we find proof of Lyndon Terracini’s assertion that “I haven’t gone out of my way to soothe the audience. Tony Gould set up the festival brilliantly. But society has changed in response to what he offered, and it’s time to move on.” Most notably, Brisbane’s education system has changed in creating the Queensland University of Technology’s Creative Industries hub. The festival brings its graduates back on campus to give focus to its ongoing work.

For instance, Deep Blue is an actual ARC research project in which Professor Andy Arthurs is trying to create a sustainable orchestra for the 21st century. This one contains a fifth electronics section, a big coordinated light show on screens, previews at which the audience can help to develop the performance and the prospect that the resulting band could play the world like Arthurs’ similarly crafted and superbly marketed Ten Tenors.

Cheryl Stock’s Accented Body is yet another event with screens as she goes live in 3 different countries to see whether dancing bodies can interact virtually as well as live. “It’s a fascinating use of technology to watch a body from a huge distance away,” says Terracini, “just making patterns of movement like a chessboard; and then bring it right up to touching distance.” Somehow this is a promenade event as well as online.

But then you can get right down and virtually dirty with Intimate Transactions, where you go one to one in hyperspace with someone else in Cairns, and every action of theirs has an effect on you in Brisbane.

The final two QUT works were both created elsewhere by graduates, and Terracini is delighted to bring them back to reflect the institution to the community. Unspoken has won a heap of awards in Sydney for Rebecca Clarke’s poignant solo text and performance about growing up with a severely disabled brother; and Clare Dyson’s dance about depression, Churchill’s Black Dog, made in Canberra, is so gorgeous visually, according to Terracini, that the terrifying isolation caused by depression somehow becomes an uplifting experience.

But perhaps the major event that’s challenging stereotypes is Mabou Mines’ Dollhouse, an even more radical take on Ibsen’s original than the Adelaide Festival version from Berlin. Somehow Lee Breuer, who’s been reconceiving the classics in New York since 1970 has never been to Australia. Now he comes with a cast of male dwarfs to reflect both the stunted condition of the patriarchy and the infantilisation of men that women don’t seem able to resist. Apparently there’s even a line or two in Ibsen to justify such extreme casting and the production wowed them even in Ibsen’s homeland of Oslo.

From even further back in time, Sophocles’ Oedipus plays have been mined by the much younger American Anonymous Ensemble to satirise the Iraq War and the society of Homeland that’s been created to support it by the Neo-Cons. “An Orwellian American Idol” is how Terracini describes this upbeat MTV take on Weimar cabaret.

Can the local avant garde compete? It will be interesting to see how the Elision Ensemble fares as they celebrate their 20th birthday (see page 35). They’re Brisbane natives these days, but they’ve never played their opera, Moon Spirit Feasting at home before, while taking it all round the world. Magic-realist writer Beth Yahp and composer Liza Lim pooled their Chinese genes over a story about which no two Chinese are ever said to totally agree: how Chang-O became the Woman in the Moon.

Adventurous Brisbane media artist Craig Walsh (his Cross-reference, currently touring to the UK, is the cover image for this edition of RealTime), features twice in the festival, providing visual design for Johnno and taking those images and transforming them in Aloof, a major installation at the entrance to the Brisbane Powerhouse. “By pushing out of the theatre like that”, explains Terracini, “I hope he’ll give people a way into the piece.”

Finally, in respect of Indigenous presence, the Brisbane Festival ‘06 appears to have but a token smoking ceremony, leaving the field to Rhoda Roberts’s Dreaming Festival, up the road at Woodford. Of course, Lyndon Terracini was able to disabuse me: the Maralinga episode of Winners involves Yami Lester and family. But he was also keen to reveal the development of a Memorandum of Understanding between the Festival and Indigenous Australia which he hopes will lead to significant contributions in 2 years time. “There were problems between the Festival and the community”, he admits. “But I’d involved Cherbourg (the notorious dumping place for Queensland’s Aborigines) in the Music Biennial, so I knew it was possible, if I put myself on the line, to get them to feed a lot back in so that we can work things out together.”

A man stands on a burning chair screaming at the national palace through closed gates. A body is draped, arms spread as if impaled on the bars of the gate. Notes from the audience about education are glued to the bars.

Rows of old style wooden desks from Dutch colonial times are set up like a classroom with blackboard and teacher’s desk, in front of the Jogjakarta Parliament building. A group of blue and white uniformed students, arms and legs in bandages, march under the regimental instruction of their teacher/commander. Their faces blanked out by tall white hoods, they are marched to the desks where their berating instruction continues.

Men swing from ropes hanging from tall banyan trees. They come dangerously close to crashing into the desks, each other, the trees and the audience. Then the inevitable happens. Two of the men collide. One falls to the ground. A pool of blood spreads out across the asphalt from the back of the man’s head. The other dangles unconscious in his rope. This part of the performance wasn’t planned, but this is performance art Indonesian style, where anything can happen.

Perfurbance is a new festival organised by Iwan Wijono and Ronald Apriyon of the Performance Klub, a group of Jogjakarta artists who want to take art out of conventional spaces and into the street.

Perfurbance#1 in 2005 had a similar format. Around 30 artist/performers were invited to submit proposals for 10-minute performance pieces in outdoor locations around Jogjakarta.
Iwan Wijon

In April this year, performances took place in 3 locations: the grounds of DPR, the local Parliament in front of the National Palace gates on Malioboro Street and in the bookshop street behind. In case you didn’t know, Malioboro is the famous street of Jogja leading to the Kraton, the Sultan’s palace, and is alive and bustling at all hours with vendors, becak (pedicab), andong (horse and carriage), street food and masses of motorbikes and cars cruising its length just to see what’s happening. On any Sunday an audience is assured and crowds gathered to watch local artists and a couple of guest performers—myself and Seiji Shimoda, a noted Japanese performance artist who is also director of Nipaf, Japan’s twice yearly performance arts festival.

Seiji travels internationally performing his art and has interesting things to say about how culture and censorship mould the different tastes and personalities of performance art in all the countries he visits.

In Indonesia, as one audience member noted, you can always count on pissing and penises, blood and fire and a degree of body mutilation. The blood spilt when the flying tree swingers crashed is characteristic of the wild nature of some of the performance art seen here. There is nothing chaotic, however, about the way this festival is organised. On little to no budget it pays its performers a token fee (50,000 rupiah or AUD$7), provides lunch, produces posters and programs, pays for performance permits and produces a VCD-ROM for each performer. It also gives its performers a theme to work with. Last year it was urbanisation. This year it’s the industrialisation of education.

As the day progressed artists performed their work in different classroom arrangements in one of the locations. The desks were then piled into a truck and carried on to the next place.

One artist in school uniform sat alone in the desks pretending to be a good student, working on his laptop until it dawned on the audience that he was watching porn. A crowd then gathered to watch with him. A woman watched cartoons on a monitor placed on piles of books on the teacher’s desk while another stepped from desktop to desktop dressing in layers of coloured school skirts and cutting up standard text books with scissors. Another artist crawled through the desks, asking the audience to cut his skin and cover him with crushed chalk before placing him in a cardboard box.

There was body painting, spray painting and proclamations, and ideas about the education system were taped, eaten, shouted, waved and burned as the audience gathered and dispersed again.

Jogja, a university town overflowing with students, artists and street performers, is accustomed to this kind of thing and the hard core audience stayed to the end to catch the dusk performance of Seiji Shimoda. Stepping up onto the teacher’s desk, he used his body alone to display the tensions of a man trying to fit himself impossibly into a frame.

More performances followed as night fell. Rose petals flew into the air, fire, smoke from a hookah, kisses through plastic and the fate of a lone roast chicken on the sidewalk were all remembered. As the last performance faded into the dark we all took our places behind the Perfurbance banner for photos, and the ongoing discussion among participants and audience about what makes good or true performance art continued on into the night.

The experienced artists, including Iwan Wijono, who performs internationally, Ronald Apriyon who is about to perform in Japan’s Nipaf festival, and Seiji Shimoda all have something in common. Their presence as performers comes from an intense focus and commitment to a single idea. As a result you are left with an image, a taste, an experience or a feeling, so strong it stays with you like a dream image. Whether you recognise it, understand it or process it at the time doesn’t matter, for performance art often works best when it cannot immediately be explained but instead wakes you up to a new way of looking at the world around you.

Spending the day like this with Indonesian performance artists has the same effect. It changes you, and you can’t help but be moved by the commitment they all have to producing their art. While the intense energy of their work comes from celebrating a new freedom of expression following the years of repression and censorship of the old Suharto regime, there is still little or no support for artists, only the cold comfort that conservative forces in government are rallying again to bring in new anti-pornography laws that will seriously hamper the work of all artists in this country. Hence the flavour of performance art in Indonesia is always political. Whether carrying a direct message to the powers that be or reflecting a past of violence, pain and neglect, these performers represent a spirit that pervades all Indonesian life—the will to survive against all odds and laugh in the face of impossibility.

As Australian performance artists only a few hours’ plane ride away, we have the opportunity to experience this spirit and the vibrant atmosphere of Jogjakarta’s arts communities. This year’s festival was spontaneously supported at the last moment by a handful of Aussie performers and by RealTime. The organisers of next year’s festival invite more Australian performance artists to be involved.

Note: Performance Klub members survived the recent earthquake and are carrying out volunteer work in affected areas. They badly need donations to get kerosene, food and tents to those left homeless. Please email Jan Cornall whwn@jancornall.com to arrange a direct donation

The EPIC (Emerging Producers in Community) initiative was let loose on the cultural landscape in 2004 developed by multiple departments within Australia Council—the former Audience and Market Development Division (AMD), the Community Cultural Development Board (CCDB), the New Media Arts Board (NMAB) and the Policy Communication Research Division (PCR). Well named, its aims are certainly challenging: professional development for emerging producers, curators and community cultural development workers, creating projects utlising new media art in rural and remote Australia. Oh, and where possible, get the youth involved too. No mean feat for an experienced producer, let alone an emerging one—you have to be 30 or under. The producers undertake internships or mentorships with appropriate arts organisations, and then devise a series of activities or projects to develop within particular regions, frequently extending that organisation’s reach into areas they have not been able to tackle. Nine producers have taken up the challenge so far.

Western Australia is well-suited for the EPIC program with 2 consecutive producers placed at IASKA, and one at Artrage. IASKA (International Art Space Kellerberrin Australia is situated 210kms east of Perth. IASKA has a strong residency program for national and international artists so EPIC producer’s role is to develop engagement between the visiting artists and the community through workshops, projects, education and other access opportunities. The first round placed Felena Alach at the centre in 2004/5, followed by Amanda Alderston. A key project for Alderston so far has been working in conjuction with artist-in-residence Nigel Helyer who created a temporary FM radio station in the main street airing material collected from locals. For this Alderston initiated a youth radio project Midnight Cries—an 18-part mini drama written and produced by local students. In May she will work with WA artist Bennett Miller for the Playing Up program exploring “sport as the means through which young people in rural and remote communities explore and develop personal identity and interpersonal relationships.” She has also managed to secure funding for Zones of Engagement—a large scale project planned for 2006-2007 involving 2 Australian and 2 international artists from the residency program, and research scientists from CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems working “with local youth, land care groups and rural students to research the interaction between natural and human living environments in the Wallatin/O’Brian catchment.” A key to the success of both Alderston’s and Alach’s mentorships is that that their roles are integrally linked to the everyday business of IASKA and there is a continuing community engagement with secession between producers factored in. (www.iaska.com.au)

While Artrage is based in Perth, Ro Alexander’s EPIC project is expanding the organisation’s reach to Geraldton, 440kms north of Perth, and is in partnership with the Geraldton Regional Art Gallery. Since 2005 Alexander has been working on Audiosity, with artists Josh McAuliffe, Tomàs Ford and young people sampling the sounds of the town: “on the streets, down the beach, at the crayfish factory, the wheat silos and in the bush…During workshops the samples have been cut, stretched, affected, re pitched and rearranged into a range of rhythmic and ambient loops, as well as full sound works.” The results have 2 manifestations, one an interactive sculptural instrument designed by McAuliffe, programmed by Chris McCormick exhibited in the gallery until June 9; and online at NOISE as an interactive sequencer from June 10 until 2008. It will also be shown later in the year in Perth during the Northbridge Festival. Meanwhile Alexander is continuing to work as an associate producer at Artrage. (www.artrage.com.au)

Across in South Australia, Sasha Grbich has joined with ANAT (Australian Network for Art and Technology) to develop the pixel.play project. Working in Whyalla (396km northwest of Adelaide) and Port Lincoln (646km northwest) Grbich will facilitate intensive workshops for young artists to develop creative content for mobile phones. The outcome will include exhibitions within the regional communities and in Adelaide at the Come Out Festival in 2007. Due to the emergent nature of mobile phone art, Grbich found that no SA-based artists felt suitably skilled in this area so before going into the communities she actually had to set up train-the-trainer workshops led by with the UK group the-phone-book.ltd in December 2005. Workshops in the communities are set to kick off in July this year. Already looking ahead, she is also trying to secure funding for the sequel, portable worlds, “an extensive regional touring exhibition and skills development program engaging mobile and wireless projects.” (www.anat.org.au)

Queensland’s EPIC producer is Thea Bauman. Mentored by MAAP (Multimedia Art Asia Pacific) and with a key partnership with Queensland State Library she is developing Manhua Video Wonderland. Drawing inspiration from graphic novels, gaming, gamics and fan fiction, Bauman will be co-ordinating mobile workshops in video and animation in venues such as hybrid noodle bars, manga cafes and LAN/gaming arcades. The resulting screen and web works will be distributed via MAAP, (Youth Internet Radio Network) and various other media-based festivals, with the potential for other education-based outcomes. (www.maap.org.au)

Pip Shea has recently finished her EPIC internship with Next Wave facilitating BITSCAPE—a program of events across 3 regional areas: the Macedon Ranges, the La Trobe Valley in Victoria and Wagga Wagga in NSW. She says: “We tried to keep the workshop program flexible as conditions, access and skill levels varied from group to group. The workshops explored animation, blogging, digital audio, digital video, stencilling and image making.” Each region had a slightly different final outcome; in the Latrobe Valley, work by Koorie students of the Woolum Bellum Campus were projected onto the TRUenergy power station; in Wagga Wagga, works were projected on to the Civic Theatre; and in the Macedon Ranges the creations were used as projections for a live theatre performance. Components from all regions were also brought together in an exhibition at Experimedia at the State Library of Victoria, during the Next Wave festival. An impressive website also documents the elements allowing the communities to see their contributions to the combined project. (www.nextwave.org.au/bitscape/)

Interestingly, part of Shea’s team was Ian Corcoran, one of the first round of EPIC producers, working with Experimenta in 2004/5 in Warnambool which involved training local artists in new media practices so that this skills base developed in the region. Corcoran is continuing to work in this area producing projects for Artrage (see RT 70, p12) and Liquid Aesthetics for the Midsumma Festival (RT72, p26).

Sara Boniwell has also finished her time as EPIC producer. Boniwell, mentored by 24HR art (Darwin), developed a partnership with the Deadly Mob (Alice Springs) to work further on the Youth Out Bush Project, conducting workhops in sound and video and touring media-based works around remote Indigenous communities in Central Australia. (www.24hrart.org.au, www.deadlymob.org) Daniel Flood from Victoria is just finishing up the DIGITAL GRAFFITI through Franskton Arts Centre on, running skills-based workshops with at-risk youth in the area with an extended exhibition outcome at the Glass Studio.

And in NSW… well. Besides Pip Shea’s slip across the boder to Wagga Wagga, there hasn’t been a NSW EPIC producer. Electrofringe/ Octapod was approach for the first round when I was one of the directors however the mentor model that the initiative proposed just didn’t work for us. Octapod was run by volunteers and the directors of EF receive honoraria so the idea of a paid mentee created an imbalance. Also the EPIC initiative required that the producer extend the current program, and once again, this seemed beyond the current organisation’s capacity. However as Octapod has undergone considerable infrastructure change over the last 2 years, EPIC may sit better within the cultural ecology now. The fact that no other organisation has either been interested or successful does raise questions as to whether the model can be adapted to fit different situations.

In October 2005 all the producers came together in Perth as part of Artrage for a Think Tank in order do a running assessment of the initiative. I was invited as a guest to share my experiences with Electrofringe in 2003/4 and perhaps offer a NSW perspective. By this stage 3 of the producers had just finished their projects so it provided a valuable exchange of handy tips and inspirational experiences. The most pressing issues that arose were (as in all areas of the arts) the matter of raising enough funding. All of the projects augment the established programs of their hosts, and as these are often key organisations there are restrictions on seeking funding from the same artform board. Thus producers have to investigate state and local government options, as well as health, education, philanthropic and other non arts-based options. But as Marshall Heald from Noise (also a guest speaker at the Think Tank) stated, that’s the job of being a producer, securing the cash. The other issue is that none of the mentor organisations besides IASKA are based in the regions. Not only does this mean a lot of travel time and expense, but perhaps more importantly, the producers are always coming in from the outside, trying to quickly gauge the temper of a community, find the right access points and gain trust. This is also problematic for sustaining relations with communities. Also raised, was the problem that some of the mentor organisations did not have prior CCD experience or focus, so that the producers really are forging new, and frequently tricky territory less supported than they had assumed. Of course some of issues can be ameliorated if key partnerships are formed in the regional areas. Discussion also revealed that perhaps one year was actually not long enough to develop the projects, particularly within the cycle of funding deadlines. Overall, the producers have found (or are finding) the experience to be incredibly rewarding. Those who have finished are continuing to work in the area either freelance or in continuing relationships with their host organisation.

So in the ever-shifting landscape of new media funding is this an ongoing initiative? According to Nina Stromqvist, the EPIC project manager for the Inter Arts Office, the Australia Council is pleased with the progress and will be announcing 4 new producers and organisations for 2006-2007 very soon. A welcome sign of support for community cultural development and new media arts.

At exactly 5pm on March 13, 2006, the computers in the State Library of South Australia shut down. No advance warning, just a blank screen. The person taking notes for the final session of the Hard Copy workshop sat bolt upright as the data projector defaulted to blue. “Errr… we’ve been continually saving this I hope.” Vain hope as it turned out. Given the day’s discussions with regards to the important role of the library in the process of archiving this seemed like just a little too much irony.

Hard Copy was organised by Lizzie Muller and Melinda Rackham as part of ANAT’s [Media State] program run in association with the 2006 Adelaide Festival of the Arts. The workshop was facilitated by Roger Malina, editor of the US periodical Leonardo, and its aims were to provide an overview of the state of interdisciplinary publishing in Australia and to provide participants with an opportunity to contribute to a dialogue about new models. It also aimed to develop new partnerships between organisations and individuals active in the field. The workshop was preceded by a discussion on the Fibreculture list led by Malina and the other facilitators; Lizzie Muller, Keith Gallasch, Linda Carroli and myself. An ongoing report on the outcomes of the workshop will be developed on the wiki on the Fibreculture site and it is hoped that a permanent resource will emerge from this (http://wiki.fibreculture.org/index.php/ Hard_Copy_Workshop_2006).

The workshop itself was divided into 3 themes that looked at interdisciplinary publishing from the point of view of archiving and distribution, research, scholarship and their dissemination, criticism and readerships. Given the breadth of the themes, it’s not surprising that the day’s discussions were far ranging and detailed. Rather than attempt their faithful reproduction, I’ll focus on a few salient points.

From the outset, the question of language and the definition of terms occupied both the discussants on the list prior to the event and those present at the workshop in Adelaide. Andrew Murphie asked whether the use of the term ‘transdisiplinarity’ was more appropriate than ‘interdisciplinarity.’ “Put simply”, he wrote, “if interdisciplinarity allows an impossibly smooth communication between different disciplines, often by imposing some kind of recognition metrics across the whole, transdisciplinarity is about how things cut across disciplines and transform them, moment by moment. Of course, their processes—including legitimation and so on—are constantly transformed as well. This would include publishing.” Although not explicitly addressed at the workshop, Andrew’s point could have framed many of the discussions that took place on the day.

How, for example, do we allow for the transformation of academic writing by new technologies rather than trying to make new modes of writing fit into outdated but recognisable academic constructs? Even further to this, how do we then get the academy and those who fund research to recognise these new modes of writing as legitimate? As many of the workshop participants noted, new technologies for publishing not only allow for different outcomes in terms of writing but can in fact also produce new ways of thinking about writing. Writing is not always about something, as Linda Marie Walker put it. An instrumentalist approach to writing fails to recognise writing as research rather than writing about research. This was a point also made by Ross Gibson when he talked about the need for a more immersed critical writing to balance out the over-emphasis on critical distance in academic writing that has emerged in the last 150 years. He argued that the kind of writing called for in interdisciplinary publishing is reflective, active and immersed writing that helps the reader to think rather than telling the reader what to think. For Gibson, however, new technologies for publishing can actually hinder this kind of writing because they emphasise speed rather than reflection and development.

Questions about the potentials created by the use of digital technologies in research and publishing, however, did generate a good deal of discussion on the day. These discussions ranged from the appropriate use of terms such as ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ to describe off and online forms of publishing (does the term ‘soft’ devalue online publishing, for example) through to questions of authentication and reputation in online and collaborative publishing environments. And, of course, the archive is critical to the entire project of online publishing. Katie Cavanagh warned that we are living in a digital ‘dark age’ where the amount of content published is exceeding already its ability to be stored and retrieved effectively. How we address this problem is crucial if what we create now is to survive into the future.

Following on from this, questions about how we sustain publications, and in particular specialised, academic or niche publications, in a rapidly contracting funding environment were also addressed. As both Sam de Silva and Andrew Murphie pointed out, we are approaching a time when we may have to imagine a world where there is no funding or institutional support. As an adjunct to this, the development and maintenance of readerships/audiences is crucial if interdisciplinary research is to develop an interface with the broader community. As Lizzie Muller pointed out, there is a need for a public discourse that is still thoughtful and not merely popular. How all of this will transform Keith Gallasch’s publishing “ecology”—“the patterns of mutualism, dependency, fuelling, parasitism … in a system and between overlapping systems” (Fibreculture list, 11.03.2006, http://fibreculture.org/pipermail/) is anyone’s guess. As his post also notes, it’s a challenge that this very publication is facing as it continues to work to “bring audiences into the loop of critical engagement” in the face of new models and methods of delivery.

Hard Copy, the event, was an intensive and inspiring day. The issues that were raised both on the day and on the Fibreculture list need to continue to be addressed. Hopefully this is just the beginning of an ongoing engagement with these critical issues and ideas.

Hard Copy, organisers, Lizzie Muller and Melinda Rackham, ANAT’s [Media State] program, 2006 Adelaide Festival of the Arts with support from Creativity and Cognition Studios, University of Technology, Sydney, the Fibreculture network and Smart Internet CRC.

At her floor talk, new media artist, r e a, stands before a map on the wall, pointing to the area she hails from, the country of the Gamilaraay/Wailwan people. At the entrance to her exhibition at Sydney Opera House is a small black and white photograph of the class of 1970 at Coonabarabran Primary. She’s the kid at the end of the second row and somewhere in the same iconic image are Sharmaine, Maria and Susan—Aboriginal girls from the gang she hung out with. Though she’s a local, and well regarded in her own community, r e a’s still a puzzle—a woman who left to pursue a career in an artform few in her community understand. “Everyone thinks if you’re an artist, you have to be a painter or if you’re carrying a camera, you must be a filmmaker.” Then there’s the name. Having discarded surnames r e a has chosen a single moniker with gaps between the letters and no capital. It suits her, expresses her identity, in a modest kind of way. But in Aboriginal culture, she says, the individual is an unfamiliar concept. Everyone is connected to family, community and to country.

r e a’s creative life has taken her a long way from Coonabarabran. Recipient of a New Media Arts Fellowship this year, she spends a lot of time in the US and has recently been studying at San Francisco Institute of Art as part of an American/Australian Fulbright Scholarship for research and development in creative technologies. She returns home regularly. On one such visit in 2001, she sought out her old schoolmates, this time with the idea of recording interviews with them about their connections to the place that none save her has left. This material forms the basis of gins_leap / dubb_speak

I enter the multi-channel DVD installation through an ante-room, past the map, past a wall of words expressing female connection to country: gamilaraay wirringgaa dhayaamba-li wadhagii (gamilaraay women whisper secrets). Once inside I take my place in a circle of illuminated stones, enveloped by the 4 large screens, turning as I’m called to take in each, sometimes one at a time, at other times, all four at once. Sometimes I simply listen as Lea Collins’ recordings of birdsong, wind or water fill the space. No faces appear.

It’s a gentle, reflective work that slows you down, invites you to listen to the land speaking through the voices of women who love this place, though they’ve thought of leaving. They speak of shared memories, of the joy of returning after absence as well as thwarted ambition and sad family memories. There’s pride in the regeneration of languages thought lost. As the camera gathers and layers images—feet on stones, fingers sifting earth, scooping pebbles from water, cradling blossoms and seed pods—the 4 women weave together again the strands of a complex and enduring relationship.

In June-September, dLux media arts will tour gins_leap / dubb_speak to regional centres in NSW. Sadly there’s no venue in Coonabarabran to show this work but it’ll be touring to Newcastle, Moree and Broken Hill and r e a will attend the opening nights at all venues.

gins_leap / dubb_speak, creative director, artist r e a, technical designer, programmer Stephen Jones, dramaturg/project coordinator Gail Kelly, sound design Lea Collins, co-editor Peter Oldham. In collaboration with dLux media arts and the Sydney Opera House gins_leap / dubb_speak was included in the 2006 Message Stick Program, May 12-28

Don’t think this is a show about Berlin.
<img src="http://www.realtime.org.au/wp-content/uploads/art/3/317_conner_van_lieshout.jpg" alt="Erik van Lieshout, installation view of
Schöne Grüße aus Chemnitz-Rostock (working title), 2006″>

Erik van Lieshout, installation view of
Schöne Grüße aus Chemnitz-Rostock (working title), 2006

The curators of the 4th Berlin Biennial issue this warning as part of their statement in the exhibition catalogue. They can be excused for worrying that the local context and history could overshadow the work. This is, after all, Berlin—a city that bore witness to the Reichstag fire and the fall of the Berlin Wall, evolved into a mecca for the international creative class and is now riven by joblessness and racist attacks. Your humble art hack on the beat can be excused for thinking there’s quite a lot to write about before he even gets to the artwork.

The official programme of the Biennial was staged along a single city street, Auguststrasse, and this concise structure was one of its greatest strengths. The journey from one end of the street to the other was as much an urban archaeology experience as an international biennial. The exhibition made use of venues that elicited narratives from the local context, such as a shipping container, a graveyard, numerous private apartments and a former Jewish girls’ school, in addition to the KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Of these, the disused school provoked perhaps the most comment. The building was one of the last buildings opened before the Nazis seized power and the catalogue tells us that it “remained open throughout the 1930s, despite the increasing persecution of Jews by the Nazi regime.” Many of the rooms had paint peeling from the ceiling, wallpaper hanging off the walls, strange fixtures of indeterminate use. At one point I spent several minutes in a disused toilet before realising that it wasn’t an artist’s installation.

This momentary confusion would no doubt have been welcomed by the curators. Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gionni and Ali Subotnick have earned curatorial notoriety in recent years with the Wrong Gallery. With one square metre of exhibition space, it was billed as the smallest gallery in New York: “The Wrong Gallery is the back door to contemporary art and it’s always locked.” To ensure that the Biennial lived up to this irreverent precedent, the curators established a rogue gallery in Berlin under the international art brand “Gagosian”, without, of course, official permission from Larry G himself. Their love of the unconventional also came across through the inclusion of works like Martin Creed’s The Lights Going on and Off. When an installation consists of a blinking light fixture installed in a rickety 1920s German institutional building, the line between art and life becomes difficult to detect. To make matters worse, the work was out of order during my visit: Creed’s lights were simply stuck in the ‘off’ position.

Grim sights

Don’t let these gestures fool you into thinking the Berlin Biennial was a rip-roaring good time. This was a rough-hewn exhibition that wasn’t afraid to confront the absurd and tragic futility of the human condition. Otto Mühl’s orgy smorgasbord; Klara Liden’s manic exercise routine set on a Swedish subway; Jan Toomik ice skating in an endless loop while naked—the works in this exhibition suggested that the line between human and animal behaviour, between mice and man may not be as clearly marked as one might like to think.

Bruce Conner suggests that even disaster can be absurd in his film work Crossroads (1976), drawn from archival footage of the first postwar A-bomb tests. The nuclear test is replayed again and again, from a number of different angles, in a pulsing visual rhythm. As I watched, the image of the mushroom cloud gradually lost its associations with disaster and began to have a hypnotic effect on me—due in no small part to the urgent soundtrack by avant-garde musicians Terry Riley and Patrick Gleeson. When I got back to my hotel that night, I was still impressed enough with the piece to check the web for more information on these two and was not disappointed—terryriley.com is well worth a visit for anyone interested in psychedelic wallpaper or audio tracks with names like Conquest of the War Demons (see Greg Hoooper’s review of Terry Riley’s Brisbane performances on page 33).

While Conner’s work undercuts the factual nature of his source imagery, a well-known piece by Gillian Wearing trades on the supposed objectivity of the video image. In the 3-screen video installation Drunk, Wearing’s camera captures alcoholics from her South London neighbourhood in a sterile, white environment. The scale and installation style of the piece gives the impression that these men are actually in the gallery space itself. This illusion creates a sense of awkwardness, perhaps because the men are being callously scrutinised on camera, or perhaps partly because these men are unpalatable for a gallery context.

Erik van Lieshout, an unpalatable character himself, is also known for creating uncomfortable portraits of subjects including Moroccan prostitutes, Dutch mental patients, his brother and most prominently, himself. Each of his videos is structured as a series of shots that flow by in rapid succession offering glimpses of events that seem to be triggering a nervous breakdown on the part of the artist. His new piece for the Berlin Biennial was no exception. In this work, van Lieshout travelled through Germany by bicycle “to get to know his neighboring country.” The resulting work offers a snapshot of van Lieshout’s own intolerance and that of his neighbours. He criticises a man on the street who appears to be out of work and yet owns an iPod; he gets beat up; he worries about his pee being yellow.

Van Lieshout’s piece is presented in a shipping container viewing environment that could best be described as abject. Only a handful of viewers could enter at a time, and the wait for a screening was at least an hour throughout the opening days. This problem of hundreds of visitors trying to enter unorthodox spaces and private apartments was one logistical downside to the event. The single interactive artwork at the entire Biennial was displayed in one such private apartment and the context did the work no favours. Damián Ortega’s furniture works were designed to shake whenever a person approached. It made a certain kind of sense to show the work in a domestic space, but it also ensured that the only people who would go to the trouble to queue and see the work would be those who already had some idea of what to expect. Perhaps the installation would have benefited from the element of surprise if it were shown in a more accessible venue.

More successfully spooky than the moving chairs was Aïda Ruilova’s new film work, an homage to her mentor, French horror auteur Jean Rollin. Ruilova’s past work has relied heavily on the repetition of sound, filled with staccato mantras such as, “You’re pretty!” Her new piece makes use of a similar audio rhythm, but instead of spoken mantras, the soundtrack is composed of small noises recorded in close-up, such as the unzipping of a fly. The work centres on an erotic scene between a young woman and a seemingly dead Rollin, shot in his Paris apartment. The young woman is continually on the verge of expressing her passion through kisses and caresses, but each time she is about to complete these gestures, Ruilova cuts the shot sharply. The inability of the protagonist to kiss or touch the object of her lust imbues the piece with the sense of obsessively repressed sexual desire.

Alternative viewing

One of the most interesting projects at the Biennial was not a part of the official program at all, but an independent exhibition. The Treasures Project was an exhibition of 4 young artists from Berlin selected by Janet Cardiff, Rebecca Horn and Robert Wilson. The show was installed in the basement of an old brewery, the Alte Königstadt Brauerei. Visitors descended several flights of stairs emerging into a dark, labyrinthine vault. To navigate their way to the exhibition space, they had to follow a trail of small light fixtures that were extinguished as each visitor moved through the space. The technology behind it was simple—the kind of motion sensors that are most commonly found in the driveways of suburban houses—but it made a big psychological impact.
Nebelwelten

The Treasures Project included 3 works, each of which played up to the texture of the exhibition space itself. Erik Bünger’s installation Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground used computer controllers to determine the speed of 3 turntables, each playing a recording by Blind Willie Johnson to create an ominous choir that echoed throughout the space. Andrea Loux’s video installation Nebelwelten filled a subterranean chamber with a large screen projection of fog covered landscapes. The pastel palette of the video very nearly complimented the colour scheme of the subterranean vault where it was installed, creating the illusion of a tunnel looking out into open space. A third piece, Performance Envelope, created a theatrical underground laboratory for the cultivation of genetically modified plants used for detecting the presence of land mines. Visitors were invited to literally watch grass grow—and explore the secret narratives suggested by the piece. Upon leaving, visitors passed through a final room where exhibition organisers Anna von Stackelberg and Louise Witthöft had covered a long banquet table with hundreds of candles.

The Treasures Project marked a sharp contrast with the official programme of the Berlin Biennial, which seemingly betrayed a desire to return to a pre-technological era. The exhibition suffered from the inclusion of too many works with a self-conscious aura of age, giving the impression of a slightly ham fisted attempt by the curators to evoke a sense of history. On the other hand, the Biennial’s biggest successes stemmed from its traditional approach. The narrative structure of the exhibition, the in-depth engagement with the local context, and the care with which the works were selected and presented, made this exhibition a success on many levels.

4th Berlin Biennial, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, March 25 – June 5, 2006; The Treasures Project, Alte Konigstadt Brauerei, March 23 – April 24

We often think of technology as ultimately impersonal, and of having a dehumanising effect upon the soul. Cyberspace may create a perceived intimacy—of conversation and communion, even real time vision—but it occurs without skin and touch. It offers the flaneur’s consolation, of being ‘in’ the world but not ‘of’ it; of being a perpetual eavesdropper, voyeur or passerby. And yet in Leah Mercer and Amantha May’s The Physics Project, technology also makes it possible to bridge time and space; and to bridge the metaphysical gap between the old certainties (of knowledge in God) and the great postmodern void.

