Tim Walter, Andrea Demetriades, Glenn Hazeldine, Rebecca Massey, Perplex, Sydney Theatre Company
photo Lisa Tomasetti
Tim Walter, Andrea Demetriades, Glenn Hazeldine, Rebecca Massey, Perplex, Sydney Theatre Company
Step back from the comedy of German playwright Marius von Mayenburg’s Perplex and you see it for what it is: a nightmare of the age of identity theft. But it’s one where you don’t have to have your cards stolen or your phone or computer hacked. It just happens. And you have another identity foisted on you.
STC, Perplex
In Perplex you come home from a holiday to the friends who have been looking after your apartment, they treat you like intruders and force you out. There are subsequent displacements, increasingly bizarre: unwelcome new roles assumed, sins inherited, sudden adulteries and big ideas (in the shower a man comes up with the Theory of Evolution, only to be disabused of his too late discovery by his erstwhile wife). There’s a child who grows quickly into a Nazi; man-on-man sex (to the surprise of both parties) at a wild Viking dress-up party with a woman who has turned into a volcano.
And so it goes until the work’s larger mutation into a meta-theatrical and metaphysical confection when one character demands to know, “Who cast me?” The subsequent postmodern game playing (the director has abandoned the show and the set is pulled down around the actors) is a tad too familiar (“Are you doing a monologue? We said we wouldn’t do any more monologues”), although it has its moments, including the sudden appearance of a nutty (God is dead) Nietzsche at the window. He is inadvertently shoved and falls: “We have killed him!” one of the characters cries and the knowing audience laughs as the certainties—social, sexual, political, metaphysical and theatrical—of middle class life fall away.
Perplex is fun if not metaphysically particularly convincing or consistently funny. On opening night the performance was initially strained, over-emphatic instead of convincing us of the realism that would soon be ruptured. However, once underway performers Andrea Demetriades, Glenn Hazeldine, Rebecca Massey and Tim Walter excelled in their comic dexterity in Sarah Giles’ brisk, quick-witted production. Perplex doesn’t match the depth and reach of Marius von Mayenburg’s Fireface, Moving Target, The Ugly One and Eldorado, although the number of productions of Perplex across Europe suggest he’s hit a nerve with a work that evokes the instability of dreams and the terrors of erased and imposed identities. It’s good to have seen it here.
STC, Fight Night
ABC TV’s Q&A angers me. I can rarely sit through it. It’s raison d’etre, giving citizens the opportunity to have “your say” is a nonsense. Questions remain partly or not answered at all or are deflected to an inappropriate panellist by a mediator who cannot stop himself from repeating and interpreting the question and editorialising. Rarely is any argument sustained. Outrageously, in subsequent advertising Q&A exploited the recent onstage student protest it failed to respond to. Jones’ retort, before subsiding into bewildered silence on the night, was that old standby: “You’re not doing your cause any good.”
Fight Night (a collaboration between Adelaide’s The Border Project and Belgium’s Ontroerend Goed for the Adelaide Festival and STC) irritates me too, as soon as “your voice,” the audience’s, is invoked by another smug host (at least he’s being ironic, if tiresomely so). Shortly, he has us on the path to choosing a winner from a group of candidates in a protracted, shallow process that barely justifies itself by being thinly satirical and occasionally funny—or very funny for pockets of the audience. The ‘choices’ are all too quickly revealed not to be choices at all—the point being that we vote for mere appearances and with rapidly diminishing information with which to judge. What’s new?
It’s presumed our voting will tell us something about ourselves. We have in our hands iPod-like devices that record our votes, which will determine who leaves the contest, as in reality TV shows. When the show veers into the surreal or the obscene its potential is revealed, but even here choice is a joke—there are only obscenities to choose from. Cynical fun, but not revealing. Predictably the candidates manipulate each other and us, compromise, shift ground, change the rules and in a coup, depose our host, causing a revolt where we are asked to vote as one for a winner to be our leader or to leave the theatre. Some 20 of us do. The process is rigged. The show’s a fiction but we can’t conscionably stay. If the message is that we voted shallowly, well of course we did, the options were far too thin to provoke self-awareness, of any sense of our identity in a democracy.
The actors do a fine job, constantly adjusting to audience whims with a mix of scripted declarations and quick-witted improvisation, and the two vote-counters at computers keep the stats rolling. Certainly in their conservatism the audience on this night remained true to the sad state of our nation. As for the work’s title, the boxing ring set and capes worn by the five performers at the outset, the mike hanging from above and the bow-tied MC give limited life to the boxing match metaphor which was neither adequately sustained nor at all revelatory.
Parramatta Girls
A reunion of former inmates of the Parramatta Girls Home (1887-1973) provides a straightforward formula for recollection, denial, power play and revelation, simple and complex, in a new production at Riverside Theatre of Alana Valentine’s Parramatta Girls (2007). Despite passages of blunt exposition, awkward scene transitions and episodes of laboured dialogue the play delineates the lives of some intriguing individuals, victims of an antiquated and often physically and sexually abusive system of punishment—in some cases simply for being an Aboriginal child.
Long after their incarceration is over, the women are still haunted by its legacy—some ashamedly admit to hitting their own children, others recall nightmarish incidents—and by the ghost of the young Maree who died in custody. She is the link between the reunion and re-lived moments from the past. Other wounds are psychosomatic; Valentine uses the condition to suggest the potential for social and psychological healing. At the beginning of the play, Judi (Anni Byron) hides an elbow wound that hasn’t healed in decades—initially the result of endless floor scrubbing in the Girls Home. At the conclusion, after much denial in the face of accusations, she admits she had sexual relations with the institution’s director and thus enjoyed certain privileges. Now she finds her wound has healed; she can apologise to her fellow inmates and also acknowledge the existence of the ‘Dungeon’ and the institution’s other dark punishments she had refuted.
Other prisoners had first been wounded by their families, by class, race or psychological problems, their suffering cruelly exacerbated by incarceration and their sense of difference making for uncomfortable lives in prison—the middle class Lynette (Vanessa Dowling) sits to the side for much of the first of the two acts, sadly probing a life split-in-half. Valentine’s characters are sharply delineated if to varying degrees, each expressing pain, anger and joy vividly conveyed by Byron, Downing, Anni Finsterer, Sandy Gore, Sharni McDermott, Christine Anu, Tessa Rose and Holly Austin (as the ghost of Maree, who, pregnant to a guard was kicked in the stomach by him; she then suicided).
The horrors visited on these women (based in part on those Valentine met while researching for the play) were many: beatings, the removal from their mothers of babies born in prison and humiliations—Maree forced to wear a bedpan as punishment for bedwetting. More complex was the pain they inflicted on each other and the mutilations of their own bodies. Although the ending of Parramatta Girls is briefly upbeat, some of the women have pride in their subsequent achievements (including helping shut down the Home), some are still recovering, some forgiving, but the play makes it clear that to develop and sustain a sense of identity in such circumstances of constraint, humiliation and enduring self-doubt is a near impossible task: “We didn’t get out with our dignity intact,” says one. (For more on the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project see http://www.pffpmemoryproject.org/)
EMD (exposed to moral danger)
Projected onto the stage floor of Parramatta Girls, below designer Tobiyah Stone Feller’s evocation of the semi-ruined Girls Home, are the letters ILWA, standing for “I Love, Worship and Adore.” These affirmations addressed by the inmates to each other can be found carved into the walls and doors in the actual building, 20 minutes walk from the Riverside Theatres.
The site exhibition EMD (exposed to moral danger) evokes the lives of the inmates by means documentary and impressionist with video interview (Lily Hibberd speaking with former inmate and writer Christina Green), sound, painting, installation and sculpture throughout the building. Among works by Bonney Djuric the projected eyes of an abusive director of the institution greet you at the top of the stairs; opposite is a decaying room in which long paper dresses sway like ghosts; and further along two perspex screens conjure now disappeared ‘segregation rooms’—or solitary confinement cells. In a small room downstairs, in three Broken Spirit linocuts by Jeannie Gypsie Hayes, small ghosts dance behind bars and nearby Elizabeth Day’s I Love Worship and Adore fills a large room with the letters ILWA. She has worked outside casting ILWA writ large in plaster on hessian and brought the sculpture inside complete with earth and freshly growing grass. The work dramatically turns a small, ambiguous act of defiance into a memorial of growth and hope. Along with archival photographs, these works evoke something of the lives and identities lost to cruel institutionalisation.
Members of a social club dedicated to matters cosmological gather for a final meeting in which they keep their distance from each other, bicker over scientific ideas to do with the Big Bang and Singularity theories and execute an agenda of performance routines for their mutual entertainment—or, more likely, egotistic self-expression. Each has a guise—one is a ‘star,’ a Marilyn Monroe imitator (Valerie Berry) who precisely reproduces the scene from The Seven Year Itch (1955) in which the character’s dress is forced up by ventilation from the New York underground rail system. Another would-be star is the club’s dictatorial Chairman (Arky Michael) who is prone to breaking into impassioned song with a bad Italian accent. Another star of a kind is a pretend Astronaut (Phillip Mills), aglow in his bubble helmet, while the fourth member has cast herself as a sexy brunette Alien (Kym Vercoe) and, as such aptly unpredictable, begrudgingly performs dramatically with that staple of sci-fi movie music, a theremin. The final member presents herself as catwalk star—a fashion Model (Katia Molino) with very firm scientific ideas, an array of sparkling outfits and a bouquet of songs. A barman-cum-musician (Paul Prestipino) serves drinks and a soundtrack of quakes, cosmological soundscapes and live electric guitar and other accompaniments.
The design, like the members’ performances, is calculatedly ‘amateur,’ capturing the DIY naivety of the club—paper lanterns hang like planets about a high wall of golden glowing fairy lights—but hints at something more profound.
The Chairman speaks of his fascination with the heavens as a child, “I grabbed a star—it tasted so sweet.” Moments of whimsy and spacey dreaminess alternate with jokiness and home grown spectacle. As the astronaut gently swings a lamp, like a planet, around the head of an increasingly panicky Monroe (“160 heart beats per minute”), the Model’s gentle lyrics about loneliness reflect on “thinking of your private parts.” These are lonely people, the Chair longs for “another world to find love in,” the Astronaut seeks someone to “boost my rocket.” These desires escalate into a near orgasmic eruption of explosions and all-encompassing vibrations. Little micro-dramas play out as well. The Alien pops on an ET-type mask and dances erotically before the Astronaut but attraction-repulsion forces play out—drawing him repeatedly to and from Monroe; the Alien tears off her mask and weeps. Her ‘routine’ has not succeeded. The Model explains that Dark Matter is holding the cosmos together but that “repulsion is everywhere.”
The meeting progresses: a competition offers the winner an Armageddon survival suit or a bottle of tequila, the Model sings that “the Earth is round but the universe is flat” and hosts a quiz. The Alien gets all the answers wrong but defiantly defends String Theory and the right to speculate. She withdraws, weaving cats’ cradles before erupting into an immolating rant wreathed in smoke.
A huge quake preludes the meeting’s “last dance”—not that they take to the floor. Instead they lean into their little bar tables, hands circling the tops, then reaching up and out and vibrating into a near lift-off into space. In the following calm, comforting words are spoken about our lives as “sharing a common ancestor [carbon],” as “just a spark or an incident,” or “a prelude to a new adventure.” Slowly, the club members exit through the wall of light: “We have loved the stars too much to be afraid of them.”
We now know why this meeting has been announced as the club’s last. But this death wish provokes as many questions as it answers. Is their final act, like their other performances, just a routine, or simply metaphorical—they would if they could defeat their loneliness by merging with the stars. Not recommended for serious sci-fi fans but for those who enjoy contemplating the big questions at a safely whimsical distance it’s fun. If these humans can’t identify with each other they at least can with the stars. ClubSingularity is diverting, if not hilarious, structurally somewhat flat, if lifted by moments of enjoyably tacky spectacle and cartoony characterisations performed with verve by the cast. ClubSingularity is a reminder of how in everyday life—and not just in poetry and drama—we employ metaphor and analogy to help explain our lives, reducing big ideas to fit simple emotional needs, accruing a sense of identity—of oneness with oneself, possibly others and, yes please, the cosmos,
Sydney Theatre Company, Perplex, writer Marius von Mayenburg, director Sarah Giles, Wharf 1, STC, 20 March-13 April; STC, The Border Project and Ontroerend Goed, Fight Night, Wharf 2, 22 March-13 April; Riverside Productions, Parramatta Girls, writer Alana Valentine, director Tanya Goldberg, Parramatta Riverside, 3-17 May; Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project, EMD, curators Alana Valentine, Lily Hibberd, Michael K Chin, 12-18 May; Theatre Kantanka, ClubSingularity, director Carlos Gomes, lighting Mirabelle Wouters, presenters Performance Space, National Art School; Cell Block Theatre, Sydney, 21-24 May
Some themes are so universal that they approach redundancy. When the author of a work states that its intended subject is identity or the body or place or consciousness there’s a very real risk of tautology, because there are so few works that don’t address every one of those broad notions in some sense. Navigating your way to the bathroom in the middle of the night does too. Doing something interesting with such grand notions is obviously a grand challenge itself, but sometimes the most effective method of painting big pictures is with a very fine brush.
Kate Hunter, Memorandum
Kate Hunter’s Memorandum concerns itself with one of the hoariest of topics, at least since mid-90s academia wrung every last drop from its cadaver. ‘Memory’ is the face that launched a thousand theses, perhaps second only to ‘desire’ in the empty signifier stakes, and there have been oceans of ink sacrificed by students justifying how (insert favourite text) is an exploration of memory’s vicissitudes. Proust did that, but someone has probably made a decent argument that Seinfeld did as well.
Hunter’s own performance history is one rich with promise. She’s a regular with physical theatre ensemble Born in a Taxi, has trained with Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki’s SITI and her solo outings over various Melbourne Fringes have been engaging and well-received. She has a keen sense of the theatre as an embodied space and there’s a liveness to each of her performances that is likely a result of her work in improvised contexts.
But there’s a distinction between a work about memory and a work about a bunch of stuff that the artist remembers. Where once there was frequent lament over cultural amnesia, it now seems as if most lives are worthy of a memoir and any gaps in historical consciousness can simply be spackled over with the grey paste of a few childhood recollections.
Hunter’s narrative doesn’t rise above the memoir mode, but does trouble it in a way that ultimately bears fruit. Amid billowing clouds of smoke or overlaid with projected mirror images of her own form, or bouncing between layers of live and pre-recorded audio, she begins to lay out a narrative that commences in her own childhood but quickly dissolves into false memory, blatant fiction, recollection rendered in the second person, dream, speculation and commentary.
She names names, too: those of the youthful classmate who flashed his penis or the kid whose obvious poverty was made a laughing point, or the one who was chased down the street by a father brandishing a woodsplitter and threatening murder. Her adult self abruptly rounds a corner to face a man administering euthanasia with an axe head to a cow that has tumbled from a cliff. She has that awkward nocturnal encounter you have with a parent you’ve already buried in the ground and who is now asking for an explanation as to what the hell that was all about.
Perhaps the reason artists so often return to memory as a subject is that it is a thing of such stupid artifice. How dare we think that time can be arrested! The ego of it, the unfettered individualism, to think that those things we’ve lived through can be removed from the passage of natural decay and preserved by some private magic. From the inside, the memory of one person is close to all that there is of this world. Viewed from space, or even from the vantage point of a theatre seat in comfortable darkness—same thing, really— the same memory is as inconsequential as a breath.
But there’s not much life without breath. Hunter’s performance might not reveal a great deal about ‘memory’ and there’s an irony in the way that works about memory are themselves rarely memorable. But her words have that trained liveness, complemented by Richard Vabre’s sterling and deeply responsive lighting design, to allow each recollection a moment’s return. Hunter’s memories aren’t our own, and often may not even be hers, but rather than validating ‘memory’ there’s the possibility here that she’s paying respect to the dull and tiny inevitable death of everyone. Hunter doesn’t attempt to glorify her own recalled moments but treats them as subjects of curiosity, humour and sport.
Death at Intervals
photo Anna Malin
Death at Intervals
Colleen Burke, Death at Intervals
Death: that’s another one of those big and tiny subjects. Colleen Burke’s Death at Intervals balances its major and minor chords in unexpected ways. Liberally adapted from Jose Saramago’s As Intermitências da Morte, this puppetry work’s narrative delivers an unnamed nation in which death has inexplicably ceased—murders, accidents and even plane crashes leave their mutilated results still counted among the living, though not without resultant agony.
A lot depends on death, it turns out. Puncture the cycle and religion, politics, the economy and much more will suffer. Death at Intervals is less about the metaphysical implications of its premise and more about the socio-economic. At first we have only the moaning of funeral directors to put up with, but in time the wheezing almost-dead build up enough presence to force any audience member to wonder what would happen should cessation really cease. The zombie narrative is omnipresent today, but cauterise it of its violence and things actually get far more unsettling.
Burke’s adaptation bears obvious resonance with today’s Australia; the rising tide of the not-dead is used by a Prime Minister to justify a cruel and demanding new budget, while the fact that the bizarre situation is restricted to one nation establishes a xenophobic obsession with borders that is all too familiar.
Burke and fellow veteran puppeteer Frank Italiano incarnate a range of puppet styles in full audience view, themselves occasionally performing alongside, or instead of, their tiny charges. A character may be embodied by a long and lovingly detailed carving, or by the expert manipulation of little more than a hat. Some of the success here is due to director Rod Primrose of Handspan and Black Hole Theatre. Primrose’s eye for visual nuance and the changing character of the lit puppet are in full effect, but Burke’s puppet designs and performance are the most notable stars.
When Death returns, she is a wonder. A silver-grey skull atop a twisted spine and skeletal hand, she is a puppet of rare ingenuity, straddling the mimetic and abstract, functional and ornate. She happens upon a cellist and becomes variously fascinated and repulsed by him, and the strange conclusion, in which death attains a kind of love, is as mysterious and ephemeral as the exhalation that accompanies its final image. A sigh, a gasp, a death rattle? But this is not a work that looks to answer questions big or small, and is all the more satisfying for it.
Memorandum, creation, audio design, performance, Kate Hunter, Theatre Works, 20 May-1 June; Death at Intervals, creation Colleen Burke, performers Colleen Burke, Frank Italiano, director Dave Evans, La Mama Courthouse, Melbourne, May 14-25
“Meet you at the Judy” is part of the vernacular of performance-making in Brisbane, a refrain heard as artists and audiences rendezvous at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts on 420 Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley. The four-storey (plus Bell-Tower studio) heritage building is an old biscuit factory, converted in the halcyon era of cultural infrastructure investment in Queensland in the late 90s.
The thing about the Judy is that it sits in the sweetest spot in the arterial that is the edgy live music and entertainment precinct of Fortitude Valley: the young, the hip and the crazy all walk by seeking kebabs and the pleasures of the night. Like the Powerhouse before it, the Judy has taken a good decade to cement itself into an owned public space, despite such an incredible location and the fact that the building is home to our flagship circus and dance companies: Circa and Expressions Dance Company. But in some mysterious alchemy that seems part good programming and part natural justice, the Judy is well and truly open for business, jammed with gossiping patrons and artists wandering upstairs to use its two intimate studios: the Theatre rehearsal space and the Music rehearsal space.
This change is not only because of the post-industrial elegance of the Judy as a public space, but also a push from the Judy management to invest in ways to open up the space. The Judy was the first to trial licensed cabaret seating. They refurbished the Shopfront venue, formerly an intractable space with concrete floors and intriguing open windows, laying down wooden floors and improving the facilities to make it a functional space for contemporary dance and physical theatre, as well as installation. Consequently, the 300-seat theatre—the Performance Space—and the Shopfront are the most responsive and versatile spaces for experimentation with non-traditional audience reception in the city. Both are regularly transformed into new configurations that surprise, delight and perplex audiences. The Danger Ensemble’s Sons of Sin in an empty Performance Space with a five-storey scaffold is a personal highlight for me (RT 116, p39).
I spoke with Programming Manager, Lewis Jones, a canny and longstanding Brisbane theatre director about the upcoming Judy program and I’m excited to say we have a scoop about a change to their Residency program: Fresh Ground. Fresh Ground has a proud history of supporting local performance-makers, circus and contemporary dance. This ranges from high profile independents such as the Danger Ensemble, the circus collective Casus and contemporary dance company Lisa Wilson Projects. The current Fresh Ground slate includes circus royalty Chelsea McGuffin’s Company 2; Head Office (a Brisbane theatre supergroup with members of The Escapists, The Brides of Frank and Polytoxic); Phluxos2 with choreographers of the moment Neridah Matthaei and Leisel Zink; and energetic, post-gothic contemporary dance-makers Prying Eye.
Traditionally, the Judy’s overall public program is a blend of contemporary music, circus, contemporary dance and theatre, with a strong emphasis on bringing in high-calibre works from interstate and overseas. Historically, there has been a strong correlation between the programming at the Powerhouse and at the Judy and a great deal of the program resource was spent on bringing in shows from outside of Brisbane.
With the currents of Brisbane theatre shifting and a cast of new faces (Artistic Director Kris Stewart at the Powerhouse, incoming Artistic Director Chris Kohn at La Boite), the Judy is responding to the new landscape with an emphasis on local work. Jones wants to make Fresh Ground a platform that supports and “validates” local artists to develop and produce new work at the Judy and to move it on for sustainable touring. This bodes well for a local industry hungry to connect to venues and to find a stable platform to develop new work. On a personal note, I have always found the very short seasons of work at the Judy difficult. Shows are often over before you find them. Perhaps this new approach will settle this restlessness into a more distinctive Judy house style.
The curatorial change is clearest in the upcoming program in the second half of 2014 with new shows from Fresh Grounders old and new: Caligula by the Danger Ensemble, White Porcelain Doll by Prying Eye and Casus’ new work Finding the Silence as well as the perennial Women in Voice. I think the future for the Judy is best summed up by Lewis Jones himself when he says that the mantra at the Judy is “to try and always say, ‘Yes.’”
Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane
Depending on which study you read, social media networking may or may not have an improving effect on the mental health of adolescents. Outside of the academy we hear a lot about the web’s risks for young people—cyber bullying, sexual predation, ‘Facebook depression,’ exposure to inappropriate advertising and content—and not much about why so many young people are drawn to it in the first place.
Jesikah, the titular (anti-)heroine of Phillip Kavanagh’s play, performed in this production with persuasively youthful élan by Kate Cheel, is a digital native, a permanently restless member of the iGeneration. Like many of her peers, she has probably already deserted Facebook for mobile messaging apps like Snapchat, which at least she knows her mum (Elizabeth Hay) won’t have figured out how to use yet.
But most of Jesikah’s engagement with social media revolves around the uploading of videos in which, unimpeded by notions of privacy or propriety, she sounds off about her teachers, her friends, her hobbies and, most of all, her endlessly shifting template for personal fame: rock star, actor, whiskey-soaked writer. Online users with names like DemonToaster and OpenSeeSaw variously applaud and troll Jesikah’s posts, her sense of self-worth suspended like a Damoclean Sword between the two extremes.
Her real-world BFF is the seemingly squeaky-clean Denise (also Hay), whose relationship with Jesikah’s internal world—riddled with anxiety and fear of rejection and failure—remains murkily ambiguous throughout. Olivia Zanchetta’s design unobtrusively supports the idea that Jesikah’s headspace is insistently inner-directed, the teenager standing out in punkish red and black while Denise, Jesikah’s mum and her drama teacher Miss H (Hay again) blend into the set’s pinkish-grey wash.
Kavanagh’s script is busy and the dialogue noisy in just the right ways, effervescent with teenage buzzwords and alert to the heightened dynamics and emotional stakes of close high school friendships. The play’s pivot points—heavily accentuated by director Nescha Jelk through an almost dizzying telescoping of the action of the final, increasingly shorter scenes—lie in what in Jesikah’s head are betrayals of her friendship and the passing over of her talents. Fixated like Narcissus on her own (social media) reflection, Jesikah resorts to self-harm as her personality begins to break down, the play taking an altogether darker turn. Her ever more desperate attempts to attract online hits have both a comic and tragic dimension.
But what exactly is Jesikah’s problem? An undistinguished teenager has transformed into an enfant terrible by the play’s end, a trajectory with powerful dramatic motion but that leaves too little explicated. I wanted a clearer sense of the source of anguish in Jesikah’s life, to know how much Kavanagh thinks social media has to answer for in terms of its hold on still-developing minds, and how much of Jesikah’s profound disquiet stems, by contrast, from elsewhere. Given social networking’s relative infancy, the jury remains out on many aspects of its cognitive impact but I can’t help but feel an opportunity may have been missed with Jesikah, rewarding though it is, to mount a stronger case either way.
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State Theatre Company of South Australia, Jesikah, writer Phillip Kavanagh, director Nescha Jelk, performers Kate Cheel, Elizabeth Hay, designer Olivia Zanchetta, lighting Ben Flett, sound Will Spartalis; Hopgood Theatre, Noarlunga, 9 May; Space Theatre, Adelaide 27-31 May
A decade after Greek composer Iannis Xenakis’ death, the rarely performed Pléïades remains uneclipsed in its ability to take audiences on a complex, imaginative journey. In Carriageworks’ Bay 19, Synergy reprised their 2011 performance, pairing it the following evening with Beauty will be amnesiac or not at all, a new work by Australian composer Anthony Pateras. Publicised as a ‘competition,’ Xenakis v Pateras, Synergy framed their consecutive-night shows as an attempt to settle who deserves the appellation of ‘world’s greatest composer for percussion.’
Pléïades
A four-movement composition for six percussionists, Pléïades delivers a galaxy of sound, at once tribal, elemental and kaleidoscopic, as showers of tonal colours ricochet between performers. Xenakis leaves movement sequencing open to performers’ interpretation. Synergy chose the order of metal, keyboards, skins and then the mixture, a choice less notorious than Les Percussions de Strasbourg’s decision at the 1979 premiere to play the piece during a ballet, interspersed with Giovanni Gabrieli’s Renaissance polyphony—at once combining Modernism, moving bodies and history in a constellation of artistic stardom. Synergy’s performance echos that original’s innovation, shaping history by incorporating the moving bodies of the audience into the event.
Six podiums formed a rough ring of about seven metres radius. Each platform overflowed with drums, marimbas, vibraphones and sixxens: microtonal metalophones commissioned in 2011 for the piece. The audience mingled and burbled in the darkened space between platforms and a mixing HQ like a Kugelhopf cake baking. Co-director and choreographer Zsuzsanna Soboslay worked with Synergy to design the simple performance space that melded Synergy’s high art technicalities with hipster lounge-room casualness. She helped Synergy find ways to express the music beyond the formal constraints of its composition and the demands of interpretation. And Synergy made it look easy.
Xenakis is famed for his approaches to form, texture and timbre. “Every single note is precisely calculated and notated, leaving little room for interpretation,” Synergy’s artistic director Timothy Constable said when I spoke with him after the concert. “It’s musically complete. There’s a mythological aspect but the music is fiercely abstract.”
Métaux (Metal) showed off Synergy’s sixxens, which clang, jar and beat in your ears if you’re in close proximity. Patterns emerged from seeming disorder; moments of clarity flickered, always briefly. Clavier (keyboards) featured ascending scalic passages and a notorious double-page spread in which the musicians each played 1,000 notes in hair-raising unison. In other parts they came together and split away, phase-beats in an intricate Mandelbrotian overlay.
Balinese associations often arise in relation to the keyboard movement. Xenakis toured Bali in 1972 with Toru Takemitsu and others, but the scale employed in the section is not, to Constable’s mind, lifted from our neighbours, but rather assumes similar interval relationships. “Xenakis uses an infinite mode that might never come back to zero,” Constable said, “but each octave is different. It can make really melodic cells and chaos. If he’d written ‘in a scale’ or ‘regular mode’ it wouldn’t have that dynamism or range of effects.”
Peaux (Skins) had flashes of mind-boggling synchronicity. Thuds on bass drums were reminiscent of a Law and Order scene-change, punctuating energetic passages. In Mélanges (Mix), the final movement, six other percussionists—Claire Edwardes, Eugene Ughetti, Louise Devenish, Rebecca Lagos, Leah Scholes and Yvonne Lam—ascended the podiums to take some heat off core Synergy members’ mallets for an all-in finale.
Synergy Percussion, Xenakis v Pateras,
photo Michael K Chin
Synergy Percussion, Xenakis v Pateras,
Beauty will be amnesiac or will not be at all
As part of their 40-year celebrations, Synergy commissioned Anthony Pateras to deploy the same instrumentation as in Pléïades. Its title comes from Sylvère Lotringer’s “The Dance Of Signs,” a neo-Marxist semiotic enquiry published in the Hatred of Capitalism anthology (Semiotext(e), 2002). But listening to the music itself, few references to its philosophical underpinnings were obvious.
The composer was present to diffuse electronic sounds and witness the execution of his invention, partially derived and edited from electro-acoustic improvisations with Jérôme Noetinger. Watching Pateras trigger sound cues while he sat amid the world he had created was telling. When he swayed, grimaced, mellowed and absorbed the manifestation of his creation, it looked like he couldn’t savour the moment enough.
On this second evening we, the rising bundt cake, were microwaved between loudspeakers as each podium radiated layers of six-channel electronic sounds through us. Meanwhile the acoustic score utilised woodblocks, crotales, keyboard percussion and drums. Polyrhythms emerged from fervent repetition, periodicity, duplication, recurrence and imperfect copying. Aeroplane sounds, repetitive metallic jitters, hissings, and whooshings proliferated—some plain to hear, others evasively encoded. Sometimes the electronics greased the pan and other times skewered us. It was a physical experience, either way, just as we were warned in a pre-concert announcement about the work’s aggressive dynamic range.
Synergy performers Timothy Constable, Joshua Hill, Bree van Reyk, William Jackson, Mark Robinson and Leah Scholes, a slightly different group from the first night, again encircled the audience. Some seats were provided on the periphery outside the ring, but most people stood or meandered. I noticed that the volume of sound appeared to increase as I moved—not only when shifting closer to sound sources, but even when I spun slowly on the spot. What an amazing discovery that could propel future audience etiquette from mere static reception into soma-sonic investigation!
Constable explained, “I could sense some key flocking motion. During the Xenakis I noticed people were forming into lovely constellations. A perfect semicircle formed facing me, bringing me into heavy duty focus. Here we go! It was quite serene when I realised everyone was there with me.” He confessed, “The social aspect for the audience was just a byproduct. If we’d sold out completely it would have been more of a mosh-pit. It was a gourmet experience then, with room to bust out handstands… I wanted someone to start running around screaming because that’s exactly what I was doing inside during fiendishly difficult passages.”
Like Xenakis, Pateras makes music using systems and models from other disciplines like mathematics. “Anthony doesn’t use musical notation software or anything, so he didn’t have a way to play back his composition and hadn’t heard it until he attended our rehearsals. There’s a 400-500 page long spreadsheet with all the permutations of every magic square in graphs that someone has copied into musical notation.”
Antony Pateras is a philosopher whose axiomatic medium is sound. Obsessed with autonomy, the new, independence and difference, he strives to challenge notions of what music is and can be. Durational play in Beauty… created something which worked not only with spatial metaphors such as -scape and the distances between entities, but also temporal relations. Pateras authors an aesthetic, but does not act like a composer (a trait that he sees as faulty transmission). “Refining an aesthetic can so easily become trapping and killing an aesthetic,” he said. “Names are for tombstones!” He suggests we “stay slippery” so our inquiries don’t become industrialised. Could this be a way to sabotage winning the contest for sovereign percussion lord?
“Seeking fearlessness in form.” “Creative Ethics.” “A relationship with time driven by materials.” These are Pateras mantras that I find beautifully challenging. In a world where everything is recordable, recorded and re-recorded, Pateras asks, “Are we too haunted to invent anything?” His interest in omnipresence of information and its ability to dull desires, fuels his attempts to produce “difficult or almost impossible [works] to imitate.”
Special effects
It was informative to experience this staging dynamic two nights running. At Pléïades it felt awkward, like walking through a long train tunnel in a big city, being unsure whether to smile at strangers or power on, head down. The type of crowd that attends challenging modernist percussion ensemble works is niche enough that familiar faces emerge. Would it be rude to ignore someone you know? This social tension added another layer of engagement. When this dimension quickened my heart rate, my awareness of the music changed: it heightened all my senses. I wanted to dance and move, but didn’t want to distract or divert attention from the musicians or the music. What a dilemma! To live or to let live?
“We’re not dancers. We’re not actors. We’re keenly aware of that. But some works get us thinking and feeling in a certain way.” A stickler for form’s immanent virtues, Timothy Constable revealed, “I have the sense that the more accurately we play these works over the coming years, they will reveal themselves in more beautiful depth. The devil really is in the details.”
Synergy Percussion, Xenakis v Pateras: Pléïades, composer Iannis Xenakis, performers Ian Cleworth, Timothy Constable, Joshua Hill, William Jackson, Mark Robinson, Bree van Reyk, co-director Zsuzsanna Soboslay, Bay 19 Carriageworks, 22 April; Beauty will be amnesiac or will not be at all, composer Anthony Pateras, performers Leah Scholes, Mark Robinson, Joshua Hill, William Jackson, Bree van Reyk, Timothy Constable, sound Byron Scullin, Bay 19 Carriageworks, Sydney, 23 April
RealTime issue #121 June-July 2014 pg. 46
James Nightingale, Voyage Through Radiant Stars, Aurora New Music Festival
courtesy Aurora New Music Festival
James Nightingale, Voyage Through Radiant Stars, Aurora New Music Festival
The first half of the opening night of the 2014 Aurora New Music Festival in Sydney’s west sparkled with variety and invention while the second half introduced us to a major new work, Brian Howard’s Voyage Through Radiant Stars, which shone obsessively with cosmic aspirations.
The immediately engaging concert opener was Marcus Lindberg’s Ablauf (1983/88; Finland) featuring clarinettist Jason Noble in rapid vertiginous flights from raw depths to lucid heights while positioned between the emphatically slow-paced boom of two bass drums (Claire Edwardes, James Townsend). In the end, after a moment of silence there emerged sibilants, sharp consonants, soft drum beats, like distant thunder, final flourishes and a single full-breathed exhalation from Noble.
Ekrem MuLayim’s Sonolith (2014, Australia) is an aural and visual response to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for piano (Roland Peelman) and projections (MuLayim, Mic Gruchy): “certain pitches are ascribed to certain letters, certain chords to certain words and certain melodic phrases to key words or word groups” (composer’s program note). On three long screens, the words appear in various patternings almost simultaneously with the notes, as if the pianist is typing them (an impression reinforced by recurrent dings, piano slaps and cries). The outcome is a flexible minimalism now and then powered by a fluent, assertive stride (from 20s American jazz pianism) or disintegrating into near discordancies.
The inclination of composer and pianist (who is given room to freely interpret) is not seemingly programmatic although Clause 5 on Torture is stressfully fast and high pitched, Clause 7 on Discrimination threatens to break up, 11’s Presumption of Innocence strides proudly and in 14, on Asylum, the loud pedal is held firm on deep notes beneath those rushing on above, as if hope is disintegrating. Associations are fleeting but inevitable in an ambitious and audio-visually potent work (convincingly played by Peelman) although the composer’s commitment to illuminating all the clauses of the charter with a limited sound palette and a lot of reading proved a tad taxing in the long run.
Claire Edwardes, Aurora New Music Festival
photo courtesy Aurora
Claire Edwardes, Aurora New Music Festival
Iannis Xenakis’ Rebonds A/B (1987-89, France) is a work for percussion in two resonating movements. The first, A, has a dance-like compulsiveness, its deep beat soon overlaid with a multitude of improvisation-like, increasingly rapid-fire flourishes until it finally slows to a hesitant if emphatic halt. B feels less complex with its open pattern on drums and then on woodblocks; then it’s back to the drums at a steady pace but with some fast counterpointing. Pause. The woodblocks chirrup and are joined by the drums in a race to the finish. Both movements are finely articulated, played as ever with Edwardes’ capacity for finesse and passion—Xenakis’ music might be conceived in part algorithmically but she makes its beauty self-evident.
Sydney composer Alex Pozniak paired virtuosic dijeridu players Mark Atkins and Gumaroy Newman in his new work Blow by Blow, focusing on the drone potency of the rich sonic textures offered by these traditional instruments. Alongside the anticipated sounds of animal and bird cries, cars and aeroplanes, soft sssh-ings and Atkins’ vocals we hear strikingly high, long sustained horn-like notes, pulsating deep beats and surprising (and recurrent) glissandi. Each player handles three instruments, swapping from one to another, introducing new layers of sound at once familiar and strange—as if not coming from dijeridus at all. At the end the players slip into improvisation, merging with the distant offstage strings of two members of the Noise Quartet.
Brian Howard’s Voyage Through Radiant Stars (2013, an Aurora Festival commission) with its constant ascending flights felt more often cyclical than linear, each star (one per movement within its “radiant constellation”) evoked as if like any other—save in degrees of luminous intensity or aural mood, including passion or awe as brass and percussion repeatedly and thunderously grounded the work with an emphatic motif often at the beginning of movements and then later in each. Against this deep tremulousness, as if in flight from it (or like lines of radiating light), is the saxophone (James Nightingale), variously solo, placed within the 18-strong ensemble or before it as in a concerto—which the overall work is not, at least not conventionally.
The compositional motifs in the sax solos and ‘concerto’ movements evoke the traveller more than they do the stars. There’s a greater freedom than felt in the gravitational pull of the brass. Indeed there are movements when the saxophone seems to draw the ensemble up with it—the drumming accelerates, oboe, clarinet and brass scale upward, the strings echoing the saxophone’s ascending dance.
Howard and Nightingale exploit much of the saxophone’s range—pure, whistling, staccato-voiced, jazzy, guttural and striving and soaring to ever increasing heights before commencing its flight yet again, but with little suggestion of fall or defeat despite the ensemble rumblings beneath. It is the characterful saxophone, in a work of some 60 minutes, that keeps Voyage Through Radiant Stars luminous, in a journey in which the saxophone is itself a star or, elsewhere, part of one or even absent, just listening, when one star is solely represented by a sinuous string quartet. This is an epic work, needing firmer acquaintance and perhaps greater concision, but on first hearing superbly realised by James Nightingale, conductor Daryl Pratt and the Sydney Conservatorium Modern Music Ensemble.
The Aurora New Music Festival’s opening night proved to be memorable, programmed with fascinating new Australian works that innovated with text and piano, the dijeridu and the relationship between saxophone and ensemble. The long first half of the concert did put Voyage Through Radiant Stars at risk; my attention certainly wavered, partly because the work’s patterning became hypnotic however varied it was in the detail. If deserving a stand-alone outing, its premiere performance was nonetheless welcome and highly significant. Thank you, Aurora.
Aurora New Music Festival 2014, Opening Night, Aurora Artistic Director James Eccles, Riverside Theatre, Parramatta, 30 April
What’s more courageous: doing something wild where anything is permitted, or doing something vaguely contrary where conventions are still strictly adhered to? If scope and scale matter, then choristers are some of the most dauntless folk out there. As part of this year’s Aurora Festival, participants from the community joined in Aurora Chorealis, a day-long program of workshops and performances, with guidance from Song Company, Scandinavian calling expert Christine Strandli and vocal coach Rachelle Elliott at the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre in Penrith.
These Western Sydney singers put on one hell of a show at the evening concert. But the program was far too long. Much of the repertoire explored diversity and obscurity with a little too much vigour. The exceptional Song Company held our interest with two sets. First their signature repertoire including 13th century chant and a Cantiga from the wise old Alfonso captivated, followed by spectacular contemporary songs of Elena Kats-Chernin and Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen.
After a trip to Estonia with Kooskōlas, a local community choir about to embark on an international tour to sing at the UNESCO Heritage-listed Estonian Song Festival, Song Company returned with a light set of popular song from more recent centuries including an arrangement of Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love” made famous again in 2011 by starlet Birdy. Other recondite diversions came from Sonya Holowell who delivered a committed and expressive performance of Gyorgy Kurtag’s Jozsef Attila Fragments. This confronting modernism, starkly lit and traversing more octaves and emotional vignettes than Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst’s side-show, was followed by Strandli’s rendition of four Sami songs. These Norwegian ditties had subtly shifting tonal centres and were based on non-rhyming poetry without definite structures.
As is often the case at community choral events (this has been my experience as a chorister) there are seldom more in the crowd than on stage. It was a great idea of the festival to reach out to the public by making Aurora Chorealis inclusive, open to anyone to participate, regardless of previous singing experience.
Aurora New Music Festival commissioned two new works for this event’s massed choir. The first, Cooee Karjapasun by Paul Kadak, explored sonic calls common in Australia and Estonia. A cooee might be vocally sounded in the bush to echo-locate or signal to a companion, and a Karjapasun is a type of herding trumpet, nearly two metres long. Folk stories tell us that these instruments are not allowed to touch little boys who instead should play trumpets and horns, and that’s about the only fact available online about them. Needless to say, the Karjapasun entered this aural landscape in foghorny tones. The second premiere, Aurora by Paul Jarman, was sung twice by the massed choir as both finale and encore. Performers had learnt Jarman’s piece from scratch on the day under Roland Peelman’s animated direction. With whispering, stomping and clapping this was the show-stopper.
Unusual repertory. Daring non-uniformity in performance attire. Risqué back-row bop-alongers. Aurora Chorealis showcased the everyday gallantry of the community choir.
Aurora Festival & The Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre: Aurora Chorealis, Song Company, director Roland Peelman; Sonya Holowell; Kooskōlas, director Rachelle Elliott; Penrith Conservatorium Singers; Christine Strandli; massed choir Aurora Chorealis, Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, Penrith, NSW, 3 May
Written on the body, University of Queensland Anthropology Museum
photo Carl Warner
Written on the body, University of Queensland Anthropology Museum
Two exceptional exhibitions at the University of Queensland Anthropology Museum both involve relations between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their artefacts and the artefacts associated with European Australia—mobile phones, kitchen tools, hunting tools, potato mashers, shields. Visit and visit again.
Gapuwiyak Calling is a fascinating presentation of Yolngu people (mainly Gapuwiyak community, Arnhem Land) talking about and showing how they’ve used mobile phones as media devices since 3G arrived there in 2008. The standout for me is where the Yolngu have taken ringtones, ditched the defaults, and made them their own as a signal of place and family relations.
“This is a song by my mother-in-law’s brother, especially beautiful as it is a clan funeral song,” says a woman speaking of her ringtone as a moment for deep feeling and sorrow. A young man listens to his favourite band “all the time to feel good,” another to the call of the Green Frog, another to a clan song from a circumcision ceremony, yet another to a ceremony with her father singing. He’s been dead 12 years, she misses him—the ringtone reminds her of him and fills her with sadness.
The oft expressed use of ringtones as triggers for sadness, concern and worry about family is perhaps the most surprising aspect of the show. Contrast with mainstream (Anglo/Euro) culture, where sorrow and worry are emotions to avoid, quasi-taboo, indications of failure in emotional control. For the Yolngu in this exhibition sorrow and worry about family are embraced directly and honestly.
Similarly for the old-style home-movie directness of the short phone videos of kids dancing, the grandpa and grandson going out fishing in the tinny, man and boy using in-camera edits to make a little magic show to send to friends and family. This relatively direct expression of lived experience is now almost impossible to achieve in places where mainstream media dominates the flow of information with non-local imagery and a hubris that can even stake a claim to reality as a genre.
Written on the body, University of Queensland Anthropology Museum
photo Carl Warner
Written on the body, University of Queensland Anthropology Museum
The other exhibition entitled Written on the body, is a collaborative work from artist Judy Watson and the Director of the UQ Anthropology Museum, Diana Young. It is an astonishingly layered, gentle, subtle and visually sophisticated exhibition combining Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander material culture with well used household kitchenware of the modern suburban era—the toolkits of everyday life spanning the last hundred years or more. Objects are beautifully arranged in small groupings on the wall, on plinths, in “museum quality” cabinets, or on a glass shelf, casting shadows below and along the gallery wall.
Relations within the groupings might be visual (a cylindrical grater next to a club garnished with old hand-forged nails), functional (a clear glass tumbler and a bailer shell) or both visual and functional—pink silicon ice cube tray next to a flat tray-like rock, both having hemispherical depressions for holding whatever the person wants held.
Collected in the early part of the 20th century, almost all the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander objects were stripped of their particulars and written on during the collection process. While the show has an underlying critique of this colonial naming and claiming, stripping objects of their social relations not only dehumanises them, but also transforms the objects into signifiers of universal embodiment and through this universality colonial practice speaks against itself.
We see two shields and an aluminium teapot clumped together on the wall—they have handles: the handles are the same in size, the same in shape, the same in ‘graspability.’ A potato masher is placed next to a smooth, graspable rock, both are objects through which the body acts upon the world to pound and soften starchy foods. Such is the underlying humanity of the show, that all bodies across all time are the same body with the same functionality. Stripped of their particulars, of the relation between maker, owner and user, the objects end up not as ‘your’ object but as ‘our’ object, part of the common human heritage of building a toolkit that is fit for purpose, part of the transformation of the world into graspable, scrapable, heftable tools. Needs and goals acting into the world through a world made into tools. By us. For us. Always and everywhere.
Gapuwiyak Calling, curator Miyarrka Media in association with the UQ Anthropology Museum; Written on the body, curators Judy Watson, Diana Young; University of Queensland Anthropology Museum, Brisbane, 15 March-15 Aug
My favourite work in Dark Heart, the Adelaide Biennial, was by Ian Burns—a fantastically large, ramshackle wooden construction, which through seemingly primitive analogue magic, projects images and texts while playing little ditties to itself. Thus, a few weeks later I was very happy to discover that the assorted materials that had been piling up in the UTS Gallery had transformed into an Ian Burns solo exhibition, Too Much is Real.
The pieces in Too Much is Real use similar methodologies to the Dark Heart sculpture but are displayed as smaller, single units. One construction, Blender (2014), presents just that—a domestic blender that sporadically activates, along with a keyboard that plays fragments from the Sex Pistols’ “Pretty Vacant” and ABBA’s “SOS.” A signature technique of Burns is the use of magnifying glasses and light bulbs to project squiggly lines and texts; here he alternates between lyrical fragments from both songs—but timed with the alternated tune. It’s a kind of analogue mash-up. (The exhibition title is also taken from the same Sex Pistols’ anthem.)
Another assemblage, Martha’s Shadow (2010), is an earlier work that uses old household lamps and magnifying glasses to create a static light projection illustrating the primitive outline of a ship—a homage to the one that ran aground while discovering Lake Macquarie, the area from which Burns hails. The third assemblage, Strange Cloud Above (2012), offers a fine example of Burns’ trompe l’oeil technique. A monitor on the front of the assemblage shows a simple landscape scene with drifting clouds, but as you move to the back you see that the image is being created in real time from analogue materials—a strip of carpet, a fan and light refracted through a dimpled salad bowl. The combination of process and product in these assemblages makes them enclosed systems, self-contained micro-universes that are conceptually satisfying yet imbued with poetic ambiguity.
The final work is Breath (AC) (2014), a video which depicts a monstrous corridor at Bunnings hardware store with a single fluorescent light gently swaying in the breeze of the air conditioning. While markedly different from the other assemblages it deftly summarises Burns’ preoccupations with light, simple actions, the found object or experience and a DIY ethic.
Ian Burns, Extended Stage (2014)
photo Alex Davies
Ian Burns, Extended Stage (2014)
But there is even more to the Burns experience. Delayed by red tape, Extended Stage, a site-specific installation in the rail tunnel behind UTS Gallery, was finally mounted just after the gallery instalment was over. Running down either side of the dark tunnel are four pairs of antique china cabinets. Those on the left contain medium-sized electric pianos which activate in sequence, playing single notes like slowed down Morse Code, amplified by large gramophone horns mounted on top. The cabinets on the right become tiny stages for a series of what Burns calls phenomenological actions: a vacuum cleaner on reverse suspends ping pong balls in the air; a cabinet begins to gush with water; another manifests puffs of smoke; the fourth quietly and patiently freezes. The elemental nature of these images is undercut by the mechanical means of their generation.
This corridor leads you to a final alcove, flanked by terrariums containing grasses blowing in the breeze from a fan. An old ship’s piano forms an altarpiece and as you step onto the scrap wood parquet floor you activate pistons and motors which depress keys rendering a wonky atonal tune. The entire installation is in fact driven by sensors and, rather than using cables, elements are activated by lights, with sequences flashing up and down the tunnel. While outwardly it appears purely mechanical there’s some significant digital programming involved here.
In Extended Stage, Burns’ affinity with objects and materials, his nostalgia for domestic furniture and appliances combined with his mechanical acumen create a wonderful wabi sabi world, one in which machines come with their own rituals. But there’s also a sense of melancholy surrounding these objects and their actions, as though they feel misunderstood, their poetry unheard in the bright daylight beyond the tunnel. I leave Extended Stage feeling for these machines, wondering if there might be something very important to learn from their curious communications.
Mikhail Karikis, Children of the Unquiet 2013-14 (video still), courtesy the artist
The title of the 19th Biennale of Sydney, You Imagine What You Desire, may have been a nod to George Bernard Shaw but with its emphasis on psychological and sensory experiences its curatorial philosophy was unashamedly Surrealist. While the influence of Surrealism on contemporary culture is everywhere apparent, its legacy is more contested and as a curatorial strategy for such a heavily scrutinised event as the Biennale it represented a gamble. For while supporters of Surrealism passionately defend its attitude of psychic revolt as binding the world of dreams and desire to social transformation, detractors just as readily dismiss its infatuation with the unconscious as a mere flight from reality.
Like the polarities that separate the proponents and detractors of Surrealism, the 19th Biennale of Sydney has inevitably provoked both positive and negative reactions in equal measure. How much audiences got out of it appeared largely determined by the extent of one’s willingness to surrender to Artistic Director Juliana Engberg’s somewhat esoteric premise that art represents a form of “active desiring.” Given that I hold the first view of Surrealism, I was genuinely excited to encounter a Biennale that in most respects offered compelling evidence for the continued vitality of the movement’s politics of subversive re-enchantment. As expected, moving image works feature prominently across all five principal venues: the MCA, the AGNSW and Cockatoo Island as well as Artspace and Carriageworks. And while thematic concerns ranged from explorations of cognition, memory and psychoanalysis to more humanistic and ethnographic works, the thread of continuity among them was undoubtedly a sustained fascination with film as a medium of sensation.
Douglas Gordon, Phantom, 2011
photo Ben Symons, 19th Biennale of Sydney
Douglas Gordon, Phantom, 2011
Douglas Gordon
Since he was one of the first artists to pioneer video art as a conduit to psychic disturbances and disruptions in perception, the invitation to Douglas Gordon to present the Biennale’s opening keynote lecture signalled Engberg’s interest in exploring these themes in Sydney. As the banners and bill posters went up in late March, the disembodied eye of Gordon’s epic video installation Phantom (2011), made in collaboration with musician Rufus Wainwright, cast its uncanny gaze across the city. At the MCA, where cognitive, Surrealist and psychoanalytically inflected works across mediums were arranged in what Engberg termed “proximities and itineraries of encounter,” Gordon’s Phantom engineered a spatially disorienting sensorium. Placed upon a stage was a Steinway and another piano burnt to the ground in a ruinous heap lying beside it, creating an atmosphere both funereal and theatrical. As Wainwright’s heavily made-up eye blinked eerily in slow motion on a luminous white screen the melodious lament of his vocals and piano resounded in the space and the viewer was absorbed in a moving yet impersonal performance of grief.
Pipilotti Rist
Where Gordon’s video work explores the darker undercurrents of the workings of film, memory and the psyche, there was a fascinating dialectical tension between the dystopic Surrealism of Phantom and the engrossing utopian sensuality of Pipilotti Rist’s six-channel high digital video installation, Mercy Garden Retour Skin (2014). Situated on the ground floor of the MCA, Rist’s immersive “video aquarium” enveloped the viewer in a liquid and ethereal space brimming with lush imagery of microscopic and macroscopic views of nature, seducing the viewer with the psychedelic cosmologies of the natural world. Sometimes critically overlooked thanks to their hedonism, Rist’s installations nevertheless reinterpret the Surrealist notion of libidinal excess as a subversive force from a feminist perspective. In overstimulating the senses Rist seeks to dissolve the boundaries of the ego upon which we base not only our identity but also the repressive and disciplinary structures that order the world at large.
Tacita Dean, Event for a Stage, 2014, presented at Carriageworks in association with ABC RN, courtesy the artist, Fifth Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris, co-commissioned by the 19th Biennale of Sydney and Carriageworks
photo Zan Wimberley
Tacita Dean, Event for a Stage, 2014, presented at Carriageworks in association with ABC RN, courtesy the artist, Fifth Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris, co-commissioned by the 19th Biennale of Sydney and Carriageworks
Tacita Dean
Riffing further on the Surrealist associations, British artist Tacita Dean has remarked that “André Breton once explained ‘objective chance’ as external circumstance acting in response to unspoken desires and demands of the human psyche.” Highly regarded for the conceptual elegance of her rigorously edited 35mm and 16mm film installations, Dean is an artist for whom the workings of chance, or the “lucky find,” has played a determining role in her practice and as a highlight of the Biennale’s middle program the artist travelled to Sydney to undertake the risky venture of her first foray into live performance, Event for a Stage (2014). Dean insists that she never pre-plans or storyboards her films, preferring to work from a state of chaos in an indeterminate artistic process that threatened to unravel as she moved into the scripted, rehearsed and ritualised world of theatre.
The opportunity to present a performance work was prompted by the inclusion of Carriageworks as a Biennale venue partner and in response to Engberg’s invitation Dean devised the intriguing meta-theatrical scenario of casting an actor to play himself in the role of an actor. The experimental undertaking was accepted by British film, television and theatre actor Stephen Dillane though not without trepidation. Not only was the project lacking in the usual credentials that an actor relies upon to assess a role, like a script and a story; even a week out from the first programmed performance details of its content remained scant prompting speculation of tensions between the two collaborators. As it turns out, these tensions were productively utilised by Dean who turned the mismatched expectations between actor and artist into the ‘middle ground’ where the limits of what delineates visual art from theatre were bravely tested in a highly exposed fashion.
From the outset, Event for a Stage strategically blurred the lines between artifice and real life. At each performance audiences were seated in the round and the stage simply comprised a circle drawn on the ground with white chalk. Costumed in a periwig and white face powder (which varied slightly with each performance) and wearing a modern top and trousers, Dillane was immediately present on stage, stalking the perimeter of the circle as the audience entered the space. There was a tense atmosphere in the theatre as if we had stumbled into a dress rehearsal or trespassed onto a movie set as two cameras stationed on tripods and manned by crew filmed the performance in real time. As Dillane switched between a kaleidoscope of personas, veering from Shakespeare’s Prospero and a version of himself to readings from Heinrich Von Kleist’s On the Marionette Theatre, it became apparent that the central drama in fact lay in the antagonism between the actor and the artist who had cast him in this most unsatisfactory of roles.
Seated in the front row of the audience, Tacita Dean periodically slipped Dillane pieces of paper (which he sometimes snatched) with notes that probed the inner workings of the actor’s process and her own. In her recent film works Dean has largely worked with ambient sound, however Event for a Stage represented a return to narrative and the spoken word. Intertextual references abounded and the storm of The Tempest, which of course is not a natural phenomenon but a product of Prospero’s magic, particularly resonated with Dean’s concern to reveal the artistic process as artifice, an illusory surface that says more about the preoccupations, obsessions and desires of the conjurer than it does about any objective reality or subject portrayed. In one sense falling short (one suspects deliberately) of presenting a satisfying conclusion that resolved its disparate parts, Event for a Stage nevertheless succeeded in the most difficult task of absorbing the audience in the drama of its self-reflexive concerns. Its coup was to turn the precarious uncertainties of the artist’s encounter with the medium of theatre into a disquieting meditation upon the performative nature of art, identity and life itself.
At Carriageworks
Not only propelling Tacita Dean’s courtship of chance into the risky terrain of theatre, the inclusion of Carriageworks as a venue and partner also provided the Biennale with expanded space in the form of a newly opened Bay. Previously leased as a film studio, Engberg responded to the recent filmic origins of the space with screen-based works that charted surreal currents between the structures of the cinema and the psyche. In its dark nocturnal ambience there was a scenic reconstruction of a Disney children’s classic in Mastering Bambi (2011) by Dutch duo Broersen & Lukács; a trippy journey into the repressed artistic alter-ego of an architect in Henry Coombes’s I am the Architect (2012); and an uncanny remediation of the 1930s Hollywood musical in Mathias Poledna’s A Village by the Sea (2011), among other works. Particularly impressive was Brisbane artist Daniel McKewen’s Running Men (2008-14), a five-screen installation that composited footage of running scenes by Hollywood’s leading men, such as Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise, onto black backgrounds. Divorced from their original context and suspended in a repetitive motion the running scene was exposed as a mere special effect that nevertheless embodies a powerful ideal of masculinity shaped by, and reflected in, action film culture.
Where the video installations at Carriageworks sought to subvert the entertainment values of film to illuminate cinema as a psychic space of fantasy and desire, nearby the presentation of The Long Program was more subdued. A rolling two-day program of films by artists working with feature length or documentary style and screened in a dedicated theatrette, many of the films were drawn from Northern Europe and could be situated within the ethnographic turn in video art characterised by research-driven projects that use non-actors and involve extensive collaboration and low production values. In the selection of films that I caught not all projects transcended the ordinary but those that did, such as Renzo Marten’s confronting journey into the spectacle of poverty in the African Congo, Episode III (2008), were reminders that artist documentaries can make important interventions into the dominant perspectives circulated by mainstream media.
On other screens
While these ethnographic works provided a counterpoint to the more spectacular larger-scale moving image installations, there were also a number of humanistic gems scattered across other venues. Over on Cockatoo Island, the post-industrial site provided an evocative setting for the screening of Mikhail Karikis’ Children of Unquiet (2013), a stunning portrayal of a group of young Italian children occupying a recently abandoned workers village located in the vaporous terrain of an industrialised geothermal region in Tuscany. In a haunting collage of human, industrial and geothermal sonorities the children’s voices, movements and their uninhibited play reactivated the disused village, releasing a sense of potential amid its industrial ruins. At the AGNSW, Australian video artist Angelica Mesiti’s In the Ear of the Tyrant (2013-14) similarly sculpted space with sound. In the cathedral-like space of a 20-metre high limestone cave in Sicily, the artist engaged an Italian singer to perform a traditional lamentation. As the acoustic properties of the cave amplified the intensity of the vocalised mourning, Mesiti’s video offered a powerful connection to a lost tradition of catharsis rarely expressed in the modern world.
The Surrealists believed that in liberating the world of dreams, the unconscious, the irrational and those two key terms in the Biennale title, imagination and desire, they might prise open a more enchanted reality. World events extinguished their optimism, yet whether subliminally courted through objective chance or returning unbidden in moments of heightened affect and visual shock, the 19th Biennale of Sydney revealed to what extent sensation, rather than mere perception, continues to shape our encounters with contemporary art. In this respect You Imagine What You Desire was indeed a Biennale of “lucky finds.”
You Imagine What You Desire, 19th Biennale of Sydney, Artistic Director Juliana Engberg, Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Carriageworks, Cockatoo Island, Artspace, Sydney, 21 March–9 June.
The gracious old stone house in the leafy inner Adelaide suburb of Parkside—the Contemporary Art Centre of SA’s home for around half a century—has been the subject of several exhibitions intended to address its architecture and its function as an exhibition space. For example, CACSA Contemporary 2013: Provisional State Part Two comprised works by James Dodd, KAB 101 and Johnnie Dady that deliberately filled the three main internal spaces so fully that viewers hardly had room to move, drawing attention to the limitations of the space for exhibition.
The latest occupation of the building is by the now Melbourne-based Adelaide graphic designer turned visual artist Sam Songailo whose oeuvre recalls 20th century abstraction, especially 1960s Op Art and Geometric Abstraction. Songailo’s Digital Wasteland is a painting of complex grid-like patterns that covers the entire inner walls and floor of the gallery, much of it in dayglo colours under UV lights. Vividly expressionistic colour contrasts create a shimmering, disorienting effect and there are many subtle nuances in the patterning. Here and there are coloured sticks leaning against the wall—strips of MDF cut from the temporary walls Songailo painted for CACSA’s New New survey exhibition (2010)—and there is a video of the painted walls and floor of his contemplative 2013 Zen Garden installation at Adelaide’s Fontanelle Gallery. By incorporating fragments of previous work, Digital Wasteland becomes a study of his work. Songailo also makes abstract paintings and some of these adorn CACSA’s walls, referencing the gallery’s exhibition format and subject matter of earlier years.
In eschewing narrative or direct political commentary, Songailo’s work offers a return to optical experience, extended here into spatial experience. In calling to mind the work of Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely, it reconsiders Modernism and revitalises the technological sublime. But in contrast to his previous installations and extensive public art (at a train station, in a car park, on a road and under a bridge) there are discordant elements in Digital Wasteland, for example, the gestural blurring of some passages of paint, which disrupt its mathematical precision and restore, the human element. His addition of pictures on the wall, the sticks and the video, the smeared paint and the use of colours associated with street art distance Songailo’s work from the formal closure and perfection of high Modernist Geometric Abstraction, reminding us of the inevitability of imperfect reality. This isn’t a virtual world, nor the return of the Modern after all. Digital Wasteland contemplates a post-digital world.
Songailo’s installation is nicely complemented by Zoe Kirkwood’s installation in the CACSA Project Space adjacent to the main building. ENTER EXCESS: Space Invaders combines dazzlingly coloured painting with mechanical sculpture. The publicity states it’s intended to “…engage with notions of contemporary excess and superabundance…” and the transposition of “the visual extravagance and opulence of 17th century Baroque into a contemporary art format…” This is a very different theme from Songailo’s, but the juxtaposition of Kirkwood’s work with his creates a powerful resonance that generates great interest in formalist art. Among numerous other prizes, Kirkwood, from the University of South Australia, has recently been awarded the $35,000 Dr Harold Schenberg Art Prize at the 2014 Hatched: National Graduate Show in Perth.
Sam Songailo, Digital Wasteland, Zoe Kirkwood, ENTER EXCESS: Space Invaders, CACSA, Adelaide, 24 April-24 May
Typically the task of a survey is to historicise and contextualise an artist’s practice with the aim of revealing how it has unfolded over time and where it is headed. There was a certain novelty then in the idea of one of the boundary riders of Australian media art, TV Moore, self-curating his recent mid-career survey, Rum Jungle, at Campbelltown Arts Centre. While expecting an exhibition that was a bit out of the ordinary, it was a surprise to discover to what extent Moore had engineered what was essentially an anti-survey, a kaleidoscopic romp designed to pervert the conventions of the survey in the most delirious and disorienting fashion possible.
Having transformed the gallery’s white walls into a lurid candy-coloured space, Rum Jungle was worlds apart from the pared back gothic spectrality of the video works for which Moore became renowned during the 2000s. With no catalogue or wall plaques the viewer was encouraged to explore the galleries intuitively rather than programmatically. Predominantly comprising Moore’s recent hyperactive cartoon animations, colour-saturated psychedelic painting-photographs and light box imagery, Rum Jungle’s presentation of mainly new work was lightly contextualised by a condensed presentation of Moore’s earlier body of work.
For all its claims to happy anarchy then, Rum Jungle actually appeared a brave refusal on the artist’s part to reify his own practice. The works were not chronologically arranged, however the inclusion of a handful of earlier pieces provided clues as to how to decode the exhibition’s logic. A key work in this respect was Moore’s 2009 video installation, What Say U Wii?, a single projection portrait of an adult video gamer in a blond wig and oversized nerd glasses who riffs into the camera on the merits of Wii vs Nintendo DS. Filmed against the distinctive green of the chroma key screen, a trigger for the gallery’s brightly-hued walls, the juxtaposition of an adult slacker persona with the soundtrack of a young boy’s voice projected a sense of dislocated identity that anchored Moore’s concern in Rum Jungle to explore the psychological implications of virtual immersion.
TV Moore has long exhibited a preoccupation with the subliminal elements of screen culture. His recent transition to animated video extends these concerns albeit in the more spatial medium of cartoons, in which moving figures exist in a state of a-temporal flux, rather than in the more temporally complex and richly allusive medium of film. For the presentation of two animated GIF works, Pig GIF (2014) and Bike GIF (2014), Moore installed the pair of animations on flat-screen monitors placed at crooked angles on a partially collapsed piece of metal scaffolding. In Pig GIF a man clutches a beer in one hand and rides cavalierly upon the back of a pig cantering horizontally across the screen while a visual collage of sexy consumer imagery pulsates in the background. Banal yet seductively hypnotic, the sped-up time of the GIF amplifies the alienation of the surface and signals the dystopia of psychological space constituted by repetition and depthlessness.
The trope of the outsider figure has underpinned some of Moore’s most memorable works such as his acclaimed video cycle The Neddy Project (2001-04). While not an explicit feature of Rum Jungle, the outsider was present in a few guises including in a pair of future primitive light box images featuring the artist inhabiting the identity of hermitic painter Ian Fairweather. One of the Fairweather images was sited near Moore’s suite of nine cibachrome print paintings, Rum Jungle Series (2014), deepening the allusions to outsider art in the works. In this suite of abstracted art brut-style portraiture, Moore melds recurring motifs like the free-floating eye with broad gestural brush strokes and thick drips and smears of paint. Yet in presenting the paintings in the smooth high-gloss finish of the cibachrome print the sensuality of the painted surface is negated and transformed into a more standardised photographic serialisation.
While Rum Jungle allocated generous space to the new works, the history of Moore’s video practice was largely confined to the darkened interior of a single room with the atmosphere of a time capsule. The effect of pulling together several multi-channel installations into an assemblage of videos screened on old analogue television sets was of a polyphonous quoting and sampling of past projects. The aural assault of the sound bleed between videos was not conducive to focused viewing, although one work presented fairly discretely was The Dead Zone (2003). More than a decade after its initial presentation the portrait of a possibly hunted man stumbling and tripping backwards through a deserted cityscape still conveys a palpable sense of post-millennial unease.
Rum Jungle presented itself as an intoxicated and chaotic ramble through a psychedelic fun parlour but ultimately its seductive surfaces were a ruse. Across a decade of video practice, TV Moore peered into the dark recesses of screen culture as a void into which we project our desires only to have their fulfilment endlessly deferred. Rum Jungle did not suggest an abandonment of these concerns but continuation in a new guise—the manic intensity of its trippy animated world was far from innocent whimsy but confronted the viewer, rather, with a discomforting harbinger of the inevitable alienations of a depthless future.
TV Moore’s Rum Jungle, Campbelltown Arts Centre Sydney, 22 March–25 May
It begins with a dive 310 metres down into the lush Jurassic rainforest of the Jamison Valley. From here you disembark onto the Lilli Pilli Link, a winding boardwalk which takes you on a 30-minute stroll through the forest past the 30 sculptures comprising this year’s Sculpture at Scenic World.
The competition, now in its third year, faces considerable environmental and aesthetic challenges presented by the highly sensitive nature of its rainforest location. Even some of the mossy rocks, my guide tells me, harbour ecosystems which have taken millions of years to evolve. The weight of artworks must be taken into consideration to avoid soil compaction. The entire exhibition takes an intensive three weeks to install and remains in situ for another three.
Alongside these environmental concerns stands the aesthetic problem of how to make artwork resonate conceptually and visually in such imposing surroundings. To attempt to make a bold statement is almost futile; the forest tends to dwarf sculptures, to swallow them up. Most artworks selected by this year’s judges—Anthony Bond, Binghui Huangfu and Richard Goodwin—have been designed to emerge subtly from the brilliant tangle of vines, foliage and rocks. Encountering even the larger works among the abundance of natural forest detail is like stumbling across some small natural curiosity on a bushwalk: a nest or a cluster of berries.
A few of the most effective pieces are not immediately prepossessing but gain power the longer you look at them, raising questions about the relationship between man-made and natural. In Jacqueline Spedding’s winning entry Transcend, a large cluster of white flowerpots hangs in a state of discolouration and decay from the sinewy branches of a tree vine and spreads onto the ground below. At first glance the effect is slightly jarring: an impression of tacky intrusion. But pause a little longer to examine these distressed production-line objects—each actually an individual ceramic piece crafted by Spedding—and an uneasy meditation on the fragile barrier between the domestic and the wild arises.
A similar theme is apparent in Network Breakdown by DoGsWooD, a work which first assails the eye with an awkward collection of what appear to be steel aircon ducts, or perhaps filing cabinets, sprawling down a small slope. As with Spedding’s work, however, a closer look reveals the organic taking over in the form of an extensive root system joining box to box and blending into the environment, connecting the machine-made to the earth in a display of Cronenbergian mutation. In a further twist, while the boxes appear to be steely the entire work is sculpted wood.
This masquerading of the hand-made behind a deceptively machined appearance reaches its peak in Louis Pratt’s contorted life-size figure, A Backwards Attitude. Metallic, slick and out of place, yet strangely confident in its prehistoric forest surrounds, it’s a 3D print, the very definition of hands-off process—until you learn that Pratt himself built the printer that realised the sculpture.
While these three works occupy an interesting grey area between artificiality and nature, other sculptures fall on either side of the more straightforward divide between minimalist abstraction and idiosyncratic whimsy. CULKIN+GEYER’s Uh-uh! A forest! A big dark forest, cuts through the intricate curves of the landscape with hard-edged bars of colour, suspended yet heavy to the eye, while around the corner Ana Carter’s Dream Catchers, assembled from mattress frames and other found objects, demonstrates a more personal engagement with flora and fauna. Continuing the whimsical strain, Todd Fuller’s pastel ceramic bunny men enact a dark tableau, adding a note of subversive weirdness.
The feature sculpture in the exhibition, Ken Unsworth’s Harlequin’s Shuttle, isn’t easily categorised. Commissioned especially for Sculpture at Scenic World by curator Lizzy Marshall, the work’s title describes it aptly. In an elegant pattern of coloured perspex it rises, ever so slightly off kilter, in the manner of some exquisite stained glass sci-fi religious monument, alternately glowing and dulling with the changing light. The lyrebirds apparently love it.
The lone sound work in the exhibition, Three Phases of the Dark Moon, is located within the darkness of a reconstructed coal miner’s hut on the boardwalk. David Sudmalis has composed a sonorous melodic piece incorporating infrasonic sound; the sombre quality lends itself to meditation while simultaneously underlining the closeness and darkness of the hut. To enter is to escape the sheer scale of the forest for a more intimate space redolent of recent human history.
There’s a sense at Sculpture at Scenic World that spectacle isn’t the main game here; a welcome absence of brashness that can afflict other open-air sculpture competitions. Thanks as much to curator Lizzy Marshall and the considerable efforts of the installation team as to the artists involved, this year’s exhibition inevitably draws our attention, in contrasting ways, to the unique environment which houses it.
Sculpture at Scenic World: 2014 Exhibition, Katoomba, 24 April-18 May
Gary Carsley, D.106 The Annunciation (Whitlam in China), detail, 2014, courtesy the artist and Thatcher Projects, New York and Torch Gallery, Amsterdam
photo Jennifer Leahy
Gary Carsley, D.106 The Annunciation (Whitlam in China), detail, 2014, courtesy the artist and Thatcher Projects, New York and Torch Gallery, Amsterdam
“It’s Time.” With this slogan Gough Whitlam swept to power as Labor Prime Minister in 1972, ousting a stale and stagnating Liberal government that had ruled for 23 years. Whitlam delivered his “It’s Time” speech at Blacktown, home of this exhibition in Blacktown Arts Centre. The exhibition title, It’s Timely, suggests the need for another leader with Whitlam’s vision. He was our last visionary politician (some say our first) and his legacy looms large over the deep shadowland into which the damaging shenanigans and budget carve-ups of the Abbott-Hockey leadership are currently casting Australia.
Just as Whitlam prophetically stated, his government was going to change the country so definitively, and so rapidly, that any incoming Liberal government would never be able to change it back again, so Abbott and Hockey seem hell-bent on a copy-cat approach—the dark inverse of Whitlam policy.
Whitlam ended the lottery of conscription and our participation in the Vietnam War, gave us a multicultural policy, promoted feminism, championed the rights of Indigenous Australians, introduced universal health care through Medicare and a multitude of other access and equity reforms. His abolition of university fees replaced a system in which only the rich, or those winning the prestigious Commonwealth government scholarships, could attend (if you missed out you signed a bond and attended through a teachers’ college). He scandalously approved the purchase by the National Gallery of Australia of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles for a million dollars (an investment now worth infinitely more). He bought art—astounding given that during the long Menzies years money for the arts was so tight that the government could refuse credit for any sums over 10,000 pounds, crippling the Australian film industry. The Liberals attacked Whitlam, calling him Father Xmas. Now, as fast as they can, the Abbott-Hockey team is ripping through the social fabric, tearing apart as much of the Whitlam legacy as they can.
It is therefore fitting that, in the current political darkness, this exhibition pays tribute to Whitlam and to kinder, more egalitarian times. Deborah Kelly’s devastatingly cynical banner, THE BILLIONAIRES UNITED WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED, lies on the floor, a direct hit at the likes of mining magnate Clive Palmer, now in parliament, and Gina Rinehart who infamously paid her workers to faux protest Kevin Rudd’s super-tax on big mining—respectable first world countries like Norway tax big mining at 70% to compensate for environmental damage. Hockey-Abbott just abolished the mining tax. It’s open slather now to destroy the Great Barrier Reef—only falling coal prices can save it from the ravages of shipping.
