John Jasperse, Becky, Jodi & John, John Jasperse Company, Dance Massive 2011
photo Alex Escalante 2007
John Jasperse, Becky, Jodi & John, John Jasperse Company, Dance Massive 2011
New York dance maker John Jasperse looks like he’s firing in Becky, Jodi and John, one of the works in the excellent 2011 Dance Massive program in which enormous creative energy was unleashed on the stages of Malthouse, Dancehouse and Arts House across almost two weeks. In this edition we’ve reproduced a selection of reviews sweated out daily by the RealTime writing team for what was certainly a smokin’ Dance Massive. Long may it burn for the sake of Australian contemporary dance and its lovers; but what exactly is the future for Dance Massive?
And while we’re on burning issues, the detention by the Chinese Government of Ai Wei Wei, a leading Chinese artist whose work and personal presence has been strongly felt in Australia, has revealed in no uncertain terms that China will not tolerate any dissent, particularly while the so-called Jasmine Revolution continues to build in northern Africa and the Middle-East. In 2009, Ai Wei Wei was beaten by police (resulting in an operation for a subdural hematoma); last December he was prevented from attending the Nobel Peace Prize awards; and he was subsequently placed under house arrest for protesting the government demolition of his Shanghai studio. The artist was detained on April 2 at Beijing airport while on his way to Hong Kong. His home and studio have been searched and his staff detained as well. The United States, France, Britain and Germany have all called for the artist’s release and the Australian Government has stated its concern. “Only sustained international pressure can help Ai Wei Wei now,” says Sophie Richardson, Asia Advocacy Director, Human Rights Watch. We should all urge our government to intensify its protest, not only against the detention of Ai Wei Wei but of other artists and dissidents.
RealTime issue #102 April-May 2011 pg. 1
APOLLO 13: Mission Control, Hackman
photo courtesy Brisbane Powerhouse
APOLLO 13: Mission Control, Hackman
IN THE POWERHOUSE FOYER FOR THE WORLD THEATRE FESTIVAL, A REALISTIC LOOKING SPACE MODULE BEARING THE INSIGNIA OF THE STARS AND STRIPES PROVIDES A BRIEF FRISSON FOR MEMBERS OF MY GENERATION.
Two apparently pregnant members of Chilean theatre company, Teatro en el Blanco, pour cascades of beans from burgeoning bellies onto a darkened stage at the finale of their play, Diciembre—a poignant, complex image encapsulating themes which inevitably bring up memories of past American interventions in that country.
In a foretaste of her project in development, Rramp, petite Lisa O’Neill en pointe pounds drumpads like an obsessed automaton creating a metronomic synergy of sound and movement. Guitar wielding, towering Goth-resplendent, Christine Johnson, inclines her Bride of Frankenstein bouffant condescendingly to enquire, “Do your feet hurt, dear?”
The hedonistic precinct of nearby Fortitude Valley at night was the location for a race to solicit someone willing to indulge in the chaste thrill of kissing a man in a rabbit mask, an innocuous fairytale recounted for us in a real-time version of the flicks by UK group Gobsquad (but no popcorn) in Super Night Shot.
Rats ran riot in a Polytoxic work-in-progress environment in the Turbine Hall, and the young performers of The Escapists inveigled us on a mystery tour culminating at the top of the Powerhouse in a breathtaking moment of pure jouissance. Distracted by a theatrical sleight of hand, we rummaged in boxes to release a flight of balloons (ho hum). Only when we looked over the balcony did we perceive the panorama of the forecourt below which at that time of day was a teeming thoroughfare. Bathed in a late afternoon glow, hordes of pedestrians, cyclists, joggers, mothers with strollers and children in hand, flaneurs of all kinds went about their business each holding a string with a balloon attached. A joyful flash of Seurat by the river. I thought I caught a glimpse of Jacques Tati bicycling through. And then in a gesture of detournement worthy of the Situationists, they insisted on giving us $2 back on the price of our ticket.
These random snapshots of the World Theatre Festival at the Brisbane Powerhouse in February might conjure pictures from any alternative (read niche marketing) festival anywhere in the world. What was so unique about WTF that I should sing its body electric? First let’s clear the decks. WTF aimed to capture the imagination of younger generations by providing a saturated environment similar to events like The Big Night Out, accessible ticket pricing and answering its own question—WTF is theatre?—with exemplary pluralism. Some people complained that Gob Squad belonged in a film festival and was not pertinent to theatre. Gob Squad, of course, sits well in either format, and blurring the boundaries was a distinctive feature of WTF. But an ironic confusion of categories innocently appeared in locally produced Daniel Santangeli’s participatory Room 328, a show I admire. (See review). Young women high on pheromones and other substances blithely performed themselves careening through the space, apparently oblivious to the abusive acts the young male performers were perpetrating on their symbolic sister: a rubber sex doll. Santangeli’s forceful critique of clubland seemed cancelled out by WTF’s wooing of the same.
There was an apparent groundswell of young people, but the anonymous admixture of audiences was more apparent on band nights that ran concurrently with the festival on Fridays and Saturdays; audiences in the theatre were by and large the affluent and aficionados. Perhaps management should have bussed in young people with less ease of access. I spoke with a young artist who’d travelled up from Melbourne and was surprised not to meet friends with whom she’d studied drama at Queensland University of Technology not so long ago. Changing culture is a long haul I know, and WTF should be credited with putting its money where its mouth is with progressive programming that supports equity, fairness and tolerance. I personally look forward to a potentially broader conflation of audiences in 2012.
Groundbreaking is an overused word nowadays (compared to whom? Beckett? Kantor? Pina Bausch?) and I didn’t find any of the works earth shattering in this sense (except perhaps for the legitimate shock value inherent in the work in progress Black Queen Black King). So why was WTF so impressive? WTF promised a dialogue, and on this count it delivered. I was completely taken over by the conversation that took place between the shows (I mean the shows themselves were in conversation), something that captured a hopeful zeitgeist. Something that registered a seismic shift. Something with the colour of balloons. Something that restores to art its avant garde function as social antennae, pointing in the direction of new social imaginaries.
teatro en el blanco, diciembre
I interpreted the overall affirmative nature of this conversation as the tentative expression of an ethic of joy, previously postulated by Spinoza and Nietzsche, a joy that is not necessarily concerned with liberating mankind from pain and suffering (the American pursuit of happiness), but rather the living of a true life in this world. This ethic was given a voice in a final soliloquy by the politically uncommitted brother in the Chilean production of Diciembre who finds his personal discovery of love for men, whilst in the army, transcends opposing ideological imperatives represented by his two older sisters. Guillermo Calderon, the young award winning writer and director of Diciembre and representative of the generation who grew up under the fascist dictatorship of Pinochet, regrets the lack of any genuine attempt at a process of reconciliation in his country, but has been equally appalled by the so-called restoration of democracy in neo-liberal guise. His acidulous black comedy performed at breakneck speed by actors who doubled themselves in subsidiary roles in the blink of an eye, consummately, was a tour de force of round table discussions, especially as in the end the two sisters swap points of view, a not unlikely proposition evident from our own political comedy performed in Canberra.
art & egalitarianism
WTF keynote speaker Jude Kelly (artistic director of Southbank UK) in an inspiring extempore speech seemed to be groping towards articulating a political position that takes stock of the way power operates now, and that doesn’t rely on violence and the hardening of attitudes along right and left lines to arbitrate outcomes. She also seemed, bless her, to endorse the notion of some kind of redistribution of cultural wealth, an idea that has become a shibboleth in the economic sphere. She cited successful educational schemes along these lines gleaned from her travels in South America that in no way compromise artistic standards of excellence and come close to the realisation of Felix Guattari’s conception of an ‘ethico-aesthetic politics’. Another panel discussion pursued egalitarianism along intergenerational lines set out by Lenine Bourke (artistic director of Contact Inc) and Mary Anne Hunter in their Currency House Platform Paper, Not Just an Audience: Young people Transforming our Theatre.
Good Cop Bad Cop, Kassys
photo Prudence Upton
Good Cop Bad Cop, Kassys
kassys, good cop bad cop
Kassys in Good Cop Bad Cop presented a humorous, sharply observed and self-mocking observation of ourselves as we are, and how we embrace the media promulgated fabulising that allows us to invent and interpret these selves as our own. The video interviews that inter-cut the performance, are triumphs of banal, self dramatising content and sincere delivery. Their effortless stage playing style, by contrast, evoked the unsensationalised and natural behaviour of domestic animals with seeming spontaneity flowing into moments of pictorial stillness. I loved this unusual and quietly intelligent work both for what it said and left unsaid. (See also RT101.)
Kate Hunter, Nick Papas, Carolyn Hanna, Andrew Gray, The Waiting Room, Born in a Taxi
photo Leo Dale
Kate Hunter, Nick Papas, Carolyn Hanna, Andrew Gray, The Waiting Room, Born in a Taxi
born in a taxi, waiting room
I appreciate experiencing performers who are old in their craft. In Born in a Taxi and the Public Floor Project’s The Waiting Room the physical ensemble improvisation felt like a surfeit of riches in poor theatre guise. The ability of the performers to almost telepathically fragment and re-cohere always followed a mysterious boundary line between order and chaos. Cognitive scientists describe a process in which original ideas crop up at random and then survive or fail in microseconds, depending on their fitness for rapidly changing electrochemical environments produced by surrounding brain activity. The Waiting Room was such an environment. It seemed to elicit, in its exits and entrances, sad human reflections such as Gauguin wrote on one of his Polynesian paintings: “Who are we, where do we come from, where are we going.” In this way, the work was oddly moving. One room, one door, rows of chairs and ourselves as co-performers.
hackman, apollo 13: mission control
Apollo 13: Mission Control was a big flight of the imagination. However naive the New Zealand company Hackman might have appeared about Cold War politics and its involvement in the space race, it delivered a complex and immersive theatre environment which was impressive in its sheer enormity as a passable replica of the NASA control room of the period. Playing it was great fun for everybody. Narratively it followed a well-tried Hollywood formula about the grizzled veteran and the young nerd who eventually saves the day. However, this was played with credible verisimilitude and was really only background to our own involvement in bringing the boys home. They created a huge level of engagement leading to a crucial moment demanding that an audience member, in the absence of any one else—the actors having left the stage—spontaneously step into a performer’s shoes to respond to increasingly panicky calls from the astronauts. The spear-carriers carried the day.
temporary distortion, american kamikaze
A transnational collaboration by US company Temporary Distortions, American Kamikaze’s admittedly seductive pop aesthetic which, on the surface, appeared as a potent and congruent mix of art installation, video and live performance seemed nonetheless to be the odd man out at WTF. The set is a triptych of two human sized boxes with a vertical video screen between and slightly above them. The actors’ mode of delivery is straight on to the audience, they never make eye contact with each other, never touch and barely move. Their lines only tangentially read as dialogue. The video projections are beautifully composed, and have a ravishing cinematic sensuousness, acting as a hell-mouth for eruption of repressed materials reproduced from Japanese Horror Films and Hollywood film noir. The overall mood is subdued, overcast, brooding and a non-linear story line fractures both time and identity. In its hallucinatory darkness, this set-up reminded me of a 19th century wax museum which, it has been suggested, is a kind of proto cinema. The show deconstructed men’s phallic panic when confronted by women, the animal and death. However, women were portrayed as bereft, vacant objects of desire or else she-devils, and men remained either lone cowboys incapable of intimacy or else predatory beasts. Because we had no sense of characters, everything seemed reduced to a surface equivalence with no hope of change.
Zahra Newman, Random, Real TV
photo courtesy Brisbane Powerhouse
Zahra Newman, Random, Real TV
realtv, random; stephen oliver, black queen, black king
The lives of black minorities were examined in Real TV’s premiere production in Australia of Random by English playwright debbie tucker green, and in the presentation of excerpts from a musical theatre work in progress, Black Queen Black King by Queensland’s Steven Oliver. Random was a fresh and poignant one-woman show in the slice-of-life genre. Zahra Newman performed brilliant emotional riffs as she re-lived a day in the lives of a Jamaican working class family stricken out of the blue by the tragic death of their 15 year old son in a senseless street fight. In her role as older sister telling the story, Newman was by turns funky, cocky, caustically funny, magnificently sharp-tongued, sarcastic, sorrowing, angry and dignified. She slipped seamlessly in and out of multiple family and community roles. In a word, superb. Black Queen Black King was a confronting exposure of the lives of gay Indigenous men, as the play expressed it, “on the margins of the margin.” The script was gutsy, graphic, funny and often tender. It dealt with issues that seemed as melodramatic as a revenge tragedy but are the real stuff of Indigenous experience. I’m glad that Powerhouse director Andrew Ross seemed to be taking it under his wing.
World Theatre Festival 2011, Hackman, APOLLO 13: Mission Control; co-creator, director Kip Chapman co-creator, designer Brad Knewstubb; Born in a Taxi and The Public Floor Project, Waiting Room, director Penny Baron; Kassys, Good Cop Bad Cop, deviser-performers Liesbeth Gritter, Esther Snelder, Ton Heijligers, Mette van der Sijs and Adriaan Beukema; Gob Squad, Super Night Shot; deviser-performers Johanna Freiburg, Sean Patten, Elyce Semenec, Berit Stumpf, Sarah Thom, Bastian Trost, Simon Will Mat Hand; Real TV, Random, writer debbie tucker green, actor Zahra Newman director Leticia Caceres; Temporary Distortion, Americana Kamikaze writer, director Kenneth Collins co-creator, video projection William Cusick; Teatro en el Blanco, Diciembre, writer, director Guillermo Calderon; SCRATCH SERIES: Polytoxic, The Rat Trap; Daniel Santangeli, Genevieve Trace, Room 328; Christine Johnston, Lisa O’Neill, Peter Nelson, RRAMP; Steven Oliver, Black Queen Black King; The Escapists, Elephant Gun; Brisbane Powerhouse, Feb 9-20
FOR THOSE WHO FEEL THAT THEATRE IS SUPPOSED TO BE A COMMUNAL EVENT, THIS YEAR’S PUSH FESTIVAL TURNED OUT TO BE A POWERFUL EXERCISE IN CIVIC BONDING. WHILE THE FESTIVAL WAS AS EXPANSIVE AS EVER, ONE OF THIS YEAR’S THEMES WAS “NOTIONS OF CITYNESS.” IN A CITY THAT PRIDES ITSELF ON ITS PANORAMIC “VIEW CORRIDORS,” ARTISTS AT PUSH REVERSED THE LINES OF SIGHT, CUTTING INTO THE SURFACE GLOSS OF THE URBAN MATRIX TO REVEAL A SURPRISING DEPTH OF COMMUNITY FEELING.
100% vancouver
Theatre Replacement’s adaptation of Rimini Protokoll’s 100% series—in this case 100% Vancouver—was perhaps the most explicit example of this depth. The show puts 100 citizens on stage—representing all of the city’s neighbourhoods, ethnicities and ages—and has them group and regroup according to how they answer a number of census-like questions. It can be a surprisingly moving exercise—to see someone take centrestage in response to “How many of you are sick?” becomes a remarkable act of exposure. Vancouver, often a poster child for post-modernist urban fragmentation, is shown here to be anything but a place of disjointed neighbourhoods in which people of varying backgrounds are unable to connect with one another. I confess I was astonished when fists were raised in solidarity to the question, “How many of you would fight for your city?” Was this an expression of existing bonds or a longing for a unified civic identity?
City of Dreams
photo Tim Matheson
City of Dreams
city of dreams
From demographic city to city as architectural accumulation. English director Peter Reder, in collaboration with Vancouver’s Urban Crawl Theatre, presented City of Dreams, an installation that constructs the urban landscape before the audience’s eyes. It begins with six performers outlining the contours of the city’s coastline with twigs and cedar fronds placed on the floor, and ends with them building a high-rise representation made of old bricks and glass vases. During the implied timeline, development accelerates after WWII. Neighbourhoods are filled in and the downtown area takes on the ‘city of glass’ character for which Vancouver has become known. Wine glasses line the waterways and dozens of tea candles are sprinkled throughout. In the dim light the effect is mesmerising. Each glowing candle is like a star in a constellation that happens to take the shape of the city.
During a post-show talkback spectators had a range of responses, from utter enchantment to grief at the loss of natural habitat and the aboriginal way of life. The unspoken ideological perspective of the piece was also questioned: didn’t the focus on urban development and on the past century support a Eurocentric, colonialist point of view? Reder had no arguments with any of this; he intended the piece to be open to interpretation; feelings of loss, including lost dreams, were part of it. I was one of the artists who built the Vancouver edition of Dreams, and I found that the differing opinions expressed by the spectators reflected my own conflicted views about creating the work. But I couldn’t deny that Reder and sound designer Tom Wallace had captured much of the city’s character. A week after the show closed I was riding my bike along the north side of False Creek at dusk. I looked across the water at the cluster of apartment buildings in Yaletown. The evening sun reflected off the glass exteriors. Individual flats were lit up warmly from within. It looked like life imitating art, like Reder’s miniature theatrical representation blown up to scale. It was breathtaking—monumental and fragile at the same time.
peter panties
It could be argued that with its tinkling of wine glasses amid a glittering assemblage of candle-lit skyscrapers City of Dreams had a West-side feel to it. Peter Panties, on the other hand, offered a glorious orgy of East-side freakdom. Panties, the brainchild of Niall McNeil, was co-written with Neworld Theatre’s Marcus Youssef and staged by the wild geniuses that typically make up a Leaky Heaven Circus performance. Panties is all about sex: Peter Pan (James Long), who by the end of the play is revealed to be McNeil’s alter ego, wants to get into Wendy’s (Sasa Brown) undergarments. The more Wendy resists coital and matrimonial union, the more trials the playwrights put her through. Peter is a creature of irrepressible sexual impulse; Wendy has a more thoughtful, searching side. While the character of Wendy is hesitant, the play as a whole indulges Peter/McNeill’s fantasies. These include having Wendy captured and bound by a Captain Hook figure in a scenario that is part innocent childhood fantasy, part sadomasochistic bondage routine; a showdown between Tinkerbell (Tanya Podlozniuk) and Wendy is performed in silhouette, emphasising the actors’ shapely bodies, and includes a tit-twisting wrestling match. I think it’s intended to be both titillating and absurd. Peter/McNeill’s adolescent sexual desire is the lens through which we see this transformation of the Peter Pan story, one in which escape from the constraints of ordered civilisation is taken to libidinal extremes.
The staging has a deceptively anarchic feel but is actually carefully composed and includes composer Veda Hille and the superb teenage rock band, The Bank Dogs, who together provide musical accompaniment for the songs. Peter Panties is like a slumber party where sexual latency bursts through the flannel and runs riot. The beautifully disjointed dialogue and stage imagery is full of unexpected turns, and is evocative of the theatre of Alfred Jarry, Dada and the Surrealists in that it is never lacking in delightful surprises. And, as a friend commented, “There’s something very human about it.” Kudos to Leaky Heaven for once again setting the standard for Vancouver theatre.
Hard Core Logo: Live
photo courtesy the artist & Push Festival
Hard Core Logo: Live
hard core logo: live
Vancouver didn’t invent punk, but it has carved its place in history as the founding city of hard core. If this is a city of glass, then legendary bands like DOA have made it their mission to smash in the windows of the over-privileged. Contrary to the civic pride expressed in 100% Vancouver, punk takes aim at the “plastic people building a plastic steeple” (in the words of DOA). But trying to squeeze Punk sensibility into a conventional theatre format is a tricky exercise. When so much order is imposed on chaos is it still Punk? Hard Core Logo: Live is November Theatre’s stage adaptation of Bruce McDonald’s film adaptation of Michael Turner’s book of the same name. Turner’s book is a poetic account of the disastrous re-union tour of Hard Core Logo, a fictional band based on the real-life legendary hardcore Vancouver band DOA. McDonald turns Logo into a road movie, which is appropriate to the structure of the book. DOA has been going strong since the late 70s, but this show is essentially a nostalgic rock revue in which four aging band mates try to rekindle the anarchistic spirit of their youth, with music by DOA icon Joey “Shithead” Kiethly and lyrics by Turner. Michael Scholar Jr, who wrote the stage adaptation (and performs the lead role), keeps some of the flavour of the road movie and book while managing to flesh out the characters and their relationships to a degree that elicits more emotional investment than its predecessors.
For a two and a half hour performance that can’t offer the visual distractions of cinematography, or the freedom to put the book down when interest flags, this was a good move. But the frame of a conventional theatre set-up, in which the performers are confined to a proscenium arch stage, and the spectators sit obediently in the assigned seating area, undermines any subversive intent. The Vancouver Punk scene thrived in venues where audience and spectator were always a threat to one another. There was rarely a tidy separation between the two. It was also a politically charged scene. Its anti-establishment posture was intelligently focused—a fact which seems entirely absent from any of the three versions of Hard Core Logo. To this day DOA, the grand-daddies of the scene remain anarchistically active, musically and politically. Hard Core Logo, on the other hand, comes off as a harmless meander down a grunge-bordered memory lane.
PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, Vancouver, Jan 18-Feb6, http://pushfestival.ca
Mat Fraser, Julie Atlas Muz, The Freak and the Showgirl
photo courtesy the artists
Mat Fraser, Julie Atlas Muz, The Freak and the Showgirl
WA’S ARTRAGE MOUNTED A MAJOR PUSH IN FEBRUARY TO BOTH DEVELOP THE FORMAT FOR A PERTH FRINGE IN 2012 AND TO TEST THE MARKET WITH AN AMBITIOUS PROGRAM OF CABARET, BURLESQUE AND BOUTIQUE SHOWS. IT’S NOT THE ‘BIRTH’ OF A PERTH FRINGE AS SUCH; RATHER A RETURN—ARTRAGE ITSELF HAVING BEEN FOUNDED IN 1983 AS THE QUAINTLY NAMED FESTIVAL FRINGE SOCIETY OF PERTH.
Fringe World ran for three weeks and four weekends at The Pearl Spiegeltent (recently acquired by ARTRAGE) with a handful of ‘black box’ solo shows round the corner at PICA’s Performance Space. Audiences gathered before, after and in-between at the modest but pleasantly balmy outdoor hub of the Urban Orchard, tucked conveniently between the Art Gallery of Western Australia, PICA and the Perth railway station. As well as 23 shows from local, national and international performers—including the Wau Wau Sisters, Woohoo Revue, Frisky & Mannish, locals Sugar Blue Burlesque, Piff! The Magic Dragon (UK) and New Yorker David Calvitto, to name a few—Fringe World also included a two-day summit to thrash out how Perth Fringe 2012, dubbed “The Boutique Fringe at the Edge of the World,” might be structured.
Inclusion of the PICA Performance Space in Fringe World created an opportunity for four local solo performers (and one international) to enjoy the benefits of a high-profile central theatre venue and Fringe World’s readymade marketing machine. I managed to catch two PICA shows—Leon Ewing’s The Problem with Evil and Andrea Gibbs’ Grow Up.
The Problem with Evil is largely based around two ‘characters’: an Al Gore-style circuit-lecturer on a “demotivational tour” to encourage more evil; and a talking fish-puppet called Bruce. In a series of fairly heavy-handed monologues, the death’s head-masked public speaker referenced everything from the GFC to the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) and online paedophilia, enthusiastically equating profits, bushfires and mining with evil and even congratulating cats for devastating native wildlife. While the message was ironically clear, its delivery seemed confused at best and banal at worst. The crassness reached its zenith when Ewing performed a ludicrous ‘interpretive dance’ against repeated video loops of the World Trade Centre as the second plane smashes through the building. This scene was, admittedly, genuinely disturbing: is it evil to perform such a thing, or evil to be watching it? Or both?
Andrea Gibbs, Grow Up
photo Brett W Cullen
Andrea Gibbs, Grow Up
Perth comedian Andrea Gibbs’ Grow Up is a perhaps-autobiographical series of vignettes from childhood and adolescence, announced by scene-setting, projected titles such as “In Bathers I Trust.” From the poignant reflections of an eight-year-old pondering being killed by a werewolf, to the aching bravado of a teenager confronted by a male ‘skimpy’ after sneaking into the pub, Gibbs held the audience captive with her impeccable timing and telling gestures, subtle as the brush of her feet on the rungs of her stool. Like The Problem with Evil, Grow Up embodied a certain naivety—but unlike Ewing, Gibbs created a space for the unspoken, in a study of vulnerability that belongs as much to the adult performer as to the child.
Around the corner at The Pearl Spiegeltent, the programming encompassed a not-unexpected mix of music, comedy, burlesque, sideshow and circus, with a good number of local performers gracing the stage. Fringe World laid on plenty of ‘quality acts’—like Matt Kelly and Rich Higgins’ clever and pacy The List Operators, for example—and the queues were encouragingly long in a city unaccustomed to such a wealth of choices. Truly edgy or subversive work was a little harder to uncover; but Mat Fraser and Julie Atlas Muz’s (UK/USA) The Freak and the Showgirl stood out with its self-proclaimed “orgy of flesh, flippers and fun.”
The Freak and the Showgirl is, at face value, pure burlesque: a series of themed show-numbers and skits loaded with spinning, sequined nipple-pasties and titillating tricks. What set it apart was not only that Mat Fraser has two very short arms—or ‘flippers’—due to his mother’s encounter with Thalidomide, but that he and Atlas Muz extend both the burlesque and the freak-show genres to talk about it, politicise it, and most of all to sexualise Fraser’s ‘different’ body.
Early in The Freak and the Showgirl, Atlas Muz and Fraser played with limbs, false limbs and limblessness, beginning with Atlas Muz’s strip act, complete with wolf mask and replacing her own hands with wolf ‘gloves.’ She and Fraser performed sleight-of-hand tricks to “It Wouldn’t Be Make Believe,” Atlas Muz standing behind Fraser and replacing his arms with her own. Fraser performed his own striptease, shedding a pair of prosthetic arms along with his clothes.
Between song-and-dance routines and the casting off of spangled costumes, Fraser introduced himself, firstly explaining his condition and a little later performing a monologue about the history of old-time dust-bowl freak shows. He painted a picture of the ‘empowered freak’ who earned a good living and lived independently with a supportive freak ‘family.’ Later still, Fraser turned himself into the sideshow, shaving himself, sawing through a piece of wood, unscrewing a bottle and then swigging from it. The absence of glittery costumes or sexy moves now turned the mirror back onto the audience: while burlesque is all about the gaze, suddenly it was no longer burlesque—our own voyeurism seemed to become the object of scrutiny.
The glitter kept on coming though, both performers exploiting every opportunity to strut, pout, shimmy and eventually disrobe; until sex and sweat seemed to have got the better of both Freak and Showgirl. From start to finish, The Freak and the Showgirl managed to carefully hone a razor’s edge between the bawdy and the troubling; and while seeing Matt Fraser and Julie Atlas Muz descend into a messy melée of simulated sex elicited slight shock, the feeling in the audience was far from discomfort.
Debate raged during the two-day Fringe World Summit as to whether Perth Fringe 2012 should be an Adelaide/Edinburgh-style open call, or a curated festival along the lines of the Dublin or New York Fringes. The question remains unresolved, but Fringe World 2011 gave Perth audiences a taste of things to come. And for local artists, many of whom have toured work to Edinburgh, Adelaide or the Canadian Fringe circuit, it was a rare opportunity to showcase their work on home ground.
Fringe World: Spiegeltent Program and Fringe World Solos,The Pearl Spiegeltent and PICA Performance Space, Perth, Feb 4-26
Refolding (Laboratory Architecture), Kira O’Reilly and Jennifer Willet, InBetween Time
photo Jamie Woodley
Refolding (Laboratory Architecture), Kira O’Reilly and Jennifer Willet, InBetween Time
ACCORDING TO THE PROGRAM, ONE OF THE STRANDS OF THE 2010-11 INBETWEEN TIME FESTIVAL, THE EXHIBITION, WHAT NEXT FOR THE BODY, PRESENTS WORKS THAT “CONSIDER THE CONDITIONS AND OUTCOMES OF THE CONTEMPORARY BODY BREAKING DOWN…AT WHAT POINT DOES OUR MATTER CEASE TO BE OURSELVES?”
Director Helen Cole said during an exhibition tour that the commissioned work in InBetween Time came from artists who have a history of working with the body in live art contexts; who have done a whole lot of messing about with insertion and incision and bodily fluids and using the body as their canvas or perhaps their medium; who have on their own flesh tested the limits of endurance, exposure and incarnation. Some of these artists are moving on from thinking of the skin as ultimate border between one reality and another, as a barrier that must be tested and/or crossed. Cole explained that one question guiding her choices in curating the festival was, if you run out of body, then what? And what if the body is over, fails and dies? What about the traces that are left behind? The symposium on February 5 took up this and other issues in more detail.
death, tatts & zombies
In the first session, Dr John Troyer, Death and Dying Practices Associate at the University of Bath, talked about memorial tattoos. In this practice a person’s living body is used as a canvas to display an image of a dead loved one. Troyer’s presentation drew fascinating contrasts between different attitudes to tattooing: 19th century notions that tattooing and criminality are connected; the idea of the Noble Savage; the idea that the body is unfinished and needs to be modified in order to be cultured rather than natural, hence tattoos and body modification; that the tattoo may equally be a pledge of love, a nationalistic affirmation, a gesture of reclamation or a ritualised token; that a tattoo is a visible sign that provokes a narration of its meaning, in order to be activated.
The slides Troyer showed ranged from 19th century post-mortem photographs to a colour snapshot of the tattooed back of a girl he met on the beach. He asserted that memorial tattoos make death visible on a person who wears them. He also mentioned the practice of keeping post-mortem tattoo samples. Some examples from museums consist of a few square inches of inked skin stretched on a frame—what was once a living memorial, a trigger for the exchange of dialogue, memory and imagination in everyday live encounters, becomes an inert graphical object. At this point someone in the audience speculated on whether it would ever be possible to maintain an excised tattoo as living tissue.
Martin Hargreaves’ provocative presentation (he claims his research interests lie between boredom and hysteria) dwelt on what might be the ultimate body; unstable, ugly, predicated on decay and nihilism. Referencing David Wojnarowicz and Bruce LaBruce (RT99, p26), AIDS discourse and “the societal death-wish of the young effeminate,” Hargreaves made an unlikely case for the zombie as a signifier of the attempt to lead an ethical (gay) life. “What are the positives of opening up to zombie logic?” he asked.
Unlike the other contemporary horror tropes of vampire and werewolf, the zombie is not glamorous. Bereft of everything—mind, sense, volition, wholeness—the zombie is helpless to resist invading appetite, and is cannibal; the zombie will inexorably infect others with its own infirmity. It has nothing but its own self, which is defunct. Between helplessness and authenticity, the zombie figures as (heroic) exemplar of our hapless existence.
Mind you, going by Bruce LaBruce’s Otto; or, Up with Dead People, the zombie is rather good looking. So far, so ghoulish.
immortal cancers, divisive dividends
Dr Muireann Quigley talked about legal, scientific and commercial issues pertaining to human remains: cadavers and cell strains. The speaker cited test cases to illustrate the current situation of property in the body. She talked about cell lines and cultures; mentioning such cases as Henrietta Lacks, whose cancerous tumour gave rise to an ‘immortal’ cell line still being used in laboratories around the world, contributing to the profit of the institution that first made a culture of it.
Quigley explained some of the legal precedents that create an economy around bodily remains, producing concepts of ‘bio-equity’ and of a ‘tissue economy.’ “Human bodies and bio-materials are firmly in the realm of property discourse and subject to property relations.” She noted that within this discourse there is conflict between emotional and scientific value, and between public and private realms. Listening to her explain the application of commercial values to bits of people’s bodies had a strangely fetishising effect. This bio-material also has some value simply because, being derived from humans, its use is transgressive, going against contemporary cultural mores. It is as if commercial value becomes a totem which science shakes in the face of those who might question the use of this material. It was odd, to say the least, to catch glimpses of such an archaic mindset underlying the operation of some of our newest technologies.
Refolding (Laboratory Architecture), Kira O’Reilly & Jennifer Willett, InBetween Time,
photo Jamie Woodley
Refolding (Laboratory Architecture), Kira O’Reilly & Jennifer Willett, InBetween Time,
bio-art: science look-alike
Dr Jennifer Willet and Kira O’Reilly, whose collaborative photographic work Refolding (Laboratory Architectures) was part of the gallery exhibition, took it in turns to address the symposium. Willet spoke via Skype from Canada.
She began with a definition of bio-art. The prefixes genetic-, transgenic-, biotech-, vivo-, life-, ecological-, land-, bio- joined to the word ‘art’ all describe practices aligned to or contained within bio-art, whose artistic medium is life or living systems. It is a woolly concept but a large one, and it is easier to define what it is not, than what it is. Bio-art does not represent another thing, it forms neither pictures nor maps. Occurring in the laboratory, it may make use of methodologies more usually seen in studio practice, or may create a scientific methodology peculiar to itself. It is not science, although it may look like science.
Willet asserted that as bio-art involves the manipulation of life to aesthetic ends, it is political, intrinsically involving ethical considerations not conventionally afforded to other art forms. Typically, bio-art must adhere to ethical codes and community standards established by the scientific community. But, according to Willet, in requiring collaboration between artists and scientists, bio-art represents a democratisation of scientific processes.
Kira O’Reilly has been Honorary Research Associate and Artist in Residence at the School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham. In Refolding (Laboratory Architecture), installation photographs portray O’Reilly and Willet in scientific environments. The photographs illustrate a taxonomic system of which the humans are part. Through costume they are coded as part of the system; as observing it; and as camouflaged within it. Willet and O’Reilly wear specially designed white lab coats, each modified to indicate a different era, evoking its associated historical/cultural habits of thought.
The siting and collaborative methodology of Refolding (Laboratory Architectures) within a scientific institution, confers the institution’s credibility on the work. It is fair to say this is characteristic of bio-art.
to infinity and beyond!
The idea of regeneration and what cell technologies might mean for a transhuman, or indeed post-human future became a hot topic of the symposium. The aspiration towards immortality had kept surfacing all day. In spite of the context some element of magical thinking seemed to come in to play, fixing on the potency of physical traces we leave behind. It’s almost as if our detritus, our bits and pieces, achieve a witchy glamour from being at once inanimate while also theoretically capable of being reanimated.
I was comforted to recall something I wrote for the last InBetween Time in 2006: “(Sally Jane) Norman insisted that although technology has extended the human impulse to play with versions of embodiment and variations of reality, this has not changed our fundamental nature. ‘The post-carbon, hairy monkey Stelarc body refutes the idea that we are somehow less physical than we once were.’”
I say comforted. From the Golem to Metropolis to Dr Frankenstein to Planet of the Apes to Alien popular culture views the notion of humans using technology to enhance or engender life with foreboding and caustic cynicism.
jam tomorrow
As demonstrated in Dr Troyer’s presentation, Western culture has historically had a stronger appetite for the ghoulish than is currently generally acceptable. Museums once thought nothing of collecting and displaying anthropological remains, shrunken heads and skeletons of subject peoples, entire skins of tattooed men. These practices are embedded in the history of collecting, and are loaded as drastic acts of objectification of subject peoples’ bodies, a totem activity of the colonial project. However much potency Live Art practice derives from breaking taboos, it would be ironic if seizure of the trophy relic regained legitimacy under its wing.
Jordan McKenzie explained he was a founding member of the Dead Dad’s Club. His performances, a meditation on breath, were a response to watching his father die of emphysema. So, he creates traces: in Drawing Breath, McKenzie breathes into a charcoal covered paper bag which is burst against the wall, leaving a print of its impact. In Condensation Box and Holding My Breath McKenzie breathes into a glass tank, freezing the resultant condensation. The ice dissolves in his hands as he holds it above a block of charcoal, splashing and leaving a mark. The marks he leaves delineate the edges of representation, they signify a boundary where something existed for a short time. A notch is placed in time as well as space. In these actions, McKenzie is standing in for another body: he is his father’s proxy. His actions create the memorial.
Richard Gregory introduced Quarantine’s new project, When You Thought You Were (an Inbetween Time commission). The year-long participatory enterprise is “a biography of an (extra)ordinary person…a kind of wake for someone living” (www.qtine.com). Speaking of relics, memorials and celebrations, Gregory showed slides of grass, shoes, summer, dinner, play. He told the audience how, going to clear out his mother’s house after her death, before he locked the back door for the last time he had taken a jar of jam from the pantry. There and then he brought out a pot of jam and some teaspoons, placed the pot on a saucer and handed it down the table inviting the other panellists to taste it, which they did. He mentioned that blackcurrant jam wasn’t his favourite.
This is an action that suggests a form of immortality through sharing, lineage and relationships. The jam is a relic, it engages the senses and needs to be physically handled. It is concrete, it is able to be shared, it requires narration to release its meaning—it demands engagement on several levels before it can be understood; and its impact cannot be completely appreciated on a verbal level. The other thing demonstrated here was the difference between action and discourse.
“Once you are born, know you have to die.” With fireworks and intensity most of the symposium demonstrated the latter half of this equation. The achievement of many of the artists involved in InBetween Time was to give weight to the other half. Academic language needs to be able to position both these approaches along the same continuum: however much the occult needs to be revealed, so does the thing that is hidden in plain sight.
InBetween Time Festival of Live Art and Intrigue, director Helen Cole; symposium What Next for the Body, Feb 5; exhibition Arnolfini, Bristol, UK, Dec 1 2010-Feb 6 2011; www.inbetweentime.co.uk
Daniel P Johnson, Leeanne Letch, Hail, Amiel Courtin-Wilson
photo Germain McMicking
Daniel P Johnson, Leeanne Letch, Hail, Amiel Courtin-Wilson
THE 2011 BIGPOND ADELAIDE FILM FESTIVAL FEATURED A STRONG LINE-UP OF NEW AUSTRALIAN FILMS, SIGNIFICANT OVERSEAS WORKS AND, CHARACTERISTICALLY FOR THIS INNOVATIVE FESTIVAL, DIVERSE SCREEN WORKS THAT RICHLY ILLUSTRATED THE HISTORY AND POTENTIAL OF A RAPIDLY MUTATING MEDIUM. THESE INCLUDED A LIVE BENSHI PERFORMANCE, MUSIC FOR STAN BRAKHAGE FILMS (SEE CHRIS REID’S REVIEW), FESTIVAL GUEST SPECIAL EFFECTS LEGEND DOUGLAS TRUMBULL, AN ENGROSSING TRACEY MOFFAT RETROSPECTIVE AND THE INTRIGUING STOP[THE]GAP INTERNATIONAL INDIGENOUS MEDIA ARTS EXHIBITION AT THE SAMSTAG MUSEUM OF ART (SEE BELOW AND THOMAS REDWOOD’S RESPONSE).
The Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC) was also held during the festival contributing informative and provocative discussions about innovation, funding and distribution (see Kath Dooley’s report).
In just over a week we sampled the festival’s diversity of forms and practices in an extensive program that nonetheless retained the requisite sense of intimacy that makes an event like this work its magic. However, slotting ourselves into half the duration of the program meant missing the competition winner Incendies (Canada/France, 2009) directed by Dennis Villeneuve who received the $25,000 10 News International Award for Best Feature Film. Special Jury Mention was granted to Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure (Australia, 2011) a documentary directed by Adelaide filmmaker Matthew Bate. Meanwhile, word of mouth also rated highly the festival’s opening night film Bob Connolly’s Mrs Carey’s Concert (see Jeremy Eccles’ review) and hotly debated Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown, admiring the film for its superb craft but disturbed by its scenes of sustained violence.
The Four Times, Michelangelo Frammartino
michelangelo frammartino, the four times
In RealTime 101 Tom Redwood sampled the festival program, seeing the Kurdish director Shahrah Alidi’s Whisper with the Wind, winner of the Young Critics Award at Cannes, Year Without A Summer by Malaysian director Tan Chui Mui, Michelangelo Frammartino’s The Four Times (La Quattro Volte) and Romanian director Radu Muntean’s Tuesday, After Christmas (RT101). The Four Times proved particularly memorable, a sublime fiction that does away with language and conventional plotting, tracking the mysterious transmission of a soul from nature to man to domesticated animal to tree and—via ritual and artful rural manufacture—to fire, smoke and charcoal. All of this is achieved without any sense of religiosity (a seasonal church pageant is quite comical if juxtaposed with a moment of poignancy) and constantly surprises with its unpredictability and glorious cinematography. We’ll certainly now regard goats in a different light, observed here with the same acuity usually given human subjects. Surely The Four Times must have been a strong contender for the best feature award and, surely, it must find its way into other Australian festivals and cinemas. The incredibly elliptical narrative of Year Without A Summer, however, proved a considerable challenge, making even the Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s wonderful Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives seem a relatively straightforward exercise.
Shai Pittman, Here I Am
beck cole: here i am
Beck Cole prefaced the screening of her first feature, Here I Am, by declaring it “a tribute to the women in my life.” It’s a film about women who have lost their place in the world and most of its players are women. The plot has a familiar feel—a young Indigenous mother, Karen (Shai Pittman), is released from prison into a half-way house; unskilled, she struggles to get a job while at the same time attempting to retrieve her child from her embittered mother (Marcia Langton) who has given up on her addict daughter. However, the spontaneity of the performances (mostly from non-professionals), the often witty screenplay (ample evidence of the Indigenous sense of humour that counters misery where it can) and Warwick Thornton’s luminous cinematography take us into less familiar territory. The scenes between the women in the half-way house are some of the film’s best (especially a late night party), revealing the diversity of backgrounds, troubles and personalities and the ways in which this temporary community is enabling for Karen—offering her support, companionship and an understanding of how others cope, or not.
A fascinating aspect of Here I Am is that most of the institutional figures that Karen encounters are Indigenous—job consultants, prison guards, social workers. And a firm, forceful and droll bunch they are, as if Cole is saying, with hope, that the world is changing: no longer is it a matter of Indigenous people oppressed by white police and bureaucrats, but something more complex. The film’s measured optimism is tempered, however, by some emotionally demanding scenes that leave despair on the agenda—a girl taken back into custody, Karen’s monitored meeting with her child and the tense encounters between Karen and her mother. Pittman plays her role with a quiet directness and an affecting watchfulness, as if slowly waking up to the real world, while Langton’s mother appears cruelly stubborn, unyielding almost to the end when the camera closes in on a look that says forgiveness might just be possible. With its tight focus on an imperiled woman in a transient community bounded by a less welcoming if stable world, Here I Am is an assured, finely crafted film, with some its greatest rewards to be found in the realism of its unaffected ensemble acting.
Lloyd Doomadgee, brother of Cameron Doomadgee, The Tall Man, Tony Krawitz
photo Hamish Cairns
Lloyd Doomadgee, brother of Cameron Doomadgee, The Tall Man, Tony Krawitz
tony krawitz: the tall man
Tony Krawitz’s documentary The Tall Man painfully captures the horrendous ambiguities surrounding the death of Mulrunji Cameron Doomadgee on Palm Island in 2004 and the failure to convict police sergeant Chris Hurley for his part in the man’s death. Like Chloe Hooper’s award winning book of the same title, this is a film that attempts to deal with both (or more) sides of a story that is deeply complex given the character of Queensland colonialism, its police history and the cruel peculiarities of Palm Island, once run like a penal colony and still a place where people don’t belong to the land. The book is credited with inspiring the film, though the documentary doesn’t have Hooper’s first person presence nor her close, if shifting, relationship with the women of Palm Island—they’re certainly not as central to the film as in the book, nor is their strength as fully acknowledged.
Telling differences between book and film aside, The Tall Man stands on its own as an indictment of a system that has ruined the lives of Indigenous people and then held them guilty for the outcome. Krawitz combines recent interviews, historical stills and film footage, news reports, court case recordings and rough documentation of the rioting after Hurley was not charged. At times, as we take an account of an aspect of the unfolding drama, Krawitz cuts away to children diving into the sea, a boy riding a horse, as if some normal pleasures are being pursued amid all the pain. At other times his camera suggests anxiety and foreboding, wandering the nighttime streets of Palm Island. The rioting scenes (seen at greater length in Vernon Ah Kee’s Tall Man installation at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation), Hurley’s re-creation of the ‘tragic accident’ scene, the interview with Cameron Doomadgee’s son Eric before he suicides, the massive police force rally on behalf of Hurley, these and other images alongside the emotionally worn faces of victims and witnesses become indelibly painful.
vernon ah kee, tall man
Vernon Ah Kee’s large-scale video installation, Tall Man, fills the long wall of the Australian Experimental Art Foundation gallery with personal and archival news footage of the Palm Island riot, shot on the streets and from within the embattled police buildings. “They’ve just heard how Doomadgee died…Game’s on, we’re in trouble,” cries a policeman, issuing orders as projectiles crash into the building. All we see are his fumbling hands. “Put a few shots in the air to scare the shit out of the fuckers!” These trapped men know they might be killed. People make speeches in the street: in a telling moment, as a woman speaks passionately to the media (“We are an oppressed people”), someone cries out, “You, the media, you gonna put this on…no one will stop this tidal wave.” Somebody else yells, “Don’t edit it!” (Elsewhere the people of Palm Island are described as illiterate with no understanding of the court system—the consequence: “their fear is our fear.”) But amid the images of anger and confusion, Ah Kee interpolates footage of two children watching the burning police station from a distant hill, and the aerial view from the plane bringing in police reinforcements.
If Krawitz’s film unfolds the whole tragic story of Palm Island for our reflection, Ah Kee in 12 minutes has created an artistic, political document from the crude documentation of eruption of anger, fear and panic, multiplying the same image simultaneously across the four screens in one contiguous frame or mixing and juxtaposing discrete images to unnerving effect. It is a work that is at once contemplative and deeply disturbing. We are well used to the news media’s obsessive repetition of a small number of images that suit their purposes. Here Ah Kee rhythmically fixes our attention on video in the public domain that we might otherwise not be aware of and shapes it for our contemplation. If you’ve read Chloe Hooper’s book or you’ve seen Krawitz’s film, or done both, you identify key figures, filling in names not provided here, placing incidents and speeches, ascribing meaning—an eerie experience, as if of recognition. The inclusion of Ah Kee’s Tall Man video installation in the Adelaide Film Festival is an indication of the expanded vision of film and media arts that has been the mark of this event since its inception.
Daniel P Johnson, Hail, Amiel Courtin-Wilson
photo Germain McMicking
Daniel P Johnson, Hail, Amiel Courtin-Wilson
amiel courtin-wilson, hail
Amiel Courtin-Wilson’s documentary feature Bastardy, about actor, singer, potter and former criminal and addict Jack Charles, is blessed with brutal frankness, inherent sadness and remarkable immediacy in its embrace of a wounded man who nonetheless evinces energy, wit and creativity. Hail, Courtin-Wilson’s first drama feature, is also rooted in the life of someone who is very real, Daniel P Jones, another man associated with crime and drugs, a 50-year-old ex-convict who likewise found refuge in the theatre. In Hail, Jones plays Dan someone it seems very much like himself; the film’s plot, says Courtin-Wilson, is fuelled by the stories Jones told the director about himself and his milieu. Like Charles, Jones has a touch of the poet, but his character’s demeanor is cool to cold and, when on edge, restless, obsessive and downright dangerous.
Hail is a drama feature that deftly manages to fuse documentary immediacy (fluid hand-held camera work, raw dialogue) with carefully constructed scenography built around lyrical editing and richly textured and adroitly framed widescreen cinematography (Germain McMicking). It’s a big screen, immersive experience.
Just out of prison, Dan comes home to his girlfriend Leanne (Leeanne Letch). Initial awkwardness surrenders to a slow build to sexual embrace in extreme visual and aural close-up. The film then relaxes into a job search, funny if it wasn’t so sad. Jones has no resume and admits he’s a former criminal: “but I don’t steal from people I work with.” An employer who takes him on says, “You look like a criminal.” Dan humbly retorts, “I’ll put my teeth in for a start.” Later we see him insert his teeth before a mirror, shyly practising a smile.
After a near fight in a pub, Dan’s old friends, all reformed, gruffly advise him, “You wanna change, we’ll help you.” But all too soon his demons possess him (“I’m a danger to me…something out there wants me dead”), intimacy is too much for him (smashing a birthday cake, he flees the house) and he loses his job after falling from a ladder. Leeanne is murdered by an old drug-dealing flame (or, we wonder, perhaps by Dan himself in a fit of jealousy). Dan immolates her body in a car in snow country, madly stalks and assaults a woman but then with neat psychotic rigour calmly tracks the murderer for the balance of the film, torturing and killing as he goes. The stark beauty of the journey and the relentless suspense are engrossingly sustained but the sudden one-dimensionality of the revenge saga radically thins out the psychological complexities that had been so carefully and convincingly established earlier.
Despite this uneven development, Hail is a remarkable film: Jones and Letch’s performances are excellent in their portrayal of a profoundly uneasy love, cinematography is superb and the script tightly focused, conveying both spontaneity and a sense of craft and purpose. As Courtin-Wilson wrote of his earlier collaboration with Jones (Cicada, 2008): “I interviewed Danny, transcribed that material, edited it, then fed it back to him as honed dialogue in the context of dramatic scenes. In this way Danny is able to truly own the material while performing, thereby transcending the all too common problem of non-actors being given dialogue that never really sits comfortably with them. This technique also circumvents the issues with meandering improvisation as the raw material can be used extremely sparingly in the context of a scene” (http://hailmovie.com).
tracey moffatt: narratives
The Tracey Moffatt retrospective at the Art Gallery of South Australia is focused principally on the artist’s photographic and video works, offering cinematic pleasures of other kinds. Spaciously displayed, the exhibition was a vivid reminder of Moffatt’s gift for merging supreme craftsmanship, humour, pathos and tragedy to make beautiful art with political heft. There are the wickedly funny but revealing collections of movie clips (including Doomed, made with Gary Hilberg, 2007) built around particular themes in which, for example, scenes of women being physically abused become cumulatively more and more shocking while the female assaults on men appear happily vengeful.
The photographic series Up In the Sky (1998) and Laudanum (1999) suggest stills from films of earlier eras (hints of neo-realism and Nosferatu-ish shadow play respectively) that we’ll never see but can imaginatively piece together. Other works are more painterly but still invested with a strong sense of scenography as in Invocation (2000) with its 13 silk screen prints suggesting animation stills inspired, the gallery notes confirm, by Goya, Hitchcock and Disney. One of my favorite series, Scarred for Life (1994/2000), evokes documentary filmmaking with telling stills and suggestive captions (a weeping girl has “found out her real father’s name;” Homemade Handknit 1958—”He knew his teammates were chuckling over his knitted football clothes”). This finely staged retrospective warrants a national tour.
Stop(the)Gap curated by Brenda L Croft with overseas guests, presented a fascinating range of works from Australia, Canada, US and New Zealand each working the screen in a unique way, technologically and culturally (see Tom Redwood’s review). Nova Paul’s deployment of “three colour separation, an early cinematic optical printing process” (catalogue) in This Is Not Dying (2010) makes for a magical experience as a slowly panning camera reveals a community coming together, setting tables, and riding motorbikes. But as each movement continues, a trace of it remains and a third image manifests, each a different colour, each at their own lyrical asynchronous pace, suggesting co-existing realities unfolding in the slippage between past and present. Lisa Reihana’s sleekly crafted video images in Te Po O Matariki (NZ, 2010) silently evoke the power of song and ritualised gesture as it is passed through generations of women, hovering in dark space like Maori goddesses.
port projections: rea, genevieve grieves
In Port Projections, organised by the film festival’s Associate Director Adele Hann, Australian artists r e a and Genevieve Grieves projected extant works onto the face of large, old building, part of Port Adelaide’s historic Harts Mill. Arriving at night by car was a bit like going to a drive-in in the old days: a row of cars facing the ‘screen,’ people wandering about, chatting amiably. The Port River lapped quietly by as we looked up at the images overlaying windows, doors and brickwork without greatly surrendering their specificity. Instead the historical dimensions of both works with their 19th century contexts were amplified.
In PolesApart (2009, RT91), r e a, in a long black dress is lost in the bush, pursued by the unseen forces of colonial oppression and finally disappears—as if she’d been the Indigenous subject who never appeared in the ‘nation building’ Heidelberg School paintings. In Grieves’ Picturing the Old People (2006-7) project, the artist reconstructs the making of studio portraits of Indigenous peoples either attired in European garb or carefully arranged as anthropological curiosities, remnants of a dying race. There are moments of both humour and poignancy. For the artists this was something of an experiment: r e a told me that the possibility of further re-platforming of this kind excited her but would require more technical investment in the creation of future works. I could see the potential although it helped that I’d seen the works before and already knew what I was looking at. It might have been a more mysterious experience for others, but true to the Adelaide Film Festival vision here was another opportunity taken to expand our sense of cinema into public space.
charlie hill-smith, strange birds in paradise: a west papuan story
This not-to-be-missed film from Adelaide documentary filmmaker Charlie Hill-Smith is to be screened later this year on SBS-TV, trimmed from 75 to 52 minutes, while the full-length version will be released on DVD. The film was rejected repeatedly by ABC TV, leaving producers Jamie Nicolai and John Cherry wondering if the ABC was afraid of upsetting the Australian and Indonesian Governments. Certainly the Australian population needs to know that West Papuans are being oppressed, their environmental heritage ruined and their mineral wealth appropriated. If that’s upsetting, so be it.
This vigorous documentary effectively weaves together a number of strands. There’s Hill-Smith’s innocent, home-movie visit to West Papua in the late 90s (the beginning he says, “of my own rite of passage;” “we’ve been blundering around an undeclared war”) followed by a later, much more alert trip travelling deep into the country, meeting locals of all kinds and persuasions and interviewing exiled rebels across the New Guinea border (where one of the wives sadly declares the exhaustion of the women as the men talk on and on). Also in the weave is revealing news media footage grimly spilling out the country’s bloody history, and there’s the unfolding story of composer David Bridie working in a studio in Australia with West Papuan musicians on an evolving song. Not least, there are animation passages that vividly evoke a sense of the culture’s identity and challenges featuring birds both metaphorically and in terms of West Papuan mythologies.
Hill-Smith figures quietly in the film, sometimes merely sitting in the frame, writing, sketching, chatting. He tells us that he has emotional ties with an Indonesian family in Java, making his task emotionally harder since his return to the country any time soon is unlikely. Strange Birds in Paradise is a brave film, inventive, informative and provocative. It could make a difference. Australia provides aid to and investment in Indonesia but why, as the film asks, does that have to include military aid when it’s the Indonesian military that plays a major role in the oppression of West Papuans?
Meek’s Cutoff, Kelly Reichardt
kelly reichardt, meek’s cutoff
So soon after enjoying the Coen Brothers’ True Grit, it was a great pleasure to see an even more atypical western, Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (US). A small wagon train is lost on its way to California. The travellers are short of water, fear their guide, Meek (Bruce Greenwood), has deliberately mislead them and all are anxious about the hostility of the Indian tribe whose land they are crossing. The women in the train are at the film’s centre. When the men wander off to meet and make decisions away from the wagons, the camera and the sound stay with the women—like them we can sometimes only guess at what the men are saying. As conditions worsen, the group captures a lone Indian who appears to be singing the land, something the travellers can’t comprehend, their Christianity compounding fear of his apparent primitiveness. But, despite the cynical Meek’s desire to kill the Indian, they persuade him to lead them to water.
What is so striking about the film is Reichardt’s subtle portrayal of the cultural gaps between the men and the women (nuanced in varying, revealing degrees) and between the travellers and the Indian. The gap between the men and the women is negotiable to a degree—one of them (Michelle Williams) shockingly usurps the male prerogative at a critical moment, saving the Indian from Meek—but the chasm between invader and indigene is profound. There is no smoking the peace pipe or pidgin bartering or sign language, only the most basic communication. The sense of otherness is exacerbated by the long-held shots of the barren landscape and real-time takes of trudging to exhaustion. The dialogue is aptly spare and the performances, especially from Greenwood and Williams, idiosyncratic and finely honed. If not an action-packed Western, Meek’s Cutoff is suspenseful and insightful, a rewarding variation on the wagon train genre and deserving of cinema release here.
clio barnard, the arbor
The Arbor is a curious exercise in the reconstruction of the life of Andrea Dunbar, a poorly educated young woman from a Bradford housing estate in the UK who became a famous playwright for a brief period from the late 1970s although she’d never been near a theatre in her life until that time. While her acutely realist plays were being picked up by the Royal Court Theatre, Dunbar’s life deteriorated rapidly. Often staying in bed for most of the day, writing and then heading off to the pub, all the while she was seriously neglecting her daughters. We see TV footage of Dunbar but everyone else in the film—the psychologically wounded daughters (traumatised by a fire after they’d been locked in by their mother), distraught neighbors who looked after and loved the children, and Max Stafford-Clark from the Royal Court—are played by actors who lip-synch the recorded voices of the originals. They’re good performers, but the aesthetic motivation for director Clio Barnard’s approach is difficult to gauge. As well, a group of actors perform excerpts from Dunbar’s works in a park in the housing estate—we never learn what the gathered locals (mostly at a distance from the action) make of this exercise.
It was assumed that given Dunbar’s subject matter and insights, she was socially enlightened. What the film reveals is a broken marriage to a Pakistani man, the father of her first daughter. She subsequently treats the girl with disdain and, later, open hostility. She declares publicly, “I’m not a racist, I just couldn’t deal with Pakistanis.” (It seems her husband locked her in when she was pregnant as well as applying other constraints.) The daughter becomes a heroin addict, her son dies in mysterious circumstances (possibly accidental methadone poisoning), she is treated like a murderer, cleared and, despite her damaging history, admits, “I had to grow up and stop blaming the world.”
Although very oddly constructed (for example, the dramatic opening scene of a bed on fire and the adult sisters standing by it reflecting on their childhood has no later equivalent) and contrived (the lip-synching suggests documentary authority, but at a fictional remove), The Arbor is an intriguing and certainly disturbing experiment in the contemporary mode of melding documentary and outright artifice in ever more elaborate ways.
Enter the Void
gaspar noe, enter the void
In terms of cinematography, Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void (Germany/Italy) has to be seen to be believed. It trawls through contemporary Tokyo, drug-induced deliria, back street clubs and a multi-coloured fluorescent model of Tokyo (weirdly, the city subsequently takes on its astonishing hue). The film’s protagonists, brother and sister—American 20-somethings, refugees from the car crash death of their parents—are incestuously inclined; he’s flirting with crime and has had sex with his best friend’s mother; while she’s a dancer at a club owned by a criminal lover. At first the story is told elliptically as fragments of the past and present are put together, then melodramatically as consequences are played out and finally as a long, beautiful-to-look at but tediously sluggish hallucination when the young male enters the void. But it’s a void blindingly rich in colour and illusion (there’s even a Douglas Trumbull 2001-stargate homage). As in Hail, the descent into disaster becomes one-dimensional, but the film remains worth seeing for its uncommon narrative adventurousness and bold cinematography—no drugs necessary. A good film festival must bravely remind us of film’s potential in whatever form, using whatever technology and wherever shown—in cinemas, on computers, in galleries or public places.
Bigpond Adelaide Film Festival, including Stop(the)Gap, International Indigenous Arts in Motion, Samstag Museum of Art, Feb 24-April 21; Port Projections, Port Adelaide, Feb 25-27; Vernon Ah Kee, Tall Man, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Feb 24-March 26; Tracey Moffatt: Narratives, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Feb 25-March 20
The RealTime Managing Editors were guests of the Bigpond Adelaide Film Festival.
Warwick Thornton, Stranded, 2011, film still, commissioned by Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund 2011
AT THE EXHIBITION OPENING, AMID ENDLESS GLASSES OF CHENIN BLANC, THE GUESTS WERE FORTUNATE ENOUGH TO WITNESS A TRADITIONAL KAURNA SMOKING. LOCAL ELDER UNCLE LEWIS O’BRIEN THEN WELCOMED ARTISTS, CURATORS AND GUESTS IN KAURNA LANGUAGE TO STOP(THE)GAP, AN INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION OF INDIGENOUS MEDIA ARTS, BEFORE ADDING A BRIEF FOOTNOTE IN ENGLISH: “WE HAVE BEEN WELCOMING VISITORS TO OUR LAND FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS. THE PROBLEM IS WE’VE NEVER TOLD THEM TO GO HOME.” HIS COMMENT MET A GENERAL SILENCE.
A similar frankness runs through curator Brenda L Croft’s introductory essay in the exhibition catalogue. In an aggressive and confessional style Croft outlined her infuriation at being Indigenous and intelligent in a place as heart-poundingly and mind-numbingly stupid as mainstream Australia, where even the most elementary reflection on colonisation and the marginalisation of Indigenous Australians is consistently and wilfully avoided. It was an angry and perhaps reckless decision to share such unrestrained thoughts. For daring to express her outrage in forthright political language Croft was ruthlessly attacked by The Australian’s Christopher Allen in a review less concerned with discussing the artworks on display than with celebrating the writer’s tiresomely cynical politicking.
Such political directness was not, however, to be found in the artworks on display in Stop(the)Gap. Indeed, the exhibition is surprisingly non-confrontational. Something quite different (and often more complex than) direct ideological or political discourses on ‘Indigeneity’ is on offer here. Suggesting no easy answers, or even difficult answers, the conceptual implications of the seven featured artworks (of which I will discuss four) are instead fleeting and poetic, grasped for a moment.
The elusiveness of the artworks on display at Stop(the)Gap points to what might be understood as the exhibition’s determining ethos. Opening the forum held to discuss the exhibition, curator Croft (who coordinated the choices of her overseas guest curators) clearly explained her key goal for the exhibition as a movement (or series of movements) beyond colonial forms of representation towards Indigenous self-representation. And this, of course, means a movement into the unknown. In Croft’s words:
“Indigenous communities around the globe share colonial histories relating to dispossession, injustice, inequity and misrepresentation. Even in the 21st century, indigenous art continues to be negatively configured through the historical contexts of Western art.” Exhibition catalogue.
Alan Michelson’s large four-channel work TwoRow II (2005) stands as an emblematic expression of this ethos. Michelson (a Mowhawk member of the Six Nations) is clearly aware that a large part of the contemporary Indigenous artist’s energy must be spent bending, breaking, transgressing, transcending the constrictive and static representations of Indigeneity perpetuated by colonial discourses. That’s a no-brainer. Michelson is also aware, however, that there are two sides to this agenda. In TwoRow II, two horizontal bands of purple and white images (alluding to a belt woven by the Native American Haudenosaunee people to mark their 1613 treaty with Dutch colonists) denote the two sides of the Grand River in southern Ontario, Canada. One bank is populated by non-Native townships. The other is the site of a Six Nations reserve. Travelling in both directions along the river, the viewer absorbs these juxtaposed rows simultaneously (along with the contrasting Indigenous and non-Indigenous stories and tourist commentary played on loudspeakers).
For Michelson the river both links and divides the Native and the non-Native. Ideas of ‘Coloniality’ (as well as ‘Indigeneity’ or ‘Aboriginality’) must therefore be opened up for questioning. The Colonial and Indigenous are interrelated and in a constant state of change. Quite literally, Michelson’s work keeps moving. The literal two-sidedness of Two Row II undermines the viewer’s desire to focus on one of these sides independently of the other. There is no stationary reference point.
Two other interesting and very different large-scale works came from Canadian artists Rebecca Belmore (of Anishinaabe-Canadian heritage) and Dana Claxton (of the Hunkapa Lakota Sioux nation). Noting their obvious differences, Canadian curator David Garneau (who selected both works for exhibition) emphasised his interest in their paradoxical commonality. Beginning at either end of a hypothetical Indigenous artistic spectrum, Belmore and Claxton seem to be moving towards something in the middle, some common problem or ideal perhaps. This dialectical relationship was emphasised by Croft, who positioned the two works opposite one another on the ground floor of the Samstag Museum.
At one end, Claxton’s Rattle (2003) is one of the most beautiful examples of installation art in motion I have seen. A difficult work to describe in concrete terms, Rattle is in the artist’s own words “a visual prayer attempting to create infinity…[much] like a palindrome” (catalogue). Across four screens—the inner two mirroring and the outer two mirroring—Claxton offers the viewer-listener a hypnotic and strangely powerful aural-visual experience of perceptual and perpetual rhythm. It is a delicately made and extremely impressive work, of living art over artefact, invoking traditional Sioux singing, music and movement without conceding to any coy idea of the ‘traditional.’
Rebecca Belmore, The Named and the Unnamed, 2002, video installation, Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia
Rebecca Belmore, The Named and the Unnamed, 2002, video installation, Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia
Rough, handheld and with a markedly street aesthetic, Rebecca Belmore’s The Named and the Unnamed (2002) seems to be everything that Rattle is not, certainly no delicate expression of Indigenous spirituality. Also seemingly the most overtly political work of the exhibition, The Named and the Unnamed is an installation based around Belmore’s performance work Vigil (in fact it is, more or less, a recording of this performance projected onto a wall sparely quilted with small lights perhaps indicative of the women lost—the subject of the work). Approaching performance as a sacred act, Belmore acts out a series of painful rituals on a street corner in downtown Vancouver, a site where many missing and now presumed murdered Indigenous prostitutes worked. It’s not entirely clear as to precisely why the artist performs particular rituals (stripping roses with her teeth, nailing her dress to telephone poles) but that’s how rituals work. In the exhibition notes, Jolene Rickard suggests Belmore’s intent is to set right or balance imbalance (“Rebecca Belmore: Performing Power,” 2005). With no material justice coming from authorities who have shown little interest in pursuing the cases of these poor, marginalised, Indigenous women, Belmore aims at a higher spiritual justice for these young souls in trauma. It is a problematic but also very arresting piece, demonstrating that sacredness has nothing, essentially, to do with style.
Finally, there’s Warwick Thornton’s Stranded —a difficult work to pin down, all the more so coming from the director of the realist masterpiece Samson and Delilah. On entering the space—with 3D glasses and complementary popcorn in hand—we see the artist himself, nailed to a kitsch fluorescent cross that spins slowly, hovering above a richly coloured central Australian landscape with wide open skies and waterholes. At the base of the cross is a skull and crossbones. Dressed in a drover’s outfit (a reference to Aboriginal stockmen?), Thornton seems at first to be feigning an heroic machismo, but then, in close-ups, is revealed as simply drowsy: sleeping, yawning, head slumping. On his chest (in intense close-up) are the bloody traces of a whipping.
The only explanation we are offered in the exhibition notes is that Stranded was inspired by a drawing the artist made when six years old, under which he wrote, “When I grow up I want to be just like Jesus.” Thornton’s decision not to attend the exhibition forum only reinforced a sense of his reluctance to explain anything more about the work. The ironic tone (the ludicrous cross, the costume, the flaccid hero) suggests a playful critique of European Christianity’s influence on First Australians, or of Thornton himself. But that doesn’t seem nearly enough. Perhaps what we are seeing here is the juxtaposition not only of ideologies but of histories: the ‘newness’ of the flash cross (Christianity) highlighted by the ‘ancientness’ of the surroundings (Country, Dreaming). We are also possibly witnessing a representation of a ‘lost’ Aboriginal generation, Thornton’s own, no longer under missionary control, yet still nailed to the cross, detached and hovering above the Land. Perhaps in Stranded we encounter another ‘muddying of the waters:’ art that worries at the line between Indigenous and non-indigenous, elusively pushing beyond established concepts.
If it can be put into words, Stop(the)Gap seems to outgrow old restrictions, naturally and organically, advancing towards new, as yet unformulated conceptions of Indigenous self-representation. The role Brenda Croft assumes as curator is unusually active in this respect. With a second chapter of Stop(the)Gap due for exhibition in various Adelaide gallery spaces in October, Croft envisions the exhibition as spreading worldwide, in a state of continual relocation and reconfiguration.
Stop(the)Gap: International Indigenous arts in motion, curator Brenda L Croft, artists Rebecca Belmore, Dana Claxton, Alan Michelson, Nova Paul, Lisa Reihana, Warwick Thornton, Samstag Museum, Adelaide Film Festival, Feb 24-April 21
Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure, director Matthew Bate
“FILMS DON’T CHANGE THE WORLD. PEOPLE WHO SEE THE FILMS CHANGE THE WORLD.” THIS IS THE MOTTO OF GIL SCRINE’S CINEMA VENTURES, A DOCUMENTARY DISTRIBUTION MODEL, PRESENTED AT ADELAIDE’S HILTON HOTEL AS PART OF THE 2011 AUSTRALIAN INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY CONFERENCE. ALONGSIDE THE HOST OF INTERNATIONAL AND NATIONAL SPEAKERS WHO PRESENTED KEYNOTE ADDRESSES, MASTER CLASSES AND PANEL DISCUSSIONS, SCRINE WAS NOT ALONE IN STRESSING THE NEED TO RE-EVALUATE ESTABLISHED MODELS OF DOCUMENTARY FUNDING AND DISTRIBUTION IN ORDER TO EMBRACE NEW METHODS OF CONNECTING WITH AN AUDIENCE.
Over four days, conference delegates were presented with case studies of recent TV and web documentary success stories and conversations on documentary craft, as well as alternative strategies for funding and development. Running alongside the BigPond Adelaide Film Festival, where for the second time, the F4 (First Factual Film Festival) was able to showcase the work of emerging documentary makers, the 2011 conference marked the launch of P2P: CO-CREATE, a networking initiative designed to connect Australian factual content creators with international partners. With the swag of national and international commissioning editors, acquisition managers and executive producers signalling what AIDC Executive Director Joost den Hartog describes as “a new found confidence” in the TV sector, one can only hope that many a deal was struck.
In a session exploring global trends in factual television programming, Stephen Harris of American A&E Television Network spoke of the need for programs to feature big characters, high stakes and unique access—traits undoubtedly present in Channel 4’s 2011 breakout hit, Big Fat Gypsy Weddings. With 8.7 million UK viewers tuning in for the second of four episodes, this program’s success suggests that audiences want to connect with characters living in unusual or unfamiliar worlds. This premise has been explored locally (albeit on a smaller scale) through a community-made webisode project, Big Stories, Small Towns, also presented at AIDC. Giving voice to local groups in three South Australian towns, this innovative project offers its audience insight, for example, into the Longriders Motorcycle Club in Murray Bridge. With a clear community focus these stories tap into larger themes of belonging and identity.
Amal Basry with Steve Thomas, Hope
cinema ventures
Drawing on the DIY spirit of 1970s film co-ops, Cinema Ventures is an exciting attempt to reconnect with audiences at grass roots level. As Gil Scrine commented, this means getting films and the social issues they explore out to people in rural locations. With a focus on community, not unlike that of Big Stories, Cinema Ventures takes a philanthropic approach to the not-for-profit distribution of documentary. Inspired to find solutions to the difficulties facing community groups when attempting to undertake effective film screening fundraisers, the project began with an eight-leg tour of Steve Thomas’ film Hope, a documentary partly funded by refugee support groups. Screening in venues such as community halls and churches in remote parts of Australia, this survival story of a shipwrecked refugee boat drew audiences of up to 200 people at a time, with the filmmaker present to discuss his work.
Most surprisingly, the community group that initiated or helped organise the screening was able to keep the box-office takings, amounting to between $1,300 and $3,000 per screening. This is the beauty of Cinema Ventures: with the filmmaker receiving a standard film hire fee for each screening, and able to capitalise on revenue gained by undertaking guest lectures in local schools and businesses, it seems that everyone is a winner. Scrine commented that the industry was crying out for a new model of distribution. With many cinema chains owned by distributors (Dendy, owned by Icon, being one example) small, independent films often find traditional paths difficult to access. “You can easily get done down in the world of distribution,” remarked Scrine. “It’s hard to navigate.”
Since the initial tour of Hope, a website has been developed with assistance from Screen Australia and several state agencies, and a slate of films is being assembled. Scrine encourages filmmakers to think of Cinema Ventures as a distributor that could be attached to projects in the development stage, assisting with the raising of production funds through philanthropy. As one AIDC attendee commented, the strength is in Cinema Venture’s database, a list of remote venues, screening contacts and audience information that can assist with the organisation of a tour. With the ultimate goal of establishing a network of occasionally used community cinemas in rural locations, Scrine is already in talks with groups in Wynnum and Stradbroke Island.
“It’s amazing after a screening when people have to pack the chairs away, when someone says, ‘come back to my place and we’ll open a bottle of wine and have a party.’ That sort of thing doesn’t happen at Hoyts.”
from the sunroom to sundance
In the wake of the Sundance Film Festival screening of the South Australian documentary feature Shut Up Little Man (Sophie Hyde, Matthew Bate), the From the Sunroom to Sundance panel discussion elaborated on models of documentary development and production funding currently in place at the South Australian Film Corporation. Alongside Matt Bate, Sophie Hyde and Bryan Mason of the prolific Adelaide-based company Closer Productions, SAFC CEO Richard Harris explained how the programs Film Lab and the Documentary Innovation Fund have allowed for the production of stories that may not have been made otherwise.
In the case of the Film Lab feature film development and production initiative, the focus involves developing people, rather than projects. Although not initially designed for documentary production, it was soon apparent that Matt Bate’s Shut Up Little Man was an international project well suited to the initiative’s tight budget constraints. Bate commented that the project had received little interest from the ABC and SBS due to the American nature of the story, and the film would not have been made without SAFC support. The guaranteed production funding meant that the director could establish sound relationships with the subjects of the film in the development phase as there were no questions as to the certainty of the project. As well as receiving a special mention in the BigPond Adelaide Film Festival’s official competition, Shut Up Little Man is currently negotiating a deal for theatrical distribution in the USA and Canada following its successful reception at Sundance.
The SAFC Documentary Innovation Fund is unique in that it backs projects without the constraint of having a broadcaster attached prior to production. For Sophie Hyde this meant the opportunity to break out of the emerging filmmaker mould with her feature length project Life in Movement about the late dancer and choreographer Tanja Liedtke. SAFC support meant that Hyde was able to access additional development and production funds from Screen Australia and the Adelaide Film Festival, where the film premiered to rave reviews. SAFC Director Richard Harris commented that the two SAFC initiatives are not about ignoring old methods of development, but rather, embracing new ones. As session moderator Julia Overton commented, “It’s all about backing talent.”
Other AIDC conference highlights included a masterclass on “maximising the story” by producer, John Smithson (127 Hours, Touching the Void) and from Dr David Gallo from the Oceanographic Institution’s keynote address on the wealth of deep water stories that wait to be told. (Did you know that there are lakes and waterfalls underwater? There were certainly many AIDC delegates left open mouthed when Gallo provided still images of the phenomenon.) With these and many other speakers on the guest list, AIDC was an opportunity to pose questions about rapidly changing methods of development, production and audience engagement, as well as how to network and deal. As Smithson concluded, it’s about finding the small human story that paints a bigger picture. Then it’s about getting that story out there.
AIDC (Australian International Documentary Conference) 2011, Adelaide Hilton, March 1-4
BOB CONNOLLY’S DOCUMENTARIES HAVE AN EXTRAORDINARY QUALITY, LIKE ROUNDED WORKS OF FICTION. THE WONDERFUL PNG TRILOGY—FINDING THE CHARACTER THAT LINKED FIRST WHITE CONTACT WITH A TRIBAL WAR IN THE PRESENT; THE LAST MINUTE MACHINATIONS THAT DECIDED THE LEICHHARDT MAYORALTY IN RATS IN THE RANKS; THE BRITTLE EMOTIONS BEHIND ACADEMIC FACADES IN FACING THE MUSIC.
In Mrs Carey’s Concert—Connolly’s first documentary in a decade and made without the balancing force of his late wife and film-making partner, Robin Anderson—we’re once again suffused with musical emotions. But we also have good and bad leads, two last minute crises and a cathartic triumph. What’s amazing is that the world in which Connolly and new film-partner Sophie Raymond are operating is a private girls’ school as it spends 18 months working up to a massive concert in the Sydney Opera House—an ethos apparently quite beyond the predictability or manipulations of drama.
And yet Chinese immigrant Emily Sun makes both character and musical leaps over that period to progress from a kid vaguely at risk to a model of self-knowledge, as well as knocking off a damn fine performance of the Bruch Violin Concerto’s first movement at 12 weeks’ notice. We realise she couldn’t have done it without Head of Music Karen Carey’s subtle mind games. But would Emily have discovered that without this film?
Even more ethically tight-roped is Iris Shi—another Chinese-Australian girl at the ethnically diverse Methodist Ladies College—who must have adored having her leather-jacketed, gum-chewing badness given star billing. Her cool boasts of exploiting her teachers’ weaknesses are linked on screen to Mrs Carey’s one moment of self-doubt in a saga that’s intended to confirm the life-changing power of music. One has to wonder, though, whether Iris’s life was changed one iota by her minor musical role singing in the Slave’s Chorus from Aida?
To achieve such delineation, time was of the essence. Eighteen months filming allowed Connolly’s camera to become part of the MLC furniture, even in the cramped staff quarters where conferences and the cajoling of girls occur. But another 18 months was needed to turn 263 hours of random events into this coherent story: editing credits to Sophie Raymond and Ray Thomas. What story streams or high dramas were left out?
Certainly the wider school story was brushed aside—you’d think they did music all day and every day; not just 45 minutes a week. But multiple cameras at the concert meant we not only got a ‘Last Night of The Proms’ detail of the musicians we’d got to know enjoying their finest hour; we also saw the backstage dramas of Mrs Carey nearly losing a star wind player and actually losing her conducting score, and some grainy, Breughellian images of tired and tense teachers undergoing the finely balanced intensities of the concert.
There’s a naughty schoolboy just under Bob Connolly’s hide. One of film’s joys is the alert camera work that picks up the cheeky reactions of the girls, unseen by their teachers, and an episode with a sabotaged computer took me right back to the ‘invisible’ snowball left in the middle of my boys’ school Music Room—its existence denied by the whole class. Gender equality at last!
And how marvellous that everyone involved—from precious parents to mocked teachers—gave their assent to appear unvarnished in the film.
But, since the project emerged from Connolly’s recording of a previous Mrs Carey’s concert when another violinist was boosted up to concerto level, it certainly distinguished this version that Emily Sun’s back-story has enough human and musical twists to both underscore the constant battle between the technicalities of just playing the notes and finding emotion in both the score and herself, which carries this film into the realm of the ‘migrant overcoming the odds’ story.
Mrs Carey’s biennial triumph of the will is made bitter-sweet by her comment that her pupils will leave school and she’ll lose them: “we have to start all over again…”, a wistfulness underlined by the credits ending with the cacophony of recorders that began this musical progress. But that’s the teacher’s inevitable lot. And Mrs Carey won’t only have this film as succour in her retirement—she’ll also have the sound of Emily Sun’s career, which has already progressed to the Royal College of Music in London. Will she follow Iris Shi so keenly, though?
Mrs Carey’s Concert, directors Bob Connolly, Sophie Raymond, camera Bob Connnolly, editors Sophie Raymond, Ray Thomas, producers Helen Panckhurst, Bob Connolly, Music Films, 2011, 95mins; www.mrscareysconcert.com
Mrs Carey’s Concert premiered at the Bigpond Adelaide Film Festival and screens throughout Australia from April 28, except Brisbane from May 5
Shaun Gladwell, Parallels (2011), synchronised dual channel HD video
courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery
Shaun Gladwell, Parallels (2011), synchronised dual channel HD video
SHAUN GLADWELL’S FORTHCOMING EXHIBITION AT ACMI, THE MAJOR COMMISSION STEREO SEQUENCES, PROMISES TO BE ONE OF THE ARTIST’S BOLDEST STATEMENTS TO DATE. WORKING ON A GRAND SCALE, THIS SHOW AFFORDS GLADWELL THE OPPORTUNITY TO CREATE A NEW SERIES OF WORKS WHICH GENERATE A PATTERN OF INTERCONNECTED NARRATIVES—A DIALOGUE BETWEEN PERFORMER AND PERFORMER, PERFORMER AND MACHINE, BODY IN LANDSCAPE AND ONE IN WHICH THE VIEWER BECOMES AN ACTIVE AGENT. FOLLOWING ON FROM HIS TECHNICALLY EXTRAVAGANT VIDEO WORKS OF RECENT YEARS, GLADWELL’S CONCERNS FOR THIS SHOW REFLECT A NEW MODESTY TO HIS PRACTICE, WITH A REVIVED INTEREST IN THE EXTREMITIES OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE SUBJECT AND ITS REPRESENTATION ON FILM.
For this exhibition, Gladwell returns to some of the guiding principles of his early experiments in the late 90s where, for example, he explored the freedoms of the early Handy Cam, turning the camera on himself as he skateboards through the streets of urban Australia. The final artwork, he states, reveals itself in the final edit, and while the new works are clearly more involved, the drive for undirected experimentation is evident.
soldiers: dance with camera
The logic for this show evolved from a commission by the Australian War Memorial, the institution somewhat controversially appointing Gladwell as their Official War Artist at the end of 2009. Locating himself in southern Afghanistan, Gladwell ran a series of ‘workshops’ with two soldiers. During this process, he handed the camera to the soldiers to record each other acting out a series of self-generated mirroring movements. Through repetition, a constant in Gladwell’s oeuvre, the work documents the ritualistic practice of gestural movement and by default taps into the commitment and focus which is central to the soldiers’ training and performance in the extremes of war.
Gladwell refers to this action as akin to “an early form of dance” and it is clear that the suspension of consciousness, which the soldiers develop through the work, is the artist’s aim. The dedication and focus of the subject, be they skateboarder, break-dancer or soldier are the drivers for Gladwell’s search for the ‘authentic.’ While on initial approach this may be easily dismissed as cultural appropriation, it becomes clear that Gladwell’s impetus is to capture on film the intense psychological states that occur when the body is placed in extreme situations.
In handing over the camera to the performer, the authorship of the work is largely relinquished. This seems not to perturb Gladwell who places his practice firmly in the context of Dan Graham’s performative experiments in the 1970s: “I particularly loved the idea of him not reporting the work but enabling the audience to do so.” Like Graham, Gladwell wants to test the conventions of the audience and performer relationship, a practice clearly rooted in his own origins in urban sports and street cultures. Through the gesture of self-documentation, Gladwell is almost testing his own levels of perception; as for the viewer, we are there to accompany him on this journey of curiosity.
figures, machines, landscape
Shaun Gladwell is not concerned with the democratisation of media, a notion that has engulfed our digital age. Though he enjoys his works appearing on social networks and flirted briefly with placing work onto handheld consoles, his concerns are much more discursive—connecting subcultures to cultural traditions. He places cars, helicopters and other machines of transportation into a desert landscape in order to portray the details embedded within these grand gestures. Gladwell references the Romantic German landscape artist Casper David Friedrich and particularly his genre-defining painting Wanderer Above The Sea Fog (1818) which depicts a lone figure standing triumphant at the peak of a mist-engulfed mountain. In Gladwell’s works the individual employs the machine to attempt mastery over landscape, while their anonymity and subsequent insignificance marks this as an ultimately barren act.