Two women—one in Brisbane, one in New York—are grieving the loss of people they have loved. The Brisbane woman lost a close friend a decade or so ago and the American woman is haunted by reminders of her mother who died 12 years ago. We learn of these twin narratives in a complex latticework of live performance in Brisbane interspersed with ostensibly real time live streaming broadcasts from Amantha in New York, who is ‘watching’ the show from her loungeroom. A fictionalised extension of her self is performed live; while this fictional self in turn imagines her parents’ courtship in the Yucatan in the 1960s. Mercer directs the piece and relates her own narrative through a woman living in a revolving box on stage who, via video projection, ventures desolately into the crowded and increasingly faceless urban sprawl of the Brisbane CBD.
Hanna Wood, The Physics Project

It takes some time to locate precisely whose story is whose, and what is fiction and what is memoir. The piece is, in many ways, a meditation on the elusiveness of truth and of narrative closure in the cycle of human life and death. Attention to this complexity, though, is richly rewarded as the audience is slowly given the pieces with which to fill in the jigsaw. It is as though Mercer and May provide the borders and it is up to us to complete the picture in any fashion we choose.

Both women are looking for order amid chaos. They turn to maths and science as a means of finding consolation for grief and absence in a world where the range of options (for personal faith) are as infinite as the universe itself. The American finds comfort in mathematical equations; the serendipitous patterns that occur in the infinite configuration of pi seem to hint to her of meaning and order within randomness. The Australian turns to Confucius and Einstein and their theories of time and motion to conclude that the past and present get closer together as time escalates, so that there is ultimately a place where all of our experience converges, and we are reunited with everyone we have ever loved.

As technologically daring as the logistics of this fascinating theatrical rumination are (scenic design complements of Kieran Swann, lighting by Matt Logan, and video by Conan Fitzpatrick), the piece is surprisingly touching. Margi Brown Ash brings her trademark warmth and wisdom to the stage as the narrator who assures us it will all be all right in the end. Pre-recorded telecasts from the American Woman’s (real!) father add a fond patrician gravitas to her narrative. We are reminded too—in case we were needing further proof—that technically it is ‘yesterday’ right now in the live streaming from New York and that the light we see reflected in the stars at night belongs to suns that have already died. The past and the future are constantly with us. The Physics Project is a unique, transporting and surprisingly consoling theatrical experience. One hopes there is an afterlife for this work too.

The Physics Project, creators Leah Mercer and Amantha May, performers Margi Brown Ash, Erica Field, Hanna Wood, Emily Thomas, Errin Rodger, Amantha May, William May, Gracie, Georgia, musicians Gavin Henderson, Sam Kahle, Michael Gray, scenic designer, Keiran Swann, lighting Matt Logan, video Conan Fitzpatrick, composer/sound Robert D Clark, costumes Beck Clark, Megan Wlliams; QUT Loft Theatre, April 6-8

Benedict Andrews is about to make his Melbourne directorial debut with Marius von Mayenburg’s Eldorado for Malthouse. Andrews’ strong body of work has included a commitment to contemporary German plays alongside forays into Brecht, Malraux, Calderon, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Sarah Kane and Caryl Churchill, all with a consistently developing, bold vision.

Melbourne’s radical theatre lineage includes Lindzee Smith, Peter King, Jenny Kemp, Richard Murphet, Barrie Kosky, Nico Lathouris, Margaret Cameron, Douglas Horton and Michael Kantor, and continues in the new generation of theatre magicians John Bailey has been reviewing on these pages. Andrews, a Flinders University Drama School Graduate and former Sydney Theatre Company Associate Director (with Wesley Enoch and the guidance of Stephen Armstrong), will find himself in good company, in a theatre culture which has seen itself as engaged in a European tradition of a very distinctly Australian kind. Not only that, but Andrews, like Kosky, has been developing a life as a director in Europe. His productions in Sydney attracted the interest of Berlin’s Schaubühne, where he has now directed 2 plays including Blackbird by the Scots writer David Harrower (reviewed in RT 71, p10 by Melbourne director Daniel Schlusser) and is looking forward to doing more—and extending his grasp of the German language.

I asked Andrews about the attractions of German theatre and of German plays. As a student he’d been fascinated with Buchner and Brecht, visited Germany and later toured his account of Goethe’s Ur/Faust there. “It’s the only culture in the world where mainstream theatre is radical and intense, and there’s a density of activity like nowhere else. It’s a culture that permits risk, but also the full-time engagement of artists, especially actors. I hadn’t experienced this.”

While searching for the contemporary plays he wanted to direct, Andrews encountered English translations of German plays through London’s Royal Court Theatre, and found the work of Marius von Mayenburg and “a great friendship unsought for.” Andrews premiered the playwright’s Fireface in Australia and David Gieselmann’s Mr Kolpert, which von Mayenburg had premiered as a director in Germany. Von Mayenburg found Andrews’ STC account of Chekhov’s Three Sisters unlike any he had encountered, but felt at home with the director’s vision and an invitation to direct at the Schaubühne later ensued. In turn, Andrews found himself “feeling at home at the Schaubühne, close to the actors with their belief in [artistic director] Thomas Ostermeier’s vision. The directors and writers are of my generation, text-based, and in an intense engagement with theatre making.” Andrews makes it clear, however, that it’s not German theatre alone that interests him, but theatre that challenges him: working in Germany has allowed him to experience the vision of the likes of great Swiss director Christoph Marthaler. He’s also adamant that his interests are not limited to German plays, which leads him to comment that, “anyway, Mr Kolpert is the most un-German of plays.”

From early on, reviewing Andrews’ work in these pages, I saw an integrative vision, a creative deployment of performer, sound, image and mise en scene common to contemporary performance (which Andrews wrote about for RealTime from Europe and New York) which soon grew to become his own. The stage designs had a kinship with contemporary visual arts, design and sound, and the performances were rooted in languages other than naturalism. Andrews says this tendency went back to student days, pre-dating his German encounters, and with a wariness “of theatre that was decorative. Theatre demands to be an artform with every element part of a discourse, a poetry machine, always engaged with the ongoing question of what theatre is.”

Andrews describes von Mayenburg’s Eldorado as “a luminous nightmare”, an experience, I have to say, conjured by a reading of the script alone. He sees himself attracted to plays that have a sense of fable (most evident in Caryl Churchill’s Far Away): “even Blackbird, with its extreme naturalism, has that sense.” How does a fabulist deal with reality? Andrews describes von Mayenburg’s Cold Child as “a fractured cubist nightmare of overlapping realities.” In Eldorado it’s the overlapping of realities (there’s some kind of war going on) and fantasies (what kind of war?), with the play’s opening words conjuring bizarre horrors with kinship to Churchill’s grim fantasia in Far Away.

Another, related preoccupation is with distance. Andrews feels that it’s been common to his work whether it’s emotional distance, which can become explosive, or the distance that keeps us from the brute realities of the Balkan wars or Iraq. In Eldorado, he says, near and far come together in “overlapping cities”, in the kind of world described by urban theorist Paul Virilio. The city in this play is no Eldorado, no city of gold, although it is wished to be by at least one of the characters. It is a city at war, but with few signs of it as its bourgeois inhabitants continue the struggle with art, relationships and the property market. “The play was written March to May 2003”, says Andrews, “when Bush and company were invading Iraq and we were submitted to a constant stream of war pornography in the media, bringing the war near but keeping it far. In his fabulation, von Mayenburg has the city being reconstructed as it’s being annihilated.” Such is the Neo-Con fantasy in Baghdad.

A summary of the plot of Eldorado wouldn’t tell you much; its power and meanings reside in the way it overlaps realities, plays with near and far in the most intimate manner, distorts your sense of time in the curious entries into scenes and the cutting away from them (“it’s not blackout theatre”, declares Andrews), avoids expository explanation and speaks to you through a language that is deceptively lucid and littered with gripping images.

Andrews describes von Mayenburg’s dramaturgy as “cellular”, as always referring to the space around the immediate world of the play, never separate from the larger world, although not literally connected. It’s a dream world, a nightmare of connections and associations, in which, like Noh theatre, ghosts can appear as a matter of course. This connectedness yields what appears to be a nihilistic vision in which, says Andrews, “we are all complicit, we are all guilty, all culpable, as an orgy of annihilation is enacted on a city, but no one person is blamed in Eldorado. That’s for the audience to think about.” There’s something about von Mayenburg’s language, about his vision that Andrews describes as “sophisticated, but crazy, like a child, a child’s eye view” which estranges us from the world, making us look at it again. Thekla, the pianist, haunted by visions of a worsening war, pregnant and alienated by her husband’s secrecy, is losing her art, afraid to “put my hands into that elephant’s mouth.” The feverishness of the language reminds Andrews of Buchner and the young Brecht.

Played through a 12 metre glass wall and radio miked, the otherwise sparely staged Eldorado promises to be quite an experience, not least because it deploys talented performers of the calibre of Gillian Jones, Robert Menzies, Alison Whyte, Bojana Novakovic and Greg Stone.

Malthouse Theatre, Eldorado, writer Marius von Mayenburg, translator Maja Zade, director Benedict Andrews, design Anna Tregloan, lighting Paul Jackson, sound Max Lyandvert, June 10-July 2, www.malthousetheatre.com.au

It was one of those strange times, a couple of months in which much of the work in contemporary performance and theatre I saw didn’t hit the mark. There were exceptions, even if with reservations. At the youth end of the spectrum there was PACT’s Toxic Dreams, a remarkable music theatre venture, and at the other the State Theatre Company of South Australia production of the emotionally and ethically rivetting Who is Sylvia? The Goat, written only a few years ago by Edward Albee, now in his 80th year. But it was dance theatre that excelled, just as we went to print, in the form of Tania Liedtke’s 12th Floor, immaculately made and bravely performed, if to a somewhat dodgy scenario. Like Kate Champion at her best with Force Majeure, or Chunky Move in Tense Dave, this was exhilarating and inspirational theatre (to be reviewed in RT 74).

Toxic Dreams

There has been a toxic airborne event, Seven people have taken refuge in makeshift safe house. Time for a miracle. Or a song.

PACT’s Toxic Dreams, is a nightmare vision—on the promotional postcard and program not even the cockroach (the most likely survivor of nuclear war) has survived this disaster. However, this unrelentingly grim and apparently helpless vision is relieved by a superbly effective exploration of the potential of new music in performance.

This is a world of waste (swathes of unread newspaper) against a dark mural of tired oil derricks and drab pelicans. A jug of water and 7 cups sit centre stage. Each cup is filled and drunk in the course of the performance, each act of drinking possibly a death sentence. Like the paper, the performers are littered across the space, coming into focus primarily in solos or now and then in duets of assault or temporary compassion—cradling, protecting, feeding. Occasionally they are as one, but mostly they signal helplessly, audiences to each other’s passions and fears.

After visiting a sewage plant, a waste disposal site, Lucas Heights and going on a bush trip, 7 writers worked with dramaturg Bryoni Trezise on texts about toxification and intoxication to be used collectively as a libretto for a PACT performance. As often, libretti on the page rarely impress, but in performance they here enjoy the alchemy of Margery Smith’s powerful musical direction for 2 saxophones, electronics and piano. The texts are sung or spoken and, when spoken, the performers’ voices are liberated, extending their range, shifting registers, exploiting acoustic and microphonic spaces. Although articulation and verbal clarity weren’t always sufficiently sharp, intention, shape and strength were-a big vocal step forward for young performers in demanding work.

As ever, PACT’s directors get the most out of their young performers, perhaps here more than ever, Georgie Read excelling in a vertiginous rhythmic flailing high above us and, eslewhere, displaying potent vocal qualities. While individual writing, the matching of words with music and the strategies for enacting them were all admirable, the overall scenario however sometimes lacked shape and intelligibility and the PACT performance vocabulary felt more than familiar. These not inconsiderable complaints aside, Toxic Dreams was a bracing music theatre experience.

The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?

Edward Albee provides a more conventional theatre experience, but one nonetheless full of surprises, not just in content but in construction. That most favored of American stage formulae, the unravelling of a secret is again centrestage. However, the title gives up the secret to allow Albee to focus on just how his characters will reveal and explore it. He deftly moves from social comedy into the kind of verbal viciousness we associate with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, on into dizzying ethical debate and, finally, a ritualistic moment straight out of Greek tragedy (“goat play”). While the set design and spatial deployment of the actors appear less than accommodating, the performances are superb, director Marion Potts drawing out of Victoria Longley and Bill Zappa some of their very best work. Zappa lives his persona of an essentially quiet, forgetful and ruminative middle-aged man, caught out, struggling to understand himself and the violence of other people’s responses to what was for him a transcendant experience before morality kicked in.

From a Distance

Version 1.0 have created an impressive track record with Second Last Supper, CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident) and Wages of Spin. Their discursive but incisive house style, adroit play with forms and media, and a strong sense of ensemble sustain their political drive. From a Distance, however, is not in the race. Inspired by the bad behaviour of an Australian Olympics rower who let her team down and they in turn her, the show begins strongly with a walking dance of meticulous uniformity in which the members collectively stare one of their number down until no-one is left. At the end of From a Distance, the rowing team and management line up to spin their collective taking on the blame for turning on each other and behaving in ways un-Australian, but all still jockeying to stay centrestage. It’s become just too easy to say sorry. It’s in these scenes that you feel close to the material which inspired From a Distance, but in between, for the bulk of the work, you’re somewhere altogether different, at an Australian family barbecue.

Version 1.0 opt for metaphor instead of going at their subject matter, as they usually do, head on. This image of bad domestic behaviour peppered with prejudice, infidelity, petty squabbles and personal quirks, and fuelled by wedge politics, goes nowhere fast, it remains a conceit—a half hour with Kath and Kim’s quickfire satire seems more revelatory. There are brief bursts of insight and some fine, wacky moments from the Fondue Set, like Emma Saunder’s frantic inability to play the game, but it’s not clear what this family adds up to. Nikki Heywood as mum, ironing fatigues and sports jumpers, drolly worries at her son’s primary school experience of being labelled un-Australian by a teacher, and seems momentarily to belong to an altogether different, more politically aware family than this obtuse bunch. If there were too many signs of cut and paste and an inconsistent and under-developed vision (and an unusually weak link for Version 1.0 between live performance and video imagery), we mustn’t get depressed, the occasional defeat will doubtless be corrected on the learning curve. The excellent Wages of Spin is soon go on tour.

Blowback

I wasn’t any happier at Not Yet Its’ Difficult’s Blowback which relentlessly hammered home its dark vision of a US-occupied Australia. As in Version 1.0’s Wages of Spin, the setting is a television studio, though less totally so because it shares the stage with a torture chamber and a war room. Framing these is an Australian TV soap opera suspected of delivering coded signals for terrorist resistance. The torture oscillates between erotic play and rape, and the US officer, Jenny Ripper, is an unfunny relative of the Ripper in Dr Strangelove. Although played with great commitment and realised with deft cinematic shifts of focus, the code-in-the-soap plot was ungainly and Blowback’s agitprop stance and pacing allowed little room for reflection on our complicity in the occupation. Again, the choice of subject matter is spot on, but its handling uncertain. Not everything in the same company’s K appealed to me, but for clarity of intent, nuance, technological engagement and potency of image it far surpassed this new work. John Bailey’s review of the Melbourne season of Blowback appeared in RealTime 65 (page 35).

Silence

Tanya Denny’s account of Suzan Lori Parke’s In the Blood was one of the best shows of 2005. However, her version of Moira Buffini’s Silence did not impress. This much praised British play is an historical comedy, played here as farce, but not convincingly written as one. The acting was exhaustingly big with only Rose Grayson as the girl raised as a boy to become a lord of the manor playing, for the most part, with the requisite subtlety.

The Hanging Man

Also historical, also from the UK, Theatre Improbable’s The Hanging Man. This fable is about an architect who hangs himself when he senses his new cathedral a failure, but lives, ghost-like, until he learns to love life and Death then lets him die. The best thing about The Hanging Man is the theatre as machine. The clever unit set is packed with devices that allow for flight, entrances through the floor and for swift changes of scene. But the inadequate metaphysics, the sluggish pacing, a text-driven revelation, and a final superfluity of effects, weakened the theatre magic and the easy ensemble playing.

Luke Davies’ Stag

Sydney Theatre Company’s PUSH program of plays-in-development is attracting big audiences over its 3-night presentations in the age of participation. All kinds of Q&As, festivals of ideas and other forums are proliferating, developing in parallel with new communications technologies. There’s even a user-pays aspect: $15 a ticket to see a work-very-much-in-progress. Luke Davies’ Stag, about a group of sports day dissidents hiding out, smoking dope and reflecting on the meaning of life at the far end of the school yard, is wonderfully discursive, capturing the power plays and embarrassed confessions of of adolescence. Davies’ language is, as ever, a joy, here focusing on how verbal images grab young minds and enter into circulation. The business of 2 school teachers having an affair is as yet unweildly, there’s a loaded theme pertaining to absent fathers and the resolution in a set of monologues describing what happened to each of the characters reads like author notes. Otherwise Stag looks promising.

Request Program

From the same wing of the STC, Wharf2LOUD, came Brendan Cowell’s production of Franz Xaver Kroetz’s Request Program (1971). Without ever speaking, the lone subject of the play goes about her quiet life, meticulously ordering every object and moment in it until her resolve finally weakens and alcohol and medication beckon. Cowell admirably has Suzi Dougherty maintain her distance from us, she remains a stranger (unlike, say, the confessionalists of Big Brother), but he cannot resist overplaying and parodying the radio request program for lovers and the lonely she listens to, but never visibly reacts to. The sheer strangeness of witnessing such empty privacy is consequently, if not irredeemably (once the radio is turned off), undercut.

Toxic Dreams, director Regina Heilmann, assistant director Alice Osborne, performers Ashley Dyer, Jane Grimley, Lulu Hogg, Gideon Payten Griffiths, Georgie Read, George Root, Hila Sukkar; writers Corin Adams, Christian Brimo, Thao Cao, Lynda Ng, Sarah-Jane Norman, Jon Seltin, Hila Sukkar, saxophones Nathan Henshaw, Andrew Smith, digital musician Andrew Smith; dramaturgy Bryoni Trezise, musical direction Margery Smith, design Claire Sandford, lighting Clytie Smith; PACT Theatre, Sydney, April 6-16

Who is Sylvia? The Goat, writer Edward Albee, , director Marion Potts, performers Bill Zappa, Victoria Longley, Pip Miller, Cameron Goodall, designer Gaelle Mellis, lighting Geoff Cobham, Company B Belvoir, State Theatre Company of South Australia, Seymour Centre, Sydney, April 1-May 7

Version 1.0, From a Distance, devisors, performers Nikki Heywood, Stephen Klinder, Jane McKernan, Jane Phegan, Elizabeth ryan, Christopher Ryan, Emma Saunders, director, producer David Williams, consultant director Yana Taylor, dramaturgy Paul Dwyer, lighting, video Simon Wise, sound Jason Sweeney; co-producer Performance Space, Sydney, April 5-16

Not Yet It’s Difficult, Blowback, writer, director David Pledger, performers Todd MacDonald, Roslyn Oades, Rachel Gordon, Benji McNair, Vivienne Walshe, Luciano Martucci, Tom Considine, Natalie Cursio, Joshua Hewitt, dramaturg Peter Eckersall, lighting Paul Jackson, design David Pledger, costumes Danielle Harrison, sound Lydia Teychenne, film editor Mark Atkin, animation Louise Taube; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, April 26-29

Moira Buffini, Silence, director Tanya Denny, producer Sam Hawker, performers Sophie Cleary, Rose Grayson, Nicholas Papademetriou, Paul Tassone, Andrea Wallis, Johann Walraven, design Jo Lewis, lighting Stephen Hawker, sound Jeremy Silver; B Sharp, Seymour Centre, Sydney, May 5-28

Improbable, The Hanging Man, directed, designed & scripted by Phelim McDermott, Lee Simpson, Julian Crouch; Adventures in the Dark, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, May 4-June 3

Push#1, Stag, writer Luke Davies, director Lee Lewis, Wharf2Loud, Sydney Theatre Company, Wharf2, April 20-22

Franz Xaver Kroetz, Request Program, director Brendan Cowell, performer Suzi Dougherty, designer Genevieve Dugard, lighting Stephen Hawker, sound/composition Basil Hogios, radio show written and performed by Brendan Cowell; Wharf2, Sydney Theatre Company, May 25-June 10

In Francois Truffaut's French New Wave film The 400 Blows (1959), the protagonist, a wayward schoolboy, wags school for the pleasures of exploring the city. At an amusement fair he tries the Rotor ride, climbing into a circular chamber that spins at great speed. Plastered against its side, he whirls round and round, joyously suspended between sky and ground.
LR: Heath Ledger, Abbie Cornish, Luke Davies, Neil Armfield

LR: Heath Ledger, Abbie Cornish, Luke Davies, Neil Armfield

The opening of Candy, the new Australian film directed by pre-eminent Australian theatre director Neil Armfield and based on Luke Davies' novel of the same name, recalls this very image. This time its own protagonists, the equally wayward Candy and Dan, played by Abbie Cornish and Heath Ledger, similarly defy gravity. In this image Armfield finds an eloquent metaphor for the thrill of heroin, and its seductive sensation of suspending time. It's an impossible wish, of course, and the film charts the consequences of Candy and Dan’s spiralling addiction. Candy is soon forced to work as a prostitute in order to fund their habits while Dan scores and occasionally works a scam. The terrible price that this experience exacts on them individually and as a couple is the subject of the film.

Back in 2003 I attended a daylong scriptwriting workshop at Byron Bay with Neil Armfield and Luke Davies, the film’s co-writer. At that time they had already spent 4 years adapting Davies' novel into screenplay form. Candy, originally published in 1998, was Davies' first novel and he had based it on his own experiences as a long-term addict. Producer Margaret Fink was impressed by the book and approached Davies to develop some ideas he might have into screenplays. None of Davies' suggestions matched the singular intensity of the novel but his own initial draft adaptation—which closely replicated the book's episodic structure—needed development to find its cinematic form. It was at this point that Fink introduced Davies to Armfield, an experienced theatre director with a few television credits and they quickly developed a collaborative relationship.

In particular, Armfield and Davies grappled with how best to convert the book's perspective from Dan's introspective and deluded headspace. Davies commented, “Neil expanded the original cast into the circle of family—family is what he loves to explore—and that's when the script was transformed, when it really began to blossom.” They made another crucial change, enhancing substantially the role of Dan's mentor, Casper (performed by Geoffrey Rush, a long-time theatre collaborator of Armfield's), a junkie friend and organic chemistry professor. These changes have shifted much of the story's action from predominantly down-at-heel terraces in Sydney's inner suburbs to a more affluent millieu. Unlike the recent Little Fish (Rowan Woods 2005) that set its own story of heroin use against a bleak backdrop of systemic problems in Sydney's struggling west, Candy’s focus squarely remains the love story between its protagonists. Armfield cited this as what attracted him to the film in the first place. It presented him with a uniquely cinematic opportunity to explore the nature of a sexual relationship, not possible in the theatre.

That central relationship is rendered with great poignancy. While the film is still framed from Dan’s perspective, Cornish’s Candy is the mesmerizing heart of the film. She is by turn youthfully exuberant and full of painful, suppressed emotion. The sparseness of the dialogue makes Cornish’s performance largely one of gesture. It’s remarkable watching her minute shifts in expression as she moves between emotional registers. Ledger likewise inhabits his role with a similar degree of conviction. That we come to like Dan as much as we do attests to Ledger’s ability to play him with surprising compassion. He is a largely thankless character—parasitic and hopelessly passive—for much of the film. But Ledger hones in on Dan’s romanticism; he is an enthusiast. His fervent desire to remain in the moment is a desperate way to avoid thinking too hard about Candy’s sex work in which he is complicit.

The inevitability of the characters’ downward trajectory imbues this love story with a tender melancholy. It’s a minor miracle that our sympathy extends to Candy and Dan for the duration of the film. After all it could be argued that their problems are largely of their own making. Armfield, however, is a compassionate filmmaker and he brings a restrained dignity to the material that includes some difficult and horrific scenes. Instead of psychologising addiction, offering up ‘reasons’ for Candy and Dan’s heroin use that might invoke sympathy for its protagonists, the film takes a refreshingly defiant stance. This is a life lived, for better or worse. Or as Armfield’s puts it, “At the heart of the film is the suggestion that junkies are you and me.” He described this decision as purely aesthetic. As soon as they tried including scenes that might go some way towards providing an explanation for Candy and Dan’s addiction, the story, according to Armfield, got boring. Instead, the film focuses on heroin’s role in this particular relationship, from something that they initially share, to something that divides them.

All of this makes Candy sound very dark indeed, yet it doesn’t feel overly sombre. The film pulses with energy and a killer soundtrack. Sydney sunshine, suburban swimming pools and the ocean's expansive horizon provides the backdrop. The film is awash with light. By staging so much of the action outside and in the daytime, Armfield avoids one of the pitfalls of genre, the cliché of the dank drug den. The film adaptation also retains the book's humour. Dan's voice-over provides a wry perspective on their disintegrating lives. There’s a humorous edge to his baroque, poetic riffs; a comic mismatch between the richness of the language and the increasing leanness of their junkie existence. Candy also includes scenes memorable for their absurdity. In one such sequence Dan steals a wallet from an unlocked car outside a known beat and impersonates its owner at the bank in order to withdraw his money. He would like to be a smooth con artist, but in reality he’s desperate for the money, a complete amateur. It tells you something about Armfield’s view of the world that the victim of the theft—a nerdy, nervous guy—is clearly undeserving of the crime. While we are pleased to see Dan finally pulling his weight, our pleasure is laced with discomfort.

The question of audience identification is one of the more complex aspects of Candy. There is a sense in which heroin and Candy and Dan’s love for one another creates a closed circuit, one that places the viewer on the outside. The film overcomes this difficulty by opening the story up to include Candy’s family. It's a welcome jolt to see that she matters to someone other than Dan. Their initial sense of denial gives way to helplessness at the situation. Tony Martin and Noni Hazelhurst, both excellent here, portray Candy’s uptight, bewildered parents. They find themselves completely out of their depth, fearful of appearing intrusive but nevertheless deeply concerned. Although the film generates a lot of sympathy for them it also manages in a few short scenes to paint a portrait of suffocating conservatism and family dysfunction.

Despite Armfield's background in the theatre, in almost every respect Candy is a cinematic film. If anything Armfield’s professional experience is reflected in the film's overall clarity. It's totally devoid of that awful staginess that marrs so many theatre directors' film efforts. Armfield, accustomed to the democratic nature of the stage, directs his actors with a sense of even-handedness. For the most part it helps shape the film’s rich and complex view of human nature. On occasion however, it feels as though he is unsure of how to best deploy the camera in suggesting interiority. At a crucial point in the story, just when Dan has begun to turn his life around and his relationship with Candy is deteriorating, the film briskly skirts the seismic changes taking place. It feels as though an opportunity has been lost to experience Candy's and particularly Dan’s, deep level of disappointment and hurt.

Minor quibbles aside, Davies and Armfield have fashioned a heart-breaking love story that manages to convey with an elegant simplicity and unerring directness the painful, heady experience of coming of age. The rush of drugs, the rush of love, they're the big notes, sure, and Candy covers that territory with candour. But it's the film’s ability to unearth the more complex emotions that underpin the intoxicating experiences of drug use and love that resonates most. In its many beautifully observed moments Candy shows the tenderness that can exist between 2 people even in the grips of addiction. The cost of Candy and Dan’s getting of wisdom is a deep sense of regret. It's in that final reckoning that Candy most powerfully reminds us of the responsibilities of love.

Candy, director Neil Armfield, writers Neil Armfield, Luke Davies, based on the novel by Luke Davies, Producer Margaret Fink & Emile Sherman, distributed by Dendy Films

In an interview with RealTime during the principal photography of his Indigenous language cautionary fable, Ten Canoes, writer, director and producer Rolf de Heer revealed, “Ultimately, I wrote a script that conformed to the parameters that were set for me” (RT68, p22). The finished film is proof that de Heer is adroit at turning constraints to advantage in a fine tragicomedy not only of considerable historical significance, but also containing its own distinctive narrative and production elements. There is little doubt that Ten Canoes will be fittingly recognised in Australia and internationally. It has already won the Special Jury Prize at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section.

The intrinsic rules placed on de Heer included the desire of his collaborators, the Yolngu people of Ramingining (local elder Peter Djigirr is co-director), to include certain ethnographic details so the film could also serve as an object of historical posterity for the community. To this end, one layer of the narrative centres on canoe building and goose egg gathering, significant rites and activities that the Yolngu wished to record as a capsule of traditional activities. De Heer uses this action as the platform for the main narrative; set centuries ago against the backdrop of these daily hunter-gatherer tasks, a Yolngu elder, Minygululu, imparts an instructional tale to his younger sibling Dayindi who lusts after the elder man’s wife. The mythic tale told by Minygululu is expressed in a sequence of flashbacks and forms the chief action of the film, and is brimming with dramatic tension including instances of mistaken identity, forbidden love and violence.

In entwining these 2 narrative strands, the film cleverly echoes the episodic and elliptical storytelling patterns of some Australian Indigenous cultures. There are discursive diversions, explorations of alternate versions of the events, and the plot’s pacing is punctuated by ruminative breaks: several times Minygululu’s story halts for a moment and the perspective returns to the goose egg gatherers. As they set camp or cook some food, Minygululu chides his brother for his impatience to hear the end of the story. A further story strand is layered in by way of a friendly omniscient narration, spoken in English with the distinctive voice of David Gulpilil giving the on screen action an easy accessibility.

From the very first diegetic exchange in the film, a variation on the ‘silent but deadly’ fart gag, it is plain that de Heer is reaching for universal resonance through breadth of humour. On the whole he is successful: it is very enjoyable to see the group of canoe-builders verbally needling young Dayindi because of his crush, and scenes involving the corpulent elder Birrinbirrin build an easy bridge between Arnhem Land of a thousand years ago and contemporary mores. Counterbalancing the moments of near slapstick is a more lugubrious tone provided by occasional reminders of the cheapness of life. Perhaps most representative of this mix is the film’s denouement which manages to match the amusing aphorism “be careful what you wish for,” with sorrowful circumstances.

Ten Canoes was partly inspired by the research and photography of anthropologist Donald Thomson, and the visual style of the film certainly is informed by his 1930s work. The goose egg scenes are shot in pristine black and white, often with a locked-off camera and are highly reminiscent of classical landscape portraiture, even the figures move minimally and slowly. Great assistance is provided by the hauntingly photogenic Arafura swamp. Contrastingly, Minygululu’s story is shot in colour with more dynamic movement within the frame, often encircling smooth steadicam shots. It is rare to see such an articulated stylistic division within an Australian film, and director of photography Ian Jones and his department are to be commended for its precise execution.

To return to de Heer’s production parameters, it was the exclusive and necessary use of non-actors that posed the biggest risk of diminishing the impact of the film, and the term non-actors here means a cast with only the most rudimentary conceptual handle on fictionalised performance. However, the cast is almost uniformly outstanding. Of particular excellence is Crusoe Kurrdal, who plays the central warrior in Minygululu’s tale with a sense of powerful fatalism, Jamie Dayindi Gulpilil Dalaithngu in a dual role as confused apprentices, and Richard Birrinbirrin in a natural comic turn as a greedy honeyeater. These performances are also attributable to de Heer’s directorial skill and his rich association with the Ramingining community.

Much will be made—as it should be—of the status of Ten Canoes as an Indigenous language film, and as an historical marker with an Indigenous perspective. But this is far more than a curiosity piece—it is a well-nuanced and strikingly designed film deserving of wide attention.

Ten Canoes, director Rolf de Heer, co-director: Peter Djigirr, producers Rolf de Heer, Julie Ryan. National release June 29.

Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-73) was a key figure for prominent directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Michael Mann and John Woo, yet Australian audiences have rarely been given the opportunity to catch anything but a limited glimpse of his films. Le Samouraï (1967) was re-released in a restored print back in the early 1990s, and more recently a new print of Le Cercle Rouge (1970) toured the country, but Melville's earlier work has long been hard to access. That situation will shortly be remedied for Sydneysiders at least, with a retrospective at this year's Sydney Film Festival.

Melville is best known for his crime films which draw heavily on the American gangster tradition and its film noir variant. The influence of American cinema is clearly evident in his gangster classic Bob le Flambeur (1955), set in Paris' Montmartre. The film's referential, playful tone was a strong influence on the French New Wave, and Melville has a brief but amusing cameo in Godard's 1959 debut, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless). But while they shared a common interest in American genre cinema, Melville avoided the pastiches and deconstruction of genre that characterised Godard's early films. He worked within genre forms rather than taking them apart; exaggerated generic conventions are integral to his fatalistic cinematic world, particularly in his later films. Le Samouraï is typical in this regard—indeed from its opening shot Le Samouraï is the exemplary Melville movie.

Behind the opening credits we see a man lying on a bed in a bare grey-brown apartment. There is no movement, except for his smoking of a cigarette. A birdcage sits beside his bed and we hear a high pitched twittering on the soundtrack. The regular rhythm of passing traffic can be heard outside. The gently drifting smoke is the only random element in the austere composition, which frames the apartment in long shot like a theatre stage. As the titles end, the frame very subtly moves for no obvious reason. Although the overall shape of the shot remains fixed, tiny variations in the image and sound are continually playing out.

This single prolonged introductory shot reveals much about Melville's style. As the Sydney Film Festival's season curator Adrian Danks has noted, Melville pictures the world according to a “modernist tradition in which [it] appears predetermined, patterned, almost geometric.”Within these rigorously framed patterns Melville's characters move along apparently fixed lines, alienated from their own actions, simultaneously inside and outside the drama (to paraphrase Danks). Yet as the films progress, the repetitive actions and compositions gradually mutate, change and fall apart. Melville's characters operate within systems and routines, but their fate is never completely predetermined. Rather, there is a constant tension between systems, routines and balanced oppositions on the one hand, and the overarching effect of time on the other. It is duration which above all serves to erode and shift the most meticulous arrangements in Melville's on screen worlds.

Danks has described Melville's cinema as”tonal.” To take this concept one step further, Melville's is a cinema of subtly shifting tones in which resonances from the slightest oscillations build until they explode, often in the unexpectedly violent deaths that characterise most of Melville's conclusions. To put it a different way, his films record the results of 2 systems coming into contact: in the case of Le Samouraï, the regimented routine of a lone assassin and police systems of observation and control. Each system gradually shifts as each tries to out manoeuvre the other. Inevitably, it is the individual who eventually succumbs.