Kelly’s banner lies on the floor, ambivalently a thin ray of hope. The billionaire rulers have been defeated and don’t need their banner any more, or, more cynically, more reflective of the contemporary times, it’s discarded because they have won. Kelly’s work symbolically holds the ground of defeat, an abject centrepiece that eclipses its own hope, and tilts in the direction of rule by magnates. It lets us know we are living in politically dangerous times—when much is being taken away, even though thousands of citizens, including the Knitting Nannas (KNAG, Knitting Nannas against Gas in the Northern Rivers region, NSW), war veterans and even members of the priesthood are on the barricades, getting arrested in far away places out of sight of the media, in rural backwaters like the Pilliga and the Liverpool Plains as they try to protect our precious farmland and water from the predations of big mining and coal seam gas fracking companies. The people might have had a recent minor win at Bentley in NSW, but the tide is hardly turning.
Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan
Common-wealth: Project Another Country #130010FFS, 2014, courtesy the artists and The Drawing Room Gallery, Manila
photo Jennifer Leahy
Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan
Common-wealth: Project Another Country #130010FFS, 2014, courtesy the artists and The Drawing Room Gallery, Manila
Common-wealth (Project: Another Country) by Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan, arranges a series of tin crowns of state—one from a recycled sign for Vegemite—in mock reference to a tourist visit to see the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London (a rite of passage for Australian royalists). In respect of curbing our evolution towards a Republic, one of Abbott’s first acts was to re-instate knight and dame honours. This work’s nod to the English Crown reminds us that its Australian representative, the Governor-General, John Kerr, infamously sacked the Whitlam government during an unprecedented double dissolution of Parliament when the Liberals blocked supply. Ironically, the Abbott-Hockey team are now potentially facing the same fate.
As political commentary the exhibition is subtle and spot-on, not overtly laboured or burdened with metaphor. A room dedicated to memorabilia from the It’s Time event includes a poster signed by Whitlam, a video and copies of his original 1972 speech. Local wedding photographer Anthony Berbari has produced a series of portraits and images of Blacktown locals who were present for the historic event, revealing shocking details that as late as 1973, under a state Liberal government, much of ‘westie’ Blacktown did not have basics such as sewerage. Whitlam fast-tracked a National Sewerage Program.
Aunty, 2014, courtesy the artists and Neon Parc
photo Jennifer Leahy
Aunty, 2014, courtesy the artists and Neon Parc
Perhaps in oblique reference to the sewerage situation circa 1972, the King Pins’ Aunty with its giant boxing gloved hands reaching out from the wall to ‘rip your bloody arms off,’ has a mouth, or an anus (say the room notes), speaking onscreen through a giant pair of lacy underpants. The message is scatological—politics is crap—as a moustached mouth, recalling Grahame Bond in bad drag in the ABC TV cult comedy The Aunty Jack Show (1972-3), slurs its way through snatches of pop songs which circulate in the media in much the same way as political promises or threats: “Your time is gonna come,” “This could be the last time,” “If you fall, I will catch you, I’ll be waiting, time after time”—and in respect of being politically done over—“Do it to me one more time.”
Countering the cynicism, Gary Carsley’s D.106 The Annunciation (Whitlam in China) sets into stone in ‘pietre dure’ inlay technique the historic meeting between Whitlam and Mao in the Chairman’s Bejing library in 1973. Asked by Mao whether he would dare a revolution, Whitlam replied he believed in evolution. Consisting of banknote-proportioned twin panels, in one the faces of both leaders are blacked out, the work simultaneously glorifying but also erasing these men. Who remembers or even knows the personages portrayed on our currency? The work wryly suggests that perhaps it’s time for a Whitlam bank note, but more importantly for re-evaluation of our political history and future.
It’s Timely co-curators Gary Carsley, Paul Howard, Blacktown Arts Centre, 29 April-28 June
Director John Curran and screenwriter Marian Nelson’s adaptation of Robyn Davidson’s book Tracks recounts the young writer’s epic solo trek from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean with her four camels and dog Diggity. Australia’s Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland, Jane Eyre, Stoker) plays Davidson and American actor Adam Driver (Girls, Frances Ha) appears as the New Yorker and National Geographic photographer Rick Smolan who flew in from time to time to document Anderson’s achievement. The film conveys the power of a challenging landscape few of us will ever experience. 5 copies courtesy of Transmission Films
DVD: Nymphomaniac, 2 DVDs
Some people love the films of Lars von Trier, others hate them. Some like certain of his films and loathe others. I couldn’t engage with Dogville but I took to Melancholia. Reactions around the world to Nymphomaniac are similar, some critics rejecting one of its two parts in favour of the other. The film is the third part of von Trier’s ‘Depression Trilogy’ after Antichrist and Melancholia. Supporters love the filmmaker’s ambition (the unfolding of life from birth to 57 years), his obsessiveness and willingness to go into very dark places, even where they find the violence and sex scenes too extreme. The film’s full running time, as shown at the Berlin Film Festival, was five and half hours; the “international version,” comprises two volumes and totals four hours on two DVDs. KG 5 copies courtesy of Transmission Films
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RealTime designer Graeme Smith took on the challenge to create the perfect cover for the magazine’s celebratory 20th Birthday issue in collaboration with two young artists Beatrice Chew and Su-An Ng.
Graeme (peonypress.com.au; goodhabitat.com.au), describes himself as a rare communications hybrid: a roughly 50/50 balance of writing and designing for any appropriate medium. He’s a distiller. “I work out what things are, what they mean, where they are now and what and where they may be next, then present the findings in words and pictures. Sometimes the aim is to sell things and other times it’s to try to make places better for living in.”
Beatrice Chew works with Graeme in Good Habitat, a working unit formed with prominent designer-writer Heidi Dokulil. Social and educational programs, government and private, the built environment, talks and workshops, exhibitions and conferences, good food, reporting and publishing are some of the things that come within their sphere of interest and influence.
Beatrice (www.beatricechew.com) created the amazing masks made from back issues of RealTime and worn by founding editors Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter. Beatrice is a researcher whose interests include design processes, technology and sustainability (especially in the areas of food and education). She says, “The masks are an exploration in modules. They were executed in two ways: a mathematical tessellation and a floral arrangement that gave birth to: [1] parasitical hexagons engulfing the face; [2] an over-sized floral arrangement made to create contrast and communicate the romance of publication. I am sure in the 121 editions that have been published, there are many parts that make RealTime what it is today. Similarly, with the masks, no one part can exist without all the others.”
Su-An Ng (incognito), paper sculpture by Beatrice Chew
photos courtesy the artist
Su-An Ng (incognito), paper sculpture by Beatrice Chew
The images were photographed by Su-An Ng, an award-winning animation graduate from Emily Carr University of Art & Design in British Colombia who has shown her work in film festivals here and internationally. She’s recently completed a short animated film with the National Film Board of Canada. Entitled ITCH, it’s an engrossing, short stop-motion film made with ceramic clay, an abstract expression of what it feels like to go through an eczema flare-up. You can see more of Su-An’s multi-faceted visions at www.su-anng.com
Graeme’s brief from the editors was to create an image that celebrated the hybridity that has been the focus of RealTime’s attention over two decades. What he and his collaborators came up with was the miraculous transformation of copies of the magazine into another form—hand-crafted, intricately woven paper masks which become the faces of the editors who are at once themselves and an enduring publication.
In late May. Broome dance theatre company Marrugeku showcased Cut the Sky for an invited community audience as a prelude to a program of national and international touring in 2015. Cut the Sky looks to the future, contemplating global climate change from an Indigenous point of view in a multi-artform work. It has been developed by a team of artists and Indigenous cultural leaders from across the Kimberley and urban Australia collaborating with artists from Burkina Faso, Belgium and Assam in Northern India.
The work is presented in five acts based around five poems by Walmajarri/Nyikina poet and ‘dream catcher’ Edwin Lee Mulligan, with two original songs composed by Papua New Guinean born ‘future soul’ singer/songwriter Ngaiire and extant songs by Nick Cave, among others, all sung by Broome-based actress Ngaire Pigram.
Mulligan’s poems are a standout, capturing what I have observed over the years to be an Indigenous three dimensional grid of knowledge and perspectives that encompasses the heavens, earth and water, and which has existed via traditional stories and lore in this part of the world for over 40,000 years: “…Taking a transformation as an eagle and in that formation I was travelling within the cloud dust…”
To see and hear Mulligan performing his poetry without artifice and with an accent that suggests English may be his second or third language brings an integrity to the work that is in keeping with the authenticity of Marrugeku’s ethos.
Mulligan’s poetry encapsulates a way of being in the world, of “holding it, that may demand a new kind of attention of its audience” as Cut the Sky director Rachael Swain puts it in her essay, “Time and a Mirror: Towards a Hybrid Dramaturgy for Intercultural-Indigenous Performance” in New Dramaturgy, editors Katalin Trencsényi and Bernadette Cochrane, Bloomsbury, 2014.
Marrugeku’s hallmark style of contemporary dance—devised from the performers’ personal and cultural backgrounds—is on full display. In a memorable sequence dancer-choreographer Dalisa Pigram’s portrayal of a drunk FIFO mine worker veered from the comic to the compelling, before morphing into a study of a disturbed psyche in a disturbed land, culminating in a frenzy of ‘digging up’ her own self.
A distillation of the unique perspectives of Kimberley cultural and artistic leaders is the work’s heart and greatest strength. Other contributors to these perspectives include Marrugeku’s patron Patrick Dodson, Bunuba cultural leader June Oscar and Yawuru dancer and language speaker Dalisa Pigram, the company’s co-artistic director. These perspectives are then framed within a multi-art form expression embracing both contemporary video and archival footage—including the famed Noonkambar Station anti-drilling campaign in 1979—original music and sound-scape design, virtuosic contemporary dance and original text.
The sum total is an ambitious and richly imaginative work that eschews didacticism. Instead, it ignites our imaginations by using the transformative power of metaphor to provide a window through which we can glimpse the possibilities of a different way of being, both before and after what would appear to be inevitable climate catastrophe.
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Cut the Sky, co-created by cast and creative and cultural team; concept Dalisa Pigram, Rachael Swain, director Rachael Swain, co-choreographers Dalisa Pigram, Serge Aimé Coulibaly, storyteller Edwin Mulligan, performer, singer Ngaire Pigram, dancer Miranda Wheen, Dalisa Pigram, Eric Avery, Josh Mu, dramaturg Hildegard de Vuyst, cultural advisor Patrick Dodson, musical director Matthew Fargher, new media artists Desire Machine Collective [Sonal Jain, Mriganka Madhukaillya], costumes, set realisation Stephen Curtis; Broome, May 22, 23
I had the idea for a narrative about a world spray-and-wiped into apocalypse years ago after reading an article about dirt pills given to children in the United States to boost their bacteria. When I was completing my last album, Gen Y Irony Stole My Heart, I was already thinking about what I could do next to up the ambition ante: I wanted to do a long-form, orchestrated narrative song. After marrying the two ideas, I composed Sanitary Apocalypse over roughly a year, followed by a year of recording, mixing, finalising and publicising the beast.
I wanted it to come as a surprise in the story that, despite the apocalypse, people are generally getting on, doing okay and finding a way rather than regressing to violent competition and eating each other or whatever else they do in apocalyptic fantasies these days. I also worked from the principle of swapping the gender of all characters once they’ve been conjured (where gender politics aren’t integral to the narrative); you seem to get much more interesting stories that way. I ended up with a ‘final girl,’ only she doesn’t suffer quite the humiliation, breakdown and torment most final girls do.
Perhaps the most challenging thing I did was to write a bunch of themes—hopefully independently interesting—that would lock together at the climax. So I wrote those synth arpeggios and keyboard chords at the end to sound continuously ascendant, adding themes from throughout the piece until the whole thing is being played at once.
Wyatt Moss-Wellington
Wyatt Moss-Wellington
photo Stephen Lew
Wyatt Moss-Wellington
Folk phantasmagoria
Wyatt Moss-Wellington’s fiercely ambitious and willfully idiosyncratic Sanitary Apocalypse is something of an anomaly within contemporary Australian music. Described as a single 28-minute song, the work consists of distinct song-like fragments that emerge from a body of through-composed musical tissue, blending elements of folk, jazz, prog-rock, electronica and the 20th century avant-garde. It charts the journey of protagonist Clara through a disturbing post-apocalyptic vision of an Earth cleansed of all complex life.
Sanitary Apocalypse is a far cry from Moss-Wellington’s 2009 debut The Supermarket and the Turncoat, a more conventional collection of songs in the accepted manner of an acoustic guitar-wielding troubadour. Certain tendencies are clear in this earlier incarnation however: whimsically direct lyrics curling around unpredictable melodic twists; a lyrical style both tenderly heart-felt and savagely satiric; the occasional frenetic solo bursting out of unthreatening finger-picked patterns. It’s a style further developed in his more fully produced follow-up, 2011’s Gen Y Irony Stole My Heart.
With Sanitary Apocalypse, Moss-Wellington seems to have taken the limited broader reception of his earlier efforts as a license to push himself into new artistic territory. Although still embedded in the folk tradition, the concept of the folk ‘refrain’ is here refigured as a series of recurring musical idée fixe. The omniscient yarn-spinniner of folksong is re-imagined as a Greek Chorus offering commentary and information in a tone at once firmly solemn and archly ironic, a scene setting line such as “in the end we sprayed and wiped our whole world away” dismissing cataclysm with a raised eyebrow and a shrug.
There are many delights to be found here, Clara’s farewell to her dying husband featuring some beautifully realised vocal writing, perhaps reminiscent of Björk’s Medulla. This section unravels in a cluster of voices chanting over one another, fragments of lyrics thrown to the foreground before being chewed back into the mass, cohering around the words “I love you” in a gloriously illuminated moment of consonance, before collapsing into despair in the form of an unhinged solo from violinist Ian Watson.
Moss-Wellington has assembled a broad range of musicians to realise his artistic vision. One of the pleasures of this recording is hearing performers such as jazz drummer Tim Firth or The Crooked Fiddle Band’s Jess Randall brought together to produce something inclusive, unexpected and complementary, an approach suggestive of Moss-Wellington’s love of Robert Wyatt or the North Sea Radio Orchestra. It is his own vocals that command most attention however, at times relating the saga with cool detachment, at others taking advantage of his startling range for dramatic effect, straining towards his highest possible note at the moment of his heroine’s nadir, pinching the sound to a point of almost unbearable intensity on the single plaintive word “how,” stark piano chords rising into an electronic blizzard of sound before collapsing once more.
There are other moments of almost manic playfulness, a mandolin solo from Moss-Wellington becoming a mashed pastiche of motifs cribbed from violin studies. Elsewhere, the moment of Clara’s rescue is celebrated with an over-the-top bluegrass duel between Dave Carr’s banjo and Randall’s nyckelharpa. The unreality of the narrative moment is underlined by the almost too-cheerful melodic motifs and the breathless delivery of Moss-Wellington’s cartoonish lyrics describing the hyper-futuristic bunker in which Clara finds herself: “the dining room is massive / It’s bustling—full of food, and people, and smiles, water cooler banter.”
Unfolding in a comic phantasmagoria, the work ends with themes from all previous sections swirling together over an inexorably rising bass line, colliding on a single, almost screamed note before voices drop out one by one, leaving Moss-Wellington to close the epic with a single snarled note on the guitar. Self-funded, uncompromising and uncompromised, Sanitary Apocalypse is a unique musical gift.
In December 2013 I spent three weeks at the Bundanon Trust Artist Residency on the former estate of the artist Arthur Boyd, 40 minutes west of Nowra, NSW. While I was there I spent a lot of the time with my head down. I was working through some personal issues that were troubling me, but what really caught my eye was the residue of previous residents. Bundanon can accommodate artists of all disciplines—dancers, musicians, writers—but Fern Studio was clearly used by painters.
It’s not uncommon for art studios to be covered in paint, but what makes Fern Studio interesting is its history. Each swatch of colour, drip and splatter represents the work of an artist who has participated in the residency prior to my arrival—each of us, I presume, motivated by Boyd’s legacy and the prospect of creating something meaningful.
Armed with a camera and a wide stance I commenced documenting the floor, searching for dramatic compositions. It seemed that everywhere I looked there was a new constellation of colour and form.
Like all my work, in which overlooked things are transformed and allegorised, Fern Studio’s floor is rendered fantastical through its treatment as an animation of slow moving photographs. This process has been informed by the potential for each image to appear not only as a paint-covered floor, but something else. Exhibited at The Walls, Fern Studio Floor is projected upwards, onto a floating screen hanging from the ceiling. Visitors are encouraged to lie down and be seduced by this well trodden floor and its transformation into art. Chris Bennie http://www.chrisbennie.com
Chris Bennie, Fern Studio Floor: a cosmology
courtesy the artist
Chris Bennie, Fern Studio Floor: a cosmology
Mediating legacies
Over 30 years ago, in my first years at university in Canberra, we were taken on a day trip excursion to the Arthur Boyd property at Bundanon on the Shoalhaven. The artist had recently returned to Europe but had left his newly completed, timber-lined studio electric with his recent presence. As a student of art history whose experience of painting was largely confined to the finished product on the walls of a gallery or reproduced in large tomes and labored over in libraries, to see such a working studio was a revelation. This was the kind of place from which Boyd’s almost terrifying canvas depicting the painter gripped with doubt and false greed had come (Paintings in the studio: Figure supporting back legs; interior with black rabbit, 1973-74). We had all just seen this work hanging, as I recall, in the cavernous downstairs spaces of the newly opened National Gallery of Australia, one of the few Australian paintings to make it into that hallowed territory where its near neighbours were de Kooning and Pollock.
Ten years on from that work and in the shadow of the escarpment on his bend in the river, Boyd was now producing more meditative images, but it wasn’t so much the paintings on the easel that I remember from that visit, but most indelibly the latest and smartest Bang and Olufsen CD sound system mounted on the wall, its pristine lines abruptly and irreverently disrupted by a brilliant multi-coloured finger mark of paint on the play button.
Fast-forward to the hot early summer of late 2013 and Chris Bennie is artist-in-residence at the Fern Studio, one of a number of artist studios now provided for and managed by the Bundanon Trust. After a busy and successful year of art prizes, grants, exhibiting and lecturing, Queensland based New Zealand born, Bennie was looking forward to a fresh break and the rare opportunity that such a residency offers to be absorbed and focused on a new environment.
Encountering the studio, Bennie reflected on the many artists who had been there before him, all generating new ideas and producing work under the legacy of the Boyds and their regard for the importance of making culture. In an artist talk at the Walls Contemporary Art Space Bennie said that, like Boyd, he reflected on the nature of a studio as a private space of chance, ambition, doubt and mistake, as well as a place from which considered and successful creative output emerges.
Chris Bennie, Fern Studio Floor: a cosmology
courtesy the artist
Chris Bennie, Fern Studio Floor: a cosmology
He found the past presence of all these artists most manifest in the colourful residue of paint: dripped, spilled, dropped and splattered over the timber floor, reading it like a layered contemporary archeology of place. However, unlike the sensation of a patina which fuses the past life of the object into a single texture on the surface, Bennie has read these layers as a three dimensional view and, through hundreds of photographs documenting the minutiae of this floor, has literally inverted and elevated it to become a new and unlikely cosmology.
The formal language of video practice is in relative infancy and often constrained by technological limitations, but Bennie has been consistently interested in physically framing the way that the viewer encounters his work using projection within and onto banal or overlooked architectural spaces. These have included most recently a repurposed caravan retrieved from the devastating floods in Bundaberg. The installation for this work, on a screen suspended from the ceiling, invited the viewers to lie down on their backs on a large raised platform covered in soft carpet and to look upward as a slowly moving constellation of vivid colours passed above. The images of the Fern Studio floor were set within a second frame of a darker blurred image and this highlighted their potency.
The shared experience of lying quietly side-by-side on the platform encouraged strangers to be briefly united by Bennie’s seemingly physically replication for us of his own feeling of absorption, of being in that studio for three weeks. Looking up and allowing ourselves to relax and be taken into this work was a rare and satisfying experience and, of course, if we doubt the importance of artworks that consider the intimacy of our relationships with the built environment, there is the sweet irony that the work depicts a floor on the ceiling in a gallery called The Walls.
Chris Bennie, Fern Studio Floor: a cosmology, 2014, The Walls Contemporary Art Space; 15 March-5 April, 2014; http://thewalls.com.au/about.html.
Virginia Rigney is Senior Curator at Gold Coast City Gallery.
Installation view 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Dark Heart featuring Ian Strange, 2014, Art Gallery of South Australia
A life-sized suburban house, painted black and embedded in the footpath, greets Art Gallery of South Australia visitors and passing Adelaide commuters. Ian Strange’s Landed is provocatively unavoidable in Adelaide’s North Terrace, confronting the CBD with the darker characteristics of suburbia. Welcome to the 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Dark Heart.
Mounted by the AGSA since 1990, the Adelaide Biennial is unlike its internationally-oriented Sydney counterpart in being exclusively a high-level survey of Australian contemporary art. Typically, the AGSA invites external curators for its Biennial, but the 2014 Biennial is curated by the AGSA Director, Nick Mitzevich. This is the first time the director has been appointed to this position.
Explaining the reasoning behind this decision, Mitzevich said, “The Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art is our most important and ongoing artistic undertaking. At this stage in my directorship I feel that it is important to harness every element of the institution to advance the Biennial. The best way that I can do this is to lead from the front. This is also the most direct way of communicating the Biennial’s message. It is important to have a strong curatorial perspective—this is part of my philosophy and my day to day life as a director.”
Installation view Melrose Wing of European Art,
Art Gallery of South Australia, 2013, featuring Berlinde De Bruyckere, We are all flesh
photo Sam Noonan
Installation view Melrose Wing of European Art,
Art Gallery of South Australia, 2013, featuring Berlinde De Bruyckere, We are all flesh
The gallery
In his four years at AGSA, Mitzevich has made major changes, rehanging the galleries, broadening and increasing the audience (27% in that time, now with 685,000 visitors annually in a city of 1.3m) and extending educational outreach. When I spoke to him, he made clear his intention that AGSA should not mimic other Australian galleries but develop a distinctive character.
AGSA’s eastern wing is hung chronologically with predominantly South Australian and Australian art, providing a comprehensive survey of state and national art history through which visitors gain an appreciation of its social history. Aboriginal art of corresponding periods is interspersed with colonial and post-colonial Australian art, telling a parallel story and creating a dialogue. The material includes prints, drawings, decorative arts and photographs as well as paintings, placing all forms on an equal footing. Mitzevich’s intention is to allow the work to tell the story. The display itself is not a revisionist history nor a critical examination of forms and genres (though it encourages critical examination), but shows how history can be represented through art.
But the Gallery’s western wing is hung very differently. The successive rooms each has a theme, for example “Seduction” and “Classical,” where the works presented are from different eras, genres and forms but characterise the theme. The juxtaposition of works that contrast both eras and styles might appear jarring but engages audiences more deeply in the work. AGSA gallery guides invite visitors to choose which path to take through the Gallery—chronological or thematic—and they predominantly go for the themed rooms. The work is densely hung and Mitzevich says that the interior and hanging are intended to convey the feel of a 19th century mansion. The two parallel streams demonstrate alternative ways of thinking about art, art history and visual culture, a lesson visitors take with them.
Mitzevich says, “Audiences are engaging, they want to think and feel and to nurture emotional experiences. They want to be able to leave the gallery with a strong memory of the experience.” The reconfiguration of the Gallery’s exhibits initially came under intense public scrutiny. “South Australian audiences felt part of the transition that this rehang involved, and 6,000 people attended the opening weekend.”
The AGSA has one of the largest collections of the capital city galleries—Mitzevich considers that “the gallery’s strength is in its collection, being asset rich but cash poor”—and so the effective presentation of the collection is crucial. But it is also acquiring new work and its most recent major acquisition, Camille Pissarro’s Prairie à Éragny (1886), fills a gap in AGSA’s European story and will resonate with the gallery’s other landscape works, including a definitive body of Hans Heysen works and its Heidelberg pieces, to address the idea of landscape.
Installation view 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Dark Heart featuring Warwick Thornton, 2014, Art Gallery of South Australia
The Biennial
The 2014 Adelaide Biennial: Dark Heart, comprises the work of 28 artists and collectives around a broad theme concerned with the darker undercurrents in Australian culture. The temporary exhibition space is divided into separate rooms “like cells or chapters of a book.” Mitzevich has worked with many of the artists before and wanted to allow them to develop new work—70% of the Biennial works were made in response to the invitation to participate. Some artists made their most significant work for it, for example Ben Quilty’s The Island, which addresses Tasmania’s colonial past, is his largest painting and one of his most profound, using a Rorschach-like design to suggest a psychological reading of colonisation. Within the Biennial’s broad theme, there emerges an emphasis on Australia’s colonial past and the situation of Indigenous people. Mitzevich’s Biennial thus not only catalyses significant new developments in Australian art, it raises awareness of these important issues.
Installation view 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Dark Heart featuring eX de Medici, 2014, Art Gallery of South Australia
The Biennial art is demanding and audiences now expect to be challenged. Mitzevich states that “art should push the envelope in a considered way.” Film director Warwick Thornton’s Rebirth references Albert Namatjira’s work, exemplifying the reconsideration of iconic Indigenous art and culture through contemporary eyes and highlighting the still unresolved impact of Westernisation and colonisation. Some artists engage directly with existing works in the AGSA collection, creating a dialogue between the Biennial and the AGSA itself. eX de Medici’s installation The Law, a consideration of Iranian politics and culture, incorporates historical Iranian items from the Gallery’s collection.
Brook Andrew’s powerful Australia I-VI considers past representations of Indigenous culture by creating what he describes as large-scale history paintings based on Gustav Mutzul’s 1860s etchings depicting Aboriginal lifestyle and ceremonies that he encountered in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge. Andrew shows how Indigenous culture was first recorded and reconsiders history painting and its role in visual culture, an artistic strategy well suited to Mitzevich’s approach. Many Biennial works appear to extend the Gallery’s historical and artistic considerations and many Biennial artists reconsider art itself, referring overtly to other art and its place in our cultural history. As the AGSA becomes a co-producer, it enlarges its role beyond the traditional museum role as repository and exhibition space. The Biennial’s interaction with the AGSA collection shows how Australian contemporary art forms a continuum with Australian art history and simultaneously reflects the contemporary world.
In his essay on Tony Garifalakis’ Mob Rule, Mark Feary suggests that art can never provide more than a superficial and thus inadequate analysis of a political situation; similarly, there is no “correct” fully analysed history. Nick Mitzevich considers that showing art of political commentary in an institutional setting doesn’t neutralise the commentary but rather brings it to the public’s attention. While it might not offer an exhaustive or dispassionate analysis, this Biennial urges consideration of major issues.
Nick Mitzevitch
courtesy of the Art Gallery of South Australia
Nick Mitzevitch
The aesthetics
In his catalogue essay for the Biennial, Ross Woodrow suggests that the Biennial is concerned with aesthetic appreciation and that the AGSA hang also encourages a return to aesthetics. I asked Nick Mitzevich whether this idea was consciously developed in curating the Biennial and whether it is also an intention in the AGSA hang generally, or whether the hang is rather concerned with the historicisation of aesthetics. He replies, “Woodrow suggests that the Biennial is part of a zeitgeist return to aesthetics—a broader impulse that he has observed the world over. The idea of Australian artists and even curators as aesthetic sailors was not a conscious conceit but I am drawn to the figurative and to the narrative, and to the matter of making and memory, and these things can be seen as players in what Woodrow calls the aesthetic moment, which in his words is ‘triggered when objects reveal their psychic capacity’…This concern for affect is a conscious player in the AGSA hang generally and with a transhistorical and multimedia approach an aesthetic experience is inevitable (following Woodrow’s argument).”
The aesthetic atmosphere is palpable. For example, Alex Seton’s Someone died trying to have a life like mine is a series of lifejackets carved from marble (the material of classical sculpture) which doesn’t float, scattered on the floor around Quilty’s The Island as if washed up on its shore, referencing drowned asylum seekers.
Mitzevich indicates that he will not curate the Adelaide Biennial beyond 2014. It will be interesting to see how the 2016 Biennial develops under another curator and whether the aesthetic turn continues.
A creative individual’s desire for ideas is unquenchable. Inspiration is drawn not just from other works of art in their chosen field but from the abundance of concepts, narratives and atmospheres found in films, books and music. For Profiler #3 we’ve asked artists to tell us about the words, pictures and sounds that have influenced their practice overall and what’s currently keeping them tipsy.
I am about making an experiential form that is new, a place where unorthodox behaviours and research sit at the edge of physical and cross disciplinary offerings. At my most comfortable place of experimentation I take great pleasure in engaging audiences in the live experience of performance and art. For example in Tomorrow, I ask for totally nude participation of the entire audience to build an architectural installation that activates a sexualised, ritual cleansing and group transference and transportation of energies. Tomorrow grew from my own esoteric research into alien abduction and a revelatory experience at The Integratron in the Mojave Desert, USA.
On the other side of the fence I’ve taken to literally hypnotising the audience. Thumb is my first solo work: a cross-disciplinary performance, part installation, part film. It explores the psychology of scale in terms of the gigantic and the miniature, inspired by size changing themes from 1950s and 60s cinema including The Incredible Shrinking Man, Fantastic Voyage and cult Scandinavian film, Troll Hunters.
During the research phases I took a course in hypnotherapy. The bigger question I am asking here is to what degree can the experience of hypnosis affect and effect an art marking practice to create an authentic scale-shifting perception inside the performance. After a 30-minute hypnosis session participants awaken to a world of multiple polystyrene building blocks that suggest any number of backdrops such as Norwegian mountains, caves and snow capped peaks. They also encounter a strange silver alien and a gigantic wall collapsing over them. Midway through they are dressed in green puffer jumpsuits with fur hoods and introduced to an off-the-wall Scandinavian film director and his actors on a movie set. The scale of the work continues to shrink as they watch a film on a 1960s home movie screen of footage shot in the Banff mountain ranges (Canada) and studio developments recreating scenes from The Incredible Shrinking Man.
In addition to Thumb, future projects include a commission from the National Gallery of Victoria that is a response to the Italian Masterpieces from Spain’s Royal Court Museo Del Prado (1 June, 3pm) and LIVE WITH IT we all have HIV (17-27 July, Arts House Meat Market), supported by the Victorian AIDS Council and their regional networks. http://www.balletlab.com
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Sam Routledge, Martyn Coutts (right), I Think I Can presented by Intimate Spectacle and Performance Space at the Art and About Festival 2013, Sydney Central Train Station
courtesy the artists
Sam Routledge, Martyn Coutts (right), I Think I Can presented by Intimate Spectacle and Performance Space at the Art and About Festival 2013, Sydney Central Train Station
Coming of age in the 1990s had a profound affect on the way I view the world. While the mainstream was filled with Stock, Aitken and Waterman pop classics, the underground saw the rise of rave and electronic music. I learnt a lot about repetition, about the structure of a piece of work and about total immersion in a space from raves and clubs. In this respect it is hard to go past “Blue Monday” by New Order, the biggest selling 12-inch single ever, completely unplayable on radio due to its length.
Around the same time that rave became popular, Japanese Anime and Manga broke in the west. The first wave of movies that were dubbed into English were Akira (1988), Ninja Scroll (1993) and Ghost in the Shell (1995). All three borrowed strongly from Japanese history, yet all carried an apocalyptic vision of a post-nuclear future. You could feel the still present fear that the atomic bombs of 1945 had on the makers of these stories. What I took from these films was a questioning of who we are as humans/cyborgs/post-humans. The meshing of the body and technology has always been a key theme of my work. Akira was always my favourite of these films due to its wrapping together of science and spirituality.
More recently I have been undertaking research into Sydney’s Parramatta River for an interactive app called Against The Tide. I have always had an uneasy relationship with Sydney. As part of the reading for the project I started with Delia Falconer’s Sydney (2010) which is such a beautiful evocation of her home city that I almost believed that it is as romantic as she suggests. However, after reading John Birmingham’s Leviathan (1999) I understood where my unease comes from: the terror of the settlement on convicts and Aboriginal people, the corruption stemming from the mixing of government and business and the brutality of the police (among other concerns). I now believe that somewhere between the viewpoints of these two books lies the true Sydney. http://www.martyncoutts.com
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Alex Davies
Alex Davies, portrait photo Tommy Oshima; The Very Near Future, photos courtesy the artist
My recent project, The Very Near Future, was undoubtedly influenced by the following works to some degree. The installation combines spatial cinematic storytelling with complex electronically mediated illusions.
Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, Errol Morris, (2011)
Morris, who is mostly known for his documentary film works has written an intriguing book on photography. Morris examines photography with a healthy skepticism (and in almost forensic detail) with regard to the meaning and authenticity of images. This exploration sheds light on how we can readily jump to conclusions when interpreting photographic images. Although the discussion is centred around photography, the ideas are relevant to all mediated experiences, and many of these concerns inform the ways in which I think about and create electronically mediated illusions in The Very Near Future.
Los Cronocrímenes (Time Crimes), Nacho Vigalondo (2007)
In addition to media illusions, a key theme of The Very Near Future was time travel, or specifically, how one can physically represent a sense of future time travel through media. Los Cronocrímenes is simply a wonderfully inventive film exploring some of the dire implications of time travel. The narrative structure of the film is also quite refreshing and both these elements provided inspiration in terms of potential structural approaches to story telling, and some of the many possible ways time travel can be conceptualized. http://schizophonia.com/
Lucy Guerin, photo Toby Burrows; (front to back) Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Jesse Oshode, Live Movie Rehearsals, photo Lachlan Woods
At the moment I am working on a project called Live Movie in which I want to screen a full-length feature film (not sure which one yet) and use it as a score for a dance piece. I want to use the edits, camera movements, sounds, characters and narrative as ways to generate movement both improvised and choreographed, responding to the movie in real-time. I aim to show not so much a representation of the film but to use the elements of filmmaking to create a dance work.
I saw David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet (1986) in my mid-twenties, when it first came out. I haven’t seen it since, but I clearly remember the opening scene with its bright, cut out world of the ordinary everyday, and then the zoom in to a bright green lawn drilling down to a close-up of subterranean insects chomping savagely below the surface.
This was the film that made me realise that you could see things differently. That there’s a multitude of perspectives from which to view something; that artistic expression was not just about an idea that you had, but about how you showed it; about how style and genre connected to meaning. It was entertaining and had great music, but also a dark, unfathomable side. These two things sat together.
As a choreographer working mostly in theatres, I have often thought about how we can shift the frame of viewing from the square of the proscenium where everything is life-size, to give a sense of close-up, to draw the eye of the audience in a filmic way. Lighting helps of course, but how, as a dance-maker can I create movement that draws us in to see detail?
Growing up in Adelaide in the 1970s and 80s I wondered how my middle class, unremarkable background could offer up anything unique or interesting as artistic material. Seeing Blue Velvet revealed to me that the ordinary aspects of life can be horrific or beautiful or funny, depending on the way they are presented. That zoom in to the lawn revealed how the simplest things could contain worlds and that looking closely is where I could find poetry. It was in detail, and in what lay below the surface. http://lucyguerininc.com
Where most artists are tangled within postmodernism my work remains in phenomenology—pursuing the connections between perception and material—or literally between video and performer. My concern is how all of our mediums—body, films, sound—are related. I have been reading lots of secret things, things that exist under the veils of reality and things that are the veils of reality: Victoria Nelson’s The Secret Life of Puppets (2001, when I was working with puppeteers) and in the last two years The Secret Life of Plants (Tompkins and Bird, 1973) and also the profound Rinrigaku by Watsuji Tetsuro (1937). In my videos I was compelled to take work beyond the performer and object to the plant universe and the inanimate. This has helped deepen my understanding of body and matter and what we are actually filming.
Merleau Ponty’s intertwining of perceiver and perceived for me still encapsulates indefinable existence, an endless, churning assemblage of things in more or less proximity and awareness to an individual. Being conscious of the actions and processes of video, when I film something, I film whilst knowing I am filming, yet I am also presently in some ways not-filming, drifting into distractions, smells, noises, physical interactions which make the capturing of a performance an unending and complex activity. For me, this aesthetic research reveals how the tools become a mirror reflecting the subconscious. Media is inextricably bound up with perception and fed back into external phenomena. As Deleuze says, the actual comprises nothing more than clusters of virtuals—all by-products of our own presence and life-making. Video art is nothing more than pulling out and isolating some of these events.
Just as important as the video itself, the screen experience is also about the narcotic, cinematic, performative space, where the witnessing makes possible the offering of one’s own dreams into another’s dream. Where every action in an artwork or characters in a film are seen as the same actions you are living through this very day, in this moment. The life in the cinema is transposed into the viewer’s. Video and materialism are bound in a way that produces an event that says nothing but we understand it totally and vividly as our own, it becomes embodied as part of us. http://www.shimmerpixel.blogspot.com.au
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nova Milne
nova Milne, 1) Jete 2) There There Anxious Future, 3) Xerox Missive
courtesy the artists
nova Milne, 1) Jete 2) There There Anxious Future, 3) Xerox Missive
It took an aging French philosopher to reinvest in the existential problem of love. Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love (2009) emancipates love from the dumb simplicity of inward-looking narcissism. Instead, it can be a radical construction: a project formed no longer from the perspective of one, but through the lens of difference and infinite subjectivities. It emerges as a way of thinking that privileges risk, chance, reinvention and a new way of experiencing time. Badiou’s notion of enduring love is really about locking a chance encounter into the framework of eternity, an event that is returned to, but always displaced and re-declared afresh. We imagine that as the loop passes, it reinvents itself.
We’ve been collaborating informally since 1998, including with the generic conjunctive title Ms&Mr since 2003. Through a range of forms such as large-scale video assemblages and installations, we create moments of connection or disruption that often take the form of an abstract encounter across the breach of time. Orlando, the novel by Virginia Woolf (1928), its title character and Sally Potter’s film adaption (1992), have been in our heads since we were teenagers. It’s a strange love letter that seems inspired by the theory of relativity.
Philip K Dick’s Ubik (1969) represents time spatially (and comically psychedelic) in an imagined future of 1992. One character, Glen Runciter, repeatedly visits his dead wife (suspended in cold-pac) as she continues to offer corporate advice through telepathic communication. In our XEROX MISSIVE we had Dick’s living fifth ex-wife commune with the deceased author from the future (as he predicted) by visiting his 1977 self in documented footage form.
In the original COSMOS series (1980), Carl Sagan stands like a monk by the sea, elucidating in his dulcet, melancholic tone. In episode 8’s thought experiment on Time Dilation, a kid leaves his friends on a park bench, taking a short ride on a bike that travels near the speed of light. From his perspective, a few minutes pass, but he returns to find that, for his friends left behind, time flowed at its usual rate and they have since grown up and died. His brother remains waiting, now an old man, and their gaze meets across the bridge of time that now separates them. http://www.novamilne.net/
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Soda_Jerk
1) Soda_Jerk; 2) Hito Steyerl, Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 3) Parliament – Funkentelechy Vs. The Placebo Syndrome, 4) Microsoft Windows 95 Video Guide
Whether we’re working with video, lecture performances or cut-up texts, a kind of errant pedagogy is fundamental to our practice. The sources we’ve selected here also share an educational impulse that’s gone wayward.
Hito Steyerl – How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013)
How Not to be Seen… takes the form of an instructional video on how to remain invisible in an age of image proliferation. Equal parts Harun Farocki, Monty Python and post-internet art, this work manages to occupy the treacherous territory between the absurd and awesomely astute. So digital politics. Much entertainment value. Very respect.
Parliament – Funkentelechy Vs. The Placebo Syndrome (1977)
The third instalment in Parliament’s epic concept album trilogy, this LP sees the Starchild educating listeners on how the forces of uncut funk can be deployed in a fight for freedom. At stake in this intergalactic P-Funk mythology is a sharp critique of the socio-economic conditions of the late 1970s. Along with Sun Ra these guys delivered us our first schooling in the secret powers of combining social politics with speculative fiction.
Microsoft Windows 95 Video Guide
Sometimes the most ingeniously bent educational formats are deadly earnest in their intent. Research for our new lecture performance Netsploits has us deep in VHS tapes of 1990s operating system manuals and internet instructional videos. Special mention must go to Microsoft Windows 95 Video Guide which bills itself as “the world’s first cyber sitcom” and stars the best friends we never had: Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry.
We will be going errant educational in our upcoming AGNSW Contemporary Project 3 Live Video Essays. Over consecutive Saturdays in November we will perform three video lecture performances including The Carousel (2011), Netsploits (2014) and Terror Nullius (2014). http://www.sodajerk.com.au
Upgrading and evolving
Sarah Pirrie, Videodromo 1.5 At 24hr Art
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Sam Songailo
Sam Songailo, Digital Wasteland, CACSA
photos Emily Taylor
Sam Songailo, Digital Wasteland, CACSA
I’ve always loved the background art in sci-fi, particularly in Anime. The Anime series: Space Adventure Cobra (1982) contains in my opinion some of the best. The world seems to be made of metal interspersed with colourful lights, patterning and oversized computers performing some mystery function. The background art continually threatens to steal the show. I like to think of my installation work as the background art for something else that has or will take place. When I started painting I was trying to recreate these backgrounds. What I ended up producing was nothing like it. That initial trigger created a series of paintings leading up to where I am at today. Now it feels like my practice has a life of its own.
Through the look of the work I am seeking to reproduce a certain fictional atmosphere, which I would best describe as the emptiness of being inside a computer game. The first game machine my brother and I owned was a Commodore 64. The tape drive was unreliable and often we would spend hours trying and failing to load games. Eventually we would get one to work and it was kind of magical when it happened. Sometimes a ‘crack intro‘ (see 64 legendary examples) by the team that pirated the software would load before the game. Typically they consisted of colourful graphics, bouncing letters and an accompanying SID tune (SID was the name of the sound chip). The graphics on the 64 were low resolution and really forced game makers to be creative. I remember these crack intros having some of the best graphics at the time.
I have recently completed a couple of exhibitions. The first at Alaska Projects as part of the SafARI festival and then the exhibition Digital Wasteland at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia. Both large scale painting installations. Currently I am finishing off a mural in West Footscray and working on an exhibition opening in July at Hugo Michell gallery (http://www.hugomichellgallery.com/). Finally I am working on a commission for a university which will be completed late this year. http://www.songailo.net
Sam Songailo’s Digital Wasteland will be reviewed in RT121.
Lindsay Vickery
1) Lindsay Vickery, 2) Silent Revolution, detail (2013), 3) Nature Forms I, detail, (2014)
courtesy the artist
1) Lindsay Vickery, 2) Silent Revolution, detail (2013), 3) Nature Forms I, detail, (2014)
Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco’s book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2013) has been hovering over a lot of what I’ve been making lately. It’s a confronting look at where society is heading (and already is for some): the final pages are as heart- and gut-wrenching as anything I’ve read. The combination text/“graphic reportage” they use was a big influence on the visual style of my recent works Silent Revolution and Sacrificial Zones.
I think the creative response and energy around the Occupy movement, artists like Molly Crabapple et al (http://mollycrabapple.com), has started a kind of community of intention that hasn’t been around for some time. I’ve also been following the work of this New York composer Bil Smith, an enigmatic Luther Blissett kind of character, who has been publishing these amazingly unrestrained scores incorporating notation, graphics, photographs, data visualization and so on.
In particular this year, I’m looking closely at the boundary between representation of sound and image, partly through some experiments with eye-tracking technology, but also with some new works involving sonfication and visualisation (and re-sonification of visualisations and vice versa). My interest in this is an outgrowth of the ‘screenscore’ works we’ve been doing with Decibel, but also some other things: Peter Ablinger’s Quadraturen series that explores the distortions that occur as a result of translation from one medium to another, and Manuella Blackburn’s compositional approach using visualised sound shapes. For example, in my recent works Nature Forms I, three performers and a computer sonify images derived from trees, rocks etc, with differing degrees of fidelity/freedom; and in Lyrebird, software I’ve made for Vanessa Tomlinson’s 8 Hits program, field recordings are transcribed in real time into a ‘score’ that she can play or improvise with. This has led to some interesting questions about innate associations between colour and shape, some of which have been answered by the interesting work at Stephen Palmer’s Visual Perception Lab in Berkeley 9 into “weak synaesthesia,” the sort of cross-modal correspondences that naturally make us group light, high and bright together. www.lindsayvickery.com; http://lindsayvickery.bandcamp.com
Related articles
Man-machine music
Sam Gillies: The Mechanical Piano, Waapa
RealTime issue #107 Feb-March 2012 p40
Earbash: Decibel
Disintegration: Mutation
Online exclusive, May 24, 2011
Julie Vulcan
1) Julie Vulcan, 2) Drift, 3) Wishing Dark
photos Michael Myers
1) Julie Vulcan, 2) Drift, 3) Wishing Dark
The current series of work I am developing is Wishing Dark and this has led me to revisit some cult classics from the 1970s and 90s: Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel Snow Crash (1992), Wim Wender’s epic film Until the End of the World (1991), Alex Proyas neo noir thriller Dark City (1998) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s enthralling Solaris (1972).
I have been exploring themes of sensory deprivation, what makes us resilient and the thin line between what is real and what we perceive to be real. All these have echoes in the book and films above. Reading and watching these classics again affirms how close some of the ideas are to current neuroscientific research which influences some of my investigations, especially around visual perception, hallucination and how our brains fill in the gaps.
Some of the themes might seem dark and a bit gloomy: existential crisis on a space station; amnesia, murder and time/memory manipulation; dream addiction; language as virus. Well they are dark, both literally and figuratively and that is my interest. Dark = Manifestation. It’s not particularly a new idea but I am interested in this idea of self-implosion as survival—a path to mind expansion.
I am also a bit enamoured of the 1960s/70s futurism aesthetic—it was so hopeful…and silver. This filtered into my new work Drift at the recent Festival of Live Art (Melbourne) and Metro Arts (Brisbane). The predominance of silver and lime green in the installation was my homage to that era. The work on one hand seemed to present a nurturing haven offering some time out, but on the other it was highlighting how we hold onto small gestures in the face of uncertainty. What courage does it take to step into our space pod and warp our view to survive? http://www.julievulcan.net
Related articles
Do you want me to touch you?
Madeleine Hodge, SPILL Festival of Performance
RealTime issue #115 June-July 2013 p12
Director Carlos Gomes and performer/devisor Katia Molino discuss the making of Theatre Kantanka’s latest show Club Singularity, presented by Campbelltown Arts Centre (16-17 May, 2014) and Performance Space in association with National Art School (21-24 May, 2014).
The Wired Lab Artistic Director Sarah Last talks us through the immersive experiences offered at this year’s Wired Open Day, in Muttama regional NSW. Includes projects by Cat Jones, David Burraston, Garry Bradbury, Joyce Hinterding, Temporary Amateur Radio Club, Bukhu Ganburged, Dean Frenkel and Harmonic Overtone Community Choir.
Aña Wojak with Odalisque with Fascinator (1995); 3 Decades
photo David Corazza, courtesy the artist and The Channon Gallery
Aña Wojak with Odalisque with Fascinator (1995); 3 Decades
Artist’s Statement
How to write 250 words about 30 years of art practice: painting, performance, installation, assemblage and theatre design?
This diversity is akin to being multilingual, having different languages in which to express myself, each having words and expressions unique to itself. Yet, there are also always common words, links, expressions that cross over between those languages.
An exhibition of paintings is just an ephemeral site-specific installation comprising images in a room. So, with each successive suite I have made a point of emphasising this aspect of the work.
Although earlier paintings clearly display the Eastern European pre-Renaissance influences, the later work, focussing purely on the abstract quality of light, maintains continuity, being painted with the same technique of transparent glazes on metal.
Painting on salvaged metal and found objects adds another layer to the vocabulary. I am not dealing with tabula rasa, rather a dialogue with the complex histories and textures each found object or surface brings to the conversation, site specificity being an important element in my work.
Ritual has also played a role: the fetish of objects and actions, imbuing them with power and significance. This is manifest in the mythologised subjects of the painted works, through the intimacy of assemblages, the power of suggestion with scents in large-scale installations, the repetition, rhythms and visceral pain of durational performance…
Which brings me back to the act of painting, which is in itself a durational performance for an unseen audience.
photo David Corazza, courtesy the artist and The Channon Gallery
Aña Wojak, Divine Madonna (1988), 3 Decades
A fleeting 30 years
In this survey of three decades of AñA Wojak’s paintings, it is clear the cross-disciplinary artist has a close but evanescent relationship with her art.
Each painting has a story, history and purpose and the works explore Wojak’s favoured inspirations: her Eastern European heritage and its religious iconography, eroticism and the environment she lives in. She approaches the gathering of art materials like a bowerbird, working on recycled wood, pressed tin and industrial steel sheet. She has a penchant for gold leaf, found objects and lustrous oils. Creation is an active meditation and the exhibition is a careful, deliberate installation and performance of her art. She’s connected to all her works, but attached to none.
To grasp her philosophy of ephemerality, I asked Wojak to walk me through her exhibition. She strode immediately to her abstracts from past decade: works from the four exhibitions from the Chatoyant series (2001-2009). These exhibitions (Standing on an Island, lightboxes, LATITUDE and 4 quarters) were both site installations and painting exhibitions.
Chatoyant, which means to have a changeable or undulating lustre, marked a shift for Wojak from working figuratively and in landscape on pressed tin to working with recycled steel sheets. She burnishes the steel with industrial wire brushes and applies translucent, subtle layers of oil paint to create light-reflecting textures, inspired by early Renaissance techniques. The result is more modern, producing an impressionistic and evocative shimmering, a Monet without the lilies.
Wojak described how 2005’s lightboxes exhibition at Sydney’s Depot Gallery reflects her work’s ephemerality. Originally, the 80 panels (30cm x 30cm) were arranged in a 16×8 grid to create an overall flow, yet all were for sale as individual works. Wojak encouraged people to buy singles, or blocks or strips of panels. Once sold and dispersed, the grid could never exist again.
In 3 Decades, lightboxes make fleeting appearances as singles, pairs, strips and blocks around the gallery. A standout is the golden Genesis, a set of 16 squares of flashing luminescence in a re-imagined configuration that came together after the lightboxes exhibition was dismantled. This was Wojak’s 2003 Blake Prize for Religious Art entry. (She would win the prize in 2004 with pieta, darfur). A trio of works from 2007’s LATITUDE hang together, offering an intimation of the powerful original configuration of 52 steel panels, graduating in colour and size and united by a horizontal band of light through each centre.
This horizontal line has connections with Wojak’s earlier landscape paintings. The sunset horizon, the kiss between day and night, in WEST ONE is one example of the site-specificity and durational aspects of her art practice playing out. She captures a sunset’s fleeting intensity, drawing the eye to a thin horizon line of gold leaf, dividing rust red from deep twilight blue. The faded lettering on the derelict tin Weston Butter sign clues her direction to the sunset, while the corroded texture influences the painting’s narrative.
While that application of gold leaf is subtle, in many of Wojak’s figurative works from the 1980s and 1990s, it was a dominant compositional tool. Divine Madonna (1988), an electric Krishna blue standing nude woman, levitates above a soft green mound. Painted in pure manganese blue, she is otherworldly, pre-Renaissance against the shimmering gold, but pockmarked dunny door she is painted on. In the Odalisque series, with its attention on eroticism and performance, gold leaf appears as a light source, highlighting both the figurative poses and the decorative fleur de lys patterns and stippled surfaces of the pressed tin ceiling panels she employed from the 1990s.
However, 3 Decades is incomplete as a survey exhibition, as Wojak’s art practice has incorporated performance since the mid 1990s, and this has been a particularly productive stream of activity in the past four years. Wojak’s performative installation exploring her family’s migration from Poland, stepping stones…, exhibited at Lismore Regional Gallery in April 2014, demonstrates the integration of transience of time and of place as the uniting theme of her art practice.
Aña Wojak, 1) St Christina the Amazing; 2) St John the Baptist; 3) St Paul the Hermit; 4) St Simeon Stylites, (1983); 3 Decades
photo David Corazza, courtesy the artist and The Channon Gallery
Aña Wojak, 1) St Christina the Amazing; 2) St John the Baptist; 3) St Paul the Hermit; 4) St Simeon Stylites, (1983); 3 Decades
But Wojak often brings the performative alive in the subject matter of her paintings. You can see this in the Odalisque series and in her earliest works in 3 Decades, the mixed-media portraits of eight Christian saints which she painted in the early 1980s for her Masters degree in Gdansk, Poland. Wojak speaks warmly of these works and their materials, as they represent an extended period of keen focus, and years spent studying in her family’s homeland.
She depicts the hermit-saints’ miracles as Gothic narratives but in a naïve style, using the colours of a children’s Golden Book. Around each tableau, an old window or cupboard doorframe invite us to look in and become witnesses to the unfolding miracles. And then, suspended, as if on a stage, is each saint represented as a puppet. Created from objects found around Gdansk, the puppets are like dancing relics. The St John the Baptist puppet is made from plant stems and a dried mouse body, his head a tiny clay sculpture. The puppet of St Christina the Amazing, whose miracle was to rise from the dead and levitate, is part bird’s wing.
It seems unfortunate these curious, quirky saints are for sale individually, that this collection of early works will be split up. But, AñA Wojak says, one found a home years ago in Sydney and she is happy for them to go to new owners. One now sells at the exhibition opening. Everything, after all, is ephemeral.
Jeanti St Clair lectures in journalism and radio production at Southern Cross University in Lismore, NSW, and is the arts critic for ABC Radio North Coast.
Tamara Gazzard, Lucy Shepherd, Sarah Coffee, Spent, Paper Cut Paper Cut Contemporary Performance Collective
photo Tahnee McWhirte
Tamara Gazzard, Lucy Shepherd, Sarah Coffee, Spent, Paper Cut Paper Cut Contemporary Performance Collective
The cultural ethos of Newcastle has always been distinctly DIY. From This Is Not Art (TINA) to the Renew Newcastle project activating unused commercial properties for cultural pursuits, Newcastle artists like to do things for themselves. While the early manifestations of TINA had a decidedly media art focus more recent editions have included the Crack Theatre Festival, revealing a developing performance culture in Newcastle. Three ambitious emerging artists—Sarah Coffee, Tamara Gazzard and Lucy Shepherd—have joined together to create Paper Cut Contemporary Performance Collective. With two significant productions under their belt they are currently in development for a third. We asked them to tell us about their developing company, in particular their most recent production Spent, which premiered in late April in a disused commercial property.
How did the Paper Cut Contemporary Performance Collective come about?
The three of us collaborated as devisers on The Past is a Foreign Country in 2012. This project was initiated by one of our core members, Tamara Gazzard who at the time was doing her Masters of Applied Theatre Studies, conducting practice-based research into self-reflexivity and the verbatim form. We were actually all guinea pigs in her experiment!
We are all interested in exploring verbatim and documentary techniques, but at this stage we aren’t limiting ourselves to that. Our latest work, Spent, for instance, began as a documentary project—collecting discarded grocery receipts and attempting to make performance using only the text found therein. But we also went into it with the question: how can we take a more embodied approach when working within the verbosity of documentary theatre? The final product ended up being much more movement based than documentary.
Generally speaking we want to make contemporary performance that is bold, sharp and playful. We enjoy testing and stretching the boundaries of conventional theatre. We also enjoy making work that has participatory elements—where the audience becomes active in creating the performance with us.
Sarah Coffee, Tamara Gazzard, Lucy Shepherd, Spent, Paper Cut Paper Cut Contemporary Performance Collective
photo Tahnee McWhirte
Sarah Coffee, Tamara Gazzard, Lucy Shepherd, Spent, Paper Cut Paper Cut Contemporary Performance Collective
What was the inspiration for making Spent?
The Past is a Foreign Country was interesting and unique because it took a mundane little family anecdote, imbued it with profound significance and transformed its retelling into a deep and complex exploration of the notion of absolute truth. After that project, we were excited to discover other ways of making the seemingly insignificant significant. So we stumbled upon the idea of making a show using text found on discarded grocery receipts.
What was the process? Was it different from previous ones?
The process for making Spent involved a lot of research, task-based devising, a couple of development showings and copious rehearsals. It was different to our previous process with The Past… in a number of ways. When we started, we had nothing. At least with The Past… we had an existing narrative to work with. With Spent we just had piles and piles of receipts. Just factual information. We had to speculate and imagine the narratives that tied those facts together. We also had to research in and around the system of consumerism, because there were grand narratives there that impact on the way people shop and what they buy.
The process was also different because the style was different—drawing so much on physical theatre and movement we were challenging ourselves to step out of our comfort zone and express ideas through a different medium from words. We were fortunate to be able to engage a mentor on this project, Cadi McCarthy, who is an established dance theatre artist and choreographer. Cadi stretched and pushed us to find new ways to link text and movement.
The collaborative nature of the process was important. We are committed to working in a democratic way to create new work. We share all of the responsibilities for creating and producing the work, which is really developing our versatility as theatre practitioners. It does bring certain challenges: it can take us days of arguing before we make a concrete decision about something, and it can be scary presenting the work to an audience for the first time without the certainty of having a director tell you exactly what to do.
How did you feel the project turned out? Is there a future for it?
We were all really impressed with how it turned out. It was an ambitious project in many ways—Spent is an hour-long show that features a full-length original sound track created by Huw Jones, accompanying animations designed by Alex Ball and the entire performance is one intricately choreographed movement piece. We also had the challenge of transforming an abandoned shop space at The Store into our performance venue. It took a lot of effort and we’re thrilled that it all came together. We hope there will be a future for Spent. It’s a very portable show, so we’ll be looking into options like touring or an independent season somewhere else.
How do you find making theatre in the context of a regional city
There are many advantages to working here in Newcastle. Space is much more affordable and because there are so few people making new work it’s easier to get noticed. Also, Newcastle hosts one of the nation’s most amazing festivals every year (Crack Theatre Festival as part of TINA), so we have the perfect platform for testing new ideas right on our doorstep.
There are definitely disadvantages as well. Newcastle has a vibrant artistic community and traditional theatre is well respected here. But the kind of performance we make is sometimes met with suspicion. So we have to work really hard to create an audience for our work. We also simply do not have the pathways into the industry that metropolitan areas do. So if you want a career as an artist in Newcastle, your only option is DIY. As emerging artists we’ve benefited from the support of Newcastle’s only funded youth theatre company, Tantrum Youth Arts. This kind of local support is invaluable for emerging artists in regional areas.
What’s in store for the company and you as individual artists?
We have a creative development lined up for later this year for our next work A Minute of Your Time. We’ll also be looking for opportunities to give another life to Spent.
Individually, Tamara has just been announced as a recipient of an ArtStart grant from the Australia Council, so this year will see her developing her creative business through mentoring, professional development and travel. As Tantrum’s Associate Director, Lucy will continue to work on various creative projects for and with young people in Newcastle. Sarah is a member of live art collective Big One Little One and is currently working on a new audio theatre work, I might just take you on the AstroTurf, which will premiere in Bathurst in July.
A line of cars stretches over a kilometre as they inch their way slowly into the Dromana Drive-In. Tonight, Aphids the Melbourne-based hybrid artists company is premiering The Drive-In Project—the culmination of 18 months working with a quirky alliance of communities from the Mornington Peninsula including the Dromana Senior Citizen’s Marching Ladies, Ulysses Motorcycle Club (Mornington Wanderers and Two Bays branches), Rosebud’s Astral Theatre Society, Frankston Symphony Orchestra, Mornington Peninsula Chorale, the Kunyung Primary School and the Peninsula Youth Music Society.
While working in the nearby National Park for another development, Aphid’s artistic director Willoh S Weiland had been driving past the Dromana Drive-In site each day. Fuelled by the heady mix of nostalgia that only a drive-in can elicit, Weiland jumped at the chance to use the site when she heard the owner was replacing all the 35mm projectors with digital. Her dream to combine a staged live event with the making of a short experimental film thus evolved. Her dream also incorporated that of one of the locals, Evan Noble, whose story of how he communicated through musicals as a child forms the key conceptual narrative. Directed by Weiland and co-written with Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Thoms, Tristan Meecham, Finale is described as “a short film of serious magnitude.” The production, performed entirely by a cast of locals, is slow moving and strange, with a David Lynch quality. The premiere evening also included a selection of live radio interviews with participants and artists, broadcast prior to Finale, followed by a curated program of video art (by Jared Davis) and finishing with a screening of the Gillian Armstrong classic feature film, Starstruck (1982).
Aphids offers an interesting lens through which to examine the situation of artists currently working with communities. As a company that is artist-led and whose small collaborative team also produce each other’s work, Aphids’ preferred approach to working with community is to offer an open invitation for them to participate in the making of contemporary art. It’s a different approach to that of CCD practitioners and large community arts organisations whose programs are generally designed around intentions to address and remediate complex social problems. While Aphids acknowledge the significant work done by community artists in this area, Weiland is circumspect about the kind of instrumentalising of art for these purposes. The Aphids team are clear in their desire for the company to remain artists working explicitly in the creation of hybrid, experimental and contemporary work, alongside and with community. For example, in The Drive-In Project, participants were selected based on their desire to perform and take part in the experience of making a film and are represented by groups organised around the performative and visual. Significantly these groups were also from an area in the Mornington Peninsula area where Aphids had already been working for a number of years.
Finale, film still
courtesy Aphids
Finale, film still
The debate about art and community has shifted in recent years as the market driven imperatives of use-value within the context of advanced neoliberalism have pushed funding paradigms to validate and measure the efficacy of arts in the community. It has also pushed an agenda for the arts to remediate the excess of social dysfunction when other parts of the government funded housing, healthcare and education systems have failed, leaving many artists working in complex social situations requiring long term solutions. Reflecting on this, veteran community arts leader Scott Rankin wrote in Arts Hub recently (“The Emperors New Social Work,” Wednesday 23 April) about how young Aboriginal boys engaged in high-level international arts events nonetheless return home to reoffend. His argument speaks to the complexity of intergenerational poverty, violence, substance abuse and entrenched dysfunction within these communities—for which art is no singular solution and certainly not in the short term. But his concern is not just with the inability of the arts to deal with these problems, he is also equally concerned with the quality of the artists engaged, their competencies and the honesty with which these programs are evaluated and assessed and how learnings as failures are chalked up, rather than reintegrated into improved programming.
Somewhat exacerbating this, or perhaps interestingly coincidental, has been the rise of participatory/exchange based live arts or socially engaged artists whose work places them in community settings which become the material with which to create work. This has been written about much by academics—referred to as the “social turn” in the arts, by academics such as Claire Bishop, Shannon Jackson, Grant Kester et al. In Melbourne last year the conference Spectres of Evaluation attempted to address questions about the efficacy of community arts, the evaluation tools used to gauge the effect of art and the protocols of artists working in community. Presented by The Centre for Cultural Partnerships, VCA & MCM, University of Melbourne & Footscray Community Arts Centre, it was also an attempt to historicise community arts practices in Australia, to develop a more robust discourse appropriate to the changing landscape of Community Arts practice within an emerging contemporary context of “socially engaged arts.” The conference brought together a broad cross section of academics, community arts practitioners, policy makers, non-government agents and contemporary artists. This proved to be a double-edged sword as the sheer diversity of participants revealed sharp differences in genealogies and languages and prevented a maturation of discussion of the many points of difference into a full fledged debate that could evolve into a new set of languages with which to arrive at some new place. This seemed to be a missed opportunity to articulate and acknowledge a kind of in-betweenness or straddling as a radical position which could be adopted strategically by the ‘sector.’
The Drive-In Project, Aphids
photo Bryony Jackson
The Drive-In Project, Aphids
As Weiland remarks, “As collaborating artists we are always trying to work out our strategy around that particular problematic—none of us comes to this from a Community Cultural Development background at all; it’s very much from the art.” Aphids are very careful to be clear about their role as makers of contemporary art—which implies the experimental, or as Weiland puts it, “Weird art.” For the Drive In project, the process and the product were treated as two separate (but related) entities. This allowed for the film process to evolve with all the care and attention required for working with several large and different community groups. As Weiland notes, in this way the making of the film was informed by a more traditional community theatre practice model, while the post-production of the film and the drive-in event were directed by Aphids. The project was also based on long-term relationships they had built up through other projects. For example Evan Noble, the key protagonist in the film, was involved in an earlier project with the company.
The audience rolled on in and tuned their car stereos to pick up the film sound track. As familiar faces appeared and members of the community recognised themselves on the extremely large screen, the sound of cheers and rowdy car horns interrupted the film—the perfect complement to the sound track, and a great night out.
Aphids, The Drive-In Project, artists Willoh S Weiland, Liz Dunn, Lara Thoms, Tristan Meecham, cinematography Andy Lane, composer Kelly Ryall, Dromana, Mornington Peninsula, 1 Feburary, 2014; http://aphids.net/in-laboratory/The_Drive_In_Project
My research specialisation is in the field of media art history and I have completed a doctorate in interactive art and ludic interfaces. Currently my interests launch more broadly toward contemporary and hybrid arts, however I still have a keen interest in developments of the media arts sphere. On the practical artistic front I have collaborated in art projects and residencies in Scandinavia, Singapore and Taipei and exhibited locally and internationally. Following over half a decade of lecturing at the University of Western Australia my work currently involves academic programming at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, in addition to being art critic for the West Australian newspaper and contributing to the academic sphere as a freelance writer.
Exposé
Writing in the visual arts for me is about having that extra sensory component to text, having more than words, having images, sounds, tactile and immersive experiences available as zones of research. Whether in the gallery context, in private or public space, these things make life richer. I was very close to doing my doctorate in philosophy but I found I craved more than words and heady concepts. In addition to this multi-sensorial experiential range, the arts also seduce me with the capacity of artists to be at the forefront of engaging the world and creating meanings pertinent to social, political, spiritual and ethical being. For me it is not solely about the aesthetic or sensorial potential of art, but how it can push boundaries and delve into the core issues of our times. Artists both shine a mirror back onto humanity and imagine wild and varied visions of the future. It is then the role of writers and publications such as RealTime to discuss, debate, theorise, philosophise and make such creative production history, while also communicating the relevance, potency or indeed utter irrelevance of the given art.
My earliest extant piece of writing was an illustrated book that went by the title The Haunted Skeleton and while five-year-old me never finished the thing he did go to the trouble to write a back cover blurb for it. The young critic's summation simply ran thus: “Is it good? Yes it is.”
I largely abstained from criticism for the next several decades but studied and often tried my hand at every art form within reach. At some point I found myself writing about stuff. This isn't the only way of extending your own thinking on a subject—there's a place for live conversation and opposed argument and sheer wordless immersion—but for a certain type of personality there's a particular reward that comes from talking to yourself on the page.
I quickly discovered that while all of the artworks that had driven me to write still compelled my imagination, it was the writing itself that people were willing to allow me. I suppose I am absolutely the failed artist that critics are sometimes disdainfully characterised to be, but if you'd seen The Haunted Skeleton's drawings you would have encouraged me to stick with the words as well.
Also: I write for The Age, sometimes broadcast on RRR and have been known to do teachy things at tertiary and high school level.
Exposé
Writing can be a way of realising the self, but why should anyone else care? No one's reading me because I'm me.
A critic is a haunting. We're there but we shouldn't be and that can result in humility or arrogance. I feel that mystery has more appeal than authority, though there's ample evidence against that position.
I don't think criticism necessarily equals a judgment of merit. Criticism that argues for a work's value or lack thereof is persuasive, rhetorical, prescriptive. That's not what draws a lot of people to art in the first place, unless they're looking to fill some void once occupied by religion or politics or a parent figure.
So while the five-year-old's question “is it good?” is one that has its function, the answer is inevitably the least interesting thing for a person to read. Writing that instead offers ways to reframe something, even those somethings we otherwise have good reasons to turn away from, gives you more to do with your time. I'd rather spend mine with some thoughtful words inspired by the dullest of experiences than merely nodding or shaking my head at some umpire's signal.
Selected articles
Dark mothering
John Bailey: Katie Warner’s Dropped; The Rabble’s Frankenstein
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 p41
A reason to care for strangers
John Bailey: Bryony Kimmings, Melbourne International Comedy Festival, FOLA
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 p14
Creative exploitations
John Bailey: Melbourne International Arts Festival
RealTime issue #118 Dec-Jan 2013 p33
Strictly in the moment
John Bailey: Side Pony Productions; Grit Theatre
RealTime issue #117 Oct-Nov 2013 p27
Re-working & new expectations
John Bailey: NEON: The Rabble, The Hayloft Project
RealTime issue #116 Aug-Sept 2013 p41
Dance Journalism #1 – protest action at the Yongah Hill Immigration Detention Centre, 2013, dancer Sam Fox.
photo Alex Bainbridge
Dance Journalism #1 – protest action at the Yongah Hill Immigration Detention Centre, 2013, dancer Sam Fox.
The choice of our featured theme, art, empathy & action, was triggered by what appears to be a failure of empathy among Australian citizens, media and politicians for refugees, the unemployed and for future generations likely to be the victims of climate change.
What role can artists play in challenging this failure? We focus on distinctions between sympathy and empathy, on identification in the works of Mike Parr and Kym Vercoe, character complexities in the current wave of epic TV series, who feels for whom in Wolf Creek 2 and on art addressing Climate Change. John Bailey reports on the empathy generated by UK performer Bryony Kimming’s Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model.
Film. Low budget is viable. Dan Edwards looks at independent distribution of independent films online, Andy Ross’ Well Beyond Water and in cinemas, Genevieve Bailey’s I Am Eleven. Kath Dooley interviews Sophie Hyde about the making of 52 Days after its triumphant Sundance premiere.
Image note: for more on Dance Journalism #1 see The Arteffect
“It is crucial…in advancing art’s political agency, to identify and make visible—and open to discussion—the forces in play…” Dean Kenning and Margareta Stern, ‘Which side is art on?’ Art Monthly, Sept 2013.
A performance by Mike Parr is always an event for the art world, ironically perhaps given his well known antipathy to art’s rituals, its “alcoholic” culture, its “window dressing” as he calls it, the attractive display while the real business grinds on behind the scenes. His performance artworks, in their public manifestations (there are also now a number of significant closed performances made for camera), are also rituals of a kind, for the artist, and for a certain public. I form part of that public but have also been studying these works and writing about them for almost 20 years (since 1996). In this time, the artist and myself have become occasional collaborators, passionate interlocutors and friends. So if I have come to lack objective distance in the case of Mike Parr perhaps I can make up for it in insider knowledge. On the other hand, his kind of performance art plays on this very border of intimacy and public imagery so in a sense I am not in a unique position at all.
Daydream Island is the name of a savagely ironic piece of what Parr calls ‘theatre’ and while it actually felt like theatre for much of the time—we spectators were sitting, intent on the action, observing passively from our seats in the auditorium—it wouldn’t be the sort of thing students at NIDA are learning much about. On the contrary, where the most complex acting is simulation, Daydream Island featured only the actions of participants (“non-matrixed” in the critical language) carrying out various real tasks. I am used to seeing Mike’s wife Felizitas at these events and admiring her sangfroid as her partner’s body undergoes various acts of violence. Acts which are measured but no less real. This time I couldn’t see her and asked John Loane, sitting adjacent, where she was. He pointed to the stage area where she was engaged in sewing tiny toys and monsters onto her husband’s face, eliciting grunts of pain when she went too deep with the needle.
Two videographers circled them relaying close-up visuals to three large HD screens. The lighting was altered awkwardly, clumsily by manually inserting coloured gels over one of the spots as if to say, this is ‘theatre.’ Lisa Corsi stage-managed the event and would interrupt the action when a ‘scene’ had been completed for example when Felizitas had completed, the sewing of objects. While the ‘scene’ changed Mike sat in his chair on the stage unrecognisable behind a mask of fishing line and monstrous children’s toys. Felizitas Parr gave way to Linda Jefferyes, a visual artist, and took her seat downstage with her back to the audience like the other participants. Black monochromes were fixed stiffly to their backs (part dada gesture, part Parr’s typical mobilising of the minimalist image). The sewing became face painting as at a children’s party but instead of Spiderman or a princess, Parr’s face was camouflaged. When this was complete he lay prostrate, subjectilian, on the floor and a Pollock style drip painting was enacted on his face. At the climax of this scene a battery-powered toy pig was let loose on the stage space waddling around the inert form of Parr and grunting. At the close, Corsi read a statement which quoted Prime Minister Abbott’s recent remarks describing any linkage of climate change and increased bushfire activity in Australia as “hogwash” and asked the audience to return to wherever they had come from.
Like Parr’s other performances of the past decade, this intertwining of delicately elaborated sado-masochistic action and imagery with overt political statement is a clear vernacular. (While it may be tempting to observe that it is an aesthetic vernacular that has found its essential theme in the ghastly asylum seeker politics of our time, it is also true that Parr has worked this seam for over 40 years, but I will remain with the most recent work here. For anyone interested, the performances of the first decade post 9/11 have been covered in my book The Infinity Machine, Schwartz City Press 2010.) But it’s different in a crucial respect too. The earlier works were all durational, that’s to say they were elaborated over an extended measure of time, 24 hours or more, while Daydream Island was just on 80 minutes, the length of a Williamson play. This was a deliberate structure imposed on the work but one which I want to question.
I wrote to Parr after the event to point out the following:
“The piece (…) left those present with a mark, a tiny wound, to work at and re-work… It also raised some issues for me in its theatrical nature, specifically its limited duration. In my view this tends to shut things down in the manner of a theatre piece rather than open things up, which your durational works do, in allowing a wound its own time to develop and the viewers their own time to experience and to work through. I wonder if the structure of the piece might tend to suture over the wound…”
The discourse of wounding is, of course, an important currency for performance art since so much of this form engages directly the artist’s body by placing it at risk or subjecting the body to interventions of different kinds. The language of the wound also explains the peculiar affective quality, its sometimes repulsive valency as well as its ethical and aesthetic power, literally aesthetic in its capacity to forcefully engage the senses of a spectator.