Shaun Gladwell, Parallels (2011), synchronised dual channel HD video
courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery
Shaun Gladwell, Parallels (2011), synchronised dual channel HD video
new perspective, new vulnerability
Though now distanced from his early works involving the reappropriation of physical acts into alien environments, Gladwell’s new work, Stereo Sequences, is still rooted in the depiction of the body in space—largely the Australian landscape. His shift of focus from urban to outback was pivotal in Interceptor Surf Sequence (2009) where the cinematic idioms of Australian action movies dictated the overall aesthetic. Within the new works, this landscape is conveyed to the viewer less through the vista of Hollywood than as a point of exploration for the artist for whom this terrain is also unfamiliar. This shift adds vulnerability to the work by replacing the readymade, fast paced aesthetic of Australian action cinema with a more naive consideration of the vast terrain. The boldness of this act reflects the fluidity of Gladwell’s larger practice—he is in a process of exploration and traditional conventions are discarded as necessary. This notable shift in the artist’s work is one of which he is fully conscious: “I like the idea that a signature style can be broken…if an idea demands a certain methodology then you have to go with it.”
a crossfire of images
The monumental scale of the films will be key to the presentation of the final works at ACMI. Each film is presented as a pair, which the audience passes through a central corridor. Gladwell intends that walking through these coordinates you make decisions as a viewer, again suggesting a nod back to Dan Graham’s experiments, with the audience caught in what Gladwell describes as a “hall of mirror gazes.” Within this crossfire of images, the viewer encounters simultaneous movement of the subject in real-time, with the recorded figures at times looking at each other and sometimes moving within the frame. However it is the body’s relationship to machines—helicopters, cars, skateboards—in the environment that drives the motion in this series, creating a comparative study.
the urban edge in a spin
The urban edge to Gladwell’s practice prevails within this show, particularly in a series of films focusing on the singular performative act of spinning. Engaging a range of practitioners from break-dancing, skateboarding and capoeira, Gladwell ran a series of ‘relational workshops’ in which he asked each practitioner to perform the act at its most extreme within their own discipline. The actions recorded, Gladwell then shared footage with the other groups in an attempt to engender a form of cultural fusion around spinning. Through this process, the rotation of the body in space becomes apparent, amplified through Gladwell’s use of a fixed, overhead camera point which frames the body in motion. Gladwell will install these films as a ceiling projection suspended above the audience inviting the viewer to address them from a horizontal position. The Romantic element of the artist’s practice is again evident as the original, fast, physical act mutates into a series of ethereal movements forming a never-ending choreography in space.
It is hard to pin Shaun Gladwell’s practice to a single genre. He is at once a landscape artist, a social documenter, choreographer and performer. His work, however, provides a moment to reflect on what it means to be a solitary being in a dense and hyper-paced world. His empathetic interventions into subcultures and landscapes exaggerate the potential and limitations of the body while reaffirming the value of the individual self. The most ambitious works to date from Shaun Gladwell’s prolific output will leave you feeling at once displaced, overwhelmed and fragile but, above all else, alive.
ACMI, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Shaun Gladwell: Stereo Sequences, Federation Square, Melbourne, June 1-Aug 14; www.acmi.net.au
RealTime issue #102 April-May 2011 pg. 26
Snow White, Re-enchantment, courtesy ABC
RE-ENCHANTMENT IS A TRANSMEDIA DOCUMENTARY PROJECT, WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY SARAH GIBSON AND PRODUCED BY SUE MASLIN. APPEARING ON TV, RADIO AND INTERACTIVELY ONLINE AS WELL AS VIA FACEBOOK AND TWITTER, IT EXPLORES “WHY FAIRY STORIES CONTINUE TO ENCHANT, ENTERTAIN, FASCINATE AND HORRIFY CONTEMPORARY ADULT AUDIENCES.” THE PROJECT COMPRISES A WEBSITE [WWW.ABC.NET.AU/TV/RE-ENCHANTMENT] WITH AN OPEN FORUM AND CURATED EXHIBITIONS, 10 THREE-MINUTE ANIMATIONS AND A SERIES OF NARRATED FAIRYTALES.
You’ve received critical acclaim as a documentary-maker. What drew you to the idea of an online documentary that also crossed into other media?
I have been making documentaries for over 30 years and I have always been interested in experimenting with the documentary form. Re-enchantment was a new direction, allowing me to explore whether working in a multiplatform and interactive way could extend the documentary essay and the poetic possibility of documentary—both have been important in my previous documentaries such as Myths of Childhood and The Hundredth Room.
To be honest when I began this project, I was extremely frustrated with the documentary landscape that was dominated by ‘reality.’ I have always been interested in documentaries about ideas and fairytales were occupying my thinking at this time. Although I had no previous experience working in interactive online form I was excited about the possibility of engaging with audiences in new ways. Fairytales seemed ideally suited to an interactive approach.
I saw other documentary makers using the web to repurpose their documentaries originally created for television but I was more interested in working on a project that was conceived for the web, that could use interactivity to extend the purpose of the project.
How different was it to embark on writing an online documentary?
I knew I did not want to retell the stories themselves but to approach their interpretation at the same time as deepening our connection to the mystery of the stories. I was interested in the way artist and filmmakers had reimagined these stories and sensed that Re-enchantment would in itself be a work of creative reinterpretation.
I began with research into each story and a script writing process thinking about how we might engage with the interpretations. I knew I wanted all six story spaces in the forest to look and feel different, using the motifs and symbols unique to each. Bluebeard was the first space developed. This is a story based on keys and a forbidden room. The script developed around Bluebeard’s castle where you find a “corridor of interpretation” and each door you unlock leads to a different take on the story. Cinderella unfolds in a vaudeville theatre and carnival space where different stage shows and experiences with a wheel of fortune and kissing booth determine the ideas you encounter. Rapunzel is set in a tower within a tree where you find yourself in a lift and choose a hair treatment. Each floor you enter challenges you with new content about interpreting the story.
Many visual ideas came from workshopping my scripts with lead animator and graphic designer Rose Draper and interactive designers Catherine Gleeson and Keren Moran and producer Sue Maslin. There was a massive job of visual research by Penny Chai who fed many images by artists into the script development phase. As the visual designs and ideas for interactivity were developed, I did more research and writing. We were all working without a template. I had to learn a new language of ‘navigation’ and ‘asset management.’
It was at this script stage that I had input into storyboards and visual design but then these images and ideas disappear into the world of computer programming and I would not see the results till many months later. This is a very different and frustrating process compared to shooting and editing a documentary. I found it very challenging that in this process I was committing to visuals very early with little or no opportunity for editing and changes. I did not know how interactive elements would work until they were programmed. On the plus side, there was an enormous possibility of layering graphic elements and images that has made for an extremely beautiful and poetic aesthetic. I kept reworking text throughout.
The role of writer/director of content changes in the interactive form. In a linear mode you can structure your documentary around an unfolding argument, even a visual one. But in an interactive mode users skip, hop, immerse, revisit or even turn off the sound. I had to accept they go on a journey of ideas that you as director can’t control. So the challenge is that, even more than in linear documentary, the form must embody my ideas. Each section of the site then has to engage the user in some way with the thinking about the story.
What gave you the inkling to focus on fairytales?
As a small girl I had a mysterious book of fairytales by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. Dangers lurked in the woods. Caged birds and frogs changed into princes. The Little Match Girl died unfairly I thought. Each time I reread this book I thought I would be able to understand it, but I never did. Fairytales frightened me and fascinated me at the same time. When I became interested in Jungian psychology, I was once again confronted by the strangeness of these tales and their deep resonance in the human psyche. They have continued to surprise and delight me.
When I was making my documentary series Myths of Childhood (2006), I was drawn to fairytales because their more realistic depiction was an antidote to the over sentimentalised idea of childhood in contemporary western culture as a magical, precious time, a period separated off as special and permeated with adult nostalgia. In fairytales children are abandoned by their parents, mothers imprison and plan to eat their children and fathers have incestuous relationships with their daughters. But fairytales also provide hope in the battle against impossible odds and the comforting idea that others have been there before us.
The idea for Re-enchantment was seeded by a conversation. I have been making documentaries since the 1970s and increasingly my documentaries have taken up the relevance of psychological ideas for contemporary culture. In all my work I have been pushing our expectations of documentary. I was chatting with my friend and producer Sue Maslin at an exhibition opening. When she heard I was interested in fairytales she suggested that this would make a great interactive documentary. At that point I had no idea how one made an interactive documentary but we both agreed that fairytales were ideally suited to an interactive form.
Do you have a favourite fairytale?
I ‘lived’ the Hansel and Gretel story as a child and as an adult spent a long time learning to burn the witch in the oven. A fairytale will mean different things to us at 5, 15, 35 and 55. I love the dark aspects of fairytales, in particular stories of the negative mother who imprisons and threatens to devour her children. Now I think about what we can learn about ourselves as older women from the Baba Yaga or old witch stories.
Did this initial response colour how you went about directing the project?
I knew that the power of fairy stories lies in their mystery. They are poetic and cannot be reduced to ‘this means that.’ I think it is exactly because of this they continue to enchant and satisfy us. Visually I wanted to keep a poetic quality and the story spaces to be evocative and where possible playful. Rather than stripping away the mystery and enchantment, the project threads together various interpretations and versions of a story from the perspectives of psychology, social history and popular culture in a way that deepens our connection to and fascination with the richness of fairytales. It is the connection we make to a story that gives it the power to excite our own reimaginings.
The visual language throughout Re-enchantment reflects the symbolic language of the story, for example the use of the shoe motif or hair, and responds to the content or interpretations of the story being considered.
You’re a Jungian therapist. Do you find the symbolism of fairytales affects the way your clients see the world, or how you practice?
Fairytales can help us make sense of inner and outer life experiences. I always liked what the novelist Phillip Pullman once said, “your life begins when you are born, but your life story begins when you realise you were delivered into the wrong family by mistake.”
In the therapy room I have observed that if we are able to see our own personal history in terms of story we are much less likely to be overwhelmed by negative life experiences. When we can imagine our selves as the fairytale figures in say Cinderella or Snow White, we gain new psychological insights into sibling rivalry, overwhelming envy, poisonous, devouring love and murderous hatred. We are introduced to the ways in which difficult life experiences can be endured and even overcome. Tales tell of the ensnaring witch who is defeated, the murderous husband who is killed, the spell of enchantment that is broken and the transformation that is possible.
How great do you see the impact of fairytales on contemporary literature, film and television?
I have been interested in the way traditional fairytales have a powerful hold on our cultural imagination. Adapted, revised and parodied they greet us in print and popular fiction, as a reality TV show to find an Australian princess, at the movies as Pan’s Labyrinth and Sex and the City, in advertisements for everything from Chanel to Moccona coffee and hair conditioner to Magnum ice cream. I am fond of the work of Tim Burton who often speaks about the power of fairytales in his own narratives and how all monster movies to him are a version of Beauty and the Beast. Visual artists, photographers and filmmakers are constantly reimagining these traditional stories. Fairytales are perpetually in the back of our collective minds. Knowing fairy stories provides us all with a rich vein of motifs and narratives available for creative reimagining.
Fairytales are of course cultural snapshots of the time and location of their telling, but they can also open out wider cultural questions for us today: Why are we caught up in the princess fantasy? Why do we project greed and overconsumption onto children? Why is cosmetic surgery of the foot on the rise? Why are older women demonised? Why is death our night-time entertainment?
As well as the Forum, the Re-enchantment site also features curated exhibitions. Why is that?
I draw together work by artists exploring particular themes. There are two online now: “Woman and Wolf” and “The Heroine Re-Imagined.” I am confident that there are hundreds of visual artists, photographers and filmmakers who are working with fairytales in some way or other. The Gallery provides a place for their work. This project is a conversation with others who are interested in fairytales. This is the heart of the reason why I wanted to do a project that is interactive.
Re-enchantment, writer, director Sarah Gibson, producer Sue Maslin, Inside Out Productions with the assistance of Screen Australia, Film Victoria, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the University of Technology Sydney; ABC On-Line, ABC 1, ABC Radio National; www.abc.net.au/tv/re-enchantment
Human Theramin, Luke Pasquale Calarco and audience member
photo Pia van Gelder
Human Theramin, Luke Pasquale Calarco and audience member
AS IF HANDPICKED ESPECIALLY TO APPEAL TO MY SENSES AND ALIGN WITH MY ETHICS, THIS YEAR’S SYDNEY DORKBOT GROUP SHOW EXHIBITION AT SERIAL SPACE ASSEMBLED SIX CAPTIVATINGLY EARNEST WORKS. CURATOR PIA VAN GELDER ALSO HOSTED AN ARTISTS’ TALK THAT TURNED OUT TO BE A PRETTY SPECIAL SUNDAY AFTERNOON OF ENGAGING DISCUSSION.
Jiann Hughes’ interactive boxing breath-centric work, Below the Belt, is right up my alley: sensors, interactivity and an awesome costume to boot. Donning the red headgear, I’m strapped into an immersive solitary auditory environment that immediately blocks out the reverberant gallery sound. Appearing on screen, Tony (the boxing instructor from Mundine’s gym) puts me to the test. He’s only interested in one thing: my breathing. In a series of rounds, he manages to coach me through a couple of breathing exercises while dishing out occasional words of criticism or encouragement. Ability to control breath leaves you with a ranking of lightweight, featherweight or sometimes even better.
Below the Belt, Jiann Hughes
photo Pia van Gelder
Below the Belt, Jiann Hughes
So often breath-controlled interactives encourage peaceful experiences (such as the artworks of George Khut, Hannah Clemen or Elliat Rich). Below the Belt takes you into another realm of all-consuming fun reminiscent of You Are Here’s Pemulwuy Dream Team interactive boxing game, albeit with a very different motive. As Hughes puts it, the work explores “tensions between competitive contact sports and the inward focus of breathing practices that support[s] them.” Amid the fun, I am still consciously attempting to centre myself through my breath. Overall, Below the Belt could do with a little tidying at the edges. However building a work like this is challenging—especially in incorporating this form of interactive control—while ensuring the scenario is a truly believable one. Not for one moment was my attention distracted.
Next on offer is a different intimate interaction. The Human Theramin by Luke Pasquale Calarco is a construction made from a backpack stuffed with the essential old-school gadgets, aerial poking out the top, plus a power lead trailing behind. Wearing the backpack, Calarco turns himself into a touchable sound-producing instrument, generating a range of squeaks, squeals, drones and groans typical of a short-circuiting electronic gadget. Having navigated all the politics of physical interaction with a total stranger, audience members’ faces display a sense of wonder as they engage in the noise-making process. Observing from the sidelines, it’s like watching a bunch of two-year-olds with a newfound toy.
Drone 1, David Kirkpatrick
photo Pia van Gelder
Drone 1, David Kirkpatrick
David Kirkpatrick’s Drone 1, bearing several crucial messages, is a reflection of the state of current society. One oversized switch swaps the glow of a dozen or so tiny protrusions of electro-luminescent wire to radiating loops, positioned equidistantly in a 3D copper pipe grid. Look closer and you realise it is an apartment block in miniature—each room either an office (containing a desk, chairs and laptop) or a bedroom. At the flick of the switch, stick figures hard at work in their offices then lie still in their beds. Kirkpatrick describes Drone 1 as “the way we feel when moving towards a binary life,” and it’s almost impossible to oppose this statement. Which of us doesn’t feel chained to a computer almost every waking hour, with our only respite being sleep? Through further explanation in the artist’s talk, more layers of critique appear. “Copper is important to tell this story,” states Kirkpatrick. Constructed from finite resources, the materials he’s selected also draw attention to our way of life that is ultimately unsustainable in so many respects.
The other three works in this show are non-interactive and it’s worthwhile noting comments from the curator. She explains that visitors to the exhibition expect the works to be responsive. When nothing happens, they’re actually surprised.
The first of these is Michael Petchovsky’s Infomadream, which is a step towards socially, environmentally and economically conscious media art creation. For several years, I’ve been concerned about the immeasurable environmental impact of electronic components used in creating technology-based artworks. Infomadream is a gesture in the direction of overall awareness. This video installation utilises an open source operating system and video tools installed on some hard garbage (a laptop found on the side of the street). While the video wasn’t the most engaging work in the show, the ideas—particularly the desire for positive activism, which it helped to generate during discussion—sparked something far greater than the work itself.
Ross Manning’s Trapped Universe is the odd one out. Located in the main exhibition space, it deserved to be placed where quiet contemplation might occur. Without an interactive or time-based component, this work actually requires more patience of its audience. While it may have been overlooked on occasion, for those who were willing to sit and observe this undemanding work gently revealed an entire world of peaks, valleys and cascading rainbows.
Death by Stereo, Wade Marynowsky
photo Pia van Gelder
Death by Stereo, Wade Marynowsky
Death by Stereo combines all of the elements one would expect to find in a Wade Marynowsky work, coupled with the essential Marynowsky aesthetic: retro devices, bubbling pink foam and the almost overbearing chords of impending doom—as if you’d been suddenly transported into a 1950s sci-fi horror flick. This work is the least understated of the exhibition, and I imagine that’s its purpose. As Marynowsky indicates, Death by Stereo “comments on the way we receive constant tragic news bursts.” I’m not so sure this is the message I receive. But it does imprint on my mind that anything pink and bubbly must certainly be toxic and I should remember to steer clear in the future.
I’m revitalised by the works in this exhibition, particularly the ideas driving them and so evident in the accompanying artists’ talks and subsequent discussions that were nothing short of invigorating. I can almost glimpse a new era of media art creation that is socially, politically, economically and environmentally conscious. A new generation and decade of art-making, considerate of the resources consumed in its construction and presentation, produces a glimmer of hope.
Sydney Dorkbot 2011 Group Show, curator Pia van Gelder, Serial Space, Sydney, Feb 22-27; http://dorkbotsyd.boztek.net
TO SAY MATTHEW DAY “EXPLODED” ONTO THE AUSTRALIAN DANCE SCENE ALMOST FEELS LIKE AN UNDERSTATEMENT. IT’S ONLY ABOUT 10 MONTHS AGO THAT HE PREMIERED HIS FIRST FULL-LENGTH SOLO, THOUSANDS, AT MELBOURNE’S NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL. IN THE MEANTIME, THE WORK HAS HAD TWO REMOUNTS—AT LAST YEAR’S SYDNEY FRINGE AND AT THE 2011 DANCE MASSIVE. DAY ALSO PREMIERED A NEW WORK, CANNIBAL, AS PART OF THIS YEAR’S SYDNEY GAY & LESBIAN MARDI GRAS. INCLUSION IN SHORT WORK PROGRAMS SUCH AS CAMPBELLTOWN ARTS CENTRE’S DANCE HISTORY AND LUCY GUERIN INC’S PIECES FOR SMALL SPACES HAVE FURTHER CONTRIBUTED TO A SUSTAINED VISIBILITY.
At the recent National Dance Forum in Melbourne, Day spoke on a panel titled “The Next Generation.” As is often the case, though, with artists whose first works create something of a splash, the perception that they have come out of nowhere, materialised from thin air, is deceptive.
“I made my first dance pieces when I was like six,” says Day, now 31. “I made pieces for my sister and my friends all the time. We’d perform them in front of our families. But everybody does that, no? Nothing unusual, really.” Well, maybe not. Slightly more unusual, perhaps, is the fact that Day took up ballroom dancing when he was 15. And not only that: two years later, he and his dance partner, a daughter of world champions, came third in the Australian Championships (youth division) and were crowned Pan Pacific Youth Champions. His career as ballroom dancer, however, finished as quickly as it began when his dance partner decided to change partners. What then?
Day didn’t discover contemporary dance until he was 20, when he first attended the Sydney Dance Company open classes. Once hooked, he decided to pursue dance as a regularactivity and enrolled in the dance course at the University of Western Sydney (UWS) in 2003. After two years he called it quits and continued his studies at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) only to leave after the first year and relocate to Amsterdam in 2006. After a bit of a false start, narrowly missing out in the auditions for the prestigious School for New Dance Development (SNDO), Day ended up staying in Amsterdam for three years. In retrospect he considers that time an extremely important formative period.
“I was living in squats, always organising, always trying to make things happen. Pretty much everything was done on a DIY principle.” Together with his close friend, Australian dancer Noha Ramadan, Day put on queer performance events at which they also performed. One of them, Blue Monday, ran for three months, each Monday, and always featured a 10-minute duet by Day and Ramadan, usually performed to a couple of well-known pop songs and often made up only shortly before they went on. The aim of the exercise was to explore “instant choreography.” The premise was that “things didn’t have to be good.” It was more about “unblocking creative powers,” Day says. “Learning serious things while having fun.”
It was in Amsterdam that Day started up a rigorous physical regime consisting of yoga, swimming, running, cycling and strength work. He also spent endless hours in rehearsal studios by himself, developing a solo practice and incessantly reading cultural theory and philosophy with the works of Gilles Deleuze a declared favourite. Day says that what he took away from his Amsterdam years was the need to be resourceful, continuously making do with what was there and not asking for anything else. This lesson, he claims, stood him in good stead when he returned to Australia in 2009 to establish himself as an independent dance maker.
Shortly after his return, Day applied to the Next Wave Festival for inclusion in their 2010 program. His application was successful and in the following year he presented his solo Thousands. That’s when things started to take off for him. Thousands was largely received positively by critics, peers and audiences, drawing praise for its conceptual and physical rigour. Even though he had occasionally performed solo in the past, Day clearly considers Thousands his solo debut. “I would say Thousands is my first album,” he laughs. “I might have made a few singles along the way.” And how does he feel about the increased interest in his work? “It’s exciting. I’m aware that it’s partly because I’m new on the scene. But the interest in my work definitely makes me more interested in what I do and keeps me committed.”
Matthew Day, Cannibal
photo Gareth Hart
Matthew Day, Cannibal
After presenting Cannibal, his second full-length work, in Sydney earlier this year, Day is scheduled to start work on a new piece in October, which, together with its predecessors, will form a three-part series. Day sees Trilogy as an opportunity “to look at the same questions from different perspectives. What all these works will have in common is my interest in exploring the body as a site of infinite potential and constant transformation, creating intensely physical states of continual becoming.” The construction of Trilogy, Day says, is based on the idea that each piece evolves from questions produced by the previous one. Where Thousands, for example, explored microscopic movement, having Day’s body moving extremely slowly for an extended period of time, Cannibal presented the body in continual pulsing repetition, traversing the space. Day expects the third piece in the series, as yet untitled, to be somewhat more energetic, maybe euphoric even. “It’s some kind of release I’m after.”
Day thinks of his works as “operative rather than representational.” He explains: “It’s as if some kind of operation is taking place. The focus is on what is happening, not what does it mean? My choreography is not interesting as such, it works through its accumulative effect and how it unfolds over time.”
Judging by Thousands and Cannibal, both staged with great attention to detail in terms of their ‘look,’ it seems Day prefers a minimalist aesthetic. “Yes. I have always liked the analogy of shooting a gun with a silencer. The effect is just as powerful but it makes less noise. I like understatement. I like subtlety. At the same time I am interested in intensity and extremity.”
What is striking when listening to Day speak about his work is how articulate and assured he is. He exudes the quiet confidence of someone who knows he has done the hard yards and that the attention bestowed on him is the result of what he has invested to achieve it. It is easy to imagine that Matthew Day is in dance for the long haul. He is practically bursting with ideas: “Eventually, I would like to make duets and group works. I’d also be interested in creating a durational performance installation and possibly even curating a gallery event that brings together works by performance makers and visual artists.”
For the time being, however, Matthew Day is going to stick with the solo form: “There is an increased responsibility when working with others. I feel I need more space and time to myself so I can become clearer and find out more about my choreographic concerns. And also,” he smiles and for a moment it looks as if he is a little surprised by what he is about to reveal, “I have the feeling, I can’t put my finger on it yet, that further down the track there is a solo which I’m not yet ready to make.”
IT’S A SHAME THERE IS NOT MORE DANCE LIKE THIS: DIRECTLY IMPACTING, ABSTRACT, VISCERAL AND EVISCERATING, ATMOSPHERIC, FLESHY. CANNIBAL IS SO MATTHEW DAY; IT COULD NOT BE ANYONE ELSE’S. BUT IT IS NOT IMPENETRABLE OR SOLIPSISTIC. ON THE CONTRARY, ITS REVELATION OF THE PERFORMER IS A MOTIONAL ACT OF HUMILITY THAT SEEKS TO DISCOVER, NOT DISPLAY DANCE. THIS IS A DANCER I CAN KNOW WELL FOR A LITTLE WHILE AS HE RIDES THE WAVE OF TRANSCENDENT INTENSITY THAT IS CANNIBAL.
The work is Day’s second solo in a trilogy which “explores the body as a site of infinite potential and constant transformation” (program note). He is interested in “extreme physical states” and while the first solo Thousands (RT100) investigated the possibility and detail of stillness, this development explores unceasing and relentless motion.
In a white, white space lit brightly whiter, the dancer also clad in white begins to twitch. Presenting his back, his peachy, twitching buttocks enact a molten and bubbling genesis. It starts so small it is an almost-stillness. Other muscle groups join in with the gluteals, irritating each other, creating a variegated body, but also synchronising a symphony of small movements that fire other movements.
In the asylum whiteness, sound rumbles from behind and underneath, thickly shaking the space, vibrating this place with almost un-nameable, almost disturbing atmospherics: ominous, distant, mighty. My flesh is agitated into an empathetic twitch. Relentless sonic drives become horsey cloppings, rumbles ooze into circular metallic rubs that sit on top of softly thunderous sweeps, making me edgy, slightly nervous.
The powerhouse buttocks have sent the head into a deeper and more frenzied bob that makes it disappear behind its own body to leave the back monstrously rounded: a mountain with arms. The twitches have become sinking jabs and the dancer is joined by three shadows dancing grey on the white wall. They are whispers of the real dancer revealing that this monstrous back has a front, as Day resolutely ignores us, showing us his shell.
The twitch has matured. What was buried deep now becomes asymmetrical: larger, longer, smoother, casting its energies outward. A sequential patterning is revealing itself. It is this softly held crafting, this delicate understanding of emergent design, this love of scored improvisation that will save Cannibal from any hint of self indulgence. Segments originate, develop, alter and morph into sequences that develop their own personality. But all remain connected as if with a pulsing thread, each moment is part of the whole, each moment born of the one that came before, each moment only made possible by the work’s self-generating history. While Cannibal accumulates itself moment by moment, it does not build predictably to crescendo. It waves, weaves and wavers. Sometimes it almost saunters into disappearance.
There is a piquancy in knowing that this performance will never be replicated but Cannibal preserves itself into a meta-history by a knowing of what must be scored, what must be set, to balance and temper the openness. The crystalline patternings of the lights, of the set, of the sound, of the spatial pathway and of the idea allow this performance to fly from solid ground.
Day sweats. This is the moisture of an intensity that never stops, that winds this body through its pathway across and around the asylum. There is never stillness, always the twitch is present as a pulse, a generator, a memory, a trace, a fire, a dance, a rhythm, occasionally a joke. Sweat starts as a shiny bead, it turns into a sheen, a patina of effort, then Day drips and as he heads toward us, his eyes the only truly still part of his being, his face is red with exertion against all the white whiteness and his blood pumped lips are crimson and slack.
I can see a man in effort. I can see dance as an elemental thing, a force of the world, revealing itself.
Matthew Day is not concerned with using the body to represent narrative, yet, as with the best of post modernism, momentary tales and stories nonetheless emerge and fade—not clung to as ultimate significance, but as breathing apertures of fleeting and individuated poetics. The play of repetition and variations turns Day into a simian hanging thing, a dance floor diva, a dying runner convulsing with exhaustion, a delirious floor fucker, a stoned ballerina in fourth and, for a moment, he becomes loose legged jive guy as Elvis begins to spasm and dissolve.
Body to body, Cannibal was a silencing event, smashing word and image, making heat on a balmy Sydney night.
Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, Cannibal, choreographer & performer Matthew Day, sound James Brown, dramaturg Martin Del Amo, lighting: Travis Hodgson, PACT, Sydney, Feb 17-26
RealTime issue #102 April-May 2011 pg. 31
Richard Bligh, Anne Browning, Song of the Bleeding Throat, The Eleventh Hour
photo Ponch Hawkes
Richard Bligh, Anne Browning, Song of the Bleeding Throat, The Eleventh Hour
IN HER 1977 ESSAY “MODERN THEATER DOES NOT TAKE (A) PLACE,” JULIA KRISTEVA SOUNDS THE DEATH KNELL FOR THEATRE AS A PLACE OF COMMUNALLY CONSTRUED MEANING, AS IT MAY HAVE BEEN FOR THE GREEKS AT LEAST. “MODERN THEATER NO LONGER EXISTS OUTSIDE OF THE TEXT,” SHE WRITES, AND WHILE SUCH A STATEMENT MAY SOUND ODD GIVEN THE FERTILE FIELD OF NON-TEXT-BASED THEATRE THAT HAS FLOWERED IN SUBSEQUENT DECADES, KRISTEVA’S POINT IS THAT THE PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE—OR ITS ABSENCE—HAS TAKEN THE PLACE OF THE SHARED SACRED AS THEATRE ONCE EMBODIED IT.
It’s impossible to think about the most recent productions by Angus Cerini and The Eleventh Hour without considering their relationships to language. Both are intensely written, almost manic embraces of the wild possibilities of words; both, too, subject the idea of theatrical language—the grammar and vocabulary of performance itself—to a rigorous pummelling. Yet while each offers a provocative feat of linguistic acrobatics, their end results are of quite a different order.
the eleventh hour: song of the bleeding throat
The Eleventh Hour has long displayed an admirable ability to excavate the depths of canonical texts; rather than dressing up old works in frilly new garb, the company’s best work drills deep into the possibilities suggested by the plays themselves and returns to us these unearthed discoveries in intriguing, engaging assemblages. Song of the Bleeding Throat is a first for the group: an original play written by regular company member David Tredinnick and produced with the same incisive attention to detail which has marked Eleventh Hour’s previous adaptations.
Tredinnick’s script is a tissue of quotations, to steal Barthes’ phrase; a dense interweaving of historical sources and fictional dialogue staffed by an array of real and imagined figures giving voice to these borrowed lines. Its first half centres on the domestic world of Thomas Carlyle, here a buffoonish caricature whose foils include an anxious, narcotic-ridden wife and a deadpan dog with natural urges that threaten his master’s preferred life of the mind. The often troubling philosophical rants of this key proto-modern man—tracing thought-paths of colonialism and individualism—are thrown into relief by his painful constipation and the constant trips to the toilet; this vein of scatological humour runs throughout the work.
The second half of the work presents us with Abraham Lincoln on his deathbed, visited by his assassin John Wilkes Booth and poet Walt Whitman. Again, these historical figures are turned inside out, becoming mouthpieces for racist comedy, ironic self-promotion or a trembling instability of character. It’s reminiscent of a fine tradition of American post-war fiction that tears the guts out of similar iconic personages and repackages the corpses as excrement-stuffed scarecrows—an irreverence that here makes for provocative and entertaining viewing.
It doesn’t always work, though. The sheer dexterity of the wordplay makes great demands of its audience, and at times ideas are lost in the barrage of language. Director Brian Lipson frequently plays up the carnivalesque pyrotechnics of the production’s physical and visual aspects while obscuring the intellectual threads that wend their way through the script; ultimately we find ourselves scratching at the wall of words to glimpse what, if anything, might lie beyond. The rewards aren’t obvious, but that stymied search for something of value might just be the point. It’s certainly a memorable struggle.
Ben Grant, Peta Brady, Save For Crying
photo Vikk Shayen
Ben Grant, Peta Brady, Save For Crying
angus cerini: save for crying
As linguistically gymnastic but far less confounding, it took me some days to recover from Angus Cerini’s Save For Crying, easily one of the most impactful productions I’ve witnessed at La Mama. Just as unexpected was a realisation that this astonishing, sui generis work is still recognisably a play: there’s a strong narrative arc, distinctive characters, a unity of place and constancy of thematic concerns. At the same time, not a single element of this work seems an unconsidered legacy of any theatrical tradition; those elements which may resemble classic theatre-making are anything but conventional, instead appearing as if invented for the first time.
Luv and Alfie (Peta Brady, Ben Grant) are a straggle-haired and blank-eyed pair living in some squalid nook; daily they venture out to try to raise a few dollars for a meal and are regularly terrorised by the vicious Ratspunk (LeRoy Parsons) who relieves them of their money while abusing and degrading them. All the while they speak a curious pidgin, a language of abbreviated or reconfigured phrases with its own musical cadences.
So far, so Pinter. Alfie and Luv’s precise situation is never made obvious. There are strong hints of disability, but also suggestions of institutionalisation, mental illness, homelessness and addiction. Ratspunk’s nature is equally problematic—petty thug or shared projection? State sanctioned overlord or evil angel? He’s a fascinating character. He wears a shiny headdress of black feathers which is both menacing and ridiculous; as a figure of violent power, he is also ironically someone just as oppressed as his victims. To complicate matters he is played by an Indigenous actor. But Ratspunk uses his blackness as a weapon—his marginalisation is recognised, which puts him in a more potent position than those who can’t define their own disadvantage.
Cerini takes us far beyond the confines of Pinter, however; just as comparisons with Beckett or Ionescu prove limiting here. The intricate, carefully constructed language of the piece works not to alienate its audience or make strange this world but something rather opposite. Its rhythms and odd logic bring us into this world rather than situating us as cold observers. While the diction leaves us unable to locate the exact circumstances of Luv and Alfie’s predicament, it’s in this that we become more like them. There’s a little humour in the piece, but for the most part it’s a deeply humanist love story centred on the heart-rending connection between two people. They’re not outsiders. There is no outside.
Lighting, set and costume are all exquisitely accomplished here, creating a perfectly formed world from the inside out. So too does Cerini’s direction possess its own well-executed grammar. Violence is represented through sound rather than direct action; sexual violence through stylised postures. Both are even more terrible for what isn’t shown.
Where Song of the Bleeding Throat tears pieces from a history of discourse and pastes them together to produce a burlesque of the act of speaking itself, Save For Crying comes closer to building language from almost nothing. One is deeply, darkly critical, while the other is constructive and, in its way, animated by a fierce hopefulness. Eleventh Hour’s work seems to me closer to the profane—a reminder that the language of great thinkers and men of state is not that of the mundane world we live in. Perhaps more interesting to me is Cerini’s reproduction of the sacred theatre, in which through the act of watching—individually and communally—we share in the meanings of what we see before us.
The Eleventh Hour, Song of the Bleeding Throat, writer David Tredinnick, director Brian Lipson, performers Richard Bligh, Anne Browning, James Saunders, Neil Pigot, design Brian Lipson, Alexis George, costumes Alexis George, dramaturg William Henderson, lighting Niklas Pajanti, Nicola Andrews; Eleventh Hour Theatre, Jan 27-Feb 12; Save For Crying, writer, director Angus Cerini, performers Peta Brady, Ben Grant, LeRoy Parsons, lighting Rachel Burke, set & costumes Marg Horwell, composer Kelly Ryall; La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, Feb 18-Mar 6
ACROSS 51 SHORT SCENES GERMAN PLAYWRIGHT ROLAND SCHIMMELPFENNIG CONJURES A COSMOS FROM AN EXPLODING LIGHT GLOBE—LIKE THAT FAMOUS BUTTERFLY IT TRIGGERS CYCLONIC, EVEN QUASI-SPIRITUAL REPERCUSSIONS LIGHT YEARS AWAY, BUT IN THE ROOM NEXT DOOR TOO, IN THE SAME HOTEL, WHERE RELATIONSHIPS FALL IN AND OUT OF SYNC AND SOLO LIVES HANG ON FOR DEAR LIFE. BEFOREAFTER PLAYS OUT LIKE HUMANISED CHAOS THEORY. WHEREAS ITS NEAR KIN, BOTHO STRAUSS’ BIG AND LITTLE SCENES (COMING TO THE STC THIS YEAR), LARGELY TRACKS THE LIFE OF ONE WOMAN, LOTTE, BEFOREAFTER IS MORE DIFFUSE, MORE CHAOTIC—A SERIOUS CHALLENGE FOR DIRECTOR, DESIGNERS AND PERFORMERS.
The moment of panic experienced when the globe shatters is made analogous with the disgust at seeing oneself naked in a mirror or the shock of realising you’re on the edge of infidelity or, more quietly, with having to face one’s aloneness late in life and trying to put it into perspective. These and other trains of thought are densely woven in BeforeAfter if loosened by the play’s episodic construction—you have to pay attention. But director Cristabel Sved and her design team have a very good go at keeping themes focussed and creating coherence if on occasion letting it unravel with a superfluity of effects. Some work well—actors invade intimate bedroom scenes, wielding cameras and casting close-ups onto the walls, but later the images are huge and ill-defined, their purpose uncertain. The projection of the classic animated cartoon Hoppity Goes to Town (Fleischer Studios, 1941)—about nature invaded by humans—juxtaposes a sense of innocent purpose with the near bizarre complexities of human life (one woman loses weight and height and another’s speech involuntarily speeds up and slows down). Elsewhere the stage is convincingly transformed into a glowing galaxy dancing with suspended and hand-held lights.
The biggest challenge was one only partly met—the tight ensemble playing that a work like BeforeAfter demands. Physically and spatially, actors and director do well enough, realising with agility some 40 characters, but they fail to find a shared voice and common rhythms. The largely brisk, naturalistic delivery gravitated against the play’s strangeness and its peculiar poetry if somewhat compensated for by the production’s various clever design aspects. Doubtless a short rehearsal period for such a large work would not have helped. Nonetheless, the ambitions of playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig and director Cristabel Sved made for an adventurous theatrical experience, and one quite out of the ordinary.
STC Next Stage: BeforeAfter, writer Roland Schimmelpfennig, director Cristabel Sved, performers Annie Byron, Justin Stewart Cotta, Zinozi Okenyo, Johanna Puglisi, Richard Pyros, Graham Rhodes, Sophie Ross, Tahki Saul, designer Justin Nardelle, lighting & audio-visual design Verity Hampson, composer, sound designer Max Lyandvert, choreographer Johanna Puglisi; Wharf 2, Sydney Theatre Co, Feb 4-19
THE VICTORIAN ARTS CENTRE’S CARNEGIE 18 PROGRAM PROVIDES FUNDS AND EXPERTISE TO DEVELOP EMBRYONIC WORKS FROM MELBOURNE’S VIBRANT MUSICAL THEATRE SCENE. TAKING ITS NAME FROM THE STAGE OF FOETAL DEVELOPMENT WHEN THE INNER EAR IS FORMED, THE PROGRAM SEEKS NOT ONLY TO PROVIDE A PLATFORM FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF NEW MUSIC THEATRE, BUT TO QUESTION THE BOUNDARIES OF THE GENRE. IN UTERO, SO TO SPEAK, THE FOUR CARNEGIE 18 WORKS OF 2010—EVERY ANGEL IS TERRIBLE, RAWK, CONTACT! AND CURTAINS—ARE REMARKABLE IN THEIR VENEERS OF COMPLETION AND THE CHALLENGES EACH WORK PRESENTS FOR FUTURE DEVELOPMENT.
contact!
Composer Angus Grant found the ideal subject matter for his operetta Contact! in suburban netball—dramatic, quintessentially Australian and just a little daggy. The cast, consisting of a seven-girl netball team, their coach Bev and her son Bevan, induce a few Eureka moments as the traditional opera elements of chorus, recitative and aria are used to add expressive and humorous emphasis to netball colloquialisms and high school vernacular. The girls incredulously drone “what is she on” at the newly arrived Goth and prodigious goal shooter Daisy, and sing out the game’s ubiquitous “if you need” during simulated netball matches. Wendy, the coach’s daughter, expresses her girl-crush on Daisy in an aria reminiscent of one of Puccini’s early 20th century hits. Even the orchestra is in on the game, suitably attired in netball bibs.
Beyond a humorous subject for tried and tested musical methods, Grant foregrounds the seemingly endless rules of the sport, including the prohibition of contact. It might be said that, beyond the game’s status as a ‘Commonwealth’ sport, its abundance of rules and restriction of contact is what makes it most ‘Australian.’ As such, I would like to see the budding romance between Daisy and Wendy developed further, in stark opposition to Bev and her fixation on football players and teen pregnancy. With further character and plot development to back up Grant’s musical wit, both performers and audiences will be kept ‘on their toes.’
every angel is terrible
In stark contrast to Contact!’s serious music and light-hearted plot, Every Angel is Terrible uses saccharine show tunes to show up the contradiction between society’s sparkling exterior and the persistence of its greatest taboo, filicide. The writers and composers Maude Davey, Sarah Ward, Bec Matthews and Ania Reynolds tell their contemporary fable through Weillian cabaret tunes, Larson-esque choruses and Krieger-like diva moments. The composers are in good company with Weill, whose 1927 “scenic cantata” Mahagonny held up an unflattering mirror to “a public which goes to the theatre naïvely and for fun.” However, unlike Weill’s ‘naïve’ audience, contemporary theatre-goers have a century of challenging theatre behind them and so are largely immured to Every Angel is Terrible’s shock tactics. No great unmasking was apparent when the performers tricked the audience into imagining themselves killing a child and asked rhetorically, “but we wouldn’t do that, would we?” Considering the writers claimed to have no personal experience with filicide, their desire to unmask the killer lurking inside each of us betrays less their ability to see through the façade of our supposedly filicide-oblivious society than just another symptom of our media-driven obsession with it.
The writers’ claim to “listen to the children” comes through appropriately in their retelling of Hansel and Gretel, in which a social worker arrives at the witch’s house where Hansel is being fattened and ignores Gretel’s pleas for help. However, when Gretel bursts forth with her Dreamgirls-like “Everything I say is true” the writers attempt a sincere representation of grief that slips back into the sugar-coated hypocrisy they try to unmask. Overall, the audience seemed divided between those who thought the issue should be addressed and those who thought it should not be addressed in this way, which is not exactly a division. Can this versatile group of composers, aided by the sublime projection art by Cazerine Barry, find a way of telling these stories without resorting to hollow shock tactics and melodramatic musical clichés that only reinforce the voyeuristic gestures of the mass-media? While ‘listening to the children’ is not an option, engaging others whose lives have been directly affected by filicide might be.
rawk
Moving right away from traditional musical and operatic styles, Peter Burgess’ RAWK pioneers the soft metal musical. It tells the story of Tim who takes the message of his anti-capitalist rock-star hero, RAWK, seriously. He quits his job, hits the streets, deals drugs and eventually returns to his former life while RAWK himself exposes his manipulative marketing strategies through a series of acoustic guitar confessionals. The band, consisting of Burgess, Matthew Lewin, Markus Buckley and Arron Light produce a polished soft metal sound reminiscent of those anti-establishment paragons of the 90s, Rage Against The Machine and Tool. Pulling the musical back into the 80s, the melodic strains of Pearl Jam can also be heard in Tim’s more heartfelt moments. While the music is well composed and executed, the lyrics require finessing to give the characters depth. If, as Burgess expressed in question time, he would like to present this fable to school students, then he may need to draw on more 21st century musical influences lest he appeal solely to the two spotty rockers in each year level.
curtains
Hilarious, clever and gripping, David Chisholm’s Curtains–part three of a set of five extended works that “examine lost, dead or decaying musical forms”—is a take on the Broadway musical. Performers Yana Alana, Tina del Twist, Mikelangelo and Meow Meow mill about the stage, occasionally telling the story of, and performing in, a revival concert of the musical Revival in a “Marxist critique of Hollywood and Broadway culture.” No striking point is made about Broadway through the show’s not-completely-non-linear plot. Yes, we know that performers get chewed up and spat out by the entertainment industry. On the other hand, Chisholm’s musical dialectic of synthesised barrel organ representing the culture industry and the Silo string quartet representing the actors’ “humanity” is thought provoking because so insidiously affecting. Deftly bending this unusual ensemble around the Broadway musical style, Chisholm leads the audience to sympathise with Wes Snelling, crooning as Tina del Twist playing Dorothy Day playing a character in Revival. That is, until Yana Alana interjects with “Do you want some ham to go with that cheese?” causing layers of artifice to unravel and re-ravel once more. Constantly renegotiating the audience’s relation to the characters playing characters through layers of storytelling, Curtains traps the audience in a break-neck barrel organ comedy. With improvisation and pre-established characters playing a vital role, it will be interesting to see what is churned out when different sets of performers are fed into Chisholm’s barrel organ entertainment machine.
Taken together, the four works of the 2010 Carnegie 18 series challenge the audience to broaden their notion of music theatre, operetta and cabaret. More importantly, the combination of musical talent and thematic interest in each work provides scope for further development and performance.
Full Tilt: Carnegie 18, New Music Theatre Series, Contact!, composer Angus Grant, libretto Angus Grant, Kate Schmitt; Every Angel is Terrible, composers Maude Davey, Sarah Ward, Bec Matthews, Ania Reynolds, book Maude Davey, Sarah Ward; RAWK, music & book Peter Burgess; Curtains, music & book David Chisholm; Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre, Melbourne, Jan 19-25
THE NOW NOW FESTIVAL OF SPONTANEOUS MUSIC IS ALWAYS AN ADVENTURE AND OFTEN MOVES IN UNCHARTED MUSICAL TERRITORY OR, IN THE WORDS OF GUEST MC, SEAN BAXTER, IS “10 YEARS LONG [AND] ALWAYS BRUTAL.” THIS YEAR THE FESTIVAL RETURNED TO THE INNER WEST OF SYDNEY AFTER THREE YEARS IN THE BLUE MOUNTAINS, THE FORMAT CHANGING FROM ONE INTENSE WEEKEND TO SEVEN EVENING CONCERTS OVER EIGHT DAYS (FIVE AT THE RED RATTLER CLUB AND TWO OFF-SITE). THE ENDURANCE REQUIRED FOR THESE PLUS THE MARRICKVILLE AMBIENCE BROUGHT A DIFFERENT EDGE TO THE EVENT AND MARKED THE COMPLETION OF A TWO-TO-THREE YEAR TRANSITION INTO THE SAFE HANDS OF A NEW ORGANISING TEAM.
The festival got off to an excellent start with two very different but fine quartets. First up was Embedded, a new combo with Rishin Singh (trombone), Monica Brooks (accordion), Sam Pettigrew (bass) and Jim Denley (sax/flutes/various extensions) creating an intense concentration of acoustic sound from among the audience. From here the instruments combined to build a remarkable sound mass—frequency ranges coalescing into a group characteristic that provided solid backdrops for the various rebounding staccato effects produced by each player. A vibrating, dense jungle inhabited by Denley’s rubber extensions and Pettigrew’s (strangely loud) application of polystyrene to a resonant bass body combined with high squeaks from Brooks’ accordion and breathy attacks from the trombone to create a mesmeric world of sound.
Simon Ferrenci, Reuben Derrick
film stills Joe Glaysher
Simon Ferrenci, Reuben Derrick
Reuben Derrick (NZ), Simon Ferenci, Milica Stefanovic and Evan Dorrian settled into sympathetic communication very quickly with Dorrian and Stefanovich setting a funereal tone with single bass/bass drum strikes before Dorrian’s stickless, free-hand agitations pushed the piece along into more layered textures. At one point the cut-rhythm bass tugged at a funk feel only to be subverted by aquatic textures emerging from the clarinet as Derrick processed it through an amplified bin full of water. The trumpet’s distant calls evolved into a syncopated tussle between the wind instruments only to be replaced by the mournful beauty of a lone clarinet across the rhythm section, all ultimately replaced by Ferenci’s trademark metal-on-metal scraping.
This first night finished with Brisbane’s Sky Needle (Joel Stern, Alex Cuffe, Ross Manning and Sarah Byrne) pressing noise into the service of the song cycle. They misappropriated the form with splendid anarchy and without regard for tradition. All objects played by this group are their own inventions. One instrument was a cross between a bass guitar and a mobile angle grinder and another resembled an African thumb piano/dulcimer combination. Stern’s feet pumped for dear life to produce percussive wind sounds at the end of a couple of tubes and Byrne sounded like an out-of-control Siouxie Sioux. This is surely the future of pop!
On Saturday Peter Blamey was first up, suspending and dropping hair’s breadth copper wire from above onto six or so open circuit boards like some interpretive suicide leap. The circuits screamed and pulsed cataclysmically whilst Blamey sat in Frankensteinian calm extracting music from the incidental noise and discordant pulses occurring deep within the sonic material.
The next night’s highlight was the duet by Tony Buck (percussion) and Magda Mayas (prepared piano). Harmonics seeped from all that they struck, scraped and wrung out producing a luscious ebb and flow of complex layers. Lost in the evocations of this piece, I imagined at one point that I was hearing the everyday sounds of a small town, notated and reproduced in musical form. Eyes closed, I lost track of instrument identity sometimes and had to look back at the stage to understand exactly what was creating these sounds so full of cadence, resonance and melody.
This perception of blurring sonic boundaries between instruments was also a feature of Martin Kirkwood (electronics) and Peter Farrar’s (extended saxophone) set, a couple of nights later. There were sonic ‘illusions’ in this arresting piece wherein goat-calls appeared amid pure machinistic pulses, collapsing the tenor and the electronics into a curious unity. Farrar’s blown sounds, created by various plastic attachments and insertions, brought the integrity of the saxophone into joyful disrepute by creasing bits of drink bottles and other flotsam into vibrating buzzes and moans. Conversely Kirkwood’s pedals and boxes, some looking like a home electronics project, often achieved notes of pure acoustic clarity.
At the louder end of the music discourse was Melbourne drummer Sean Baxter demonstrating what he meant by sonic brutality with his renowned floor tom and feedback work (night five at Serial Space) which utilised various metal scraps bent and tortured by Baxter to both provoke and subdue varying levels of PA feedback. The following night he joined Hermione Johnson (piano), NZ’s Jeff Henderson (sax) and Mike Majkowski (double bass) on the Red Rattler stage with his full kit in a breakneck romp that turned up the temperature further in Marrickville’s summer steam. Following this on Friday we were treated to Scandinavian trio The Thing who are Mats Gustafasson (tenor & baritone sax), Ingebright H Flaten (double bass) and Nilssen-Love (drums). They took off from zero to hit full-speed a split-second later. In both these bands the listening was deceptively intense between the players. Walls of sound came at you with playing that was flat out but which dispersed incongruously until only remnants of the original energy remained. Accelerating unison playing and seamless tempo shifts attest to the level of attention these players exercise.
But for me it was the collaboration on night five, AV, between Norwegian Kym Myhr (guitar, autoharp and various electric devices and extensions), Sam Pettigrew (bass & extensions) and Nick Shimmin (film curation) that produced the most finely tuned and sensitive playing of the festival. Swedish filmmaker Gunvor Nelson’s “personal” work, True To Life contained macro probings of a variety of plant-life and exchanged background/foreground positions with the musicians. The music seemed to move between creating a dramatic and foreboding soundtrack while at other times itself becoming the subject of strange narrative contexts evoked by the abstracted images. Listening by players and audience alike was perceptible and Myhr and Pettigrew’s acute sensitivity within their sound world was intriguing. It created a piece that explored an extraordinary dynamic range and compositional awareness as autoharp arpeggios, a ringing bowl and the strategic placing of small electric motors against a variety of resonant and pitched objects played within and across the assertions of Pettigrew’s fingering and long bowing bass sequences.
Earlier in the night there were some fine AV co-ordinations from Aemon Webb and Jon Watts which were as different from John Blades’ multimedia narratives on Saturday as those narratives were from the spoken mythic inventions of Gerard Crewdson (NZ) on Monday at the Camperdown concert. From the sinewy progressions of the trio Roil on Saturday to the exquisite minimalism of Thursday’s sampling trio Jason Kahn (Canada), Adam Sussman and Matt Earle, the Now Now 2011 was an exciting week of music and the range of noise presented was wide as always and of course, the Splinter Orchestra played a set too!
the NOW now 2011, curators Laura Altman, Mike Majkowski, Sam Pettigrew, various locations, Sydney, Jan 21-28; www.theNOWnow.com
SOUNDOUT IS THE NEW-KID-ON-THE-FESTIVAL-BLOCK, BUT BY NO MEANS UNFORMED IN TERMS OF AGENDA. WHILE OTHER FESTIVALS MAY NOW TAKE IN INFLUENCES FROM A RANGE OF MUSICS WITH EXPERIMENTAL FRINGES (POP, FOLK, BEATS), SOUNDOUT DIRECTED BY RICHARD JOHNSON, IS UNCOMPROMISING IN ITS PURE PURSUIT OF MUSIC IN THE MOMENT, SOUGHT THROUGH FREE JAZZ AND IMPROVISATION.
Johnson has established a rigorous structure in which 20 artists play in a range of groupings for a total of 16 hours over two days. If you attended the entire festival (which I, the artists, and a few dedicated punters did) you were treated to seeing the same people perform up to five times. The original programming, promising 40-minute sets with 8-minute turnaround times, quickly proved impractical as artists felt they needed to play for as long or (as was more often the case) as briefly as felt right—and thankfully some shorter sets allowed the audience to take a break. So while the event felt a little like an endurance test, there were many rewarding moments of which the following are but a few.
It was a joy to witness another instalment of the Great Waitress—Magda Mayas (Germany), Monica Brooks and Laura Altman. I saw them first at the 2009 NOW Now festival (RT89) and really appreciated their intense, quiet focus. This time they were louder and more forceful, Brooks on accordion producing fat humming drones, Altman on clarinet interjecting with high tones and overblows while Mayas, with her hands in the instrument, pulled strings attached to piano wires to create long, slow glissandi and big bent notes, evoking a Fellini-esque circus ambience.
Saxophonists Jim Denley and Rosalind Hall re-arranged the room to sit facing each other across a table set amid the audience. While Hall explored timbral shifts over long tones by placing a variety of objects into the bell of her saxophone, Denley, augmenting the mouthpiece of his sax with his trusty balloon extension, worked more with rhythm and phrasing. Their searchings around each other’s sounds created the sense of a challenging, yet cheeky conversation.
A playful approach also characterised a collaboration between Cor Fuhler (Germany), Dale Gorfinkel and Kim Myhr (Norway). Fuhler generated startling harmonics with magnets and ebows and then set toys crawling over the strings, while Myhr bowed ancient fairy tones from a zither. Gorfinkel added and subtracted bits from his trumpet/trombone hybrid, augmented with tubing and extra motors on which he placed spinning bits of styrofoam, his instrument strangely reminiscent of a platypus in its mismatched wonder. The overall combination of rich drones, agitated pizzicatos and friction squeals was as joyous as it was unique.
Late on the Sunday afternoon a primal drumming sequence from Gorfinkel and James Waples, with stuttered, broken chords from Brooks on piano, kicked in before the audience had come back from a break, creating a sense that we were welcome but not necessary to the proceedings: this was purely an exploration for the musicians themselves. After the initial energy burst of drumming fell away, Brooks busied herself running a glass over the strings of the piano; Waples explored a scratching sequence over his kits including cymbal spinning; and, after a long period of non-participation, Gorfinkel explored a tapping sequence on his trumpet. It was the purest set of the festival in its unabashed pursuit of sound-making actions with less concern as to how these might be shaped to appeal to an audience. It was a kind of crumbly music, with no binding principles beyond the authenticity of the actions themselves—a thought provoking session that had me pondering the tensions between process and presentation in improvisation.
The most invigorating shake-up was experienced in the blistering power jazz of The Thing (Norway/Sweden). With the bravado of stadium rock the trio delivered a sustained high-energy set—a seemingly endless stream of notes and complex rhythmic interplay crashing, clashing and sometimes combining. Occasionally it resolved into merely medium-energy free jazz, the saxophonist Mats Gustavsson treating us to fragments of nostalgic melody while the bass player Ingebrigt Håker Flaten generated warm fuzzy feedback hum through his amplifier until the drummer, Paal Nilssen-Love could no longer rein in his need to go faster, harder and louder and the band exploded, again—all orgasm faces and forces. The trio was joined by Tony Buck, also on drums, Mayas on piano and Mike Majkowski on bass and The Thing pulled back politely, creating something of a harmonic field over which the others added angular and pointillist elements.
Isaiah Ceccarelli, SoundOut 2011
photo Yasmin Masri
Isaiah Ceccarelli, SoundOut 2011
However the most surprising turn in events came in the 16th set (out of 20) of the festival with Denley and Richard Johnson on woodwinds and Evan Dorrian and Canadian artist Isaiah Ceccarelli on drums. Ceccarelli had been an intriguing presence, often sustaining an action through long sections of a set, providing a sense of consistency while others swirled around him. In this instance, after exploring the running of bells across his drum, he suddenly burst into song! In a beautiful baritone he executed interval leaps and chants, creating an improv opera that was playful, profoundly beautiful and surprising, energising everyone, most of all, perhaps, his fellow musicians.
Moments like Ceccarelli’s poetic outpouring and Gorfinkel/Waples/Brooks’ ‘crumbly music’ were interesting responses to the intensity otherwise generated by the SoundOut format. (Yan Jun from China on delicate handmade electronics and Monica Brooks on accordion also sought extremes in their exactingly minimalist set in which the in-house cricket was decibels louder than their output.) It was fascinating to watch musicians discover that some of their tactics were exhausted by their fifth appearance, forcing them to push further to find new methods of engagement with their own instruments and with the group. Experiencing all the SoundOut sessions was not for the faint-hearted, but the compression certainly brought something out in the musicians: this energy was felt by audiences attending even a single session. While the NOW now festival (page 38) covers a similar improv remit, it encourages a little more cross-genre play and is more spacious, spread over several evenings. The crazy intensity of the work-day units of SoundOut, its purity of focus and its location in our nation’s capital offer it genuine points of difference.
SoundOut 2011, director Richard Johnson, artists Cor Fuhler, Dale Gorfinkel, Evan Dorrian, Jim Denley, Kim Myhr, Laura Altman, Magda Mayas, Michael Norris, Mike Majkowski, Monika Brooks, Richard Johnson, Rosalind Hall, Shoeb Ahmed, The Thing (Mats Gustafsson, Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten, Paal Nilssen-Love), Tony Buck, Isaiah Ceccarelli, James Waples, Yan Jun; The Street Theatre, Canberra, Jan 29-30
Judith Hamann, Sam Dunscombe, James Rushford, Golden Fur
courtesy the aritsts
Judith Hamann, Sam Dunscombe, James Rushford, Golden Fur
THE COCHLEAR IMPLANT CONSISTS OF 22 ELECTRODES CONNECTED DIRECTLY TO THE AUDITORY NERVE. A MICROPHONE TRANSMITS AN AUDIO SIGNAL TO THESE ELECTRODES, ALLOWING THE WEARER TO BECOME AWARE OF THE SOUNDS AROUND THEM. GIVEN THE DIFFICULTY FOR COCHLEAR IMPLANT WEARERS TO DISTINGUISH TIMBRE AND PITCH, MUSIC IS A CHALLENGING AND SOMETIMES UNPLEASANT EXPERIENCE. THE INTERIOR DESIGN: MUSIC FOR THE BIONIC EAR PROJECT, CULMINATING IN A PERFORMANCE OF SIX NEWLY COMMISSIONED WORKS, AIMED TO ADDRESS THIS ISSUE.
In the concert, performed by Golden Fur and Speak Percussion, 11 loudspeakers were designed to mimic the 22 electrodes in a cochlear implant for an audience listening with and without implants. Composers and scientists have worked with wearers to investigate which sounds can be effectively perceived.
As well as the practical objective of producing music that can be appreciated by cochlear implant wearers, this project also raises questions about the nature of musical engagement. How does one go about composing music for someone with an entirely different experience of sound from one’s own?
A similar dilemma is faced by audiences who do not use implants. At times it was difficult to know how certain sounds were intended to be perceived, given that a number of the compositions used sounds specifically chosen for the way they would be experienced through an implant. For example, Ben Harper’s This is All I Need employs a tuning system based on the frequency spectrum of the electrodes in the cochlear implant. Rohan Drape’s Another in Another Dark uses extreme limitation as a means of focusing a listener’s perception. Instruments play various combinations of one or two note fragments at a slow tempo, with slight variations in duration. The result is something analogous to a suspended mobile, in that the experience of the work does not change over time, although the gradual shift of parts creates an illusion of changing perspectives.
Natasha Anderson’s Study for the Bionic Ear #1 moves between radically different sound worlds. The work begins with a stark and dry pallet of shaker, bongos and congas played with mallets. This is transformed with the introduction of piano samples—single note, contrasting rhythmic patterns sent through various speaker channels. In stark contrast to this highly rhythmic and energetic language, the final section uses bowed vibraphone, vibraphone tremolos, sine tones and samples of cello harmonics to create a highly spacious and atmospheric sound world.
Eugene Ughetti’s Syncretism A engages through a sense of theatricality and playfulness. Three percussionists with expanded drum kit set-ups play with speech, dynamic level and obscured stylistic references. The work is a pastiche of contrasting styles and techniques. Hand-held microphones are used to diffuse the sound of certain instruments into various parts of the theatre.
In a brief statement preceding the concert, artistic director Robin Fox drew attention to the fact that the works of these composers are rooted in an experimental aesthetic, concerned with challenging the parameters through which we engage with music. It follows logically that composers with this kind of approach, generally speaking, would be the obvious choice for such a project. However there were instances in the program where the conceptual agenda weighed the music down for the hearing audience.
It is a supreme challenge to compose music that will be perceived in an entirely different acoustic reality. Fox’s 3 Studies for the Bionic Ear achieved this most convincingly. In this work, sound was diffused through speakers in various patterns, an integral component in the language. These sonic patterns were accompanied by visual material that was highly integrated with sound, brilliantly drawing attention to subtle sonic shifts which may not otherwise have been noticed. What was most exciting was that the strength and clarity of the gestures produced by sound and visuals made it seem entirely feasible that this work would be just as engaging through a radically different mode of perceiving sound.
James Rushford’s Tusilage was also a standout work, due purely to the strength of its musical material. Performed by Rushford on viola, Judith Hamann on cello and accompanied by tape play-back, there was an eloquence and depth in its form, created through a sophisticated layering of material. Variations in the complexity and density of timbre were created through an exploration of the sonic potential of the bowed instruments and planes of pre-recorded sounds, allowing Tusilage to traverse vastly different states of energy and movement.
Interior Design: Music for the Bionic Ear, artistic director Robin Fox, composers Robin Fox, Natasha Anderson, Rohan Drape, Eugene Ughetti, Ben Harper, James Rushford, performers Golden Fur, Speak Percussion, Fairfax Theatre, Arts Centre, Melbourne, Feb 13
RealTime issue #102 April-May 2011 pg. 39
Eric La Casa’s Spirale 4, Bogong Air
photo John Billan
Eric La Casa’s Spirale 4, Bogong Air
FOLLOWING AN OVERNIGHT DELUGE, THE KIEWA RIVER WAS A SWOLLEN BODY OF TURBULENT WHITE WATER. WE STOOD A SCANT METRE ABOVE THE TORRENT ON AN OLD LOG BRIDGE WITH SAX-PLAYING JIM DENLEY, WHOSE WHOLE BODY WAS STRAINING WITH THE EFFORT OF BLOWING AMID THE WATER’S WHITE NOISE. THE WATER HAD GRAVITY ON ITS SIDE, PLUNGING DOWN THE CHANNELS OF THE MOUNTAINS, WHILST DENLEY HAD HUBRIS ON HIS; OR SEEMINGLY SO, UNTIL HIS PARTING COMMENT: “THAT WAS JUST SO WE KNOW HOW PATHETIC WE REALLY ARE.”
This performance was part of the weekend long Bogong AIR Festival of site-specific sound art at Mt Bogong Village in the Alpine region of Victoria, staged by composer Philip Samartzis and his partner Madelynne Cornish, in conjunction with Melbourne’s West Space gallery. Artists included Slavek Kwi, Natasha Anderson, Jim Denley, Rosalind Hall, Alice Hui-Sheng Chang and Dianne Peacock, who all undertook a five-day residency in the lead-up to the festival “in order to develop responses to the acoustic and spatial dynamics of Bogong Alpine Village.”
Mt Bogong is Victoria’s highest peak and has long been a site of significance. The village is situated on the side of a valley and has a sense of the uncanny about it, produced by the unusual mix of natural and artificial elements. The village was built in the 1930s to support the installation of a hydro-electric system while Lake Guy, at the foot of the village, is part of a concealed network of pipes, tunnels, catchments and generators that handle water flows around the system. The buildings of the village were constructed at the same time, and are now largely empty outside of tourist usage: perhaps this produces something of the ‘ghost town’ feel.
Site-specific audio has recently been featured at the Rolling Stock event in Junee, NSW (RT101) and has also attracted a high public profile with Suzanne Philipsz’s Lost Reflection winning the UK’s Turner Prize. The outdoor performances of Bogong AIR set sound within nature, the tension of this combination heightened by the intense weather conditions, as indicated by Denley’s performance. On the day, the artist invited the audience to his solo piece with a caution that it entailed a 20-minute walk through rain and wind on a slippery path; after a moment’s pause, almost everyone set out to follow him. Indeed, getting wet did not prove fatal and the effort involved gave the experience a stronger character.
In her artist’s talk, recorder player Natasha Anderson remarked on the linking of music and a forest setting—apparently the recorder was a key instrument of the Hitler Youth and playing it in forests part of an ideological idealisation of nature. Anderson’s solo performance at the dam wall seemed unusually disjointed and awkward, but became more interesting in the context of these cultural references.
JIm Denley, Bogong Air
photo John Billan
Jim Denley, Bogong Air
Denley and Anderson, Hall and Hui-Sheng performed in pairs inside the vaults of the dam wall creating a satisfying and delicate work that explored the acoustics of the space. In a nearby forest clearing, Denley, Hui-Shang and Hall’s trio performance was curiously enhanced by the drizzle—the strong presence of the elements perhaps evoking something pagan. Architect Dianne Peacock created a video work based on the dam wall architecture, re-projecting it within the space. Interestingly, the creative process of filming functioned as a starting point for Peacock’s imagination, as she re-imagined the monumental dam structure as a concrete skyscraper to be played upon. Eric Le Casa’s composition for canoe, was a gorgeous festival highlight, placing two listeners at a time with iPods in the floating boat. The electro-acoustic composition comprised natural and artificial sounds related to water, responding to the unusual mix of those elements at the site. La Casa’s half-hour composition, if perhaps overly exhaustive in exploring its theme, ranged dynamically across passages of powerful materiality and delicacy, surprising shifts of perspective and intensity.
Visiting from Ireland to present work at the 10 Days on the Island Festival in Tasmania was Slavek Kwi, working under the name Artificial Memory Trace. In his talk, he linked the relatively anarchic space of experimental composition to his upbringing under the strict rules of communist Czechoslovakia; the distinctness of his experience evidenced by the passing comment that he never really got into trouble with the regime, and that the police only confiscated or destroyed his record collection a couple of times! Kwi’s audio brought a musical approach to field recording, utilising repetitive rhythmic material and sounds collected at the site blended with strobe lights and sculptural elements to make a surprisingly theatrical and energizing performance. The artist’s belief in the importance of perception and its role in art gave his work a strongly material quality that was playful and intense.
Curator Philip Samartzis presented Crush Grind, a work using sound and video recordings from a 2010 Antarctic residency. The audio component, previously heard at Heide Museum of Modern Art, features the exceptionally high quality recordings for which Samartzis is known worked together in a fashion that privileges content over process. This time around, Samartzis has included a video componentwherein almost static views of the Australian Base interior (minus people) are featured, with the intent of capturing the visual reality and mundanity of the station, while the high-resolution audio speaks of the scale and intensity of the southern continent. The work offers an intriguing insight into life on base and, ignoring the video, an evocatively crisp and spatially dynamic soundscape.
I hope Bogong AIR happens again and, if it does, you should try to be there. Site-specific sound is a fascinating area of practice that builds on sound’s unique acoustic phenomenology and aesthetics: it was presented here with integrity.
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West Space: Bogong AIR Festival, festival of site-specific sound art, artists Slavek Kwi, Natasha Anderson, Jim Denley, Rosalind Hall, Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, Eric La Casa, Dianne Peacock, Philip Samartzis, Bogong Village, Victoria, Feb 19, 20; www.westspace.org.au/projects/bogong-air-festival.html
COMBINING WORKS OF MUSIC AND FILM THAT WERE ORIGINALLY INTENDED TO BE SEPARATE MAY SEEM LIKE A STRATEGIC ACT OF POSTMODERN APPROPRIATION OR INTERTEXTUAL ENQUIRY. STEPHEN WHITTINGTON’S THE MUSIC OF LIGHT IS IN FACT A UNIQUE TREATMENT OF THE ART AND PHILOSOPHY OF US FILMMAKER STAN BRAKHAGE (1933–2003) AND OF THE MUSIC OF THE COMPOSERS WHOSE WORK HE PERFORMS WHILE SHOWING BRAKHAGE’S FILMS. ULTIMATELY, WHITTINGTON’S PERFORMANCE IS AN ESSAY ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOUND, LIGHT AND HUMAN PERCEPTION, AN ESSAY THAT IS ITSELF A WORK OF ART.
In this 90-minute performance, Adelaide pianist, composer and lecturer Stephen Whittington shows several of Brakhage’s most famous short films, including Dog Star Man Part 2 (1963), Black Ice (1994) and Glaze of Cathexis (1990). Simultaneously, he performs at the piano the music firstly of JS Bach and then Alexander Scriabin, Arnold Schoenberg, Philip Corner, Anton Webern and Josef Matthias Hauer, and he replays a computer-mediated recording he made of keyboard music by Brakhage’s associate James Tenney. Brakhage, initially a poet, was influenced by Bach and studied music to inform his filmmaking and, in the program note, Whittington suggests that Brakhage’s films were visual embodiments of sound. Whittington also performs his own work, Passacaglia B.A.C.H. (2011), which he wrote for this performance, an entrancing piece performed without film accompaniment to allow viewers to focus solely on the music.
Stan Brakhage made hundreds of short films, some just a minute or two in length and some using radical techniques such as gluing objects onto the celluloid or scratching or hand colouring it. These were works of visual art more than cinema, often having the effect of an abstract painting unfolding in time. Those films that focused on places and people, for example The Wonder Ring (1955), which shows scenes shot from a train window—the world as perceived by the train—are primarily optical rather than narrative. The rapid succession of abstract shapes asks us to experience our visual awareness rather than read for meaning, and so to consider how we assign meaning to imagery. We’re invited to try to regain our visual naivety or innocence.
Brakhage’s film is avant garde in its intent and form, using the medium to analyse visual perception. Each composer also contributed to the dialogue on the essence of music, their avant-gardism lying in the investigation of the inner truth of their chosen art. The Music of Light is not a thorough analysis of Brakhage’s oeuvre, but considers aspects of his work and their relationship to music. Nor does the performance fully consider the oeuvres and impact of the composers. Instead, it is a synthesis of certain aspects of their respective work. This performance recalls some significant milestones in Western artistic development.
Whittington introduces Brakhage’s work and the music with readings—from Wassily Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art (1911), Arnold Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony (1911) and Johann Von Goethe’s Theory of Colours (1810). Kandinsky, the so-called father of abstraction, explicitly addressed the relationship between art and music, and The Music of Light illustrates these writers’ theories. Whittington also read from Brakhage’s Metaphors for Vision (1963), which opens with, “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception.”
Whittington states that the music was not intended to accompany the film, but that the performance comprised two streams in parallel. But the Brakhage works were intended to be silent and the music was intended to be heard on its own, prompting us to consider how combining them affects both visual and musical experiences. By blending visual, musical and textual discourses into a unique synthesis, Whittington creates an exciting new work that represents the way in which sound can induce visual awareness and vice versa. This cross-mediation of vision, sound and performed text opens each discipline to deeper phenomenological analysis through comparison and demonstrates the coherence between them, amplifying and confirming the nature of human awareness of light and sound and the way they are theorised.
The Music of Light is an illuminating and finely crafted performance. The program concludes with Brakhage’s Chinese Series (2003), made by the artist on his deathbed, and is accompanied by Whittington’s arrangement of Bach’s last work, also written on the deathbed, the Chorale Prelude: Before Thy Throne (1750). Whittington completes the parallel by describing the arc of the two artists’ lives, each leaving a final statement that reflected on life, death and God.
Stephen Whittington, The Music of Light, Art Gallery of South Australia, 2011 Bigpond Adelaide Film Festival, Feb 27
SANDY EDWARDS IS A DISTINGUISHED SYDNEY-BASED PHOTOGRAPHER AND CURATOR. I TALKED TO HER ABOUT HOW PHOTOGRAPHERS ARE ASSISTED, MENTORED AND EXHIBITED HERE GIVEN THE PAUCITY OF GALLERIES THAT EITHER SPECIALISE IN OR FEEL CONFIDENT TO EXHIBIT PHOTOGRAPHY AND ABOUT HER ROLE AS CREATIVE PRODUCER IN HER BUSINESS, ARTHERE, WHICH PROVIDES SERVICES FOR PHOTOGRAPHIC PROJECTS AND EXHIBITIONS AS WELL AS MENTORING AND CONSULTATION.
What was the impetus for ARTHERE?
I’d been working at Stills Gallery for about 17 years. Stills is a beacon for photographers because there are so few prestige galleries that focus purely on photography in Australia. At Stills we have nine exhibition slots a year and even if you show two artists simultaneously, that’s only 18. At the same time we’re representing artists and that means regular exhibitions for them. Even though Stills is committed to providing spaces for emerging artists, I was constantly having to advise people where else to go. I also realised there was a general lack of understanding about how the gallery world works. I still have a really good relationship with Stills and work there part-time as a curator but I decided to make a sideways step away—hence this idea of helping people to find spaces and have exhibitions.
How do you establish your validity if you don’t have your own space?
That’s not so easy as a space speaks for itself. However, not having a space leaves you free to do things in different ways. A space means you have to be in attendance at all times or employ staff. The freedom of working from home and sometimes from makeshift offices means that I can do a lot online, meet people in person and then place their work in appropriate spaces around the city.
What sorts of spaces?
Everyone would like to be represented by a gallery because that’s in a way what you’re aiming for as a serious artist—the peak reward. This notion is supported by the political structure. It’s how works are purchased for gallery collections, bought by private collectors—how they’re seen.
My belief is that photography, being a varied medium, can attach itself to all sorts of meanings and forms of expression. Therefore it should have multiple possibilities in terms of where you see it. So I started looking at empty spaces, alternate spaces. It might be an embassy because an artist is a foreign national. It might be a café, a shopfront. Then the whole concept of pop-up galleries was presented to me, apparently already popular in the US; you have a space for the period of the exhibition and then you leave. Shopfronts are a natural for this kind of thing if they’re waiting to be rented. If you can persuade the owner or the lessee to let you use it then you can sometimes get a very good spot—visibility is pretty important. And then, of course, there are public and private galleries.
How do you find spaces?
I travel around a lot and I just see spaces. The first place we used was in Danks Street, Waterloo. The gallery scene there had been in existence for about five years. I noticed an arcade of shops that were not visible to the street. I approached the agent and he said I could have three of the shops for the period of an exhibition. So we had a three-week show and I put a different artist in each of the shops.
One of your shows was on the top floor of an apartment building.
The old Police Headquarters on College Street facing Hyde Park was being redeveloped into classy apartments. Photographer Pete Longworth had been employed by the developers to be their front-person to make the place and the location look beautiful to potential buyers. He’d provided them with a lot of photographs, but he’d also produced his own artistic interpretation of Hyde Park. So he came to me and we decided to have the exhibition on the top floor of that building with its fabulous views of the harbour and the park. That was really exciting.
In the last year and a half I have been moving away from the rental and pop up spaces and concentrating more on working with galleries, both commercial (Meyer Gallery, Sara Roney Gallery, Conny Dietzschold Gallery) and curating shows for public and institutional spaces (Customs House, UTS Gallery, Manly Art Gallery and Museum). The latest idea is Photography On Oxford, a project associated with the Head On Photo Festival. We plan to put photography in shopfronts along Oxford Street, Paddington as a mini street exhibition.
How do you manage the marketing given you’re dealing with a fair sweep of work—art photography, documentary…
The mailing list was built from the beginning. Obviously there are a lot of photographers, a general list of interested people, but then curators, collectors and a few other categories. What happens is that your relationships with people become really important and you have to develop and maintain them. I’m constantly telling the photographers I’m working with to grow their own mailing lists and to get to know their audience.
Jack Ryan throwing poppies into the Aegean Sea, When Old Foes Meet
photo Vedat Acikalin
Jack Ryan throwing poppies into the Aegean Sea, When Old Foes Meet
How do you select the artists you work with?
They come in waves. Lots of people come as they’re getting themselves together for the year. Photographers ask for consultations and that may roll over into what I call mentoring, to achieve a particular goal. It may be to get ready to approach a gallery or venue, or to secure the venue, or to follow the steps to having an exhibition once the venue is lined up. I’ve discovered that people who actually make the effort to come to me are already proactive. Not that everyone needs to be totally confident but that drive and the belief in what they’ve got is really critical.
People tend to be ‘other’ oriented. We want someone else to tell us that our work is good. To go to an established gallery and ask for an exhibition is quite daunting. A lot of my clients are having their first experience of the art world. But people who come to me whose work is not ready for exhibition go away with a list of tasks to further develop the work. I don’t want people to have to commit a lot of money in the beginning because they may not be in that place yet.
What proportion of your photographers are emerging artists?
It’s probably about 70 percent. However, I have people I’ve worked with before who are now onto their second or third exhibition. That’s really satisfying. Some artists, like Ben Ali Ong, whom I worked with in the early stages of ARTHERE, is now with Tim Olsen Gallery and doing really well. But it’s hard to get representation. If someone comes to me and says I want a gallery, I say, well, it might take a few years so we need to look at what the steps are. I find it hard to find galleries for people unless their work is absolutely standout.
And your own work?
I’m still taking photographs but I haven’t done anything in the way of an exhibition since 2004 when I had INDELIBLE at Stills. However, creativity comes in many forms and if you’re getting a lot out of what you’re doing, as long as you’re not burning yourself out, that’s very satisfying as well.
This seems to me a very creative enterprise. But can you make money from it?
I can. The only thing that’s problematic is that I’m making money pretty well purely from artists and, as we know, artists don’t have a lot of money. That’s why I have the different stages so someone can see me and, out of that meeting, they’ll get a lot of ideas and begin to focus. They’ll get the benefit of my knowledge about what’s required to be an artist—how it’s not just about working on your own. You need to have a context, a peer group; you need to see others’ work; you need to meet people. Otherwise you end up not being seen.
Tell me a little bit about your latest exhibition.
This is a good example of one that might never have got up. Vedat Acikalin is a Turkish-born photographer who’s lived in Australia for a long time. He’s worked as a press photographer in sports and world news. He photographed the 75th anniversary of the Gallipoli landing in 1990 and felt very passionate about the fact that former Turkish and Australian soldiers who’d previously fought one another were actually meeting and becoming friends. The exhibition is called When Old Foes Meet. It’s documentary work and tells a very positive story of reconciliation. Vedat was determined to get this exhibition up. He found a space in Chifley Tower. It’s in a beautiful marble foyer in Bent Street and the exhibition will run through Anzac Day.
I should say that the other critically important half of ARTHERE is Cassie French of Pop-Up Publicity. She works on most of the shows and takes on others as well and is unique in Sydney, specialising in photography. And if your show is not out there in the media it just doesn’t get seen. We’re pretty much equal in the business and bounce a lot of ideas off each other. Bruce Nicholson is the designer and technical support person and Lisa Sharkey is involved in installation.
So do you see ARTHERE as eventually growing into part of the infrastructure or will it retain its subversive character?
The mainstream gallery scene is pretty rigid. I’m not saying curators don’t choose really carefully but from my observation there are lots of photographers out there who don’t necessarily get looked at. So I guess it’s subversive in a way to try to find other venues in the hope that it will move things around. This is a time when lots of people are looking for different models. ARTHERE is just one.
ARTHERE: Vedat Acikalin, When Old Foes Meet, March 28-April 29, Chifley Tower, Bent Street Lobby, 2 Bent Street, Sydney, Mon-Fri 7am-7pm; www.arthere.com.au
Photography on Oxford Street, shop windows photography exhibtion, May 9-29
Philip Brophy, The Sound of Milk, 2004 video still
courtesy the artist
Philip Brophy, The Sound of Milk, 2004 video still
ACCORDING TO THE LONDON TELEGRAPH (FEB 1, 2011), SCIENTISTS HAVE MANAGED TO MAKE A PAPER CLIP DISAPPEAR USING ‘CLOAKING TECHNOLOGY’ OF THE KIND THAT ALLOWS VULCAN SHIPS IN STAR TREK (1966-2005) TO SUDDENLY MATERIALISE BEHIND THE ENTERPRISE. THEY’VE ALSO BEEN EXPLORING THE USE OF METAMATERIALS—PROJECTING ‘BACKGROUND’ OVER A MICROSCOPIC OBJECT SO THAT IT WILL SEEM INVISIBLE. IT SOUNDS RATHER LIKE THE TECHNOLOGY DESCRIBED BY WILLIAM GIBSON IN THE FORM OF SCRAMBLE SUITS WORN BY THE PANTHER MODERNS IN HIS NOVEL NEUROMANCER (1984). AS CURATOR LIZZIE MULLER SUGGESTS, “SCIENCE FICTION DOESN’T JUST PREDICT THE FUTURE, IN SOME WAYS IT BRINGS IT INTO BEING.”
Of course many science fiction writers are very well informed about science. In extending the possibilities of current tools and speculating on sociological trends they play a vital role in preparing us for new technological horizons. It is this interplay of fact, fiction, reality and dreaming that has inspired Muller and her co-conspirator Bec Dean in their curation of the upcoming exhibition Awfully Wonderful, at Performance Space. Dean is a curator, writer and Performance Space Associate Director and Muller, a Senior Lecturer in the School of Design at the University of Technology Sydney, is a curator, writer and researcher specialising in interaction, audience experience and interdisciplinary collaboration.
low-tech excursions
The relationship between science fiction and ‘new’ media art has always been strong. However, what is intriguing about Awfully Wonderful is the downplaying of technology: the works are, on the whole, relatively low-fi, with the emphasis placed firmly on the fictive content. There’s no bio-art, laser technologies, holograms or robots; rather there’s photomedia, video, installation, sculpture and painting. Well actually there is a robot, but it’s made of cardboard—Simon Yates will be recreating the cyborg Maria from Metropolis in the style of his balloon-suspended walking characters. Muller says ironically that Yates’ Maria “is probably not dissimilarly as high-tech as the one that starred in the actual film,” the longer, recently rediscovered version of which will also be screened in Awfully Wonderful.
Eugene Carchesio, she sells $ilence by the sea shore 2011
courtesy Milani Gallery
Eugene Carchesio, she sells $ilence by the sea shore 2011
An unusual inclusion is artist Eugene Carchesio, who will be creating a wall painting specifically for the exhibition. Dean says, “I’m really interested in the small systems, languages and codes that Eugene proposes in his work…I think inside [this] painting is the potential for infinity within a closed form…Science, time and space are implicit and yet not overstated in his works. He is interested in numerology and cosmologies and all these different kinds of patterns and systems that are repeated and are not so easy to pin down or quantify.”
artist as lab rat
Bec Dean has also been interested in the work of Hayden Fowler for some time. Previously his absurdist scenarios in which people co-exist quietly with a variety of animals have been exhibited as video works, but in Anthropocene the artist himself will inhabit his installation accompanied by some lab rats. Dean explains: “[Fowler is] an artist who is interested in inter-species relationships and the kinds of connections that we might have with other sorts of life forms here on planet earth and maybe somewhere else too.” The use of lab rats alludes to biotechnology but Muller also suggests that the interspecies exploration is a “neo-Adam, neo-Eden thing…there’s this idea of biotechnology being the latest apple that we’ve stolen. What is that going to do to our relationship with the natural world? This is what Eden and Adam myths are about, the relationship to power, to knowledge, to god, to everything else that exists on the planet. That’s why sci-fi is such a great genre because it really goes at those great myths.”
time travellers
Time travel is explored through the technologies of moving image by both Sam Smith and Ms&Mr. Dean says Smith’s work “is about the kind of time travel that is inherent within any form of recorded media in terms of the way you can reverse it, play it forward, go back to a point or pause it. [This is] taken further by Ms&Mr who go back into old media and insert something new or intertwine stories [about themselves] before they’d even met. In both of those works the artists are very playfully engaging with the notion of time travel within media that is already extant, that we already have at our fingertips.” A related work by Jaki Middleton and David Lawrey will continue the artists’ explorations using the pre-cinematic device of Pepper’s Ghost to create pre- and post-apocalyptic dioramas, gradually shifting from prosperity to disaster before our very eyes. [See RT Studio]
earth’s atmosphere and beyond
The works of David Haines/Joyce Hinterding and Adam Norton engage a little more directly with notions of science. Haines/Hinterding are inspired both artistically and philosophically by the controversial psychiatrist and inventor Wilhelm Reich. They will be recreating Reich’s Cloudbuster, which was invented to produce rainclouds. Muller suggests that the cloudbuster has particular resonance now with “global warming and the possibility of geo-engineering fixing some of our manmade problems…the technological fix, but also technology as magic.”