This retrospective is important not only because it will bring some of Melville's lesser-known films to light, but also because it is only in a cinema that Melville's tonal approach can be fully appreciated. His meticulous formal compositions, graphic matches and expressionistic colour palettes need the luxuriously wide spaces of the cinema screen to truly come into their own. Although disappointingly non-comprehensive (only 7 of Melville’s 13 features are screening), the retrospective nonetheless includes such important works as Melville's 1949 collaboration with Jean Cocteau, Les Enfants Terribles, his 1969 Resistance film L'Armée des Ombres (Shadow Army), and the aforementioned Bob le Flambeur, Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge.

A Band of Outsiders—The Cinematic Underworld of Jean-Pierre Melville, 53rd Sydney Film Festival; State Theatre, George St Cinemas, Dendy Opera Quays; June 11-19

Dan Edwards will be appearing with season curator Adrian Danks, and regular RealTime contributor Hamish Ford, on a panel discussing Melville's work in the Festival Lounge at the State Theatre, 2.30-4.30pm, Monday, June 19.

Akram Zaatari is a video artist and curator who lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon. He is part of a generation of independent video makers from the Middle East who use video beyond the conventions and limitations of television. These films explore new avenues of storytelling which express the social and cultural debates of the Middle East. Many of Zaatari's stories have an unmistakable documentary form, as in This Day which was screened as part of the Middleastalentime program of Middle Eastern film and video. I curated the program at the Sydney Opera House where Zaatari was a special guest of dLux media arts. My conversation with Zaatari began at the after screening talk and then via the internet since the artist’s return to Beirut.

This Day seems at first a documentary of your investigations of early photographic images shot in the Syrian Desert 50 to 60 years ago. Once you returned to Beirut to the comfort of your editing suite, it takes another turn with these images not only being discussed further but juxtaposed with images of modern-day Beirut, your own images and diaries during the civil war, planes, cable cars, archival photographs and footage and sound bites from the internet and television which are all brought into the mix. What triggered such an investigation? Was it initially planned this way or did the project just morph itself from the perch of your editing station, where these layers of history and the truths captured in these images are questioned?

This Day From the beginning I wanted this work to sum up my relation to different groups of images and sound and video recordings that I had been collecting and studying. So from the beginning I knew it would end up a heterogeneous work, where those collections are tied with different threads. I conceived the video as a container for them. I was inhabited by these images and sounds, partially with what I do as part of the Arab Image Foundation, and partially with a huge number of recordings I did and still do until this day. These are recordings of sound explosions, of news clips, images of shelling, particularly dating back to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

I had always considered these two practices [sound and image] distinct, but not anymore. By saying that I had conceived the work this way, I do not mean the work was pre-scripted, on the contrary. I was opening up axes, heading in different directions pursuing elements of study. I delayed even thinking of binding everything altogether until post-production. I would say the film took shape while editing, not because it is a collage, but because writing this film was like doing lab work, waiting to go through a synthesis phase. In all cases, for me, films get written while editing, in the sense that there is always an unpredictable shift that takes the film somewhere else. In the editing I rebel against myself.

The collections belong to a particular geography, divided by territorial conflicts, and marked by successive wars. I am talking about Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine/Israel. How can one talk about images in these countries without ending up talking about war? While working I was becoming conscious of the formation of an iconographic landscape that can testify to conflicts. It is then that I started to find interest in analyzing images circulating on the net—images of mobilization, commercials and anti-commercials—to say that in situations of war, the images that tend to circulate are images of mobilisation. For me it was about time to cease these images and take them seriously.

The major narrative link between all the different parts of this work was, on one hand, the element of transportation: the crossing of distances and borders to meet subjects, in Syria and Jordan. So it was the machine, the car, the airplane, and even the camel. So the film starts with a pan on a black and white photograph taken by Manoug in the desert, showing historian Jibrail Jabbur holding his camera on his shoulder, standing next to a Bedouin, observing someone fixing his car. The car is clearly from the 50s and is broken in the desert and the commentator says that this is an image of “East meets West”, because a western car has to break down in the desert. This is how the film starts the voyage: in the Syrian desert looking for desert inhabitants that were once photographed by Jabbur and Manoug.

This trip to the Syrian Desert was indirectly my tribute to a documentary tradition often marginalised in the art world, but also often trivialised in the documentary genre. I wanted the film to oscillate between these traditions, on the one hand an extrovert voyage in geography, visiting places and meeting people, on the other hand an introvert voyage in time observing images of past wars. Some people perceive it as 2 films, I don't. I say it is one film that looks formally as a diptych in duration.

I was one of the founders of the Arab Image Foundation, an archive for collecting and preserving the photographic history of the Middle East and North Africa from the 19th century to 1960. Since then I got to shape and improve my collecting practice. I travelled in Syria, Jordan and Egypt and met so many people who used, or collected photography. I made a video about Van Leo (an Armenian photographer from Cairo) entitled Her + Him Van Leo. I have made a few publications and exhibitions based on these photographic findings. Now I am studying the work of Lebanese studio photographer Hashem el Madani, in particular in relation to the city he comes from, Saida.

You chose video over film or television. You have strong views also about documentary and feature films. Please elaborate on your views, particularly as you have plans to make a feature length film in the near future.

I never draw boundaries between these disciplines. I wish one could navigate among all of them. However, the boundaries exist and they are imposed by markets and by industries of production. So the boundaries are not inherent to those disciplines, but are artificial creations of the market. I have always worked outside systems of production, partially because I live in Lebanon where these relationships (producer to director to distributor) do not exist. After playing all these roles for more than 10 years, I think I am reaching a dead end. I do want my work to be widely seen, ie seen on television, in theatres etc—I want my work to encounter people who did not particularly choose to see it. This happens particularly on television. And this is, I believe, the power of television. This is why I am now doing what I resisted for a long time, which is writing a script in order to look for a producer.

I left Lebanon before Rafik Harriri's assassination. As an outsider, I could see that public opinion of him was quite divided before his death. Ask any taxi driver. Funny thing is, I am that sure since his assassination these same drivers who used to complain about how corrupt he was now carry images of him around in their taxi. But besides the initial 'Peoples' demonstrations, how has the arts community responded to his death, or do they not know how to respond?

Despite possible critiques of Hariri, he was a very pragmatic man of state, very charismatic, down to earth and very open to critique, which is really rare. Unlike other political figures, he was not a war figure and never had a militia. It is naïve to say that after his death, many people discovered his qualities, but it is partially true. His tragic assassination brought images of other assassinations that remained un-investigated in the recent Lebanese history, and that brought people to the street. It is hard for us, artists and intellectuals, to stop what’s happening. I personally need some distance to formulate an opinion about it. Naturally, I started recording directly after the assassination, and now I have more than 100 hours of tape from television, and many direct audio recordings of demonstrations. I do not think I am ready, as I need to digest this material; besides I need time to view it!

Brisbane’s OtherFilm Festival (OFF) is less an occasion of mourning for the death of cinema than an opportunity for the happy reanimation of its corpse (courtesy of some incandescent electrics). This revival can be attributed as much to an expedient and fruitful accommodation with digital technologies as it can to the cinema’s alchemical ménage à trois of chemistry, optics and mechanical moving parts. That accommodation might suggest an ungainly and ultimately static confusion of back and forward steps, but the reality is some considered hoofing in otherwise unlikely ellipses. Clearly the epitaphs have been somewhat premature; on the evidence of this year’s OtherFilm Festival, artists will continue to find creative solutions to the problem of cinema for a considerable time to come.

The prevailing atmosphere is one of avuncular congeniality; there is a discreet but genuine sense of community among many of the OFF attendees, nurtured in part by experimental music festivals like What Is Music?, Liquid Architecture, the NOW Now, and the Articulating Space concert series. The obvious sonic analogies are completely pertinent: the structural dynamics of the work at OFF are informed by the energy and electricity of contemporary music. This embrace of strategies of immersive spectacle and audience engagement lies at a far remove from the austerity of sober structural methodologies that came to characterise creative film several decades back. By consolidating a recent legacy of experimental synaesthesia, OFF’s curatorial agenda approaches a dedicated exploration of ‘Audio-Vision.’

OFF is further distinguished from comparable Australian surveys of moving image media by its curators’ appreciation of a rich international history of marginal media practice, and their fervidiness to interrogate a specifically Australian historical context. At this year’s OFF, these imperatives were served by the presence of the nation’s most tireless champions of experimental film, Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, in company of their son, occasional filmmaker Ivor. Long-time advocates and agitators for the cause of creative media through their self-published Cantrills Filmnotes—the longest lived experimental media journal in the world—the Cantrills’ filmwork is increasingly occluded from public audition. On the evidence of their expanded cinema performance, reprised at OFF for only the second time since its 1970 premiere at the National Gallery of Victoria, this seems both an injustice to them personally and, more widely, a considerable loss to Australian film culture.

Across some four decades, the Cantrills have been undertaking an interrogation of the celluloid muse that is, certainly within Australia, unique in its scope and rigour. The results of that research are brilliantly detailed in their ‘colour separation films’; domestic scenes shot in black and white, before grey-scale spectra are translated into different colour tones through the device of an optical printer. The effect is of some colours being both naturalistic and ravishingly variegated, while others (bright orange skin tones or deep blue shadows!) are confoundingly aberrant. For its modest ambition, this work reveals a virtuosic control of cinematic apparatus.

Even more profound was the revelation of the Cantrills’ Expanded Cinema performance. This work elaborates their purely celluloid experiments by resorting to multiple projections, live declamation, some accomplished musique concrete soundtracks by Arthur Cantrill and the same sculptural screens they employed at the work’s original NGV debut. The Cantrills’ evident on-screen interest in notional ‘place’—something approaching a psychogeography of domestic space and the Australian landscape—is here transposed into an exploration of the physical limits of theatrical exhibition, a utopian challenge to a situation which can otherwise reproduce its own normative models of audience and filmmaker behaviour.

This expansion of cinematic ideal form is, alongside the reevaluation of sound-image relationships, one of the principal concerns of the festival. Natasha Anderson back-projects her organically fluid animations of tumescent grotesquerie onto home-made latex screens, performing the live soundtrack on processed voice and contrabass recorder. As an essay in abjection, it’s a compellingly lateral use of digital imaging technology. Velvet Pesu doesn’t even resort to a conventional projector, demonstrating rather the shadowplay and trompe l’oeil effects produced by her intricately wrought kinetic sculpture. Beautiful to behold, this skeletal assemblage communicates a quality of obsessive atavism which is provoked into unearthly, cacophonous life by Pesu’s performance.

The work at OFF is typically characterised by a thoughtful ambivalence towards new technologies, subordinating their use to more elemental aesthetic criteria. This measured synthesis of digital and analogue means is evidenced by Pia Borg’s digital projections for Pride and Prejudice (in collaboration with Mark Harwood, who provides live scoring). Their performance investigates the inherent uncanniness of theatrical screening: the ambiguity of a static human form projected at life-scale and enhanced by the matte cutout protruding from the screen proper. An intelligent work that acknowledges its debt to the supernatural qualities of the primitive cinema, with Harwood’s soundtrack evoking the perfect mood of creeped-out apprehension. A different course to minatory dread is taken by performance duo Vanilla (animator Van Sowerwine on image duties accompanied by Camilla Hannan on soundtrack). Exploiting another variety of the uncanny, Sowerwine invests her doll’s house set with infantile terror through the use of articulated silhouette puppets, while Hannan makes an unsettling mix of environmental sound. If the question of narrative aspirations is an indifferent matter for some OFF participants, both these artist ensembles are elsewhere working in more conventional narrative forms and I am frankly excited at the possibility that these performances might support some renovation of Australian filmmaking practice.

Lloyd Barrett’s Mise En Scene essays more elusive narrative intentions, employing a programming metalogic to drive its lurid abstractions of character portraits. Barrett’s striking electroacoustic score discloses a close attention to the sonic environment, something he otherwise explored through the soundwalk he conducted with acoustic ecology partisan, Anthony Magen. Where Barrett and others (notably, the synaesthetic feedback produced by Botborg) employ more strictly digital means, international guests Sam Hamilton and Eve Gordon (New Zealand) and audio-vision ensemble Abject Leader (Sally Golding and Joel Stern, with guest Adam Park) are conducting their very different enquiries into the tactile properties of analogue film. This artisanal countermedia is sometimes assisted by some hilariously pataphysical instruments (eg Hamilton & Gordon’s light refractors: broken glass supported by soup cans spinning on turntables in front of the projector beam).

Australian cultural institutions can sometimes seem beholden to a naive technological determinism at the expense of a more considered understanding of artists’ interventions in moving image media. The OtherFilm Festival provides a heterogenous corrective and the curators should be congratulated both for gracefully negotiating what must have been a logistical nightmare of outlandish technical requirements and for providing such an expansive survey of contemporary artists’ cinema practice. The only prominent omission was Robin Fox, whose compositional practice has made a considerable advance since the addition of a laser to his visual arsenal.

Velvet Pesu is moving soon from her expansive studio and irregular venue for experimental music, a one-time Masonic Lodge in inner city Woolloongabba. The good news is that the Brisbane City Council is providing her a with new home—larger, at the edge of the CBD and even double-glazing the windows to forestall any neighbourhood noise complaints—for a peppercorn rent. As much as Brisbane suffers some unkind comparison to Southern circumstance, to my knowledge there’s not a municipality in Sydney or Melbourne prepared to extend this level of support to creative music.

And there’s the rub: a loose coalition of Brisbane artists have described themselves a mandate that large and amply resourced institutions outside Queensland have signally failed to address (a 10 minute drive from ACMI would put you at the Cantrills’ doorstep). The OFF curators have historical smarts, an international ambit and the kind of hands-off support that doesn’t compromise their curatorial independence. This might bode well for the success of Brisbane’s Australian Cinematheque, but it also entails a considerable challenge to legitimated screen culture south of the Tweed River.

The 2nd OtherFilm Festival, curators Sally Golding, Joel Stern, Danni Zuvela., Queensland College of Art, Griffith University; Globe Theatre, Brisbane Brisbane, March 24-27, www.otherfilm.org

Further discussion of OFF and Australia’s problematic history of creative media in relation to cultural policy will appear in the next issue of the Senses Of Cinema web journal: www.sensesofcinema.com

At the moment, in Australia at least, mobile phones are the new buzz technology for delivering news, info, porn and entertainment. Documentarians have joined the rush to the mobile. Telcos are hungry for content and those filmmakers who’ve worked in the online environment are upgrading skills to create portals and interactive mobile phone docos. It’s early days.

Major broadcasters like BBC and NBC are mostly treating mobile phones as a platform, one of many mobile ways of viewing material. Mobile phones are placed in the same category as portable media centres and iPods. To date, broadcaster alliances with telcos to create exciting new documentaries are limited. In Australia the national broadcaster, ABC, provides news for the Telstra portal: a picture followed by 3 or 4 paragraphs of text. Snippet News. They are yet to discover the full potential of mobiles. Commercial channels are mainly using mobiles as a way for youth audiences to vote for their favourite character on reality TV programmes. Clearly there is far more potential. Only in Korea has a full TV network for mobiles been established but unfortunately they commission very little, relying instead on material that is already popular on regular TV.

Image gatherers

For broadcasters the mobile phone functions more as an independent news gathering device than a delivery platform. Think of the masses of images of the London bombings that the BBC used in conventional broadcasts and online. Other broadcasters are following suit and disasters around the world are now being covered by victims and onlookers. Disaster coverage has become postmodern. Of course amateur video has been around for a while. Think of the impact in the US of the Rodney King bashing footage. The amateurs of the 20th century were limited to those who happened to have a video camera handy, mainly tourists. Now almost everyone in the first world has a mobile camera, the cinematographers are endless.

The problem is verifying the authenticity of the images and their context. In the wake of the recent cyclone in Queensland, the ABC asked its audience to send through images of the disaster. Because phone lines were down there was no way for the ABC to verify most of the images they received. They published them on trust, and on their assessment that they were indeed of that particular cyclone.

Myth of the ephemeral

For documentary makers the story is different. While broadcasters are using mobiles as a platform of immediacy, documentaries on the whole are anything but projects of immediacy. How can documentarians train the audience to use them as catalysts for revisiting the past or provoking analysis of the current world order? Where does mobile delivery sit in the plethora of media?

It is interesting to take a look at the internet as a way of understanding how new media is consumed. The major broadcasters around the world are fast coming to the realisation that the online environment is far from ephemeral. Quite the opposite, it lengthens the life of a documentary by years. Prior to 3G mobile technology the web was thought of as the ‘immediacy’ media form. Online news updated each hour, emails flashing through systems and traversing the world in seconds. Yet the usage data on major sites associated with documentaries shows a life span of years after the broadcast date. At the 2006 Australian International Documentary Conference, Annie Valva explained that her site Evolution has been Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” site for a few years. For the uninitiated that means that the site associated with the documentary has more sites linking to it on the web than any other site that discusses the concept of evolution. The BBC are so excited by the ‘tail end’ life provided by the web that they are even revisiting archived documentaries and versioning them for the web environment.

I’m arguing that there is the potential for mobile platforms to inherit the longevity that the web has created for the documentary. In fact the most ephemeral of the broadcast options is the conventional free-to-air or pay TV ‘appointment television.’ The documentary is accessible in perpetuity on the web.

Red lion inspired by rising sun

In England there was a recent project created by the BBC Natural History unit that gave information to tourists in situ via their mobile phones. Instead of reading a guidebook they photographed a pixel image on a sign that told them by phone to go to a certain site to access information about this view, or this building. This opens up the potential for documentaries to interact with space and place. This project was inspired by the use of mobiles in Asia, especially Japan. When it comes to new ways to use them Japan is in the lead. Basically the mobile is becoming what the watch was to Buck Rogers and other sci-fi heroes of the 20th century. It will have everything and be able to do everything.

In Japan mobile ownership is approaching saturation and companies are now reaching out to children by creating phones that include GPS and emergency help alarms. The same Natural History unit at BBC has turned this around and created a game. The kids role-play lions in the savannah using GPS to locate themselves in the make-believe world. In a combination of documentary and new technology, anthropomorphising is taken to the extreme.

Problems with mobiles

There are the obvious problems: multiple platforms that are not compatible; different screen sizes; lack of bandwidth etc. These technical issues need to be resolved, but not by documentary makers. Their issues are to do with content and how the viewer interacts with it.

One of the problems that occurs in the online environment is that not much of the product out there engages on an emotional level. A good feature length or TV hour documentary will engage, you’ll cry or laugh or feel angry and reach a cathartic conclusion. The mobile platform has the potential to leap out of the fact-heavy internet world and engage with emotions. This is an intimate device that you hold in your hands, near your body. Viewers will be open to material beyond what they expect on the medium screen net. One of the few Australian internet documentary producers engaging this emotional level is BIG hART (www.knotathome.com/interface). It will be interesting to see what the group creates for mobiles, especially since their target audience is disaffected youth.

Most pressing among the tech issues for documentary are sound and image clarity. Mobiles have dreadful sound unless the user wears earphones. There are myths about image clarity. Sure, a cinema-style wide shot is lost on a mobile, but because of the proximity of the device to the viewer’s eyes, images shot for TV are fine for mobiles. The exception is that fast pans and shaky-cam will degrade the image, simply because it takes more memory to view a moving image. That will become less of an issue as bandwidth increases.

The most important thing is that the video clip is quick to download and access. When given the choice of high quality, slow download versus low quality, quick download the user will nearly always choose the latter. This tends to mean that shorter pieces work better for the mobile audience, whereas longer pieces, probably purchased on DVD, will be loaded on mobile media centres and iPods. In Korea they worked with the notion that viewers had an attention span of approximately 5 minutes. According to Neal Anderon from Ovum, Telstra has found Australians are happy with maerial between 5-13 minutes—engagement with the media is higher than expected.

The choice medium

Mobile devices have also become the ‘choice’ media. Already young users are downloading from i-tunes into their phones and creating their own mix of music, in essence, their own radio station. Radio has cottoned on to this and has begun to make available download versions of the talk sections. You can now schedule radio to suit you. The iPod and mobile are merging. As they do, the notion of downloadable discrete material for mobile devices is becoming common. This is not about letting people see feature documentaries on their mobiles, it’s about short pieces that are easy to consume on the peak hour train to work.

The modern user no longer buys a product, they buy an experience. It’s the experience of the cinema, or the lounge room or the intimate and handy mobile, accessible where other screens are not.

Attracting an audience

How does the audience find out about your doco? Most documentary material for mobiles will be accessed online. The main access to sites at the moment on mobile technology is through portals: index pages that contain links to a variety of sites. The most effective portals are run by the telcos. This is because when you fire up your phone it immediately takes you to your telco portal. As the bandwidth grows the portals will become less vital. Already the major search engines have created mobile phone versions of their sites, but most internet sites have not yet re-versioned to make themselves mobile phone friendly. You simply can’t interact with the page in the same way that you do at a computer. For instance, there is no mouse on a mobile, the backend coding is slightly different and screen size is certainly different. So until the net becomes more mobile savvy you can bet your favourite astrology site won’t be viewable. This means the audience is less likely to search the net on a mobile until they are sure it is going to provide viewable material. Working outside portals is a risky business at present.

A version of this article appears in DOX, the European Documentary Network magazine

Lisa Pieroni, curator of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image’s Focus on David Cronenberg retrospective, describes the Canadian director’s films as “a very cohesive body of work.” Despite the reflex to describe simply any filmmaker or artist’s work in such terms, the body metaphor is more appropriate than usual when discussing Cronenberg.
Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) & Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), Scanners

Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) & Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), Scanners

‘Body horror’ is a popular, generic label for Cronenberg’s films, suggesting they are comfortably situated within the conventions of the horror genre. The ACMI retrospective traversed Cronenberg’s works from early avant-garde shorts such as Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970), to his latest, A History of Violence (2005). Such a broad coverage ultimately confirmed that generic labels are, as always, oversimplifications.

While Cronenberg’s films are strikingly preoccupied with the body, particularly processes of abjection (even his forgotten B-racing film, Fast Company [1979] finds its narrative denouement in death by inferno), the idiosyncratic narrative tendencies and mise en scène defy generic classification. Videodrome (1983) was initially marketed as a horror film. Rather than for terror or manipulative suspense, the film is memorable for hallucinatory plot machinations, surreal set pieces and tantalising (though somewhat under-realised) proclamations of a ‘new flesh’ emerging in our media saturated world.

When researching the program, Pieroni learned that the majority of Cronenberg’s films are largely unavailable on DVD. She commented, “I think that says something about the position of his work, I think quite often people don’t know where to put it.” The Cronenberg opus confirms the truism that the question of genre reveals more about the need for distributors to find audiences rather than anything in the films themselves. Even ACMI struggles to overcome this. Their promotional brochure described Crimes of the Future as a thriller and the inaugurator of the body horror fascination. Yet it resists reductionist labels with its alien aesthetic. The Cronenberg lens (he was cinematographer on his early shorts) fixates on abstract architectural framing. The central premise of the film, concerning a future where men become the locus of all gender possibilities after most women die of a bizarre disease, is explored through a non-narrative, under-the-microscope approach.

The early low-budget films, Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979), Scanners (1981) and even Cronenberg’s first 2 ‘mainstream’ films The Dead Zone (1983) and The Fly (1986), all variously contain the stuff of horror (gore, violence, the overthrow of normal social order). Yet Cronenberg’s claim in early interviews, that he was doing something different from contemporaries like John Carpenter, Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper is (without generalising Carpenter et al) hard to disagree with.

In Shivers, artificial parasites infest a sterile apartment complex rendering the inhabitants sexual zombies. An orgy of sexual intercourse replaces a lacking social intercourse. The film’s conclusion of sexed-up apartment dwellers emanating from the underground car park (a visual metaphor for ejaculation) to spread the sexual epidemic across Montreal, provokes debate as to whether disgust or joy is appropriate.

Pieroni “shrieked with laughter” watching Samantha Eggar’s hyper-manic performance in The Brood, and wonders whether a woman whose rage manifests in murderous, deformed clones of her daughter could come from anywhere but the mind of a man. The scatological climax, revealing a womb external to her body, certainly armours critics who label Cronenberg misogynist, especially since he admitted the film stemmed from his frustration with the divorce from his first wife. Yet, as Pieroni suggests, “You’re in a judgement vacuum when you’re watching his films.” The film’s striking image of Eggar licking a newborn seems not misogynist, but rather a visceral confrontation of the humanist assertion that we are not animals.

A public forum complemented the film program, with Age critic Philipa Hawker and artists Philip Brophy and Ian Haig. Discussion centred on Cronenberg’s obsessional challenges to culturally constructed dualities, from the Cartesian body/mind split to gender binaries, and discourses of high and low culture. This seems to run through all Cronenberg films, from the sexualisation of technology in Crash (1996), the metafictional fusion of his own artistic sensibility with William Burroughs’ in Naked Lunch (1991), and the paradoxes of embodied identity in the exceptional Dead Ringers (1988).

According to Pieroni the Cronenberg program was a success, with “consistent audiences across all of his films.” Presumably this was a relief after the difficulty of locating prints thanks to the not uncommon tendency of distributors to thoughtlessly trash them. Such a reality tempers the myth of a networked society of instantaneously obtainable information and demonstrates the continuing relevance and importance of retrospectives. The exposure to David Cronenberg’s oeuvre certainly enhances our appreciation of A History of Violence, prompting a more lyrical understanding of its exploration of darkness within the American family. Like the bodies we all inhabit, hopefully Cronenberg’s body of work will continue to mutate and evolve over time.

Focus on David Cronenberg, curator Lisa Pieroni, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, April 13 – 23

When broadcast in April, the 2-part telemovie The Silence was promoted as something of a showcase for the beleaguered ABC drama department, the program that “might help resuscitate the ABC’s reputation as a producer of quality television”(Sacha Molitorisz, “Good cop, mad cop”, Sydney Morning Herald, March 29). With the hours of Australian drama on our television screens dropping drastically in recent years, a new program from the team that brought us Somersault was always going to garner a lot of attention. Produced by the seasoned Jan Chapman, the telemovie also reunited Somersault’s behind-the-camera pairing of director Cate Shortland and cinematographer Robert Humphreys. A strong team and an intriguing dramatic premise offered the possibility that The Silence might actually deliver the kind of innovative locally-produced drama that has been so lacking in the contemporary Australian television landscape.

One of the great weaknesses of our local TV dramas is their almost uniformly unadventurous visual style, so Shortland was an inspired directorial choice. She is one of the few Australian filmmakers who really delves into the visually expressive possibilities of cinema, relying on the colour and texture of her images to tell her stories at least as much as words. Which made The Silence’s unvaryingly predictable visual approach all the more disappointing. While there were elements of the emotive colour palette of Somersault, they were less successfully integrated into the story. In the main Shortland fell back on the shaky camera work and jagged editing that has become virtually de-rigueur for ‘edgy’ Australian cop dramas since the pioneering Wild Side and Blue Murder a decade ago.

The sense of harking back to former cop drama glories was reinforced by the presence of Richard Roxburgh, turning in a decent lead performance as the traumatised detective Richard Treloar, a role not a million miles from his remarkable portrayal of the infamous Roger Rogerson in Blue Murder. But the tough talking, emotionally wounded Treloar was essentially a by-numbers addition to the long list of similarly depressed detectives who have been the mainstay of crime fiction since the 1940s. The rest of The Silence’s characters ranged from one-dimensional stereotypes to barely fleshed out plot devices. The fault here essentially lay in the writing, which as well as relying on hackneyed character types was fatally undermined by a chronic lack of thematic development.

The idea for The Silence apparently came to writers Mary Walsh and Alice Addison while Walsh was working at Sydney’s Justice and Police Museum. Centring on the aforementioned Treloar, the story begins with the detective posted to a desk job at the Police Museum after he witnesses, and fails to stop, the shooting of a police informer. At the museum he curates an exhibition of vintage crime scene photographs and notices an attractive young woman loitering at the edge of several shots from the early 1960s. When the woman turns up as a corpse in a series of photographs from 1964, Treloar becomes obsessed with uncovering her identity and exhuming her story.

Anyone who saw Ross Gibson and Kate Richard’s Crime Scene exhibition at Sydney’s Justice and Police Museum (1999-2000) will have experienced the mysterious allure of vintage crime scene photographs. Recording the bloody aftermath of grisly events, they frequently feature an unnerving combination of homely domestic settings or prosaic public spaces marked by traces of extreme violence such as mangled corpses, pools of blood, overturned chairs or bloodied blunt objects. The photographs function as mute historical witnesses, clinically recording every physical detail before the lens but offering no explanation for the horrors they depict. In its opening half-hour The Silence seemed to be exploring the morbid fascination of these images, offering a thought-provoking consideration of photography’s ambiguous, uncertain relationship to the past.

Several of The Silence’s early scenes brought to mind Antonioni’s Blowup (1996), which similarly revolved around an alienated character trying to unlock the story of a crime caught on film. However, where Antonioni offered a rich meditation on photography’s slippery relationship to reality, The Silence quickly shied away from anything remotely resembling philosophically engaging content. Instead, the plot rapidly degenerates into a convoluted murder mystery in which the crime scene photographs function simply as narrative markers, holding all the clues required to solve a 40 year-old crime.

In a ludicrous turn of events, the murdered woman is revealed to be closely linked to Treloar’s mysterious childhood, and solving her 1964 murder conveniently serves to resolve the detective’s emotional issues in the present. Happily, the murderer is still at large in the local area, which gives Treloar the opportunity to engage in a strange scene of transference in which he appears to be following a ghostly shadow of his mother to her killer’s house. Once there, he stumbles upon a scene of the murderer holding his estranged girlfriend (a fellow police detective) at gun point. Blurring with the apparition of his mother, his girlfriend is shot down. But this time the victim survives. Thus, in apprehending his mother’s killer, Treloar undergoes a kind of bizarre “rebirth”, reliving his mother’s murder—except this time the incident has a happy ending, clearing the way for the program’s trite up-beat conclusion.

The script glibly ties together every disparate narrative thread from 1964 to the present stretching credibility beyond belief and, suffocatingly, leaves no room for viewer interpretation. The program’s thematic tentativeness would have been more forgivable if it hadn’t suffered from such narrative straitjacketing.

There has been much hand-wringing lately about the dire state of drama on the national broadcaster, with output plummeting from 103 hours annually to just 13 in the past four years (figures quoted in “Senators could cross floor over media law changes”, ABC News Online, March 15). The Silence’s numerous failings are indicative of how damaging such low levels of production can be. Without a sense of ongoing production, with old hands fostering young talent and healthy competition inspiring innovation, the dynamics of an active industry are lost. Broadcasters become increasingly conservative, genres remain static, writers and directors fall back on clichés, and audiences become utterly indifferent. Unless we regain some sense of critical mass in terms of production, we have little hope of producing television drama of worth, irrespective of the talent involved. Given the limited opportunities for making feature films in this country, this has serious implications for the health of Australian screen drama as a whole.

In this context, the $88.2 million increase over three years to ABC funding announced in May’s federal budget (with $30 million earmarked for drama production) is far from impressive. A leaked draft of the recent KPMG report on ABC funding stated that an increase of $125 million over three years was necessary for the broadcaster to even maintain current services. In light of this shortfall, May’s financial boost hardly signals an end to the crisis.

The Silence, director Cate Shortland, producer Jan Chapman, writers Alice Addison, Mary Walsh, performers Richard Roxburgh, Essie Davis, Alice McConnell, Emily Barclay, ABC Television , 2006

Richard Sowada has now been at the helm of the Revelation Perth International Film Festival for nearly a decade. Over that time, the festival’s founder and director has seen its reputation and cache as an uncompromising advocate for independently made and distributed cinema grow exponentially.

This year, Sowada received more than 350 entries across the festival’s genres—feature film, animation, feature documentary and shorts—with almost 40% of the total coming from overseas filmmakers who had heard about the festival through good old-fashioned word of mouth.
Boys of Baraka

It’s the same with promoting a film or any cultural activity, really, Sowada says of Revelation’s increasing profile. “Sometimes you can really promote the buggery out of something and work really, really hard and it just doesn’t fire. At other times, things just build their own momentum. I’m not saying I haven’t worked hard in building Rev, but it seems to be taking on its own momentum now. The network of filmmakers and screen artists internationally is large, but really it’s not as big as you might think, and in an environment where not many events are prepared to stick their necks out, a reputation can build quite effectively under its own steam.”

Revelation has always been strong on a particular ethos, an anti-commercial philosophy that underpins every decision Sowada makes about what will or won’t make it into his program. Revelation isn’t just about screening great low-budget, indie films to cult film buffs who want something more challenging than the dross served up by the cineplexes. It’s about fostering distribution opportunities for young filmmakers who may not have the clout or experience to penetrate a market glutted by product aimed squarely at the major distributors’ appetite for no-risk, guaranteed-commercially-successful formula.

“Rev purposely exists outside of the established distribution and exhibition infrastructure, which works, I think, in direct opposition to independent activity”, Sowada says. “That’s the very nature of vertical integration and corporate strategy. The current structure has really scattered independent activity to the 4 winds and it puts screen culture at the mercy of commercial dynamics which it can’t obey.”

Last year Sowada introduced a screen conference element to the festival, a forum for filmmakers and those involved in the industry to discuss the logistical, technical and creative aspects of filmmaking and distribution. He believes the troubled relationship between production and distribution in Australia has reached crisis point, but it’s an issue consistently swept under the carpet or put in the too-hard basket.

“The relationship between healthy production and the existing distribution and exhibition environment is something Rev has continued to highlight and it’s a central component of the conference side of things,” he says. “You can’t really have one without the other, but at the moment the distribution and exhibition component is very unwell and the vertical integration of the industry’s main players—Village, Hoyts and Palace—is a real problem. One weak link in the chain has a major impact on the others, and I think we’ve seen this in the low standard of Australian films recently. If one element is in trouble, then they’re all in trouble, but I’ve yet to read anything that makes that link or provides a serious critique of these relationships.”

While film festivals can redress the imbalance caused by the domination of the multiplex mentality, Sowada argues that Australian audiences still get exposed to only the tiniest fraction of what is being produced globally.

“I don’t know if it’s possible to have too many independent film festivals in Australia, although I think the term ‘film festival’ is used too loosely”, he says. “One of the big problems with film festivals to a degree is that there is such a lack of context in the programming, and in the philosophy behind the event. With something like Rev, where I think there is a very strong sensibility behind it, people respond very strongly.”