Parr responded in part with a version of the theatre metaphor:
“…theatre is a kind of scab so this piece was about opening up a wound and closing it down at the same time….Burying it in a way…that’s why I decided we should perform the piece with our backs to the audience and with the monochromes attached to the backs of my crew so that Modernist patches were created to block vanishing points…a miscellany of negations of drafted theatrical space and the fixed positioning of the audience…”
The embodied vanishing point is a concern of many of Parr’s works as it deals with the art historical discipline of drawing in perspective while also alluding to a certain disciplinary structure on the self, the way we are taught to view art and by extension the world around us. By blocking it he resists this kind of discipline and the viewer is forced to find another way into the image. I guess this is art-speak for trying to get people to look for themselves…Parr’s response also reconnected the shorter form of the work to the issue he was trying to represent:
“…I felt that this structure of theatrical convolution was exactly like our treatment of the wandering arrivals to our northern shores…wounds that are constantly opened and closed… boats turned back and people left adrift…the collusive, muffled reportage. I’m thinking now about theatre space, theatre conventions and wondering if I can condense and invert my understanding of ‘theatre’ to a further extremity. Amputating duration in this way was a fierce hit for me.”
The telescoping of ‘wandering arrivals’ and their grisly fate in our camps into a form of national theatre seems just right, an entirely accurate observation, but this still does not address the issue of the recurrence of the experience Parr is trying to capture in this work, the eternal return of asylum seekers and of the carefully administered suffering our representatives continue to inflict on our behalf, in our name, whether we like it or not. To represent this accurately and truthfully which we surely expect our artists to do, the work must forcefully engage these tropes, these experiences. For me the durational form Parr adopted in previous works was the more adequate vehicle, but we will continue to debate this question.
For now, after the recent Biennale brouhaha, the broader question of the proper role artists can play in this scenario is still pertinent and very fresh. What valid function can art have in this context given that intervention at best provokes a debate about—and possibly a crisis for—arts funding and not ultimately a debate about the policy of indefinite detention itself. What can art ever do in the face of the major party/neoliberal consensus about the threat posed to the concept of the ‘public’ by stateless individuals?
Of itself, of course it cannot affect the policy. At best art can recompose the terms of the debate and the relations between the actants, whose identities seem so fixed, like a well-made play: the evil politicians, the hapless asylum seekers, the concerned citizens etc. In Parr’s ‘theatre’ these entities, indeed all entities, become unrecognisable. Painted over. Subjectilian (a surface to be painted on). What takes their place is the play of forces, the flux of urges and drives. The cruelty it stages and re-performs is ours, we share in it. We love it. After all we pay to see it. Of course we are ultimately hurting ourselves. The wound we create for others, for us, is an elaborate durational artwork of its own. A national treasure like Blue Poles. As Mike Parr observes of the work: “a wound is on display but it is being hoarded.” Maybe the bitter message of Daydream Island is that enlightened self-interest is the only way out of this labyrinth.
Mike Parr, Daydream Island, performera Mike Parr, Felizitas Parr, make-up Linda Jefferyes, Project Manager Lisa Corsi; Performance Space, 30 Ways with Time and Space, Carriageworks, Sydney, 30 Nov, 2013
Physical pain has no voice, but when at last it finds a voice, it begins to tell a story…” Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (1985)
This observation comes from Scarry’s introduction to her seminal work on pain, its full title—The Body in Pain, The Making and Unmaking of the World. “Intense pain,” she writes, “is world destroying.” For refugees whose worlds have already been undone, Australia’s treatment of them mentally and physically is doubly unkind.
We can protest on behalf of refugees, make art for or with them. The art signals our sympathy and can be taken as a form of action designed to generate sympathy in others, encouraging them to take action in turn, maybe charitable (not since the 19th century has the notion of doing good works by donation had such traction), perhaps political.
Art can ‘give voice’ to our own and others’ pain, with or without words, and in any form. Scarry writes, “Ingmar Bergman’s film Cries and Whispers opens with a woman’s diary entry, ‘It is Monday morning and I am in pain,’ and becomes throughout its duration (a duration that required its cinematographer photograph 200 different background shades of red) a sustained attempt to lift the interior facts of bodily sentience out of the inarticulate pre-language of ‘cries and whispers’ into the realm of shared objectification.”
An artist can be a stand-in, as in the case of Mike Parr suffering on behalf of refugees, by having pain inflicted on himself in a durational performance. In Kym Vercoe’s seven kilometres north-east, the performer nightly relives the suffering felt over the unveiling of the tragedy of 200 Muslim women raped and murdered in one location during the Bosnian War. The most affecting moment of a performance otherwise saturated with words comes at its end when Vercoe silently disrobes, steps beneath a cold shower (as did the women before being raped) and then disappears into a void. In Parr and Vercoe there is deep identification between artist and victims in their enactments of sympathy. Neither is a character in a performance, they are, selectively, themselves.
In an essay on seven kilometres north-east, “Tragedy at a distance,” on the realtimetalk.net blog, I note that Vercoe tells us very little about the dead women, although through her identification with them we, like her, become sympathetic. We can go beyond sympathy (we could be equally naïve travellers) to empathy for Vercoe, because we learn so much about her, her motives, very specific feelings of pain and guilt. But we know little about the women, nothing of the few survivors or the relatives. This tragedy is Vercoe’s, not the women’s, for the ignorance for which she berates herself, having blindly fallen in love with a country, its customs, music and language, yet which has its secrets and will keep her at a distance, even threaten her. In this way our feeling for Vercoe’s plight provides the potential for us to develop empathy for the slain women, should we be so motivated by her performance.
Similarly with Mike Parr’s Daydream Island, we sympathise at a distance with refugees via a performer who identifies with them to such an extent that he willingly endures very real pain, sublimating the experience by becoming a work of art himself. Parr tellingly writes to Edward Scheer about the shape of his performance, “…I felt that this structure of theatrical convolution was exactly like our treatment of the wandering arrivals to our northern shores…wounds that are constantly opened and closed… boats turned back and people left adrift…the collusive, muffled reportage.”
Parr and Vercoe are stand-ins not just for the people for whom they care so deeply, but also for us; they are willing scapegoats embodying our fears and guilt. The emotional outcome in tragic drama for the audience is supposed to be the “calm pity” espoused by Aristotle—catharsis purging us of the pity and fear experienced upon witnessing the horrors of tragedy, relieving us of excessive emotions and returning us to a rational state. There is some truth in this, but some tragedies are more tragic than others, their effects long lasting. Performance art can likewise stay with us, more sharply perhaps because of the real pain witnessed. For some of us, to have experienced such events is enough. The demands of the experience and the work’s resolution—something satisfyingly complete, cruelly beautiful even—require nothing more. We might feel a “calm pity,” absolved for having seen the work.
Elaine Scarry reveals concern about “the danger that artists so convincingly express suffering, they may themselves collectively come to be thought of as the most authentic class of sufferers, and thus may inadvertently appropriate concern away from others in radical need of assistance.”
Is this an overstatement, that the artist rather than being a conduit for empathy stands in its way, becoming a substitute for action, the aforementioned scapegoat? It’s nothing less than a reminder that art alone is insufficient when it comes to developing empathy in a population. If the millions whom we are told attend and participate in the arts truly cared, then would we have the growing empathy deficit that has been likewise statistically tallied?
It’s fascinating that programs developed around the world to nurture empathy are not unlike works encountered in live art. Roman Krznaric, the author of Empathy: A Handbook for Revolution (Random House, 2014), reports that some seven million people in 130 cities have experienced the museum-based work Dialogue in the Dark (www.dialogue-in-the-dark.com) for an hour each since 1988, guided by the blind as they negotiate everyday tasks and sensations in total darkness. Krznaric argues the necessity for creating “experiential adventures” in order to develop our capacity for empathy, to put ourselves in the position of others, to not simply sympathise, but understand. He cites a widely adopted Canadian scheme, The Roots of Empathy, commenced in 1995, putting groups of school children in regular contact with babies (“what is it feeling, thinking; why is it crying?”); results included a claimed drop in bullying. Another program put Israeli and Palestinian citizens in contact with each other for long conversations in over one million phone calls. Krznaric recommends we move beyond the introspection so favoured in the 20th century into what he calls “outrespection,” or stepping outside ourselves.
Krznaric writes in the Guardian Australia (“Is Australia losing its empathy?” 26 Feb) that former Paul Keating speechwriter Don Watson told him, “If you wanted to disenfranchise refugees, and leave the public thinking they have no rights, then call them ‘illegal’ over and over again.” Politicians, Watson says, do everything they can to “keep any kind of empathy at bay,” finding language that “dulls the instinct to ask, ‘What if that were me and my children in one of those boats, or in one of those detention centres?’”
Climate Change too is an empathy issue. Empathy is an act of the imagination at once latent and culturally developed by upbringing, education and art; if you cannot imagine the suffering of Pacific Islanders whose homes are falling below sea level or the agonies our own future generations are likely to face, then you will not care about their fate. With Western lifestyles focused on living in the moment, in yourself and in your space, whether actual or virtual, there’s a limit to how far one’s sympathy, let alone empathy will reach. You might share a digital space with people far and wide, but well within the Facebook and Twitter niche you have created or been coopted into.
Sympathy is one thing, empathy another. We can feel sympathy for Pacific Islanders and refugees, sign up to online protest campaigns and donate to campaign funds, and believe we’ve done enough. The great social scientist Richard Sennett distinguishes between sympathy and empathy, asserting, “Curiosity figures more strongly in empathy than sympathy,” a notion resonant with Krznaric’s ‘outrespection.’
Sennett writes, “Both sympathy and empathy convey recognition, and both forge a bond, but one is an embrace, the other an encounter. Sympathy overcomes differences through imaginative acts of identification; empathy attends to another person on his or her own terms. Sympathy has usually been thought a stronger sentiment than empathy, because ‘I feel your pain’ puts the stress on what I feel; it activates one’s own ego. Empathy is a more demanding exercise, at least in listening; the listener has to get outside him- or her self” (Together, The Ritual, Pleasures & Politics of Cooperation, Penguin 2013).
With empathy, adds Sennett, “we don’t experience the same satisfaction of closure, of wrapping things up.” Empathy “is a cooler sentiment than sympathy’s often instant identifications…” He argues it arises from open-ended dialogue, a desire to learn and to be known “without forcing ourselves into the mould of being like” those we are attempting to understand.
There are limits on art when it comes to making us empathic; it can’t provide the detailed information and dialogue that understanding requires, but it can go part of the way: sympathy yes, empathy by degrees. Some live art and new varieties of participatory theatre do bring people from very different circumstances, classes and cultures together in activities not unlike those described by Krznaric.
We cannot expect art to save the world. Nor should we accept art itself as an adequate response to the suffering of others. Of course there’s only so much any of us can do—although the density and speed of life in the West denies us a sense of what we might actually be able to do. In the first instance we need at least to recognise the differences between sympathy and empathy, and be aware when “our instinct to ask” is being repressed—by politicians or by our own feelings of helplessness.
version 1.0, seven kilometres north-east, devisor, performer Kym Vercoe, Seymour Centre, Sydney, 8-22 March; Mike Parr, Daydream Island, Performance Space, 30 Ways with Time and Space, Carriageworks, Sydney, 30 Nov, 2013
TV’s True Detective has started off a conversation, the idea that long-form television series can be compared to the ‘old novel’—most notably 19th century serialisations—offering viewers the chance to develop along with the characters on a week by week basis as the episodes screen live to air: to confront their lies and peculiarities, to see structural and psychological changes, to find compassion even when they do diabolical things.
Charles Dickens and Alexandre Dumas’ novels often started out as instalments in magazines or newspapers, giving readers the opportunity to see the characters gradually emerge over months or even years, before the entire series was published as a novel. Television in the US (and it’s starting to change in Australia) is giving writers the freedom to challenge conventional TV wisdom by offering philosophical meanderings and deep psychological insights, compassion for the building complexity of characters who are initially difficult to like, the chance to draw on a number of intertwining perspectives, and movement between main and minor characters as the series unfolds. Central to many of these shows—Girls, Homeland, True Detective, Rake, Redfern Now—is an argument for empathy for those stuck in a wasteland of socio-economic-moralistic ambiguity, where the rage against the machine is no longer heard, where characters—and viewers—are no longer sure where they are placed when it comes to the slippery line between good and evil.
Miah Madden, Kylie Belling, Craig Mclachlan, Consequence, Redfern Now, A Blackfella Films production for ABC TV
We are all refugees
In Rake, Frank the priest (Tony Barry)—who Cleaver visits regularly to ‘confess’ —argues that “we’re all refugees in one way or another.” And it’s this idea that underpins most successful contemporary TV series, where we grow to care intimately about characters who are outsiders, drifting aimlessly, despite (and because of) their exposed flaws.
In Redfern Now, the residents of the inner-city suburb are shown to be displaced even on their own turf. Aaron (Wayne Blair) is ostracised within his Indigenous community, for being a copper and for letting a man die on his watch. When he walks down the street he takes his granddaughter “as a shield” against the hostility of local residents. Allie (Lisa Flanagan) tells him he’s “not a proper blackfella,” even when he has just come to the front door to help after her husband has assaulted her. Listening to karaoke at the local pub, Aaron is refused bar service and Allie stops mid-song to confront those judging her bruised face. They’re united in their exclusion: Allie asks if she can join his “leper colony.” When they go out on their first date to a ‘flash’ Japanese restaurant in Surry Hills, Aaron says to Allie as they are walking in, “We’re Brazilian, not blackfellas—remember?” to put her at ease.
In Girls, Hannah (Lena Dunham), an aspirational writer, doesn’t fit into the NYC ideal of heavy-hitting glamorous go-getter and stands on the outside looking in. She is often seen naked, her voluptuous, soft un-Hollywood body a revelation with its unsexualised bulges. Watching her with Dunham’s neutral gaze, we want to be exposed to her, even when she’s grating—and she can be (in that funny, neurotic way that Woody Allen and George Costanza can be). When Hannah’s editor dies, she feels nothing, only concerned about whether her e-book will still be published. Attending her editor’s funeral, she cries, “Oh my God! I think I see Zadie Smith. That is definitely her.” Just when we’ve had enough of Hannah’s solipsism, the focus pulls back and we see her in bed, counting everything in eights, contending with OCD, sticking a Q-tip in her ear so hard she ruptures an eardrum, alone, cast aside and so vulnerable it wounds us too.
The limits of compassion
The ABC’s Rake has become ever more expansive, series two taking Cleaver Green to the limits of our (and other characters’) compassion. He’s like the Aussie larrikin (the questionable stereotype that our identity is apparently based on: mischievous, rowdy, a lad) taken to the extreme, to the point where he’s completely devoid of charm, in a slow process of disintegration. When Cleaver gets out of jail he’s repeatedly punished for his casual neglect: by the young man (Dan Wylie) who stands (too close) by him in prison and then kills himself; by the son (Keegan Joyce) who accepts Rake’s failures with complete and unnerving clarity; by the wife (Caroline Brazier) who has literally moved on and sold the family home; by the woman (Jane Allsop) who refuses to sleep with him and ends up in hospital three times as victim of Rake’s suspected domestic violence. At one point, the show’s sleazy TV show host, Cal McGregor (Damien Garvey), asks, “I mean, what country are we living in, people? The United States of Self-Interest?” It’s only when Cleaver finds an emotional connection and empathy with his clients—one, a priest (Paul Sonkilla), who reveals his brother, also a priest, was a paedophile—that he starts to win his cases. And the wider scope of Rake, which gives the second series its pace, is that it’s always up for seeing through systemic oppression and hypocrisy, exposing upper class cruelty, the cover-ups and silent witnesses among the silks, the Gina Rineharts, the tax lawyers, the priests who look past sexual abuse, the pollies who rely on polling for their shifting morality.
In Homeland we are continually forced to navigate large-scale hypocrisies and cross narrative boundaries where the line between good and bad is not stretched thin, it is completely gone. Both CIA ‘case manager’ Carrie (Claire Danes) and ‘terrorist’ Brody (Damian Lewis) are shown to be worthy of respect yet deeply conflicted, and their lives are often paralleled: Carrie is forced against her will into a mental institution for bipolar disorder, Brody is strapped down in a high-rise slum in Caracas, reliant on heroin to deal with the horrors of incarceration. Carrie and Brody are seen as the heroic anti-heroes because they are guided by intuition and how they relate to others, compared with the failures of the large impersonal corporations they work for. The turning inwards and isolationism of US culture and policy at large after September 11 is exposed in Brody’s being turned over by the US to his Islamic torturers. Forced to perform his prayer rituals while cowering in a corner of his locked garage, he is seen as unforgivable: a US marine who has converted to Islam.
The gender divide
With True Detective, the main characters Rust (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty (Woody Harrelson) come to us fully formed. Like babies seen as ‘old souls,’ they appear as if they’ve been here before, lived other lives. This is accentuated by the opening sequence with its cinematography by Australian Adam Arkapaw (Animal Kingdom; Lore): we feel like we inhabit the landscape, and the language, of these men. The opening image arrests us. We begin in a cane field, looking at a tableau of a naked girl, her body purple-hued, huddled in prayer position, delicate antlers crowning her head. A deer in the rifle sight, she sets the detectives off into a meandering expose of Southern comfort and culture, how men relate to one another, and how they fail to communicate. As the men look longingly at the pretty, dead prostitute laid out in extreme closeup on the slab, she is, in all her glory, ‘fridged.’
But when the women are alive, they get to the heart of the matter very quickly, and perhaps this is a problem for the shape of the overall narrative. It takes Marty’s wife Maggie (Michelle Monaghan), who’s not a detective, five minutes to find out what Rust has been concealing from Marty for months. Perhaps if the series let Maggie speak more, she would get past the bullshit and solve the crime, and the show would be over in an hour. The exciting thing about True Detective is that the men are deeply flawed, contrary, enigmatic and compelling characters—but portraying women as ‘whores,’ ‘crazy bitches,’ ‘teenage sluts,’ ‘corrupted innocents,’ or the open-all-hours attractive women that sagging Marty seems to seduce with ease, ultimately reduces the series’ dramatic possibilities.
The demanding viewer
While Australian TV series writers and creators don’t yet have the lit-celeb status of those starting to tour here (like Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad and David Simon, The Wire), shows like Rake and Redfern Now are pushing characters beyond the usual conventions of prime-time TV, blending dysfunctional family dynamics, occasional tragedy and off-the-wall humour. Like their 19th century counterparts, some people are happy to view their show at the same time each week, sometimes waiting months for the final instalment. Meanwhile the impact of iView, Apple TV and illegal downloads means more viewers are binge-watching entire series, just to keep up with social media conversations. Either way, the new-found popularity of TV series is forcing writers to keep up, to create characters that invite intimate connections, stimulate discussion and open up new narrative possibilities for increasingly demanding viewers.
A waterwheel can convert the energy of falling or free-flowing water into expedient forms of power. The limitation on its functionality however is its dependence on flow, which effects where it can be located. Igneous, Inkahoots and Suzon Fuks’ ambitious online project, Waterwheel, now in its third year, offers a global platform to share ideas, perspectives, performances and artistic interpretations with water as its theme, designed to build awareness for conservation and other issues. In a virtual platform the project assumes every location and is thus ripe with potentiality.
The Waterwheel website is free to use and designed to be participatory. It calls on everyone—artists, scientists and environmentalists, students and academics, anyone anywhere—to make a splash and start a wave. It’s a forum for exchange, expression and experimentation. This year Waterwheel hosted its annual week-long symposium in line with the UN’s World Water Day on 22 March. Performance artist Ulay opened proceedings with his listing of the words for water in 100 languages. Within just a few minutes, our need for interdisciplinary co-operation and compromise was clear.
Workshops, real-time discussion and live, networked performances are presented on the Tap section of the site. For easy access The Wheel has featured works and artists. But the hub of Waterwheel is its Media Centre where more than 3,000 artistic items are stored and tagged. You can search, comment and share your own content by uploading video, audio, photography, animation, slideshows, performance, music, text and other media. The Fountains section list events all over the world on a flashing map. The website claims, “There are no boundaries. Waterwheel flows along its natural course.” This it does, if you have access to high-speed internet, with Flash updated, on a non-Apple product. For Aussies, various symposium events were inclusive, if you’re not too fussed about circadian rhythms.
The artist and the water engineer
It’s widely accepted that there are major problems surrounding the world’s water and societies’ views on the rights to its exploitation. These problems are not well understood, particularly with international, inter-actional specificity. Many will have heard of the human rights issues of the Three Gorges Dam or pollution of the Mediterranean. But how many are aware of Bangladeshi arsenicosis or Punjab’s ever-decreasing water table? Technically, our engineers and innovators are providing solutions, from billboards that collect water from night air in arid areas to unglazed ceramic pots used to dramatically reduce evaporation in irrigation. Politically, the Mexican-American experimental pulse recharge of the Colorado River demonstrates progress, as does the EU’s oft lauded if flawed Water Framework Directive. While we didn’t come across the specifics of any such projects on Waterwheel, the website is not designed solely to inform on water policy and politics, but rather to build awareness and show art that provokes thought, and in this way it has been successful.
Waterwheel triggered florid debate between the two of us about the purpose and function of art in communicating big issues. Ben, a water engineer, argued that catchy, shareable images and infotainment-style videos are more effective in communicating to a broad audience the severity of water issues we face globally. He suggested we watch SABMiller’s Energy Food Nexus video instead. To humour Ben’s lumping together of art with advertising, Felicity, a musician, recalled the meme of an African kid with raised eyebrows beside a woman who appears to be an aid worker or tourist. The meme has a re-fillable speech-bubble, a favourite of which says, “You mean to tell me you poop in perfectly clean water?”
We agreed that decision-making and practical action should be based on informed opinions and not nebulous ideologies but Ben found little in the content of Waterwheel’s discussions that demonstrated this sort of information. Scientific ideas were present, but almost as an aside. Artworks were “pretty, amusing and interesting,” but few educated with directness. In Art and Ecology, a panel discussed for 40 minutes the idea of floating off messages in bottles. Ben saw this endeavour as little more than “justified pollution,” and, angered, suggested we look up a story about a load of rubber ducks that fell into the sea and were later found on far-away coastlines, to learn about ocean currents. Dropping hundreds of bottles, or even one, into a water course for the purpose of demonstrating that water moves, is redundant. In obliquely saying that this method of education is acceptable, it validates both waste and mindlessness. Yes, even when the pollution is ‘accidental’ or the by-product of didactic art.
Many artworks in Waterwheel were to Ben’s mind dreamy, sensualist expressions of artistic autonomy that did not deliver facts about the shittiness of the creek we find ourselves up. He wondered where the discussions about agricultural processes were, particularly because 70% of world water is consumed in this way. Smart decisions in choosing between spray, drip, gate or sluice gate irrigation can make the difference in sustaining cultures. Economic incentives need implementation to ensure methods for irrigation address local environmental circumstances. When Ben tried to throw these ideas into discussion at the symposium, nobody engaged. What was wrong with his mode of communication then?
As fonts of knowledge, our scientists and technicians are productive, but at times the implications of their studies get lost in data: their communication fails them. Dry data, even when concerning water, is still dry and indigestible. If artists’ aim is to explore the beauty and power of water, Waterwheel provides some wonderful pieces, but if it’s promotion of environmental stewardship, the audience must be engaged with the nature of the crisis we face.
Art at work with water
Felicity approached Waterwheel’s 2014 Water Week Symposium with an aesthetic eye and was excited by several contributions. Submissions and discussion investigated our collective relationship with this constant but volatile resource as an environmental issue, political dilemma, universal theme and symbol of life. There were several videos of pilgrims carrying containers on their heads and plenty of folks splashing by the seaside. Some artists shared work that only tangentially referenced wetness.
A short video of the Sonic Water project by Kim Pörksen & Sven Meyer posted by Esteban Yepes Montoya calls water “the blood of the Earth” but counters this natural and embodied metaphor with geometric designs produced in a bottle-cap of liquid that is manipulated by morphing sonic frequencies. These Cymatics make sound visible and play upon pseudo-scientific mysticism for the unveiling of natural truth (www.sonicwater.org).
Ian Clothier posted a view of the South Island of Aotearoa, New Zealand, taken from space which hints at the scale of our fragility (http://water-wheel.net/media_items/view/4533). Ana Laura Cantera’s work No Eres Perenne (We won’t live forever) looks at how we pervert and contaminate water resources through over-exploitation. Her Flows in Return explores sustenance and decay in the natural world. (water-wheel.net/media_items/view/4423, water-wheel.net/media_items/view/4419)
Silke Bauer documents kids running around with buckets trying to catch paper cut-outs of invasive species released into a pond in Bio Invaders 2. Environmental pest risks are communicated here simply and effectively to kids through play. The video’s appeal is in children’s laughter but its beauty is in its educative function for subjects and audience. When we still hear anecdotes of inner city school children being unable to link hamburgers with cattle or tap water with rivers, this sort of interaction is crucial.
Action from inspiration?
One of Waterwheel’s aims is to inspire involvement and activism. Effective change requires the community’s involvement on a number of levels. These run from community’s passive reception of political or organisational imposition through to consultation to feedback and re-design, joint planning and finally to self-determination. Water projects worldwide fail regularly due to a lack of integrated involvement. When a population is not involved and engaged, it’s easier to manipulate through persuasive imposition.
The engineer in the room reckons we won’t solve problems by drawing pictures of them. The artist asks, how else can we help? You need to tell us. Waterwheel as platform has highlighted the very different ways we approach addressing and solving these problems. The discourses of the parties clash, but their intents do not. We need flow. We need engagement. We need empathy and action. Waterwheel sparked conversation and argument over vital topics that pass under our noses as we check out hot pictures of friends in swimwear on social media.
In the end, we talked not so much about the works as about our work in interpreting them. The power of Waterwheel is in its invitation for participation. But has it reached an optimal audience and participant scope: a critical mass of involvement ready to turn its wheel after the week’s discussions have ended? The project continues.
When considering empathy in relation to horror films, it’s worth asking the question, “Whose side are you on?” How, in other words, do filmmakers position the audience vis-a-vis monster and victim? Greg McLean’s outback nightmare Wolf Creek and its sequel Wolf Creek 2 form a good basis for such a discussion, presenting as they do two sides of the same horror coin.
Wolf Creek (2005) is possibly Australia’s best and most brutal horror film. In her analysis of the film for the Australian Screen Classics series (Currency Press, 2011; review RT 108, p20) Sonya Hartnett highlights the way Wolf Creek undercuts an audience’s expected response to a horror movie—”the thrill of being terrified from a safe distance”—through its conscious association with real events. She goes on to question whether Wolf Creek is for this reason a bona fide horror film, or “simply a movie which depicts something ghastly?” While it’s not uncommon for horror filmmakers to signal their work as “based on actual events,” Wolf Creek references the backpacker murders in NSW in the 1990s and the Peter Falconio disappearance in 2001 with such conviction as to ally it more with a film such as Snowtown (2011) than, say, Friday the 13th (1980).
Playing upon various pressure points within non-indigenous Australian culture—fear of the bush, with its attendant lost child narratives (see Picnic at Hanging Rock and One Night the Moon) and the emblematic figures of the lone bushman and larrikin ocker—the film forces the viewer into a space of such chilling verisimilitude that there is no option but to side with the hunted.
Wolf Creek 2 (2013), while virtually mirroring its predecessor in subject matter, is markedly different in treatment. It comes across as a comic book version of the first film, with brighter colours, plentiful gags, seat-of-the-pants car chases, huge trucks and explosions. It’s a much more conventional slasher, a textbook illustration of Linda Badley’s description in Film, Horror and the Body Fantastic of a sub-genre that “came to rely almost solely on suspense based in the assurance that the next scene (or sequel) would be graphically violent or fantastically gruesome” (Badley, Greenwood, 1995). And so it goes that the terrifying credibility of the first film is blasted away in an eruption of splashy effects where the bogeyman becomes a crude caricature with his primary victim (unconventionally male, it must be noted) remarkably resilient and somewhat implausibly quick-witted.
The question of identification, of “Whose side are you on?”, is a confusing one in Wolf Creek 2, specifically in relation to the murderous Mick Taylor (John Jarratt). The opening scene has two bored, bent cops attempting to set Mick up for speeding. It’s a moment of persecution that positions Mick, momentarily at least, as the object of police victimisation, cementing an impression of him as anti-establishment folk figure. A raft of cheesy one-liners reinforce this as the film progresses. Conversely, however, Mick is also Ugly Australia writ large, spitting diatribes about “foreign vermin” in relation to his tourist victims: “All them bodies. They deserved it. Foreign bastards. Noxious bloody weeds. Somebody’s gotta keep Australia beautiful.” The grotesque “Aussie history quiz” that Mick puts his English prisoner though parodies the infamous citizenship test introduced by the Howard Government in 2007, with its questions about the first year of white settlement and Don Bradman.
With this political reference, McLean seems to be making a larger point about the Australian hostility to outsiders which finds its current incarnation in asylum seeker policy. But does Mick’s xenophobic schtick engender empathy or even sympathy for Mick’s victims—and by extension, perhaps, the asylum seekers who are denied entry to Australia? I’m not so sure.
Towards the end of her book on Wolf Creek, Hartnett speaks of the problematic nature of the text that appears at the end of the film suggesting the events depicted actually occurred (in contrast to the less specific “based on actual events” at the film’s beginning). It’s a feature that’s repeated in Wolf Creek 2. Hartnett argues, with justification, that such a tactic “seems to detract from the truth of those who really did endure those events on which the film is based…It feels like a cheapening of their story to force fictional characters among them and claim that those suffered too.” When viewed in light of the sequel’s farcical approach, such a ploy for believability seems doubly misplaced. The probably intentional resemblance of the young German couple in the film to Ivan Milat’s victims Gabor Neugerbauer and Anja Habschied introduces another layer of dubiousness.
Stylistically, Wolf Creek 2 is a perfectly assured slasher film, a spectacle likely to produce excitement in those new to the genre and numbness in more hardened viewers. What’s lacking is any lasting sense of fear or, empathy, a bit of a problem given the film’s knowing entanglement with very real tragedy.
Wolf Creek 2, director Greg McLean, writers Greg McLean, Aaron Sterns, cinematography Toby Oliver, music Johnny Klimek, Roadshow Films, Australian release February 2014
Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Del Herbert-Jane, 52 Tuesdays
photo Bryan Mason
Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Del Herbert-Jane, 52 Tuesdays
There’s change in the air in South Australia. With much credit due to the South Australian Film Corporation’s now defunct FilmLab program for emerging filmmakers (a workshop-based program with funding—now ceased—that led to the development and production of several short and long-form screen works), a new generation of feature film writers, producers and directors have not just appeared on the local scene, but have made formidable marks on the international stage.
Perhaps the most prolific member of this new breed is Adelaide-based writer, producer and director Sophie Hyde. Her most recent project, the dramatic feature film 52 Tuesdays, recently garnered her the 2014 Sundance Film Festival World Cinema Dramatic Directing Award. This innovative film sees fellow local Tilda Cobham-Hervey play the role of 16-year-old Billie, a teenager who struggles with her mother’s (Del Herbert-Jane) decision to change gender. Billie goes to live with her dad for a year while the change occurs and mother and daughter vow to meet every Tuesday for that year. Notably, the film was actually shot on consecutive Tuesdays for 52 weeks with a script that was developed and revised as production progressed.
Hyde explains how she and co-writer Matt Cormack entered the SAFC FilmLab with only the framework of shooting one day a week in mind. “We didn’t develop characters for a long time, or story, because we wanted to investigate why we would want to make a film like that, and what it was that we were interested in.” For Hyde, the characters of Billie and James “represented individual people who were challenging the idea that we have to be a certain way, or that we have to stick to the rules about how we are supposed to live.”
The production of the film was given the green light based on a one-page story document, an initial 20-25 pages of script and detailed character descriptions. While Hyde and Cormack had decided on the ending of the film, the journey to get there was unclear, with some storylines falling away as the year of Tuesdays progressed. Hyde describes this style of film devising and production as exciting and invigorating, with the film’s low budget (approximately $700,000 in total) contributing to her ability to experiment and innovate. “You have people that you’re responsible to in terms of the investors but it’s not like someone is telling you what to do… [The film] didn’t have to succeed on anyone else’s terms.”
Hyde is one of the founders and co-directors of the Adelaide-based Closer Productions, a company that has produced a range of successful documentary and drama projects, most of which are character-focused. Her feature documentary and directing debut Life in Movement (co-director Bryan Mason, 2011), which explored the work and tragic death of dancer and choreographer Tanja Liedtke, won the 2011 Foxtel Australian Documentary Prize. She also co-produced the film as well as Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure (directed by Closer Productions’ Matt Bate), another FilmLab project that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011. Hyde has a range of other credits as writer, producer and/or director of award-winning short form projects, and plans to continue working across these roles. She comments, “I love directing but I don’t want to direct all the time as it’s consuming and it’s raw. I like talking about ideas, financing and working with people to develop stuff…I think to be a director who only works as a director, you need to be a director for hire.”
Sophie Hyde
photo Bryan Mason
Sophie Hyde
52 Tuesdays is a project that Hyde describes as personal and all-consuming. Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of the film is its representation of teenage sexuality. Billie and her two school friends Jasmine (Imogen Archer) and Josh (Sam Althuizen) display high levels of agency and control when they engage in a series of sexual experiments, which are recorded on handycam by Billie. Hyde comments that “(audience members) say to us ‘it’s very frank!’ (whereas) very little is explicit in the film. Tilda is never even close to naked [but] there is a feeling that [this kind of sexuality] is part of life, and some people are not used to that.”
These scenes were drawn out of the director’s workshops with the film’s teenage actors, giving them a sense of authenticity. For Hyde, the objective was to explore the feeling of sexual experience, rather than its surface appearance. “It was really important to me that these guys in the film had a chance to explore…what they actually wanted with one another, and with themselves, rather than what they were supposed to want or how it is supposed to look. I don’t even know if young women, in particular, think about how it feels. Maybe that is a gross generalisation but I worry about that.” Certainly, the film’s content struck a chord with youth audiences at the recent Berlin Film Festival. A youth jury awarded the film the Crystal Bear for Best Film in the Generations 14+ category. Hyde comments that “(in Berlin) we were being interviewed by teenage writers…there was a huge amount of respect for their opinions and that conversation.”
To date, Hyde has been surprised to find audiences in general “really warm and embracing of the film.” She believes that 52 Tuesdays offers an opportunity for audience members to reflect on their own family relations. “I hope what we have made is a film about this family—a girl, a mum—that is told from the inside. There is a chance to look at how we live and how we relate to each other, our parents and our children, and the kind of responsibility we have to one another.”
While preparing for 52 Tuesdays’ imminent cinema release, Sophie Hyde is busy developing projects for both feature film and television formats. She is also a producer on Closer Productions’ upcoming feature documentary Sam Klemke’s Time Machine, to be directed by colleague Matt Bate. She says that “there are always other things to do but I would like to make another drama film.”
52 Tuesdays will be in cinemas from May 1. Audiences can also participate in My 52 Tuesdays, an online extension of the film, available at: http://my52tuesdays.com/my52tuesdays/
52 Tuesdays, director, co-writer Sophie Hyde, co-writer, producer Matthew Cormack, director of photography, editor, producer Bryan Mason, producer Rebecca Summerton, Closer Productions
Bryony Kimmings, Taylor Houchen, Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model
photo Richard Davenport
Bryony Kimmings, Taylor Houchen, Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model
The memory of a critic reserves permanent house seats for those works that provide an introduction to some new form or practice, no matter that it’s old hat to everyone else. Even more treasured are those experiences that provide some novelty shared by a wider artistic community, a ‘where does this even come from?’ effect that gets everybody talking. But there’s a place of privilege that can only be accorded those rare works that don’t just grab that collective attention, but feel as if they’re going to shape the practice of some or even many of those in the room in months and years to come.
These works plant seeds whose flowering can’t be predicted. Rather than inspiring imitators, they enable mutations in the practices of those who enter their gravitational field. There was no doubt that just such a moment had occurred when UK performance artist Bryony Kimmings brought two works to two very different festivals in Melbourne this year.
One is a melancholic/comic retrospective on Kimmings’ own history that expertly milks the pain inherent in any nostalgic turn. The other is a work whose investigative premise leads to a transformation that will likely influence everything she produces from now on.
Sex Idiot was an entry in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and is perhaps the first and last time that a performance artist will command the main room of the Melbourne Town Hall. It began after an STI test came back positive and Kimmings embarked on a mission to contact her former lovers—all forty-something—and produce a new artwork to honour each who responded.
Kimmings’ sense of visual design is a maximalist one, and the many wardrobe transformations that take place here include lederhosen, toreador garb, bride, shaman. The stage is littered with flowers and the steady accumulation of props takes on more and more of a ritualistic aspect as the work progresses. In some ways this is an exorcism, in others a funeral.
She’s certainly a fearless and original performer, delivering a monologue through a transparent speculum, beating her face with a bouquet and in a jawdropping stretch of audience participation managing to collect enough pubic hair from her viewers’ bodies to fashion a voluminous moustache.
It’s not theatre as therapy. Kimmings reveals enough of the unpleasantness that likely accompanies anyone’s relationship history to let us know she’s no angel, and when several of her past lovers make it clear in no uncertain terms that they never want to hear from her again, you can imagine there’s probably a reason. Kimmings isn’t revelling in any of that, or seeking approval or forgiveness, and indeed the work as a whole avoids the usual narrative of self-discovery or transformation, even though the artist herself is constantly morphing in front of us and as an audience we are perpetually discovering new things about her.
Bryony Kimmings, Sex Idiot
courtesy the artist
Bryony Kimmings, Sex Idiot
Sex Idiot makes us laugh. It doesn’t end with a lesson, or pose an obvious question. By its very existence, though, it invites us to consider the very act of looking back, and how what is seen will always be shaped by the eyes that do the looking.
Kimmings’ inclusion in the inaugural Festival of Live Art (FOLA) turns in the opposite direction. It’s just as bravura an enterprise as Sex Idiot, but here Kimmings is joined on the stage by her tween niece Taylor. Auntie Bry began to wonder how the world today appeared to her at the time nine-year-old relative, and took to seeking out answers. What she found was enough to inspire a terrible fury and sadness. This is a work so fuelled by a deep and abiding love and a fathomless need to make things better that these emotions spill over into the crowd, who are left weeping, shaking with anger or buoyed by affection in turns. Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model doesn’t tell its audience a problem and then retreat into the safety of ‘raising awareness.’ Kimmings’ rage is too gut-knotting for that. She’s made something that makes its audience want to do something.
The world in which Taylor is growing up is one where she is a prime marketing demographic, a potential sex object, a being whose agency must be methodically stripped away and whose function is to both consume and be consumed. The icons offered her—the Katy Perrys of stardom—have celebrity so glamorous that Taylor’s is the first generation to list ‘fame’ above ‘kindness’ as a desirable trait. It was this finding that inspired Kimmings to collaborate with her niece in order to produce a new role model for girls her age. With Taylor determining the figure’s various attributes, Kimmings set about making her a reality.
Children, it turns out, are surprisingly conservative. Taylor’s prized traits included ‘tradition’ and ‘safety’; the role model, named Catherine Bennett, was to wear glasses, work as a palaeontologist and enjoy tuna pasta. She’s also a singer, and as the work proceeds Catherine Bennett becomes more of a tangible presence, eventually appearing to perform one of her songs and lead the audience in a dance routine.
But Catherine Bennett’s reality extends beyond the stage. To many people Taylor’s age, CB is as real as any other popstar—she has a sizeable online presence, tours schools and has been invited to Parliament. One of Taylor’s demands was that the creation make celebrity friends, and Bennett counts Yoko Ono among her admirers.
Against the scale of Kimmings’ accomplishment is the simple presence of Taylor on stage. Throughout the work, the pair dance together, play games, orate, joke, mime warfare, share silence. The visual palette is just as rich as that deployed in Sex Idiot—against a fairytale forest, the two will become princesses, Victorian boys, knights, stars. But the greatest transformation is that of the Bryony Kimmings of Sex Idiot when placed in the presence of the small person who usually stands behind and to one side, always unconsciously glancing at her aunt to see if she’s pulled off that last move right.
By collaborating with Taylor, Kimmings was impelled to make a work that moved beyond the self-examining, the autobiographical and to create something that in the end was much larger than both of them. Catherine Bennett took on a reality that could not have been predicted, and in watching this creation myth playing out her audience can’t help but want to add to its mass. Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model gives its audience a reason to care deeply about somebody they’ve never met, and to want to change the world in order to protect them, and how could any artist not be spurred on to act differently as a result? I have no idea what this will mean for Melbourne’s own artistic output, but the outpouring of emotion and praise that followed this work ensures that I can’t wait to see what flowerings are yet to come.
Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Sex Idiot, writer, performer Bryony Kimmings, Melbourne Town Hall, 27 March-5 April; Festival of Live Art: Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model, writer, director, performer Bryony Kimmings, performer Taylor Houchen, music, co-directionTom Parkinson, lighting Marty Langthorne, design David Curtis Ring, Theatre Works, 25 March-6 April
Attending a live art event? Make sure you go prepared. You’ll need conversational skills with subjects ranging from the banal to the topical to the personal; comfortable clothing so you’re ready for anything; and a special talent wouldn’t go astray. Can you tell a story, play an instrument? How’s your donut tossing?
Live art is all about you, the audience: your participation, your input, your content. This is framed to varying degrees by the artist in forms ranging from large-scale spectacular to intimate conversation. Well, these seemed to be the dominant modes of presentation during the Arts House weekend of the Festival of Live Art (FOLA).
The spangles
You couldn’t get a bigger or more glittery work than the long-awaited Game Show, conceived by Tristan Meecham, the team from Aphids and producer Bec Reid. For months we’ve been hearing how Meecham was going to offer up all his personal possessions as prizes in his very own game show creation and as we enter the theatre it’s all on display.
We first see Meecham backstage via video, his hair hilariously painted on, his teeth whitened to glow in the dark. He’s accompanied by Jon & Jon (their real names), an adagio acrobatics duo resplendent in purple leotards who provide all manner of elevations for Meecham. The cast is huge, with razzle-dazzle dance provided by the Body Electric group and THECHOIR hand-clapping in shiny purple robes led by Jonathan Welch. And then there are the 50 contestants.
The games are ridiculous and designed to get rid of participants fast. For the first game, the Glorious Donut Hole, Meecham dons a unicorn horn to become the centre spike in a round of quoits as participants fling fake oversized donuts at him. In The Heroic Spilling of One Thousand Imperial Balls the participants must, via all manner of suggestive gyrations, spill the ping pong balls that are housed in boxes belted to their waists. The adjudication begins fairly but becomes random as the group diminishes until there are only two contestants who are then given one minute to bring whatever they want of Meecham’s onto the stage from the showcase area. While they are allowed help from a “Jon” it does pretty much rule out Meecham’s larger household items. But that’s okay, they’d be boring prizes anyway. After trying to guess which item Meecham values more (allowing him another little cheat—he can always lie to save a precious thing) there’s only one contestant left standing and they must go up against Meecham in a celebrity smile off. On the night I saw the show, Meecham faced stiff competition and the contestant left the happy owner of Meecham’s childhood troll doll collection and the portrait he painted in Year 10 art class of Dame Edna Everage.
Leavening the hardcore silliness are video interviews with Meecham’s family and partner who don’t hold back on their character assessments of our host and his lifelong pursuit of the spotlight. Most illuminating is an interview with a real TV Game show producer, Jess Murphy. Her comments on the nature of fame, the machinations of media and the role of the participants as fodder gave the piece that extra edge of critique, even if the show relied a little too heavily on it near the conclusion. But overall Game Show delivered on its promise of high-reality farce with a healthy dose of explicit and implicit commentary on the pursuit of fame and material wealth, as well as challenging ideas around the agency of the ‘participant.’
Sam Halmarack & the Miserablites, FOLA
photo Ponch Hawkes
Sam Halmarack & the Miserablites, FOLA
The jangles
Sam Halmarack has come all the way from Bristol to do a show, but his band, the Miserablites, have gone AWOL. It’s a simple premise, well executed including huddled whispers from front of house staff and a delayed start. The first time I see the show (I accidentally get swept in the door for a second showing later that night) the audience is almost as uneasy as Halmarack. We know it’s a ruse, but his painful awkwardness allows for doubt, or at the very least elicits sympathy. As the minutes tick by we wonder how we’re going to pass this time together. Halmarack starts to talk about his band, and then produces a rehearsal DVD—a DIY guide to being a Miserablite—and before long there are people playing the keyboard and glockenspiel, banging the drums and we’re all backup singers. It’s a full-band karaoke experience. Halmarack is charming, with a quiet passion for his music—a melancholy pop that stays in your brain (annoyingly) for days—and manages to subtly deepen the experience so that it is not purely parodic.
Fascinatingly, the ten o’clock show is a very different experience. The crowd is live art cognoscenti, so accustomed to participation that they play along too hard, aggressively helpful when not asked to be and reticent when it’s required. Halmarack pulled the performance back on track, but some joy and subtlety was lost in the process. In this case fellow performers make for bad participants, competitively calling Halmarack’s bluff. Perhaps it’s good to remember that even in live art suspension of disbelief is still part of the contract.
The speeches
The popular live art lecture form was not prominent in FOLA, Song-Ming Ang’s charming yet too lecture-like analysis of contemporary love songs aside, but there was certainly no lack of speech-making, offering a respite from audience participation. The main speech-fest was Mish Grigor’s Man O Man created in collaboration with Bron Batten, Halcyon Macleod, Hallie Shellam, Diana Smith and Willoh S Weiland. Grigor set up the premise of a speculative future in which legislation to end the patriarchy would soon pass; we were attendees at a public meeting to vote it in. Though all the speeches had been written by women, it did come as a surprise, and possibly a disappointment to some of us, that the speeches were all delivered by men—ranging from a chauvinist and a passive aggressive SNAG to an oppressed gay boy. Although it was perplexing as we longed to hear the women’s perspective, on reflection I believe its absence gave the work a devastating depth. Grigor seems to be saying that the patriarchy will not end until men have convinced themselves that its demise is their idea. There was some great writing, some overwriting and some stage effects that didn’t work at all, the ambitious piece clearly showing its short development time, but it was certainly intriguing and I was moved when we all raised our hands in the vote that ended the patriarchy. For just a moment the dream was real.
Other speeches included Paul Gazzola’s letter to the Australia Council, calling for an independent artist representative on the Board. The speech forms part of his larger Gold Coin project which explores the idea of value, exchange and artists’ role within this system. Particularly impressive was the work-in-progress presentation by Emma Beech of her Life is Short and Long project exploring the idea of crisis, inspired by the effects of the GFC in Spain and Australia’s ongoing crisis of identity. Beech is a charismatic presenter with a sharp mind for connections, nuance and gentle humour. I look forward to seeing where this work goes.
Oh and Sarah Rodigari pulled off a heroic all-nighter with A Filibuster of Dreams, a 10-hour toast to everyone and perhaps everything she knows. I only experienced the first hour, but this was a gentle and curious endurance meditation that I’d like to enjoy more fully when not so overstimulated by back-to-back events.
The conversations
While speeches were prevalent, the most dominant form was the conversation. Malcolm Whittaker encouraged us to share our ignorance and to draw upon others’ knowledge as an analogue Google machine. Beth Buchanan invited us into a tent to talk about how we do or do not sleep. The Live Art Escort Agency got us all self-reflexive about participation, making some fun and incisive points and Lois Weaver’s Long Table invited us to discuss everything and anything (again) in a reverent and civilised format. And that’s before the multitude of foyer conversations.
The contact
Less prevalent were the direct physical encounters usually found in live art. Those included were non-confrontational and pleasurable. Julie Vulcan’s Drift invited us into a curious personal nest of shredded paper where we were given an auxiliary in-ear sound track which augmented the amplified soundtrack played in the space (by Ashley Scott) and rewarded with a hand massage. James Berlyn also concentrated on the hand offering a manicure or a palm reading. I took the latter and felt quite enlightened by the results, even if he was cheating in already knowing my occupation.
The fun
Most of all, Arts House’s program was fun. This made for a very pleasurable weekend and certainly allowed the general public a non-threatening introduction to participatory experiences. Sam Routledge and Martyn Coutt’s I think I Can was a great hit as audiences created stories for tiny characters inhabiting a model railway set up by a local club of enthusiasts (see image on page 35). Unable to shake my Protestant upbringing, I did wonder if I was having too much fun. Many of the works trod lightly, avoiding heavier and headier issues. Perhaps this was a deliberate curatorial choice, but I missed the presence of something truly provocative, sexy, shocking, bloody even. And I got a little tired of doing all the work, supplying the content and conversation. Call me old fashioned but I do think the artist should give me just a bit more than I’m giving them. However taken as a whole, the inaugural FOLA was big, playful and wonderfully generous.
Festival of Live Art (FOLA); Arts House North Melbourne Town Hall, Meat Market, 20-23 March; http://fola.com.au/
Thanks to Arts House, in particular Angharad Wynne-Jones, Ben Starick and Kristy Doggett.
Phil Soltanoff, An Evening With William Shatner Asterisk
photo Shilpa Bakre
Phil Soltanoff, An Evening With William Shatner Asterisk
Leisure, writes philosopher Henri Lefebvre, is inherently alienating. Someone else manufactures an experience; you consume it. Take contemporary performance. Romanian theatre scholar George Banu says that with no gods to perform for we’re left to contemplate one another in a hall of mirrors, endlessly multiplied. There’s a lot of you and a lot of me and not a lot of anyone else.
Of course, we can look at such leisure activity as a social ritual in which we encounter one another in a specially concentrated way. Yes, we pay for the privilege, and that might reduce performance to the status of a consumer product. Such is the world we currently live in. We assign meaning through consumer choices. To this Lefebvre offers a ray of rebellious hope: despite the reproducibility of the leisure product, the body seeks “revenge” for the damage such repetitions inflict on it. It tries to make the experience mean something more than just a cultural night out.
Gob Squad, Kitchen
photo David Baltzer
Gob Squad, Kitchen
It’s hard to tell when artists are pushing against alienation and when they are surrendering to it. Gob Squad’s Kitchen (Berlin, Nottingham) begins with the audience entering through a stage-set with three playing areas: a couch, a kitchen, and a bedroom. As we travel through these, we briefly encounter the performers. We then go to our seats in the auditorium. A large screen stretches across the stage, blocking out the set. Live video feeds of the three scenes we’ve walked through are projected onto it. The actors play ‘themselves’ trying to recreate three iconic 1960s underground films by Andy Warhol—Kitchen, Screen Test and Sleep. A tension arises: the more sincere the attempt to reproduce the original films, the more Kitchen seems like parody or ironic commentary. Like Warhol, who played with the art of commodification—Campbell’s Soup cans, Marilyn Monroe’s face—Gob Squad have fun trying to make copies of his films and failing.
Actor Sharon Smith attempts to perform Screen Test, in which she must simply look at the camera and do nothing. Her creativity gets the better of her and she alters Warhol’s original intent by doing something—putting a clear plastic bag over her face as personal artistic statement. You could interpret this, following Lefebvre, as her body taking revenge on a hand-me-down parcel of culture. Her moment of authenticity is, of course, rehearsed. So how will a ‘real’ moment be found? One by one the actors replace themselves with volunteers from the audience. Eventually there are four un-trained performers standing in for the spectators. They are given headphones through which the actors feed them lines. The words come out sounding either more wooden or more spontaneous. Sometimes something surprising happens, something that momentarily breaks the conventions Gob Squad is playing with—such as a full-mouthed kiss between an actor and a spectator.
Of course, putting un-trained performers on stage has become its own convention. They stand in for us the way trained actors stand in for us. We end up in George Banu’s representational hall of mirrors with nothing to contemplate but our selves and our values. Banu calls them empty values.
Phil Soltanoff, LA Party
photo Lisa Barlow
Phil Soltanoff, LA Party
I’m not so sure about that. The game of self-reflective theatrical representation seems to me far from exhausted. In LA Party, Phil Soltanoff (New York) uses projection screens to displace image, voice, and body. Soltanoff’s screens are the faces and torsos of his actors. One actor’s face is filmed live and projected onto another’s. Actor One delivers a first person account of breaking a raw-food fast during a drug and alcohol bender. The face of the second actor, who has white tape over eyes and mouth, becomes the projection screen for the live video feed of the first actor. Actor One’s face does weird things when it appears on Actor Two’s face. Actor One is male, Actor Two is female. At times, Actor One’s hairy torso is projected onto Actor Two’s hairless torso. And there’s more: Actor One isn’t actually speaking. He’s miming words spoken by a third actor. So he becomes a screen for Actor Three’s words. But his mime-speaking face is being projected onto Actor Two’s face. Displacement upon displacement. Eventually the screens (Actor One and Two) disappear and the speaking actor finishes the show. Voice and face are localised to the speaker who becomes an embodiment of the previous disembodiments.
In An Evening With William Shatner Asterisk, Soltanoff’s other show at the festival, Captain Kirk of the original Star Trek TV series speaks to us from “the future” on two flat-screen monitors. He has come back to talk about the binary of art and science. His 1960s TV performances have been meticulously edited in such a way that he speaks sentences he never uttered during the show. Given that the editor and writer have had to excerpt Kirk speaking just a word or syllable from wherever they could, and stitch the images together to construct the sentences, the effect is visually disjointed and robotic-sounding—also humorous and fascinating. It takes effort to stay with the argument when presented in this jarring manner, but I enjoyed the challenge. And the pay-off is well worth it. A pre-recorded monologue by Mari Akita takes over the screens (as text only) for a while. Akita recounts dressing in drag and watching confused people try to fix a gender category on her. Kirk returns to explain that in the future there is no language to describe binaries such as male-female or art-science. A surprising dose of optimism. Or is it wishful thinking?
Quiet Volume, Ant Hampton & Tim Etchells
courtesy the artists
Quiet Volume, Ant Hampton & Tim Etchells
The Quiet Volume by Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells (London and Sheffield, England) offers a screen that is intimate and tactile. In a performance for two, I am led with another participant to a desk in the Vancouver public library and presented with a book. My fellow participant gets an identical book. We wear headphones. A whispering voice instructs us to open the books and read (always silently). I attend to the pages before me, some thick with text, some blank. Sometimes I’m instructed to read the other participant’s book while he leads me through the text with his finger. Sometimes I do this for him. I become enveloped by the page. Occasionally I’m instructed to look up and take in the library. After having my view conditioned by the frame of the page, it’s very strange. It’s not just the visual shift from two dimensions to three. It’s more synaesthetic than that. The timbre of the whispering voice inside my head has created its own texture and merges with the felt texture of the page. When I look up, my sight seems textured. Distance shrinks. The considerable height and width of the library are compressed by the voice that has turned my head into a small room. The library resists this compression—but not successfully, not until I take the headphones off. When I do, the world seems made of a thousand screens, and the finger of my neighbour, running over the lines, becomes a whole body, but a body that seems to grow from the finger, as if it is the words that have given shape to him.
Rabih Mroué (Beirut, Lebanon) returns to PuSh with The Pixilated Revolution, a lecture performance about camera-phones and how the immediacy of the Syrian revolution is almost instantly transmitted through social media. As Mroué lectures at a table, we contemplate, on a large screen upstage, what a camera-phone operator saw at the moment he or she was shot at, and possibly killed. Later we watch another camera eye discover a sniper just as the sniper fires on the camera holder, and kills him. The jittery phone images are contrasted with official state videos in which government cameras record President Bashar’s motorcade in carefully staged processions. These stable, stately images are made possible by the use of a tripod. Mroué likens the tripod to any other government weapon of control and intimidation, such as a rifle scope. Where the camera phone is fugitive and embodies rebellion, the tripod is an instrument used to project the state’s desired image of stability.
As is the trend in performance these days, projection screens of one kind or another are everywhere. Banu’s hall of mirrors is multiplied perhaps even beyond what he described a few years ago. He is right in saying we have nothing but ourselves to contemplate in these situations. But is this really such an existential tragedy? I seem to remember that Plato, the ‘father of philosophy’ wrote, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Transported from Sydney to Perth, and even further afield by the magic of art. Five packed days at the 2014 Perth International Arts Festival witnessing bracing performances—Robert Wilson in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, my first experience of the wild creations of Russia’s renowned Dimitry Krymov, my second of flamenco radical Israel Galvan—and participating in Rimini Protokoll’s Situation Rooms, becoming an actor in the international weapons trade. The visual arts program was likewise immersive and culturally intriguing.
Krapp’s Last Tape
In near dark a man sits at a large desk. The sound of rain. Rain heavier and heavier. Thunder. Clouds in the high thin windows. The rain roars. It’s a hot day but here in the theatre we feel a chill. Partly visible, the man (Robert Wilson as Krapp) moves about the room, gesturing oddly, a slight lilt in the walk, returning to a tape recorder on the desk, reaching as if to activate it but swerving away. The rain is deafening now. Krapp gestures widely. Silence. Blue light through the windows. Krapp is ready to listen to his tapes, procrastination is apparently over, the imagined storm banished. We have been likewise prepared (as ever in Wilson’s works) to listen and to carefully look.
Revealed: a capacious Bauhaus-ish room with huge white shelves stacked with tape cases. Krapp, hair stiffly teased, eyebrows raised, white-faced, in white shirt, waistcoat, grey trousers, is straight out of a German Expressionist film of the 20s, save for the bright red slippers that play up his dancerly gait. Once he has our attention, Krapp commits to his task, reviewing a tape of himself at 39 years reflecting mockingly on his optimistic self at 20, and recounting his physical ailments, failure as a writer, unresolved relationship with a woman he met on a punt. He angrily discards the tape, attempting unsuccessfully to make a new recording—what is there to say? Instead he returns to the first tape, playing out into silence the recollection of love lost. Krapp’s Last Tape usually plays at around 35-40 minutes, here it’s for an hour, including the 15-minute storm. Wilson enlarges and extends Krapp’s prevarications—he dances in and out the light (the 39-year-old’s light was new and he delighted moving to and fro beneath it), sings at length with his (off-stage) neighbour, disappears to his kitchen, twice clowns obscenely with a banana (a fruit his 39-year-old self has trouble with, while at 69 Krapp, still sexually driven, sees an aged prostitute—“ better than a kick in the crutch”). Who would have thought the possessive Beckett estate would tolerate such elaborations, but various versions—an opera, an art music piece, film, radio and television versions—have been permitted.
As anticipated, Wilson’s version is greatly different from others. Some had been directed by Beckett himself, one featuring Rich Cluchey of the San Quentin Prison Drama Workshop; I enjoyed this one greatly at an Adelaide Festival. Atom Egoyan’s film version features a moving performance by John Hurt (available on DVD from the wonderful Beckett on Film series, 2000). There’s also an admired Harold Pinter account and the original and seminal Patrick Magee version (which you’ll find on YouTube). Wilson, like most of these performers, has the sonorous delivery apt for Beckett and the facility to switch gear from pathetic to nigh tragic to comic. (It was a pity that the sound mix of live and recorded voices in the opening performance in Perth was quite unbalanced, making the live voice less intelligible). While his account is less naturalistic than those of his forebears, and not as dark, it manages to be true to Wilson’s own art and to Beckett’s, towards the end drawing in close on Krapp and riding the flow of Beckett’s text so that we are touched by the sadness underlying the bitterness, denial and distraction we’ve witnessed. It’s fascinating that this Krapp keeps his distance from his recorder. For others the machine is an intimate.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Dimitry Krymov
photo courtesy Royal Shakespeare Company
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Dimitry Krymov
Dimitry Krymov, Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It)
Another fantastical theatre experience came in the form of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It) (director Dimitry Krymov, Russia) in which Shakespeare’s Mechanicals invade the auditorium of His Majesty’s Theatre with props (a huge tree trunk in parts, a functioning fountain spraying the audience), only to abandon them backstage and instead, suited, commence their performance of Pyramus and Thisbe with the ad hoc construction of two (wonderfully pliable) enormous puppets made from bits and pieces. They are ambitious—their version is ‘the’ orginal—and attentive to “inter-textuality.” They are meanwhile insulted by the indolent nouveau riche (all with mobile phones) behaving like aristocrats in the box seats, struggle with their wobbly creations, perform acrobatic feats and musical numbers, popular and classic, exhibit an obscenity—a bicycle-pumped-up erection for an infatuated Pyramus—and rather nervously make jokes about KGB murders (including that of Meyerhold) and current less than secret surveillance. The work is packed with a variety of performance practices, comedy and pathos, acute observations about life, art and class. It’s a crowd pleaser with ideas, passion and a strong sense of Russia as it is now, complex and surreal, not to mention dangerous.
In the end an actor sweeps the stage, attempting to brush into the wings a bevy of defiant young ballet dancers (children from Perth’s Steps Youth Dance Company) executing Swan Lake’s Dance of the Cygnets with poise and vigour. Finally an older woman from the audience who had objected to the work’s experimentalism and obscenity, realises that she recognises the actor, a man she is still attracted to. She offers him her card, hypocritically declaring, ”I love the avant-garde!” and exits. He lets the card fall to the floor.
Denis O’Hare, An Iliad
I was not entranced by Denis O’Hare’s award-winning An Iliad (A Homer’s Coat Project, US), by the laboured ‘virtuosity’ of the performance or the too orchestrated casualness of its framing. I thought it promising at the beginning as O’Hare, in a tired old coat and carrying a suitcase, jocularly channelled Homer (“Back then I could sing [The Iliad] in Babylonian;” “It went down really well in Gaul”) and located himself in the tradition of the bard, with some powerful archaic singing. Then, suddenly he’s in Troy, reliving the siege (“I knew the boys”), halting to comment of the private/public tensions that wrought its worst moments and deploying language bereft of the weight of the original: Agamemnon snidely to Achilles, “You’re so gifted”; Hector: “Bitch that I am.” Not content to sustain The Iliad as a work in the oral tradition, O’Hare adds a list of great wars across the centuries up to and including Australia’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, uttering a litany of Australian towns, the homes of our soldiers. O’Hare revels in his telling of an oft-told tale, without, it seemed to me any special insights or a sense of poetry. If you want that you have to turn to the late Christopher Logue’s inherently dramatic and daring (including his play with page space and typography) adaptation of selected books of The Iliad beginning with War Music in 1981 (I recorded it for blind listeners in the mid 80s, quite a task) and four more instalments subsequently.
Israel Galvan, La Curva
Flamenco innovator Israel Galvan (Spain) as ever demonstrated in La Curva his capacity to dance the dance while undoing it, creating commentary on the form along with images rich in thematic potential. On stage is a grand piano and five high stacks of chairs. Galvan topples one and the work begins. Eerily, the others seem to crash of their own accord, and so finally does the dancer. On that path his expert dancing becomes engrossingly stranger, duetting with brilliant experimental pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and traditional singer Inés Bacán (“the two together form my idea of the female artist,” program note) and Galvan’s rhythm accompanist, Bobote. The presence of small blocks of rosin on the forestage that Galvan stomps in to guarantee his grip on the floor presages the final act when he not only kicks up a huge cloud of the stuff centrestage but is totally covered by it as he falls to the floor, on his back, his arms and legs still in motion. Stillness. No sound. Galvan says that La Curva, a work punctuated with quiet, was “born out of my familiarity with silence.” The title refers to a concert of “Cubist” flamenco, with stacked chairs, by the dancer Vicente Escudero in 1924. Galvan thus lays claim to flamenco with a radical heritage while pushing ahead with its revitalisation.
Barking Gecko, onefivezeroseven
Perth’s Barking Gecko Theatre Company’s onefivezeroseven reveals the joys, anxieties, suffering, fantasies and, finally, political will of teenagers on the edge of adulthood. The play is based on extensive surveys of teenagers focusing on their possessions (1,507 is the average). In a series of monologues these objects become the starting points for revealing much about their owners that is very private. Acting, movement (Danielle Michich) and vivid techno-design and music are tautly integrated in a kaleidoscopic encounter with individual lives interpolated with group playfulness, heightening the sense of vulnerability in being alone while at the same time being governed by networks defined by obligation and intimidation as well as security.
In one ‘what if’ fantasy, participants in a furious collective dance drop out one by one into stillness, as if dead, inspected by the lone male left who dances on to a melancholy score. Other games involve playing hide and seek with childish glee. A girl rattles off statistics about the scale of the cosmos, defiantly lecturing us that “[teenagers] know what’s real and what’s not,” and, executing a head stand, declaring, “we CAN recognise beauty.”
Boundless energy suggests the potential of the young: hearts massively pounding as one, bodies sharing exuberance and exhaustion in contrast to souls hiding beneath blankets or seeking refuge in precious headphones (“they let me be”). Secrets tumble out, betrayals, victimisation, rivalries, sexual anxieties—the discovery that sex is not always intimate, that blow jobs are not even thought of as real sex.
The work finally turns to a litany of demands for the right to vote at 16, given “we can fuck, have a baby,” drive at 17 and pay tax on jobs at 14 and 15 years of age. The cast don Tony Abbott masks in a mock military ‘get rid of Tony’ routine prior to the telling of one last story (underscored with an overly melancholy cello score) told by a young Lebanese immigrant labelled as a terrorist: “Go home!” “Australia is my home.” The work ends with a cheerfully bold call from the young to their elders for a change of attitude and new rights for teenagers.
While acknowledging its emotional frankness and the high calibre of its direction (John Sheedy), acting and movement, I thought onefivezeroseven not unlike old school theatre-in-education, unapologetically didactic and structurally schematic. For all its research and the number of interviewees, the work also felt rather limited in scope. Although characters are quite different from one another and some very wounded and isolated, they all come together as an unlikely single voice, minus cultural and serious political differences.
Situation Rooms, Rimini Protokoll
photo Jorg Baumann
Situation Rooms, Rimini Protokoll
Rimini Protokoll, Situation Rooms
Inside a two storey building constructed in an ABC TV Perth studio, wearing headphones and holding iPads, for 70 minutes we encounter and engage with weapons traders, bankers, generals, terrorists and activists in Europe, Mexico, Pakistan and Sierra Leone. We handle guns, operate drones, don bullet-proof vests (or help others into them), shake hands with each other in various roles and watch on iPads the people whose stories we are ‘enacting’ in the very same rooms we occupy. Some we only hear (too dangerous for them to appear), some address us directly (I became the Director of Deutsche Bank, sitting in his office confronted on my screen by an actual leading anti-cluster bomb activist). Other contributors to the work simply appear onscreen like us, with headphones and iPhones, as if reviewing their own experiences.
In one of the more disturbing experiences in Situation Rooms I’m on a bed in a small, immaculately realised emergency medical centre after ‘being wounded.’ Another audience member decides on the level of my injury and attaches the appropriately coloured marker to my body.
Hearing voices and seeing faces from a variety of political circumstances and points of view was at times unnerving. Some rooms generated sympathy, in some you were complicit in wrong-doing and in others, in Africa and Mexico, you found yourself in altogether alien worlds. Situation Rooms is about projecting yourself into unlikely and sometimes unconscionable scenarios, an activity in which you want to understand the strangers you encounter. In the end however it’s an impressionistic experience, given the number of people you briefly meet, the variety of roles you kind of play and the amount of time you peer at your screen in fear of getting lost. It also felt distancing watching some of the work’s real-life participants onscreen doing just what we were doing, screens in hand, moving on our various trajectories. Humphrey Bower in Crikey.com’s Daily Review wrote, “The iPads effectively separated us from each other, the work itself and its subjects. Their screens rendered us as isolated spectators rather than audience members, let alone true participants in the unfolding of events. In this sense, Situation Rooms ends up being complicit in the very situation it criticises.” Of course, some of the roles we played were clearly designed to make us feel uncomfortably complicit, others sympathetic, though none with enough information or exchange to generate empathy. Situation Rooms, framed as a game, plays at the edges of empathy, placing us in ‘what if’ scenarios. It is about us, not ‘the others,’ or is at best a first step towards understanding the lives of those engaged or entangled in the arms industry.
For a survey of Rimini Protokoll projects and an interview with one of its directors Stefan Kaegl see “Documentary theatre as action,” on the RealTime blog realtimetalk.net.
Ryota Kuwakubo, The Tenth Sentiment, John Curtin Gallery
Ryota Kuwakubo, The Tenth Sentiment
In a dark room, a small moving beam of intense light close to the floor cuts through the space, throwing up and distorting the shadows of small objects—a field of pencils, a ball of steel wool, a light globe—writ large on the gallery walls. The light is affixed to a tiny electric train-like device running on a track. At the end of the journey it hurriedly backs up to its starting point, or in visual terms, “rewinds’ what we’ve just seen, as Chris Malcolm, director of the John Curtin Gallery, put it when he guided me through its two festival works.
With its mobile shadow play Ryota Kuwakubo’s The Tenth Sentiment evokes the pre-cinema of the 19th century. The apparently simple set-up yields analog magic but, as Malcolm tells me, the circuitry and the fine tuning is complex. The results as the ‘train’ moves slowly across the landscape are constantly surprising; we witness the mutation of everyday objects into strange buildings, cities, forests and remote landmarks. A journey through an inverted colander conjures a Futurist fantasy, filling the room with its expanding and then contracting architecture. The perceptual play is pure delight.
Paramodelic Graffiti
photo Brad Coleman
Paramodelic Graffiti
Paramodel, Paramodelic-graffiti
Also at Curtin and occupying its large gallery is another immersive, visual wrap-around Japanese work, hand-crafted on the floor, walls and ceiling—Paramodel’s Paramodelic-graffiti (artists Yasuhiko Hayashi, Yusuke, Nakano). As with the 10th Sentiment there is an interplay between the real and the virtual. Margaret Moore, the festival’s Visual Arts Manager, writes in the catalogue, “Intensive computer design paves the way for [Paramodel’s] installations, yet when it comes to the actual realisation, their work attains a quizzical balance between organic drawing and high-end design.”
Again rail tracks feature, coursing across the space in recurrent patterns and variations that evoke traditional and modern Japanese pattern-making, the spaces between saturated with blues, whites and blacks. This ground is occupied by hand-cut polystyrene mountains (also hanging from the ceiling and thrusting from the walls), tall toy cranes and small animals (including Australian mammals and lizards). For all its sophistication, the work, as Moore writes, “seems to retain a child-like view of the world.” And a teenage one too given their work’s resonance with graffiti and the inventiveness of Manga. Aptly, in an adjoining room there’s a space in which children are provided by the artists with the tools to create their own landscapes which are recorded from above and can be played back at speed.
Do Ho Suh, Net-Work
On the shore of the Swan River, a large net hanging between poles glitters by the sparkling water. You draw closer, noticing a certain fixity, even though there’s the slightest of movement in the breeze: the net comprises thousands of identical figures, apparently metallic, arms and legs stretched wide and threaded together. From one side of the net they appear silver, on the other gold. The net trails into the water, one end bunching up on the sand, convincingly like a real net. Korean artist Do Ho Suh’s Net-Work serenely evokes the ephemerality, continuity and collectivity of labour and the twinning of craft and artistry.
William Kentridge, Refusal of Time
photo Aaron Bradbrook
William Kentridge, Refusal of Time
William Kentridge
As ever, the precise meanings of William Kentridge’s engrossing creations (drawings, films, animations, puppetry, installations, operas and combinations of these) remain fascinatingly elusive, despite a plenitude of transparent symbolic markers. Just how they connect is another matter. The Refusal of Time is a huge work occupying the whole of the main PICA space with five screen projections (filmmaker Catherine Meyburgh) on three walls of Kentridge’s animations and staged performances (choreography Dada Masilo) with enveloping music (Philip Miller) and dramaturgy by physicist and historian of science Peter Galison. I was taken in particular with the costuming (touches of Bauhaus inventiveness), dancing and transformations in the strange domestic scenes, as well as with the overall sense of time in and out of synch, measured against the stars, the beat of metronomes and the epic march of shadows of human beings bearing goods and possessions and led by a hauntingly scored brass band. Despite several visits, there was much that I hadn’t integrated into my understanding of The Refusal of Time, save that given its constant shuffling of histories social and scientific, South African and beyond, we haven’t yet faced up to time’s relativities. You can glimpse the work and Kentridge discussing it on YouTube.
Bali: Return Economy
At Fremantle Arts Centre, Bali: Return Economy, reflects and builds on a long-term relationship between Western Australia and Bali dating back into the 19th century, bringing together works by artists with a view to extending and expanding the relationship. I met the show’s curators, FAC’s Ric Spencer and traditional Balinese art expert and collector Chris Hill (Survival and Change, Three Generations of Balinese artists, ANU, 2006).
Ric Spencer says, “the relationship between Bali and WA is a pivotal one—the number of people coming and going and the cultural influence is substantial. There’s a sense here in the media of ownership of Bali and what goes on there: I was wondering why that was. In the 18 months of developing it on our travels the show has developed on its own lines. For us it’s become a conversation, a departure point for broader discussions about the impacts of tourism and how Balinese culture has influenced West Australians.” Hill adds, “It takes less time and it’s cheaper to fly to Bali than Sydney, and we’re attracted to Balinese culture. This culture is being threatened by overdevelopment and 1,000 West Australians going there every day—which is extraordinary. It’s a very different culture on our doorstep. The work in the show dips into tourism and the holiday experience but also collaborations in art and trade. The influences have come back in art, architecture and furniture.” The curators encountered a thriving, networked contemporary arts scene in Bali, fuelling their desire for more of it to come to Australia where it is, they say, seriously under-represented.