Adam Norton, Mars Space Walk
photo courtesy the artists
Adam Norton, Mars Space Walk
Adam Norton has set himself a particularly ambitious task attempting to recreate the gravity of Mars in the CarriageWorks foyer. Using a complicated system of harnesses and ramps based on NASA’s Apollo space program devices, he will perform Mars space walks in simulated 38% gravity at the opening and every Saturday during the exhibition.
the other woman
Deborah Kelly has been commissioned to create a work responding to the representations of women in science fiction. After trawling through Australia’s largest archive of sci-fi pulp magazines, Kelly has taken a slightly oblique approach. Inspired by the writings of radical feminist Shulamith Firestone on issues to do with women taking control of their own reproductive lives, she is creating delicate collages in which sci-fi scenarios are recreated with organic materials like seashells. Muller says, “it is another take on sci-fi imagery that I think is as interesting as the big breasted 70-foot woman, pulp-type imagery and is also really interesting in terms of the connection between the organic and the machinic, which is where the cyborg idea comes from.” Thematically linked is a Philip Brophy video work, exhibited here for the first time, The Sound of Milk (2004), a dystopian tale in which males and females have become separate species. Ian Haig’s Chronicles of the new human organism (2009, with sound by Brophy and Philip Samartzis), in the form of a post-apocalyptic nature documentary, will also play in the dedicated screening room.
sci-fi science
A particularly exciting inclusion is a series of artefacts sourced from the Powerhouse Museum, assembled and interpreted by Jo Law and featuring an Edison phonograph from 1908, a Curta Calculator and Dr Bodkin Adam’s Electromassager. While these artefacts relate to the artworks in Awfully Wonderful and are particularly beautiful as objects, they also offer their own fictions. For example, the Curta calculator features in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition as a prize collector’s item connected with smuggling and conspiracy. The Electromassager manufactured by the Ediswan company is a vibrator that emits a violet light intended to relieve female hysteria, and was owned by English physician Dr Bodkin Adams who is suspected of killing a large number of his patients after securing inclusion in their wills. In addition, in their obsolescence these objects offer further potential for the imagination. Muller says, “because they’re no longer current in terms of scientific truth, they’ve moved into the realms of scientific fiction and they have that same kind of provocative speculative aura as the artworks.”
In addition to the exhibition, there will also be a range of public programs including a symposium and an audio guide by scientists, in collaboration with the Royal Institute of Australia (RiAus, Adelaide) who advocate for a broader understanding of science. “We really wanted to have scientists talking about the works and the scientific possibilities behind them and have that as an aspect of the interpretation,” Muller says.
For Lizzie Muller and Bec Dean, Awfully Wonderful brings together their passion for art and their shared love of science fiction. Muller concludes, “I did literature before I did art, and I was really interested in science too…I loved Gulliver’s Travels and things that combined science, literature and experimentation with a form. That’s what we’re looking for—artworks that have kind of wormholed into another dimension.”
Performance Space, Awfully Wonderful, curators Bec Dean, Lizzie Muller, artists Philip Brophy, Eugene Carchesio, Haines/Hinterding, Deborah Kelly, Jo Law, David Lawrey & Jaki Middleton, Ms&Mr, Hayden Fowler, Ian Haig, Adam Norton, Sam Smith, Simon Yates, Performance Space, CarriageWorks, April 15-May 14
The RealTime-Performance Space informal discussion with artists, curators and guests about Awfully Wonderful will be held Monday May 9, 6.30pm. All welcome.
Richard Alleyne, Invisibility cloak enters the real world, Feb 1, 2011; www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8296338/Invisibility-cloak-enters-the-real-world.html
John Gerrard, Dust Storm (Dalhart, Texas), 2007, 2007, Realtime 3D
courtesy of the artist, Simon Preston Gallery, New York and Thomas Dane Gallery, London
John Gerrard, Dust Storm (Dalhart, Texas), 2007, 2007, Realtime 3D
THE LANDSCAPE HAS THE SPOOKY UNINHABITEDNESS OF THE COMPUTER GAME, AND THE SHIFTING VIEWPOINT OF THE SIMULATOR—BUT SLOWED DOWN TO A PACE AT WHICH PIXELS SCRATCH AT THE GAZE. ACROSS THE YELLOW-BROWN PRAIRIE RUNS A BITUMEN ROAD, EDGED BY POWER POLES AND LOOSE-SLUNG WIRES. THE VIEW SHIFTS TO REVEAL A MONUMENTAL SET OF FARM BUILDINGS, LIKE THE ANTITHESIS OF A SIMS GAME, AHEAD OF A MOUNTAINOUS FRONT OF CHOCOLATEY DUST. THE COLOURS, THOUGH REALISTIC, ARE RINSED WEIRDLY CLEAN. SILOS STAND LIKE SCI-FI WAR MACHINES, SENTINEL; THE SKY IS FEARFULLY WHITE.
Irish artist John Gerrard’s Dust Storm (Manter, Kansas) (2007) is part of his Animated Scenes series, four of which were shown recently at PICA. Constructed from thousands of still photographs, Gerrard’s ‘portraits’ are fully animated models, locked to a real-time schedule of changing light over the duration of the day. The viewer is drawn around both object and horizon in a stately, 360-degree orbit.
The images of dustbowl landscapes reference an astonishing history: the USA’s Black Sunday of 1935, when a dust storm 1,500 miles wide and half a mile high roiled and churned across much of Colorado, Kansas and New Mexico. The result of over-ploughing, the storm carried the topsoil of 100 million acres—a phenomenon made possible by the internal combustion engine. The storm took four hours to pass in some places; there are few photos of the apocalyptic event. To recreate it, Gerrard used photos taken by US troops in Iraq, of literal ‘desert storms’ passing over military bases.
The second work, Dust Storm (Dalhart, Texas) (2007) is even more epic and menacing, its group of farm buildings huddled in the far distance, insignificant before the advancing front. But as the view pans away from the storm itself, the threat vanishes. A dichotomy appears between the seething, chthonic cloud of grit and wind, and an idyllic, if sparse, pastoral scene.
The ubiquitous row of telegraph wires seems almost out of place here, as though there should really be no linkage between the cluster of distant equipment and the monstrous storm, or even indeed with the viewer. It’s a feeling that resonates with John Barrett-Lennard’s catalogue essay description of Gerrard’s works as floating in “a space between the real and imaginary, connected but apart from both.”
In his artist talk at PICA, Gerrard showed a photograph titled Figure Blocking Sun (Cesar) (2008). It features the silhouette of a man: an utterly black shape surrounded by a fine rim of backlight. Relating it to the Animated Scenes series, Gerrard spoke of the figure as void; of its form as an “oscillation between surface and portal.” As Barrett-Lennard points out, “however precise the rendering [of Gerrard’s images, their] reality is incomplete and a haunting emptiness remains.”
John Gerrard, John Gerrard, Grow Finish Unit (Near Elkhart, Kansas), 2008
photo Tony Nathan/Imagelab, courtesy the artist and PICA
John Gerrard, John Gerrard, Grow Finish Unit (Near Elkhart, Kansas), 2008
Gerrard’s Grow Finish Unit (near Elkhart, Kansas) (2008) presents an ominous array of low, grey-roofed buildings, whose eerie uniformity accentuates the silence of his works: no bird sings, no machinery hums. The term “grow finish unit” is a euphemism for an indoor pig farm, and the unnaturally still lagoon aligning with the sheds is, Gerrard points out, an effluent pond.
At the end of each shed are what seem to be extractor fan vents: large metallic cylindrical attachments, which, like squid suckers, lend an unsettling organic feel to the oddly warm cream and grey of the buildings. There is no opportunity to move the controls and enter. The paired feed silos that appear between sheds are strangely anthropomorphic, as though the viewer can’t help but place a figure here. Tellingly, it’s a figure that seems to ward off intruders.
Gerrard’s animations defeat the logic of the gaming engine he uses to create them, disabling the viewer from forging their own pathway through the work. The relentlessly orbiting ‘eye’ sometimes moves excruciatingly slowly, forcing reflection on these monuments to an environmental wealth that’s come at the price of desolation. The nodding oilfield Lufkin pumpjack of Lufkin (near Hugo, Colorado) (2009), like a huge, thirsty bird, is the most prosaic and familiar of the structures we observe, but seems the most irreal; perhaps because we are close enough to observe its subtle dislocation from the photographic image, the lack of minute detail rendering it smoothly alien. Gerrard describes it as “parasitically vasomorphic—reminiscent of the 20th century”—his own century, he says; a kind of self-portrait.
By eliminating surface distractions, John Gerrard’s ‘portraits’ distill both the human presence and the post-industrial ‘naturalness’ of the landscapes they recreate. It’s an uncanny blend of computer age and lost romanticism, which leaves the viewer oscillating in an intriguing void-portal space.
PICA: artist John Gerrard, production Werner Poetzelberger, modelling Daniel Felsner, programming Helmut Bressler, Matthias Strohmaier, additional modelling Christina Pilsl, additional programming Helmut Bressler; Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Feb 17-April 3
GOING TO THE CINEMA TODAY IS A NOSTALGIC THING TO DO, AS HOME ENTERTAINMENT SYSTEMS OFFER A SIMILAR SORT OF IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE. THE MULTIPLEXES NOW RESORT TO ALL KINDS OF TRICKS TO ATTRACT AUDIENCES, FROM FIRST CLASS SEATS TO 3D GLASSES. IT IS AGAINST THE BACKDROP OF THIS CRISIS FOR CINEMA THAT JESPER JUST’S SHORT FILMS ARE INSTALLED, CINEMATICALLY, AT THE JOHN CURTIN GALLERY IN PERTH.
Several recessed rooms offer a sumptuous simulation of the multiplex, their doors open so that we are able to wander between films, between moods. This is indeed moody, melancholy stuff, as old men cry and young men sing. Yet these intensely choreographed vignettes also work to deconstruct the cinematic conventions that conspire to affect us. Movements are slow, controlled and slightly out of synch with their narratives, representing in style the disconnection that is also the theme of the relationships they depict.
The men in No Man is an Island II (2004) sit apart from each other in a windowless bar covered with erotic portraits of women, before coming together in a choral cover of Roy Orbison’s “Crying.” In Bliss and Heaven (2004) a truck driver dressed in drag breaks into Olivia Newton-John’s “Please Don’t Keep Me Waiting.” When he finishes and breaks into tears, it is difficult not to recall the pivotal scene at Club Silencio in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) where the host reminds us that the performance is only a recording, only to have the singer drop dead while her voice carries on echoing through the theatre. Just’s films are full of such allusions to cinema and its conventions for simulating feeling. The truck driver’s song is uncannily moving although the scene is a comic one, in a duplicity of affect that leaves us unsure as to the film’s genre.
While Just’s earlier work focuses on men, curator Chris Malcolm has included his later attention to women. The Sirens of Chrome (2010) uses an Angelo Badalamenti style track to score an encounter between a woman and a parked car. She rolls over it in a choreographed orgy of limbs, chrome reflections and hair. Again it is difficult not to fall into the trap of genre confusion that Just has set for us, as the close camera makes it appear as if the woman is being hit by a moving vehicle, and simultaneously as if she is moving to a trashy modelling routine. This kind of ambiguity accounts for the strength of the work, immersed as it is in cinematic allusion. The women in Just’s films are far more in control than his men, who instead break into song and tears in desperate attempts to break the cold deadlock that separates them from others.
The cinematic installation of Just’s films offers a way of meditating on the subtleties of the medium in a way that online versions of the same (mostly on YouTube) can’t reproduce. Their affects are tied up in the qualities of cinematography and music, the details of performance and mise-en-scène. It is also Just’s reliance on cinematographers, musicians and other technicians of feeling that marks his work out as part of a more conservative stream of contemporary art. This is what Terry Smith calls “remodernism,” that revivifies older artistic practices (here, cinema), and lends itself to a history of art in a way that the much more radical contemporary video and new media movements do not. In this sense Just’s contemporaries reside less in the new democracy of the camera than in Hollywood. Just’s art becomes a way of thinking through the spectacle of this culture industry that carries on despite its apparent demise.
Jesper Just, Something to Love, 2005, production still
image courtesy of the Artist; Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris; and Galleri Christina Wilson, Copenhagen
Jesper Just, Something to Love, 2005, production still
It is appropriate, then, that Jesper Just helps us to be suspicious of the filmic conventions that are laid bare in his films. In Something to Love (2005), a black car moves through a car park, ominously suggestive, as if in some Swedish detective drama, before a man in tears disrupts the cool toughness of this cinematic cliché. The intersections and encounters in Just’s films return us to the point at which meaning and feeling come together, so that we are held in a state of suspense by their ambiguities, their combinations of cinema conventions, method acting and cover songs. These are remixes of a polished kind, lifting the tropes of classical Hollywood cinema into a slowed down and sublime version of themselves.
Mike Parr, Malevich (A Political Arm), performance for as long as possible
courtesy the artist
Mike Parr, Malevich (A Political Arm), performance for as long as possible
LOOK AT THESE TWO BOOKS. SAME ARTIST: MIKE PARR. SAME PUBLISHER: SCHWARTZ CITY. SIMILAR TITLES: MIKE PARR PERFORMANCES 1971-2008 (2008) AND THE INFINITY MACHINE: MIKE PARR’S PERFORMANCE ART 1971-2005 (2009). THE FIRST IS COMPILED BY THE ARTIST AND IS VERY MUCH OF THE ORDER OF AN ARTIST’S PROJECT. THE SECOND IS WRITTEN BY EDWARD SCHEER WHO TEACHES IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES. HIS IS AN ACADEMIC’S PROJECT, THAT IS, WE APPROACH PARR’S WORK THROUGH THE INTELLECTUAL FILTER OF THE AUTHOR. BOTH BOOKS ARE LARGE AND RICHLY ILLUSTRATED. IN THESE TIMES, WHEN SO MUCH ON ANY GIVEN SUBJECT CAN BE ACCESSED THROUGH ELECTRONIC MEANS, IT IS SOMETHING OF A PUBLISHING MIRACLE FOR JUST ONE, LET ALONE TWO LARGE MONOGRAPHS ON THE SAME ARTIST TO COME OUT IN QUICK SUCCESSION.
The book is a form that to me inhabits the world of stasis (object) and the world of movement (text). And with these books and this artist, more than usual attention has been given to the experience of the reader who is simultaneously the performer of the object and the audience of the text.
As I mentioned, both books have the same publisher who is also able to handle distribution and has obvious connection to Parr’s dealer, Anna Schwartz. They also share the same editor, the always thorough Linda Michael and the same designer, John Warwicker of tomato, who has applied some stylistic crossovers but recognised the essential differences between the projects.
Parr’s book is a staggering 960 pages, printed on thin, absorbent paper that somehow manages the ink-heavy, often full-bleed illustrations extremely well. Scheer’s book is 200 pages with a high gloss cover and heavy coated stock that gives both images and text a more substantial feel. The closeness of the production team has ensured objects of great quality.
As the titles signify, a long chronological overview is important in both texts. And it’s being applied to a single strand of Parr’s practice: performance, or at least as far as that’s possible when one is dealing with an artist whose media extend to writing, film, video, drawing, photography, print-making, sculpture and installation. By privileging performance, one gets the sense that these other media (and even performance itself) are driven by a greater force, that of time itself.
This is certainly the guiding principle of Scheer’s text which is nothing short of a long essay on time, or more specifically on “duration” which he points out, “implies a specific construction of time.” He goes on to describe a “durational aesthetic” in Parr’s work and observes the changing shape of this aesthetic over what he sees as five distinct (chronological) phases of Parr’s work: the self-aggressive performances; the Black Boxes; the Self-Portrait Project; the Bride performances; and the political works. I found the focus on duration particularly nuanced and sustaining though more convincing in relation to the first and fifth phases, less so in those works dealing with the fixity of the arrested image such as the Black Boxes and the Brides.
Parr’s book is more catalogue raisonné than essay. He sets out to document his entire performance oeuvre. Each performance, including those that were never actualised, is fully catalogued in the back of the book. The front (major) section addresses most but not all of these performances according to photographic documentation and other appropriate forms of evidence, for instance “scripts,” letters to curators and controversial newspaper reviews. Parr has handled the notoriously difficult relationship between original performance and secondary evidence as a challenging opportunity to extend the reach of performance into its equally engaging after-effect.
One example is the treatment of the infamous “armchop” work from 1977, Cathartic Action: Social Gestus No. 5 from Rules and Displacement Activities III. Fourteen double-page spreads are devoted to drawing out the short, sharp blow of the tomahawk that Parr wielded to his meat-filled prosthetic left arm before a shocked audience. The images are frames from the original video footage. The 14 frames therefore represent less than a second in real time, but here we can slow time down or use it like a flip-book to reconstitute the original act. The following pages are occupied by six luscious colour stills taken by John Delacour illustrating the second, often overlooked part of the performance in which members of Parr’s family fit him with a replacement hand-knitted pink woollen prosthetic arm and Parr engages the audience in dialogue about what they’ve just witnessed. The documentation of this work concludes with a written statement by Parr exploring the provocations of the work for himself and his audience.
It’s interesting to compare how the same work is discussed in Scheer’s book. Occurring in the 1970s, all The Rules and Displacement Activities series fall within the first chapter of Scheer’s text. Here the writer introduces the importance to Parr’s work of the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Jung and Lacan. In the subsection to Chapter 1 titled The Time of Abreaction, the Cathartic Action performance is the primary example for elucidating Freud and Breuer’s work on abreaction and its part in catharsis. Scheer maps the theory onto Parr’s own life experience of how his left arm came to be surgically removed shortly after birth and how this trauma is restaged for an audience. But, as Parr does with the inclusion of the Delacour images and explanatory text, Scheer is careful to devote as much attention to the post-traumatic phase. In keeping with his overarching theme, Scheer expresses it in terms of time: “Abreaction involves a complex movement of time in which there is a climactic cathartic moment followed by an extended period in which the subject’s traumatic episode can be gradually reintegrated into consciousness, the time of healing.”
From the early performances in the 1970s to the more recent, more politically directed works such as Close the Concentration Camps (stitched face) and Kingdom Come and/or Punch Holes in the Body Politic, performance for as long as possible (arm nailed to wall), Mike Parr has expected no less from his audience than he has demanded from himself. In such works, the demands are so high that the audience/artist divide dissolves. Many choose not to make the commitment and for many reasons. Scheer has certainly ventured where others feared to tread and in doing so has given, at least this reader, the critical time and space to reflect on Mike Parr’s work away from the affect-laden closeness of the performance arena.
Mike Parr, Mike Parr: Performances 1971–2008, Schwartz City, Melbourne, 2008, RRP $199.00
Edward Scheer, The Infinity Machine: Mike Parr’s Performance Art 1971-2005, Melbourne, Schwartz City, 2009, RRP $49.95
{$slideshow}MY FIRST RESPONSE TO BILL HART'S IN THE GUISE OF THOUGHT DREW FORTH THE CATCHPHRASES “AWE-INSPIRING” AND “MESMERISING.” I MEANT THEM IN NO UNCERTAIN TERMS.
Hart was once a numerical modeller with the CSIRO; he changed careers in 1993, becoming an academic at the Tasmanian School of Art. He is one of the most genuinely gifted e-media artists operating in Tasmania. Visiting his show at CAST, you first see a warning to let your eyes adjust to extreme darkness. Eventually, by the soft light of computer-generated, abstract images floating across the large screen in the centre of the gallery, I found my way to a capacious sofa. I was instantly drawn into a visual experience of sheer beauty—seemingly random words and shapes morphing and dissolving into other ephemeral words and forms. The process is gently paced; it is interesting to pick out the cursive text as it ebbs and flows and re-forms yet again, on and on, always different.
Hart’s artist statement refers to Noam Chomsky and his linguistic universals—the idea that at base level all languages are similarly hard-wired into the brain. I remember struggling with Chomsky at university and later noted how his theories seemed to have had their day. This Hart observes; he explains that different languages have different structures and concepts. So his work is a swirling, seething mass of “language, of vague and amorphous concepts forming and rippling, struggling to form or perceive a larger meaning.” And this is done visually, using quotations from related studies.
I loved the visual element: the beautiful mini-pixilations (my terminology) ever-changing in the most subtle and engaging of colours, and the soft light at the centre of the darkened gallery. I simply gave myself up to the utter pleasure of the experience, returning to the gallery at least four times, just as one might to a much-loved movie. On my third visit I realised there was a soft soundscape emanating not from the screen, but from speakers in the cathedral-like gallery space, featuring the gently murmuring voices of William Burroughs and Laurie Anderson. The work is about language and thought but I'm not sure what this dimension added.
In the Guise of Thought is an important show—as “awe-inspiring” and “mesmerising” as I initially felt. My words cannot do it justice.
Bill Hart, In the Guise of Thought, CAST Gallery, North Hobart,
March, www.billhart.id.au
THE CHINESE LUNAR NEW YEAR BEGAN FEBRUARY 3. IT’S THE YEAR OF THE RABBIT. TO CELEBRATE WE PARK AND STROLL SLOWLY (LIKE A PAIR OF DUCKS) TO THE POWERHOUSE MUSEUM; IN THE LIGHT RAIN, HEAVILY PREGNANT, I WADDLE. WE HOPE FOR A HAPPY MARRIAGE, CLEAR DIRECTIONS VIA GOOGLEMAPS, A YEAR OF HEALTH AND WEALTH. AT THE POWERHOUSE WE DOWNLOAD OUR IPHONE APP FOR CHINA HEART.
There’s a map with various spots highlighted. Videos to watch like mini soap operas. Special objects from the museum are displayed in a glass case. As strains of the museum’s AbbaWorld karaoke filter in, we look at papercuts, toggles for men’s belts used to hold small bags of tobacco, a fan with low-flying ducks.
We begin the journey perched on a red leather seat. We’re guests at an engagement party—a mother-in-law gives a speech in English at first, turning to her native tongue when distressed. Her daughter, Lian, understands but in anger won’t translate; her son-in-law, a ‘good boy,’ is oblivious to her pain. A mysterious parcel arrives with a note that needs translation. After a fight with her mother (about a father who has died, who was never really around before), Lian suggests Chinatown, to find out more about the note (and her ancestors).
We head off looking for clues. The Southern Gates of Chinatown—no, not the golden arches of Maccas nearby—are the first stopping point. The clues are cryptic but the answers easy to find. As we head through Chinatown we are distracted again and again to follow our own hearts: late yum cha customers spill onto sidewalks with banquets piled high (we are told that “for romantics,” dim sum can mean “to touch the heart”); a dragon-twisted queue waits patiently for the Emperor’s Cream Puffs, a “supreme nutritious snack”—what are they? I want one.
Shops sell masks, cheap dragon puppets on strings and glittering lipstick cases while a dragon lies beneath the city linking the Chinese districts. We watch the narrative unfold in noisy streets, struggling to hear through the iPhone speakers. At Albion Place, women recount their experience of debutante dances and Dragon Balls at the Trocadero—we’re invited to imagine a building that no longer stands— remembering how the chutes above the roof would open out to rain streaming down on dancers doing the can-can.
We wonder at the lack of interactivity. It seems we are following a formula, being told by our iPhone what to do. Where’s the chance to talk back, to take photos, to interpret what we find, to tell our own stories? Perhaps as we proceed…
Men flip roti and make satay in the windows as we snake back through the streets to Belmore Park, the original site for the Chinese market gardens. The narrative turns from fiction to documentary as we weave into the Capitol Theatre, the eventual site for the markets (the facade decorated with fruit and flowers) and meet an English woman who, posed in front of historical photos, tells of her desertion by a Chinese man who returns to his country. Her story echoes the more recent accounts of the “astronauts’ wives” (Lian’s mother is one) who, through the 1990s, recount the years of bringing up their children in Sydney while their husbands ‘go into orbit’ in Hong Kong to work, leaving their families for years; a sad contrast with the symbolism of the two ducks on the fan, swimming together and mating for life. The juxtaposition of happy marriage and absent husband/father is played out throughout China Heart and gives the central video narrative its edge of melancholy as a couple prepares for their wedding. But walking through the city reminds us of the times we have loved, the food we have discovered, how the streets have changed, and we sit down and have a Valentine’s Day dinner, ordering pork buns and stuffed eggplant. The couple next to us order Peking duck, the waiter tenderly placing the skin onto pancakes.
China Heart
photo Damon Girbon
China Heart
Sitting in the Chinese Gardens of Friendship eating yum cha with a pot of tea, we watch Lian and her mother sitting eating yum cha with pots of tea. Then, looking out over the lotus pond, we watch Lian and her beau contemplate the same expanse of water (her father reappears on the surface offering closure). The nature of mobile technology offers the chance to experience the narrative in the exact location where the characters were filmed, and a kind of frisson emerges in the experience, the retelling via iPhone means making connections in real space. A group of teenage girls in magnificent Chinese dress wobble as they balance delicately on stone bridges over the water. At first we think they are the promised Chinese opera performers but as they edge closer, and we take their photo, they point to a sign that directs visitors to where they can play dress-ups and try on traditional outfits.
China Heart seems a starting point for a technology just beginning to emerge—a tourist guide-meets-ficto-historical narrative—that doesn’t quite use the possibilities of the app to full effect. It works more like a school excursion (join the dots; great for children) rather than an integrated media work. It’s a disjointed experience on your feet, but it helps if you revisit the journey online (all the videos and links are available to explore using a regular web browser). The possibilities—for linking histories, documentary, narrative fiction, interaction with users, maps and locations, museum resources, web links—are just starting to open up.
China Heart, writer, director, producer Annette Shun Wah, producer Josephine Emery, presented by d/Lux/MediaArts, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, the Powerhouse Museum and the Project Factory; Jan 30-Feb 13
You can still do the walking tour by downloading the free app or take the journey online via the China Heart website, www.chinaheart.org.au
This article was first published online April 5, 2011
Biographies are hard. I moved to Australia from Croatia, via Italy, in 2005. I have studied languages, philosophy, literature, theatre, have half a degree in Japanese (language and culture) and I’m a trained classical pianist. By profession: urban designer and geographer. I teach and research at the University of Melbourne on issues ranging from spatial clustering of creative industries to why children no longer walk to school on their own. I proudly sit on the Green Room Awards panel for performance, hybrid forms, circus and puppetry. As any emigrant, my life is full of inexplicable fractures of logic.
Exposé
I’ve been writing since about the age of three, but I think of language as a form of communication, not a fetish object. I like things that are not words, that cannot be words: dances, places, experiences, emotions. My engagement with RealTime comes out of this interest in writing about the unwriteable. One thing I try to instill into my students is that reflection of this sort is painful, but necessary, if one is not to be a typing (or dancing, designing, or singing) monkey. This year, I am also hoping to create some space for that long overdue conversation about performance and live art in Melbourne—but I will say no more.
I am also hoping for a break from language, and more space for designing: spaces, projects, events. This year, I will be going to Japan to study Japanese cities, and perhaps to Croatia to work on restoring socialist-era hotels. And after a long stint writing academically, I am making room for imagination. Last year I saw a number of inspiring approaches in Europe—projects involving people in the thinking of their city in hugely stimulating ways, such as Urban Festival. There must be room for similar work on this continent.
These are diverse articles. The Plotki was an honest recounting of what moving to Australia felt like. The Crikey article I include because it generated heat that caught me unprepared: people stopped me on the street to congratulate or admonish me. The Emerging Writers Festival Reader one was the most fun to write.
I work mostly as an arts journalist and producer, also maintaining my own creative writing practice. I was based in Perth for a while but am back in Melbourne now. Some of my favourite gigs have been with Melbourne Festival, Arts House and Gasworks Arts Park. I co-wrote Melbourne’s successful UNESCO City of Literature bid, and was excited to work as producer for the 2009 Art of Difference deaf and disability arts festival. My training is in creative writing, visual arts and journalism; I occasionally write for Art Monthly Australia as well as RealTime.
My fiction has been published in anthologies and journals in Australia, the UK and the US and I’ve presented countless spoken word performances in several cities. I’ve done artist residencies in Minnesota, Marrickville, Reykjavík and the high Arctic, and am now working on a non-fiction manuscript as well as some collaborative projects with visual and performing artists.
Exposé
I’ve always loved words—when I was a musician I wrote songs; when I did visual arts, writing was an important element; and eventually words took over completely. I did a postgrad in journalism in 2008 and got especially interested in the blurred spaces between creative writing and explanatory journalism. I do arts journalism because I’m fascinated by the process of creation. I love talking to artists about why and how they make work, and I love it when readers go “oh!” and can share that pleasure. I also like the challenge of reviewing work that I may or may not immediately respond to—it pushes me out of my world and into someone else’s space and ideas.
In my own work, I’m a kind of ‘fractured Romantic,’ obsessed with CD Friedrich-type landscapes full of jagged peaks and broken ships, and curious about my place in them. I’m interested in how the beautifully sublime quickly becomes treacherous when you commit yourself to walking there; and I’m equally fascinated with emotional landscapes, how we negotiate their peaks and their perils. One way or another, it’s all about desire.
Other writing
my ‘arctic blog’ and some recent work-in-progress can be found on my web site Light Blue
Bonita Ely, detail, DelugeDrown (2010)
Ink jet print on rice paper, ink, silk, wood. 1400 cm L x 92 cm W
image courtesy of the artist and AEAF
Bonita Ely, detail, DelugeDrown (2010)
Ink jet print on rice paper, ink, silk, wood. 1400 cm L x 92 cm W
environmental engagements
The Australian Experimental Art Foundation is about to open Three Rivers, a major survey of Bonita Ely’s environmental art. We’ve previously admired Ely’s work in the MCA’s exhibition In the Balance and the Campbelltown Art Centre’s River Project (RT100). The exhibition includes the artist’s most recent work, The Murray’s Edge, which focuses on the river’s headwaters in the Mount Kosciusko National Park. When combined with her earlier work, the result is a complex and “compelling study of the Murray River from the 1970s until the present” (press release). If you can’t get to Adelaide, you can listen to Ely talk about her long-running engagement with the environment in an online video titled The Murray’s Darling. Bonita Ely, Three Rivers, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, April 8-May 5; www.aeaf.org.au
making and remaking the city
Still on the environmental theme, keep an eye out for The Right to the City, a symposium and exhibition happening in Sydney. The project takes its title from David Harvey’s article of the same name, in which he argues that the “freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is…one of the most precious yet neglected of our human rights” (press release). Curated by Lee Stickells and Zanny Begg (who reported on Tipping Point in RT100), the exhibition includes international artists such as Temporary Services (US), Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée (France), Marjetica Potrc (Slovenia), as well as locals Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro (RT92, RT57), Joni Taylor, SquatSpace and Milkcrate Urbanism. There is also a symposium on April 9, featuring a keynote lecture by Professor Margaret Crawford from the University of California, Berkeley. If you can’t be there, an exhibition catalogue is being published and selected symposium papers will be published in the Architectural Theory Review. The Right to the City, symposium April 9, exhibition April 8-30, TinSheds Gallery; www.therighttothecity.com
The Waterloo Girls
photo Karen Therese
The Waterloo Girls
out and about
The practice of walking is one way of remaking the city that has become increasingly popular. So much so that there is now a Walking Artist’s Network where you can find artists who work with walking practices as well as a list of symposia and academic publications. Karen Therese’s name might be added as she kicks off the Performance Space season of “walks, promenades, marches and strolls” with The Waterloo Girls. The piece “traverses though the lives and places of four generations of women who grew up in Waterloo” (website). Later in the year, there’ll be walks with Paschal Daantos Berry, Deborah Pollard and Anino Shadowplay Collective (Philippines); Jennifer Hamilton; Big Fag Press, Jo Holder and Fiona McDonald; Sarah Rodigari; Diana Smith; and Lily Hibberd. Quite apart from the walks, it’s good to see Performance Space getting out of CarriageWorks and getting about Sydney. The Waterloo Girls, part of Walk, Performance Space, April 7-9; www.performancespace.com.au
Chrissy Norford, Benjamin Hancock, Eric Avery. Forseen
photo Regis Lansac
Chrissy Norford, Benjamin Hancock, Eric Avery. Forseen
double dance
It’s only March but 2011 is already shaping up as a major year for contemporary dance in Australia: Dance Massive has just concluded; it’s Gideon Obarzanek’s last year at Chunky Move; Rafael Bonchela is consolidating himself at the Sydney Dance Company, extending his contract; there’s a new national secondary curriculum in dance to be written; and we’ve just launched our RealTime Dance portal, which includes all our dance articles back to 1994. In the meantime Dance Bites, from Western Sydney Dance Action and Riverside Theatre Parramatta, continues to gain momentum. Their latest show is a double bill by Frances Rings (RT98) and Narelle Benjamin. Rings’ Debris was commissioned by the West Australian Ballet and Benjamin’s The Dark Room was initially created for the Australian Ballet, so as it’s likely you missed them the first time around now’s your chance. Forseen: Double Bill, April 6-9; www.riversideparramatta.com.au
Applespiel, Tiny Stadiums
photo courtesy of the artists
Applespiel, Tiny Stadiums
spatial and relational art
We’ve only just recovered from the Imperial Panda festival (see Caroline Wake’s forthcoming review in the May 9 e-dition), but there’s another artist-produced festival on the horizon. Presented by PACT and curated by Quarterbred, the Tiny Stadiums Festival is now in its fourth year. This time round it presents a selection of projects that consider “art and its relationship to public space” with the chosen works spanning mediums including video, performance, live art, participation, installation and duration (press release). The artists include Applespiel (RT100), Beth Arnold, Lucas Ihlein (RT84), Jen Jamieson (RT87), Dan Koop (RT101), Bennett Miller, Nat Randall, Amy Spiers and Lara Thoms (RT76). Tiny Stadiums, PACT Centre for Emerging Artists, May 2-15; www.quarterbred.blogspot.com
Yang Fudong, No Snow on the Broken Bridge, (still), 2006, 35mm film transferred to DVD, music by Jing Wang
courtesy the artist and ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai, China
Yang Fudong, No Snow on the Broken Bridge, (still), 2006, 35mm film transferred to DVD, music by Jing Wang
no snow on broken bridge
The work of Yang Fudong has appeared in a number of exhibitions over the past year: first in the 17th Biennale of Sydney (RT97); then in Mu:Screen, Three Generations of Video Art at UTS (RT98) and also in The Big Bang at White Rabbit Gallery (RT98). Now, he has an exhibition all to himself at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation. The exhibition opens with No Snow on the Broken Bridge, a black and white multi-screen film that “explores the lives of the generation of young intellectuals who have grown up in a country hurtling toward modernisation” (press release). It also includes special screenings of Yang Fudong’s seminal five-part film Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest (2003-07). Yang Fudong, No Snow on Broken Bridge, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, March 18-June 4; www.sherman-scaf.org.au
DANCE MASSIVE, IN ITS SECOND INCARNATION, AGAIN PROVED TO BE INVALUABLE TO THE GOOD HEALTH OF AUSTRALIAN CONTEMPORARY DANCE, ATTRACTING PASSIONATE AUDIENCES, STRENGTHENING A SENSE OF COMMUNITY AND GENERATING INTENSE DISCUSSION ABOUT THE STATE OF THE ARTFORM AT A TIME WHEN HYBRIDITY RULES.
This unique dance event premieres new works, re-mounts acclaimed productions and invites local and international presenters to consider prospective touring and co-production. This is a dance event that is both marketplace (showing complete works rather than excerpts) and festival. The value for dance artists of seeing and discussing each other’s work cannot be underestimated.
Dance Massive has also commissioned RealTime in 2009 and 2011 to provide detailed responses to all the works in its programs, with some creations being reviewed by two writers or covered again in survey essays, for example on space or sound (p20). As newspaper reviewing declines, as evidenced in shorter and shorter responses, if offered at all, it’s important to have longer estimations of choreographers’ creations, both as documentation and dialogue.
RealTime Editors Virginia Baxter and Keith Gallasch teamed with Melbourne writers Jana Perkovic and Carl Nilsson-Polias to respond to the performances while Associate Editor Gail Priest put our words in print and online and produced the RealTime video interviews with Dance Massive artists. Significantly these interviews were made soon after we’d seen the work—unlike most media interviews that act as previews of works as yet unseen. We look forward to doing many more of these.
It’s of concern that the future of Dance Massive seems uncertain, not least because its cooperative progenitors—Stephen Richardson (Artshouse), Stephen Armstrong (Malthouse) and David Tyndall (Dancehouse)—are all moving on. As Richardson points out in the interview with Sophie Travers (RT101, p36) staging Dance Massive has involved a considerable programming investment from its partners. Dance Massive might not be sustainable for the partners in the future nor match the visions of their incoming directors. Another key event is the Sydney Opera House’s Spring Dance season—its propagator, Wendy Martin, is also on the move.
Australian contemporary dance has long needed a celebratory and analytical focal point, once provided by the Greenmill festivals (1993-97) in Melbourne and intermittently since by Australia’s international arts festivals. The loss of Dance Massive would surrender the opportunity for greater public awareness of dance, vital communication between artists across the country and opportunities for presenters to program innovative dance creations of the highest quality.
A selection of our Dance Massive reviews follows—others can be read on our website where you’ll also find video interviews with dancemakers.
With thanks to the Jasper Hotel and to the Dance Massive partners Arts House, Malthouse and Dancehouse. RT
FOR A FESTIVAL FOCUSED ON THE DANCING BODY, DANCE MASSIVE PROVIDED SURPRISING SATISFACTIONS FOR THE EAR. WHILE CUNNINGHAM AND CAGE, ALONG WITH RAINER AND FELLOW 60S AVANT-GARDISTS, FOUGHT AGAINST OR SOUGHT BEYOND AN ESSENTIALLY EXPRESSIONIST RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MUSIC AND DANCE, THE LURE OF THE EMOTIONALLY CHARGED UNION OF SOUND AND MOVEMENT IS HARD TO RESIST. MOST WORKS IN DANCE MASSIVE OFFERED SOUNDTRACKS THAT, IN CONCERT WITH LIGHT AND DESIGN, PROVIDED THE EMOTIONAL WEIGHT AND ATMOSPHERIC TENOR OF THE WORLDS INHABITED BY THE DANCERS. HOWEVER A VARIETY OF METHODOLOGIES WERE DEPLOYED, IMPLICITLY INTERROGATING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOUND, MOVEMENT AND MEANING MAKING.
live on stage
Of course a direct and intense way to integrate music with dance is for the sound to be produced live, a tactic several of the works exploited. Its most breathtaking realisation was found in No one will tell us… Here the guitarist, Swiss musician Hansueili Tischhauser, literally played with the dancers, Rosalind Crisp and Andrew Morrish, prowling the stage, adopting and responding to their gestures, all the while musically shaping the tone of the improvisation. With effortless precision he used looping and effects pedals to create a range of atmospheres from elaborate carnival capers to sparse and haunting John Fahey-like meditations, to joyous propulsive blues grooves. Here Tischhauser’s presence, as well as his sound, was an equal performative force in the trio, and in the performance I experienced, everyone was on fire.
Amplification, BalletLab
photo Jeff Busby
Amplification, BalletLab
Composer/turntablist Lynton Carr’s presence was similarly strong in BalletLab’s Amplification. Placed prominently on stage, Carr was lit for the entire performance, allowing us to witness his dexterity as he manipulated a vast range of vinyl into a cohesive soundtrack. Most often, and in keeping with the thematic of the work, it is a harsh and brutal score, the very gesture of ‘scratching’ implying force and abrasiveness, creating abrupt snatches of sound sampled from sources as disparate as Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” to Nico & the Velvet Undergound’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” At its most lyrical we entered the world of illbient—loping bass beats and dreamy atmospheres; we are literally caught in the loop. Phillip Adams’ choreography exploits the energetic properties and often the cultural associations of the sound without in essence directly dancing to it (a ‘balletic’ “Rite of Spring” scene excepted). Amplification was first performed in 1999 when the presence of a live DJ would have been quite new. While some in the audience thought the turntablist sound dated or nostalgic (maybe I’m out of touch but isn’t mixing vinyl still a pretty current phenomenon?), the virtuosity of its execution and the dynamism that it injected into the work were exceptional.
Noisician Hirofumi Uchino was firmly embedded in the structure of Branch Nebula’s Sweat as a worker and artist. Ten minutes into the show, as an example of the work’s focus on labour, his entire sound system was rolled in and set up from scratch, part of an evolving transition from the ‘real’ to ‘theatrical’ space. For an artist whose genre is most often associated with aggression and extreme volume, Uchino and directors Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters exercised surprising restraint. Many moments of silence emphasised the power imbalance of the audience-performer dynamic. When we did get sounds, they were dark, verging on threatening without being melodramatic, occasionally funky with beats made from digital detritus, and on the whole avoided any figurative palette. Uchino’s disorienting static scattering around the room from a parabolic transmitter was particularly unsettling over the infamous dinner party scene. My one quibble is that in a show that allows each worker/performer to display their particular skill, there was no moment focused specifically on Uchino’s prowess.
Music for Imagined Dances, Madeleine Flynn & Tim Humphrey
photo Dean Petersen
Music for Imagined Dances, Madeleine Flynn & Tim Humphrey
imagined soundtracks, imagined dances
The first sonic statement in The weight of the thing left its mark, directed by Shaun McLeod, was the delicate song of a currawong, heard at such a distance as to seem recorded. We turn to the musicians Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, seated at a table at the edge of the space, and they smile. They cannot take credit for this quite magical moment in a piece that is all about being in the moment. What they do create is based on the same materials wielded by the performers: common cutlery and kitchen utensils. Flynn scrapes forks over surfaces, strikes a metal mixing bowl and decants dry grains between cups, all closely miked and processed by Humphrey to pull out the ring and the sing of the object. It is just sparse enough, just varied enough to make a delicate environment for play for the dancers whose bodies search through improvisational sequences. Out of place is the moment in which a wheat bag is cut, the grains pouring onto a corrugated iron sheet—the scale of the gesture indicating a significance that has little correspondence (either in a unifying or antagonistic way) with the onstage action.
Flynn and Humphrey also have an installation at Dancehouse titled Music For Imagined Dances, which is essentially a listening room that plays a random 25-minute selection of music (see RealTime interview). With a dynamic design by Nik Pijanti that places moving lights behind pin-holed sound attenuation material, the space is infused with shifting colours and patterns making an elegant, contemplative environment. However the range of pieces—from tracks composed by contemporary Australian composers (some for real dances, some imagined) through to iconic dance compositions by Stravinsky, Cage and Feldman, through to tracks by M.I.A, Nirvana and Radiohead—seems too broad. Music For Imagined Dances declares that all music can be danced to in your mind, which is of course true, but doesn’t some music conjure a stronger imaginative kinetic response? For me the material lacks the focus to engage us more deeply with its lovely proposition.
Matthew Day, Thousands
photo Jac Price
Matthew Day, Thousands
inhabiting the music
For Matthew Day’s Thousands, composer James Brown takes his place behind the audience, but his presence is by no means diminished. Offering a unified, almost monotonous sonic palette Brown concentrates on the visceral effect of the music, his hyper-panning of sub-frequency growl unsettling our very organs and giving us a real physical empathy with Day’s muscular tremors as he incrementally moves through a slow rotation over the course of 45 minutes. Even as Donna Summer’s disco classic “I Feel Love” surprisingly emerges from the rumble, Day still does not dance to the music, rather it gives him something against which to fight harder—music as obstacle to dance.
Curated in a double bill with Matthew Day was Deanne Butterworth’s Dual Repérage in Threes with sound by Michael Munson. Here, the relationship with the music is most intriguing at the beginning where Munson creates a spacious environment for Butterworth to inhabit rather than dance to, using cavernous chords with strong attacks and long delays. As the piece progresses, more rhythms emerge, offering Butterworth more drive to draw from. She slips between dancing to and living with the sound, the latter mode allowing for more nuance.
In Michelle Heaven’s Disagreeable Object, Bill McDonald’s soundscape also provides more environment than accompaniment. Interestingly, in a video interview with RealTime, Heaven mentions how the piece was initially created without music, working only with the rhythms of the movement. McDonald has respected this by creating a sense of nostalgia by using scratchy gramophone records and adding ominous tones that hover just below the action, maintaining the arch gothic ambience of the work. In addition the team has worked to highlight particular diegetic effects, miking the sounds of crunching, swallowing, snuffling. Heaven also vocalises the sounds of objects—a tap turning, the squeak of tea trolley wheels—creating a cartoon effect that adds extra quirkiness to this ingenious little gem of a work.
dancing partners
A particular sonic pleasure was the collaboration between Robin Fox and Oren Ambarchi for Chunky Move’s Connected. Each an undisputed master of Australian experimental music, together they created an epic score of tension-filled spaciousness between a series of ever increasing crescendos—Ambarchi providing lurching drones of fulsome harmonies, Fox delivering hard edge statics, underrumbles and tingly spatter. Structurally the role of the music here is what we have come to expect. It propels the dance, holding the energies in check and then releasing them, unabashedly manipulating our response through a series of smaller climaxes to the final one.
Robin Fox also provided the sound for Antony Hamilton’s Drift which was played drive-in style through the stereo of the vehicle in which you also viewed the work. Fox’s material, rich in bass, is somewhat challenged in this listening environment (although some audience members might have had a pumping car stereo system that could cope). A highlight is the inclusion of material from a collaboration with improvising bassist Clayton Thomas, with percussive, rubbery plunking and complex rhythmic interplay that sits uneasily but interestingly over the street-inflected dance. But the tone of Drift as a whole was perplexing—was that extended primal drum sequence with accompanying flailing dance in earnest? The irony was hard to read, disconnected as we were from the action in our metal capsules.
Luke George, Kristy Ayre, Timothy Harvey, NOW NOW NOW
photo Jeff Busby
Luke George, Kristy Ayre, Timothy Harvey, NOW NOW NOW
less is more
Huey Benjamin has created vast amounts of intricate and detailed digital material for the score of In Glass by Narelle Benjamin, much of it very beautiful, but constantly shifting, moving on. I longed for fewer layers, more space, more moments of repetition and pattern making, more dynamics (the soundtrack is compressed to the limit) in order to grasp the many territories and ideas that both Benjamins are working with. It felt as if there needed to be more trust in the dance itself, freeing the music from its parallel role of exposition and allowing it to bring more oblique lyrical space to the work.
Livia Ruzic’s sound design for Trevor Patrick’s I Could Pretend The Sky Is Water seemed subtle in comparison with the music-drenched works in Dance Massive but it was no less effective. In a heavily text-driven work, with Patrick’s recorded voice-over alternating between an older and younger self and full of poetic remembrances and curious philosophising on the nature of choreography and art-making, Ruzic’s spare additions of water droplets, fire crackle and subtle tonal washes were subliminal and dreamlike. She offered unobtrusive, egoless support absolutely vital to the ambience and momentum of the piece.
Finally, to the sparest sound design of all, found in Luke George’s NOW NOW NOW, where in fact, at some point in the creative proceedings the choreographer chose to do away with a sound designer altogether (see RealTime interview). The majority of sound was made by the performers themselves, either through rhythmic chanting of ‘ow’ words or in their laboured breathing after an extended sequence of high kicks, or disconnected phrases mimicked from a silent TV screen. The only recorded sound was a piece of non-descript pop music played from an iPod that triggered a pivoting jazz-dance sequence. Meanwhile, uncomfortable silences brought us back, time and time again, to our awkward present. But, of course, as John Cage counselled, there is no silence and, on the night I attended, traffic noise, sirens and a large blow fly kept us very much aware of ourselves, and the dancers, in the here and now.
future fusions
While the majority of experimental music and sound practice in Australia operates in isolation—without a body, without performative or overt gestural distraction—it is exciting to see more cross-over and cross-disciplinary exploration developing, evidenced by much of the work in Dance Massive. With the recent Australia Council Music-Dance initiative which is encouraging a bi-partisin approach to funding dance with music, or music with dance, hopefully the dance sector will become even more adventurous in its level of sonic experimentation (and vice versa) with the conversation between music, dance and performance becoming even richer, more complex, and more daring.
My schedule prevented me from seeing Happy as Larry (composers Nick Wales, Bree Van Reyk ), Not in a Million Years (Max Lyandavert), Sunstruck (Livia Ruzic), Becky Jodi and John (Hahn Rowe) or Dance Marathon (Ciara Adams, Richard Windeyer).
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Dance Massive 2011, Arts House, Dancehouse, Malthouse, Melbourne, March 15-27; www.dancemassive.com
DANCE MARATHON IS ONE OF THE MOST COMPLEX, MOST SOPHISTICATED AND YET MOST DELIRIOUSLY ENJOYABLE PERFORMANCE WORKS I HAVE EXPERIENCED IN A LONG WHILE, AND THE CIRCUMSTANCES IN WHICH THIS REVIEW HAS COME ABOUT WILL ALLOW ONLY THE MOST SUPERFICIAL SCRATCHING OF ITS SURFACE. THE NEED TO PRODUCE A WRITTEN RESPONSE TO A PERFORMANCE WORK BY THE FOLLOWING MORNING BECOMES A GREAT IMPEDIMENT TO ANALYSIS IF SUCH WORK REQUIRES YOU TO DANCE ALMOST NON-STOP FROM 8PM UNTIL MUCH PAST MIDNIGHT. BETWEEN MY RAW EXPERIENCE AND THE REFLECTION ON IT THERE HAS BEEN TIME ONLY FOR SOME VERY DEEP SLEEP.
Dance Marathon, staged by Canadian interdisciplinary theatre collective bluemouth inc, functions on at least two levels, which have not entirely come together in my mind. The first is referential. It is staged as a version of the dance marathons popular in the USA in the 1920s and the 1930s. Starting off as Charleston-era one-person (largely female) showcases, the willingness of young dancers to compete in endurance dancing, seeking quick fame, prompted presenters to organise increasingly more elaborate marathons, weaving variety acts and celebrity appearances through the event, introducing complex rules of elimination, theatricalising personal dramas of the contestants and attracting large audiences. Short breaks were introduced for the dancers, allowing the overall length of the marathon to stretch to days, weeks, months. During the Depression era, dance marathons became the bread and circuses of the time, reflecting the large amounts of free time the unemployed citizens of America now had—but also offering that intriguing combination of promises: faint traces of fame and glory, cash and prizes, on the one hand, and work, food and shelter for a short while, on the other.
We may not know any of this, however, and still experience Dance Marathon as a satisfactory reference to a popular form, because the similarity with contemporary reality television is so stark. We enter; we queue to register; we fill out a form waiving health risks; we get a number; we complete a small dance card with personal trivia that will become crucial for the unfolding of the show; we talk to each other in mass anticipation. Our Mistress of Ceremonies introduces the rules: feet moving at all times, no knees touching the floor. We are randomly coupled and, I may add, this is all very exciting: we do dance, with great abandon, the way I rarely see Melburnians dance. There is no audience, although we are being filmed. Do we notice or care? No. As we have heard from reality TV participants, nobody does.
The evening includes dance lessons, games, elimination rounds, celebrity guests, skills showcases (Bron Batten does a mean tap dance), prizes. The logic of elimination is entirely congruent with both reality TV and the pedagogical rules of making all children feel included in a game: very few eliminations in the first three quarters, and a large cull before the semi-finals (bringing the numbers down from 65 to 6); contestants are eliminated on mainly irrelevant grounds, with great attention to preserving the diversity of faces; and the overall winner is decided in a micro-cart race. It is the most inclusive format that an elimination game could possibly assume. Just like those real people on TV sets, smiling under a cloud of swirling confetti, so are we feeling extremely gratified to be participating in something as lovely as Dance Marathon.
However, as a first-hand immersive experience Dance Marathon is the complete opposite of its own references: it is rewarding, pleasurable, even empowering. In a town of reluctant dancers, it was quite marvellous to see people with no clear dance skills throw themselves around next to highly trained professionals, the former unselfconscious, the latter unselfconsciously corny. Moments of provided entertainment quickly became something to participate in, rather than just watch—in a way similar to Jerome Bel’s The Show Must Go On, the emphasis on the silly imbued the audience with great freedom to act. A reading of a sad poem prompted waves of expressive dance. Every so often, in the middle of a dance number, a choreographed formation would emerge, and we would move aside to observe better these bluemouth inc dancers whom we thought were here just to play. Overall, Dance Marathon worked like a truly wonderful party, in which the organised entertainment blended in perfectly with the fun we were able to have all by ourselves.
Dance Matathon, bluemouth inc
photo Gordon Hawkins
Dance Matathon, bluemouth inc
The question worth posing is, why? This close to the experience, the answer can be only vaguely attempted. Dance Marathon foregrounded the elements of game with rules and challenges that stripped away a whole layer of agency from the participant, paradoxically liberating us from having to make choices, thus making us also safe from ridicule or awkwardness. Freud elaborates on the transition from children’s games to adults’ jokes, the latter being essentially more self-protective and tendentious. A joke protects its own pleasure before the intellect. A game, on the other hand, is pure pleasure codified—the purpose is not winning, but following the rules. Once inside the girdle of the rules, we are probably as free as we can ever be. It makes one wonder about the extent to which the emergence of immersive theatre—essentially games for adults—responds to some deep need we have today for simple pleasures.
On the other hand, it was very rewarding to see a huge mix of people—from the dedicated contemporary dance audience to people coming straight from swing classes, to those just having a Saturday night out—utterly enjoying, and understanding, an event that questions the theatrical form to this degree. It reminds one of the fact that dance, of all the ‘highbrow’ art forms, has the strongest connection to the street and to play—a point not made often enough. As Deleuze said somewhere, we do not have a body, we are a body. In other words, our body is not an object we put into practice, but the entity through which we experience the world. This is why Dance Marathon, however satisfying on the level of reference to bread and circuses, exists primarily as an extraordinary party, allowing us to dance with strangers, be blindfolded and drawn into complex choreographies, and even attempt a mass (unskilled) rendition of the dance sequence in Jean Luc Godard’s Bande à part (1964), as Anna Karina, Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey progressively accelerate on screen—and all with great pleasure.
A perfect end to Dance Massive.
Dance Marathon appears as part of 10 Days on the Island, Launceston, April 1-3, http://tendaysontheisland.org. The dance scene in Bande à part can be found on YouTube.
Dance Massive: bluemouth Inc, Dance Marathon, performers, creators Clara Adams, Stephen O’Connell, Clayton Dean Smith, Cass Bugge, Lucy Simic, Cameron Davis, musicians Steve Charles, Peter Lubulwa, Eugene Ball, Carlo Barbaro. Arts House, Meat Market, Melbourne, March 26; www.dancemassive.com.au
THE INCOMPARABLE TREVOR PATRICK’S I COULD PRETEND THE SKY IS WATER IS AN UTTERLY MAGICAL, IMMERSIVE 33-MINUTE PERFORMANCE-CUM-INSTALLATION THAT EXPLORES RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN PLACE AND MEMORY AND, WITH WICKED WIT, NEGOTIATES THE DISASTER THAT CAN BEFALL ANY PERFORMANCE, NOT LEAST DANCE.
We’re loath to give too much away. We can say it involves a clever stage design (Efterpi Soropos) comprising three large surfaces that act as screens. The projected videos by Rhian Hinkley, with evocative detail, transform these into ceiling, wall and floor and, later, the sea. Trevor Patrick is somewhere in here, first glimpsed as a ghostly presence on the wall—perhaps just a video image, a Bill Viola-ish spectre, an ectoplasmic return of the repressed. But we do have his voice, an older Patrick croaking out a series of 13 remembrances, each deliciously precise and framed by seductive, sometimes disturbing ambient sounds drawn from nature (Livia Ruzic), commencing with the mere drip, drip of water but soon growing into something more turbulent.
As with all things in I Could Pretend The Sky Is Water, the recollections float freely—the memory of a childhood ride in a rocking boat could have been on a swaying train. And as ever with Patrick, the writing is rich in detail and inherent poetry, suffused with droll humour. The particularity of place is striking in these remembrances—the idiosyncratic names of Australian towns seem odder than ever—although the reliability of recall is again tested: did such an event happen in this town or that one? Memory floats, suspended between possibilities.
The droll pace of Patrick’s speech mirrors the Australian voice of older generations. Or will we all sound like this some day? Inducing a dreamy forgetfulness, it relishes the crisp consonants of words like “Tumbarumba,” the fruity tongue rolls for names like “Gloria.” Sentences are rarely tied off briskly but rather extended with gross relish in words like “a-r-s-e” or the endless possibility of “Anyway…”
Suspension is the text’s insistent motif—on a chair, on a plank, in a boat, atop the artist’s father’s shoulders. Deft shifts in point of view are especially amusing—an old council chair remembers supporting an aunt’s “fat arse,” a carpet recalls the uneven weight of furniture and feet. The impressionistic image of Patrick on the wall sees him suspended and slowly rotating, his movement of strangely elongated hands and feet heavy, as if under water. Indeed, water increasingly invades his, and our, environment. Hinkley’s video art masterfully generates this transformation with images of great beauty, entailing subtle superimpositions and fragmentations: the ceiling rose is awash, the carpet colours spread into new patterns.
Patrick is subsequently revealed to be a human-animal hybrid in an exquisite stretch lace costume (by Peter Allan) that, in the shifting textures of Soropos’ lighting, evokes at different times soft, delicate flesh or a richly delineated scaly armour. The creature’s movement becomes more fluid, more dancerly but with not a little irony in the ensuing dialogue between Patrick and his older self. The text suggests not just the discovery of a pre-historic living fossil—suspended between species at a particular evolutionary moment—but also the performance itself as potential disaster (“eight of the audience are still unaccounted for”). This refers inherently to the riskiness of this performance but also to the challenges for all performers, not least choreographers (the crisis entails throwing out choreographic sections and other anxieties: “the longer a dance goes on the less likely its survival”).
There is no sense in which the work is confessional, beyond expressing with metaphoric intensity the stress of creation and performance for that very singular, strange species, the artist in the struggle for survival. There is a brief reference to Patrick as bow-legged and pigeon-toed when a child. Someone in his family assumes this will “right itself if attention is not drawn to it” and that “the blackboard will calm his restive legs.” But much of the imagery captures the look and feel of the past in terms of names, places, events (the Queen’s 1954 visit—“Nothing to see”), objects and lateral associations—crooked teeth and a lop-sided car grille.
I Could Pretend The Sky Is Water celebrates the survival of the artist with a great deal of beautifully clothed irony and hints of hard won optimism (“the audience never give up hope until the last of the choreography”), although the final image is as disturbing as it is beautiful. Similarly the grace of Patrick’s movement belies the physical endurance entailed in being suspended for the entire performance.
This marvellous act of suspension is supported by highly integrated video, stage, lighting and costume design and reinforced with the sustaining power of remembrance embodied in words in a work that anticipates a future reflective self while facing the creative crises of the present. In little more than half an hour, Trevor Patrick marvellously suspends himself, time and our disbelief with a scenario at once deeply familiar (the dance of memory) and utterly strange (the artist as beautiful alien).
Dance Massive: I Could Pretend The Sky Is Water, words & movement Trevor Patrick, costume Peter Allan, set & visual design Efterpi Soropos, set & design realisation Bluebottle, film production Rhian Hinkley, soundscape Livia Ruzic; Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 23-26; www.dancemassive.com.au
Becky Hilton, Jodi Melnick, John Jasperse, Becky, Jodi and John
Vladimir: He didn’t say for sure he’d come.
Estragon: And if he doesn’t come?
Vladimir: We’ll come back tomorrow.
Estragon: And the day after tomorrow.
Vladimir: Possibly
Estragon: And so on.
Vladimir: The point is—
Estragon: Until he comes.
[Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot]
Becky, Jodi and John, from New York’s John Jasperse Company, is a Trojan horse, a masquerade, a depth beneath the façade. It is also what it seems, funny, witty, casual, undulating, perambulating, a play of surfaces. Beneath the mask of hilarity lies a serious piece. Or is it the other way round?
Film titles roll down, looking a bit like Episode 20 of StarWars telling us about the work. Let’s begin with an existential conundrum: this piece is about life. It was conceived by the artists in 2006, but that was some time ago and life has changed. What’s more, someone’s not here. But that’s okay, because we’ve called her on Skype. So here we have it, an absent presence, time out of joint, framed by the group, by the collective ‘we.’ That collective framing remains throughout, warming us with its camaraderie.
Becky, Jodi and John emerge; quirky limbs peek over the wallpaper frieze, their timing eccentric. Chrysa also appears on a monitor manifesting the same wallpaper. Domesticity abounds. She speaks into her webcam, her face looming against what appears to be her bedroom. Chrysa can’t be here, she had too much on to participate in this project. Well, she certainly made up for it, raising questions throughout, inserting propositions, even teleporting her stuffed animal for a disco solo later on.
“The trouble with us,” Chrysa opines, “is that we are too articulate.” There is no lack of articulation here. Jodi Melnick’s early solo is nothing if not articulate. Strong, clear events resound in the body, kinetic initiatives pass through her torso or pelvis, bouncing around like billiard balls, fine dancing without the aid of excess muscularity. There is an intense delicacy about her dancing.
Becky and John offer their own duet behind Jodi. They begin by rubbing their knees, looking like a Greek chorus of washerwomen but then the rubbing becomes something else, a dance forming a tangent with the everyday. There are many everyday moments; emails are read out, the threesome have a break and open up for audience questions. But these elements are completely integrated into the work. So they are no longer everyday.
The spectre of time hovers, endings loom. Becky reads an email from Jodi cataloguing all the problems that have developed in her body. Becky tells us why she stopped dancing. John refers to a critical response to his work which suggests he should perhaps stop making art, as if the time for art has come to an end.
Chrysa Parkinson (on monitor), Becky Hilton, John Jasperse, Jodi Melnick
Physically, the duets, trios and solos are a pleasure to watch. Bodies engage through touching, pushing, softening, leaning, falling. Their touch is considered. John stands naked in front of Jodi. Her proximity to his nakedness raises questions; how will she touch him, where will she touch him? She meets his skin time and again. Heads roll of their own accord while a torso propels itself across space, a snifter of Cunningham. But these bodies are soft. They soften around a pushing hand, then plump up again. Jodi falls on the group, a percussive moment of choreography becoming humour. There is a casual feel about this dancing and spoken text, aided and abetted by Hahn Rowe’s music which is quirky and whimsical, relaxed, inviting laughter.
No-one takes themselves too seriously, but neither are these conversations just played for laughs. Anxieties about the body surface in Jodi’s conversation. There is a marked tension between her catalogue of infirmities and this capable, dancing body. Becky narrates a story about her son’s superhero fantasies. She returns dressed in a makeshift outfit in imitation of that worn by her then eight-year old child. Her breasts are bare, green tights are pulled up high and a footy flag (the Western Bulldogs) is tied around her neck. But for her breasts, she could be that child. There is an air of vulnerability about her nakedness, a sort of Bill Henson turning away from the gaze.
John recounts a colleague’s critical comments about experimentalism in his work. These are read out by Jodi. By way of response, John appears naked, holding a huge pile of pretend bricks. Unstable, they collapse, falling to the ground, the last one revealing his genitals. Is this a riposte, an experiment or a compulsion to return to the source of irritation?
The audience is at some point invited to ask questions, which are in turn deflected and treated obliquely. There is a distorted skull in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533), a disguised reference to mortality that appears only through a change in perspective. Are these deflections an anamorphosis, distorted reflections on mortality? Chrysa misses her friends. Chrysa isn’t here. Chrysa’s elephant dances under the disco mirror ball. Maybe all this hilarity is a carrier, death’s Trojan horse. There is this scene I recall in a film about Congo’s ill-fated president, Patrice Lumumba (Lumumba, director Raoul Peck, 2000). Lumumba and his best friend lie tied and beaten up, waiting for the inevitable. They tell stories, reminding each other of earlier times. The two of them piss themselves laughing. Then they die. I’m sure they would have danced too, if they could.
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Dance Massive: John Jasperse Company, Becky, Jodi and John, creators, performers Becky Hilton, John Jasperse, Jodi Melnick, Chrysa Parkinson (online), choreographer, director John Jasperse, music Hahn Rowe, lobby video Ben Speth, Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 24-April 3; www.dancemassive.com.au
IIN THE PERFORMING ARTS, MEMORY CAN BE SHORT. FASHIONS ARE FORGOTTEN, MISSTEPS ARE GLOSSED OVER, WHEELS ARE REINVENTED. IT IS THE BLESSING AND CURSE OF PRODUCING EPHEMERA. SO, WHEN A CHOREOGRAPHER UPSETS THE USUAL CYCLE OF MEMORY LAPSE BY RETURNING TO AN OLD WORK, WHAT IS THE RESULT? HOW DOES AN AUDIENCE PRIMED FOR IMMEDIACY RESPOND TO ARCHIVAL DISTANCE? WHAT DO WE SEE AND WHAT DO WE MISS?
Amplification is the work that launched BalletLab and Phillip Adams. Its premiere dates back to the far reaches of 1999. The same year, sanctions against Libya were dropped, something called Napster started and The Matrix opened. So, in some respects, Amplification is ancient history. Yet, here it is again, resurrected.
It is impossible to watch Amplification with eyes a decade younger—to see it now is to see it with the knowledge of what has come since. The problems this gives rise to are clear: the groundbreaking may now seem derivative, the accessible may now seem obscure and the noteworthy may now disappear into a fog of familiarity. However, the rewards are nevertheless there. Amplification holds its own if only because, while some of the style might seem dated, the expressive language remains distinct. Adams’ direction and choreography, in its metaphorical leaps and snowballing dramaturgy is unlike anything else at Dance Massive so far.
Amplification, BalletLab
photo Jeff Busby
Amplification, BalletLab
It is possible to draw a worthwhile comparison here with German choreographer Sasha Waltz. Premiering only a few months later than Amplification, Waltz’s seminal Körper (seen recently at the 2009 Melbourne International Arts Festival, RT94) has informed not only a decade of contemporary dance but also marked a fundamental moment of artistic expression for Waltz herself. In the subsequent years, Waltz has produced two other works—S and noBody—in response to Körper, making a trilogy of sorts that reflects her development as an artist as much as it does the development of the themes. Similarly, just over a year ago, Adams produced a response to Amplification called Miracle (RT 93). And this year he produced a third instalment, Above.
Amplification, BalletLab
photo Jeff Busby
Amplification, BalletLab
The most enticing conclusion to be drawn from this is that Amplification is an incomplete work. One that provokes questions rather than providing answers; one that leaves you wanting more; one that Phillip Adams has not finished exploring. This also suggests an excellent reason for a remount—for the audience to revisit a work with knowledge of its progeny.
Indeed, as someone who came to Miracle before Amplification, it is only possible to view the older work refracted through the lens of the newer. On the one hand, the distillation and evolution of Adams’ choreography in Miracle becomes evident—for instance, his increased trust in the dancers as embodiments rather than functionaries of his expression. On the other hand, cross-referenced understandings can be reached—for example, the common motif of the saffron cloth makes an overlong ritualistic swaddling of a corpse in Amplification ring with the memory of Miracle’s extraordinary final image of levitation.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a choreographer, the locus for Adams’ artistic interest tends to be the body itself. But rather than the encyclopaedic vein of Waltz’s investigation in Körper, Adams is particularly focused on the extremities that the body can conquer, endure or suffer, which leads inevitably to the final extremity—mortality (like live performance, the body too is ephemeral).
Amplification, BalletLab
photo Jeff Busby
Amplification, BalletLab
In Miracle, the body was a site for internal hysteria, a hindrance to be denied, a vessel to be exited. In Amplification, the violence enacted on the body comes from outside. The partnering work is fast and violent, bodies flung with disregard, Lynton Carr’s soundtrack an oppressive ceiling edging downwards. The space is never fully devoid of menace—the silhouetted torture scene is reminiscent of the disturbingly sterile violence of Romeo Castellucci’s Tragedia Endogonidia: BR.#04 Brussels (RT 76), yet there are moments that almost break into the absurd—threatening toy cars roll towards the dancers, one scene mimics the tropes of horror films, another alludes to the symphorophilia of JG Ballard’s Crash.
In the end, the clearest point of contrast between Miracle and Amplification comes not in their exploration of the living body but in their vision of the afterlife. Miracle ended with a transcendent sleight of hand, a weightlessly impossible vision of the body in harmony with space. In Amplification, the body retains its mass. The afterlife here is one grounded in the body’s inescapability and so, one by one, the naked bodies of the dancers form a soft eternal landscape.
DEANNE BUTTERWORTH AND MATTHEW DAY’S DANCEHOUSE DOUBLE BILL IS AN APT PAIRING, EACH PERFORMER EXUDING A PALPABLE SENSE OF COMPULSIVE PURPOSE WITH INTENSIVELY FOCUSED BODY-WORK IN SPACES TIGHTLY FRAMED BY LIGHT, SHADOW AND ENVELOPING SOUND. THERE IS NOTHING LITERAL TO HANG ON TO HERE—ONCE AGAIN IN DANCE MASSIVE WE ARE ALL VERY MUCH IN THE MOMENT.
dual repérage in threes
Butterworth’s Dual Repérage in Threes works the length of the venue’s upstairs Studio. To our far right, the choreographer-dancer appears abruptly, in a flurry of extensions, silhouetted in front of a human scale rectangle of bright, softly coloured light. Butterworth’s relationship to this light source is pivotal: she constantly moves away from it to the centre of her stage, sometimes further, only to return to it, sometimes moving backwards into its acute frame. The dancer is not miming push and pull, but the magnetism is evident—sometimes in a mere walk, sometimes as if she’s danced by an unseen force. As if to amplify the work’s anxious, moth-to-a-flame vibrancy, a hand-held torch lightly tracks Butterworth, casting a flickering shadow on the long wall as she moves into the dark.
Michael Munson’s score resonates with the dance; initially short, deep chords and high piano twangs suggest the solidity of acoustic sources, providing a palpable physical sonic pattern against which the dancer’s restive body moves regardless.
As Dual Repérage in Threes evolves, Butterworth’s choreography takes shape, cumulatively building on a calculatedly limited set of movements with occasional, strikingly different images (sculpted posturing, balletic tip-toeing, feet ‘stuttering,’ rapid pelvic thrusts) breaking the routine. The dancing’s not minimalist as in, say, some Molissa Fenley works, but the recurrence and recombination of motifs can be hypnotic or, at times, hard to hold together. Arms lead the body in wide turns, swing over shoulders singly and then together, back and forth at speed; hands spin rapidly over each other; and, in a dominant image, the dancer’s upper body is constantly pulled down towards the floor, centrestage, hands reaching, half-cupped as if something sighted is beyond grasp—the strange potency of this gesture is heightened by the addition of a percussive element to the sound score.
Deanne Butterworth, Dual Repérage in Threes
photo Rohan Young
Deanne Butterworth, Dual Repérage in Threes
The work is played out in two sections—there is a ‘private’ third that only Butterworth experiences or we can imagine, as she suggests in her opaque program notes. As the first ‘act’ progresses, the pull of the light is amplified when it turns slowly, softly orange, Butterworth travelling elegantly sideways, then walking serenely towards it. On arrival, she oscillates between bursts of energy and calm, drifts back to the centre, again as if seeing…what? Sweet organ-like tones fill the space. Black-out. Butterworth stands over a flickering fluorescent light as she commences her second ‘act,’ in which the rectangle of light is a vivid orange, and the images into which she recurrently locks are more intense, more urgent while others—like squared-off poses, moments of rare stability—are added. A thin line of lilac light illuminates the space where wall and floor meet, drawing a crawling Butterworth away from her principal light source, perhaps into some kind of release. In a moment that seems to break even further from the work’s patterning, Butterworth is no longer compelled to bend low; instead she clenches a fist and reaches out directly to us. It’s a powerful almost implicating moment, if again an abstract one.
In the work’s climactic moments, Butterworth returns to the light, a deep musical pulse underlining a frightening escalation of the work’s key motifs—arms and hands spinning, body pulled down and forward over and over. I’m not sure precisely what I witnessed in Dual Repérage in Threes, but Deanne Butterworth’s adroit coding of her choreography (inflected with years of dance know—how, superb balance and rapid gear-shifting) and the work’s near obsessive—compulsive realisation made for a compelling experience.
Matthew Day, Thousands
photo Jac Price
Matthew Day, Thousands
thousands
After I’d seen Thousands during the 2010 Sydney Fringe Festival, I wrote: “We’re seated mere feet away from Matthew Day, alert to the increasing tension in his body as he balances horizontally, close to the harsh floor on a mere two points of contact, suspended for a brief eternity before unfolding into a rotating, standing series of subtle transformations for…I don’t know how long. Time is erased as Day seamlessly mutates into slow-mo, non-literal evocations suggestive of body-builder, dance clubber (bizarrely headless as he faces away from us, head dipped), martial artist, butoh dancer, sportsman… as well as suggesting the body young and then strangely aged. The precision, control and focus are breathtaking. This is not dance in the usual sense, but it takes all the skill, strength and creativity of a talented dancer-choreographer to realise this acutely delineated state of being.” (See RT100)
A second viewing of Thousands confirmed for me the work’s peculiar, tension-driven power. Day maintains his performance constantly on the pivot of transition, always moving in minimal increments, such that the tension required not to topple or speed up creates a bodily vibration that is at times exhausting to watch but which provides the work with its pulse. This time I was hyper-alert to the meticulous shifts in movement: an arm leads out left, the direction Day is facing, but the palm of the hand faces us while the rest of the body slowly but with determination turns to the right.
Matthew Day,Thousands
photo Gareth Hart & Next Wave Festival
Matthew Day,Thousands
As part of Dance Massive, Thousands was performed at one end of the Dancehouse Studio against a white wall and on a polished timber floor. In terms of space and focus this created a very different ambience from the Sydney performance at PACT. There, Day’s black outfit was in sync with dark floor and walls. Here, the sheen of surfaces and the scatter of shadows reduced a little the work’s sense of sheer singularity. (In the second part of his trilogy, Cannibal, Day, in white clothes and hair, works a large white space in which shadows play an essential role: see RealTime 102, April-May.) Nonetheless, lighting designer Travis Hodgson (who also lit Cannibal), using strong down-lighting, manages to fix our attention while floorlights create shadows to amplify momentary, chance associations with, among others, sporting heroism, Soviet Realism, Rodin and Buddha.
James Brown’s monumental score also generates associations. Its enormous pulsing rumble feels like we’re sitting atop a giant machine, then stuck in a tunnel facing an oncoming train, then the target of hovering helicopters. But Brown’s composition is never literal, its long throbbing, humming lines magnifing the sense of body tension, although not in calculated sync with Day’s staccato internal beat, until the disco passage where music and body become one, Brown making even more of the flying bass lines than usual in that idiom. Of course, Day never deviates from his own pulse, making for some of the most restrained club dancing of all time.
Rosalind Crisp’s No one will tell us…, Luke George’s NOW NOW NOW and Deanne Butterworth’s Dual Repérage in Threes, in their very different ways deliriously engage with the notion of the moment. So does Matthew Day’s Thousands, not with improvisation or an open structure as its foundation, but with the ‘high-wire’ on-the-floor skill of maintaining balance and precision at the slowest of motion in the strangest of dances.
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Dance Massive: Double Bill: Dual Repérage in Threes, choreographer, performer Deanne Butterworth, sound design Michael Munson, lighting Rose Connors Dance; Thousands, choreographer, performer Matthew Day, sound James Brown, lighting Travis Hodgson, dramaturgy Martin del Amo, Rebecca Pollard, Yana Taylor; Studio, Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 22, 23; www.dancemassive.com.au
I ENCOUNTERED SHAUN PARKER’S HAPPY AS LARRY WITH A VIVID FEAR OF REPEATING A RECENT EXPERIENCE OF SEEING A PERFORMANCE ON HAPPINESS DEVISED BY SOME THEATRE UNDERGRADUATES. AFTER AN HOUR OF WATCHING THEM FROLIC AND TUMBLE, GIGGLE AND DANCE, I BELIEVE THE ENTIRE AUDIENCE WISHED THEM DEAD. NOTHING CAN BE QUITE SO IRRITATING AS WATCHING A PERSON IN A PROLONGED STATE OF BEING DEEPLY HAPPY. WE DO NOT IDENTIFY, QUITE THE CONTRARY: WE FEEL EXCLUDED, DISRESPECTED, IGNORED. WE MAKE COMPARISONS TO ARYAN PROPAGANDA. WE FEEL ENVY.
Not without reason have the classic theatrical forms focused on showing us great tragedies, or ridiculing deeply flawed characters. That’s something to identify with easily: suffering and smugness. Herein lies the paradox of mimesis: another’s happiness is not transferable by identification, does not become my happiness. Show me a happy person on stage, I am likely to see only a self-satisfied bastard.
Happy as Larry shows us people in prolonged states of happiness for no less than 75 minutes, with no narrative arc or character development to introduce variety, and no recourse to the spoken word. However, within this field of monotony it focuses on the varieties of experience and personality, loudly proclaiming its employment of the Enneagram’s nine personality types to create an interesting range of joyful experiences.
We watch very different people enjoy very different activities: a ballerina delights in perfectly executing a classical figure; two young men copy each other’s movements flawlessly, their happiness being both shared and competitive; three women dance, laughing, lightly and not overly concerned with precision; a roller-skater learns to control his wheels. Adam Gardnir’s elegant set, a rotating blackboard slab, keeps the meter of the show, sweeping dancers upstage and bringing new scenes on. While most activities are representations of a simple, even childlike delight in bodily coordination, synchronised movement or skill, some are complex and intriguing. A narcissistic seducer, compulsively revealing his tattoo, dances despite Dean Cross’s chalked suggestion: “Don’t just do something. Stand there.” Miranda Wheen, on the other hand, appears on the scene only as a mediator of other performers’ journeys: she tries to contain the seducer’s movements, or picks up and steadies the roller-skater. Her satisfaction is palpable, and yet there remains a niggling trace of disappointment as the stage is never hers, her fulfilment never self-generated.
Ghenoa Gela, Happy as Larry, Shaun Parker & Company
photo Prudence Upton
Ghenoa Gela, Happy as Larry, Shaun Parker & Company
It is this democratisation of what could otherwise easily be a fascist insistence on unity of experience that guides Happy as Larry safely out of dangerous waters or sparking a riot in the audience. The rotation of interacting, interfering characters opens up a space for identification. While Parker spends too long hitting a single emotional note, thus provoking some boredom, he also repeatedly manages to bring us back by creating a fresh image of a kind of joy we have previously not considered—such as Cross’ deep, rich euphoria expressed through forceful sliding across the stage, leaving powerful and inarticulate daubs of chalk on the board, a possible representation of artistic creation. Moments of such recognition are powerful if infrequent, and it does make one wonder about how little time we spend thinking about what makes us happy, and how much worrying about what worries us.
The choreography and the technique are beautiful, and this is to a large extent a dance to enjoy for the variety of dancing bodies and styles. However, the dramaturgy is held together more by the rotating slab and the excellent soundtrack (available on iTunes, no less!) than by any sound sense of purpose. What backbone there is is provided by a recurring attempt to illustrate the fleetingness of happiness—from trying to draw a square around a balletic swirl to the ever-growing ridiculous chalk diagrams of Marnie Palomares’ limbs. Like Luke George’s excellent NOW NOW NOW (see p16), Happy as Larry allows the pursuits of the present moment to resolve in absurdity. Now is only ever now, and the detritus of these moments is not happiness itself, any more than the collection of props in a gallery could ever be a decent substitute for Marina Abramovic.
After many false endings, the final scene turns unexpectedly bleak: the choreography resolves into unison repetition of movements one could expect from football hooligans—raised fists, chest banging, machine-gun mime. This is repetition for its own sake, dark and not at all joyful, the very image of the death drive. Is this what happens when we try to retrieve irrecuperable happiness? There is not enough solid dramaturgy to know for sure. One by one the dancers leave the stage, leaving Dean Cross entangled in the balloons, themselves detritus from the beginning of the show which, I forgot to mention, involved a sequence of very simple stage trickery. Light switches drawn on the blackboard ‘operated’ stage lights and a flock of balloons was summoned with a snap of fingers. Happiness seemed a very simple thing at that time.
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Dance Massive: Shaun Parker, Happy as Larry, director/choreographer Shaun Parker, dramaturg Veronica Neave, musical director Nick Wales, composers Nick Wales, Bree van Reyk, production design Adam Gardnir, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 22, 23; www.dancemassive.com.au
ITALIAN CHOREOGRAPHER JACOPO GODANI IS CURRENTLY IN SYDNEY TO CHOREOGRAPH A NEW WORK, RAW MODELS, FOR THE SYDNEY DANCE COMPANY. THE PIECE FORMS ONE HALF OF A DOUBLE BILL, SHARED FREQUENCIES, THE OTHER HALF BEING RAFAEL BONACHELA’S LANDFORMS. ERIN BRANNIGAN SPOKE WITH GODANI IN THE MIDST OF HIS PREPARATIONS.
I’m very interested in the overall approach you take to the choreography, the lighting and the design, your authorship over the entire work. You studied Fine Arts and Dance. Were you doing these at the same time?
I was in Italy and, yes, I did start dancing on a very quiet level in the last two years of my studies in Fine Art, but then I finally managed to go to the Maurice Béjart School and I could slow down with the fine arts to dedicate more time to dance. I started [dance] really late so I had to work all day, every day.
It was straight out of that that you set up your own company in 1990?
A couple of years later. I went to work with a small contemporary dance group in Paris for one year and then eight months back in Belgium with a new group that was a bit post-Béjart. And in that group I asked if I could do a work, which went well and we went on tour with it. And then a director of a theatre in Brussels saw it and offered me a residency…
That was an exciting time in Brussels with artists like De Keersmaeker, Vandekeybus and Alain Platel emerging and experimenting in collective environments.
It was fantastic…Money for culture, support and, most of all, curiosity. They were not creating a market or an economy. I don’t think they were making money but, culturally I mean, they were one of the most important movements in Europe in those years.
The Rosas School (P.A.R.T.S) that came out of that moment—where an artist was able to set up a training institution—was very idealistic and follows De Keersmaeker’s particular vision. For that to happen now, here…
Impossible. I work with a lot of companies in Europe. A lot of people ask me, “Why don’t you have your own company?” I would love to but right now with the frequency of work I have and the intensity…I do everything myself—lights, costumes, staging and choreography. And I am participating in the creation of the music and sometimes I do video design as well. When you’re a professional artist, you know how to deal with many fields. You don’t need 20 years company formation for everything you do. But right now, if I were to think about which country to set up a base to ask for an amount of money to carry on a philosophy with a group of dancers, I wouldn’t know where to do that.