One of the most important aspects of Revelation is Sowada’s insistence of taking film viewing out of the cinema complexes and providing other avenues of exposure and exhibition. Although the idea of ‘microcinema’—showcasing film selections outside the theatre environment in more informal settings, like clubs, bars and lounges—has been popular in the United States and Europe since the 1930s, it’s still a comparative novelty in Australia.

“The problem with filmmaking here is that people aren’t exposed to enough,” Sowada says. “We don’t have the alternative screening mechanisms that places like the States and Europe have. There’s a fairly long tradition of more subversive styles of film exhibition and distribution over there. In the last decade or so things have become incredibly corporatised in Australia, but people are slowly beginning to turn around towards concepts like microcinema, not just in the Eastern States but also here in WA, where you’ve got 3 or 4 different sources that I know of either working non-theatrically or looking at non-theatrical screening of alternative or experimental works.”

Along with this year’s Cinema Tabu microcinema showcases (replete with live music, DJs and a bar), Revelation 2006 contains a mix of its stalwart categories with a handful of new initiatives, including a feature length program of short Australian experimental films. The animation showcase has a much stronger Australian component than last year, while home-grown talent gets highlighted through Get Your Shorts On—Rev’s selection of Western Australian short films—and S.P.L.I.F (Screening Perth’s Local Independent Films).

This year’s feature films are a typically diverse and wacky lot, from Spanish director Santi Omodeo’s Astronautus—described after its showing at the Edinburgh Film Festival as “Breakfast at Tiffany’s on methadone”—to Hungarian film Fekete Kefe (Black Brush), a ‘lazy, aimless’ film that Sowada describes on the Revelation website as a cross between Richard Linklater’s Slacker and the Jim Jarmusch classic, Stranger than Paradise.

This year’s ‘buzz’ film is I Am A Sex Addict, the ultra-low budget autobiographical story of writer, director and star Caveh Zahedi’s addiction to prostitutes, which has been a cult hit on the US film festival circuit and which, Sowada says, is “told in such a clever and interesting way that, as with all good low-budget films, the budget is irrelevant”.

The festival’s Australian contingent includes Kriv Stenders’ Dogme-style realist film Blacktown, the Vietnamese-Australian co-production Bride of Silence, which traces the life of a young Vietnamese woman disowned by her family for falling pregnant, and Perth filmmaker Zak Hilditch’s The Actress, made for $800 by a group of Curtin University film graduates and already screened to acclaim at the Slamdance Film Festival in Utah earlier this year.

As always, a strong documentary section combines recent work with archival films. While this year’s documentary program is not as heavily music-based as last year, Amazing Grace: Jeff Buckley is the feature film every Buckley fan has been waiting for. Other highlights include Favela Rising, a powerful portrait of Rio de Janeiro’s slum areas, Boys of Baraka, an uplifting film about a group of young, ‘at-risk’ Baltimore kids who spend 2 years attending school in a tiny, remote Kenyan village; and The Future of Food, which takes a hard-hitting and eye-opening look at the GM cropping industry in the United States.

Sowada says he programs the festival according to the mood or a tone of a film rather than trying to provide any kind of overarching theme. “The process tends to dictate itself,” he says of the selection process. “I end up choosing films that relate in some way to the feeling that people have about the world around them. Last year the films were overtly critical and politically questioning; this year there aren’t as many political documentaries, and even the feature films aren’t as bleak. Instead, there’s a lot more twisted, black humour and introspection. It’s not as fist-shakingly angry, but it’s still very much about individuals who have no control over their circumstances. Yet they just keep going forward, because they have to. The anger of what’s been happening globally over the last couple of years has resulted in a batch of films that are giving a much more sophisticated and subtle critique of society, and how it impacts on the individual.”

As Australians become more conscious of the ways our fortunes are tied to China, media companies and government agencies are putting out feelers to increase regional film activity. All the more reason then, why events such as the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) should assume increased significance for Australians.
Little Red Flowers

This year was the festival’s 30th anniversary as it continues to change in response to the fluctuations of Asian film industries. At a panel discussion on the importance of HKIFF for Chinese cinema, Jia Zhangke (director of Platform and The World) said that for him, the festival had been like meeting the Chinese audience for the first time. Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien stressed the importance of the exposure given to Taiwan’s new wave movement in the 1980s and invoked the 1985 screening of Yellow Earth, which famously launched the international reputation of the Fifth Generation.

A few years ago it was difficult to see mainland Chinese films at Hong Kong. Programmers were faced with the dilemma that if they accepted films shot without official sanction they would have the films withdrawn. The Chinese government has worked to heal this breach and draw the underground filmmakers back into the industry, but the question remains: what to do with them?

The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) recently announced that while China is now making more films, only 10% of them are being screened with any kind of success. Of the 260 films made last year, only 90 screened domestically and two-thirds of those were withdrawn the day after release due to lack of popular response.

As Hong Kong’s own production has declined, HKIFF has become a major venue for viewing the diversity of mainland Chinese production. While we saw the usual mixture of special effects spectacles spiralling down the same lush, sterile path established by Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, there were also films to suggest that a viable, popular, smaller scale cinema might be emerging.

After the miserabilist tradition of Sixth Generation filmmaking, it is strangely heartening to see a well-crafted sentimental piece like Ma Liwen’s You and Me. Centring on the relationship between a crotchety old granny and her feisty young student tenant, it tracks a predictable enough path from initial antipathy to deep attachment. There are no great surprises here, no buckets tipped on the transition to the market economy. Given that we’ve had so many dystopian visions of China recently, it seems significant to acknowledge that the relation between generations goes on with its usual mixture of love, irritation and poignancy. Director Ma understands the need to push against sentimentality to produce true sentiment. Her film proceeds on its understated and elliptical way until its final, heartfelt scenes have shed the need for any dialogue at all. Australian screenwriters might take note.

Dam Street is another fine, restrained achievement. Its story of lost children and sundered generations has become a recurring theme in recent Chinese films such as Wang Chao’s The Orphan of Anyang and Li Shaohong’s A Stolen Life. Li Yu is another in a wave of impressive women directors and her film tells of a woman’s rediscovery of a son she gave up after a teenage pregnancy in the early 1980s. It is full of the understated felicities of mise en scène-effects, where we need to keep track of both sides of the frame and elliptical cutting which begins scenes just after crucial actions which we are forced to reconstruct. Its long takes don’t call attention to themselves but build to a quite complex achievement.

Zhang Yuan is a relatively well-known director (Beijing Bastards, Seventeen Years) and he has significant international investment in Little Red Flowers. This is another film built around children—source material that has always been a central element of art cinema, to the extent that it even launched the international profile of Iranian cinema. We all know that Chinese tykes are unbearably cute, but in this story of a little boy’s experiences in kindergarten, a dark undertone is never far away. Four year-old Qiang is a fairly standard kid, interested in peeing, farting and pooping as keys to life’s mysteries. The film chronicles his descent into naughtiness and finally aloneness. It deals with the ways that socialisation is applied through children’s conceptions of their own bodies and bodily functions.

Combining static camera, flat compositions, little dialogue, extensive and imaginative use of framing and off-screen space, Korean-Chinese director Zhang Lu’s Grain in Ear represents a major follow up to the promise of Tang Poetry and marks him as a leading figure in Chinese art cinema. There is a skilful synthesis of character development along with a rigorous play within the formal restrictions Zhang has set himself. He pulls off an unusual combination—generating emotional warmth while making a minimalist film. Grain in Ear uses its restricted formal options to set up a final departure from them, though given the strength of a style based on suggestion and understatement, I wish he hadn’t found it necessary to pound his characters into the ground.

While China has become some sort of economic monolith in Australian mythology of late, it is important to keep track of its internal diversity and of the emerging social issues which are generating debate within China. Zhao Hao’s documentary, Senior Year, is a revealing portrait of the education system in a small provincial town. The students cram furiously for university entrance exams, spurred on relentlessly by teachers. For parents, who are generally uneducated and doing long hours of manual labour, it is clear that what is at stake is nothing less than the ability of their children to make the breathtaking leap to the new world of economic modernity.

We never see teachers doing much actual teaching, but rather driving students on with exhortations drawn from the vocabulary stretching back through revolutionary Party rhetoric to the May 4th Movement. Students must learn to “eat bitterness” for the year as they gird themselves up for “the conflict without gunfire” that will decide their fates. This is not always a pleasant film to watch as the filmmakers often seem complicit in the humiliation of students, and the girls who comprise the bulk of the class are never developed in any depth. It is, however, a fascinating account of the way a society is changing along the lines set down in its recent past.

Giving video cameras to ordinary people so that they can document the issues affecting them is one of those ideas that technological utopians proclaim as the hope of the digitally democratic future. It’s hard to argue against in theory and so the European Union had documentarist Wu Wenguang devise a project whereby 10 villagers were given cameras and instruction on how to use them and then sent out to make their own films about local elections. It seems churlish to report that the results are pretty uninspired. Maybe the format is the problem with each segment lasting only eight minutes; maybe we’re talking about the wrong medium for coming to grips with the complex and abstract processes of Chinese democracy. Maybe the tools of insightful exposition and political analysis aren’t inherently in everyone’s hands and this is what makes thoughtful artists such a valuable resource.

It is worth noting that an Australian film, Candy, closed the festival this year, due in no small part to the involvement of Fortissimo, an international sales agency with a strong base in Hong Kong. Prioritising institutional connections such as these are vital if Australian films are to have a regional future.

Joyce Hinterding, David Haines, House II:
The Great Artesian Basin, USA 2003 (2003)

As part of the Undergrowth program of Australian art touring to the UK in 2005-06, Experimenta is showing a collection of works drawn from The House of Tomorrow (2003) and Vanishing Point (2005), large scale new media art exhibitions that attracted considerable audiences in Australia. Both shows turned curious viewers into hands-on users of the artworks or made them their subjects. Audiences were amused, intrigued and sometimes disturbed, for example by the figures that suddenly appeared behind them in Alex Davies’ Dislocation but who were not really there, or the grim behavioural cycle activated in Van Sowerwine’s Expecting. But even these have their moments of humour, rooted in surprise.

In her catalogue essay for Experimenta’s Under the Radar, “The Art of Playing Up” (www.experimenta.org), Shiralee Saul makes much of 2 things. One is the quick uptake of new technology by Australians:

For a start, Australia is a nation of early adopters and enthusiastic adapters. Australian artists have used every new bit of technology in their work just as soon as they could get their hands on it…Australians were among the first generation of media artists to receive international recognition and Australian artists remain at the forefront of new developments in concept and practice.

It’s an optimistic view, one certainly challenged by arts funding bodies and universities in recent times but can still be argued for. The other focus of Saul’s observations is Australian humour, because while our geographical isolation has yielded “a ‘cultural cringe’…it has also granted [Australians] a sense of license. They can heckle from the sidelines. They thumb their noses at tradition.” But it’s not just mockery for its own sake: “It’s easy to mistake this sassiness for a lack of seriousness. It’s all too tempting to overlook the significance of humour, to ignore the bite in irony.”

In the Australian embrace of the new Saul discerns a creative playfulness which fits us to make the most of new technologies as both artists and consumers. She cites Darren Tofts’ opinion in his book Interzone that computer gaming is central to the emergence of media art.

Liz Hughes’ selection of works for Experimenta Under the Radar confirms Saul’s account: “Playfulness in all its guises is the thread that stitches together Experimenta’s selection of contemporary Australian artworks.” It’s a show packed with works that entertain but often demand that little extra, challenging perception, identity, function and the very nature of art.

In February this year RealTime witnessed the sheer pleasure of audiences at Arnolfini’s Inbetween Time Festival engaging with new media works by British and Australian artists. The range and variety offered by Experimenta Under the Radar should guarantee success. As House of Tomorrow revealed as it toured Australia, young audiences were particularly enthusiastic.

The sense of play is fully evident in what you’ll encounter in Experimenta Under the Radar: a digital rocking horse; an affectionate (and farting) couch; onscreen figures that rush away as you approach; a doll with a grim life of her own; a tiny room in which you can virtually bounce the furniture around; a giant who peers through a doorway (our cover image: Craig Walsh’s Cross-Reference); a house that spectacularly floods a neighborhood; digital ghosts who dart behind you; and the world digitally sliced up like bread and compacted. Logic is reversed, or tossed out, and fantasies realised. In every instance humour or surprise generate other dimensions to do with how we see and how we are seen, the distortions of perception, the thrill and the irresponsibility of voyeurism. These are toys with big ideas.

Saul sees the works, and presumably Hughes’ vision, as essentially optimistic: “This insistence on the centrality of the individual, on their individual necessity, runs counter to the technophobia that dominates so much of the media and so many people’s suspicion of new technologies. ‘No’, these works insist, ‘technology is not going to make humanity redundant; it can only exist for and through people. You interact therefore I am’.”

Doubtless such optimism is bound to be challenged, and should be, but the wit of Experimenta Under the Radar and, above all, its connectedness to the reality of our daily engagements with new technologies makes an active response more likely, a few significant glimpses into the dark side excepted. RT

The featured artists are: Stephen Barrass, Linda Davy, Kerry Richens; Daniel Crooks; Alex Davies; Shaun Gladwell; David Haines, Joyce Hinterding; ENESS (Steven Mieszelewicz, Nimrod Weis, Asaf Weis); Narinda Reeders, David McLeod; Van Sowerwine, Isobel Knowles, Liam Fennessy; Craig Walsh; and Tan Teck Weng. See the catalogue for the accompanying video program.

Experimenta Under the Radar, Foundation for Art and Creative Technology). Liverpool (FACT), June 16-Aug 28; Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London, Nov 18-Dec 2; www.experimenta.org

This blistering display of fuel-injected narcissism is almost art-defying: watching a bunch of young men squeezing the most out of their car cylinders in the small hours of the morning. Burnt is a series of video installations produced by Mike Stubbs (see interview, RT69) exhibiting at Adelaide’s Experimental Art Foundation. At first glance, the axle-grinding maleness just about slaps you in the face.
Mike Stubbs, Jump Jet

Within a dual-screened installation titled Donut, the artist gleefully re-enacts his adolescent days in Bedford UK, flooring a customised car around a parking lot and leaving a trace of arabesque designs on the asphalt in his wake. You can almost smell the burning rubber searing off the car’s tyres as Stubbs demonstrates his circle-work in a neoplatonist pursuit of the perfect donut.

The twin loops of footage glare at one another from opposite ends of the gallery as I sit in their crossfire, straining my peripheral vision. Going nowhere hard and fast, a group of young men and teenage boys accelerate their tyres into an oblivion of black smoking liquid, plumes of noxious smoke enveloping the car and the driver like a magic cloak. This is interspersed with teenage crowds at a car rally and overhead footage of Stubbs as he executes a series of spectacular turns.

Glancing from side to side I catch subliminal glimpses of a young woman’s face in close-up-made up like a 70s porn star—and the voyeuristic snapshots of female friends, limbs suggestively interlaced. Plenty of psychoanalysts after Freud have posited theories about the relationship between ‘programmed’ cellular death on a biological level and its affect on consciousness. Nature’s last-ditch effort to propel the genes further down the timeline means that libidinous male energy flows on the precipice of physical danger. It has also been suggested that displays of narcissism mask an underlying sense of incompleteness. This notion of absence, combined with the subconscious fear of death may go some way towards explaining some ritualised acts of destruction, performed in order to attain a form of completion. Via the use of subtle symbolism Stubbs hints at a circular narrative within the work. In one scene he pushes a toy car around a woman’s navel, as if to suggest a return to childhood. A poem pinned to the back wall of the gallery between the 2 screens perhaps captures the artist’s return. The text reads in part:

A boy from one town / A small Island
In England / A small Island
Wanting to make a mark / Wanting penetration
To leave a trace / Afraid of the bigger boy
With the longer stare / The faster punch
A bigger gun

The white heat of the poem’s youthful defiance leaves a mark as indelible as the streaks of rubber left behind on the road.

On a smaller screen in the corner of the gallery, a much greater scale of self-destruction and hopelessness is exhibited within a work titled Tyne. The river Tyne runs through the metropolitan borough of Newcastle, in the North East of England. A long-range lens on a hand held video recorder films a young man perched on the cold, meatless structure of the Tyne Bridge spanning Newcastle and Gateshead, presumably about to jump. In stark contrast to the rebellious heat of Donut, there is no warmth to be found here. Below the bridge, a crowd of rubbernecking voyeurs waits for an outcome from the indecisive figure far above. On the ground, an onlooker can be seen grinning and talking on his mobile phone. The man on the bridge too, looks to the screen of his mobile phone, apparently with no messages, or no reception. In a culture so inured to second-hand information, reality TV and surveillance, social responsibility and duty of care is readily handed over to figures of authority: police, the military or anybody in a uniform.

The intensity of immanent conflict screams throughout the exhibition space from the sound of a Harrier Jet coming in to land in a piece called Jump Jet, made on location at RAF Wittering. Donning the headphones of this installation is rewarding, if only to gain temporary relief from the assault of jet engine noise passing overhead. The heavy respiration of a man in pilot uniform and oxygen mask (presumably the artist) is suffocating. Media reports of strikes over petrol prices in Britain are overdubbed with bleakly humorous comments from the artist, mocking the increased consumption of fuel as the public’s response to the overall shortage. Far from being a symbol of national security, military presence stirs social tensions into a judgement impairing state of crisis.

City of Culture is a ten-minute DVD essay screening of footage pertaining to the City of Newcastle-Gateshead’s failed bid for the 2008 European Capital of Culture. This footage is contrasted with audio recordings and video-texts of an incisive conversation between Mike Stubbs and Neil Ramy, the CEO of the Newcastle-Gateshead initiative. The tone of the conversation critiques the ostensible values attached to the ‘branding’ of public spaces for the benefit of tourism and cultural development. Cities that use selective framing to promote the attractions of the city, whilst editing out the ugly bits, as Stubbs suggests, may be doing wonders for the image of the city, not necessarily passing on those benefits to the people who live in it. The complex issue of developing the esteem and economy of a community—both inside and out—is put into sharp relief with the complementary screening of Cultural Quarter. Based on images acquired from Schedule D Productions, the film captures an event on the street below a set of inner city flats, depicting a group of children and teenagers progressively demolishing a parked car. Adults and passers-by view the spectacle with a detached interest until the police arrive, signalling the game has come to an end.

The installations in Burnt are perhaps not at a scale that matches the potency of their content. They work exceptionally well as interdependent pieces however, revealing Stubbs' artfulness at reframing seemingly “impartial observations” as subtle and engaging social commentary.

Media Ecologies—Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture
Matthew Fuller
Leonardo series, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2005
ISBN 0-262-062-06247-X (hbk)

Art, as much as science, often attempts to put an enclosure around a sequence, a process, in order to isolate it as material to be inspected in a certain way, as distinct. Name a system, exhaust its permutations.

Aphorisms of this kind pepper Matthew Fuller’s account of the interplay of expressive electronic media forms with creative people, both producers and audience, through the millennium change years. Characteristically, the statement can be taken as both pungent critique and benign observation. As critique it suggests practitioners and researchers cynically delineate territory through which they career for their individual professional and economic benefit. As an observation, it is a reasonable description of the approach so many, the altruistic together with the avaricious, take to dealing with complexity—far better perhaps, to deal with a part of the world in depth than drown in peripheral details.

Ecological systems of biological interdependency are less than 50 years old in the public mind during which time we have experienced the impact of systems of information and communications technology. Indeed radio and television have been largely responsible for disseminating information about the biological domains, presenting us with the shape of an image we now refer to as ecology. It enables us “to think through the patterns of mutualism, dependency, fuelling, parasitism etc in a system, and between overlapping systems…” as Keith Gallasch wrote recently. “Audiences eager for arts information and criticism increasingly seek alternatives to a challenged mass media, whether in street papers, magazines, websites or blogs, and above all, in combinations of these. A decade ago the commercial media mocked prophets who forecast a participatory rather than a passive audience in the near future. How wrong they were.” (Fibreculture list, 11.03.2006, http://fibreculture.org).

Media Ecologies—Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture traces the shifts, developments, dead-ends and breakthroughs in this dynamic area of studio, laboratory and street-culture activity. Fuller’s tone is agitational rather than methodological. The pitch builds upon selected works of cultural, political and philosophical treatise: from Nietzsche through Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (1938), to Foucault, Negri, Deleuze & Guattari. The recurring metaphor of the itinerant metallurgist, moving to where the materials, the conditions and the needs are situated, the “machinic phylum” of A Thousand Plateaus, “allows thought to enter a thicker relationship with practice, with materials of expression, their constitution of effect.”

Materials like the low-power FM transmitter, used (illegally) in districts of London as a part of hip-hop culture, are tempered with the more mundane official documents that trace the management of a key material of modernity, radio waves (the subject of 70s activism for community-based radio and television). The “machinic” tools of turntable and microphone, of voice and drugs, the issues of redundancy and entropy bent out of shape to produce heard stuff, are crafted through parts of the text into a prose refracting the central issues of cultural traction. Reflection by the reader is a requirement here, as this is no quickly absorbed account. Discussion of mobile (phone) cultures moves back into more familiar range with echoes of JJ Gibson’s views about technology driving cultural change and where frameworks and affordances provide for consumers and hackers opportunity to patch their gadgets, from which emerges more meaningful “dimensions of relationality.”

These are present in The Switch, a community-based installation by Jakob Jakobson where the street lighting in a cul-de-sac in Denmark involved the 40 households in determining each night at what point the lighting would be switched on or off. What flowed was unpredictable, less so the rhetoric of Australian, Natelie Jeremijenko’s BITRadio data interventions over WNYC at the WEF. This is straightforward reading, but not so the penultimate and longest chapter, “Seams, Memes, and Flecks of Identity.” Covering boundaries, variables and events, it zips between ideas and artefacts at a breathless rate: Dawkins to packet switching; Chaosmosis to Neue Slowenische Kunst collective; TCP/IP to A Media Art (Manifesto) from the 60s; Jennicam to Albert Speer.

The short final chapter deepens the auto-reflective stance taken by the writer, seemingly conscious that the ride has been a demanding one, though determined to resist the temptation to prescribe or predict progression, through the text or from the text. He proffers a belief in a reframed art practice having the potential to take a lead in the intense process of reinvention, of orders and relationalities of the social, the material and the imagination. Fuller moves to extract essences from the phenomena encountered, by so doing, to make transitions more visible between them, highlighting tendencies, accenting flow.

Innovative, insightful, significant. These are some words that may come to mind when thinking about the appellations artists crave to hear about their work. Ian Haig, it seems, is an exception to the rule. For Haig, revolting barbarous and shameless would appear to be favorites in the ultimate lexicon of recognition. During the exhibition of his most recent work, The Dirt Factory, he was the recipient of that most sought after grail, a full page of free publicity in the Melbourne Herald Sun, courtesy of our lyrical orator of all things cultural, journalist Andrew Bolt. The scourge of artists and cultural funding bodies, Bolt pilloried Haig in his inimitable “your taxes paid for this” style of bellicose belle lettrism. The excremental theme of The Dirt Factory clearly wasn’t to Bolt’s taste and after describing how Haig’s work stinks, he likened him to a pig frolicking in its own filth. Art, it seems, must always be uplifting and enlightening, steering away from the darker less palatable realities of the human condition. If Haig is indeed a pig, then he is in good company. One of the greatest artists of abjection is also of the porcine family, by name Francis Bacon. Not to mention those other spurned artists who have plumbed the depths, among them Samuel Beckett (whose centenary was celebrated last month), Shakespeare and Dante. I took some time out to wallow in the mire.

The Dirt Factory continues the theme of a number of your recent exhibitions, such as Sick at Conical Gallery in Melbourne.

The Dirt Factory is a development of some of the ideas I explored in Excelsior 3000, Super Interactive Toilets [2001]. However with this new project I have tried to push the idea of the body a lot further into a more perverse, psychopathological realm of abject material like dirt and shit. I’m interested in dirt as transformative material, as a metaphor for bodily decay and uselessness.

I like the fact that The Dirt Factory is kind of ugly and fucked up. It needs to be because the material I am dealing with in the exhibition looks at the story behind Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, which is quite strange. Dr John Harvey Kellogg was obsessed with the proper functioning of one’s bowels and there are parallels with that and the whole contemporary detox industry; this idea of cleansing and cleaning as a kind of transformation of the body. Philip Samartzis did the soundtrack for the show, with a soundscape of the human body as a form of plumbing. So in addition to the sound, there are lots of drawings, animations and various installations.

While these are familiar themes in your work, The Dirt Factory and Sick also evidence a rather dramatic shift in your practice away from interactive media to mixed media installation, with a strong emphasis on drawing; in other words, low tech, hand-made media.
Ian Haig

I’ve always drawn. Most of my installations began as drawings first. Over the last 5 years I’ve been incorporating drawing into various exhibitions. I’ve always worked across media and I am interested in hybridity in a pluralistic and expanded sense. It’s really more about what services an idea at a particular time. This new body of work is exploring notions of fanaticism, so it seemed crude sculptures and drawings would be well suited to such a theme.

Everyone likes to classify artists, maybe this is prescribed from the way cultural funding works in Australia: you’re either a visual artist, a performance artist, a media artist or a video artist. I’ve never subscribed to these categories. I am an artist; when I am drawing I am the same artist as when I am making an interactive installation or when I am making a video or whatever. Working across media you challenge that classification, so no one really knows what you are, which I like, in a perverse way.

Does this shift away from interactive media reflect an attitude to the concept of interactive art?

Interactive art is really about foregrounding the control the artist has over the user. In this sense interactivity is really a fiction I think. I have always found the notion of choice in interactive media quite odd. It’s art, not online shopping. As an artist I want to impose my aesthetic and sensibility onto people, I don’t want them to have a choice about it. My take on interactivity, therefore, has been very different from other artists. I’ve always tried to screw with it a bit as I had problems with this whole idea of a digital imperative, of technology and the computer leading the art. This new work is a bit of a break from that.

You’ve raised the thorny issue of arts funding in Australia. What is your sense of the current state of media art, from a curatorial and institutional perspective?

Media art exhibitions can appear like a Sony showroom. It’s often about a ‘sophisticated’ and tasteful aesthetic experience with video works exhibited on plasma screens and interactive works that sometimes look more like demonstrations of software. It’s become more about interior design and presentation. I can’t help thinking this excludes more challenging and experimental ideas in media art. For example I can’t imagine ACMI going for an installation featuring a pile of grungy old 386 PCs from Cash Converters displaying crude ASCII art animation. It wouldn’t look ‘impressive’ and it would look out of place with the design of the place, which is absurd. I feel institutions and curators play it safe, they need to be less concerned about pleasing an audience and more open to work that is challenging, experimental and difficult to categorise.

The Dirt Factory has a strong satiric and ironic force about it. Humour is clearly an important part of your work.

Humour and satire provides for a powerful form of cultural critique in ways that you can’t possibly achieve otherwise. Many of the works deal with notions of caricature and the idea of the amplification of a feature into something highly exaggerated. The by-product of that of course is humour, which doesn’t mean that the work is any less serious. Also on another level, as an Australian, humour is a big part of our vernacular so it actually makes sense for art to be satirical.

How would you respond to the assertion that you may be in danger of ‘type-casting’ or stereotyping yourself in relation to the scatological nature of The Dirt Factory?

I have produced only 2 works that deal with the bowel, so it’s hardly typecasting. A lot of contemporary art deals with very familiar, what I would label generic and validated art themes such as memory, consumerism, globalisation, which are very stereotypical. I am more interested in taking the audience somewhere else, somewhere they may not be used to going in a gallery.

If people have a problem with this kind of material or these themes I don’t really care, that’s their problem. Art should be provocative; it should challenge you. This is fundamentally one of the roles of contemporary art, which we don’t see enough of. The work isn’t about shocking anyone; it’s attempting to deal with themes that have been deemed culturally unsavoury and of no value. I am saying such themes are loaded ones and as such have value as cultural artefacts.

Ian Haig, The Dirt Factory, VCA Gallery, Melbourne, April 20-May 6; Sick, Conical Gallery, Melbourne, April 7-29

Artist Barbara Campbell describes 1001 nights cast as “a durational performance.” It began on June 21, 2005, and will continue until March 18, 2008. Each morning she seeks out newspaper reportage on the Middle East; chooses a phrase from a current story and uploads it with its citation details to 1001.net.au the project website. She may email the phrase directly to a particular writer who has agreed to generate a response to this ‘prompt’ as a short story before sunset (Campbell’s local time). At the appointed time, she performs the new story in a video broadcast of 5 minutes or so via the website.

At the time of this interview, I had contributed on 5 occasions to 1001 nights cast. On August 21, 2005 staying back in my office at work in Melbourne, I wrote anxiously through the winter night to submit my first story for broadcast at sunset in Paris (Campbell’s location at the time). Prior to the performance (number 62), several emails flew between Paris and Melbourne concerning the story—details of pronunciation, feedback, reassurance. The noiseless, paperless effort to meet Campbell’s deadline was intense, necessarily collaborative, involving concentrated energy and candour. The atmosphere and anonymity of the darkness outside lent the experience a faintly dreamlike quality.

On April 28, 2006 at Casey House in East Melbourne, I met with Campbell to speak about the imperative of 1001 nights cast; its imagery, logic, and trajectory so far. Earlier she had posted prompt number 312, “war of words.”

When I first accessed 1001 nights cast to watch the story-telling at sunset, I was surprised by the choice of frame for the video, centred on the image of the mouth in close-up. I’d anticipated a performance ‘scene’, providing a more descriptive context. The image clearly challenges romantic notions of the female storyteller, for example, as a source of consolation and positive fantasy.

In my mind the project is very much about the West’s conception of the Middle East, through its reference to the original text of the Thousand and One Nights. What we see when we look at any version of it is really ourselves; the West’s own conception of itself in relation to the Middle East. We often picture the Middle East through the purdah, specifically through the woman’s veil and what is fostered by that piece of clothing: a mystery of the eyes. We love to conceptualise the Middle East in terms of this particularly feminine image. The Western corollary to that theatre of the eyes is a theatre of the mouth. The West is always speaking on behalf of someone else—

At the diplomatic extreme, yes. We’re so comfortable imagining what other people should be doing, and whether we articulate this in spoken words or written words, it forever seems to be about words and speaking. When presenting such a severe image of the storyteller, I hope that 1001 nights cast will at least encourage the question ‘why?’ To have the question always present is important to the work.

So the choice of frame for the video is conceptual, and an effect: if you think of the mouth as an eroticised space, then what’s the difference between that kind of eroticised space, which seems to be so open, viscous and corporeal, compared to the eroticised space of the theatre of the eyes, which seems to be about mystery and denial and ‘closedness’?

There’s another, practical reason for the choice of frame. When I have a story to tell every day I can’t possibly memorise it, and I don’t want the audience to see that my eyes are scanning a text, to be distracted by the realisation that I’m reading. My reading needs to have a more invisible aspect.

Following the broadcast, the stories will be accessible in the 1001.net.au archive as text, but you’re especially interested in what happens when the stories are narrated—

Obviously there’s a difference between the stories as texts and as performances. If I have a role, it’s simply that of the storyteller. I am a channel, if you like, for these stories to pass through. They come through me from the writer to the audience.

As you describe it there’s a ritual aspect to your role. The live storytelling at sunset is the culmination of a set of connections. These are digital connections, literally, but also connections with journalists’ reportage on the Middle East through which you create the prompt and the connections of relationship with a writer or writers, who take up the prompt to compose a story. In a way, the performance is an affirmation and a release from the hold of such connections with the wider world. Each day is a miniature cycle of the larger cycle of your project over nearly 3 years. At that level, and in the classical sense, it could be understood as a cathartic effort, to ensure refreshment for the next day.
Barbara Campbell, images by Glen Stace

As well, in the ritual of broadcasting there seems to be a motivation to try to guarantee others’ connection with the poetic of the prompt and the resultant story.

Yes, the story’s not just told, but ‘told at a certain time.’ The ‘certain time’ comes back to the fact of my being alive. The whole project is set up as a survival story: that we are in fact alive has to be proved again and again. This is why people can see the video only as it’s happening—why the live moment can’t be accessed after it’s passed. I’ve refused to archive the broadcasts, not just for technological reasons, but very much for conceptual reasons. My audience will just have to wait to be assured that I’m still there the next day. I hope that some sort of transference happens then: if I’m alive doing this performance, then you too must be alive, watching and listening. 1001 nights cast is about the things that bind us to this world. All of us constantly have to make this mutual commitment to keep ourselves here.

It seems that each day is an experiment with the potential of the internet to witness human connectivity through presence. You’re opening out the definition of presence to embrace the technologies in real time, and in conjunction with real time.

That’s true. The importance of the telling of the tale probably has much to do with the fact that I’ve been a performer of live works to live audiences for the last 20 years. From this perspective, to pull back so far as to become almost completely invisible is a big change for me. I did want to test the limits of the ‘liveness’ of this medium, one which gives an impression of being quite ‘cold.’ When there’s always the computer screen, what kind of a trace of the corporeal can there be?

In relation to your theme of survival, the mouth frequently serves as an image for consumption. From its beginnings, 1001 nights cast has involved structuring your time and place of residence around its parameters: thus far, have there been occasions when you’ve felt consumed by the project? Perhaps by the thought of its duration until March 2008?

Honestly, no. Fairly early on, maybe after the first 100 nights, I felt that in fact I had consumed it; that it was now completely incorporated within me.

Yes, it genuinely lives inside me somehow. My other image of the project is that of a home; as such, it could actually precede me. It could always exist as a home-space, and one that I could inhabit quite comfortably rather than drag around like a burden.

By ‘it’ I mean the timeframe and the connection with the writer or writers on any particular day. There can be emotional aspects, depending on where I put my mind. For instance, I might be very aware of the writer’s constraints; she or he might be up at 1am on the east coast of America trying to submit a story.

Of course the project doesn’t consume all my waking hours, but at the point when I send him or her the prompt I fall into the writer’s space and when the deadline is approaching, to some extent I’m with the writer then too. That we do meet up somewhere in an undefined space is actually the traditional conception of cyberspace.

The tongue stud is the other aspect of the project that I carry around. I got this piercing for the 1001 nights cast because I wanted to have something in my body, my mouth, that would change me physically in the task of performing the story. Actually, the stud is quite a challenge to wear.