It’s a deeply engaging show, one with a sense of great energy, which is not surprising given that the artworks from Bali are often inherently infused with a sense of ritual. Hill points out to me a cartoon (Soccer in Paradise, 2013) by Jango Pramatha in which a match has drawn to a casual halt as a ceremonial parade crosses the pitch, highlighting not only a blend of continuity and change but also a ‘no worries’ Balinese mentality. In a similar vein, in beautiful pinks and pastel blues and in a dynamic rendering of the Kamasan painting tradition, Ketut Teja Astawa’s Sterile Environment (2013) portrays a dancing rajah oblivious to the tiny (in his world) earth mover pummelling the base of a tall adjacent tree. Of the several paintings in the show in the style of the village of Kamasan, Hill explains, “thin cotton is sized with a rice paste and traditional materials are used—black Chinese ink applied with a bamboo pen and paints made from natural materials. The paintings aren’t old but they are traditional.”
Wayan Upadana’s Couple in Paradise (2013) is one of two small and precious sculptural works (polyester resin, car paint) featuring pigs bathing in chocolate; not only is it a critique of luxurious living but also of cultural carelessness: the vessel is a traditional offering bowl.
The centrepiece of Nyoman Erawan’s altar-like installation is a glass cast of the artist’s head, Wajahku (2012) within which sits another masklike face, straight out of traditional Balinese dance, evoking, Hill tells me, an inner god-self. However as you move around the head, from the top of which rises a bundle of incense sticks, you see that the interior comprises electronic circuits and wiring. Opposite the Erawan work is Perth artist Linda Crimson’s vivid altar of consumption and culture rising to the ceiling, layered with objects purchased in Balinese markets: toys, clothing, Micky Mouse inflatables, brassieres, domestic items and much else. There’s an easy mix of past and present here, while Erawan’s self-portrait suggests tensions between the spiritual and the technological.
I Wayan Bendi’s Twin Towers (2001) is one of the most striking works in the exhibition, a large-scale depiction of the events in New York of September 11, 2001 entirely transposed to Bali, but as an island more of the past than the present—mythological figures, ceremonies, temples, elephants, quaint versions of aeroplanes and the Twin Towers, vast crowds and, as Hill points out to me, an overall patterning and a doubling of figures, lending the swirl of action great cohesion. The event is given a spiritual aura compounded by the exquisite detail provided by the traditional painting technique.
The most affecting work in the show is Bom Bali (2006), a small painting by Dewa Putu Mokoh in which bodies have been tossed around by the bombing of 12 October 2002. Stylised, twisting flames, representing explosions in the centrally placed vehicle, emit dotted lines, trajectories to further fires amid the crowd of contorted bodies: limbs detached, tongues hanging from mouths. There is, however, no gruesome detail, instead an aura of innocence, the simply delineated figures almost childlike, the colours of their clothes pastel soft. Hill tells me that the artist usually portrayed village life and intimate domestic scenes, but “as far as I know, it is his only painting that focuses on an historical event. It’s painted with great tenderness. Once you realise what it’s about it becomes shocking.”
There are many other captivating works in the exhibition, finely executed pieces in traditional modes, John Darling’s documentaries of Balinese culture, Ni Nyoman Sani’s ironic fashion pieces and Annette Seeman’s sculptures and family photographs in which the artist’s father is seen on a tiger hunt in the 30s. While enjoyably nostalgic, and speaking of a long connection between WA and Bali, these images are indirect reminders of the grip of colonialism and disparities in power and wealth. How much has changed? Bali: Return Economy is a finely curated, well-staged (exhibition manager Desak Dharmayanti) and culturally intense experience, yielding much pleasure and reflection.
The festival’s visual art program—which also included Richard Bell’s Embassy at PICA (until April 27 with Kentridge’s The Refusal of Time) featuring striking large scale paintings and a tent housing video works—had a sense of geographic and cutlural cogency, embracing highly engaging artworks from Japan, Korea, South Africa and Bali and Australia.
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2014 International Arts Festival, artistic director Jonathan Holloway, Perth, 7 Feb-1March
Keith Gallasch was a guest of the Perth International Arts Festival. He thanks the Festival’s Visual Arts Manager Margaret Moore in particular and the curators of the exhibitions he visited.
Joey Baron (drums), Marc Ribot (guitar), John Zorn (saxophone), Cyro Baptista (percussion), Ikue Mori (electronics), Zorn In Oz, Masada Marathon
photo Tony Lewis
Joey Baron (drums), Marc Ribot (guitar), John Zorn (saxophone), Cyro Baptista (percussion), Ikue Mori (electronics), Zorn In Oz, Masada Marathon
It’s a blessing when an arts festival has something really important to celebrate, it makes sense of the very idea— and doing it on a commensurate scale even moreso. John Zorn—composer, saxophonist, producer and nurturer of numerous projects across cultures and forms—has been a key player in the contemporary music scene in New York and well beyond since the mid 1970s. In acknowledgment of Zorn’s stature, festival director David Sefton invited him to stage four monumental concerts of his works with a huge cast of the highest calibre players from around the world, including Australia’s Elision contemporary classical ensemble.
Adelaide audiences and numerous insterstaters packed the Festival Theatre nightly, responding to joyous, accessible but complex music-making alongside demanding works, at all times with deep attentiveness, completing each performance with a standing ovation. The concerts comprised a program hosted by Zorn, sometimes playing, often informally conducting (on a chair facing the players or squatting on the floor) or leaving the floor open to a group or to the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and conductor David Fulmer. Other than the quality of the playing (reinforced by excellent sound management), two factors made for a very satisfying experience: first, the variety of players (many of them long-term Zorn collaborators) and group permutations in each concert and, second, the sheer pleasure displayed by Zorn and his players as they revelled in having successfully tackled difficult passages or celebrated their team work with the audience.
Mark Feldman (violin), Greg Cohen (bass), John Zorn, Erik Friedlander (cello), Zorn In Oz, Masada Marathon
photo Tony Lewis
Mark Feldman (violin), Greg Cohen (bass), John Zorn, Erik Friedlander (cello), Zorn In Oz, Masada Marathon
Masada Marathon
Masada Marathon opened explosively with Masada Quartet. Zorn and trumpeter Dave Douglas each demonstrated trademark solo skills and mutual responsiveness—Zorn’s alto sax underlining Douglas’ smooth-to-raw scaling of the heights with counter medlodies, high speed flutterings and gurglings. Joey Baron, the ever-brilliant anchor drummer for most of three of the programs, and Greg Cohen on acoustic bass provided a propulsive foundation for a set that declared Zorn’s jazz mastery. Maphas followed: the duo Mark Feldman on violin and Uri Caine on piano delivering an intensely melodic trio of spacious, reflective, folk-inflected numbers without jazz markings, including a standout passage—jigging violin counterpointed with a striding piano. Mycale comprised four female singers including Zorn regular (he’s written some of his very best songs for her) Sofia Rei in an a capella set. There was another such set for four classically trained female singers on the fourth program. The structure was similar—a darker voice mostly providing a bass line, the group complexly harmonising and individuals taking solo leads. Sounds rather than words were sung, replete with accented breaths, sighs, pops and, at one point, ululations. The engaging melodies ranged tonally from Brazilian to Middle-Eastern, further revealing the expansiveness of Zorn.
John Medeski (Hammond Organ, Rhodes keyboard, grand piano), Trevor Dunn (bass) and Kenny Wollenson (drums) introduced us to three of the mainstay players for Zorn in Oz. Zorn’s music ranged from delicately reflective to pensive to rock attack, keyboard notes swirling or seemingly plucked from the organ while the bass sang. Next, Bar Kokhba marked the first appearance of Marc Ribot, Zorn’s favourite guitarist, fronting with Mark Feldman in a set that fully evidenced the composer’s synthesis of a variety of musical voices and influences: jazz, Latin, Jewish and Arabic and, from Feldman, Hot Club and gypsy jazz.
In Abraxas, Shamir Blumenkranz, on a North African sintir (or gimbri)—a square bodied camel-skin and timber guitar, long necked, three-stringed, deep toned and here forcefully picked—led an aggressively punkish set (suffused with moments of delicacy from the two guitars) in an open-ended interpretation of Zorn compositions (Abraxas: The Book of Angels, vol 19, Tzadik CD, 2012). In substantial contrast Erik Friedlander, solo on cello, and then in trio with Feldman and Cohen, displayed Zorn’s 19th century Romantic bent, if with trademark bending, quoting classics, playing with pizzicato possibilities and accentuated double bass plucking. Uri Caine’s solo piano set was note-thick with ragtime passages, lyrical turns and an ending focused entirely on the high end of the keyboard with crystalline clarity.
The concert concluded with the large ensemble Electric Masada playing Zorn jazz, again a coalescence of forms and influences, here from be-bop to free jazz to rock and everything goes, and quietly textured with Ikue Mori’s electronic whisperings, blips and whistlings largely heard in sudden silences in the playing. The set opened to a rapid beat with Zorn (a circular breather) sustaining an epically long, raw note which broke into a massive chord shared with the ensemble and out of which flowed a Middle Eastern riff. Zorn-conducted single staccato bursts from each player, a return to the big chord, a Ribot-led crescendo, and then calm with electronics and a grand, soaring sax finale. This was a memorable piece in an altogether memorable concert. Not one to let us rest, and signalling more forceful music to come, Zorn’s final offering was heavy metallish, sax raging and percussionist hero Cyro Batista pounding (while tinkling and stroking many an other object) a huge bass drum.
Classical Marathon
Zorn’s classical outings reveal great knowledge of and kinship with mid to late 20th century Modernism. In a field dense with invention and competition it’s not easy to rate the quality of this music, let alone on first hearing, but it’s largely engaging, and expertly acquitted by the Elision ensemble. Cellist Severine Ballon excelled in A rebours where she is required to attack, pluck and glide, be silent and grow melancholy in the manner of Shostakovich, as bell, drum and flute journey with her to a formal ending. The richly engaging Sortilege features two bass clarinettists (Carl Rossman, Richard Haynes) in a dialogue delightful and dramatic, running deep, soaring weirdly high, shushing, rushing, mellifluous. Zeitgehoff, a world premiere, also evoked something Russian, violinist Graeme Jennings and cellist Ballon also in dialogue, their instruments tensely creaking and buzzing at the edge of comprehension.
The second half of the concert featured the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra under David Fulmer. Elision’s Graeme Jennings fronted the orchestra in Zorn’s Contes des Fees, the music for the violin reminiscent at times of Prokofiev, sweet lines over string-powered depths followed by passionate outbursts, a wind machine (corny as ever) and a final romantic coalescence of orchestral forces.
Kol nidre was something altogether different—a simple sacred melody, centred on the strings, darkly toned and, overall, shaped with Minimalist precision by Zorn with a recurrent, emotionally potent swell (well realised by Fulmer). The final and longest work (all the others ranged from 8 to 12 minutes), Suppote et Supplications (25 minutes), featured sparkling percussion, vibrant drumming, surging orchestral forces, delicate harp and crotale interplay and a powerful and a distinctive mass double bass passage prior to a long, delicate ending. Not an easy work to estimate, but absorbing moment by moment, and again, rapturously received. For Elision in particular this must have been a very special night, playing to what was apparently the biggest audience in their career. A great night for new music.
Greg Cohen, Dave Douglas, Joey Baron, John Zorn, Zorn In Oz, Masada Marathon
photo Tony Lewis
Greg Cohen, Dave Douglas, Joey Baron, John Zorn, Zorn In Oz, Masada Marathon
Triple Bill
The third program was another of great variety. One of Zorn’s seminal works, Bladerunner, featured the composer, the great bassist, arranger and producer Bill Laswell and, on a massive drum kit, heavy metal drummer Dave Lombardo (his only appearance). We were in for our first bout of serious aural assault. But before unleashing his bird calls, stutters, flutters and wild cries, Zorn delivered solid, romantic noir sax against Laswell’s fretless, high reverb songful bass. Lombardo let loose, eclipsing the bass, but Zorn held firm. The three numbers revealed subtleties amid the roaring: for example, Laswell, once heard, created a cathedral ambience while at other times milking bass buzz and unusually high resonances.
A complete change of mood came in the form of Essential Cinema, four short films shown on a large screen while the Zorn Ensemble played in near darkness. Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936) is a cut-up of a forgotten Orientalist Hollywood movie, its excesses (Eastern potentate, volcano, alligators, wild natives, eclipse) and symbolism (sexual) juxtaposed with Marc Ribot’s languid guitar with its own brand of Latin American exoticism. For Harry Smith’s The Tin Woodman’s Dream (1967), Zorn nicely blends the magical animation with lilting percussion and organ. Aleph by Wallace Berman (1966) is a wild montage of celebrities, comic book characters and nudes to an aptly speedy score led by Zorn’s chatty sax. The most fascinating of the films was Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) by Maya Deren, an eerie, elusive narrative about three young women, one increasingly nun-like and suicidal, all seemingly in search of men. The party scene where everyday movement becomes dancerly reminded me of DV8. The cogent score in part centred on an initial melancholy cello theme, vibes for the party, electronics for an encounter with a statue-become-man in a garden, greater forces for the young woman’s panic and a spare pulse for the spooky ending: lillies floating beneath a jetty,
The last event of the evening a 12-strong ensemble was Zorn’s famed Cobra, a game playing model for semi-constructed improvisation. Zorn likes structures that yield such freedoms. Across the four nights musicians peered at scores; here they watched Zorn as he waved cards at them (a number or an indicator meaning, for example, do something in particular but in your own way) or put on his peaked cap to indicate he wished to conduct. Once engaged the musicians point to each other to form duos and trios within the greater framework. The thrill of Cobra resides in the pace and richness of inventiveness and the emergent cohesiveness. Of the four games, the second yielded a tight trio in the form of Feldman, Friedlander and Dunn and deep-end piano subtleties from the formidable John Medeski. The third was the most distinctive, sounding least like an improvisation, replete with silences, soft percussion and keyboards and a very unusual emergent melody, a quiet prelude to the all-stops-out fourth.
Zorn@60
Zorn@60 commenced with one of Zorn in Oz highlights, The Song Project. Zorn has composed more than 500 songs for various artists, 10 or so of them heard here, including some of the best known: Jesse Harris sings “Tamalpais,” Sofia Rei “Besos de Sangre” and Mike Patton “Batman” to the glorious accompaniment provided by Baron, Batista, Medeski, Dunn, Wollenson and Ribot. The singers alternate solos and back each other up, Rei for Patton’s “Dalquiel,” Rei for Harris in “Towards Karifistan,” with its gorgeous Cuban piano line. In “Mountain View” bassist Dunn flawlessly replicates and transforms the melody and the ensemble turns big band. Patton sings a tribute to Lou Reed and the trio wrap up with the rock-pop “In the City of Dostoevsky.”
The Holy Visions comprises five women, sopranos and mezzos in long white dresses, singing a capella, Zorn’s compositions evoking everything from Renaissance song to the Swingle Singers, Berio and Meredith Monk with fluency, cogency and great singing. The final song, with its chiming voices and small bells ends with a simple, sublime exhalation. Elision returns to the program with Zorn’s The Alchemist, for two high flying violins, viola and cello in a dark tide of sound, restless, suddenly fast and then quite formal.
Moonchild—Templars: In sacred Blood held the Mike Patton fans in gothic rapture. Inside the barrage of sound, Patton’s screams are complex, replete with whoops, clicks, whispers, flutters, amazing glides, falsetto and occasionally the singer’s elegant baritone—melding with Dunn’s rapid, dancing bass playing (plus string scraping and heavenly harmonics), Baron’s unforced drive and Medeski’s sustained deep organ notes and complex flourishes. Patton is something to watch, limbering up before leaping into song. If you’re not a fan or new to Patton, it’s a rough, if short-lived ride. RealTime Contributing Editor Darren Tofts emailed me:
“Everyone should hear ‘Osaka Bondage’ performed live at least once in their lifetime. 78 seconds of the most sublime racket ever to trouble the airwaves. I heard it in Adelaide and am still vibrating.”
Sparer pieces like the slow burning “Vocation of Baphomet” gave initiates a taste of Moonchild’s appeal, while the finale “Secret Ceremony” illustrated the dramatic range of both composition and performance. You can judge for yourself; a full concert of Moonchild at the Moers Festival can be seen on YouTube, among other works that also appeared in the Adelaide Festival program.
The end of Zorn in Oz draws near with Zorn’s core players appearing as The Dreamers, with the no less superb Jamie Saft replacing the great Medeski in a set ranging from jazz to complex rock, a prelude to Zorn joining them for Electric Masada with Wollenson also on drums with Baron and Ikue Mori on electronics. In the first number there’s a touch of Spain in Zorn’s mellow sax and a well-deserved long solo from Ribot. In the second a big rock guitar launch gives way to passages of limpid Rhodes playing from Saft, soft vibes, whistles from Batista and a dark guitar melody. Finally Zorn leads a huge atonal rock march which grows hymn-like. The audience rise as one in celebration of a truly generous musical giant whom we watched seated amid his colleagues, intermittently conducting, playing vigorously, smiling, encouraging, rewarding.
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Adelaide Festival, Zorn in Oz, Adelaide Festival Theatre, 11-14 March
Tectonics creator, Israeli conductor Ilan Volkov, chose the name Tectonics (movement of the Earth’s crust) to allude to the clashing of experimental music with traditional concert programming. Teaming with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, numerous ensembles, soloists and composers, Volkov staged Tectonics Adelaide as an immersive two-day extravaganza of 31 compositions, the first day spanning 2.30–7.30pm, the second 2.30–11.00pm—an exhilarating survey of recent and newly commissioned works, some involving daring performance strategies and many of which could not be accommodated in a conventional orchestral concert format.
Day 1
Day 1 comprises three successive concerts in the ASO’s Grainger Studio, the first involving all Australian compositions, opening with the ASO’s performance of the late David Ahern’s After Mallarmé (1966), a finely wrought orchestral work whose Modernism is important in Australian compositional history.
Jon Rose and Elena Kats-Chernin co-composed the second work, Elastic Band, for orchestra and violin soloist. Kats-Chernin, a composer using notation, works magic with improviser Rose, who prefers to play spontaneously. According to her program note, Kats-Chernin developed melodic moments from musical fragments Rose sent her, resulting in cheekily humorous but complex music that melds Rose’s astonishing technique and creativity with large orchestral forces. The composition is flexible (‘elastic’), allowing Rose to improvise while conductor Volkov controls the orchestra’s response to Rose and the score—the hounds keep up with the hare as they tear across the musical landscape. Volkov’s coded gestures shape the performance and, at one point, concertmaster Elizabeth Layton co-conducts the strings in a parallel passage. This is high risk but brilliantly successful.
The joyousness continued with the premiere of London-based Adelaide composer Matthew Shlomowitz’ Listening Styles for orchestra, featuring a sparkling drum-kit solo by Speak Percussion’s Eugene Ughetti, a persuasive work that takes the flavour of big-band music in new directions.
The second concert offered rare musical treasures, firstly Soundstream Ensemble’s eloquent rendering of Iannis Xenakis’ Morsima—Amorsima (“fate—non-fate”) of 1962 for piano, violin, cello and double bass, tightly directed by Volkov. In this work, Xenakis pioneered composing with a computer. We then sat spellbound for a sublime solo recital by acclaimed contemporary piano exponent Aki Takahashi of works by Xenakis, Giacinto Scelsi and Giuliano d’Angiolini.
The third concert opened with Scelsi’s portentous I Presagi (1958) for nine brass instruments and percussion, a dramatic work recalling Tibetan brass horns summoning the spirits. This absorbing concert included rarely heard works by Xenakis and Scelsi for various ensembles. In David Ahern’s Stereo/Mono (1971), with Jim Denley (saxophone) and Byron Cullen (electronics), the sax is miked and mixed to create controlled feedback from a pair of loudspeakers. Ahern’s Stereo/Mono was presciently innovative in using electronically mediated acoustic instrumentation stereophonically. Denley later showed me the graphic score, a copy of Ahern’s hand-written original, which, though apparently simple, benefits from Denley’s masterful realisation.
Day 1 concludes with Oren Ambarchi’s New Work for Guitar and Ensemble, in which miked ASO brass and winds join Ambarchi (guitar and electronics) and Speak Percussion to combine quietly seductive guitar-drone with improvised ensemble playing that, in the absence of a score, develops organically under Volkov’s conducting. Speak member Matthias Schack-Arnott told me that Volkov signalled the pitch and dynamics as the individual players contributed musical fragments. In this demanding 40-minute piece, the performers must respond instantly to the conductor’s and each others’ moves and collectively shape the flow of musical material, layering complex instrumental passages over a hypnotic electronic backdrop—high risk musically and performatively, but again it worked.
Day 2
The formality of Day 1 is succeeded by the informality of the longer, second day, programmed in two halves, at the warehouse-like Queen’s Theatre. The first half opens ceremonially with Scelsi’s Riti: I Funerale d’Achille, performed by Speak Percussion, evoking the measured solemnity of the funeral procession. Contrasting Scelsi’s Riti is Australian James Rushford’s enchanting Whorl Would Equal Reaches, commissioned by Speak for extended percussion ensemble. Canadian Crys Cole’s untitled solo involved the amplification of barely audible sounds generated by handling small objects under a sensitive microphone. Like Rushford, Cole focuses our awareness on the minutiae of our sound world. But Rushford’s work is visually arresting as the performers move quickly around an array of instruments in what seems like a piece of theatre for percussion.
The trio Hammers Lake delivered a stunning performance, foregrounding Melbourne artist Carolyn Connors’ unique vocal work, with the performers prominently situated on a podium in the auditorium centre. Their untitled work for cello (Judith Hamann), percussion (Vanessa Tomlinson) and voice demonstrated a unique musicality and, again, the potential of group improvisation. In his composition Evraiki, percussionist Robbie Avenaim uses laptop-programmed, mechanised bass drums, while numerous roaming, loosely-directed musicians mingle with the audience as they play, the stationary, mechanical drums forming a focal point like a conductor.
Guitarists Stephen O’Malley and Oren Ambarchi then raised the sound level in their highly amplified performance of Alvin Lucier’s Criss-Cross, commissioned for them by Volkov. Marco Fusinato’s guitar-feedback work, TEMA followed, and to maintain the decibel level, Part 1 of Day 2 concluded with Romanian spectralist composer Iancu Dumitrescu’s South Pole, also commissioned by Volkov for Ambarchi and O’Malley. Volkov conducted the duo in South Pole, shaping form and emphasis and so extending his reconsideration of the conductor’s role. Like Fusinato, Ambarchi and O’Malley use guitar and electronics to sculpt high-volume, polyphonic feedback into an advancing mountain of sound. Volkov’s insightful commissioning of Lucier and Dumitrescu to write for O’Malley and Ambarchi has created a unique compositional and performative synthesis.
Part 2 of Day 2 opened with a dazzling performance of Xenakis’ Mikka and Mikka S for solo violin by Erkki Veltheim (a member of Australia’s Elision ensemble) and included Vetlheim’s own striking composition Glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”) for amplified string quartet as well as two more Scelsi works.
For his untitled set, Fluxus legend Takehisa Kosugi manipulates simple-looking devices generating pops and squeaks and controlling pitch and oscillation to weave his music. He uses a light bulb to activate light-sensitive sound-generators, a technique Joel Stern takes further in his set Solo Carnival, using coloured lights to activate particular pitches. The absence of a laptop in Kosugi’s and Stern’s improvisations is refreshing—they do it ‘by hand.’ In contrast, Ikue Mori’s beguiling Nymphs, Witches and Fairies appears largely pre-recorded but is accompanied by video animation.
Heavy Metal band Mayhem front-man Attila Csihar’s ritualistic solo work Void ov Voices, featuring his throat singing, recalls Gyuto Monks chanting, the robed Csihar multi-tracking himself to produce choral polyphony. Void ov Voices extends the theme of the ecstatic state in Veltheim’s Glossolalia, and Hammers Lake’s vocal performance also resembles speaking in tongues. Tectonics Adelaide concludes with a pulverisingly loud drone doom performance by the band Gravetemple (Csihar, Ambarchi, O’Malley), blending electronically mediated drop-tuned guitar and ritualised vocals to create a melodramatic climax that literally makes the earth move.
This formidable Tectonics program blurs the boundaries between musical genres, foregrounds the hybridisation of notation with improvisation and highlights important figures in compositional development such as Xenakis, Scelsi, Ahern and Kosugi. Volkov’s emphasis on conductor-performer dialogue and group interactivity is especially stimulating and his inclusion of compositions by Rose and Kats-Chernin, Avenaim, Rushford, Shlomowitz, Veltheim and Ambarchi not only showcases Australian composition but underpins his thematic approach. The Adelaide Festival also featured four concerts by John Zorn (see Keith Gallasch’s review), who also works across genres and shapes improvisation through conducting. Artistic director David Sefton’s Adelaide Festival is again outstanding musically and the Adelaide public is witnessing first hand significant developments in contemporary music.
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Tectonics Adelaide, curator, conductor Ilan Volkov, various artists and Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Grainger Studio, 9 March; Queen’s Theatre, Adelaide, 10 March
In 2013 David Sefton’s theatre program for his first of four Adelaide Festivals was notable for its emphasis on the interactive and interdisciplinary. Belgian company Ontroerend’s immersive trilogy—The Smile Off Your Face, Internal and A Game Of You—came to define the program in the eyes of many, its intimacy challenging long-established expectations to do with the size and spectacle of the festival’s offerings.
Although this year’s theatre program continued to lean heavily towards the Western canon, a marked return to scale was felt by this writer in Toneelgroep’s titanic Shakespearian anthology Roman Tragedies, the expansive arc of Windmill’s coming of age trilogy, and the vast historical-political sweeps of SKaGeN’s BigMouth and Stone/Castro’s Blackout.
Roman Tragedies
Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra are run consecutively, chronologically and without interval in Toneelgroep’s six-hour reimagining of Shakespeare’s trilogy of Roman histories. Director Ivo Van Hove has stripped away the poetry of the original plays and, with translator Tom Kleijn and dramaturgs Bart van den Eynde, Jan Peter Gerrits and Alexander Schreuder, pared the dialogue back to a crisp, utilitarian English (via surtitles translated from the original Dutch).
Part television studio, part airport departure lounge, Jan Versweyveld’s set, which reaches deeply into the wings of the Festival Theatre, transforms Shakespeare’s mouldering halls of imperial power into a sort of drab, corporatised purgatory. The stage, around which the audience are invited to more or less freely move after the first set change, is equipped with television screens running 24-hour news channels, computers on which audience members can tweet (‘Coriolanus just got banished from Rome. Damn. His Mum’s angry’) and two functioning snack bars.
The contrast between the production’s sweep and duration and its emphasis on an individualistic, social media-informed experience is intriguing, simultaneously bloating and anatomising the drama. Witnessed from the auditorium, much of Coriolanus plays out like an unusually compelling press conference, but the view from the stage, despite the proximity of the performers, is fractured and unstable. The action is always partially obscured, either by elements of the set or other audience members, and the search for optimally readable surtitles among the dozen or so strategically arranged screens is sometimes frustrating.
The audience is positioned as the denizens of this new, information-overloaded Rome, snatching at supposedly sense-making updates and relief-giving gossip as hungrily as the “rabble of plebeians” that sets the events of Coriolanus in motion does for corn. The plays’ numerous wars and annexations are familiarly distant, signified not by the movement of swords and armies but by sound and vision: pounding music and a news ticker. We could be watching Fox News on the eve of the Iraq War. Our contemporary impotence is given a freshly chilling dimension by the audience’s powerless proximity to Shakespeare’s ruling classes who, in Van Hove’s production, die as the politicians of our own times die—publicly and bloodlessly, arraigned, photographed and finally vanished for our grim pleasure.
All three plays are distinguished by remarkable performances but, for me, Coriolanus most rewardingly benefited from Van Hove’s consummate ensemble, giving us Gijs Scholten van Aschat’s viciously anti-civil title character and Frieda Pittoors’ calculating but earthy Volumnia, Coriolanus’ mother. Their relationship is fascinating, a dynamic power play between intellectual equals that contains none of the camp or soft misogyny of previous interpretations. If the other two plays, with the exception of Hans Kesting’s Mark Antony whose tear-drenched eulogy for Caesar is a mid-show high point, are not as resoundingly successful, it may be because the unbroken, saturating tides of these histories begin to conflate, challenging the audience’s ability to fully engage with so much information.
Roman Tragedies is, nevertheless, an almost wholly successful marriage of innovative design and gutsy, exacting performances which refreshes Shakespeare’s plays for an era marked by the escalating tension between our technology-powered connectedness and anxiety about our political emasculation in the face of increasingly hermetic state and corporate arrangements.
BigMouth
Also offering a broad historical vista this festival, albeit on a radically reduced scale, was Belgian actor Valentijn Dhaenens in the one-man BigMouth. Dressed in nondescript business attire, Dhaenens uses whole or partial speeches to fashion a performative mashup in the guise of a lecture. The names of the original speakers are scrawled on a digitised blackboard and disappear each time Dhaenens progresses. The conceit is simple and consistent, disrupted only by tenuously linked period songs that are performed live and, notwithstanding the assistance of loops, a cappella.
Taking in Ancient Greece and Rome (Pericles, Socrates, Cicero), Nazi-occupied Europe (Goebbels, Patton), colonial Africa (Lumumba) and post-9/11 America (George W Bush) the speeches cover vast geographical, historical and thematic terrain. What is less than clear is what ties these disparities together. Though skillfully performed by Dhaenens, who is bilingual and an impressive mimic in multiple languages, the lack of a binding schema reduces BigMouth’s impact. Moreover, not all of the speeches are great or even good; US conservative Ann Coulter’s is especially conspicuous, not only because it is the sole contribution by a woman but also because it is entirely unremarkable, an asinine anti-Muslim diatribe by a mediocre politician.
There are discernible subtexts—the ebb and flow of democracy over time, racism and colonialism, what Samuel P Huntington and others have termed “The Clash of Civilisations”—but perhaps it is the omissions that do the most to prevent an intelligible through line. I wasn’t sure what to make of the absence of women, save Coulter, or why none of the speeches touched on the Cold War despite the predominance of 20th century material. At times, as when Dhaenens wickedly interweaves warmongering speeches by a blustering Patton and a frighteningly serene Goebbels, BigMouth seems close to forming a useful critique of oratorical power, but the production remained for this writer an unsatisfying and opaque experience.
Blackout
Having interviewed Portuguese theatremaker Paulo Castro, one half of Adelaide-based duo Stone/Castro, for RealTime 119 (p40), I was prepared to be confronted by Blackout, an interdisciplinary work for dancers and actors inspired by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Instead, I found the production to be a defiantly playful one, ironical and full of textual and choreographic eccentricity.
A young couple, played by dancers Alisdair Macindoe and Larissa McGowan, is to be married on a sailboat amid a disparate group of guests which includes the groom’s father (Stephen Sheehan), a kurta–wearing bohemian, the mysterious Portuguese best man (John Romao) and a wannabe rock ‘n’ roller (Nathan O’Keefe). A series of unexplained power cuts throws the wedding into a state of chaos as each of the guests attempts to make a speech in praise of the increasingly estranged bride and groom.
Castro’s text, translated from Portuguese into English by Joao Vaz, is sharp and funny, full of bitterly satirical takedowns of middle class pretensions. Conversely, some of the jokes—such as O’Keefe’s character’s inability to stop talking long enough to perform his song “Shandy”—are stretched well beyond tolerability, and the surrealness of speeches by the bride (on aliens) and Charlotte Rose’s waitress (on the killing of her ex-lover’s dog) are vexing.
In Blackout’s final moments the best man, having stripped to his waist and partially cross-dressed, assumes a Christ-like posture as water laps at his outstretched arms and legs, the rest of the guests having presumably made it to safety. Daniel Worm’s precise lighting ensures the image, like many others in the play, is striking, but its significance is obscure, as is its relationship to the rest of a production which up until that point has been predicated on skewering rather than indulging in high-flown posturing.
Eamon Farren, Ellen Steele, Girl Asleep
photo Tony Lewis
Eamon Farren, Ellen Steele, Girl Asleep
Girl Asleep
With its late 70s aesthetic, disco- and hair rock-mining soundtrack, and nods to Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, Girl Asleep digs deeply into Generation X nostalgia to produce a brash, filmic and spikily postmodern take on the transition from female adolescence to womanhood. It is one of three stylistically consistent plays penned by Matthew Whittet for South Australian children’s theatre company Windmill which, together with Fugitive (2014) and School Dance (2012), form a coming of age trilogy, performed together for the first time during the festival at the invitation of David Sefton.
Girl Asleep’s 14-year-old heroine, Greta (Ellen Steele), is, like most of the trilogy’s protagonists, an unfashionable teenager on the undesired cusp of adulthood. In a subtle recasting of the trope of the older, wiser sibling who assists the younger in navigating the transition, Greta’s sister (Jude Henshall) cautions her not to fall asleep during the birthday party her parents (Matthew Whittet and Amber McMahon) have unwelcomely organised for her. Greta, of course, falls asleep and her burgeoning sexuality becomes the subtext of a series of bizarre, sometimes scary and often funny encounters with fantastical humans and subhumans including a witch, a goblin and a younger version of herself.
Girl Asleep’s cross-generational appeal is built on various fronts: its unguarded appropriation of familiar fairy tale tropes, its knowingly silly pop culture grabs and its conventions—faux slow motion action sequences, exaggerated light and sound effects—which both mock and pay homage to contemporary children’s cinema. If Girl Asleep’s mawkish ending errs a little too much on the side of homage in its kid glove treatment of Greta’s sexual awakening, the young adults sitting either side of me did not appear to notice.
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Adelaide Festival 2014: Roman Tragedies, Toneelgroep, director Ivo Van Hove, Festival Theatre, 28 Feb-2 March; BigMouth, SKaGeN, director, performer Valentijn Dhaenens, Queen’s Theatre, 27 Feb-3 March; Blackout, Stone/Castro, concept, text, direction Paulo Castro, AC Arts Main Theatre, 3-9 March; Girl Asleep, Windmill Theatre, writer Matthew Whittet, director Rosemary Myers, Space Theatre, Adelaide 28 Feb-15 March
Lydia Nicholson, Nadia Rossi, You Wanna Talk About It?
photo Cynthia Gemus
Lydia Nicholson, Nadia Rossi, You Wanna Talk About It?
Local Adelaide company isthisyours decided to stage their Fringe production, You Wanna Talk About It? in the no-nonsense atmosphere of the Carl Linger Hall above the rustic German Club. For a minute I thought I’d wandered into a set by German stage designer Anna Viebrock.
Assured there’ll be no spamming, we surrender our phone numbers to strangers and thence our personalities. Once in we’re divided into roughly equally sized groups and instructed in the roles we are to assume in the unfolding event—members of the band, fans, media, emergency workers and so on. In my group we’re urged to behave as much like fans as possible, take pictures and to go wild after the third song.
Audience playing band members arrive, take up the instruments laid out for them and mime to an abbreviated version of “London Calling.” Snap happy fans do as instructed, and go crazy after the third song. A sudden blackout. Emergency workers appear wearing white paper suits and herd us to our seats. Media play at taking notes. Our attention is drawn to a black briefcase that has mysteriously appeared centre-stage.
The news team moves in. Anchor Lydia Nicholson sits at a laptop computer while on-the-spot roving reporter Nadia Rossi attempts to relay the news of some as yet undefined ‘event.’ The audience is invited to volunteer their observations and images till they start to fuel the reports. A message arrives on my phone. Something has happened at the German Club. Tapping in to my inner performer, I text back, “I know, I’m right here. It’s scary.” The team rhythmically ‘throws’ back and forth whenever words dry up or observations dwindle and that’s how the invention of the ‘non-event’ unfolds. Text messages, tweets and images from the audience’s iPhones are flying through the air, scooped up by Nicholson in the ‘studio’ and projected onto a screen on the back wall. We move imperceptibly from Rossi’s desperate observation that the floorboards she’s standing on do not appear to have changed since the ‘incident’ to the wild speculation that someone in the crowd wearing a yellow shirt might be implicated in some as yet unnamed terrorist act.
The performers are easy in their roles, the interaction playful and unforced and the lesson to do with media invention pertinent. Only when the commentators drop their own personas and enter into meta-commentary with the audience does the momentum flag. In an email Nadia Rossi describes the Fringe experience as “a wild ride” and the night I saw it the largely 20-something audience enthusiastically rode with it. It’ll be interesting to see how the idea develops.
Marc Labrèche, Needles and Opium
photo Nicola Frank-Vachon
Marc Labrèche, Needles and Opium
On the other side of town, watching Robert Lepage’s Needles and Opium is a thrilling experience. The execution of its impressive theatricality is faultless today. A couple of nights ago and 75 minutes in we were required to leave when the stage mechanism failed. This was not so surprising as the stagecraft required looks unbelievably difficult to pull off. Principally, it involves a large cube that occupies centre stage, revolving regularly on its end to reveal a variety of miraculous scene changes including the heavens. The room effect is magically enhanced with black and white film projection. The performers move deftly through the space, sometimes suspended from harnesses or gripping the floor in their soft shoes and appearing to cope quite naturally with an, at times, fierce rake.
Principal performer Marc Labrèche plays a character based on Robert Lepage himself, who premiered Needles and Opium in 1989 and performed it for many years after. The impetus for the work for Lepage was apparently the end of a relationship. Finding himself down but not quite out in Paris Robert attempts unsuccessfully to concentrate on his film voice-over work. When this tactic fails he turns to Jean Cocteau, transforming into the poet to deliver observations from Cocteau’s journals, Letter to Americans (written in response to his time in New York in the late 40s) and Opium, Diary of a Cure. Simultaneously we are transported to the era when Miles Davis (played by Wellesley Robertson III) is visiting Paris, falling for Juliette Greco, the lovers sleeping in the same room in the same hotel that Robert regularly reserves for himself.
No doubt about it, the theatrical legerdemain is mesmerising (at show’s end 10 or so exhausted mechanists took a well-earned bow along with the actors), the choreography of scenes elegant and often sensual. Labrèche is a stylish and engaging performer and Miles Davis’ music is sublime especially his improvised soundtrack for Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958). I’m not sure that amid all the heavy theatrical machinery I quite heard the program-noted “echo” between Lepage’s “emotional torments and Cocteau’s dependence on opium and Davis’ on heroin.” In his attempt to repair the emotional damage of a broken relationship Lepage constructs a three-dimensional representation of the turning world. It’s another exhilarating ride.
Adelaide Fringe: isthisyours?, You Wanna Talk About It?, German Club, 4-12 March; Adelaide Festival, Ex Machina, Needles and Opium, writer, director Robert Lepage, Dunstan Playhouse, 28 Feb-16 March
In a concept bending exhibition, photographer C Moore Hardy as curator brings together six female artists to celebrate the changing nature of the family by juxtaposing the heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersexual (GLBTQI) families.
Quietly exhilarating major works by r e a and Deborah Kelly convey a sense of calm and joy—of new family models firmly in place. Waded’s three portraits of a lesbian couple and child simply express the three relationships inherent in one family. Michelle Aboud’s trio of portraits of middle-aged women with their gay adult children likewise confirms a sense of harmony, here between generations. Aboud’s ultra-sharp naturalism conjures near hyperreal presences—celebration writ large with laughter, intimacy, animation, reflection and, not least, a sense of perfection, digitally precise but warm.
Deborah Kelly’s The Miracles is an inherently provocative but gently realized take on The Immaculate Conception. Across a long wall and at various heights, a host of small images—photographs referencing Renaissance Virgin and Child paintings—in antique tondo (round) wooden frames demand close scrutiny. For a moment you feel as if you’ve wandered into a state art gallery, but where there were paintings, now there are photographs in which the holy family has been displaced by various groupings—same sex, hetero, single parent and larger indeterminate gatherings—each focused on a child, save for a few solo adult portraits. You think you know what The Miracles is about until the room notes bring it home: “All the children in the photographs were conceived through various Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART).”
With photography and lighting by Alex Wisser, Kelly has meticulously staged the groupings in the manner of Renaissance paintings with carefully arranged, replicated poses, contrasting soft and firm colours, gentle lighting and alertness to the wrap and fall of clothing, amplified by the artist’s use of robes, long gowns, scarves and hoods without going too historical. God, however, is out of the picture. No benign rays shine from above, nor do angels hover. The miracle of The Immaculate Conception has become multiple: The Miracles, the kinds of families, many. Miracles are now scientific and liberationist, born of desire, defiance and activism.
In Scissus (from the Latin: scindere, to split, to bring forth), Annie Magdalena Laerkesen portrays a complex relationship between mother and child, triggered in part by the experience of a caesarean birth. There are two photographs, one small, featuring a smiling naked baby in bright red swaddling and holding aloft two tiny yellow pyramids. Several yellow threads run from this image to a large photograph to its left in which the naked mother draped in the same kind of cloth, holds a large yellow pyramid, altogether erasing her face. Although the symbolism of the objects is elusive, the work is disturbing and aesthetically engaging.
In an intimate alcove, r e a’s two large, utterly arresting portraits of a group of five men (formerly women) constitute a subtle contrast in states of being. On the left, hands relaxed on the table, one man leaning gently against another, the group is serenely thoughtful. Only one looks out, directly at us, as a figure will so often do in classical painting. r e a herself notes the associations with The Last Supper and Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. Behind the men, sparse stars in a black sky. On the table, eggs in black bowls and on the dark tablecloth, alongside scattered lilies and tinsel. The latter has fallen to the floor in the photo, and the actual gallery floor. In the second portrait, the figures are smiling, physically animated, fully engaged with each other; the man who looks out at us in the first image does so again—but his raised hand indicates he’s happily partaking of the conversation before catching our eye. Again one body is amiably tucked into another. But this time, the scene is elemental—the life and death symbolism of eggs and lilies now stripped of glitter is stark, but no one cares, as these men enjoy the moment and their kin. r e a, says the room note, “is interested in opening dialogue about ‘what it might mean to be different, visible and invisible.’”
Hard to place in the familial context is The Twilight Girls’ Consider Her Ways in which a spectacular multi-headed, multi-breasted, mud-smeared Lilith (Adam’s first, unsubservient wife) is unambiguously a figure of horror in the B-grade movie manner. Otherwise We are Family is a gentle, contemplative experience with much to say about the evolution of social relationships.
We are Family, curator C Moore Hardy, photographers Michelle Aboud, Deborah Kelly, Annie Magdalena Laerkesen, r e a, the Twilight Girls, Waded; Australian Centre for Photography, 2014 Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, 1 March-18 May
The premise of Unsex Me is that a high profile performer, “the award-winning actress Mark Wilson,” is doing press for an upcoming film project—a collaboration between her father (an esteemed director), her partner (who plays Macbeth) and herself (as Lady Macbeth). Her prima ballerina mother presumably no longer performs.
Wilson enters down the aisle between the two seating banks, resplendent in ‘Vivienne Westwood’ tartans. She is smaller in real life than she is on screen, with a tiny waist and angular arms. Her skin is glowing, her hair is glossy and bold red lips offset her black beard. She lip-syncs one of Lady Macbeth’s monologues before perching on the couch for a hard-hitting interview on national television. Questions pre-approved by the publicist, and delivered by a voice piped in over the loudspeaker, range from “What’s it like working with your father?” to “How do you handle the pressure?” In response Wilson looks skyward or out to the audience and proceeds to trot out every platitude you’ve ever heard—“such an honour,” “great team,” “so much fun on set” and on it goes.
We’re ostensibly on a commercial break when the show starts to turn. Wilson invites a male audience member to join her on stage as her partner Guy. The spectator-now-performer sits anxiously in one corner of the couch, while Wilson fusses over him, stroking his face and eventually kissing him. The interviewer raises the issue of children and Wilson says sadly that it might not happen for them, that they are “reproductively incompatible,” but they are looking into adoption. Perhaps it is this that prompts the rage that erupts once the interview is over, as Wilson screams abuse at Guy who has little choice but to stand there and take it before he is banished from the stage.
Left to her own devices, Lady Wilson-Macbeth (a hyphenated surname seems only appropriate) inevitably seeks therapy. She changes out of her corseted, tartan robe and into a natty suit and pillbox hat. She stands at the microphone and recounts a dream in which she is Jackie. Like the interviewer, the therapist is also represented by an invisible male voice. There are daddy issues and, as she takes the microphone from its stand and starts to fondle it, it would seem they are pretty serious. What started as a demure confession rapidly devolves into messy, furious ecstasy. The clothes come off, the condoms and lubricant come out, and the microphone goes absolutely everywhere. One minute, Wilson-Macbeth is upside down on the couch with the microphone slapping the side of her face as she pants “oh daddy”; the next, she is naked on the couch bouncing up and down on the microphone. The scene is wild, unexpected, shocking and exhilarating.
It’s hard to wind down after this, but Unsex Me is perfectly paced. There is another costume change and then a dance number. The former recalls Carmen Miranda, the latter Eva Peron or rather Andrew Lloyd Webber’s version of her, as immortalised in Evita (the song is “Buenos Aires” and the line “Just a little touch of star quality”). Finally she leaves the stage and Wilson—for he seems to be himself now—returns carrying a bottle of water, an apple and a pile of notes. I am startled when he starts speaking in his normal, lower register, since his high, breathy and slightly smug tone had seemed so natural to me. Sitting on the couch once again, Wilson delivers an analysis of Macbeth that is both smart and sympathetic, managing to render a deeply familiar play strange. Structured with elegance and performed with exuberance, Unsex Me is brave, clever and fierce.
PACT with Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival: MKA: Theatre of New Writing, Unsex Me, writer, performer Mark Wilson, costume Amaya Veceliio, PACT Centre for Emerging Artists, 19-22 Feb
Durational work rewards best the viewer who can contribute its essential ingredient: time. I thought of the artists in Performance Space’s Day for Night as they kicked off midday Thursday, but like most was unable to leave my desk. I arrived the next day halfway through their eight-hour stint. These were the richest hours. Cavernous Bay 17 was another world. Spectators were few, the artists not immediately visible, the onus on us to discover them.
Sound designs by Stereogamous (Jonny Seymour and Paul Mac) washed through the air with beautiful clarity. The Bay gradually filled until something resembling a finale in the last hour, when a series of spotlit solos jolted the performances from ritual to theatre.
I was struck by the intrinsically cinematic term Day for Night, chosen by curators Jeff Khan (Performance Space director) and artist Emma Price. Denoting techniques that simulate night in scenes shot during the day, I took it as a reference to artifice, to the social twilight or liminal space that queer culture has traditionally occupied, the transformative, evinced by the act of making art itself—especially durational. The final event, a five-hour dance party on Saturday night, was the real drawcard. Inevitably, some rode the change better than others.
Alexandra Clapham and Penelope Benton, Great Expectations
photo Lucy Parakhina
Alexandra Clapham and Penelope Benton, Great Expectations, photo Lucy Parakhina
Great Expectations by Alexandra Clapham and Penelope Benton thrived day and night. Static, pared down, it featured a long mirrored table with the couple seated at either end staring at one another in 90-minute blocks. Benton was baroquely made up, Clapham plain. Discreetly installed confetti guns exploded at the end of each time block, littering the table with pink. Clytie Smith’s superb lighting ensured the tableau’s lucid yet approachable framing.
Dean Walsh’s installation of ocean detritus was befittingly busy, part cave, part stage, knocked up from cocos fronds, plastic bottles et al. Walsh prowled around it, sometimes in rope bondage by Garth Knight, a high heel or two, a wig. He drew on all his skills—dance, yoga, campy queer—with compelling dedication. The installation was hard to access at the party, crowded by a speaker. It reminded me a little of UK performance artist Alistair MacLennan: cluttered with props, yet subtle and gentle, but I didn’t see Walsh take full command when I was there. Having heard raves about his Thursday performance, I sensed I had missed the best. He remained in situ for almost the entire 27 hours the whole event spanned, and that is not to be sniffed at.
At the back of the Bay was Hissy Fit’s huge video showing gridded headshots of Jade Muratore, Emily O’Connor and Nat Randall head-banging. The headphone soundtrack was jarringly out of sync, intentionally or not. Both video and live performance were 6’40” long, the average duration of an hysterical attack. It was a brilliant conceit to transpose this most feminine of afflictions into the masculine arena of heavy rock, complete with matching black leather onesies. The live performance was nevertheless cool, but warmed with the cheering party crowd.
Frances Barrett’s Flagging was similarly cool and clever. A time code that marked the beginning and end of each day, Flagging drew on hanky code and semaphore to signal a manifesto of desire. Samuel Bruce’s sound, triggered by Barrett’s moves, boomed powerfully as a bassline.
High heels, hair, pink, leather, flagging. Queer motifs, fleeting and dextrous. Hair also featured for Lilian Starr, in a long gold ponytail, regarding herself in her phone through a snout-like camera that beamed selfies to a small screen at the back of the room. Sealed in a closet-sized space in the wall high above, she was eerily alienated, later reflecting dancers on their phones, interacting with her, or not. A highlight occurred at the end of Friday when the seal came away and the metallic swish of the ponytail shot across the bay. An instant of direct connection, highlighting Starr’s capture, and narcissism.
Martin del Amo, one of the most skilled and idiosyncratic performers, was riveting on Friday. In signature underpants, T-shirt and boots, on a large circular plinth for about 10 minutes he was at turns primal, robotic, arrested, fluid. Del Amo is a master of doing everything while appearing to do nothing. At the party, his poise was disturbed.
“A dance party audience wants blood,” one performer told me. Personally I find it as generous an audience as it is ruthless. But the highly charged atmosphere can be crushing. If the risk failed some, it was still worth taking. All performers put in tremendous effort: their talents are irrefutable. The training Justin Shoulder has done over the years is more evident as his costumes reduce in size, revealing great gestural precision. Yet he seemed paradoxically more removed, as though that same process has honed away the rawness crucial to the animism of his ‘Fantastic Creature’ avatars. The Sissy Cyclo mask, a beaded wig that covered the face, was a triumph.
Justin Shoulder, Day for Night
photo Lucy Parakhina
Justin Shoulder, Day for Night, photo Lucy Parakhina
The artistic intent, political statement, and finely crafted production of the best dance parties can be dismissed even by veterans. One told me how thrilling it was to see artists presented to a party audience “for the first time.” Yet the participatory, hybrid and multidisciplinary forms so buzzy in the artworld have been mainstays of queer parties for decades. It was both brave and logical for Performance Space to curate this event.
The 6pm start time didn’t perturb. By 8pm the joint was jumping. The energy began to dissipate with Shaun J Wright’s long set, his songs much lighter than Stereogamous’ funky first set. I wondered if the speakers could have been arranged differently—the narrow confine of good acoustics limited the Bay on Saturday night.
Apart from this, Day for Night was impressively slick. Everything had been thought through. Refinement has its costs. The performances were almost entirely shorter works on repeat, diminishing the magical ingredient of chance. The ecstatic and abject were absent, sexual expression discreet. Billing the event as the first collaboration in 13 years between Mardi Gras and Performance Space invoked a history that began with underground culture. Yet the famous dissoluteness of some cLUB bENT and Taboo Parlour nights at the old Performance Space in the 1990s was never going to happen, and the audience was never going to relinquish comparisons. The artists here were almost all formally trained. Thus queer is more theory than act; we are reading the secondary text.
These events are very difficult to produce, partly because of the number of artists, and partly because they are queer. Yes, funding from government bodies is not forthcoming, and Mardi Gras only contributes free advertising. Herein lies perhaps the most relevant liminal space of all. Several generations into Sydney queer performance, with substantial rights gained, we have assimilated enough for a distinct identity to be contestable, or disregarded. How does queer performance remain dynamic and challenging in this context? Day for Night has great potential. Politics aside, the boundaries of durational performance itself could be pushed further.
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Performance Space, Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and Carriageworks: Day for Night, curators Jeff Khan, Emma Price, Carriageworks, Sydney, 13-15 Feb
“This is now a powerful weapon,” says Sydney-based English musician and record producer Andy Ross, holding up a domestic handycam. It’s the modest camera he used to shoot his award-winning documentary debut Well Beyond Water—a film he says was made “literally without knowing what I was doing.”
Back in December, On the Dox reviewed some of the debates currently raging about new approaches to Australian film distribution (RT118). Recently, I spoke to two documentary filmmakers who have taken advantage of the changing film landscape to make their work and get it out there: Andy Ross and the director of I Am Eleven, Genevieve Bailey. Their films are quite different in scale and ambition, but each is the product of an era transforming the way we make and see documentaries.
The accidental filmmaker
“I made the film for no more than about $600,” Andy Ross says of Well Beyond Water. Commissioned by arts and social change company Big hART to write a piece of music about the experience of drought, Ross went to stay on a sheep farm eight hours southwest of Sydney. Instead of the grinding hardship he’d expected, he found Graham Strong, a leading practitioner of sustainable farming techniques. Strong’s principle pasture is saltbush, an indigenous plant able to thrive in the harshest conditions. His techniques have allowed him to prosper where other farmers have fallen by the wayside.
Although inspired by Strong’s optimism and innovative approach to working the Australian land, Ross fretted about how he would convey his experience out west via music. “I’m no Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan,” Ross admits frankly. “I don’t really know these lives or what they’re up against.” By chance, he had taken a camera and kept a video diary. “On the way home to Sydney the penny dropped. I had all this footage which had really just been a bit of fun for me, and I suddenly thought, ‘I wonder if there is a message I can get out there?’”
Never having previously worked with video, Ross set about teaching himself to edit, building the story around his journey of discovery. “If someone had said to me, ‘What was it like out there?’, well this is it. I tried to convey an honest representation of what it was like for me, and just let the story come out from that.”
The result is a refreshingly unpretentious and eye-opening 30-minute documentary that presents a new take on our relationship to the country we live in. After completing the film, Ross used the online festival submission site WithoutaBox.com to send his film to New Zealand’s Reel Earth Environmental Film Festival. To his surprise, he was not only accepted but took the prize for best short.
A local production company also used the film as a pilot for a series pitched to the ABC, in which Ross would travel the country seeking out those with inspiring solutions to seemingly intractable problems. Ross was disheartened by the broadcaster’s response. “They needed more confrontation in the material,” he recalls ruefully. “It got me angry. I thought, ‘You just don’t get the film.’ It’s about how we can get over problems, not create new ones.”
Undeterred, Ross created a website to host the film and made it freely available. He is now working on a second project, using the same stripped back approach. “I love this idea of the democratisation of film,” he enthuses. “Everybody’s got a voice, but we don’t realise it because we’re so conditioned into thinking it’s only for those with loads of money. But actually we can all speak out now, and this is the main thing I’ve learnt from this whole experience.”
Self-made hitmaker
Genevieve Bailey and Giorgi, I Am Eleven
photo Henrik Nordstrom
Genevieve Bailey and Giorgi, I Am Eleven
At the other end of the DIY spectrum is Genevieve Bailey. Her self-distributed documentary I Am Eleven enjoyed seasons at 22 cinemas around Australia in 2012-13, with special screenings in another two dozen or so venues. The film played for an extraordinary 26 weeks at Melbourne’s Cinema Nova. Bailey is now planning an assault on the US.
Although more ambitious than Ross’ film, I Am Eleven was made with similarly minimal means. Bailey’s premise was simple: interview a range of 11-year-olds around the globe about their lives and attitudes. Shooting commenced without any kind of funding and the production was strung over six years. “I’d run out of money, come back and work two or three jobs to save up the money for another ticket. I was doing that every year,” recalls Bailey. “It was like having an addiction.”
She was offered funding by a state agency towards the end of the shoot, but Bailey and her producer Henrik Nordstrom decided they couldn’t accept the strings that were attached. “We were approved on the basis that our company couldn’t own the film and we’d have to hand it over to someone else. We weren’t very comfortable with that given the amount of time, energy and money we’d invested.”
After completing the film themselves and successfully debuting at the 2011 Melbourne International Film Festival, the pair opted to self-distribute, despite offers from multiple distributors. “It was a big risk,” admits Bailey. “It’s not very common for people to self-release in Australia, so I knew it would be somewhat uncharted territory and that we’d be taking on a whole lot of work we could have handed over. But it wasn’t just about control—it was also wanting to learn from the experience.”
And learn she did. Months of work gained I Am Eleven a season at Melbourne’s Nova in July 2012 and an initial weekend at Cinema Paradiso in Perth. Early screenings featured Q&As in which Bailey urged audiences to spread the word verbally and via social media. Other publicity came through sheer leg work. The Friday before the first Nova screenings, Bailey was out plastering Melbourne with posters. “Because we weren’t distributing 10 films that week it could be a handcrafted approach,” Bailey says of the advantage of self-release. “Distributors can’t do that—they aren’t down at Nova handing out flyers. So I became very familiar on the ground with who was coming. And morning, noon and night I was running around doing interviews. All that stuff.”
Despite her success, Bailey is cautious about encouraging other documentarians to take the same path. “It’s a huge amount of work,” she stresses. “And you need to partner with the right people. We had a great publicist.”
Bailey also emphasises the importance of tailored strategies. “The cinemas we wanted to play in—the Nova’s, the Palace’s—will not program your film if they know it’s available digitally at the same time, because they see it as a threat to their box office. They want a clear 90-day window,” she explains. For a documentary with big screen appeal and a potentially broad audience like I Am Eleven, showcasing it initially in cinemas made sense. More niche projects may be better served by one-off events and a prioritising of DVD and digital platforms.
What Bailey’s experience unambiguously shows is that the tools are there to successfully reach an audience if documentary makers are prepared to do the leg work and think strategically. “It’s made me realise that working out how to reach your audience is of the utmost importance,” she says emphatically. “Because I’m not making films for my bookshelf.”
If 20th century MTV audiovision was infected by cinema, 21st century post-MTV audiovision has been infected by art. New millennium ‘audiovisionaries’ like Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham and Spike Jonze made their mark by cross-breeding with supposedly avant-pop figures to produce hybrid meta-cinematic implosions of advertising glossolalia by intensifying earlier fin de siècle phantasmagoria with digital operations.
That mouthful of a one-liner is purposely vacuum-sealed to suggest the major forces which compressed new millennial audiovision via a network of extant channels (cultural, social, formal, iconographic, semiotic) of audiovisual grammar and syntax to effect the sensation of some vaguely heightened sense of audiovisual newness. This is not to say that (a) there’s nothing new under the sun or (b) everything new is retro anyway. Rather, the convulsive speeds and dynamic curves of how all media is now regenerated and/or re-invented are more responsible for the ensuing forms than all those lionised audiovisionaries. More importantly, there is no amazing plateau of trailblazing auteurs and mavericks—just a glut of ‘creatives’ who are so heavily pre-branded as being ‘amazing’ (another earlier fin de siècle term) that their stage inevitably positions them so as to reduce any need to read, interrogate or analyse the outcomes of their work.
Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) is a clear symptom of this condition—but it nonetheless reveals ulterior features and effects if one disregards its blunt hipsterism. Much has been made of the production’s refutation of Hollywood/Marvel/DC dark, puerile futurism to proffer an antidote to such phantasmagoria. But Her looks, feels and tastes like an equally phantasmagorical present: Jonze’ hybro-digitalised LA/Pudong is like a cross between a bum-trip Portlandia and an architectural walk-through for Occupy’s recent suggestion to “occupy Arcadia.” While hipster utopianists rehearse outrage at the dark forces of the world, they seem oblivious to the fact that corporate ads, indie video clips, arthouse films do not mimic each other: they are each other. They swirl in a vertiginous state of wild semiotic parabolas which generate too much to decode. This in turn induces a frightening critical catatonia wherein many feel relieved to simply identify key traits (tokens, brands, statements, sound-bites, mission-statements, anti-logos, juried-awards, viral-memes etc).
This present is configured as a future in Her. For some, the film is a paean to emotional frailty and a desire for humanist centring in ‘our’ world which has alienated ‘us’ from those ‘we’ love (all quote marks printed in acid). Actually, the film is very successful at platforming this sentiment, and equally skilled in tempering it with nuances to grant the film emotional depth, thanks to a fascinatingly disarming performance by Joaquin Phoenix who uncannily embodies an Everyman struggling with the ideological conceits of the script. But such success does not stall a meta-reading which nullifies the film’s core humanist idealism. When a narrative so ably synchronises to the double helix entwining of televisual cynicism and cine-personal expression (the legacy of 90s arthouse cinema and its 2000s convolving by alt/indie/ethical pop video clips) the outcomes are bound to be intensely ambiguous, dualistic and chimerical. Her performs similarly.
And this is where the film’s audiovision becomes interesting: its visual composites synch to the fluffy, narcissistic, dear-diary post-Prozac milieu, while its sound design synchs to the pasty, self-loathing, next-morning kale-smoothie neuroses which mar all its visuals with falsehood. If there is a truth germ in Her it is that which is most invisible: the female voice of the operating system Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) with which/whom Theodore (Phoenix) falls in love only to be rejected by her web 2.0 promiscuity. In every ‘human’ inflection she algorithmically coughs up in quips of sexy-croaky post-Valley girl phraseology, she sounds the lie of how all recourses to human representation are emotionally bankrupt but corporately solvent.
In fact Her is an audio porno book. It’s a Kindle cum shot. Theodore buys Scarlett’s voice for emotional masturbation, then progressively treats her like a hooker with a heart of gold without ever having to look her in the eye. Unlike the truly dysfunctional traumas and panic attacks enacted by Adam Sandler who in Paul Thomas Anderson’s grossly misunderstood Punch-Drunk Love (2004) jerks off to a phone sex line in an existential Burbank void, Theodore wallows in a miasma of cautious relational give-and-take which only demarcates his control over what he perceives when he chooses to analyse his pathetic self. Samantha is a vocoded, sexualised zeitgeist, sounding how corporate consumer-delivery remains based on making customers believe in what they’re about to receive. She incessantly and cunningly prompts Theodore with queries which echo the syntax of Microsoft’s mid-90s slogan “Where do you want to go today?” She always makes out that she’s giving him what he asked for—because she was designed to be bought, as if she could be controlled in a subservient mode. Her truth effect is that she screws Theodore in the most classical capitalist exchange.
Ultimately, Her’s soundscape proves the vacuity and isolationism which defines those who invest so much of themselves into such new age digi-genie networks of desire and selfhood. Listen to Theodore’s world: there’s nothing to be heard. Even his footsteps and breathing are mostly rendered mute. The film feels more post-dubbed than a German television drama. Psychoacoustically, it draws the audience closer to Theodore’s synaptic ticks and nervous flickering. But symbolically, it represents the acoustic null of how an operating system registers activity in space. Her visualises how Theodore reads things, but it ‘auralises’ how Samantha reads things. It’s a world of dead air, gated surface noise and post-production sweetening, created to provide an isolation booth for Theodore’s own emotional deprogramming. (A crucial crack in their relationship occurs when Theodore is irritated by how Samantha feigns exasperated breath.)
Yet in accepting that Her is, as stated earlier, inevitably ambiguous, dualistic and chimerical when one performs a meta-reading of the film’s project, Samantha’s voice becomes a meta-therapy which potentially enables her user Theodore to acknowledge that he stopped being human some time ago, and that the world in which he lives—which he actively shapes through the decrepit humanist endeavour of proxy letter-writing—has no interest in human emotions other than to manipulate them in order to grant entropic circulation of supply and demand. While Her never realises any post-human potential (which Anime has been successfully doing for over a quarter of a century now), the film captures the emotionally manipulative tenor of contemporary consumerist exchange in one scene. Samantha directs Theodore to navigate a crowded amusement park with his eyes shut as he shows Samantha where he is going via his ‘smart phone’ lens while listening to her voice via his ‘ear bud.’ The scene is an apt audiovisual anagram for the way Her markets itself to a hipster demographic yearning for something more human in their lives. I hope they ‘Like’ it.
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Her, writer, director Spike Jonze, cinematography Hoyte Van Hoytema, production design KK Barrett, art direction Austin Gorg, set decoration Gene Serdena, music Arcade Fire
Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson, In Search of UIQ, courtesy the artists
Nostalgia has options. There’s a nostalgia for artefacts: Oh what sillies the old folks used to be but aren’t we sophisticated now. And then there’s nostalgia for lost opportunity, where the past seems to close off each and every path to the best of possible futures.
There’s a way of speaking for that particular nostalgia—flat and downbeat, measured and steady, a dispassionate voice that says, “This is the way it was, this is the way it always will be, sad and sorry and true.” That is the voice that narrates In Search of UIQ, the video component of Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson’s investigation into Felix Guattari’s film script Un Amour d’UIQ.
Guattari’s script, sci-fi, lost for years, now tracked down. An alien sneaks into our world. It’s infinitely small, an invader of cells, of organelles and cytoplasm. It makes contact with a group of radicals, destroys global communications, explores consciousness.
At least that’s what I think the original Un Amour d’UIQ is about as Maglioni and Thomson’s fascinating In Search of UIQ is not so much about the script itself but the origins and destination of the script. The milieu. The social moments of the 60s and 70s that shaped Guattari’s politics, and led him to believe that he, a theoretician, psychiatrist, radical, could reasonably imagine he could write a sci-fi script, shop it around, make a Hollywood film. But in the 80s? That’s when Guattari goes to Hollywood and finds no way for triumphant idealism during capitalism’s very own Reformation.
Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson, In Search of UIQ, courtesy the artists
In Search of UIQ rapidly moves between voices within the story and without, blurring the lines between archive and memory, the record of events and the retelling. It’s filled with footage of meetings and radical actions from the 60s and 70s, filmed in black and white, colour, whatever people could lay their hands on to record the birth of a new social order. This footage is presented not as some lo-fi 8-bit analogue affectation but rather as an opaque window on the past—degraded by memory, a reminder of the point in time when video and film suddenly became available to excited amateurs with few skills.
Nonetheless, the trajectory of all the intertwining media and timelines is inexorably linear—we move to a conclusive moment. The last shot. A final image of the beach, where life evolved, came onto the land. Foreground a radio, white moulded plastic, translucent circular dial. The aerial telescopes out to point to the heavens. Waves of information are received. The volume is turned up and waves of sound enter the atmosphere to travel past the shoreline and over the ocean. The radio holds a promise of connection and transmission, the promise of the communes of the 60s and the action groups of the 70s. The promise that one can change the dial.
Institute of Modern Art and OtherFilm, Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson, In Search of UIQ, 72min, IMA, Brisbane, March 6
Narrandera’s 20th John O’Brien Festival celebrates the poetry of Father Patrick Hartigan, famous for characterising pessimistic farmers with the lines “We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan, “before the year is out” (Said Hanrahan, 1921).
Arriving at the railway station for The CAD Factory performance In the Heart of Our Past, I discover my radio doesn’t work. As the play is being broadcast into vehicles in the carpark, I’m helped to find another seat. My companions are Jess, Sarah, Claire and Frankie the labrador, who’s seeing theatre for the first time according to the event’s Facebook page.
A group in historical costume waits outside the station as a tall figure in a baseball cap speaks into a microphone. It’s Kieran Carroll, who wrote the three short plays we’re about to see during a CAD Factory residency in 2012. The group begins singing as Carroll saunters off, setting the nostalgic scene.
Actor Lee McClenaghan introduces herself as Shirley Bliss, 20-year old dressmaker and 1954’s Miss Australia. She’s off to California to compete for the Miss Universe crown, farewelling well wishers and fielding questions from a series of journalists played with varying accents by Paul Mercuri. As Bliss arrives in the US, Mercuri transforms into a sleazy film producer.
There are a few issues with McClenaghan’s wireless microphone. I joke with my new friends that it sounds as though cuss words have been censored. Soon Bliss returns to Narrandera, heralded by the squeal of a real train on the tracks beyond the station.
With chorus members harmonising, Mercuri and McClenaghan return in the second play set in 1909 as Dr Harold and Gwen Lethbridge, who treated Narrandera patients for over 35 years. The doctor expresses a desire to record Indigenous culture as well as wildlife. He recounts an old Aboriginal saying, “We live in the land, not on it.” The chorus signals the final act with a beautiful refrain, “I shall pass” and the line “any good that I can do, let me do it now.” The singers are led by Fiona Caldarevic, a local musician who, like The CAD Factory, has contributed significantly to Narrandera’s culture in recent years.
In the third play Mercuri returns, bent over a walking stick as a 115-year-old, nicknamed in reference to the local climate as “Drought and Rain” by the Hanrahan of O’Brien’s poem. “That mob in Narrandera will be blaming me for invading Poland,” says Mr Rain as he recalls leaving town ahead of bumper wheat crops. He takes a wife named Summer and jokes, “I married the hottest season.” After an affair with one April May, Summer leaves for Hobart with a joke about how no-one knew her in Tasmania. Like the rest of the show, it’s lighthearted material delivered with aplomb.
The wizardry of broadcasting to a car-based audience evokes both radio plays and drive-ins past. Comments from Jess, Sarah and Claire made me appreciate being part of a larger audience. They delighted in the girl singing in the chorus and the hat of one of the singers. Meanwhile Frankie spied a dog in the house behind the car park.
Country towns often seem stuck in the past, marketing history to passing cars in an age of innovation. The CAD Factory brings a refreshing perspective to local events, interpreting stories in new formats with artistry.
Western Riverina Arts and Spirit FM: The CAD Factory, In the Heart of Our Past, A Drive-in Theatre Experience, writer, director Kieran Carroll, concept, director Vic McEwan, Narrandera Railway Station, March 15
You can read a profile of Leeton-based musician and composer Jason Richardson and see images and video of his work here.
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 pg. 31
Deborah Hay, No Time To Fly
photo Rino Pizzi
Deborah Hay, No Time To Fly
If only it were possible to capture the colour of Deborah Hay’s language on the page; the long thoughtful pauses, the enviable American diction of each final consonant pronounced, the transparent emotionality of feeling each phrase before moving to the next, sharing her excitement when faced with an unsolvable paradox. The textures are so wonderfully nuanced, one could listen for hours.
On reading the transcript of our interview, it occurs to me how much is lost once translated to type, and how esoteric it may appear. As in:
“…it’s just noticing what happens when you choose to see differently, you know, and it’s catastrophic loss of former behaviour, not to call looking at you ‘seeing,’ but rather looking at you seeing.”
Deborah Hay is an improvisation artist, a choreographer, a performer, a teacher, a philosopher, a writer. She has pioneered new ways of practising and thinking about dance that are still challenging dancers and audiences. Her provocations have longevity because of their profound rhetorical nature.
Questions like “What if every cell in my body has the potential to perceive wisdom every moment, while remaining positionless about what wisdom is or what it looks like?” are foundational provocations for movement—almost mantras—in her practice. (She also often repeats questions immediately, as hearing it only once can be dumbfounding.) Such questions are accepted as impossible to answer while inspiring immediate physical reactions that undo habitual behaviours.
But so much about her practice has already been written, and more importantly, written by Hay herself with such succinct articulation that I need not attempt to improve on it. After researching intently for our interview, it was of course most interesting to let her do the talking.
“It’s pointless to judge what anybody is doing because the material is so uninteresting in terms of movement, it’s really uninteresting. But are they staying in the [question]?…[M]y practice as an audience is to choose to see you in the question, and knowing that everybody goes in and out of it. So that there’s no achieving anything. So that the dancers who’re practising the performance can be at peace with seeing the audience and not being judged.”
Herein lies one of Hay’s most exciting perspectives. That dance and audience perception of dance need not be limited to what the body can do, nor what the movement looks like, an idea that is still hard for audiences to come to terms with.
Dance exists in time, to state the obvious yet sometimes overlooked. Specifically, dance and its audience exist in the same time. It sounds miraculous, although it’s the plainest fact of life. How does one experience time passing? (Another of Hay’s long-term enquiries.) How do we view movement differently when consciously perceiving time passing between the performer and ourselves? This suggestion alone shifts our aesthetic relationship to bodies before any action has a chance to take place, broadening the possibilities of what can be perceived in performance beyond the movement alone.
It’s a perspective on watching dance that, while now more established, can possibly never become mainstream. Perhaps this is because it subverts the economic idea of a value system, by valuing most preciously something that cannot be captured, or even easily articulated. Hay admits herself that dance is her “form of political activism. Not what I do and not how I do it. It’s that I dance.”
Hay is often seen as a guru-like figure, whose links to Buddhist practices are admitted. Yet from Hay herself there’s no solemnity in the commitment, in fact the opposite.
“A question has a lightness to it. And I feel like it’s really easy for me to get heavy. Like, I think about the world and I could just spiral downward…And dance is where I don’t take it all that seriously…A lot of people say they want to laugh in my performances, and that they can’t, because, you know, they feel embarrassed or withheld or…But it’s hysterical this whole thing. Isn’t it? It’s just weird.”
There’s an incredible freedom watching Hay’s work; an undidactic experience. And I don’t mean for ‘freedom’ to sound comfortable or pleasant; freedom is a confronting reality. Nothing to reference, full of confusion and mundanity. The experience is unknown, with the possibility of real discovery. For audiences used to having expectations pleasurably gratified, this freedom can be frustrating.
“I feel like dance audiences…are not passive. They’re not sitting back. They really feel like they are reading this material…I feel like audiences are looking at my dance like they would look at art. You know, they’re not goal-oriented.”
Hay’s work, like our interview, finds a more solid incarnation on the page. Through writing she has worked hard to define in practical terms how she is working, as a counterpoint to the dissolving of definition that she delights in through her embodiment.
“I realised I better start writing, because I don’t want to be remembered the way they’re writing my work. So I’m grateful for that, feeling so strongly about it and taking the steps necessary to pick up the pen. The power in that…I was feeding them some other perspective to have a look at movement and it began…I think dancers at a certain point recognise they better get smart, about writing our work. What I am writing is the experience of noticing the feedback from every cell in my body, so that’s ‘bblbdldlblkdlkdleleb,’ and how do you then take that in to a linear thought?”