So you don’t have any of the responsibility of having to raise funds or be responsible for a company of dancers. And the benefit outweighs the fact that you’re starting afresh with virtually a new company each time? Or are you invited into companies where you know what you’re dealing with to a certain extent?
I’m invited into companies regularly but you know how it is, dancers come and go all the time, especially in big companies. And dancers have other experiences and forget about what they have gone through with you. So you have to restart anyway. In that way, it’s a bit frustrating.
I don’t know how many of the dancers can tell you having worked with Jacopo has been an important experience or not. I think within the context of the limited time we have together, I challenge them a lot really. It’s quite an interesting ‘weapon’ to work with, dance, first of all because of the openness there is to receiving information. The dancer is really one of the most dedicated interpreters in the art world. In this way you can influence—in a very positive way—people’s way of seeing things. And this doesn’t only involve ideas. It involves mental mechanics. Because of the bodily involvement I think this goes much deeper, much further than just simply experiencing something that opens your mind.
Jacopo Godani (R) rehearsing with SDC Dancers
photo Peter Greig
Jacopo Godani (R) rehearsing with SDC Dancers
This idea that there’s a much closer link between thinking and the body, this is something you must have found in working with William Forsythe who really requires dancers who are very engaged and independent. How was that time?
It was absolutely amazing. I still dream about it and I left in 2000 so it’s 11 years now.
You were with him for ten years.
When you find a company like his, you don’t go somewhere else! It was the best of the best. There was everything there from avant-garde classical dancing to, the next day, singing in a parody of a musical and then, next day [undertaking] research into wearing sneakers and developing improvisational skills. It was incredible what Bill achieved. Utopian probably. He managed to have a group of 40 people in an opera house where basically there was only space for big stuff and ‘entertaining’ things. But his genius was to be able to make big shows with avant-garde ideas at the same time.
And his dancers … intelligent, definitely, but also very spontaneous because Bill had no parameters. That’s where I learned somehow that we could be free.
At that time the common logic was to shape yourself in circles and lines and angles and go from one to the other, as the step requires. Bill was revolutionary because he made people move like animals, like human beings. Nobody moved like human beings at that time, no matter what contemporary dance style you were looking at. It was about ‘artificialising’ yourself. Bill started to use the body and make it look like a body even though it was dancing classical [ballet]. It was amazing when you saw that.
I was looking at the small video clips online from your works Anomaly 1 (2008) and Spazio-Tempo (2010). There are really quick shifts between still, sculptural moments and really frenetic work.
When you choreograph you can easily be absorbed by looking into mechanics and shapes. And then you let yourself go and you think, “Wow it’s gorgeous!” And I’m so tired of myself. I don’t want to fall into this trap. So now I’m trying to create a type of musicality that is not logical to the brain. I want to get out of a traditional way of seeing beauty and lyricism. I’m sick and tired of doing something like “Lift her and she curls and…Gorgeous!” The dance has to be made because there is an intellectual, physical, mental challenge to produce something creative from dancers’ bodies.
The approach [the dancers] have towards what we are asking is really important. For me there is no creative effort or engagement in [simply] reproducing something correctly. I put [the dancers] in front of the mirror and say, “Do it, look, what do you think? I’m not teaching you this. This is your job. You have to be able to take care of it yourself.”
Let’s talk about Raw Models, your work for Sydney Dance Company. What’s this new work and how does it fit into what you’ve been doing lately?
It fits because I have managed to find a way of moving on even though I’m guest choreographing. I just go from company to company bringing the ‘baggage’ of what I do before. [For instance], I do a small piece of 20 minutes and then I redo it to 45 minutes or something like that. I have four or five weeks here, which is a bit limited unfortunately, so I use the tools that I have access to.
Rafael Bonachela is one of the most important people I’ve met in many years. He’s very alive. We have a very similar energy. We’re very curious. We also like all that there is around the basic artistic production—the networking, the promotional point of view, the contact, speaking to people, interviews—all these things. A lot of artists I find very reluctant about this side of things.
So apart from the music as a starting point [a commissioned score by German duo 48nord], what is this choreographic ‘baggage’ that you’re bringing from your last gig?
I want to create a certain allure around this piece, which is not pretty, lyrical and pleasing. I like the fleshiness and the aggressiveness of humankind and the nature of us as animals. So I’m trying to develop a sort of physicality that is very rough and very eloquent at the same time, by assembling bits of information of all kinds. I’m not trying to make a collage of styles because that’s crap as a concept. I’m trying to develop a piece that has a sort of alien, animalistic universe.
The research that I do choreographically is also structural. I’m also trying to think about light and height at the same time. It’s about the perception of volume. It’s about how to light the space in order to expand it and shrink it and bring it forward and back, [to highlight] all that is involved in a three-dimensional stage space…trying to find a type of light that helps people perceive this.
Sydney Dance Company, Shared Frequencies: Raw Models, choreographer
Jacopo Godani, composers 48nord; Landforms, choreographer Rafael Bonachela, composer Ezio Bosso; lighting designer Mark Dyson, sound designer Adam Luston; Sydney Theatre, March 29-April 16; www.sydneydancecompany.com
IN A PROGRAMMING COUP FOR THE 2011 FESTIVAL OF GERMAN FILM, THE GOETHE-INSTITUTE AUSTRALIA, SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE AND HOPSCOTCH FILMS HAVE SECURED THE AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE SCREENING OF WIM WENDERS' PINA, A 3-D FEATURE-LENGTH FILM TRIBUTE TO THE DANCE THEATRE REVOLUTIONARY, PINA BAUSCH, WHO DIED IN 2009. THE FILM'S WORLD PREMIERE WAS AT THIS YEAR'S BERLIN BERLINALE.
After being trained by Kurt Joos at the multidisciplinary Folkwang Hochschule and subsequently performing with major international choreographers, in 1973 Bausch was appointed, by Joos, as head of the Wuppertal Ballet, which she renamed Tanztheater Wuppertal, initiating both the revolutionary dance theatre phenomenon and the company she led until her death. The term tanztheater had originated with Rudolf Laban in the 1920s to express a desire to escape from the technicalities of dance into a greater range of expression: it was Bausch who fulfilled this vision, extending the possibilities of dance and embracing performative means outside of it.
Wim Wenders, Pina
For many of us whose first encounter with Bausch's mysterious works was at the 1982 Adelaide Festival, the profound experience of Kontakthof, Blue Beard and 1980 remains indelibly felt in body and mind—our recall confirmed by photographer William Yang's acutely empathetic documentation and the host of video material now found in online tributes. Wim Wenders, on September 4, 2009 at a memorial service for Bausch aptly said of her, “She showed us [a] way to overcome our fears and to not feel imprisoned in our bodies any more.”
Bausch's works often made enormous demands on dancers and audiences alike. They were performances informed by dance but not always danced, painfully compulsive in their repetitiveness and in their sustained images of cruelty, panic and passion. The unreal worlds they conjured seemed astonishingly real and increasing familiar as each Bausch reverie endured into timelessness and we grew to know the faces, bodies and moods of people who seemed to become more than performers.
Bausch's best works were nothing less than sublime—fearfully beautiful, intensely visceral, lyrical, alarmingly unpredictable, turning from anger and cruelty to compassion and communality with an inherent strangeness that eschewed sentimentality and story-telling comforts.
But Bausch wasn't alone in the 1970s and 80s as a radical artist: like her compatriots Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders (born 1945, Bausch 1940) and Botho Strauss—and in other ways, the hyper-story-teller Rainer Werner Fassbinder—she conjured strange worlds that didn't reflect so much as wilfully distort our own, giving them back to us anew.
Wim Wenders, Pina
Wim Wenders is now best known as a documentary filmmaker but his early feature films, like The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty (1971, with co-writer Peter Handke), Alice in the Cities (1973), Kings of the Road (1976), The American Friend (1977), The State of Things (1982) and Wings of Desire (1987) are, like Bausch's works, the immersive creations of a laterally-minded, utterly distinctive and innovative artist.
Wenders was working with Bausch on the film when she died. Shot in the streets of the industrial city of Wuppertal (where Bausch worked and lived for 35 years) with members of her company, the film also includes especially recorded performances of some of the choreographer’s best known works: Café Müller, Le Sacre Du Printemps, Vollmond and Kontakthof.
Wim Wenders' website includes a Pina trailer and a 24-minute interview with the filmmaker. You'll find even more about the film and Pina Bausch at the pina-film website.
The one-off festival screening in 3D in the presence of director Wim Wenders (with Q&A) shows only in Sydney. Doubtless a cinema season will follow—but when? Catch it now, even if you've never seen a Pina Bausch work.
In the last In the Loop, we mentioned the exhibition Afterglow: Performance Art and Photography, which got us thinking—we haven’t featured photography in a while. So this week’s In the Loop highlights what’s happening in the world of contemporary photographic practices.
Jon Rhodes,
Hobart, Tasmania, 1972-75
from the album Australia
1 of 53 gelatin silver photographs, 11.9 x 17.7 cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales. Purchased 1980
Jon Rhodes
Jon Rhodes,
Hobart, Tasmania, 1972-75
from the album Australia
1 of 53 gelatin silver photographs, 11.9 x 17.7 cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales. Purchased 1980
place, space and the image
The Art Gallery of New South Wales has just opened its exhibition Photography & Place: Australian Landscape Photography 1970s Until Now. The show presents the work of 18 artists, including Jon Rhodes and a few RealTime regulars such as Rosemary Laing (RT58 and RT85), Simryn Gill (RT42), Ricky Maynard (2009) and the much-missed Michael Riley (featured in RT50 and reviewed in RT76 and RT77).Their work, according to the press release, “encompasses ideas of place in relation to historical residue, ethnicity, the interface between people and nature, the sublime, as well as the road and the journey in Australian landscape mythologies.” There is also an accompanying film program, featuring classics such as Wake in Fright (1971), Roadgames (1981), Broken Highway (1993) and Beneath Clouds (2002, see RT48), as well as a symposium—the first in a new annual series dedicated to photography. Photography & Place: Australian Landscape Photography 1970s Until Now, AGNSW, March 16-May 29; www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au
two kinds of tours
Elsewhere in Sydney, the MCA has just extended the touring exhibition Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life 1990–2005. If you haven’t already seen it, the show brings together almost 200 iconic images of famous public figures together with personal photographs of Leibovitz’s family and close friends. The images are arranged chronologically, rather than thematically, allowing for a “unified narrative of the artist’s private life [to emerge] against the backdrop of her public image” (press release). The MCA is also co-presenting, with Hurstville City Council, Angelica Mesiti’s The Begin-Again: A Contemporary Art Tour At Night as part of C3West (RT84). Presented over two nights, the work is billed as a “showcase of local stories” and features four large-scaled video installations and a live performance in Hurstville’s laneways and shopping centre (press release). Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life 1990–2005, until April 26; The Begin-Again: A Contemporary Art Tour at Night, April 1-2; www.mca.com.au
Miss Alesandra, 2010 digital print
photo Jacqueline Mitelman
Miss Alesandra, 2010 digital print
national photographic portrait prize 2011
Community involvement is also a key part of the annual National Photographic Portrait Prize, which anyone can enter. The finalists are currently on display at the National Portrait Gallery, with their images depicting birth (see Dean McCartney’s highly commended image of his minutes-old son), death (see Donna Gibbons’ image of her father on his death bed), and almost everything in between (childhood, adolescence, parenthood etc). The winning image is Jacquline Mitelman’s portrait of Suzi Alesandra, whom Mitelman has been photographing for over 25 years. Strangely enough, Alesandra bears more than a passing resemblance to that great theorist of photography Susan Sontag as photographed by Leibovitz. The exhibition will be in Canberra until April 26 before it goes on tour to Bunbury, Geraldton, Fremantle and the Yarra Ranges; there’s also an online gallery. National Photographic Portrait Prize, National Portrait Gallery Canberra, February 25-April 26; www.portrait.gov.au
The trees r talkin I, iPhonegraphy
photo Syliva Dardha
The trees r talkin I, iPhonegraphy
iphoneography
Last year the NPG curated Present Tense: An Imagined Grammar of Portraiture in the Digital Age (RT98), but surprisingly there was no mention of iPhoneography, a practice which is becoming increasingly popular. There are now thousands of photography apps for the iPhone, hundreds of blogs dedicated to the subject and more than a few exhibitions too. In Spain last year La Panera Art Centre curated iPhoneografia and in the US, the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art is about to open Pixels: The Art of iPhone Photography. Locally, the West Gippsland Arts Centre is showing Wats On Ur iPhone?, which provides an insight into the “creative world of tiny technology” and features images captured and edited on artist Sylvia Dardha’s iPhone (press release). Wats On Ur iPhone? West Gippsland Arts Centre, March 14-28; www.wgac.org.au
Imogen Cunningham
Subway New York 1956
gelatin silver print
Collection of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film
1956, 2010 The Imogen Cunningham Trust
Imogen Cunningham
Subway New York 1956
gelatin silver print
Collection of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film
the american century
Not to be outdone, another regional gallery is exhibiting American Dreams: 20th Century Photography from George Eastman House. The House, where the founder of Kodak once lived, holds over 400,000 images, of which 80 have loaned to the Bendigo Art Gallery. The images include original works by Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Capa, Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans, Nan Goldin, Dorothea Lange, Man Ray, Cindy Sherman and Alfred Stieglitz, among others. Taken individually, the images are remarkable for their artistry; taken together, they also provide an extraordinary visual history of life in 20th century America. American Dreams: 20th Century Photography from George Eastman House, Bendigo Art Gallery, April 16-July 10; www.bendigoartgallery.com.au
untitled
There are, of course, many other exhibitions on. Fotofreo is having its year off, but the Perth Centre for Photography is currently showing the work of Olivia Martin-McGuire and Mark Penhale. Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography is showing Pat Foster and Jen Berean’s Spencer is Drunk and Ian Haig’s experimental video Chronicles of the New Human Organism. The Australian Centre for Photography is exhibiting Crossroads: Contemporary Russian Photography as well as the work of Ray Cook and Sean O’Carroll. And for the voyeur in us all, the Justice & Police Museum is showing Collision: Misadventures by Motor Car, featuring police photographs of traffic accidents from the early 1920s to the mid-1960s. Olivia Martin-McGuire, The Sleepers, Mark Penhale, Shadows, Perth Centre for Photography, March 18-April 10, www.pcp.org.au; Pat Foster and Jen Berean, Spencer Is Drunk: Progressive Studies, Ian Haig, Chronicles of the New Human Organism, Centre for Contemporary Photography, April 15-June 4, www.ccp.org.au; Crossroads: Contemporary Russian Photography, March 18-April 30, Ray Cook: Money Up Front and No Kissing, Sean O’Carroll, Interspection, both March 18-April 17, the Australian Centre for Photography, www.acp.org.au; Collision: Misadventures By Motor Car, Justice & Police Museum, March 19-Dec 31, www.hht.net.au
Kristy Ayre, Luke George, Timothy Harvey, audience participant, NOW NOW NOW
photo Jeff Busby
Kristy Ayre, Luke George, Timothy Harvey, audience participant, NOW NOW NOW
HERE AT DANCE MASSIVE, IMPROVISATION IS VERY MUCH ON THE AGENDA AND RESPONSES—LIKE THE QUALITY OF IMPROVISATORY PERFORMANCES OVER A SEASON—ARE WILDLY DIVERGENT. LINES ARE BEING DRAWN. WE’VE NOW SEEN THREE WORKS THAT DEAL WITH THE PROCESS IN DIFFERENT WAYS. IN NO ONE WILL TELL US…, ROSALIND CRISP IN COLLABORATION WITH HANSUELI TISCHHAUSER AND ANDREW MORRISH SHOWS US A BODY SO FINELY TUNED TO SENSATION AND ITS OWN HISTORY THAT ITS MOVEMENT IS LIKE MUSIC, LEAVING US TO VENTURE OUR OWN READINGS. THE FOUR PERFORMERS IN SHAUN MCLEOD’S THE WEIGHT OF THE THING LEFT ITS MARK INTRIGUINGLY PRACTICE ‘PURE’ IMPROVISATION WHILE NEGOTIATING PARTIALLY CHOREOGRAPHED PATHWAYS.
In Luke George’s NOW NOW NOW, we are invited to enter the moment as three improvising performers attempt to pin it down.
White. We remove our shoes to walk the soft, white felted corridor. The fabric extends into the theatre, even to our seats. Above us light is filtered through white Japanese paper. On all sides the white room is bounded by black.
The scene invites concentration. The purity of the setting also highlights the physical presence of the three performers—Luke George, Kristy Ayre and Timothy Harvey.
Costume. In the case of Luke George, this involves a change from his childlike mismatch (yellow shorts, a plastic breast plate, a string of beads dangling a small turtle, and an Indian feather headdress) to track pants and top. The others also change into primary colours until eventually all are in the uniform attire of your average dance ensemble. Not that this is your average dance ensemble.
Warm-up. Lined up, they shout a list of OW words to clear their heads: “Now, cow, vow, bow, chow…” The bland listing becomes warbling chorale.
Research. They move lazily to one corner to gaze at a silent video invisible to the audience. From time to time they pick up on particular movements and mirror them, sometimes together, sometimes apart. We fill in the gaps with imagined dancing. One moment I see a line of men in tails and top hats. They’re gone. Later the trio will utter disjointed phrases seemingly read from the monitor, including:
“I feel I’ve had some funny episodes.”
“I will absolutely indulge that.”
“The most amazing dancer of all time.”
These words and others are repeated and redistributed until they almost become a weirdly naturalistic conversation.
I note we must be 15 minutes in and still in full light.
Luke George, Kristy Ayre, Timothy Harvey, NOW NOW NOW
photo Jeff Busby
Luke George, Kristy Ayre, Timothy Harvey, NOW NOW NOW
Effort. The dancers perform a feat of endurance, jumping and kicking until the sweat streams. They move through awkward, frenetic and apparently unmotivated movements. This is some other kind of dance. I stop taking notes.
Long, utter, emptying blackout.
Interaction. Timothy Harvey approaches an audience member, offers her a set of headphones and an iPod relaying her instructions. She enters the space and for the next five minutes or so becomes a fascinating part of the action, performing small gestures, uttering words, snippets of song—a line from “Singin’ in the Rain.” The others pay her no special attention. She is simply there, part of the scene. Eventually she announces: “A special event!” then leaves. Nothing much happens. Perfect.
Another list. Shouted snatches of sentences. Indolent action followed by wild eruptions suggesting anger or pain, all inflected and articulated with dance moves, all short-lived till someone says, “Enough!”
Sequence in wigs. Synchronised dancing to disco music distracts momentarily from the otherwise engrossing unfamiliarity of the work.
Funny moments. Who said existentialism needed to be angst-ridden? The three appear to be suddenly aware of their surroundings, finding everything surprising or scary.
“Drapes! Drapes!” shouts one as if suddenly shocked by the curtains that frame the space. “Black!” yells another. Luke George is startled to find himself eyeballing the audience. “Downstage!” he gasps “Downstage!” as if crying for help. “Retreating, retreating,” he signals. The others take refuge in geometry, shouting “Triangle!” until George registers and finds safety again in the dancerly threesome.
They stare at us, until the moment when Kristy Ayre says “thank you.”
Applause. Something like an hour has passed.
Watching NOW NOW NOW feels like something new, though not altogether. In the improvisation stakes, it’s about the impetus, the ‘energy’ and whether the impulse hits home, rebounding in a form such that a large enough proportion of the audience can share or interpret it. What is that elusive thing we feel we know when we see it? In NOW NOW NOW, the sense of the live presence is palpable if using a meta-theatre aesthetic for its seduction. In its careful choice of expressive means, there seems more than a hint of possibility. Will it lead to what Helen Herbertson has hoped for, “a kind of re-flowering of really specific, detailed physical language” (quoted in Erin Brannigan’s Platform Paper, Moving Across Disciplines, Currency House, 2011)? On a path shared with Rosalind Crisp’s very different No one will tell us…, NOW NOW NOW takes some big steps in the right direction.
See also realtime’s video interview with Luke George.
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NOW NOW NOW, choreographer Luke George, performers Kristy Ayre, Timothy Harvey, Luke George, design, production Benjamin Cisterne, dramaturg Martyn Coutts, Music Glass Candy. NOW NOW NOW was originally commissioned by Lucy Guerin Inc; www.dancemassive.com.au
BRANCH NEBULA’S SWEAT IS CONCERNED WITH TURNING OUR ATTENTION TO THE INVISIBLE MEMBERS OF SOCIETY—THE ONES WHO PULL BACK OUR CHAIRS, SWEEP UP OUR DEAD SKIN, WIPE AWAY OUR SKIDMARKS AND COLLECT OUR CAFETERIA TRAYS. COINCIDENTALLY, CHUNKY MOVE’S CONNECTED TOUCHES ON SIMILAR GROUND WITH ITS DIP INTO THE WORLD OF SECURITY GUARDS, BUT SWEAT TACKLES THE BRIEF FAR MORE DIRECTLY AND PROVOCATIVELY.
Nevertheless, it starts by turning our attention to our own behaviour. On entering the well-lit vastness of the North Melbourne Town Hall, there is nothing to look at but ourselves as we mingle and coalesce in atolls of strangers and acquaintances. It is the foyer writ large, a continuation of the antespace and yet, Sweat has actually begun. From the gathering comes the sound of a welcome. A young woman, dressed in black with a tray and an apron, steps forward to suggest that we really could have made a better entrée—too noisy, too slow and now we are running late. But punctuality is less important than quality so we are asked to leave and re-enter properly. It is a disempowering experience, like any scolding, which is followed on our second entrance by a pronouncement of the social contract we are entering into.
We are expected to stand and move as instructed, to do so autonomously when required, to empathise with the performers, to view them objectively on occasion, to applaud them at the end until we are told we can stop clapping and to be upbeat about the show afterwards, indeed, to focus on three central messages: [1] that we saw ordinary people doing extraordinary things; [2] that the piece challenged accepted forms but always remained accessible; [3] that it is a work of great importance to the future of Australia.
Claudia Escobar, Sweat, Branch Nebula
photo Heidrun Löhr
Claudia Escobar, Sweat, Branch Nebula
The sheer tongue-in-cheek gall of these clichéd pronouncements produces knowing titters in the audience, delivered as they are with the host-like air of a waiter explaining the evening’s specials. But the tone shifts markedly as our host walks from one audience member to another and asks them first to dress her in the accessories of a cleaner and then to remove her other clothes. At last, semi-naked in rubber gloves and hairnet, she kindly asks a man to force her to the ground. He complies. The shoe of disempowerment is now firmly on the other foot and we have all been implicated.
This simple point of departure is reminiscent of the recent work of performance artists like Georgie Read, who play a consciously mercurial game of push-pull with the audience’s affection. Throughout Sweat, the performers invite our attention and the visibility it affords with flirtatious glances, sweetness and displays of skill. But they can just as quickly disappear into the resentful distance, punish us or deride our presence. This dynamic with the audience enacts the same power hierarchies that are being represented, where the performers are ordered to clean the floor with their hair, threatened with violence and abused in Spanish, all in the course of a few minutes.
Sweat constantly shifts in its use of space, employing an ingenious collection of mobile light sources to carve out discrete landscapes. And the audience, as instructed, moves about to stay in contact with what is happening. As an aesthetic policy it is interesting—forcing us to engage with different angles, different architectures, rejigging our perspective. On the other hand, the meaning-making of it is sometimes less evident or necessary. When we are asked to choose a corner to stand in and, thereby, a performer to favour, the act of choosing is a potentially loaded act. What are our criteria? Why do we choose a man and not a woman? Why do we look around to see what we are missing? Yet, the subsequent scene feels redundant in its reformulation of previous content and the movement of the performers from corner to corner negates the weight of our choice and elides the kind of interrogation it could provoke.
Ahil Ratnamohan, Sweat, Branch Nebula
photo Heidrun Löhr
Ahil Ratnamohan, Sweat, Branch Nebula
However, this is a quibble with one short moment in the middle of Sweat. In its final set piece it regains most of the traction with which it began. A group of audience members is invited to sit at table where the performers, dressed as sweatshop workers, politely serve them wine, spaghetti, tomato soup, peas, pineapple, frankfurts—the kicker being that these items are ladled very carefully into completely inappropriate places. The end result is part Grand Bouffe, part Abstract Expressionism. The smiling ceremonial quality of the rebellion is so disarming and so cleverly worked in with our own understandings of theatre etiquette that the audience victims are left laughing rather than humiliated. The humour relies also on our empathy with the performers who, in becoming so clearly and endearingly visible, make mockery of the established codes of service and their concordant entitlements and disenfranchisements. The performers leave the space with gusto, with an animalistic exuberance. At last, they have been seen.
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Dance Massive: Branch Nebula, Sweat, co-creators Lee Wilson, Mirabelle Wouters, performers, devisors, choreographers Claudia Escobar, Erwin Fenis, Ali Kadhim, Ahilan Ratnamohan, Angela Goh, noisician/live sound Hirofumi Uchino, dramaturg John Baylis, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 18,19; www.dancemassive.com.au
MICHELLE HEAVEN’S DISAGREEABLE OBJECT IS IMMEDIATELY REMINISCENT OF ONE OF THE ENIGMATIC SCENARIOS OF GOTHIC NEW YORK ARTIST AND BALLETOMANE EDWARD GOREY (SEE THE GILDED BAT, THE CURIOUS SOFA). AT TURNS WHIMSICAL AND STRANGE, THE PIECE ALSO HAS THE FASCINATION OF A MINIATURE SPECTACLE IN WHICH THE AUDIENCE’S VISION IS UTTERLY PRIMARY.
The action takes place in a narrow space constructed within the Meat Market venue. Inside this small room, tightly packed into a bank of seats, we peer into the gloom, gradually making out a small woman (Michelle Heaven) seated on a tiny chair and eating noisily from a metal dish. She leaves to be replaced on the same chair by a very tall man (Brian Lucas). Both are white faced and wearing black—she bustled, he in tails. Both bear the signs of evil intent in permanently devious expressions. Occasionally, as he falls prey to her poisonous intentions, the deadpan mask of Lucas stretches to a ghastly grimace. They make a striking couple.
For all their Edwardian elegance, there’s something decidedly feral about these two who might be the mad servants living below the stairs. The act of eating is central and happens in greedy grabs. She also appears part mad scientist (what is she dispensing from that tap on the wall we wonder?) threatening at every turn to destroy this claustrophobically symbiotic relationship. He has perfected the art of escape and almost wins out when in one funny and deftly choreographed sequence she attempts to force him to eat an outsized poisoned pea. From here, things escalate in every way!
Michelle Heaven, Disagreeable Object
photo Ben Cobham
Michelle Heaven, Disagreeable Object
The choreography is precise, perfectly tailored to meet the needs of this gothic little tale, which traverses what might be days or decades in just 33 minutes. There are a lot of enigmatic entrances and exits. Occasionally, the pair breaks into odd little angular dance sequences, though ever contained and always returning to their devious personae. Heaven wheels her squeaky mobile serving tray/laboratory trolley in and out, concocting her evil potions in swift little moves. At other times she appears in surprising suspension in the gloomy distance. From here she seems to angle and float as if possessed by some other force. Ben Cobham’s design and lighting plays cleverly with perspective and shadow to elegantly enhance the gothic ambience of the work in surprising ways. At times you wonder if you’re seeing straight. Similarly Bill McDonald’s score reminds us of the manifestations of this genre in melodrama and silent movie.
A disarming and diverting miniature, concluding with a very grand flourish, Disagreeable Object is nonetheless ambitious in scope. Dramaturgically tight, choreographically inventive, imaginative in design and performed by two consummate artists, I for one am grateful for its release from the Dance Massive crypt allowing more of us to experience its particular pleasures (though peas will never be the same). May it continue to see the light.
Elsewhere in the Meat Market, in another semi-retro experience, we don 3D cellophane glasses and enter a darkened booth to experience UK artist Billie Cowie’s Revery Alone, as part of his Stereoscopic showings. On a floor screen, a dancer uncurls from her prone position and reaches upward towards us. The work’s simple trickery still fascinates as we catch the fleeting realism of that elusive entity—the dancer’s gaze.
Disagreeable Object, choreographer, performer Michelle Heaven, collaborator, performer Brian Lucas, collaborator, designer Ben Cobham, composer Bill McDonald, costume design Louise McCarthy, production and operation Bluebottle, Frog Peck, James Russell, Arts House, Meat Market, March 16-19; Billy Cowie, Revery Alone, Stereoscopic, Meat Market, Melbourne, March 16-19; www.dancemassive.com.au
Rosalind Crisp, Hansueli Tischhauser, No one will tell us…
photo Patrick Berger
Rosalind Crisp, Hansueli Tischhauser, No one will tell us…
ROSALIND CRISP’S NO ONE WILL TELL US… IS A VERY STRANGE EXPERIENCE, ONE ALMOST BEYOND DEFINITION AND NOT EASY TO DESCRIBE. AND EVEN IF I DID, THE VERSION OF THE WORK THAT SEDUCED ME WOULD NOT BE THE ONE YOU’D SEE IN ANOTHER PERFORMANCE UNDER THE SAME TITLE.
Rosalind Crisp has been living creatively by a strict improvisational code, central to her long-term project, danse (see realtimedance for details and video excerpts) and best described in words from her website:
“Rosalind’s work is about the body. The body is the subject. The compositional causality of her movement is unpredictable. There is no assumption about what will follow what. Through practice, the dancer is held awake by the imperative of taking or noticing each successive decision as it is made” (www.omeodance.com).
Within the proscenium arch of Dancehouse’s Sylvia Staehli Theatre, Crisp in red silk shirt, slacks and bare feet wanders the stage with movements that epitomise her mission: there are no straight lines or smooth curves, no predictable dance moves. She is stiff legged, leaning back, head directed away from where her feet take her, one leg suddenly moving off with its own momentum, the body in tow, the dancer’s gaze now to the ceiling, now into the wings. There’s also a quick dip at the waist, like a bow, as if to acknowledge us.
I have to resort to analogy. It’s as if Crisp is a child, or autistic, deeply distracted, attentive everywhere but on calculated movement. And because her body is in tight vertical alignment she also appears clown-like, an accident waiting to happen. So when Crisp is propelled aimlessly off-stage, as if lost, the audience giggles, and laughs when she descends the stairs and darts back onstage, as if panicked. (It’s interesting that in a post-show RealTime video interview, Crisp said that before the performance she’d thought about the previous night, how she felt she’d been too close to the other performers and too fast. Tonight she thought she would explore her body’s surfaces and this slowed her in a way she enjoyed.)
Hansueli Tischhauser, Rosalind Crisp, No-one will tell us…
photo Patrick Berger
Hansueli Tischhauser, Rosalind Crisp, No-one will tell us…
Beyond analogy, Crisp’s movement is astonishing in its sheer otherness, the beauty of its constant disconnects and the way it adds up without any overt patterning. Yet it is deeply informed by the history of dance and Crisp’s body of work—an inherent dancerliness is evinced in sudden, precise extensions, fluent turns and spins, deep swoops, elegant articulation of limbs and hands, but with the commas and conjunctions eliminated, the standard syntax of dance erased. It’s magical. It’s years since I’ve seen Crisp perform. I admired her vision then. Now I witness its embodiment more acutely and affectingly realised. But that’s just the beginning.
In the video interview, a smiling Crisp identified No one will tell us… as the “bad cousin” or “dark side” of the danse project. It’s the outcome of inviting some other virtuosi to perform with her: improviser Andrew Morrish and guitarist Hansueli Tischhauser. The latter stands on the floor below the stage with his guitar and a range of foot pedals that allow him, among other things, to lay down long rhythmic pulsings against which he can improvise moods or melodies, working with Crisp, or pushing her in new directions once she’s joined him on the floor. He conjures up a driving march and suddenly Crisp opens out, big steps, arms flung wide. Tischhauser is no mere accompanist: sometimes he’s comically the archetypal rock guitarist, sometimes he’s physically in sync with Crisp, duplicating aspects of her movement.
Andrew Morrish comes and goes, a kind of host, silver-suited, mercurial, finding space between guitar phrases to inform us that he has no narrative to offer, no explanation for the show (“I’m like you”), but happily riffs on the tale of a pair of children who always play and never speak (“they’re not like us— children,” “they have appetites, we have preferences”). He’ll return to this later (“This is not a love story”). And he’ll do his own idiosyncratic solo dancing prior to a collective performativity invades the trio. There’s an odd aptness to Morrish’s chosen theme, countering the innocence of Crisp’s first appearance and the subsequent playfulness between her and the guitarist. The children in Morrish’s spare tale eventually run away rather than be forced to speak, are caught and “pretend to be normal”: “They were surviving.”
As No one will tell us… unfolds Crisp appears to transform, struggling as if from a chrysalis into a new being, looser, faster, lyrical—but in no ordinary sense and as unpredictable as ever. Big moves, strides, surges, elicit sharp breaths and gasps from the dancer are buried in the guitar’s roar but fully felt in the silence that follows, the body revealing its own rather than the music’s momentum. The later dancing is larger, sensual and finally riotously funny without ever losing Crisp’s determined and beautifully realised purpose.
No one will tell us… is, however, unusually theatrical for a Rosalind Crisp work. Partly it’s a given with the mix of talents, with Crisp’s search for another way to address her danse project vision; but it’s also inherent in the exploitation of the theatre’s spaces via the distribution of movement and the excellent lighting that also has a life of its own. At times the guitarist is foregrounded, Crisp in the dim distance, insisting on another perspective on the dance; at others the light establishes a space, as if to say, use me. The theatricality is also embedded in the consistent good-humour of the performances, doubtless a variable, but strongly felt on this night, lending the work a particular coherence while not undercutting the seriousness of the larger flights of dance and music.
No one will tell us (the artists) what to do, (the audience) what it means, (anyone) what it is. Well, it’s dance, dance theatre even, like never before.
Dance Massive: No one will tell us… choreographer, performer Rosalind Crisp, Andrew Morrish live music Hansueli Tischhauser, lighting, technical director Marco Wehrspann; Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 15-17; www.dancemassive.com.au
PLENITUDE IS A GOOD WORD TO DESCRIBE NARELLE BENJAMIN’S IN GLASS—NOT IN THE SENSE OF ABUNDANCE, PERHAPS NOT, BUT CERTAINLY IN THE SENSE OF AMASSING, OF MULTIPLIED SAMENESS. THE GORGEOUS, PRECISE BODIES OF KRISTINA CHAN AND PAUL WHITE ARE QUITE ABLE TO COMMAND THE STAGE IN SINGULAR, BUT IN GLASS MULTIPLIES THEM THROUGH GENTLY ANGLED MIRRORS, FILM AND INTERPLAY OF LIGHT AND SHADOW—MAKING AS MANY AS SIX OF THE SAME DANCING COUPLE AT ONCE.
They mirror each other, too, sometimes in perfect synchronicity, sometimes with a calculated lag; then they split into duets with a recognisable male-female dynamic. This shifting between synchronicity and sensual dialogue evokes intriguing parallels with psychoanalytical thought, as the two dancers seem to achieve a completion of sorts in paralleling each other’s movements: through learning to imitate and respond to each other they seem to grow conscious of themselves, each other, the world, their relationship. Without going too deeply into Lacanian psychoanalysis, the notion of the mirror stage, in which reflection of one’s self allows self-conscience to emerge, is a notion dear to all performance—recurring in theories of performativity from Judith Butler among others. For a while there, the multitude of reflecting Chans and Whites exists without leader or follower: a perfect tribe of dancers, an image of primordial unity. There is some logic to this interpretation: the mirror stage is but a moment in our lives, and irretrievable—and Chan and White spend the later, larger part of In Glass out of sync, seeking each other. If the mirror starts as a vehicle for happy unison of the many, it soon turns into a visual maze, a passage through a glass, darkly.
Much of the dramaturgical responsibility in In Glass rests on Samuel James’ visual design, which adds a layer of video to the already complex reflecting images. Through the projections, the mirrors shatter, dancers’ limbs multiply into insectoid, almost abstract arabesques and a forest landscape engulfs Chan’s and White’s bodies as they slip behind glass. Chan, a comparatively small woman, repeatedly wanders off into the forest, as bare-footed and lost as that child in McCubbin’s painting. When she reappears on stage, she is prostrate, asleep, as if she had been spirited away without any agency of her own. In these moments In Glass appears to tell a story of star-crossed lovers, or even (to remain psychoanalytical) of that impossible thing we seek in everyone we fall in love with—the faint memory of our pre-conscious unity with the world. The repetition of loss, search and encounter echoes itself in slight inflections, as reclamation of lost ground, which never turns out to be quite the same.
Benjamin’s choreography reaches its apex with the introduction of two smaller, oval mirrors, which allow the dancers to multiply only some of their body parts, and merge into fabulous beasts. Paul White becomes a three-headed Narcissus (or Cerberus), licking and kissing his own reflection. The moment is exquisite: as the light from the mirrors scans through the audience, occasionally blinding us, we are brought into the same space as White, now as sublime as a psychotic monster. Kristina Chan’s transformation into a many-limbed Hindu deity is equally captivating: White stands behind her with the mirrors, multiplying her arms. Both dancers reflect and multiply in the larger mirrors behind them, forming a gigantic pastiche of human matter, not unlike an organic Rorschach blot. In these moments, what has so far been their internal quest grows larger, universal, archetypal. The performers could be gods or animals.
However, such moments of confronting strangeness are too rare. For the most part, In Glass insists on a certain mellow beauty which, however satisfying on a purely aesthetic level, keeps its tone too even, too centred, to build a genuinely satisfactory dramatic arc. The beauty of individual scenes is undeniable; the purpose or intent of the entire endeavour much harder to ascertain—video and choreography become sequential eye candy, creating the pleasant effect of dance wallpaper.
I am reminded of early 20th-century dance, its insistence on harmony and pure expression of the body, and, even more, of Gertrude Stein’s ‘landscape plays.’ All of Stein’s principles—the interest in reaching the unconscious, the continuous dramatic present, the play that one can contemplate as one would a park or a landscape, the seeming homogeneity of content which, actually, goes through subtle variations and loops—are present in In Glass. Stein eliminated the dramatic narrative on purpose, proclaiming that it always made her terribly nervous. In Glass comes with no such manifesto, but it does seem to be trying to create a landscape of its own sort. And it succeeds: even if we are not sure what it was saying, we do believe we have heard it say something.
The greatest part of the experience of any dance work is retrospective, the memory of a body at a constant vanishing point. As such, it is hard in a review that follows so closely after the event to say with certainty what this experience was. Perhaps that three-headed Narcissus will crystallise into an indelible image in a week’s time? It is too early to tell.
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2011 Dance Massive: In Glass, choreographer Narelle Benjamin, dancers Kristina Chan, Paul White, composer Huey Benjamin, visual design Samuel James, costumes Tess Schofield, lighting Karen Norris, Beckett Theatre, Malthouse, Melbourne, March 15-20; www.dancemassive.com.au
Harriet Ritchie, Stephanie Lake, Marnie Palomares, Alisdair Macindoe, Joseph Simon, Connected, Chunky Move
photo Jeff Busby
Harriet Ritchie, Stephanie Lake, Marnie Palomares, Alisdair Macindoe, Joseph Simon, Connected, Chunky Move
GGIDEON OBARZANEK’S CONNECTED COMMENCES WITH CONTEMPLATION AND A BLOW. IF WE WEREN’T SEATED, WE COULD BE IN AN ART GALLERY, GAZING UP AT A HUGE SCULPTURE THRUSTING TOWARDS THE CEILING OF THE MERLYN THEATRE. IT’S A MACHINE OF SOME KIND. WE PONDER ITS PECULIAR TIMBER AND STRING BEAUTY. WE ITCH TO SEE IT ACTIVATED. ONE PERFORMER APPEARS TO BE COMPLETING IT—MAKING CONNECTIONS. ANOTHER TWO PERFORMERS STAND SIDE BY SIDE; A BURST OF SOUND AND ONE IS FLUNG SIDEWAYS ACROSS THE STAGE. CONNECTIONS ARE MADE: DEVICE-BODY, SOUND-BODY, GALLERY-THEATRE, ART-WORK. THESE WILL MERGE AND ACCUMULATE IN A GROWING WEB OF ASSOCIATIONS.
A circular component of the sculpture suggests a spinning wheel and the adjacent threaded frame a loom, from which dozens of strings rise tautly to a tilted rectangular grid high above us. From there, these myriad lines descend to waist height where they are intricately linked by one or, later, more performers into another grid. This is quiet work, construction; not dance, but patterned labour.
Simultaneously, intriguing human connections are being formed—ricochets from that initial sonic blow or waves coursing from one dancing body to the next. These are forceful and unstable; appearing to spring almost involuntarily from one part of a dancer’s anatomy and rippling out into the whole and beyond into other bodies. In one passage the movement is near slow motion, evincing a kind of brutality underlined by the propulsive power of the music; in another, bodies jerk with staccato suddenness. Duos and trios appear enmeshed in the fine lines of unseen forces, like puppets on strings for all their dynamic attentiveness to each other’s transformations, evoking the imponderables of cause and effect or Chaos Theory’s maximisation of small impulses into major moves. (Sculptor Reuben Margolin reveals his fascination with waves in an interview with John Bailey and Gideon Obarzanek, in a video interview with Keith Gallasch, reflects on causality in Connections). The dancing is fascinating; I yearn to experience again its shock waves and deregulated fluency.
Work on the sculpture is complete—fine white, identical, magnetised paper shards link all the strings. The new grid is neatly horizontal. Four dancers are harnessed to the strings that emanate from the ‘loom’ and are hooked to the backs of costumes. With the pushing that pulls, the performers collectively lean forward and with great effort and concentration slowly hoist the grid high and then lower it, the mass of strings quivering with each exertion and machine stress. But it’s not mass effort that reveals the sculpture’s beauty or its subtleties. That labour is allocated to one dancer (Alisdair Macindoe) by another (Marnie Palomares) affixing all the connecting lines to his body, so that when he leans into his work he momentarily appears like a participant in an ancient Indian ritual or a performance artist whose skin has been pierced with hooks to which some great physical and spiritual burden applies. Here, astonishingly, when Palomares makes slight adjustments to Macindoe’s bearing—the angling of a shoulder, the turn of the head—it’s these that have the greatest effect on the sculpture, re-shaping the suspended grid into a floating mound or deep hollow, rippling with dancerly fluency. It’s as if, in his near stillness and beyond mere mechanics, the dancer’s spirit has passed into the art machine—such is the nature of puppetry. if here a radical inversion of the usual scale of the art.
When Palomares stands beneath the lowering grid, she faces up until it reaches her lips for a kiss between human and machine and secondarily its operator in an oddly romantic moment (Macindoe’s attention is not on Palomares but on the work effort—though he does vibrate reciprocally). However oblique the connection between the two the kiss suggests the intrinsic humanity in artistic creation—this sculpture is no mere object.
But in a sudden and surprising shift of focus, the dancer is unharnessed, the sculpture’s wheel is electrically activated and the artwork makes its own moves. It becomes, in effect, a stand-alone installation guarded by the dancers as a team of suited gallery attendants. We’re in an art gallery: but it’s not about the art. Live voices and voice-overs provide brief verbatim accounts of how people from diverse backgrounds are employed by security companies to become guards in galleries. The art there seems incidental to them, while their sense of isolation and the menial nature of their labour (“You don’t make anything; you just look at people”) is felt in neatly patterned group movement as well as words. However, there’s something in the air. The dancing sculpture and the sublimely soaring music re-shapes and undresses these sad souls, stripping them down to shirts, forming them into exquisite living mandalas, opening and closing like flowers, and finally resting beneath the descending grid with which they become one.
Stephanie Lake, Harriet Ritchie, Joseph Simons, Connected, Chunky Move
photo Jeff Busby
Stephanie Lake, Harriet Ritchie, Joseph Simons, Connected, Chunky Move
This osmotic liberation might seem corny from a distance, merely metaphorical, let alone likely in this instance, but in the moment it had an enveloping romantic logic, resonating with the surprisingly generative disjunctions in the scale of cause and effect witnessed earlier.
Connected is an engrossing creation, intensely and rewardingly collaborative, passionately danced to exacting choreography (in the first section some of Gideon Obarzanek’s best), superbly lit (Benjamin Cisterne makes the sculpture appear self-illuminating) and thrillingly scored (I can’t find the words to do justice to the haunting, compulsive compositions of Robin Fox and Oren Ambachi). Reuben Margolin’s kinetic sculpture alone is reason enough to see Connected. But that’s just the first wave of this labour of love and the work that is art.
Interview with Chunky Move director/choreographer Gideon Obarzanek about his latest work Connected, in collaboration with visual artist Reuben Margolin. Interviewed by Keith Gallasch for RealTime @ Dance Massive 2011, Melbourne, Australia.
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Dance Massive: Chunky Move, Connected, director, choreographer Gideon Obarzanek, sculpture Reuben Margolin, performers Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Harriet Ritchie, Marnie Palomares, Joseph Simons, composers Oren Ambarchi, Robin Fox, lighting Benjamin Cisterne, costumes Anna Cordingley; Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, Melbourne, March 15-20; www.dancemassive.com.au
Connected will appear at Sydney Theatre, May 10-14; chunkymove.com
WHAT A DIFFERENCE CONTEXT MAKES! IN 2008, SUNSTRUCK FELT LIKE A WORK ABOUT THE DROUGHT— THE THICK, ENDLESS, DUSTY THING EVERYWHERE AROUND US ON THIS OLD ROCK OF A COUNTRY. THIS RAINY BUT APOCALYPTIC YEAR, I HEAR SOMEONE ASK IN THE FOYER, PRE-SHOW: “THIS IS NOT ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE, IS IT?” I SENSE FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES FOR AN IMMINENT WAVE OF THEATRE AND DANCE, LEAVING US AWASH WITH DRAWING ROOM DRAMAS IN WHICH THE AID-WORKER DAUGHTER INTRODUCES HER BOYFRIEND, A SURVIVOR FROM A SUBMERGED ATOLL, TO HER CLIMATE SCIENTIST FATHER…BUT SUNSTRUCK IS NONE OF THESE.
One of the great benefits of Dance Massive is that it brings some important dance works that may not have received the attention they deserved to a receptive and curious audience. Having been among the relatively few who saw Sunstruck at the 2008 Melbourne International Arts Festival, it is very rewarding to now see it delight a whole new audience.
Nick Sommerville, Sunstruck
photo Heidrun Löhr
Nick Sommerville, Sunstruck
At the time, I compared it with the paintings of Russell Drysdale, to Camus’ protagonist who kills an Arab, blinded by the sun. The simple geometry of these works was concordant with the simple geometry of Sunstruck: the single source of light, the single circle of chairs for the audience, the black of the two male performers’ clothing. The series of gestures, interlocking (yet seemingly independent) movements that the two performers engage in—the youthfully strong, mannish Nick Sommerville and the older, fluid, catlike Trevor Patrick—build to create a universe of silent masculinity, in which one can only self-express whilst blinded by the sun. At the same time, the heat, the absence of rain, as much as it delivers them into ecstatic abandonment, also appears to strike them down. Or is this just a beginning of something new?
Nick Sommerville and Trevor Patrick, Sunstruck
photo Heidrun Löhr
Nick Sommerville and Trevor Patrick, Sunstruck
In 2008, I saw a personal journey in Sunstruck, a sort of dictionary or compendium of particularly masculine Australian body language—there was great restraint, silent grief, competitiveness, care and extraordinary liberation of body and emotion which, unsurprisingly, ended in weeping. A great deal of the choreography, indeed, is very close in form to mime—staring at strong light, combing hair, smoking a cigarette. However, this time I saw what Helen Herbertson talks about in her director’s notes—a death, a childbirth, the ecstasy of existence, the heavy load of being alive. It was a journey of a tribe rather than of the individual.
Trevor Patrick, Sunstruck
photo Heidrun Löhr
Trevor Patrick, Sunstruck
But it is hard to describe Sunstruck, because it is not technically ‘about’ anything—it is an experience, rather than a work of representation. The crucial aspects of the work, though, are also the easiest to overlook: the great dark space, greetings from the artists, receiving a warm drink, sitting in a close circle. The atmosphere it creates—of quiet meditation, but a communal one, not unlike sitting around a campfire—is the container for the experience. If after the show has ended we all remain seated in our chairs, quietly enjoying the tangible community we now are, that would be why. We have seen different things in Sunstruck, but we have all shared a cup of the same tea.
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Dance Massive: Sunstruck, concept collaboration Helen Herbertson, Ben Cobham, devisor, director Herbertson, design, light Cobham, performers Trevor Patrick, Nick Sommerville, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 14-16; www.dancemassive.com.au
Stephanie Lake, Harriet Ritchie, Joseph Simons, Connected, Chunky Move
photo Jeff Busby
Stephanie Lake, Harriet Ritchie, Joseph Simons, Connected, Chunky Move
NOT SO MANY YEARS AGO, REUBEN MARGOLIN MET A MAN IN SWITZERLAND OBSESSED WITH JIGSAW PUZZLES. THE MAN LIVES IN A MANSION WHERE MORE THAN A DOZEN ROOMS ARE FILLED WITH THE THINGS. THOUSANDS OF PUZZLES—OF DIFFERENT TIME PERIODS AND GENRES, SOME SELF-MADE. HE TOLD MARGOLIN THAT IN HIS VIEW, EVERYTHING IS A JIGSAW PUZZLE. EVERYTHING FITS WITH SOMETHING ELSE. NO, SAID MARGOLIN. EVERYTHING IS A WAVE.
At that point, says Margolin, “it occurred to me that whatever you’re really into, you start to see that everywhere. So the more I’ve gotten into waves, the more I see patterns everywhere.”
Waves are Margolin’s world. From his studio in Emeryville, California, the 40-year-old creates intricate kinetic sculptures that employ thousands of moving parts to embody the waves that occur across the natural realm. He visited Melbourne recently to deliver the sculpture he’s devised for Chunky Move’s Connected, a work which will see dancers harnessed into one of the artist’s complex moving wave-machines.
It’s hard to spend much time in Margolin’s company without finding yourself subtly affected by this notion of waves. “Anything that cycles can be expressed as a wave, and everything cycles. Everything goes around and around. The best way to describe something that cycles is a wave.”
He points to a door and calls it a wave. I have no idea what he means. “It opens and shuts, it opens and shuts,” he says. “But it opens and shuts more in the daytime and less at night. If you plotted that, the best way to understand that door opening and shutting is as a wave-form.”
Marnie Palomares, Gideon Obarzanek, Connected in rehearsal
photo Jeff Busby
Marnie Palomares, Gideon Obarzanek, Connected in rehearsal
The path that has led Margolin to where he is today would seem anything but wave-like: he enjoyed the challenges of geometry in high school and began studying maths at college. In his second year he switched majors to geology (“because I wanted to go camping”). The following year he changed focus again, to anthropology; finally, deciding he wanted to be a poet, he graduated in English. Not long after, he studied classical painting in Italy and Russia.
And yet, Margolin says, he was always making kinetic art. At eight he would craft little duck puppets and marionettes and try to sell them at craft fairs. “I’ve always liked making things. I keep coming back to the fact that I like cutting a piece of wood with a handsaw. That’s about as good as it gets. There’s nothing more grounding than having a two-by-four on a sawhorse and just cutting. It’s great.”
While still pursuing a possible career in painting, Margolin became obsessed with a caterpillar. The unique undulations of the creature fascinated him, and he wondered how they could be reproduced. He ended up spending five months devising a small mechanical sculpture inspired by the caterpillar; he’s now made three different versions, but says that he still hasn’t quite nailed it. “I think I will. Maybe I’m still working on it. Maybe every sculpture still has a little bit of caterpillar in it.”
Josh Mu, Marnie Palomares, Connected
photo Reuben Margolin
Josh Mu, Marnie Palomares, Connected
Margolin met Chunky Move’s Gideon Obarzanek at a PopTech conference in Maine in 2009. Impressed by the choreographer’s presentation of previous works exploring the intersection of technology and dance, the sculptor approached him and suggested a collaboration. “I was actually thinking of a very small weekend adventure with some strings and sticks but Gideon kept pushing it and we kept working together and it grew to be a much more ambitious, world-touring production.”
Connected is a departure from Chunky Move’s more recent high-tech projects due to the mechanical materiality of its sculptural centrepiece. Margolin’s wire-and-string creations don’t engage with the ethereal invisibility of electronics. Apart from the occasional motor, the forces that produce his waves are simple physics.
“I’m just sort of low-tech. It’s what I’m good at. Making small bits. It’s just fun to do. I feel like more and more as a culture we’re moving towards things that are digital. If you can do something not digital that is beautiful and elegant, to me that’s just super interesting.”
It’s important that the operative mechanisms of Margolin’s sculptures are on full display, too: “One thing that’s always been important for me is not to put a box around it. And not even to have a big plane that blocks your vision of how it works. Making it as transparent as possible. So it’s all there. You can see exactly how it’s working. But it’s complicated enough and there are enough parts that it becomes something else, hopefully.”
With much digital art—including Chunky Move’s acclaimed Glow and Mortal Engine—a sense of wonder is produced by the mystery behind the technologies creating what we see. Margolin’s sculptures operate differently. There’s no mystery. We can see everything. And yet the sheer number of moving components is what exceeds our capacity to understand what we’re being offered. “Nature is just so wonderfully fluid. You see waves that are perfectly formed and variable and magnificent in water and wind and flames and trees. Everywhere. The only way to kind of go in that direction is to throw a lot of little parts at it.”
Margolin’s exploration of waves has also resulted, perhaps organically, in a broader philosophical view of the patterns of life. “I think that having studied the wave I have a little bit more tolerance than most people that there’s going to be some good times and there’s going to be some bad times. There’s going to be times when I have no money and times when I have money. Times where I’m really happy with what I’m doing and times where I’m not.
“Because these things that I study, waves, are everywhere, and they also have their ups and downs, that is going to happen with mood, with relationships, with politics. I feel more tolerant when things aren’t going well; that’s okay, I’m down, but I’ll probably go back up. And later, hey, I’m up here, but will probably go back down again.”
And yet, surely, the counterpoint to the wave is the interruption, the shock that breaks any cycle? Margolin demurs: “If you had what you’re calling a large shock or rupture, what if you had another one the next day? And another the next day? You’re looking at one peak or one valley, and you just need to relate that to all those peaks and valleys of that amplitude, that scale, and there’s another wave that’s in there. I’m not sure that there are these giant, discontinuous events, or whether they only look discontinuous because you’re not far enough away to see them as a larger pattern.”
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Dance Massive, Chunky Move, Connected, Malthouse, Melbourne, March 15-20; www.dancemassive.com.au
Kerrie Poliness, Blue Wall Drawing #1 2007/11
Work in progress, Monday 10 to Friday 15 January 2011
photo courtesy of the artist and gallery
Kerrie Poliness, Blue Wall Drawing #1 2007/11
Work in progress, Monday 10 to Friday 15 January 2011
LANGUAGE IS NOW LITTERED WITH WORDS WHOSE STATUS AS NOUN OR VERB APPEARS CONFLATED. TO ‘TEXT,’ TO ‘MESSAGE,’ TO ‘EMAIL,’ TO ‘GOOGLE’ AND EVEN TO ‘FACEBOOK’ ANOTHER PERSON DESCRIBE ACTIVITIES THAT MOST OF US PERFORM EVERY DAY. THE SAME COULD BE SAID OF THE WORD ‘NETWORK,’ WHICH LENDS ITS SEMANTIC LOAD TO BOTH THINGS IN THE WORLD AND ACTIVITIES THAT WE ENGAGE IN WITH SEEMINGLY INCREASING FREQUENCY. HOWEVER, AS THE WORKS IN THE MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART’S LATEST EXHIBITION DEMONSTRATE, DESPITE THE EFFICACY WITH WHICH THE WORD PERMEATES SOCIAL DISCOURSE, NETWORK IS A COMPLEX, SLIPPERY TERM. AS A DESCRIPTOR, ITS USE IS SO WIDESPREAD THAT IT ACTS TO EMPTY OUT MEANING RATHER THAN CREATE IT. ‘WHAT IS IT?,’ ‘OH, IT’S A NETWORK.’ BUT WHAT EXACTLY DOES THIS MEAN?
What is often obscured in the use of the word ‘network’ is the important role played by the work in the network. It is the work that activates the net and creates a sense of dynamic tension—of being caught up in a net and working to making sense of one’s place in the structure of it. Of making connections or resisting connections or playing against those connections. And there is no connection without activity. The net will catch nothing if there is nothing against which it can work. It is this dynamic property that makes the network difficult to visualise. Its translation to the visual most often ends up as a form of aesthetic cartography, like a family tree or a data map. The rhizomatic territorialising energy of the network gets lost in what Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter describe in their catalogue essay as the “ever-present Will to Visualise.” It is against this drive that the exhibits in Networks Cells and Silos have to operate. Some manage it more effectively than others.
Kerrie Poliness’ Blue Wall Drawing #1 dominates the back wall of the exhibition space and could easily be dismissed as an attempt to map the geometries of networked space. However, understanding how the work has been constructed reveals an engagement with the conundrum of invisibility of the work in networks that is far more interesting than the finished work itself. The artist works by establishing a series of laws or principles that serve as a guide to a team of agents who construct the drawing through collaboration. To the gallery visitor, this work is invisible, having taken place in advance of the viewer’s engagement with the drawing. In this sense, the work as a whole only becomes available to the viewer who is willing to do some work, to activate a connection that is off screen, so to speak, and become in turn a collaborator in the network of agents involved in the construction of the work.
Mikala Dwyer, Outfield 2009
Installation view, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
photo courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Mikala Dwyer, Outfield 2009
Installation view, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Similarly, Mikala Dwyer’s Outfield forces the viewer into an active relation with the work by bringing together a strange array of objects whose own relations to each other are only made obvious by their placement in a circle, the metaphoric symbol of unity. The totemic qualities of many of the objects suggest ancient rites and cosmological significance while simultaneously resisting categorisation, forcing the viewer to draw on their own connective strategies to generate meanings.
Heath Bunting, The Status Project: A1072 Able to provide a natural person date of birth 2010
photo courtesy of the artist and gallery
Heath Bunting, The Status Project: A1072 Able to provide a natural person date of birth 2010
Other works play with and disrupt the drive towards data mapping which characterises the aesthetic visualisation of networks. Heath Bunting’s Status Project 2006-2011 is the visual realisation of an ongoing project aimed at charting the relations between characteristics of “natural” and “artificial persons” and their characteristics to produce “maps of influence.” These complex maps chart such webs of data as religion, political identification and ability to provide a current postal address to produce maps like ‘A terrorist 2010.’ Their complexity reveals the absurdity produced by the abstraction of data from actual lived lives, tapping into the empty zones of audit culture that dominate modern bureaucratic life. Printmaker Justin Trendall’s ‘Darlinghurst 1’ weaves together a textured space of actual sites and their semiotic traces into a map that looks uncannily like embroidery while Sandra Selig’s contribution, titled heart of the air you can hear, protrudes from a corner of the gallery like gossamer macramé, a wistful reminder of the fragile temporality of the networked connection.
Tjaduwa Woods, Ilkurlka 2010
photo courtesy of the artist and gallery
Tjaduwa Woods, Ilkurlka 2010
In all, 20 artists are represented in the exhibition and their inclusion is itself a commentary on the nature of networks. The variety of mediums used, from the screen based work of Natalie Bookchin’s Mass Ornament to the paintings Ilkurlka and Kamanti by Indigenous artist Tjadawu Woods, demonstrates the promiscuity of the network’s effect on artistic consciousness. The inclusion of older works from the MUMA collection, such as John Dunkley-Smith’s Perspectives for conscious alterations in everyday life #5 (1990) and Roger Kemp’s Metamorphosis (1973) attests to its longevity. Curator Geraldine Barlow’s choices help us to draw unexpected insights from unlikely juxtapositions both within the individual works and from their eclectic correspondences with each other. The exhibition is also reflective of what Director Max Delany has described as MUMA’s curatorial focus, “the unfinished business of modernity and historical reconstruction, as well as the direct experience and creation of our contemporary condition, in all its complexity.”
This theme plays itself out in the architectural design of the museum itself. Occupying the ground floor of a curved 1960s era educational building, the museum is a combination of existing structures and new purpose built gallery spaces. One of the more intriguing aspects of the design is the exposed support structures between the gallery spaces, giving the visitor the sense of ongoing construction, like being behind the scenes on a film set where one is unsure where the real action is taking place. Rather than acting as a distraction to the works, the spaces between galleries work like interstitials on television, keeping up the sense of flow and contributing to the dynamism of the exhibition. The slightly curved walls and the rectangular spaces also make the visitor attentive to appearances, or rather the appearance of appearances.
Outside the museum, Callum Morton’s Silverscreen 2010 is wedged between the museum and the Art and Design building, its scaffold-like properties also reinforcing the sense of ongoing construction. This monumentally scaled steel edifice functions as both a visual connection between the two buildings and a passageway through them, leading from the bustle of adjacent Dandenong Road to the serenity of the internal sculpture garden. Its similarity to the rear side of a drive-in screen or a billboard forces us to ask—is it art or is it commerce?—a question no doubt familiar to the occupants of both buildings.
The co-location of MUMA with the Faculty of Art and Design makes a great deal of sense and on my visit the gallery was filled with small groups of newly minted art students, sprawled on the floor in front of works, talking animatedly about their relative merits. They too gave an air of construction to the scene, themselves works in progress, making new connections with the works and with each other. The networks that they will inhabit, create, resist and deploy will undoubtedly inform them and their practice as they develop their own creative sensibilities, the expression of which may well find its way onto the walls of MUMA some day in the future.
Networks (Cells & Silos), curator Geraldine Barlow, Monash University Museum of Art, Caulfield Campus, Feb 1-April 16; www.monash.edu.au/muma
This article was originally published online March 7, 2011
photo courtesy of the artist and MONA, Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania
Brook Andrew, The Cell
AS THE SUN SETS BEHIND THE MOUNTAINS OVERLOOKING SULLIVAN’S COVE, A GREY BALL, FOUR METRES IN DIAMETER, BOUNCES INTO THE AIR. ITS AERIAL EXCURSION IS FOLLOWED WITH LAUGHTER AND SHOUTS BY A CROWD OF ADULTS AND CHILDREN CLAMBERING FOR A CHANCE TO CHANGE THE GLOBE’S ERRANT PATH. THE SCENE WOULD NOT BE OUT OF PLACE IN A TELECOMMUNICATIONS ADVERTISEMENT, EXCEPT FOR THE STATIC, FEEDBACK, CAREENING SINE WAVES AND EXPLOSIONS BLASTING FROM A NEARBY STAGE IN RESPONSE TO THE BALL’S MOVEMENTS. JON ROSE’S INTERACTIVE BALL PROJECT EPITOMISES MONA FOMA. AS ROSE PUT IT, “PEOPLE HAVING FUN MAKING EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC.”
Providing a playful environment in which people can enjoy contemporary music is essential to MONA FOMA curator Brian Ritchie who seeks to share the visceral excitement he felt upon hearing Edgar Varèse’s groundbreaking 1931 percussion piece Ionisation at age 10. “It was the first piece of contemporary classical music I heard,” Ritchie recalls. “It absolutely blew my mind.” With the rhythmic pounding of Ionisation providing one of the quieter moments of Speak Percussion’s opening program, Ritchie’s curatorial rationale was put to the test.
Speak Percussion, MONA FOMA
photo Sean Fennessy, courtesy of MONA, Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania
Speak Percussion, MONA FOMA
speak percussion
Entering Princes Wharf Shed No.1 at Sullivan’s Cove through the airy seaside courtyard, wandering to the main stage past the Interactive Ball Project, Indigenous artist Brook Andrew’s inflatable art work The Cell, the irresistible aroma of catering by MONA chefs, and a row of table-tennis tables, it was hard not to feel enchanted and receptive. “You have to make the environment comfortable, so people don’t feel excluded, like they’re on the outside,” Ritchie explains. Approaching Speak Percussion’s setup on the main stage, it became evident that Ritchie was not using a figure of speech. Six batteries of gongs, bongos, toms, bass drums, cymbals and assorted non-traditional percussion instruments encircled an audience lazing expectantly on pink, purple and black beanbags. Percussion ensembles have a long history of playing “in the round,” or spaced around the audience, but rarely include some of the best festival food and an artistic jumping castle so close at hand.
Moving around the space or perched contemplatively on their beanbags, the rapt audience sat through the epic four-hour program (spread over two days) with the informality of a rock festival and the hush of a concert hall. This is just as well, as Speak Percussion’s sound engineers did not compromise the performance’s amplification for a potentially rowdy audience. As a result, the gently undulating marimbas and distant-sounding gongs of Liza Lim’s City of Falling Angels invited close listening, drawing the audience into what Speak Percussion’s Artistic Director Eugene Ughetti describes as Lim’s “hyper-emotional” musical language. The world premiere of Flesh and Ghost, Anthony Pateras’ study in crescendi, explored the space between gently clattering glass and roaring cymbals. The shocking assault of Xenakis’ Persephassa was as physical as it was aural. Xenakis’ ear-splittingly loud bongo rhythms darted around the space, wrapping the audience in a pointy, threatening cocoon that, thanks to the otherwise welcoming atmosphere, scared away only a few children.
Fifteen performers, 450 instruments (which almost missed the ferry), and eight Tasmanian, Australian and world premieres later, Ritchie was willing to declare the “huge risk” of Speak Percussion’s program a success. “The audience were carried by it, they didn’t baulk. We purport to be something: edgy, presenting new music, and sometimes you have to deliver.”
glocal collaborations
Though Sullivan’s Cove was settled in 1804 to defend against foreign exploration, at MONA FOMA the precinct functions as a launch pad for the discovery of local and international musical traditions. In particular, collaborations between Asian vocalists and Australian instrumentalists provided two of the most exciting contributions to the festival’s timbral palate in performances by Chiri and Cambodian Space Project.
Chiri’s Bae Il Dong perfected the Korean Pansori vocal style by singing at a waterfall for seven years. Ranging from swallowed, rumbling bass tones through an explosive, fraying tenor range to a howling falsetto, Bae Il Dong’s vocal skill was complemented by Simon Barker’s Pansori-inspired drumming and Scott Tinkler’s trumpet improvisation.
Cambodian Space Project’s Srey Thy honed her voice through five years of singing in Phnom Penh karaoke bars. With an Australian backing band she finally brings the bold tone and gorgeous prolonged nasal stops (“m,” “n” and “ng”) of Khmer singing to Australian audiences. Srey Thy’s expert execution of Khmer rock and roll classics and original songs paid a worthy homage to 1960s and 70s Khmer rock and roll pioneered by the singers Pan Ron and Sinn Sisamouth.
Drawn in by the playground of Princes Wharf Shed No.1, the audience was then encouraged to strike out across Hobart to the city’s many historically fascinating festival venues. Walking or, if you are lucky, riding one of Arts Tasmania’s free Vanmoof Artbikes past the heavy 1820s stone buildings of Salamanca Place, c1900 Federation houses and modernist Government buildings, you’re left to ponder the importance of place to art production. Again, contributions from Asian performers and artists provided the festival’s most striking engagements with context.
Hong Kong New Music Ensemble’s hypnotic Sound Cloud (Gong III) installation and performance filled the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery’s Bond Store with dozens of Arduino-powered blinking lights and piezo buzzers. As the 1826 warehouse was originally used for storing tobacco and spirits, it was fitting that composer Samson Young used the space to evoke Chinese miners’ experiences of smoking opium in the late 19th century Tasmanian tin fields. As piezo note clusters gently undulated, the slowly blinking lights signalled flute, violin, clarinet and sheng performers to play sequences of pre-determined notes, their vibrato melding with the gentle harmonic beating of the piezo sound cloud. Encouraged to wander through the space, the audience made the most of the profoundly differentiated sound experiences of the furthest corners of the dim, dusty, low-roofed warehouse. Even humming along on its own, without performers, the installation was eerily hypnotic. One boy, perhaps channelling the claustrophobia and very real dangers of 1870s mine shafts, exclaimed “it’s death-defying in there,” adding that he “even saw a ghost.”
Chiharu Shiota, Biel Klavier
photo courtesy the artist
Chiharu Shiota, Biel Klavier
Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota’s In Silence presents a desecrated piano within the desecrated, heritage listed brick church that is the inner-city gallery Detached. Black wool is woven around the charred remains of the piano and high up into the vault above it. Shiota’s installation springs from a childhood memory of seeing a burnt-out piano in the remains of a neighbour’s house fire, a sight that has made her feel “overcome with silence” ever since. While the sight of the silenced piano carved a sacred, silent space in Shiota’s imagination, her woollen desecration of the church, no matter how still and picturesque, shows memory’s power, as an active, disruptive noise, to silence the present.
shards of glass
In contrast to Shiota’s burning stillness, Tasmania’s saxophone quartet 22SQ complemented the silent geometricity of Hobart’s Baha’i Centre with their exquisite control of dynamics and rhythm in works by Philip Glass. The SSQ2 performance was followed by Brian Ritchie’s interview with the composer. Like many of his 60s contemporaries, Glass looked away from institutionalised art music and towards Hindu and Buddhist philosophies to find new ways of composing and listening. In the interview it was evident that his earlier interest in the musical implications of those philosophies had passed over to their pedagogical traditions. Glass regaled the audience for half an hour on the importance of gurus in education and the importance of learning counterpoint. When a woman asked “Why do I love your music?”, Glass abruptly responded “What do you care?” In a way, he had already given her the answer, but it might not have been the one she was looking for. Far from a thesis on the importance of repetition to the human psyche his answer was (in my paraphrase): “Because I studied under Nadia Boulanger and Ravi Shankar, and because I studied counterpoint for two to three hours a day for three years.” While Glass took comfort in yarns about Shankar and India, those who sought comfort in Glass would have been disappointed, both in interview and performance.
If, as Brian Ritchie told Gail Priest (RT100), “music is the comfort food of the arts,” then the audience was out to gorge itself on Glass’ performance of his own solo piano works at Federation Hall. His expressive rubato (speeding up and slowing down) was a welcome departure from others’ metronomic interpretations of his works, though his faltering polyrhythms and fudged passages often snapped listeners out of their contemplative reveries. Observing that “not much has changed” since its composition, Glass concluded with a moving performance of the anti-war poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” accompanying a recording of the poem read by its author Allen Ginsberg. Indicative of Glass’ performance as a whole, “Wichita Vortex Sutra” did not strike me so much as a rousing call for peace as a dejected ode to the past.
inspiring exploration
Back at Princes Wharf the paroxysms of art-joy continued. Fabio Bonelli (aka Musica Da Cucina) painted a musical image of his two aunts living in Sondrio—a town in Italy that doesn’t see the sun for several months a year—using funnels, cups of water, silver forks and a clarinet. Pateras/Baxter/Brown barraged the audience with their prepared instrument sagas. Owen Pallett deftly manipulated violin loops to create clever, Mozartian, episodic pop miniatures. Amanda Palmer sang about her map of Tasmania. South Australia’s The New Pollutants performed a chilling live score to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis with vocalist Astrid Pill and cellist Zoë Barry. Neil Gaiman read a story with live accompaniment by FourPlay, and audiences queued for hours to see BalletLab’s trio of dance works. By inspiring the audience’s exploration of new musical experiences, not demanding it, MONA FOMA hit its mark.
MONA FOMA – Museum of Old and New Art Festival of Music and Art, curator Brian Ritchie, MONA, Hobart, Jan 14-20; www.mona.net.au
This article was originally published online March 7, 2011
Zoe Coombs Marr, And That Was The Summer That Changed My Life
photo courtesy of the artist and Imperial Panda
Zoe Coombs Marr, And That Was The Summer That Changed My Life
panda strikes again
Since their sell-out events in 2008 and 2009 (RT90), we have been eagerly awaiting news of the next Imperial Panda festival. This year it’s bigger and better than ever, thanks to funding from Arts NSW and the City of Sydney and the indefatigable team of Rosie Fisher, Mish Grigor, Zoe Coombs Marr and Eddie Sharp. The action started on the weekend with the premiere of Gareth Davies (of Black Lung) and Charlie Garber’s (of Pig Island) show Masterclass, but there are two more solid weeks of performances, exhibitions, events, talks, drinking and dancing to go.
Other new shows include What Is Soil Erosion? by Claudia O’Doherty, also of Pig Island (RT85), and Rhubarb Rhubarb’s Some Film Museums I Have Known. Suitcase Royale will also be premiering their Test Flight #1 and one member, Miles O’Neil, will be stepping out on his own in World Around Us. New to Sydney, but not entirely new, is Coombs Marr’s show And That Was The Summer That Changed My Life (RT98).
Brown Council are presenting A Comedy again (RT98; RT100). One Brownie, Frances Barrett, is also curating Man Up: A Night of Male Impersonation. Elsewhere Tim Webster and Sarah Rodigari are presenting In Periscope (RT98) and overseeing a weekend of activities at Firstdraft Gallery. If that doesn’t persuade you to come on down, then surely the promise of a Cab Sav party will! Imperial Panda, various venues, Sydney, March 4-20; www.theimperialpanda.com
When the Pictures Came, Terrapin Puppet Theatre and the Children’s Art Theatre of China Welfare Institute
photo courtesy of the artists and Come Out Festival
When the Pictures Came, Terrapin Puppet Theatre and the Children’s Art Theatre of China Welfare Institute
come on, come out
A little more sedate perhaps, this year’s Come Out Festival is billed as an event for children, young people and families. Some shows are for schools only (such as the Living Library), but there is a range of other events that will appeal to innovative arts seekers. If you have a dinosaur enthusiast at your house, or even if you don’t, you might enjoy Erth’s amazingly life-scale puppet show Dinosaur Petting Zoo (RT84). Other highlights include Restless Dance Theatre’s new work Take Me There, which Jonathan Bollen will review in our May 9 e-dition. There’s also the Border Project’s collaboration with Windmill Theatre, Escape from Peligro Island, which is billed as “choose-your-own-adventure theatre” an audience interactive format the Project has been honing for a while (see RT84).
In another interesting collaboration, Tasmania’s Terrapin Puppet Theatre have been working with the Children’s Art Theatre of China Welfare Institute to create When the Pictures Came. The play blends “the animations of award-winning film maker Zeng Yigang with black-light puppetry and live performance.” Cross-cultural exchange is also evident in Wulamanayuwi and the Seven Pamanui, a new Aboriginal play that brings together European fairytales with the Palaneri or Dreaming characters and stories of the Tiwi Islands. Come Out Festival, Adelaide, March 25-April 1; www.comeout.on.net
Re-enchantment: An Immersive Journey into the Hidden Meanings of Fairy Tales
photo courtesy of the ABC
Re-enchantment: An Immersive Journey into the Hidden Meanings of Fairy Tales
multiplatform media magic
Fairytales also feature in the ABC’s newly launched Re-enchantment, which will be available almost everywhere. Billed as an “immersive journey into the hidden meanings of fairy tales,” Re-enchantment is an “interactive multi-platform documentary project exploring why fairy stories continue to enchant, entertain, fascinate and horrify contemporary adult audiences” (press release). Featuring Bluebeard, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, Rapunzel and Red Riding Hood, Re-enchantment doesn’t so much strip away the mystery and magic of these tales, but rather shows “how threading together various interpretations and versions of a story from the perspectives of psychology, social history and popular culture, [can] deepen our connection to and fascination with the richness of fairy tales” (website).
The project was launched last week at the Adelaide Film Festival and also in a session on transmedia documentary at the Australian International Documentary Conference. You can already encounter it online (www.abc.net.au/tv/re-enchantment) and from tomorrow you see it on ABC1 and ABC2, which will be screening 10 x three-minute interstitials. Or you can listen to oral retellings of different interpretations of the stories on Radio National. There is also a two-day symposium, Fairy Tales Re-Imagined: From Werewolf to Forbidden Room, at ACMI in mid-March before the premiere in Sydney on March 24. For more information go to the website and keep an eye out for Kirsten Krauth’s review in RT102. Re-enchantment: An Immersive Journey into the Hidden Meanings of Fairy Tales, www.abc.net.au/tv/re-enchantment; Fairytales Re-Imagined: From Werewolf to Forbidden Room, ACMI, March 10-11, www.acmi.net.au/fairy-tales-reimagined.aspx
Jill Orr, Lunch with the birds 1979
ink-jet print
photo Elizabeth Campbell, Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Now the Monash Gallery of Art is presenting Afterglow: Performance Art and Photography, the first major exhibition to focus on the Australian relationship. The artists include Gordon Bennett, Juan Davila, Cherine Fahd, Bert Flugelman, Hayden Fowler, Tim Johnson, Ash Keating, Ben Morieson, Jill Orr, Mike Parr, Robert Rooney, Linda Sproul, Slave Pianos, Stelarc, David M Thomas, Peter Tyndall and Justene Williams. In addition, the gallery is presenting a series of talks. Curator Stephen Zagala, Mike Parr and Anne Marsh will have already discussed whether “photography kills performance art” but you can still catch Stelarc’s presentation, “Circulating Flesh: The Cadaver, the Comatose and the Chimera” on March 19 and then Zagala on the theme “Performing Identity” on March 23. Bookings essential. Afterglow: Performance Art and Photography, curator Stephen Zagala, Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill, Victoria, Jan 28-April 3; www.mga.org.au
photo Susannah Wimberley, courtesy of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Cinema Alley 2011
THE MATERIAL OF FILM AND VIDEO IS LIGHT, SO WE USUALLY CREATE DARKENED ROOMS IN WHICH TO EXPERIENCE ITS ART. 4A’S CINEMA ALLEY HOWEVER MAKES USE OF THE NIGHT, ERECTING A LARGE OUTDOOR SCREEN IN SYDNEY’S PARKER STREET FOR ONE EVENING EACH CHINESE NEW YEAR FESTIVAL. NOW IN ITS THIRD YEAR, THE EVENT TRANSFORMS THIS CHINATOWN BACKSTREET INTO AN OPEN-AIR CINEMA AND SCREENS A SELECTION OF CHINESE VIDEO ART CURATED BY 4A DIRECTOR, AARON SEETO.
4A’s own laneway project, Cinema Alley is also a result of the gallery’s focus on community engagement, extending outdoors from the gallery and, this year, including screenings from their 2010 Animation Project with the local community.
A major work in this year’s program was Jun Yang’s A Short-Story on Forgetting and Remembering (2007), made in the short film (or even short story) tradition of a first person narrator. Unable to sleep, the main character wanders the streets of Taipei at night, reflecting on a city built for an alternative history of China. “Everything here seems to be temporary, or at least built on something temporary.” CCTV images suggest a life recorded in pixels. Neon signs flicker, both confident and illusory, stuck in an endless performance of modernity. The film ends with the background sounds of Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner providing a popular reference point for this sense of mass amnesia and never-ending quest for the new.
A less conventional exploration of memory, Factory (2003), by Taiwanese Chen Chieh-jen complicates the experience of time through experiments with pace, absence and repetition. Shot largely in a disused textile factory, the film intercuts images of old equipment and abandoned rooms with footage of the female former workers, back at their machines now seven years after the factory’s closure—the ghosts of a labour market after the tide of global capital has moved on. The interweaving of archival footage of factory workers produced by the Taiwanese government in the 1960s adds to this folding of time, of different eras experienced simultaneously in the apprehension of places and objects.
Ou Ning and Cao Fei’s accelerated montage, San Yuan Li (2003), records the encroachment of Guangzhou’s urbanisation on a once rural village. The result of collaboration between 12 artists, all of whom collected footage, the film is an example of the documentary urge currently shaping much contemporary Chinese art and film—the drive towards archival projects amid so much change and destruction. The 45-minute San Yuan Li appeared in Cinema Alley in a shortened version (produced by Ou Ning) along with a brief explanation of the project. Shot largely from below, looking up between buildings to slits of sky, this rapid juxtaposition of the rural and urban conveys a sense of the unnatural in the speed of China’s urban development.
Yuan Goang-Ming’s Floating (2000) was the simplest of the films screened, a short work about disorientation in which the camera is fixed on a repeatedly capsizing boat. We spin with the camera and, like an IMAX film or a ride at an amusement park, the film confuses our bearings. Wang Qingsong’s Skyscraper (2008) was screened for the third time in less than four months in Sydney—previously in Arena at Hazelhurst Gallery (RT100, p44) and Eye of the Dream at Customs House—but its final scene worked especially well in this context. The fireworks that burst into a celebration of China’s faith in modernisation looked particularly familiar (and just as ironic) in the Sydney night sky.
Ultimately, these accidental reverberations stole the show: the neon of Taipei amid that of Sydney, the urban canyons of outer Guangzhou viewed from one within Chinatown. The move from the gallery and out into the open extended the work not only to new audiences but also to new ways of viewing. The focus of this year’s program on cities, histories and transformation made for a particularly rich array of resonances, stitching Sydney into the experience of the films and the films within the experience of Sydney. This nesting of different local spaces drew out the connections between them, suggesting their formation within shared global processes. Time and space were compressed and, for an evening, the soundtracks of urban Asia added to the white noise of Sydney.
4A Cinema Alley 2011, curator Aaron Seeto, artists Ou Ning and Cao Fei, Jun Yang, Chen Chieh-jen, Wang Qingsong, Yuan Goang-Ming, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Feb 11; www.4a.com.au
This article was originally published online March 7, 2011
BELVOIR’S THE WILD DUCK, WRITTEN BY SIMON STONE WITH CHRIS RYAN “AFTER HENRIK IBSEN” AND DIRECTED BY STONE, IS A POWERFULLY ENGAGING WORK, TAUTLY SCRIPTED, SUPERBLY ACTED AND COMPLEMENTED BY AN AUSTERE DESIGN THAT EVOKES A ZOOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION IN WHICH WE WATCH HUMANS CAGED BY OBLIGATIONS AND TABOOS LITERALISED AS A LARGE GLASS BOX FURNISHED WITH NOUGHT BUT CARPET AND, ABOVE, A DIGITAL READOUT OF THE DAY OF THE WEEK AND TIME.
Although Stone uses the title of Ibsen’s 1884 play, his is quite another Wild Duck. He cleverly fast-forwards the plot to the present, pares back much of the original, invents new scenes and thins out the melodramatics (replacing them with some of his own, not least musically). In some ways Stone gets to the essence of the original but, finally, cannot retain its gravitas or its cathartic power. His play is moving, but that’s another matter, and even then is undercut by a lamentable final scene in which, some time after the death of their daughter, the grieving parents meet but fail to regain their relationship. Ibsen with apt bluntness, reminiscent of Puccini, didn’t bother with such a coda.
Stone sticks broadly to the plot of the original while reducing its sociological density. There’s a narrower range of characters and social types, and less emphasis on status, work and the debate about moral idealism. Ibsen’s family fears poverty—the photography business is not faring well; the need to keep working is part of the stage action. In Stone’s version, the pressure is mildly present but doesn’t become a key issue—surprising in today’s volatile economy. But Stone is not Ibsen—the psychological drama is more important for him than the social forces that frame it and which are so essential to Ibsen. It’s a big difference.