Yes, the tongue in particular wants to heal itself quickly, all the time, and I do feel like I’m struggling with it. By retaining this piercing, I’m preventing myself from healing.

There’s an irony in that, since the website explicitly introduces 1001 nights cast as a project for healing across time. This is conveyed, for example, by the line “Every night at sunset she is greeted by a stranger who gives her a story to heal her heart and continue with her journey.” And indeed by the first story.

Yet perhaps in the broadest sense you’ll be aware of the healing process in relation to healing that’s not occurring as well. The tongue stud is like your own daily prompt to yourself, to observe the change; maintain awareness.

It certainly is an awareness, and the most physical aspect of the project as I live it.

Your readers are immediately encouraged to imagine the heritage of the Thousand and One Nights and to cleave to the mythological space. However, during the project’s first year, you’ve been personalising your rapport with the writers, especially through cultivating a sense of collegiality, if not friendship, with many who submit stories. Obviously this doesn’t preclude the mythologisation of self, but your approach appears to be much more about cultivating authenticity of self in relationships, rather than pursuing the potential of the internet for masquerade.

That’s interesting, yes. Regarding my relationship with the writers, I don’t question the projection of the authentic self—'authentic’ is a problematic word of course. It simply seems to be part of the contract that I don’t dissemble to these people. I continually recognise the incredibly generous commitment that they make to the project. I think that the least I can do is be as honest as possible with them, at every moment.

This impulse comes back to the realisation that I’m playing to two distinct groups. One group is the writers, with whom I consciously propagate a personal relationship. I want them to feel that they’re part of something much bigger and ongoing; that they’ve knitted themselves into a global community of writers. And there is the community of the audience. I’m happy for the audience to remain at a distance from the more personal background and process and for them to remain in that compelled questioning mode, asking, ‘how much of this is real?’.

Circa’s Timepieces I-IV represents the company’s latest attempt to physicalise the metaphysical. Building thematically on their most successful show to date, The Space Between (currently touring Europe), the new work takes place in the cavernous main auditorium of the Judith Wright Centre. The move from Circa’s studio to the larger space presents a welcome chance for more people to experience this beguiling series of confrontations between performers and time. A dense work of multilayered sequences, Timepieces allows audiences to take from them what they will. The bodies of the performers (Louise Deleur, Darcy Grant and Chelsea McGuffin) yield one beautiful image after another, asking ‘What is real about time?’

Grant’s Chaplin-esque cat and mouse game opens the show, setting the tone for the production’s clever use of a strikingly spacious set design. A pair of LCD screens, sitting like footlights and an as yet blank, floor-to-ceiling rear wall projection screen leave the performer ample room to chase an elusive spotlight around one half of the space. From this simple prologue the entirety of the stage quickly comes alive as the scene evolves into a backlit, tumble-athon with performers attempting to outdo one another in a series of cross-stage exchanges. It is McGuffin’s static trapeze routine, though, that epitomises this production’s clever engagement with both the technical and the physical in the attempt to materialise the immaterial. A geometric projection and an industrial soundscape cleverly syncopate the routine to analogise the framework that time accords our daily lives.

A tightrope struggle and a hula hoop dance each make an appearance while McGuffin’s bed of nails routine provides an early highlight. Deleur’s en-pointe disjunctive, industrial ballet makes clear the employment of dance as both illustration and exploration of the temporal plane of existence. A largo somersault to a tick-tocking metronome is almost too painful to watch while the honesty and resolution of a well-crafted pop song (in this case, the Streets’ Dry Your Eyes) and a waltz between lovers provide stark examples of the neighbourly intrusion of time in our lives.

By physicalising time’s ethereal presence in the everyday, Circa’s production represents that which we cannot see. Like the time-lapse footage of a turn-of-the-century city building’s demolition and replacement that accompanies several transitions in Timepieces, Circa’s latest palimpsest deftly invites its audience to reflect on the time signatures of their own lives.

Circa, Timepieces I-IV, concept, direction Yaron Lifschitz, performers Louise Deleur, Darcy Grant, Chelsea McGuffin, sound design Lawrence English, video loops Kirsten Bradley, programming Robin Fox, choreography by the company, additional material Natalie Cursio, Lucy Guerin, costumes Louise Deleur; Judith Wright Centre for Performing Arts, April 3-8

Clowns are a dubious bunch at best. They can be frighteningly atavistic and their naked need for love and attention can be as inopportune as that stranger at last night’s party. Yet clowns are seemingly for our times. All manner of motley, zanies and bobos are contributing to a Brisbane charivari. But if red noses are becoming ubiquitous, the masqueraders are hearteningly heterodox.

The Clown from Snowy River celebrates the 8th birthday of deBASE Productions working in Queensland and was devised in consultation with Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Performing Arts Company. deBASE has created a following for its madcap clown shows, comedy sketches and political satire, and this work is a well considered amalgamation of all these. Aimed primarily at young audiences, the show also underlined the clown’s natural propensity for anarchy and disruption as a welcome social tonic.

The publicity poster already hinted at subversion. An Aboriginal clown (Daz) wearing a red nose and replete with cork-dangling bushie hat conveyed a cheeky miscegenation of cultural icons. The metaphysics of black face/white face evoked Genet’s The Blacks but with an intentionally disarming Australian gaucherie. As Daz declares in the show: “Nobody waltzes Matilda like me”.

The work is a new departure for deBASE in that, according to the program notes, “it aims not only to make people laugh but to make people think”, particularly in regard to notions of national identity. This is timely. Historian Henry Reynolds differentiates a decade of reconciliation leading to the historic Mabo decision from the amnesiac drift of the Howard government after their election in 1996 when Land Rights and the Stolen Generation were dropped from the agenda. This is the sorry substance of the ‘history wars’ triggered by Keith Windshuttle’s revisionism.

A larrikin nod to World War 1 made clear that deBASE is acutely aware their clown-eye view is that of ordinary soldiers head down in the trenches. At the beginning of their show within the show, controversial reenactments of the Children Overboard or Corby affairs are rejected. The radical bent of their project lies in the clown’s innocence. The extraordinary achievement of The Clown from Snowy River is that Aboriginality is naturalised so seamlessly that the clown’s world in itself is sufficient critique of mediated history. The smug Strine expert falters into silence when called upon to translate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island lingo by Indigenous clowns Daz (Mark Sheppard) and Sprinta (Nadine McDonald-Dowd).

There were the old standards, and some new standard-bearers deflated by the clowns into pocket-size vignettes of Australian history: The Dreamtime, Captain Cook’s arrival, Burke and Wills, Ned Kelly, Anzacs, the Sydney Olympics, Cathy Freeman, Kylie Minogue, Shane Warne. The action is played out in and around the clowns’ shared house (a sly dig at Big Brother by designer Clare McFadden). deBASE espouses a loose pantomime form, but the individual clown personae were so sure footed and idiosyncratically Australian that it worked as if it were inspired improvisation. Their sweaty vigour and democratic relationship with the audience was a reminder of early Circus Oz.

Amongst a multi-talented cast the physical colossus Footsy (Allen Laverty) as gymnastic footballer cum ballet dancer was noteworthy for his provocative forays into the audience. Swagman is differentiated in this world sans red nose. This mythical democrat is entertainingly deconstructed by Jonathan Brand in all his humourless authoritarian guises. He wants to tell his story—and play all the parts! He can’t say s-s-sorry.

Male dominated history limited the scope for independent female clown performances until in a moment of exhilarating girl gang jouissance they hold their own and remind the men that ‘women are mates too!’. Netball girl Spaz (Laurel Collins), dizzy blonde Shaz (Liz Skitch) and murri guide Sprinta (Nadine McDonald-Dowd) were versatile and dexterous in slipping in and out of myriad roles. A consummate piece of ensemble playing was achieved during the re-creation of Cathy Freeman’s lighting of the Olympic flame in slo-mo.

St Chrysostom formulated the definition of a clown as “he who gets slapped.” When Swagman and Footsy as white settlers set out to clear the land, Daz, while embodying a kangaroo, is ‘he who gets shot’—an action replicated under different circumstances as a running gag. In the previous scene, Daz stands in for both Captain Cook and an abashed Aboriginal child. This highly successful Brechtian gambit establishes Daz as consummate player of shifting status rather than sacrificial victim. Mark Sheppard delivered an impressive performance to suit.

Daz first arrives on stage in farcical drag costume as if he were Dionysius at the gates of Thebes/Kylie at the Emmy’s. But Swagman as the self-appointed ringmaster repeatedly refuses Daz a chance to do his act only to be defeated in the end by mass strike action by the other clowns. If the most successful clown is ‘he who is none the worse for his slapping’, Daz earns his final acclamation. But even so he remains equivocal, darting quizzical smiles at the audience while being lauded/loaded with ridiculous consumer goods as the glittering prizes, perhaps, for having survived. In bittersweet clown fashion, Dionysus (and Kylie) are reborn again and again without dying.

deBASE has mounted a tour de force within modest and intelligent limits. If Australia wants to send people overseas in the future, please send in the clowns.

deBase, The Clown from Snowy River, writer-directors Bridget Boyle, Liz Skitch, clowns Jonathan Brand, Laurel Collins, Allen Laverty, Nadine McDonald-Dowd, Mark Sheppard, Liz Skitch, choreographer Nerida Waters, designer Clare McFadden, sound Ian O’Brien, lighting Andrew Meadows; devised in collaboration with Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Performing Arts Company; Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane, May 2-6

It’s intriguing to contemplate whether Claude Gauvreau—Quebecois poet, author of the original text Faisceau d’épingles de verre and inventor of the automatist language, Exploréen, in which it is written—had ever envisioned this work being performed at all. And if so, whether it might have taken the form of a multidisciplinary performance work encompassing live audio and video, dance, and text-to-speech technologies.
Ray of Glass Needles

The challenge of performing this never before attempted text has been taken up by P: Media Arts, a young Canadian organisation founded by Martin Renaud and Philippe Pasquier. They have transformed a text from non-sensical surrealist experimentation into a powerful and evocative piece of media art performance. Despite the extremely alienating script, the work is so well composed and well integrated that it’s hard to not find meaning, even if it is the sense of alienation itself. The seamless blend of sound, video and dance creates an atmosphere of extreme estrangement with which we can’t help feel some unsettling affinity.

Visually, the work contrasts Orientalism with Occidentalism, offsetting the dancers’ ceremonial theatre masks with the laboratory-like sterility of the set. All stark black and white, the splashes of red in the projected images add a very visceral element, like dispersing blood inside a viscous atmosphere. A wall of lifeless arms with rubber glove hands hangs limply behind the dancers through the first half of the performance, creating a haunting presence, then tilts backwards causing the arms to reach out like a mass of lost souls, disturbingly evocative of so many human genocidal tragedies.

Within this environment the dancers, covered in shapeless white, barely move. Their painfully slow and awkward jerks are the movements of a different species with a different experience of lived time. The impressive performances by Mike Hornblow, Dani-ela Kayler, Soo-Yeun You and Tomoko Yamasaki require an intensity of focus and concentration. They are like biological test subjects at some point in a post-apocalyptic future, with human form yet not human—the abandoned failures of human experimentation. It’s difficult not to feel some sense of culpability for the existence of these beings, so like the products of any one of our possible biogenetic engineering futures.

Philippe Pasquier’s semi-industrial, electronic sound fills the space in a way that is often as physical as it is aural. Like a constant filtering, at times screeching, of noise and psychobabble inside a high-powered air-conditioning system, the harsh scratching of the audio intensifies the confusion and pain of the dancers’ movements. The script penetrates through this in digitised voices of text-to-speech software as a kind of synthetic communication between creatures we have no way of understanding. This use of technology further abstracts the unintelligible language and re-emphasises our complete alienation from these creatures, casting us in the position of observers as they move despairingly inside their dehumanising cell.

The video imagery created by Lionel Arnould and Matthew Gingold is projected on and through multiple screens both in front of and behind the dancers, creating a submersive environment from which it’s hard to escape. Pools of floating liquid and explosions create dramatic landscapes that envelope the dancers within an environment that shifts from extreme violence to sudden calm, sometimes almost womb-like in effect.

It’s inspiring to see such a powerful work in which the synchronising of audio, video, dance and digital technology produces a strong performance that leaves a lasting, if somewhat unsettling, even threatening, impression.

P: Media Arts, Ray of Glass Needles (Faisceau d’épingles de verre), writer Claude Gauvreau (1925-1971), creators Martin Renaud and Philippe Pasquier, director: Christian Lapointe, performers Mike Hornblow, Dani-ela Kayler, Soo-Yeun You, Tomoko Yamasaki, designer: Jean-François Labbé, video Lionel Arnould, costumes and masks Danielle Boutin, technical director Bernard Hellier, live video manager/designer Matthew Gingold, live, audio manager/designer Philippe Pasquier, lighting Christian Lapointe; Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 22-26

There’s a certain kind of person who likes to ride in the bullet proof car, look out on the squalor and the roadside lifers, the trash pile pickers and the sump-oil gleaners and think—that’d be me if I wasn’t so good. Terry Riley is from the other end of the distribution. Grew up in a nothing special place, loved music as a kid. Went to uni around 1960, was buddies with LaMonte Young, the guy with the original minimalist vision. Got into Jazz—Monk, Coltrane, Miles—20thC classical—Schoenberg—then wrote In C in 1964 and started the whole modular pulse based style that later hit the bigtime with Reich and Glass. Travelled, smoked dope, performed all nighters, was on the edge of pop-crossover stardom then went to India to study music with Pandit Pran Nath. Family man, teaching, to and from India, composing, performing, the quiet culture-hero. Turns up in Australia not a moment too soon.

Solo

Two night concert series: first night—Terry Riley solo piano improvisation. Up on the Powerhouse stage is the Steinway, 3 mikes lined up along the length, not much else. Terry Riley strolls out, smiling grandpa with beard, little brimless cap, shirt with a somewhere from Asia type pattern. Sits down, slow bass riffs start and then a few isolated jazz chords drop in over the top. Gentle warm-up, sort of early ECM Keith Jarrett without steroids. Arpeggios start rolling out—big ones, full width of the keyboard. Rhumba action, happy ragtime boogie then enter the singing, Indian drone style, and segue into world music scat improv, Tuvalu horseman at the piano bar.

End first half. Post the interval and a more contemplative second half begins with Riley reaching into the piano to play the strings. It looks and sounds like he is using an eBow, a device for magnetically driving strings into oscillation. The sound is like the tampura, the instrument that typically supplies the droning tonal centre for a lot of Indian music. Riley often played tampura when accompanying Pran Nath. Back to the laying of hands upon the keyboard and jazz again, and what about a few show tunes with singing on the side to weird things out even more. Oops, back to the roots with a hippie blues refrain for a couple of bars before slouching into dark moods for awhile until Riley goes upbeat with Bessie Smith meets Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Back to club-style and a song about ‘stories of love, money and intelligence’—a hipster code for every screenplay out of Hollywood.

Notes fade away, harmonics pulse and wash, the keyboard gets plucked, hammered, stroked and droned. The first night had been a couple of hours and it didn’t seem that long at all. But it wasn’t what I expected. First up I was a little surprised, even disappointed, not to be hearing grand and charismatic revelations from a master of 20th century composition. No sweat, no charisma, nothing showy from the old guy on stage. Instead Riley delivered Beat into Hippie and out the other side. More like seeing Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg all those Adelaide Festivals ago rather than seeing Glass or Reich—not so Rock, not so singular of purpose. Just great touch and virtuosic improvisation. Stamina and agility. One great memory leading to another.

Collaborations

The second night is a mix of Terry Riley performing with others, and works by others performed in celebration of Terry Riley. The first piece is an improvisation between Riley on piano and Lawrence English and Keith Fullerton Whitman. (Trivia insert: Fullerton is the town where Leo Fender was born and invented the first commercially produced solid body electric guitar). English and Fullerton are on laptops and processing. Both excellent musicians in their own right, English and Fullerton are in many ways the inheritors of the punk do-it-yourself cassettes through the mail revolution of the 70s. Annoyed, disgusted and indifferent to the major transmission modes of the culture industries, punk went for a down-home distribution of both music and design aesthetic, exploiting the cheap postal system and the new possibilities that cassettes offered as a recording and distribution medium. In much the same way, the work of English and Whitman (CD labels, online artist presence, festival/concert organisation), illustrates the possibilities of current production and distribution technologies. The music and aesthetics have changed but it’s still do-it-yourself community building.

Riley starts up with sparse and spiky minimalist riffs—these are great riffs, but what sets them apart is the transitions from one riff to the next. As with last night, always smooth and if not smooth then surprising. Harmonics smear around as the laptops pick up the piano and echo phrases into layered drones. But the playback doesn’t always work, clicks and pops extend the piano sound in an uninteresting way—more disruptive than glitch, more like bad looping. I get the impression the laptop side was having a hard time adding something of interest. It’s a hard ask—go on young processing chaps show suitable reverence while improving modern piano style of guru composer.

The piece ends, stage goes dark, and the roadies start to disassemble all the electronica. A competition sets in—the audience is waiting and quiet, and the quieter they are the quieter the roadies have to be, which makes the audience quieter still, which makes the roadies…

Next follows a set of pieces by Sarah Hopkins. Of all the composers working with Riley at this concert, it is Hopkins who most overtly identifies a spiritual component within her musical practice. Her first piece starts very gentle with didgeridoo then cello on sad melody—sounds like the intro to Within You Without You by the Beatles. More build up, some harmonic singing, the effect a bit too much like bringing in one new ‘spiritual ‘ device after another. Then comes a piece with Topology and Eric Griswald on piano—a sort of American Civil War melody done minimal. Next, a choral piece for a women’s choir, Robert Davidson on bass, a bit of scat jazz amongst the drones. Gets a bit earnest and new age-ish. I start looking for the ghost of Joan Baez, and she isn’t even dead yet. A big upside of Hopkins’ pieces though is their sense of community and sociability in performance. Anyone can apply to join.

After the interval comes A Rainbow in Curved Air, Riley’s 1968 second album after In C. It’s a slow and steady jazz classical groove again, like so many other pieces, but then you realize that it’s more the case that so many other pieces are like it. Then everything speeds up. Cue the ecstatic singing, courtesy of Riley’s years of training and performance with Pran Nath. Amazing playing as the musicians fade in and out of synch. This is the music that started a whole genre—where the riff came from in The Who’s 1971 hit, Baba O’Reilly. A great work brilliantly played by Riley, Clocked Out Duo, Topology and Iain Grandage.

Pause, and Eric Griswold starts one of his compositions, deliberately clumsy fiddling about with a music box until strings come in with a little phrase, fingered bass, more short phrases, nothing actually developing, strange groans as the bass gets bowed, a few percussive bits and pieces on the glockenspiel, move into piano tinkles and the glockenspiel again. Sort of aimless, then Bang! jump into the whole band pumping. Great contrast. Finishes back with a different music box.

Another by Riley, Salome’s Excellent Extension. Cinematic, very distinct sections, like cuts to different scenes of the action. Jerry Goldsmith TV titles, Streets of San Francisco or any other 70s show—maybe all of them. And then back to the jazz club, a 60s caper movie, John Steed and Mrs Peel.

Finish the night with a new work. Moorish beginnings, slow mournful singing, then up-tempo, like triumphing over sadness. Builds up and flops around. Strange, free form post-Beat hippie lyrics. Nice blending of instruments and part following. Great modulation between feels and, if you don’t like one bit, don’t worry a new bit is coming.

Riley bypassed the whole let’s get domesticated, big buddy corporate collectivism, cowardice is the strategic positioning of the risk averse, and stayed true to the building a better world one personal transformation at a time individualism of the Hippies. He improvises. Spontaneous, looking outward, intellectual and humble, each phrase gives rise to a new phrase and that phrase to another again. 50 years of listening shuffled in a bag and dropped onto the keyboard to hear this now.

PULS8, A Festival celebrating the music of Terry Riley; Terry Riley in Concert, Solo Piano Works, April 21; Collaborations, Terry Riley with Keith Fullerton Whitman, Lawrence English, Sarah Hopkins, Elwyn Hennaway, Iain Grandage, Clocked Out Duo, Topology, Brisbane Powerhouse, April 22

Jean Lee was the last woman to be hanged in Australia, in 1951. Her life was a complex pattern of bad choices, abuse and negligence; she is not a wronged woman in any simple sense, but nor did executing her solve anything, let alone confirm her guilt for murder or the accuracy of the police investigation.
<img src="http://www.realtime.org.au/wp-content/uploads/art/3/343_greenwell.jpg" alt="Jean Lee is escorted to the City Watchhouse on November 8, 1949,
by Detectives Ronald Kellett and Cyril Currer”>

Jean Lee is escorted to the City Watchhouse on November 8, 1949,
by Detectives Ronald Kellett and Cyril Currer

Music theatre, music film

Andrée Greenwell chooses strong subjects for her music theatre works: gluttony, suicide, murder, the hard lives of early 19th century white Australian women and, in Medusahead, a decapitated soprano.

Sweet Death, an opera for Melbourne’s Chamber Made, has a heroine who gorges herself to death on gourmet pastries and sweets. Conceived and composed by Greenwell to a libretto by playwright Abe Pogos, it was based upon the novel by Claude Tardat, premiered at the 1991 Melbourne International Festival of the Arts and was broadcast on ABC radio in 1992.

Medusahead, described by Greenwell as “a video opera clip for decapitated soprano and 3D animated snakes” was made at the Australian Film and Television School in 1997. Composed and directed by Greenwell it screened nationally and internationally and was purchased by Kunst Kanal, Germany.

The haunting staged concert work, Laquiem: Tales from the Mourning of the Lac Women, based on writings from Kathleen Mary Fallon, premiered at The Studio, Sydney Opera House in 1999. It was memorable for the range of voices and musical forms it brought to Fallon’s texts, merging them into a collective meditation. Greenwell adapted Laquiem to the screen in 2002. Ravishingly shot in 35mm with Dolby Digital Surround, it screened at film festivals in Australia and around the world and also on SBS TV.

Greenwell’s Dreaming Transportation, Voice Portraits of the First Women of White Settlement at Port Jackson (2003) was a larger, if still intimate work, virtuosically deploying folk and classical idioms and rich imagery from Australia’s past. A Sydney Festival commission for 6 singers, 7 musicians and digital projections, it was based on Jordie Albiston’s Botany Bay Document. Greenwell directed all aspects of the production as well as composing the music. After its launch at the Paramatta Riverside Theatres it enjoyed a season at the Sydney Opera House, a radio account for the ABC, In Studio-Dreaming Transportation, which won the Prix Marulic in Croatia in 2004, and the title song was awarded Best Classical Song at the MusicOz Awards, 2003.

Jean Lee

Greenwell was inspired by Jordie Albiston’s poems about Lee’s life and death, but cautious as well. “I was a bit frightened by the material and it took me a year or 2 to come at it. Eventually I thought, it’s scary but I can go there.” Greenwell had studied with Albiston at the VCA in the 80s where they both played flute. She set Albiston’s wonderfully spare and often imagistic poems to music for her wonderful Dreaming Transportation.

What Greenwell finds attractive about Albiston’s poems is that they are “texts that suggest an open form, that allow me to compose colourful music, use eclectic techniques and set up meanings through juxtapositions between words and music and between episodes.” What was particularly attractive about the Lee story “was its emotional power. Music allows you to approach difficult territory that other forms don’t.”

I ask if The Hanging of Jean Lee is a test of empathy, will its audience if not sympathise actually come to understand something of what the woman is going through. “That’s the razor’s edge of the piece, Jordie hates what Lee did, the bad choices she made, but there’s empathy.” What Jean Lee endures for her crime, Greenwell says, makes the material very operatic, especially the waiting to be hanged.

Musically, Greenwell made a firm decision not to go down the roads of nostalgia or re-creation. “There is nothing of the 40s or 50s in it. Nor do I use jazz, I don’t understand it and it’s not true to me or to Jordie’s language.” That said, “there are beatnik and Nick Cave-ish touches, moments like Weill and Brel. There’s more rock’n’roll than anything I’ve done. It’s a work for an extended rock band.”

Greenwell has taken 30 of the 50 poems on Lee by Albiston and ordered them in collaboration with the Melbourne playwright Abe Pogos. As well she committed herself to research and was helped by Don Trebl, co-author with Paul Wilson and Robyn Lincoln of Jean Lee, the Last Woman Hanged in Melbourne (Random House, 1997), who gave her access to his research. As well, “the Victorian police were enthusiastic and gave permission for use of Lee’s prostitution charge record.”

Also aiding Greenwell is experimental filmmaker Janet Merewether who revealed a flair for the melding of documentary, recreation and fantasy in her award-winning Jabe Babe (RT 68, p18). Merewether is “advising on image development and stylistic cohesion, drawing on a range of visual techniques similar to the music.” Unlike Dreaming Transportation, which featured enveloping moving imagery, The Hanging of Jean Lee will mostly use still images, many of them fascinating photographs and clippings from the period.

Dan Potra will design the set, Tim Maddock will direct the performers and Greenwell will oversee the production which features 4 strong, idiosyncratic vocal and stage presences: Max Sharam (ex-Sydney, now New York), Hugo Race (orginal Bad Seeds member, now with True Spirit in Europe), the renowned Jeff Duff and actor and backing singer Josh Quong Tart (All Saints). The format, says Greenwell, “will be staged concert, not a narrative journey but an emotional exploration using music and text, not all of it sung, so that the poetry can stand on its own.”

Jordie Albiston’s works include Nervous Arcs (Spinifex,1995), Botany Bay Document: A Poetic History of the Women of Botany Bay (Black Pepper, 1996), The Hanging of Jean Lee (Black Pepper, 1998) and The Fall (White Crane Press, 2003).

Elision, the Brisbane-based new music ensemble, with a core ensemble of 20 players, has had 19 tours to 14 countries, 34 international composer commissions, partnerships with Ensemble Modern (Germany) and CIKADA (Norway), and been programmed at some of the world’s leading arts festivals and venues, including Wien Modern, Philharmonie Berlin, Hebbel Theatre, Saitama Arts Centre Japan, Agora Festival Paris, Milano Musica, Zurich TheatreSpektakel, Pro Musica Nova, BBC 3, and the Huddersfield and Liverpool Festivals.

Elision is a unique venture with an wonderful record of explorations of cross-cultural and intermedia composition and performance, engagements with architecture, medicine and science, and enjoys a capacity to develop unique and successful international collaborations. It has changed the face of Australian music, not only in its support for talented composers and musicians, but in ways of presenting music for new audiences. Elision has also cleverly developed an international market for its work by commissioning composers from other countries and by partnering overseas ensembles in productions. It has achieved a remarkable touring record.

For 20 years the ensemble has been led by the indefatigible and wickedly funny Daryl Buckley. Buckley might be alone at the helm, but not lonely. Elision is intensely collaborative. As he says, “Some people are afraid of collaboration. It’s fraught with risk. But very rarely has it ever been problematic in my experience. You invite people into your life and you share something. It’s incredibly rich and dense in that moment. It’s great.”

I’ve been witness to much of Elision’s 20 years and always been inspired by what I’ve experienced, not just what I’ve heard, and that’s always challenging in the very best sense, but by what I’ve seen and very much felt in works that range from the visceral to the meditative, the epic and the intimate and bracing permutations of these. Whether it’s the architectural magnificence of the Australian-British-Norwegian Dark Matter (2001), with audience and musicians embedded in a massive installation that conjured cosmic reflections, or wandering the dark, reflective tunnels of Sonorous bodies (1999) to the sounds of Satsuki Odamura playing the music of Liza Lim to video images by Judith Wright, Elision offers unique experiences. Tulp, the Body Public (2004) was typically and magically hybrid, defying labels with its rich merging of documentary, chamber opera, sound art and digital imagery. I spoke to Daryl Buckley shortly before Elision’s birthday concerts in Sydney and Brisbane.

In the beginning

You started out as a young man and now here you are still seeking to realise your full potential—20 years on. Still looking like a young man.

Oh, thanks! The stress has kept me young. The birth of Elision had incredibly passionate energies behind it. It was a group of 7 students who were really committed to playing Australian new music, as we understood it in the 80s. We put an enormous amount of energy and belief into it. And I think one of the really great things is that you couldn’t have predicted what would happen. The ensemble that performed in Trinity College Chapel in the late 80s, or The Oresteia (1993) with Barrie Kosky and Liza Lim, or Bardo (1993), the Tibetan Book of the Dead installation with Domenico di Clario, or that undertook the transmisi project (1999) with Heri Dono at the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial, is not the same organization. So there is a sense of journey and evolution about the work we’ve done. Dark Matter (2001), would have been inconceivable back then. That’s one of the things I really, really want to keep alive about the ensemble because it does give you life-that sense of transformation.

…amongst a Melbourne music environment teeming with new music ensembles, there was at times a fierce aesthetic opposition from some within the new music community—simple anxieties and unarticulated fears of the European art world, even of the wider Australian situation itself: “You can’t have a national new music ensemble or an ensemble larger than 7”, or “Australian musicians will never play this kind of music”.
Daryl Buckley, Australian Music Centre, Update, No 143, May-July 2006

Originally it was a very clear group of 7 players of whom there are still 3, including myself. Then there were others who joined in the early 90s and stayed. They’ve also been integral to the development of a lot of other organizations since. So you find vocalist Deborah Kayser who went to school with Liza. One of her very first major professional appearances was in The Oresteia. Years later, Deborah performs a hell of a lot of other work in Melbourne. It’s the same with Jeffrey Morris, Carl Rosman and a host of others. So it’s that thing of providing something of a platform from which people can either bounce their careers or their creative endeavours into other areas.

In the ensemble the core is always there but you can get major generational change, bringing in other people who totally challenge the predictability of the artistic experience within the group, and the way you work.

Music re-staged

You rarely use conventional concert formats, you’ve got a couple of major music theatre works under your belt, you use installation and multimedia. Where did that all come from?

Again, it’s an evolutionary process. When we began, we played notated chamber music with a conductor and we would play more or less anything as long as it was Australian. After a certain point it became unsatisfying, a service organization, if you like, to help a community that will have, to put it politely, varying capacity to actually engage with what’s being offered. Earlier, people like Simon De Haan who formed Pipeline had issues with that way of working too. So we weren’t unique. And you’ve got limited resources. You don’t have the money to pay everyone. You don’t have the funding to work as a nationally representative organization effectively. So what I decided to do was I thought, okay, this group’s gonna be fucking great. We’re going to focus, develop some strategies, build some core repertoire, really work on that and get to a serious standard. So we focussed on recent Italian new music around the aesthetics of the composer Franco Donatoni and also on what came to be known as the English Complexity School around composers such as Richard Barrett, and Chris Dench in the way he was writing then. The idea was that we were going to carve out expertise in these aesthetics and, over concert after concert, build up our skill base.

The musician dances

I started to think about the way the vision of a choreographer impacts upon the musculature and the physical capabilities of a dancer and how the idiosyncracies of a particular dancer might trigger things for a choreographer. And that provided a basis for an even greater degree of specialisation. It became very interesting to me, within the chamber music that was being written at the time, how far and how deep an engagement with those two composers we might have, and how experimentations with performance, of pushing to the nth degree the most bizarre, extreme techniques, might impact on their imaginations and vice versa.

Absolutely. It’s not just how the notes might look on the page. You bring to the forefront a whole lot of ethical questions, what you can do, what you can’t do, your own input into the music as a creative person, the physical possibility of actually doing it. Then you start to notice these really interesting composers have relationships with other people who are not composers. At that stage Liza had met Barrie Kosky and Domenico di Clario and that provided the impetus towards doing The Oresteia, our opera, and then The Bardo, the durational work which we performed over a week. It became an exercise in spatialisation and duration performed as an installation on a farm outside Lismore and then a year later in Perth. Richard Barrett was working with a UK visual artist, Crow, and that became Elision’s The Opening of the Mouth (1992) in the 1997 Festival of Perth.

Out of the desert…

It then became really apparent that Elision was working in ways that our peer ensembles in Europe were not. Now, of course, Ensemble Modern does works with Heiner Goebbels like Black and White, but in Europe the cultural infrastructure is there to encourage you to do the work the way you’ve always done it year after year. Of course, there are new technologies and ways to utilise them, new experiences bring change, but the basic core also encourages a lot of stability.

In some ways I think of Australia as a desert where you have the law of the minimum. I think people running ensembles before me have found Australia to be an incredibly frustrating environment because the ceiling is there, the desert is there. I was very conscious of using these limitations. We still do concerts, but they’ve become more rare. I still think it’s good to do them. They can be really subversive. One of the hardest things to do is to stick somebody in a hall and ask them to listen to something really actively, to listen to a piece of new music they have to concentrate on.

I think Elision and I think of vision. I think of an incredibly flexible entity, constant fiddling creatively with things-form, relationships, technology-going at it, but with a great consistency of purpose There’s a certain openness making the most of what’s there, in an arts ecology where resources are scarce.

We fiddle because we have to. There’s a really big element of necessity. And I think if you don’t you’re either an institution that has a degree of guaranteed security or you’re very frustrated. It’s also bloody hard. In the end, with all of the organizations in the small to medium sector, whether they’re doing well or badly, it still depends on having one person in there that galvanises or energises the whole thing. And if they’re not persistent, or if that person disappears, or gets tired, the thing collapses….or never emerges in the first place.

How much of Elision is your vision, steering things and you enjoying the creative collisions?

Artistically, you’ve spelled out the role. Organisationally, I help keep things together and powered along. As you get older you gather skills in dealing with government or people. You gain perspective so you don’t panic.

Is there a desire to use collaboration and working across forms and media to maintain openness?

Absolutely. For me the tension of reinvention is partly driven by the need to have new things, to mutate and evolve, but also at the same time to keep a level of stability. Successful mutations, I think, are those where there’s a tiny alteration in the gene. You don’t throw out entire biological history and understanding of the organism. That’s what collaboration offers.

One of the crucial things about any canon is that a new generation must learn it. And in any re-learning there’ll be a number of creative errors, misunderstandings that create a slightly new interpretation or another approach that’s contemporary to the day. So you have to have innovation within a traditional framework. Otherwise you’ve got a fucking museum and it’s dead and why would anyone bother? If you don’t re-think the canon you don’t have ownership, if that’s the right word; you won’t have absorbed it into your body.