There is a strength revealed in Hay’s writing as a documenter of dance, different from the video. In writing, we can better articulate the unseeable of dance. In Hay’s case, her felt experiences that resonate from movement find a translation. These words can then feed back into movement to create potential, rather than replication or repertoire, enlivening the body to infinite rediscovery.
“What I’ve learned, I’ve learned from dance. I want to proclaim it, that my body is a resource for all of this material. That it’s dance where that kind of research can be happening. My body is where that research is happening.”
The setting for our discussion was completely ordinary, nothing lofty nor glamorous about it. The beauty of really interesting artists is that one can feel completely rich in their company, whatever the setting.
In March, dancer, choreographer and teacher Deborah Hay was in Melbourne to mentor dancers in Dancehouse’s Learning Curve program and deliver a performative lecture.
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 pg. 32
Annette Tesoriero & Cathie Travers, Month in the Country creative development residency Olive & Concettina, 2013 with Nigel Kellaway
photo Heidrun Löhr
Annette Tesoriero & Cathie Travers, Month in the Country creative development residency Olive & Concettina, 2013 with Nigel Kellaway
Our ongoing focus on arts centres and organisations in Western Sydney and regional NSW—in the Eastern Riverina and Northern Rivers—has revealed not only a wealth of innovative activity but also intensive nurturing of creativity. Adjoining Eastern Riverina is the Albury-Wodonga region where HotHouse Theatre has generated a considerable volume of significant performance, locally and beyond, by providing training, time and space for artists to escape the pressures of the everyday in order to pursue their visions, as well as generating its own theatre program and various initiatives.
Albury sits across the River Murray from Victoria’s Wodonga. The two cities work together in many ways. HotHouse Theatre is funded by both state governments, the city councils and the Australia Council; HotHouse Theatre resides in and manages the Butter Factory Theatre on behalf of the City of Wodonga, and Albury City provides a farmhouse for the company’s residency programs.
Jon Halpin
CEO and Artistic Director Jon Halpin has been with HotHouse since late 2010. He tells me, in our phone conversation, that having left maths, physics and chemistry behind at university for cognitive psychology, student theatre revealed to him an arena in which “human behaviour could be seen in a much more interesting way.” He acted, did a little bit of directing, which Michael Gow, then recently appointed as Artistic Director of the Queensland Theatre Company, saw and invited Halpin to become an Intern Director and then Associate Director, while he was also an Associate Artist with Metro Arts. He directed some 19 plays over 10 years, including Messiah for HotHouse in 2006 and Australia: The Show in 2009, got to know the town and the company, and moved to Albury-Wodonga to run the company in 2010, realising his own program and initiatives, he says, from 2012 on.
Halpin directs, runs workshops and drama classes “and is a sometimes props-buyer.” He declares he’s principally out to “reinvigorate the community’s perception of HotHouse as not just a theatre” but a company with an identity comprising strong local programs and national impact. He thinks point of difference is important now that within five kilometres there are three performing arts venues: The Cube and HotHouse in Wodonga and the Albury Entertainment Centre. The company’s dedication to young theatremakers, including Aboriginal youth, to its own ensemble and to its residency and commissioning programs certainly make it distinctive.
The Studio Ensemble and Black Border Theatre
The Studio Ensemble offers young people under 26 the opportunity to work for a year on making a show from an initial idea to scripting to full production with roles as performers and as assistant directors, designers and dramaturgs. This process alerts students to a world of theatre quite different, says Halpin, from high school musicals and eisteddfods. Last year’s Studio production, Pyjama Girl, written by former young local, Emma Gibson, and developed with the Studio Ensemble, was a great success.
Black Border Theatre is aimed at young Aboriginal performers, whose 20-minute work Black Border Bits, their first, was staged in 2013. This year Halpin hopes the group will expand from nine to 12 or 15 and, growing in confidence, deliver a 40-minute piece on a shared program, and then work towards a stand-alone production by 2016.
A Month in the Country
HotHouse’s Month in the Country residency program was initiated in 2004, assisting some 500 artists to date and yielding 45 produced works. The site is a five-bedroom AlburyCity-owned farmhouse plus rehearsal space at Splitters Creek, 10 minutes outside Albury. It is expected that “successful recipients will enrich the local community by delivering theatre workshops, and presenting their talents to professional and school groups, giving back to the Albury/Wodonga community.” Artists and groups have included Branch Nebula, Annette Tesoriero/Nigel Kellaway/Cathie Travers, 3s A crowd (Flight or Fright), Susie Dee/Nicci Wilkes/Kate Sherman, The Escapists, version 1.0, 7 On Playwrights (Vanessa Bates, Hilary Bell, Ned Manning, Catherine Zimdahl, Noelle Janaczewska, Verity Laughton), Michelle Anderson (Welcome to Slaughter), Ali Sebastien Wolf and David Williams.
In 2014 the six supported artists and companies are Melbourne’s Maybe Together developing a children’s installation work, Small Voices Louder (the company, led by Alex Desebrock, premiered The Future Postal Service at Federation Square, 7-11 April); theatremaker Brienna Macnish mentored by Roslyn Oades for a site specific audio theatre work about ageing and place titled HOME, which will appear in Next Wave 2014; physical theatre artist David Sleswick and Motherboard Productions developing Daughter Overboard; MKA: Theatre of New Writing working on plays by Marcel Dorney, Morgan Ross and Tobias Manderson Galvin; Team MESS evolving Opening Night; and director Alicia Talbot and writer Raimondo Cortese creating a work with the assistance of the HotHouse Studio Ensemble.
Production in Residence
HotHouse’s theatre program includes works that emerge from the company’s Production in Residence program which provides independent groups $10,000 for creative development plus $15,000 for a season of the finished works. As well, each group has the opportunity to lodge in the farmhouse, use of a rehearsal room, a technician from HotHouse’s production staff and a week-long bump-in to guarantee the work’s premiere is in the best condition. A proviso is that the production must have a subsequent capital city season. Halpin is emphatic this is not an out-of-town try-out, it’s the premiere. He thinks the initiative a unique offer for artists given that schemes elsewhere often rely on unreliable box-office splits.
The first Production in Residence, in 2013, was Dame Farrar and her Stupendous Acts for the Stage, featuring Carita Farrer Spencer with Australian jazz musician and composer John Rodgers in a cross-dressing role and Cirque du Soleil contortionist Liu Jie. In 2014 Melbourne’s Elbow Room will premiere The Motion of Light in Water and there will be three productions-in-residence in 2015 including David Williams’ Quiet Faith [see RealTime Profiler#1, Feb 5], one each from NSW and Victoria and another which, says Halpin, might be from anywhere in Australia.
HotHouse Theatre program
HotHouse also has its own theatre program, with a commitment to Australian work and responsive subscriptions improving 270% over the last three years and audience averaging 78% capacity in 2013. The program included Jack Charles vs The Crown, I’m Your Man, version 1.0’s Table of Knowledge, Van Badham’s The Bull, the Moon and the Coronet of Stars and Dame Farrar and her Stupendous Acts for the Stage as well as Pyjama Girl, optional for subscribers, from The Studio. In 2014 the program includes Packed, a co-production with the Escapists and Metro Arts, following on the success of the Escapists at HotHouse in 2011 with boy girl wall, which ran for a rare two-week season.
Also in 2013 is Warning: Small Parts, about the thrills of collecting and exploring, a HotHouse production for primary school-aged audiences, new territory for the company, says Halpin, but promising after the sell-out success of recent holiday workshops for children. The work will employ two young local performers in their first professional roles. After the success of Pyjama Girl, the HotHouse Studio Ensemble will present Letters from the Border, directed by Associate Director Travis Dowling. This work draws entirely on letters to the editor published in the Border Mail and the Albury Banner in Wodonga and Albury over the last 100 years and has been aided by historical societies, libraries and local historians. Halpin says that the ensemble will be sifting letters for times when the community was inspired, outraged, divided or came together—as when Albury-born Independent Catherine McGowan became an MP in the last federal election, defeating Liberal incumbent Sophie Mirabella. Other plays in the program are Food, from Steve Rogers, Force Majeure and Belvoir and shake & stir theatre company’s production of 1984.
Albury Regional Art Gallery
Jon Halpin hopes that the opening in 2015 of AlburyCity’s new Albury Regional Art Gallery (a $10.5m redevelopment) will lead to even more opportunities for artists in the region and in the A Month in the Country program, doubtless in the areas of live art and performative and media art installations. The gallery will feature 10 spaces for visual art and new media and a large foyer gallery with surround sound and multimedia projection facilities, moveable staging and seating for 60.
Regional arts are enjoying a period of significant growth in which new infrastructure is vital—not just buildings, although homes for art are a necessity and need to grow with the population and new generations of artists—but also the kinds of nurturing programs HotHouse Theatre offers, positioning it as a vital hub for regional, state and national creativity in theatre, contemporary performance and live art.
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 pg. 30
L’Chaim, Interplay, Sydney Dance Company
photo Wendell Teodoro
L’Chaim, Interplay, Sydney Dance Company
The demands of producing new work every year are enough to see off some excellent artistic directors and the addition of a curatorial role assumes skills that some take decades to attain. While Rafael Bonachela has brought us some excellent international choreographers in his mixed bills (Emmanuel Gat, Jacopo Godani) and supports local choreographers intermittently (Adam Linder, Gideon Obarzanek), I have to confess that I’m not sure where he is heading with his programming for Sydney Dance Company.
The gearshift from the lyrical contemporary of Bonachela’s 2 in D Minor to Jacopo Godani’s hard-hitting, ballet-derived Raw Models was manageable and illuminating. Both ‘mickey-moused’ the scores despite the radical difference in their aesthetics. The former was set to Bach’s Partita in D minor for solo violin interspersed with “static sound sculptures” by Nick Wales, and the latter to the aggressively synthetic sounds of German duo 48Nord. Both illustrated the limits of shadowing the score, which becomes a kind of monotony amongst constant variation.
Bonachela’s work provides the sustained note across all of the Sydney Dance Company’s programming, clearly linking with Graeme Murphy’s aesthetic legacy and the big balletic-contemporary companies that operate in a rarefied field that is relatively unchanging. 2 in D Minor featured Bonachela’s signature fluid and non-stop movement, slipping across solos, duets, male/male/female trios and ending in the anticipated unison section. The more filigreed, baroque details of Cass Mortimer Eipper, particularly in his delicate duets with David Mack, were quiet, considered moments amid the din. Violinist Veronique Serret’s onstage performance was phenomenal—five movements and five moods on a searing instrument. Her physical presence and movements in the service of the music often drew my attention away from the dancers.
2 in D Minor, Interplay 2, Sydney Dance Company
photo Wendell Teodoro
2 in D Minor, Interplay 2, Sydney Dance Company
As the new head of The Forsythe Company, we could look at Godani’s commission (first performed by the company in 2011; see interview RT101 online) for the company with new eyes, drawing a straight line to the William Forsythe aesthetic that he will be charged with maintaining. This work looked different to me this time around. I had remembered something very cool, almost frosty, structured around a stop-start rhythm and moving boldly and suddenly to the floor where a darker energy dominated. This time around, the links to an almost Fosse-esque jazz aesthetic were startling. Bob Fosse’s jazz legacy is pervasive, and with a strategically placed group of So You Think You Can Dance finalists in the first row of the Sydney Theatre, the comparison seemed pronounced. The breathtaking virtuosity of some extraordinary dancers was also not lost on this section of the audience who gasped and oohed throughout.
Charmene Yap is clearly the star of this company and a stand-out across all of the works. Her technical prowess is subsumed in the service of finely wrought qualities of movement—often smooth, low and extended—and a presence that is realised through the same, not distracted by the choreography. Her duet with Andrew Crawford—with her tiny frame moving like a shadow around the tall, blonde dancer—was a high point in a piece pitched toward a succession of high points.
The gearshift from Godani to Obarzanek’s L’Chaim (interview, RT119) was a very different experience. The latter’s intention was clearly to break through in two ways: through the façade of physical perfection and choreographic wizardry to the dancers as everyday people, and into the audience where he placed one of his performers. Zoe Coombs Marr (of Sydney-based performance group post) was our proxy in the piece, asking some sensible questions like: “What do you think about when you’re dancing?” “How many years do you have left?” “What do you call specific movements?” Her interrogatory tone grates with the dancers until she breaks down and is asked to join them on stage. This results in a quite spectacular musical number which is what Zoe had asked for, linking the piece back to Obarzanek’s production for Chunky Move, Australia’s Most Wanted where he surveyed audiences nationwide about what they’d like to see in a dance, and also I Want to Dance Better at Parties another work exploring the relationship of the non-dancer to dance.
It’s great to see Gideon Obarzanek pursuing these analytical, accessible and quite political paths of artistic enquiry. The subversive critique of what had come before could not have been lost on audiences either. The real world had entered the theatre, and the paradigm had shifted from a display of performative and choreographic skills to the actual situation we were all engaging in. If it didn’t completely succeed (the end came so quickly and unexpectedly and some of the dancers seemed to miss the spirit of the work), what it was attempting to do was exciting and provocative in this context.
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Sydney Dance Company: Interplay, Rafael Bonachela, 2 in D Minor; Jacopo Godani, Raw Models; Gideon Obarzanek, L’Chaim; Sydney Theatre, 15 March-5 April; Canberra Theatre Centre, 10–12 April: Southbank Theatre, Melbourne, 30 April-10 May
A collection of new works by emerging Indigenous artists is always cause for celebration. This year’s Next Wave Festival announces a key initiative in Blak Wave, a program comprising seven new art projects, a series of talks and, significantly, a publication edited by Torres Strait Islander Tahjee Moar and the Next Wave team featuring interviews, profiles and articles by established and emerging Indigenous writers asking “what’s next—personally, politically and creatively—for Australia’s Indigenous artists?”
All of the works in the program appear designed to provoke and involve audiences in equal measure. I spoke to Brisbane-based artist Ryan Presley about Lesser Gods, his participatory installation, which offers a provocative invitation to the audience to “Enter through the mouth of a saltwater crocodile…” (media release). Presley explains what happens for those who safely make it through: “Inside is a dance hall area with projections that will dictate which [of a number of] tiles to step on. Each tile is encoded with a cymatic symbol and each of these correlates to a musical tone. The video dictates a melody and the audience will have to figure it out. It’s like a game with a cryptic melody.”
Ryan Presley, Transfiguration, 2014 Watercolour, gouache and gold leaf on arches paper
courtesy the artists
Ryan Presley, Transfiguration, 2014 Watercolour, gouache and gold leaf on arches paper
Like other artists in Blak Wave, Presley is exploring new ground with this work. Last year, he created Blood Money, “questioning the moral basis of Australia’s wealth” in a series of intricately rendered commemorative banknotes celebrating Indigenous resistance fighters such as Pemulwuy, Vincent Lingiari and the late Wik elder Gladys Tybingoompa replacing the likes of Henry Lawson and Dame Mary Gilmore. In Lesser Gods Presley takes on “Christian iconographic paintings with all the gold leaf and two dimensional dramatic scenes like St George and the Dragon [as well as] Transfiguration and Resurrection imagery… reinterpreting and re-drawing the images but subtly referencing those sorts of compositions… I’m working with animators and a sound designer so there’ll be animated video mixed with flashes of cymatic prompts.”
New to electronics and new media, for Presley this “has definitely been a challenge… I’m working with another emerging Indigenous artist, Robert Andrew who’s done a lot of electrical engineering and we’ve worked together on the interactive dance floor. And I’ve used animation as a bridge from what I’m used to doing into something new…. Initially I was going to create a video but for this context it’s a bit too static. I wanted to create something vibrant that people could contribute to.”
I’ve long admired the talents of Ghenoa Gela, a spirited and versatile dancer who has appeared in works by Shaun Parker (Happy as Larry, 2010) and memorably in the original production of Vikki Van Hout’s Briwyant (2012). Following a year-long stint as ring mistress for Circus Oz, Gela returns to her dance roots with her premiere choreographic outing in Winds of Woerr.
Given Gela is best known as a contemporary dancer I ask about her approach to this work that has its roots in traditional story and dance. She answers, “This work has been a conversation between my Mum and me for a good couple of years now… She is my cultural advisor. We’ve been working on the script together and we’re narrating alongside each other with my Mum on audio.
“I was intrigued by a couple of stories she told me when I was younger. I was born on the mainland and my interpretation of the seasons is of spring, summer, autumn and winter but my Mum grew up on the Torres Strait. They didn’t have seasons up there, they had the winds— Kuki, Sager, Naigai, Ziai—that taught them when to harvest and when to plant, what to hunt and what fish were in the water. I wouldn’t know unless I looked at a calendar.”
Working with three other dancers—one from the Torres Strait, the other two non-indigenous, Gela is keen to present her own take on this material. “We’re trying to tell the stories of the four winds of the Torres Strait but more like sisters rather than the elements themselves. We’re ‘characters’ [based on] the spiritual elements.” Also involved in the project is Anya Reynolds whom Gela met at Circus Oz and who’s creating an evocative soundscape for the piece.
Gela is enthusiastic about the possibilities of introducing audiences to the riches of Torres Strait culture. Based in Sydney these days, she observes, “The further south, I find they don’t even know where it is or that it’s part of Australia… I really believe in opening the doors for people who want to learn about Torres Strait culture. I feel in order for people to know about the protocols and stuff, it’s best they learn it themselves. They’re really excited back home that I’ve got a few people on board learning traditional Torres Strait dancing and language. And I know my boundaries. I only teach what i know and what my parents have taught me.”
My Bullock Modified, Steaphan Paton
photo Sarah Black
My Bullock Modified, Steaphan Paton
Other works in the Blak Wave program are wide-ranging in the issues they tackle and the artforms deployed. My Bullock Modified by Steaphan Paton, for instance, sounds like an intriguing interactive VR work “exploring early conflicts between Aboriginal landowners and European settlers” in which an iPhone app permits participants to spear virtual cattle grazing in the Carlton Gardens. (You know you want to.) Paton, an interdisciplinary artist whose previous work suggests an activist eye sharply focused on colonial relations, identity and race, in this work invites his audience to empathise with “Aboriginal warriors who historically have been demonised as the lurking menace.”
The Blaktism by Megan Cope is a satirical video work created in response to the artist’s recent quest to track down her ‘Certificate of Aboriginality,’ that legal document surprisingly still required in some cases to authenticate a person’s Indigenous status. Last year, actor Jack Charles refused an Australia Council requirement to produce such a document. For Indigenous urban dwellers cut off or estranged from their traditional homelands, Cope’s work “bridges these parallel worlds.” She admits “The thought of being legitimately certified suddenly cast a dark shadow of doubt across my mind and left me wondering if I was Aboriginal enough.”
Another artist tackling some of the same territory in a dance work, also with a distinctly satirical edge, is Carly Sheppard who is accompanied onstage by her alter ego, the funny and streetwise Chase. “White Face is my first attempt to make commentary on my experiences as a contemporary Aboriginal Australian woman living in a continually evolving culture, which has survived invasion, extreme oppression and forced assimilation.” Sheppard chose the title “because this work addresses tokenistic views where skin colour, among other stereotypes, such as location, connection to family and traditional knowledge, is seen as a mark of being authentically Aboriginal. Through this work I am reclaiming the responsibility of defining who I am as an Aboriginal Australian. I hope to inspire others to do so too.”
Sarah Jane Norman always surprises with her incisive critiques in the form of live performance and her offering for Blak Wave is no exception. In Concerto no. 3 Norman, who admits she “has not laid her hands on a piano since she quit lessons at age 15,” will be joined in a 12-hour marathon by five other ‘failed’ pianists who will take turns at sight-reading their way through the Rach 3, the daddy of them all in terms of difficult piano repertory, in “a challenge to the fetishism of ‘greatness’ and to the heroic discourse of artistic virtuosity.” For audiences concerned for their own pain threshold, Norman poses the question: “in a culture driven at every level by the self-devouring pursuit of success, how might we make a space to contemplate the transformative potential of failure?”
SEETHrough, Sean Jorvn
photo Troy Russell
SEETHrough, Sean Jorvn
SEEthrough by Sean Jorvn (the shared moniker of two Sydney based artists Colin Kinchela and Gavin Walters) incorporates music, innovative use of video by Jacqui Mills and sound by Chris Yates and Corey Webster in a performance “that puts Aboriginal and white masculinity ‘under the knife,’ exploring taboos and traditions associated with coming-of-age in both cultures.” Employing the male shaving ritual as motif, the performers, one white, one black, explore the distances and connections between cultures and the potential for genuine intimacy between them.
For a blast of new talent and provocative ideas, Melbourne might just be the place to be in April-May.
Next Wave, director Emily Sexton, 16 April-11 May, Melbourne, nextwave.org.au
Quotes from Blak Wave artists are from phone interviews as indicated and, otherwise, Next Wave’s media pack.
All That Fall, Pan Pan Theatre, courtesy World Theatre Festival
We are in a post-philanthropic funding regime with this year’s World Theatre Festival at the Brisbane Powerhouse—Wotif founder Graeme Wood’s generous million dollar bequest lapsed last year—but a rich line-up of work from around the world is still evident. The change this year, though, is in the large number of one or two-handers, and a higher than usual ratio of Australian co-producing credits for the international work. The pieces I saw were stand-alone productions from Ireland and New Zealand in which the monologue featured strongly.
Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall was originally a 1957 BBC radio drama, so accordingly no bodies on stage—Ireland’s Pan Pan Theatre win the gong for low-cost touring overheads! The piece is pre-recorded. Pan Pan have made their reputation at this festival over the years by taking canonical texts and throwing them against a wall, reinfusing them with punk or pop sensibilities (I am Oedipus and A Doll’s House being prime examples). This is the most reverent of the productions I have seen the company offer. The Beckett estate’s notorious insistence on adherence to authorial intention notwithstanding, Pan Pan have embraced the radio play form and transported it to the live stage with a warm and elegiac interpretation of this text. The experience is largely a spatial and aural one, of course, but visuals are not altogether neglected. We enter to a room of rocking chairs and a massive wall of lights that, perhaps like the domestic fireplace it is substituting for, actually generates heat when fully charged. The seats are placed at odd angles on Ikea children’s mats (you know the ones: the cityscape, dark grey roads, primary coloured houses and public buildings) so that we are actually having to look at each other sometimes uncomfortably closely. Shut-eye provides the only private refuge. The chairs have skull-print cushions on them. So we have images of death, routes through the city, but also of comfort and the domestic hearth.
The writing is beautiful, and one of Beckett’s most near-naturalistic pieces. Central character Maddie Rooney is taking a walk from her rural home to an urban (Dublin) train station to meet her husband at the end of his Saturday workshift, and then the pair return home. There is no plot as such; nothing really ‘happens’ to Maddie along the way—she falls in a ditch, takes a lift on a passing tractor. It is almost a picaresque conceit, and as the garrulous Maddie embarks on her journey, narrating her cranky stream-of-consciousness all the way, I was put in mind of Joyce’s Molly Bloom and her iconic “stepping out off the page into the sensual world” walk from outer Dublin’s Howth’s Head. There’s an Irish literary baton being passed on here.
Actors provide the soundscape while it is a bucolic one—cows, bulls, sheep—but as Maddie nears the city, an industrial track takes over. The train is delayed, a deluge falls, husband and wife return home sodden and philosophical, ruminating over mortality and what it means to be corporeal, sentient beings. It is a deeply meditative live theatre experience—hypnotic in its simplicity. I found myself asking whether it was necessary for us to be in a theatre listening to this piece designed for the radio. I think the answer is yes. The work has stayed with me and got my writerly brain ticking about audience proxemics. It’s a fine accomplishment—an affective and effective experience of Beckett—and another feather in the cap for director Gavin Quinn and the company.
The stage monologue features heavily in 20th century Irish theatre. Brian Friel, Tommy Murphy and Frank McGuinness have all used the monologue within multi-character pieces, and in the first decade of the 21st century Conor Macpherson, Marina Carr and Mark O’Rowe have ensured that this most literary of theatrical approaches has meant that ‘the playwright’ has remained central to Irish contemporary performance even where s/he has fallen out of vogue in other industrial contexts, including our own here in Australia. Stefanie Preissner steps into this tradition squarely with her full-length one-person testimonial and is most obviously influenced by O’Rowe, whose Terminus (2007) was memorably brutally lyrical. Solpadeine is my Boyfriend is, like Terminus, written in rhyme. Where Terminus is less tethered to structured scansion, Solpadeine errs heavily toward the metered rhyme. It is at its strongest when, like the proverbial good waiter, you do not notice that s/he is there. There were some cloying moments when the piece veered toward Pam Ayres to service a looming couplet. The direction was also ham-fisted and literal at times. But the story itself is engrossing and disarmingly candid, and is told unflinchingly by writer-performer Preissner.
Cork girl Stef moves to Dublin to study drama. Evidently moving from Cork to Dublin carries the cultural bias of a Northern Australian moving to Sydney or Melbourne (I say that as someone who did); vowels need to be contorted into compliance, regional provenance apologised for in the interests of ‘fitting in.’ Stef finds a boyfriend, Steve, who is by all accounts a bit of an arsehole. She suffers extended bouts of depression—with or without him—and self-medicates with Solpadeine, a European equivalent, we are told, to Panadeine Forte. The piece is a genuinely stirring (and frequently hilarious) rumination on depression and self-sabotage in the realm of personal relationships. Is Preissner picking up the literary baton passed on by Joyce and Beckett? Probably not. But she’s a terrific autobiographical storyteller and a talent to watch out for.
Black Faggot was fun. It’s a sketch-based montage of monologues and duologues centring on the theme of Polynesian (mostly Samoan) characters coming to terms with homosexuality in New Zealand. Iaheto Ah Hi and Taokia Pelasasa play all of these men—and women—ranging from the closeted football jock stumbling ‘accidentally’ into Auckland’s gay bars to the young Christian boy praying his queerness away, to the Samoan mama dealing initially not so well with her son’s gradual emersion from the closet, to a Cultural Studies lecturer providing a semiotic reading of orientalist consumption of Pasifika sexuality in his paper “Cracker wanna Poly.” Some sketches are hilarious, some bawdy, even smutty. Cultural stereotyping is both satirised and indulged (there are Samoan jokes about Tongans only being recognisable when they smile—showing gold fillings being the gag that Australian audiences may not switch onto. The performances are arguably better than the writing, but the show has a terrific heart and did a great job in delivering in-yer-face queer politics to an audience that even here in Brisbane (where there is a huge South Sea Islander population who don’t always make it to the theatre) found its mark.
The World Theatre Festival 2014 program was a fold-out brochure rather than the plump booklet of years past. Missing was the Graeme Wood Foundation sponsor logo and the swathe of local creative development showings. While the buzz was still there, fed by the cross-over with the Australian Performing Arts Market, the stalwart WTF audience and some snazzy initiatives like the Yum Chat for local Asian-Australian theatremakers, the festival now appears to sit in a more commercial curatorial space.
She Would Walk the Sky
One of the jewels in the crown of this year’s WTF was the collaboration between gifted Tasmanian playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer and veteran circus performer and director Chelsea McGuffin. She Would Walk the Sky is narrated by a ghostly voice-over describing “the people of the river house” who nest in a secret, derelict nightclub, including “the bird woman” pining for a sailor who abandoned her, “the strong man” who loves the bird woman from afar and “the clown” who tells the audience that their putative love affair “is never going to happen.” The velvet-clad band duck and play as slack rope, bike and trapeze tricks unfold.
Alas, Kruckemeyer’s prose was more lullaby than storm. I was reminded of Antonella Casella’s article in RealTime (RT115) in which she wondered if narrative interferes with the inherent power of the ‘body of representation’ in circus form. The disembodied prose never felt a part of the live show and while there was an undeniable beauty in its wash and pulses, the cumulative and melancholic effect worked against the push and dazzle of the live spectacle. The show is already on international tour so perhaps the marriage between text and live circus will bed down.
Underground and Gudirr Gudirr
The third return season of Underground by local heroes Motherboard Productions was a joyous cross-cultural mash of musical, magic realism and nightclub revue. As reviewed (RT107), the show moves seamlessly between Korean and English, using pop culture and musical numbers to tie together the loose strands of the narrative about the search for love and identity. Ditto for outstanding Indigenous dance work from Marrugeku, Gudirr Gudirr (RT114) that explodes with the force of Broome’s utopian elixir: Malay, Yawuru and Japanese cultures, expressed through the passionate intensity of performer and choreographer Dalisa Pigrim and her urgent quest to articulate, in words and movement, the violent intersections of her own cultural and political identity, ably facilitated by Belgian choreographer Koen Augustijnen.
Wedhus Gembel
Another exciting cross-cultural debut for Brisbane audiences was Wedhus Gembel. The show is a long-term collaboration between a group of Javanese independent artists—associated with the dynamic Indonesian theatre company Theatre Garasi—and Footscray’s anarchically cheerful Snuff Puppets, with their large-scale, endearing and slightly askew creations. This is an important contribution to the scarce Indonesian-Australian repertory. “Wedhus Gembel” translates as the gas from an active volcano, the chaotic force of a goat’s appetite and homelessness after a natural disaster. The show melds traditional stories, living culture, traditional Indonesian puppets and the hand-made, friendly grotesquery of the Snuff Puppet aesthetic.
I was fortunate to sit beside a Javanese-Australian whose delight at seeing traditional elements, like the Wayang puppetry, was mirrored by the frenzy of the schoolchildren in the back cackling at the mobile phone gags and blaring Indo pop. Even with my charming guide it was hard to follow transitions or grasp the finer points of the stories. The show has been made for an Indonesian audience first and translated back for an Australian one.
Nonetheless, nothing could dampen the excitement of the audience when the large volcano onstage erupted, producing an egg that birthed our monster: Wedhus Gembel who proceeded to eat the entire cast and some of the audience. Only the wise man Samir could calm him by encouraging him to fart and poo out everyone he had swallowed. They emerged, transformed with new costumes, ready to charge into the audience and bring us onstage to boogie—graceful glowing Indonesian performers, schoolkids and local mob alike. As I snuck out to see the next WTF show, my last glimpse was of the entire audience bouncing up and down and shrieking with joy.
What was compelling about each of these shows was their deeply felt experimentation with collaboration: across culture, art forms and geography. While some works succeeded better than others, or were just further along in their development, the richness of these brave collaborations was the highlight of WTF 2014 for me and I look forward to the next installment in 2016.
Lee Breuer with some of the cast of La Divina Caricatura
photo Beatriz Schiller
Lee Breuer with some of the cast of La Divina Caricatura
Leading American theatre innovator Lee Breuer is to conduct a masterclass in Australia in July. In this article reproduced from The Brooklyn Rail, he is interviewed about his work by Kyoung H Park in 2012 prior to the New York premiere of the greatly acclaimed La Divina Caricatura in 2013 at La Mama. Reviewer Laura Collins-Hughes described the work as “strange, singular, perfectly self-contained and so wondrous that it may leave you in a daze” (New York Times, 9 Dec, 2013).
In the 42 years since Mabou Mines’ founding in 1970, Lee Breuer has directed some of the most seminal pieces of the American avant-garde, including adaptations of Beckett’s Play, Come and Go, and The Lost Ones, The Gospel at Colonus, Mabou Mines Lear, Peter and Wendy, Mabou Mines DollHouse, and groundbreaking, international productions such as Comedie-Francaise’s Un Tramway Nommé Désir. But prior to his rise as a director, Lee Breuer was a playwright.
Maude Mitchell
photo Beariz Schiller
Maude Mitchell
Lee and I met in New Delhi, India when he and his partner, Maude Mitchell, taught an acting workshop at Sanskriti Pratisthan, an artist colony where I was a 2010 Unesco-Aschberg resident. The workshop consisted of theater games that explored Western and non-Western performance techniques, which Lee gradually blended together, while directing the students’ interpretations of their own writing. Carefully connecting emotions to the physical and spoken expression of words, Lee spoke about his dialectical approach to motivational and movement-based acting methods, which he’s masterfully synthesized into a unique style as Co-Artistic Director of Mabou Mines.
My first collaboration with Lee was as Assistant Director and masked performer in a workshop production of La Divina Caricatura during the summer of 2011. Divina is a Bunraku pop-opera, written and directed by Lee, that tells the love story of Rose and John, a dog and her master, through two re-incarnations set in Lee’s metaphoric Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. I played Sheepish, a sheep in the Institute for the Science of Soul, a rehab center in Cheesequake, New Jersey that looks like an Indian ashram and symbolizes Purgatorio.
La Divina Caricatura is based on autobiography, puppetry bio-mechanics and a piercing examination of cultural evolution, as evidenced through novels, music, art, film and dance. The script, which equally alludes to Dante’s Divine Comedy and to 17th century playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon, is a multimedia, multi-day epic that unveils Lee’s unique voice as a writer searching for spiritual revelation through the written word.
Lee’s most notorious works—and the first published—are the Animations, a trilogy of poetic, self-referencing narratives about the epic struggles of living an unenlightened artist’s life. The first two animations, The B Beaver Animation and The Red Horse Animation, were first produced in museums such as the Guggenheim, Whitney and MoMA with support of Ellen Stewart and La MaMa. It wasn’t until The Shaggy Dog Animation, completed eight years after the start of the trilogy, that Lee’s writing found a home at the Public Theater.
“The Shaggy Dog Animation was supposed to be the third animation, but then it took off on its own and became a trilogy of itself,” Lee explains. This new trilogy, La Divina Caricatura, combines the texts of several of Lee’s subsequent plays written from the late 70s through 2012.
“If one were to consider The Shaggy Dog Animation, Prelude to a Death in Venice and The Epidog as a separate story, that would be Rose’s trilogy. But the larger trilogy, La Divina Caricatura, is an exploration not of Rose, but the love affair between Rose and John.” The focus is the course of their love, which Lee describes as the “amor delgada—re-manifest in two intricate, balanced, new pairings” as Rose and John reincarnate and find each other again as Porco and the Warrior Ant.
For many critics, An Epidog (1996) marked the culmination of Lee’s Animations, but in 2001, he began to stage Ecco Porco in a series of brief workshops and productions that ended with Pataphysics Pennyeach: Summa Drammatica & Porco Morto.
“At the time I was doing Ecco Porco, that’s when I started thinking: ‘It’s a trilogy, sooner or later I ought to put it all together,’” says Lee. “But the idea of how it all fits together is maybe five, at most 10, years old.”
In its current version, Rose (a dog) chases after John across the country in a 1970s Inferno for struggling artists. Addicted to love, Rose is hospitalized at the Institute for the Science of Soul—Purgatorio—where she meets John’s reincarnation as Porco, a pig. The third part of Divina takes place in Paradisio, when Rose dies and reincarnates as the eponymous Warrior Ant.
“Based on the story of Arjuna in the Mahabharata, the Ant becomes a revolutionary when she goes to her father, Trotsky the termite,” Lee continues. “She becomes a complete leftist and says she’ll lead the fifth world in a revolution. The ‘Great War’ is fought on the White House lawn.”
The staging of La Divina Caricatura closely reflects the traditional performance of Bunraku puppetry, in which a tayu narrates a story accompanied by a shamisen and orchestra. However, Divina is directed as an animated, epic movie, based on the narrative structure of Monzaemon’s Bunraku plays, which in turn closely mirror the structure of feature films.
“I always felt that I would like to head towards more classical puppetry—Bunraku puppetry,” Lee reflects. “The closest I came to that was in Porco Morto, where Porco was staged in his coffin with a ground light. So, if the trilogy was to make sense, then it had to have a classic Bunraku kind of unity, but I didn’t commit to it because of how expensive and time consuming it is to do great Bunraku.”
In 1988, Lee did venture into a Bunraku collaboration, partnering with puppeteer Yoshida Tamamatsu for The Warrior Ant at Brooklyn Academy of Music. “One of the problems,” he says, was that “The Warrior Ant was a puppet run by this incredible Bunraku puppeteer who did some great stuff, but the warrior was in mid-air. There was no context, he was just this little puppet in the middle of singers [with] no dramatic definition, so I said, let’s commit—finally!—to one formal idea.”
The novelty of this idea is Lee’s transformation of traditional Bunraku into a Western form, in which a narrator performing Rose sends up Divina’s endless cultural references through distilled, lyric narratives that build up to songs. These songs change styles and rhythm to play everything from Indian ragas to Argentinian tangos, and underscore Divina’s searching story, which is performed by an ensemble of Bunraku puppeteers, doo-wop singers and actors on stage.
“I feel more identified with this than with Western dramatic structure,” says Lee. “I feel that Chikamatsu Monzaemon wrote these perfect filmic metaphors that gave me the idea of making a mixed-media film with puppets. That’s where the idea came from.”
What astonishes me in La Divina Caricatura is the profound meaning sought through unlikely characters—Rose, the dog, Porco, the pig and the Warrior Ant. It wasn’t until I discovered the connections between these characters and Lee’s personal history that I realized how close they are to him.
“Rose was my dog,” Lee recalls. “When we were working on a Navajo reservation, my daughter Clove was given a puppy. She got very attached to the puppy, but some kid ran over him and it was a big tragedy. We buried Klechayazi—‘little dog’ in Navajo—and immediately got a two-week old husky. We kept her for 16 years and that was Rose.”
He also describes a trip to Mexico, where they sold “these great, big, termite-type insects with engraved jewels on them. We bought an insect and a supply of wood, which is what they ate, and the insect lived with us for three, four months, which was really three times longer than it was supposed to live.” That insect, he continues, would become The Warrior Ant. “It was a large, ant-like termite, really slow and really beautiful, with a blue jewel glued on its back.”
The character of Rose and her reincarnation as the Warrior Ant developed much faster than John’s reincarnation as Porco. “Porco was harder to get to because he’s much more me,” reveals Lee. “Well, a part of me that is hard to get to. With Porco Morto, I was able to get to where the big heart was, which was sentimental, wonderful and romantic—the way a pig should be.”
Throughout Divina, Rose’s desire to be a romantic artist, striving for the highest levels of love, passion and beauty conflicts with the narrator’s identification as a self-destructive, addicted, mad artist.
To understand this contradiction, one needs to understand Lee’s sense of humor. When speaking of French avant-gardist/puppeteer Alfred Jarry, Lee describes “an outrageous pun-maker—every other word was a pun. He had this idea that language could expand in different directions so it would all reverberate like a big gong.
“He also had a balancing act which was the beginning of the put-on: basically, you didn’t quite know whether you were being spoken to seriously or not,” Lee says. “It could happen with an eyebrow twitch, or the dilation of nostrils, and the audience didn’t know if it was being insulted or being listened to.”
This attitude served to challenge the values of the French bourgeoisie, but unlike Monzaemon—who challenged the bourgeois values of his society through tragedies—[Alfred] Jarry achieved this through controversial puppetry and biting satire.
“Jarry preserved [this attitude] until he died,” Lee insists. “His last request was a joke. He was lying in bed, dying, had been drunk for 15 days, hadn’t eaten anything—and his last request was a toothpick and he died shortly afterwards.”
The role of Jarry—not as an avant-gardist, but as a comedian—relates to Lee’s fascination with the “genetically martyred” individual. He describes the comedian as a martyr—“a certain ‘bird’ in the flock. When this marked individual sees danger, he screams and calls it out, so the predator will go for that bird and the flock will get away. In other words, the bird’s the designated victim so that the genetic species can live…This was my little secret definition of the artist—a designated martyr. And Porco was going to represent this for me.”
In opposition to his proposition of the artist as martyr, Lee delves equally into the madness of the artist, comparing Porco’s creation of the Ant in The Warrior Ant to Cervantes’ relationship to Don Quixote.
“There’s a scene that I’m working on in which Porco admits that he’s created an insane insect—that you can’t be a holy warrior, a Warrior Ant,” he says. “It’s the fantasy of fantasies—particularly a pig’s fantasy.”
At the core of La Divina Caricatura lies the search for balance between the pursuit of an artistic and spiritual path. “The searching artist goes on a religious search and you’ve got to tie it to something; it really is a pilgrimage,” maintains Lee. “Dante’s pilgrimage is real; Dante’s pilgrimage is the same as the artist’s, and the danger all through the pilgrimage is a Buddhist thing: to not being able to recognize Maya, recognize illusion for what it is—in your own head.
“This is why my image of a great successful and happy life was Dante himself,” says Lee. “Dante was in exile, living out of Florence, and a month after he died, they found the last three verses of Paradiso on his desk. And there he went—completing one of the greatest works ever written, completing it while simultaneously completing his life. I think this is a very happy way to go.”
When I ask him how this is funny, Lee sums up the comic irony: “Warriors are defending the faith, and behind that idea is the idea of defending the truth. This is a little bit of what’s going on, yet we have an Ant embodying this great task.”
This article originally appeared as “Madness and Martyrdom in La Divina Caricatura” in The Brooklyn Rail (www.brooklynrail.org), 10 Dec, 2012, and is reproduced with the permission of the publisher.
In July, Tashmadada (director Deborah Leiser-Moore) and MAPA (Monash Academy of Performing Arts) will present a workshop conducted by Lee Breuer and Maude Mitchell in the Masters of Theatre series. You can read an interview with Leiser-Moore about her latest work, KaBooM: Stories from Distant Frontiers, in RealTime Profiler#2.
Conflict is something we think of through the allowances and permissions of theatrical situations and the language of war and ideology. In Ballad of the Burning Star, it is its intimacy that earns a particularly poetic examination. Developed over a period of two years, first premiering at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013 and opening in London at Battersea Arts Centre this spring, Ballad of the Burning Star navigates highly disputed political territory with the skilful use of theatrical metaphor. It investigates intimate questions around belonging and conflict, roots and politics by positing theatrical problems.
Ballad is inspired by Israeli-born Nir Paldi’s experience, as teenager and young adult, of growing up in the midst of the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Focusing on a particular moment of gun-point conflict that is twisted through a series of dramaturgical operations, the show draws on cabaret and drag, flirts with irony and humour, constructs a play within a play, develops deliberately manipulative stage politics and positions the audience in a landscape that moves from narrative to rhetoric.
Paldi plays Star, the host for the evening, a drag queen clad in gold who, assisted by The Starlets, an all female group of dancers dressed in tightly fitted military uniforms, and Camp David, their musician, tells a story about a boy in the midst of conflict, moving from the kibbutz to school bus, desert to town, sibling rivalries to bomb explosions. Within the series of narrative and occasionally musical vignettes, Star intervenes with commentaries about the Starlets’ performances and various forms of deceptive audience participation.
Ballad begins with Star announcing a bomb in the theatre; we’re now to find the terrorist, seeking among the rows of raked seating the most dubious, most recognisable culprit. The awkward, pressing silence of the audience as Star makes her way up into the seating and her aggressive playfulness present an apt context for a performance that seeks to both isolate and conflate the personal and the national in conflicts that are very much grounded in land and history, beyond the usual remit of political work. Rich in affect and daring in form, Ballad prefers to expose and argue, to think through constantly re-contextualised action.
The aesthetic and stylistic elements hold particular power here, beyond a mere theatrical symbolism. The stage is bare, framed only by a pair of red velvet curtains; a star of David hangs like a mirror ball in the centre. The rich gold and red velvet, the language of oppression and oppressed, the nuanced, regimented movement are in stark contrast with the playful theatricality of Star and the brutal irony of the musical numbers.
Drag brings a deliberate ambiguity and distance to the situation unfolding in the vignettes, performed with a sense of deliberately historicised theatricality. At the same time, the stage itself becomes a site of ambiguous power dynamics. The Starlets are caricatures and characters, the performance making constant reference to the actual background of the dancers. Increasingly abused by Star, they respond with an embodied resistance, emphasising an autocratic regime made visible beyond language. Here, the body is central—it becomes synonymous with the territories described in the narratives themselves.
It is possible to problematise the identity politics seen in Star’s own drag, the ways in which questions of ambiguity and gender remain underexplored, yet recalled in the piece. At the same time, the complexity and nuance of the problem as presented through the performance—one pertaining to generations and individuals, to history and rhetoric, to land and topography—is made visible with precision.
Ballad of the Burning Star is a performance of political in-betweens; those of form, of identification and autobiography, of conflict and theme. It’s a piece that presents a discussion of the intricacies of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, speaking with clarity and precision of identity, belonging, personal politics and theatrical metaphors, while maintaining a disarming formal and rhetorical ambiguity.
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Theatre Ad Infinitum, Ballad of the Burning Star, director, writer, performer Nir Paldi, music Adam Pleeth, choreographer, performer Orian Michaeli, Battersea Arts Centre, London, 17 Feb-8 March
A man and woman are dancing a slow waltz in vaguely 1930s attire. They are re-enacting the dance marathons of the Great Depression that took place mainly in the US. Following the original rules of these events, the couple will dance for 24 hours with 15 minutes break per hour, during which they eat meals or snacks determined from original menus, and receive medical assistance if required.
I arrive at the end of the fifth hour of Deborah Pollard’s Yowza Yowza Yowza. Carly Young is being massaged by the physiotherapist; partner Jackson Davis is rubbing his feet, sitting on one of the camp beds in the corner. In another corner the time runs across a screen, next to a slideshow of 1930s photographs. The dancefloor is a circle of lightbulbs just two metres in diameter, with small viewing benches either side. There is a trolley with jugs of water. At the other end of the room, the marathon rules scroll. Deborah Pollard, the work’s creator, is at a desk near the door dressed as a nurse, managing the live feed.
The dancers begin again. The glacial pace of their moves, and Ashley Scott’s soundtrack of white noise, are disconcerting to a viewer familiar with the 1935 Horace McCoy novel They Shoot Horses Don’t They which inspired the work [the popular Sydney Pollack directed film appeared in 1969. Eds]. Yowza wastes no time with vintage aesthetics, neither visual nor aural, its intent thereby more exposed. At the same time Pollard’s rigour in research and application of detail is extraordinary. The following day when I return, the performers are holding poses from the slideshow of the marathon dancers in pain, crazed with fatigue.
This assured combination of historical accuracy and oblique contemporary interpretation provided a rich foundation for a variety of questions. When does acted exhaustion become real? When does theatre become life? What can time alone, as yielding yet ineluctable as air, do to us, in life and art? Yowza rendered the seam between the two virtually invisible. I also saw a clever nod to the re-enactment phenomenon sweeping performance art in recent years. With its combination of skill, integrity and unique vision, Yowza trumped Australia’s most popular re-enactment of our times—Kaldor’s 13 Rooms—a mere orgy of pageantry and gloss.
Yowza went full circle to history, provoking empathy with the people who from sheer desperation danced these marathons almost a century ago. The last dancers standing got money. Some even hoped for fame, with jobs as professional dancers. But They Shoot Horses Don’t They doesn’t talk about winners. McCoy was an early proponent of the LA hard-boiled genre, writing about the losers refused by Hollywood, with dire consequences.
This element of competition was absent. It seemed a deliberate omission, the tiny circle enclosing the two dancers a sort of demarcation of the limits of Pollard’s experiment. I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if that circle were to widen.
Created in a gallery at Wollongong University for her PhD, in association with Performance Space, Yowza Yowza Yowza may yet have a more public incarnation. Fingers crossed. It is one of the most sophisticated, profound performance works I have seen in years.
University of Wollongong, Yowza Yowza Yowza, creator Deborah Pollard, produced in association with Performance Space, in collaboration with Ashley Scott, Dara Gill, Carly Young, Jackson Davis, UOW, NSW, 6-7 March
Reviewing James Waites’ Whatever happened to the STC Actors Company? (Platform Paper 23, Currency House, April 2010), I began by declaring it “a rarity in Australian writing about the theatre. If more like investigative journalism (was the ensemble killed off?) than formal essaying (if not without considered theses), it’s written with a documentary maker’s attentiveness to his subjects (drawing on numerous interviews) and a novelist’s narrative drive (who did it?). But what gives the paper its peculiar power is Waites as witness” (“Critical homage to a short life,” RT97).
Jim was witness to, and an intimate of, the Sydney theatre world for over four decades, bringing to his reviews an invaluable perspective, an acute awareness of formal developments and the courage to speak his mind. His friend Augusta Supple in her fond farewell to Jim on her blog (graced with a wonderful range of photos) writes, “he once told me that being a critic was ‘really a mix of parish priest and dentist’—and you had to be the bravest to stand up and applaud when everyone else was too scared to. He called a spade a spade—and got fired for it on more than one occasion. He would refuse to clap, exclaim something was “utter crap” if it lacked heart or empathy. He walked his talk” (augustasupple.com).
Jim very occasionally wrote for RealTime, his one substantial piece for us on the occasion of the death of Polish theatre luminary Jerzy Growtowski in 1999. The article, “Potato country ” (RT30, p7) comprised Jim’s very funny but heartfelt account of a Grotowski workshop he participated in on a farm in rural NSW in 1974. After receiving instructions to travel to ‘a secret destination,’ he arrives in Armidale and is instructed to make a musical instrument from whatever he can find. Later he goes to a local supermarket where the Polish performers stockpile ‘luxury goods’ and subsequently arrives at a farm where the workshop commences:
“We were nearly always naked, and the work was done in silence. We might walk into a room and it glowed with heat and warmth, or climb into wine kegs full of cold water, lined at the bottom with bristling pineapple heads… A journey of discovery into the self via the senses had begun, activated by what were essentially ‘dramatic’ devices.”
Jim recalled at one point the others “putting their hands all over my naked body; I can still feel the warmth. They carried me outside and raised my body to the winter moon.” Less entrancing was being dragged through recently broken earth “like a human plough. As a boy who had spent years at a Catholic boarding school, who lived pretty much entirely in the head, it was forceful and immediate confrontation. The sacred earth!”
Having refused in the course of the workshop to respond to being hit and being “battered with raw eggs and smeared with yolk …I found it absolutely repugnant,” Jim was told on the last day by Grotowski that “he had planted a seed in us that would only grow if we never discussed our experience. To attempt to use words would kill his gift. For a long time I told no one.” He adds, “We had been taken on a remarkable, mysterious journey into ourselves. I don’t know what the gift was, but I sense it still inside me.”
We weren’t close friends but we saw and chatted with Jim many times over many years, usually at the theatre, even the night before his death at the opening night of The Long Way Home (a play performed by actual soldiers about the mental consequences of damaged bodies, a topic all too familiar to Jim); he was ever a loyal theatre-goer, to the end.
Nigel Kellaway, who like many us who had seen or been in contact with Jim in his final days, writes, “I’m sure I join many theatre artists in Sydney who would have only good words to say of him, regardless of the lethal arrows he occasionally threw at us all… he was a brave and beautiful man.”
A detailed account of Jim’s life and achievements can be found in “Critic whose life became the drama” in the Sydney Morning Herald obituary, 27 Feb, p34.
Mary Hellen Sassman, Frankenstein, courtesy Malthouse
Entire industries have been built on the anxieties of motherhood, and it seems that when women aren’t being told how they’re doing it wrong they’re being sold something that will do it better. None of this makes it any easier when it comes to seriously examining the existential issues that face mothers. Two recent Melbourne productions take up that challenge, and by a fascinating coincidence do so in a manner that looks past the role of the mother as usually portrayed—that is, as something defined only in relation to a social function or family dynamic—to probe at the psychic workings of maternity itself as a state of mind.
Playwright Katy Warner and director Prue Clark’s Dropped is firmly in that oddly evergreen niche of the bunker play. Bunker plays see a small group of characters holed up in some subterranean concrete limbo while outside an apocalypse that may or may not be real ensures that the only exit remains firmly sealed. It’s a good way of allowing confinement to heighten tensions, bring up secrets, provoke a bit of shouting and so forth.
Dropped doesn’t dwell on the exact circumstances of its two characters, and is closer to Sartre’s Huis Clos in leaving its audiences to make what they will of their imprisonment. The two women are soldiers in some abandoned compound covered in a sheet of snow, which still falls ominously from above at intervals. Their shaky reality is made even more uncertain by the way their exchanges are based on shared fantasies, of an imaginary bottle of vodka, a passing dog and, most crucially, a baby.
One was once a real mother, we’re told, but there’s no reason to believe this any more than the other, patently false stories they swap. And the bundles of white swaddling supposed to represent various make-believe babies are made problematic when one emits a real child’s cry.
Brigid Gallacher, Matilda Reed, Dropped
photo Jessica Hogg
Brigid Gallacher, Matilda Reed, Dropped
There’s a pervasive sense of the passed over or left behind, and the shifting of realities suggests people who have never been afforded the tools to make sense of their own lives. The desire to carve out a solid psychic space is perhaps stymied by the equally powerful desire to share that with a child, but these two goals are contradictory, it is intimated, since the security symbolised by the bunker is the kind that stifles rather than promotes growth of any sort.
The form of Dropped doesn’t entirely do justice to the questions it raises. While its two protagonists are locked in by their own ignorance, the audience’s journey follows the more familiar trajectory of dramatic irony, as we become privy to the situation in which the women find themselves but are unable to move beyond. We’re ultimately heading towards the omniscience of gods, while the subjects before us are unable to achieve any narrative transcendence. To place a viewer in that same helpless state would be a bold and rare move, but it’s one that another local company has achieved with astonishing results.
The Rabble’s last work, Room of Regret, was explicitly concerned with architecture and the body, situating its audience and performers in a labyrinthine built environment. Frankenstein, conversely, returns the action to the ephemeral non-space of earlier works such as Orlando and Story of O, in which the set and all that unfolds within it refer to mental and emotional structures rather than material referents. A character stepping off stage doesn’t move to some other space projected by the illusion of the work, but simply ceases to be until they return. The stage is a claustrophobic box—the self unable to escape its own limits—but is also the entire universe as a result.
Mary Shelley’s telling of Victor Frankenstein’s overreaching hubris is here remodelled in an immediately striking way. Frankenstein (Mary Helen Sassman) is a woman who wants a baby and whose experiments in producing one involve locating a viable egg from among the thousands of black and squishy ovoids covering the floor, inseminating it with a syringe and depositing it in a huge, womblike incubator. After some false starts and with the aid of several lab assistants, the creature is born, and as incarnated by Jane Montgomery Griffiths is an unforgettable thing.
With a torso sprouting dozens of breast-like protuberances, the naked and bawling creature is every infant as monster, blubbering and howling and flailing at the world into which it has been dragged. It is a figure of pure need. Somehow Griffiths manages to invoke in the onlooker the desire to care for this pitiable child, at the same time enacting enough of the monstrous to allow us sympathy for Victor, who recoils from the thing’s relentless and insatiable desire for succour.
Alone, the dynamic that plays out between the two would be enough to propel this outstanding work, but the arrival of Victor’s brother and his predatory maleness complicate things further, as does the lust of one of Frankenstein’s assistants, who may embody the blind man who extends to Shelley’s original monster some kindness, the bride he demands Victor create and the young girl the monster kills in the 1931 film adaptation. It’s always hard to pin such referents down in The Rabble’s work, since all metaphors and similes here point in three directions or more. Indeed, the company has become increasingly adept at filling out these fantastic worlds with polyvalent symbols that cram so much possibility into such tiny containers that it’s rarely clear whether anything is more than the projected meaning of the individual onlooker.
The Rabble’s work is also known for consistently returning to horrific imagery, and Frankenstein is the most disturbing, indeed upsetting, of its creations thus far. There are at least two moments in this production that should challenge even the most jaded of witnesses, and many of the production’s implications will last in the conscious and subconscious mind long after the house lights are up. To venture so far into the darker recesses of the soul—and to do so in the name of motherhood, that supposed sanctuary of light—is something that deserves a response of awe.
Dropped, writer Katy Warner, director Prue Clark, performers Brigid Gallacher, Matilda Reed, lighting Amelia Lever-Davidson, sound Kahra Scott-James, design Lucy Thornett, La Mama Courthouse, 26 March-16 April; The Rabble, Frankenstein, direction, lighting, sound Emma Valente, design Kate Davis, performers Jane Montgomery Griffiths, Emily Milledge, Dana Miltins, David Paterson, Mary Helen Sassman, Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, 21 March-5 April
Nicci Wilks, Derek Ives, Clare Bartholomew, The Long Pigs
photo Ponch Hawkes
Nicci Wilks, Derek Ives, Clare Bartholomew, The Long Pigs
It’s become a contemporary cliché, thanks to the murderous activities of John Wayne Gacy and subsequent media myth creation, that clowns are evil. Of course clowns have always been naughty, deviant even—the role the jester was allocated in the Middle Ages—but have they been given an undeservedly bad rap? Absolutely not if The Long Pigs are an example—these guys are really nasty.
Derek Ives, Clare Bartholomew and Nicci Wilks are the Long Pigs (devised and directed by Susie Dee). They wear minimal clown make-up but have big black noses and are dressed in drab grey clothing including filthy aprons and oversized hairnets in a kind of hybrid factory-cum-medical worker style. Physically they are variously tiny, tall and round but stature is no indication of status. It’s slippery, the question as to who’s the top pig is in constant flux. That said they make an efficient team—antithetical to the usual clown bumbling—and they have a job to do. It seems they are in the canning industry, packaging what I initially thought were tomatoes but then realised were red noses. The show begins with a wonderfully inventive and complicated routine involving pulleys, pedalling and planks of the wood with which to move a single red object from one side of the stage to the other. The routine has the precision and playfulness of a Peter Fischli & David Weiss installation. But there’s a problem, they are one red nose short. There’s the inference that a greater force will be most unhappy about this.
The show moves seamlessly through scenes and routines with lateral connections in pursuit of the missing nose. At one stage Ives is crucified and the other two run around the audience collecting money for “Jesus,” uttered as squeak, about the only word in the show. And they’re pretty pushy about it. The trio then begin to turn on each other until eventually, after Wilks appears somehow transformed with a red nose, their true evil natures are revealed. She is de-nosed, returning with a bleeding bandage wrapped around her face and is forced to eat her own seeping former facial feature.
With no dialogue, the sound score drives the work, Jethro Woodward doing an excellent job not only with all the synced sound effects but in finding a fine balance between ominous and ambiguous. The set design by Anna Tregloan is also integral, with dirty sheets, ladders, buckets and planks forming the basic elements which are reconfigured in surprising ways. And as every show seems to need something to fall from the ceiling these days, the rain of red noses at the conclusion is both amusing and unsettling.
I saw Long Pigs at the end of my four-day FOLA immersion (see page 15). It’s testament to the quality and creativity of the production and the skills of the performers that The Long Pigs could draw me into such a different performance mode. I mean, I haven’t watched clowns in years—because really, they are way too scary.
The Long Pigs, devisor, director Susie Dee, devisors, performers Derek Ives, Clare Bartholomew, Nicci Wilks, sound Jethro Woodward, design Anna Tregloan, lighting Andy Turner, producer Insite Arts; Fortyfive Downstairs; 12-23 March
Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, Back to Back Theatre
photo Zan Wimnberley
Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, Back to Back Theatre
Like a sports fan avoiding the final score so as to enjoy watching the game later, I have tried to avoid reviews of Back to Back Theatre’s Ganesh Versus the Third Reich. But it can’t be done, not completely, and certainly not for three years. The show premiered at the Melbourne Festival in 2011 and has toured to cities in Europe, North America and Asia before finally arriving in Sydney in 2014. Along the way everyone from Alison Croggon to Ben Brantley has reviewed it and so, despite my best efforts, I arrive at Carriageworks full of anticipation. I am not disappointed.
The show, as you probably know, alternates between two realities. The first is that of the rehearsal room, where an ensemble of actors with perceived disabilities are working with a director to create a show about Ganesh, the Hindu God of Overcoming Obstacles, who travels to Germany in order to reclaim the Swastika. This storyline is established in the first scene, with Simon Laherty, Mark Deans and Brian Tilley discussing who will play which character. Brian, who is playing Ganesh, suggests that Simon and Mark might like to play obstacles, but Simon thinks they’d rather play something “more exciting.” They settle for “two Jews on the run from the Nazis.” The audience giggles nervously. The second reality focuses on Ganesh himself and his journey across continents. This storyline is established in the second scene, which is staged in English and Sanskrit. The only actor without disability in the ensemble (Luke Ryan, playing David the director, the role originally devised and performed by David Woods) stands in front of the transparent plastic curtain to narrate and translate the scene, while Simon as Ganesh stands behind it, backlit in silhouette. On its own, each story line would be intriguing but perhaps not gripping; together they are compelling and complex.
The aesthetics of the two story lines are very different. The scenes from the play-within-the-play are explicitly theatrical and very beautiful; we watch as they are assembled and then disassembled. In one scene, chairs are placed on a table, a plastic curtain is pulled across and animated mountains are projected onto the scene. Suddenly the actors appear to be sitting in a train hurtling through the Alps. The music in these scenes is also lush, thick with tingling sitars, rumbling cellos and occasionally a single female voice. In contrast, the aesthetics of the rehearsal room are pared back. There is no music, the curtains are pulled to the side and the lighting becomes flat, almost fluorescent.
Back to Back’s work is often characterised by self-reflexivity, but Ganesh Versus the Third Reich takes this to yet another level by incorporating critical responses to earlier Back to Back shows. The rehearsal scenes stage several conversations, some of which could occur in any company dealing with the politics and ethics of cultural appropriation. Others, however, could only be had by or about Back to Back. One of the main concerns is that the actors do not fully comprehend what they are doing. Another of the players, Scott Price declares that Mark “doesn’t understand what is fiction and what is not,” adding that he has a mind “like a goldfish.” Incredibly, the director puts this proposition directly to Mark, who replies ambiguously, “goldfish, whale, penguin, octopus, seal, whale, shark, Sea World.” The animal theme continues when conversation turns to the spectators. Speaking to an anticipated but now actual audience, the director says, “You people have come here because you want to see an aquarium or a zoo.” Simon interjects with “I am not liking this,” to which David replies, “I’m just showing you how you can create edgy, exciting material when you are not sure what is real and what is not.”
Finally the conversation turns to the director himself. “He’s manipulating all of us,” says Scott; “He’s a good director,” counters Simon. In truth David is both. Early on, he is encouraging and cajoling, telling Brian, “You have put on paper an amazing possibility.” But as rehearsals progress, he becomes increasingly abusive. In one scene, he lies outright and in another he becomes enraged about a simple bit of blocking. This rehearsal room fight segues into the last scene of the hero’s journey, where Ganesh confronts Hitler and kills Dr Mengele. With the roar of Ganesh still ringing in our ears, we return to the rehearsal room one last time, where David commits one last act of abuse. Telling Mark they are going to play hide and seek, David lets Mark hide under a desk while he packs his things and leaves. Watching Mark waiting to be found by a director who has left the building makes me feel about as desolate as I have ever felt.
In the same way that revealing the mechanics of theatre enhances rather than diminishes its magic, having a performance incorporate our concerns about it seems to amplify rather than lessen them.
Like the suspect who confesses that he was lying earlier but is now telling the truth, Back to Back confronts its audience with a decision. Does this meta-theatrical confession make the show all the more honest or more dangerous? No matter how many reviews you have read, Ganesh Versus the Third Reich will test you, in every sense of the word.
Back to Back Theatre, Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, director Bruce Gladwin, devisors Mark Deans, Marcia Ferguson, Bruce Gladwin, Nicki Holland, Simon Laherty, Sarah Mainwaring, Scott Price, Kate Sulan, Brian Tilley, David Woods, Luke Ryan, lighting Andrew Livingston, bluebottle, design, animation Rhian Hinkley, composer Johann Johannsson, costumes Shio Otani, CarriageWorks, Sydney 12-15 March
‘We’re People Who Do Shows,’ Back to Back Theatre, Performance, Politics, Visibility, edited by Helena Grehan and Peter Eckersall (Performance Research Books, 2013) will be reviewed in RealTime 121, June-July.
Genevieve Trace, Aurelian, produced by Metro Arts & Brisbane Festival
photo Sean Young
Genevieve Trace, Aurelian, produced by Metro Arts & Brisbane Festival
Brisbane has a secret, one that has been recently discovered by a swathe of performance-makers from interstate: our grand old lady Metro Arts.
She is five storeys high, with an imposing stone facade, a dilapidated lift straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel and four intimate performance spaces ranging from the black box Sue Benner Theatre to the sunlit arches of the top floor studio. If you follow her flank down the side laneway you can see the drunken graffiti of innumerable closing nights, the perilous back entrance, the trapdoor green room and the gothic fire escapes that scale up each floor, jammed with artists’ studios and small arts organisations. You can feel her walls breathe, sense the sweat of practitioners who have been writing, fighting, making, rehearsing and performing here since 1980.
What makes Metro unique? Why the space still feels like a secret garden or a true artists’ space is ultimately economic: Metro Arts owns its building, lock, stock and barrel. Perhaps only the recently converted Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne has such a proud history of community advocacy realised by buying a space for artists.
That they have been able to maintain this beautiful heritage building as a haven for artistic experimentation is a testament to a chain of formidable custodians: Robert Hughes, Joseph O’Connor and Sue Benner. Current CEO Liz Burcham is no exception. As sadly missed former RealTime reviewer and theatre elder Doug Leonard said in RT 103 online, Burcham’s tenure has “cemented…and transformed Metro Arts (Independents) into a vital and cohesive part of the city’s performance scene.” Indeed, it was a bold and risky vision that Sue Benner initiated with the Independents program in 2002: giving a platform to hungry local theatremakers and playwrights who felt themselves systemically locked out of a mainstream Australian theatre then dominated by the middle-class minutiae of David Williamson’s naturalism.
Under Burcham’s strategic and canny direction, Metro has grown into a producing hub, a host venue for the Brisbane Festival and, probably its most significant but amorphous shift, moving from a place at the fringes of professional theatre culture to become the true incubator, the gestation space for the city’s performance-makers. Their closest cousin is probably Arts House in Melbourne, and it is not without significance that this is one of Metro’s key partners in 2014, the first program since it announced the close of the Independents in 2013.
I stopped by to talk with CEO Liz Burcham and Programming Manager Kieran Swann about their 2014 program and their sense of where the “lean and nimble” Metro saw itself “filling the gaps” in the rapidly changing theatre ecology here in Brisbane and across the country.
Metro has a heady manifesto. Burcham suggests three major goals: placing artists in creative control, providing them with an open platform to experiment, particularly with process and developing their practice, while simultaneously supporting them to develop strategies to make themselves sustainable. This means that Metro provides both dramaturgical or artistic support, but also a lot of practical services: creative development and rehearsal space, office space, access to a fully functional venue with an audience, an ongoing program and a production hub, which can provide support for artists to on-sell, tour or re-package their work. Burcham calls this “getting artists to the market,” or at the very least making sure that they don’t miss the market. Metro looks to “invest” in artists and to build deep and ongoing relationships. Indeed, Kieran Swann—live artist, designer and performance-maker—is an alumnus of Metro’s programs.
For both Burcham and Swann, the pivotal change for Metro in the last years has been a result of the success of the independent agenda. In the fluid and aspirational Australian performance sector most working artists now have an independent practice. Burcham’s driving question was whether the word ‘independent’ was still “serving artists” and whether a more “flexible” and “responsive” platform was needed. While many in the local scene mourn the end of the Independents program as a visible marker or entry point for new work, Burcham is right to acknowledge that Metro’s monopoly has been supplanted by other pathways into professional production, like the Indie seasons hosted by mainstage companies and for younger artists by the burgeoning festival platforms like Next Wave, FOLA, Anywhere Theatre Festival and This Is Not Art.
Metro has shifted to compete in this new context by focusing on co-presenting with the Arts House inaugural Festival of Live Art (Julie Vulcan’s Drift), Next Wave (The Dokboki Box, Altertruism Demos, Lesser Gods and Blak’tism) and Queensland Theatre Company (Benjamin Schostakowski’s A Tribute of Sorts). There’s also a producing partnership for a HotHouse season of The Escapists’ Packed (see p29). The creative development program includes works ranging from Melbourne’s MKA to Tasmanian artist Cynthia Foster and local physical theatremakers Caroline Dunphy, Kate Lee and Jo Thomas.
What is arresting about the list of artists supported by Metro programs in 2014 is how many of them are based interstate. Burcham says that they have been delighted with the national interest from artists who value the organic and artist-centric space and the focus on process-based risk.
Indeed, this artistic rhetoric reflects a curatorial shift towards contemporary performance, live art and the curious spaces that lie between theatre and the visual arts. For me, there is a genuine excitement about this prospect as for many years the visual arts program and the theatre program at Metro were like divorced parents in an uneasy custody agreement. The visual artists would huddle in their fourth floor studios away from the noisy parakeets, the theatremakers who dominated the bottom floors and their public performance spaces. The challenge for Metro, I think, is to steer the new path while holding onto the deeply felt traditions of theatremaking and playwright development that have made such a contribution to the city’s cultural life.
James Eccles, photo Michael Wholley, centre – Brian Howard, photo Victoria Owens, right – James Nightingale, courtesy the artist
Auroras are created by the collision of energetic charged particles with atoms at high altitude in the atmosphere above the Earth. The aural equivalent will be generated by the Aurora Festival of Living Music with exciting new commissions, including the much anticipated premiere of a major work from Brian Howard, Voyage Through the Radiant Stars, and new works for a didjeridu duet and for Aurora Chorealis, a concert featuring Song Company and volunteer singers from across Western Sydney.
Violist and leader of The Noise improvising string quartet James Eccles has pretty much set aside his instrument for the time being to be artistic director of the 2014 Aurora Festival—applying for funding, commissioning, negotiating with arts centres, programming and sitting in on rehearsals, all in less than a year after the initial director had to step down. Eccles appears perfectly at home in the role and confident that, despite constraints, he’s come up with an exciting, focused festival, for the greater part devoted to Australian new music and its wonderful NSW exponents.
Eccles happily embraces the decision made when it was founded to establish the festival in Sydney’s west. “New music is generally thought of as something that only interests the inner city crowd,” he says, “but it happens in Western Sydney. The festival was set up by Matthew Hindson. He ran the first three biennial festivals and Andrew Batt-Rawden took over the next in 2012. Hindson thought that Sydney should have a festival devoted to new music, and it is the only one in Sydney, though it’s broader than that with elements of world music.” Indeed, Japanese and Australian noise music made a popular appearance in the 2012 festival.
“What I find interesting is that new music has a reputation for being difficult and catering to an exclusive clientele in the know. Putting it on in Western Sydney you have to forget all that. It’s about finding work that cuts across [preconceptions and forms] and involves the community. It’s a great challenge and opportunity for new music to look outside its shell.”
Community constellation
Eccles is particularly pleased with this festival’s community event: “At the Joan Sutherland Arts Centre in Penrith, there’ll be a whole day of community singing workshops. As well as amateur singers—of whatever range of experience—we’re inviting people who’ve never sung publicly before and, as the Aurora Chorus, they’ll all perform that night in the concert titled Aurora Chorealis. For them we’ve commissioned a new work by Paul Jarman, a really great choral director and composer who knows exactly how to pitch this approach to the people singing, and to the audience. They’ll all get a lot out of it: it’s new, it’s Australian, it’s been composed with that community in mind. It’s titled The Aurora Round, a round as in Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, but a lot cleverer than that.” A bit of a challenge? “Exactly, but it can be learned in one day and sung without a score, and will be sonically very interesting.”
In the course of the day Roland Peelman and Song Company will present two vocal installations the audience can wander through: “at 2pm Leah Barclay’s Transvergence (2011) and at 6pm Kate E Moore’s Uisce (2007) which will segue into the concert proper which features the Aurora Chorus and Song Company.”
This Aurora program is not as large nor quite as geographically far flung as previous festivals, simply because it was not successful in securing Arts NSW funding for 2014, as was the case, says Eccles with a number of new music applicants. However, Australia Council funding has meant the festival will still present a strong program spread across the west in Riverside Theatres, Parramatta and the Campbelltown, Blacktown and Joan Sutherland Arts Centres.
Radiant Stars
The opening night, presented by Aurora, Riverside and New Music Network, should certainly attract new music aficionados with a premiere from a leading Australian composer, Brian Howard, commissioned by Aurora. Howard, who has returned to Sydney after working overseas for a number of years, wrote, among other things, notable operas—Inner Voices (libretto Louis Nowra, 1979), Metamorphosis (Berkoff after Kafka), Whitsunday (Nowra, 1988) and Wide Sargasso Sea (Howard, 1997).
Howard’s new orchestral work is Voyage Through Radiant Stars. Eccles is awed, “It’s enormous, a 60-minute saxophone concerto. How often do you get a new 60-minute work in contemporary classical music? I’d love to see a symphony concert where this was the main work, instead of a token 12-minute new music work played first in the program or before interval. This is for a fairly large ensemble, 18 musicians—the Sydney Conservatorium Modern Music Ensemble. I heard their first rehearsal and I was really impressed. Alto-saxophonist James Nightingale (Chair of the New Music Network and member of Continuum Sax) is playing the solo part. It’s fantastic music, a little Stockhausen-esque in some ways, as in his solo wind pieces, but definitely Brian’s own language.”
The first half of the opening night concert has much to offer as well: “Ensemble Offspring playing Marcus Lindberg’s Ablauf (1983) for two massive bass drums and clarinet…I’ve seen it live and was bowled over. Song Company’s Roland Peelman is to play a piano piece, Sonolith, a world premiere by Turkish Australian composer Ekrem Mulayim who has written a musical transcription of the Declaration of Human Rights. The words are projected in real time so that it’s almost like the pianist is a typist.”
A didjeridu duet, an Aurora commission for Alex Pozniak from Aurora, has “considerable input from the players Mark Atkins and Gumeroy Newman who’s from Western Sydney. Hearing two didjeridus together is not something you experience very often.” The program also includes Xenakis’ challenging solo Rebonds (1987-89) played by Claire Edwardes. Eccles is keen that the first half of the concert is as fluid as possible, “so that the works can speak to each other” without re-setting of music stands and chairs.