The stripping back similarly reduces the complexity of the original characters. Hjalmar, the husband, is played by Ewen Leslie with a restless, nervous energy, repeatedly bouncing a tennis ball, rolling on the floor, physically playful with his daughter, easy-going. The fond family scenes with overlapping dialogue establish an idyllic state. However, unlike his forbear there is little of the self-aggrandisement, self-pity and moments of irritability that anticipate Hjalmar’s subsequent inability to handle the revelation that his wife Gina (Anita Hegh) was once the lover of Werle (John Gaden), the local works owner and merchant, that his daughter (Eloise Mignon) is Werle’s, not his own, and that Werle had subsidised the set-up of the photography business and the salary of Hjlamar’s ruined father, Ekdal (Anthony Phelan).
Leslie’s fine performance and Stone’s writing compensate to a degree, but Hjalmar’s weakness simply becomes a given when the crisis hits. More problematic is the characterisation of Werle’s disaffected son, the meddling moralist Gregers (Toby Schmitz) who suspects his father drove his mother to suicide and betrayed Ekdal. He soon discovers the truth about Werle and Gina and sets out on a relentless crusade to liberate Hjlamar and family from a life of lies. Schmitz’s Gregers is icily remote, with a physical rectitude contrasting with Hjalmar’s casual bearing. His best scene, one of Stone’s inventing, is with Leslie, when Gregers opens up, revealing his failings in love. Later he simply doesn’t have the weight of Ibsen’s creation. In two scenes in the original he attempts to persuade Hedvig to kill her wild duck as a sacrifice to appease her alienated father. In these moments Gregers’ insensitivity and, worse, moral irresponsibility, are frighteningly evident. But his force is not sustained in the Stone version.
Eloise Mignon, Anthony Phelan, The Wild Duck
photo Heidrun Lohr
Eloise Mignon, Anthony Phelan, The Wild Duck
A significant reason for this is Stone’s updating of Hedvig—she’s more intelligent, bold, ambitious and already knows that she is going blind (a condition inherited from Werle). A modern child on the edge of adolescence, Hedvig decides of her own volition to kill the duck with her grandfather’s gun—she doesn’t need Gregers’ rhetoric as a prompt. Mignon is an excellent Hedvig but a more complex exchange with Gregers would have allowed a greater sense of someone on the borderline between child and adult—the decision to kill the duck comes too easily. (In the original she takes up Gregers’ proposal at first, but repudiates it, if momentarily, at their second meeting.) The outcome is a reduction of Gregers’ role as rigorous engineer of destruction in this human laboratory. In the original he’s subsequently deeply shocked, such is his naivety, when the family falls apart instead of building a new life based on truth. A foil (Doctor Relling in Ibsen) or some other challenge to Gregers’ moral fundamentalism would have been welcome in Stone’s version.
The character closest to the original is Ekdal, a former military man, forester and businessman who went to jail for illicit property dealings, shaming himself and his family. Emotionally damaged, sometimes barely present and haltingly articulate, at other times alert and observant, Ekdal has created a refuge in Hjalmar’s attic where he houses (and shoots) rabbits and birds. In a very funny, if foreboding scene, he teaches Hedvig how to load and fire the gun with which she will inadvertantly kill herself. Stone has invested Ekdal with characterful language (“I’m as full as a fat girl’s sock”), insights (“Not much of the forest left—it’ll have its revenge”—words almost straight from Ibsen), amusing recollections (playing The Tempest’s Miranda in school) and anger over Hjalmar’s behaviour (“Everyone’s got a story like this. It’s as old as the hills.”). Anthony Phelan’s performance as Ekdal is one of the best seen in Sydney in recent years—richly expressive and detailed, drifting in and out of himself, deeply present, fondly cradling the wounded duck, naturally pacing his delivery between its quacks, the actor’s characteristic gravelly rasp enhanced by intimate radio-miking.
John Gaden as the pragmatic Werle—accepting his imminent blindness but eager to move on into a new marriage, to smooth relations with his son and those he feels obliged to assist—is quietly effective; the scene in which he and Ekdal meet, both men disoriented, is particularly touching, age taking them beyond bitterness or blame. Anita Hegh plays Gina with the requisite ease in the beginning, then denial and finally shock at Hjalmar’s bitter response to her long-ago failings. As with Hjalmar and Gregers, Gina’s role is reduced in this version, even more severely, in terms of class, language and coping with her overly sensitive and ineffectual husband. However Hegh conveys the visceral effect of abandonment in her absolute collapse and later in a brutal tussle with Hjalmar. Her determination not to return the marriage does allow a rare show of strength.
While, for the most part, I was swept along by the tide of Stone’s brisk, vivid scripting, deft characterisations and the production’s potent sense of immediacy (the glass walls and radio-miking were only initially distancing), in the end I felt half satisfied, moved but not, admiring but critical, impressed but not awed. On its own terms, Stone’s The Wild Duck works well and has won praise from reviewers for revitalising the original, but the writer-director has set himself a formidable challenge—to remake rather than interpret a classic play. It’s ambitious—the outcome must be tested against the original.
I’m not suggesting that Stone reproduce more of the original play than he’s already done. I was struck by his inventiveness—new scenes, a modern Hedvig, a degree of topicality. But I wanted him to go further, to be more ambitious, give his characters more complexity and dynamism, achieve a greater sense of our lives now—to match Ibsen. Why else would you create a variation on a great play?
Belvoir’s The Wild Duck confirms Stone’s directorial and writing strengths, abetted by fine actors (with outstanding performances from Phelan and Eloise Mignon), Ralph Myers’ complexly simple set and Niklas Pajanti’s stark lighting. But, inspired by, adapting and updating Ibsen, Stone has not matched the strengths of the original play in his short, compact variation. His play’s embracing immediacy cannot, in the end, disguise its inclination to melodrama and a certain thinness of conception. That said, it’s a production to be seen and debated: the rewards are many.
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Belvoir, The Wild Duck, writer Simon Stone with Chris Ryan after Henrik Ibsen, director Simon Stone, performers John Gaden, Anita Hegh, Ewen Leslie, Eloise Mignon, Anthony Phelan, Toby Schmitz, designer Ralph Myers, costumes Tess Schofield, lighting Niklas Pajanti, music & sound design Stefan Gregory; Belvoir St Upstairs Theatre, Feb 12-March 27
This article was originally published online March 7, 2011
Rock Hudson, Jane Wyman, All That Heaven Allows, Douglas Sirk
IN THE 1950S THE FILMS OF DOUGLAS SIRK WERE CONDEMNED AND DISMISSED BY SOME REVIEWERS AS LOW BROW, POPULAR FANTASIES FOR WOMEN—OVERLY DRAMATIC, HYPER-EMOTIONAL AND SENTIMENTAL. IN THE SATURDAY REVIEW, ARTHUR KNIGHT DESCRIBED IMITATION OF LIFE (1959) AS “LIFE AS [AUDIENCES] WOULD LIKE TO BELIEVE IT, AND IT MAKES GOOD MOVIE MATERIAL—AT LEAST FOR A MATINEE.” THE MONTHLY FILM BULLETIN’S REVIEW IDENTIFIED THE FILM’S DUAL FORCES, DESCRIBING IT AS “HIGH-CLASS PULP FICTION” AND SUGGESTING THAT, “ITS ONSLAUGHT ON THE EMOTIONS IS ALMOST ENTIRELY SYNTHETIC…ITS ATTITUDE TOWARD ITS RACIAL PROBLEM IS DEBASED AND COMPROMISED.”
However, Sirk’s melodramas were embraced in the 1980s and ‘read against the grain’ as rich and revealing film texts that were simultaneously reflecting and critiquing the culture of their production. By developing intricate narrative patterns encouraging identification and catharsis, Sirkian melodramas were seen to function as ‘safety valves’ for patriarchy, siphoning off cultural anxieties.
Douglas Sirk was an art historian when he began his career as a director of German theatre and cinema during the 1920s. Influenced by the style of German Expressionism, particularly its projection of a character’s psyche onto an artificial external space, Sirk brought this vision to Hollywood, and this aesthetic defined the melodramas he directed for Universal Studios. He was also inspired by the politicised theatre developed by Brecht and used techniques of ‘distanciation’ to provoke an active, critical spectator. As a result, the universe created in Sirk’s melodramas deliberately breaks with realist conventions, creating artificial worlds. An excessive mise-en-scène is constructed with a use of frames within frames to separate characters; mirrors and reflective surfaces to suggest split, or multiple identities; spaces that are segregated; and vivid colours to highlight character traits. The melodramas explore time in narrative, prioritising accidents, interruptions, coincidence, fate and particularly the trope of being ‘too late.’
Sirk’s films feature a fascination with failure. Magnificent Obsession (1954) features an array of plot twists and parallel worlds beginning with the resuscitation of the rogue playboy and jet boat pilot Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson) at the expense of the life of the respected Dr Wayne Phillips. The film details the anguish and affection of a burgeoning romance between Helen Phillips (Jane Wyman) a character who introduces herself to Bob as “Mrs Wayne Phillips.” While trying to escape Bob’s clutches, Helen is hit by a car, resulting in a blindness that can only be cured by Bob’s return to his earlier career—neurosurgery. Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955) uses the same stars to explore the controversy of a ‘May/December’ relationship, with Jane Wyman as Cary, the older woman battling resistance to her affair with Ron (Rock Hudson). The image that resonates most from this film is the reflection of Cary framed in the screen of a television her son and daughter have bought her for Christmas, hoping to distract her from unbridled passion.
Films like Imitation of Life (1959) use ‘spatial narration’ to define the importance of space and power in the cinema. Sirk’s spaces carry reference to class, status, wealth and dominance, symbolising exclusion, division, restriction and segregation. This is clear in the opening shots of Imitation of Life as Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) searches for her child on the boardwalk. Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore) and Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) are looking after Susie (Sandra Dee) in the shade beneath. When they share an apartment, Annie and Sarah Jane are relegated to the broom cupboard, a space that Lora describes as:
“a little place off the kitchen…but you could hardly call it a room.” In their country home Lora and Susie have access to the more formal public rooms, while Annie and Sarah Jane are confined to the kitchen and the rear of the house. Sirk highlights the dislocation and segregation with an image of the rebellious Sarah Jane speaking with a Southern twang as she delivers crawfish to guests, carrying the plate on her head.
While Sirk’s Hollywood melodramas were misunderstood on their release, his film work continues to exert a significant and lasting impression on contemporary visual culture. The impact is evident in remakes like Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002) and on the small screen in the series Mad Men (2007-), but these revisions are never quite as aesthetically vibrant, narratively complex or as incisive in their cultural critique as Sirk’s progressive ouvre. Douglas Sirk’s films are so loaded they almost split apart at the seams.
Douglas Sirk: King of Hollywood Melodrama, Madman Entertainment,
Courtesy of Madman Entertainment and in celebration of our 101st edition, RealTime is offering a lucky reader a ravishing cinematic giveaway: a 9-DVD box set of the great films of the 1950s master of aesthetically and socially incisive Hollywood melodramas, Douglas Sirk. To compete for the Sirk DVD set go to: www.realtimearts.net/sirk_survey.html
Keith Bain teaching at NIDA Open Day July 1993. Sophie Heathcote in the foreground (NIDA Archive)
$64.95 MIGHT SEEM A LOT TO PAY FOR A 320 PAGE BOOK THAT’S ABOUT TEACHING A MINOR PART OF AN ACTOR’S CRAFT—AN ILLUSION NOT HELPED BY A MUNDANE CLASS PHOTO OF KEITH BAIN DOING JUST THAT AT NIDA ON ITS FRONT COVER. BUT THAT WOULD BE TO WILDLY UNDERVALUE THIS BOOK’S CONTENT. FOR WHAT EMERGES IS THE REVELATION THAT MOVEMENT IS ABSOLUTELY CENTRAL TO THE ACTOR’S ART; AND THAT THE NOW 84 YEAR OLD KEITH BAIN WAS ABSOLUTELY CENTRAL TO THE DISCOVERY OF THIS IN AUSTRALIA.
Indeed, one might argue that our justifiable reputation for ‘physical theatre’ would never have developed if Doris Fitton had not summoned Bain to her Independent Theatre in 1959 and commanded him to begin a movement class. At that time, neither Bain nor the imperious Fitton had any idea what he was going to teach. What’s more, Melbourne’s APG claque would certainly disagree with Bain’s (and NIDA’s) centrality in all this! But Bain was there when Reg Livermore pioneered his first solo in 1961, when John Bell needed him for The Legend of King O’Malley in 1970 and when Jim Sharman tackled Jesus Christ Superstar in 1971.
The claim is further justified by the wide range of adoration offered by Bain’s former students in the book—ranging in time from Reg Livermore to Matthew Whittet, and in their influence on the national scene from directors John Bell, Jim Sharman, Rex Cramphorn, Gale Edwards, Moffatt Oxenbould and Baz Luhrmann to actors on the world stage such as Mel Gibson, Geoffrey Rush, Hugo Weaving and Cate Blanchett.
Do we believe the hyperbolic Blanchett when she declares in her introduction to the book that “His teachings are the foundation of my technique”? And “Keith Bain was and is the biggest single influence on my work as an actor”! It only adds up when her scattered quotes are brought together to include this: “He would brook no laziness, but would support your failure, because in this failure he could sense advancement round the corner; the attempt at what was currently impossible.”
The key to that achievement, of course, was that Bain was a brilliant teacher per se—and his thoughts on that subject should find a ready audience amongst teachers everywhere. Geoffrey Rush brackets him in pedagogy with Parisian clown-master Jacques Lecoq in their ability to “plant some personal awareness of what the parameters of creativity might potentially become in you.” This is despite Bain’s unvarnished description of the young Rush as “the most awkward looking, gangly, pimply student with the strangest physicality that you ever saw—and a power of concentration you wouldn’t believe.”
Bain had become a school teacher in emulation of the glamour he associated with the pre-WWII arrival of such authority figures in a remote town like Wauchope—where am-drams (amateur dramatics) and ballroom dancing were the major forms of relief from simply surviving the Depression. Fortunately, he was lead astray from this noble career when, at 27, he decided to become a dancer—not just one sort, but a polymath developing his improvisatory skills under the tutelage of expatriate ‘modern’ dance sage Gertrude Bodenweiser while earning money on TV variety shows or down at the Trocadero Ballroom (revived this year by the Sydney Festival) where his craving for freedom of expression in the samba, paso doble and cha-cha lead to his becoming The Man who was Strictly Ballroom. For the dancer and teacher was also a dab hand at engaging his students at NIDA—including the young Baz Luhrmann—with a bit of old-fashioned, country yarn-spinning.
Keith Bain, On Movement
Indeed, the now white-haired Luhrmann declared at the book’s launch that Bain had taught him that learning was a life-long affair. Which makes it all the odder in the book that NIDA’s former bosses John Clark and Elizabeth Butcher fail to take the opportunity offered to explain why they backed both Movement and Bain by taking him on (part-time) in 1965. At least Katharine Brisbane—doyenne of Aussie theatre critics from 1967 until the 80s—used her current hat as publisher of the book to issue a mea culpa at its launch for never once crediting Keith’s contribution to the productions she was reviewing on stage. “We in the stalls knew nothing of his work.”
Bain himself is aware of this gap, using the book as an opportunity to remind directors that, as another former student, Miranda Otto, puts it so succinctly, “Movement goes on all the time”—not just when the text calls for a dance or a fight. Every entrance and exit has to look spontaneous, vital emotions have to find physical expression, and Movement can uncover deeper degrees of truth, subtlety and spectacle. Perhaps the most readable of the teaching chapters is that on Space—a philosophical disquisition as much as a textbook case. As NIDA staff member Kevin Jackson comments, “[Bain] introduced us to the notion of being a god, being truly alive in the magic space on-stage.”
As to Bain’s own skills at on-stage transformation, I can’t do better than quote actress Jeanette Cronin: “Those noble shoulders would collapse under the weight of indignity, that majestic chest would contract into a cave of sorrow, the proud neck could no longer support that once bright visage, the dancing eyes now drooped like raindrops. That wicked mouth lost its wit. He showed us a little finger could be sad; a mouth can contain the fury of a thousand frustrations.”
But then Keith Bain had experienced the “miracle of transformation” very early. It came “when I watched someone as grounded and normal as my barber father offer his hand to my mother and lead her on to the dance floor. Somehow, as if on a breath, their two bodies connected into one new unity as they moved into the figures of the dance.”
Amazingly, Bain also had time off-stage to be, in his own words, “a bloody busybody,” forming and chairing many of the major national and international dance bodies that now exist. But the book covers too little of the process whereby Keith brought together the warring tribes of dance through the simple expedient of a Dancers’ Picnic, quietly organised under the aegis of UNESCO’s International Dance Day. It has more noisily (but more narrowly) lead on to today’s National Dance Awards.
In the last issue of RealTime, Amanda Card reviewed Alan Brissenden and Keith Glennon’s Australia Dances (RT100), a book that had its genesis in the 1950s. Movement is obviously a stop/start matter. Bain began his book in 1993 when he received a Keating Fellowship for that purpose. The writing since has been by him while shaping of the book belatedly fell to the Keith Bain Book Team, notably his successors at NIDA, Julia Cotton and Anca Frankenhaeuser, under editor Michael Campbell. The beauty of this is that Keith Bain can use the word ‘luck’ a lot, while the beneficiaries of his belief in drawing “the best version of themselves” from so many students and casts can fall in behind Hugo Weaving and offer up their versions of Weaving’s, “He is a sort of guru to generations of us.”
Keith Bain on Movement, edited by Michael Campbell, Currency House, Sydney, 2010, hard cover, $64.95
I am starting a band with my long time creative partner Christine Johnston, I’m not a musician…But that’s okay. Christine has for many years said “You would look great in a band; I want to start a band and put you in it!” The response from my fellow practitioners was “What the f…k do you play?” I replied, “I’ll create my own position in the band!” So I’m now a proud member of what we call RRAMP. I thought it worth mentioning this project as a work that has pushed my performance practice into yet another and sometimes challenging direction. Lisa O’Neill, performer, choreographer, director
EXPLORATIVE BOUNDARY-CROSSING EXPEDITIONS AND COLLABORATIONS DELVING INTO THE AQUATIC, THE FORESTED AND THE INTER-GALACTIC. Aphids 2011 program launches with a BIG BANG, as heart-throb Kamahl serenades and croons mysteries of the universe in VOID LOVE, a concert and soap opera about deep space and astrophysics. Coral spawning, sex and death on the reef are placed under a voyeuristic lens, as Aphids develop CORAL WORK in flotation tanks and on the Great Barrier Reef. Mixed reality gaming infiltrates the coastlines and parklands of Southern Victoria with ATELIER EDENS, an R+D lab developing transmedia experiences and live performances in site-specific and natural environments. Willoh S Wieland & Thea Beaumann, Aphids
Cordelia Beresford, Superhero, My Favourite Doll
Two ideas I am working on in 2011: My Favourite Doll—video & still photography portraits of young children, boys and girls, with a human-form toy they project personal attributes onto, in some way examining the ‘wish-animism’ that is a normal part of infantile self-object development. I am fascinated by how we gain our sense of personal identity, along with all the cultural and gender-specific role-playing that forms it. Splitting—a multi-image video work, with psychic division as a starting point, portrays two female characters from two different eras inhabiting the same physical space and subconsciously reacting to each other. Cordelia Beresford, cinematographer, video artist
Every night, as we fall asleep, we leave the earth for just a while. In Sweet Dreams the singers of Song Company take flight into a different realm, a world of dreams, just by singing, and whilst singing, by creating images with their shadows and some of the wonderfully simple and self-made creatures of our collaborator, ecological systems designer Stephen Mushin. Think of it as ‘back to the cave.’ Or back to nature. Or back to our childhood. Sweet Dreams. The program will premiere in October before going to South America, then returning to Australia for the company’s final season in December. Roland Peelman, Artistic Director, Song Company
Currently I’m making a work with the Royal Flanders Ballet in Antwerp. In April-May I’ll be with the Ballet Du Rhin in France creating a new version of The Rite of Spring, experimenting with a sound engineer on the compartmentalisation and placement of sound throughout the theatre, including the wings, the back of the auditorium and from the stage itself amongst the dancers. For ADT I’ll make a work incorporating a live illustrator mark-making in charcoal throughout the performance in direct conjunction with the dancers. I’ll also be developing a new work that experiments with the dancing body and live processed video and photographic imagery. Garry Stewart, Artistic Director, Australian Dance Theatre
Skye Gellmann
This year I’m moving to a far away island to pursue love. I thought that Melbourne and its relationship with depression was on the cards but I was stolen. I effortlessly think about somebody all day and every moment boils down to seeing them again. For example, I write grants and they all read like dodgy schemes to go overseas! Still, I do have a couple of new art projects (both computer-game/performance hybrids) but the real challenges in my life are: selling all my belongings, re-starting my life and shedding hang-ups. In 2011 I encourage readers to feel 18 again. Skye Gellmann, physical theatre artist
Our year got off to a great start with Gob Squad’s Super Night Shot at the Sydney Opera House as part of Sydney Festival. Jeff Khan joins our team and I’m looking forward to working with him and Bec Dean on a truly interdisciplinary approach to our program. I’m really pleased we’re shaking up our programming model a little. We have two seasons at CarriageWorks—Uneasy Futures and Exchange—but heaps more on throughout the year. Watch out for WALK—it’s off-site and on-the-streets—and a whole range of projects ranging from Applespiel’s residency to the premiere of My Darling Patricia’s new work. Daniel Brine, Artistic Director, Performance Space
Field Theory: the second year of an experiment in sustainability and exchange. We’ll send out 800 handmade gifts. You can put $100 towards art projects that otherwise wouldn’t have seen the light of day. The last year of field theory has allowed for a colour audit of a megamall, an online soap opera about astrophysics starring Khamal and IVF family portraits. Jason Maling, Deborah Kelly and Willoh S Weiland thank you from the bottom of their hearts and pockets. Those in the know have seen glimpses of prismatic auditor socks and flammable magnets in the crevices of homes, streets and legs. 2011 will see four new projects and several gift sweatshops come to life. Lara Thoms, field theory
Di Smith, Frances Barrett, Kate Blackmore, (Kelly Doley not pictured), Brown Council, work-in-progress
courtesy the artists
Di Smith, Frances Barrett, Kate Blackmore, (Kelly Doley not pictured), Brown Council, work-in-progress
“This footage is really dark and shaky, but you can just make out the water surrounding the base of the ladder. The water is electrified, so if I fell, I would have been electrocuted…you just had to be there…” Chris Burden. We are excited to be developing A Random Selection of Video Tapes, an exhibition for Artspace in November. Inspired by Burden’s lo-fi documentary about his practice, we will explore documentary filmmaking and performance art documentation to see how they shape our cultural memory. We are especially interested in investigating the notion of ‘truth’ within such documentation and the role of the artist as its harbinger. Brown Council, video and performance artists
We’re excited about:
Only communicating in lists
4 shows we think will be irresponsible
4 Rough Draft creative developments
Not pursuing ‘the truth’
Not worrying about rationality
Sometimes being unreasonable
Not navel gazing
Having nothing constructive to say
Having a beer
No small talk
Theatre that’s:
Not sweet
Not edifying
Illogical
Confused about morality
Might not have big narratives
Not out to make Australia seem normal
Not about making the audience feel educated and intelligent
Contrary. Elusive. Sceptical. Delirious. Bitter. Bothersome. Arousing. False. Tawdry. Light. Archaeological. Foolish. Lewd. Innocent. Debauched. Volatile. Noxious. Spectral. Wanton. Illustrative. Pretty-Ugly. Profane-Sacred. Poor. Sad. Filthy. Tom Wright, Associate Director and Polly Rowe, Literary Manager, Sydney Theatre Company, for Next Stage
My year will start at Peter Brook’s Bouffes du Nord in Paris performing My Dearest, My Fairest, a love story told through music and played only on toy instruments. Celebrating its 10th year, this piece originated at Berlin’s Schaubühne and has since played in opera houses throughout Europe, the bars of Buenos Aires and Tel Aviv and, most memorably, Peter Lehmann’s wine warehouse in the Barossa. From the near ruin of the beautiful Bouffes du Nord, an Asialink scholarship takes me to its very antithesis—the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre where I will be their artist in residence. Joanna Dudley, director, performer, singer
My Vinyl Arcade, Lucas Abela,
photo Alex Davies
My Vinyl Arcade, Lucas Abela,
2011 is going to be busy indeed: I’m currently touring Indonesia. My Vinyl Arcade project is going gangbusters, starting the year in the Australia Council window, then as an installation at Imperial Panda festival in March before being shipped off to Austria for the Donau festival in Krems in April. dualpLOVER is touring ravesploitation act Captain Ahab from LA in Feb. Justice Yeldham has a European tour, and I’m building him new instruments at Cydonia glass studios. I’ll be debuting Mix Tape at Tinsheds in June, a curated exhibition of exposed audio tape/interactive installation. And finally my fingers are firmly crossed that my proposed tap dogs meets merzbow ice-capades project gets off the ground. Lucas Abela, sound performer
2011 is shaping up really well. I’m excited to be working with architects Peta Heffernan and Elvio Brianese on the production design of a hybrid large-scale work for MOFO 2012 in Hobart—a wonderful commission for our 21st anniversary year. A 12-month design development period is tremendous. The work is based on the writing of Constantine Cavafy and will have a fusion of Greek and Egyptian music. Kimisis—Falling Asleep, from our 2010 program, is touring to Darwin, and an American producer is developing USA presentations for later in 2011 and 2012. Constantine Koukias, Artistic Director, IHOS Music Theatre and Opera
2011 starts fast for Insite Arts as producers of MONA FOMA in Hobart in January. 2 Dimensional Life of Her by Fleur Elise Noble will tour internationally with trips to New Zealand, Denmark, USA and the UK. Saltbush, a co-production between Insite and Compagnia TPO [creator of immersive, interactive theatre for children] from Italy, will tour to Adelaide Festival Centre, ArtPlay, Castlemaine Festival and then Korea. Mirazozo by Architects of Air will return to Australia after a successful season on the forecourt of Sydney Opera House. In between we’ll be showing a new work—The Drawing Project by Fleur Elise Noble. Lee Cumberlidge, Insite Arts
In 2011 some things fascinating me are: Depression-era folk furniture, Neolithic jewellery and objects, greenwood carving, gleaning urban timber, Modernist abstract sculpture and remnant vegetation on battlegrounds. In February I have two exhibitions: Polygon Wood at Greenaway Art Gallery opening on the 16th; and a group show at Artroom 5 opening on the 20th. I will then get packed up, ready to travel overseas to take up my Anne and Gordon Samstag Scholarship. With my destination in the laps of the application gods it seems I will spend the latter part of 2011 in either the USA or Portugal. Bridget Currie, visual artist
I am absorbed by futures and fictions with Lizzie Muller and a host of Australian artists: time travel, walking on Mars, shrinking things with ray guns, civil wars fought along the gender divide, cloud seeding, interspecies relationships, survival kits, fembots and more. Awfully Wonderful: Science Fiction in Contemporary Art opens in April. Throughout the year Performance Space is walking with artists around various Sydney locations. Later, we are exploring the body, its viscidities and exchanges. Now I’m sitting in the office with Jeff Khan talking more about the future—2012: a decade after we made first contact (really!). Bec Dean, Associate Director, Performance Space
Hurtling out of a commission for the gala opening of the Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre—a new work using layers of animation mapped onto multiple screens with dancers navigating their way into and around a forest of light. Floating into a month preparing images of new digital art works for an exhibition in May. Flying to Melbourne to work on Winterreisse directed by Matt Lutton with Paul Capsis, Alistair Spence George Shvetsov and dancer James O’Hara. Approaching the third phase of creative development of Kings and Queens, a physical theatre production with painter Patrick Doherty, writer Reg Cribb, composer Jonathan Mustard, actors vocalists and dancers. Chrissie Parrott, choreographer, producer
Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, Limona Studios, Mumbai
Back to Back Theatre’s new work Ganesh versus the Third Reich premieres this year. Constructed as a play within a play, the first narrative is the epic hero’s journey of Ganesh travelling from India to Nazi Germany to reclaim the Swastika (the ancient Hindu symbol) from Hitler. The second narrative is the moral and ethical journey that the makers of the play undertake in presenting the first narrative. The further Ganesh travels, the more enmeshed its protagonists become in the politics of appropriation. If you are a small theatre company from Geelong, Australia is it okay to rewrite Asiatic and European history? Should authors be allowed to craft fairytales, satires and comedies about anything? Back to Back Theatre Company
I’m most looking forward to a show that kicks off PICA’s exhibition program this year. John Gerrard is an extraordinarily accomplished Irish artist who has been using real time 3D, a technology mainly used in video gaming, to create eerily realistic animated video works that depict bleak but compelling agri-industrial scenes in America’s Great Plains. For this show, John’s first in Australia, we’ll see chilling imagery of infamous dust storms in Texas and Kansas during the 1930s, daily circumnavigations of a fully automated pig farm in Oklahoma and the relentless movement of a lone oil derrick in Colorado. It’s strangely powerful stuff! Amy Barrett-Lennard, Director, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art
What is ahead for Stalker? The best indicator is a snapshot of today—several of us researching a new work called Encoded. We are discussing developing photogrammetry techniques to enable real time virtual cameras to interact with live performance. It all comes from the use of photos to generate point clouds that we can then animate. The BIG question from today was how to embody such heavy use of technology in a physically meaningful way. After all Stalker has been a physical theatre company for well over 20 years! But we did start the day with yoga, and catapult training! David Clarkson, Co-artistic Director, Stalker Theatre Company
Chunky Move, Connected
photo courtesy Chunky Move
Chunky Move, Connected
After 15 exciting years of Chunky Move I am leaving at the end of 2011 with a bang! Turning on some sweet middle-aged moves in my solo show, Faker, at Dance Massive in Melbourne and am most excited about premiering two large-scale works: Connected—kinetic sculptor Reuben Margolin, lots of mathematics, composers Robin Fox and Oren Ambarchi, five extraordinary dancers, lighting Ben Cistern, costumes Anna Cordingly; Assembly—Richard Gill, Nick Schlieper, Victorian Opera, 50 singers, 8 dancers, chants, Gesualdo, Ligeti, a cappella, mass, crowds and power.…Oh, and if you are in Melbourne, a huge party in December!” Gideon Obarzanek, Artistic Director, Chunky Move
In 2010 we explained the GFC from what we reckoned. In 2011 we’re working out “Who’s The Best,” out of us…from what we reckon. And what the audience reckons. The show/competition will be at STC, then touring Oz. We’re all excited to hear the scores. After that we might have a crack at figuring out Death. Probably from what we reckon, and maybe some other sources too. For us this year’s all about drag, imposters, impressions, bad acting, The Biggest Loser, birth, auditions, shamans, epitaphs, avatars, and those nightmares where you have to give a speech but haven’t got any pants on… Mish, Zoe, Nat, Post performance collective
Tracing lines beyond the map. Deleuze and Guttari’s rhizome engenders an operational velocity that is ever apparent, though sometimes perhaps only to myself. There are lines and tracings that flow through Revelation and other aspects of theoretical, literary, curatorial and programming work with which I continually engage, both above and below the maps of culture. Presently deep in exploring trauma and film academically, this may well contribute to interesting decisions subsequently. As ever, I feel the need to be fighting the powers of boredom and stasis, searching for new films and expressions that challenge and stimulate, striving to present the limitless potentialities that can be reached. Jack Sargeant, Program Director, Revelation Perth International Film Festival, author, nihilistic bon vivant
King Lear, director Benedict Andrews, Icelandic National Theatre
photo Eddi ljosmyndari
King Lear, director Benedict Andrews, Icelandic National Theatre
I’m in Reykjavik sitting at the kitchen table. Outside are the silver waters of the bay. One moment, the low sun shines, next a blizzard blows in from the mountains, or a thick fog from the sea. It’s a sublime, cosmic theatre—ideal to watch while preparing my version of The Seagull (Belvoir, June-July). The idiom and milieu will be distinctly Australian—my bones longing for Australian summer—but the turbulent Icelandic weather seeps in. I’m thrilled to be returning to Chekhov in 2011—to the dramatist of what Giorgio Agamben calls “the time that is left.” Benedict Andrews, theatre director
I am looking forward to building a rich practice outside of my project-based work and hope to find myself in a room with other performers as much as possible this year. There are a few things on the boil that I’m most excited about: Whelping Box with Branch Nebula and Clare Britton—a two-hander that takes on dogs, men and gods; regrouping with the raw joyous energy of Whale Chorus (Janie Gibson, James Brown); and finding ways to tour Hole in the Wall (with Clare Britton), something we want to see mature after a successful premiere in 2010. Matt Prest, performance maker
2011 promises big things for Stompin! We are exploring our inner rev-head with the premiere of I ♥ Cars at Ten Days on the Island. Set in a car mechanic’s workshop, this show is a site-specific, multi-art mash-up that explores our love affair with cars and the way they literally connect and separate us. Stompin’s incredibly talented team of artists, including Adam Wheeler, Emma Porteus, Philip Peck from Bluebottle and Dan Speed, will collaborate with 15 young, non-professional performers from around Launceston to create a performance event that shifts between abstraction, representation and documentation. Stompin says art/youth/community 4ever. Sarah McCormack, Executive Producer, Stompin
Polytoxic, l-r Fez Fa’anana, Leah Shelton, Natano Fa’anana, Lisa Fa’alafi, Mark Winmill, Amanda-Lyn Pearson
photo Sean Young
Polytoxic, l-r Fez Fa’anana, Leah Shelton, Natano Fa’anana, Lisa Fa’alafi, Mark Winmill, Amanda-Lyn Pearson
2011 will bring us a whole lot closer to realising two new works, kicking it off with a scratch showing of The Rat Trap at the Brisbane Powerhouse’s World Theatre Festival. Based around a twisted tale of blood ties, revenge and rodents, it’s a chance for all six Polytoxics to meld our gutsy physicality with aerials, theatricality and even some WWE wrestling moves. Also on the cards is further development of a smaller work, Lost Dances, which arose from research into lost, suppressed and archived dances of Samoa; a partnership with Queensland Theatre Company; a residency at the Brisbane Powerhouse; and our usual antics. Polytoxic, dance ensemble
2011 will be a year for regaining my physical and mental faculties after two years of art making and dissipation in the fine but exhausting city of Berlin. I’ve sublet my Neukölln flat, god bless it, to establish a new nest in Katoomba. A collaborative project, between myself, my partner and the Goddess of the Hearth. This Rabbit year will be one of quietude and completion. The focus: finishing a large scale writing project (a book of ghost stories) too often neglected in favour of the more obnoxious demands of performing. The body will get out there too: the epic cycle Songs of Rapture and Torture will be performed in its pent-amorous entirety; new works, developed and performed overseas, most recently at InBetweenTime, will see Australian premieres. Until then, I’ll be writing, bottling preserves and learning new skills domestic and esoteric. Sarah-Jane Norman, artist, writer
Looking forward to adventures…turning a most impossible ear toward the lost opera Minotaur—the Island (Chamber Made Opera, Ten Days on the Island)…to salt winds on the Bruny Island ferry…to living with ‘the company’ and ‘lunching’ with the audience. I am squinting toward horizons where wild paths of works flicker far into a year. And, after Falling Like a Bird (Ladyfinger) soft landing in Italy on an escapade, if the little puppet sisters of A Quarrelling Pair (Aphids) fly off to fight again about their rooms, their milk and whether hearts are big or small. Margaret Cameron, poet, performer, director
Precarious, Merilyn Fairskye 2011
Precarious (digital video, 65 minutes) evokes the aftermath of the explosion at Chernobyl 25 years on. This road movie takes the spectator on a journey from the shores of the Black Sea to the frozen heart of Chernobyl, passing through desolate, snowy landscapes littered with abandoned villages. Squatting in this icy wasteland, the ghostly sarcophagus of Reactor #4 is a constant reminder of the threat still lurking. Winter exerts its hold, ice keeps the hidden radiation at bay, but the spring thaw will once again release the surrounding rivers’ toxic flow. Accompanied by testimony from a group of veterans of the disaster, Precarious bears witness to the folly and resilience of humans and to nature’s fragility. Merilyn Fairskye, artist: photomedia, video, installation
The nexus between contemporary art and environmental sustainability will underpin Arts House in 2011 in two programs—Six Degrees and nude works. Six Degrees brings together the notion of six degrees of separation (sometimes known as Human Web) and the idea that if global temperature increases by six degrees Celsius the world will be uninhabitable. These two ideas underpin the Arts House Six Degrees project, inviting sound artists to collaborate and respond to climate change. In August, nude works is a mini festival of contemporary performance and live art that is elemental, stripped back and essential. Nude works may not all be performed entirely naked! Steven Richardson, Artistic Director, Arts House
Lee Wilson, Branch Nebula, The Whelping Box
photo Mirabelle Wouters
Lee Wilson, Branch Nebula, The Whelping Box
We are excited about birthing our new performance, Whelping Box: from fighting dogs to mythological beings, in collaboration with Matthew Prest and Clare Britton. The project also extends to a stand-alone video, with Denis Beaubois and Steve Couri. We head to Melbourne in March to find new audiences for our recent work, Sweat, at Dance Massive. Next we brave new territory with a site-specific creative development when Concrete and Bone Sessions infiltrates the local skate park at night with nine artists utilizing BMX, skating, parkour, martial arts, dance and gore. Later in the year we explore artistic and familial connections when we head to Europe. Lee Wilson & Mirabelle Wouters, Artistic Directors, Branch Nebula
I spent day one, 2011, in Jakarta, a city of 15 million people that runs on subsidised petrol and hums with the sound of as many motorbikes. Jakarta sprawls as far as you can imagine, with massive shopping malls and countless kampungs crammed with warungs selling food, cigarettes and pulsar. I hope 2011 remains true to its first day. I am looking forward to working at Tin Sheds and hope to find ways of linking artists here with those from around our region. We need to turn the world upside down or we are all stuck in a Jakarta traffic jam. Zanny Begg, Director, Tin Sheds Gallery
“I do understand the anxiety and indeed fears that Australians have when they see boats…” Is Prime Minister Julia Gillard imagining herself to be an Eora woman witnessing the arrival of the First Fleet? If so, what an astonishing piece of theatre! Heiner Muller said, “As long as freedom is based on force, and the creation of art is based on privilege, works of art will tend to be prisons…” At the VCA Grant St. Theatre, Feb 17-20, Doomstruck Oedipus, Why Are You Here? Parts 1-2-3 will be asking, among other things, What is the role of performance in Australian society today? Ben Speth, theatre director
The sharp trill of an alarm clock launches Clocked Out into 2011. After 10 years of the same dream, forays into the wide alley searching for foreign objects, cleaning up the messy spills of Dada, we finally say enough is enough. It’s time to Wake Up! to the everyday sounds around us. [Wake Up! debuts March 23, 6:30 pm @ Queensland Conservatorium.] Also in 2011: watch out for our Ensemble in Residence series at Queensland Conservatorium, The Trilling Wire Series at Judith Wright Centre, the Radio Plays project at Queensland Music Festival, and a new collaboration with Continuum Sax! Erik Griswold & Vanessa Tomlinson, Clocked Out
2011, despite being an odd number, seems to have a lot of symmetry to it. It’s been 10 years since we created Same, same But Different and with it Force Majeure. 2011 sees us complete our collaboration with Sydney Theatre Company—Never Did Me Any Harm—a work about contemporary attitudes to raising children, something of a minefield we’ve discovered! Also looking forward to participating in the Adelaide Film Festival’s The Hive lab; presenting Not In A Million Years at Dance Massive; conducting our own lab, CULTIVATE; directing a play, FOOD (hopefully for Belvoir); and welcoming new CEO Lisa Havilah to CarriageWorks with open arms! Kate Champion, Artistic Director, Force Majeure
Lily Shearer leading a smoking ceremony at the posts
photo Michelle Blakeney
Lily Shearer leading a smoking ceremony at the posts
This year My Darling Patricia will premiere Posts in the Paddock. In 1900 relatives of mine were murdered by Jimmy Governor. The film and novel, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, are based on his life. Actor LeRoy Parsons (Jimmy’s great-great grandson) and musician Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor will join My Darling Patricia on stage. Australian history is full of silences. We want Posts in the Paddock to allow Indigenous and non-indigenous artists to speak into that silence together. For us, it’s the culmination of three years of research and consultation. Also really exciting: our Malthouse commission, Africa, on tour with Mobile States and to STC’s Next Stage. Clare Britton for My Darling Patricia
2011 sees me in the middle of my three-part solo series, Trilogy. It explores the potential of durational and intensely physical choreographic forms to encounter the body as both a site and agent of continual becoming. In each piece the figure is restrained by an extremely minimal choreographic structure that the internal forces of the body rebel against, producing visceral micro-choreographies of rhythm and vibration. The first piece, Thousands, will return to Melbourne for Dance Massive and Cannibal, the second work, will have Sydney and Melbourne seasons. In October I’ll begin working on the final piece in the series. Matthew Day, dancer, choreographer
“Minotaur is a place—the island of Minotaur. The music is tense—just out of reach—fracturing and breaking into bits—travelling through corridors. The objects are the island, and are moved around the space like flotsam from a shipwreck. The characters are: Ariadne with a sound puzzle box, Venus in a man’s suit, Pasiphæ in a white hand-knitted dress, Theseus dressed as a matador, Dædelus, Monteverdi in a medieval dress, the small Minotaur with fur boots, Icarus with a gull’s head and a harpsichord. ‘She could have music depending on the wind.’” From text by Margaret Cameron & David Young. Chamber Made Opera, Minotaur, Bruny Island, 2011 Ten Days on the Island
2011 marks a clear shift in my practice. After mainly working as a solo artist for many years, my focal point will now be collaboration with other dancers, both on group works and on solos. I’m especially excited about the premiere of my new work, Mountains Never Meet, at Riverside Parramatta in August. It’s a collaboration with young footballer and performance maker Ahilan Ratnamohan and eight untrained male performers from Western Sydney. Exploring the connection between sport and art, the work aims to playfully challenge our notion of what dance is and who can be considered a dancer. Martin del Amo, dancer, choreographer
2011 starts with Embedded (trombone Rishin Singh, accordion Monika Brooks, double bass Sam Pettigrew) opening the Now now Festival and till death us do part. February: Bogong AIR Festival, playing in the high country of Victoria. West Head Project: releasing our first CD, a closely woven fabrik, on Splitrec. Blip (with bassist Mike Majkowski) release calibrated and tour the East coast. March-April: collaboration with Tess de Quincey. August: MURAL launches a CD at the Rothko Chapel, Houston, recorded there in 2010. November: first trip to Chile. I hope lotsa bush music in between. Jim Denley, improvising musician
Not travelling, or tooling ninja-style on productions, I’m bunkering down into the literal moon crater of COFA this year. These next two years I am trying to establish an understanding of digital animism, a haunted and blooming soul of video. I need to explore this state where the multiplication of video transcends itself and hidden meaning appears. VIVARIA will tour in Mobile States and I’ll be in Campbelltown making a fictional documentary on the imaginarium of shopkeepers. Every few weeks I can emerge to add life to the gestures of puppets and the enigma of performance art, still the wildest state of living. Sam James, video artist/projection designer
2011 will see my next feature film, Falling for Sahara, starring an entire cast of African refugees, premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival in July…all very exciting. At the moment I’m writing a play about Vietnamese weddings for Belvoir and creating a four-hour dramatic mini-series for FremantleMedia about capital punishment, which we hope will go into production in late 2011. Khoa Do, filmmaker
2011 is a year of recovery. In the aftermath of the floods I’m provoking questions about the role of theatre in our society. How do we respond to the social trends, demography, geography and the uniqueness this brings to our storytelling? It’s not enough to just devise a program and expect people to come to it anymore. Engagement, Diversity and Excellence have become my mantra. I’m looking at creating an Indigenous Program, developing a Studio Program to give artists space and resources to create work, take the next step and explore their craft, and also trying to unashamedly increase the audiences for theatre in Queensland. Wesley Enoch, Artistic Director, Queensland Theatre Company
Dean Walsh
photo Heidrun Löhr
Dean Walsh
Granted an Australia Council two-year dance fellowship, my independent practice is presented with a renewed oxygen supply for more in-depth experimentation and an expansion of my interest in planned future works. Research, apart from many weeks investing in solo and group work and more frequent scuba diving, will also involve attending conferences and interviewing experts on environmental and species un/sustainability interfaced with exploration of our everyday perceptions of these realities. I’m taking my dance reflections out of the sub/urban and into the ocean and back again. Performance Space has invited me to undertake a stage one performance ‘research touchdown’ this coming May as part of their Uneasy Futures season. This new work is called Fathom. Dean Walsh, choreographer, dancer, Sydney
Dwelling Structure: a new music work that premieres in May. For this operatic project without singers, the sound of the house is the main protagonist in a collection of time-use episodes. Greatly inspired by textual development with writer Cynthia Troup and visual assemblage by Neil Thomas and very happy to be part of the Chamber Made Opera house. As David Foster Wallace, our new fave author, writes in Infinite Jest: “almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trench-coated out of an alley with some sort of ‘psst’ that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.” Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, musicians, composers
2011 looks bright, with some great projects coming to fruition early in the year. My ANAT Synapse residency with the Bionic Ear Institute culminates in a concert of newly commissioned works for the bionic ear on Feb 13 and two exciting new dance works. Connected, with Chunky Move and Drift by Antony Hamilton feature my sound designs in the Dance Massive festival in March. A new album with double bassist Clayton Thomas is ready; I’m still editing the 3D shoot of the laser show, reading a lot about holograms and giant Theremins, planning tours…the rest is highly classified. Robin Fox, sound and visual artist
Halcyon has always been about championing composers, so we’re thrilled to be launching our inaugural young composers project, First Stones, where participants will develop a new song for voice and chamber ensemble; the new works will be on show in Halcyon’s final concert for 2011. As well, we’ve commissioned a major chamber work from Sydney composer Andrew Schultz, to be premiered later this year in a program with George Crumb and Joseph Schwanter, and in March, Jenny, Andrew and Alison are Artists in Residence at Bundanon to share and develop ideas for the new work in relaxed and inspirational surrounds. Alison Morgan & Jenny Duck-Chong, Halcyon, new music ensemble
This is the year of time and practice, particularly primary research and its application. This means first hand interviews with informers for our work, engaging directly in the struggles that we reference, spending open ended time in pivotal locations, sending probes into our own bodies and cutting things out…I’ll be labouring on Hydra’s theatre work Prompter Live Studio and a new project based around a SymbioticA residency exploring empathy, abstraction and broken narratives. I’ll be curating performance for a peer exchange project called WASTE with an accompanying zine from Mother [has words], looking, sans sentiment, at what discarded conceptual efforts suggest. Sam Fox, director, Hydra Poesis
Fiona McGregor, Vertigo, 2009, still from performance video / multi-channel video installation
photo Julia Charles
Fiona McGregor, Vertigo, 2009, still from performance video / multi-channel video installation
Water—fundamental to our existence; the functioning of our bodies, the life cycles of our environment. Its scarcity across much of Australia has become one of the most urgent issues facing our society; its rare, violent overabundance causes chaos and destruction. It nourishes and yet can be used to torture both body and psyche. Through November Fiona McGregor will produce Water, a suite of installations and durational body-centred performances across all the Artspace galleries, both evoking the magical, poetic qualities of water and exploring states of relationship with it—saturation, absorption, deprivation. Blair French, Executive Director, Artspace
An ‘environmental’ triumvirate in 2011. Firstly, Site Listening, a term I coined to encourage the activation of the ears and reduce the dominance of our visual perception, will be a focus with a Queensland version to be unveiled as part of the Queensland Music Festival. Secondly, my project with Werner Dafeldecker, The Cold Monolith (based on our work in Antarctica under invitation from Argentina’s Dirección Nacional del Antártico), will be presented on Germany’s SWR radio and also as an installation at festivals. And finally I’ll be working all year on a series of audio/media works based on problematising contemporary understandings of [the Japanese aesthetic philosophy] Wabi-Sabi. Lawrence English, room40
Ever wondered what a genre film director like Enzo G Castellari would have created if he were a choreographer? My debauched lifelong obsession with the avant-garde works of genre celluloid trailblazers found its way into my latest dance work, DRIFT. DRIFT fell from its loftier concerns of “architecture, the body and their intangible relationship” to “devising dystopian pagan rituals of the future!” The project began as a quest to discover Melbourne’s atmospheric derelict urban haunts. Like a location for film instead of theatre for dance, the location is a vessel for a nostalgic romance with B-grade sci-fi post-apocalyptic fantasy. Antony Hamilton, choreographer, dancer
Close Encounters (3D render/composite), Jordana Maisie
In 2011, Close Encounters takes off. A large-scale interactive sculpture raised 2.9 metres: at a distance it appears as if a luminous UFO is hovering above the undulating festival audience, transmitting messages to the crowd as they move through the site. When walking underneath it, Close Encounters acts as a portal connecting you to the sky. The work provokes participation through text messaging and LED technology, inviting punters to ‘text’ the number displayed. By responding to the text provocations, a collective conversation begins—the audience co-creating a real time narrative as the festival unfolds. Jordana Maisie, new media & electronic artist
We’ll be creating a new stop-motion world in 2011. Interactivity and performance will get a look-in as we gear up to create a new multi-viewer experience to premiere towards the end of the year. We can’t wait to visit MONA [Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania] where our 2010 work You Were In My Dream will be showing August–September, and the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery in May. We’ll be running stop-motion workshops, dreaming up new film ideas, sculpting miniature scenes and making faces. Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine, media artists
so what might be ephemeral practices? / launch of hard soft john barbour survey publication main gallery vernon ah kee tall man bonita ely murray river punch elizabeth newman + nicki wynnychuck installation nasim nasir women in shadow kit wise projections james + luna cheryl l’hirondelle mind the gap osw (bianca hester + terri bird) / noel sheridan project space ray harris videos ane damcho drolma one moon christine collins drawing installation nien schwarz residency + installation / odradekaeaf window box february through august curated by ray harris + matthew huppatz / wura-natasha ogunji videos / launch of new performance/installation/project space. Domenico de Clario, Director, Australian Experimental Art Foundation
Prediction for Luke George: You will reignite collaboration with your spiritual-art-brother Miguel Gutierrez (NYC). Late February is a powerful time for you both. You will meet and dance every day through a CultureLab Residency in a Melbourne House of Arts. Joining the power of your minds/bodies, you will develop supernatural perception and the ability to slip between multiple performance modalities at the speed of light. Through a completely illegitimate process, you will research what is the biology and neurology of performing. You will invoke a space that resists opinion and evaluation and invite an audience to exist within the live-ness of this dance. Luke George, dancer, choreographer
In November Marrugeku will partner with Atamira Dance Collective to present the third International Indigenous Choreographic Laboratory in Auckland. The labs (Sydney 2009, Broome 2010), explore resonances and differences in contemporary Indigenous dance-theatre from Africa, New Zealand and Australia. New influences, processes and cultural pathways are explored and their relationships to traditional practices. Each laboratory is steeped in the local cultural context and artists work from their own experience of being Indigenous artists or working in Indigenous contexts. IICL3 will be lead by New York based Zimbabwean choreographer Nora Chipaumire and Maori choreographers Louise Potiki Bryant and Charles Royal. Rachael Swain, Dalisa Pigram, Co-artistic Directors, Marrugeku
Critical Path 2011, Choreographic Research
■ ■→ IDEAS of bodies orientated CHAOS, falling, finding seeing; critical characters turning spaces; ■ musicality, hand movements past improvisations → artist’s language lucid notices watching them watch images. ■
↓↑With content of arms pelvis head ears eyes facing pointing fingers mapping directions thrown front toward distant tangents of irritation; slowly, swaged ■ Of imagined time future training permissible beyond >>>>> counting >>>>>> audience’s inspirations ║ reaction fast ↔ finding forgiven feet, shins, knees, thighs, torso ║ surface ↓↑ fading expectation blacked out. •∞
Margie Medlin, director Critical Path
•∞↔→↓↑║
Whilst my passion for natural systems, morphology and cultural histories has grown apace, my desire to work with galleries and museums has gradually diminished—displaced by my enthusiasm for environmental projects that directly engage public space and community. 2011 will see me on the high seas again, working from my boat Sisu in the Abrolhos Islands (WA) to develop CrayVox, a work for the Space(d) Biennale; then mounting VoxAura, the River Sings for European Capital of Culture in Turku, Finland; and onto Istanbul for ISEA with a sound installation entitled Weeping Willow. Add in a couple of large scale public sculpture commissions and that’s my year! Nigel Helyer, sculptor and sound artist
In 2011 I’m embarking on a feature documentary/on-line project with Melbourne colleague John Hughes to tell the story of the Filmmakers’ Cooperatives which operated in most state capitals in the 70s and early 80s, until in the mid 80s a centralised government bureaucracy effectively closed them down. The project will examine the history of the Co-ops and their aesthetic concerns in a period where filmmakers were deeply engaged with social/political issues. This is an important and overlooked moment of Australian film history which will not only entertain but also be useful to new generations of filmmakers, and essential in any comprehensive appreciation of Australian cultural history. Tom Zubrycki, filmmaker
Concerts with eRikm, Valerio Tricoli, Thomas Lehn and Stephen O’Malley in Europe. PIVIXKI in Canada and NZ, solo in Chicago, tour with Fusinato, Thymolphthalein LP on Editions Mego. New work for percussion quartet and flute that HAS to be better than the music for Kwaidan. Making the solo piano record that I’ve always wanted to make and re-issuing the last one the label shafted me on. Practising Doepfer every day, writing elaborate songs that WON’T be better than Scott Walker, doing my first film in six years, listening harder, reading wider, seeing deeper, remembering to live. Antony Pateras, composer, performer
Brooke Leeder, Gabrielle van der Elst, wok, Tongues of Stone
photo Sarah Burrell
Brooke Leeder, Gabrielle van der Elst, wok, Tongues of Stone
After Prague (2003), Athens (2005) and Wellington (2006), Perth hosts the site-specific work of New Zealand’s Carol Brown (choreography), Dorita Hannah (design) and Russell Scoones (sound). Three years in development, Tongues of Stone features 15 dancers carving their way through the city, from the underground central station to the open foreshore. Reminding us of the disappearance of Perth wetlands, Tongues of Stone brings to the surface silenced memories. In a quest to make visible the lightest of art forms, STRUT joins the Barcelona-based Dancing Cities Network and brings its voice to worldwide conversations between dance, architecture, public space and social change. Agnes Michelet, Director, STRUT dance
To be excited about one dance project over another at Campbelltown Arts Centre is too hard. Kathy Cogill and Latai Taumoepeau trying to define what Intercultural work is? Beautiful. There’s a Bright Golden Haze on the Meadow. There sure is. Lizzie Thomson with local amateur actors reworking old musicals. Beautiful. Not to mention Antony Hamilton out on his own with us in cars listening to the radio. Who’s Donna Miranda? You just WAIT! In the meantime, Nat Cursio comes to town to curate a motza. Emma Saunders, curator, dance program, Campbelltown Arts Centre
Decibel are still going strong, in 2011 making a book, releasing recordings and running a subscription concert series. These PICA concerts will take place in the main gallery space so we really get a chance to explore ways of combining sound art and more traditional composition. There is so much great new music being made in Australia right now, and we are excited about playing, recording and writing about it both here and overseas! Cat Hope, director, Decibel, new music ensemble
Performance is the key to my creative thinking at this moment and it has dominated my thinking for the past 10 years. It never ceases to amaze me, that in 2011 Indigenous artists are still constructed as the ‘other’; performing in a space that is only allocated to the ‘Performative of Aboriginality,’ rather than just being artists who are Aboriginal. Why…? I will continue to make work that questions the reasoning behind why there is a lack of visionary thinking and courage to do it differently! r e a, media artist
It’s about the emotional nerve. Working with artists from across the arts who inspire through their passion and individuality, and with the need to realise their respective visions. 2011 promises a rich palette—a performance of the complete Berio Sequenzas; collaborating with Jon Rose on his Pursuit project; an overseas visit to observe other new music festivals and organisations thanks to a Churchill Fellowship. Also exploring the music of Hannah Kulenty through movement with choreographer Amanda Phillips as well as celebrating the 50th anniversary of Grainger’s death with cellist John Adderson and Vincent Plush. Underpinning all of these activities, I continue to delve into the visceral, intellectual depth of pianism. Gabriella Smart, musician, Artistic Director, Soundstream Festival
2011: the year of collaboration! I’ll be digging alongside Ian Milliss as we embark on our Yeomans Project—about the cultural (and agricultural) phenomenon of Percy Yeomans (an Aussie visionary who invented a special ploughing system in the 1950s). I’ll also be digging through the archives with SquatSpace, as we work towards a 10-year retrospective project at Campbelltown Arts Centre in 2012. Apart from that, my gardening collaboration with Diego Bonetto will continue decomposing itself, at the Sydney College of the Arts. And through all of this, I’ll keep on getting inky at Big Fag Press. Lucas Ihlein, artist
Started the year working with Hitlab NZ to deliver an augmented reality work for the next Adelaide Film Festival…excited because it uses technology just on the edge of deliverability so we have to keep trying to solve the maze of what we can imagine and what is actually possible. Using coral specimens from a trip I made to Lord Howe Island last year to the southernmost coral reef and drawing data feeds of bleaching alerts from NOAA. The health of reefs is urgent so I thought about the sugar bowls of the Abolitionist movement and decided to do my first work for mobile phones. Lynette Wallworth, media artist
Alan Flower, Kym Vercoe, Yana Taylor, The Table of Knowledge, version 1.0
photo Heidrun Löhr
Alan Flower, Kym Vercoe, Yana Taylor, The Table of Knowledge, version 1.0
In 2011 version 1.0 are presenting new work all over the place—including Bathurst, Launceston, Sarajevo and our hometown of Sydney. What I’m most looking forward to is The Table of Knowledge at the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre in Wollongong, exploring an infamous corruption scandal involving developers and former staff of a major local government. It’s got sex, kebabs, massive overdevelopment and conmen played by balloons. The show opens in late August and will be visually spectacular and outrageously hilarious, with a cast of dodgy characters and stories too crazy to have been made up. No one said political performance couldn’t also be deeply fun! David Williams, Chief Executive Officer, version 1.0
In 2011 Urban Theatre Projects moves to a new Arts Centre in Bankstown; develops The Quarry in collaboration with Belvoir, directed by Alicia Talbot and written by Raimondo Cortese; and Effie Nkrumah and Alan Lao premiere the funny and politically incorrect show Ama and Chan. Roslyn Oades’ Stories of Love and Hate reappears as part of STC’s Education Program and a workshop program travels to Adelaide care of Vitalstatistix. Rosie Dennis runs a masterclass; Alicia and Michelle Kotevski return to London to develop a new commission from LIFT [London International Festival of Theatre]; Ahil Ratnamohan and linguist Daisy Wouters develop Michael Essien I Want to Play as You, in Brussels and Paris. Alicia Talbot, Artistic Director, Urban Theatre Projects
Dedicated to innovative new music, Ensemble Offspring will present a program of unique events in 2011 beginning with a fresh angle on the Minimalist tradition in our Why Patterns tour, featuring the vast canvases of Morton Feldman. In May we’ll join the NOW now crew in Sydney for a rendition of the Cardew epic, Treatise. In June, Professor Bad Trip will introduce Sydney audiences to the exhilarating drug-induced sounds of Italian composer Romitelli. And not satisfied with merely performing new works, our ongoing Partch’s Bastards project will premiere newly devised musical instruments capable of wondrous tones in September. Damien Ricketson & Claire Edwardes, Artistic Directors, Ensemble Offspring
Jess White & Isadora Drummond Sweeney, Next of Kin, November 2010
photo Chris Herzfeld
Jess White & Isadora Drummond Sweeney, Next of Kin, November 2010
We’re excited about our new show for Come Out 2011. Take me there directed by Dan Koerner uses startling video technology and a pumping, original score by Ian Moorhead. At once poignant and hilarious, it not only transports the performers but the audience as well into a strange world where there is freedom to be wherever you want, whenever you want. Restless continues to be fiercely committed to combating discrimination within Australia’s artistic scene. The company has embraced a deeply inclusive rationale, working predominantly with people with disability across dance, tutoring, directing and choreography. Nick Hughes, Company Manager, Restless Dance Theatre
The art of play. I will continue my collaboration with Chiara Guidi from Italian theatre company Societas Raffaello Sanzio at Campelltown Arts Centre, working towards the creation of a work for and by children. Looking for opportunities to present: Impasse an installation collaboration with Denis Beaubois and William McClure. Over-lay: a performance collaboration with Paul Gazzola. The Raven Project with Frank Mainoo will become a “film club” presentation exploring the interplay between performance and film. Currently working with Shfa on Hoopla Festival and later in the year on Viva la Gong Festival in Wollongong. Jeffrey Stein, performer, creative producer
In our 12th year, Bonemap continues to develop new work within the influences of the ‘north’ and an ongoing questioning of the processes and overheads required to practice against the backdrop of a groaning natural environment. Although our practice, processes and methodology are continually rediscovered afresh, we are increasingly regarded as senior artists by the community and asked to recount seminal events in the manufacture of a culture that is becoming less transient. The creative sector continues to inspire development in the deep north as a new wave of exciting projects takes shape in the Cairns region including a $240 million performing arts centre, Indigenous museum and cultural precinct (see www.movedancetnq.com). Russell Milledge & Rebecca Youdell, Directors, Bonemap
Dreams Rising, a new hybrid work about transformative aspects of dreaming and memory, will be developed as part of The Opium Confessions series at The University of Sydney with showings for invited audiences in April. Concerned with the nature of visionary experience, it will draw on poetic and scientific approaches and, in collaboration with Radio National, weave together personal accounts of people from diverse cultural backgrounds in Sydney for whom such experiences have been life changing. Science offers an understanding of dreams and visions in terms of technical brain function, yet our culture has other dimensions, deep histories that honour the reality of visionary experience and find powerful forms of meaning in it. Tess de Quincey, Artistic Director, De Quincey Co
Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art, LCD screen. Vienna, 2010
photo Michael Yuen, courtesy of DICA
Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art, LCD screen. Vienna, 2010
Across Australia, Asia and Europe, my lecture tour series, Testing the City, addresses ideas drawn from the new mega cities in emerging countries. The tour follows last year’s lectures on dismantling old, prevailing city planning ideas. In the northern summer, the Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art [DICA] hits the road again, our non-profit space on the back of a donkey travelling the streets of Beijing. The institute lives by the charm and rhythm unique to the donkey’s soul. In this sense, DICA is the most inhuman and radical fulfillment of the avant-garde. Plans are brewing for an exhibition of young noise artists and a second travelling library. Michael Yuen, artist
ELISION is collaborating with SIAL-RMIT on a large-scale project, CONSTRUCTION, the follow-up to composer Richard Barrett’s Dark Matter. The project explores ideas of spatialisation in acoustic and electronic form examining relationships between “utopian” and real architectures—a long tradition stretching from Plato’s ‘Republic’ to Bacon, Campanella and onwards which is juxtaposed with real cities layered by violent disruptions of war, conquest and rebuilding. Also in the wings is a creative development with David Pledger’s NYID and American composer Aaron Cassidy. I’m enthused about this exploration of composition as a ‘choreography of gesture’ placed within Pledger’s concept of the body itself as a listening mechanism. Daryl Buckley, ELISION
2011 is going to be a great year for the company, touring our latest works and making new ones—taking us right across the country, deep into regional Australia and overseas. Human Interest Story opens the new Heath Ledger Theatre at the Perth Festival and plays at Belvoir in September while Untrained’s three-month Road Work regional tour will feature courageous locals. I’ll be developing a work commissioned by Belvoir in April with actors, dancers and the 2011 Tanja Leidtke fellowship recipient. We’ll take Structure and Sadness to the US in October and, back home in November, I’ll begin work on a brand new piece as yet unknown! Lucy Guerin, Artistic Director, Lucy Guerin Inc
2011: a year of multi-focus challenge. A film project, Virtuosi, will take me around the world filming extraordinary dancers, and a major performance project ,Variant, will be premiered in Sydney. There is real magic in the mix—Variant realises a dream cast of performers who push the boundaries in everything they do and are, quite simply, astonishing. The physical and emotional palette within Variant is the most diverse and exciting of my career. It will challenge the perception that dance is merely a ‘cult of a body-type’ and will turn the idea of what is normal on its head. Sue Healey, choreographer, filmmaker
CHRONOLOGY ARTS (new music collective) presents TACTILITY. Sound is an awesome medium, one of the most ephemeral, but this year we’re taking a leap away from the immaterial as we team emerging composers with emerging fine art practitioners, conceptualising in true symbiosis between members of six teams consisting of composers with a painter, two photographers, a sculptor, video artist and another artist—each creating right now to be ready to present ephemeral temporal art with solidified components upstairs at the TAP gallery, Sydney, at the end of March 2011…Huge Creative Risk. That’s the way we like it. Chronology Arts, new music
Tony Yap, Yumi Umiumare
photo Sean O’Brien
Tony Yap, Yumi Umiumare
Last year Yumi Umiumare and I launched a new and timely work inspired by the sites of our spiritual heritages in Japan and Malaysia. This contemporary performance work will be uncompromising, innovating deep rituals from our cultural background. ZeroZero is a development springing from the long-term partnership embodied in our renowned series, How could you even begin to understand? of which Jonathan Marshall wrote: “butoh and its multifarious manifestations of a body…draws on traditions of the ecstatic body—[How could you…] is the closest to a shamanistic trance most of us are likely to see…another masterful work.” Tony Yap, dancer, choreographer
Between channel surfing half a dozen crime dramas and simultaneously playing news clips on YouTube, narratives collide, genuine articles mix with the artificial, all confused into one. We want to see beyond surface representations. We want to see the car crashes and smouldering bullet holes on the streets. We want the police and the press to arrive, figure out what happened and present their verdicts to us. We will do this in public spaces, experimenting with the space between audience and event, between abjection and seduction, between producing popular narratives and exploring how they determine social relations and the dynamics of public spaces. Malcolm Whittaker for Team Mess
When I’m not wearing my RealTime blazer, I’ll be involved in an eclectic range of projects. Stuart Buchanan from New Weird Australia has invited me co-curate Volume 10 which focuses on the voice in experimental and ‘interesting’ musics. For version 1.0 I will contribute some sexy sounds to their tales of corruption in Table of Knowledge. Then I’ll sonify our corporeal fluids for Peta Clancy and Helen Pynor’s installation about organ transplantation, The Body is a Big Place at Performance Space. In between I’ll be delving further into vocal improvisation, learning to make a kaiseki banquet and writing a haiku or two. Gail Priest, sound artist
This year I will travel to Europe as the recipient of the 2010 Robert Helpmann Scholarship. I will spend four weeks researching ideas for a new dance work with UK choreographer Wendy Houstoun, continuing the relationship we began with the Fondue Set in No Success Like Failure; four weeks with German choreographer Antje Pfundtner, initiating a collaboration to make a new duet; and four weeks with Belgian-based NZ choreographer Kate McIntosh, sitting in as she creates a new group commission. Three months with three strong women. Then one month in Berlin attending workshops and dance performances. Viel spass! Jane McKernan, dance artist
2011. Meow Meow delves into the lush land of French New Wave cinema, works with Oscar winner Michel Legrand, Pulitzer Prize winner Sheldon Harnick and UK director extraordinaire Emma Rice in Kneehigh Theatre’s adaptation of Jacques Demy’s Classic 1960s French jazz romance “that just happens to be sung”—The Umbrellas of Cherbourg opens on the West End in March. Meow performs Cocteau at opera festivals in the US, continues punk-art-love globally with Amanda Palmer, Lance Horne, La Soiree and exotica with Thomas M Lauderdale; converts Floridian Republicans to the Meow Meow Risque Revolution; dreams of Malthouse Melbourne, Schubert, Schoenberg and presents a surprise announcement at the Edinburgh International Festival. She continues to carry her own luggage and experience crowd surfing as the closest she can get to “a good lie down.” Meow Meow, artiste
Mike Majkowski
photo Corrie Ancone
Mike Majkowski
Double bassist/improviser/composer Mike Majkowski’s list of things to do (so far) in 2011 (and the list is growing): continue SOLO double bass work (mix & edit recent recordings, record some more—aiming towards a new release); BLIP (duo w Jim Denley) tour to promote the release of a new record, Calibrated; complete the 2nd album, Frost Frost, by ROIL (trio w Chris Abrahams & James Waples) & get it released; more recording with ROIL; complete STRIKE’s debut album (trio w Jon Rose & Clayton Thomas) & get it released; get some gigs with the neo-marrickville-mega-babes (new group w Monica Brooks [drums] & Jon Watts [electric bass])…with Mike singing & playing electric guitar. Mike Majkowski, improvising musician
At the CD launch for Topology’s album Difference Engine, the band welcomes the charming Emma Baker-Spink to perform its Brisbane Songs. Then a few large productions with The Australian Voices exploring the Australian landscape in Sky Songs through new works by Rob Davidson and Gordon Hamilton; a show of new cross-cultural works featuring William Barton composing and performing alongside the band, with Dheeraj Shrestha’s sublime tabla; and a new work for John Babbage in collaboration with Natalie Weir and Expressions Dance Company. The quintet will then create another new engrossing one-hour piece followed by revisiting and redeveloping its hilarious Kransky Sisters collaboration. Topology, new music ensemble
The NOW now is alive and well, thank you very much. And for now, The NOW now will continue to present borderless music twice a month, in Sydney, throughout 2011. Pushing musical binaries so hard they snap. Making a space for the music of the present and the in-between. Always listening. The NOW now is here, now, with you, where it will always be and The NOW now would like to leave you with a Derek Bailey quote: “Of course there’ll be another NOW along shortly, but it won’t be the same NOW. It won’t be this NOW, the NOW now.” The NOW now
2011. January: in cia studios developing Accidental Monsters of Meaning (about surviving consumerist society). February: helping Albany put on a new community dance production. March: Accidental Monsters lands in the WA Museum—11 days straight, four hours a day, five dancers perform in perspex boxes. April: off to Taipei Artist Village for a two-month residency. May: creating in Taipei. June: catching up on uni—studying a Master of Arts in Sustainability. July: seek grants for next year’s artistic endeavours. August: more study. September: more study. October: more grant writing. November: off to Kyoto Arts Centre for a 3-month artist residency. December: cold, icy and inspired in Japan. Aimee Smith, dancer-choreographer
Arlo Mountford & Nick Selenitsch, Movement work #1, Wood, turntables, magnets, metal tacks, motion sensors, 2011
courtesy of the artists and GRANTPIRRIE, Sydney and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
Arlo Mountford & Nick Selenitsch, Movement work #1, Wood, turntables, magnets, metal tacks, motion sensors, 2011
One of the most exciting projects for me in 2011 opened recently. Fellow Melbourne artist Nick Selenitsch and myself have been collaborating on works for a show in the RMIT Project Space—Movements—in which two kinetic sculptural works play with the human instinct to anthropomorphise basic phenomena—like thumb tacks propelled across a surface by magnets or steel balls collecting on a gallery floor. Also on the horizon are two major animated works that include reworking YouTube videos. And there will be a whole lotta saving the cashola for a studio residency in Japan at the beginning of 2012! Arlo Mountford, artist
Current project is Tongue of the Invisible, commissioned by the Holland Festival for jazz musician Uri Caine, singer Omar Ebrahim and musikFabrik which premieres this June in Amsterdam and Cologne. There’s a text by Jonathan Holmes after the Sufi poet Hafez and the work explores an ecstatic world of Improvisation as unpredictable play, Song as longing for the Divine, Musicians as listeners, drunk with desire, and The Concert as a tavern, a meeting-place between world and ’other.’ “This door is the mouth of love,/ Whether it leads to the mosque or the wine-shop/ Souls inhabit the dust of its threshold.” (Holmes). Liza Lim, composer
pvi collective t2 r&d
We are most looking forward to playing hard and getting our hands dirty in 2011 with: transumer inspired street intervention workshops at Adhocracy, Adelaide; a new series of quick and dirty public actions titled Do we need a permit for this?; developing national “go fcuk it up day” to launch in time for CHOGM when Perth becomes the centre of world political debate; showcasing t2 at pica, where audiences will be invited to undertake tiny acts of resistance against their built environment. 2011 is looking a little bit brutal & full of love, but we will have killer smiles and sly mischief on our side! PVI Collective
In 2011 an art gang I’m part of, which emerged out of the DLux TILT festival and Newcastle’s Electrofringe, will be ten years old. We’re boat-people.org, we’ve been making work around the ideas of race, nation, history and borders since John Howard conjured us into being with his 2001 border panic election. A decade on, we’ve made all kinds of public spectacles of ourselves and others, maybe including you, in (the hope of) the public sphere. As we reach double digits there’s much more mischief to be made around the troubled themes of our interesting times. Sign up, join us! boat-people.org. Deborah Kelly, artist
We are developing a project for the inaugural San Francisco/Sydney Biennial curated by Justine Topfer (SFAC Gallery) and Meg Shiffler (Director, San Francisco Art Commission Gallery). The exhibition is titled Envisioning Urban Change: Proposals for an Integrated Urban Life and will include three projects about each city created by local artists. The first stage of the project opens in San Francisco in April, the second stage will be exhibited at CarriageWorks, Sydney in August. Our project focuses on Sydney Harbour, exploring people’s relationship to it, the state of the water and how we imagine the harbour’s future. Josephine Starrs & Leon Cmielewski, artists
It’s hard to pick a highlight (how lucky am I?) but none of us in the FULL TILT office have quite come down off the ceiling yet after the extraordinary success of the new music theatre series Carnegie 18 which we showcased in January at the Arts Centre. But from this vantage point we can see the 2012 Carnegie 18 program rapidly approaching! If 2011 gave us an opera about netball, vaudevillian grotesques and rock musicals, then bring on the next round of little gems for 2012. I’m really looking forward to the next new batch! Applications close in May. Vanessa Pigrum, Program Manager, Creative Development, The Arts Centre, Melbourne
MAJOR ARTS FESTIVALS LIKE TO THINK BIG, PROGRAMMING A HANDFUL OF BIG WINNERS (WELL RUN-IN BY OTHER INTERNATIONAL FESTIVALS), ONE OR TWO OTHER WORKS OF SCALE (RELIABLE BRAND NAMES, RELATIVELY LOW RISK) AND A BIG RETINUE OF SMALL SHOWS. NOWADAYS ADD TO THIS A BIG SCHEDULE OF SOLO SINGERS AND BANDS AND OTHER ENTERTAINMENTS THAT CO-EXIST WITH THE FESTIVAL IF APPEARING TO HAVE LITTLE TO DO WITH THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR’S VISION. THESE LARGELY PLAY TO A VERY DIFFERENT AUDIENCE, BUT PRESUMABLY PROVIDE GUARANTEED INCOME. THE 2011 SYDNEY FESTIVAL WAS AN OCCASION WHEN SOME BIG SHOWS DIDN’T COME GOOD AND LITTLE WAS BIG—THE PROGRAM’S SMALL-SCALE WORKS, TO VARYING DEGREES, OFFERING INNOVATION, PROVOCATION AND ENGAGEMENT.
The Netherlands company Kassy’s Good Cop Bad Cop snuck up on me. Here was an immaculate domestic setting, ideal for a sitcom or a David Williamson play, with three casually attired performers loitering onstage pre-show and occasionally striking unusual poses while staring intently at nothing in particular. What unfolds is a gentle fable-cum-soap opera about the lives and loves of domestic animals, acutely observed, cleverly avoiding standard mimicry (the actors dropping in and out of animality) and complemented with an onscreen commentary from the characters in a more human vein, but never too complicated so that the human-animal divide is constantly erased. Instead of anthropomorphism we’re offered a comic vision that looks both ways—distancing us from animal behaviour, to regard it anew, while pointing up our need to project intention onto animals and simultaneously confirming our own animal-ness. Beautifully paced and performed with loving attention to detail, Good Cop Bad Cop was a welcome surprise.
Food Chain, Animal Farm Collective
photo Prudence Upton
Food Chain, Animal Farm Collective
Animal life, human and other, was also the subject of Gavin Webber and Grayson Millwood’s Food Chain, a larger scale work with bigger ambitions. A huge tree, reaching up beyond the proscenium fills centrestage, immaculately ‘sculpted’ it appears at once real and false as does the world around it, transmuting from forest to museum diorama and back again and then, nightmarishly, into one. A pair of apparently taxidermied bears come to life and terrorise a pair of campers—she is eaten, he is wounded when the increasingly human bears shoot him—and a female museum attendant who, in projected shadow play on the wall of a tent, has sex with one of the bears. Subsequently, Salome-like, she dances with his head. In this fantastical world, the bears chat about human behaviour like smutty armchair zoologists, use the scent of their female victim to attract her wounded partner and transform into moustachioed, beige-suited, but no less violent men. The outsider in the scenario is a tree-dwelling man in a bad monkey suit who, leaving his isolation, lectures the smaller forest animals on how to deal with bears but veers wildly instead into how to accept your fate in their jaws—prefiguring his own subsequent demise.
While the bear behaviour is nicely executed and the stage design is embracing, the structure of Food Chain is loose, the pacing sluggish and the comic neo-Darwinian tooth and claw savagery taxing. Redemption comes in a beautiful and unexpected coda as the entire cast form a positive version of the chain of animal life, one of mutuality. This is the descent of species in which cooperation is vital and eternal: singly and then wondrously linked the performers perpetually lower themselves down the tree, disappearing ever so briefly behind it only to appear again at its top with the most subtle directorial sleight of hand.
Gob Squad’s much anticipated Super Night Shot also adopted animal guises, in the form of cheap masks as four performers ventured into the world immediately around the Sydney Opera House, each with a camera, to make a quickie movie in an hour which was then immediately shown unedited and sound-mixed live for us on four large screens. At the centre of a highly synchronised venture was the chance outcome of approaching strangers to find one who would kiss the performer wearing a rabbit mask. The resultant blend of technological assuredness and the happenstance of improvisation was engaging, and quite free of profundities. The work simply celebrated DIY spontaneity, technologically and performatively, with a Live Art back-to-basics vision challenging the sophistication and complexity of the big end of the entertainment world.
Entity, Random Dance
photo Prudence Upton
Entity, Random Dance
Wayne McGregor’s Entity is a large-scale work that also uses screens, three big, wide ones framing the dance space and mounted on mechanical devices that dancers could raise or lower by hand as required. Onto these were projected equations and data scrolling furiously if dimly. The dancing was also furious—fast and acutely articulated, balletic but constantly and miraculously off-centre in the Forsythe manner. Striking solos and duets with odd holds and sudden acrobatic inversions or rare slow unfoldings multiplied virally across the stage until the mass of dancers dissolved and a new set was initiated. I was seduced moment by moment but the sense of a totality evaded me.
McGregor’s fascination with the science and psychology of the creative process makes for good reading but the subject is not convincingly embodied in Entity: “By forcing breakdowns of coordination in his dancers, McGregor hoped to gain an insight into the relationship between their physical and cognitive functions. To this end he submitted the dancers to perturbations, assigning them tasks like counting backwards while dancing, and making them wear prisms over their eyes to distort their spatial awareness” (Luke Jennings, program note). Certainly the dancers evinced a remarkable certainty of purpose against the odds of speed and complicated shaping but Entity’s rhythmic sameness (countered somewhat by the melancholy string score of the first section but underlined by the driven pop pulse of the second), the iterated theme and variation structure and the vapidity of the screen deployment gravitated against coherence and interest. The relationship between dancers and projections was nil, the raising and lowering of screens insignificant—a prime example of ‘background new media.’ Australian artists Gideon Obarzanek, Lucy Guerin and Garry Stewart integrate dancers and stage materials, whether objects, projections or devices, with thoroughness and creativity.
Alexandra Harrison, My Bicycle Loves You, Legs on the Wall
photo Prudence Upton
Alexandra Harrison, My Bicycle Loves You, Legs on the Wall
More projections came in the form of wonderful footage from the Australian National Film and Sound Archive from the early 20th century Corrick family circus that showed film—beautiful, funny, strange—as part of their repertoire, 1901-14. Whether or not this was just value adding or seminal multimedia work is not clear, but despite attempts by Legs on the Wall to connect stage action with film image, My Bicycle Loves You was not a convincing merger of live bodies and projections. This was partly a problem of scale, the images sometimes huge, filling the stage as a superfluity of screens flew in and out. At other times the correspondence, at human scale, was right, with a ghostly suggestiveness. But the production’s problems were not simply to do with a disjuncture between body and image but with a chasm between the past and now, between contemporary characters and their mysterious antecedents. There are moments when those in the present watch the past, but the connections are thin, as are the relationships between the seven characters in the contemporary setting, an apartment block where their lives intersect, each person with a problem or a fantasy life that remains largely unexplored. As physical theatre, My Bicycle Loves You was unusually tame for a company like Legs on the Wall, and the relationship between routine-based scenes and the overall scenario often seemed tenuous. The show had its physical high points (not least from Alexandra Harrison and Tom Flanagan) and a great band led by Ben Walsh, but its structural disjuncts were too large to accommodate its ambitions.
Bigger Than Jesus, written and performed by Canadian artist Rick Miller was a minor festival highlight, a bit like Richard Dawkins doing his atheism number as stand-up. Mixing forms (comedian, lecturer, preacher) and media (live video, rough puppetry, superimposed stage and screen images), Miller vented his hostility to organised religion with glee (the demotic Blakean preacher being the best of it) and cunning (an hilarious Last Supper featuring among the guests a John Lennon doll and a Homer Simpson PEZ dispenser as Judas). In the end it’s clear that Miller is not only fond of Jesus but in a curiously narcissistic finale becomes physically one with a projected painting (Dali I think) of his crucified other. With the debates over atheism, religious belief and fundamentalism still raging, Bigger Than Jesus is a timely entertainment if sagging mid-way in its jet flight to Jerusalem routine and in the datedness of some of its screen technology.
The less said about the festival’s big ticket show, The Giacomo Variations, the better. An underdeveloped, clunky cut and paste life of Casanova interpolated with occasionally apposite songs from various Mozart operas, it featured a very good soprano and a fine tenor (both required to do extraordinary physical acts while singing—usually of a sexual variety), an adequate actress and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra sounding fine. John Malkovich as Casanova meandered through the narrative with none of the brisk, varied delivery of his long-ago Dangerous Liaisons movie performance as a similar rake. It was indeed strange not to have a festival with a centrepiece (as awkward as that concept can be) like the Hamlet or the Wars of the Roses of recent Sydney Festivals.
Rosie Dennis, June Hickey, Driven to New Pastures
photo Heidrun Löhr
Rosie Dennis, June Hickey, Driven to New Pastures
At the very small end of the festival spectrum was Rosie Dennis’ Driven to New Pastures, a subtle exploration of the impact of commercial residential developments on public housing in the suburbs. Except for its opening, where Dennis adeptly delivers a clever cliche-saturated sales pitch for a new nature free, maximum privacy and security development, protest is avoided. Instead Dennis recounts the events that will shift an older woman out of her home and into isolation. She is joined onstage by June Hickey, from Minto in outer Sydney, playing someone like herself who has been faced with this prospect (if with a different outcome from the one reported on stage). Hickey has an easy presence, listens, reads, dances with Dennis and speaks a little—perhaps she should have shared some of Dennis’ words (it seems she didn’t want to memorise lines, but there are other means) to give the show a finer balance, a break from the sense of monologue. Dennis’ writing and its fine grained improvisational feel is as pleasurable as ever and the simple theatricality of the work—the turning on and off of lamps for example—is effective, if faltering a little in an atypical scene in which one of the building’s inhabitants stages a rocket escape from the plight of displacement. Driven to New Pastures is an admirable work; I would like to have seen it closer to home with the audience who first experienced it, in a church hall in Minto in 2010.