Elision next

We’re bringing back Moon Spirit Feasting (1999) in a 6 night season for the Brisbane Festival. We’re working with the composer Maurizio Pisati who’s scored a soundtrack to a film by Hans Richter, Vormittagsspuk (Ghosts Before Breakfast, 1928). The soundtrack by Hindemith has been lost and the Nazis banned it because it’s one of those films where objects have free will and seem to act of their own volition. We’re doing a 20th birthday concert with a fantastic new work of Liza’s called Mother Tongue, a collaboration with the Melbourne-based poet Patricia Sykes who’s in her 60s now and started writing late in life. We tour to the UK at the end of the year. We have a creative development for a new project for the Liverpool European Cultural Capital of 2008. That’s Construction, by Richard Barrett and Brisbane new media artist, Craig Walsh. We’ll be doing some experiments with the construction of models of both real buildings and visionary designs out of organic material. They will be collapsed, rotted, decayed, exposed to various biological agents of change. Small cameras will record this and the knowledge we get from that will underpin a bigger creative work in 2008 in a sugar silo in Liverpool that’s about 35 metres high and 180 metres long.

In future I want the group to spend more time on the creative development side of projects. As time goes on, people spread out and our network extends to different cities and overseas. So the loss of hangout time can be a danger. It’s really important to bring people together and actually spend time, thinking, bouncing ideas off one another, exploring things and channeling the impact into the work. It’s really hard to do that in Australia. Funding agencies here are naturally dedicated towards outcomes—KPIs, reserves, volume of activity, distribution, a whole lot of stuff. But you need time. It’s vital for the life of an organization so you don’t become a yearly formula addressing the concerns of your grant application.

I’m lucky. Liza is a fantastic person; a wonderfully creatively gifted and brilliant person and we have a very strong understanding of each other and each other’s working process. We’re part of each other’s working process. And having a little child, Raphael, also gives you balance and perspective, or relief. It also offers another set of things to do. It keeps you thinking. I guess I’m still really optimistic.

Daryl Buckley will give the Peggy Glanville Hicks address later this year in Sydney.
On June 10 and 11, in concerts in Brisbane and Sydney, Elision celebrates its 20th birthday with Chris Dench’s Agni-Prometheus-Lucifer (2006), Timothy O’Dwyer’s Gravity (2006) and the Amor revised (2006) of John Rodgers for intertwined flute and oboe.

Elision, Moon Spirit Feasting, Brisbane Festival, Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, July 28-30, www.elision.org.au

Do walls have ears? What if they could record, process and play back to you what they had been exposed to in earlier years or generations? In What Survives: Sonic Residues in Breathing Buildings, curated by Gail Priest, 3 installations and 2 listening stations explore the memory of sounds embedded in buildings, perhaps through their material impact, perhaps in the echoes of distant events that re-impinge themselves through memory.
Nigel Helyer, The Naughty Apartment (detail)

Nigel Helyer, The Naughty Apartment (detail)

Sound occupies the Performance Space as though it were the remains of daylight. The late afternoon when I caught the show led me into a slowly revealed mystery. It seems very odd walking into an exhibition of soundworks where you can’t actually hear anything, but you have to listen and slowly things appear. It’s a show you have to work at; nothing is particularly obvious. Of course the problem with sound art is that the contents of one room can easily disturb the sounds of another. Thus headphones become de rigeur. And, as I rarely read the room notes before I look at a show, I am usually quite unprepared.

Each work deals with memory in some way: Jodi Rose’s memory of spending endless hours “guarding” a bridge; Nigel Helyer’s fragments of tales relating the memory of a mysterious event of momentous psychological power; and Alex Davies’ exploration of memory as the delayed re-presentation of things held in mind (memory), each as installation.

Nigel Helyer’s The Naughty Apartment presents chapters from a tale of mystery by the Russian author Bulgakov, which evoke a moment when a building itself comes alive. Entering the installation, the room is silent, small sculptures sit on plinths in an arc, and a jumble of complex looking tools lie on a table at the back. Walking up to the plinths I notice they all represent the same apartment space, each inhabited by tiny human models in one or other of the rooms, but still no sound, no apparent interaction. On looking at the apparatus on the table I discover that each contains a small induction coil wound around a magnifying glass, some kind of handle and some electronics leading to a headphone so, obviously, I put one on and walk back to the arc of apartments. Now they spring to life. As you peer into each one through the glass, the stories embedded in them are transmitted to your headphones; interludes in the story rising from each model, fragments of a mystery, paragraphs from somewhere in the progress of the tale, but can we ever have the full story? Or do we even need to as we make our own surmises, building on the characters and the behaviour of the cat from The Master and Margarita. The mystery remains, carried from room to room as though the apartment itself had become the gallery space.

In Jodi Rose’s installation, Playing Bridges, a collection of postcards covers the wall and Nick Wishart’s model of a bridge waits in the centre of the room; a single span of cables tensioned from one end via what turn out to be telescopic antennae (the once ubiquitous TV rabbit’s ears). Again, silence. Put the headphones on and … still silence. Having been informed that the bridge is “interactive” I go to touch it and the shrill sounds of a theremin break out, so I play with it for a moment and then try the span cables but they seem to do nothing. I find myself disappointed given that the theremin offers all sorts of possibilities by varying the lengths of the antennae and using its output to release other sounds. It is only with the small screen on the wall that we hear any of Rose’s bridge music. Her other room features an immensely still video of a castle high on a hill overlooking a river with but the merest flicker of change in the pixels arrayed across the projection screen. I come back a little later and the image has hardly moved but I chance to hear a short orchestral manoeuvre, which apparently only appears once in every 3-hours. Is this Rose’s view from the bridge that we are presented with?

Alex Davies’ Sonic Displacements were said to be spread throughout the gallery. Apparently the work gathered sounds of visitors to the gallery some hours before and reprocessed them, playing them back to us as long delayed memories of moments gone before. The paradigm is reminiscent of Davies’ work at Experimenta last year, which used video as well as incidental sound and to bring you face to face with yourself, and invented others, from prior moments in the installation. Sadly, I don’t think this sound only version worked. The main installation room was completely silent each of several times I entered it and the corridor sounds were a mere whisper of people talking in the background, they might simply have been in another room for all I could tell.

Not prone to hanging about in the gents’ toilet I found the Listening Station: Men’s Toilet set of short commissioned playback works disconcerting. On later listening they turned out to be intensely interesting. Sunugan Sivanesan’s The WC Overture, produced from “stealth recordings of toilet blocks” works the sprinkle of men pissing, the rattle of toilet roll fixtures and drains gulping into the elements of a rhythmical reflection on ablution and the sounds of the water closet. In Amanda Stewart’s Sign, imagination brings out the hiss of the gas and the boiling of a jug for tea, rendering the voice into microsound, bubbling up as the phase change starts on the way to boiling, bubbling up out of traces of words, teetering on the verge of pure noise. Like Stewart’s, Garry Bradbury’s two Untitled pieces present short vocal reconstructions, but of an entirely different order. In the first the repetitive frustrations of English domestic life through an old woman’s nagging and attempts to converse. In the second, obsession and a toy piano conspire to take Johnny Cash’s The Ring of Fire apart with devastating effect.

Listening Station: Stairwell provided a rather more comfortable environment. Aaron Hull’s Corroded Memories offers snippets of sound swelling into big rounded orchestral forms sweeping over you and vanishing abruptly; rich expanses of memory underlaid by the echoing roar of machines and the quietness of someone speaking. Somaya Langley’s out | side | in suggests isolation, wintry spaces, an increasingly dense soundscape, the wind, outside; inside, the breathing of the earth and the roar of time in a vast expanse of loneliness. In Radiation 3, Joyce Hinterding’s magic wand, the loop antenna with which she draws sounds from the walls and small extrinsic sounds from space that impinge on the earth, brings that most mundane and unavoidable interference, hum, out from the backdrop of everyday life and gives it an unaccustomed beauty.

What Survives: Sonic Residues in Breathing Buildings, curator Gail Priest, Performance Space, March 25 -April 22

The last few years have seen something of a resurgence in performances that could be described as offering a kind of apocalyptic interiority. Works like Chunky Move’s Tense Dave or the more current Singularity, Malthouse Theatre’s A View of Concrete and Eldorado, Vanessa Rowell’s Can’t Leave Tomorrow Alone and a number of productions by Red Stitch Actors Theatre and other companies, have all offered bleak and violent visions which employ insularity to amplify their effectiveness. There is no outside to these visions, no normal against which their horrors may be measured. Perhaps this mode of theatre, which last had its heyday in the late 80s and early 90s, can be seen as the postmodern response to psychoanalytic discourse: we’re not over our neuroses, but we’re over the idea that there’s something else beyond them.

Chamber Made Opera’s latest production, corRUPTION, is an excellent case in point. An impressionistic hyper-opera, it presents a series of images centred on a nameless woman who embarks on a destructive sequence of sexual encounters outside of the supposedly satisfying relationship she has with her equally nameless partner. The heroine, played simultaneously by Anna Margolis and Ingrid Weisfelt, is all we have to interpret this scenario: her self-sought corruption is never contrasted to any normative model of reality which might allow us to make some sense of the scenes we witness.

The grinding, dissonant score by composer and sometimes-DJ Sasha Stella offers an almost industrial, jarring soundscape, sometimes given depth through the incorporation of spoken word texts by Ania Walwicz. There are moments of more operatic singing by Margolis as “Her (vocalist)” but these are regularly subsumed to the more attention-grabbing horrors foregrounded onstage.

The piece begins with confusing scenes of jagged domesticity: “Her” is presented in a relationship with the robotic and passive “Him” (Inside), pitched as a model of contained repression by the bald and bespectacled Brian Lucas. Him is an alienated interlocutor to her sensuality, responding to her outstretched thigh with a childish wonder but mechanically bound by his soulless typewriter. These initial moments are at first jarring, since they seem to be the ‘real’ against which subsequent fantasies will be compared, but again offer no angle through which we might identify with the woman’s predicament. Instead, we are immediately tossed into the maelstrom of her subjectivity, no purchase at hand with which to anchor our response to the events on offer.

The ‘Him Out There’ (Colin Sneesby) whom the woman encounters outside of the safety of her relationship, is a grotesque, Pan-like beast, sometimes portrayed bearing a massive fluffy phallus and sometimes playing a more submissive role. She walks upon his buttocks in high heels, or fills a teapot with urine and pours it onto his thirsty face. It’s nasty stuff, and doesn’t get any lighter. By the end, after a lengthy and fascinating section in which He (Inside) comes to confront his own reactions to her infidelity (or is it a projection of her guilt?), we’re given a closing scene in which she is crucified on an upright table, blood pouring from her mouth and vagina, her former partner prostrate at her feet and the demon-god lover flinging something faeces-like over the lot of them. It could have been lentils. It made no difference. The audience is so thoroughly disconnected from the interior life of Her that by this point understanding is nigh impossible.

Ultimately, corRUPTION both succeeds and fails as a result of its intense insularity. Creatively, Chamber Made has produced a work which regenerates the rich and vital life of intensely subjective sensuous experience, but in doing so its audience must necessarily be denied complete access to or identification with that experience. Despite its best efforts, we’re never afforded understanding of its central character’s interiority, since to do so would be to violate the very subjectivity we are supposed to be witnessing. All we can do is spy glimpses through the curtain veiling an impossibly complex desire, but those glimpses are enough to have any audience member pulling their own curtains closed once the show is over.

Chamber Made Opera, corRUPTION, directors Douglas Horton, Michelle Heaven, music Sasha Stella, text Ania Walwicz, performers Brian Lucas, Anna Margolis, Colin Sneesby, Ingrid Weisfelt, choreography Michelle Heaven and ensemble, design: Philip Rolfe, lighting Paul Jackson; Chunky Move Studio, May 13-28

Tura New Music’s regular Club Zho gigs got off to something of a retro start this year with UK expatriate Mike Cooper. After an initial career in folk and roots music, Cooper moved to tape music and electronic guitar effects in the 1970s before producing his current genre of what has been called free jazz exotica. Dressed in Hawaiian shirt and with a steel guitar in his lap, he sat before a table covered with a bad batik drop-cloth, upon which rested a number of effects and tape loop devices.

Cooper strummed chaotically between delivering snatches of an unfinished narrative about the conflict between local islanders and the sailors of a tall-masted ship called The Dolphin—a fairly standard tale of paradise lost; part Gauguin, Captain Bligh, Fletcher Christian and Captain Cook, all rolled together. This rather problematic referencing of old colonial fantasies and battles served however merely as a prelude for Cooper’s principally musical performance. His blues inflected crazy psychedelia twanging—very John Hammond Jr meets Captain Beefheart or Frank Zappa—gave way to material developed mostly from the looping and processing of the original guitar material, which was then layered with tape sounds and old fashioned musique concrète tape-swipe noises. Watery dripping, washing and plashing elements, presumably intended to reference the initial seafaring narrative, moved about within a fairly dense but somewhat unstructured bed of electronic noise. Although some deeper tones and throbbing elements akin to early electronica bands like Cabaret Voltaire did emerge late in the piece, on the whole the gently moving skrunkle of effects produced an ambience very much in keeping with the Grateful Dead or the early Kool-Aid Acid Tests of the 1960s and other precursors to later rave culture. There was little new about Cooper’s performance, but it was interesting to see and hear a bit of good old fashioned head music in a live context again.

More arresting was US-based Keith Fullerton Whitman. Like Cooper, Fullerton Whitman used a guitar to generate most of his initial sonic palette which he then processed and played via a complicated series of laptop patches and program interfaces. While he has collaborated with some real hard noise merchants like Voicecrack and Hrvatski in the past, his generally minimal manipulation of a wide, filled soundscape made his Club Zho gig fit in well with the general ambience created by the stoner meditations of Cooper.

Changes were mapped by Fullerton Whitman over long time frames, creating a piece which one principally imbibed and experienced rather than following in minute detail or chasing after small returns and fragments. He began with a series of rather classic, spacey computer sounds which would not have been out of place in a Macintosh system sounds folder, or the early computer music faculties of MIT and elsewhere, scattering these zings and boings about the scales. These slightly retro materials soon clustered and grew into something else, though, generating an all encompassing sonic density and spread such as was created by Steve Reich’s use of multiple distinct lines playing the same motif. These wide, snarling layers soon accumulated into an intense, beat like pulsation, before turning into a noise-scape which impacted upon the whole body like a bath of sound.

Fullerton Whitman had also set up a microphone to capture the sounds in the room, gently feeding back these elements into his mix throughout his performance. This was therefore a literally additive composition which eventually produced a pure ocean of bass and noise. Fullerton Whitman took us out of this wonderful physical experience with a sequence of hard sonic splatters which bounced off the walls and about the room. The pointed distinction of these noises broke up the composition and provided a space for the artist to wind the sound down and bring the whole to a satisfying end. Although Fullerton Whitman produced a performance designed more to be experienced than intellectually monitored, this was nevertheless a highly satisfying showing and a fine start to Club Zho 2006.

Club Zho, Mike Cooper, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Tura New Music, Llama Bar, Perth, April 24

Sydney’s Seymour Group (formed in 1977) has been re-named the Sonic Art Ensemble and newly launched, opening with an engaging program, Southern Stars, focused on work coming out of Central and South America. Artistic director Marshall McGuire told his audience that the program was in part inspired by work he had encountered on his Churchill Fellowship travels in the USA, hearing the music of American Mason Bates, cuban-born Tania Leon (he’d enjoyed a whole evening of her music with its Cuban Rhumba swagger), and Argentinian Osvaldo Golijov. It was Golijov’s Passion of St Mark heard at a Sydney Festival that first alerted McGuire to the composer. The work had been conducted by Anthony Fogg, founding conductor of the Seymour Group.

Golijov is a contemporary music phenomenon, long supported by the Kronos Quartet (Yiddishbook), and more recently by the advocacy of soprano Dawn Upshaw in song settings, orchestral works and opera. The centrepiece of Upshaw’s Voices of Light (with pianist Gilbert Kalish), a collection of Messiaen, Debussy and Faure songs, is a lone, searingly beautiful Golijov composition, Lua descolorida (Moon, colourless, 1999), composed for its performers. Upshaw’s most recent CD features Golijov’s Ayre, music for soprano, small ensemble (The Andalucian Dogs) and electronics evoking the co-existence of Christian, Arab and Jewish cultures in Spain before the expulsion of the Jews in the late 15th century, as well as displaying not a little of Golijov’s own Russian-Jewish Argentinian heritage.

In Golijov’s Lullaby and Doina (2001), a folkish melody spreads gently from winds, to cello and bass to violin, notes bent klezmer style, the tone deepening in the viola vibrato, slow and heartfelt and darkening right across the ensemble. Suddenly, acceleration, clarinet and flute leading a gyspy gallop. This is a fluent, passionate and lyrical work, engaging faithfully with the idiom while slowing and stretching it out almost impossibly, without distortion, and then racing, but still sustaining a vivid sense of suspension—like dancing into that state of being where time stands still.

Like a knowing jazz improviser at work on a standard, in String Band (2002) Mason Bates starts at a remove from his bluegrass tune and works towards it. Out of long violin glides, piano stutterings matched by string pizzicato and then wailing, emerges a bluegrass tune against long cello glides and percussive pianism, until the whole thing is dancing with typical fiddle cries and yelps. But the violin soon converts to a Reichian minimalism, scaling rapidly against a pulsing piano. Long cello lines, taken up by the violin suggest langour against a tango-ish pizzicato and the percussive nulled notes of a treated piano, before slowly soaring to aetherial heights from which there is a long fall, the violin in and out of unison with its fellows, the piano gonging quietly. There is a brief surge of power as strings glide and the piano palpably vibrates. Applause for this cogent and, again, passionate performance is spontaneous and strong.

Melbourne-based composer Andrián Pertout comes from Chile, born to a Slovenian father (“There are 100,000 Dalmations in Chile”, he quips). The Slovenian heritage is important for Pertout. He asks the flautist to play the key tune from the work for us “at real speed”, explaining that it will be much slower when we next hear it. La flor en la colina (The flower on the hill, 2003-04) has the surging power of a suspenseful movie score with a driven piano underpinned by a humming cello over which flute and violin dialogue, furiously together and apart. A spacious slow movement follows, violin and rumbling piano miles apart, a lyrical reflective realm soon made turbulent, a veritable romantic wind storm that settles into a minimalist pulse before shaking itself loose again and simply stopping. This demanding work warrants more hearings, its folk origins much less prominent anchors than in the Golijov and Bates.

The visual and aural showpiece of the evening was Leon’s A la par (1986) with Bernadette Balkus on piano and Alison Eddington on a substantial array of percussion. It opens with a dance of rapid, focused piano play textured with marimba followed by a sudden transition to soft vibes and spare percussive gestures in conversation with a moody piano, a kind of stream of consciousness (like a Keith Jarrett improvisation). A sudden gearshift puts the piano in marked ostinato and percussion in flourish. A deep bass drumming introduces us to what becomes a bouncey folk motif urgently delivered by the piano. It’s here that the composer then allows the percussion to come into it’s own, Eddington turning rapidly on the spot, right hand and left busily playing different instruments in an impressive dance.

On Shooting Starts—Homage to Victor Jara (1981) is Vincent Plush’s much performed work for the Chilean composer tortured and murdered in the US-backed Pinochet coup of 1973. The work starts out with Jara’s evocation of the Andean musical world with congas, clarinet and strummed violin gradually propelling themselves away from the tune, floating, settling again. In part 2 a Jara lullaby briefly unfolds out of a slow clarinet opening. Part 3, with all save the pianist playing blocks, faces the explosive pain of Jarra’s death, his voice multiplying urgently through the speakers of small cassette players, then the whole world seeming to fade away on the buzz of a cello and receding breath of a flute.

The Sonic Art Ensemble’s second 2006 concert was a Takemitsu tribute, performed in low light amidst a collection of beautiful Isamu Noguchi paper lamps, and executed with a liberating precision. The carefully constructed program moved pleasingly from Takemitsu’s engagement with the sounds of his own culture, and a particular regard for nature, to distinctive dialogues with Western idioms out of Debussy and Messiaen. McGuire’s easy engagement with his audience, informative program notes and the ensemble’s superb playing have commenced the hard work of building a new and deservedly large audience.

Sonic Art Ensemble, Southern Stars, conductor, artistic director Marshall McGuire, cello Adrian Wallis, violin Rowan Martin, viola Thomas Talmacs, double bass David Cooper, flute Christine Draeger, clarinet Margery Smith, piano Bernadette Balkus, percussion Alison Eddington; Sydney Conservatorium of Music, April 1; A Tribute to Takemitsu; Sydney Conservatorium of Music, May 13; www.sonicartensemble.com.au

While there is a healthy cross-pollination of acoustic and digital audio experimentations in Australia evidenced by the annual NOW Now festival, some events like impermanent.audio have always had more of a digitised aura about them. So it is a pleasant surprise that caleb.k’s sequel to the Typhoon series (see RT 70 p47) is Mistral—2 nights of performances and an exhibition of completely unamplified, solo, sonic explorations.

The exhibition component was particularly engaging. Vicky Browne’s works spoke loudest by being, for the most part silent. In Calling Occupants, she has created a series of objects that take the shape of modern sound playing devices made from surprising materials. Cassettes and radios are roughly chiselled out of wood; iPods cast in plaster; headphones are knitted; a record player and accompanying collection fabricated from cardboard. One contraption utilising the mechanism of a meat grinder and a paper cone actually emits a tiny sound, but only if you crank the handle. Drawing it all together are records crafted from copper, felt and spirals of tiny twigs. Perhaps it is the care of the crafting, the charmingly clunky results and their insistent silence that make this work so satisfying. These normally slick and shiny fetish objects are stripped back to basics and forced to face their imminent obsolescence. Browne’s arrangement is nicely mirrored by New Zealand artist Phil Dadson’s 33rpm UV/R#2 (rock records)—a circle of treated cardboard discs (Dobson spectrophotometer recording discs normally used for geological measurements) that have been subjected to rock-rubbings, creating a variety of markings perhaps alluding to the materiality of sound and its textures and Dadson’s continuing ecological explorations.

Special guest Ernie Althoff (see RT 70, p46) offered both a sculptural work and a live performance. Althoff’s materials are basic: wood, metal, glass, plastic. He creates relations between the materials setting them in motion either through his own actions or in the use of small motors in order to create a shifting sonic percussive landscape underpinned by a humming drone. He prowls slowly around his creations, activating and adjusting items: pinning sound making mobiles to his trousers, twirling string through the air, stretching wires. While the performance is meticulous, chance—or the uncontrollable pull of gravity—plays a major role. This is also evident in his simple yet elegant installation Aleatory Pentaphonic over 5 Part Canon which relies in part on the random intersection of a wooden pendulum with 5 aluminium tubes rotating on a turntable. This interplay between chance and control is beautifully encapsulated in his performance when he throws tuned metal rods on the floor as though casting the I-Ching. It is unusual in the current sound culture, to see such attention to gesture, but this is the Althoff magic. A cross between backyard inventor, puppet master and shaman he coaxes objects and raw materials to release their sounds, and in doing so allows us to contemplate the essence of things.

Althoff’s influence on other artists is evident in the installation and performance of Robbie Avenaim. Off-kilter motors manipulated by footswitches agitate the branches of a small uprooted tree. This in turn activates the percussion assemblages strung from it—a drum skin with bottle tops, a kalimba in a gourd struck by a spasmodically leaping drumstick. His beautifully paced performance incorporated this sculpture to create a haunting set of extended percussion explorations accompanied by the gentle rustling of leaves.

While the series was unamplified, it was by no means un-mechanised. All the performers with the exception of Clayton Thomas utilised small devices to activate vibrations. The ultimate example was the intriguing invention of Matt Hoare. A row of motorised fans with little flashing lights are individually tuned and programmed into sequence creating a surprisingly quiet and quaint geek music box. Arek Gulbenkoglu used 2 ebows (battery operated devices that magnetically activate guitar strings) on a prepared acoustic guitar creating super quiet noise music of shifting drones and vibrations. Dale Gorfinkel undertook a thorough exploration of the mysterious vibraphone. Utilising its own vibrating mechanics and other motorised devices he elicits pure tones and pulsing drones augmented by ringing melodic lines and quiet rattles to create a wondrously rich, ever developing, dreamy landscape.

However the highlight for me was the completely unelectrified, totally human-powered effort of Clayton Thomas on double bass. Employing a repetitive, aggressive bowing technique for over 20 minutes, Thomas released extraordinary harmonic overtones from his instrument and from the room itself. He gradually works up the tones and releases them, allowing them to sing gloriously pure, then he transforms them, shifting the pitch or splitting them in 2. Underneath pulsing rhythms, jaw harp twangs emerge creating mesmerising rythmic effects. The essence of this piece lies in the intensity and athleticism of the physical action and the fluidity and shifting beauty of the sustained sounds.

Accompanying Mistral in Artspace’s other gallery is Alex Davies’ new installation Flutter which while amplified, never rises above a whisper. Based on the game of Chinese Whispers it uses 16 speakers in a circle, to track the progression of phrases—urban myths, news snippets, biblical quotes. Even after taking part as one of the whisperers (along with half of the rest of the arts scene in Sydney) I am amazed how grossly distorted the messages become, phrases such as “A farm littered with landmines…” morphing into “a farmer eaten by the AIDS alliance”. Or my personal favourite: “A lie can travel around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes” becoming “A lie can travel around the world in a striped shirt!” The work offers both amusing and disturbing evidence of our tenuous control over aural language, and how easily myth is perpetuated. While based on a simple premise, its technical execution is complicated as each voice is recorded and replayed on its own channel—that’s 16-channels of hours of material to edit. However what is most appealing about Flutter is the way it works as a composition. Underpinned by an unobtrusive, yet sustaining sparse piano line, the voices ebb and flow, with rushes of whispers rising, threatening to overwhelm, only to subside again into another round of bizarre mishearings/mispeakings. Flutter is a visceral and satisfying experience.

June and July offer multiple sonic extravaganzas across Australia. The new festival on the block is Sounds Unusual happening June 8-25 featuring 13 multi-platform events in venues and sites all over Darwin. Highlights include Touch the Sound—2 evenings of sound based film works at the Deckchair Cinema including Philip Brophy’s Aurévélateur project (see RT 72, p21); improvised and electronic performance evenings with local and interstate artists including Jim Denley, Ross Bolleter, Tos Mahoney, Philip Samartzis and singing saw player J9 Stanton; a symposium at Charles Darwin University; installations at Darwin Visual Arts Association, 24 HR Art and the NT Centre for Contemporary Art; an outdoor surround sound concert at the Old Town Hall Ruins; Off The Page with sound poet Amanda Stewart and local speakers; and all this topped off with an appearance by Japanese artists K.K.Null. www.soundsunusual.com

Infiltrating the east coast is Liquid Architecture 7, feauring Erik M from the “new generation of French musique concrete,” Greg Davis (Kranky/Carpark labels), Jeph Jerman field recordist and atmospheric musician, Martin Baumgartner beat deconstructionist from Switzerland and Dean Roberts from New Zealand, as well as a plethora of Australian artists including Ross Bencina—creator of the innovative Audio Mulch software, Donna Hewitt, Speak Percussion and Fabre Castell. Presented by RMIT Union Arts sound art collective ((tRansMIT)) in partnership with interstate promoters and venues Liquid Architecture starts in Brisbane June 30 – July 1, followed by Sydney July 5 – 9, Cairns July 13, Townsville July 14, rounding off in Melbourne July 13 – 16. www.liquidarchitecture.org.au

The 2006 ACMC (Australian Computer Music Conference) is hosted by The Elder Conservatorium, Adelaide. Under the theme Medi(t)ations: computers, music and intermedia, this years conference will feature presentations, workshops, artist talks and an extensive performance program exploring the inter-relations between computer-based musics and other artforms. Keynote speakers include klipp.av (Fredrik Olofsson + Nick Collins) who explore interactive and generative processes to create audiovisual performance allowing for improvisation and input from the performance location; and Australia’s own academic, writer and artist Mitchell Whitelaw. With onsite concerts co-ordinated by Stephen Whittington and off-site events by Michael Yuen (Project1-3, see RT72, p29), it looks well worth the jaunt to SA. http://www.acma.asn.au/

On the regional front, members of Central Victoria’s undue noise collective will be in residence at Allan’s Walk Artist Run Space Inc, Bendigo inlcuding Jacque Sosdell’s s-edition (s for silence) exhibition May 28 – June 17 and a performance evening June 17. www.allanswalk.com

And if you’re wandering around Sydney in June you may encounter TERMINUS 2006 curated by Clare Lewis with installations secreted into public spaces including work by David Haines at Central Station Tunnel, James Lynch at World Square, Haymarket, Caroline Rothwell at First Fleet Park, Circular Quay. The Postal Project by Jay Ryves can be found around Redfern/Waterloo and Michelle Outram’s Not the Sound Bite will be at Speaker’s Corner, The Domain which also includes performances Saturdays and Sundays 11-3pm in June. www.terminusprojects.org

Sue Healey’s choreographic work spans more than 2 decades, involves performance, installation and film work created across 3 cities where she has made a base for herself since the mid-80s—Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney. She has also had an ongoing interest in working and presenting in Japan since 1997.
Sue Healey

Last time RealTime spoke to Sue (RT61, p48) she talked about her Niche series which included performance, film and installation. Healey has now turned her attention from space to the theme of time. Her work in this current series has included the award winning dancefilm, Three Times; a second film, Once in a Blue Moon; a live work, Inevitable Scenarios, which tours 2006-7 to Sydney (May), Melbourne (June) and Japan (TBC); and an upcoming installation/dancefilm project, Will Time Tell? The latter was funded by Neon Rising, the Asialink Japan-Australia Dance Exchange project and consists of 3 stages, the first of which (filming in Japan) has just been completed. Stage 2 involves installation research and rehearsal in Sydney at Critical Path (July 2006) and stage 3, performances in Japan in 2007.

How does the Japanese co-production, Will Time Tell? fit into your current series on time?

I was given a small grant and a lot of freedom, which was great. So I took dancer Shona Erskine and cinematographer Mark Pugh and a translator with me and in 2 weeks we shot a film on Super-8 and HD video on the streets of Tokyo and Yokohama. I still haven’t cut it together but I’m really excited about that project. It got me out of the safety of the studio and challenged me to deal with available light conditions and creating choreographic narratives ‘on the spot.’ We played with contrasts of time—placing Shona still or moving slowly in ridiculously chaotic places like Shinjuku, and then reversed with Shona moving frenetically in serene Japanese gardens. And we had 4 Butoh-trained Japanese dancers who were in each scene as my ‘controlled’ Japanese environment.

Stage 2 involves a further grant from Asialink to bring one of the Japanese artists here to work with an Australian dancer, to do more filming and then spend a week researching a live work, which incorporates some of the footage. I want to create a room of screens with multiple projections. So a film/performance installation and a film will come out of it. This stage involves Critical Path giving me 2 weeks free space so we will then work towards a public outcome. While I was in Japan last year I met up with a producer who is keen to get us back for stage 3 in 2007.

The Niche series had a very satisfying journey starting in film, then site-specific work, a collaboration in Japan, the performance, Fine Line Terrain, and culminating in a film, Fine Line, which was very much like a full stop. And Shona was the link across that work. So starting this new series I really did try and move into new territory. From being really linear and angular we started making something rhythmically complex and round-edged rather than hard-edged to describe the basic material difference. All the focus on space is still there but also temporal ideas, which are so much more slippery.

So I started with a filmic study, Three Times: 3 solos with 3 different sorts of time. Lisa Griffiths was looping and repetition; Shona was timeless and suspended, but with glitches and cuts out of time; and Nalina Wait ended up sort of floating (she was pregnant at the time and her body was changing in fantastic ways). Then I spent about a month working on Inevitable Scenarios, thinking about more theatrical ways of dealing with time beyond the abstract. And my work with film really assisted me for this stage. So reversing, slowing down, focusing on rhythm, a sense of glitching. Working with percussionist Ben Walsh was fantastic—he talked about how infinitely varied the space between moments in time can be. The score was so diverse rhythmically and aesthetically it demanded an episodic structure—many scenes of temporal play, from pure melodrama to intense physicality.

Shona Erskine is such a constant element in your work. What is it about her dancing that obviously inspires you?

Shona has been essential to my work over the past 6 or 7 years. She’s not just an incredible technician and performer; it’s the way she connects imaginatively to what I do. Her focus is psychology; so to have her in the studio from day one is extraordinary because she demands a rigour in investigating an idea. What she brings to the other dancers—that sense of enquiry—is just fantastic. It’s such a treasure working with her. She’s also given me the sense of an ongoing evolution of an idea. I don’t feel like I’m constantly having to start over again. And that goes for Lisa and Nalina as well. They bring the ideas with them to a new work and we can work deeper. I guess that’s why you form a company. And I’m still trying to find a way to make that viable. This last work was a huge undertaking for me as choreographer and producer. And I have lost 2 dancers prior to Melbourne and need a substantial amount of money each week to rehearse…which I don’t have. There’s no safety net for artists like me who are working independently. And I’ve done pretty well so far. I’ve got by because I’ve learnt administrative and producing skills.

I am feeling like film is more viable in that I have more control over it in terms of scheduling. But I do have interest in the live work from Japan and New Zealand, so having a manager or agent is really the key. These things are essential for me to move forward.

Inevitable Scenarios, choreographer and filmmaker Sue Healey, composer, Ben Walsh, performers Shona Erskine, Lisa Griffiths, Nalina Wait, Craig Bary, Michael Carter, James Batchelor, Rachelle Hickson; Arts House, Melbourne, June 13-18

Brian Lucas is a significant figure on the independent dance scene, both as a local in Brisbane and as a guest artist with companies across Australia including Chunky Move, Dance North and Rock ‘n Roll Circus (now Circa). An accomplished performer and writer, he has played a role as teacher and mentor in Australia’s first Physical Theatre and Circus Training course and the QUT Creative Industries Faculty, and holds an MA in choreographic research from Melbourne University. He is the recipient of a 2-year fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts and will produce 2 solos over the next 2 years, the first being Underbelly which premieres in Brisbane in June. When RealTime spoke to Lucas he had just finished performing in CorRUPTION (see page 37), choreographed by Michelle Heaven for Chamber Made Opera, and he will work with Clare Dyson on her show for Brisbane Festival 2006, Churchill’s Black Dog.

You have been a resident artist at the Brisbane Powerhouse for some time. What resources has that offered you?