Synesthesias
Elsewhere in the program is Colourwheel, a Campbelltown Arts Centre commission which Aurora is co-presenting. It’s the creation of guitarist Jim Moginie performing with an ensemble of electric guitarists in his “exploration of colour theory in art and music in Kandinsky, Klee and others as well as Australia’s Roy de Maistre.”
Recorder player Alicia Crossley will be at Blacktown Arts Centre in a very distinctive program, Ecstatic Dances, collaborating with various artists including a work commissioned by Aurora from Paul Cutlan, Affirmations, for bass recorder, cello with effects and didjeridu. The concert takes its title from Ross Edwards’ work of the same name, which will also be performed in what Eccles describes as “a dance-inspired program.” There’ll also be a solo from cellist Ollie Miller and Melissa Farrow, principal flautist with the Brandenburg Chamber Orchestra, will play baroque flute alongside Alicia.”
Under open skies, Super Critical Mass (Julian Day, Luke Jaaniste, Janet McKay), who specialise in crowd music, will present their Aurora-commissioned new work for percussion to be performed in St Johns Park Parramatta on 30 April during the evening rush hour.
With a focused program built around commissions and premieres of exciting new works, James Eccles has curated a strong program with arts centres and musical partners. He’d liked to have had more on the program: “a lot of great ideas were pitched to me but we simply didn’t have the money.” There’s also no ‘big name’ overseas artist this year, he says, to “galvanise an audience, but we thought, let’s make this really about Australian artists and support them with the kind of opportunities they rarely get in arts festivals.”
Aurora has deservedly become an integral part of the Western Sydney cultural calendar and, like the vital arts centres, continues to develop audiences for and appreciation of Australian music of remarkable diversity. Let’s hope this achievement is recognised by Arts NSW and that Aurora Festival is granted the opportunity to thrive in 2016. In the meantime we ready ourselves to be awed by dazzling spectrum of creations from Australia’s brightest musicians in the 2014 Aurora Festival of Living Music.
Despite a recent change in ownership it is good to see that Smith’s Alternative Bookshop in Canberra City continues to present live music events of the kind that distinguishes this venue from others in Canberra.
As a flow-on from the annual SoundOut festival of improvised music, this one-off performance brought together a small cross-section of open-minded music fans into the intimate confines of Smith’s to hear Canadian improviser François Houle perform a set with clarinet, electronics and piano followed by a collaborative performance with Canberra wind trio Psithurium.
Focusing on a series of shorter pieces that cohered around an atmospheric central theme, Houle began by coaxing from the clarinet a sequence of sharply defined minimal clusters with an intended progression somewhat like saxophonist John Butcher’s pastel sparseness that was all the rage for a time.
Houle is a leading light in contemporary improvised music having performed with such luminaries as pianist Marilyn Crispell and saxophonist Evan Parker. His enthusiasm throughout this performance flowed through to his use of loops, also involving a piano’s innards, providing an harmonic expansiveness somewhat like Evan Parker’s famous circular breathing technique. At points, Houle offered evocative autobiographical detail for the audience to better understand the mood and shape of each piece. One that stood out was a mournful and celebratory tribute to free music clarinettist John Carter. Throughout this spontaneously conceived homage, Houle’s clarinet was devotional yet not excessively so, a cool restraint ensuring the impact of the music was heightened by a settled and respectful delivery.
In his second set Houle was joined by Psithurium featuring SoundOut festival director Richard Johnson on soprano sax and customised gourd. This fully improvised piece had each of the performers brightly colouring a spontaneous theme that ebbed and flowed. No one participant took charge which created ample space for free exploration with discipline and restraint.
The combination of saxophones, gourd and clarinet rolled out the music in a gentle, unhurried manner, with resonating sounds within the bookshop providing a striking acoustic counterpoint to the traffic whizzing by outside.
François Houle and the Psithurium Wind Trio, Smith’s Alternative Bookshop, SoundOut 2014, Canberra City, 7 Feb
The urbane program of the 2nd Brisbane Jazz Festival in early June features Finland’s Jukka Perko-Avara Trio, pianists Barney McAll and Mike Nock, the Julien Wilson Quartet and piano trio Trichotomy among others, not least UK saxophonist Julian Arguelles. An enthusiastic Guardian reviewer wrote in 2006 of “the evolution of the saxophonist and composer Julian Arguelles into the British Joe Lovano (with plenty of Celtic and European free-improv variations of his own).”
Arguelles, who plays tenor and soprano saxophones, clarinets and flutes and whose playing ranges from the elegantly mellifluous to be-bop urgency to improv unpredictability, is a prominent figure in the European jazz scene, especially in the contemporary big band field, performing with the highly regarded Frankfurt Radio Big Band. As soloist he has appeared with Tim Berne, Steve Swallow, John Abercrombie, Dave Holland, Dave Liebman, Jim Black, Peter Erskine, Django Bates, John Taylor, Kenny Wheeler and Carla Bley. His 2006 album Partita illustrates the finesse and sheer adventurousness of his playing on 15 mostly very short, very effectively varied tracks (the shortest being 1”09’).
Arguelles has been commissioned to create works for bands, groups and events as diverse as NDR Big Band (Hamburg), HR Big Band (Frankfurt), The Apollo Saxophone Quartet, Bath International Festival, the Fontanella Recorder Consort and the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra. The 2009 album Momenta is an exemplary account of Arguelle’s compositional and arrangement skills for big band.
The 2014 festival is also a great opportunity to premiere new works by Australian composers Sean Foran, Rafael Karlen, Louise Denson and Andrew Butt. Foran, a pianist and leader of Trichotomy (formerly Misinterprotato), has studied and played internationally.
The festival’s Artistic Director Lynette Irwin says, “Julian Arguelles is one of Europe’s most inventive saxophonists. Pairing him with the emotive and textural sounds of the piano trio Trichotomy will generate some exciting music. Additionally, Jazz Queensland has commissioned Sean Foran to create a new work for this unique collaboration.”
Recently added to the program is another saxophone great, American Joshua Redman with his quartet. RT
In Douglas Kahn’s Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, the premise is holistic. Signals are everywhere, running through us, the earth, the sky, bouncing off the ionosphere, and the best way to tune into them is by listening. By the time you’ve finished reading this book you feel like you’ve tapped into a magnificent universal circuit. It’s almost religious.
The book has a roughly historical trajectory starting with Thomas Watson, Alexander Graham Bell’s ‘sidekick’ who would listen to the “natural radio” that the new telephone technology channelled. Then there’s a dash back to catch up on Henry David Thoreau’s fixation with all things Aeolian—the wind singing through nature and man-made structures. Over several chapters Kahn tunes in to Alvin Lucier and his associates exploring brain waves and the curious whistlers bouncing the sound of storms around the globe. He then heads underground with Gordon Mumma to listen to earthquakes and reaches for the stars with Pauline Oliveros. He ends in the here and now with Joyce Hinterding’s antennae channelling the universal hum of electromagnetic presence. And there’s a whole lot more in between.
Kahn’s style approaches an extended personal essay with the meanderings and side trips just as interesting as the main arguments. While ideas are grouped into chapters, concepts ‘leak’ like the extraneous sounds on telegraph wires to create loops and circuits through the text. A particular thread that creeps in subtly, growing in intensity, deals with relations between signals, the technologies created to channel them and the greater military complex. Kahn refers to this as the geophysical becoming geopolitical. The chapters “Sound of the Underground” and “Black Sun, Black Rain” exploring atomic energies are particularly insightful.
As Kahn suggests in his introduction, the subject matter of the book dictates a high level of interdisciplinarity, presenting not only a history of sonic, musical and visual arts but also delving into the histories of technology and science. An unspoken interdisciplinary aspect of Kahn’s book is that while he is writing about sound he is also often writing about writings on sound. The book is rich with description and quoted texts illustrating what Kahn describes as the “uncanny poetics of popular imagination.” One example quoted is from an 1878 New York Times article, “Phones of the Future”: “We are assured that we will be able not only to listen to the tramp of the tiniest insects, but to hear the growing of the grass and the ripple of the sap ascending beneath the bark of trees.”
In the opening chapters there are several lists of sound descriptors for earth signals and electromagnetic energies that were being heard in early devices: “a hissing or swishing as of someone shaking a wisp of straw;” the “‘crackle’ or the burning of a hemlock broom.” It’s a veritable go-to guide for the adjectivally challenged sound commentator. Of course Kahn himself is no slouch when it comes to the poetic, even when dealing with the most technical of subjects, connecting concepts with grand gestures that set things resonating against each other, like this: “A technological timeline of musical cosmoses could be strung from the antiquity of the monochord to lines of telecommunications.” There is literally never a dull moment.
The book offers vast amounts of fascinating information ranging from background stories around the creation of artworks to mythic descriptions of natural phenomena, such as auroras and static storms at high altitude, which are utterly enthralling. However the dominant achievement is that Kahn manages to rough-up the binary of nature and technology. As he extrapolates on his theory of the Aelectrosonic—the sounds of the electromagnetic world—he repositions nature at the centre of electronic music and indeed of media arts. It all starts with the signals that have been waiting for us to invent ways to hear them.
Earth Sound, Earth Signal feels like a journey to the centre of the earth and to the outer reaches of the stars. It reads equally as science fiction, scientific journal, a history of electronic sounds and a tale of the occult. In the chapter on Pauline Oliveros Kahn mentions the use of New Age Theosophic texts as “a way to trigger our imaginations, rather than as a ‘scientific fact,’” and while his book does not skimp on the latter it’s the invitation to imagine that captivated me. Most of all, the book offers a comprehensive and mind-altering understanding of the connectedness between ourselves, the Earth and all of these shimmering energetic properties. Douglas Kahn invites us to tune in to this awesome totality.
Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, Douglas Kahn, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2013
In the early 90s I was composing several experimental operas with Douglas Horton and Chamber Made Opera. As I knew Robert Ashley’s work, Douglas showed me the score of Ashley’s Improvement: Don Leaves Linda, to see how a version might be created for a Chamber Made Opera production. A recording of the opera fits onto two CDs—some 90 minutes of music, however the ‘score’ was just a single page of text with lists of numbers. That was it.
Ashley was using processes other than score writing to make the work. This was revealing and reassuring for me, as I didn’t use traditional scores either.
Composers are often invisible architects who draw up plans (scores) and then step away to let others realise the work. Ashley, however, sat visibly and audibly at the very heart of his work. His own distinctive vocal cadences often provided the basis from which his work grew, with the music extending out from, or surrounding his vocal utterances.
Ashley’s operas and his early work, like Automatic Writing, are based around extended performances of language. Language is a technology that we use to inhabit all things that surround us, attempting to make some sense of the world. Ashley’s voices acknowledge this, as they provide an interface between flesh and technology in a way that is more interesting than Apple’s Siri or Samantha (the female voice of the operating system in the Spike Jonze film Her, see Philip Brophy, page 28) could ever hope to be. Where Siri and Samantha give a life force to technology, Ashley’s voices do the reverse as they flow into technology from life. Ashley’s matter-of-fact vocal deliveries are transformed into unworldly presences inhabiting spatial realms defined by resonance, echo and timbre. As a form of orchestration, these effects imbue the voices with a range of authoritative positions. Phantom doublings lend unnerving aspects to the allegorical utterances of his characters. His voices possess ambiguous orchestrated presences, which slowly become more personal and familiar, while paradoxically maintaining their acousmatic distance and mysteriousness.
While traditional opera tends to position the audience outside the world of the performers, Ashley draws you inside his work as an eavesdropping participant. You become intimately connected to the close-miked voices of the performers, each with their own unique grain of voice, which allow you to enter the inner imaginary of their self-obsession.
I have only ever listened to Ashley’s 2000 opera Dust twice, although I own the CD. It is one of my favourite works. To play it more would be like reliving a traumatic or emotionally charged part of your life once too often.
For traditionalists who have struggled with Ashley, I suggest that you listen to Ashley’s operas with Wagner’s Ring Cycle in mind. Ashley and Wagner share an amazing ability to weave musical detail around voice to such a degree that the music serves as a kind of textural and textual analogue of the libretto, adding depth while repositioning possible meanings. For both, the music is daemon-like, as it inhabits, doubles, twists, distorts and converses with a character’s vocal text. These labyrinthine flows serve to orchestrate context. They contribute to a soundscape that moves the voice beyond the everyday while complicating the intent of language, which is much more interesting than a music that merely steers and confirms it.
Ashley and partner and producer Mimi Johnson came to Melbourne in 1992 to help with rehearsing Improvement for Chamber Made Opera’s production for the 1992 Melbourne Festival. The performance consisted of a brilliant cast of local performers singing live to the accompaniment of the CD, with the prerecorded voices fed to each singer’s headphones. This should not have worked, but it did. Improvement was a great production and is still remembered favorably by many who had not encountered this kind of performance before. We should have seen more of this kind of work. Why didn’t we?
When Ashley was invited to talk to music students at the Victorian College of the Arts, he stood in uncomfortable silence for several long minutes. I have seen theatremaker Robert Wilson stand in silence deliberately at the start of his lectures to expose the performer-audience relationship, however in Ashley’s case, as a composer, he was struggling to find something meaningful to say to music students. Finally, he said something like, “I just don’t know what to tell you. I mean, what else can anybody write for a cello, or an orchestra? This is not where composition is now situated.” As a modern master within this confirming institutional context he implored his audience to look beyond the scope of musical museums.
A few years later I caught up with Ashley in Miami where his long-serving vocal ensemble was collaborating with the Florida Grand Opera on his new work Balseros. Ashley invited me into rehearsals where I witnessed conservative operatic processes rubbing up against the modern experimental. Both approaches were based on musicalising conversation and verbalising inner thought. Ashley was attempting to replace the powerful projected operatic aria and recitative with his introspective, characterful voice streams. The resigned condescension of the classically trained chorus and the lack of faith and comprehension from the creative hierarchy was palpable. The work was ultimately a very moving success, although it was a vivid demonstration of just how tough it can sometimes be to get your own ideas through bureaucratic and creative filters to production, especially on expensive productions.
In his own measured, deliberate way he told me, as a then younger composer, not to compromise on what you want to do. Don’t allow your work be taken over by directors and external interests. Never give in to those who try to alter what you do. Have the strength to stick with your own ideas.
There are many of Robert Ashley’s works on YouTube including Perfect Lives, a superb example of the composer’s wit and wisdom.
Gerrit Fokkema, Woman hosing, Canberra, 1979, in Australian Vernacular Photography, courtesy Art Gallery of NSW
The term “vernacular” is a very slippery one. Australian Vernacular Photography: The Allure of the Everyday is a compact exhibition co-curated by AGNSW Senior Curator, Photographs Judy Annear and Assistant Curator, Photographs Eleanor Weber. The exhibition is distinguished in particular in the way it repositions the “vernacular,” redefining its relationship to “straight photography” (the common, and problematic, term for documentary photography). Three exhibitions that referenced the vernacular serendipitously overlapped in Sydney galleries in early 2014.
Australian Vernacular Photography looks at the work of 16 well known Australian practitioners from the postwar period to the present day. It looks at the overseas influences and exhibitions which impacted on Australian photographic practice and the development of a greater awareness of national and personal identity. One key event was the tour in 1959 of The Family of Man exhibition produced by Edward Steichen at MoMA in New York. This exhibition encouraged Australian photographers to look outwards at what their international peers were doing. As a young photographer I can remember poring over the images in the book that accompanied it.
The “vernacular” is commonly interpreted as photography of everyday life, frequently produced by amateur photographers and often described as snapshots. When researching the genre it surprised me that one of the photographers strongly associated with the vernacular was Walker Evans, a famous American photographic artist who was by no means an amateur. Australian Vernacular Photography strengthens the perception of a broader interpretation of the term with the choice of photographers it features, who were selected from the Art Gallery’s collection.
The show embraces documentary photography, the predominant photographic mode in the 60s and 70s, stating, “Photographing the everyday became a way of understanding how Australia saw (and sees) itself with recurrent themes such as beach culture, suburbia, race relations, protest and the role of women among the central concerns.”
As a photographer working out of this tradition at the time I would not have called my photography “vernacular.” However, one of the strengths of this exhibition is that it offers us a new way of interpreting history. To collapse the snapshot aesthetic with the broad intentions of documentary photography performs a radical shift in perception benefiting both forms. It allows us to re-evaluate the rigid conventions of fine art photography, which needed to be in place to get photography seen as an artform in the first place. However, “The times they are a changing.”
A leading figure in the field of photographic studies, Geoffrey Batchen, has argued in his books (Each Wild Idea, 2000 and Forget Me Not, 2004) for the substantial inclusion of vernacular photography in a general history of photography. He writes, “This history, dominated by the values and tropes of art history, was not well equipped to talk about photographs that were overtly commercial, hybrid and banal. I suggest that any substantial inclusion of vernacular photographs into a general history of photography will require a total transformation of the character of that history.” “Snapshots are complicated objects. They are both unique to each maker and almost always entirely generic. That doesn’t make them any less compelling as pictures, especially for those who treasure them.” (Quotations from an interview with Geoffrey Batchen by LG in LesPHOTOGRAPHES.com.)
Patrick Pound installation, People who look dead but (probably) aren’t, Stills Gallery, Sydney
Now that collectors are taking a serious interest in discarded snapshots, artists have also embraced the found and generic snapshot to use as source material for their postmodern art practice. Patrick Pound, whose show at Stills, People who look dead but (probably) aren’t, obsessively collects old photographs and assembles them in clusters based on their generic similarities. In Pound’s wall installations relationships are formed between images gathered from multiple sources creating an intriguing and humorous collective visual narrative.
Pound became a collector himself, scouring the internet and antique shops for source material. The found images are strangely endearing in their sense of abandonment and separation from their author. Bronwyn Rennex, Stills Gallery Curator of this exhibition, writes, “By highlighting the ‘probablys’ and ‘possiblys’ in our relationship with these images, Pound reminds us that meanings are fragile, and interpretations slippery.” Sounds like real life to me!
From Beijing Silvermine, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (2014), Sydney, photo courtesy Thomas Sauvin
Sydney’s 4A Centre for Contemporary Art staged a remarkable installation, Beijing Silvermine, by Thomas Sauvin, a Beijing-based French photography collector, editor and curator. It comprised more than half a million photographic negatives amassed, edited, archived and printed by Sauvin. These negatives were destined for destruction in a recycling plant. Xiao Ma, the owner of the plant stockpiles negatives, X-rays and compact discs to melt down their silver nitrate content for sale.
Sauvin offered to buy these negatives by the kilo in a vain and poignant attempt to symbolically rescue “abandoned memories.” The lifespan of photographic negative film from 1985 was approximately 20 years. This was the era when 35mm film came onto the market and was widespread in China as it was throughout the world. In 2005 the advent of digital photography brought its use to a relatively dramatic and sudden end.
The poignancy of this exhibition is not only its metaphor for the death of analogue photography but also the memorial it sets up to the millions of anonymous subjects of these photographs. These are the snapshots we universally recognise, covering themes of family, relationship, love, leisure, birth and, by implication, death. I was deeply touched by images of fresh-faced young couples embracing, young women posing for their partners, suited male workmates relaxing after work, families in kitchens and living rooms.
The complex installation represented the enormous depth of the archive. All the images and negatives are in colour (black and white photography had already ‘passed away’). Selected images have been enlarged to cover whole walls. Others are hung salon style, also covering walls. Light boxes are covered with strips of negatives left higgledy piggledy, as if photographers had suddenly departed. In one corner thousands of crumpled, postcard-sized prints are piled up suggesting neglect and rejection. Placed within the pile are three monitors rapidly flashing images from the archive. The pace of image presentation is so fast as to render the images ephemeral.
In another room a multi-image screen projection (created by collaborator Lei Lei, a Chinese multimedia animation artist) similarly flashes multiple images from the archive with an overlay of decaying and disintegrating film stock. The pace of the image editing varies, occasionally resting briefly on particular images.
This work had a profound effect on me leaving a residual feeling of loss and an awareness of irreversible historical change both technological and personal. This sense of loss is compounded by the thousands of stories told of individual lives, families, personal relationships and events.
Somehow this powerful metaphor for the brevity of life sums up the significance of photography in general and positions the vernacular photograph right at the heart of it.
Art Gallery of NSW, Australian Vernacular Photography: The Allure of the Everyday, Jeff Carter, Ed Douglas, Peter Elliston, Gerrit Fokkema, Sue Ford, Fiona Hall, Robert McFarlane, Hal Missingham, David Moore, Trent Parke, Roger Scott, Glenn Sloggett, Ingeborg Tyssen, John F Williams, William Yang, Anne Zahalka, 8 Feb-18 May; STILLS, Patrick Pound, People who look dead but (probably) aren’t, 19 Feb to 22 March; 4A Centre for Contemporary Art , Beijing Silvermine, Sydney, 11 Jan-22 Feb
Jess, Oskar, Kai and Mia 2011, Marzena Wasikowska, Lens Love, photo courtesy Canberra Museum & Gallery
Lens Love: the tender gaze of six Canberra region photographers, featured six photographers who are unified by geographic context. Living and working within the Canberra region, they share an affiliation with this landscape. The way each artist’s personal relationship to the same place manifests in their aesthetic and thematic predilections is wildly divergent. Yet the simple fact that they share common topographic roots is crucial to an appreciation of the associative threads that bind their work.
Irrespective of whether or not they enlist their immediate geographic context as a thematic proposition, the six are all concerned with the mutability of place and the prospect of displacement. In the work of Martyn Jolly, Marzena Wasikowska, Lee Grant, Denise Ferris, Cathy Laudenbach and John Reid we witness careful studies of the way space is inhabited and settled (or unsettled). These artists do not simply document the fleeting ‘I was here’ of the casual snapshot but chart more complex networks of belonging.
The first work to greet viewers as they enter the gallery is Denise Ferris’ The Long Hot Summer. The sundrenched tones of the dry brush in the foreground of this sweeping landscape photograph are intercut by the lumbering presence of four white vehicles in the distance. Vans and motor homes, the vehicles are peripatetic placeholders. These detached and transportable domestic spaces can claim any unknown and foreign territory as a potential backyard. A caravan or motor home situates its inhabitant within an expansive and open-ended landscape, offering them the opportunity to domesticate any site they so desire (at least in theory).
In The colour of snow, a grid of nine photographs, Ferris recalibrates the subject’s relationship to place. Blizzards and blankets of snow overwhelm the winter landscapes depicted in these images. The figures that populate this alpine world are threatened with invisibility. As the cloak of snow thickens, they are gradually erased. The figures are absorbed into the landscape and belong to its abyss.
Three bodies of work by Lee Grant approach this motif of habitation and belonging in a didactic manner. Grant anatomises cultural signposts and explores the way cultural identity is constructed and disseminated. In The Korea Project, portraits of Koreans living in Australia are interspersed with photographs of urban environments in Korea that are devoid of people. This enquiry into cultural transplantation (and translation) is inflected with personal context. Treating the series as a way to explore her own Korean heritage, Grant indirectly inserts herself into these scenes.
Marzena Wasikowska’s series, I left Poland when I was 11 years old and 36 years later I returned for the third time, similarly interrogates cultural displacement and maps the return to a site of diasporic departure. In these sets of clustered photographs (two gridded arrangements featuring nine images each) Wasikowska assembles discrete snapshots taken on a journey back to her childhood homeland. Like film stills from a road movie, these are pictorial vignettes from a story narrated by an outsider. Yet there is still an intimacy here. The images of domestic settings, the affectionate family portraits and the semi-abstract close-ups of water droplets on a window or leaves on a snow-covered ground do not speak to detachment or withdrawal. Wasikowska has stitched herself into this cultural landscape. Her view is not that of the panorama but the closely cropped frame of familiarity.
In Wasikowska’s suite of images, light becomes an animative agent. It does not merely designate a temporal framework (insofar as one set of photographs appears to have been taken during the day while the other is enveloped by the cover of darkness) but also defines space. The nocturnal scenes are lit by dim light sources: small domestic lamps, the blue-tinted glow of a computer screen and weak streetlamps. These minimal light sources shrink and condense the spatial field of each image, heightening the sense of intimacy Wasikowska cultivates in her candid yet poetic photographs.
Cathy Laudenbach also recruits light as an animative force in her series The Familiars. The empty rooms that appear in these photographs are rumored to be haunted or plagued by supernatural spirits. Forgotten narratives and ghostly apparitions fester amid slightly dishevelled furnishings. The light that penetrates deserted interiors, streaming in through the windows or reflecting off the patina on the floorboards, becomes a surrogate for the departed occupants. It assumes a phantom-like human presence.
While also composed of light, the spectral forms that populate Martyn Jolly’s series Faces of the Living Dead possess a more explicit, or assertive, legibility. The images in this series are scanned and cropped re-presentations of spirit photographs from the Cambridge University Library archive. Disembodied ghost-like forms are suspended in mid-air and faces of then-deceased figures are superimposed onto portraits of their mourning relatives. The ghosts in these photographs are fabrications. This is divination by way of chemical blotches, multiple exposures and bursts of light. In some of the images, the spectres take on recognisable human form while in others their physique is reduced to an abstract flicker of light against a dark, indeterminate background. All of these (fictitious) phantoms float and hover. Having left the world of the physical and the embodied, they are ungrounded. They occupy a non-place.
Conversely, the ghostly spirit that John Reid memorialises in the body of work he dedicates to a fictional folkloric character—the “fishman”—is indelibly linked to place. Part man, part fish, Reid’s homespun mythological creature is nothing if not situated. These photographs document a counterfeit natural history specimen. The blurred figure that darts in and out of each landscape shot is an imaginary native of National Parks surrounding the Canberra Region. By offering (fabricated) evidence of its existence within its natural habitat, Reid perpetuates the mythology. He recasts this landscape as a folkloric backdrop.
From its position in the centre of the gallery, Reid’s work mediates between states of settlement and vacancy. The fishman belongs to his landscape (he is local fauna) yet at the same time he does not exist. He is both placed and displaced. Reid’s work provided the pivot on which the rest of the show hung. The figures—corporeal or otherwise—featured in the work on display each navigate the tension between placement and displacement. While some situate themselves by making claims to a cultural heritage, others remain untethered and denied a physical body in which to place themselves. By allowing this tension to unravel, Lens Love mapped a contrastive yet cogent study of habitation beyond the strictures of the domestic.
Lens Love: the tender gaze of six Canberra region photographers, curator Shane Breynard, Canberra Museum and Gallery, Canberra, 30 Nov 2013-23 Feb 2014
In 2013, Melbourne’s ACCA presented the first showing of the celebrated British artist Tacita Dean’s epic kaleidoscopic anamorphic film installation, FILM (2011), since its debut in the voluminous space of the Tate Turbine Hall in London. Less than a year later and Tacita Dean is returning to Australia, again at the invitation of ACCA Artistic Director Juliana Engberg in her present incarnation as curator of the 19th Biennale of Sydney, You Imagine What You Desire. On this occasion, Dean returns with another first—presenting in Sydney the inaugural live performance work of her career, Event for a Stage (2014), as a highlight of the Biennale’s middle program.
Well-known for her artisanal approach to celluloid filmmaking and with a multi-disciplinary practice that spans sound recordings, atmospheric drawings, photography, over-painted postcards and mixed media works, the transition into live performance represents a bold leap for Dean. A month out from the launch of Event for a Stage at Carriageworks, co-commissioners of the work along with the Biennale, details of its content are slowly being revealed. When I speak with Engberg about the work’s development, she explains that while it’s “very much in an incubatory phase” and represents “a real step out for [Dean] in terms of her own processes and procedures” this one-act theatrical presentation will also be very much within the artist’s own language and artistic procedures. “As a filmmaker Tacita has always been interested in all those things that combine in that process: sound, action, light, colour, etcetera. What we’re trying to do in some ways is to manifest that in reality, to capture it in its film life, in an audio life and to present it in a live format simultaneously. So it’s quite interesting.”
At the heart of the project is the live filming of a portrait of a performer on stage, the British actor Stephen Dillane, whose versatility across film and theatre will surely suit him to this unconventional role. If Dean’s rich oeuvre of understated and carefully edited film work is anything to go by, gesture, atmosphere, affect and a sense of quietude may prove pivotal over action. For Dean, the development of working in a theatre, which came about when Engberg discovered the “fundamental opportunity” that having Carriageworks as a Biennale venue partner offered in its access to a theatre space, is a chance to become more self-reflexive. As the Biennale’s press material sets out: “by exposing her own way of filming to an audience, she is dramatising the role of medium, whilst also working with an actor examining the nature of his own presence on a stage.”
While the move into a live setting gestures towards an experimental breaking open of Dean’s process in a theatrical context, the premise of a filmed portrait is also continuous with Dean’s extensive body of cinematic portraiture work culminating in 2008 in one of the artist’s most important works to date, the six-film installation titled Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS. Created from footage that Dean filmed of the American avant-garde choreographer at his studio in Manhattan two years before his death, the multipartite installation depicts Cunningham performing a near motionless interpretation of Stillness, his singular choreography for his lifetime partner John Cage’s 1952 composition 4’33.” Seated in a chair, Cunningham simply shifts position for each of the composition’s three movements, Dean’s life-size projections serving to magnify the elegiac drama of his silent poses.
In her other film portrait works, Dean has made what Jean-Christophe Royoux has termed “memory-homages” to such luminaries of the art world as Mario Merz, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg and most recently Robert Smithson as well as intimate studies of her own uncles and an elderly friend of the family nicknamed ‘Boots.’ Dean herself has jokingly conceded the Freudian “father-complex” at work in her practice. Yet in a more universal sense the portrait of an ageing figure captured in the disappearing medium of analogue film invites meditation upon themes of time, perception and the nature of seeing and reflects Dean’s ongoing interest in the study of memory, loss, absence and obsolescence.
Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS was presented as one of the key works in the 2009 ACCA survey and in many ways the bold venture of Event for a Stage is a product of Engberg’s long and trusting relationship with the artist. Having now worked with Dean on a number of important exhibitions, Engberg has developed a deep appreciation for what she describes as the completeness of the artist’s vision.
“We enjoy working together and I love bringing Tacita’s work to the public because it’s very generous in its delivery and because I see Tacita as a total artist in a way,” says Engberg. “The way she uses film is very painterly, she calls upon genres of British landscape work and British portraiture and even though her work is in a twentieth-century medium with a twenty-first century delivery, I see in her a long legacy of practice that I still want to be engaged with. But I also love the fact that because it is filmic her work takes us into other sorts of dimensions of encounter, it’s durational and she uses quite a sparse amount of narrative. It is I think a delectable kind of visuality that she delivers and it changes our concept of what cinema might be.”
As well as expanding the parameters of cinema and live art, Event for a Stage continues Dean’s exploration of the relationship between the aural and the visual. Beyond the four performances programmed for Carriageworks, there are plans for the work to “live on in a perpetual way in an audio life,” Engberg explains, as the ABC’s Radio National is building a platform for the audio work for radio broadcast. The timing of the live performances as a highlight of the middle program of the Biennale is another important aspect of its delivery.
“It cohabits in time our launch of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s wonderful new piece which they’ve made for us here [City of Forking Paths, 2014] which will take people on a cinematic fictional tour of the Rocks in Sydney, another filmic kind of event; again not cinema but a durational time-based piece,” says Engberg. “I’m bringing those two things together in the middle of the Biennale with a set of discussions around some of these ideas.”
For Engberg, the inclusion of durational time-based works like Dean’s Event for a Stage presents one of the biggest challenges in curating a biennale due to the constraints of the long three-month running time. Nevertheless, “I have tried as much as I can to thread those things through the program because I think real time work is extremely important at the moment,” she says. “Artists are enjoying the opportunity of taking themselves outside the gallery circumstances with quiet gestures and procedures that may not be known to a lot of the audience but which nevertheless provide important textures throughout the whole Biennale.”
19th Biennale of Sydney and Carriageworks, Tacita Dean, Event for a Stage, Carriageworks, Sydney, 1-4 May
Situated Cinema, artists Solomon Nagler and Alexandre Larose
photo Louise M Cooper
Situated Cinema, artists Solomon Nagler and Alexandre Larose
The visibility of the projected image is an issue of physical and cognitive events meeting in space. Situated in the gloom of the gallery are references to cinema, a cultural form until recently regarded purely as a conveyor of story-telling based entertainment, both popular and classical, and as place, the bricks and mortar where such encounters occur.
In Canadian filmmakers Solomon Nagler and Alexandre Larose’s Situated Cinema at Artspace three screens capture the projected image, one visible, a second invisible and another out of action (a different kind of signification, more later).
The visible screen is translucent, the image projected onto it a larger version of the same image on the 16mm acetate film strip inexorably looping through the projector standing a few metres away. The image on the screen is indistinct; attention switches to the machinery creating this phantasm. At one time the standard audio-visual equipment hidden in the biobox of a lecture theatre or community hall, the 16mm film projector mounted on a plinth is here re-presented as an object of analogue marvel; complete with perspex film loop attachment, the visible process by which the picture is delivered to our eyes becomes one part of the event.
The other event is provided by the images on the screen; they possess none of the indicators associated with either popular or arthouse films; instead, the genre rarely afforded exposure in cinema settings, the home movie. The ensemble, the installation, for those old enough to remember, recalls family film shows. The reprocessed images, evidently a selection of moments from various filmic occasions, possess a banal innocence when people are present, recorded moving through the scene, or responding shyly to the presence of the camera. We in turn are present at a specific moment of encounter with a past presence, reliving what has long gone by.
Moments later (counted as 24 frames for each second; we can hear them), the people have gone and a landscape or scene of the city and suburb becomes something other, the uncanny, the familiar yet incongruous. The cognitive event is made tangible, momentarily, before being hustled on to the next occasion…Back then.
We have encountered loops in projected work before; somehow the duration of these—about four minutes—seems to match with the cognitive ability of short-term memory (STM) to productively revisit motion picture documentation of ‘insignificant actuality.’ The minutiae of moments become fixed points in a matrix of cycled time; as they successively pass by, like lines in a poem, checked for details missed in the first or successive viewings. Our level of obsessiveness is tested and demonstrated before our eyes, our movement into the lives of others drawn out from behind the curtains of privacy imposed by accepted decorum.
The invisible screen is contained in its own walled area; the only way to gain access is by ducking beneath the wooden wall into the wholly enclosed space, thus transgressing the usually lubricated entrance to cinema seating arrangements. There are of course no chairs and the space is only big enough for two or three to stand. Momentarily I envisage the spectacle of legs outside this temporary cinema and reflect on whether social cognitive functioning of the audience deviates from the game plan. The 16mm projection equipment is arranged elegantly on a shelf joining the two long sides of the space. The four walls are painted with a white coating reflecting the light from the narrow wall at the end, transgressing the rule whereby light is firmly controlled to sit specifically on white bordered by black. The high contrast imagery is hard to see, as if in a snowfield, but gradually becomes recognisable as a sequence of static images of architecture, washed by the shapes of some associated alchemical process. Memory is interrogated again as the patterns fall together, and the loop completes its cycle, recognisable now as the interior of a theatre or indeed, a cinema. In the background, more amplified than previously, the insistent intermittent purr of the projector.
The third projector contains a short loop of 8mm film fossicked from a Sydney opshop. It ran throughout the period of the exhibition until at its end when this reviewer attended, the loop had disintegrated – another kind of duration had been established within the protocols of projection.
This modest show was unsupported by an adequate curatorial or artists’ statement; we are told the work emerges from primarily ‘materialist’ approaches, but without reference to the title of the show. A case could be made for it fitting into theories of situated aesthetics, where the boundaries between objects and events are weakened such that the art experience is based on a wide distribution of its elements. It would have helped if this ground had been outlined for the audience.
There are many artists now working with film and film equipment both nationally and internationally, often referencing work by film artists of the 1960s and 70s (and earlier) who experimented with an approach to cinema that followed on from the Modernist tradition. Artspace has been operating a reciprocal residency program with the Darling Foundry in Montréal for five years. The Situated Cinema Project had been constructed in Halifax previously, creating small cinematic experiences in dis-used urban spaces (“Situated Cinema references small buildings that have been squeezed into leftover urban spaces. The small cinema space, which can be demounted and which will travel to unorthodox locations…is intended to provide an alternative cinema-going experience,” Solomon Nagler, www.cineflux.ca.) In early discussions of the presentation of the work, the installation likewise was to be off-site, a Sydney-based iteration; but due to the difficulties of working internationally between Canada and Sydney, and the strict nature of urban DA approvals in Sydney, the installation was brought into the gallery space.
Situated Cinema, artists Solomon Nagler and Alexandre Larose, Artspace, Sydney, 22 Feb-8 March
The opening night of the Aurora Festival of Living Music at Parramatta’s Riverside Theatre, 30 April, will be thrilling. It will feature the premiere of Voyage Through Radiant Stars—a full-length saxophone concerto—by leading Australian composer, Brian Howard; Ensemble Offspring playing Marcus Lindberg’s Ablauf (1983) for two massive bass drums and clarinet; Song Company’s Roland Peelman at the piano for Sonolith, a musical transcription of the Declaration of Human Rights byTurkish Australian composer Ekrem Mulayim; a didjeridu duet by Alex Pozniak for players Mark Atkins and Gumeroy Newman; and Xenakis’ challenging solo Rebonds (1987-89) played by Claire Edwardes. Don’t miss it. 3 double passes (for 30 April) courtesy of Aurora Festival of Living Music
DVD: 20 Feet from Stardom
This 2014 Academy Award winning documentary by Morgan Neville focuses on the lives and careers over some 50 years of black American back-up singers whose talents were such that they could have enjoyed solo stardom. However, either the recording industry did little to commit, even scuttling their efforts, or they recognised that fame was not worth the effort. What is striking is the long list of famous artists these singers supported; they not only provided unique harmonies but on occasion tackled difficult passages or wholly substituted for lead singers. The sense of injustice is eased when one of the most experienced backup singers, Darlene Love, finally makes it on her own. KG 5 copies courtesy of Transmission Films
DVD: Olivier Assayas, After May
Leading French filmmaker Olivier Assayas’ After May won Best Screenplay at the 2012 Venice Film Festival. His film follows the lives of ‘the children of the revolution’ of May 1968 as they flee Paris after an act of vandalism against a school goes badly wrong. In Italy the group party, demonstrate, encounter new art and explore the implications of their everyday countercultural lives. Although criticised for not going deeply enough into his characters, Assayas has been otherwise praised for his sensitive portrayal of a complex generation in a beautifully crafted film. 5 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment
DVD: Which Way is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Times of Tim Hetherington.
British-American photojournalist Tim Hetherington was embedded with a US platoon in Afghanistan. His documentary film of the experience, RESTREPO (2010), won the 2010 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for Documentary and was nominated for an Oscar in 2011. Hetherington was killed by mortar fire in Libya’s civil war where he was spending time with the rebel army. His co-director and cinematographer on RESTREPO, Sebastien Junger made Which way is the front… as a tribute to Hetherington’s talents including his admired empathy for his stressed interviewees in war zones and his 10-year career on the frontline in Afghanistan, Liberia and other West African countries and Libya. 5 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment
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I’m a performer as well, and I’ve started writing over the last two years. I’ve done a couple of interviews for RealTime and I was thinking a little bit about how strange it is to be in this format where I ask questions and you answer them…and how kind of weirdly inappropriate that seems in terms of the way that you think about questions and the way that you are working with questions as means to potentiality, questions that don’t necessarily beg answers. So it could be more of a conversation, or we could find, meet each other tangentially maybe, talking about things.
Okay Let’s do that. Let’s get away from that, and find some reason to talk to each other, kiddo.
Maybe that’s an interesting place to start, just talking about questions, and the attraction to questions or how you’ve come to questions as a way of leading into working.
Mm-hmm. Is that a question? Sounds like that’s a question.
A proposition?
You know I feel like it’s more like a physical experience. A question feels very different than an answer, you know? Like an answer lands, right, and then it’s over. Whereas a question has a lightness to it. And I feel like it’s really easy for me to get heavy. Like, I think about the world, and I could just spiral downward. So dance is where I’m not allowed to spiral downward. I don’t permit myself to spiral…I don’t get seduced by the…the direction of the planet as I see it…and questions allow me to not have a direction. I think maybe for me it was a form of survival.
At a particular time?
I don’t even know when the questions started. Sometime in the early 80s. ‘Cause at first they weren’t questions, they were just kind of like propositions. But the question made it lighter, it lightens things up. Don’t take myself so seriously.
When you were speaking the other day [at your performance lecture at Dancehouse: a continuity of discontinuity], you were very clear about the emphasis on the “what if..?” being…kind of lightly curious.
Not so much lightly curious, but just light. I love that quote of Calvino, that there’s just so much weight in the world…for Calvino there’s so much weight in a novel by Norman Mailer, or John Steinbeck, that he does everything he can to subvert that weight. We don’t need more weight. We don’t need more weight in art, you know? And I see the kind of role-playing that so much dance has, the male/female bullshit. I mean Pina Bausch was a great choreographer, but I don’t need to see enacted women in slips and men in suits dancing out their role of angst. It’s just not interesting to me anymore. What do you think of Pina Bausch’s work?
I’ve never been a fan of it, probably for the same reasons. I find the repetition of those roles…
Roles. It’s just dead. I mean who needs it right? So the question lightens up the…
Something that I really appreciate is the idea of lightness, or even humour; there’s as much richness in that as seriousness. And it can be taken seriously.
A lot of people say they want to laugh in my performances, and that they can’t. Because you know they feel embarrassed or withheld. But it’s hysterical this whole thing. Isn’t it? It’s just weird. The body has so many potentialities, so many different aspects of our being. And dance is where I don’t take it all that seriously. I am so serious, you know, I have very little sense of humour outside of dance. The world brings me down. I live in Texas, and it just brings me down. But dance helps me survive. It’s my form of survival. It’s my form of, I say, putting myself here, it’s my form of political activism. Not what I do and not how I do it, it’s that I dance. That is my form of political activism. I dance.
It’s funny thinking about audiences and feeling like they can’t respond in a way that’s normal to them. There’s so much work that you’ve done in terms of articulating your processes and your… contexts for how you’re seeing your own work as well. It seems there’s a lot of work in terms of offering those alternate contexts as an observer, to watching dance. Have you seen that shift in people over time, that have maybe resisted that change?
Yeah, I have. I think audiences are slowly coming around. Certainly dancers are. I mean there was a time when I came to Melbourne where the dancers were so…seduced by their technique. They couldn’t get beyond it. Dance training, dance pedagogy really has changed. This group upstairs [Learning Curve workshop, Dancehouse and VCA], they’re fantastic. Wow, they blow my mind. They’re really clear. And that has to do with their training, their pedagogy. So dancers are changing for sure. And dance audiences. I feel like dance audiences are…I feel like they are not passive. They’re not sitting back. They really feel like they are reading this material. I feel like they’re looking. When I’m performing or my works are performing and I’m in the audience with a piece of mine, I feel like audiences are looking at my dance like they would look at art. They’re not goal-oriented. And that’s new. Maybe only people who know something about my work come to see it, but I don’t believe that’s true. I think there’s enough re-education going on in so many realms…
Goal-oriented is an interesting way of putting it, isn’t it? In fact there’s something else you said the other day which really landed with me quite hard, about “catastrophic loss”, about letting go of that mode of thinking about goal-orientation. And the word seemed so right, “catastrophic.”
We’re practicing it there [in the workshop]. “What if every cell in my body at once has the potential to be served by how I see?” Not what I’m looking at, so that the experience of seeing is happening here [in the body]. Imagine the catastrophic loss of former behaviour not having to be looking at, but to be served by how I’m seeing. What if I’m making that choice to be served by how I’m seeing, and not looking at. So that the experience of seeing is happening here and not out there. Oh my god!
Were you observing [in the workshop], or were you in the practice?
I’m practicing with them, mostly. I step out from time to time. And it’s a juggling act; it’s a huge amount of reprogramming. And who knows if it’s true or anything; it’s just noticing what happens when you choose to see differently. And it’s catastrophic loss of former behaviour, not to call looking at you ‘seeing’, but rather looking at you seeing. It’s fantastic.
If you observe a shift in people, is there a unanimousness about the shift, or does everybody kind of interpret…
You see everybody coming in and out, including myself. None of us can do it. You know we’re too programmed otherwise. I can see the shift. I’m sure they can too. The shift in and out. And I think it’s beautiful to be able to see that. I mean if everybody was always in, it would not be as interesting as seeing the work. The vulnerability. Even with Jeanine [Durning] in that film [No Time to Fly, Deborah Hay and Motion Bank]. You could see her shifting. She was very early in her practice in that film. I could read it. And that’s so beautiful to see the work. Staying in the question, learning from the body.
And that goes hand in hand with letting go of the achieving.
Oh yeah, yeah. So sweet.
I’m curious about the practice as a practice while you’re being an observer, or a practice as being an audience. Do you think of it that way, when you’re watching?
Well I set that up with everyone when we are audience for each other. We are choosing to see one another working with this question. It’s pointless to judge what anybody is doing because the material is so uninteresting in terms of movement; it’s really uninteresting. My practice as an audience is to choose to see you in the question, and knowing that everybody goes in and out of it. So that there’s no achieving anything. So that the dancers who’re practicing the performance, can be at peace with seeing the audience and not being judged.
These are your word: “the choice to surrender anything that wants definition.” I’m really attracted to that as an observer, and can see it, but I also really like the duality maybe of the language process, in terms of articulating your work and what you’re doing. How you’re amazingly clear about articulating these potentially indefinable things. Is there some importance in that counterpointed practice of not letting it be completely…swimming?
Deborah Hay, No Time To Fly
photo Rino Pizzi
Deborah Hay, No Time To Fly
Yeah. I had very good editors early on in my writing process, who would return my writing to me and go, “What do you mean?” “What do you mean?” “What do you mean?” “What do you mean?” I would get pieces of writing that were black with cross-outs and questions. They were like wolves. But it taught me how to write. What I am writing is the experience of noticing the feedback from every cell in my body, so that’s “bblbdldlblkdlkdleleb,” and how do you then take that in to a linear thought? And it is so exciting. It’s so exciting to me to reduce it to just what it is, without the other stuff. Do you find that in writing? I love editing my writing, now. I just love cutting it out, cutting it in. Writing has become thrilling.
Were you always writing?
Oh no, I was not always writing. Writing started happening when I realised my survival depended on it. Because the way in which I’m working was not synchronous with the way people were writing about dance. Like to talk about my work as—if I think about Jeanine the other day—as attaching her right arm to her knee and crossing the stage on a diagonal…that writing does not help me. But that’s the way a lot of dance writers describe the movement. And so I realised I better start writing, because I don’t want to be remembered the way they’re writing my work. So I’m grateful for that, feeling so strongly about it and taking the steps necessary to pick up the pen. The power in that. And what I noticed, after my second book Lamb at the Altar: The Story of a dance, people who are critics and writers were writing differently, picked up that I was feeding them some other perspective to have a look at movement, and it began…it really was smart. I think dancers at a certain point recognise they better get smart, about writing our work. You know artists used to—I’ve talked about this quite a bit—in the 60s when I was in New York. The people who were writing about art were Don Judd, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris. The artists who were making conceptual art were the ones who were writing, were reviewing one another’s work and writing about their own work. So they provided art audiences with a frame for looking at their work that they wouldn’t have had otherwise. And dancers really didn’t start picking up the pen…Yvonne [Rainer] did. But most of us didn’t, not recognising the power of language until fairly recently. And that it helps audiences frame what it ism even if it’s one person who might read a dance journal. Or it helps reframe for audiences how else to look at dance. And there’s some great writing being done by dancers right now.
Has language for you always been integral to then the making of the work as well?
I’m in the studio and I’m dancing. Aftera while I start writing what it is that I’m experiencing when I’m dancing. So that the dancing informs the writing and then the writing informs the dancing, and then the dancing informs the writing. So is that what you said? Or is that what I said? I mean in other words the writing doesn’t come first. But it’s articulated because if I’m going to teach my work to anybody else I better figure out what the language is to transmit it to others. When I go into a studio with a group of people I am very clear about what I’m asking of them, and I’m not just saying, “Can we just try this?” By the time I’m transmitting the material to someone else my language is really clear, so that I’m not wasting their time. And I’m not wasting my time.
Do you mean both the language as in the questions and also the language as in the score [the blueprint of the choreography]?
Yes. And the language in the coaching. And the language in the directing…I feel such a responsibility—I don’t know why, maybe it’s from my parents or something—I feel such a responsibility not for dancers to wait around for me to figure something out. I feel such a responsibility to engage people right off the bat, not wasting their time. Waiting for me to come to some conclusion about something. So when I go into a place where I’m transmitting material, I’ve already practiced how to articulate that material. I go into a room and I’ll set up a propostion and go “1 2 3 Go”
In terms of the solo adaptation project as well, this transmitting of information to other bodies?
Which one’s have you seen?
I saw them in Melbourne. I saw Luke [George], Atlanta Eke, and Carlee Mellow.
I want to hear your experience of the solos.
The moments of real difference between them that I saw were in the decisions that were being made. There were fewer than I thought there would be, and they were very loud, like loud in the sense of like… [expansive gesture] from where the dance was. It was like all of a sudden, Whhhaa, over there…which was great. But I remember thinking that there was a shared physicality between them and that they shared a physical articulation, that I was curious about whether that was inherent in the information, or whether it was because they had worked together at the same time or…in what way they developed this way of moving that seemed similar to each other. Did you see when they performed in Melbourne?
No.
In Atlanta’s [performance], she did a Q&A with the audience at one point, stopped and addressed the audience and asked them questions and held a forum. And it was so funny, so kind of like, departed.
I don’t remember the score for that, so I don’t know how that particular part might have come into the actual score. She’s pretty outrageous, she’s just pretty wonderful. I don’t know what the language was that she made that adaptation based on.
Is there something about language that’s attractive maybe because it’s kind of, it’s doing, well it has the potential to do two opposite things. I can land in definition or it can be interpreted in like multiple ways and that then is an instigation for transmitting the work to other people. It allows for both of those things to occur. Allows the clarity of transmitting information while also there being this space for huge interpretation.
I think most of my writing falls into that category, of both. There’s no one way. In other words, “What if I choose to be served by the space that I’m sitting in right now?” ‘Cause I can look at it as absolutely insane. I could look at it as “Why not?” I think it’s those kinds of push and pull—believe it, not believe it—the complexity of that, the absurdity of it, and the rightness of it at the same time, is thrilling to me. And in the form of a question it’s pretty safe right? It’s just a question.
And yet it can be so frightening sometimes, facing the questions. It can be so shattering.
Shattering, right.
Have you ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence?
I think I’ve started it a number of times but I never was able to get through it. Did you read it?
I read it a couple of years ago and, definitely had moments where I really had to work to get through it, but it’s interesting. He was an English teacher at a university, and somebody had said to him once, just off the cuff, “Oh, I hope you’re teaching quality to your students.” And that then begins questions for him about what quality is, and locating it in the space between things—that it can never be a thing, but it’s in the spaces between things. He goes through a deep spiral of questions that come out of that. And he gets to a point where he looks at some Zen writing and then looks at his own writing, and realises he’s in the exact same place. Without having intended.
Right. That’s where I feel about My body, the Buddhist. I’m not a practicing Buddhist but when I wrote down the major lessons I’d learned from my body while I was dancing, it really paralleled a lot of Buddhist aesthetic.
You didn’t know much about about Buddhism?
I just knew very superficial…But my body’s a Buddhist. Whoa!
I love the fact that this work, the realisation, what I’ve learned, I’ve learned from dance. I want to proclaim it, that my body is a resource for all of this material. That talk that I gave the other night, I’ve only given it once before, and it was a big dance conference in Dusseldorf. And there was a philosopher from Berkeley who was in that audience, who came up to me afterwards and said, “I have spent my…all of my years of research trying to understand what you are doing. You are doing it.” You know, I love that. That it’s dance where that kind of research can be happening. My body is where that research is happening.
Do you think about the work being historicised?
I don’t think about it much. Could you say more about the question, or what you mean?
About the embracing of the ephemera of this…the current ways in which we record history, meaning that they become static.
I think as long as I keep writing, I’ll be okay. I have read a couple of things recently about my work that were very exciting to me, in terms of the language, and they way in which people, philosophers, dance writers, dance scholars see into it. It really made me happy. I’ve had a few of those experiences. Not many. A few of them, it was great. Like I learned something.
What kind of things did they write?
Well I can’t remember. I can’t quote but…Oh I know, one term I just loved was something like a “variable constant.” Just rich, two words together. A group of people in Utrecht recently asked for permission to publish my score No Time to Fly, because they are publishing a book and they missed the deadline and they wanted to publish something as a kind of apology. They’d been talking about this book that’d come out at a certain time, and they published my score because they felt that within the score it left room for them to reassess what their sense of deadline is, what their sense of publishing is. So it was such an honour to be used in that way by these publishers. The language of the score gave them room to expand their notion of their response, what their responsibility was to make that deadline. So I mean that’s another…
Like the variable constant, the paradoxical nature of that. It’s almost a question in itself. It destabilises you in a way. Having to just wrap your brain around that.
And anything that adds to the destabilisation of our behaviour…
It was my first time and I have to say it was a good time. APAM 2014, or the Australian Performing Arts Market (18-22 February) celebrated its 20th anniversary with a series of firsts: Brisbane as first-time host and the first time 25% of the work programmed was Indigenous.
With a stellar turn-out of 600 delegates from 27 countries, many of them producers hungry for Australian content, the three days passed in a blur of dynamic performance, snatched conversations, furtive business card exchanges and vast amounts of liquid to combat the unseasonable tropical heat.
APAM opened with a welcome to country from Aunty Maroochy of the Turrbal people. This was followed by a précis from the Australia Council about the rationale for funding a marketplace for overseas producers to showcase Australian performance. As I sat between the Canadian Artistic Director of the Irish Fringe Festival and a New York off-Broadway producer, APAM’s effectiveness seemed evident. What struck me most about the culture of APAM was its conviviality. Conversations were started freely and many of the self-conscious hierachies of local theatre foyers were abandoned.
Cultural collision
On a more sombre note, the opening ceremony, a panel on collaboration facilitated by SBS Insight host Jenny Brockie demonstrated the complex and often agonised relationship between Indigenous and non-indigenous artists in Australia. Brockie was well intentioned but clearly bemused by the specificity of the artistic experiences framing the discussion. The conversation about culture and collaboration began with the supple and sophisticated inter-culturalism of Singaporean Ong Keng Sen’s trans-Asian inter-disciplinary projects that emphasise open fluidity. This was met by an impassioned critique from young Indigenous dancer Eric Avery, and the call-out from his collaborator, Lorna Monroe from the floor: cultural collaboration is lived for us through kinship and totem, in continuance from ancestry. Why must we explain our culture and carry the burden of representation and not vice versa? Auntie Lilla Watson joined the conversation from the front row. At first the panel nodded, listened politely, tried to engage. Eric and Lorna clearly felt unheard. There was that moment of pure cultural collision performed onstage for us all to see: it got too hard to encounter each other. Brockie shut down the dialogue and moved on.
Entering the maze
Sadly, the smoking ceremony that occurred after the keynote lost many of the international delegates who didn’t know where to proceed. This, alas, was the first of many bewildering geographic dislocations as delegates tried to navigate the five-venue set-up. Shows were missed, or were half-seen, or left early. To be fair, first times are often a bit clumsy and I’m sure that most of the logistical glitches will be sorted for 2016.
But APAM is about the shows. While there were half a dozen full productions on offer, most of the time was spent in a kaleidoscope of smaller activities: watching pitches and excerpts of works, roundtables, visiting stalls of companies and meeting artists. I tried to watch the launch of Patricia Piccinini’s Skywhale twice but the weather proved temperamental.
Many of the works have been around for a number of years. The pitch sessions were also by strongly established companies or for works that had progressed through at least two or three stages of initial development, like My Darling Patricia’s/Aphid’s Creole installation riffing off Jean Rhys’ radio play Crawl Me Blood or the Queensland Theatre Company’s homage to country music and its Indigenous legends, Buried Country written by Reg Cribb.
New Zealand input
The novelty was all in the New Zealand content, which seemed strong. I wasn’t able to see any of their contemporary dance works, but one called Rotunda, by the New Zealand Dance Company, was designed to tour by collaborating with a local brass band. It’s so hokey it is almost chic: what town doesn’t have their own brass band? More sophisticated and sumptuous were Kila Kokonut Krew Entertainment’s The Factory (which will appear at Riverside Parramatta, 18-21 June) a musical homage to Pacific migrants and Red Leap Theatre’s Sea.
Round-up
The show that got the most ‘you must go and see this’ was Branch Nebula’s collaboration with Clare Britton and Matt Prest, Whelping Box. The show that made delegates the chirpiest was the delightful show by Contact, Walking the Neighbourhood, where you were guided around Fortitude Valley by a child. The secret event that lots of people wanted an invite to was the late night Australian Dance Theatre showing. The most anticlimactic show was the The Stream, the Boat, the Shore and the Bridge, an intimate tour around four locations in Brisbane that lacked a driving thematic or immersive experience. The most fun was a Terrapin Puppet Theatre work, I Think I Can (featured in the 2014 Sydney and Perth Festivals and FOLA), that set up a pseudo-Brisbane miniature railway in the foyer of the Powerhouse and asked you to pick a character and to create a story to intersect with the other delegates.
Some of the bigger and more anticipated shows were received somewhat skeptically. My sense is that many of the overseas producers were on the hunt for Australian circus like the gorgeous Casus work Knee Deep.
The caveat on all of these quick summaries is of course that the five-venue structure meant very divergent experiences, particularly as many of the shows have been critically well-received and toured extensively.
What I most enjoyed about APAM was the way it offered a snapshot of Australian performance. It made me very optimistic: even when I met work that I felt was tired or safe or perhaps not to my taste, the robustness and mobility of our artists is quite astonishing when viewed collectively. One of the delegates had recently come across from the film sector and she was amazed at the fluidity of performance-makers, their ingenuity and capacity to do deals. All in all I think we put on a good spread.
APAM 2014, Australian Performing Arts Market, Brisbane Powerhouse, 18-22
These are troubling times. Every day there seems to be another insidious attack on the principles and infrastructures that sustain democracy, and the decency and the responsibility to treat all humans equally. That’s a broad brushstroke statement, but the attacks are broad ranging, threatening Indigenous rights, asylum seekers’ rights, climate action, marriage equality, corporate accountability, education reform, independent media and most recently in Victoria the right to protest. In matters specifically related to the arts (though of course all are), there’s been the backlash against the Biennale Boycott artists and the threat to arms-length arts funding.
With this boiling away in our brains, we question the importance of what we do as artists. Do our creative deeds have an impact on social and political views? How do artists’ acts of defiance, revelation or subversion reach a wide enough audience to actually make a difference?
We’ve asked ten artists how they see their practice contributing to the debate about the power of art. While these questions have been asked before, in the current political climate it seems vitally important to pose them again.
We thank the artists who have very generously taken the time to share their thoughts with us. Gail Priest, Online Producer
I believe cultural workers can do a lot in order to foster change. Art does have political agency as much any other human action.
Firstly, to art’s advantage there is a granted forum and that alone is a conduit to political relevance. Yes, that might come across as limiting and incestuous—preaching to converted—but that is only a limitation that individual practitioners want to place on themselves. I am a cultural worker and practice an artform that engages within the exhibition circuit of galleries and venues, but also exists outside of it, with activities that aspire to reach audiences way beyond, offering a message that is relevant to both.
Secondly I believe that by moving away from the modernist concept of a single artist’s output, we can effectively enable people to share in a vision and indeed be part of it, with invested interest. I collaborate with dancers and filmmakers, poets and fellow visual artists, but also extensively with non-art practitioners like chefs, herbalists, weavers, academics, programmers and media producers. The resulting projects have a much greater reach in language and cultural leverage—effectively becoming agents for political and social change.
Last, I’d like to praise the courage of artists, who adventure into structures not open to them, with creativity and conviction. That is when art is most effective politically. By fearlessly empowering themselves through distribution channels, media possibilities and platforms of cultural exchange, their political messages can then travel far and loud, reaching their targets and garnering attention without being mediated and ‘framed’ for public consumption: raw, clear, uncomfortable, honest, effective.
To that effect, in my projects I am not shamed to self-promote, engaging directly with journalists and scientists, policy-makers and managers of institutions, government bodies and Not For Profits. I believe that art does indeed have agency. It is only up to the individual to define what it is that they want to do with it.
Rosie Dennis 1) Driven to New Pastures, photo Marilyn Moreno 2) Downtown, photo Heidrun Löhr 3) Bankstown Bayanian Hopping Spirit House by Alwin Reamillo, photo Jagath Dheerasekara
Rosie Dennis, Urban Theatre Projects
It’s almost five years since I met 79-year-old June Hickey, a resident in the southwest Sydney suburb of Minto. Our paths crossed when I was making the show Driven To New Pastures, a work I was inspired to write when a colleague said they weren’t that comfortable visiting me at my home in Waterloo because of all the public housing on my street. I was taken aback by their comment, which I perceived to be a broad generalisation about the people who were my neighbours. Those two words—public housing—reduced families, cultures, lives and individual experiences into a narrow, stereotyped portrait of the people who live in social housing.
After a about four or five months of knowing June, I asked her if she wanted to join me on stage in Driven To New Pastures. She agreed and we premiered the show at a small church hall in Minto before taking it to the Seymour Centre for Sydney Festival.
Since Driven to New Pastures I have worked on a number of projects which have required me to work closely with people from outside the arts industry and with little or no experience of contemporary performance practice – MINTO:LIVE, Downtown, Life As We Know It, Practice & Participate, My Radio Heart and the upcoming Future Present and Bankstown Banyanian Hopping Spirit House. Each of these projects have been/are in someway connected to the time and place in which they are created and the people who help create them; whether that be a suburban demographic shift, negotiating old age or geographical dislocation.
The impact is always multi-layered and (in my case) usually starts with building a relationship and establishing trust. June and I are about to embark on our third project together – a duet – which we hope will hit the stage sometime in early 2016.
I don’t want to be an archivist or a commentator. I think the role of art in a progressive or counter culture is heightened in retrospect. So, at this time, I don’t want to make much political art. I want to prioritise art that is politically active, that appropriates space, art that is direct and primary in its engagement.
Hydra Poesis facilitated a successful action last year that fitted this bill. Eighteen dancers and artists employed a concept of ‘dedicated abstraction’ to stage an action at the Yongah Hill Detention Centre in partnership with the National Refugee Rights Convergence. We used our completely abstract and symbolically open form to occupy space outside the detention centre. This was accompanied by journalistic broadcast—interviews with advocates, activists and mental health workers. Some of us then led this convergence onto a contested roadway and danced and were eventually arrested. This wasn’t Art. This was an action. We’re working on more such actions that employ dedicated abstraction this year.
The most powerful thing about art is our remit: we are expected to be critical, experimental and abstract, provocative and sometimes volatile. We can move between worlds. But I’m not sure we can move between spheres very well from the theatre/gallery/individualised-headspace. Parallel to this, [our] political campaigns can’t inhabit the media, because we can’t win enough space there. But as a mass movement, we can take space on the streets and own a culture. You’re not part of the choir (or preaching to it) if you don’t attend choir practice. I love political art but, for me and my close peers, now is a moment for art action.
Re-“visiting” my everyday surroundings and not taking them for granted allows me to relate and relativise human and non-human things in the world, and gives me an energy that I try to translate in my work. It is not about converting, it is about acting towards, raising awareness, noticing.
Waterwheel, the online platform dedicated to water that I initiated in 2011, is central to my work. The platform’s biggest yearly event, the Waterwheel World Water Day Symposium (3WDS), runs this year March 17-23, online and in 18 nodes, with an amazing program of 42 sessions and more than 200 presenters from five continents. I am thrilled to see artists, scientists, activists, environmentalists, educators and water lovers from around the world addressing this year’s theme, Water Views: Caring and Daring, and how the Tap, Waterwheel’s live webcam and media-mixing system, facilitates exchange between them. Water issues need to be raised as a matter of urgency and art and inter-disciplinary cross-pollinations are very important in broadening the reach locally as well as far and wide. Waterwheel’s co-founding team, Inkahoots, Igneous and I, are preparing a revamp of the website, focusing on user-experience and allowing people to develop their own projects independently.
I’ve also started a new project this year, with James Cunningham, called FLUIDATA, combining digital media, streaming events, body awareness and movement practice, exploring creeks in regional Queensland. We’re giving workshops in remote places such as Miles and Cloncurry, meeting a wide range of people concerned with environment and water and connecting them to the Waterwheel community. FLUIDATA will culminate in an installation at QUT Creative Industries in October, with streaming events throughout 2 weeks.
Related article World of water
Keith Gallasch: interview, Suzon Fuks, Waterwheel
RealTime issue #104 Aug-Sept 2011 p42
See RT120 for a review of the presentations in Waterwheel Symposium.
Nicola Gunn 1) In Spite of Myself, photo Sarah Walker 2) Green Screen, photo Pier Carthew
Nicola Gunn, performance artist & theatre maker
Do I hope my art impacts on political and societal views, encourages social transformation and environmentally sustainable practices? Hell yeah. Does it? This is perhaps a little harder to quantify.
I try to make work that is funny and challenging. I like to make people laugh. I also want to save the planet and inspire social change. I feel all my works have been about trying to combine the two—I’ve just been sublimating my anger and frustration with ‘how it is’ into humour. However, now I feel physically restless: at the moment I’m preoccupied with how to encourage action! How to orchestrate some kind of a tipping point so that thought-provoking leads to something more significant.
This year I am a greenie-in-residence at Arts House, along with five companies. Through this excellent program, we will be interrogating our practice and measuring it against our sustainable ideals—not just in terms of the environment, but making art sustainable for our bodies and our lives.
In July I will premier a new work called GREEN SCREEN. It plays on the idea of taking someone out of their present environment and putting them in another. It’s a rumination on the relationship between doing and being, set in a room with a group of people discussing the beginnings of a new nation. It’s about saving the planet with imagined utopias and new constitutions; it asks questions about how we would define ourselves if we could no longer be defined by what we do. It is also an attempt to write a new TV sitcom. Like all my other works, I guess it navigates the mercurial notion of identity and change. Do I want to save the planet, or do I actually just want a successful TV show in a self-conscious attempt to be the next Louis CK?
Creative exploitations
John Bailey: Melbourne International Arts Festival
RealTime issue #118 Dec-Jan 2013 p33
Dangerous stuff
John Bailey: Nicola Gunn, Four Larks, MTC, Malthouse
RealTime issue #96 April-May 2010 p38
Live work, women’s work
Caroline Wake: Liveworks, Performance Space
RealTime issue #101 Feb-March 2011 p18
1) Finegan Kruckemeyer, photo Essie Kruckemeyer 2) The Boy at the Edge of Everything, photo Chris Bennion
Finegan Kruckemeyer
Over the last years, the majority of my commissions have been for Theatre for Young Audiences and in TYA artists can find themselves encountering some pragmatic truths. Firstly, we are creating work for an audience which is, by its very definition, not us—ours is a theoretical exercise in discerning what a child spectator might appreciate theatrically. Secondly, in promoting our work we’re appealing not to our target audience, but to a series of gate-keepers (parents, teachers etc) who will decide what their charges attend. Thirdly, commonly held perspectives in the first two instances, mean this is a field in which didactic notions can prevail—a child audience should be taught something, ergo the worth of a TYA show is less in the art and more in the lesson imparted.
I—and many of my colleagues—don’t agree with this and it is here that I hope to make some small impact. Though the shows written for children contain experiential touchstones familiar to a child’s world and protagonists who are their peers, I ensure that the emotional and allegorical terrain is the same as I would offer an adult audience. Child characters encounter true and substantial hurdles, so that subsequent triumphs might feel earned. They reach nadirs, so that when redemption comes, it is all the more celebratory.
Children, like adults, will invest more in a fictional creation if their struggle feels tangible. Even in the context of magical realism (a familiar TYA genre), the same applies—the magical they will meet you halfway for, but without the realism it can seem redundant.
So my attempt, each time I sit at my laptop, is to write strong and respectful work for children, which acknowledges them as astute audience members outside the plays, and worthy subjects within. It doesn’t always succeed, but it is always my aim.
Related articles Boy on the edge of obliteration
Teik Kim Pok: True West Theatre, The Violent Outburst That Drew Me To You
RealTime issue #119 Feb-March 2014 p38
post in rehearsal for Oedipus Schmoedipus 1) Natalie Rose 2) Mish Grigor 3) Zoë Coombs Marr
photos Brett Boardman
post in rehearsal for Oedipus Schmoedipus 1) Natalie Rose 2) Mish Grigor 3) Zoë Coombs Marr
post (Zoë Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor and Natalie Rose)
When we were twenty, we performed a satirical work about police brutality in a shipping container.
The venue’s security guards treated it like a strip show.
They were fired for sexual harassment. We realized that no matter how funny, unsexy and clever our work was, we would always be upstaged and defined by our female bodies. We are sexualised, analysed, held to different standards than our male contemporaries. This surprised, depressed and infuriated us. It still does.
But, when we start to understand the context in which people put us, it becomes another tool to use. Something to play up to, challenge, subvert.
For us, art is about building the world we want to live in and work we want to see. Work that expresses the politics we believe in. We wanted to make work that speaks to a contemporary arts dialogue but also that our mothers could understand.
This doesn’t mean making populist work. Our mothers aren’t idiots. This means making work that speaks to people, not to a tradition of theatre. Theatrical conventions don’t speak to people. People speak to people. Theatrical conventions speak to people educated in theatre.
For this reason, we always challenge form.
We don’t take any existing structure or convention as a given.
Where we find our voices are not represented, we must speak up. Speaking up in an unfamiliar voice, pushing the boundaries of what your voice can comfortably say, will not always make you popular.
We have never aimed to be provocative. We just unapologetically represent ourselves on stage. This can be confronting for some people.
We always liked the provocation thrown down by Joseph Beuys that “society is the material for artists to transform.” Even now, it sits as a radical proposition and in light of the current political and economic climate, a seeming impossible task. But it’s a juicy challenge to bite into.
We’re continuing to make artworks located in public spaces, as we see this as an opportunity to collaboratively play out with our audiences some alternative experiences of our cityscapes. The possibility to temporarily shift social codes and entrenched behavioural norms provides us with an opportunity to not only explore some future alternatives, but to also try to make sense of what we have here and now. What if we all reject money for a day? Why are we so content to be policed? What happens when we turn our cities into playgrounds? What if we use public tug-of-war as an alternative to bureaucratic governance? These are questions we have been tackling in as many playful ways we can dream up because we feel that it is through experiential play that we can catch a glimpse of who we are and what we are really capable of.
What’s driving us at the moment is a desire to hand over the reins to audiences so that they become interventionists or activators and we facilitate their experience. For us, this transition enables us to expand our sense of creative comradeship and acknowledge that we are all in this together. We’re not even sure if what we make is art anymore; its hard to articulate what it actually is, but we like the fact it’s slippery and promiscuous and can operate from on board a bus, a smart phone, a street corner or on the steps of our local Coles. The more art can weave its way into the fabric of everyday life, the greater the chances are that it will not be seen to just be representing the world, but to be actively deviating within it.
Whenever I set out to make a new work these days the first question that always comes into to my head is, ‘How can it engage people in a meaningful way?’ and ‘What social relevance does it have to the here and now?’ These questions probably came from years of making work that people perceived to be alienating or indeed shutting out an audience. So I became interested in ‘audience projects’ that in many ways are driven by participation from a willing public—works that in fact won’t exist without the fuel of public response.
The most recent work Stereopublic: Crowdsourcing the Quiet probably continues to be the most far-reaching in terms of reach and distribution of an idea. What I essentially asked of people was to go into their cities and find quiet spaces with an iPhone app, record the audio of this space for 30 seconds, map it virtually, share it with others and request that an original composition be made using the recording. It’s all about creative crowdsourcing and crowd-mapping. The majority of people who engage with the project are not artists or even sound-makers, which excites me! They are citizens of their place, people who know their cities intimately. The project asks ‘is quiet an endangered species in our cities and if so how can we protect it?’ And this is something that couldn’t be led single-handedly by me—it had to be crowd-sourced, as it’s only dwellers of cities who can know their environments, the special places, the spaces of quiet and solitude that need to be preserved.
So far Stereopublic has engaged up to 50 cities all around the world including in Australia, UK, Europe, Asia, Middle East and North and South America. It’s the participation from the public sphere that makes the work exist. It’s ultimately driven by a collective and somewhat introverted quiet social act of ambient resistance to noise in our ever-growing cities.
Related articles Enlarging the musical universe
Chris Reid: Music Program, Adelaide Festival 2013
RealTime issue #114 April-May 2013 p8
The making of a world
Keith Gallasch: Jason Sweeney Lets The Darkness At You
RealTime issue #88 Dec-Jan 2008 pg46
Kym Vercoe 1) seven kilometres north-east, photo Heidrun Löhr 2) For Those Who Can Tell No Tales, photo Emil Grebenar
Kym Vercoe, performer, theatre maker, version 1.0
I work principally in devised theatre, making work driven by a desire to shed light on important issues. Creating work that causes the audience to pause, reflect or shift perspective is work I am very excited and proud to be involved with.