Fleur Elise Noble, 2 Dimensional Life of Her
photo Jamie Williams
Fleur Elise Noble, 2 Dimensional Life of Her
Returning to the subject of projections deployed in performance, Fleur Elise Noble’s 2 Dimensional Life of Her is a performative screen work par excellence. Huge sheets of paper swathe the intimate stage space onto which are projected a large living room in a couple of layers on one side and, before us, a black and white world of marionettes who appear to tear through the screens and finally set full-colour fire to the set. Noble arrives in the flesh (having hitherto functioned unseen as a puppet master or as a projected cleaning lady) to admonish her creations and send them off sailing. An essay on creativity, control, manipulation and ways of seeing, 2 Dimensional Life is witty, technically deft and engrossing, offering more dimensions than its bigger festival counterparts. Now, after its 2010 Mobile States tour and Sydney Festival appearance, it’s to travel to festivals around the world.
Sydney Festival 2011: Kassys, Good Cop Bad Cop, Seymour Centre Downstairs, Jan 26-30; Gavin Webber & Grayson Millwood, Animal Farm Collective, Food Chain, design Moritz Muller, Everest Theatre, Seymour Centre, Jan 26-30; Gob Squad, Super Night Shot, Studio, Sydney Opera House, Jan 25-30; Random Dance, Entity, concept, direction and choreography (with the dancers), design Patrick Burnier; Legs on the Wall, My Bicycle Loves You, story by Beatrix Christian, Patrick Nolan, Anna Tregloan and company, director Patrick Nolan, designer Anna Tregloan, projection consultant Tim Gruchy, Sydney Theatre, Jan 11-15; Bigger Than Jesus, performer Rick Miller, creators Rick Miller and director Daniel Brooks, Wharf 1, STC, Jan 18-29; The Giacomo Variations, writer, director Michael Sturminger, Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Jan 20-22; Driven to New Pastures, writer, performer Rosie Dennis, performer June Hickey, Downstairs, Seymour Centre, Jan 11-16; 2 Dimensional Life of Her, creator Fleur Elise Noble, Downstairs, Seymour Centre, Jan 9-13
Streetdance, Lone Twin, image1 Darryl, image 2 Judie and daughters, image 3 Aunty Verna and grand daughter, image 4 Kaye
photos Heidrun Löhr
Streetdance, Lone Twin, image1 Darryl, image 2 Judie and daughters, image 3 Aunty Verna and grand daughter, image 4 Kaye
ONE OF THE THINGS I LOVE MOST ABOUT CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE IS THAT IT GETS ME OUT AND ABOUT TO PLACES THAT I MIGHT NOT OTHERWISE GO. GATHERING GROUND, FOR INSTANCE, TOOK ME TO THE BLOCK IN REDFERN, MARALINGA [RT77, P46] TO THE ETTALONG WAR MEMORIAL CLUB AND FAST CARS AND TRACTOR ENGINES [RT70, P41] TO THE BANKSTOWN TOWN HALL. TONIGHT I AM ON THE M5 DRIVING TO MINTO, IN SYDNEY’S SOUTH-WEST, HOME TO THE RUGBY LEAGUE TALENTS OF JARRYD HAYNE, KRISNAN INU AND ISRAEL FOLAU AS WELL AS THE POLITICAL TALENTS OF WHITLAM, LATHAM AND NOW LAURIE FERGUSON.
Fifty kilometres from the CBD, Minto is a world away from shiny, shiny Sydney: geographically isolated and economically disadvantaged. Nevertheless, it is currently undergoing rapid transformation, as Campbelltown’s Live Art Curator Rosie Dennis told Gail Priest in her interview in RealTime (RT100, p5)—public housing is moving out and private investment is moving in. Though it was not necessarily conceived as such, Minto:Live has become a part of this process of economic, social and cultural renewal. The project started in November 2010 when Dennis and several other artists literally set up shop in the Minto Mall. When curious residents came in, they found a range of activities on offer, including dancing with Lone Twin and Julie-Anne Long, crocheting with Nicole Barakat and publishing with Mickie Quick and Kernow Craig, all of which were to have performance outcomes of some description. Tonight, the final of three performances, is about sharing those outcomes.
It’s six o’clock and a crowd is milling in the mall car park. Volunteers hand out programs and a man in a cycle rickshaw distributes envelopes labelled “MINTO THE TYPEFACE.” Inside are postcards telling stories that Quick and Craig have collected from Minto residents. The stories are small, but the cards are large—handy in the heat, if you need a fan. Fanning a fire in front of Tyrepower, is Uncle Ivan Wellington. He carries the ceremonial smoking leaves slowly and carefully through the crowd. The smell seeps into our clothing. Then it’s time for Sweet Tonic—a choir of senior citizens—who sing three songs, including John Williamson’s “A Thousand Feet Have Been Through Here.” Walking across the asphalt to a concrete ramp, we spy a council worker in an orange vest slowly circling his hips—this is Street Dance.
Facilitated by UK performance duo Lone Twin with Campbelltown Arts Centre dance curator Julie-Anne Long, Street Dance features eight Minto households (13 people in total) dancing not only in the street but also in their front yards and favourite parks. In the opening dance, Ivan pitches his shoulder as if digging a hole, before stomping on the earth and jumping up a ramp. Standing at the top is Judi, whose dance is like semaphore without the flags. She and her two daughters stand still but move their arms with purpose and their wrists with delicate flicks. Up the stairs, Daryl is standing at the end of the cul de sac, rubbing his hands, half in anticipation, half in purification it seems. He extends an arm as if to hail a bus, offers his hand for a handshake and pats his pockets as he searches for his keys. Further along, a family of four puts on a Bollywood special in their front yard: two little girls in gold bounce around the lawn, before their father and mother emerge from the house to enact a skit about drink driving.
In the park across the road, a grandmother is walking around a large tree, kissing her fingertips and extending her arms. When a small girl joins her, they do another loop of the tree and then head off up the hill. From behind, the older woman looks like she is doing an elegant breaststroke while her granddaughter’s movements are more akin to a paddle. Next we stop by Kaye who does a dance of farewell (to planes) and welcome (she seems to want to share a secret). Around the corner Judi and her daughters turn on the car radio, boogie to “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” jump into the Nissan and roll off into the night. Finally, at the end of the street Chris and Kiara do the washing—shaking and folding invisible sheets. Street Dance works with a subtle and complex combination of the familiar and the strange: on the one hand, creating a choreography of every day gestures, on the other, reminding us that the nature of our day depends on gender as well as geographical and social location. Similarly, though it could be described as an attempt to make the suburban strange, it also has the opposite effect, making me realise that suburbs are strange enough, with their stamped concrete and security cameras. In these moments, Street Dance actually works to make these Truman Show streets feel slightly less surreal—like an ordinary place to play and perhaps dance.
Following Street Dance, we head to another park, where three women sit in armchairs working on Barakat’s Common Threads. One sits with a pile of old rags making rope, which the others then use to crochet. The result is what one of them describes as a “string sculpture in action” and it looks like large doily. Further up the hill, we sit on picnic blankets and listen to the sounds of nine trumpets. TrumpetSWest’s first piece is slow, sweeping and sombre while the second is jauntier, as the lead player meanders in front of the melody.
Nikki-Tala Tuiala Talalolo, Hetain Patel, Charlie Fruean, Ten
photo Heidrun Löhr
Nikki-Tala Tuiala Talalolo, Hetain Patel, Charlie Fruean, Ten
The longest contribution to Minto:Live and the one most self-consciously framed as a performance (set in a natural amphitheatre, staged on a blue mat) is Hetain Patel’s Ten. The show alternates between storytelling, music and movement, as Patel talks about being born in England to Indian parents. Formerly embarrassed by his background, he has since come to embrace it and, in an effort to become more connected to Indian culture, taken up the tabla drums. This segues into the musical sections, where he and his two local collaborators (Nikki-Tala Tuiala Talaloloa and Charlie Fruean) clap out complicated 10-beat rhythms. Talaloloa then offers a Samoan slap dance and Fruean a Maori haka in return. In the final third of the show, the men start to borrow verbal and physical phrases from each other so that Patel performs a haka and Talaloloa, in his gently clipped vowels, talks about mixing red paint. Ten is an elegant and interesting piece, if slightly too long, particularly for neighbourhood children who are busy bobbing about, disrupting the audience’s sight lines and thus reasserting the community aspect of the event over its performativity.
Perhaps they are anticipating the wheelbarrows full of ice cream further down the hill, where three large video screens play the Minto Waterhole, a film created by Class 3/4J at Sarah Redfern Primary School with the help of Howard Matthew, Caitlin Newton-Broad and Sanjay Hona. The film is an endearing mix of live action and animation, which depicts a secret water world full of puppet creatures, lurking somewhere below Minto—a magical thought on this hot summer night.
Gwendolin Robin, Instant No. 6899
photo Heidrun Löhr
Gwendolin Robin, Instant No. 6899
Minto:Live concludes with a smoking ceremony of another kind: Gwendoline Robin’s Instant No.6899. Dressed in what looks like a white space suit strapped with explosives, Robin slowly puts on her helmet and wraps silver tape around her neck. The anticipation is almost too much for the children behind me, who think she might be a suicide bomber. She lights a fuse and then her suit explodes, setting off small grass fires. “She’s dead!” the children cry, but then as Robin walks down the hill with a stream of smoke in her wake, they revise this to “She’s the walking dead! She’s a zombie! She’s on fire, she’s a fire zombie!” This stream of images is itself one of the evening’s many small pleasures and as we walk back towards the mall, we smile with the knowledge that Minto is teeming with imagination.
Minto:Live, curator Rosie Dennis; Welcome to Country, Uncle Ivan Wellington; Sweet Tonic; Street Dance, Lone Twin with Julie-Anne Long and residents of Minto; Common Threads, Nicole Barakat with residents of Minto; TrumpetSWest, Freddie Hill and company; Ten, Hetain Patel, Charlie Fruean, Nikki-Tala Tuiala Talaloloa; Minto Waterhole, Caitlin Newton-Broad, Howard Matthew with Sanjay Honas and students of Sarah Redfern Primary and High Schools; Instant No. 6899, Gwendoline Robin; Minto, Jan 20-22
EARLIER THIS YEAR PLAYWRIGHT SUZIE MILLER NOTED IN THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD THAT OF THE 80 MAINSTAGE WORKS SCHEDULED FOR 2011, ONLY NINE (OR LESS THAN 12 PERCENT) WERE WRITTEN BY WOMEN. THE NEXT DAY THE PAPER PUBLISHED A PREDICTABLY INFLAMMATORY LETTER TO THE EDITOR FROM A MAN WHO WROTE THAT WHILE HE “REJOICE[D] IN FINE PLAYS BY WOMEN” NONE COULD BE CONSIDERED GREAT AND THUS THEY DID NOT DESERVE PROGRAMMING.
It’s a familiar argument and though Miller and the letter writer appear to be on opposite sides, they have more in common than they might care to admit, for they both define writing so narrowly it’s as if post-structuralism never happened. Surely, if we’ve learned nothing else, writing is about more than the words on the page; in the context of performance, we write with bodies, light and space as well as words. Taking this broader definition, it is clear that there are in fact many women “writing” for performance. Indeed, contemporary performance in this country is unthinkable without them—imagine the Sydney stage without Frumpus, the Fondue Set, My Darling Patricia, Post and Brown Council, to name just a few. Yet these names never feature in these annually rehearsed, rehashed arguments.
My frustration with the conversation was exacerbated by the fact that I had recently been to Liveworks at Performance Space where I had seen a number of strong works by women, who in fact dominated the program. Not that there weren’t some men too—Jiva Parthipan, Jason Maling, Paul Gazzola and Jason Sweeney on screen—but it was the women who caught my eye, working in a variety of combinations (solos, duos and groups) and forms (lectures, dances and comedies).
One of the strongest shows in Liveworks is Talya Rubin’s Of the Causes of Wonderful Things, which might also be called The Curious Case of Esther Drury and Her Five Missing Nieces and Nephews. In an atmosphere of carefully curated chaos—the stage is littered with lamps, chairs, piles of dirt and projectors—Rubin cuts back and forth between several characters including Esther, the police officer investigating the disappearances, Esther’s sister Claire who is in a relationship with an abusive French puppet called Frankie and Esther’s neighbour Mr Hiroshimoto. Rubin plays expertly with perspective, creating tiny scenes in a glass box, larger scenes projected onto the wall and some truly surreal interludes, such as when a donkey mask named Samuel takes to the stage in a town talent contest. With a judicious edit, this already unsettling and affecting show could become something truly special.
Paper People shares a similar aesthetic: the room holds a small stereo, a pile of white feathers, a wooden chair, a couple of microphones, cushions and a doll. We follow the performer around the room as she leans against a wall, rubs a doll against her breast, lectures us on audience participation, throws a red cushion in the air, eats a bowl of chillies and finally stitches herself to a man in the audience with red wool. The entire room holds its breath as someone hands him a pair of scissors and he cuts them apart one thread at a time. Paper People evokes a strange sense of intimacy, indeed the strangeness of intimacy itself: what it is to look into someone’s eyes (the performer is constantly looking at the audience with a mixture of invitation, resignation and resentment), share a favourite song, desire someone’s full attention and yet fear it, lest you prove lacking. Not that she does, and we leave the space wanting more.
Nicola Gunn, At the Sans Hotel
photo Heidrun Löhr
Nicola Gunn, At the Sans Hotel
Slightly less successful though no less suggestive is Nicola Gunn’s At the Sans Hotel, which begins with her character “Sophie” confessing in a faux French accent that Nicola couldn’t make it tonight. To compensate, Sophie gives us an overview of Nicola’s planned performance, complete with chalkboard drawings and references to Kazuo Ishiguro, Cornelia Rau and Rau’s alter ego Anna Schmidt. This is about the only interpretive clue on offer as Sophie continues to tell rambling stories in English and German before dancing with projections of herself and finally to Beyonce’s “Single Ladies.” Read with Rau in mind, At the Sans Hotel might be seen as a sort of “schizoanalysis” of her tragic case; read more broadly, however, it could be seen as a riff on what happens when we forget ourselves (in every sense).
Jane McKernan, Opening and Closing Ceremony
photo Heidrun Löhr
Jane McKernan, Opening and Closing Ceremony
While Gunn focuses on forgetting, Jane McKernan is more concerned with remembering. Resplendent in red shorts and flesh coloured stockings, she spends most of Opening and Closing Ceremony outlining a potted history of gymnastics and its less glamorous cousin “physie,” touching on Beijing 2008, Brisbane 1988 and the nature of community along the way. During this time she has been adding a tail, two ears and some whiskers to her costume and once it is complete, it’s showtime. McKernan lunges and stretches her way down the stage while a voiceover shares her inner thoughts about being a dancer and mother as well as her own childhood memories. In the final moments, she performs a triumphant routine to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Opening and Closing Ceremony is a gentle and humorous meditation on what it is to be shaped by gender, culture and nation or, more specifically, physie and Brissie in the mid-1980s.
Similar themes emerge in Colombian artist Claudia Escobar’s manola, which consists of a series of striking but not always legible images. The show begins with a bag inspection, continues with Escobar wandering the stage with a brick on a rope and boiled eggs in her mouth, and finishes with her sipping through a straw from a condom full of milk. It also includes Ahilan Ratnamohan as a transvestite Miss Colombia and then as a guerrilla fighter who captures and tortures Escobar, who whimpers, “I can no longer fantasise about my death.” In the dying minutes of the performance, she whispers “this is a secret between you and me;” but for the most part the secret remained hers and, because of the untidy scenography and underdone dramaturgy, was not something I could fully share.
Fiona Winning and Victoria Hunt are also concerned with the legacies of colonialism. Their Dancing the Dead deals with Hunt’s Maori ancestor Hinemihi, also the name of a tribal meeting house which was built in 1881 and survived the 1886 volcanic eruption, only to be sold for £50 to Earl Onslow in 1892. Onslow had “her” dismantled and transported to his estate in England, where she still stands. The most interesting parts of the lecture come when Hunt herself stands and explains how she might create a dance about Hinemihi: showing us how she might represent her spirit trapped in the rafters or the energy of the volcanic earth. This “performed conversation” between Winning, Hunt and members of Hunt’s extended family is not only useful background information for Hunt’s future performance, but also a careful memorial in its own right: one that conveys Hinemihi’s absence as well as her ongoing and dancing presence.
On a lighter note, Karen Therese uses the performance lecture form to cause her audience acute discomfort by talking about nothing but comfort. The show starts with Therese sitting behind a desk, wearing a blonde wig and sharing some of her ideas on her subject. She has also consulted with friends and, more interestingly, a corporate management book that identifies the “comfort zone,” the “danger zone” and, in between, the “optimal performance zone.” Therese spends the rest of the lecture detailing how she’ll achieve the optimal zone in this particular performance. (Brian Fuata sits stage left with words of reassurance and a cup of tea.) The show finishes when she pulls several people from the audience on to the stage and asks them to dance to Beyonce’s “Halo”—dancing in public, in this case the very definition of discomfort.
Brown Council, A Comedy
photo Heidrun Löhr
Brown Council, A Comedy
Perhaps the highlight of Liveworks is Brown Council’s A Comedy. For four hours, the four performers (dressed in dunces’ caps) place themselves at the mercy of the audience, as spectators select which comedy trick or trope they’d like to see next from a list that includes stand-up, the dancing monkey, cream pies and magic tricks. This is all done to a soundtrack of ‘boom-tish’ effects and the musak of late night talk shows. In staging a four-hour comedy, Brown Council bring a much-needed levity to durational performance, which can tend towards the solemn, even po-faced. But duration has a habit of turning even the humorous into the tortuous and, as the night wears on, we reveal ourselves to be petty, silly, mean and violent. When the piece finishes with an almighty food fight, it feels like a finale to Liveworks, even though it’s only Friday night. Two days later, A Comedy remains my favourite for its intelligent conception, excellent execution and the collective exuberance it unleashed.
In its own way, attending Liveworks was itself a durational performance and like any endurance effort there were some discomforts. The timetable was difficult to decipher and the timetabling itself somewhat strange—the theatres were rather empty on Thursday and Friday afternoons, and it wasn’t until Friday evening that the event really started to hit its stride. Then on Saturday, it seemed that there were more takers than tickets, meaning that some people missed out. Perhaps if the event were moved to take in Friday, Saturday and Sunday, more people might get to see these works in progress (as many of them were). This, in turn, might encourage them to come back to Performance Space not only for more “progress reports” but also for more adventures in live art. And when these adventures are “written” (devised, designed, directed and performed) by women, they have the potential to shift the conversation not only about women’s writing but about the nature of writing itself.
Performance Space, Liveworks: Fast & Furious, CarriageWorks, Sydney, Nov 11-14, 2010
I ALWAYS FEEL EXULTANT WHEN I WALK INTO CARRIAGEWORKS DURING THE DAY AND DISCOVER SOMETHING CREATIVE HAPPENING. SUNLIGHT SHAFTS THROUGH, LIFTING THE BEAMED ROOF; PEOPLE EDDY FROM ROOM TO ROOM, VIVIFIED BY WHAT THEY’VE SEEN. THIS IS THE PLACE AT ITS BEST: ACTIVATED BY ART THAT INQUIRES, REGENERATES AND INTERACTS. USED ONLY FOR FINITE PURPOSE AND MATERIAL GAIN, CARRIAGEWORKS FEELS DEAD.
There is probably no event on its calendar that has greater potential to animate the place than Performance Space’s Liveworks, so it was disappointing to arrive Thursday midday and find CarriageWorks virtually empty. The Vorticist nonetheless was booked out—a one-on-one performance with a strong reputation honed over years. Artist Jason Maling was ambivalent about the context, deeming it “perhaps too theatrical,” but submitted the work because he wanted to be rid of it. At Liveworks, his usual process of building an archive was reversed, to become its deletion.
Dressed in waistcoat and tailored trousers, Maling leads his audience of one through a maze of corridors and stairs to a small, secluded space. You sit on the floor with him either side of a low table covered in handcrafted arcane tools and relics on paper from previous visitors. A tête-à-tête ensues with the artist. Intimacy is intrinsic to any one-on-one and the form can take this for granted and be conceptually lazy; so too artworks that request a story or secret from the audience. Yet The Vorticist, which started with this premise, ended with much more. What is this thing? Who were all these people before me? A trace installation of scrolls from years of such encounters, accumulated in a space above the foyer.
Jiva Parthipan, Last Remaining Relative
photo Heidrun Löhr
Jiva Parthipan, Last Remaining Relative
Jiva Parthipan’s performative lecture, Last Remaining Relative, recounted the artist’s recent emigration to Australia, interwoven with a series of anecdotes about international travel and art. Parthipan has been on the move his whole life: departure at age ten from war-torn Sri Lanka; decades in London; work around the world as an artist. Now he is in Australia under the visa category “Last Remaining Relative.” Constantly thwarted and harrassed by bureaucracy due to his race, Parthipan could have treated the subject harshly, encouraged into didacticism by the lecture format. Instead he was an engaging, witty, informative speaker, his true stories attaining an Orwellian absurdity. Pungent asides about the local bureaucracy finished the work perfectly. Some of the most eloquent moments were articulated with Parthipan’s body alone when he left the lectern to impersonate a tiger, then later a monkey. His performance set the political bar high at the festival, and no-one else topped it.
Linda Luke, Hoodie – Thirteen
photo Heidrun Löhr
Linda Luke, Hoodie – Thirteen
Thirteen by Linda Luke and Vic McEwan began in the foyer in the afternoon. A performance installation about homelessness drawn from Luke’s personal experience, titled Hoodie, was Part One. To McEwan’s gentle, eerie soundtrack, Luke slowly moved across the floor, half hidden and constrained by a hood. The wheeled contraption she employed part way through became an improvised skateboard, the perfect second prop. Luke was utterly in character, but the lack of audience drained energy from the work. Again through no fault of the artists, the work’s tent installation felt a little contrived as CarriageWorks management disallowed the artists from inhabiting it full-time for the three days the performance ran. I regret not making it to Part Two.
Thrashing Without Looking
photo Heidrun Löhr
Thrashing Without Looking
Thrashing Without Looking by Martyn Coutts, Tristan Meecham, Lara Thoms, and Willoh S Weiland was an interesting combination of light-hearted enjoyment and psychological challenge for those who fear the unknown or loss of control. It provoked all sorts of thoughts about the modes of disembodied communication we engage in now—televisual, internet—how trust and agency are still called upon and how intense and liberating is the sense of touch. There were moments of alienation, boredom, confusion, anticipation, humour and the ending was surprisingly tender. I didn’t want to leave.
I Luv Amanda Crowe, a work about teenagers in 80s suburbia—a strangely dominant trope in Australian performance—floundered through lack of content, courage and form. Surely adolescent desire connotes fear, tenderness, pathos, embarrassment, but all the embarrassment expressed by the performers seemed to be more about the work than its actual subject matter. Even the superlative Georgie Read couldn’t save it. The performance begs a question that came to mind frequently throughout the festival around the programming of works-in-progress.
By contrast, Brown Council’s A Comedy came to Liveworks honed by years of the quartet’s explorations of modes of comedic entertainment in performance. The masterstroke lies in their recent meld of traditional comedy with endurance via a slightly sporty aesthetic. They pushed this even further at the last minute by deciding to create a single four-hour performance instead of one hour slogs back to back. Everything is distilled: the girls’ plain black outfits; their coloured dunce caps, cannily distributed among the audience as well; the bare stage; the casual demeanour of the three performers up the back chatting and eating peanuts while their fourth is in the hot seat. The peanut gallery, of course.
Brown Council, A Comedy
photo Heidrun Löhr
Brown Council, A Comedy
A Comedy was built on five tricks, vaudeville classics such as cream pie throwing as well as stand-up. Others like the dancing monkey go back millennia and, merely by being humanly conveyed, revealed their sinister side—banana gorging, face slapping: our gluttony and lust for violence and desperation to please. There was a tremendous command of material from every one of the performers—Fran Barrett, Kate Blackmore, Kelly Doley and Diane Smith—the discomfort and hilarity building by the hour. Utterly compelling, with much food for thought.
Into/Out of Me by Brigid Jackson posed the question: To what extent does my body belong to me? Occupying a small dressing room for just under two hours, with Benjamin Cittadini manipulating sound, Jackson began on the floor, blowing up and tying off plastic bags. She gradually moved to stalking in a tight circle, making the occasional incision on her chest, dripping milk into the blood with an eye-dropper. Taped to the mirrors around the room were little sachets of hair, nail clippings, blood. In the program the work was described as an exploration of the boundaries of bodies and what is left behind, the latter less personal than the former. Yet the body remnants around the room remained disconnected, the performance itself not coherent. Like the hospital gown they didn’t articulate beyond signalling that Into/Out of Me was about the body. Nevertheless the audience seemed hungry for this sort of intimate, visceral performance, in a festival otherwise sadly devoid of it.
David Cross’s Hold, from Performance Space’s Nighshifters program, was a perfect companion piece to the Liveworks. Entering the installation I was awestruck by the size of the inflatable, a weird hybrid of ship and castle. Climbing into it was daunting and exciting, the appearance of what seemed a fake hand something to be avoided. Then, on the crest, a choice has to be made: fears surmounted, the audience’s agency absolutely intrinsic. The sheer audacity and sculptural beauty of the work opened further, enhanced by the dilemma of how to negotiate trust with a stranger and the question of reciprocation. A beautiful twist occurs in the middle, the whole experience profoundly moving. Cross performed a companion piece on Saturday morning in the blazing sun opposite the farmers’ market. In a sense Hold’s microcosm, it again tackled reciprocity and engagement this time with a small contraption worn on the artist’s head, activated—or not—by a partner. One hand, one eye; the necessity of action. Confronting from the inside, entertaining from the outside. The simplicity of these elements and the artist’s immense effort produced a complex work that, like Hold, made an endless variety of connections.
Cross’s work benefited greatly from its accessible positioning and in the range of people it reached. With so much of Liveworks dependent on audience interaction —Thrashing, Thirteen, A Comedy, to name a few—it seemed a shame to let performances languish in the barely attended daytime working week slots. Saturday afternoon by contrast had so many events on simultaneously you were bound to miss many. Even then, many people I know who attend cultural events every weekend didn’t know about Liveworks. Full price tickets for works-in-progress, some barely begun, created more hindrance to healthy numbers.
There is the danger of insularity. Indeed, the lushest party was the restricted artists’ event at kick-off; by contrast, after Night Time on Sunday night, full and buzzing, the foyer sadly emptied. Can the performance world accept its marginal status to the point of complacency? And how much longer can CarriageWorks be so unaccommodating and expect to survive culturally? Moved to straddle a whole weekend and offered to a broader audience, Liveworks could blossom. CarriageWorks itself, in spite of its resistance to date, could still be the best place for it. What seems ancillary—fairly priced good coffee; bars and restaurants worthy of the neighbourhood, open late as befits a mature culture; a decipherable and well distributed program—could be linchpins. The possibilities are endless.
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Performance Space, Liveworks: Fast & Furious, CarriageWorks, Sydney, Nov 11-14, 2010
IN AN ERA OF INTERNATIONAL ARTS AND FILM FESTIVAL GIGANTISM, SMALL FESTIVALS HAVE TREMENDOUS COMMUNITY AND THEMATIC APPEAL, THE POTENTIAL FOR SHARED EXPERIENCE AND CLARITY OF PURPOSE. TEN DAYS ON THE ISLAND IS AN EXEMPLAR OF SUCH FESTIVALS. CURRENT ARTISTIC DIRECTOR ELIZABETH WALSH HAS BUILT SUBSTANTIALLY ON THE ORIGINAL THAT WAS MAGICALLY REALISED BY ROBYN ARCHER, THE FIRST ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF TEN DAYS ON THE ISLAND (FOR WHOM WALSH WAS PROGRAM MANAGER, 2001, AND EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, 2002- 2005). I SPOKE WITH WALSH ABOUT HER FORTHCOMING THIRD AND FINAL FESTIVAL.
The festival has embraced more and more Tasmanian communities every two years, more island cultures around the world and tackled the very idea of ‘islandness.’ What’s been the focus of your approach?
What I really wanted to do with the 2011 festival was to get artists to engage for longer out in the community. So there’s a whole range of residencies all over the state. Theatre Newfoundland Labrador Youth Theatre is making work here with Launceston’s Second Storey. Melbourne’s Chamber Made Opera will be on Bruny Island [with Minotaur—The Island, a ‘reconstruction’ of a lost Monteverdi opera] and The Gertrude Association, also from Melbourne, will work with the King Island Cultural Centre [in a new media residency with an installation and workshops]. It’s about engagement between artists in communities that aren’t urban-centric—the festival itself isn’t urban-centric. It’s all over Tasmania allowing people out there to have the one-on-one experience of meeting an artist. This development over these three festivals has been the thing I find the most satisfying. It really changes the way in which people approach the festival—being more than just an audience.
How do these meetings work?
Often around projects or ideas that engage Tasmanian companies and artists through commissions which, where possible, have a broader creative presence than just providing performances. I’ve developed collaborations over these three festivals between young people passionate about music and professional music groups. There was the Tasmanian Youth Orchestra and the Strung Out Project in 2007, then access was provided for TYO in 2009 to Ethel [a string quartet from Manhattan] and in 2011 there’s a collaboration between the Australian Youth Orchestra’s Wind Quartet and the Tasmanian Youth Orchestra along with tutoring by the principal oboist of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra—potentially changing the creative output of younger artists.
Continuity’s important for you?
It’s like a longer conversation and finding new ways to develop it. It’s not just a flash in the pan.
The festival’s geographical scope seems to broaden each time too. How many towns did you ‘inherit’?
In 2001, for the first festival Anthony Steel’s report recommended eight and I think with Robyn Archer we actually did 32; 2007 was 52, last festival was 56 and this time round we’re going to 62.
They’re all willing partners?
(LAUGHS) Absolutely. If we didn’t go to certain areas, I’d be lynched. It’s one island and there are only half a million people here but the communities are very different in terms of their interests. It takes one good music teacher and suddenly you have an interest in string playing. It takes one person who’s interested in dance to wind up at a school like St Helen’s or someone with a passion for the visual arts, like Sally Marsden on King Island, and suddenly you’re able to not only support what they’re doing but also build opportunities in the community.
I don’t like using the term “community development,” because I don’t think that’s what it’s about. A lot of my work has been around putting artists in environments where they have opportunities to work in different ways in terms of situating their work. So Chamber Made Opera is going to a little hall on the end of Dennes Point on Bruny Island. I haven’t asked them to make work in a different way; I haven’t set up an environment where they’re necessarily going to change the creative experience that they’re engaged with. But certainly being there will change things—buying a loaf of bread at the local shop will change their own and locals’ experience. It’s about putting artists into different environments, changing not only them but the environment they’re in. If the world were full of more of those experiences, we’d be a better place. People take up the opportunity to meet and engage with artists like Ross Bolleter (RT91, p14) collecting old pianos on and off for three months for his work Ruined for the 2009 festival. How often do you get to meet a composer? It opens up the work to a broader audience and, I hope, people’s imaginations and inquisitiveness.
So, sometimes the artist might be working directly with people, sometimes it’s just being there that’s critical?
I’d like to think that Ten Days is not just a ticket price. It’s about evolving a whole range of different entry points for people, providing commissions that are the beginnings of conversations for artists and audiences and contributing to the broader sense of identity of this place. There have been particular projects that have been very important in this respect.
The Port Arthur Project [see rt review] in 2007 involved 27 commissions at Port Arthur with the University of Tasmania and Port Arthur as partners. In 2009 it was Trust, where we worked with the National Trust and, again, the university on commissions in five National Trust properties. And this time round we’re working on site-specific installations with the NRM North [Natural Resource Management Group] in the northern part of the state in five locations that are as diverse as a field, a community hall and a restaurant. The interest here has been about developing a conversation around built and natural heritage. We have so much built heritage here—that kind of “Georgian-ness” of the place. But my exploration’s been more about how contemporary Tasmanians articulate that history in a way that’s for now. Not that I’m saying don’t restore those beautiful homes or don’t touch the wilderness but, rather, how do we view these as they’re presented to us—for example as images for tourism.
Has the concept of a festival of island cultures from around the world evolved over the years?
It’s a fabulous idea. The genius of Archer, picking on the thing that seemed to be a disadvantage! Often small islands off continents—like Newfoundland and New Zealand—are the brunt of jokes, seen as backward and behind. What’s been interesting in the conversation generated by Ten Days on the Island is that it hasn’t been filtered through the main cultural hubs of the world. Not everything has to have been through New York or be the biggest thing or part of the star system that operates within more urban festivals. It liberates you to go out and really have a look at what people are doing in other places. Once upon a time would a show like Vestuport’s Metamorphosis for the 2009 festival have ever come to Tasmania? And that came from digging around in Iceland!
There are also links with international academic Island Studies about island dwellers experiencing not the same but very similar things: in the leaving of islands, in notions of the sea, in politics determined by the size of a place—Ivan Heng’s work from Singapore is significant here.
I see also there’s a Korean work for young people—Halmang, Myth of Jeju Island—about the mythology associated with an island off Korea.
And it’s been fascinating to find all that reggae material in the Pacific [Pacific Reggae: Roots Beyond the Reef]—an extraordinary kind of movement. So it’s not just islands or one kind of idea—the festival teases out a whole range of different kinds of connections that aren’t necessarily obvious. That’s the great thing for me as an artistic director—having several festivals gives you time to go digging and find those things that are not just literally the obvious connection.
Dance Matathon, bluemouth inc
photo Gordon Hawkins
Dance Matathon, bluemouth inc
Are there shows that will particularly appeal to RealTime readers?
Dance Marathon by bluemouth inc (Manhattan-Toronto) represents the evolution of a particular kind of theatre form. Dancing, moving, having a partner and the dance marathon premise of the film They Shoot Horses Don’t They, these are the mechanisms through which the company explores a different kind of relationship between performer and audience. It’s fascinating.
Orwell’s Animal Farm, as adapted by Ivan Heng for Singapore’s Wild Rice, is an extraordinarily well-made piece of theatre in which the actors play the animals, transforming into them onstage. The dogs are fantastic: they’re just stupid. The show’s quite fantastic.
Daniel Barrow’s Every Time I See A Picture I Cry just won the Scobie Award for contemporary art in Halifax, Canada. Daniel works with layers of acetate on which he has illustrated the world of the narrative he’s about to tell. He manipulates the acetate using an overhead projector to animate the story. It’s exquisite. Right out there. It’s about a janitor sifting through the city’s garbage in order to create a phone book and a chronicle of the life of every citizen in the town. At the same time he’s being stalked by a serial killer. Another fascinating work and an exploration of a different form altogether.
Chronicles of Long Kesh, a theatre work from Belfast’s Green Shoot Productions, uses documentary style interviews as its basis. It’s tough material—we’re talking about the blanket protests and Bobbie Sands starving himself to death—and it’s hard to perform. But the structure comprises 10 or 15-minute vignettes, some only two minutes. These are interspersed with the songs the prisoners in The Maze used to sing to each other. One of the IRA guys was a choirmaster. Interestingly, it’s another story of an island—The Maze. Could that have happened in another place, that story? Guantanamo Bay is an island. When I saw the show, I couldn’t speak for half an hour afterwards. We know something of the story and ‘The Troubles’ but it’s something else to be in the dark with a great piece of theatre.
The 2011 festival program looks very good—ample shows, diversity of practice, location and invention.
The scale of our program is small, our budget is tiny. Maybe Darwin is smaller. But I look at the program and think, actually this is good—all sorts of ideas and experiences across the island. A lot of it’s about working partnerships. It’s great that after three festivals I can leave and think, We did good here.
Festival-goers should also look out for Stompin’s I ♥ Cars; Erth’s Dinosaur Petting Zoo; Djupid (The Deep) from Iceland and Scotland; version 1.0’s Bougainville Photoplay Project; Terrapin Puppet Theatre’s Australia-China collaboration, When the Pictures Came; New Zealand String Quartet; Craig Walsh’s Digital Odyssey; Julie Gough’s The Crossing; Ming Wong’s Life of Imitation, about the golden age of Singaporean cinema; Puso, by Philipino artist Richie Ares Doña; and Welsh visual artists Heather and Ivan Morrison working with locals, puppets and an old truck in Mister Clevver.
Children of the Commune, Audi Festival of German Film
german film: radical docs
One of the immediately fascinating components of the 2011 Festival of German Film program is Radical Docs, presented with ZDF/ARTE and described as exploring radical attitudes to life. In films about art The Radical Gardener (director Hermann Vaske) observes an artist striving to live up to the ideals of Andy Warhol, Malcolm McLaren and Meinhard Neese, while Super Art Market (Zoran Solomun) reveals the attitudes and lifestyles generated around the art markets of Berlin, New York and London. The lives of children in an Austrian commune are investigated in Children of The Commune (Juliane Großheim), while gated communities in America, Africa and Asia are revealingly scrutinised in On the Safe Side (Corinna Wichmann, Lukas Schmid). The full festival program, including more Radical Docs, will feature recent releases and a Retro program of significant films of the last decade. As ever, the festival is eagerly anticipated. Audi Festival of German Film, Palace Cinemas: Sydney April 6-18; Melbourne, April 7-18; Brisbane, April 7-12; Adelaide, April 13-18; Perth, April 14-18; program available March 15 www.goethe.de/australia
muffling muff
Whatever you might think of Melbourne Underground Film Festival director Richard Wolstencroft’s politics, the laying of charges against him by the Australian Federal Police for screening the Canadian film LA Zombie at the 2010 festival was nonsensical. In a recent press release Wolstencroft wrote, “Our only intention was to play this important work of cinematic art to an appreciative adult audience after its screening was cancelled by the Melbourne International Film Festival due the OFLC’s [Office of Film and Literature Classification] absurd decision not to grant it exemption to screen…Two months later my home was raided by police searching for a copy of LA Zombie. Why an artistic director who runs an established film festival like MUFF should have such draconian tactics…applied to him over a work of art in our day and age is another problem altogether. I had made sure two months earlier that I didn’t have a copy and that our only copy had been destroyed.” On January 20, Wolstencroft was issued with a summons to which, bizarrely, was attached “a diversion notice, agreeing to settle the matter without a felony on my record and with a donation to charity.” Had a formal charge been laid a gaol sentence and fine might have ensued. With pro bono help from leading lawyers, the MUFF director is working out what to do—let the issue drop or face the demands of challenging the AFP action. Wolstencroft has received letters of support from the film’s director Bruce LaBruce, Camille Paglia, Jack Sargeant and the directors of Locarno and the Raindance Film Festival. See Jack Sargeant’s account of the background and the key issues in RT99. Mystery MUFF: Freedom Of Speech Event and Fundraiser, Red Bennies, Chapel Street, Melbourne, Feb 27, www.muff.com.au
Cover of Oz magazine, part of Lampoon—An Historical Art Trajectory (1970-2010)
provocations: poster-cover-collage
Sydney’s enterprisingly mobile Arthere, run by photographer and curator Sandy Edwards and exhibiting in often unexpected venues, is staging an exhibition of Jim Anderson’s poster and cover art from the 60s and 70s at the Tin Sheds Gallery. As one of editors of Oz Magazine with Richard Neville and Felix Dennis in London from 1968-73 Anderson was charged with “Conspiracy to Corrupt Public Morals” and publishing an obscene magazine. For this exhibition the artist “has re-imagined some of those Oz covers (School Kids Oz, Homosexual Oz, Special Pig Oz) that the British Establishment found so offensive at the time.” Also on show will be Anderson’s more recent collages which he calls ‘lampooneries.’ Showing on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Oz Conspiracy Trial and in conjunction with the 2011 Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival, the show promises a riot of colour and provocative opinions across half a century. Lampoon—An Historical Art Trajectory (1970-2010), February 18-March 12, Tin Sheds Gallery, University of Sydney, www.tinsheds.wordpress.com
the poster & the cultural revolution
For a different perspective on the politics of poster art of the 60s and 70s as propaganda, an exhibition at RMIT Gallery explores “the relationship between the political poster art of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and its impact on contemporary Chinese art.” The show draws on the vivid original posters from the University of Westminster collection, works from collaborating artists Liu Dahong, Shen Jiawei, Li Gongming and Xu Weixin, and oral histories reflecting on the art of the Cultural Revolution. China and Revolution: History, Parody and Memory in Contemporary Art, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, Jan 21-March 19, www.rmit.edu.au/rmitgallery
expanding dance worlds
With Dance Massive on the horizon in Melbourne, it’s great to see other programs announced, including Dance Bites from Western Sydney Dance Action & Riverside Theatres in Parramatta and the contemporary dance program at Campbelltown Arts Centre from curator Emma Saunders (p8). Dance Bites commences with Fiona Malone’s new large-scale work Picture Perfect (Feb 16-19) which follows a woman in her quest for physical perfection—how far will she go? Other works in the program will come from Narelle Benjamin and Frances Rings in a double bill, and collaborations between Martin del Amo and Ahil Ratnamohanm and Lisa Griffiths and Craig Bary. In Perth MOVEME.ORG.AU, a new promotional body for contemporary dance is hosting six productions across the year, including Buzz, WAAPA’s Link, Strut and Daneil Micich. Dance Bites, Riverside Theatres, Parramatta www.wsda.org.au/projectscur.htm; www.riversideparramatta.com.au; MOVEME.ORG.AU, Perth
mardi gras: common noise
Once upon a time, the Sydney Mardi Gras ran a seriously engaging discrete arts festival as part of its annual celebrations. Now in one small step for man, as part of Mardi Gras 2011, Chronology Arts has engaged five emerging composers (Andrew Batt-Rawden, Nicholas Ng, Marcus Whale, Lachlan Hughes, Max Bendall) to write works for Common Noise—an art-music concert delving into sexuality and masculinity through music. The performances include sections of senior composer Colin Bright’s Book of Cock song cycle. Common Noise, Supper Club, Oxford Hotel, Sydney, Feb 19 & 23, 7pm, www.chronologyarts.net, www.mardigras.org.au
blade runner re-worked
Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic Blade Runner (1982) continues to be an inexhaustible source of inspiration and theorising. Why you might replace Vangelis’ score (superior to the composer’s other output) with your own and edit scenes from the film is a mystery that will only be solved by seeing.
Berlin-based filmmaker and sound artist Zan Lyons perform with viola, foot pedals and laptop while simultaneously remixing and reworking the film. The performance comes at the end of GoMa’s film program, A New Tomorrow: Visions of the Future in Cinema, which coincides with the exhibition 21st Century: Art in the First Decade. Cinematheque, Gallery of Modern Art (re-opening, post flood, Feb 13), Brisbane, Feb 26, 27, http://qag.qld.gov.au/cinematheque/current/21st_century_cinema
expanding the australian sound sphere
The Australia Council is inviting Australian musicians, sound artists and media artists working in sound to apply for a 3-month residency in the AlloSphere at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “The Allosphere is a 30-foot diameter sphere built inside a three-storey near anechoic (echo free) cube. It allows for synthesis, manipulation, exploration and analysis of large-scale data sets in an environment that can simulate virtually real sensorial perception….The AlloSphere is an instrument similar to the telescope, in that it enables scientists to see data in new ways in fields ranging from nanotechnology to theoretical physics, from proteomics to cosmology, from neurophysiology to the spaces of consciousness, and from new materials to new media. But it is has also been compared to a musical instrument or orchestra…” The Australia Council, through its Music Board and the Inter Arts Office, is the first organisation in the world to support a formal artist residency at the AlloSphere, in partnership between with the University of California Santa Barbara. Allosphere Residency, www.australiacouncil.gov.au/grants/grants/allosphere_residency; www.allosphere.ucsb.edu
GENRE FILMS, PARTICULARLY COMEDIES, HORROR AND TEEN FLICKS, HAVE ALWAYS BEEN QUICK TO INCORPORATE THE LATEST FADS. JUMPIN’ JACK FLASH FEATURED ONLINE CHATS, YOU’VE GOT MAIL REVOLVED AROUND EMAILS AND ROMANCE, JULIE AND JULIA FOCUSED ON A BLOGGER, WHILE EASY A, JUST RELEASED ON DVD, INCORPORATES VIDEO BLOGS TO HELP THE SPREAD OF GOSSIP, A MODERN EQUIVALENT OF THE SWIRLING NEWSPAPER MONTAGE.
In general, though, filmmakers have been slow to explore social media phenomena: the increasingly important daily impact on many lives of using websites like Facebook (FB) and Twitter. Perhaps it’s the text-based nature of these online worlds that makes it difficult to weave into dramatic narrative. But two recent films, Hollywood’s The Social Network and the low-budget doco Catfish, explore the history and ramifications of lives being created, lived and loved online.
Musicians have been quick to incorporate social media into their songs. YouTube is awash with clever ditties about FB loves and hates and the joys of Twitter. Australian singer/songwriter Kate Miller Heidke’s ballad “R U Fucking Kidding Me?” details a failed relationship with a nasty ex who now wants to be a Friend on FB. But contemporary fiction writers (at least those published in the mainstream) seem to have let the internet and its social ramifications bypass them completely. Literary critic Geordie Williamson argues that for most fiction writers the internet doesn’t even exist, despite the reality of a substantial subculture compulsively checking their email, iPhones, FB and Twitter accounts every couple of minutes (especially those in their teens and 20s):
“You only have to start reading with one eye for the internet to see how ignored it is by the profession that once explored the radical implications of Marx, Freud and Darwin’s thought, and which blasted totalitarianism, dramatised sexual revolution, thought the unthinkable about nuclear war…Faced with the web, though, fiction has retreated into silence. Old-school modernism toned down for middlebrow tastes (with a dash of post-colonial exotica, perhaps) seems the default mode for much self-described literature these days, that or a flight into the past, into the safety of the historical.” (“Only Connect,” The Australian, Sept 2, 2010).
James Andrews, looking at socially networked content engaged with film and television, argues that the whole system of ratings should be rethought in terms of the outcomes of the programs, that “the most popular shows are not those with the most viewers but…[those] that create the most conversations online… When I watch the show 24 I’m chatting about [it] on Twitter and FB with thousands of other fans…the question is, how do you produce media for a multi-minding, multi-screen audience?” (“Socially Networked Content: Why TV and Film Need Social Media,” FastCompany.com, Sept 2, 2009).
Filmmakers have been quick to experiment using FB and Twitter to promote and distribute their films, setting up FB pages and encouraging users to ‘Like’ their films, post their own reviews online and re-tweet the latest news. But they have been slow to take up the possibilities in their film narratives. Karin Altmann, head of the script development company ScriptWorks, comments:
“I read a lot of scripts for various bodies and I am stunned at how few of them even make a gesture in the direction of using social media as a tool for their stories. It’s especially weird considering how young so many of these writers are. You’d think they’d be all over it…It’s actually quite hard to do—because of the ever-present question of what do you actually put on the screen? A whole lot of text and graphics? And as for the script—what do you put on the page? That’s what makes a film like Easy A so interesting. It focuses on the effect of social networking on the character and then on the way she uses it to solve her problem, rather than worrying about seeing the graphics” (Conversation via FB, Jan 27, 2011).
But the climate is changing. Along with Easy A, in the last months two very different films, The Social Network and Catfish, employ FB as a structural framework, helping to propel the narrative at great speed, while the Australian film Wasted on the Young, soon to be released, incorporates text-based cultures into the visual fabric of a teen film. The enormous critical and popular success of The Social Network, a film that looked bland on paper before it was released, reveals an audience hungry for explorations of these virtual worlds.
The Social Network
Interestingly, the film is written by Aaron Sorkin (creator of The West Wing) who is on the record as saying that the social connections of FB don’t interest him; his only connections with others online are through email (Mark Harris, “Inventing Facebook,” New York Magazine, Sept 17, 2010). Perhaps that is why The Social Network has garnered such a huge following. Its narrative is peculiarly old-fashioned in many respects, centring on a protagonist, Mark Zuckerberg, who engages in spectacularly fast-paced witty dialogue (like something from a 1940s film), but is unable, ironically, to make emotional connections with others. The film successfully sets up the disconnect between his aim for the website (to help bring people together, or more accurately, boys get laid) and his inability to even acknowledge the feelings of his girlfriend. But it’s clear the Zuckerberg character has been embellished. Novelist Zadie Smith argues: “The real Zuckerberg is much more like his website…Controlled but dull, bright and clear but uniformly plain, non-ideological, affectless” (“Generation Why?”, The New York Review of Books, Nov 25, 2010). Not enough characterisation for a hit film, Sorkin rightly guessed.
Smith also observes that while, in his non-fiction form, Zuckerberg concentrates on the word “connect” with an almost missionary zeal, the reality of the connections people make on FB are less interesting, primarily superficial, so much so that the novelist ended her relationship with FB altogether, finding the experience of going cold-turkey from such an addiction difficult. MIT professor Sherry Turkle, in her new book Alone Together, argues that the uptake of digital technologies is making society less human: “Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, it is actually isolating us from real human interaction, in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world” (Paul Harris, “Social Networking Under Fresh Attack As Tide of Cyber-Scepticism Sweeps US,” The Observer, guardian.co.uk, Jan 22, 2011).
Ben C Lucas, in his soon to be released film Wasted on the Young, which screened in competition at the 2010 Sydney Film Festival, nurtures this theme, exploring the (virtual) headspaces of rich high school students in Perth who survive in strangely alluring yet empty competing worlds where adults don’t exist. Lucas melds text-based digital cultures seamlessly into the visual style and narrative of the film: “…the ‘isolation through technology’ thing played a big part in Wasted but that’s only because it’s the way people talk…It’s a basic part of our day to day but the underlying principles of bullying, of abuse, of exploitation of the technology, are as old as civilisation…the tools change, maybe enhance it, but the way we treat each other remains. If we had ignored or excluded texting and instant messages from Wasted it would have felt less authentic, in my opinion. Graphically we tried to involve it in the environment of the film so that it would just feel like another form of dialogue—part of the world.” (Conversation via FB, Jan 24, 2011).
With so much fictionalisation of character happening online, through avatars, the audience response seems to be an anxiety about whether the characters, or the film itself, are real. Much of the debate around The Social Network in the US centred on the extent to which Mark Zuckerberg’s character had been made up for the purpose of the film. At the Q+A screening of Catfish I attended, much of the audience time was spent questioning the filmmakers as to whether or not the documentary was a cleverly disguised fiction. With the recent release of docos like Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop and Casey Affleck’s I’m Still Here, it’s getting increasingly (and wondrously) difficult to see where the borders of fiction and fact blur. And it’s not surprising, given the content of Catfish, that the audience is sceptical.
Catfish centres on a New York photographer, Yaniv Schulman (the film is co-directed by his brother Ariel), who meets an eight-year-old girl, Abby, on FB, becomes her Friend (attracted by her precocious ability to paint) and is gradually introduced to her family and friends (via FB), eventually falling for a spunky older sister, Megan, whom he gets to know over the course of eight months, through an exchange of text messages, status updates and jpegs. When various forms of communication start looking dodgy (Megan posts him songs she’s supposedly written that turn out to be just downloaded from YouTube), Yaniv decides to grab his satellite navigation system and head to Michigan to meet her, arriving unannounced.
What he finds reveals as much about the nature of FB, and the desire to connect, as the surprising naïveté of Yaniv. (THE MEDIA HAVE BEEN WARNED NOT TO REVEAL FROM HERE ON IN SO STOP READING NOW IF YOU HAVE TO.) The family he has got to know are, in essence, a construct. Abby and her mother Angela do exist but Mum has populated FB with an entire world of avatars—family members, friends, all with unique voices and stories, that she maintains late into the night after Abby has gone to sleep.
It’s a fictionalised narrative of her own, to entice Yaniv’s affections and escape her own difficult circumstances; she is the primary caregiver of two adult males with severe disabilities. FB allows her to ‘make herself up’ and manipulate the world around her so it makes sense, much like the filmmakers’ angle in screening the outcomes. It’s to Yaniv’s credit that, rather than confronting the woman and pushing his agenda of hurt and betrayal, he allows her longing and sadness to unfold. In a sense he has been fictionalising too, imagining Megan, creating a world around her that he wanted to exist, even Photoshopping her image into pictures of his own, creating a virtual romantic couple.
What’s most surprising, given the nature of the film’s central theme—just who can you trust in a screen-based digital world?—is the filmmakers’ apparent surprise at the audience challenges to the documentary’s veracity; in Catfish, everything is mirage. In The Social Network the reality of the enterprise—the cold, hard cash—is the focus. In the end, neither film is about realising your (romantic) dreams, but about how marketing hype and the conversations that follow can make you a star. And then punish you for it.
Wasted on the Young will be released March 3. The Social Network is set for release on Blu-ray and DVD on March 2, 2011. Catfish is screening currently.
Wasted on the Young, writer, director Ben C Lucas, producers Janelle Landers, Aidan O’Bryan, cinematographer Dan Freene, editor Leanne Cole. The Social Network, director David Fincher, screenplay Aaron Sorkin, based on a book by Ben Mezrich, producers Dana Brunetti, Ceán Chaffin, Michael De Luca, Scott Rudin, original music Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, editors Kirk Baxter, Angus Wall; Catfish, directors and cinematographers Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman, featuring Yaniv Schulman.
RealTime issue #101 Feb-March 2011 pg. 27
a study in red weight, Rebecca Cunningham, Exist-ence 2010
video still Nicola Morton
a study in red weight, Rebecca Cunningham, Exist-ence 2010
EXIST-ENCE IS AN ANNUAL TWO-DAY FESTIVAL OF PERFORMANCE ART, LIVE ART AND ACTION ART CURATED, PRODUCED AND PRESENTED BY BRITTANY GUY, LAUREN CLELLAND AND REBECCA CUNNINGHAM IN BRISBANE. LAST YEAR THE THIRD FESTIVAL TOOK PLACE IN THE SHOP-FRONT AT THE JUDITH WRIGHT CENTRE OF PERFORMING ARTS, BUT WENT LARGELY UNHERALDED.
The event receives no funding and, although the space was generously donated, the creators of this event expend their time and labour gratis. Likewise artists pay for their own materials and perform for free. The modest admission fee covered front of house and technical assistance, but equipment was loaned by the big-hearted Kim Machan—the same Kim Machan who created the Multimedia Art Asia Pacific festival (MAAP) that went off-shore to China through lack of funding here.
Let’s hope history doesn’t repeat itself, because Exist-ence is professionally presented, from the appealingly bound program that includes a useful guide to global performance websites to the continuous live streaming of international artists on the walls of the space, and represents an independent, accessible and welcome renewal of exploration and exposure to this artform in Queensland for another generation.
The Exist-ence initiative is reminiscent of the ferment of ideas and investigation of new forms explored in the 1990s in Brisbane by artist driven venues such as The Crab Room and Cherry Herring. Nick Tsoutas at the Institute of Modern Art, Joseph O’Connor at Metro Arts and Jude Abernathy at Van Gogh’s Earlobe all provided support and space for independent performance artists. Luminary Queensland performers who cut their teeth in such spaces during this period are now well known: Christine Johnston, Lisa O’Neill, Brian Lucas… What surprised me was that while performance art continues to thrive as a discrete practice, especially overseas, I had wrongly attributed its demise in Brisbane to its having been subsumed under the rubric of contemporary performance. New circus, for instance, seems to have completely amalgamated performance art into its praxis.
At Exist-ence there was the expected atmosphere of a jamboree and some quietly subversive touches. You could avoid the rather pricey front bar and earn free drinks by screaming into the interior of a suitcase that was placed on a table with finger food that you were invited to eat “at your own risk.” An inter-generational contribution that nicely sutured the seeming hiatus in the handing down of a ‘tradition’ came from Jan Baker-Finch who believes “in the two-faced truth, in the Either, the Or and the Holy Both.” She improvised dance with enviable suppleness and, dressed in a series of fantastical costumes fashioned from ever recurring green garbage bags, made personal interventions with the audience. Dan Koop from Melbourne in his performance Wish you Were Here, sat at a table offering to personally hand deliver post card messages within five kilometres of the Judith Wright Centre. Throughout the hand delivery process DJK International mapped the route by sending live delivery update reports, ironically, via Twitter. Part corporate spoof, part re-humanising latter day communications, it was a sweet idea and in great demand—I sent my first Humanogram to a couple expecting their first child who were both bemused and delighted by Koop’s deadpan ‘delivery.’
Velvet Pesu
Describing her art and life as inseparable, the striking figure of Velvet Pesu was a living sound sculpture who phenomenally endured during most of a long night. Concentric Circles on Red was an experimental piece combining audio made from inventively recycled materials secreted as part of her costume with her own superbly improvised vocals. She stood like a tall tree in a forest with the hauteur of an Elizabethan aristocrat or Aztec princess, wearing a shark’s jawbone and a ruff made from recycled venetian blinds. A visual artist and experimental filmmaker, Pesu looked up towards what looked like handmade film thrown on the ceiling by an antique projector. The artist possesses the only remaining bulb for the machine, and I was moved by this detail, significant of her wholly committed, unique way of life. I was less convinced by Nicola Morton’s claims to be “a writer-artist-future-time woman” declaring “the end of capitalism.” If only. But this might be a grumpy response to what appeared suspiciously like one of those getting to know you drama exercises I temperamentally abhor. We were asked to perform yogic breathing while twirling like Sufis and sticking bright dots all over our neighbours. Ugh.
If Morton attempts in an admittedly light-hearted fashion to hypnotise the audience, Rebecca Cunningham is attracted to the meditative, trance-like state she enters during a performance. In a study in red weight, she wore a red dress and wove a garland of red roses round her neck. To the roses were added successively layered necklaces of red wool and washers, bondage tape, stones and what appeared to be razor wire and ribbon that left scarlet indentations on the artist’s bare shoulders. As she kneeled and rhythmically rocked in a penitential posture, weighty stones clashing and grinding the bouquet to bits, I was inclined to read these signs in terms of the kind of psychological-political analysis of sexuality in a patriarchal world familiar from feminist discourse. However, Cunningham disavowed any such intentions, referring me back to the text accompanying her action: “what has come before, what is ahead, no matter. Living in the here, living in the now is where I want to be. With you living in the here, living in the now… There is no them, there is no then. Only we, only now.”
Cunningham’s brave action appeared to recapitulate aspects of an earlier Mike Parr-like body art where the focus on the abject appeared self-obsessive, but it also seemed positively to reiterate the axiom that innocence, consciously or not, longs for experience, longs to be different from itself. Taken along with her text, Cunningham’s display of overt masochism seemed a vivid reminder of the Zen notion translated by 1960s writer Alan Watts into the proposition that we are in fact a sort of resistance in the middle of the flow of life. As life impinges on you, you hurt, and so you know that you are here. Perhaps it was the shock of alterity that induced us to share the moment. Cunningham’s piece at any rate seemed to bear out Parr’s original observation that “the eye of the audience is submerged in the body as in a wound.”
Melody Woodnutt is a descendent of pirates and claims to have stolen her arts education while flirting with arts institutions internationally. Bravo! Recently returned from a residency in Iceland, her work Lines and Flux reflected her stay there. Part visual installation, part live art, her piece centred on a nomadic, ecological way of thinking that was reminiscent of 70s preoccupations overlaid with Woodnutt’s “meditation on lines, borders, boundaries and the path of (least) resistance.” The work enacted the temporal installation of an environment on the border of land and sea. There was a pile of heavy stones, one of which a member of the audience was tasked to interminably weigh. Earth was poured from sandbags in the ‘interior,’ eventually to be mixed by Woodnutt dragging a fishing net between her toes, eliding borderline distinctions. More metaphorical were the string and tape that excluded the audience beyond another border between themselves and the performer, but also highlighting the glut of the eye which easily penetrated all barriers. In Woodnutt’s moveable dialectic, it is the crossing of borders and boundaries, or the place where they intersect which is important. The ‘I’ consciously situates itself between the two. As Derrida puts it, “we have to cross the border but not to destroy the border.”
Derrida’s prohibition, of course, is blithely ignored by the forces of global capitalism. They are the ones who literally mix up the world. Although I didn’t have the opportunity to speak with Woodnutt, her work could not have been ignorant of the economic basket case Iceland became as one of the first victims of the capitalist meltdown. As we saw on television, Iceland (tied in with a Scottish investment bank that likewise foundered) fell hook, line and sinker for the shibboleths of economic rationalism and invested its national savings in global hedge funds. Viewed from this perspective, Woodnutt’s performance proved all the more politically astute.
The future for Exist-ence includes plans to bring out international powerhouse La Pocha Nostra in September for the fourth international Exist-ence festival and, with a little luck, Black Market International in 2012. Boringly, such big dreams depend on funding. However, they will persist in any event. At the moment the curators are looking for a space to promote performance art, live art and action art in Brisbane on a regular, perhaps bi-monthly basis. Any offers out there?
Exist-ence, a festival of performance art, live art and action art curated, produced and presented by Brittany Guy, Lauren Clelland, Rebecca Cunningham; live performances created and performed by Jan Baker-Finch, Dan Koop, Nicola Morton, Velvet Pesu, Melody Woodnutt; Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, Nov 26-27, 2010; http://existenceperformanceart.wordpress.com
IF A POSITIVE SPIN CAN BE MADE OF THE FLAGRANT MONOPOLISATION OF WHAT WE USED TO CALL ART-HOUSE CINEMAS IN THIS COUNTRY, IT IS THE INCREASED RESPONSIBILITY THAT AUSTRALIAN FILM FESTIVALS NOW HAVE TO EXHIBIT DIVERSE, UNIQUE AND VITAL FILMS FROM ALL PARTS OF OUR WORLD. WE KNOW WE WON’T SEE MUCH BEYOND BATMAN FOR THE REST OF THE YEAR (UNLESS WE LOOK REALLY HARD), SO WHEN OUR LOCAL FESTIVAL COMES ALONG IT BECOMES NECESSARY TO BEHAVE MUCH AS A CAMEL WOULD AT AN OASIS, AND FILL UP WITH A YEAR OR TWO’S WORTH OF INTERESTING CINEMA IN A FEW SHORT DAYS.
Festivals are, of course, not immune to the kind of intimidation of which small independent cinemas are clearly victims. Festival organisers too can succumb to the fear that an unusual, ‘excessively internationalist’ program won’t attract an audience weaned on superheroes. It’s extremely pleasing then, when a young film festival like Adelaide’s holds firm to its original game plan and offers a spread of films designed to challenge rather than appease its audience.
Since 2007 the Adelaide film festival has been headlined by its competition group, a selection of a dozen films often indicative of the program at large. This year the competition’s emphasis on stylistically distinctive cinema continues. Established masters like Raoul Ruiz and Patricio Guzman line up next to newcomers and lesser-knowns like Kurdish Shahram Alidi and Australian Beck Cole (whose debut feature Here I Am premieres at the festival). And for the first time two documentaries are included in competition: Guzman’s Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la Luz) and Australian Mathew Bate’s Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Mis-Adventure.
The decision to include documentaries in competition is as bold as it is curious, and it could be asked how a documentary can be fairly evaluated against narrative films in a prize for ‘best feature.’ Oddly enough, the inclusion is rather fitting for this year’s selection. More than a couple of those entries designated as ‘narrative features’ are themselves barely narratives at all, or at least barely fiction. One of the standout artistic merits of this year’s competition is that so many of the films carefully traverse the gap between life and art. The distinction between documentary and fiction becomes a lot less clear cut than we might assume it to be.
Radu Muntean’s Tuesday, After Christmas (Marti, Dupa Craciun) is a remarkable case in point, another gem from the current wave of great Romanian cinema. It combines a modest but passionate interest in adult relationships with a long take style that might be called bravura were it not so unassuming. Moving his camera only when necessary, and yet also refusing to cut into the action in order to drive a point home, Muntean respectfully and very skilfully allows his actors and his audience space to experience and interpret the story, that of a man who follows his heart wherever it goes and the ensuing catastrophe this brings his family. This is a truly great accomplishment of cinematic realism, wholly avoiding dogma in both tone and message. Some films we watch because they offer us a view of another world, others we can watch because they reveal our own lives taking place in another country.
The Four Times (La Quattro Volte)
If Tuesday, After Christmas offers a seamless kind of domestic realism, two other films in this year’s competition present a more poetic type of realism, of life beyond the day-to-day. Quite unlike anything I have ever seen, Michelangelo Frammartino’s The Four Times (La Quattro Volte) is a wordless ‘narrative’ that follows the transmigratory passage of a dying Calabrian goat-herd’s soul from human incarnation to animal (a baby goat), to vegetable (a pine tree) and finally to mineral (charcoal). Unusual though the plot may be (you might care to think of something more unusual) the filmmaker’s approach to the mystical content is anything but fantastical. Again, with extremely restrained long takes (many several minutes long) the action presents itself as a perfectly natural course of events. As with much great realist cinema, what the Four Times offers is an awareness of the world as a work of art, and of our movement through it.
Similarly in Year Without A Summer, Malaysian director Tan Chui Mui takes us on a journey that is as much about its setting as its characters. Long departed and forgotten friend Azam returns to his childhood fishing village, emerging from the sea like some monster to spend the night with his dear friend Ali and Ali’s wife Minah. Bobbing in their small boat on the moonlit ocean the friends rejoice with memories and folk tales, themselves resembling mythical figures in a watery dream world. Things suddenly change however, when the film returns to the much harsher world of Azam’s childhood. An elusive and very lyrical film, Year Without A Summer displays Tan Chui Mui’s highly developed visual sensitivity. The way digital video is used to capture moonlight on the Malaysian coast is alone reason enough to see this film.
More lyrical still is the Kurdish elegy Whisper with the Wind (Sirta la gal ba), winner of the Young Critics Award at Cannes. Paradoxically both eclectic and solemn, Whisper with the Wind conveys the period and place of the Kurdish genocides, known as ANFAL, which took place in the late 1980s in Kurdistan (Northern Iraq) under Saddam Hussein. The opening titles inform us that during these years 32,000 Kurds were murdered, many buried alive (though other estimates suggest as many as 180,000). Following the trail of message carrier Mam Baldar through decimated Kurdish communities, Whisper in the Wind presents a poetic and harrowing portrait of this profoundly troubling event. Whether or not the Kurdish genocide validates, or is in any way related to, the 2003 invasion of Iraq is not a question easily answered. What is certain is that a film like this in the 2011 competition powerfully illustrates the vital role that film festivals can play in a sheltered culture like Australia’s.
Other entries in competition for the International Award for Best Feature include the Peruvian black comedy October (Octubre) directed by brothers Daniel and Diego Vega, Kelly Reichardt’s acclaimed indie American western Meek’s Cutoff and Canadian writer-director Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies.
SHORT AND RELATIVELY SIMPLE, FLUID NETWORK WON JAMES COOK UNIVERSITY’S SCHOOL OF CREATIVE ARTS SECOND ANNUAL SCREENGRAB NEW MEDIA ARTS PRIZE. CLEVERLY AND SUCCINCTLY ADDRESSING THE THEME OF ‘NETWORK,’ THE VIDEO WORK BY BRAZILIAN ENTRANTS JULIANA GOTILLA AND IZABEL RAINER HARBACH OF RAPADURA STUDIO RELIES ON FAMILIAR VISUAL AND SONIC MARKERS ALLIED IN AN UNEXPECTED WAY.
A world map with the continents formed from water on a slick white surface is the initial visual. Arresting for a number of reasons, it displaces/reverses where we think the land and ocean should be, so it’s already messing with our world as we know it; and it immediately raises questions as to how the effect is technically achieved—is it actual water, or a digitally embossed effect?
The map image remains static just long enough to allow us to contemplate these mysteries before the soundtrack kicks in with old school dial-up internet connection sounds, followed by scratchy static. As the sounds continue, drops of water begin to rain randomly onto the world map and the continents lose their distinct outlines. While the visual aspect gradually changes, the audio progresses through all those chirpy little alerts which tell us we have new emails, or someone wants to chat with us online. The fluid continents bleed and grow into supercontinents and then meld in a single world pool to a musical finale of a repeated Skype ringtone.
The sedate, watery video is wonderfully at odds with the anxiety-inducing soundscape, even though some of the net noises mimic plops and splashes. Gotilla and Rainer Harbach are obviously playing on their audience’s investment, socially and economically (and therefore emotionally) in internet communication. They are not telling us anything new about contemporary reliance on electronic interaction or how access is perceptually shrinking geographic distance, spanning oceans and redefining borders. Nor are they making any particular judgement about whether this is good or bad. But Fluid Network simply illustrates the intangible in an original, engaging way employing basic and familiar elements. The use of water both for its fluid properties and as a metaphor for universality is inspired.
Another video work from Italy, Multimedia Head by Osvaldo Cibils, shares the tactile, analogue sensibility of Fluid Network, but examines a deficit of the communication network—the compromise of personal identity under the weight of accumulated data. Cibils has taped himself taping things to himself, quite literally. We first see his face unadorned, then watch as he attaches a cassette tape, a mobile phone, a book, a flash drive, a media disc, and so forth, to his head with masking tape. His clumsiness is mildly amusing, the action is laboured, but bewilderment as to his motive keeps the viewer glued for almost five minutes to see the outcome. In the end, Cibils is totally obscured, resembling a mummy who has fallen into a bargain bin at a Dick Smith outlet, the lens of a digital camera staring out in place of an eye. Emphasising the symbolic dehumanisation in process, Cibils doesn’t speak a word throughout.
Questions of compromised electronic identity are also played out by Boris Eldagsen in Spam: the Musical; a genre-bending, theatrical and very funny episode subtitled The Lonely Girls. Three young women with a variety of accents, dressed in pyjamas, battle for a hairbrush pretend-microphone via which to relate texts taken from actual spam emails from love-lorn Eastern Europeans and Africans requesting help to claim inheritances, giving out false names, lying about their height—all delivered with disarming sincerity.
The additional Deleted Scene is also a take on image manipulation, but in total contrast to the visual fluffiness of the first part. A woman sits in a spotlight in a cabaret setting wearing a sequinned top and smudged mascara, while three sets of anonymous hands move her arms and mouth to mime a bluesy version of the AC/DC song “TNT (I’m Dynamite).” She is a marionette at their mercy and the song mocks her helplessness. It is compulsive to watch, but very disturbing, hinting perhaps at the systemic malignancy behind scamming and identity theft.
The UK’s Marco Donnarumma’s Golden Shield Music subtly draws our attention to political manipulation, using China’s IP censorship (the Golden Shield Project) for a generative net art composition. The work collects the IP numbers of the 12 most-blocked websites and assigns them musical notes, generating a free-form composition. The idea of random and creative art emanating from a project intended to repress individual freedom and limit access to information is the beauty of Golden Shield Music, even if the screen visual, a list of IP numbers, isn’t particularly compelling.
Silica-esc by Vladimir Todorovic of Singapore is a generative movie about a new supercomputing platform introducing itself to potential users with extravagant promises of becoming a means to ‘unite all mankind’. The graphics are mesmerising—cold, sophisticated and seamless matrices. Despite the apparent gravity at the start of the eight-minute work, the tone quickly becomes tongue-in-cheek as a rich woman and a farmer, each represented by a different roiling geometric form, discuss (in English-subtitled French) who caused a car accident, quickly descending into a class-based slanging match. Silica-esc (in Chinese) also boasts that all individual expression and feeling is recorded in “our spiritual data segment” for classification and dissemination via Spiritupedia. Others will become your friends and “celebrate and rejoice in your networked spirituality in unity.” By sending up the persistence of humankind’s eternal power struggles and search for meaning, Todorovic seems to be acknowledging that any means by which we choose to communicate and interact will still reflect innate human strengths and weaknesses.
Many of Screengrab’s 17 finalists test the limits of technologies as artistic media while hypothesising the potential and pitfalls of the system even as they use it. The role of the artist, regardless of the preferred media, is evidently intact.
Rebecca Belmore, The Named and the Unnamed, 2002, video installation, Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia
Rebecca Belmore, The Named and the Unnamed, 2002, video installation, Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia
THE BRINGING TOGETHER OF INDIGENOUS CULTURES FROM THE PACIFIC REGION, WHETHER IN LARGE SCALE EVENTS LIKE THE ASIA PACIFIC TRIENNIAL OR SMALLER BUT SIGNIFICANT SHOWS LIKE JENNY FRASER AND LUBI THOMAS’ BIG EYE: ABORIGINAL ANIMATION FROM AUSTRALIA AND CANADA (RT91, P26) YIELDS INSIGHTS FOR BOTH ARTISTS AND AUDIENCES ABOUT INDIGENEITY AND ART IN A BROADER THAN USUAL CONTEXT. STOP(THE) GAP IS SUCH AN EVENT, ONE WITH AN EXCITING, TIMELY FOCUS ON MEDIA ARTS.
As part of its celebration of the moving image in visual art, the 2011 Adelaide Film Festival is partnering the University of South Australia’s Samstag Museum of Art to present Stop(the)Gap: International Indigenous Art in Motion. Curated by Brenda L Croft, the exhibition will bring together from Australia the considerable talents of filmmaker Warwick Thornton, leading new media artist r e a and curator and media artist Genevieve Grieves (Bunjilaka, Melbourne Museum).
Warwick Thornton, Stranded, 2011, film still, commissioned by Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund 2011
Warwick Thornton, Stranded, 2011, film still, commissioned by Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund 2011
Warwick Thornton’s contribution to Stop(the)Gap, commissioned through the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund, will be on show at the Samstag Museum while r e a and Genevieve Grieves will screen their creations outdoors at Port Adelaide’s historic Harts Mill.
The Australians are joined by a range of visiting major artists: Rebecca Belmore (performance, installation; Canada’s official representative at the 2005 Venice Biennale, Sydney Biennale, 1988), Dana Claxton (Canada; video, performance; Sundance Film Festival; 2010 Biennale of Sydney; Microwave, Hong Kong); Alan Michelson (USA; digital photography, video and glass), Nova Paul (NZ; photography, film: fascinating three-colour separation images of New Zealand sites), Lisa Reihana (NZ; Campbelltown Arts Centre’s Edge of Elsewhere, 2010 and major Australian galleries have shown her richly textured photomedia portraits) and Erica Lord (USA; interdisciplinary artist; striking photographic work).
In the Stop(the)Gap press release, Brenda Croft writes, “Some of the most provocative and illuminating moving image work today is being created by Indigenous new media artists—yet there has been no international focus on this work until now. Despite physical distances, Indigenous communities around the globe are linked through their shared colonial histories, each bearing the scars borne of dispossession, injustice, inequality, and misrepresentation.” Croft has “selected works challenging preconceptions of contemporary Indigenous expression and addressing themes of human rights, environmental concerns, cultural security, and negotiating diversity.”
At the very same time as they provoke us, the works of these artists display the seductive power of art, using bodies, film, video, new technologies and a potent sense of place to transform a problematic world into one that fascinates as much as it challenges, thereby further opening us up to the riches of Indigenous cultures.
WHEN MICHAEL O’ROURKE ATTENDED THE INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF FILM SOCIETIES’ ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING AND WORLD CONFERENCE IN RECIFE, BRAZIL, LAST DECEMBER, HE EXPECTED DAYS OF TALK AND DISCUSSION AND THE OCCASIONAL FILM SCREENING. HE DIDN’T ANTICIPATE HAVING ONE OF THE MOST UNEXPECTED AND MOVING VIEWING EXPERIENCES OF HIS LIFE. BUT HE DID.
The Pina favela is one of the poorest and most deprived areas of the city of Recife, and it was in the favela, in Bullet Square (a place rumoured to see two murders a day), where a screen was erected one evening to show a new documentary. All the IFFS delegates were invited to see A Mao E A Luva, which had been filmed within the favela. They sat watching with crowds of favela residents, who laughed and cried as they viewed a film in which they and their children appeared: a film about something and somebody very important to them. And Michael O’Rourke, with years of experience watching emotional and harrowing stories on film, reports that it was the most moving experience of his filmgoing life, to watch this uplifting, hopeful film, amongst people to whom it meant so much.
The Pina favela spreads along the banks of the river, and it is here that Ricardo Gomes Ferraz, now aged 35, better known as Kcal, a poet and musician, has turned his shabby waterfront house into a library for the children of his community. For over 15 years he has used all his spare resources to buy second-hand books in different places all over the city to gradually establish a library that has now become a meeting place for hundreds of children and adults—“where dreaming is not forbidden, where imagination can fly to places very different from the favela,” as Kcal says.
Drugs and prostitution are constants in daily life in the favela, but for Kcal that life changed when at 16 he found and read a book, A Mao E A Luva, by Machado de Assis (a 19th century writer, descended from slaves, now regarded as one of Brazil’s most important). He realised the importance of reading—and from that day on he has never stopped—then passing it on to children. In 2008, this man, who defines himself as “a dealer in books,” received an esteemed national award in recognition of his work but, more importantly, a government project has evolved which has seen the opening of many libraries in the favelas; from the original founded by Kcal, another 514 libraries are functioning all over Brazil today.
Ricardo Gomes Ferraz
The film about Kcal and his work was directed by Roberto Orazi and produced by Riccardo Neri, two Italian filmmakers who were in Recife researching a film they were making on the dark subject of the trade in human organs. Looking for someone to help them talk to people in the favela, they were directed to Kcal. After meeting and working with him and learning about his work with books, the library and with the children of the favela, they decided that they had to make a film about this wonderful story. (The film screened at the Rome Film Festival late last year and hopefully will be making its way to other festivals soon.)
the cinema club phenomenon
Michael O’Rourke was in Recife representing the Australian Council of Film Societies, of which he is vice-president. Film societies in Australia have a long and interesting history, but they are currently in decline, and the Council is urgently looking at both this decline and the role of the council, with the aim of re-invigorating both firmly in its sights. O’Rourke found much in his five days in Brazil to encourage him and, through him, the council; the international film society scene is amazingly rich, varied and active, with much more happening in many countries round the world than in Australia.
A film society is a membership-based organisation where people watch screenings of films not shown in mainstream cinemas. (In Spain they are known as cineclubs and in Germany as filmclubs, names that are increasing in popularity around the world.) Such organisations, usually with an educational as well as a screen cultural aim, work to introduce new audiences to varied audiovisual work through a member-curated program of screenings, usually supported by well-researched information sheets and even essays on the films shown. A common feature of most screenings is an introduction to the film and a post-screening discussion; a healthy debate on both style and content is seen as important. Film societies in most countries are organised into federations, councils, collectives, or local networks, and these national bodies can be members of the IFFS, which uses its rich and multi-lingual website and its regular publications to maintain a free flow of information throughout the film society world. (Interestingly, the IFFS is currently setting up an archive in which to collect and preserve all the documentation produced by its members; it will be, as retiring Secretary General Golan Rabbany Biplob said, “the right place where any researcher can get sufficient input to study the world film society movement.”)
a united effort
Last December the Brazilian government provided some outstanding hospitality to allow both the world conference on film societies and the general assembly of the IFFS to take place in Recife over five days, with participants coming from all around the world to report on their current activities and to plan for the future of worldwide “cineclubism.” This was the first time in 25 years that such a get-together was held in Latin America, where the film society movement seems to be doing well. The Brazilian government, on behalf of the Brazilian Federation, covered travel expenses and accommodation for many of those in attendance; Michael O’Rourke was particularly impressed by the fact that the national body from Norway paid the membership fees for the newly formed film society in Kabul so they could send a representative.
The five days saw a packed program in which reports from state and local film societies, from national bodies, and from various working groups were interspersed with panel discussions on relevant issues, including a debate on the role of film societies in the 21st century, and on research on film societies, their origins and publications, while social events and screenings lightened the more formal but necessary business of conference and AGM.
film clubs for the young
It was a report from Denmark on its very successful film club model for children and teenagers that particularly enthused O’Rourke. It’s a model that has its roots back in the 1950s, when teachers decided to show films to their students on a regular basis, while in the 1980s a law was introduced that required 25 percent of national film production be set aside for children’s and adolescent films. Now most young Danes belong to film clubs, where they have regular screenings of high quality films, acquiring a habit of watching films within their community and in circumstances that encourage both a critical standpoint and lively discussion, and gaining an insight into both the issues covered in the film but also in the way cinema works. While Australia does have some local or regional activities that encourage children’s film-going and critical evaluation (such as Queensland’s Cine Sparks), there’s nothing on an organised national level.
film club australia?
Back from the meeting excited and invigorated by much of the film society activity he heard about in other countries, O’Rourke is looking forward to the challenges posed in Australia, where the film society movement is now going through a difficult period, with many longstanding groups faced with aging and declining membership and finding it hard to connect with new audiences. The attractions provided by excellent equipment and the rich and growing supply of material on DVD is enhancing home viewing, while many in the younger generations seem to have different interests and other ways of watching screen material. It’s not all doom and gloom; there are some film societies doing really well, with large and active memberships and programs. What’s needed is some way of making this much more widespread, and to this end Michael O’Rourke feels positive about increasing Australia’s connection with the burgeoning world of film societies.
Incompatible Elements (video still), Josephine Starrs & Leon Cmielewski
courtesy the artists
Incompatible Elements (video still), Josephine Starrs & Leon Cmielewski
HAVING BEEN BASED IN THE UK SINCE 2007, IT IS GLARINGLY OBVIOUS TO ME HOW INVISIBLE AUSTRALIAN VISUAL ARTISTS CAN BE ON THE HIGHLY COMPETITIVE INTERNATIONAL CIRCUIT. THEY ARE RARELY SEEN IN EUROPEAN BIENNIALS AND SURVEY EXHIBITIONS, LET ALONE IN SOLO EXHIBITIONS. SOME AUSTRALIAN GALLERISTS TAKE THEIR ARTISTS TO INTERNATIONAL FAIRS, THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL OFFERS SUPPORT IN VARYING DEGREES AND MAGAZINES LIKE ARTLINK ARE MAKING THEIR WAY ONTO THE SHELVES OF UK AND EUROPEAN BOOKSHOPS. HOWEVER, AUSTRALIANS WORKING IN COMPUTER-GENERATED AND RELATED FORMS HAVE CONSISTENTLY ACHIEVED PROMINENCE ON THE EUROPEAN MEDIA ARTS CIRCUIT AND BEYOND.
Since the early 1990s Australian artists have been highly visible in this arena and have made a vital contribution to the growth of international media arts practice. With the continued vitality and expansion of the sector evident in events such as Ars Electronica in Austria, Transmediale in Germany and the nomadic International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA, scheduled for Sydney in 2013), the media arts scene has proved itself a resilient and relevant forum for audiences to experience media arts practice.
Not only are Australian artists prominent in these exhibitions but their excellence in the field is acknowledged, especially through the series of prizes awarded by Ars Electronica. In 2010 Melbourne-based Stelarc was awarded the highest prize at Ars Electronica, the Golden Nica (for Hybrid Art) and Perth-based SymbioticA won the same prize when it was first awarded in 2007. Awards of Distinction at Ars Electronica have also been presented in 2005 to Brisbane based Keith Armstrong, Sydney based Joyce Hinterding & David Haines in 2009 and Josephine Starrs & Leon Cmielewski in 2007. Melbourne Oribotics artist Matthew Gardiner was an Artist in Residence at Ars Electronica Futurelab in 2010 with the support of Novamedia and the Australia Council for the Arts, and returns there this year.