The position is a fairly ephemeral one in that it doesn’t come with some of the formalities of many other residencies. Since 2000, the organisation has informally underwritten my career. My association with the Powerhouse has certainly been most valuable to me in terms of my profile, simply because the venue has a really strong reputation both as a presenter of exciting performance work and as a local cultural icon. When you operate as a freelance artist, it sometimes becomes a real struggle just to ‘prove your worth.’ More practically, the Powerhouse provides me with access to rehearsal space and administrative support, and is the chief commissioner of my work. While it has all been negotiated in a fairly laid-back way, each of these things has been enormously beneficial.

You worked with Chunky Move in their New York Bessie Award winner Tense Dave (a collaboration between Gideon Obarznek, Lucy Guerin and Michael Kantor). How does that experience fit into your career?

It really represented an important move for me in many ways. Although I had been working continually in Brisbane for just over 20 years, at that time I still had a fairly low profile in the rest of Australia. That’s one of the few drawbacks of being based outside of the Melbourne-Sydney axis.

The experience itself was fantastic, everyone involved in creating the piece had a sense that we were onto something very special and the subsequent success of the work both here and overseas totally proved that. And it saw the start of what I think will be long-term collaborations, like that with Michelle Heaven.

On the surface, the plan is a fairly simple one. I’m creating and presenting 2 new solo works, one in June 2006 and then the next in June 2007.

In reality, it has become more complex than that. I’ve used the first 12 months to create the first piece, Underbelly, but I’ve given myself the opportunity to research and develop the work in a wide variety of contexts. I started the piece during the Chunky Move USA tour in 2005, and since then have been able to continue the process in a wide range of locations. I listed them the other day for my own amusement and realised that Underbelly has been made in New York, Jacob’s Pillow, Tallahassee (Florida), Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra (at the Choreographic Centre), Brisbane and Warwick, my hometown in Queensland. It was a really strange experience to hire the hall that I first started dance classes in as a 6 year-old, and to use it as a rehearsal space for my work 35 years later!

After Underbelly premieres at Brisbane Powerhouse in June I’ll be starting on the next work, and my aim is to follow a similar process but to take it into a more international sphere. I’m hoping to spend some more time in both the US and the UK rehearsing and researching, as well as checking out as much live work as I can.

That’s been one of the other fantastic aspects of the fellowship, it’s provided me with a bit of breathing space to recharge and refocus. I’ve been able to immerse myself in anything that will feed my creative work. After 2 decades of working in the arts, and particularly after 10 years of freelancing, it’s exactly the right time for me to take stock of where I am and what I’m doing, and to look forward, without the stress of just keeping my head above water in the here and now.

You’ve chosen to create 2 solo works during your fellowship. Is this the genre of work with which you feel most comfortable?

God, there’s a thesis in there, somewhere! I love creating and performing solo works. I love it as a form and find that it suits me. I suppose that you could either be kind and refer to my having an ‘auteur mentality’, or be more cutting and say it’s just a case of my being an egomaniacal control freak. Either way, I just know that I have a particular set of creative and performance skills that are only fully catered for in my presentation of these solo works.

There is something about really taking yourself on, challenging yourself and drawing out the stories and states that exist within the ‘self.’ I’ve always been keenly aware that solo work, without common reference points, is just personal therapy…I’m still trying to figure this one out. But I do know that I couldn’t work as a choreographer or as a performer in other contexts if I didn’t do what I do with my solo pieces.

The bottom line? I just know that if I didn’t create these solo pieces, I would metaphorically explode. It, ‘the stuff’, needs to get out. There has to be a release valve for me… and in my experience, I realise that I’m the best person for this particular job. It’s dirty work, but someone’s gotta do it.

Underbelly, choreographer and performer Brian Lucas, Brisbane Powerhouse June 21-24

Melbourne-based contemporary dance company, BalletLab, recently received a prestigious Arts Innovations Grant from Arts Victoria for its new production Origami, the epitome of Artistic Director, Phillip Adams’ collaborative drive. I spoke to him as he prepared for his final creative development before the premiere in Melbourne and then a season at The Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre.

The inspiration with anything pop up or moulded, such as modular plastic toys has always been there. These are the images I retain from being a small kid and which first fuelled me as an artist. Combine this with the Americanised bastardization of Japanese cartoons, such as Astroboy and Kimba, which excited me in the early 50s and you have a sort of oriental fantasia which still resonates with me as an adult.

Origami is perhaps the culmination of all the work I have made to date, as it takes my obsession with the fold to its logical conclusion. There is an approach to layering in the piece which moves from sea to land to mountain to sky, creating a landscape which is inspired by my Western perception of all things Japanese. Yet I am proud to say that there is actually no paper in this production, nor is there any ‘typical’ Japanese music. The most literal origami you will see is in our use of objects like tatami mats and the costumes that fold up around the body as the performance progresses.

I am striving for a relentless complexity in every aspect of Origami. The choreography becomes magnificent in the virtuosic vocabulary which interprets ballet technique loosely before taking it to extremes. Another influence is Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, in which I took a short course. We create an Ikebana arrangement through ballet technique.

I still draw heavily from ballet technique, yes. I am very inspired by the baroque, the romantic, the classical form. I am just seeking to twist this into a contemporary aesthetic that allows me the range of diversity and queer elegance that is me.

But there is a lot more than just you in this piece? How did you find the many collaborators for Origami?

The architects, BURO, found us, having seen Fiction and been enthralled at the animation of toys in that piece. I like to educate myself before commencing any new work, so I plunged into architecture to learn about structure, form and space at an academic level.

I am delighted by the ‘piece de resistance’ set which we call ‘Mount Fuji.’ The mountain starts from a flat surface and folds ad infinitum into a valley, a plain and ultimately a flat wall.

I was introduced to Matt Gardiner, a conceptual origamist after seeing his Orobotics exhibition and we were soon collaborating. There is a folding of light in the work of Ben Cisterne, and Rhian Hinkley, the animator whose work I had seen in Soft by Back to Back Theatre, makes another important contribution.

Also, I am working with David Chisholm, the composer, with whom I have just finished a commission for The Australian Ballet’s bodytorque season and who will be my collaborator on the next production, Brindabella. David and I have a productive mutual appreciation which I find very inspiring. He is composing for a four string instrument ensemble which will play live over an electronic score.

No, in the past I have had a live DJ, but otherwise that has been it. In Brindabella I have the luxury of live music again and I feel like I have turned a corner and will dedicate the next set of productions to incorporating live music.

I draw, we talk, watch movies, look at buildings, try things out in the open and take them back to the studio. It’s all about creating a new vocabulary together. I also bring a lot of stuff into the studio. I should really have a junk shop to store all the paraphernalia…

Collaboration is definitely the way forward. Either contemporary dance in its purest form has exhausted itself or I am just over it, but I have to work with artists from other disciplines. I feel that the visual arts, contemporary chamber music and architecture are really driving the arts in Australia and that dance has to merge with these forms to thrive.

I am not interested in the use of technology, nor multimedia and tend to stay clear of the synthetic domain. I am most defiantly a hands-on artist and need to touch tangible objects to coax the work out of me. It’s about crafting the human body within a visual arts aesthetic.

You are already well advanced in the creation of your next production, Brindabella. How do you keep such passionate productions running in parallel without interference?

I am an artist for life. Nothing else matters but the work. Each time I begin a new work, there are already 2 others forming in the background. That is never a hassle. I have an abundance of ideas which I very passionately and necessarily have to show to my public.

Yes, in light of our history, which has never been easy, now seems to be a very good time. Having met David (Chisholm) I feel more confident as an artist holding up a company. Plus international presentations such as the recent New York season at PS122 have locked us in as a significant company. Also Linda (Sastradipradja, producer and performer) has real vision for the company.

We have genuine interest for international touring of Origami and have almost confirmed the San Francisco International Arts Festival alongside dates in Slovenia, Bangkok and Hamburg. Plus this could be the work that enables me to fulfill my goal of taking BalletLab to the UK.

BalletLab, Origami, ArtsHouse, North Melbourne Town Hall; Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, July 31-Aug 5

From abrasion to seduction, precision to play, Strut’s two week mixed bill presented a challenging collection of disparate embodiment.

Choreographer Paul Gazzola offered a reprise of his duet for Aimee Smith and Jessyka Watson-Galbraith with Yep. The piece worked somewhat better in its earlier gallery manifestation at Artrage in February, the theatrical restaging here having something of a uniformity of rhythm. At Artrage the work had been characterised by silent pauses irregularly shifting between long, pregnant gaps and shorter ones, which alternated with moments of rapid gesticulatory activity. Hands saluted or cut the air before the trunk, describing the space immediately around the body, whilst also suggesting a florid, opaque language. Sound designer Dave Miller fired off selections from his CD collection as the performers launched into movement, from a standing position, to cries of “Yep!” Unison was broadly maintained, before something went awry (“What?” spectators wondered) and one dancer announced “Nup!” Then it all came to a halt as each performer strained to perceive the motives of the other. The space was reconfigured as one dancer strode to a new position—typically with one unable to directly see the other—and suddenly it began again. During one notable moment at Artrage, both Smith and Watson-Galbraith tramped outside and across the road, distant echoes of “Yep! … Nup!” reaching bemused onlookers by the gallery.

This piece became a great guessing game with the performers publicly displaying and vocalising the rules-based structure of the semi-improvised work, whilst also withholding the information to allow one to fully decode their actions. Questions of why, what and when danced about this organised display of abstraction.

In Sliding Towards, dance-maker Olivia Millard appeared on her own, exhibiting a strong sense of directional movement and swinging inertia. She violently threw her leg out from her waist, causing her frame to pivot at this point and sharply roll out behind it in a counter-balancing action. After a whirlwind of intense dynamism, traversing both walls and floor, Millard settled into a slower, meditative phase, almost romantic, produced from the inward contemplation of her own embodiment and resting within a single pool of light. As she quietly posed and rotated through the shoulder, along the arm, and ended poised on one foot, the audience was invited into a sympathetic relationship with her; a metaphorical caressing of the body through shared physical attention. This initial section—the strongest within the piece—was followed by equally lyrical material in which dancer Paea Leach joined Millard to perform a series of slow, gymnastic weight-exchanges and poses. The effect here too was heightened by the performers’ concentration, yet focused on their active accommodation of each other’s bodies. The duo made a stimulating contrast, Millard with a fine, elongated form in which the limbs extended the line of the torso, while Leach’s broader shoulders suggested a more weighty, muscular presence.

In Leach’s own work, Vibratile et Nuance, the dancer-choreographer melodramatically scissored her arms before her torso in a red dress, or plied the garment’s surface as she spread it on the floor. Jessyka Watson-Galbraith threw her head back so violently that her red-clad torso arched and her whole frame staggered. In a miniskirt, Watson-Galbraith’s legs glowed under Andrew Lake’s lighting, adding a sense of misplaced sexuality and aggressive exposure within this tense space. Separate even when touching, these bodies only came together to angrily carve up geometric lines, to bounce together or to urgently clasp as they enacted violent self-abuse. Leach has said that the choreography explored sensations of touch. If Sliding Towards manifested a seduction of bodies—a self-aware choreography of physical dissonance, lyrically accommodated—then Vibratile et Nuance produced a sense of psychokinetic frottage, a rasping of bodies within a potentially threatening environment.

The finest piece in the program was choreographer Sue Peacock’s full length Hoofas. As in Yep, this work featured a series rules-based improvisations. The piece had an enticing, relaxing stop/start ambience, in which the 2 performers ceased dancing, came to the front of the stage and played, amongst other things, the child’s game of seeing who can slap the other’s outstretched hands. Clothing was rearranged, coins tossed, pants and tops exchanged and worn in bizarre variants as head gear, a top, or as a skirt, and other configurations. The hoofing of the title involved a repeated tap sequence—a test to see how many variations could be stomped out while the other performer took time on a stopwatch. The piece was sustained by a bittersweet, fragmentary narrative of 2 women, friends since school days in the country (out amongst the horses), who had worked cabaret, showgirl gigs, as hostesses, and in modern dance, falling out and together again. Moulding herself into a virtual doll, Tammy Meeuwissen donned a beaded cocktail dress, bouffant hair-piece, tiara, heels and grimacing smile, pouring forth the rules to which she had been subject (always smile, light the gentleman’s cigarette, keep a napkin over your lap) and the scorn which she had received from peers and friends. In an ambivalent, rarely fully-accepted gesture, Claudia Alessi attempted to compensate for such human failings by resting her chin on Meeuwissen’s shoulder, or by pushing into her partner with the back of her head, like a horse.

Beginning as a slight, comic piece, the performance ended as an intriguing study of the character of these dancers and their physical presence—Alessi the gamine game player, at ease on the ground and in gymnasticism, versus Meeuwissen’s sensual, far-flinging dancerly play. Jokes about Alessi’s diminutive stature abounded, leading her to seek revenge by stealing a cigarette and showing off with smoke rings. The constant rearrangement of costume and props produced a pleasing musicality of colour and texture, moving from bright shades to black tops and stockings, which reflected an overall darkening and formalisation of tone. Enacting an ambience between that of Sliding Towards and Vibratile et Nuance, Hoofas depended upon individuals endlessly coming together and splitting apart, a love/hate relationship of bodies and sensibilities, warmly represented.

Strut, curator Sue Peacock, Yep, choreography Paul Gazzola, sound Dave Miller; Honey You Lied, choreography Bianca Martin; Sliding Towards, choreography Olivia Millard; Vibratile et Nuance, choreography Paea Leach; Moon Hides Go Seek, direction/choreography Sete Tele; performers: Aimee Smith, Jessyka Watson-Galbraith, Brooke Leeder, Olivia Millard, Paea Leach, Sete Tele, Mike Nanning; design: Andrew Lake; Deckchair Theatre, March 22-26

Hoofas, choreographer Sue Peacock, designer Andrew Lake. performers Claudia Alessi, Tammy Meeuwissen; Deckchair Theatre, March 15-18.

“Bloom” is a provocative choice of title for an exhibition developed for Adelaide’s decaying Queen’s Theatre. The artists have approached the site as though sneaking through an abandoned house; there are few lights and screens flicker against the darkness. Domestic objects take on the character of ghosts in a deserted space. Discomfort is the pervading tone; this bloom suggests uneasy birth.
Lisa Harms, flightpatterns_flocking 2006 installation (detail)

Lisa Harms, flightpatterns_flocking 2006 installation (detail)

Kaylie Weir, Lisa Harms and Anna Hughes have created installation works in response to notions of disease or perhaps dis-ease. Harms describes a process that involves “letting uncomfortable things well up” to inform the works. While the artists have distinct sensibilities and subject matter, there are formal threads and peripheral connections that keep the encounter of the exhibition a tightly constructed experience.

Anna Hughes uses the space most aggressively with the 4 distinct parts of her installation, Beside History, marking out a central square in a lighter, more open part of the space. In one corner an unhealthy proliferation of charcoal black latex nipples swarm on the surface of a vaguely physiological form. The installation title supports the suggestion of a medical mapping of bodies: a dominant male paradigm (his-story) encrusted with a plague of female body bits. In the opposite corner bodies, or things that might become bodies, pile up, like the outcome of a conveyer belt crash in a stick figure factory. These vaguely human forms are made from new pine, bolted at the joints and strapped haphazardly together by leather belts in a pile, the total resembling something between a collapsed house frame and a mass grave.

There is a calculated formality in the making of Hughes’ work; a deadpan delivery of highly subjective and emotional content. The work might also evoke a profound sense of futility, akin to the numbest part of loss, where mechanical movements take the wheel, creative activity becomes misdirected and wooden skeletons are repeatedly made only to miscarry before completion.

Kaylie Weir presents a series of tactile installation works made predominantly from screen works, plaster, toffee and hundreds of red shiny, rotting apples. She uses the highly charged symbolism of the fruit to signify knowledge and perhaps sex. If an apple is a single consumable unit of thought, then the sheer number used implies confusion and mental disorder, or to follow the path of temptation, uncontrolled opulence. The apples are crowded, disorganised and decaying. Alongside are fragile plaster and toffee casts of suitcases that suggest an attempt to control, compartmentalise or hold still this excessive, unstable mental state.

A strength of the exhibition is its diversity and sensitivity in the use of screen media. Weir photographs soft-edged painted scenes from a distance and projects them also from a distance—we are held at arms length, perpetually out of focus as though watching another person’s memories.

Lisa Harms displays a delicate sensibility in her video installation flightpatterns_flocking. The screens show related images and sequences, most featuring a young woman spinning at different intensities. In one we see a corseted torso as she spins giddily, in another it’s legs only as she turns in a circle, perpetually held on tip-toe by careful editing, impossibly teetering. Harms uses old furniture, bell jars, the ecstatic spinning and the old Queen’s Theatre itself to evoke women of an earlier era—‘hysterical’ women of the sort that might have fascinated and frightened Freud.

Harms’ work involves making and tracing patterns. The installation title might reference Deleuze and Guattari’s “lines of flight”, a term they use to describe a stringing together of movements based on intensity (A Thousand Plateaus). A large video projection shows bird flocking patterns overlaid onto an image of wallpaper. The freedom implied by the flight is juxtaposed with the tightly controlled editing and mirroring used to construct the ebb and flow. The overlaying suggests nature held still alongside a desire for release.

In a dark, dank space Lisa Harms, Anna Hughes and Kaylie Weir have explored rich and difficult subject matter, the sheer scale of the Queen’s Theatre allowing for ambitious installations. The exhibition suggests the potential richness of working outside traditional art spaces. While, like a delicate flower, Bloom tempts the viewer, it is equally unsettling. I leave feeling I have been handed a bright algal bloom; its beauty made dangerous by unstable replication.

Bloom, co-curated installation by Lisa Harms, Anna Hughes and Kaylie Weir, Queen’s Theatre Adelaide, April 29-May 21

Complex digital technology pervades every aspect of our daily lives and the visual arts are no exception, especially with the readily available and cheap stockpile of high-tech, off-the-shelf gizmos and gadgets currently saturating the market. However, Rebecca Horn’s kinetic creations are born out of the mechanisms, gearing and inner-workings of obsolete typewriters, surgical instruments and analogue clocks. Her exhibition Time Goes By at the ANU’s Drill Hall Gallery brings to Australia for the first time a number of the photographs, drawings, films and most interestingly the kinetic sculptures of this internationally acclaimed artist.
Rebecca Horn, Large Feather Wheel, 1997

As a student in the 1960s at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, Horn produced a series of filmed performances incorporating body sculptures and extensions, masks and feathered objects/costumes. Over the next decade these fanciful creations developed into the wearable kinetic sculptures documented in films such as The Feathered Prison Fan in Der Eintänzer (1978) or The Peacock Machine in La Ferdinanda (1981). However, as Horn’s practice evolved, she completely replaced the human body with mechanical constructions and kinetic sculptures. The dynamic and fluid movement of the performers’ bodies in her earlier films is replaced by the very slight rhythmic movements and extremely precise mechanised functions of her sculptures. In a final step, this exhibition displays these as individual artworks.

Painting Machine, 1999, is Horn’s largest kinetic sculpture in this exhibition and resembles a primitive version of the complex and technologically advanced robotic machines used in the automotive industry. As though resurrected from one of Henry Ford’s automated production lines, Horn’s robotic arm sprays a fine jet of paint across an entire gallery wall. As the name suggests, the human painter is displaced by the mechanical apparatus, in the same way factory workers were made redundant by robots. In effect, Horn’s robo-painter replaces the need for an artist’s involvement in the creative act and raises questions as to whether it is the actual process of painting or the idea and construction of the mechanical apparatus that constitutes the artwork.

Moving parts powered by intricately geared electric motors and pumps animate this and many other sculptures in Horn’s exhibition. On entering the gallery, the viewer faces the splayed wing-feathers of a bird, mounted on a brass apparatus. As implied by the title, Large Feather Wheel (1997), the feathers momentarily form a giant disc when fully open, before slowly folding away as the machine completes its cycle. On the opposite wall is another small machine, constructed from 7 oyster shells attached to the working innards of a piano. In Oysterpiano (1992), the rocker action of the revolving shaft causes the oyster shells to rise and fall in a wave-like motion. Horn has an obvious interest in natural cycles, such as the influence of the moon or sun on the seasons, weather and tides. In Blue Wave (2002), she sets in motion 2 circular mirrors, over-painted with blue waves, that orbit one another. Occasionally, one of the mirrors catches an overhead floodlight and redirects its beam, casting a crescent shadow across the floor like a solar eclipse.

At the heart of each kinetic sculpture beats the faint repetitive sounds of animated parts. Reverberating from across the gallery space the “pitter-patter” of tiny feet, leads the perceptive listener to a large canvas splattered with dark blue paint, Arteaters (1998). The sound resonates from 2 miniature insect-like machines attached at either end of the canvas that beat to a constant rhythm just like their living counterpart, the cricket. Their long spindly legs, made from brass tubing delicately soldered and activated by small electric motors and gears sourced from an old clock or typewriter, softly tap on a canvas surface taut as a drum. Effectively, Horn has overcome the limitations once advanced mechanisms to perform new artistic functions that are now taken for granted by new media artists using digital technology. Horn’s art is neither nostalgic nor romantic, she uses the outmoded components of antique instruments, of scientific innovation past, to construct beautifully simple creations.

Rebecca Horn, Time Goes By, Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra. March 9 – April 23

Inflight’s new Project Space is one of Tasmania’s few public art spaces offering visitors the chance to see works in progress and take part in their evolution. Specifically catering for experimental work, the Project Space offers a relaxed arena for artists wanting to test and develop their ideas. The compact, intimate space (located in a small room just off the main gallery) also acts as a prime location for projections, video and sound work.
Deborah Pollard & Matt Warren, Apparently Nothing

Deborah Pollard & Matt Warren, Apparently Nothing

Amongst the first to make the most of the Project Space were Deborah Pollard and Matt Warren. Presented in late March, their collaborative video/sound installation, Apparently Nothing, explored aspects of absence and memory associated with loss. Part one of a 2-part exhibition slated to conclude at Inflight in November 2006, this version of the show included a 5-day home video diary and a recorded phone conversation describing the dread associated with impending loss.

Curtained off from the main entrance to accommodate for low light, Apparently Nothing transformed the Project Space into a sparse dining room. Positioned in the middle of the room was a table set for three. Four chairs beckoned the viewer to choose a place. Once seated, it became apparent that the plates were clean and the cutlery unused. Seated by yourself at the table, a pervading sense of loneliness and isolation began to creep in. The absence of others was clearly felt.

Breaking the desolation of the room was a dual video projection of Warren and Pollard appearing at separate intervals on the outer walls. Like the initiator of a pre-dinner discussion, Pollard appeared first and began to speak (in past tense) about an inspirational colleague. The tone was conversational yet neutral. As the video unfolded, Pollard gradually revealed more about her subject’s characteristics (the way he laughed, his gift for storytelling and meals they shared) and spoke about the effect he had on her life. Aided by the darkened space and the personal conversation, the experience of watching and listening became strangely hypnotic.

After several minutes, Pollard faded into black and another projection located directly opposite began. Similar in style to Pollard’s confessional, the second projection captured Warren reminiscing about a childhood friend. Again the details were esoteric. Hints of departure, change and the passing of time were scattered through Warren’s story yet the disparate nature of the narrative made it difficult to fully comprehend. What happened to his friend? Was he still alive? Is he invited to dinner?

At sporadic points during the projections the speed of the frames became slower and caused the speaker’s facial movements to appear drawn out and distorted. During an unnerving slow motion blink, Pollard’s eyes rolled back in her head as though momentarily looking within. At times, the emotional impact of the recollections caused the performers’ speech to stall and their eyes to become dewy. For the viewer, there were more questions than answers.

To further accentuate the sense of absence and mystery, spliced in between the video monologues was documentary style footage of uninhabited domestic interiors. An unmade bed, a messy lounge, an empty kitchen—the air was thick with the shadows of the past. A muffled voice spoke off camera about people and events associated with the interiors. The dialogue was often difficult to hear and seemed deliberately shrouded in secrecy.

Cracking open the uncomfortable experience of loss, Apparently Nothing forced the viewer to assume the position of silent witness. Like being the unintroduced guest at a dinner party listening to fragments of conversations about unknown people and places, Pollard and Warren created an experiential void that threatened to swallow the viewer whole. Without the flickering light of the projections or the subdued voices emanating from the speakers, silence engulfed the space and emphasised the social alienation felt while sitting alone at the table with only one’s own thoughts and memories for company.

Citing the influence of John Cage’s task-based scores and performances as well as the work of UK performance artist Tim Etchells, Pollard and Warren construct affecting collaborations that lucidly dissect the nature of communication and emotive experience. Part 2 of the exhibition promises to extend beyond personal accounts to include a group discussion of the absent figure and a real-time meal daily attended by 4 performers.

Apparently Nothing, Part One, Deborah Pollard and Matt Warren; Inflight Gallery (Project Space), North Hobart, March 23-31, www.inflightart.com.au

Two very different works featured recently at the new and improved Inflight gallery, the popular artist-run initiative which launched its second gallery Project Space a few months previously. This new space is intended to allow Inflight to showcase more artists, both local and national.

Alicia King is artist-in-residence at the University of Tasmania’s School of Medicine, where she is learning tissue culture techniques for growing semi-living sculptural forms from human tissue. She is interested in the potential of biological technologies to influence the human perception of ‘self’ within the natural world.

Her fascinating installation clearly draws on these concerns, but can be profitably viewed or ‘read’ without an awareness of them. A large, approximately door-height, white fabric lair (to use King’s word) has been positioned at the entrance of the main gallery, effectively blocking it off and seeming to grow from within the gallery itself. It’s a a mass of white protrusions extending and dangling from its uneven ceiling and curved sides like stalactites or fingers, all of the work a mass of organic shapes suggestive, to this viewer, of some rogue body part or internal growth.

A wall panel advises the viewer to spend some minutes within the several metres deep brightly lit space; 2 movement-sensitive heat lamps switch on when this occurs and large, copper-toned globular masses within the work turn green. I thought the white lair, with its meticulously sewn walls and dangling finger-like growths, was almost a significant enough resolved work in itself, but I was intrigued and engaged by the addition of this nominally interactive element.

A colleague observed that the heat lamp-globule component of the installation might just as successfully have been exhibited on its own and this is arguable, but I enjoyed the physical and visual sensations experienced in the context of the wider work which is a real testament to skill, patience, vision and research in its creation.

King explains, “As new developments in biological technologies occur, our ability to interact within these and other spaces, to generate growth and life in the most unlikely of circumstances, is greatly enhanced … [The installation addresses] the possibility of life to manifest itself in unexpected ways [which] has significant potential to enrich our perceptions, experiences and relationships with the natural world and the spaces we inhabit.”
Ada Henskens, Blackstream

Quite different in format if not in some of its concerns is Ada Henskens’ experimental video Blackstream, one of a sequence of experimental works using digital image in conjunction with 2D works to explore constructing concepts of reality we can live with. The work deals with the dialogue between light reflected off surfaces and the visual cortex—with flux, light as wave and particle: things in the moment of becoming, with an element of fantasy creeping in.

A seemingly simple 5-minute loop of abstracted black and white curvilinear visuals, Blackstream really does offer more than first meets the eye. The piece is silent and this works in its favour, as the viewer is neither distracted nor seduced by sound. My first impression, on looking at the bubbling, twisting, dissolving black lines, was of the prosaic idea of knitting spontaneously unravelling. Don’t laugh, I know it’s not a very high-tech interpretation, but Henskens is out to let the viewer catch glimpses of things before they vanish. I next saw hieroglyphics and assorted other semi-figurative shapes, only again to see them disappear. The curved lines and irregular spaces between them constantly change and evolve and this flux is exactly what Henskens is aiming for. One viewer neatly called the image ‘space-time foam’, while another revelled in trying to decide what he was seeing and in concluding everything was left wide open.

Certainly, I found the work hypnotic (perhaps unsurprisingly) and for such simple (but not simplistic) art making, very engaging and seductive. As one fellow commentator noted, Henskens, a mid-career artist, certainly makes unselfconscious use of effects, such as zooming in and out, that the grainier and grittier work of emerging practitioners generally eschews as a little cringeworthy. Interestingly, in Ada Henskens’ hands, these techniques work and serve a purpose. For once, the uninformed gallery-goer could voice the old anti-Modernist mantra, ‘What’s it supposed to be?’ and feel confident that it’s whatever he/she chooses.

I’m growing to love you, installation, Alicia King, March 4- 24; Blackstream, experimental work, Ada Henskens, Inflight Gallery, Hobart, April 7-29

I had a gander at some interesting performance stuff in Canberra recently and it was refreshing to see some free-form exposition take centrestage. What I like about the whole performance thing is that it moves the punter away from the edges of the gallery to that somewhat dangerous middle ground at the centre of the space. Thus exposed, the audience becomes an integral part of a fleeting event. It’s kind of like a dance. Audience and artists meet halfway and fool around.
Dysfunctional Feed

The exhibition comprised 3 separate collaborative performances, and I saw the opening of each over the course of 3 Friday nights. First on the menu was Dysfunctional Feed, an apparently loose collective of about 25 artists from Sydney. It was a terrific show, comprising various video installations and live performances set against and interacting with a range of experimental music, which was the engine and undisputed star of the performance. Trying to say too much more about the music would be futile—you just have to hear it—but some of the artist descriptions are great: “cinematic industrial analog”, “computer game music”, “laptop focus listening.” One feature that especially captured me was a sort of time-based programming in which the artist manipulated the sound digitally to maintain a kind of wave function on the video, sort of like a flowing worm graph. Another of the larger video installations depicted multifarious human scenes quickly, but with pathos, though maybe this was my reaction to the ominous, building white noise that accompanied it. I really like the ideas of these guys. They just seem to be into putting stuff together and getting it out there with very little pretension, though it must be hard to shuffle the stylings of so many together.

Natalie Thomas and Kristen Phillips gave us their appropriately titled Picassol performance on the second Friday. Fast forward many hours after the show and I still seemed to be surrounded by imitation Picassos resplendent in their French jailbird tops. This was true of more than one drinking establishment. The work centered on Dora Marr, the surrealist photographer who was better known for her relationship with Pablo Picasso and as his model. Through Marr, the artists explored the subjugation and suffering of female artists across history, I suppose asking us to consider amongst other things the social maladies that lead to their obsequiousness. This was achieved through an ‘historical’ intervention, an act of retribution against men like Picasso and their brutal and selfish use of women. To wit, the audience was treated to installed caricatures of some of the little man’s sculptures: cleverly mutated versions of Goat and Skipping Girl. There was video and dance too, the former incorporating Johnathan Richman’s witty single Picasso, the latter performed to a scathing poem acerbically highlighting the history of a very one-sided relationship. I guess this was overly and overtly a political piece, but, as Richman’s lyrics noted, “Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole, not like you.” So perhaps it was high time. Plus there was plenty of free wine.

spat & loogie rounded out the series with new!shop, a “genre-hopping ride in a shopping trolley full of video, performance and interactive technology.” Now this was a fully interactive performance piece. The space was changed entirely to resemble a supermarket or convenience store; and the audience was asked to take a basket and fill it with a range of nebulous yet strangely desirable products such as used sporting trophies, syringes and styrofoam pills in bottles with labels making outlandish promises. Once the shopper’s contagious desire was sated or the basket was full, an orderly queue was formed to checkout where the goods were scanned—but not delivered back to the customer. Instead a receipt was printed outlining a unique consumer horoscope, topped with a dapper name badge. Naturally, I was “priceless.” This was all to the insidious banality of elevator music. The shop was fully staffed (I was at one point frisked for security purposes) and the audience/shopper was initially guided by a video installation outlining a perverse sort of mission statement. Lots of fun and an apt parody of the inward material vision of contemporary human life.

Canberra Contemporary Art Space (CCAS), ctrl+alt+del, performance-sound-new media-installation, curators Mark Hislop , Amita Kirpalani; Dysfunctional Feed, www.dysfunctionalfeed.com, April 21; Picassol, Natalie Thomas and Kristen Phillips, April 28; new!shop, spat & loogie, May 5; Gorman House Arts Centre, Canberra

In brief…

For this edition, our editorial is necessarily a short one. We’ve been busy beyond belief, completing our plans for the next 3 years, working on a publication documenting the achievements of Australia’s Indigenous filmmakers, and engaging in the Australia Council Theatre Board’s timely dialogues about future funding strategies (see their Make it New? paper available from the Australia Council website). Interesting to see the Australia Council Chair David Gonski do a runner before securing the Federal Government funds we thought he’d promised to raise for Council and its clients after the 2005 restructure. He’s to be replaced by James Strong, not a promising appointment at first glance, given Howard and Kemp walked all over his important recommendations for the reform of Australia’s orchestras. We live in hope.

Experimenta Under the Radar

Good news is Experimenta is taking an exhibition of great Australian new media art to FACT in Liverpool (an impressive complex of cinemas, galleries, bar and café) and to the ICA in London. While we were in UK it was a relief not to have to worry about what we called the work, ‘new media art’ seemed fine, while here the push is on to re-label it as ‘media art.’ On page 27 we look at the Experimenta Under the Radar program and what Shiralee Saul has made of it in her optimistic catalogue essay.

Craig Walsh

Great too to see Craig Walsh in the Experimenta Under the Radar program with Cross-Reference, the work featured on our cover. Craig’s disturbing Contested Space (2004) nested massive cockroaches above the Art Gallery of New South Wales portico and appeared on the cover of RealTime 65 when he was a finalist for the Anne Landa Award. In the 2003 Sydney Festival showing he convincingly filled the windows of the financial institutions on Martin Place with water, fish and floating office furniture.

RealTime 74: Arts Education; LIFT; Rich Mix

In our last editorial we promised reports from London on LIFT and Rich Mix. These stories have been held over until our August edition.

RealTime 74 includes our popular Arts Education feature, this year focusing on artist-teachers in tertiary education, how they balance the demands of teaching and art, sustain vision and inspire new generations of artists. KG

Booking a ticket for Simon Ellis' Inert is perhaps part of the experience itself: when informed that the audience capacity for each performance is limited to 2, and then asked for one's height, a sense of anticipation is inevitable. Why would height be a factor? And, more interestingly, who will be the other lone audience member to share this encounter?

Arriving early, I find myself passing time in the Dancehouse foyer, aware of the young woman similarly distracting herself with show brochures, advertisements for classes and, yes, browsing RealTime. We smile politely, conscious of the fact that we're here for the same reason, but don't make much small talk. All of this, I later think, is an integral component of Inert, whether deliberately intended or otherwise.