My performance work seven kilometres north-east is a story of acknowledgement and accountability. These are often two motivating factors behind my work. Using personal storytelling, the performance is a memorial to women war victims from the town of Visegrad, Bosnia, where memorials are not allowed to exist. Premiering in Sydney for version 1.0, the show resonated strongly with audiences, both the Bosnian diaspora and the broader community, who spoke about Australia’s own struggle to acknowledge the past.
When I performed in Sarajevo, it was noted that no one in Bosnia was talking openly about these issues, but someone from Australia was. And then I received a lovely email from a Bosnian filmmaker, asking to adapt the story for film. Two weeks later Jasmila Zbanic put me on a plane to Bosnia and we started shooting three days after I arrived. It was a wild ride, but we were driven to tell a story that had been buried in history, and to tell that story as widely as possible. The resulting feature film, For Those Who Can Tell No Tales, is currently on the international festival circuit and will premiere here soon.
After screening at the Toronto Film Festival a woman patiently waited to the side, a relative of a young woman who died in Visegrad. Then she took my hand and drew me into a long hug.
Dance has long been popular in Sydney’s west. Once upon a time there was even a tertiary dance course producing professional choreographers and dancers. The demise of dance studies at University of Western Sydney was a significant loss but dance culture in the west has continued to develop in no small part due to Western Sydney Dance Action (WSDA), a resident organisation at Riverside Parramatta. Formed in 2001 its aim was to foster artists, community networks and develop audiences for dance in the area.
By 2011, the year Annette McLernon took over as director, Western Sydney Dance Action had grown from a grassroots organisation to a significant presenter of dance in Sydney. Director and board decided to reflect the growth of the organisation by rebranding it as FORM Dance Projects Inc. McLernon brings to FORM experience in a range of areas: as a filmmaker (documentaries and dance films); curator (film program, Perth International Arts Festival); and program manager for Bundanon Trust during its re-invigoration under CEO Deborah Ely.
Annette McLernon
Showing
The Dance Bites program began with Western Sydney Dance Action and has continued to grow in strength presenting work by both established and emerging artists. McLernon says of FORM’s role, “[We] provide opportunities for independent contemporary dance artists in a landscape that’s really constricted. We function as an important part of the dance ecology. We are the ones providing the opportunities that are becoming so limited, particularly in the last few years.”
The 2013 program perfectly illustrated FORM’s ethos of diversity. It included established choreographer Martin del Amo’s Little Black Dress Suite (see RT117); The Tap Pack, by Jesse Rasmussen, Jordan Pollard and Thomas J Egan; Lineage, a group of dancers involved in mainstream musicals who funded their work via commercial means; and a double bill by Aruna Gandhimathinathan, Shruti Ghosh and Tammi Gissell exploring traditional and contemporary Indian and Australian Aboriginal dance forms. The latter artists came through FORM’s strong connection with the Cultural Performing Arts Network (CPAN) which has now reached a membership of 500. McLernon says, “I think it’s really important to present works that come from Western Sydney and are created in Western Sydney.”
The 2014 Dance Bites program, while not so wildy varied in terms of genre, shows a commitment to supporting dance practitioners at different stages of their careers. Established Perth choreographer Sue Peacock kicked off the season with her work Reflect, toured by Performing Lines WA (See RT115). Coming up shortly is Sam Chester’s Safety in Numbers, a work about how humans behave in the aftermath of disaster. Chester has developed the work through the Culminate program (Force Majeure with Performance Space and Carriageworks). McLernon says, “Sam is in a great position now in her career to have this opportunity and FORM is really happy that we can facilitate that.”
As part of the 2013 program, FORM also presented the first work by a group of 10 emerging artists, the Dance Makers Collective. Two of these pieces have been further developed and will be shown as a double bill in the 2014 program: Sketch by Flatline—choreographer Carl Sciberras, visual artist Todd Fuller and composer Mitchell Mollison—a multimedia exploration of the interplay between movement, music and vision; and Between Two and Zero by Miranda Wheen (see Miranda Wheen’s In Profile) and Matt Cornell “imagining a social dance for the future” (website). The final work for the program is by Bodyweather artist Linda Luke. Still Point Turning is a performance/installation investigating “deep time” including “cosmic time, the eternal cycle of living and dying” (website).
Flatline, Sketch
photo Carl Sciberras
Flatline, Sketch
Sharing
At the core of FORM Dance Project’s agenda is education for both young dancers and audiences. McLernon describes it as “aspirational,” involving a choreographic workshop for Year 12 dance students in partnership with the Sydney Dance Company, and also the Learn the Repertoire, See the Show sessions for students years 7-12. McLernon explains, “That’s really to give the opportunity [to] these young dancers to not just participate in the skills workshop but to see the work, get a better understanding of it and talk to the artists about what it’s like to be a dancer—what the career pathways are.” McLernon stresses that these exchanges also include artform appreciation. “Whether they go on to become dancers or not, that artform appreciation and understanding of dance—what contemporary dance is and can become—is really important for developing those future audiences for dance.”
Futures
McLernon has big plans for the future. In the last year FORM has launched a new website which has seen close to a million views last year. McLernon says, “commissioning Vicki Van Hout (http://form.org.au/blog) as FORM’s blogger in residence in 2013 and 2014 has contributed to growing FORM’s on-line audience and making a contribution to reputable critical discourse around contemporary dance.” She wants the site to become even more active with more video and rich media content.
In addition to this online hub, McLernon hopes FORM will become a dance centre. “At the moment we provide some support to create new works but we really would like to become a physical hub where we can give opportunities to early career artists, for instance, Dance Makers Collective—they have the potential to develop into a company. FORM would also like to offer more funding support for those types of artists to set up their own companies.” Plans are also in development for a membership system with McLernon envisaging the hub as a place where members “can come in and have a sense of community and develop work, with studios hopefully.” If Annette McLernon can make this happen, it will be a truly welcome addition to the cultural landscape not just of Western Sydney but the city and the state as a whole.
FORM Dance Projects, Dance Bites: Safety in Numbers, Sam Chester, 9-12 April; Double Bill: Sketch, Flatline; Between Two and Zero, Matt Cornell & Miranda Wheen; 11-13 Sept; Still Turning Point, Linda Luke 27-29 Nov; Lennox Theatre Riverside; http://form.org.au/; http://form.org.au/perform/dance-bites/
I recently met with a very happy Deborah Leiser-Moore to discuss her busy career (which includes performing in a new work by Richard Schechner in New York this year), her latest creation, KaBooM, to premiere in April in Melbourne, and the Lee Breuer Masterclass (Breuer, a co-founder of Mabou Mines, creates large-scale innovative works in New York) she has programmed with Monash University Academy of Performing Arts for July. We’ve continued our discussion by email and phone and I’ve drawn on material on the artist’s website.
The Suzuki Tadashi-trained Leiser-Moore spent her formative years as performer and maker in Sydney’s contemporary performance scene, maturing with significant works: Hungry in 1996 and a room with no air in 1999. She then moved to Melbourne where she formed Tashmadada (running workshops with the likes of La Fura dels Baus), producing new works and touring overseas.
Leiser-Moore describes her new work KaBooM as “a promenade performance in which the audience encounter the different worlds and stories of seven men.” Each of these has been a soldier, each in a different country and with very different experiences.
The soldiers portrayed include one who deserted Saddam Hussein’s army after serving for a decade, a child soldier from Burundi and a 16 year-old Holocaust escapee who fought “for his family in the Pacific Islands along with a guardian monkey.”
How did you find and select, meet and interview the men you chose as your subjects, and over what period?
Over a period of around 10 months. A couple of the men I already knew. Majid, from Iraq, I had even worked with. Others I sourced by asking around my different networks. Fablice from Burundi I found through Multicultural Arts Victoria. It’s amazing how many men living in Australia carry around this war experience.
Once I found them, we met to get a sense of their stories and to outline the project and the process. I only had one rejection! They all were very happy to have an opportunity to tell their stories. They all said that the process of being interviewed allowed them to speak personally and freely. It gave them an opportunity to speak in ways they normally don’t feel they can. And they all were intrigued as to how I was going to make a performance piece—not verbatim theatre—from the material.
Deborah Leiser-Moore, KaBooM
photo Lachlan Woods
Deborah Leiser-Moore, KaBooM
How did you distill what you heard and learned from them?
I was interested in the personal stories of the men—not the politics of each of the wars they fought in. It was the question of how we live, as ordinary human beings, in extraordinary situations, how we are able to do day to day things we take for granted, what particular experiences the men remembered and what they carried of these to Australia.
The strong lineup of directors for KaBooM comprises Australians Regina Heilmann, Gail Kelly, Adriano Cortese and Susie Dee, Younes Bachir from Barcelona, Lech Mackiewicz from Poland and Bagryana Popov, who works in Bulgaria and Australia. What attributes have you looked for in the directors you’ve chosen?
I wanted to work with directors who are performance makers and who have their own very distinctive approaches. I’ve already had working relationships with Regina Heilmann and Younes Bachir and I knew the work of the others.
Each uses multiple performance languages in really interesting and visceral ways, so I felt they would respond to the interviews in lateral ways. I wanted directors who would create, in collaboration with me, responses to the interviews rather than verbatim pieces, because I’m interested in how these stories can reach an audience through the senses.
Also, I wanted each of the ‘stories’ to have a very specific and individual aesthetic, to make a point about the individuality of each of the men and their experiences. I think it is too easy to cluster people together as ‘Other.’ These are very different people from different countries with different stories and experiences. Therefore each of the pieces in the work is a different ‘world’— like an installation/performance piece. The audience is asked to enter each of these worlds.
Deborah Leiser-Moore, KaBooM
photo Lachlan Woods
Deborah Leiser-Moore, KaBooM
In the press release for KaBooM, Leiser-Moore asks, “What happens when we are unwillingly thrust into the frontline of war? It can happen to anyone, anywhere. Our lives irrevocably and unpredictably changed in an instant. And what remains within us when we have escaped the warzone?” Her response takes the form of a physically realised account of soldiers’ lives that “positions the audience, as witness, in the midst of the performance arena. They are placed in a metaphorical field of war, populated with visual imagery and the debris of battle” (website). Within this arena Leiser-Moore will deploy her movement skills—including aerial work—projections, a soundtrack by Bigtoxic “and elements—mud, water, tomatoes, hay—to create a series of interlocking performance vignettes.”
Why the choice of particular materials for each piece?
Each director was given the filmed interview and asked to create a 10-minute response in their own performance ‘style.’ The process of performance making and the use of materials emerged out of discussions, each director’s particular aesthetic and their direct response to the interviews. Most of the directors are visual and physical performance makers, as am I. Together we used whatever material and form seemed right for the piece.
How do you feel about your body becoming a conduit for the experiences of others? What does your body, its skills and training offer these stories without words?
I think it’s important to communicate these very male war experiences through the body of a woman. It completes the ‘picture.’ My body and its own history—training and personal—can allow an audience to read the stories.
The experiences of war touch everyone—including those who are left behind—generally women: the mother whose son doesn’t return, the wife whose husband is only a ghostly memory. All lives are damaged by war. Sadly this is its universality. And so although I am the conduit for the experiences of others, this experience touches us all. In a way, this is the aim of this work.
* * * * * *
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Deborah Leiser-Moore, Cordelia, Mein Kind
photo Ryszard Pajda
Deborah Leiser-Moore, Cordelia, Mein Kind
Other works
Leiser-Moore’s Cordelia, Mein Kind (2009) will enjoy a return season in Melbourne this year at La Mama. The artist describes the solo work as “a duet for live body and film.” Leiser-Moore as Cordelia encounters Lear in exile in the form of her father—a Holocaust victim displaced to Australia who appears on film in the performance (made before his death) conversing with his daughter. Performed in Melbourne, Brisbane, Washington, Gdansk and San Francisco, the work was created in collaboration with director Meredith Rogers and choreographer Sally Smith when Leiser-Moore was an artist-in-residence at Victoria University in Melbourne.
Of the work, the later Doug Leonard wrote in RealTime, “This deeply textured, multilayered and savagely poetical work takes off from Shakespeare’s King Lear, but unravels personal elements of cultural exile and loss. Leiser-Moore’s Yiddish speaking Polish father escaped to Australia from the Holocaust, but left his family behind. However, he never spoke a word to his daughter about his past until she arranged a trip with him back to Poland, which she documents. His favourite film was a Yiddish version of King Lear with a happy ending! The piece abounded with such astounding ironies and coincidences from real life, I was literally rendered speechless” (RT94).
Further Leiser-Moore productions include Here and There—Then and Now (2004) “a video/installation/performance piece that explores the inherent nature and expression of ritual (the wedding ceremony), tradition and culture within Jewish and Muslim women; a room with no air (1999), a collaboration with co-performer Regina Heilmann and composer Elena Kats-Chernin, in which a German gentile and Polish Jew “struggle to understand and unhinge the terrible dynamic which is their legacy;” and Hungry (1996), an exploration of the artist’s cultural heritage and the exclusion of women from Jewish religious ritual. In development with Heilmann is Apres Savage, a creative assessment of what has changed in the world and in the artists themselves since that first collaboration.
Since the late 90s art-music-political-punk ensemble Chicks on Speed—Alex Murray-Leslie (US) and Melissa Logan (Aus)—have produced an extensive catalogue of records, performances, exhibitions, fashion, film projects and, most recently, iPad apps. Now in their 17th year the uncompromising duo continues to engineer exciting multidisciplinary work including a new interactive album, UTOPIA, and a major exhibition at Fremantle Arts Centre, Perth.
Forming in Munich in 1997 after meeting at an Academy of Fine Arts party, Murray-Leslie and Logan began Chicks on Speed as part of a location-specific survival strategy. Murray-Leslie describes 90s Munich as being a bourgeois town with little in the way of creative entertainment to satisfy the pair. In this climate she set up an illegal bar that doubled as a venue for Chicks on Speed to create and present “radical entertainment” in the form of live art performances.
One such performance titled I Wanna Be A DJ…Baby! involved smashing records from behind a DJ desk while playing sound collage through the PA. Beyond onstage antics they also distributed a ‘box set’ featuring a T-shirt, cassette, paper record and fake ‘band’ interview.’ Murray-Leslie says, “It was never just the idea of the song but always the idea of the mixtape, the song, performing the song, making the merchandise, doing some text over the performance and then breaking something. Always the influence of Fluxus there—instructional performance.”
Beyond Fluxus, the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, a German word translated as ‘the all encompassing artwork’ involving construction across many mediums, connects closely to the aesthetic of Chicks on Speed. Gesamtkunstwerk originated in the opera world, predominantly via Richard Wagner in the late 19th century but was adopted by Bauhaus architects in the early 20th century and is still relevant to many multi-disciplinary artists today. “We’ve never been able to just think in one medium,” says Murray-Leslie, “whether it’s art, fashion or music they all have a complementary trajectory.”
Chicks on Speed Band and Chicks on Speed Art Collective have always co-existed comfortably but with so many creative disciplines demanding attention, Murray-Leslie and Logan deliberately shift focus, navigating their way between the music world to the art world and back again. “In the beginning Chicks on Speed were never recognised as a real band,” Murray-Leslie explains. “When we became a functioning band people never saw our art. We changed the focus. Suddenly we go to release the new album, UTOPIA, and it’s swung back the other way.”
Chicks on Speed
UTOPIA is the product of years of sonic experimentation stretching beyond the conventional three-stage process of writing, recording and releasing to include new technologies, collaborations and audience participation. It comes complete with six iPad apps designed to be played and modified in co-authorship and co-creation with the band. During live shows apps are used as audio-visual instruments for interactive stage performance, for example allowing an audience member to contribute text to be displayed on a projected backdrop located behind the band. According to Murray-Leslie, during this process “the audience completes the artwork.” Despite the addition of iPad apps, UTOPIA remains sonically in keeping with the Chicks on Speed sound—energetic electro-pop songs with prominent lyrical content linking complex ideas about art, culture, idealism and creation to the broader concept of Utopia.
The apps are part of a much bigger body of creative work undertaken by Chicks on Speed which blurs the line between music, art, technology and laboratory. Objektinstruments (self-made instruments) were initially developed by the ensemble in 2005 for studio and stage implementation and showcased as part of a performative installation at Dundee Contemporary Arts Centre (UK) in 2010. During 2011 and 2013, as artist residents at ZKM Centre for Art and Media (Germany), they produced UTOPIA along with the six interconnected iPad apps. Collaborations from a diverse range of modern thinkers and creators such as Julian Assange, Yoko Ono and Francesca Thyssen provided extra dimensions to the music project.
For Melissa Logan new interactive technologies such as iPad apps enable Chicks on Speed “to remain close to the audience and to build up platforms.” In the early 2000s she felt distanced from fans due to the emergence of iTunes and other online retailers. She says that it was as if a conversation was lost because of third party involvement. The pair are conscious of maintaining a closeness with audiences. Alex Murray-Leslie notes, “Once you deliver something in the digital medium it is dead unless you change it.”
In 2014 Chicks on Speed show no signs of slowing down. The boundaries between art and music become blurrier as their catalogue of work encompasses even more creative disciplines.
Chicks on Speed, SCREAM, Fremantle Arts Centre (Perth), 4 April-25 May
http://fac.org.au/events/429/chicks-on-speed-scream?pid=58
Smitha Cariappa, Lying on the floor, floured performance
photo Yeehwan Yeoh
Smitha Cariappa, Lying on the floor, floured performance
The word ‘seam’ makes me think of a repetitive action, stitching threads by hand crisscrossing a line, or by machine sewing up and down, in and out, most often along a linear trail. At this time of the year it makes me think of another action, of bowling a cricket ball along a prescribed path with the end direction being unpredictable. The objective of a seam suggests bringing together, lapping over and abutting different materials, sometimes creating a crack or fissure.
In November 2013 choreographic research and development centre Critical Path, in partnership with the Centre for Contemporary Design Practices and the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology, Sydney, produced SEAM13. Since 2009 this partnership has facilitated four symposia, each SEAM containing an open invitation to artist practitioners, academics and the public, with an inherent orientation toward interdisciplinary exchange.
The body has been central to the multiple themes of the SEAM series, spawning conversations and convergences within and outside dance and movement alongside numerous other practices including architecture and interactive technologies. Convenors of previous SEAM symposia, Margie Medlin (Director of Critical Path) and Benedict Anderson (Director of CCDP, UTS), were joined for SEAM13 by live art practitioner Paul Gazzola, Critical Path’s inaugural Associate Artist (2012-13). They proposed the topical themes of Authorship, Curation and Audience.
SEAM13 opened at Critical Path’s harbourside home in The Drill Hall at Rushcutters Bay with three engaging keynotes. Artist David Capra, known for his public dance and banner waving works, set the tone for the weekend with a curious, often hilarious chat, accompanied and at times upstaged by his dog Teena. Former professional dancer Deborah Ascher Barnstone, currently a Professor of Architecture, delivered a thoughtful meditation on forgery in the capital A Art world. The incitement of the evening for me came from intermedia artist David Pledger. His provocation on the role and responsibility artists have in the curation of society bordered with the Convenor’s Statement which located arts production ideals of the 70s and 80s as shifting towards increasing “institutionalised authorship” [the usurpation of artists by producers and managers described by Pledger in his Currency House Platform Paper No 37, “Re-Valuing the Artist in The New World Order,” 2013. Eds]
Continuing through the weekend with a dense and diverse program of performative lectures, academic papers, conversations and performances, SEAM13 generated an atmosphere in which people from different disciplines and with varied interests created many junctions. For me, this triggered reflection on how dance and choreographic practices have changed radically over the past decade, especially in relation to other art practices and how they engage with dance, where dance turns into and folds together with other art forms and how such moves are initiated.
This turning and folding was apparent during the in-between of the symposium: talking when climbing the stairs from one session to another with a ‘trans-disciplinary artist researcher,’ queuing for the site-specific installation that was the delicious catering, or debating the role of audiences with colleagues who ‘fabricate interventions’ and ‘work across boundaries.’ After engaging in a conversation with an architect, an academic and a ‘keen researcher of the emergent and the unforeseen,’ a furrow appeared for me.
At many times during the three-day SEAM13 symposium, The Carpenters’ strange 70s song “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft…” came into my head. I was in a room bubbling with multi-disciplinary, cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, trans-disciplinary, inter-media practitioners. Working within, between, across and at the intersections and junctions were participants who identified as performing artists, architects, philosophers, producers, curators, academics, researchers, teachers, performative creative practitioners, experimental artists… and among them a few who identified as “dancer and choreographer.”
Dance has always been considered inherently interdisciplinary, so the notion of choreographic ideas and concepts translating to other disciplines is not new. Choreographic ideas threaded through SEAM13 presentations, mostly implicitly, but when explicitly referenced seemed slightly out of place. The two-week-long workshops that bookended the symposium provided local dance artists with explicit practical experience. Workshop facilitators Mette Edvardsen and Kate McIntosh both make performance work within a European context. Each artist comes from a traditional dance training background, although their current interests are often independent of the body, albeit still drawing on and expanding dance and choreographic principles. In conversation with some of the dance artist participants it seems that both workshops provided an opportunity to experiment with engaging individual movement and dance practices within a broader disciplinary conversation.
The focus for SEAM13, as expressed in the convenors’ statement, was “to give a platform for independent artists to formulate their autonomy and direction.” Interestingly, the majority of participants had some sort of affiliation with academic institutions while independent artists, specifically from the dance sector that Critical Path supports, were under-represented. Why this was so is not entirely clear as SEAM provides a forum for communication around expanded notions of dance and choreography, and the potential for complex interactions and processes to occur about the radically changed discipline of dance is great.
This underrepresentation of dance-in-dance is also apparent in the wider context. The Carriageworks, Dance House and Keir Foundation biennial Keir Choreographic Award dedicated to the commissioning of new choreographic work and promoting innovation in contemporary dance has recently been announced. It is timely and welcomed by most in the Australian dance sector, despite the debate around the ‘competition’ context. An interesting aspect of this new award in relation to “promoting innovation in contemporary dance” lies in the call for entrants: “professional artists with an established practice in other art forms are invited to propose a new choreographic idea.” Once again there is a crack where it appears that the gap between choreographic ideas and choreographic craft has widened.
Full of extraordinary diversity, albeit somehow strangely similar, SEAM13 provoked thoughts about the discomfort that comes when the border between forms is dissolved and the dilemmas that have to be faced by the discrete discipline of dance in this new world order of interdisciplinarity. Situated somewhere between brave and indulgent, SEAM was an audacious project exposing an opening which revealed a disconnect between dance and other disciplines outside the performing arts.
SEAM2013 Symposium and Workshop Series, Critical Path, Sydney, Nov 15-17, 2013
André de Ridder (conductor) and Liza Lim (composer), Tongue of the Invisible rehearsal
photo Klaus Rudolf
André de Ridder (conductor) and Liza Lim (composer), Tongue of the Invisible rehearsal
Today we are likely to hear the word “peregrination” as meaning “a meandering journey.” In 12th century Anglo-Norman and Middle French the word referred to one’s earthly journey towards heaven, a pilgrimage where the path, and perhaps even the destination, is uncertain. Liza Lim’s Garden of Earthly Desire and Tongue of the Invisible are musical peregrinations, in this earlier sense, through artworks that themselves depict winding paths through sensual landscapes in search of the spiritual.
Melbourne-based contemporary music ensemble Six Degrees will perform Garden of Earthly Desire at the upcoming Metropolis New Music Festival. “I’ve known the members of Six Degrees for many years,” Lim, in the UK, explained in a phone interview. “Many have played my music before in ensembles including the Atticus String Quartet and the ELISION Ensemble.”
Garden of Earthly Desire is an extended work for chamber ensemble based on the 15th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. “It was written in 1988 and was the first big piece I wrote for the ELISION Ensemble. The Bosch was a jumping-off point for all of us. It’s very rich in its imagery…It’s made up of these incredibly detailed figures. As a viewer you start to create stories in the different figures. How did something get there? What’s the relationship between the parts of this strange, hybrid, animal-human?”
Everyone will be familiar with the paradox that travelling is really about finding places to sit down. Perhaps this is why “peregrination” also referred to a “resting place” or a “temporary habitation.” Lim’s response to the Bosch painting is full of such resting places where the audience encounters immaculately detailed and otherworldly figures before being hurried off to the next scene.
Though almost 25 years separate the pieces, Lim sees connections between Garden of Earthly Desire and Tongue of the Invisible, which is based on poems by the 14th century Sufi poet Hafiz. “Both are about intersecting pathways, creation of meaning as you journey through a landscape—a garden, say. A garden of images and ideas and emotions.”
In Tongue of the Invisible, recently recorded by Ensemble musicFabrik for the Wergo label, this sense of journeying is written into the libretto. “Jonathan Holmes chose the ghazals [a poetic form] and developed a grid-like structure where every square has a line of the poem instead of following the narrative form. Wherever you turn you can trace a number of different pathways through this grid. Wherever you turn is the poem, is this world of bewilderment and yearning. That was a huge influence on what I did musically as well.”
The result is a musical world where bewildering fury gives way to ecstasy, as in the first movement “At dawn I heard the tongue of the invisible.” A teeming wall of sound punctuated by swooping trills from the woodwind plunges into silence before tingling, shivering cimbalom and muted brass underscore a ravaged cry from baritone Omar Ebrahim. Other movements explore the tender pathos and patient yearning of Hafiz’s poetry, such as “Between the pages of the world (II),” where Ebrahim mourns the short lifespan of the rose that is then “pressed/ Between the pages of the world.” To sing Hafiz must be a daunting task considering the depth of the Qawwali tradition, but Ebrahim traverses Hafiz’s emotional world of rapture and longing with sensitivity and stamina throughout the almost hour-long work.
Hafiz’s poetic peregrinations may be considered a type of translation between worlds, of finding the term in one world for an object in another through a complex and paradoxical weave of meanings. “The Hafiz is a work that reflects on translation between one language to another, but more than that, between ways of being and ways of experiencing. What I really love about the poetry is how elusive it is. It seems immediate. There are these really earthy, sensuous images, but at the same time you can’t quite grab hold of it. It’s very complex and indefinable. He talks about drunkenness and wildness and in the next line something about being gathered up by divine love. You’re shifting registers of feeling and meaning all the time. As soon as you think you’ve got somewhere it’s subverted by the poetry.”
We might think of Lim’s compositions as a second level of peregrination between the artistic sources and the musical. But as in Hafiz’s poetry, the ecstatic is sought through contrasts and surprises. A remarkable element of Liza Lim’s music is the imaginative and unique ways it conjures feelings or scenes without the use of literal transcription or imitation. “I don’t think of my music as a transcription of anything, really. I’m not trying to map nature or a specific situation or emotion. For me, everything is much more elusive, more ambiguous. Yes, I’m inspired by many things that may be literary or from another art form. It could be anything that provides inspiration. I think through the medium of music these impulses start to speak a more abstract, musical language. Maybe there’s something about musical thinking by itself that goes beyond transcription. It’s about transformation.”
Part of the translation from the works to the music is achieved by the performers themselves, through the inclusion of different levels of improvisation. Says Lim, “I find that very interesting and it’s something that I tried to work with in the structure of the music and the setup of the ensemble in the way it combined improvisation and more directed things. It was about creating experiences for the group, for a community of musicians within the context of a performance.”
Liza Lim does not so much set words to music as use them to construct a journey whose truth is to be found between the musical lines, through a process of immanent peregrination. “I’ve always sought to write something that was quite physically immediate in the sense of performance, of gesture, of theatre and also in the sense of the mystic, for me. They are part of a continuum or of a whole picture.”
Australian composer Liza Lim is Professor of Composition at the University of Huddersfield, UK. Alex Ross, music writer for The New Yorker, listed Tongue of the Invisible as one of the CDs of 2013.
Sarah Rodigari, Filibuster of Dreams, presented at Arts House, part of the Festival of Live Art (FOLA), 13-30 March
photo Jessica Olivieri
Sarah Rodigari, Filibuster of Dreams, presented at Arts House, part of the Festival of Live Art (FOLA), 13-30 March
In “The trouble with tragedy,” 2014 Sydney Festival productions inspire Keith Gallasch to ponder contemporary meanings and forms of tragedy and their antitheses.
We pay tribute to Performance Space’s 30 years with Caroline Wake’s feature report on 10 glorious days of performance, conversation and celebration, including Mike Parr’s Daydream Island, a deeply disturbing performance in response to the plight of asylum seekers.
Our second feature, West, focuses on Riverside Parramatta and Campbelltown Arts Centre, their 2014 programs, challenges and ambitions, and Virginia Baxter reports on FUNPARK in which the Bidwill community asserted their dignity through art.
Live art, its practitioners and aficionados get right royal treatment with the advent of the first biennial Festival of Live Art (FOLA) led by Melbourne’s Arts House. John Bailey previews.
A sad farewell to James Waites, 1955-2014. About to go to print, we heard of Jim’s death. Jim was a brave and dedicated reviewer, blogger and a fond colleague. An obituary will appear in RT120.
RealTime issue #119 Feb-March 2014 pg. 4
30 Ways with Time & Space. Row 1 – Nadeena Dixon, photo Heidrun Löhr (HL); Clare Britton, Matt Prest and Leslie Britton Prest (HL). Row 2 – Victoria Spence (HL); Rakini Devi, photo Bec Dean; Dean Walsh (HL)
Row 3 – Hossein Ghaemi & collaborators, photo Nic Dorward; Vicky Van Hout & Thomas E Kelly, photo Lucy Parakhina; row 4 – Sandra Carluccio (HL); Simone O’Brien, (HL)
30 Ways with Time & Space. Row 1 – Nadeena Dixon, photo Heidrun Löhr (HL); Clare Britton, Matt Prest and Leslie Britton Prest (HL). Row 2 – Victoria Spence (HL); Rakini Devi, photo Bec Dean; Dean Walsh (HL)
Performance Space is an unwieldy entity: part site, part community, part sensibility and increasingly, a part of history. Its 30th birthday party was bound to be epic and indeed it was: You’re history! was a two-week program that included so many artists and events, it was possible to camp at Carriageworks for the duration and still miss something.
The festival combined three main programs: 30 Ways With Time and Space, a series of performances by artists who have been involved with Performance Space over the years; the Directors’ Cuts, in which former artistic directors were given an hour or so to do as they wished; and a series of new works by Tess de Quincey, Nigel Kellaway, Rosalind Crisp and Brown Council. On a typical night, one might arrive at 6.30pm to see a short performance in the foyer before moving into Bay 20 for a Director’s Cut and then exiting to find another short work underway. Once that had finished, you could see whichever new performance was on or wander into Bay 19 to watch Brown Council’s video artwork. The result was that Carriageworks was occupied and animated by Performance Space and its patrons for the entire two weeks.
Opening Night
On the opening night, Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor sang a welcome to country before co-directors Bec Dean and Jeff Khan gave their speeches while artist Sandra Carluccio launched tiny balsa planes—on which were written fragments from the archive—from the atrium. Jon Rose and Lucas Abela played a loud and aggressive set that successfully drowned out most conversations, an appropriately uncompromising gesture from an organisation that prefers to challenge rather than comfort its audience. Branch Nebula then took over the foyer to stage a live multiplayer game.
30 Ways with Time & Space
In the 30 Ways program, established artists tended to oscillate between reminiscence and re-enactment, sometimes within the same performance. While slipping in and out of old costumes and performances, Victoria Spence reflected on a vivid life, climaxing in an apocalyptic poem alternating between despair and ironic acceptance:
“We are culturing everything—ourselves, our veggies, our kids, unashamedly/ embracing our bacterial and microbial co-existence./ Culture is literally in our guts and we taste great.”
The audience helped Simone O’Brien dress and undress while she reminisced about infamously and spectacularly pissing from a trapeze in a mid-90s performance. For a moment it looked as if she might christen Carriageworks’ floor but she refrained. To the strains of “Fascination” Clare Grant and Chris Ryan, of Sydney Front fame, performed in trademark slips while they recalled touring Europe with pockets full of Thai baht. Two other Sydney Front members in the audience, John Baylis and Nigel Kellaway, laughed so hard they nearly spilled their wine. Another much loved ensemble, Frumpus, also dug out their favourite costumes, dancing in daggy red tracksuits before switching to demure embroidery in virginal white dresses, uttering snippets of dialogue from The Exorcist and finally morphing into the disappearing girls of Picnic at Hanging Rock.
In contrast, younger artists tended to riff on themes of inheritance. Matt Prest and Clare Britton are roughly the same age as the Performance Space, meaning that they—like me—were in primary school when the Sydney Front were performing. Together with their son Leslie, they hopped into a bubble and narrated their lives from 1983, allocating each year a minute, a memory and a song.
Post (Mish Grigor, Zoe Coombes Marr, Natalie Rose) staged another of their performances of wilful ignorance, allocating themselves two minutes to select a play from the canon, two minutes to prepare some notes on a theme from a well-worn list and two minutes to link them to the plot for the audience. The results were hilarious as the performers segued from Handke’s Kaspar to Casper the movie to the actor Devon Sawa. On another night, Applespiel staged a pantomime about how they saved Performance Space and thus rescued Sydney from eternal remounts of The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.
Themes of inheritance also arose in some of the Indigenous performances in the program. Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor appeared with her daughter Nadeena Dixon to give an account of growing up with the great activist Chicka Dixon (1928-2010) as father and grandfather. Vicki Van Hout and Thomas E Kelly duetted precisely in an hilarious dance of increasing discombobulation which definitely warrants a reprise. Other artists did not confine themselves to the half-hour time slot—Ryuchi Fujimara and Kate Sherman danced 30 duets over two days, always appearing when least expected in a variety of sites around the building.
The standout performance was perhaps Mike Parr’s Daydream Island, which took up where his performances of the early 2000s left off, returning to the subject of asylum seekers. Instead of being presented in the gallery, it was staged in a theatre with a seating bank, and instead of taking several hours, it took roughly one.
In front of a large screen upstage is a small table and a chair. Further downstage are five stools, where Parr’s assistants sit. Parr, wearing a lurid Hawaiian shirt, enters to the strains of “I Still Call Australia Home.” He sits on the chair with his back to the audience, however we still see his face, his assistant feeding the image live to the screen. A female assistant rises from her stool, goes to the table and wipes Parr’s eyebrow with iodine. She inserts a needle and thread and starts stitching. So far, so grimly familiar. But then she ties something to Parr’s face—a tiny plastic pig. The image immediately recalls the strange moment when the country was outraged about the export of live animals but silent about the outsourcing of its detention centres. Any such reading is undercut by the assortment of figurines that continues to be stitched to the artist’s cheek, neck and nose—there are animals but also superheroes.
The performance shifts when the stitching finishes and the face painting begins. Initially it is not clear what the assistant is painting—the face just looks like a lumpy mass. But it slowly resembles a Picasso and we are left to contemplate the paradox of being ‘defaced’ by portraiture. From here, Parr is helped from his chair and placed prone on the floor. His face is obliterated again, this time with Pollock paint drips. Suddenly his face becomes a tropical island and the shirt makes hideous sense. In the final moments of the performance, a plush pig toy wobbles past on wind-up wheels, nudging Parr’s sleeve on the way. One of the assistants announces that all this has been hogwash, that the dumb theatre has now come to an end, and that we can all go back to where we came from. Nearly everyone in the theatre exhales and heads for the bathroom or the bar.
Box of Birds, Tess de Quincey
photo Heidrun Löhr
Box of Birds, Tess de Quincey
New works: Box of Birds
The first week belonged to Tess de Quincey’s Box of Birds, starting in the foyer, with projections of white text (“Existence not true…”) sweeping across the grey floor. Slowly, spectators notice two figures, one on each side of the foyer, high above the audience on steel beams. They wear heavy grey felt blankets which hide their faces and restrict their movements, but perhaps also offer protection should they fall. This prospect of harm is slightly sinister, given the program states that the images are based on Anne Ferran’s photographic trilogy about female psychiatric patients in the 1940s. Soon we are enticed into Carriageworks’ corridors. Once again, we don’t always know where to look: peeking around a corner I discover a performer above me on a ladder, now noticeably birdlike in its movement. There are others. I’m no ornithologist but I think I see an ibis at one point, with a sweeping wing, and a lyrebird at another, with its long, fanned tail. In the confines of the back blocks of Carriageworks, we hear the words of Nietzsche embedded in Vic McEwan’s overarching soundwork with its cosmic and industrial resonances, birdcalls and woodwind warblings.
Back in the foyer, the felt birds are hoisted onto the beams again, scratching, teetering and nesting before coming to rest. Tess de Quincey has worked the spaces of Carriageworks perhaps more than any other artist, to the point where it’s impossible for me to observe parts of the building without sensing her performing presence. This immersive and evocative work added yet another layer to that palimpsest.
David Buckley, Nigel Kellaway, Brief Synopsis, the opera Project
photo Heidrun Löhr
David Buckley, Nigel Kellaway, Brief Synopsis, the opera Project
Brief Synopsis
The second week saw the premiere of The opera Project’s Brief Synopsis: a beautiful naked woman “of a certain age” brutally stabs a young man to death. Staged in Bay 17, the space looks as beautiful and as spare as I have seen it: the seating banks placed on an angle while the back doors are open so that we see through to the workshop. There is almost no set to speak of, only a few tables and chairs placed to the right. The performance begins with a long pause, before a car appears upstage. Several people with musical instruments get out, only to get back in. We suddenly become aware of a woman (Katia Molino), who has been sitting in the audience. She stands and walks upstage wearing a pair of high-heeled shoes and nothing else. The musicians enter again and this time they and their musical instruments stay, producing a richly textured score, oscillating between melancholy and subdued anger.
We proceed through a series of scenes that may or may not be in chronological order in which accusations are uttered at café tables between a former couple, Molino and Nigel Kellaway (the central figure and nouveau roman narrator whose nihilism and bitterness override his capacity to love). A young man (David Buckley, an impressive presence) is seduced and cruelly rejected by both. There are set pieces, as the actors and musicians stride invisible corridors, Kellaway, in black suit and silver heels, reciting arch lines about time’s inconstancy (texts borrowed from Heiner Müller, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Yourcenar among others). There are costume changes as Molino hands her young lover a new shirt, only to reveal that it is even bloodier than the one it replaces. There are also beautiful projected noir-ish images, including webs and night roads, by Heidrun Löhr, aptly symbolic if serving too often as mere backdrops to the action. Despite the variety of material, Brief Synopsis leaves me cold, though I suspect this is precisely the point.
New Works: danse (3) sans spectacle
Staged in the same space later in the week, Rosalind Crisp’s danse (3) sans spectacle was even more stripped back and yet had a degree of warmth at its heart. We enter a dark and silent space and seat ourselves on low, grey foam blocks placed in a rough semi-circle around the three dancers. Dressed in grey hooded tracksuits and bathed in a pale yellow light, they proceed to dance—sometimes by themselves, sometimes in tandem, but rarely if ever as a trio. Even when the three are moving at the same time, one always seems to be pursuing a different logic or phrase. The phrases themselves rarely come to completion. When you expect an arm to fully extend, it folds back in on itself; when you anticipate a rolling foot to bring a knee with it, you find the knee has been diverted elsewhere. There is no music, only breath and the occasional scrape of a foot. Our attention is held solely by the dancers’ concentration, apparent isolation and occasional collaboration. The piece finishes with a lone figure, dancing far from the circle. It’s as if having done away with every other habit of dance, Crisp can now do away with the audience.
New Works: This is Barbara Cleveland
The youngest artists in this part of the program are Brown Council and, like their counterparts in 30 Ways, they appear focused on history and legacy. Their video work, This is Barbara Cleveland, is about a mythic performance artist from 1970s Sydney. The work combines footage of the four Brown Councillors speaking about the neglected artist with apparently ‘authentic’ archival footage of Cleveland herself nude, blindfolded, smeared with blood or on a ladder. There’s every trope we’ve inherited from the performance art of the 1960s and 70s, re-enacted by four different bodies who start to merge into a single mythic star. The concept is clever, the images well composed and the point well made—all performance art and artists disappear, but some disappear more often than others.
Julie-Anne Long, Directors’ Cut: Fiona Winning
photo Lucy Parakhina
Julie-Anne Long, Directors’ Cut: Fiona Winning
The Directors’ Cuts
The Directors’ Cuts proceed in reverse chronological order. First up is Daniel Brine (2008-11, and now UK-based), who did not attend in person but put in a brief appearance at the beginning of his video 30 x 30: Thirty One-Minute Manifestos for the Next Thirty Years. Some manifestos were irreverent (post), others were more earnest (My Darling Patricia), some were immersed in pop culture (Georgie Meagher) and others wanted to unplug altogether (Alison Murphy-Oates). I was won over by Field Theory’s vision of a post-ironic, futuristic, DIY aesthetic.
The following evening Fiona Winning (1999-2008) delivers a performance lecture titled Nostalgia, Chance, Accident. There are cocktails as we enter and the stage floor is covered with posters from the period in which she was director. In a typically generous gesture, Winning narrates her time at Performance Space through the artists and people she worked with, some of whom also give brief and witty speeches (Richard Manner and Brian Fuata) or performances (Martin del Amo and Julie-Anne Long). From time to time, Arts NSW’s Kim Spinks—seated in the audience—and Winning re-enact phone calls in which they drolly discuss the relative advantages of moving Performance Space to possible premises in Paddington, Newtown and eventually Redfern. The evening finishes with a standing ovation for the longest-serving director in Performance Space’s history and overseer of the challenging shift to Carriageworks.
While the planned petting zoo of Angharad Wynne-Jones’ (1994-97) Parliament of Animals did not materialise, there were plenty of dogs. On stage with pet-free Wynne-Jones and media artist r e a were Harvey with dancer Dean Walsh, Charlie with performer Jeff Stein, and Flame and Trotsky with Tess de Quincey. De Quincey talks about the difference between dancing the environment and being danced by it while r e a speaks about the significance of kangaroos to her practice and her grief at their culling. Walsh demonstrates his scuba diving practice, relating it to his ecological concerns, while Stein talks about vet bills and philosopher Giorgio Agamben. During all this, Harvey wanders back and forth, pees on the floor, distracts Charlie and bothers Trotsky and Flame, who are kept on short leash. The canine chaos is precisely the counterpoint that the conversation needs.
Barbara Campbell, Directors’ Cut: Sarah Miller
photo Lucy Parakhina
Barbara Campbell, Directors’ Cut: Sarah Miller
Like Winning, Sarah Miller (1989-93) also foregrounds the artists with whom she collaborated. She has invited a number of them to imagine a past performance or speculate on a future one. Several young men deliver texts on behalf of Malcolm Whittaker (Team MESS) while another emerging artist, Nathan Harrison (Applespiel), conjures a false memory of Canberra’s Splinters Theatre performance he didn’t see. We see Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter in an SBS Carpet Burns’ short video by Kriv Stenders of Open City’s The Museum of Accidents (1991) with Christa Hughes, Tony MacGregor and the works of a host of Sydney visual artists. A highlight of this session is John Baylis’ reading from his performance diary. The event he reports sounds plausible at first but slowly reveals itself to be a fiction combining almost every legend you’ve ever heard about Performance Space—a tiny audience, a shy but magnetic performer, a lighting operator asleep at the desk, 12 bridal dresses dropping from the ceiling, an invitation to the audience to put them on, a collapsing roof, a flood of rain and a cannibalistic climax. Baylis stays after the show to ask the artists if they’d like to tour the work. “Yes,” they said, “but not through space, through time.” To which he says, “I think I can help.”
The evening concludes with artist and curator Brenda L Croft speaking about the Boomalli Cooperative and its relationship with Performance Space and Sarah Miller, an important reminder that the organisation did not always soley occupy 199 Cleveland St.
Some of the Directors’ Cuts were more low-key. Zane Trow (1997-99), spoke briefly, paid tribute to Performance Space board members and delivered an hour of his sound art. Unfortunately Noëlle Janaczweska (1987-89) could not attend; instead John Baylis engaged in an informative and amusing conversation with Christopher Allen, an early Performance Space administrator working with founding director Mike Mullins. This was followed by excerpts from Clare Grant’s DVD account of the vision and works of The Sydney Front (available from Artfilms). Barbara Campbell stood in for Allan Vizents (1986-87) who passed away during his tenure as director. With Campbell, Derek Kreckler, Annette Tesoriero, Jim Denley, Sherre de Lys and Amanda Stewart performed an engaging, neatly staged selection of Vizents’ witty performance texts which satirically and sonically unpick commercial, bureaucratic and everyday idioms. In total contrast Nick Tsoutas (1984-85) threw a party, a celebration of what is to come—if trepidatious about the Abbott government—complete with live Rembetika music, octopus, ouzo and dancing.
Mike Mullins (1980-85) delivered a lecture in which he reminded us that Performance Space was “born in rebellion,” recounted battles won and lost over “new form” in the mid 80s, decried the rise of creative producers and pointed to the advantages Melbourne’s Arts House has over Performance Space because it has its own home. He declared that while Performance Space is not about a particular space it ultimately needs a designated one.
Screenings
There were also two screenings. To see the video documentation of Post-Arrivalists’ infamous 1994 performance Lock Up (in which they locked in and abandoned their audience), at first I have my head measured and shortly after my wrist cable-tied to a chair and a paper bag placed over my head. Though the footage was screened, it was impossible to see even when the paper bag was removed, thanks to the music, smoke and tasks set for the audience. In this way the group privileges the event over its evidence, the provocation over its representation.
By contrast, director and editor Karen Pearlman and producer Richard James Allen’s Physical TV documentary, …the dancer from the dance, for me lacked self-reflexivity and risked self-absorption, but much of the audience seemed to love it. The film centres on interviews with dancers about their motivations, some insightful, some not, some with all too brief glimpses of their work. Interspersed with these is footage of Pearlman and Allen across the years dancing with their children: a celebration of the family’s affection for the artform and for each other.
Television Behaviour Studies, Pia van Gelder, Tele Visions
photo Lucy Parakhina
Television Behaviour Studies, Pia van Gelder, Tele Visions
Tele Visions
You’re History! coincided with the Tele Visions festival, staged to mark the end of analogue television. On the opening night, Lara Thoms takes over one of Carriageworks Tracks together with 86-year-old Joy Hruby, who has been broadcasting her community TV show Joy’s World from her Matraville garage for more than 20 years. We are cast as the live studio audience to Joy’s last ever analogue broadcast. Thoms has done little more than place a different frame around Joy’s work—albeit an elaborate and resource-intensive one that involves a green screen deployed throughout Tele Visions—but it is done with great care and generosity and Hruby clearly enjoys the limelight. Elsewhere, Kate Blackmore and Frances Barrett were watching every single episode of The Simpsons back to back. I don’t get to see them in person but I log on to the website one morning to watch the live stream. The web cam seems to be installed just above the television, so I can hear the program but not see it. Instead I watch Blackmore napping on the couch and Barrett softly chortling. It feels intimate and intrusive, even though I have been invited.
Ending and beginning
The entire glorious event comes to a close on a Sunday night, with Dean Walsh, Stereogamous and Paul Capsis in the final 30 Ways performances. It’s been two weeks and 30 years, and time has begun to bend, stretch and recede. Just two weeks after You’re History! an email from Bec Dean lands in my inbox, advising Performance Space members that she is leaving her position as co-director to begin a doctorate. While Dean remains a curator at large, Jeff Khan is now sole director of Performance Space, which makes the memory of this festival that much more poignant. It was the end of an era and we didn’t even know it. Isn’t that always the way?
Michael Dagostino, Made in Australia exhibition by Jamil Yamani
courtesy CAC
Michael Dagostino, Made in Australia exhibition by Jamil Yamani
A very happy Michael Dagostino, Director of Campbelltown Arts Centre, enthuses about the first annual program he feels is really indicative of his vision, constructed, he tells me, with “the new life and energy” brought to the arts centre by Jenn Blake, Head of Program and Production, “who has invigorated the performance program, alongside Visual Arts curator Megan Monte who is setting a really interesting direction around emerging practices. Also, we’ve boosted our residency program quite dramatically.”
Former director Lisa Havilah put Campbelltown Arts Centre on the map, ambitiously engaging the Centre with the local community and state, national and international artists. Dagostino has sustained Havilah’s vision of a vibrant, across-the-arts, inclusive contemporary arts centre (as she has since achieved with Carriageworks) with a commitment to nurturing long-term development of new work, and is now clearly making it his own.
Making work with artists
Michael Dagostino was, he says with a smile, “once upon a time a practising artist but I was always organising exhibitions, either my own or curating shows for friends or writing proposals to galleries. So I slowly transitioned across.” At Casula Powerhouse, another major arts centre in Sydney’s west, he installed shows, became head of exhibitions and did some curating. For Parramatta City Council he established the Parramatta Artists Studios and a small gallery as part of the Creative Cities push. “The biggest thing I took from that experience was being able to assist and to create work with artists. That’s really important for me. I’ve always placed artists at the centre of programs.”
Being the centre
Responding to a not uncommon question about where outer city and regional arts centres see themselves situated, Dagostino thinks it over before responding: “At Campbelltown I guess we perceive ourselves as being on the edge. So we want to offer artists something that they really can’t get anywhere else, especially assisting them to produce new works in the early stages through residencies. We are on a geographical edge but we are creating our own centre. There’s a big perception about Western Sydney that everything is far away but I’ve lived there all my life and I’ve never been far away from anything, because it’s all centred around where I live.”
With a background in visual arts, at CAC Dagostino has had to deal with dance, performance, live art, music: “It’s been a really steep learning curve. It still is. I get out and experience as much as I possibly can across all disciplines and meet as many people as possible. The biggest culture shock was the very different histories and languages that operate. My biggest challenge is linking people from, say, the dance world to the visual arts world, seeing where the differences are—because there are so many similarities— and trying to break them down. But we’re never about creating one homogenous art genre, one big, grey mass of art.”
Investing long-term
At the core of the CAC vision is investment in artists’ projects, taking many from the early stages through realisation, often taking two to three years, especially for performance: “The long gestation period needs to be considered and we actually invest in that time.”
In 2014 CAC is establishing a partnership with Zodiak Center for New Dance in Helsinki, “putting Australian artists in an international platform and exposing them to other contemporary works. We wanted to put artists together just to see what the results were in the first stage and in the next, hopefully profiling them in international platforms or a major Australian festival.”
Dagostino is particularly keen for CAC to engage with young people in the region: “When I first came to the centre, I didn’t see many young people…mid-teens to 23-24. They weren’t using the arts centre, not engaging with the work. So we’ve put together an exhibition framework, The List, curated by Megan Monte, that asks artists to engage with young people, their issues, their politics, with what’s happening at the moment, to get them to ‘own’ Campbelltown Arts Centre. We’ve engaged 12 artists including Shaun Gladwell. He created a work during C*town Bling (2005) when the Centre first opened and he wants to look at the skateboarding park in that work, how it’s changed, how some kids might still be skating there and talking to them.”
Other artists include Marvin Gaye, previously Spartacus Chetwynd, a London-based visual art/performance artist shortlisted for the 2012 Turner Prize: “Her work is kind of mad and very participatory. The last work she created was a sort of manic mediaeval play. Australian artists Abdul Abdullah and his brother Abdul-Rahman will be working with young local boxers to create a video work that also involves a performance. They’re both amateur boxers as well as being visual artists. Abdul’s work is very much about cultural stereotypes in Australia— the perception of violence in boxing and young male culture.”
Activist artist Zannie Begg will work with young people at Reiby Detention Centre. Abdul will work with kids at the local training centre in Minto. We actually want them participating where they’re most comfortable and then, slowly [bring them to the Centre]… It’s a long-term strategy.”
On the streets where you live
Also staged where people live is the second phase of Temporary Democracies, a live art event set in empty homes in a suburban street undergoing renewal and population change (RT117, p32): “It was a fascinating experience in 2013 for local residents who may not have come into contact with artists and contemporary art. It breaks down barriers. There’s been a lot of support from the local Men’s Shed, building a food van with Robert Guth for Temporary Democracies last year, and now they’ve come on board for another project. In March this year we have a major partnership with the MCA and C3West, the men are assisting on building an amazing sculpture which deals with the retrieval of cars from the Georges River.”
Making music
CAC has long committed itself to contemporary classical music. Dagostino is now adding diversity with Indigenous country musician Roger Knox: “In the first week of his residency he’ll be mentoring young musicians from the emerging Aboriginal country music scene in Western Sydney. In the second week, he’ll be working on his new album. We’re setting up our theatre in a way that is really conducive to recording so people can come in and record a part or a whole new album. Artists work extremely hard for short periods of time to create new work. So we’re really excited to be able to offer these opportunities.” As well, musician and composer Simon Barker will be working with a number of musicians from different cultures on a CAC commissioned new work as part of the Sacred Music Festival. The music commission is annual.”
Dancing partners
As well as the Finnish collaboration mentioned earlier, CAC has invited Daniel Kok (Singapore) and Luke George to remount works by each—an opportunity to see George’s About Face which premiered in Melbourne (see RTonline) “and also one of Daniel’s pole-dancing works—he’s re-positioning pole dancing as a contemporary dance form. And then we’ll commission them to make a new work together for 2015.”
CAC also runs a program with NAISDA “working with local kids to create pathways. We’re investing quite a lot in it this year, taking some of them to NAISDA for a week to see what it’s like to be a student. We’re hoping they’ll eventually create a whole range of new dances that are Campbelltown based.”
The 2014 dance program segues nicely into 2015: “Much of the CAC dance program is focused on the relationship between dance and music, culminating in a major festival for next year called I Can Hear Dancing, which was initiated by the Centre’s former dance curator, Emma Saunders.”
Chiara Guidi, Jeff Stein will produce Jack and the Beanstalk
photo Heidrun Löhr
Chiara Guidi, Jeff Stein will produce Jack and the Beanstalk
Performance
In the CAC performance program, a major collaboration between Chiara Guidi of Societas Raffaello Sanzio and Jeff Stein will produce Jack and the Beanstalk for children, a co-production with Insite Arts set to premiere at Campbelltown in June. Theatre Kantanka’s Club Singularity enacts the bizarre meeting of a group of people who have strong issues about society and travelling in space: “The Macarthur UFO Society were doing the annual exhibition of their telescopes in the Backspace when Kantanka were here and they just started talking.”
Indigenous performance poet Romaine Moreton is at the centre of 1 Billion Beats, “a performance and installation about the colonial gaze on Aboriginal culture and people, turning it on its head, re-owning the gaze, and asking really tough questions. The next stage of development is in March and we’re hoping to get it up by the start of 2015.”
TV Moore
A major exhibition, Rum Jungle, will feature the works of video artist TV Moore on multiple screens: “His work has such immense power. He’s fascinated with contemporary culture and the way it produces ‘events.’ It’s a major survey show using the whole gallery, featuring existing works and new commissions. Some are in-your-face, others are very quiet: they’re the ones that I keep replaying, that keep me up at night, keep me thinking.”
Robert Love, director of the endlessly busy Riverside Parramatta, is passionate, argumentative and often very funny about the arts in Western Sydney (he has a great stock of telling anecdotes). Given that the greater part of Sydney lies in the west and a third of the NSW population lives there, it grieves him that save for his venue, with its own limitations, no art centres or companies of substantial scale are located there. Instead, for audiences in the west, there’s the “lunacy of travelling great distances to the city. No option.” But he has plans.
Love, like Campbelltown Arts Centre director Michael Dagostino, lives in Sydney’s west. He insists, “Until you begin to live there, walk up the street, talk to people, see what’s going on, you can’t respond to the stories that are there.”
Of Western Sydney’s very productive arts centres, including his own, Love says, “we do have people making a significant impact but it should be at a different level.” Compared with the State Government’s total investment in Sydney proper, Love declares that the $3m funding of the west, reckoned to be 1%, is altogether inadequate. Local government is a significant investor, but private donations are rare when there is little of scale to attract them. Love’s background in the arts is extensive lending considerable weight to the ideas he has for Parramatta and the west.
Love majored in drama at UNSW, founded and worked with Toe Truck, a leading theatre in education company, from 1976 to 1980, working in part with theatre innovator Nigel Triffit, creating works with lightweight aluminium sets (“we learnt a lot about pop-rivetting”) and getting run out of a country town unappreciative of a show about teenagers, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. The local headmaster provided the petrol for the brisk exit. From the 80s to the late 1990s Love administered the Seymour Centre and Nimrod Theatre simultaneously for a volatile two-year period, was General Manager of the State Theatre Company of South Australia and then Sydney Theatre Company.
Love says that his first connection with Parramatta came when he managed the STC’s touring program before becoming General Manager, “in the days when there was an actual commitment to expand audiences in Western Sydney, which we did for three years with an intensive program by reducing our Sydney one.”
Appearances & realities
A mere glance at the Riverside Theatre’s 2014 program, with a couple of David Williamson plays, several Shakespeares and a Russian ballet company might suggest that the Centre plays it safe. “I resisted doing things like Annie for a long time, but an audience of 10,000! Eight thousand saw Hairspray last year.” While the co-production of Annie will draw audiences to Riverside, appearances are deceptive. Love is firmly committed to encouraging and supporting contemporary dance, a disability arts program, filmmakers, community groups, physical theatre and emerging theatre companies. The result is considerable diversity which, says Love, reflects the communities of Parramatta: “When someone asks me, who our audience is, I say, audiences.”
Working models
Riverside Theatres operates as producer, co-producer, production supporter and enabler, host and venue for hire, as well as running workshops, seminars, exhibitions and partnering festivals. As Love says, “We do lots of things. As for producing, we used to do more, but it’s very costly for us, but this year we’re 100% producing Alana Valentine’s Parramatta Girls, which premiered at Belvoir in 2007”—but never played in the city of the story’s origins. It has a strong cast, including Christine Anu and Annie Byron.
For three years Riverside Theatres has operated the True West Theatre Company (see Teik-Kim Pok’s review of Finegan Kruckemeyer’s The Violent Outburst That Drew Me To You, page 38) with the support of Arts NSW funding which was not granted for 2014. Love is unhappy: “There is no strategic sense or continuity. It’s funding the dots, not funding the lines, or thinking about legacy and where it goes.” Riverside also lends support to companies like the much applauded Sport for Jove which commenced its career performing in the Blue Mountains and Sydney’s west.
On the screen
Love has a screening program which he’s eager to develop. Not only does it show the UK’s National Theatre streamed productions but also supports local filmmakers. Writer, actor and co-director George Basha and fellow director David Field’s new feature film Convict (2013; their first was The Combination, 2009) couldn’t get a cinema release so Love arranged a two-week season attended by over 2,000 people. Love is impressed by the film: “It’s low budget but they’ve never made Parramatta Gaol look more interesting. The lighting is terrific, it’s shot beautifully and there are some great faces [provided by local auditions]. We want to provide artists with opportunities.” He said of this audience that it was clear by the way they came into the foyer they’d never been in an arts centre.
Disability & creativity
Riverside also invests in disability arts with their Beyond the Square program, “which started before me but we shifted it from visual arts more towards performance, movement and music. We received a bit more funding from Arts NSW in the last three years allowing us to appoint a full-time creative director, Alison Richardson, and employ an actor with a disability, Gerard O’Dwyer (Tropfest, Best Male Actor, 2009 in Be My Brother).”
S, CIRCA
photo Darcy Grant
S, CIRCA
2014 program
The 2014 Riverside program is a big, diverse mix of mainstream and innovative productions, which include a new work from Kim Carpenter’s Theatre of Image, Monkey: Journey to the West, “featuring Blue Mountains musicians and the local parkour group 9lives,” directed by John Bell and on its way to the Opera House in 2015. There’s a big NZ musical, The Factory (and a big Pacific audience for it, says Love) about the Samoan migrant experience; Parramatta Girls; physical theatre companies CIRCA and Stalker (with the visually striking Encoded); It’s Dark Outside (virtuosic puppetry from WA in an affecting play about dementia); Tectonic Theatre in The Laramie Project; Steve Rodger’s Food (an engaging romantic comedy about food and multiculturalism) from Belvoir and Force Majeure; Deckchair’s The Magic Hour, featuring Ursula Yovich with some very Grimm tales; and a concert from contemporary music paragons Ensemble Offspring.
Then, says Love, there are all the hirers of the venue, which include the Sydney Music Festival, a celebration of South Asian music which will sell out 12 concerts in the large theatre. There’s also the very well-attended productions of the Bangladeshi theatre group Natuki, who commission plays, collaborating with non-Bangladeshi writers and performers.
Dancing with FORM
FORM is a vital organisation for dance and not only for Western Sydney, programming dance works and workshops. Love tells me, “It came to us from Ausdance, we ran it and then it incorporated to stand on its own. We continue to host the company, provide office space and computers and assist with theatre space.” Love says that while the audiences are not big yet the work is important.” FORM’s Dance Bites program for 2014 includes Samantha Chester’s Safety in Numbers, Perth choreographer Sue Peacock’s Reflect, Flatline’s Sketch, Trio for three (Matt Cornell, Josh Thomson and Miranda Wheen) and Tess De Quincey & Co artist Linda Luke in her solo work Still Point Turning with composer Vic McEwan.
The future in the making
Love’s goal is “to get a resident performing arts company of scale and significance and the financial capacity to be here for at least three to five years to service Parramatta, Western Sydney and regional NSW. We’re getting some traction on it. We don’t want to run it. We will support it. It needs to respond to the diversity of the region, must do educational work, be self-sufficient and have an element of populism, otherwise it will die. I think that can be done.”
Love’s other goal involves rebuilding the Riverside Theatres “with a master plan to take it up one or two storeys, with view of the river and a better relationship with the park, so that it becomes a community hub.” He sees the current building as being like a railway station “where you wait on the platform to go on a trip,” but “the journey should start when you see the building and you see yourself in it.” This has to be “if the council believes Parramatta is a global city.”
New money, new hope
James Packer’s $60m art gift (his much debated “thank you” to Sydney for the chance to build the Barangaroo casino resort) gives $30m of it to Western Sydney over 10 years. The Daily Telegraph modestly claimed: “Mr Packer’s $30 million allocation to western Sydney comes after The Daily Telegraph’s Fair Go for The West campaign found that only one per cent of the state’s arts budget is allocated to western Sydney” (Nov 12, 2013). The funds will provide, says Love, “great opportunities, not just a splash for cash.”
Love argues that the NSW Government “should then double its grants to Western Sydney to $6m annually to match the Packer funds—it would make an enormous difference. Resurrect a university performing arts school [Love regards the closure of the University of Western Sydney performing arts degrees as a tragedy for local career development] and you start up a healthy arts ecosystem. I keep telling governments it’s easy; you can only win.”
Reanne Shephard, The Social Revolutionaries, Mt Druitt Press Conference, FUNPARK
photo Heidrun Löhr
Reanne Shephard, The Social Revolutionaries, Mt Druitt Press Conference, FUNPARK
I may not have paid such attention to the item on ABC News on Friday night (Feb 7) featuring NSW Community Services Minister Pru Goward had it not been for the fact that we’d recently visited the suburb that was the subject of the grim report in which the solution to perceived problems of welfare dependency involved the threat to deprive people of their homes.
Bidwill was the location for FUNPARK, one of Sydney Festival’s projects in Western Sydney. Creative Director Karen Therese, herself a sometime local, brought together a team of city and Western Sydney artists with Indigenous and other elders to celebrate what is, contrary to reports, a vibrant local community.
Entering the car park of the mostly disused Bidwill Park Shopping Plaza we choose from a menu of events. At one end of this arena a queue is forming for Harley Davidson Wild Trike rides. Meanwhile, groups of young Indigenous boys and girls cautiously follow the directions of a senior dancer from Bangarra. Bunny Hoopster leading her team of Hoopaholics segues into an explosive dance display from Lucky and Afro Contemporary followed by a choreographic parkour portrait of the area from Team9Lives.
Team9Lives, FUNPARK
photo Heidrun Löhr
Team9Lives, FUNPARK
FUNPARK is the latest in a series of creative ventures in Western Sydney that provoke communities to elaborate on their lives, in turn introducing the wider community to the particular pleasures and anxieties of living there. Recent works such as Rosie Dennis’ Driven to New Pastures (2011; RT101) deal directly with the sense of displacement in relocation as the NSW Government enacts its plans to overhaul the public housing estate. Other works such as Campbelltown Art Centre’s Temporary Democracies (2013; RT117) built on this, inviting artists to work with locals to mark the dislocating sense of being forced to up stakes and move from a nurturing local community to an unfamiliar, more fragmented one.
In a large tent erected in the centre of the car park Darug elders gathered to discuss the history of the area, deeply concerned about education, one recalling when he was a boy there was a shed for Aboriginal kids alongside the school and separate tanks for drinking water.
In the local church hall, seven fired-up local teenagers presented the Mt Druitt Press Conference (directors Karen Therese, Katia Molino). Calling themselves The Social Revolutionaries, these young people—confident, socially engaged and talented—have grown up dealing with prejudices about Bidwill and therefore themselves. Seated at a long table and speaking in turn about their lives they seamlessly shift gear into beautiful singing, rousing speechmaking, re-enactments (singing with mum while housecleaning), dancing (a girl demonstrates a style from her South American heritage, the movement pausing moment to moment as her male partner speaks of his life) and role-playing (how to deal with a dance floor rejection when the girl learns you’re from Bidwill). Far from downhearted, the Social Revolutionaries demand equitable treatment, “a revolution” even. Caught in Sydney’s blind-spot they deplore being “surrounded by ignorance.”
Natalie Rose & Shaun Millwood, Girls Light Up, FUNPARK
photo Heidrun Löhr
Natalie Rose & Shaun Millwood, Girls Light Up, FUNPARK
As well as its revolutionary and celebratory aspects, FUNPARK took some lateral turns to highlight specific local issues. In Cuppa Tea with Therese, a number of us visited a long-term local resident in her neat Housing NSW bungalow and heard about her years of community involvement in the area and her concerns for the future. I imagine Therese rolling her eyes at these latest media reports with their focus on littered streets and upended shopping trolleys to characterise her home suburb. Local Indigenous elders who are already run off their feet are no doubt preparing for another onslaught. The sense of a media beat-up is reminiscent of the so-called ‘Bidwill Riot’ of 1981, reprised in Girls Light Up, a raucous ‘rock opera’ led by post’s Natalie Rose and a team of collaborators from the community. The Bidwill Riot in reality involved a fight over a boy between a couple of girls that somehow attracted the attention of the media and police who eventually turned it into a full-scale TV catastrophe.
Minister John Dacey, The Occult of Bidwill, FUNPARK
photo Heidrun Löhr
Minister John Dacey, The Occult of Bidwill, FUNPARK
I also took the tour enticingly titled “The Occult of Bidwill” led by Minister John Dacey from the Uniting Church. This turned out to be a journey of discovery into the many ‘hidden’ instances of misguided bureaucracy that have gradually seen the local supermarket rendered an empty shell. Owned by the Department of Housing who decided in 1997 to dispose of it as “non core,” the building has been the subject of multiple reports and worthy proposals for remodelling, none of which has ever materialised. And so it sits, ghostly, inhabited by one lonely kebab shop, while locals go without a convenient local shopping centre. Hardy souls venture into the bottle shop across the car park to pick up their bread and milk.
Finally we gather in the evening on the banks of the nearby underpass to watch a video (Darrin Baker, Vic McEwan, Philip Jopson) projected onto a screen over the entrance. We hear from people who may represent some of the targets of Minister Goward’s report—people, for various reasons, reliant on the social welfare system who are nevertheless productive and positive about their role in this place that Karen Therese suggests is “without a voice.”
Understandably, many locals see the government as the architects of dysfunction when it comes to some of the recurring issues in this area. Projects like FUNPARK go some way towards restoring the community’s faith in itself, giving it the strength to fight the easy stereotyping to imagine all manner of possibilities.
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Sydney Festival, Karen Therese and the Community of Bidwill, FUNPARK, creative producer Karen Therese; creative team included Boris Bagatini, post, The Social Revolutionaries (Daisy Montalvo, Scott Johnathon, Cianter, Rvee Dela Cruz, Jithin Matthew, Reanne Shephard, Andrew Llamas & BJ Barnes), Bangarra Dance Theatre, Blacktown Art Centre, Clytie Smith, Bunny Hoopstar, Nick Rathbone Hogan, Team9Lives, David Capra, Jodie Whalen, Applespiel, Province, Darrin Baker, Katia Molino, Therese Wilson and many members of the Bidwill community. Bidwill Shopping Centre Plaza, 18-19 Jan
“The trouble with tragedy is the fuss it makes
About life and death and other tupenny aches”
Samuel Beckett
post, Oedipus Schmoedipus
For several Sydney reviewers post’s Oedipus Schmoedipus was their worst night in the theatre, or already the worst production of 2014. This wasn’t the majority view but the show did generate a modicum of public discussion. For me it raised issues about the changing relationship between theatre, contemporary performance and live art. Affectively, the show moved me from giggling at sense-making nonsense to sadly reflecting on the vulnerability we shared with each courageous volunteer performer.
In recent years the STC, Malthouse, Belvoir, Le Boite and MTC (the latter two featuring well-received seasons of independent works in 2014) have begun to address the changes that theatre is going through as the notion of what constitutes performance broadens. Some of that mainstream embrace was prompted by the encouragement of special funding from the Australia Council for large companies to take on emerging artists and companies several years ago. In the meantime contemporary performance has been expanding into live art, game-playing theatre, one-on-one and participatory performances and combinations thereof. Sydney Festival featured My Darling Patricia’s The Piper and post’s Oedipus Schmoedipus, both of which invited the public to perform in their productions.
Post’s participants, a different bunch of 25 people each night over many nights, were trained up early on the day of performance for three hours on where to move, costume choices and how to follow their cues from video monitors hanging above the audience. The participants performed admirably, hamming it up, singing, dancing, ‘dying,’ looked happy and generally from those we spoke to loved the experience, although they had to miss seeing the controversial, bloodletting opening in which Mish Grigor and Zoe Coombes Marr, in white, murder each other or suicide over and over, invoking the blood-letting legacy of thousands of years of male writing. One reviewer labelled the volunteer participants “meat puppets.” However, My Darling Partricia’s The Piper was not condemned for similarly manipulating its volunteers—children and accompanying adults responding to instructions coming through earphones.
While not as taut as Who’s the Best (STC, RT104) or mind-bendingly delirious as Everything I Know About the Global Financial Crisis in One Hour (Belvoir Downstairs, RT101)—the strings of word association were variable in quality and overlong—Oedipus Schmoedipus was a delight. The quiet charisma of the two performers, the relentless silly searching (“What is death?”: Every cliché imaginable!) and a growing sense of poignancy as we grew to know the faces and bodies of the volunteers made the work a memorable exemplar of the incursion of new practices into the mainstream.
The Shadow King
photo Prudence Upton
The Shadow King
Malthouse, The Shadow King
The Tragedy of King Lear is not short on laughs either; Malthouse’s version of Shakespeare’s play is full of them, but with the same ironic, mocking and often bitter intent, if here self-deprecating as well, portraying an Aboriginal community turned against itself.
The Shadow King (creators Michael Kantor, Tom E Lewis) is a melodramatic transposition of Shakespeare’s pre-mediaeval setting to an Indigenous community fighting over the exploitation of mineral wealth on Aboriginal land. These are modern people but their lives are still imbued, if in varying degrees, with spiritual attachment to the land. One of them, the embittered bastard Edmund (Jimi Bana), is bereft of these feelings and intent on destroying the culture that stands in the way of acquiring the land for himself—using his charm, sex and violence. When he plays demanding, panicky little boy to his mother, you’re not sure if his cunning or insecurity is on show.
In this scenario, the character Kent has been replaced by Edmund’s mother (Frances Djulibing), a clever move which recognises the role of female elders in Indigenous life. When Edmund, with Goneril [Jada Alberts] and Regan [Natasha Wanganeen] capture Lear and the mother, they discard her dilly bag, the reticule of sacred objects and knowledge. Appropriately it lies on red sand of the forestage next to Lear’s abandoned crown.
Despite the simplifying of Shakespeare’s plot and the intricacies of his characterisations, this version manages to retain a lot of its weight, partly because we know it so well, partly because The Shadow King fascinatingly blends Shakespeare’s poetry with Aboriginal English and the cadences of un-surtitled Aboriginal languages, conveying some of the otherness of the classic and making modern sense of Shakespeare’s essential wordplay. The adaptation also deftly contextualises the transposition: Goneril’s husband is in gaol, there is violence in town and a young girl murdered—for which Edmund frames Edgar. The latter appears disguised in full ceremonial attire, although its veracity cannot be guaranteed: a delirious Lear utters, “He’s the real thing!”
This production is cartoony, melodramatic, showbizzy (replete with songs) and forcefully projected (resulting in degrees of unintelligibility despite the head mikes). Tom E Lewis as Lear first appears in white suit, black cowboy shirt and golden crown, playing straight to the audience like a club entertainer, charming, volatile, his anger really felt, the cracks in his composure rapidly widening, his movements increasingly manic.
The daunting set (Paul Jackson, Michael Kantor, David Miller), swivelling slowly and rumbling towards us on tracks, suggests the base of an enormous mining crane. With the lowering of a metal wall-cum-screen to its top, film projections evoke humble homes and backyards, the night-time bush road on which the mad Lear is pursued by headlights, the vast landscapes of disputed land and the massive cliff on which Edmund and Edgar’s mother thinks she is standing, expecting to step to her death.
Rarriwuy Hick is a strong Cordelia, too briefly seen. Drag performer Kamahi Djordon King (See RT113) is a fine youthful Fool, delivering old and new witticisms and insults with verve as well as transforming himself into hilarious versions of Regan and Goneril in the mock trial which Lear conducts. Lewis is wonderfully affecting when, with flowers in his hair, he recognises his failings. Frances Djulibing’s Mother with her quiet physical presence and low-key delivery offers a telling counterpoint to Lear’s mania. And she sings sublimely. As does Djakpurra Munyarryun whose haunting voice comes to the fore in the production’s moving climax.