This Australian presence on the media art scene has developed over 20 years, the outcome of hard work from artists, support and profile building by the Australia Council along with Australian curators and agencies. Individuals such as Linda Wallace in the 1990s through her company Machine Hunger took the work of Australian artists to Asia and Europe and Antoaneta Ivanova with Novamedia established an international network for exhibiting media art in the 2000s. Experimenta has curated several exhibitions that have toured internationally and ANAT has supported artists to present work through its (now defunct) Conference and Workshop Fund. Kim Machan through MAAP (Multimedia Art Asia Pacific) has also built significant collaborative exhibition opportunities in Asia and presented major exhibitions in Singapore and Beijing.
Entrepreneurial Australian curators continue to create opportunities for Australian media artists overseas and in 2010 Dream Worlds: Australian Moving Image, curated by Melinda Rackham and produced by Michael Yuen (see p10) showed eight artworks on a 27-metre public screen in Beijing’s Sanlitun Village. This large screen was apparently very hard to miss and caught the eye of the local press: “Few in China are aware that as well as strange animals and a Mandarin-speaking former Prime Minister, Australia sports a thriving new media art scene comprising some of the world’s most innovative artists” (www.thebeijinger.com).
This concerted effort has enabled artists to build networks and relationships (particularly in Asia and Europe) that continue to yield invitations to exhibit and participate in other opportunities such as conferences and residencies. While organisations like MAAP and Novamedia are not as active in the current climate, their efforts have paid off through a continued presence of Australian artists in the international spotlight.
For established artists such as Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski, exhibiting overseas “is important to us because of the opportunity it gives to engage with a wider audience, and from our experience, unexpected opportunities often arise from participating in an international exhibition or art festival.” Starrs and Cmielewski’s work is well regarded. They have shown at the 2008 Guangzhou Triennial and in 2011 present at the Sydney/San Francisco Biennale and the Auckland Arts Festival. They have also secured opportunities for R&D through residencies and in 2009 were the first Australian artists in residence at the Ars Electronica Future Lab.
Elegy for Young Lovers, Young Vic and English National Opera
image Lynette Wallworth
Elegy for Young Lovers, Young Vic and English National Opera
An artist achieving considerable success overseas is Lynette Wallworth. It is not unrealistic to say that her profile is perhaps more significant outside of Australia than it is at home, although her solo exhibition at Adelaide’s Samstag Museum in 2009 in tandem with the Adelaide Film Festival gained considerable national attention. She is represented by UK based Forma, one of Europe’s leading production agencies for interdisciplinary contemporary art. With the support of Forma, Wallworth is developing complex and engaging media installations that are shown in a range of venues. Over the last few years, her work has been commissioned and exhibited at the Lincoln Centre, NYC; New Frontier at Sundance Film Festival; Vienna Festival and Aix en Provence Festival. In 2010 she developed a 40-minute video piece, Kafka Fragments, in the Netherlands and in the same year an interactive video for English National Opera’s Elegy for Young Lovers directed by Fiona Shaw.
Wallworth says that these opportunities “offer a way of developing a different relationship with audience and I am interested in that. The importance for me is in staying fluid enough to go where the space is opening up…Right now for me that is definitely film festivals as they make space for moving image work and for artist film makers.”
Wade Marynowsky, Bricolage Disco, 2010, ST PAUL St Gallery, Auckland, New Zeland
photo courtesy the artist
Wade Marynowsky, Bricolage Disco, 2010, ST PAUL St Gallery, Auckland, New Zeland
Emerging Australian artists are also starting to find their feet in the international arena. Sydney based Wade Marynowsky was recently included in the 2010 Mediations Biennale in Poznan, Poland and also in 2010 showed his installation Bricolage Disco at ST PAUL St Gallery in Auckland. He has commented that these opportunities have arisen from meeting international curators who have visited Australia, with introductions through the likes of Fiona Winning and Mike Leggett. Inclusion in international exhibitions opens new doors and exposes younger artists to the work of important international figures. Marynowksy says about Poznan, “it was important to show the work overseas to access new audiences and for professional development; it was also my first experience of exhibiting in an international biennale. This was exciting for me as I was shown amongst some media art big names such as Ken Feingold, Luc Courchesne and Eduardo Kac.”
All the artists mentioned here have significant international profiles or are starting to embark on international careers, but they are not the only media artists regularly exhibiting overseas. Jon McCormack, Christian Thompson, Alex Davies, Nigel Helyer, Daniel Crooks, Kate Richards, Mari Velonaki, Craig Walsh and Troy Innocent all enjoy success and continue to build their profiles through international connections.
These artists have spearheaded the forward guard of Australian artists on the international stage. They demonstrate that despite distance, limited resources and a certain European snobbery directed at the ‘antipodes’ that Australian art can thrive beyond our shores. There are certainly more opportunities to be explored, but in the meantime the forging of networks and opportunities by innovative practitioners might possibly provide inspiration for the Australian visual arts sector to embark on new directions into new places to reach new audiences.
{$slideshow} THE IMAGE OF TIME, A RETROSPECTIVE OF THE WORK OF SENIOR BRITISH ARTIST MALCOLM LE GRICE, INITIATED BY NEW ZEALAND CURATOR MARK WILLIAMS AND REALISED IN BRISBANE BY OTHERFILM, SHONE A LIGHT ON A QUEENSLAND SCREEN CULTURAL LANDSCAPE WHOSE CONTOURS ARE BEING REMAPPED. OVER TWO NIGHTS AT THE INSTITUTE OF MODERN ART AND THE TRIBAL THEATRE, THE LE GRICE PROGRAM WAS SUPPORTED BY AN INSTITUTION AT THE EPICENTRE OF THE CURRENT SHIFTS IN SCREEN CULTURE: THE BRISBANE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (BIFF).
brisbane international film festival
There have been a few changes at BIFF lately, just like there’s been a bit of rain in Queensland. Huw Walmsley-Evans discusses the organisational purge at the city’s flagship screen event in the 57th edition of Senses of Cinema (which, like RealTime’s OnScreen has not been funded by Screen Australia for 2011). In 2009, BIFF was seen as “a diseased limb” of the troubled state film financing body, the Pacific Film and Television Commission, and so, “when the PFTC was purged, the blameless BIFF administration was also swept away.” The loss of director Anne Demy-Geroe, whose 17-year stewardship of the festival saw it foster and grow a deep appreciation for grown-up film in Brisbane, was felt in 2010. Walmsley-Evans pays tribute to the artful layering of Demy-Geroe’s “Russian-doll”-like programs, with their thematic and aesthetic sub-sections, “digressions, riffs, fully fledged retrospectives, tributes and established areas of specialist interests,” and notes with some chagrin the etiolated Asia-Pacific and Middle Eastern programming.
trash video
Digressions, riffs, retros, tributes and specialist interests were a casualty of another 2010 demise, that of Trash Video, which closed the doors of its West End bunker for the last time in August. More than just an independent video store, Trash, like BIFF, acted as a public gateway to the cinematic state of mind. Presided over by Andrew ‘Stumpy’ Leavold, Trash offered an absorbing education in the unfamiliar, unsettling and sometimes unsanitary worlds of B-movies and cult cinema. While all film programmers are people of passion, there are few with Stumpy’s almost messianic exaltation of the most mutant, malformed, only-a-mother-could-love them films. The organised chaos of the physical Trash universe may be gone, but Stumpy’s unflagging devotion to ‘other cinema’ lives on with other unmistakeably ‘Trash’ projects. At BIFF, he introduced the Philippines exploitation cinema overview, Machete Maidens Unleashed, fronted by Mark Hartley (who directed the exploitation cinema doco, 2009’s Not Quite Hollywood). As Trash Video Film Club patrons may recall, the words “Filipino midget private eye” remain inextricably associated with the store and the man whose Search for Weng Weng remains legend.
Machete Maidens’ BIFF premiere, as part of the Shock Corridor section of cult, grindhouse and exploitation cinema (which, Walmsley-Evans notes, is “the one recognisable holdover from Anne Demy-Geroe’s programming”) coincided with the festival’s presentation of the Malcolm Le Grice program at the Institute of Modern Art. IMA and BIFF have partnered memorably before, with the tour de force Shoot Shoot Shoot program of British avant-garde film curated by Mark Webber in 2002, and with film artist Guy Sherwin’s performance program in 2008.
malcolm le grice
The Malcolm Le Grice program lent first-hand substance to arguments that this kind of work finds a natural home in the white cube; certainly, in comparison to the black box of the theatre, the gallery space seems to more readily adapt to the aesthetic and material challenges of staging hybrid experimental work. At the IMA, Le Grice’s 40-year career was surveyed in installation, film and video screenings and performance. At the artist’s suggestion, the meta-cinematic work After Leonardo (1974) was installed in multi-screen across the smooth white interior of the gallery, allowing for a wall-to-ceiling immersion in the work’s play with film frames/video frames. The playful deconstruction of art history is a marker of the filmmaker’s modernist pedigree and, as the artist explained in his affable unscripted address to the crowd, also a way to pose questions about the relations between cinema, experimental film and painting.
As a film festival venue, the gallery space afforded critical intimacy to the audience with the projected works and the artist himself. Nowhere was this more evident than in Horror Film 1. For many in the capacity crowd, the chance to finally experience Le Grice’s legendary 1971 multi-projector film-performance, re-enacted in all its kaleidoscopic, confrontational glory, was a high point in the cinematic year. In contrast, something of the sense of critical liveness of the second expanded cinema performance, 1972’s Threshold, was lost at the conclusion of the second program the following night. This three-projector performance, at the more traditional cinematic venue, the Tribal Theatre, nonetheless provided insight into the interplay between projection processes and human vision, showing how, as Le Grice explained, “film is, at each stage, raw material for new transformation.” The program illuminated how sensitive we have all become to the specificities of space—physical, phenomenological, social and institutional—in the experience of moving image art.
gallery of modern art
Concomitant with the unfolding of the first new-regime BIFF program, the Gallery of Modern Art screened yet another extraordinary program. Pier Paolo Pasolini: We Are All In Danger was precisely the kind of exceptional, world-class retrospective program Brisbanites have come to expect from the programming powerhouse of Kathryn Weir and her team. As other institutions have been dismantled or reformed, the Cinémathèque has continued to amaze and exceed expectations, and is consistently rewarded with growing audiences at even the most demanding films. It is clear that the strategy of astutely curated ‘blockbuster’ seasons with the power to partly subsidise or offset the programming of contemplative films from all corners of the globe is an ideal model. Audiences are fortunate—and relieved—that the Cinémathèque, despite closure for some weeks following the flood, appears to have survived with its enthusiasm for adventurous programming undampened.
In addition to exciting imaginations with the BIFF show, IMA brought the extravagant Nollywood metacinema of photographer Pieter Hugo, and the installed audiovisual mayhem of Christian Marclay to further expand Brisbane’s moving image experience and develop the relations between visual art and screen culture. The year also saw more growth and renewal in Brisbane’s independent sector with the promising signs heralded by the newborn Brisbane Underground Film Festival and flourishing artist-run initiative scene, showing that amidst strife and cataclysm, new conditions of possibility are always emerging.
Malcolm Le Grice, The image of Time, a joint project with OtherFilm, Institute of Modern Art, New Zealand Film Archive and Screen Queensland, Brisbane Film Festival, Nov 4-14, 2010
DANCE MASSIVE IS AVOIDING THE F-WORD. ACROSS ITS PRINT AND PUBLICITY, THE BIENNIAL PRESENTATION OF A CONCENTRATION OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE IN MELBOURNE IS CALLING ITSELF A “COLLECTION.” A “PROGRAM,” AN “INITIATIVE.”
To discuss “the Massive” I met with Steven Richardson, Director of Arts House in Melbourne. Richardson was instrumental in founding Dance Massive, urging the Australia Council following his time on the Dance Board to consider a concentration of dance programming both to attract international attention to new work and to provide a place for the sector to meet and share experiences at a national level. Arts House, a complex of venues run by City of Melbourne, plays a central coordinating role for the Dance Massive program, although Richardson admits that, “surrendering half of our six month program to make this work is not ideal.”
Without an artistic director for Dance Massive, Richardson tells me, there is no festival infrastructure and all programming is supported by existing State and Federal resources allocated to the three Melbourne venues where the work is presented. “There hasn’t been the funding to create a central framework. When the idea first came up, we considered trying to create a national program by coordinating venues around the country. It quickly became apparent that this was going to be impossible. It would take 15 years for us to find the same two weeks across every dance venue nationally. So we decided to start in our own backyard.”
The coincidence of Malthouse Director Michael Kantor and producer Stephen Armstrong investing in contemporary dance and physical theatre programming and the energy of David Tyndall as the new(ish) Director of Dancehouse created sufficient momentum in Melbourne for the project to take off in 2009. “It’s hard to apologise for the focus on Melbourne,” Richardson says, “There is arguably the healthiest ecology for dance here, with a concentration of institutions, companies like Chunky Move and lots of independent artists and audiences.”
In its first edition Dance Massive programmed 14 works from across Australia across the three venues. The program was well attended and received positive feedback and critical acclaim. Dance Massive was also pronounced a success for the way in which it raised the profile of dance in the media and created a meeting point for artists and companies to see each others’ work and network during a concentrated period. The same venues have joined to create Dance Massive 2011, and several of those artists included in the original program are making a return appearance. “We each have our own curatorial framework, our own audiences and remits regarding programming,” says Richardson. “but there has been some very interesting cross-fertilisation between the venues since the first Massive,” he adds. “There has been surprisingly little tripping over each other too; we are all interested in contemporary work, but our curatorial approaches are slightly different and we have worked hard to ensure that the work falls where it needs to fall.”
Richardson is referring to the fact that the program is broad, both in terms of its definition of dance (including a physical theatre company such as Branch Nebula), its inclusion of generations of makers, (from Trevor Patrick to Luke George) and its accessibility (from the popular dance theatre work of Force Majeure and Shaun Parker to the relatively obscure independent work of Deanne Butterworth and Matthew Day).
Dance Marathon, bluemouth inc
photo Gordon Hawkins
Dance Marathon, bluemouth inc
Whilst the first Massive included only Australians, there are artists from the UK and Canada in the 2011 program. “The international work is directly linked to Australian artists,” Richardson explains. “The bluemouth piece from Canada, Dance Marathon, is populated by local artists because it is built upon local participation. It was an important agenda item for Arts House to include a participatory element this year and the Dance Marathon project has been receiving incredible reviews wherever it plays around the world.” On the other hand, Billy Cowie, from the UK, has made his piece around an extraordinary Australian performer.
Now, Now, Now, Luke George
photo Jeff Busby
Now, Now, Now, Luke George
Richardson acknowledges that certain States and Territories are not represented in the final program but is adamant that Dance Massive is curated through the call for applications combined with the practical resources of the venues involved. “We would need a lot more money to support more companies to travel from interstate.” Richardson is aware of the absence of Indigenous work in the program. “It is not missing through any lack of trying,” he states,” The call is a rather brutal process, which can only consider the work that is out there and ready to go at the right time. Although we did get over sixty applications from the call this year, we also went out to our networks as presenters in order to find the best possible work.”
Richardson goes on to talk about the National Dance Forum associated with Dance Massive as a place where conversations around Indigenous and regional work can take place. “We have been able to include more spaces-in-between this year,” he says and cites the two international residencies and the dance on film program as initiatives that seek to address the aspiration of all three venues to create a place where dance artists and enthusiasts can meet. The National Dance Forum, led by Ausdance and the Australia Council and taking place over a long weekend during Dance Massive, will involve international choreographers such as Pichet Klunchen from Thailand with national dance artists in a series of forums, conversations and provocations designed to inspire art form development, in a similar fashion to that achieved during the National Theatre Forum in 2010.
Arts House will host the 2011 Tanja Liedtke Foundation Fellow, Katarzyna Sitarz, during Dance Massive. Sitarz will direct a residency at Arts House that will involve local independent artists and will take part in a new collaborative project directed by Lucy Guerin. Also during Dance Massive, the Australia Council’s IETM program, directed by David Pledger in Brussels, will send Norwegian choreographer Heine Avdal of deepblue company to undertake a residency and build relationships with Australian dance artists.
The venues and companies worked together to create a hit list of international presenters to invite to Dance Massive. Around a dozen high profile programmers from Europe, Asia and the US will attend. Dancehouse will also target a handful of French presenters in a special initiative. “It is important for the work to be shown in full, in the best possible theatrical conditions,’ Richardson says. “We also try to attract national and regional presenters,” he continues, “Although that is never easy. Last time we had half a dozen regional presenters attend and this year we hope for more.”
Richardson is optimistic about the impact of the 2011 program and is particularly looking forward to the two new productions by Chunky Move as well as the site-specific presentation, Drift, by Anthony Hamilton and the sound installation by composers Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey. “I am hoping some of these projects will turn a few heads about what the nature of dance engagement can be,” he says.
Despite his enthusiasm, Steven Richardson is sanguine about the future of Dance Massive with no illusions about the third edition planned for 2013 being a shoo-in. “Once we get through March, we will start thinking about what we want Dance Massive to be,” he says. “Perhaps there is another model out there; something more nimble or more relevant to current practice.” Dance Massive is not a festival, or a showcase, that much is clear, but what it is and what it could be, seems to be tantalisingly up for grabs.
Throughout Dance Massive, RealTime reviews and interviews will appear online at www.realtimearts.net.
The considerable Dance Massive program includes works by Chunky Move, The Shaun Parker Project, Narelle Benjamin, Michelle Heaven, Helen Herbertson, Balletlab, Deanne Butterworth, Matthew Day, Antony Hamilton, Force Majeure, Trevor Patrick, Luke George, Branch Nebula, overseas guests Billy Cowie, John Jasperse Company and bluemouth inc, and the welcome return to Australia from France of Rosalind Crisp and Andrew Morrish.
Dance Massive: partners Arts House, Malthouse Theatre, Dancehouse; Melbourne, March 15-27; download the program at http://dancemassive. com.au
Leisa Shelton, Irony is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve, Fragment31
photo Ponch Hawkes
Leisa Shelton, Irony is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve, Fragment31
THE LAST TWO PERFORMANCES IN THE ARTS HOUSE FUTURE TENSE SEASON, BY MELBOURNE’S FRAGMENT31 AND THE GERMAN-ISRAELI TEAM JOCHEN ROLLER AND SAAR MAGAL, SHARE DOUBLE FOCI: IRONY AND TRAUMA.
Fragment31’s Irony is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve performance is a theatrical rendition of Anne Carson’s poem of the same title, which turns the poet into a third-person Deneuve, and narrates her infatuation with a female student through the doubly ironic prism of cinema and classical references. What would Socrates say, she wonders, her words laced with mature, weary detachment. Deneuve, the cinematic Barbie doll, effortlessly blank, is inserted in the place of a complex self. (In The Guardian, December 30, 2006, Germaine Greer remarked that so devoid of personality have Deneuve’s roles been, that she cannot recall a single line any of her characters ever uttered.)
Fragment31 play with the representation of the fractured desiring self by simulating film. Shelton/Carson/Deneuve walks to the Metro; receives a phone call in her office; waits in a hotel room. Each scene is sculpted in filmic detail, each physically and narratively disconnected from the other, each floating as an island of naturalistic imagery in the mangle of props and wires of the Meat Market stage space. Sound, light, set, actors and musician, and designers, onstage too, come together in fitful fragments—the coalescing of the desiring, decentred self into one sharpened and fuelled by love. Even the narrator, Carson/Deneuve, is played by two actors: Leisa Shelton for body, Luke Mullins for voice. It is an attempt to discipline desire with a muffle of irony, dissimulation. But irony is not enough to stop infatuation; self-knowledge does not mandate control. Desire shows through. The poem crackles; the stage version, murkier and not as focused, less so.
Jochen Roller, Saar Magal, Basically I Don’t But Actually I Do
photo Friedemann Simon
Jochen Roller, Saar Magal, Basically I Don’t But Actually I Do
If in the first work irony is employed as the girdle of trauma, to keep the fractured self in one piece, in the next work irony is a safe, fenced pathway to the exploration of trauma. Basically I Don’t But Actually I Do is Israeli choreographer Saar Magal’s answer to a question: whether to make a work about the Holocaust with friend German Jochen Roller or, rather, not about the Holocaust at all, but third generation Israelis and Germans.
It opens with a discussion over the order of epithets—which layer of identity comes first? They agree: German Jew, black Jewish German, even gay German black Jew; but, says Magal, “we’re not going to talk about Palestine.” Magal and Roller change clothes, from the yellow of the Star of David to the brown of the SS uniform, and back. They play Holocaust testimonies on tape. They enact a series of iconic WWII photos: Magal collapsing into Roller’s arms, Roller shooting Magal, vice versa. Magal says, “This man stole a book from a Tel Aviv bookshop!” And Roller recites, “I don’t remember. Everyone was doing it. I was simply there.”
We are asked to take our shoes off, walk, sit and, later, to get up. We don’t understand. “Aufstehen!” shouts Roller. Some of us are randomly marked out, and one person pulled out of the crowd, to dance briefly with Magal, and then sent back. The show creates small moments of terror: we are dislodged from our audience complacency, but nothing bad ever happens, because it’s not that kind of show.
Basically I Don’t But Actually I Do is a catalogue of images enacted, repeated, but only as traces. It assumes a traumatised audience, for which every hint will be a trigger of memory. But, remarkably, it is a work that refuses to create false memories. It tests recognition; it has exactly as much content as the audience brings to it. It is up to each person to see genocide in the stage imagery, hear the Nuremberg Trials in the dialogue. The piece gently probes. How much do we still remember? What does it mean to us? What does it do to us?
In Australia (as opposed to Germany or Israel), the answer is not much. There were some walk-outs, which I cannot imagine happening at a Holocaust tear-jerker (for reasons of decorum). But for those to whom it meant something, Magal and Roller created a tasteful, careful little memorial space, in which a past event was reconnected to the present, and the relationship between the two weighed up.
One could say that the risks in Basically…never felt sufficiently dangerous, the stakes never high enough to justify the pussyfooting (one German critic called it “politically correct”). The love woes of Deneuve/Carson are saturated with much greater danger, despite the ironic title. However, Basically…uses irony differently, as a way of coming closer to something unspeakable, rather than pulling away from it. If traumatic desire is a sore one still wants to pick, the Holocaust is a trauma of a completely other kind, one to tiptoe around carefully, holding hands.
Fragment31, Irony is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve, creators, performers Luke Mullins, Leisa Shelton, music Jethro Woodward, set Anna Cordingly, lighting Jen Hector; Nov 16-20; Basically I Don’t But Actually I Do, creators, performers Jochen Roller, Saar Magal, lighting Marek Lamprecht, soundtrack Paul Ratzel; Arts House, Meat Market, Melbourne, Nov 24-27, 2010
WOMAN TEETERS IN THE DISTANCE, A GIANT PUMPKIN FOR A HEAD. SHE CUTS A SURREAL FIGURE. SHE IS IN HEELS, SKITTERING ACROSS A SMALL PROSCENIUM ARCH STAGE. VEERING FROM SIDE TO SIDE, SEEKING EQUILIBRIUM, THE WOMAN-VEGETABLE FAILS TO SETTLE, FAILS TO ACHIEVE STASIS. SHE ABANDONS THE TASK, SQUIRRELING ALONG TOWARDS THE DISTANT AUDIENCE. THE PROSCENIUM ARCH OFFERS A TALE, OF WOMAN AS OBJECT, AS HYBRID, BUFFETED BY ELEMENTS BEYOND HER CONTROL.
She is so far away that we watch almost dispassionately. The frame in a distance flattens. When she leaves, she becomes more real, a body rather than an image. No longer part vegetable, she comes towards us, moving to a melange of rhythms. She draws upon a history of dance training, pulling out moves and stringing them along a line. Inexorably, she approaches. As she nears, her body becomes round, flesh, soft. She dances nearer and nearer until her face becomes a player. Emotions, affects and intensities flicker then pass. Not exactly real but not quite surreal either, like switching stations on the radio.
Facing the audience, she emits a string of sounds. We are close now. The music is part of all this somehow. It matches the shifts, the proximities, the intensities, the progress. It seems we are at a peak. Clothes come off. Her naked body speaks, of dancing; muscular, buff. Even nudity tells a story. When the performers in the musical Hair stripped off, their nudity made a statement. Mellow’s nakedness emerges after a slew of expletives, like a full stop.
From a linear point of view, thus far the gaze of the audience has been increasingly enhanced by the tactile approach of a body. The volume of its flesh has been continuously increasing. Beginning as a distant figure, a subject-object, she is now more assertive, an intensity making decisions rather than a thing that responds.
The next phase is more twisted. She finds clothes and pursues a duet with a rope, melding and folding in movement. She traces a retreat to the rear of the theatre space, threading her way towards an ultimate inversion. She hangs upside down, like the Hanged Man of the Tarot pack. Technically and traditionally, the Hanged Man represents submission. Not submission as annihilation but giving up something to achieve something else. A creation through reversal, perhaps.
While Expectation follows a linear pathway of increasing revelation, it also reverts into a twisted transformation. Perhaps nothing is revealed. Is something expressed? Mmm. What I perceive is a powerful commitment, an intensity of feeling, a modulation of theatrical effect and an episodic movement through phases. The cavernous Arts House space has been treated to good effect, creating frames and scenarios that make this piece feel like more than a solo work. The shifting occupation of its massive depth—far, near, high, low and diagonally—cuts back from any linear sense of progress. We are rather treated to a series of differences that vary in intensity. Mellow exudes a performative strength that seems to heighten as she comes nearer. Perhaps her own energy becomes more directed toward the observer when she vocalises and strips or perhaps the observer reciprocates something in response.
Expectation follows Carlee Mellow’s performance in Deborah Hay’s solo project, In the Dark (RT98, p22). It resonates with Hay’s attitude towards performative attention. Its theatrical tenor also suggests Margaret Cameron’s dramaturgical influence—whimsical, surreal, with a strong performative focus. Since Hay’s work is about performance quality rather than any physical look, the movement belongs to Mellow. There is a trace of Ros Warby too. Mellow’s weird soundings reminded me of Warby’s vocalisations when performing Hay’s work, as if both women were abducted by the same aliens.
My enduring impression of Expectation is a sense of delight at Carlee Mellow’s courage and commitment. There is a freshness in this work; a degree of structure but also an aliveness that left me alert. Perhaps this piece is not alone in its concern to achieve something in the moment, to connect with its audience, but it does so in its own way.
Arts House, Future Tense: Expectation, choreographer, performer Carlee Mellow, composer Kelly Ryall, design Bluebottle, dramaturgical consultant Margaret Cameron, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, Nov 9-14, 2010
RealTime issue #101 Feb-March 2011 pg. 41
Africa, My Darling Patricia
photo Jeff Busby
Africa, My Darling Patricia
THE LAUNCH OF NEXT STAGE 2011 WAS HOT. THE TEMPERATURE WAS UP, THE WHARF 2 FOYER CRAMMED WITH ENTHUSIASTIC 20 SOMETHINGS AND ARTISTS THRILLED TO BE IN THE PROGRAM WHICH STC ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR TOM WRIGHT AND LITERARY MANAGER POLLY ROWE OUTLINED IN A NEAT DOUBLE ACT FOLLOWED BY A FEW WORDS EACH FROM DIRECTORS AND PERFORMERS.
Next Stage is focused on development, emerging artists, providing alternatives to the STC’s main program, attracting a different audience, “not trying to please everyone all the time” and “not setting expectations too high” for new works. Tickets are $25 and there’s a free beer per ticket offer.
First up in Next Stage 2011 is German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Before/After, directed by Cristabel Sved, who spoke mid-rehearsal of “the luxury of all working together and with all the languages of the stage being used.” A nice change from the challenges of resource-scarce independent theatre. With its 51 short scenes the play should provide a fascinating companion piece to the STC mainstage production of German writer Botho Strauss’ epic Big and Little Scenes.
Sam Routledge a collaborator with contemporary performance group My Darling Patricia expressed the group’s pleasure at being in Next Stage with Africa, originally a Malthouse commission, and outlined the origins of the work in the true story of German children caught running away to Africa. Told with puppets and broken toys, Africa presents a magical Australian perspective on childhood pain and fantasy.
Another innovative Sydney-based performance group, Post, in typical form stacked on a stand-up turn anticipating the themes and fun antagonism of their new work Who’s The Best? which was developed with Next Stage’s support in 2010.
Also developed in 2010, Money Shots will feature 15-minute plays about money by Tahli Corin, Duncan Graham, Angus Cerini, Rita Kalnejais, Zoe Pepper and The Suitcase Royale, directed by Richard Wherrett Fellow Sarah Giles and designed by Alice Babidge. As well the program continues the Rough Drafts series, week-long creative developments followed by free showings that allow audiences to track the growth of a play.
The heat’s on: Next Stage 2011 promises intense diversity of form as well as the means for hot-housing new work from a fascinating range of theatre and contemporary performance artists.
STALKER IS ONE OF AUSTRALIA’S MOST IDIOSYNCRATIC PERFORMANCE COMPANIES, EVOLVING OVER TWO DECADES FROM STILT-WALKING SHOWS—WITH VERVE AND INTELLIGENCE—INTO INCREASINGLY SOPHISTICATED, RICHLY THEMED LARGE-SCALE WORKS, ALL PERFORMED OUTDOORS, AND THEN DIVERSIFYING INTO TWO COMPANIES, STALKER AND MARRUGEKU. BOTH HAVE RESHAPED NOTIONS OF PHYSICAL THEATRE, INCORPORATING OTHER ARTFORMS AND EMBRACING SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND METAPHYSICAL ISSUES AND THEMES WHILE ACHIEVING INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION.
Sydney-based Stalker is co-directed by David Clarkson and Rachael Swain, each contributing discrete shows to the company repertoire, while Marrugeku is co-directed by Swain and Broome-based choreographer Dalisa Pigram. I spoke with Clarkson and Swain after Stalker celebrated its 21st year at the end of 2010. Such longevity for a continually innovative company is quite an achievement, not least in a country of short-lived artistic ventures.
starting out on stilts
Clarkson tells me that an early version of the company had played in New Zealand for three years, but reformed in Sydney where it was joined by Swain in 1989 and given “$10,000 cold cash by the Sydney Festival after I showed them some of our New Zealand work and they said, ‘It looks great!’” Swain and Clarkson point out that their starting out was timely—the Expo in Brisbane and the Bicentennial had programmed a substantial number of outdoor works, as did the Perth Festival and the Spoleto Festival in Melbourne directed by John Truscott. Clarkson recalls that “within a year we were touring Australia-wide and within 18 months we were in Europe.”
I asked how the pair would describe their early work. “It was street theatre. Very high energy,” says Swain. “When we first got to Europe we made quite a big splash. David and I both grew up in New Zealand and I think there was a sense of the rhythms and energy of the Pacific in the work. It was quite pumping.” Adds Clarkson, “Our work was stilt-based and we took stilts somewhere that no-one else had. Dive rolls, backbend get-ups, carrying each other, throwing each other to the ground, picking each other up. Very bruising. ‘Hell for leather,’ that’s what it was. Stilt acrobatics.”
Swain mentions that Stalker was working with choreographers as early as their second show, Toy Cart (1990): “Nigel Kellaway directed and Rosalind Crisp choreographed and it premiered at Spoleto in 1990. It was high energy but it was also quite visually driven work and quite lyrical—a strong aesthetic that exists to this day.” Clarkson recalls that Swain “was never in love with Fast Ground (1989), our first piece, but looking back at it and at Grotowski’s movement work I can see connections—muscle and bone work, always distinctive from circus even though stilts are a circus thing. It was always for me about embodiment: ‘a state of being’ expressed through the body and what visual imagery we might use to support that embodiment.”
Swain and Clark acknowledge significant differences between their bodies of work, their aesthetics and Marrugeku’s artistic direction. Marrugeku started in 1995, commissioned into existence by Perth Festival. Stalker produces Marrugeku, but the company has its own life, based first in Central Arnhem Land for seven years and subsequently in Broome for eight, and with its own steering committee and direction. “But,” says Swain, “there are certain core elements that link all three bodies of work, combining dance theatre processes and aesthetics with circus forms and a fairly poetic, layered dramaturgy prevalent in all the works. David and I worked collectively to make material initially and then slowly brought other people in—Sue-ellen Kohler choreographed the third work we did, Angels ex Machina (1993)—often in very strong collaborative partnerships. Both of our processes are physical—we make material on the floor—like choreographers.”
working europe
Some of the aesthetic influences on Stalkers’ work came from their rapid arrival on the European summer festival street theatre touring circuit in their first year of existence. “We were exposed to a whole raft of European companies from the small street theatre acts through to really large scale: Generik Vapeur, La Furas dels Baus, Les Ballets C de la B, Vis-a-Vis, Dogtroep, all making very ambitious, large scale work.” Clarkson says that the company saw a model they thought they could adapt. “Some of the shows were in the streets, with a full 1,500 seat grandstand and all the production values, like the Dogtroep work. We saw a model used to create an incredible audience base and access to touring circuits, came back here and tried to function between the two markets, Europe and Australia. For about a decade that was both our advantage and, to a degree, our bête noir. We were trying to exist as if we were a European company but there wasn’t the market here for large scale outdoor shows outside the five major festivals.”
Swain regrets that “for me, the only presentation in Australia I’ve had outside a festival has been when the Sydney Opera House commissioned Incognita (2003). We’d spend our year in the European summer and come back for the Australasian summer for 10 to15 years.” Clarkson recalls that “in the early years we were on the road for 10 months of the year.” In the mid-90s, when Justin Macdonnell was the company’s manager, its circuit extended to Latin America, as it did to Japan with Marguerite Pepper and Rosemary Hinde. Clarkson says, “We were really surviving by touring and weren’t really funded early on. For youngish performers it was a tremendous experience and great exposure for us, an exciting way to live, but the ensemble burnt out. You can’t actually live by touring eight or nine months of the year.”
a model for survival
I asked when it was that Swain and Clarkson decided not to work together. Clarkson explains that he took “a big sabbatical in 1999. Blood Vessel was a Stalker show without me performing in it. I was in the States. Throughout the 90s we’d had a very close working relationship but then decided to go our own directions. [Arts consultant] Antony Jeffrey came in to work with us as facilitator to devise a new model. I think we both thought it meant either ending the company or one of us taking over. Personally I think what we got is a really great model for survival in the arts—shared infrastructure and management for two bodies of work that have similar sets of concerns.” Swain says, “it’s become a way of sharing resources and a point of dialogue and support for each other’s work, which I think we possibly wouldn’t have come up with ourselves. And so Antony is to be credited.”
market adjustments
Swain says she “went very strongly into the large scale outdoor theatre model and somehow managed to make that function until the dance theatre element of it became stronger and stronger and the large scale outdoor European summer festivals didn’t know how to program it. It was somehow too ‘arty’ for the summer festival world and the dance festivals that were starting to get interested didn’t know how to present outdoor work. So my work started to fall between the cracks and I think the fact that Shanghai Lady Killer [Swain’s latest creation for Stalker, 2010] became an indoor work has been a part of that process. I just wasn’t finding a way to park the work. Incognita should have had a longer life. It did three of the national Australian festivals, which is about as good as you can get in this country. Then in Europe we couldn’t fit either field any more. We have multi-arts festivals here so we’re used to all kinds of works being in a festival whereas in Europe they’re very artform specific.”
from the body
In 2010 David Clarkson created Mirror/Mirror (2009) for Stalker in collaboration with dancer Dean Walsh (RT94, p36). Before that he’d made Red (2004) and Four Riders (2001) “with an ensemble that I trained, with them taking on my approach to physicality.” Clarkson is currently developing a new work, Encoded, “working with a range of artists, virtual cameras and projection and point cloud generated animation” and wondering, “What is the next phase?” He suspects he’ll direct Encoded but not perform in it—“but it’s my own physicality that still enriches my creative process.” Like Swain’s Shanghai Lady Killer, Clarkson’s Mirror/Mirror also moved indoors.
a choreographic heritage
Rachael Swain appears to be working more and more choreographically, via collaboration with a range of choreographers, as in Incognita (2003) and Shanghai Lady Killer (2010) for Stalker and the Marrugeku creations (MIMI, 1996; Crying Baby, 2001; Burning Daylight, 2006, 2009). The works are large, multi-plane, theatrical, culturally dense. She attributes this in part to the influences of Europe in the 1990s and also of Stalker’s agent since 1991-2, Gie Baguet, as his first international company. Swain says, “Gie’s also the agent for Les Ballets C de la B and he introduced us to their work and other northern European dance theatre companies. The last decade for me has been a big project to bring something of their aesthetics into a dialogue with the kind of raw physicality of Australian dance and Australian new circus techniques. We saw so much work. We were in Amsterdam during the Yulidans international dance festival every year. We saw the evolution of the works of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Wim Vandekeybus, Needcompany, Les Ballets C de la B. And we saw them every year. Australian physical theatre, dance theatre and circus have a really amazing physicality, a lot of which comes from a relationship with the landscape and the physical environment. I wanted to bring this and European aesthetics and processes together. A lot of that work is about a theatrical improvisational process that, as Alain Platel says, “sometimes leads to people dancing.”
That quotation puts me in mind of the work of Pina Bausch. Swain agrees: “Of course that is the lineage. Tim Etchells once said that he thought Forced Entertainment’s work was the end of a line of Chinese whispers that started in Wuppertal [the home of the Pina Bausch company]. And I sometimes think what we’re doing is too. Marrugeku’s Burning Daylight is the result of a very long Chinese whisper that started up in Wuppertal and went to Ghent through the collaboration between me and Koen Augustijnen [of Les Ballets C de la B] for Incognita and Serge Amié Coulibaly [from Burkina Faso; also worked with Les Ballets C de la B] for Burning Daylight and the classes I did over there.
“So I think that’s been the grand project on that front. Yes, I think I conceive and direct work as a choreographer but I really like to partner, most recently with Gavin Webber on Shanghai Lady Killer. Once again, that was about bringing European influenced contemporary dance from Gavin’s time with Wim Vandekeybus, formed through his time with ADT in a kind of loop back into the Australian dance theatre vernacular. I think that’s an ongoing project. And when I’m on the floor I’m working in an improvisational dance theatre process in shaping work.”
Swain is developing Shanghai Lady Killer after its 2010 Brisbane Festival premiere. “It’s a really big work for Stalker. It’s very complicated, an Australian-Chinese martial arts thriller that combines the wire and stunt work used in martial arts films, trampolines on stage, Chinese pole techniques and Wushu which is a particularly lyrical form of Chinese martial arts, in a kind of plot-driven futuristic thriller narrative. This was my first time working with a writer [filmmaker Tony Ayres] which was a great and challenging experience.”
Shanghai Lady Killer
photo courtesy Stalker
Shanghai Lady Killer
Clarkson says he’s captivated by Shanghai Lady Killer despite early reservations about “the commercial narrative structure which I’ve always had problems with because it’s so bloody dominant.” Swain points out that she and Ayres conceived the show before the Global Financial Crisis when “there was a niche appearing for arthouse commercial theatre,” with some opportunities for radical, culturally diverse content. “But the GFC hit and the support that we had for it internationally went. We’d been aiming for a multi-million dollar version, but had to scale way, way, way back down. We were very lucky to be commissioned by the Brisbane and Melbourne Festivals through the Major Festivals Initiative Fund—enormous support and a big project for the fund. I think there is a big national home for Shanghai Lady Killer.”
intergenerational cultural sustainability
I wonder if Swain craves work on a smaller project. “Absolutely!” she replies. “We premiered Buru [Broome, 2010] straight after Shanghai Lady Killer. It’s a much smaller work although it’s still got a fairly large cast. It was devised and created with 10 young performers from Broome aged between 10 and 21—so it’s a very different feel. We worked for three years together with elders from the Broome community, very much in the wake of Burning Daylight, grasping this model as a way to use theatre as a sustainable form of culture, of carrying stories forward—obviously not the [sacred stories] but the ones they really want to pass on, to be public. The elders started to come into rehearsal and to say this is what I think should be happening now. It was a great moment for the company where there was really direct intergenerational knowledge transmission occurring in the rehearsal process and the young performers were really given the work to take forward. So effectively, we’ve established a youth company for Marrugeku. I don’t know if that means a fourth string to our bow now!”
Clarkson is similarly focused on intergenerational connections: “There’s a piece I’m doing called Elevate out at Penrith with three 19-year-olds, a kind of hip hop street stilt piece which is very much about the next generation. I think it’s only appropriate. Theatre is a gift that’s given to you and you pass it on.”
Swain says that “when I came to writing the speech for Stalker’s 21st birthday celebrations, I momentarily found it quite depressing. What is there after 21 years? What is left behind is ephemeral, in the memories of our audiences in all those different contexts, all over the world. And because that’s been so diverse for us and because what Stalker is in Belgium or what Stalker is in Colombia or what Stalker is in Perth, they’re all different, presented in very different models and to different sectors of the community. Twenty-one years of blood, sweat and tears, quite literally…broken bones and all that.
“But there are company members who have been in our work, learned new skills and gone on and done their own work or gone into other companies and contributed to other processes. I certainly hope in Marrugeku’s case that what comes after us will be the measure of the company’s success—finding a language that reflects the Aboriginal elders’ complexity of knowledge but that is also very contemporary. It is very hard to find the comprehension of that work, especially overseas. People often just don’t know what they’re looking at. I hope that we’re opening doors and that further down the track there’ll be more appreciation.”
Stalker have created a significant legacy over 21 very creative years. If the company had fallen apart a decade ago, that legacy might not have been as rich. Swain thinks that “there were times when I’ve thought had we been sane human beings we would have stopped.” Clarkson agrees, “Either financially or personally…but there have been big rewards, tremendous experiences.” And Swain concurs. Happy 21st, Stalker.
IF NIETZSCHE GOT IT RIGHT, AND HUMANS ARE LESS STATIC BEINGS THAN INCONSTANT BECOMINGS, THEN SURELY THE SAME CAN BE SAID OF THE INSTITUTIONS WE CREATE. CERTAINLY, THE MUCH-DISCUSSED “CHANGING OF THE GUARD” IN AUSTRALIA’S MAJOR ARTS ORGANISATIONS HAS MANY THEATRE PUNDITS PONDERING WHETHER THESE COMPANIES WILL BE PUSHED TO REINVENT THEMSELVES AS A RESULT, OR WHETHER IT’LL BE BUSINESS AS USUAL WITH A NEW BRAND IMAGE. LOOKING AT THE SMALLER GROUPS MAKING WORK IN MELBOURNE TODAY, HOWEVER, WHAT’S MORE EVIDENT IS HOW THE NATURE OF SUCH ARTISTIC ENTITIES IS ALWAYS A NEGOTIATION BETWEEN AN ENDURING IDENTITY AND A FIELD OF POSSIBILITY.
the nest
The Hayloft Project has remained one of the most exciting companies in Australia for several years, but focusing on the through-lines that connect each Hayloft production can distract from the impressive imaginative diversity it has also offered. Its final production for 2010 was The Nest, and while the production furthered the company’s interest in classic (especially Russian) texts adapted for a contemporary world, it was also a significant departure from what’s gone before.
Firstly, it saw Artistic Director Simon Stone hand over the reins. While Hayloft productions are almost always helmed by Stone as director, he has also allowed others to create their own works under the company aegis without overt artistic intrusion from its founder. 2009’s Yuri Wells was a hugely successful experiment in this vein, and that show’s creators also form the creative core of The Nest.
Taking as their source Maxim Gorky’s The Philistines, Benedict Hardie and Anne-Louise Sarks have developed a wonderful script that seems utterly of our time. As with Yuri Wells, Sarks again directs and Hardie performs, with a sizeable and accomplished cast making up a strong ensemble. Performed in the round (or, rather, square), Sarks displays a terrific command of pace, shifting quickly from scenes of crowded chaos to tiny, intimate moments of solitude or suspense. Despite the relatively brief running time—around 90 minutes—the sense of an expansive and credible world is quickly established, and something of the sweeping historical consciousness which often infuses Russian playwriting is maintained here.
But where productions of Gorky (or Chekhov for that matter) walk an uneasy line between historical specificity and more universal relevance, how would you know that The Nest hadn’t been written from scratch yesterday if you hadn’t already been told? The only thing that really reminds us of its origins is that oh-so-Russian habit of having countless characters turn up unannounced. Even this slightly anachronistic theatrical convention is knowingly laughed at after the production concludes and the theme songs from various sit-coms are played (sit-coms, of course, being the only place where it’s still acceptable for a constant stream of acquaintances to invade the house at all hours).
I’ve no doubt that in different hands—Stone’s, for instance—The Nest would have been a very different beast. But its inclusion within the Hayloft’s broader output only expands the company’s creative reach, making it home to a multiplicity of voices rather than a single, unitary directive. It’s all the better for it.
Georgina Naidu, Greg Ulfan Yet to Ascertain the Nature of the Crime, Melbourne Workers Theatre
photo Ponch Hawkes
Georgina Naidu, Greg Ulfan Yet to Ascertain the Nature of the Crime, Melbourne Workers Theatre
yet to ascertain the nature of the crime
Melbourne Workers Theatre, conversely, has had many esteemed directors across the decades, but is now undergoing a radical reinvention. Its last production, Yet to Ascertain the Nature of the Crime, hinted at the plans new director Gorkem Acaroglu has for recreating the company as one solely dedicated to documentary theatre, as well as a more general shift away from creating works based primarily around class concerns towards addressing a wider variety of contemporary social issues.
Yet to Ascertain…spoke to this new brief with outstanding clarity, incorporating questions of class and work but also closely scrutinising the realities of race relations in Australia today. It was developed from a range of verbatim sources including interviews, journalistic articles, official reports and first-person narratives. Three performers re-enacted these exchanges in a variety of theatrical styles, from frankly silly Bollywood dances to skit-comedy routines to sincere and moving monologues. Though patchy in tone, the collective weight of the production was considerable, and a lengthy final sequence in which a taxi driver is attacked by racist passengers before his own cab-driving community comes to his rescue is simply breathtaking theatre.
Though largely played in somewhat exaggerated, consciously theatrical ways, the various narratives produced here were of an intricate and provocative nature. Many circled around the experiences of Indian students and immigrants in Melbourne, including the real incidents of racially-motivated violence which have made international headlines as well as more engendered and institutionalised forms of discrimination. There are layers of irony to many of the word-for-word recountings of victims themselves, including denials that Australia is home to racism, as well as the police statements which are the basis for the show’s title. At the same time, contrary viewpoints which complicate the notion of racism as an ‘us vs them’ binary add to the overall challenge—and lack of easy answers—which the show presents to its audience. It’s a pity Yet to Ascertain…had such a short season, but it’s certainly an inspiring beginning for the company’s next stage of development.
The Blue Show, Circus Oz
photo Robert Blackburn
The Blue Show, Circus Oz
the blue show
Circus Oz’s The Blue Show was billed from the outset as something unusual from the company. Housed in its new Spiegeltent, it promised an adults-only show as part of the midsumma festival, but what eventuated was something quite different. Less ‘adult’ in content than context, it was more an ageless celebration of sheer fleshy joy. Many similar Spiegeltent burlesques end up as shop-worn sequences of fairly tame titillation and nudge-nudge cabaret. Here, rather, was nudity and humour with a lack of inhibition that is often only found in children—it wasn’t that the acts set out to transgress social boundaries, but that they didn’t seem to even admit of their existence. Sure, there’s appeal in a show that allows us to enjoy a drink in intimate surrounds without toddlers scampering underfoot, but very much the same show could have played to all ages at an earlier timeslot without risking much outrage.
For me, the company’s regular higher profile family outings have long been hampered by “kid-friendly” clowning that doesn’t evince the same sophistication as some of the more intricate routines; the performers are all top-notch, but their talents can come across as dumbed-down when they don’t need to be. The Blue Show treats its audience as adults, as capable of viewing on a range of levels, but it also seems to me that many kids are just as able to handle this kind of subtle complexity. It’s encouraging to see the company branch off in this direction, and one can only hope that some of the acuity and focus displayed here will develop in the company’s more popular ventures in the future.
The Hayloft Project, The Nest, writers Benedict Hardie, Anne-Louise Sarks, after Maxim Gorky’s The Philistines, director Anne-Louise Sarks, performers Sarah Armanious, Stuart Bowden, Stefan Bramble, Alexander England, Brigid Gallacher, Julia Grace, Benedict Hardie, Carl Nilsson-Polias, Meredith Penman, James Wardlaw, set Claude Marcos, costumes Mel Page, lighting Lisa Mibus, music & sound design Russell Goldsmith, Northcote Town Hall, December 4–19, 2010; Melbourne Workers Theatre, Yet to Ascertain the Nature of the Crime, writer Roanna Gonsalves with Raimondo Cortese, Damien Miller, director Gorkem Acaroglu, performers Georgina Naidu, Greg Ulfan, Andreas Littras, performance consultant John Bolton, sound design by Mik La Vage, lighting Jason Lehane; Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, Nov 24-28, 2010; Circus Oz, The Blue Show, director Anni Davey, Circus Oz Melba Spiegeltent, Jan 13-Feb 6, 2011
Natalie Rose, Zoe Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor, Everything I Know About the Global Financial Crisis in One Hour, Post
photo Heidrun Löhr
Natalie Rose, Zoe Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor, Everything I Know About the Global Financial Crisis in One Hour, Post
IN A DELIRIUM OF RIGHTEOUS FREE MARKET FUNDAMENTALISM, WESTERN CAPITALISM, ONSELLING UNSUPPORTABLE LOANS THE WORLD OVER, WENT MAD. SOME OBSERVERS RECOGNISED THE SIGNS OF INSANITY AND FORESAW IMMINENT COLLAPSE, THE REST OF US SUFFERED THE DELIRIUM OF THE AFTERSHOCKS AS STATE ECONOMIES, JOBS AND HOUSING MARKETS WERE SUCKED INTO A HELLISH BLACK HOLE.
Even if you didn’t feel the impact of the Global Financial Collapse in the pocket (a welcome $900 cheque from Prime Minister Rudd aside) you doubtless spent time anxiously wondering what had actually happened and would it recur in the shape of a much anticipated vicious double dip recession.
Nervous times yielded countless articles, broadcasts and books providing analyses simple and complex of the Global Finance Collapse. Some have been reassuring—providing a clear chain of cause and effect running from bad economic theory to market deregulation to failed governance and downright corruption. Others have revealed more worrying networks of disturbance, from unrelated one-off criminal acts (Bernie Madoff, a handy villain) to globalisation’s maximisation of the GFC’s impact, from American Republican and Australian Liberal politicians arguing for brutal economic clean-slating instead of stimulus packages to Detroit’s motor industry tsars driving cars to Washington’s Senate Enquiry and all of us having to grasp the reality that the USA was in substantial debt to China. The world had truly turned upside-down.
How can art assist in a time of paranoia and breathtaking absolutism? Belvoir’s B Sharp, in one of its last acts, brought relief and enlightenment in the form of A Distressing Scenario, a double bill from Sydney performance companies Post and version 1.0.
Of the two performances, Post’s Everything I Know About the Global Financial Crisis in One Hour, more effectively conveyed the aforementioned sense of delirium with a virtuosic stringing together of unlikely causes and effects, the semi-lecture format reinforced with bizarre chalkboarding (the board itself revealing ever new extensions) and interrupted with manic dancing, the waving of sparklers and the positioning of champagne bottles in readiness for the ultimate release.
The experience was like having the GFC explained to us by the ill-read, the ill-informed and the plain ill—the bandaged performers presented variously as victims of car accident, tonsilitis, cocaine addiction and pregnancy, all impediments to putting their show together. Undaunted, the Post trio launched into an elaborate and diffuse explanation of the GFC replete with muddled and inaccurate historical grabs and bizarre connections altogether reminiscent of paranoid popular media. An exhausting whirligig of associations dated GFC origins back to Rockefeller, the corn market, popcorn and the decline of the cinema, the 1988 Australian Bicentennial and Bette Midler tours as positive market indicators. These were accompanied by wild speculations about the value of training monkeys in universities and why there are no jaws of death for newsagents. The sheer, manic drive of the performance, its bracing informality, the self-belief, its mad poetry and smatterings of GFC-reality sucked an initially wary audience into a vortex of nigh impossibly suspended disbelief.
Everything I Know…was durational in every sense, for the courageous performers, sometimes perilously over-taxed, and for an audience riding the wild waves of free association, coursing the looping illogic and withstanding the recurrent, battering dance passages and the final champagne spray. With wicked ease, but little to celebrate as bankers and brokers clawed back their bonuses, Post left us nonetheless wiser about the way the human brain miscalculates and rationalises its way into disasters of the order of the GFC.
After the brief respite of intermission and anticipating further assault, we were bemused to find ourselves removed from Post’s compulsive cosmos and relocated to the parallel universe of version 1.0’s The Market is Not Functioning Properly. Same Big Bang—the GFC; same problems—how to comprehend and survive economic disaster; similar symptoms—faltering rationality and increasing delirium. The Market’s performers also, like Post, reveal themselves to be performers (“I’m an artist: no finances to speak of,” declares one).
But the Post and version 1.0 universes travel in opposite directions. Instead of the desperate, gutsy vigour of Everything I Know, The Market is neat, tautly framed, carefully paced. Two genteel women (Jane Phegan, Kim Vercoe) in pearls and satin gowns appear to parody themselves and then, more archly, middle-class womanhood as they grapple with the GFC and their domestic budgets (laid out on laminated cards that threaten to slip from their grasp). If Post are wildly mock educational, version 1.0 are calculatedly didactic. The women puzzle and bicker informatively beneath three screens inhabited by unreassuring world leaders, all men, alternating with three Australians, also men, with very little to say about the GFC.
As finances and life become less manageable (cut back on wine, on Belvoir tickets), the women strike poses of fright before the images of these men (the powerful and the ‘ordinary’ at times superimposed), dance awkwardly, swing together in violent circles, teeter on the edge of the raised stage and, finally, spew champagne into buckets hanging immediately before us. But they might as well have gone to pieces on another planet from our own. We could recognise the symptoms of their GFC-induced malaise but where was the rich, cranky substance of appalling cause and effect that we have come to associate with version 1.0? The Market was a surprisingly tame affair for a company whose major works have surreally and satirically brought to light the frightening deployment of power in politics, media and gender relations—revealing that the irrationalities and manipulation involved don’t have to be exaggerated, but reframed in order to be seen. Version 1.0 have set their benchmark very high and we expect a lot, not least the means with which to do battle with the insidious GFC.
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B Sharp, A Distressing Scenario: Post, Everything I Know About the Global Financial Crisis in One Hour, deviser-performers Zoe Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor, Natalie Rose; version 1.0, The Market is Not Functioning Properly, deviser-performers Jane Phegan, Kym Vercoe, director David Williams, video artist Sean Bacon, sound Paul Prestipino, lighting Frank Mainoo; Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, Nov 25-Dec 19
IN REALTIME 100, I GREETED THE 2011 BELVOIR PROGRAM WITH ENTHUSIASM. NEW ARTISTIC DIRECTOR RALPH MYERS’ LARGELY YOUNG TEAM OF DIRECTORS (INCLUDING SEVERAL WOMEN), A MIX OF RARELY SEEN CLASSICS (INCLUDING RAY LAWLER’S SUMMER OF THE SEVENTEENTH DOLL TO BE DIRECTED BY OUTGOING ARTISTIC DIRECTOR NEIL ARMFIELD), NEW PLAYS, A DANCE PIECE AND TWO ABORIGINAL WORKS COMPRISE A SERIOUSLY INVITING PROGRAM. IN ADDITION, THE INCORPORATION OF THE DOWNSTAIRS THEATRE INTO THE OVERALL PROGRAM SEEMS A SIGNIFICANT OPPORTUNITY TO PHILOSOPHICALLY AND PRACTICALLY EXPAND BELVOIR’S PROGRAM AND REACH.
MYERS, IN OUR FIRST MEETING, CONFIRMS HIS REPUTATION AS AMIABLE, FUNNY AND SHARP. HE’S AN ACCLAIMED THEATRE DESIGNER, NOT A STAGE DIRECTOR [AS YET], SO I THOUGHT IT MIGHT BE INTERESTING TO USE THAT AS THE PIVOT FOR OUR CONVERSATION.
You trained in visual arts, specifically in silversmithing, but then you went to NIDA.
I’m a bit impatient and hasty to see a quick result which is why I thought I might not make a good jeweller. And there’s something great about theatre design and indeed the process of making theatre in general. It’s something that happens quite quickly, you get a big result quite quickly and it’s all kind of slightly junky, which I think appeals to my kind of sensibility.
The materials, the disposability?
It’s ephemeral—you only need to make it last for a season while achieving the impression and the sensation that you’re trying to generate in the mind of an audience. Jewellery making—and I’m touching my wedding ring as I say this—is about the integrity of the material. How many carats is the gold, how well is it constructed, how many hundreds of years is it going to last? What I like about theatre is the exact opposite of that.
In theatre, it’s the durability of memory, isn’t it?
It is and that’s a strangely fugitive thing as well. Memories twist and transform. Neil’s wonderful production of Diary of a Madman makes quite an interesting comparison between what theatre was like 20 years ago in Sydney and now. He’s pretty faithfully reproduced that 1989 production with Geoffrey Rush and the original team, the original designers. It’s marvellous that even though it’s not that old, it’s stylistically from another era.
There are times when you have to live with your designs a lot longer than a Sydney season. A Streetcar Named Desire going to the US must have posed interesting challenges.
It’s a slightly horrible thing to say, but the ones that have the longest lives are not always the ones you want to. The curious thing about being a set designer is that ultimately you need to serve the vision of the director. So sometimes you have to make a decision to put your taste and your sensibilities—and your fears—aside and allow the director to ultimately make the decision.
You were serving Liv Ullman’s vision.
Absolutely. And she is an extraordinary figure, an important artist of the 20th century. Who am I to tell her what to do? I’m working on Ibsen’s The Wild Duck at the moment both as set designer and as artistic director of the company. We’re finding a way for that to work. And it does work because Simon Stone the director is very clear about his ideas and vision. So it’s not muddy.
There are a number of strong directors around who could be labelled auteurs, who arrive not just with a play but also a design concept for the designer to realise rather than invent.
You get directors who know exactly what they want and the task is making that work within the space and the parameters. And there are always an infinite number of details to resolve. I don’t mind that. I’ve been in situations for instance with Benedict [Andrews] where he’s led the process very much—I’ve realised an idea that’s come to me from him very much fully formed. On the other hand there have been other situations where the idea has been largely mine and it’s evolved in conversation. Barrie Kosky is another example. He has very strong ideas about what he wants. To be honest I find that the better directors know precisely what they want or latch onto an idea and allow it to be followed through to its logical conclusion. When I was working with Neil Armfield on Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes for Opera Australia, I’m fairly sure Neil came up with the idea of setting it in a church hall. I built a model of it and very quickly we realised that it would work. Then he allowed me to realise that very much on my own. So there’s quite an element of trust and understanding.
Your father was an architect, your mother a visual arts teacher; I’m very interested in the architectural quality of your work. It seems to me that some designers have a better architectural and spatial sense than others (whose work might resonate, say, with contemporary visual arts or technology or interior design). In certain of the shows you’ve designed the architectural quality is pronounced—those huge floating rooms in The Lost Echo (STC) or the room that revolves in Measure for Measure (Company B), that modernist superstructure hanging over a very ordinary, aged apartment in Streetcar Named Desire (STC), the grim in-the-round basement world for Blackbird (STC), the hall in Peter Grimes. They all struck me as very three-dimensional, very substantial. For all that ephemerality, they felt eerily solid.
I’m interested in solid things. My mother was an architect before I was born. I’ve always been around architects. I suppose if you come from a family of tailors, you look at what people wear. I am interested in people and space. I’m flattered that you think my work seems solid. The thing you’re fighting in theatre is that nothing is solid really. It’s all made out of bits of cardboard.
How do you feel about The Wild Duck? Do you engage with the actors and the director about the way the space is being used and inhabited?
I try to attend rehearsals as much as I can. I really like being in rehearsals. And of course the more you’re there the better the design serves the purposes of the play. I’d like to be there all the time but you can’t always be. In all good rehearsal rooms, there’s a certain amount of cross-fertilisation. Actors will suggest something about the set and you can suggest something about how they do their performance (LAUGHS). In the end it all comes out in the wash.
One of the tricks of being a good designer is to maintain as much flexibility as you can within the structures of how companies like this will work. All theatre and opera companies and certainly production departments will try to lock down the physical elements of production as early as they can because it makes it very much easier for them to do their job. One of the difficult things to say after the second preview might be: “Actually, it should all be pink” or “I think this is completely wrong. Let’s get rid of the set and do it on an empty stage” or “I think she should be wearing a wedding dress.” These things throw a spanner in the works, blow the budget and make it very difficult. But ultimately that’s what you might need to do: use the time at your disposal to make the production as good as you possibly can. Sometimes you can’t have the best idea three months in advance of the production or, in the case of opera, 18 months.
One of the things I’m conscious of as artistic director of this company is allowing it to remain pretty responsive, which it always has been. As a set designer this was the one place where you really could change your mind quite late which is a really fabulous thing. I think this probably comes from Neil’s chronic inability to make artistic decisions (LAUGHS). He’s left a great legacy for the rest of us.
For Measure for Measure you were working with projections and onstage cameras. You’ve made it clear elsewhere that you see theatre as a very different realm from film and new media—that’s not to say you’d exclude them. But that work provided a fascinating experience in terms of design, accommodating the revolving room that keeps transforming and the screens that frame it.
I’m often extremely sceptical about the use of audio-visual material in theatre productions because I think it can be a substitute for something that could be shown in real time or ‘real life.’ The figure on the screen is often much more interesting to watch than the onstage figure, because of scale. So your eye tends to be drawn there which starts to beg the question well why is there a figure there at all onstage? As you know, Benedict’s extremely interested in working in that way. As the designer for Measure for Measure of course I went along with it, made it work as best I could within the space, worked with Sean Bacon and in the end I think it was extraordinary. You gain something, of course, by the use of the camera to show a kind of detail that otherwise couldn’t be seen. That’s much more interesting than showing what you can already see. So Benedict’s focus on Mariana’s wedding—you know touching her engagement ring at the top of Act 3—or zooming in as he did in The Season at Sarsaparilla on a detail or moment that would otherwise be lost to the audience, is extremely interesting. It’s an interesting extension of that idea.
I suppose there’s not much you can reveal about your design for The Wild Duck at this stage. What would you say is the creative impulse for you in the production?
It’s extremely exciting. I don’t want to jinx it by saying it’s going to be good but Simon has a very sharp brain and a very good sense of what’s at his disposal in terms of the actors and the resources that are available to him after coming from a background in independent theatre where everything is slightly difficult to get hold of. Here things are more possible. That said, it’s quite a restrained production, not over the top in any way. He’s essentially taken the core story of The Wild Duck, those six central characters, the inevitable playing out of an action over a short period of time that happens in Ibsen plays, and stripped it of all the stuff around it, rewritten it and placed it in a very spare environment.
It all happens in one space?
It’s even more abstract than that somehow. It’s really no space at all. The adaptation has a kind of charm that’s often missing from the adaptation of classics—a kind of lightness, playfulness and charm that’s very easy to lose when you’re trying to faithfully adapt something. It’s a bit like—while being nothing like—Noel Coward or Oscar Wilde in that the way that people interact with each other doesn’t always reflect the great drama and import of the things that are being discussed. I don’t know how Simon manages to create that. He’s got a very playful rehearsal room. There’s a great deal of light. But it’s a horrific play. A 14-year-old girl in the end shoots herself.
Obviously like many before you, you’re enamoured of the Belvoir St Theatre space, and you’ve worked it before. Will you occasionally lease yourself out to bigger stages?
I’m working on a production for Opera Australia in 2012. That’s the only thing I’m doing outside at the moment. I’m designing for Benedict’s production of Chekhov’s The Seagull for our 2011 program.
What have been the pleasures of putting this program together for you?
It’s an enormous pleasure listening to a whole lot of people speak very passionately and enthusiastically about the things they want to do. The difficulty, of course, is choosing which ones to take up. A company like this should be as open as it can be, as able to hear as many ideas from as broad a range of places as possible. One of the challenges for a company is that you can become insular or that you only turn to people you know or who you’ve worked with before, which I think is extremely dangerous. The other side of that is that you have to listen to a whole lot of bad ideas from a whole lot of people too. But that’s okay. So that’s a great pleasure. And then you make a salad out of it. And there are a lot of reasons why some things end up in the mix and others don’t but really nothing ends up in there that I don’t think is going to be good or interesting or hopefully both. I very much started the process with the ambition to not include anything simply for pragmatic reasons.
Like making big box office?
Yes and you never can anyway. From a few years of working at the Sydney Theatre Company and from many years around the traps working as a designer in lots of theatre companies, you see that there are things that a company does for legitimate and artistic reasons and there are other things they do to satisfy what they imagine the audience wants or what’s going to make money, all sorts of reasons. My one ambition is to not have one of those productions. We’re lucky we can do that here. We don’t have quite the pressures of the big state companies. It’s an enviable position. The trade-off for winding up the B Sharp program was that we were going to be able to do fully staged productions down there. The disadvantage was that we wouldn’t be able to do so many of them. My ambition is to build that up over time so that it has the same volume and energy that B Sharp had but where everybody is being paid. My big ambition is to employ more artists in general. It’s surprising how few people think that’s a good idea [LAUGHS]. But I think it’s critical for a city of this size, a city as fabulous as Sydney to have a lush and thriving artistic community. And I think you have to do that by directing money towards people to do it. We’re the third or fourth biggest theatre company in the country. I think we need to face that reality.
Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, directed by Simon Stone, featuring performers John Gaden, Anita Hegh, Ewen Leslie, Eloise Mignon, Anthony Phelan, Toby Schmitz and designer Ralph Myers is playing at Belvoir Street Theatre, Feb 12-March 27; Belvoir, artistic director Ralph Myers, Sydney; www.belvoir.com.au
HERE’S AN INSPIRED IDEA: NOT ONLY PLAY A SERIES OF EIGHT CLASSIC AUSTRALIAN STAGE AND RADIO PLAYS PRODUCED BY THE ABC OVER THE DECADES BUT ALSO INTRODUCE EACH WITH CAREFULLY AND INVENTIVELY CRAFTED 30-MINUTE INTRODUCTIONS FROM WRITERS (WHERE AVAILABLE), PRODUCERS, ACTORS AND SPECIALIST COMMENTATORS FLESHING OUT THE SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND AESTHETIC WORLDS AND CREATIVE IMPULSES FROM WHICH THE WORKS EMERGED. PLAYING THE 20TH CENTURY REALISES THE VISION WITH VERVE.
The series is a collaboration between ABC Radio National’s Hindsight and Airplay programs aiming to “chart a century of Australian theatre” from Louis Esson’s The Time Is Not Yet Ripe (1912) to Katherine Thompson’s Diving for Pearls (which won the Louis Esson Prize for Drama in 1991!). The other plays are Betty Roland’s The Touch of Silk, Douglas Stewart’s radio verse play Fire on the Snow, Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, Alex Buzo’s Norm and Ahmed, David Williamson’s The Removalists and Frank Moorhouse’s experimental radio drama Loss of a Friend by Cablegram.
Of the three introductions I’ve listened to so far, it was the world conjured by the reflections of Moorhouse, McLennan and actor Arthur Dignam on Loss of a Friend by Cablegram that I found the most engrossing. The commentaries on The Time Is Not Yet Ripe from academics John McCallum and PJ Matthews were richly informative but the voice given Esson (from his letters) was not engaging and the documentary’s structure is the least inventive of the three. The introduction to Diving for Pearls however is full of the sounds of its Port Kembla steelworks and coastal setting and there is clever segueing from playwright Thompson’s voice into those of her characters along with astute observations from the play’s first stage director Ros Horin and Di Kelly from the University of Wollongong on the political context.
The appeal of the introduction to Loss of a Friend by Cablegram for me lies in its embodiment of a period of transition in radio drama production in the early 1980s from the imitation of the live theatre experience on air to more intimate approaches, from single take recordings on tape (often subsequently destroyed) to intensively edited productions, from crude FX to field recordings (the right acoustic) and from predictable structures to experiments in form. McLennan, who produced the play, details these transitions with amusement against the sounds of tapes running and creaky old FX. Again there’s a brisk alternation between the documentary voices and the original recording which was made with Dignam and Robyn Nevin in a room in the Sebel Town House in Kings Cross with verite intimacy and a lovely depth of field. Typical of the period of transition the sense of experiment that comes with Moorhouse’s writing is undercut by stilted, hyper-articulated stage delivery. Even so there’s much to amuse and even disturb in the production as a man and his estranged wife deal with his bisexuality, not least when she asks, “Did you think you were a woman when you lived with me, when we were married?”
There’s much to enjoy from Moorhouse about writing, about notebooks (which provide the play’s structure), about bisexuality, and from Dignam about working in radio (“When I started to learn how to drink”—as the actors headed off to a Push pub after recording for, as Moorhouse puts it, “critical drinking”) and the pleasant experience of being involved in a new way of working. Even so McLennan is surprised that most of Loss of a Friend by Cablegram was largely recorded in real time, in the traditional manner, even Dignam’s character’s inner thoughts—achieved by the actor simply turning to another microphone. Producer Catherine Gough-Brady’s introduction to the play offers insights about the writer, the work and an era of transition—sexual and aesthetic—telling us much about radio as well as the Australian play.
ABC Radio National, Airplay and Hindsight, Playing the 20th Century, producers Catherine Gough-Brady, Regina Botros, presenter Andrew McLennan, broadcast Dec 19, 2010-Feb 6, 2011; the series can be heard at www.abc.net.au/rn/playingthe20thcentury/
RealTime issue #101 Feb-March 2011 pg. 47
Mike McEvoy, Ida Duelund Hansen, Another Lament
photo Paul Dunn
Mike McEvoy, Ida Duelund Hansen, Another Lament
TARGET, THE ITCH AND ANOTHER LAMENT ARE THE WILD PROGENY OF CHAMBER MADE OPERA’S 2010 LIVING ROOM OPERA SERIES, AN INNOVATIVE APPROACH TO FUNDING NEW WORKS ENCOMPASSING PRIVATE PATRONAGE, GOVERNMENT SUBSIDY AND CROWDFUNDING. A HOST PROVIDES THEIR LIVING ROOM AS THE PERFORMANCE SPACE, WHILE BOOKING ONE OF THE LIMITED SEATS (IF YOU’RE LUCKY YOU’LL ACTUALLY GET THE SOFA) COMES WITH RECOGNITION AS A CO-COMMISSIONER, FOOD, WINE AND THE OPPORTUNITY TO DISCUSS THE WORK WITH THE COMPOSER AND FELLOW AUDIENCE-PATRONS.
While the Living Room Opera series has precedents in salon performance traditions, its particular combination of funding and social strategies gives hosts, audiences, composers and performers a unique sense of ownership, opening up the possibilities for original and inspired creations.
Luke Paulding’s Target re-imagines the Ancient Greek myth of Ganymede, the most beautiful of mortals abducted by Zeus to serve as cup bearer to the gods; Alex Garsden’s The Itch musically embellishes an article from The New Yorker in 2008 about a woman who awoke one morning with an chronic itch on her head (RT100, p40); and Another Lament (a collaboration between double bassist and singer Ida Duelund Hansen, from the mixed-ability performance ensemble Rawcus, and sound designer Jethro Woodward) explores the death of the English baroque composer Henry Purcell. The young composers’ musical styles are as varied as their subjects, from the bleeding edge of extended string techniques to jazz-inflected baroque arias.
“I did not especially set out to work with young composers,” claims Artistic Director David Young, “the works speak for themselves.” As many composers struggle to find funding once they grow out of the youth bracket of government grants, the Living Room Opera series provides a valuable lesson in alternative sources of funding for its participants.
target
Performed in “Melbourne’s living room,” La Mama, the work in progress Target showcases Paulding’s distinctive timbral vocabulary in exploration of the dynamics of sexual desire and fear in ancient and contemporary worlds. Through saccades between episodes of delicate wind, percussion and vocal extended techniques, Target’s enchantingly transparent sonic palette evokes a world of short attention span pleasure as Zeus (baritone Matthew Thomas) towers over Ganymede (boy soprano Jordan Janssen) in the cramped La Mama theatre. Flute and tuba breath tones flicker at the periphery of hearing until the terrifying and terrified power of Zeus’ voice is brought down upon Ganymede at the moment of his abduction. Ganymede interrupts the peripheral hum not with screams but with silence, the boy’s twittering interrupted by the glottal stops of trauma.
The audience was intimately close to the ensemble in La Mama’s black box, ensuring that none of the subtlety of Paulding’s composition was lost. After the performance, the audience had the opportunity to ask questions of the composer and hear key sections of the opera again. As David Young explains, the Living Room Opera concept takes its cue from the 19th century tradition of salon performances, where virtuosi would bash out the latest works by Liszt and gentlemen would show off their fine baritone in an intimate, semi-private setting. Beyond a small-scale format for the development of new grand works, Young sees the salon format as serving a pedagogical purpose. Warning that “this is not just a nostalgic experiment,” Young wants audiences to “learn more by having a close experience and speaking with the artists after the show.”
The didactic ending to Target evoked not only salon performances but also Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances of 1918–21. Formed for the development of musical understanding, the well-rehearsed works were repeated as many as six times during a single program. Unlike at the strictly pedagogical performances of Schoenberg’s Society, there was no shortage of applause at the conclusion of Target, which is set to become a fully-fledged Living Room Opera later this year.
the itch
With Alex Garsden’s The Itch, the Living Room Opera series moved in to full swing. Fiona Sweet and Paul Newcombe’s open plan living space filled with interested patrons quaffing wine while the performers loitered outside a set of french doors. Although Garsden’s masterful representation of skin irritation on string instruments was hard on even the most seasoned ears and despite the occasional twitch, cough or scratch of discomfort, the audience sat in rapt attention to Garsden’s score and soprano Carolyn Connors’ pained vocalisations. This was not an audience looking for a pleasant night’s entertainment, but one intent on supporting new music.
Offering the perks of being recognised as co-commissioner of the work, speaking with composer and performers, and sharing the performance in an intimate setting with like-minded aficionados, events like The Itch resemble Kickstarter and Fundbreak crowdfunding campaigns, where fans sponsor small-scale cultural projects. They are rewarded, depending on the size of their donation, with things like back catalogue CDs and visits to the recording studio of the supported artist. (Since Kickstarter campaigns rarely gather donations from outside the campaigner’s circle of friends of friends, it might be more correct to say that crowdfunding campaigns resemble an intimate living room gathering of a network of interested persons more than the decentralised and anonymous peer group that the “crowdfunding” appellage suggests.)
another lament
Another Lament takes as its inspiration the death of English baroque composer Henry Purcell. So the colourful version of the story goes, Purcell succumbed to pneumonia after his wife locked him out in the snow when he returned from a long night of carousing at the local theatre. Hosts Deidre and Naham Warhaft’s hallway and twin living spaces, separated by screen doors, provide a double proscenium arch for Rawcus director Kate Sulan’s immaculately choreographed tableaux vivants. Sulan uses the house’s depth and wings to conceal the Rawcus ensemble and lighting by Richard Vabre, haunting the tripartite stage with apparitions so carefully placed as to seem to have always inhabited the space. Even in moments of frenzied activity, when plates are broken and Purcell begs at the front door, the audience seems to be haunting a haunting quite indifferent to their presence.
Sulan’s use of simple repetition and broken symmetries complements Duelund Hansen’s pared back interpretations of Purcell hits on voice and double bass. She utilises a vast stylistic spectrum from baroque to jazz harmonies and mid-20th century Central European atonality, to extended vocal and double bass techniques. Her reinterpretations of Purcell demonstrate an expressive continuum in harmonic and timbral composition from unnerving baroque contrapuntal dissonance to the sickly crackle of cotton thread over a double bass string.
Woodward completes the ethereal habitation, manipulating sound throughout the three rooms. By looping and amplifying Hansen, actors’ voices, breaking tea cups and spinning plates, Woodward lends the house layers of resonating history as the performer’s voice is multiplied in a carefully controlled musical polyphony.
As representative of the Living Room Opera project, Another Lament stands as a celebration of contemporary chamber music and a rebirth of baroque arts business practice. The Living Room Opera series reflects the combination of public funding, private patronage and enterprise that Purcell himself enjoyed in Restoration England (while holding a post at Westminster Abbey), fulfilling commissions from royalty and composing music for the theatre. Though Chamber Made Opera’s workings may seem baroque (both historically and as in “irregular”) in an arts industry fixated on government subsidy, they are looking backwards to move forward, supporting a battery of composers by bringing chamber opera home.
A HIGHLIGHT OF WOMADELAIDE 2011 IS BOUND TO BE THE CREOLE CHOIR OF CUBA—EFFUSIVE, DYNAMIC AND COMMITTED TO SUSTAINING THE CULTURAL HERITAGE OF CAMAGÜEY IN CENTRAL CUBA. THE CHOIR OF FIVE WOMEN AND FIVE MEN FORMED IN 1994 WITH AN AIM “TO RE-FORGE THE RESISTANCE SONGS AND LAMENTS OF THEIR FOREBEARS, TO CELEBRATE THE HISTORY OF THEIR HAITIAN DESCENDENTS ENSLAVED TO THE CARIBBEAN FROM WEST AFRICA” (WWW.CREOLECHOIR.COM).
The choir’s Cuban name, Desandann, means “descendants,” and the title of their recent album Tande-la means “listen.” What you’ll hear are songs of resistance and lament about the choir’s forebears working as slaves in sugar and coffee plantations and the subsequent grim legacies of colonialism. Listening to the album or watching a video of the choir in performance however conveys anything but overwhelming grief or naked anger; rather there’s a sense of the joy of survival, of cultural continuity and hope. As well there’s the potency of the music’s diverse elements—Spanish, voodoo, gospel, Creole—and its distinctive percussion-driven choral synthesis.
WOMADelaide 2011 has a strong performative streak, with bands and performance groups offering a heightened theatricality —the Ukraine’s DakhaBrakha, French hip-hopper Féfé, China’s Hanggai (“born from the Chinese punk scene…remains true to its Mongolian roots”), the brilliantly adorned Papua New Guinean Huri Duna Dancers and Brazil’s psychedelic Os Mutantes (bearer of the 1960s Tropicália heritage). France’s Le Phun will guide small groups to installations featuring “peculiar half-human and half-plant beings from the vegetable kingdom” and, also from France, Compagnie Ekart’s large-scale puppets will roam the festival crowds.
WOMADelaide’s continuing engagement with contemporary dance is realised this year by Adelaide’s Leigh Warren + Dancers who will perform a new work, Breathe, “exploring the sacred nature of suspended breath, forged around the ageless, spectral sound of the didgeridoo.” Composer William Barton will perform his work on the instrument for Frances Rings’ choreography. The dancers will be Lizzie Vilmanis, Albert David, Bec Jones, Lisa Griffiths, Adam Synnott, Lewis Rankin and guest Indigenous artists in what promises to be another visual and aural WOMADelaide 2011 highlight. RT
WOMADelaide, Sounds of the Planet 2011, Botanic Park, Adelaide, March 11-14, www.womadelaide.com.au
THE PINNACLE OF MUSIC MAKING IS SURELY THE SOLO PIANO PERFORMANCE. IT IS FOR THE PIANO THAT THE GREATEST MUSIC IS WRITTEN, AND WHEN VIRTUOSO PIANIST MEETS LEGENDARY COMPOSER—RICHTER AND BACH, BARENBOIM AND BEETHOVEN, ARGERICH AND CHOPIN, NIKOLAYEVA AND SHOSTAKOVICH—MAGIC HAPPENS. MUSICAL RECEPTION INVOLVES EMOTIONAL PERCEPTION. THE COMPOSER WRITES TO ELICIT EMOTIONAL STATES AND THE PIANIST CONNECTS THE LISTENER TO THE COMPOSER THROUGH HERSELF.
Pianists need more than a high level of technical facility. Indeed, they can’t fully realise the music until they can transcend the score, find the composer’s voice and use it to tell their own story. When buying a recording, I used to look for the ‘best’ rendition of the work, but soon found that many renditions will appeal in their own ways. You meet a unique and engaging individual, the pianist, who introduces herself through another unique and engaging individual, the composer.
The pianist’s teacher empowers and inspires the pianist to find the composer’s voice and her own voice. To become adept is a lifetime’s work, a vocation. In her insightful and uplifting memoir Piano Lessons (Black Inc, 2009), Anna Goldsworthy reveals that her own teacher, Eleonora Sivan, teaches the philosophy of life, and describes how her teaching creates the pianist.
Inspired by meeting Eleonora Sivan and some of her former students at a music teachers’ conference, composer Larry Sitsky wrote a seven-movement suite, The Golden Dawn, each movement of which would be performed by one of Sivan’s former students—Goldsworthy, Gabriella Smart, Jane Burgess, Inna Fursa, Rosanne Hammer, Phuong Vuong and Debra Andreacchio. Sivan was a noted performer and teacher before migrating to Australia, and those students are themselves now performing and teaching, continuing a pedagogical line that can be traced back to Liszt and Czerny. Sitsky is also a teacher, having been a professor at the ANU School of Music, and was taught by masters who inculcated the Busoni tradition in him. Comparisons with the legendary Nadia Boulanger spring to mind—a teacher who could so inspire composers and performers that a whole era of development resulted.
Sitsky has written some great piano works, his The Way of the Seeker, wonderfully recorded by Michael Kieran Harvey, being a notable example. The idea of writing a work that celebrates the master teacher is uncommon in Western culture, but appropriately acknowledges the importance of teaching. In this concert, each pianist ceremonially paid homage to her teacher by giving her allotted movement a sparkling premiere performance.
For Sitsky, music is fundamental to life itself and is inextricably linked with mysticism. He named the suite after an early 20th century magical society in England, the Golden Dawn. The society used an esoteric language, Enochian, from which the names of the various movements were taken. The work is powerfully expressive, and the character of each movement is reflected in its title. The opening movement, Mahorela (Dark Heavens) begins with a slow, hammering bass and develops into a series of short, stabbing gestures as a call to action. The second movement, Malpirgi (Fiery Darts) begins with a loud bass gesture followed by cascades down the keyboard, fleeting figures and rapidly repeated notes. Vinu (Invoke) is slow and rhythmic, and Ser (Lamentation) is dreamily mournful. Luciftias (Brightness) starts with quiet tinkling and gains in complexity and Yor (Roar) growls and bellows. The final movement, Vaoan (Truth) is measured and speech-like, returning to the bell-like tones of earlier movements. Recurring forms and motifs connect the movements. The black-clad pianists sit closely around the piano, which, given the magical theme of the music, resembles a three-legged cauldron from whose depths they conjure. This is an enchanting event, and the playing is superb.
This performance is followed by delightful renderings of Sitsky’s Fantasias No. 11, E and No. 4, Arch, played by Smart, and No 7, on a Theme of Lizst, by Goldsworthy, demonstrating the range and depth of his composition.
The Golden Dawn celebrates both a school and group performance. The seven pianists approach the composition in their own ways. Should they change places, the result might be different musically, but no less resolved. The next generation is establishing itself; for example Marianna Grynchuk, a student of both Sivan and Smart, is giving articulate and persuasive performances. Each pianist brings to her playing her own emotional range and expressive style, her own consciousness.