Eventually a smiling pair are led out of the performance space and we enter, guided to a pair of upright platforms which seem nothing less than vertical operating tables. We are positioned against these, with cushions placed behind our heads and headphones over our ears. This is where our connection with one another ends.

I'm now prone, though upright, with one of the 2 performers (Ellis and Shannon Bott) positioned before me. Movement begins in silence or, at least, unaccompanied by prerecorded sound. The sounds that I do hear are those of the dancer in front of me, only piped through my headset and increased in volume. Bott is an accomplished dancer, but her performance is consciously restrained, holding back. Phrases begin to appear but are cut short, or a moment of connection beckons but deflates. Gradually, she begins to accept the presence of Ellis, who is performing in front of my fellow audience member. They eventually share a space, if hesitatingly, but before any real correspondence can occur the dancers move to our resting platforms and lower them to a horizontal position. It's a slow descent, but as I sink backwards I become aware of the screen hovering above me.

Projected upon this screen is a fragmented repository of moments: quick cuts of limbs or the corners of the body are offered as snatches of spoken text and sparse music filter through my headphones. The narrative is one of connection and disconnection, of a relationship seen only from one angle. It's a delicate and reflective play of captured movement, both physical and emotive, and it takes some time before I become aware that the performers haven't entirely succumbed to the power of the image. I have to crane my neck up see them, sometimes obscured in positions out of sight, sometimes moving in darkness. I'm forced to choose where I look, but no matter how hard I try there's no way I can view everything offered to me without losing something along the way.

Finally the performance ends, and our platforms are returned to their upright position. The slow transition has an unexpected side-effect: as I become upright, I become acutely aware of my muscles and bones settling into the pull of gravity. When watching the projected images, I hadn't noticed the weightlessness of the experience, but now I feel re-embodied, back in the world as a participant. Upon leaving the space, the woman with whom I'd just shared the performance turns to me and says “It's like waking up from a dream!” And I can't help but agree.

Inert, performance/choreography Simon Ellis, Shannon Bott, sculpture/design Scott Mitchell, videography Cormac Lally, composition/audio design David Corbet, costumes Marion Boyce; Dancehouse, May 10-21

With a program of works composed almost entirely by living American composers, Australian-born New York resident Lisa Moore wove her unique musical magic for an audience that may not have known any of the pieces before hearing them that evening. Moore specialises in performing new music by composers she has worked with closely. Thus she is able to introduce each piece with personal anecdotes and creative insights. The demanding repertoire she performs somehow seems more approachable for her warm observations and sense of humour.

The program began with performances of 2 works which displayed a strong sense of nostalgia. John Halle's Second Childhood (2000) had moments of dissonance and abrasiveness, but at its heart were Gershwin-like blues references and the classic piano rag form, although taken to a new level of virtuosity. The choice of this work to open the concert was a clever way for Moore to ease her audience into her specialised new music repertoire. Likewise, Paul Lanksy's It All Adds Up (2005) is a rhapsodic exploration of traditional and modern harmonic styles. It takes us through a variety of accessible piano textures, including toccata passages, elaborated decorations of chords, and bitonality resulting from different left and right hand patterns. Both these elegant works were played with effortless grace.

But the mood of the concert changed radically with Julia Wolfe's 'my lips from speaking' (1993), an abrasive work for 6 pianos, here performed by Lisa Moore as a live solo part with computer playback of the other 5 piano parts. Like Halle and Lansky, Wolfe also takes her inspiration from earlier music: her work is based on a few chords from the opening of Aretha Franklin's recording of the song Think. For the most part, however, a savage dissonance is imposed upon the source material. This was an excellent vehicle for Moore to demonstrate the great power and energy of her pianism. It is extremely loud, aggressive and rhythmically disjointed but in the centre of the work, there is some relief as it builds to a phenomenal funky groove between the soloist and the backing parts. The piece is both exciting and disturbing but perhaps goes on a little too long.

After an interval the concert resumed in a considerably more subdued mood with Martin Bresnick's Dream of the Lost Traveller (1997), based on a poem and drawing by William Blake. This subtle piece begins with an exploration of the major/minor dichotomy and works its way somewhat minimally through a variety of interesting piano textural ideas leading eventually to a meditative and folk-like song setting of the Blake poem. Moore handled with aplomb the somewhat unusual requirement for a concert pianist to sing a song while playing.

Lisa Moore's performance of three of György Ligeti's Etudes for piano (book 1, 1985) was the highlight of the concert for me. These highly inventive virtuosic movements by the only non-American on the program, are the more remarkable because Ligeti is not a pianist. In the first of the etudes, Fanfares, Moore maintained a suitable nimbleness of touch for the bitonal scale pattern which pervades the work; in Arc-de-ciel she achieved a mysterious and dreamy mood through its rich chordal textures; and in Automne à Varsovie she struck an excellent balance between the drama of the chordally textured melodic materials with the lightness of the accompanying multi-octave figurations.

Moore's tour de force was arguably her performance of Frederic Rzewski's Piano Piece No 4 (1977), a remarkable work based initially on rapid repeated notes, said to represent the gun shots of the Chilean Pinochet regime. They start at the very top of the instrument and gradually work their way down to the bottom. A lyrical passage then leads to use of a Chilean folk melody which is subjected to a number of dramatic textural variations including the gun-fire idea to end the piece. In introducing the work Lisa Moore indicated that it was Rzewski who had inspired her to pursue her career as an interpreter of new piano music. It certainly showed in her dynamic and charismatic performance and was a fitting end to a remarkable display of musicianship.

Lisa Moore, piano, works by Halle, Lansky, Wolfe, Bresnick, Ligeti, Rzewski, Byron Bay Steinway Series, Byron Community Cultural Centre, May 12

“I will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” writes playwright Lillian Hellmann in her brilliant account of testifying before the House Un-American Activities in the 1950s. The memoir, Scoundrel Time (1976), is about Hellmann’s refusal to ‘name names.’ The popularity of George Clooney’s Goodnight and Good Luck points to the continuing fascination with this bleak period.

In Australia at the same time, the fear surrounding the Menzies government’s attempt to ban the Communist Party saw people burying books and taking their kids to be looked after by relatives. Dossiers were kept by ASIO and an “adverse risk assessment” spelt unemployment for many. The 1950s have become a metaphor for our own troubled times with reference to political censorship, surveillance and government manipulation.

John Hughes’ Master Class and his film The Archive Project were among the highlights of the 2006 Australian International Documentary Conference. The film reveals a little known but crucial period in Australian documentary production. This painstakingly edited work is both a guide to the Australian documentary filmmakers of the 1950s and a road map to how we make films now.

The Hughes legacy

Hughes’ earlier documentaries, Menace (1976) and Film-work (1981), and Traps (1985, described by him as “a documentary and narrative drama with a documentary intent”), began his 30 year fascination with the political era of the 1950s: Communism, the Waterside Workers Federation and the ALP split. Only dimly remembered from high school textbooks, these become immediate and present in Hughes’ earlier films. Footage from the past becomes part of a living archive.

Hughes’ long-term filmmaking project is encapsulated in his voice-over at the beginning of The Archive Project. In order to preserve, document and elaborate on history’s traces Hughes says he relies on “exquisite trims—the past generation of memory.” Traps, Australia’s version of Haskell Wexler’s ode to the 1960s protest movement during the 1968 Democratic Convention, Medium Cool (1969), juxtaposes drama with the documentary reality of Bob Hawke’s 1983 electoral victory and the shady dealings of the CIA in post war Australian political life. (In an adroit move, Hughes uses outtakes from a seminal film of the early 80s, Marian Wilkinson and Sylvie Le Clezio’s Allies (1983), about the history of the US-Australia Alliance to extend his argument.)

The main character (actor Carolyn Howard) is a journalist at a community radio station who travels to Canberra to cover Bob Hawke’s first electoral victory then sets out to interview “real” subjects like historian Humphrey McQueen and activist Dennis Freney. It’s erratic and infuriating at times but it is also one of my favourite Hughes’ films.

A different world

If the 1950s and 1980s are different countries, then Melbourne’s history exists as a parallel universe to our own. Melbourne is the ultimate realist city. Unlike Sydney’s reliance on the dazzling brilliance of its harbour landscape the image that recurs again and again in The Archive Project is that of commuters entering Flinders Street Station, the city’s ‘real heart’, where work and leisure are embodied by the constant movement of the crowd. What also makes Melbourne a modernist city is closely linked to its post war art movement—the Nolans, Boyds and Heidi group always found a home here.

While there have been countless books written about these artists and their world, The Archive Project explores the little known story of the independent filmmakers who inhabited this decade. It’s a story about how the everyday reality of life in 1950s Melbourne can be understood in aesthetic and formalist terms. While Hughes, in email correspondence with me, sees these filmmakers participating in a broader modernist project involving the key planks of progress, culture and democracy, “the realist tradition in the twentieth century is really a moment of modernism.”

The Realist Film Organisation

The central problem facing Hughes is that 2 of the 3 key participants are dead. Bob Matthews and Ken Coldecutt were the main instigators of the Realist Film Organisation (RFO). The only other surviving member, Elizabeth Coldecutt, is still active, feistily questioning the Brotherhood of St Laurence’s “ownership” of the early 1950s housing rights films at the launch of Hughes’ film at ACMI. According to Coldecutt it was the more politically radical—and thus forgotten from history—Fitzroy Branch of the Communist Party that was the main instigator.

The RFO, born during the days of hope in the early post war period, was closely aligned to the political program of the Communist Party of Australia. According to Hughes’ narration, among the left there was a “shared vision of a just future.” The provision of childcare centres and libraries was, however, overshadowed by the housing crisis of the post war period—after a 15-year time span when no working class housing had been built. In 1947, 90,000 families were homeless. The inner suburbs of Fitzroy, Collingwood and South Melbourne were particularly hard hit.

While the Realist Film Organisation included films about housing and price hikes, including The Slums are Still With Us and Prices and the People, they also dealt with politically taboo subjects for the 1950s like solidarity with Mao’s China and Indigenous rights. They Chose Peace, the last of the Realist films, was about the International Carnival for Peace and Friendship. While the images remain, Hughes had to reconstruct the narration. Deborah Mailman’s new reading is an eloquent combination of old-school voice of God and today’s political reality—that in 2006 Aboriginal land rights remain an unfinished story:

For the Indigenous people of Australia there has never been a time of real peace. Isolated from the rest of the community into drab settlements, refused the rights of citizenship, they realised only too well the importance of the message the carnival brought and the friendship and mutual support between the carnival delegates became a token of the time when the Aboriginal people will stand in their full stature.

During the AIDC’s Master Class I told John Hughes that The Archive Project reminded me of Chris Marker’s The Last Bolshevik, a meditation on the Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Medvedkin’s attempt to intersect filmmaking practice with a new society. Hughes’ response was one of humility and understatement. And yet, despite the similarity of a broadly defined left project, Hughes’ protagonists break with Marker’s in one crucial respect. Medvedkin was never able to escape from the constraints of the Stalinist system, but the Realist filmmakers instituted a frank and open discussion of Soviet totalitarianism a full 5 years before Kruschev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes. While this ultimately led to Ken Coldecutt’s break with the party he remained under ASIO surveillance for years afterwards and was even denied employment in Stanley Hawes’ new Commonwealth Film Unit, the predecessor of today’s Film Australia. (In another of life’s twists, it was John Hughes who was presented with Film Australia’s Stanley Hawes Award for Lifetime Achievement at the 2006 AIDC.)

Even today, the Realist Film Organisation’s influence on Australian (and particularly Melbourne) film culture remains profound. Its members mortgaged their houses to set up the Olinda Film Festival, the forerunner to today’s Melbourne International Film Festival, the longest running in Australia. Other members were employed at the State Film Centre and their interest in European and arthouse cinema has led to Melbourne’s unique film collection. ACMI holds the collection of the State Film Centre and houses Australia’s most eclectic and successful film program—a monument to our collective film history and a testament to the pioneers of the early Realist Film Unit.

John Hughes, The Archive Project, the Realist Film Movement in Cold War Australia, Australian International Documentary Conference; Hilton on the Park, Melbourne, Feb 13-16

Melbourne-based independent producer, writer and director John Hughes has taught filmmaking and cinema studies and has been a commissioning editor for documentary with SBS Independent. His films include the documentaries River of Dreams (2002) and After Mabo (1997), the feature What I have written (1996) and One Way Street (1992), about Walter Benjamin.

The Archive Project will appear later this year on ABC TV and on DVD with the referenced RFO film.

“International cinema that kicks against the mundane—films that will blow your mind but didn’t blow their budgets.” So spruiks curator James Hewison on the cover of the program for this year’s IndiVision screenings.

Complementing the AFC’s production schedule, which currently has 12 films at various stages in the pipeline, this public component of IndiVision seeks to showcase quality low-budget cinema, inspiring local filmmakers and audiences alike in the much anticipated upturn in the quality of local features.

The idea of showcasing cutting-edge low-budget international films is a positive one. Considering the liberating, creative potential of filmmaking at the lower end of the economic scale, such screenings might ideally contribute to remedying what I consider the key problem with much Australian cinema, irrespective of budget: aesthetic impoverishment. By this I mean a lack of innovative or classically imbued formal layers and richness when it comes to what mid-20th century film theorists used to consider cinema’s ‘essence’—not narrative or character development, but mise en scène, framing and editing as the means by which a film’s meaning is generated and ‘read’ by the viewer.

Identifying the problem

Australian feature films are commonly either realist works—the ‘gritty’ or more classical surfaces of which render a very traditional narrative—or middlebrow ‘art films’ filled with often laboured images of a calendar-like, clichéd beauty or the sterile hipness common to advertising iconography. For me at least, Little Fish, though not without its merits, combines both tendencies with seemingly arbitrary framing and cutting dominating in its realist sequences while the flashbacks and more ‘interior’ shots feature very tired imagery indeed (notably the sun-spot marked seaside sequences). Yet rather than aesthetic problems, the most common complaint about local cinema is the quality of Australian scripts. The IndiVision production program clearly emphasises this area, including a very US-style approach to workshopping, drafting and input from multiple writers over a long period. This attempt at renovation ultimately reinforces the old idea of film ‘content’ as literary, with cinematic form merely the successful communication of this material. Even if we do come to see an improvement in narrative and character elements, the result will likely be determinedly narrative-centred, conventional films featuring a continuation of aesthetically uninteresting form. Australian films would hence remain stuck in a middle space—too slow and superficially ‘arty’ to satisfy Hollywood-inclined viewers, and too conceptually unambitious and stylistically conservative to cut much weight as internationally relevant art cinema.

Which brings me to the question of what the IndiVision screening program means by “international cinema.” I am not alone in thinking that the most interesting lowish-budget films of recent years come from Northern and Central Europe, South-East Asia and the Middle East. So it was disappointing that 3 of the 6 films in this showcase were from the US. While none of the films screened is actually bad, both the US emphasis and their relative mediocrity are instructive. However, as many of the problems are also those that characterise local productions, this tends to work against the aim of the program.

Down to the Bone

Down to the Bone (director Debra Granik US, 2004, budget AUD$665,000) is a quintessential US indie flick part-financed (and then later duly celebrated) by Sundance, featuring straight (non-ironic) naturalistic performances commonly offered by independent films as the necessary corrective to Hollywood’s realist aesthetic—all the while further entrenching (a more convincing perhaps) dramatic realism as the proper goal of serious feature-filmmaking. The economically depressed industrial area of Ulster in upstate New York, complete with snow-covered spaces of suburban alienation, provides some cultural grit to this story of drug addiction and attempted rehabilitation amongst the ennui-ridden white working class. But this reasonable enough ‘slice-of-life-in-fucked-up-provincial-USA’ never seems able to deepen its account beyond the myopic concerns of drug addiction. The film’s determinedly non-political address means that the national pride of the characters—all of whom are treated with generous humanism—is never dealt with beyond highlighted shots of ubiquitous US flags the characters fly despite clearly being on the losing end of their country’s role in globalisation. A very predictable narrative arc towards existential empowerment and autonomy for the central character as suggested in the film’s final shot is matched by very familiar doco-style realism in the form of hand-held DV images that (like the good but slightly over-studied performances) are asserted as a stylistic means to convince us of the material and cultural veracity of the on-screen milieu.

Close to Home

Close to Home (Vidi Bilua and Dalia Hager, Israel, 2005, AUD$875,000) exhibits a convincing cultural snapshot in the form of a semi-autobiographical account of the young directors’ experience of army service on the streets of Jerusalem. The film is very strong on conveying these young female conscripts’ boredom and growing sense of the absurd as they are forced to arbitrarily check the ID of people who “look like Arabs.” But while interesting, all this authenticity (perennially lacking in bigger-budget productions) ultimately serves a very traditional, modest coming-of-age narrative. As with so many first-time films, good social or cultural autobiography is accompanied by thematic tentativeness. Just as thematic penetration without a convincing cultural setting can be problematic, the film exemplifies the idea that knowing a particular milieu well does not guarantee satisfying cinema if there isn’t matching conceptual insight or analysis. As is so often the case, this lack of boldness is matched by similarly unadventurous formal elements, with DV used in the name of transparency-seeking sterile TV realism.

Allegro

Certainly much more formally and aesthetically extravagant is Christoffer Pfeiffer’s new film, Allegro (Denmark, 2005, AUD$2.1m). In this film a mysterious ‘zone’ of Copenhagen cut off from the rest of the city houses the repressed memories of the central character concerning a past ‘mistake’ he made with his girlfriend (supermodel Helena Christensen), that needs to be put right. Like much other recent ‘neo-baroque’ cinema, fancy spatio-temporal confusions ultimately provide the scaffolding for hackneyed, sentimental romanticism. And the potentially challenging stylistic aspects are seriously short-changed by a fairy tale voice-over that stitches the film’s themes onto the images for us, often unnecessarily concretizing what is fairly clear already. This ensures we’re never lost in the aesthetic and conceptual labyrinth—thereby denying us any potential pleasure and creative possibility beyond the schematically designated story and ideas.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness (Ian Gabriel, South Africa, 2004, AUD$1.3 m) is perhaps a necessarily worthy and dour account of an anguished white former South African policeman’s seeking of forgiveness from the family of a black student and ANC ‘terrorist’/freedom-fighter he killed in prison. The film’s aesthetic elements—notably a desaturated DV image and manipulated pixellation—are seamlessly integrated into its conceptual terrain and strong affective impact (though an excessive musical score worked against these well-conceived stylistics). Potentially controversial in some quarters vis-a-vis the particular outcome of its apparent critique of both Apartheid-era injustice and hard-line black refusal of post-Apartheid reconciliation, the film leaves a complex taste in the mouth. Even though its basic message is reconciliatory, this journey is shown to be far from easy or attainable once a schematic process has been set in train—and neither is watching or thinking through a film that exposes a whole host of class and race politics beyond the Apartheid divide. By comparison, the thematic treatment in the final scene of Rolf de Heer’s The Tracker (a film I otherwise admire)—when David Gulpilil walks off into the desert a hero—seems highly schematic in its liberal left framing of reconciliation.

The nature of the medium

If the aesthetic impoverishment of Australian films is to be reversed, industry initiatives and screening showcases such as IndiVision need to emphasise that film is an audio-visual medium (something the current script emphasis overlooks). It is, then, a pity that the progam this year didn’t feature the daring, even controversial work advertised by the pamphlet tag line. Of course there are issues with getting particular films for a small program such as this. However, the question is whether it was really easier to get this particular (US-weighted) collection, or rather whether a limited or even conservative vision of cutting-edge low-budget filmmaking prevails within the walls of the AFC, the apparently progressive language of their recent bureaucratic and advertising communiqués notwithstanding. I hesitate to highlight Hewison’s curatorial role, his programs at the Melbourne Film festival over recent years have been much more challenging than Sydney’s.

Only Forgiveness, while still a traditional narrative film, through its combination of affective aesthetic strategies as allied with difficult conceptual material, stayed with me for some time. The necessary formal and thematic rigour needed to generate this global holy grail of film-going has been seldom witnessed and experienced by this viewer when attending Australian films—at least since the high-point of Head On (Anna Kokkinos, 1998) and, in terms of low-budget cinema, the more modest The Finished People (Koah Do, 2003). Here’s hoping the IndiVision production program, its excessive emphasis on scripts notwithstanding, does genuinely invigorate the low-budget end of the feature-filmmaking spectrum in this country—diversification would be most welcome. However, in terms of exhibiting supposedly innovative international low-budget independent cinema, this year’s screening program won’t, I think, assist in this regard. Apparently contradicting the aim of the program, its value lies rather in merely highlighting familiar problems.

IndiVision Screenings 06; Dendy Newtown, Sydney, Feb 17-19; Kino Dendy, Melbourne, Feb 24-26

From the opening image of his documentary Darwin’s Nightmare, director Hubert Sauper deftly sets out the key dynamic underpinning his portrait of life around Tanzania’s Lake Victoria. A small shadow reflected on a vast body of water skims silently over gentle ripples. Slowly the camera tilts up to reveal the very real shape of an aeroplane—a vast cargo carrier and a rudely solid intruder into the dreamlike scene below. Although eschewing an accusatory tone, Sauper’s film quietly insists that so long as the ‘developed’ world continues to ride high, both literally and metaphorically, above the people of Africa, they will always toil in its shadow.

Ostensibly Darwin’s Nightmare is about the fish export trade that underpins Lake Victoria’s economy. An astounding 500 tonnes of Nile perch are caught here every day, filleted in factories around the lake, and flown out by vast Russian cargo planes to supply European dinner tables. The perch were introduced into the lake in the 1960s, although the film is vague about the exact circumstances. Once in the lake, this enormous carnivore proceeded to devour every native fish with such voraciousness that 4 decades on they are the only species left—an unmitigated ecological disaster that now provides Europe with a cheap, bountiful supply of fish fillets.

The owners of the filleting and packing factories around the lake have grown rich, while the workers and fishermen live a subsistence existence in the surrounding villages and towns. The area displays all the usual trappings of gross wealth disparity: prostitution, lawlessness, homelessness, a chronic lack of social and medical services, and rampant abuse—particularly of women and children. Sauper and his camera gradually sink into this world, lurching from one ghastly scene to another as if reeling from the sheer scale of the misery.

After the deceptive calm of the opening, we are quickly plunged into the grotesque urban settlements around Lake Victoria’s shores. We pass briefly through an antiquated airport control tower, but then Sauper leaves us disoriented, without the security of establishing shots or clear narrative bearings. It’s night and the picture is fuzzy. Homeless kids fight on unpaved streets and a choir busks, accompanied by a portable electric organ. Shadows lurk in doorways and faces loom out of the night. We meet an attractive young woman—a prostitute to the foreign pilots who fly into the town. Her attempts to sing a song of her homeland are interrupted by a drunken client leering into the camera. She is the first of many locals who drift in and out of the film, offhandedly telling tales of hardship, violence and abuse.

As Darwin’s Nightmare progresses, what initially seems like a sprawling, formless picture of life around the lake becomes a mosaic of impressions that slowly envelop the viewer in a suffocating horror so complete it takes on an almost surreal dimension. Within this impressionistic portrait, a network of gruesome symbioses slowly forms. The fish industry attracts poor farmers from Tanzania’s drought-stricken rural sector, who become underpaid fishermen or cheap factory labour. Those who can’t get work ensuring Europe’s supply of fish fillets live off the dregs that the First World rejects; hundreds of fish heads and stripped bones dumped in maggot-infested mounds every day. Sauper interviews one woman as she picks through the carcasses, hanging them out to dry so they can be sold in local markets. Maggots wriggle through her toes as she works. “My life is good” she proclaims; previously she was starving on an unproductive farm.

Similarly, the chemical by-products of the fish business find a use among those living in the factories’ surrounds. Street kids collect the discarded off-cuts of the packaging in which the fish are transported to Europe. They melt the plastic to create a viscous substance which, when sniffed, sends them into a sleep so deep they are sometimes raped without being aware of what’s happening.

Finally, a large sex industry services the cashed-up foreign pilots, as well as the local workers and fishermen. AIDS is rampant and the local church discourages the use of condoms. Many men infect their wives, who are forced into prostitution when their husbands become ill, thus perpetuating the epidemic.

The whole situation is such a graphic representation of Africa’s social, political and economic relationship to Europe that if it were created in fiction the viewer would recoil from the painful lack of subtlety. Yet throughout, Sauper hints there is an even darker side to all this wretchedness. He repeatedly asks interviewees whether the cargo planes whisking the fish off to Europe are empty when they touch down in Africa. In the film’s closing moments one of the pilots finally confesses they are importing arms that are distributed across the African continent, fuelling the endless civil conflicts in countries like Angola and the Congo.

Sauper’s understated handling of this scene distinguishes his work from the hysterical finger pointing of Michael Moore, or even the more reasoned polemics of filmmakers like Robert Greenwald (Outfoxed) and David Bradbury. Sauper sits with the pilot late at night and lets him tell his own story. The man seems a little drunk and obviously traumatised by the sights he has witnessed. He recalls a flight he made into South Africa one Christmas: “The children of Europe got grapes for Christmas day, the children of Africa got guns.” He pauses, staring ruefully at the floor. “I want to make all the children in the world happy. But I don’t know how.”

Darwin’s Nightmare leaves no position of distance from which the filmmaker, viewer, or even the film’s characters can vent righteous anger. The characters inflict misery on each other and, as the beneficiaries of this situation, we inflict misery on them. And the film offers no easy solutions to the institutionalised global inequalities that have shaped the lakeside milieu. As a local journalist points out to Sauper, to many Africans, UN officials and the like (and perhaps documentary filmmakers?) are just more Westerners reaping the benefits of African suffering. While their countrymen provide the armaments for African wars, aid officials draw comfortable salaries and build successful careers providing Band Aid solutions for the fallout of an economic system from which they will ultimately only benefit.

Sauper’s matter-of-fact, decentred presentation of life around Lake Victoria lifts Darwin’s Nightmare out of the realm of polemical social or political documentary and renders it something more akin to Alain Resnais’ Holocaust film Night and Fog (1955). Both are emotionally cool works about highly emotive subjects, confronting us with the awful truth that humanity’s worst forms of abuse are perpetrated by ordinary human beings performing quite banal tasks. Like the Holocaust, Tanzania’s fish industry is the result of calm and rational, albeit grossly inhuman, decision-making. But while the Holocaust was a clear-cut system of industrialised genocide, the situation on Lake Victoria is the product of a much more diffuse and pervasive global economic system in which we are all imbricated. However much we try to salve our consciences or live in blissful ignorance, we can’t change the fact that our Western affluence is built on the misery of the developing world. And as long as we continue to live in denial, the nightmare scenes depicted in Sauper’s film will continue to haunt our aspirational dreams of affluence.

Darwin’s Nightmare; director Hubert Sauper; producers Edouard Mauriat, Antonin Svoboda, Martin Gschlacht, Barbara Albert, Hubert Toint, Hubert Sauper; France/Austria/Belgium; 2004; distributed in Australia by Potential Films;
www.darwinsnightmare.com

Darwin’s Nightmare was nominated for an Academy Award in the category of Best Documentary Feature. Although screening in cinemas in the UK and France and promoted with large street posters, Darwin’s Nightmare had only a brief Melbourne theatrical release. It is available on DVD through Madman Entertainment. Eds

The Goethe-Institut’s annual Festival of German Films is focusing this year on women—their tribulations political, romantic, professional and sexual, and as actors and filmmakers. It’s not just a matter of fixing on a theme but responding to a wave of new women-centred films, even if mostly made by men. There are other films in the program that are less female oriented but in which women play no less a role than their male antagonists, not least in The Free Will, the festival’s most powerful film.

Sophie Scholl—The Final Days (Marc Rothemud, 2005) recounts the arrest, interrogation and trial of university student Scholl, one of the White Rose Group, for distributing anti-war leaflets in Nazi Germany. Nominated for an Academy Award in 2006 for Best Foreign Language Film, it features a superbly restrained performance from Julia Jentsch as the courageously determined and pious Scholl. Despite some awkward patches where the young Scholl reveals a level of unexpected insight into the regime’s ills, the film keeps in focus both political evil and the consequences of protest based on youthful impulse—friends, family and associates suffered for an ill-executed plan. The screenwriter Fred Breinersdorfer will be a festival guest.

The Red Cockatoo (Domink Graf, 2005) becomes increasingly engaging as it replays a slice of East German history, the weeks building suspensefully towards the building of the Berlin Wall. The film centres on a young man, Siggi (Max Riemelt), a would-be artist and theatre designer with little political awareness, attracted to a young woman in a park (Luise played by Jessica Schwarz) where young people gather in 1961 to play rock’n’roll, only to be beaten up and dispersed by police. She’s married, she’s a poet and committed to the state, it’s just got the wrong leaders. Siggi recognises in her the artist he’ll never be, publishes her book of poems without state permission and the consequences are, again, horrific, involving more beatings, suspicion and betrayals. Veering between teen comedy and high drama, The Red Cockatoo (the name of the club where the young gather to rock’n’roll and the government enforces hilariously hotted-up folk dancing) pays careful attention to its many characters, to the changing mores of a sexually and financially repressed society, and the states of political, artistic and romantic grace so hard to attain.

While Sophie Scholl—The Final Days and The Red Cockatoo continue Germany’s reassessment of its past, both are reminders of the proto-fascism that Western democracies are currently embracing with terrorism as their excuse. Scholl and her collaborators are accused of demoralising German troops, Siggi and his fellows of undermining the state; sedition is the name of the game.

Almost Heaven (Ed Herzog, 2005) stands out for its un-slick relaxed cinematography in the tale of Helen, a would-be country singer (Heike Makatsch) of limited ability (and with a bigger problem it would be unfair to give away), who takes up an offer to play in Nashville but ends up in Jamaica (a welcome bit of on-screen tourism). She finds herself up against a tough young delinquent mother, Rosie (an engaging performance from Nikki Amuka-Bird), local gangsters, wary musicians and tiny-minded hotel entertainment managers. Almost Heaven swings from serious to sentimental with unfortunate ease, and is much, much better on the dark end of the scale. As for a film about a woman with ambition, well let’s say Helen at least goes as far as she can, and as far as the people who need her can go with her. Not quite the “breezy comedy” of the press release, but there are a few smiles to be had, and not a few pleasures.

If Almost Heaven has something of the parable about it, then a trio of smoothly produced features about couples are deliriously rooted in myth and fairytale. About the Looking for and Finding of Love (Helmut Dietl, 2004) tracks a disastrous coupling between a singer and her Svengali record producer into separation, suicide, a voyage into the underworld of the ancients, and a lot of greying hair. For a “romantic comedy” it’s light on laughs, has a laboured plot and a grim outcome à la Orpheus and Eurydice. If only he knew how to express his feelings, and if only she she wasn’t “an ice-cold business woman…a frigid Aphrodite.” Barefoot (Til Schweiger, 2005) is another dark comedy, this time a kind of Cinderella tale for its odd couple. He’s the tearaway scion of a millionaire businessman and she’s a suicidal asylum inmate where he’s a cleaner, temporarily. Though it’s never clear why, he becomes responsible for her and she loves him. The drama and the occasional comedy are over the top. The Fisherman and his Wife—Why Women Never Get Enough (Doris Dorrie, 2005), loosely based on a Brothers Grimm story, features a couple so out-of-sync that nothing can convince you they will ever work it out—but the film is insistent that they try, features an irritating talking fish couple who frame the narrative interspersed with some interesting local colour from Japan and Germany about the market value of ornamental carp. The woman’s business flair, incidentally, is disastrous for the marriage, but so then is his wounded hippy childhood. All 3 films besiege the viewer with strategically placed pop songs and feature 30-something couples with the emotional maturity of teenagers. But that’s festivals for you, you have to take the good with not-so-good, and these films all have something more serious than When Harry met Sally about them although they clearly have their eye on the same market.

For a couple of a completely different order and in what looks to be the standout film of the festival, Matthias Glasner’s The Free Will (writers Glasner, Judith Angerbauer, Jürgen Vogel, 2006) offers compulsive but gruelling viewing as a rapist, Theo (Jürgen Vogel), freed after 9 years of incarceration and medical treatment, tries to live a normal life against enormous odds, primarily his sexual compulsions and a hatred for women. He comes into contact with a young woman, Nettie (Sabine Timoteo) who has recently escaped her father’s psychological abuse. However, The Free Will doesn’t lend itself to easy precis. Comprising long scenes, it is sparely scripted, dramatically sustained, superbly acted, and shot with a technique that is disturbingly immersive (Glasner himself is co-cinematographer). What’s more, it’s completely unpredictable and on occasion truly frightening—getting past the first 15 minutes or so of this 163 minute, painfully suspenseful psychological epic will be difficult for some.

There are many powerful scenes. In one of the strongest, Theo invites Nettie to his martial arts class and instructs her to attack, to choke him. In a situation where he finds control, she finds a shocking release, unable to stop, striking Theo harder and harder in a dance of repeated moves. But however different they are, Glaser reveals in Theo and Nettie a shared inarticulacy, a numb interiority, breathing that sits on the edge of panic, the fear of touch, and the spare worlds and ordered occupations they inhabit.

It’s rare in cinema to feel that you have really entered the life of another, especially someone like Theo, a psychopath with whom you can barely empathise, or the wounded and closed Nettie. Glasner adroitly tests us to the full, and his film stays with us like a bad dream, but one from which we have perhaps intuited something about the rapist psyche and the love that can find no place in it, or for too short a time.

At the 56th International Film Festival Berlin, The Free Will won a Silver Bear for Jürgen Vogel for Artistic Contribution as actor, co-writer and co-producer. It also won a Prize of the Guild of German Arthouse Cinemas for director Matthias Glasner for what he describes as “a tender film about the terror of loneliness [in which] I showed everything that my camera recorded with the same sympathy…no matter what it was, whether brutal or hesitantly hopeful” (www.thefreewill-themovie.com).

The festival also includes 2 panel discussions. Female Vision—Strong Women asks if the number of films focused on women is “a coincidence or is filmmaking about to be free itself from male dominated topics and views? Is it just a German or European trend or does this phenomenon have an equivalent in Australia?”

Festival of German Films 2006, Goethe Institut; Sydney, April 20-30; Melbourne, April 21-30; Brisbane, 26-29 April; Canberra, April, 27-30; panel discussion, Sydney, Female Visions—Strong Women, April 21, 5pm; Which Future for the Arthouse, April 28, 5pm