The Golden Dawn is a consummation of elemental life forces. Afterwards, both Eleonora Sivan and Professor Sitsky seem well pleased and the gathering of teachers, composers, musicians and listeners rejoices.
Larry Sitsky, The Golden Dawn, performers Anna Goldsworthy, Gabriella Smart, Jane Burgess, Inna Fursa, Rosanne Hammer, Phuong Vuong, Debra Andreacchio, Hartley Concert Room, University of Adelaide, Nov 27, 2010
Chris Reid’s review of Sitsky’s The Way of the Seeker appeared in RealTime 78.
Daniel Bond (Amplified Elephants), Tom Oaks and Annemeike Oaks (Noise Scavengers), Belinda Woods, Caerwen Martin, Andrea Keeble (BOLT Ensemble), The Mountain, The Click Clack Project
photo Matt Bonner
Daniel Bond (Amplified Elephants), Tom Oaks and Annemeike Oaks (Noise Scavengers), Belinda Woods, Caerwen Martin, Andrea Keeble (BOLT Ensemble), The Mountain, The Click Clack Project
THE MOUNTAIN EMBODIES AN AGENDA FOR SOCIAL EQUALITY. IT BRINGS TOGETHER ARTISTS WITH VARYING ABILITIES, FROM HIGHLY EXPERIENCED PROFESSIONAL MUSICIANS, TO THOSE WITH DISABILITIES OR FROM DISADVANTAGED BACKGROUNDS.
Artistic director James Hullick has striven to create work that equally values the contributions of all members, regardless of ability. In CD liner notes, Hullick writes, “If we are to accept that all people are equal as they walk amongst our vibrant community, then we must accept that the abilities of all people are of equal worth to our community.”
The Mountain brings together three ensembles: The Amplified Elephants, Noise Scavengers and the BOLT Ensemble. The Amplified Elephants are a group of musicians with intellectual disabilities, evolving through a program at the Footscray Community Arts Centre. Noise Scavengers is a group of young sound artists emerging from a similar program at Cloverdale Community Centre.
The BOLT Ensemble is a group of professional musicians, put together to perform original works by Hullick. As well as performing this role in the Mountain project, they have also helped in its development, working closely with musicians from The Amplified Elephants and Noise Scavengers to explore and discover new sounds.
The Mountain is a multi-movement work, using combinations of these three ensembles. It is based on Jetsun Milarepa, the story of a Buddhist saint who finds redemption through having to build a tower, then tear it down and repeat this process several times over. In this performance, Jetsun’s story is told through a series of scenes. The piece is not so much a programmatic depiction of the story but, instead, a series of abstract, contemplative moments derived from the narrative.
A plethora of sound sources are employed in this performance. These cover an entire spectrum of volume, from the subtle rustles of a prepared harp, blown bottles and delicately struck gongs, to loud, pulsating synths, no-input mixers and the grating sound of a tortured violin.
Given the varying ability of the musicians involved, Hullick’s approach to composition is dictated by the musicians’ capabilities. The role of composer is one of facilitation and the organisation of material. Hullick manages to breath life into this role by creating circumstances in which performers are free to delve into a playful engagement with sound. Despite this apparent freedom in performance, the overall work maintains focus and direction through variety of sonic ideas. What is perhaps most successful is the way sounds produced by non-professional players are integrated with those produced by professionals. This combination of sounds produced complexes of timbre that were detailed and intriguing.
Hullick’s compositions for the BOLT Ensemble seem to have recently developed a language that has greater command in the evolution of musical ideas over time. Rather than being a series of sound combinations that amble through a performance, there are different degrees of momentum and energy; musical structures that play with one’s perception of time.
Despite the complexity of Hullick’s musical structures, his aim for music to embody social equality is not lost. There is an inherent dialogue in the work in which all the voices of the players make a valuable contribution.
Visual images by Klara B Klaric and Tien Pham provide a useful way of delineating the various scenes. While the overall contribution was generally atmospheric, the graininess and roughness of the images complemented the music’s aesthetic, if at times distracting our sense of its evolution.
The Mountain takes the idea of ‘found sound’ in an entirely new direction. As well as turning unexpected objects into musical instruments, this work also finds unexpected performers. Just as found sounds are inherently intriguing, the manner in which musicians discover and engage with sound yields its own intrigue and idiosyncrasies. The risks in this work, taken for the sake of artistic ideals, have paid off with success. The Mountain Concerts have realised the ideal of social equality in performance, and not merely as the spectre of possibility.
The Mountain Concerts, by The Click Clack Project, featuring The Amplified Elephants, Noise Scavengers, BOLT Ensemble, presented by Footscray Community Arts Centre, Cloverdale Community Centre and JOLT Arts Inc; fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne, Dec15-18, 2010
RealTime issue #101 Feb-March 2011 pg. 50
Chris Watson, Rolling Stock
photo Public Assembly
Chris Watson, Rolling Stock
ON A TOASTY SATURDAY AFTERNOON, SEVERAL HUNDRED PEOPLE GATHERED FOR THE ROLLING STOCK EXTRAVAGANZA, FEATURING INSTALLATION AND PERFORMANCE WORKS AT THE JUNEE RAILWAY ROUNDHOUSE AND ON AN HISTORIC TRAIN RIDE.
The project had a site-specific emphasis, building on the evocative architecture and machinery of the train and Roundhouse and upon the phenomenon by which sound can overlay and transform the visual environment. Dave Noyze and Garry Bradbury made a hugely entertaining work of the Roundhouse turntable, a sort of huge record platter on which train carriages can be spun and driven into the workshops. The rotation of the platter caused a fearsome clamour as tons of metal and concrete ground together. The artists made a subtle yet savvy intervention, adding their own sounds but largely relying on the spectacle of the machine itself. The duo’s work harked back to the futurist enthusiasm for mechanical noise, with perhaps less Italian aristocratic arrogance and more rustily laconic bogan self-satisfaction, laced with snotty Industrial lip-curl. One can only hope that they’ll be let loose on another edifice, perhaps the Sydney Harbour Bridge or the rotating restaurant atop Sydney’s Centrepoint Tower.
Among other works, a local parkour crew braved the sun to provide some hi-NRG action, vaulting carriages and locos, eliciting visceral sensations in the audience as they flew above the concrete, evoking the spirit of concrete-clad outer Paris. Joel Stern and Andrew McLellan drummed and thrummed out a two-person, rural-NSW style gamelan sound using junk that was lying about (presumably waiting for such a performance opportunity), creating moments of entrancing musical pleasure.
Parkour, Rolling Stock
photo Jennifer Teo
Parkour, Rolling Stock
Following the Roundhouse smorgasbord of sounds came a train journey to Cootamundra and back. Like the Roundhouse, the historic train needs barely the slightest breath from the artist, being a novelty in its own right. Infusing the artistic proceedings was the social scenario created by the train, where urban and regional were thrown together in the booths of the antique rail carriages. In one such encounter, my listening to the performance of UK artist Chris Watson co-existed with a woman’s story of her daughter’s suicide following a grand-daughter’s premature death. I could not ask the woman to stop, not least because the teller hadn’t noticed there was a performance to hear. Such is art as it emerges from its trench and sticks its head into the terrain of life.
Chris Watson’s polished and sophisticated work took the form of El Tren Fantasma (The Ghost Train), a sound design recreating another train journey. It is composed from recordings made by the composer for the Great Train Journeys TV series in 1998, documenting the last coast-to-coast passenger service of the Mexican State railway system prior to its closure due to privatisation. Watson’s strength is the masterful fidelity of his recordings with which he skilfully composes his simulations. The outstanding feature of the work was his manipulation of one’s sense of time, transforming a multi-day journey into a single experience. In Junee the work reads as an imaginative fancy, layering exotic Mexico over exotic rural NSW. Given the site-specific emphasis of the festival, one hopes Watson made some local recordings and might re-present them in situ in the future. El Tren Fantasma is soon to be released on CD.
Also working with the sound of the train was Sydney media artist Shannon O’Neill, whose Locomentum foregrounded the iconic phenomenon of rail rhythms. A subtle piece inviting close listening, it blended the live and recorded sounds to create a minimalist ‘phase space’ where the already hypnotic rhythm of the train is blurred by a recorded doppelganger. This innocuous play of rhythm opens up reflection on the auditory pleasure of trains, wherein the regularity of the sound is compelling. Trains, like ships, can have a particular pleasure, stemming from their combination of high-speed motion and hotel-style living. They have a lulling rhythm, but also the potential for humungous collision, injury and death. I’m reminded of the lullaby “rock-a-bye baby in the tree top; when the wind blows, the cradle will rock; when the bough breaks the cradle will fall”; it’s a rhyme that on reflection seems an odd one to relax a child.
Other works on the train included Sleeper Carriage by Noyze and Bradbury. Installed in a sleeper carriage, and sounding much like an Alan Lamb work, it offered a rich seam of electronic sound to be listened to from the privacy and comfort of a bed, albeit with the spoken accompaniment of artists and punters who took respite and refreshments in the compartments and perhaps didn’t realise or care how far their conversations carried. In another carriage the PVI collective presented a work based on local political issues via the medium of a tug-of-war. Numerous other works were presented, with details available at http://rollingstock.weebly.com/.
Art maverick Sarah Last, who describes herself as an artist rather than curator, organised Rolling Stock. Her work in the Unsound Festivals, the Wagga Space Program, The Wired Lab and a variety of other activities is noteworthy. There are few curators working in sound in Australia, and even fewer curators working with sound site-specifically. In her plenary address to the 2010 Regional Arts Australia conference, Last outlined her interest in breaking down artist-audience divisions and encouraging the creative and active participation of local communities in art projects. The audience at Rolling Stock didn’t actually get their hands dirty with noise making, but the presence of more non-practitioners than practitioners in the audience is a step in the right direction. While some of the works showed depth of engagement with the site and were created in cooperation with community, the degree to which audiences were challenged and their perception developed was less clear, perhaps by virtue of the very private nature of the art experience.
To my ear, the most amazing sound of the weekend was the soundscape of insects, animals and air movement heard at midnight in a quiet spot 10 kilometres from town—an immersive ecosystem of interlocking patterns, layers, events and narratives. Recording technology and artists will always be hard pressed to compete with the wonders that the world serves up. For me this is the strongest offering of sound culture: events like Rolling Stock induce heightened awareness of a realm of aesthetic information that is familiar to many practitioners but, I suspect, lost on people at large.
Rolling Stock was driven by Sarah Last’s pursuit of her ideas and aims and her ongoing relationships with particular spaces and communities such as the railway works and the people of Junee. These are long-term projects, embedded in her own life in a family farm that houses The Wired Lab. It will be interesting to see how these relationships develop and how Last’s objectives play out.
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Wired Lab, Rolling Stock, curator Sarah Last, Junee, NSW, Nov 20, 2010; http://rollingstock.weebly.com/; artist residencies, Nov 12-19
THE ADELAIDE CONTEMPORARY ART SCENE IS BIG ENOUGH TO SUPPORT A SUBSTANTIAL AND DIVERSE ART COMMUNITY AND SMALL ENOUGH TO STAGE AN EXHIBITION EXEMPLIFYING THAT COMMUNITY’S PRACTICE. CACSA CONTEMPORARY 2010: THE NEW NEW SHOWCASED THE WORK OF 44 ARTISTS ACTIVE IN SA OVER THE LAST DECADE. LOCATED IN 12 SITES, INCLUDING PROMINENT PUBLIC SPACES AND EVEN ON THE SIDE OF A TRAM, NEW NEW CONTINUES CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRE OF SA DIRECTOR ALAN CRUICKSHANK’S INTEREST IN PERIODIC SURVEY EXHIBITIONS.
Cruickshank indicates in the detailed catalogue that the participants were specially selected for the exhibition, which was intended to raise awareness of SA contemporary art and to educate viewers. The opening night at The Gallerie was so well attended that some patrons had to be turned away, attesting to wide interest. This raises the possibility of developing an ongoing exposition and a permanent contemporary art collection. It also raises the question of how artists get media exposure and recognition. New New provided an important opportunity for many artists, partly addressing the perception of CACSA’s preference for international over local art during the decade, though some notable artists were omitted. But it is a significant achievement for CACSA to mount such an extensive exhibition, which was only possible with substantial public and private support.
The work was strategically sited and the seven public works extended the exhibition into prominent locations. The choice of The Gallerie—a gutted, ironically-named, former shopping arcade—as the main location was significant in opening to the public a forgotten corner of the CBD and creating a vibrant atmosphere. But while New New resembled a biennial in scale, it eschewed any unifying curatorial theme. Approximately one third of the artists emerged in SA since 2000, and the work of the established artists generally typified their oeuvres, collectively presenting a Google Earth view of Adelaide’s art. It’s too soon to historicise that decade’s artistic development, but themes and directions are apparent.
New New aggregates the principal strategies of visual art and the forms of visual culture that have emerged since the 1970s—an expanded field of multifarious visual languages, employing traditional and vernacular materials, installation, performance, text, screen media and found objects, and actively engaging the viewer. Identity, contemporary culture and the very nature of the (art) object remain perennial considerations, and full appreciation of New New relies on the viewer’s awareness of recent art history locally as well as internationally.
Most striking was the work greeting viewers at the entrance to The Gallerie, Sam Songailo’s New Sound, an installation that immerses us in a dazzling colour-field, merging neo-Op Art into the fractured architecture to ‘clear’ our heads. Painting’s evolution is apparent in Paul Sloan’s Arise Therefore, which combines painting with found objects (rock band instruments and skeleton) in an installation that also inventively appropriates The Gallerie’s architecture. Anton Hart’s Twins incorporates a found photograph, construction and painting to juxtapose three forms of representation. Painterliness appears in contrasting ways in Christian Lock’s lush, swirling, glossy abstractions Sweet Tooth and The Luxurious Hours of the Duke of Berry, and in Warren Vance’s Voyage d-elimination in which small faux naïf illustrations are mounted on light boxes. Painting meets text and street art in KAB 101’s extensive untitled wall work at The Gallerie and the imagery on the tram.
George Popperwell’s teasingly cryptic but delightfully rewarding Far Away + Once Upon a Time and Bent Bank co-locate Old English texts with commercial packaging. Another intriguing work was Strange Fruit by the conceptual art group Green Candle, a collaboration between John Barbour, Paul Hoban and others. The group approach isn’t new in art, but exciting syntheses are developing between these prominent SA artists.
Adelaide’s established photographers showed the kind of work that has gained them their reputations. Mark Kimber’s lightbox-mounted photos of dioramas in Blyth Street challenge traditional concepts of masculinity. Darren Siwes combines images with installation to reflect on the impact of class and social structure on the developing individual. Ian North’s A Short Walk in the Country eloquently addresses his favoured theme of landscape and the situation of the viewer within it through photographs inscribed like an honour board with the names of great thinkers on landscape and environmental issues. Deborah Paauwe’s Entwined Song continues her concern with loss of innocence; Nici Cumpston’s photographic installation in Rundle Mall movingly documents traces of past Aboriginal occupation of drought-stricken Lake Bonney; and Brenda Croft’s scenes of Australia suggest she is recording it in anticipation of its loss, a kind of nostalgia for the present.
Video is developing in new ways. Made using a phone, Siamak Fallah’s five videos record his spontaneous and intimate interviews with friends and acquaintances. Iranian-trained University of SA masters candidate Nasim Nasr’s moving work, Erasure, shows a chador-clad woman writing on a chador-like form, whereupon the text is erased, referencing the ‘invisibility’ of Iranian women and the issue of cultural incommensurability. Andy Petrusevics’s Buzz! Fizz! Pop! comprises imagery projected onto small panels inside a viewing booth, playfully recreating life as a sideshow. Mark Siebert’s video, Mark Siebert’s South-East Asian Chess Tour, shows the artist playing chess, having declared himself a failed painter, the work inevitably recalling Duchamp’s preoccupation with the game and his withdrawal from painting. Yoko Kajio combines video with performance in Karistirma. And Monte Masi’s videos provide the exhibition’s self-referential element—his rap-style monologues and interviews with artists are both about New New and an element of it.
Environmental awareness emerges strongly but diversely in the work of Angela Valamanesh, Croft, Cumpston, Kajio and North, in Sue Kneebone’s A Broken Party, comprising animal bones on coffee tables, and implicitly in Hossein Valamanesh’s Wishful Thinking that employs the green-powered lighting on the face of a CBD car-park, the Rundle Lantern, to create a striking text.
Sam Songallo, A New Sound
photo Alan Cruickshank
Sam Songallo, A New Sound
My favourites included Songallo’s work for its visual and architectural impact, Jonathon Dady’s An Uncertain Vessel for its grace and conceptual eloquence, and Sally-Ann Rowland’s Monuments, a series of black velvet forms mimicking indoor plants, for their elegant, brooding intensity. Dady’s An Uncertain Vessel is an outline of a boat roughly 10m x 3m x 2m, an iconic form made from cardboard and sitting tilted on wooden supports. It resembles a life-size 3D drawing, exemplifying Dady’s concern with the propositional and his use of discarded packaging to reconsider familiar forms and objects. For me, it suggests a stalled but much needed ark. Equally captivating is Joe Felber’s installation at the CACSA, which juxtaposes competing elements to challenge the viewer’s attention: Playback, El nuevo mundo acústica, in which multiple sound sources are broadcast asynchronously through fixed and swaying loudspeakers, and his video Jumping, Jerking Flesh. And Siamak Fallah’s videos succinctly embody the impact of new communications technologies on human interaction, as well as being the most genuinely new work in the show.
CACSA Contemporary 2010: the New New, Contemporary Art Centre of SA; The Gallerie; Feltspace; the SA School of Art Gallery, University of South Australia; the University of Adelaide; and at various public locations in Adelaide, Oct 29-Nov 21, 2010
WHEN TALKING ABOUT LANEWAY ART, IT’S HARD NOT TO IMAGINE THE VIBRANT PALIMPSESTS THAT ADORN MOST AVAILABLE SURFACES IN MELBOURNE’S CITY CENTRE. BUT WHILE MELBOURNE HAS TUCKED-AWAY GALLERIES, BOUTIQUE SHOPS AND UBERCOOL BARS EVERY FEW PACES, SYDNEY’S LANEWAYS ARE THE TRULY FORGOTTEN SPACES—SHADY NO-GO ZONES WHERE TRUCKS UNLOAD, GARBAGE IS DUMPED AND CHEFS STEAL A QUICK CIGGIE BREAK. HOWEVER IT’S THIS UTTER LACK OF CHARM THAT IS USED MOST INTRIGUINGLY IN THE LATEST SYDNEY CITY LANEWAY EXHIBITION, ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME?, CURATED BY BARBARA FLYNN.
Armed with the downloadable PDF walking guide I started at Underwood Lane, near Circular Quay. While the lane itself does not have much romance, the name proved to be a direct inspiration to both artists exhibited here. Simon Yates’ Woodwork consisted of large-scale photocopy paste-ups of old-style typewriters and telephones, drawing on the fact that early typewriters were manufactured by Underwood, as well as referencing the lane’s location—behind the old telephone exchange. I was unable to find the secret messages supposedly hidden in the keyboards and phone dials, but this didn’t matter. The wallscape immediately invoked a literary dreaming, calling up a pantheon of down-and-out writers clacking out stories in their inner-city dives overlooking lanes like this.
Milk and the town that went mad (detail), Mikala Dwyer
photo Gail Priest
Milk and the town that went mad (detail), Mikala Dwyer
The literary theme continued with Mikala Dwyer’s Milk and the town that went mad. For her the name Underwood conjured the spectre of Dylan Thomas and his poetic masterpiece Under Milkwood. On the barren corner beneath air-conditioning pipes, Dwyer placed a makeshift bar with stools, topped with a variety of curious and ugly ashtrays creating a hidden haven for smokers. As they indulged their guilty pleasure they were treated to Richard Burton’s famous reading of Thomas’ text. For a moment I wished I smoked in order to get the full experience, but just listening to Burton’s lilting voice, so clearly of another time, tangibly slowed the pulse in the midst of city bustle, cracking open the poetic potential of the site.
Rush, Nike Savvas (foreground), Room for Rent, Rocket Mattler (background)
photo Gail Priest
Rush, Nike Savvas (foreground), Room for Rent, Rocket Mattler (background)
High up on a wall in Tank Stream Way, Rocket Mattler’s battered “Room for Rent—apply opposite” sign directed me to a large format print of a typical old-style suburban home. It was both terrifyingly bland yet rich with detail, from the dog in the window to a barely visible graffiti tag on the front fence. To many, this picture of normality is what they are fleeing as they try to make it big in the city, while for others it offers a wistful sense of nostalgia, and for others still—the homeless, the overworked—perhaps it is a tantalising dream. Placed opposite Nike Savvas’ Rush, a ceiling of coloured plastic strips reminiscent of retro fly curtains—the most overt and celebratory artwork in the selection—the combination produced a queasy hyperreality.
Warrior, Jan van der Ploeg
photo Gail Priest
Warrior, Jan van der Ploeg
In De Mestre Place, Jan van der Ploeg’s Warrior offered a large canvas of black and white geometric patterns in mesmeric repetition. Given the scale and architectural integration of other works by the artist, it would have been good to see him let loose beyond the rectangle. In Wynyard Lane, Jon Campbell’s HAR BOUR VIEW did just that, unabashedly revelling in post-modern irony, his large banner bearing the text of the title in sickly pastels.
Circle/s in the Round for (Miles and Miles +1), Newell Harry
photo Jamie Williams Photography
Circle/s in the Round for (Miles and Miles +1), Newell Harry
Across at Temperance Lane Newell Harry’s Circle/s in the Round for (Miles and Miles +1) was an elegant wall sculpture of concentric neon circles that counselled us to “NEVEROD.” Inspired by Miles Davis’ 1967 Circle in the Round album, the work literally lit up the end of the dark alley in an eerie-cheery way. As with several of the works that have been exhibited since 2007, when the Laneways regeneration project commenced, negotiations are underway to make this a permanent public artwork.
Most of the works were in out of the way locations so it was particularly fascinating to explore the laneways themselves. I had a lot of difficulty locating Justene Williams’ Banker, Baker, Spanglemachinemaker in Curtin Place, but in the process found several other ‘possible’ installations. The act of reimagining the urban site, looking for the ‘art’ in it, was a fascinating by-product of the exhibition. (It turns out that Williams’ work was a video projection that started around 7pm, and even after returning for a second viewing at 8pm it was still not quite dark enough to get a real sense of the piece.)
Equally elusive was Simryn Gill’s Food on the Table, an ambitious proposal to create a feast in Abercrombie Lane, made from the discarded food found in bins. Gill was hoping to challenge ideas about wastage, consumerism and poverty, but was unable to fully activate the idea beyond research and consultation due to regulatory issues—which says something about the difficulties involved in mounting public art.
Rather than an instant re-invigoration of Sydney’s laneways, Are you looking at me? offers a gradual activation of forgotten spaces. The most successful works don’t attempt to decorate desolate sites, but instead propose reimaginings in and for them. In a city renowned for its love of spectacle, these small-scale aberrations are welcome, but in order to have a real effect on the cultural life of the city, we simply need more of them. The City of Sydney’s recently drafted Public Art Strategy suggests this might become a reality.
Are you looking at me?—Laneway Art 2010, curator Barbara Flynn, City of Sydney, Sept 23, 2010-Jan 31, 2011
Courtesy of Madman Entertainment and in celebration of our 101st edition, RealTime is offering a lucky reader a ravishing cinematic giveaway: a 9-DVD box set of the great films of the 1950s master of aesthetically and socially incisive Hollywood melodramas, Douglas Sirk.
Titled Douglas Sirk: King of Hollywood Melodrama, the opulent Madman set includes the filmmaker’s classic melodramas—Imitation of Life, All That Heaven Allows and Magnificent Obsession—as well as minor classics like Tarnished Angels (about stunt pilots and based on William Faulkner’s Pylon) and Taza, Son of Cochise with Rock Hudson as an Apache chief in Sirk’s only western.
Read film scholar Wendy Haslem’s overview of Sirk’s key films on page 28.
To compete for the Sirk DVD set go to www.realtimearts.net/sirk_survey.html
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In Sam James video work you’re watching an edition of RealTime
roll off the presses. Back in 1994, quite a bit of the pre-online print edition would have stayed on your hands as ink but more importantly in your mind, new synapses firing rapidly as we surveyed and critiqued the urgently needy hybrid performance and new media arts scene ignored in those days by the mass and other media. The excitement hasn’t abated, as indicated by the many artists and groups of the 101 we approached who have contributed to our 101st edition celebration with 101 or so words each about what’s next for them in 2011. The diversity, inventiveness, commitment and playfulness on show in their contributions and throughout this edition are reward enough for our 101st and will keep us fuelled up for the year to come.
RealTime on the press
photo Sam James
RealTime on the press
To make sense of editions 1-101 and beyond as a comprehensive record of an era and to pay tribute to a generation of adventurous artists, we are archiving more and more of RealTime+OnScreen online. All editions are available back to 2001, all dance articles back to 1994 as part of our RealTimeDance portal (launching in March) and we’re working hard to put the rest of RealTime 1994-2000 online over the next year. If you’re a student, a researcher, an artist, an arts writer or a fancier of innovative art you’ll find our archive increasingly valuable, recharging failed synapses, firing new ones. Fond memories and online pleasures aside, opening and fondling a new print edition of RealTime still brings joy to many a reader: the ink might not rub off, but ideas and sensations still do. Read on. Celebrate.
Sarah Jayne Howard, Not in a Million Years, Force Majeure
photo Lisa Tomasetti
Sarah Jayne Howard, Not in a Million Years, Force Majeure
A MAN STANDS HIGH UP IN THE DISTANCE, SPOTLIT, ABOUT TO JUMP, HIS VOICEOVER SPELLING OUT THE TENSION GENERATED BETWEEN THE IMPULSES OF HIS REPTILIAN BRAIN AND THE RATIONALITY OF ITS EVOLVED FORM, ALTERNATING BETWEEN SHEER TERROR AND THE ATTRACTIONS OF RISK. ONE, TWO, THREE, HE LEANS…BLACKOUT. WE DON’T KNOW IF HE ACTUALLY JUMPS, BUT ONE THING’S CLEAR, HE WANTS TO AND HE HAS KNOWLEDGE AND CHOICE. BUT FORCE MAJEURE’S NOT IN A MILLION YEARS BUILDS ITS PERVASIVE SENSE OF PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL CRISIS NOT FROM THESE EVOLUTIONARY ADVANTAGES BUT FROM INCIDENTS OF POWERLESSNESS AND UNCONSCIOUSNESS, WHERE CIRCUMSTANCES HAVE SUCKED AWAY THE PHYSICAL CAPACITY OR WILL TO ACT.
Some of the figures in Not In A Million Years—an airline attendant, a paraglider and a pair of miners—engage in jobs or activities that are inherently risky. The miners endure the collapse of a mine while the airline attendant suffers something unique: she is the lone survivor—found on the ground—of an aircraft that exploded at 33,000 feet. The paraglider is sucked up “higher than Everest” into the upper atmosphere, unconscious throughout and almost frozen, but miraculously survives (perhaps ‘preserved’ by the cold). Other figures haven’t taken the risks of employment or sport but the will to act is likewise denied them: a man in a comatose state for 10 years suddenly wakes to a world with which he is unable to engage. A woman wins a huge lottery prize but is rendered incapable of using it, fearing public attention and the risk her son might be kidnapped. Another character is a sporting champion (inspired by the story of an astonishing long-jumper), abused and shamed by her coach into mindlessly and dangerously excelling.
Elizabeth Ryan and Vincent Crowley, Not in a Million Years, Force Majeure
photo Heidrun Löhr
Elizabeth Ryan and Vincent Crowley, Not in a Million Years, Force Majeure
The horrors of these conditions are made palpable, played out on shifting clouds, fields and dunes of soft, snow-like sparkling crystals through which people wade fitfully—or, like the athlete, forcefully, as if battling sand or heavy surf—or in which they are buried. A man unearths the airline attendant in the first of a series of duets, cradling, lifting, helping her stand before an inevitable, sad collapse. The challenge of helping is further writ large in the frustrations of the wife of the comatose man as she struggles to clothe him while begging for his affection, trying to make him jealous, or in the mutual assistance enacted between the trapped miners, from time-filling chat to shared songs to the slightest of physical shifts to ease pain. Later the wife will drag her comatose husband through the ‘snow,’ unable to make him stand unassisted, amplifying the sense of helplessness experienced by carers as much as the victims of fate.
Max Lyandvert’s emphatic score moodily underlines the action—melancholy piano for the airline attendant, electronic pinging and pulsing for the athlete, ominous rumblings for the miners. Spatial transformations are also effected with the ‘snowscape’ swept away, replaced by mobile walls that frame the entrapment of the wife of the comatose man and the reclusive lottery winner, while the paraglider flies in the distance, often seemingly helpless, an almost constant reminder of the beauty and risk of human flight.
The instability of these aural and visual shifts resonates with emotional complexities as the interwoven tales unfold, some more detailed than others. Survivors like the airline attendant and the formerly comatose man cannot comprehend why they are treated like heroes. The man is bitter over the loss of time and love: “Where’s the miracle?” He cannot relate to his son or understand why his wife just didn’t give up on him—”Why did she keep me…like a piece of nostalgia?” Only a mate’s ironic “Guess what, stupid, you stopped smoking” cheers him.
These ‘accidents’ variously yield humour and fortitude, or reveal the strengths and weaknesses of relationships or result in uncomprehending despair and infinite frustration—the athlete is literally driven up the wall, repeatedly rushing at and bounding up CarriageWorks’ craggy stonework. Amidst such indeterminacy it’s odd that the figure who opened the performance, pondering a leap, returns to muse over a famous tightrope walk between skyscrapers in New York, picking over its meanings—sublime or absurd, inspirational? “Could I ever risk that? Am I ever that alive?” The victims of strange and not so strange accidents in Not In A Million Years have not taken undue risks (you might not like to paraglide, but many thousands do) and in several cases they certainly feel less than alive after their ‘accidents,’ and certainly neither adventurous nor heroic—their will-power had been suspended.
As if to underline a swing to a more optimistic view of the effects of extreme happenstance, the athlete, seemingly freed of her coach, spins and sweeps through the expanse in the first palpably choreographed movements. She draws the other performers with her into a collective dance in silence, cutting neatly through the ‘snow,’ hands pushing back over heads, fingers pointing, legs weakening at the knees (reminiscent of those characters who earlier collapsed into the ‘snow’) but rising up, looking up, suppliant even, asking not “Could I ever risk that?” but “How could I endure those states of being, of suspended will and self, with their all too existential consequences?”
I’m not certain that Not In A Million Years is conceptually consistent or that it fully exploits the potential of its ‘snowscape’ design—visually or sonically—while the deployment of the ungainly mobile walls functionally detracts from the overall eeriness and the soundscore occasionally verges on the melodramatic. But it’s a thoughtful and often disturbing creation that conveys the unbearable lightness of unconsciousness. For a dance theatre work, curiously it’s the naturalism of the affecting performances from Elizabeth Ryan and Joshua Tyler (not least as the wife and erstwhile comatose husband) that provide Not In A Million Years with its emotional centre of gravity, as their world and others around them spin out of control. I’m looking forward, anxiously, to experiencing Not In A Million Years again at Dance Massive in Melbourne in March.
Force Majeure, Not in a Million Years, director Kate Champion, assistant director Roz Hervey, designer Geoff Cobham, performers Vincent Crowley, Sarah Jayne Howard, Elizabeth Ryan, Joshua Tyler, original music, sound designer Max Lyandvert; CarriageWorks, Sydney, Nov 18-27, 2010; www.forcemajeure.com.au
This article was first published online Jan 17, 2010.
IN CHRISTIAN RIZZO’S B.C., JANVIER, 1545, FONTAINBLEU, BLACK CURTAINS PART TO REVEAL A WHITE BOX STAGE LIT BY DOZENS OF TEA CANDLES SCATTERED ACROSS THE FLOOR. SCULPTURAL CLUSTERS OF BLACK FABRIC ARE SUSPENDED LIKE FLOATING INKBLOTS AT VARIOUS HEIGHTS. UPSTAGE CENTRE, DANCER JULIE GUIBERT, IN BLACK SKULLCAP-CUM-WIG, BLACK SHIRT AND PANTS AND SILVER STILETTO HEELS LIES ON A NARROW WHITE TABLETOP WITH HER BACK TO US. IN THE FOREGROUND STANDS CHOREOGRAPHER RIZZO, WEARING AN ANTIQUE-LOOKING RABBIT MASK, T-SHIRT, BAGGY JEANS AND HIGH-TOPS—AN ENSEMBLE THAT MAKES HIM LOOK LIKE A ROMANTIC-ERA PORCELAIN FIGURINE DRESSED AS A RAPPER. THE STAGE COMPOSITION IS EXQUISITE (A LITTLE CHEER GOES UP INSIDE ME).
Guibert gets off the table and performs a short, gestural score that has her bisecting space in flat planes, changing levels and implying geometrical shapes. The execution is meticulous. She will repeat this sequence for the duration, adjusting the details slightly, changing her spatial orientation and imperceptibly increasing the tempo. Superbly controlled, Guibert is all precision and grace, even on four-inch silver spikes. Rabbit-faced Rizzo takes his time moving the candles from the floor to the table, just a few at a time. Each part of this slow-moving image is thoughtfully placed. I can feel the surety of an expert artist’s hand. I let the picture seep into my nervous system like an opiate.
Once the initial hit has done its work, I want the piece to change. It does, but at a glacial pace. Guibert goes through her iterations. The sculptures are removed. The candles are extinguished. The quality of light goes from candle-flicker warm to walk-in-cooler frigid. I think this progression is supposed to feel like a graduated revelation but, beautiful as the final state is, the development is too slow for surprise. A high volume industrial sound score by Gerome Nox makes its presence felt part way through. The grinding drone tends to flatten out the nuance of the Guibert’s articulations. The lighting design, on the other hand, is a masterpiece of sensitivity. Designer Caty Olive’s interest lies in the instability and ambiguity of her medium. From the outset she gives us a restless light, almost constantly in flicker, that refuses to settle on a base colour. Within the highly reflective surfaces of the white box, Olive manages to create a depth of field in which Guibert, Rizzo and the sculptural objects come in and out of focus. Unlike the crush of the sound score, the active lighting design contributes a deft dynamism, responsive to the spatial adjustments at work and partnering well with Guibert.
It’s a little hard on the eyes and ears at times. The unstable light, combined with Nox’s acoustic drone and the measured pace of the piece, makes me a bit sleepy. Maybe that’s the point: as I drift into semi-consciousness b.c., janvier, 1545, fontainbleu cuts a deep groove in my dream track. It stays with me in a way that most shows don’t. In the days and weeks since the show ended, the restlessness and dissatisfaction I felt at curtain has given way to a feeling of dream-saturated appreciation. When I think of the show now, I’m left with the fullness and clarity of the image.
The image, however, isn’t Rizzo’s first concern. He begins by building the choreography a step at time. His idea of choreography includes light, sound and sculpture as active partners. The ‘image’ is a natural result of such ‘partnering.’ In the 1990s, Rizzo and other choreographers were labeled in France as makers of non-danse, a designation that in retrospect only makes sense if you think of the dancer as somehow separate from the performance setting, moving in a featureless, empty space that doesn’t interfere with the purity of movement. Non-danse attempted to recontextualise the dancer—sometimes by placing them in a setting that was more ‘theatrical’ (for example, a living room), sometimes by putting the dance in a specific location and often by focusing on the bare materiality of the dancer rather than on the dancer’s technique.
These considerations, as well as others, forced a re-examination of dance and choreography. Previously, speaking, playing guitar, cooking, lecturing etc, were expressions of the body that didn’t fall into the category of dance. Things like set pieces, sculpture, props, lights and sound were usually treated as add-ons, always peripheral to the primacy of the human body. Non-danse puts the dancer-body in dialogue not just with other dancers, but also with all the other elements mentioned above. In a Rizzo show this requires a shift in the kind of attention a spectator brings to the performance. What is the interplay between dancer and light? Between sculpture, space, and sound? Like the lights, my attention flickered between all of these. Then the front part of my brain relaxed, I got sleepy, my consciousness widened and b.c., janvier, 1545, fontainbleu continued its iterations in my memory log.
JAN CHAPMAN HAS A KNACK FOR FINDING RISING TALENT WHEN IT COMES TO AUSTRALIAN SCREENWRITERS AND DIRECTORS. IF HER NAME IS STAMPED ON A FILM (AS PRODUCER OR EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) IT MEANS THE FILM WILL LIKELY HAVE A UNIQUE VOICE WITH GREAT CHARACTERISATION AND WONDERFULLY STRANGE TOUCHES — LOVE SERENADE (SHIRLEY BARRETT), JANE CAMPION FILMS INCLUDING THE PIANO AND BRIGHT STAR, LANTANA (RAY LAWRENCE), SOMERSAULT (CATE SHORTLAND), SUBURBAN MAYHEM (ALICE BELL; PAUL GOLDMAN)—AND NOW HERE COMES GRIFF THE INVISIBLE FROM WRITER-DIRECTOR AND NOVELIST LEON FORD.
Recently selected for the Toronto and Berlin Film Festivals, Griff the Invisible features an Australian superhero not quite able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and who, by day, suffers bullying in the workplace while exacting revenge at night by fighting injustice in his neighbourhood.
Recent Australian film has tended to emphasise rural nostalgia (The Tree, Summer Coda, Lou, The Boys Are Back), gritty realism (Animal Kingdom) and mainstream comedy/romance (Bran Nue Dae, I Love You Too), so it’s great to see a director who’s not afraid of an experimental touch or play with genre. Leon Ford is well-known as an actor (Beneath Hill 60, Changi) while his short films Katoomba and The Mechanicals have shown a real talent for writing in particular, winning awards at the Sydney and St Kilda Film Festivals. He joins a spate of actors (Rachel Ward, Serhat Caradee, Anthony Hayes, Nash Edgerton, Matthew Newton) turning their hand to directing, with accomplished results for their first features. These directors also have a good feel for casting: Griff the Invisible goes against type with Ryan Kwanten (who does awkward as well as he does tough-guy in Red Hill and True Blood), Maeve Dermody (Beautiful Kate) as the fragile but potent Melody, and Toby Schmitz (The Pacific, Three Blind Mice and, onstage, Ruben Guthrie for Belvoir) charismatic as the arrogant bully Tony.
The film opens with a quotation from Oscar Wilde—“Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth”—as we enter the frame of a large telescope, eyeing the cityscape, before panning around a room full of surveillance equipment on red alert for action in the streets. A woman walks, pursued by a man in a strange top hat. This is a nice parody of the big-budget blockbusters, like Superman Returns, filmed on our shores, before we’re introduced to our truly B-grade superhero in a cheap black rubber suit with a large gold G on the chest, for Griff, not Gotham.
Griff the Invisible has no superpowers that we can see but carries a blade that he swipes cartoon-style through the necks of his assailants. Kwanten has the physical ability to transform easily, moving beautifully between his alter egos. He practises his lines in front of the mirror at home—“It’s okay, you’re safe”—and searches for the right descriptor—Griff the Protector? Griff the Hidden?—as much for himself as the victims he defends.
Toby Schmitz, Griff the Invisible
By day, he is stalked by terrors even worse: the open plan office. Nervous and reluctant to engage, Griff spends his days on the phone answering client enquiries, trying not to talk to anyone at close range. Office bully Tony—a show-off in front of the ladies, a man with a strong sense of entitlement, used to getting exactly what he wants—is all too aware of Griff’s weaknesses and regularly harasses him. Ford (aided by Schmitz’s talents) cleverly chooses to portray Tony as an attractive and vivacious character (rather than the fat loser bullies often seen in US sitcoms), sexy and louche, with that right blend of menace and charm.
Maeve Dermody and Ryan Kwanten, Griff the Invisible
Griff brings his surveillance skills into the office, spying on colleagues with a series of ingeniously simple gadgets (he’s no Batman) designed to help him communicate without words. But the enigmatic narrative means that we’re never quite sure of the nature of Griff’s inner/outer world. Is it a fantasy playing in his head? Does he really hit the streets? Is he battling a mental illness in which he’s completely delusional? His girlfriend-to-be, Melody, a science student transfixed by the space between atoms, certainly believes all he says but, then again, she is the only character who can’t see him when he’s ‘invisible’ (a brilliant running gag). Getting that right balance between pathos, humour and occasional farce is extremely difficult and Ford manages it well; the film hums along with its strange dialogue, a visually inventive palette, the melancholic lead romance and real empathy for the loneliness of the central characters.
The entire plot fixes on the fight/flight response and which way Griff will turn at any moment. His life is about boundaries: who can cross them, when and where, and the possibilities of transformation. Melody, instead, wants to transcend her limitations right here right now, even attempting to walk through walls to reach Griff. With his central couple, Ford has almost effortlessly created (where films like I Love You Too and Summer Coda haven’t quite succeeded) an alluring and enduring romantic comedy, with characters complex and intertwined. It’s a strange and whimsical world for the viewer to inhabit but a terrific and courageous debut.
Griff the Invisible, writer, director Leon Ford, producer Nicole O’Donohue, executive producers Jan Chapman, Scott Meek, cinematography Simon Chapman, editor Karen Johnson, sound designer Sam Petty, production designer Sophie Nash, original music Kids At Risk; www.grifftheinvisible.com
This article was fist published online, Jan 17, 2010
Kerstin Ergenzinger in cooperation with Thom Laepple, Whiskers in Space 2010
photo courtesy of the artist and VG Bild-Kunst Bonn
Kerstin Ergenzinger in cooperation with Thom Laepple, Whiskers in Space 2010
AS PART OF THE 5TH DIGITAL ARTS FESTIVAL, CLUSTER, IN TAIPEI, THE FLEDGLING DAC DIGITAL ARTS CENTRE PRESENTED AN EXHIBITION OF WORKS FROM LOCAL AND INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE. FOUR MEDIA ARTWORKS FILLED THE GALLERY, CONFORMING TO AND CHALLENGING NORMATIVE ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT MEDIA ART. SOME PRESENTED A REIFICATION OF NOVELTY AND TECHNOLOGICAL EFFECTS AND OTHERS SIDESTEPPED THE SIDESHOW TO PUSH CONCEPTUAL AND EXPERIENTIAL ASPECTS.
Nature, so often yearned for in the dark spaces of media arts, is the theme upon which the exhibition hinged. Kerstin Ergenzinger (Germany), Yi Ping Yang and Guillaume Marmin (France), Yun-Ju Chen (Taiwan) and Chih-Chieh Huang (Taiwan) each tackle this theme distinctively, calling attention to our immediate surroundings and the global context, the metaphorical and the literal.
Kerstin Ergenzinger’s Whiskers in Space is the pièce de résistance. It engages the participant with an array of forms clumped in three groups on the gallery floor. More immediately suggesting a field of grass than whiskers, they are rough-cut airplane foam, peaking to knee-high blades. As one walks through the room, they move, bend and stretch from side to side and jitter as though stimulated by some sudden neural impulse or vibrated by a mysterious wind. In fact, wind is the critical element defining the work; not that of a blustery sea-side, but a micro-scale, unfelt wind that might trigger goose-bumps on the back of your neck for reasons bewitching and unknown. These micro-currents, impacted by our movement through the exhibition space, trigger the seemingly uncanny animation of the whiskers.
Whiskers in Space is constructed to draw the participant closer to the experience of nature not by granting the instant response expected of computing technology, but randomising and delaying the data received by changes in the air in the room. The system has been fastidiously tested by the artist to present a balance between audience expectation and the denial of immediate gratification, which is deferred but not absent. Ergenzinger’s creation is poetic and mesmerising, belying the speed imperative characteristic of the digital age—it is enough merely to sit and watch the slowly undulating forms move in mysterious ways. It is also compelling to feel responsible for their movement, in much the same way our actions yield consequences, small and large, of which we’re largely unaware, upon the natural world.
Guillaume Marmin and Yi Ping Yang, Around the Island 2011
photo courtesy of the artists
Guillaume Marmin and Yi Ping Yang, Around the Island 2011
From grass roots to mountain tops: French and Taiwanese duo Guillaume Marmin and Yi Ping Yang present Around the Island, a glowing sculptural installation of a mountain range, or stylised island, surrounded by a pitch black, uneven ground. The bright white peaks are used as a projection surface and the work essentially reaches its zenith as a performative projection installation. The accompanying soundscape, composed by Philippe Gordiani, is performed live by Yang and mixed alongside the projection of Marmin’s abstract, naturalistic organic forms drawing on local Taiwanese landscapes. The score comprises the sounds of common household objects and Yang’s haunting vocals with their erotic breathlessness. Without this auditory component, Around the Island would lose much of its sensorial impact. Rather than recalling nature, the juxtaposition of complex, layered experimental sound with imagery draws the audience into an experience more attuned to culture and its codes of expression.
Yun-Ju Chen, Starry Starry Night
photo courtesy of the artist
Yun-Ju Chen, Starry Starry Night
From the mountain to the sky: in Starry Starry Night, Taiwanese artist Yun-Ju Chen seeks to address environmental issues with an installation of large glowing balls hanging limp like loose ball-sacks, or puffed-out like eager beach balls, and lit from the inside with alternating pastel hues. These spheres symbolise the Earth’s continents. Data in the form of key words is taken from various websites and rated as positive or negative, then fed to the balls. If there are reports of flooding or excess pollution, the balls inflate, heavy with the burden. Conversely, reports of carbon reduction by use of alternative energy sources make the balls deflate as a sign of relief. Chen writes of a desire “to awake[n] people’s concern for environment,” but the work appears unresolved, problematically literalising the binary logic at the heart of digital data. Had it moved beyond the rhetoric of on/off, good/evil dichotomies to push in the direction of other possibilities it would have had greater impact.
Chih-Chieh Huang, LBSkeleton Lite
photo courtesy of the artist
Chih-Chieh Huang, LBSkeleton Lite
Chih-Chieh Huang’s LBSkeleton Lite is a robotic installation in the form of an origami-like flower pillar that emits light from an ordinary bulb within its cylindrical body. Controlled by pneumatic switches, the device continually juts out its arms. As a cross between an inarticulate robot and bad lighting, the work’s mechanical qualities supersede its poetic potentiality. Acknowledging this criticism, the work is presented as part rather than whole, minus the crucial auditory accompaniment originally intended for exhibition. As such, it is a demonstration of a work-in-progress, one mired in its mechanical technicality, its elegant origami aesthetic at odds with the jolting industrial animation.
The artists in this Digital Arts Centre exhibition, for better or worse, endeavoured to create works that act as extensions of the sensorium in relation to our experience of the ever ambiguous concept of nature. They imaged, imagined and constructed nature in terms of both our symbolic and real relations to the fragile yet fierce organic world that surrounds us. It is undeniable that nature today, as demonstrated in this exhibition, is ever enculturated. But defining nature through the technological cannot help but risk falling into to this problematic terrain.
Digital Arts Centre, Cluster: 5th Digital Art Festival, Taipei, Nov 26-Dec 5, 2010; www.dac.tw/daf10
This article was fist published online, Jan 17, 2010
“A FESTIVAL IS AS PRECARIOUS AS ANY ARTWORK,” HELEN COLE, PRODUCER AND CURATOR OF THE UK’S BIENNIAL INBETWEEN TIME FESTIVAL OF LIVE ART AND INTRIGUE IS TELLING ME. “YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN TILL YOU ADD THE AUDIENCE. YOU’VE WORKED HARD TO CREATE THE OVERALL SHAPE AND THE JOURNEY THROUGH THE WORKS, BUT YOU HAVE TO BE MET HALF-WAY BY YOUR AUDIENCE, YOUR CO-WORKERS, THE ARTISTS IN YOUR COMMUNITY.”
Cole’s concern for chemistry characterises Inbetween Time (IBT), a festival where the parties and pauses for conversation and exchange are as carefully configured as the performances. I attended the festival in its early days and was captivated by the sense of community generated by Cole around an esoteric and little known new festival in the small city of Bristol. Artists I had never heard of were mingling cheerfully with their better-known peers and international presenters in the Arnolfini gallery’s cosy bar. The work was carefully contextualised to accommodate emerging and established practice and make the five-day event feel like a singular, intense immersion into a range of practices anchored in the body.
Since 2001, the festival has grown in scale and profile and several of those emerging artists have similarly acquired international repute. Cole acknowledges that the 2010 festival is her most ambitious to date, with new venues added to the central Arnolfini gallery and performance spaces as well as an extensive sited program in public spaces. Now independently produced, IBT is a partnership with Arnolfini, where Cole was the Producer of Live Art and Dance for 12 years. With the majority of its funding for three years coming from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, IBT is in a relatively robust position amidst the devastation wrought by diminished arts funding in the UK.
“It was hard to celebrate this year,” says Cole, “knowing about the challenges facing the arts sector. Not to mention the snow!” Images from the festival, of which there are many on the websites documenting IBT, show panels of rugged-up presenters, artists and audiences engaged in joyful defiance of the weather. “There was a true spirit of the Blitz,” says Cole, “we were all in it together. The usual eccentric moments were magnified.”
highlights & new parameters
Cole cites several highlights in the 75 productions in her program, speaking with great enthusiasm of Frontman by Action Hero, the local group who have been garnering significant attention nationally and were facing that difficult hurdle of recreating the impact of their breakthrough work. In a new partnership with Circomedia, the Bristol based circus development organisation, IBT programmed Action Hero’s new work in a large church, creating an incongruous gig-like feel with dry ice and pumping sound. Cole rates the success of this satisfying production as highly as she does the extremely uncomfortable two works presented by British comedian, Kim Noble. “Kim pushed all the edges,” says Cole, “crossing from the intensely private into the public and making everyone cringe.” There was another cringing highlight for Cole in the Belgian production, Still Standing You by Pieter Ampe and Guilherme Garrido from CAMPO. Presented as part of the Lecturama mid-morning program, this confrontingly visceral grappling dance between two big blokes had everyone wincing over their coffees.
The CAMPO production is testimony to the longevity of the relationships Cole holds with peer producers in Europe. Kristof Blom, CAMPO’s producer, joined Nayse Lopes of Panorama Festival in Rio de Janeiro and Fiona Winning from Australia on an International Curators’ Panel about the modus operandi he shares with Cole: his recommendation gave her the confidence to program Still Standing You from video alone.
This unlikely dance work demonstrates that IBT is about more than live art. The festival’s brochure explicitly states that its D:Stable strand comprises “new artist commissions, premières and international co-productions that thoroughly reject theatre convention.” New experimental works by such celebrated names as Blast Theory, Ivana Muller, Quarantine and Tim Etchells stand alongside home grown premieres from Timothy X Atack and Tanuja Amarasuriya, Alex Bradley or Cole’s own production, Collecting Fireworks.
There is a through line of exploration that unites the broad diversity of the program and creates that sense of communal adventure that resonates throughout the experience of attending IBT. Cole says, “I am curating conceptually and choosing work that makes sense in a program. I want audiences to consider not just these works, but a body of work and a conversation with an artist that is as much about where they are as where they are going next.”
Sarah Jane Norman, Take This, For It Is My Body
photo Carl Newland
Sarah Jane Norman, Take This, For It Is My Body
the australian connection
Three Australian works in IBT10 reflected Cole’s lengthy engagement with Australian contemporary performance. She first visited Performance Space in Sydney in 2000, striking up a relationship with then director Fiona Winning that resulted in a number of Australian artists appearing at IBT 2006. In 2010 Winning herself and Victoria Hunt appeared in Dancing the Dead in the program strand connected to the Arnolfini exhibition, What Next for the Body.
“This work surprised me with how well it was received,“ says Cole, “given how little we know of that culture [Hunt’s Maori heritage is explored in conversation and dance]. Fiona and Victoria found a way of talking about the making of new work in front of people who do not know either of them, or the themes of the work, and held it all together. This sort of exploratory conversation really works in IBT.”
Another Performance Space connection led to the programming of Take This, For It Is My Body by Sarah Jane Norman, also in Arnolfini. “This one-on-one work was very simple,” says Cole. “I am not sure how much the audience could access the references to Australian Aboriginal culture, but they clearly understood the conceptual significance of Sarah Jane’s mixing of her blood into the bread and were challenged by her offer to consume it.” Cole saw Norman at Sydney’s PACT around 2004 and followed her trajectory through the creation of her independent work in Australia and then internationally. “We have been in conversation for several years,” she says.
Back to Back, The Democratic Set
A more recent conversation, and one that seems at first glance to be less likely, is Cole’s commission for Geelong-based Back to Back Theatre. “Despite our very different aesthetic tastes, we share the same commitment to building community around our work,” Cole says. “I learned an awful lot from having them make The Democratic Set with us over 10 days in Bristol. It is very politically current to work with diverse communities and make participatory work, but this is something different. They have such a light touch and such clear curatorial thinking. The relationships they built so quickly with our community were staggering. They worked with over 100 people without blinking. The project is so simple, so elegant and so heart-warming. There was a frenzy of about 400 people trying to get into the gala premiere screening. I am sure this is just the beginning for us. Back to Back have a community in Bristol now; people who have given something of themselves to the company and have started a relationship with them. Bruce [Gladwin, Back to Back’s director], an artist from the other side of the world, spoke at our opening event and it just felt right. Sometimes you find yourself on the other side of the world and you are at home.”
The number and diversity of artists who find themselves at home in Bristol is increasing year by year as Cole continues to pitch her close knit community of local artists further and deeper into the international context.
Inbetween Time Festival of Live Art & Intrigue, Bristol, UK, Dec 1-5, www.inbetweentime.co.uk
Our coverage of the 2010 Inbetween Time Festival is a joint venture between RealTime and Inbetween Time Productions
AMONG THE THRONG OF WINE-GLASS CLUTCHING AFICIONADOS AT INBETWEEN TIME’S LAUNCH PARTY, TWO SLIGHT YOUNG MEN SIT OPPOSITE EACH OTHER AT A TABLE, DRESSED AS PLAYTIME RED INDIANS: WHITE VESTS, SHORTS, AND CROWNS OF PRIMARY COLOURED FEATHERS. A GLASS JAR OF PEANUT M&MS (COLOURS CORRESPONDING WITH THEIR FEATHERS) SITS BETWEEN JONES AND LLYR, AND IN TURNS THEY SUCK, CHEW AND SPIT OUT THE SWEETS, FACING EACH OTHER DIRECTLY, THEIR GAZE SOMETIMES A CHALLENGE, SOMETIMES AN INVITATION, BUT ALWAYS A JOINT ENTERPRISE.
They drool residue onto the white table, making a gloopy multi-coloured patina. Occasionally they attempt to spit confectionery from one mouth to another; failed launches are met with wry smiles. This silent flirting with revulsions and bodily etiquette is youthful and funny—but at the same time suggests a strange entropy, dissipation and doubt. As the evening grows older, discarded chocolates scatter across the Arnolfini floor, as if the performance has a radiation, a half-life, particles falling away like petals from a flower.
The push-me-pull-you of partnerships is explored by several other performing duos at Inbetween Time, in forms that vary from fragile, stately propositions to noisy creative-destructive acts to sheer animal glee.
search party: somehow growing old with you
The fragile and stately first: Search Party are real-life couple Jodie Hawkes and Pete Phillips who we learn met in their 20s. Their show is a love letter to each other, but…wait, no, come back! Somehow Growing Old With You manages to circumnavigate the cloying neediness of a bad wedding ode. It doesn’t feel like a renewal of vows, though that’s essentially what it is: a ceremony, a statement of intent, occasionally demanding the patience you’d give such a thing. But its glacial pace and quiet repetition proves meditative, its moments of emotional beauty dotted about an arid landscape of salt and smoke.
Phillips and Hawkes slow-dance across a carpet of salt that crunches beneath their feet like glass. They walk forward, Hawkes having some sort of unspoken problem with reaching a certain distance, Phillips carrying her to the threshold in a variety of ways, each time failing to convince her to stay. They hold private conversations in inaudible whispers, discussing what to do next, checking their progress with each other in gazes, glances, frowns and smiles. Eventually, they each record a message to camcorder for the future, telling the story of how they met, of how their daughter was born. This is the start of a process wherein Search Party will record such messages every 10 years, for as long as they’re together, or until they’re no longer able to. The inevitability of human decay hangs heavy in the room, announced and committed to tape…but Search Party are carrying that knowledge, that destiny, together. I once heard the artist Franko B wonder at how audiences rarely have a problem with the sharing of pain, but no sooner does an artwork express overt sentimentality than its integrity is doubted. True love is sometimes a dirty secret in live art. This show, unashamedly, reeks of it.
Action Hero, Frontman
photo Carl Newland
Action Hero, Frontman
action hero: frontman
Smoke is also filling the room at Circomedia, but this time it’s rock gig smoke, drifting over a raised stage and guitar amplifiers, shot through by spotlights. Action Hero are premiering Frontman, their lament for the egos of petulant musicians throughout the ages. Previously Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse have appropriated and assimilated texts from westerns and daredevil spectaculars with a style that sees them rope the audience into the proceedings—shooting down the hero in a hail of imaginary bullets, cheering the motorcycle jump or going silent when the stranger walks into the room. Tonight is slightly different; no less urgent, but another kind of energy, because it centres upon what happens when the contract between audience and performer falters or fails. Paintin holds court in spangled hot pants, making her way through various on-stage crises: hubristic, chaotic, physically destructive, confrontational. It’s a catalogue of ineloquence made either comic or distressing by its amplification. Then, when she finally gives up the ghost and crumples, hands over her ears, the soundtrack takes over, eliminating her, a wall of intense electronic scree with frequencies so violent we reach for the earplugs we’ve been handed before the show begins.
Stenhouse is also on stage throughout, a gangly roadie in rabbit ears, operating technical equipment, untangling cables in a hilariously slow and straight-faced manner. He’s heckled by Paintin and they physically fight on stage. She hides in the shadows and accuses him of ruining everything. It’s exhausting, and you feel for the performers, Paintin especially. Action Hero themselves are a company in the spotlight, their shows the subject of great acclaim. You wonder how much this show is actually about the artists, about their mercurial creative processes, their negotiations, cul-de-sacs and unpredictable life force.
Pieter Ampe and Guilherme Garrido/CAMPO
photo Oliver Rudkin
Pieter Ampe and Guilherme Garrido/CAMPO
pieter ampe and guilherme garrido/campo: still standing you
And speaking of untameable life forces: the audience for Still Standing You is assembling. It’s 11am. Guilherme Garrido is on stage, precariously seated on an impromptu stool made of his colleague Pieter Ampe’s legs. Ampe’s back is flat on the ground. He seems stoic about the situation. “We’re just waiting for a few more people to come in,” says Garrido, “Then we can begin this breakfast buffet of contemporary European dance.” And my god, I haven’t been this excited by a dance work in years.
I’d love to be able to describe Ampe and Garrido’s performance in intricate technical detail but I’m afraid I watched much of it through gasps, stifled giggles and tears of happy laughter. There’s no music, no set, nothing on the well-lit stage bar our odd couple: Garrido a swarthy Portuguese chatterer; Ampe a wiry, wordless, ginger-haired mega-bearded Belgian. The show is about them working out what they ‘mean’ to each other, and what this means for us is an extraordinary celebration of all the stupid, joyful, hilarious, loud and unlikely things that two human bodies can do to, at, for and with each other in one hour. Ampe and Garrido hurl one another around wrestler-style, make human climbing frames of themselves, play dangerous games of physical one-upmanship, snarling throughout in ridiculous thrash metal vocalisations, gurning, spitting and croaking. Then they finally rip each other’s clothes off, flapping nude about the stage like distressed fish, yanking at each other’s penises as if they were plasticine and locking around and upon one another to make half-men forms, strange animals with human skin, a being made entirely of legs, Siamese dancers, noisy molluscs.
Easily my favourite experience at Inbetween Time, it’s almost easier to describe what Still Standing You wasn’t than what it was. For a show with explicit nudity it wasn’t remotely sexual—despite, for instance, a moment where Ampe opened up Garrido’s foreskin and screamed into it from the top of his lungs. Yep. Read that again. That’s right. It didn’t feel like a masculine initiation rite, because it was so personal to the two individuals before us, rather than existing in a specific cultural place and time. And it wasn’t random and unfocused, because the dance proceeded from one crazy move to the next with a logic that carried the audience with it, making us laugh or wince in anticipation. What it was, at heart, is best expressed by paraphrasing the late great Pina Bausch: not interested in how these two people move, but in what makes them move.
Inbetween Time Festival of Live Art and Intrigue: Jones and Llyr, A Mouthful Of Feathers, Arnolfini, Dec 1; Search Party, Growing Old With You, Wickham Theatre, Dec 2; Action Hero, Frontman, Circomedia, Dec 4; Pieter Ampe and Guilherme Garrido/CAMPO, Still Standing You, Arnolfini, Dec 2; Bristol UK, Dec 1-5
Our coverage of the 2010 Inbetween Time Festival is a joint venture between RealTime and Inbetween Time Productions
Pete Barrett, The Surety, The Surety (The Inner Surety)
photo Oliver Rudkin
Pete Barrett, The Surety, The Surety (The Inner Surety)
“THE REASON OF THE UNREASON WITH WHICH MY REASON IS AFFLICTED SO WEAKENS MY REASON THAT WITH REASON I MURMUR AT YOUR BEAUTY.” CERVANTES, DON QUIXOTE
I’ve often thought of Live Art as having properly Quixotic aspects to it: foolhardy, sometimes nonsensical quests, undertaken in the face of scorn; easily mocked; often more moving and possessed of less selfish egotism, than might first appear. In Arnolfini’s foyer, an impeccably attired Pete Barrett decorates a wooden chair with tiny florets of cake icing, a beautiful, sedate action with strange, wordless inner logic. Many onlookers scowl with incredulity, some shrug…but it’s the kids who understand him best. They toddle up close to stand quiet and respectful at Barrett’s shoulder, as he lays concentric triangles of sugary paste across the dark wood.
Cupola Bobber, Wave Machine #2
photo Oliver Rudkin
Cupola Bobber, Wave Machine #2
For Wave Machine #2, US duo Cupola Bobber spend the cold afternoon in the shadow of Bristol Cathedral, attempting to replicate the swell of an ocean wave using pulleys and white/blue tarpaulins, repeatedly, back and forth, no-nonsense—because that’s what they do. For Black Box Ni, Paul Granjon has built an independently functioning robot that is able to control its maker via an interactive costume, compelling the artist to perform random repetitive tasks and—in one hilarious sequence—firing high-velocity paintballs at Granjon whilst he tries to construct a jam sandwich.
Kim Noble
kim noble: kim noble will die
But there’s a darker side to Quixotic desire that even some of Inbetween Time’s audience might have problems with. Because generally, we prefer the safer madness, don’t we? The zany madness, the village idiot madness. Madness with boundaries and recognised borders. One 2009 review of Kim Noble Will Die protested, “Even for a show about going too far, he goes too far,” and that’s because Noble’s masterpiece is an uncomplacent, confrontational, no holds barred, side-splittingly funny and unbearably upsetting portrait of a mental condition, the bipolar monster that has been cruelly toying with him, on and off, for much of his life.
Noble has censored so little of himself (and been equally indiscriminate with the lives of his family, ex-girlfriends, and neighbours) that you leave the show feeling beaten up, elated, angry and honoured, all at once. You wonder what percentage of it was ‘true,’ and then you question how much (if at all) that knowledge would matter. Because even if Noble is fucking with our minds (he didn’t really ejaculate into that bottle of Vagisil and leave it on the supermarket shelf, did he?) the image would hold fast, the portrait of the artist would remain the same. Even if this were embellished rather than pure autobiography, the journey would feature the same remarkable peaks and troughs, in relating Noble’s struggle to find meaning in a world that, to him, looks increasingly barren.
The show is a high speed stream-of-consciousness audiovisual presentation cramming 10 hours of material into 60 minutes. Karaoke rock is sung to repeated close-ups of Noble’s ejaculating penis. Horrendously intimate phone calls bleed from the speakers. Members of the audience are banished from the room at random. Some poor ticket-holder sits with a bucket on his head for the full hour. There’s a genuine cameo by a world-famous Hollywood star. There’s product tampering, unhinged email exchanges, cash handouts and graphic, profoundly disturbing self-harm. It mugs you. Past audiences have actually reported this show to the police. It is, no doubt whatsoever, exploitative of artist, audience and innocents alike (but in its awful honesty, what else could it be?) and—it must be noted—it is very, very male.
This last factor seems to feature heavily in people’s responses to Noble’s work. Audiences keen on Live Art’s capacity to navigate uncharted territory sometimes baulk at being asked to care about problems of white middle class blokes with Macbooks. Maleness is often seen as conservative, the predominant power structure, the mainstream; as a result a full exploration of masculine motifs and issues is a relatively rare thing to see on this circuit, and to witness Noble taking it to extremes (sometimes horrible, misogynistic extremes) will go not only beyond empathy for some, beyond risk, but also beyond acceptability. I wasn’t sure what to think. I’m still, after several days, not sure. All I know is that, on and off, I’ll be thinking about this show until my tiny light sputters.
Kim Noble, You Are Not Alone
photo Oliver Rudkin
Kim Noble, You Are Not Alone
kim noble: you are not alone
In Kim Noble Will Die the artist is a pot-bellied silverback gorilla of a man, a dominant presence pacing back and forth who, you suspect, it’s best not to look in the eye for fear of reprisal. He’s grim and glowering, not smiling once. He’s similarly unsmiling throughout You Are Not Alone, his second show of the festival, until a fleeting moment late in proceedings. During a film of him presenting a ‘Kim Noble Award’ to his favourite takeaway restaurant, while shaking the bemused owner’s hand, a genuine sliver of a smile creeps onto his face. And it’s heartbreaking, a release—especially if you’ve sat through both shows. It feels like a tiny reward.
Kim Noble Will Die is riven with humiliation, failure and madness. You Are Not Alone is at the other Quixotic extreme, with its comic levels of altruism, its cranky hope, its unstoppable quest. The ‘ghost’ of Noble’s ex-girlfriend haunts the stage, a printed photograph on A4 paper projected via a glitchy webcam rigged to Noble’s head. The story begins as she departs in a taxi, their relationship ended at that very moment, and Noble decides to make sense of events by making his loneliness a weapon of empathy. Neighbours on the London street where he lives form a venn diagram of opportunities, and addressing their problems without complaint—often covertly and without reward—becomes a way of making the world better.
As you’d expect, this Knight Of The Woeful Countenance has particularly idiosyncratic solutions for stolen plant pots or a takeaway restaurant’s lack of business, his neighbour’s depleted sex life or the isolation of modern urban existence. He offers to deliver onion bhajis to anywhere in the UK, if only we’ll order them (phone numbers are provided). He ropes his audience into making appreciative phone calls about taxi journeys that never happened. He randomly twins his street with one in Eastern Europe (and journeys there to announce it, to friendly bemusement). One night he cleans every car parked on the road, dressed as a cartoon bear.
It’s still shot through with the usual Kim Noble queasiness—especially as determining his neighbour’s ‘problems’ requires him to engage in almost obsessive electronic surveillance. But he’s a different character tonight: barely speaking, letting a computerised voice narrate the quest, a man at the service of something beyond himself. Taken together the ultimate effect of these two amazing shows is, for me, the same as in Cervantes. You desperately hope that Kim Noble will one day conquer his afflictions. But at the same time the ludicrous, surreal beauty of his battle both repels and enchants you.
Inbetween Time Festival of Live Art and Intrigue, Pete Barrett, The Surety, The Surety (The Inner Surety), Arnolfini, Dec 5; Cupola Bobber, Wave Machine #2, various locations, Dec 2-5; Paul Granjon, Black Box Ni, Wickham Theatre, Dec 5; Kim Noble, Kim Noble Will Die, Arnolfini, Dec 4; Kim Noble, You Are Not Alone, Circomedia, Dec 5; Bristol, UK, Dec 1-5
Our coverage of the 2010 Inbetween Time Festival is a joint venture between RealTime and Inbetween Time Productions
THE CIRCOMEDIA BUILDING USED TO BE A GEORGIAN CHURCH, NOW RE-PURPOSED FOR AN ARTFORM IN WHICH TRANSCENDENCE OF THE PHYSICALLY MUNDANE IS A DOMINANT THEME. THE CIRCUS SCHOOL HANGS THE TRAPEZE HIGH UP IN THE CEILING ARCHES, WHICH HAVE PLENTY OF ROOM BELOW THEM FOR THE SAFETY NET. ALONG WITH THE ARCHES THEY HAVE KEPT SOME OF THE PEWS, A GALLERY AND A FEATURE STAINED GLASS WINDOW. THE SPARE BATH STONE INTERIOR IS SOFTENED BY A SPRUNG WOODEN FLOOR IN THE MAIN PERFORMANCE AREA.
hancock & kelly live: iconographia
It was here that Richard Hancock lay on a plinth, at the height of a kitchen worktop, spooning a dead pig. The pig was already in rigor with his legs stretched out, a slight twist cocking his body askew. The man and the pig were the same colour.
Traci Kelly stalked round him purposefully. She was dressed in a black ball gown, a black pillbox hat with a small veil over her eyes, black gloves. Her tools were a block of gold leaf, a folded card to tweezer up each leaf, and a large soft brush, like a make-up brush, to fix and burnish. She would pick up a square of gold leaf delicately, angling it in the breeze of its own movement to minimise creasing and doubling, lay it on one of the bodies and smooth it down with the brush.
By the time I got there, one hour in, the feet and hindquarters of both bodies were covered, and Kelly was moving to the front of the hybrid to pay attention to hips and ribs. Music played: Dido’s Lament from Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas. Shreds of gold leaf escaped from the block, from under the brush, from the bodies, fluttering to the floor round the plinth or sticking to the black gloves and having to be scraped off. Where gold leaf sealed the gap between bodies it kept breaking down and having to be replaced. I kept wanting the process of gilding to be perfect. It stubbornly continued to be messy, very far from perfect.
Hancock held the pig tenderly, one hand resting on its chest between its front trotters. Its legs lay between his and he rested one knee insecurely on its narrow hip. It was a young pig, and thus about one third the man’s size. At all times the combination of genuine gold and glitter, of bourgeois formality (the hat, the gloves, the heels), of the representation of high culture, Purcell, to guarantee the seriousness of the occasion, threatened to topple over into vulgarity. Which is indeed the case at all our most solemn social rituals, weddings and funerals, where the popular, the profane and the high-minded collide.
The man was breathing, the pig was stiff. Both were sinewy and heavily greased with Vaseline. The gold around their nether regions caught the light in a more sparkly, less dense way than did their glowing naked orange-tan-pink skins. The pig had a bruise on its forward ham. The man did not. The man trembled with the cold, or the strain of holding the pose, or because all warmth was being leached out of him into the block of dead meat he cradled.
I had been told the pig still had the grass of its previous happy existence between its toes; I walked round to scrutinise. The long cut that had gutted it formed a tightly sewn, corded seam up the length of its body. Its tongue protruded between its teeth, curving up towards its snout. Smears of blood had been mostly wiped away, leaving only traces under the layer of Vaseline. It was clean. Its eyes were half open—it seemed to be looking up. Hancock lay with his own face directed towards it. He would meet its eyes if he opened his own. Then he did so: they were blue, the same colour as the pig’s. There the two were, in affinity.
At this point I surprised myself—for I don’t have that culturally specific Western sympathy for livestock—by feeling sorry for the pig. Then I felt the ways in which Hancock stood for the pig, and the pig for him, and both of them for all of us, tied to a hunk of dead meat and an inevitable end. The realisation was awful. I had to retreat. I went and sat up in the gallery where all that could reach me was the spectacle. I felt like howling.
Hancock and Kelly Live, Iconographia
photo Oliver Rudkin
Hancock and Kelly Live, Iconographia
Although I can recall it to memory it was not a repeatable moment, since it was triggered by physical presence. Occasionally I went down to stand in the same place and feel the same thing, drawn by the intensity of it—we don’t face such raw perception very often. Kelly inexorably and gently covered the intertwined bodies, stroking and burnishing as she obliterated them with splendour. Hancock breathed, and trembled under her touch. The music broke down and destabilised with every repetition, imperceptibly; yet by the end it seemed a distorted, reverberating howling played on a disintegrating instrument. The tension as Kelly moved the gold leaf closer and closer to the two faces was painful, yet when it happened, the end was not so dramatic. She smoothed the last gold square over the diamond-shaped fragment of face that remained of Hancock. Then she took care to remove pieces of golden film from within his nostrils. Pig and man now were covered, grafted together, shiny and perfectly inert. Kelly left the area.
More people had come into the church and become slowly rapt, standing closer to the plinth, drawn towards it, fascinated. The golden object, the glittering remnant, was to remain displayed for another half-hour. But I left, not caring to watch Richard Hancock shiver for that length of time. While Kelly was there, she was responsible for the work. But once she had left, audience complicity came into play to give us all control of the spectacle.
Teresa Margolles, 37 Cuerpos
photo Carl Newland
Teresa Margolles, 37 Cuerpos
teresa margolles: 37 cuerpos
It seems logical to me to compare Iconographia to Teresa Margolles’ work, not least because the spectacular aesthetic in which Iconographia wallows is so at odds with the minimalist aesthetic of Margolles.
In 37 Cuerpos a gallery space is bisected by a thread running from wall to wall. It is a little below waist height. The room has four entrances/exits, a pair on each side of the cord, at right angles to it, and an adjacent pair in one of the walls to which the cord is fixed, opening into a corridor. The lighting is subdued and the gallery’s plainness underlines the clinical air of the installation.
Closer inspection of the thread reveals details. It is composed of many lengths of a waxy, cat gut-like material knotted together. The sections vary in the degree of blemish they have picked up: rust-coloured, grimy-looking stains. The knots are angular, giving the thing a look of organic barbed wire. The program notes explain each length was used to sew up a body after autopsy. A couple of lengths are heavily stained indeed: that person’s end must have been grisly.
Nobody who ventures into this room steps over the thread to get to the adjoining gallery, although it would be easy to do so. Instead they walk down the line to where the two doors open into the corridor; exit from one, take two paces and re-enter from the other. Then they walk up the line again.
Teresa Margolles, Aire
photo Carl Newland
Teresa Margolles, Aire
teresa margolles: aire
In Aire, Margolles’ work in the adjoining gallery, disinfected water collected from the washing of bodies humidifies a room. Those who walk there breathe it in and feel it cooling on their skin. I got to the entrance, hung with a heavy plastic strip door, where I caught a hint of pleasant coolness, as enticing for someone from the tropics as the smell of fresh bread baking. I noticed the industrial humidifier on the floor. I did not go in.
It is the spectators’ responsibility to pay attention, to leave themselves open to engage with the work. That may be all that is required, or they may be challenged by the artist to be complicit in what takes place; or they may be placed in a compromising position without their consent. However, in offering attention, the spectator also claims the freedom to refuse to take part. Once the artist asks for engagement they must also be ready for and accept refusal. Otherwise the quality of the encounter they have arranged is in question (what is real and what is not is always an issue in live work): their request is a sham, an underhand attempt to force a result using the contextual authority of the gallery.
Something more interesting is going on with Margolles, who uses not only the authority of the gallery but the entire machinery of prestige and commodification driving international high culture to draw attention to real lives and deaths in Mexico. As a conscientious spectator I could accept complicity, but I don’t: I am not part of that high culture machinery and I don’t think InBetween Time is either. Nothing could compromise me more in this situation than pretending to be so sophisticated that the idea of touching the paraphernalia of death doesn’t horrify me. A value system is being critiqued here, among other things: my naive reaction acknowledges horror at the base of it.
Inbetween Time Festival of Live Art and Intrigue, Hancock & Kelly Live, Iconographia, Circomedia, Dec 5; Teresa Margolles, 37 Cuerpos and Aire, Arnolfini, Dec 1-Feb 6; Dec 1-5, Bristol UK
Our coverage of the 2010 Inbetween Time Festival is a joint venture between RealTime and Inbetween Time Productions
THERE’S A BIT IN BARBARELLA WHERE A SPRAWL OF STONED WOMEN SURROUND A LIQUOR-FILLED GLASS GLOBE THAT HAS A YOUNG MAN SWIMMING AROUND INSIDE OF IT. HE LOOKS A LITTLE BIT HARASSED. THE WOMEN SUCK ON HOOKAHS ISSUING FROM THE GLOBE. “WHAT ARE YOU SMOKING?” BARBARELLA ASKS, INNOCENT AS EVER. “ESSENCE OF MAN,” COMES THE REPLY.
Zoran Todorovic, Warmth
photo Carl Newland
Zoran Todorovic, Warmth
zoran todorovic: warmth
I walked into the room and made a beeline for the rectangular piles of felt that looked like folded blankets. Heaped on pallets they extended upwards to just the right height for me to finger them, and to get my nose down in there. They smelt clean. Matted fibres, mostly bear-colour. Some lighter strands, some white.
I’ve noticed elsewhere that European hair-colour averages out to brown, even in Scandanavia. So the blankets default to a brindled dark mass. Mounted on the gallery wall, monochrome videos on fast-forward sum up the process of making at length. The hair is cut at the barber’s, mostly into a far-from-pretty no-frills back-and-sides. So seldom does the camera peer over the subjects’ shoulder to spy at a face in the mirror that when it happens, it comes as a shock. The backs of so many heads presenting! It’s like forming an impression of personality from the look of a person’s arse. Not that that can’t be done.
Blunt, defended scrubby heads. Utilitarian, no-nonsense settings. A couple of women are fleetingly glimpsed amongst those who do the barbering. For the rest it’s all men. In the video the shorn hair is gathered up, emptied on to tables and sorted by hand. Tissues and other detritus are picked out of it. The clumps of hair are teased and dried out in heaps on the floor and then shredded (a little) and carded in big industrial rollers, washed and felted in the steel machines. Blokes in heavy boots and overalls deployed in utilitarian structures of concrete and steel wield brooms and black bin liners under a fluorescent flicker. All the dander and the smell, the shed organic dirt that the hair must have collected is sifted out, washed off, got rid of. The blankets have been passed through an industrial process, they have been standardised and homogenised and, to a degree, purified, all obtrusively particular matter has been removed. Yet the gallery is somehow humming with essence of Bloke: hardy, gruff, obtuse, stoic.
There is no smell beyond the suggestion of a smidgeon of grease—I daresay human grease smells awful to other mammals but not to us. Just as well—I’m asthmatic, me, and have to be careful with fibres. These fibres are contained. Then I catch myself wondering what kind of garment one could make from this material, that one could bear to wear. A heavy skirt perhaps. I can picture being wrapped in this dense prickly insulating shield. For an hour or two perhaps it would not be insufferable. Perhaps.
I know that there is an ideology that determines the course of this work. I know there is a brooding, a nationalism and an exclusivity. But the de-naturing of this material, this organic remnant, renders it general. What remains is the implicit presence of hundreds and hundreds of men, their tangible residue rendered down and processed, ranked and arrayed, stacked on its pallet, ordered by the machine. The installation simulates a stack of commodities ready for some Spartan, barrack-like environment: a trading post, a quartermaster’s store.
The artist further makes use of the context of the gallery to hammer home his point about commodification: the blankets are for sale in the Arnolfini shop. Paradoxically the narrative and ideology of the work is pervaded by a seductive tenderness, the ‘warmth’ of the blankets, and by a sense of brotherhood, of community. The iconographic referencing of the major European trauma of the 20th Century, the Holocaust, I needed to have pointed out to me before I saw it, and it still jars.
Sarah Jane Norman, Take This, For It Is My Body
photo Carl Newland
Sarah Jane Norman, Take This, For It Is My Body
sarah jane norman: take this, for it is my body
“THIS WORK DEALS WITH THE GENERATIONS OF ‘HALF-BLOOD’ ABORIGINAL CHILDREN, INCLUDING THE ARTIST’S OWN MOTHER, WHO WERE AFFECTED BY THE GOVERNMENT’S REGIME OF ‘ASSIMILATION’.” INBETWEEN TIME FESTIVAL PROGRAM.
There’s a woman in an old satin slip welcoming me into the Dark Studio. It’s the sort of thing you wear when you’re slopping about the house getting on with something that’s needed to be done for a while. A garment that used to be glamorous and is now comfortable—that you feel self-indulgent in however shabby it gets. She has bare feet. There is a wonderful smell of bread baking.
Before I came in here I had to sign a disclaimer: “Please be advised that the ingredients include the blood of the artist. Please understand that you are not obliged to eat or accept this offering. If you choose to do so this will be entirely at your own risk.”
It’s like a dare, isn’t it?
She greets me. We are on either side of a long table. There’s a small industrial oven behind us in the corner. There’s another table parallel to this one, a couple of floury baking trays on it, three or so loaves proving under a cloth. To the side against the wall is a table set for one with fine linen, plain crockery, a pat of butter and a butter knife and a napkin-covered basket. There’s an area on the floor with towels, a jug and a bucket of water, and there are black bags of supplies against another wall. It’s like a cottage production line, some kind of back-country industry the farmer’s wife fits in with her other duties. Stylistically there’s something about the combination of the efficient and the genteel that reminds me of the 50s.
Sarah Jane Norman, Take This, For It Is My Body
photo Carl Newland
Sarah Jane Norman, Take This, For It Is My Body
There’s a large mixing bowl on the table, a sieve, small bowls of ingredients and a plate covered by another napkin, all different shades of white. The woman sieves the flour into the bowl and adds two dessert-spoons of sugar. In answer to my question she names the ingredients: “this is baking soda,” “this is buttermilk.” She lifts the napkin to reveal another dessert spoon. It contains blood, scarlet, with a darker line of clotting sunk to the bottom. So, the colours, glowing under the lights, are: white and cream ingredients, solid old-fashioned silverware, white crockery, white melamine tabletop, white linen, the woman creamy human in her creamy slip, one splash of red in the matt black surroundings of the Dark Studio.
Sarah Jane Norman pours the blood into the buttermilk and stirs. That turns it a dense pink, like Angel Delight. She pours this into the flour and mixes. The pink persists as the mixture starts clumping, darker material from the clot streaking through the dough. Amazing that such a small amount of blood has such a strong effect. She turns out the dough, kneading it, shaping it, slashing a cross into the top. She takes it to the next table to sit and prove with the other loaves (which show that definite tinge of pink as if they were special party bread). She goes to wash her hands in the bucket over by the towels.
The oven pings—the loaf that was put there before I entered the room is ready. Norman places it to cool by the proving loaves.
She invites me to sit at the place laid for one. Lifting the napkin from the basket she uncovers a rough, warm loaf, no longer pink. She cuts me a good slice, making eye contact all the time. It’s crusty, slightly bitter—that could be the baking soda—a bit heavy. I help myself to butter. If I’d tried to eat a whole slice we’d have been there for ages.
Succinct, earthy, confrontational, full of confidence, giving. Personal, not industrial, locating the political in the heart of family and domestic life, where it can do the most damage. About survival, not victimhood. Two very contrasting approaches to discourse about ethnicity and the threat of genocide.
Inbetween Time Festival of Live Art and Intrigue, Zoran Todorovic, Warmth, Arnolfini, Dec 1-Feb 6; Sarah Jane Norman, Take This, For It Is My Body, Arnolifini Dark Studio, Dec 4; Dec 1-5, Bristol UK
Our coverage of the 2010 Inbetween Time Festival is a joint venture between RealTime and Inbetween Time Productions
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