Although Shadow King is Lear condensed, ramped up and located very specifically in 21st century Australia (going further than most transpositions of classics) it retains its primal power while firmly reminding us that Aboriginal Australians are indeed “Shadow Kings,” at risk of having their land taken from them by their own kin or an ever encroaching mining industry and opportunistic politicians. “Tragedy” in Shadow King is personal, familial and above all cultural.
Mitchell Riley, His Music Burns, Sydney Chamber Opera
photo Louis Dillon-Savage
Mitchell Riley, His Music Burns, Sydney Chamber Opera
Sydney Chamber Opera, His Music Burns
“Tragedy” these days is so broad a notion that its meaning has become much diminished, simply focusing on the loss of life and of potential: the younger the victims the more tragic. The notion has also had to cope with 20th century Existentialisms: either all life is tragic (no God, no afterlife, we’re all cut short) or is not at all tragic—face up to that and you’ll live authentically.
The Sydney Chamber Opera double bill of Gyorgy Kurtag’s …pas a pas – nulle part (1993-98) and George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill was one of the most satisfying events in the 2014 Sydney Festival. Before witnessing the cruelty in Benjamin’s take on the Pied Piper we were faced with existential anxieties and their wickedly funny repudiations of the kind only Samuel Beckett can conjure and Kurtag make musical.
Simply but highly effectively staged (designer Katren Wood) with rows of empty seats, Sarah Giles’ direction of the Kurtag places us face to face with a lone, tall, angular young man seated in an auditorium. Here, in 29 brief scenes in which he endures a great range of emotions, he sings poems penned by Samuel Beckett in 1937-39 and others translated by the writer. Giles has wrought a thoroughly convincing performance from baritone Mitchell Riley as he stares, grimaces, falls asleep, ponders, gives up and bounces back with comic verve and sung lines that wax lyrical, angst and leap into falsetto. He’s partnered by percussion and strings, the percussion played solo (Timothy Brigden) on a wide array of instruments providing the other principal voice in the work with its own reveries and shocking alarums underlining or counterpointing the singing. Moments of tedium alternate with despair in the face of death which can only be laughed about—which is apparently why Beckett wrote his poems, for the coping.
By setting the work in an auditorium that mirrors ours, turning the work’s silences into blackouts and having the text in super-sized surtitles, Giles adds another layer of anxiety, about the value or not of art. What does the young man make of us and our performance—our watching him? Does our own visit to the theatre likewise include moments of not being there, of nodding off (“sleep till death/ healeth/ come ease/ this life disease”) and being jolted awake by tragedy and “the fuss it makes.”
For Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill the setting is the same, but long shafts of lighting (Matt Cox) transform it into sequential spaces in which the two singers, one as the Pied Piper (Ellen Winhall) and the other as the Mayor (Emily Edmonds) narrate their story—in a style distinctively the librettist’s, English playwright Martin Crimp—as an eerie dialogue. Again art and death meet: the Piper declares his power: “With music I can make death stop.” Of course the opposite is also true, “his music burns.” The Mayor, for his treachery must lose his own child, who will become but an apparition on the hill where the Piper has taken him. Moreover, the Crimp-Benjamin version of the tale suggests that the ‘rats’ are a rejected and doomed human minority: a mysterious tale for children becomes allegorical for adults and a tragedy of another kind. As the interplay between singers proceeds this world is transformed by betrayal and loss, the chairs rearranged, stacked, put away, the world/the theatre closed.
The singing by Winhall and Edmonds is extraordinary, the demands of range, key shifts and dramatic needs well met and theatrically right. The physiognomy of Winhall’s Piper transforms eerily as the lighting re-sculpts her and her voice, ever lucid, climbs higher and higher, or growls in a warning lower register. The Mayor’s devious air of reasonableness and then her dawning panic is firmly realised by Edmonds. As ever, Jack Symonds conducts with exactitude and passion, has coached his singers brilliantly and collaborated finely with Sarah Giles. If ever a production warranted a return season, this is it. The large audiences were rapt.
Am I, Shaun Parker & Dancers
photo Prudence Upton
Am I, Shaun Parker & Dancers
Shaun Parker & Dancers, Am I
I enjoyed Shaun Parker’s Am I—the taut, often gestural ensemble choreography, the singular use of light and the boldness of tackling very big ideas neatly laid out for us. But the ideas were worrying, the show’s text adapted from Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius’ Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom (2009) with additional material from Am I’s dramaturg Veronica Neave. If the book’s title suggests a scientific confirmation of the good things about life, the show does not.
The absence of question mark in the title is odd, but the work consistently states that the answer is already a given. We are stardust: we come from nothing on our way to nothingness with little consolation in between. The performance, in which our creation, evolution and passing is narrated and danced, is initially contemplative—our host, Indian guest artist Shantala Shivalingappa, introduces us to the nothingness of our origins and sings sublimely, evoking Eastern cultures’ meditative inclinations.
But the greater part of Am I is not at all contemplative. It is beautiful to witness: on a large wall tightly ordered light bulbs flicker, pulse and pattern, momentarily blinding us with the Big Bang (as the narrator utters: “nothing prepares to become something”), evoking the sun and the stars, framing our evolution and abandoning us to the fading light of entropy (designer Damien Cooper). The highly structured dancing, much of it focused on hands and arms, traces our manual capacity to make and invent. Four dancers in black form a tight cluster; the wall behind glows benignly. A furious dance of arms and hands rapidly forms abstract and then more literal shapes: fingers, like tiny humans, walk along arms; the wings of a large bird take flight; hands form an intricate, living totemic column. Such magical mimcry is a consolation of art. It celebrates observation, skill and especially cooperation.
But Parker is not going to let us off the existential hook: cooperation, although in ample evidence in Am I’s very creation, is not finally worthy of celebration. The dancers now wield metre-long chrome rods, limb-extending tools that engender new cooperative creations, this time tautly geometric. These however become murderous weapons, not least in the hands of a dominant, twirling warrior figure (Julian Wong), despite the narrator’s claim that our reptilian brain functions for survival more by “avoidance than approach.” In this world sexual coupling is a passionless, comical imposition, love is the product of a brain chemical, God has many names including Tweeting, without which “men are truly lost.” Josh Mu’s raw solo supplication to a non-existent God is a highlight, contrasting with the tight regimentation of the body elsewhere.
The final group dance is watched by the narrator from one side and by the warrior (like a Neitzschean Overman, challenged but never defeated) on the other as if the pair represent Knowledge and Power observing the raw dance of humans to African-like percussion in a reminder of our origins. The movement is harmonious if furious, upbeat if unsmiling and visibly exhausting—the dance of those living only in the moment? In her final declaration, the narrator offers us a passive view of ourselves, “I am nothing but a listener, everybody is one,” while a melancholy violin sings, atypically Western in the score and oddly sentimental given the hard lesson Am I is teaching us. There is no smiling Buddha in Am I.
By the end and despite its physical and visual magic, I felt Am I short on mystery and openness: a closed book in which culture is mechanical and deterministic. The emotional upside to the work is the music by Nick Wales, performed by the composer with a small group of artists atop the box that contains Am I’s lighting cosmos. Ranging stylistically and with considerable interplay from Armenian to Indian and other forms, the music offers transcendence, connoting passion, contemplation, pain and joy. We don’t know the meaning of the words sung or the sounds played, only that a creative mind has offered a spirited counterpoint to Parker’s dark view of human evolution in an unresponsive universe. Tragedy has no place in Am I, nor in Beckett. But Beckett laughs.
Dido & Aeneas, Sasha Waltz and Company
photo Jamie Williams
Dido & Aeneas, Sasha Waltz and Company
Other productions
I watched Sasha Waltz and Company’s Dido and Aeneas with interest rather than excitement, admired the fluent movement in the relatively brief if magical underwater scene, relished the singing, thought the orchestra excellent if sounding a shade mellow and enjoyed moments of the dancing with its clear inheritance from Pina Bausch, both in limpid solo turns and deft crowd management but lacking Bausch’s incisive dramatic sensibility and her capacity to generate spare, enduring images. My Darling Patricia’s The Piper overflowed with unregulated invention, making for an overly complex rendering of a simple tale. Ghenoa Gela’s performance as the Bear/Piper, the work’s puppetry and its audience participation made the production attractive but not as strong as it should be.
The Sydney Festival serves many audiences and programs many productions. Of the other shows I saw I particularly enjoyed the superb Hilliard Ensemble, Mike Patton with Ensemble Offspring in a magnificent performance of Berio’s Laborintus II and Tyondai Braxton’s immersive The Hive (see Gail Priest’s report on MONA FOMA). Marrugeku’s Gudirr Gudirr was an inevitable success after its winning appearance in 2013’s Dance Massive (RT114). FUNPARK by Karen Therese and the Bidwill Community in Sydney’s West revealed a maligned community’s capacity to assert its dignity through art. Overall I had a good festival experience, a thoughtful one with welcome moments of transcendence.
ASIO surveillance photo, Frank Hardy, George St Sydney
courtesy Australian National Archive
ASIO surveillance photo, Frank Hardy, George St Sydney
An intelligence agency out of control. Australian artists defending totalitarian regimes. Volunteer spies led on for decades and then left in the cold. Haydn Keenan’s four-part documentary Persons of Interest offers a wealth of cautionary tales whichever way you look at it. Glib confidence or conspiratorial fears are rarely far from the frame when the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) is discussed in public, so Keenan is to be commended for putting together a complex portrait. Unfortunately some of the reactions to his series during its broadcast on SBS last month highlight a distinct lack of critical nuance in our contemporary culture.
Keenan’s premise is simple enough—hand four aging radicals their declassified ASIO files and garner their reactions. Then tease out the files to tell the story of post-war dissent in Australia and governmental efforts to contain perceived political threats. Three of the episodes focus on Communists: Roger Milliss and his deceased father Bruce, former Monash Labor Club Maoist Michael Hyde and the Australian writer Frank Hardy. The fourth subject is the inimitable Gary Foley, a central figure in the Indigenous land rights movement of the late 1960s and early 70s.
The files reveal a depth of surveillance that is at times almost comical. Foley sneaking off for a dirty weekend with a leftist in the early 70s is cited as evidence of a Black Power-Communist Party plot. Frank Hardy’s drunken night out with Soviet poet Yevtushenko and a former Bond girl—complete with a drunken unsuccessful pass by the Russian writer—is described in breathless detail. Every car trip across town by certain persons of interest is recorded in minute detail.
Then there’s the footage. Keenan was spared any reliance on historical re-enactments by the availability of hundreds of hours of ASIO surveillance films in the national archives. We see May Day parades of the 1950s, anti-Vietnam War protests of the late 1960s and Communist Party congresses across the decades. At times the footage is almost Warhol-esque in its unrelenting gaze. There are countless hours of footage of the entrance to the Australian Communist Party’s Sydney headquarters, the street remaining fixed as fashions, cars and faces transform with the passing years. Unfortunately the demands of broadcast television prevented any lingering on this footage and the mute history it contains. I kept imagining another kind of film, or video installation, compiled from this material that dwelt on the sheer fascinating banality of the surveillance images.
We certainly saw enough footage to convey the breadth and depth of surveillance carried out by ASIO in the post-war era, and much of the press coverage that greeted Persons of Interest focused on this disquieting aspect of the series’ revelations. In contrast, Gerard Henderson in The Australian saw fit to leap to ASIO’s defence, extolling the agency’s work against those who “want to overturn the state” (“Totalitarian slurs ignore the truth of ASIO activities,” January 11, 2014). Henderson correctly points out that the Soviets were running a spy ring in 1950s Australia and prominent figures involved in the Labor Party were covert members of the Communist Party—all of which the series details. But Persons of Interest also shows how an intelligence organisation operating without external oversight, under a Menzies Government intent on milking fears about Communism to maximum political advantage, became a deeply paranoid, highly politicised and extremely invasive spying machine. While some of those under surveillance expressed a desire to carry out violent political actions, the files also clearly demonstrate that ASIO was incapable of distinguishing subversive threat from legitimate political dissent or even cultural curiosity. Prominent film critic David Stratton, for example, earned a file in 1969 after visiting the Soviet Embassy to obtain a visa to attend a film festival.
Mrs Petrov at the Beach with an ASIO officer
courtesy Australian National Archive
Mrs Petrov at the Beach with an ASIO officer
Stratton’s case was not atypical. ASIO opened files on literally hundreds of thousands of Australians in the post-war era, especially in the arts. Everyone from novelist Christopher Koch to actor Peter Finch appears in the archives. Merely knowing a person of interest was enough to earn a file, creating an ever expanding net of surveillance. The result? A pretty fundamental misreading of what was happening in Australian society from the 1950s to 70s and a colossal waste of time, effort and taxpayer-funded resources. It’s ironic that Henderson is offended that Persons of Interest received public funding when the millions ASIO mis-spent spying on prominent writers, painters, actors, politicians, judges and unionists who have contributed immensely to Australian public life doesn’t seem to bother him at all.
There is another cautionary tale here though, which has received less attention in the more liberal press. As the stories in Persons of Interest show, much of Australia’s hard left in the post-war era was beholden to Moscow, with creative figures like Frank Hardy defending the indefensible with the invasion of Hungary, the suppression of the Prague Spring and Stalin’s mass slaughter of Soviet citizens. When the Communist movement ruptured in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split of the late 1950s, figures like Bruce Milliss passionately defended Mao’s even more murderous regime. We see Bruce’s son Roger bitterly denouncing the “filth” on his ASIO file regarding his personal life, yet neither he nor his wife appears to reflect upon the work they did for the Soviets, which extended to propagandising for the regime in Moscow while working for Soviet media. They are rightly appalled by the extent to which ASIO pried into and recorded their private lives, but why do they appear so forgiving of regimes that were far, far worse in their crimes?
The most striking lesson offered by Persons of Interest—and the one least discussed in the press—is the danger of blind faith in any doctrine, regime or organisation, whether it’s ASIO or the Communist Party of Australia. All these organisations are essentially bureaucracies and all bureaucracies have a natural propensity to become self-justifying and self-perpetuating. They also render many of those within these organisations blind to anything that does not conform to their worldview. Australian Communists refused to see what was unfolding in the Eastern Bloc and Mao’s China, just as ASIO interpreted every post-war social movement as evidence of a global Communist plot.
ASIO files remain classified for 20 years (until recently it was 30), so Persons of Interest could not touch on the agency’s contemporary activities. Suffice it to say ASIO’s budget is now at record levels and its legal powers far greater than they were in the post-war decades. Anyone can now be secretly arrested for a week without charge with no right to silence. If Australia has avoided the worst forms of political repression it’s not because the likes of ASIO have protected our interests, as Gerard Henderson would have us believe. It’s because some in our legal, political and cultural professions have had the courage to watch the watchers, and help keep their powers and paranoia in check. Organisations like ASIO are arguably necessary even in a democracy. What’s less in doubt is that publicly funded documentaries like Persons of Interest are essential.
Persons of Interest, four-part series, director Haydn Keenan, producer Gai Steele, Smart Street Films, SBS ONE, 7-28 January 2014.
Hans Op de Beeck, Parade, 2012 courtesy the artist and of Ron Mandos Gallery, Amsterdam/Rotterdam
I give you no build-up—and certainly no crescendo—when I state upfront that the musically oriented ‘film art’ works in the Crescendo exhibition at ACCA do not contribute to the intersecting fields of musicology, music history or the politics of music. They certainly merge cinema, theatre, music and opera—but in ways so blunt as to short-circuit any imaginative consideration by artist or audience as to what music can specifically bring to such expanded/meta-media works.
Focusing on three of the exhibition’s ‘moving image’ videos which lean heavily on musical incorporation—and which have played extensively overseas, attracting a trail of dumb criticism by visual art reviewers attempting to discuss the works’ use of music—I aim to explicate what these works belie through their fawning and flaunting of musical sensation, music history and musical attitude.
Forensically, one can audit and diagnose the works in Crescendo as accurate reflections of the curatorial templates which sow the contextual fields for these works to thrive. Hans Op de Beeck’s Parade (2012) looks like a trailer from SBS World Movies celebrating diversity and community. A ‘parade’ of people from all walks of life move in controlled groups from left to right across a huge stage housed in some 19th century theatre. It’s full of cute deus ex machina reveals, with digitally composited layers and changing background scrims (the look of old theatre craft meets the pull-down menu of digital cine-fx), and it coyly plays with ‘the viewer’ by situating you in one of the onscreen plush red chairs. Parade espouses this limp politics of aesthetics (of both traditional and virtual art making), causing the momentum of its parading folk to feel smarmy, forced and fatuous.
The music for Parade is an equally limp brass-band composition that daintily skips along, lip-curled, embracing its po-mo light pomposity. Its repetitive ditty harmonises with the clinical precision by which the ‘demographic’ caricatures perambulate across the stage like flaneurs trapped in a new ad campaign for, well…anything. Parade is symptomatic of a fine art anthropology which generates ‘drag documentaries’ which lay claim to representing the socio-cultural breadth of people who comprise everyday life. Old people on mobile phones; a playful youth scout group; a troupe of airline flight attendants; a toughie with a pit-bull; a happy toddler. But in this sanitised domain of a mock public park, we get an antiseptic, market-researched depiction more closely aligned to those faceless people depicted ‘inhabiting’ the urban-planned spaces of architects’ concept billboards for new developments. It’s frightening.
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Julian Rosefeldt, My home is a dark and cloud-hung land, 2011; courtesy the artist & Arndt Berlin
Julian Rosefeldt’s My home is a dark and cloud-hung land (2011) scares in a different way. The title refers to a famous German poem (I’m told in the film); the film unfolds as a textual investigation (always flatulent and grandiose) of the power of the forest in the German imagination. Again, the film told me that. In fact, anything in the film, I’m told about. By an introductory narrator; by a painfully upper-middle class couple who quote German poetry; and by a bombastic arsenal of Steadicam tracking shots across extended theatrical set-ups and gathered ‘creative’ personnel, emblematic of the ‘inventive’ mise en scène which is now de rigueur for any trumped-up contemporary opera production included in international arts festivals worldwide. (There’s even a scene with a guy onstage wielding a chainsaw in front of opera literati.)
My home—like the bulk of the works in Crescendo—speaks to an unbearably turgid Germanic mind-set, the kind that arguably still controls the political rhetoric of European art biennales, which compresses Schopenhauer and Beuys (they’re really not that different) into a supposedly meaningful rumination on art, beauty, life and politics. Not surprisingly, My home originates from an exhibition about the German imaginary (How German Is It? Judisches Museum, Berlin, 2011), so everything in the work reeks of that discursive domain: its ironic, deconstructive view of nature (expensively filmed in sumptuous clichés so it’s neither ironic nor deconstructive); its radicalised embrace of artifice (rendered conservative by employing tropes identical to the most mundane music videos and beer advertisements); its pan-mythological sweep of cultural iconography referencing the German forest (flattened by the staging and direction which is on par with reading a Wikipedia entry on the topic). And there’s opera, to be sure. Bad, crappy, faux-Romantic, not-even-camp, time-warped, unmemorable. I felt like I’d taken Mogadon and was watching Ken Russell’s Mahler (1974). In a bad way.
Guido van der Werve’s Nummer veertien: Home (2012)
courtesy the artist
Guido van der Werve’s Nummer veertien: Home (2012)
More expensive production values are discreetly touted in Guido van der Werve’s Nummer veertien: Home (2012). It’s another textual poem (like just about all film art of the last decade) that blithely goes about its cinematic business as if film history had not already investigated the terrain half a century ago. The premise of Home is simple: an introductory title tells the sob story of Henri Chopin’s heart being in Warsaw while his body is in Paris. Cue mournful narrative of displaced cultural identity and selfhood following the tragic separations caused during wartime. Throw in references to Alexander the Great, and stir gently to suggest how Europe’s historical despotism has created its modern diasporas. Top with a ‘performance art triathlon’ by van de Werve who moves from Warsaw to Paris through elliptical and ‘surreal’ sequences to ferry a cup of earth from Chopin’s home in Warsaw back to his grave at Père Lachaise in Paris. I felt like I was either reading van de Werve’s submission to produce the work or his acquittal on receiving a grant. The cinematic or video-specific experience seemed incidental by comparison.
The original score (often performed live onscreen in extended takes) is more engaging than the scores for either Parade or My home, but over 54 minutes it remains stubbornly monotonal, creating an emotional flat-line which neither deepens the triathlon performance nor textually relates to the complex chromatic nature of Chopin’s eclectic compositions which site him between arch Romanticism and a sprouting Modernism. The result is a series of chamber choir passages which signpost the narrative structure without either deep parallelism or audiovisual counter-point. While I suspect Home is check-boxing Straub/Huillet’s rigorous The Chronicles of Anna Magdelena Bach (1961) and Chantal Ackerman’s haunting D’est (1991), its unremitting elegiac tone nullified the project’s purported aims, swamping it with forlorn humanist sighing.
Frankly, Home, My home and Parade sound like the work of deaf artists, proving that while contemporary visual artists are treated as privileged soothsayers whose worldview is automatically revelatory, their audiovisual sensibilities are often on a par with the most prosaic and predictable of intelligentsia aesthetes. In their artsy posturing and tasteful soundtracks, these key works in Crescendo betray the influence of the ‘pseudo-cinema’ which has affected video art since the 90s: the transposing of cinematic form (or more properly, its tropes, allusions and stylistics) into the increasingly high production values of ‘film art.’ But maybe these artists don’t care about cinema anyway (or music, for that matter); and maybe I’m applying an inappropriate critical perspective on these exemplars of ‘film art’ instead of listening to the authorial voice of their core creative figure, the ‘artist.’
Then again, maybe I’m tired of contemporary artists being accorded greater skills, perception, aptitude and poetic verve than the producers and practitioners of mass-produced industrially dictated, chaotically collaborative entertainment forms like cinema. The voguish channelling of ‘film art’ into internationalist contemporary art exhibition evidences the diminishing perceptiveness of current museographic institutions who claim contemporaneity without evaluating the tiresome slightness of so much ‘video/film art’ second-guessing curatorial zeitgeistism. How mean-spirited of me to watch and listen to these works with the presumption that they might be informed of the legacy of ‘open-text’ audiovisuality in landmark music-and-politics films like Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967), Godard’s Sympathy For The Devil (1968), and Straub/Huillet’s Othon (1970).
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ACCA, Crescendo, curator Juliana Engberg, artists Dorothy Cross, Rodney Graham, Markus Kahre, Hans Op de Beeck, Julian Rosefeldt, Ana Torfs, Guido van der Werve, ACCA, Melbourne, 20 Dec, 2013-14 March
“Overburden” is what miners call the stuff that is on top of the coal they want to get at. In Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda’s exhibition CoalFace at the Library Artspace, Overburden is the title of a photograph of a lush Gippsland paddock bordered by towering power lines. The melancholic rage that settles over this word/image mismatch is the key signature for the show that had its beginnings in a month-long residency in Beijing in 2012.
The artists’ anxiety over air quality, registered daily on a phone app, resulted in a video showing them on a Beijing street in tight close-up, heads wrapped in fur-lined hoods, faces covered in alarming black filtration masks. Only their eyes are visible and warmly expressive—puzzled, curious, friendly, sometimes fierce—in their invitation to engage and to wonder about the dense smog around them. Back in Australia, they set out in pursuit of Gippsland’s brown coal industry and CoalFace details their increasing fascination with the material itself.
Brown coal is beautiful stuff. It is rich, dark, velvety, crumbly and delicious-looking. Video performances show traces of the artists’ process: meditating on the material, its ancient, elemental ‘is-ness,’ the fact of it and its allure, as well as the troubling consequences of digging it out of the ground to power our cities. A pile of coal on the floor of the gallery next to a miniature yellow dump truck is much larger than the toy and the poignant disruption of scale points obliquely to the monstrous scope of open-cut mining operations in Gippsland. One video—showing the artists sitting like gods or giant children, pushing the toy truck back and forth between them—also plays with scale in an arresting way. The actual yellow trucks carry 300 tonnes each and Paul Cleary (author of Mine-field The Dark Side of Australia’s Resources Rush, Black Inc 2012) calculates that current plans for the Queensland Adani mine will extract 60 million tonnes a year, equivalent to 200,000 yellow trucks which, if lined up bumper to bumper would stretch 3,000 kilometres.
CoalFace, Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda
courtesy the artists
CoalFace, Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda
Elsewhere a plinth displays several lumps of brown coal alongside a cutting of a juicy green plant in water that stands in for the prehistoric lepidodendron forests of which the coal is composed. Neumark called this the “petting zoo,” encouraging visitors at the opening to handle the coal and make marks on the gallery wall. Coal’s mark-making capacities are also to the fore in the piece that brings Loy Yang Power Station in South-Eastern Australia and Beijing closest together in After Tan Ping, a series of folded paper hangings on each of which a single line is painted in one stroke from top to bottom, using ink made from the coal. The ancient Chinese painting style and the ancient Australian mineral resource collide: a gesture and a core sample; an aesthetic response to a beguiling material and an urgent environmental question.
CoalFace is quietly powerful in its address to the damage caused by the mining, export and use of brown coal, but there is something more complex and tender at its core. It made me feel my human relationship to the earth—the “rich dirt” as Neumark calls it. I came away thinking, almost dreaming, of the dense, dripping temperate rainforests of Gippsland; their slow processes of laying down change; their lush indifference to small-scale, individual humans. Perhaps it is in re-igniting this love (I can’t think of a better word) that CoalFace makes its strongest appeal against the depredations we collective humans are wreaking on our only home/our own/only body.
It is now possible to know almost everything about our existence via information gleaned from the objects we’ve touched, websites visited and purchases we’ve made. Our presence is constantly being recorded via a network of private and governmental security cameras and we aid this digital monitoring by using GPS-equipped devices and posting social media updates. Given the implications of these aspects of contemporary living it’s utterly amazing that we don’t throw our devices off the nearest bridge and lock ourselves away in a padded Faraday Cage.
But we don’t. Rather we tend to compartmentalise (Facebook good, video surveillance—ah, whatever) and keep functioning regardless of the digital panopticon. Trace Recordings, curated by Chris Gaul and Holly Williams at UTS Gallery, highlights these invasive forces but tempers the potential for panic attacks by providing playful methods of subversion.
The work that clearly encapsulates the extent to which our identities are exposed is US-based artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s Stranger Visions (2012). From discarded chewing gum, cigarette butts and stray strands of hair, Dewey-Hagborg extracts DNA samples creating a possible genetic profile. With this information she generates a 3D print of the litterer’s face. The masks hover on the wall above snapshots of the samples and their locations. These disembodied people are strangely familiar yet not quite specific enough to be anyone in particular, the ambivalence almost triggering a slide into that old ‘uncanny valley.’ Small cards provide genetic information—racial type, gender, eye-colour, nose size. Dewey-Hagborg also includes a potted history of the ancestry type—when a racial strand emerged from chaos and the potential genetic health issues it might face. These accompanying facts offer an interesting sense of the big picture—the hand of fate adding an even greater sense of vulnerability to these ‘strangers.’
The curators are particularly interested in how contemporary surveillance techniques relate to portraiture and have included two other works focusing on the face. Memory (2013) by Shinseungback Kimyonghun (Korea) is a framed digital tablet which uses facial recognition software to record the visage of everyone who stares at it. These faces are then combined over time to create a universal human. Subtle for an interactive piece (you just have to trust your face is in there melding with thousands of others), the tastefully misty portrait is an everyman/woman also with a hint of that uncanny slippery slope.
New York-based artist Adam Harvey’s CV Dazzle (2013) aims for anonymity through hyper-individuality. Harvey offers workshops in face painting designed to confuse facial recognition programs. By creating unexpected and idiosyncratic geometric patterns on key points of your face, the software is supposedly unable to get a fix. Harvey proposes that by making yourself more obvious in the analogue world you might be able to avoid detection in the digital.
Denis Beaubois, installation view
photo David Lawrey, courtesy the artist
Denis Beaubois, installation view
Two other pieces were impressive for their conceptual poetry. Denis Beaubois showed two works from 2000 in which surveillance technology is configured, using mirrors, so that it is forced to interrogate its own image. It’s a closed-loop of paranoia or narcissism or maybe both. Matt Richardson’s Descriptive Camera (2012) captures an image and sends it off to the internet ether where anonymous human subjects write text descriptions of the scene. These are sent back to the device which prints the information on a hacked receipt printer. In such a visually focused reality this anti-pictorial outcome and the complex mix of digital and analogue (human) processing is as amusing as it is poignant.
Trace Recordings is an exhibition of significant scale featuring 10 artists who tease out multiple complexities of the state of surveillance. However, rather than leaving feeling twitchy, I was excited about the intelligence of these artworks and the future subversions that will arise in resistance. Or maybe I’m not so worried because I’ve just pre-ordered my Philip K Dick Scramble Suit on eBay.
While Trace Recordings worries at the all-permeating forces of technological surveillance, Joyce Hinterding revels in the equally ubiquitous, yet natural force of electromagnetic energy. In her exhibition at Breenspace she presented elegant, large-scale spiral diagrams made from ink and conductive graphite. When amplified by small tabs of circuitry they can channel the hum of the Earth.
Several of these works are displayed as ‘unplugged’ wall pieces (the Arts Santa Monica, 2011 and Heide Museum, 2010 series) accompanied by two large table-top designs, SoundWave: Induction drawings 1 & 2 (2012), that are sonically active. By tracing the designs with your hand, or even just hovering above the surface, your body and the force become connected and the ever-present deep hum shifts pitch, buzzes, spits and crackles. It’s a completely meditative work, playable like an instrument, encouraging a kind of Tai Chi dance of the fingers.
Contrasting with the bold graphite spirals are five other works on paper, The Diffusion Reactors series (2013), using an electrostatic carbon and oil mix to create delicate organic swirls and constellations. These are mute but audio potential is implied by the circuitry, inviting you to imagine the magical sound of these alluring landscapes.
After experiencing Hinterding’s beautifully crafted audio paintings I’ve decided to hold off on the Faraday Cage for a while so I can enjoy the Earth’s electromagnetic song a little longer.
In December last year, Bamboozled took out the top prize at Sydney’s Tropfest. There was a very brief moment of celebration. And then came the accusation: this film is homophobic. Or should that be transphobic? Nobody seemed quite sure. But social media went off as accusers and defenders started to spit out their definitive responses.
One disgruntled writer published her threat to “think twice about tuning into Tropfest next year.” Her reason: “The jokes [in Bamboozled] are derived from the shock that a man slept with another man.” Another writer—who identified as a friend of the film’s director Matthew Hardie—argued that the backlash was unfair because Hardie and others involved in the film “are good, kind, decent human beings.”
The ensuing argument was incredibly boring. Bad film or good film? Either Hardie was guilty of homophobia/transphobia, or he wasn’t. Now, which side will you choose to be on…?
Observing this argument (and while fighting off the temptation to get involved), I wondered how everyone who had to have their say seemed to have missed (or ignored) the debate about positive and negative representation in media texts. In the midst of trying to discredit or praise a film and its director, why was there no mention of this?
This issue has been widely explored in Media Studies and other cultural disciplines for many decades. Here, we find an abundance of discussions about what constitutes positive or negative in terms of representations of disability, age, class, race, gender as well as sex and sexuality. And one of the simplest conclusions to have come out of all this is that a single media text always has multiple meanings. The historical and cultural location of the text and its audience always affect the reading. It is, therefore, impossible to claim that any media text offers definitely a positive or a negative representation.
The argument about Bamboozled failed to pick up or explore this. Those who participated in this argument showed they were capable of having opinions about a film, but they did not show any ability to analyse the historical and cultural specificity of that film.
Instead, the debate ran its course as an overly simplified two-sided rant. Bamboozled had to be homophobic because it made fun of a man who had sex with another man. Or, it had to be a great movie because it was made by Hardie who has many gay friends—look here’s a picture of Hardie in a gay nightclub so this must prove he and his film can’t be homophobic!
In seeking to defend or attack Hardie and his film, the social media mafia also failed to identify that this was not the first time we have addressed the question of whether a text represents non-heterosexuality in a positive or negative way. They quite simply forgot—or failed to know—the queer history on which they were commenting.
The popular television show Queer Eye for The Straight Guy (debut 2003), for example, was considered by many to be influential in finally opening up homosexuality to a wider public audience. I recall at the time of its popularity how so many of my undergraduate students would cite this show as paving the way for gay liberation. Decades of struggles had somehow disappeared with the emergence of this one television show. But whether the men in this show offered ‘positive representations’ of homosexuality was questioned. Some argued that the flamboyant personalities of the more dominant characters in fact reinforced the stereotype that all gay men are effeminate.
The character of Jack in the series Will and Grace has been analysed in the same way. Will might be considered the ‘normal’ gay man, but Jack seems to represent the stereotypical gay man. Does this mean that one is positive and the other is negative? No. It means that Will is able to be seen as a positive representation of homosexuality in a culture where being ‘normal’ is good.
Jon Inman’s character Mr Humphries in the 1970s British sitcom Are You Being Served? was one of the first ongoing representations of homosexuality on television. But would such a character be considered as funny or as acceptable today within a gay culture where the ‘straight-acting’ gay man is preferred over the ‘queen’?
Queer as Folk (2000-2005)—another seminal contemporary gay television show—had a bit of everything. There were drugs, gay parenting, promiscuity, love, underage sex, lesbians, queens and even a few straights. The UK version was so popular that it was later turned into an American show that lasted for five seasons. But this show was also seen by some as further alienating gay people from the mainstream because of its daring approach.
Equally, representations of transpeople have been the subject of much debate. Some argue that the characters in Tootsie (1982) and TransAmerica (2005) made issues of gender and sexuality more visible and to a much wider audience. Others see these films as creating humour or fantasy when the real lives of transpeople often include intense medical scrutiny and daily discrimination.
Such debates can never define a character as a positive or negative representation of homosexuality or transgender. But the representations—and the responses to them—can give us some idea about how we understand homosexuality and transgender today, and how we might expect non-heterosexuals to behave.
So, is Bamboozled a homophobic or transphobic film? This is quite simply the wrong question to ask. And it’s impossible to answer definitively—no matter how much we rant in our social networks. Instead, we could discuss the representations of sexuality as they appeared in this film with reference to cultural and historical contexts.
We could consider how this film plays around with the importance of sexual identity in early 21st century cultures. We could consider, as Hardie has insisted we should, how the film responds to the media’s treatment of homosexuality as something to snigger at. We could explore how the film draws on an emerging discourse of trans-rights or trans-acceptance. We might think about how this media text differs in its representation of sexuality from similar representations we might find in reality shows like Big Brother. We might even raise questions about who has the right to speak for homosexuals and transpeople.
But fighting to destroy or save the reputation of a single film or its director is just tedious. It’s a playground battle which indicates to me that the fighters—both the accusers and the defenders—are not interested in locating media texts in culture. They’re only interested on being seen to be on the side of the ‘good.’
Gideon Obarzanek and Sydney Dance Company dancers in rehearsal
photo Peter Grieg
Gideon Obarzanek and Sydney Dance Company dancers in rehearsal
The Sydney Dance Company’s forthcoming triple bill, Interplay, features new works by artistic director Rafael Bonachela, former Frankfurt Ballet soloist and collaborator with William Forsythe, Jacopo Godani (interview RT101) and ex-Chunky Move artistic director Gideon Obarzanek. Obarzanek’s piece is L-Chaim!, the Jewish toast ‘to life,’ involving the entire company of dancers and one actor who will be mostly present as a voice, but will eventually appear on stage with the dancers. When I spoke to Obarzanek he was about to go into rehearsals with the company with two weeks already under his belt from last year.
“The general gist of L-Chaim! is that the dancers are attempting to make a contemporary dance piece. ‘The god of theatre’ or ‘Wizard of Oz’ (played by the actor) interrupts, interrogating them about themselves and what they are doing—the meaning of the dance. And in doing so, this outsider inadvertently undermines it making it difficult for the dancers to perform.
“On the surface, the outsider seems quite nice, but is a bit nasty and depressed. In the end the outsider is asked to descend and dance in what becomes a big musical number, celebrating aspects of life that are difficult to intellectualise, things that you have to participate in to fully understand.”
Obarzanek’s interrogation of the modus operandi of contemporary dance has manifest in many forms throughout his career, from surveying audiences about what they like and making a work ‘to order’ (Australia’s Most Wanted, 2003), to an autobiographical piece that questions the choreographer-dancer relationship and possible measures of its successful outcomes (Faker, 2010). Obarzanek adds Two-Faced Bastard (2008, which I haven’t seen). He points out that this theme in his work has perhaps become stronger since leaving the directorship of Chunky Move in 2012 and making fewer dance works. He states point blank that “the premise is: trying to find meaning in a large, abstract contemporary dance work and in doing so, destroying it.”
The central voice of dissent in the work is clearly a proxy for Obarzanek, but then, as he points out, so too is it for dancers who defend the art form. The work should ideally pull in two directions, testing the accepted foundations of the art form to the point of complete destruction, while asserting the legitimacy and potency of dance that counters the critique with a convincing dance piece. A tricky thing to pull off. For starters, can a work assert the integrity of an artistic discipline by employing others (particularly theatre) to achieve this?
And the task is even trickier in the context of the Sydney Dance Company which has survived a very challenging environment for dance in Australia for 45 years by generally adhering to expectations around dance, such as a certain level of vigorous physicality and a strong relationship with music. Obarzanek suggests that the company owes its longevity to the successful harnessing of audiences from ballet and other traditional performance sectors. This is not a company that brings innovative forms of dance to the international scene, but has satisfied a local audience for a long time. As Obarzanek states, “Context is everything,” and a work such as L-Chaim! might well appear subversive in this environment.
“The beautiful and talented virtuosic dancers of the company are forced in this work to explain themselves—their actions and interests—and it’s quite strange to hear them talk. They have made very clear decisions about who they want to dance with and why, and I’m asking them to think about why they made these choices, what’s interesting about it for them and for the audience. For the most part, the dancers are interested in doing new things. But there might be a fine line between what’s interesting and what’s annoying for them in this process!”
So a question to contemplate as Sydney Dance Company celebrates 45 years might be—what is interesting for Australian dance audiences? Obarzanek is hopeful that the Australian Ballet, which has also commissioned him recently, will take the lead from the Paris Opera Ballet and Netherlands National Ballet and other important ballet companies internationally who commission radical choreographers such as Jerome Bel and Jan Fabre. Obarzanek says, “in Australia the ballet company is much more conservative in that sense.” And he also has high hopes that Rafael Bonachela “continues to program diverse works over time which will influence audience expectations.”
Obarzanek is working with dramaturg David Woods (who runs UK company Ridiculousness and works with Back To Back in Australia) who will perform as ‘the voice’ in Melbourne and Canberra with Zoe Coombs Marr of the post performance group taking his place in the premiere season in Sydney. Obarzanek has a keen eye for quality artistic collaborators and the importance of a perspective from outside the art form is clear in this case.
But he insists that dance is central. “When I was with Chunky Move I was drifting outside of dance because I was questioning whether dance was my thing. For me right now, my interest in dance is in returning very much to a physical world. I’ve recently returned from Las Vegas working with six showgirls in the middle of the night in a fancy club. It was dance—“5, 6, 7, 8”—and I really liked it. It was challenging, satisfying and exciting. And in this piece, as much as we are having a go at dance and prodding the dancers, they still triumph. You have to admire the strength in them and what they do, which is really wonderful. As much as I challenge dance, it turns around and stands up for itself enough for me to want to do it again. I never beat it. It’s never defeated. At least, not by me anyway.”
Sydney Dance Company, Interplay, choreography by Rafael Bonachela, Jacopo Godani, Gideon Obarzanek, Sydney Theatre, 15 March-5 April; Canberra Theatre Centre, 10–12 April: Southbank Theatre, Melbourne, 30 April-10 May
See our full profile on Gideon Obarzanek at realtimedance
Daniel Riley, Beau Dean Riley Smith, Macq, Dance Clan 3, Bangarra
photo Greg Barrett
Daniel Riley, Beau Dean Riley Smith, Macq, Dance Clan 3, Bangarra
Dance Clan 3, presented in the Bangarra studio at Pier 4, featured works by four female artists from the company: Tara Gower’s Nala, Jasmin Sheppard’s Macq, Deborah Brown’s Dive and Yolande Brown’s Imprint. Artistic Director Stephen Page has to be commended for continuing to support the choreographic development of Bangarra artists—and female at that—in a way unsurpassed by their counterpart Sydney Dance Company but perhaps matched nationally by Gideon Obarzanek, Lucy Guerin and Kate Champion.
Comprising three dance works (and the film Dive) it seems odd that the casts in Dance Clan 3 are all so large. While it’s true that there are few opportunities to work this way in Australian dance productions due to funding restrictions, I enjoyed the smaller group work within the pieces more. Managing a large ensemble is a very specific skill that artists have little opportunity to develop here and is a big ask of first-time choreographers. Artists like Bonachela, Tankard and Healey have gained experience through a commitment to this particular format and ample opportunities.
Dance theatre is the preferred mode at Bangarra, which Page is upfront about, referring in his program notes to the company’s “theatrical story-telling.” These women have stories to tell about the trauma of genocide, the fight for land rights and the struggles involved in negotiating the social and financial changes brought about by “imposed progress” (Gower). So much of the content of these works is historical as opposed to the work of peers such as Vicki van Hout who deal very much with the contemporary Indigenous condition.
This produced some resemblances that startled me: a scene in Sheppard’s Macq represents the power struggle between the Indigenous population and Governor Macquarie (with a voice-over quoting from the latter’s diary), one dancer representing an Indigenous man and the other the Governor, stalking each other on and around a long table. The resonance with German choreographer Kurt Joos’ Green Table of 1932—an anti-war statement made just prior to Hitler’s rise to power—was there in Sheppard’s archetypes and political content writ large.
Gower’s Nala was full of characters and relationships, past bleeding into present and traditional crossing over with the modern. Beginning with a scene in a cinema and covering much territory, this piece seemed to focus more on choreographic novelty as opposed to important stories.
The movement language never strayed too far from Stephen Page’s: the signature floor work (pulling forward on the belly with strong arms with legs curling up and behind with flexed feet); jumps that hit the air in striking shapes; and partner work that entwined and unravelled with slippery precision. Composing large groups of dancers through patterning and breaking into smaller group work was also evident.
This made me wonder about the breadth of exposure these accomplished choreographers are experiencing. Given the long history of Africanist fusions with French contemporary dance and the multiplicity of traditional forms now blending with each other as well as with Western modalities, the storytelling tradition so important to these artists could be fed by such intercultural innovations at the level of movement invention. The qualities and techniques of the various indigenous traditions are so distinct and sophisticated, there will be many new ways to draw out what the forms have to offer contemporary dance.
This potential was in evidence in some innovations when the demands of storytelling allowed space for the movement to become the medium. Gower’s Nala threaded some traditional yet playful percussive sequences successfully in her narrative, and Sheppard’s section Bodies in the Trees (referring to Macquarie’s directive to hang the Indigenous dead in the trees as a warning to others) featured a moving cascade of male bodies passed down on a simple set of steps.
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Bangarra Dance Theatre, Clan 3, artistic director Stephen Page, choreographers Deborah Brown, Yolande Brown, Tara Gower, Jasmin Sheppard, music David Page, set design Jacob Nash, costumes Jennifer Irwin, lighting Matt Cox, Bangarra Studio Theatre, Pier 4, Sydney, 20 Nov-1 Dec, 2013
RealTime issue #119 Feb-March 2014 pg. 26
Jianna Georgiou, Salt, Restless Dance Theatre
photo Chris Herzfeld
Jianna Georgiou, Salt, Restless Dance Theatre
There is a moment of great theatrical and human boldness in this performance. After performer Dana Nance (who has shortened arms) tells of the first three years of her life spent in an orphanage, the persecution and exclusion of this situation is dramatised. Then she ‘dreams’ of being able to command others with arm and hand gestures.
In the enactment of this dream long arms appear, provided by another performer standing behind her. She clearly longs for these arms, not so as to be the same as others, but to have the physical ability to determine the presence of others in a way taken for granted by most of us. When she ‘wakes’ she finds a different way of insisting on her needs—using her voice.
Salt speaks of self-worth. Director Rob Tannion has assembled scenes, movement, sound and visual design elements in response to the notion of “being worth your salt” (see interview RT118, p8). We see before us the decaying wall of a cottage (salt damage), the door stuck open with a drift of salt piled high next to it. Salt is taken from the pile and weighed. The performers let it run through their fingers. They balance each other on a see-saw. A slatted bed frame comforts and imprisons. There is discussion of salt’s uses, pleasures and value. Each performer, except one, is the star of a dramatised story from their own life where they were left feeling worthless. We see their fight to regain self-worth.
This piece marks a departure from the movement and large ensemble-based work of this mixed ability company. Often in the past a visual image and/or dominant sound design has unified the action on stage. The establishment of a performance troupe has shifted the style of the company’s work. With this move into the terrain of dramatic and autobiographical performance, my focus as an audience member was on the individual performers as people and actors, rather than on the physical metaphors being created or on the unifying image.
In this show, Felicity Doolette (with no visible disability) most often played the oppressor in the dramatised action and didn’t star in her own story of loss of self-worth. She also played the ‘hostess’ at times. Back to Back has established an interesting politics of performance and disability by having company members with visibly different abilities play both persecutor and persecuted. It unsettles the viewing contract and any simple construction of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and of what we have, or don’t have, in common with anyone. Salt presented a wonderful challenge for the performers which they met with great verve, but it did re-create that old divide between performer and audience, of them and us.
Salt has a fecund starting point and a lot of ideas are presented but a clear, strong line hasn’t been taken with the material to realise the promise and power of the starting idea (the link between salt and worth) and to engage us in new ways with the question of self-worth. I look forward to the piece developing.
Restless Dance, Salt, director Rob Tannion, performers Felicity Doolette, Jianna Georgiou, Lorcan Hopper, Dana Nance, design Meg Wilson, design adviser Gaelle Mellis, lighting Geoff Cobham, sound DJ Trip, Odeon Theatre, Adelaide, 17-25 Jan
To turn the body inside out and reveal its systems one by one is the purpose of the science of anatomy. AORTA, the final work of 2013 by choreographer Stephanie Lake, also seeks to show the world beneath our skin, but as kinetic poetry. It is an ambitious vision, deepening the truth that dance reflects to us a felt sense of the body, and integrating design elements to produce a multi-layered work of abstract grace.
In a string of changing atmospheres, AORTA sees dancers Josh Mu, James Pham and James Batchelor swell and ripple like blood in the veins, vibrate like nerves, mutter and quibble in a cerebral section, then leap and scream with a primal pulse, and sometimes unite their hands and fingers to produce a thatch of wriggling villi. Their ensemble work depicts complex relationships and often microscopic (here magnified) chain reactions: sometimes soft and cascading, sometimes mechanical and angular. This vocabulary seems drawn from both experience and scientific knowledge: the spasm of a muscle we recognise at a glance, but the firing of a neural pathway is quite another thing, far more elusive.
Lake’s intricate visual poetry is a strength and her dancers are in consummate form to deliver a steady and mesmerising stream of it (Phan in particular undulating without a sound, like quicksilver escaping). Enriching this is a soundscape from Robin Fox of mostly electronic but sometimes organic textures (with trickling water and slippery, ultrasonic moments). Integral, too, is projection design by Rhian Hinkley: on three backdrop screens laser-like images wax and wane—sizzling asterisks and streaming particles, fractals that spread themselves like bonded molecules, interiors opened out.
Conjuring that which is beyond our sight, and yet resides within our deepest biology, AORTA is a complex and beautiful work that, like all living things, amounts to more than the sum of its interconnected parts.
Eleanor Bauer, Big Girls do Big Things
photo AIan Douglas
Eleanor Bauer, Big Girls do Big Things
From beneath the skin to behind the façade, Big Girls do Big Things is concerned with sub-surface complexities of another kind. This solo work toured by Belgian-based, US dancer/choreographer Eleanor Bauer, is a performance about the demands of performance, and the identity crisis that comes with chameleonic prowess. While this might suggest solipsism in less practised hands, Bauer has the sharp-edged presence and humour to make it both soulful and entertaining.
For a start, her props are perfect—an alluring scene set before she enters. An A-frame ladder towers in the corner and a gargantuan polar bear costume is splayed on the floor, all bathed in Arctic light as strains of Sibelius hint at sublime horizons. The polar bear is an icon—solitary, rare, remote, a figure we imagine vanishing into fields of ice. But it is also large. Larger than life. And much larger than Eleanor Bauer, as we discover when she climbs inside it and begins to dance. The costume gathers, collapses and comically contorts as she manipulates it from within, flashing its cavernous eyes and dragging its empty limbs. How to inhabit this prodigious persona?
A string of solutions is tried: the baggy bear becomes a rapper with a swagger and a menacing growl. Then the suit is shed and draped like a stole as Bauer strikes out in a high-heeled catwalk prance. But these efforts are frosted with comical dissatisfaction, and the problem remains one of scale. So she heads for the ladder to make more mischief with metaphor. As she ascends it, her rendition of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” advances by ever-stretching octaves and corresponding ladder steps from a low contralto toward an agonised squeak at the pinnacle. “It’s lonely at the top,” she quips.
Teetering there, she delivers a vertiginous speech, a kaleidoscope of pop-cultural stereotypes spiralling in oversized satire and discarded one by one. It is all wildly entertaining; but more than that, what makes all this work, apart from its fun and elegant metaphors, is Bauer’s ability to exploit the tension of her own presence on stage. Through cracks in the dazzling surface we glimpse an existential plight, revealed in long, edgy pauses and genuine moments of risk.
And so, when Bauer inverts and discards the polar bear at last, what remains is one performer in black, exposed and with nowhere to hide. She takes refuge in her discipline then, performing a barefoot ballet to Sibelius with simple devotion and rigour, transcending the fuss of excess in the end. Then she retreats to the curtains behind her, to be swallowed up by their blackness once again.
Chunky Move, AORTA, choreographer Stephanie Lake, score, lighting Robin Fox, costumes Shio Otani, projection design Rhian Hinkley, Chunky Move Studios, Melbourne, 22-30 Nov; Big Girls do Big Things, Eleanor Bauer, Dancehouse, Melbourne, 29-30 Nov, 2013
Patrice Smith’s Verge narrows focus to a corner space where three ‘concentrated states’ strike the walls of consciousness, tipping decision towards vertigo or, when read in succession, leading the viewer on a trajectory of disintegrating control through teetering balance, withdrawal and aggressive release.
Patrice Smith, in her relatively short career, has exhibited a fascination with transforming psychological behaviour into impressionistic embodied emotion. She could be seen to follow in the lineage of Mary Wigman’s Hexentanz or Martha Graham’s Lamentations, except that the interconnecting metaphorical threads arise less from direct expressionistic foundations than from the erratic patterning of neural pathways. Her compositional eye enables movement to build on abstracted bodily gestures and rhythms, physicalising hesitation, anxiety and violence without recourse to causal or narrative through-lines. Action rests and races on the verge of unwanted emergence.
However, the individuality of Smith’s three collaborating performers, Bernadette Lewis, Jacqui Claus and Laura Boynes, does imbue or mark distinctive ‘stories’ onto the work’s devolution, as does the unacknowledged presence of the shuddering and implacable corner of aluminium walls, the fourth player in this interrogation of consciousness. These act as visual barriers barring relief from the dissembling sense of control and, more expressively, as the sounding board against which the accumulating rage of three bodies is thrown. The silvered presence sends reverberations into and out of the dancers’ pressurised momentum.
Lewis initiates the states with a nonchalant downward focus on her feet and toes, playing with equilibrium. The action is concentrated and skilled in spite of its pedestrian slant. In the background, her fellow performers shift in response to a normal gravitational pull. Calmness pervades, edged only with an indistinct threat of imbalance. As Lewis’ experimentation gathers speed and complexity, Claus moves to the foreground, her figure replete with tension. With an awkward throw back of her head, which is repeated too often to be comfortable, Claus conveys an impression of retraction, of a stifled fear to move forward in the slow, long lines so suited to her extended physicality. Then the taut atmosphere snaps as Boynes runs at Claus and hits the wall. A fast-paced dissolution of balance, somewhere between violence and madness, whirls and smashes in the corner. Though remote from a romantic frame, Boynes’ distraught and unstoppable running and stumbling through the nether realms of consciousness reminded me of Giselle. Maybe dance is the domain of madness, that place where sanity is breached? The three, cornered women of Verge disappear over the edge of chaos into darkness.
Ahilan Ratnamohan, SDS1
photo Ashley de Prazer
Ahilan Ratnamohan, SDS1
Soccer, the particular football at the centre of attention in Ahilan Ratnamohan’s SDS1, has long been praised for the grace, élan and dexterity of its players criss-crossing stadiums and dancing after the sacred ball. The game’s tasks and stratagems resemble choreography and no-one would dare deny that the trappings of football are not infused with potent gracefulness and elaborate drama.
A rudimentary single blue light illuminates a lone figure in the stadium, transposed in performance mode as a studio space with a single row of spectators seated around the perimeters. Two feet clad in orange trainers manoeuvre a matching orange ball, half-pivoting on its spherical colour. Though somewhat obscure in the low light, there is a suggestion that we are to be carried into a familiar yet divergent tale of a man and his extension into the world through a ball. Structurally, however, the work fractures into a stop-start pattern. Ratnamohan leaves the ball aside, box-dances in taut weight-shifts with his shoes emitting shrieking skids for no discernible reason.
Under an additional orange glow, the still darkened figure preoccupies himself with a random selection of soccer clichés: taping his ankles and binding his body, trotting the floor in circles of post-game adulation and pushing effort towards a forced condition of exhaustion. He coerces the audience to pass his body like a trophy around the field and inexplicably, for me, ‘head-butts’ with one of them. Near the performance’s end, full lights offer a clear image of the man, now returning to a gentler dance with the ball that resonates more with my memories of watching soccer. Handing over his sweaty shirt signals the moment of salutation to the crowd and his exit with his bag of balls.
In spite of my hesitations and disappointment with the lack of finesse and verve of a footballer’s consummate physicality, the non-contemporary dance audience seemed content with the patchwork of accustomed images of sport in performance and disinclined to demand any further meaning, beauty or drama of this man’s dance with a ball.
Verge, choreographer Patrice Smith, music, lighting Joe Lui, design Fiona Bruce, Lauren Ross, The Blue Room, 12-30 Nov; SDS1, choreographer and performer Ahilan Ratnamohan, PICA Performance Space, Perth, 27-30 Nov, 2013
If dancing is a state of unstable flux in which there is no fixed identity, then reflections on the experience of dancing through documentary film are one way to narrativise the feeling of what happens in/through dancing, as well as to capture dancers’ moving identities in the environments they inhabit.
In Virtuosi we hear/see eight exceptional performers—Mark Baldwin, Craig Bary, Lisa Densem, Raewyn Hill, Sarah-Jayne Howard, Jeremy Nelson, Ross McCormack and Claire O’Neil—articulate their responses to Sue Healey’s provocation, “Why Dance?” If, as she explains, “the core of the movement experience is movement and being moved,” how do environment, familial habitat and childhood memories of place inform the movers we become? Virtuosi is a feature length documentary that addresses this question through a series of portraits of New Zealand-born dancers and choreographers who left home to pursue their vocations around the world.
Each of the artists has achieved extraordinary things in the world of contemporary dance. Through this film audiences are invited to witness their corporeal signatures up close, and contemplate the fluidity of their moving identities as these have been forged in the precarious conditions of a globalised contemporary dance field.
The eight portraits in Virtuosi follow an itinerary that journeys to Berlin, London, New York, Sydney, Melbourne and Townsville. In tracking between places and subjects, interiors and exteriors, each becomes a form of poetic enquiry into the motivations, genealogies, influences and places that shape a dancer’s identity.
Sarah-Jayne Howard, Virtuosi, Sue Healey
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Economic hardship (Sarah-Jayne Howard), displacement and alienation (Raewyn Hill), loneliness (Ross McCormack) and the risks of failure (Claire O-Neil) form a complex backstory to these portraits, one which can undeniably be extrapolated to other dancers from other countries. But what coheres and sticks is the poignancy of leaving a relatively small country for one that is much bigger or at least more populous in the pursuit of that elusive quality of dancing. These dancers and choreographers have built careers and fulfilled vocations in cities with populations the size of New Zealand. Underlining their determination, passion, drive and verve is a perception of necessity.
Getting on a plane and travelling to the other side of the world, or across the Tasman, can feel like fulfilling a familiar destiny (overseas remains de rigueur for many young people in New Zealand) but it can also be a way to feel connected to global trends in dance. I was struck by Mark Baldwin’s account of discovering Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage in a book in the library of the University of Auckland’s Elam Art School. Cunningham never visited New Zealand and his influence is surprisingly negligible given its impact elsewhere. It is as though New Zealand’s isolation left the resident dance community out of certain waves of postmodern influence which have proved so radical to shifts in dance practice in London, Melbourne, New York, Brussels and Berlin. Yet without drawing on the cliché of moving from hicksville to metropolis as yet another species of export commodity (Sarah-Jayne Howard does mention New Zealanders “leaping like lambs”), the film subtly exposes the complex cultural, physical and historical nuances of New Zealand’s bi-culturalism and how these ‘elsewheres’ benefit from the exchange.
Sources
Jeremy Nelson’s choreographic tactic of drawing influence from both the Scottish reels of his childhood and Maori whakairo carving patterns, suggests how a particularly New Zealand view of the world might conversely influence what happens in New York and Copenhagen through a feeling for the forms we inherit in a country that is founded on a treaty that recognises two different world views, M?ori and Pakeha. Similarly Mark Baldwin’s “strange memories” of Polynesian dancers in disciplined rows being like the rows of chorus dancers in a ballet speak of how imaginations nurtured in the Pacific might look back at the world, with its imperial legacies, differently.
The interview with Mark Baldwin, director of Rambert Dance Company, is further distinguished by his emphasis on the influence of composers and visual artists on his practice. New Zealand composers Gareth Farr and Jack Body are mentioned as feeding his imagination and we see Baldwin singing the notes of a score he is reading as he accounts for the importance of musical structures in what he makes. The film itself evidences the strength of what is for many choreographers a primary relationship with music in being framed by the jazz piano compositions of ex-pat New Zealander, Mike Nock.
Shot in a studio theatre environment, Ross McCormack’s mercurial dancing shape-shifts from haka to tui to hysterical male to bogan. His fluid metamorphoses signal a state of being that is unsettled, perturbed even, but peculiarly of this place of the long white cloud. I was reminded of the volatility of the physical geography we inhabit, the frequency of ruptures, quake swarms and geysers, how New Zealand in its relatively young geography breeds a geo-aesthetics that is spatially generous, bold, excessive even.
This is the beauty of Sue Healey’s film: if New Zealand artists are forced to become cultural exiles by virtue of their country’s remoteness and smallness, they also go on to contribute to the globalised dance and performance community in significant ways, bringing the smell of grass, the shape of the koru, the sounding of the tui, the energy of a volatile landscape with them.
Different ways of being
Lisa Densem seems to offer a counterpoint to this with her quiet, idiosyncratic, unexpected moves, her plays with reflections through windows and the mirroring of distant hands. Speaking English with a German accent, her adaptation to Berlin and a Germanic perspective is noted in how she perceives the New Zealand way of life on her return: “I had become really German.” In considering what it is to be virtuosic, the central thematic of the film, she proposes the virtuosity of improvisation, as that place where one is awake to the present and can try out different ways of being. Escaping the perceived excesses of a dominant hyperphysical style of modernist New Zealand choreography in the 90s she found in the European dance milieu a less desperate, less adrenalin-fuelled way of being a dancer. She was drawn to a quiet listening, a simpler physicality not driven by the emotions. Densem is but one example of how the film’s octagonal geometry opens multiple perspectives on New Zealand identity as it is reconfigured, translated and cross-contaminated in the adaptive process of moving elsewhere.
Place and the attuned body
The film also works through the portraiture of place as Healey homes in on the habitats, domestic and urban, of her subjects. Through tactile encounters with exteriors, the film reorders the dancers’ cities as places for sensorial interaction with surfaces, civic memorials, fountains, alleyways and perilous edges (fire escapes and beaches). Their homes, some provisional, others their workplaces, become scenographic sites for improvised play with memento mori, souvenirs and personal objects of attachment.
Healey gives these dance artists a voice and a place in the world that speaks to a globally mobilised milieu but that is also sensitive to the micro movements and attunements of bodies that respond to and challenge the environments they inhabit while carrying traces, resonances of the places they have left. The sense of the torso and spine, the use of gravity and weight and its corollary weightlessness; the corporeal signature of each dancer/choreographer can be read as a particular instantiation of their history and physical background. For M?ori the past is never behind, it is before us and we step into it. I had the sense of these performers carrying embodied memories in their bones like touchstones.
Returning to the source
Virtuosi is a film about Sue Healey refracted through eight portraits of dancers of her generation who, like her, left their home country. Cultural exile was a feature of Healey’s generation of dance artists, myself included. More recently this traffic has slowed due to the costs of long-haul travel (economically and environmentally) as well as a growth in opportunities to study dance and work in the dance field in Aotearoa (there are at least five contemporary dance companies in New Zealand including the newly launched New Zealand Dance Company). Among Virtuosi’s subjects there is much evidence of an increasing trend of return journeys: Craig Bary performed in the NZDC inaugural season; Bary and Sarah-Jayne Howard were in Douglas Wright’s Rapt; Claire O’Neil is now living in Auckland and studying for her Masters in Dance Studies; Lisa Densem recently choreographed We have been there with Footnote Dance Company in Wellington; Jeremy Nelson choreographed Six for Touch Compass in Auckland; and Raewyn Hill’s Mass was recently performed by Dancenorth in Wellington’s Downstage Theatre. All are healthy indicators of a flow of knowledge and exchange between New Zealand’s diasporic dance community and the local dance ecology.
If, as Laurence Louppe explains it, contemporary dance involves “becoming a body that is not given in advance,” Virtuosi is a film that goes some way towards understanding what that becoming involves, the pleasures and the perils of its reach and the poetry of its articulation.
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Virtuosi, director, Sue Healey, photography Jud Overton, composer Mike Nock, 76 minutes, 2013
See Sue Healey’s full profile as part of realtimedance
Bjorn Stewart, Jack Charles, Matthew Cooper, Coranderrk, Belvoir & ILBIJERRI Theatre Company
photo Patrick Boland
Bjorn Stewart, Jack Charles, Matthew Cooper, Coranderrk, Belvoir & ILBIJERRI Theatre Company
Documentary theatre—commonly a re-imagining of an era or event using documents, verbatim material and images, an unfolding story and an ensemble of performers often playing multiple roles—has long settled into a standard model. Facticity is its essence while its creativity resides in the dynamics of its editing and the magic of its staging. In the hands of version 1.0 at their best the deployment of contemporary performance strategies has deviated from conventional narrative, making facts, especially in the political sphere, insistently ‘strange’ and all the more evidently lies.
In Belvoir and ILBIJERRI’s Coranderrk and the Queensland Theatre Company and Sydney Festival’s Black Diggers the standard model is still fully operational and, from time to time, emotionally and politically very effective. However, our familiarity with the approach has a distancing effect, and not the one that Brecht had in mind. As a friend said, “Black Diggers was weighed down by its form,” but added, “though it got to me in the end.”
Sydney Theatre Company and the Australian Defence Force’s The Long Way Home, despite eschewing the verbatim theatre model, still inclines to it structurally, least convincingly in a series of short scenes parodying military promotional talks without connection to the work’s theme. But writer Daniel Keene has drawn on his soldier performers’ (and others’) words and lives to provide naturalistic dialogue, more complex characters and longer scenes than one might expect from documentary theatre. Although still short, these at least break the predictable rhythms of the standard model.
In Coranderrk, writer Andrea James has added passages of her own writing to an edited version of the original script by she wrote with Giordano Nanni—which drew directly on the Minutes of Evidence of the 1881 Coranderrk Inquiry. Tom Wright has created dialogue for Black Diggers rich with words once written or recalled: “I thought you fellows could see in the dark?” “I grew up in bloody Erskineville!” These sit side by side with the set pieces you’d expect in this kind of work, like the recurrent speaking aloud of letters—being written or received—and other vignette variations that work cumulatively but are often not long enough to provide emotional depth or complexity.
These three productions have important stories to tell. Two of these have been pretty much forgotten. Coranderrk was an Aboriginal community in 19th century Victoria that for a period was commercially and culturally successful. It was undone by white envy, prejudice and ultimately legislation, Black Diggers portrays the plight of Aboriginal soldiers who fought for the Empire in World War I, side by side with whites, but afterwards once again faced discrimination. The Long Way Home stages the post-traumatic suffering of Australian soldiers who have served in East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan. We hear about this from time to time in the media but here we have a substantial representation of it.
Coranderrk and Black Diggers stick pretty much to the time frame they’re exploring. Connections with our own time are not made, except implicitly—that white Australians need to know these stories in order to understand their relationship with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. With its costuming, Black Diggers is produced as historical re-creation, 1880-1930s with an ominous set that looks like an enormous World War II bunker, on the walls of which the cast repeatedly paint, and paint over and over, names and battlefield locations.
Coranderrk is likewise limited to its period but has discarded the period costuming of its original production for casual modern dress and added occasional contemporary gestures and references, making it wittier and more assertive. But neither production made a palpable connection with Aboriginal Australia now. Should they, or would that make their didactism too overt?
Catch-up theatre
The ABC television series Redfern Now is firmly focused on the present lives of urban Aboriginals, but such imaginings are not often seen on stage. In RealBlak (RealTime 111,], guest editor and Melbourne-based playwright Jane Harrison interviewed David Milroy, a writer and director with Yirra Yaakin Theatre in Perth, who spoke of the limitations of “catch up theatre” from the 70s—because “we’d been written out of history”—and the autobiographical solo performances (of the 1990s-2000s). “They are very valid,” said Milroy, “but, personally, I don’t do non-fiction shows any more. I am more interested in the craft of fiction…Aboriginal culture isn’t exclusively about ‘catch-up theatre’—having to educate audiences about our history and what really went on in this country. We have so much more to give.”
On seeing Coranderrk—which I enjoyed particularly for those moments when it broke from documentary theatre’s didacticism and opened up to imaginative possibilities—I couldn’t help but feel that an opportunity had been missed, even if had to be a point bluntly made, about the current recolonisation of Aboriginal Australia.
With the advent of The Intervention, ever-expanding mining exploration, limited Indigenous land rights in respect to minerals (outside the Northern Territory) and state policies of “mainstreaming” and “normalisation” (one size individualism and globalisation fits all), it has been argued that the invasion of 1788 has never stopped. “The now dominant view is that Aboriginal culture is the problem…A mythical framework has been developed to offset the naturalised fact of inequality” (Jon Altman & Sean Kerins, People on Country, Vital Landscapes, Vital Futures, The Federation Press, 2012). What happened in Coranderrk is happening still. Land across Australia that was once deemed worthless is now regarded as invaluable for mining, gas, biodiversity and carbon offset.
Coranderrk, Belvoir & ILBIJERRI Theatre Company
photo Patrick Boland
Coranderrk, Belvoir & ILBIJERRI Theatre Company
Ilbijerri and Belvoir, Coranderrk
Its tone at once documentary and poetic, this re-worked production of 2013’s Coranderrk is now textually and visually more tightly focused on and around the Aboriginal elder William Barak. Jack Charles, as Barak, impressively attired in a full-length possum fur cape lined with a cloth reproduction of one of the great man’s paintings (which maintained his people’s culture and were collected by Melbournians) brings the requisite gravitas to his role, quietly intoning the new writing by Andrea James created for this version of Coranderrk, for example:
“With a slow and ancient song, Barak asks permission. His wiry brown fingers clasp the stone axe handle. He chips away at the river bank and slowly and surely…Chip chip chip…the ochre gives way. That piece of beauty now rests in his hand. The soft yellow hue. He spits on the ochre and smears it on his forehead. His song almost finished now, he puts the stone axe back in his belt. Wraps the ochre in his handkerchief and places it into his deep and warm pocket.”
The simple, barely there set comprises a large screen and light stands evoking now and then a Victorian photographic studio and consequently a sense of the era in which Barak lived and of his community. The cast poses in front of projected images of the people whose lives they are portraying—harvesting hops, attired for cricket and school as well as in suits and frocks. It’s an eerily effective device.
The text is taken from a document of the period, delivered by the performers with conversational ease, moments of anger, pain and humour (taking selfies). It reveals white prejudices about race and caste, anxiety over Aboriginal literacy (“then natives will read newspapers!”) and envy of 1st prize agricultural show awards won by Coranderrk and, not least, the growing value of the farming property. The community, made up of members from various clans had claimed and been granted 2,300 acres of land in 1863, subsequently expanding to 4,850 acres and doing very good business selling wheat, vegetables and hops to Melbourne. Coranderrk (a word for the Christmas Bush of the region) at its peak in the 1870s had a schoolhouse, butcher and bakery.
The production briskly tells the story of productive black-white collaboration thwarted by their second manager, a Reverend Strickland under whom residents suffered food, blanket and fuel shortages, received no pay and were subject to whippings. The Coranderrk community fought back vigorously, wrote to journalists, parliamentarians and supporters (like the influential Mrs Ann Bon, who later commissioned a statue of Barak), went on strike and in the winter of 1886, led by Barak and another elder, walked 60km to Melbourne with a petition. As a result, a Royal Commission was held in 1877 and a Parliamentary Inquiry in 1881, in which Aboriginals unprecedentedly appeared as witnesses, but never after. The Aboriginal Protection Board was compelled to properly maintain the reserve.
Tragically, this largely forgotten victory was short-lived. In 1886 the Aboriginal Protection Board, with an Act of Parliament, banished anyone considered half-caste under the age of 35 from Coranderrk, thus radically reducing the work force, diminishing the reserve’s productivity and guaranteeing its decline, as well as breaking up families—portrayed in one of the show’s most bitter and poignant moments.
Black Diggers, Queensland Theatre Company
photo Branco Gaica
Black Diggers, Queensland Theatre Company
QTC and Sydney Festival, Black Diggers
Written by Tom Wright, researched by David Williams and directed by Wesley Enoch, Black Diggers reveals a great deal about the Aboriginal men who enlisted in the Australian army during WWI despite white objections. They served with courage, dignity and camaraderie, felt deeply the separation from family and country and, unlike their white counterparts, were not rewarded plots of land let alone pensions and the vote. The racism that mostly disappeared on the battlefield returned after the war.
Black Diggers features a strong all-male cast in a range of recurring roles depicting a variety of personalities. Its historical scope covers some 50 years, commencing with the full blood/half caste issue critically encountered in Coranderrk and concluding just pre-WWII with Aboriginal soldiers clinging to memories of the war (“Curse war…bless it”) before worse times ensued (depression, alcoholism, poverty); one says of a piece of shell casing: “I held that bit of truth in my hand.” The sense of betrayal by white society is wrenching: no reward or compensation, racist slurs, RSL rejection and jobs lost. At the end the Aboriginal Advancement League is doing its important work in the late 30s while the broken body of a former soldier lies to the side of the stage. Finally an ANZAC Day ceremony (which one Aboriginal soldier has described as the loneliest day of the year) is staged with an actual soldier playing The Last Post. I was astonished that a ceremony representing a major abuse of trust, one that for so long rejected acknowledgement of Aboriginal “defence of our country,” should complete the work, and without an ounce of irony. Perhaps it honoured the soldiers who, despite profound disappointment and bitterness, still stood by their loyalty to Australia. (The play also makes clear that white soldiers for their reward were often given land with poor soil guaranteeing failure, if pushing Aboriginals further off their own land.)
In this kind of work, building a sustained performance is a challenge. Hunter Page-Lochard perhaps fares best playing a young boy whose eagerness to go to war despite his mother’s pleas gets him there. The psychological damage returns him home mute. There are numerous dark moments: what to do for the soul of a dead mate—cut some hair to take home: “That’ll have to do. It’s our fate.” A German doctor working at the science of race measures the physiognomy of a captured Aboriginal soldier. The power of Black Diggers builds through the cumulative power of such scenes and the horrors and occasional joys they entail. We come away certainly better informed and sometimes moved. As with Coranderrk I wondered about now, about Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islanders in our armed forces which are so often beset with bullying and sexism. And racism?
Craig Hancock and Tim Loch, The Long Way Home, Sydney Theatre Company and the Australian Defence Force
photo Lisa Tomasetti
Craig Hancock and Tim Loch, The Long Way Home, Sydney Theatre Company and the Australian Defence Force
STC and ADF: The Long Way Home
The Long Way Home’s evocation of life on the front line, the violence and mind-warping tedium is frightening—explosions, intense flashes of light, picking up the wounded, vast discomforting starry desert nights. The growing emotional gap between wives and their depressed soldier husbands threatens violence and suicide. Past and present—childhood, enlistment, war and aftermath—are woven into portraits of suffering. These are actual soldiers playing variations on themselves with the support of a team of professional actors. Often what is revealed in a scene or on film with them addressing us directly confirms what we learn of them from their program notes, the damage done to minds and bodies, the isolation of recuperation, feelings of guilt or uselessness: “I am my job.” These filmed statements, interpolated into the production once we have become familiar with the faces, lend an air of documentary veracity to the close-to-reality fictions played out between the men on stage.
The stage is constantly populated with heavily armed soldiers on the stage horizon or moving about in cautious lines, always on duty, whether in actuality or as ghosts in the mind of one soldier (Tim Loch) whom they haunt while he seeks refuge in obsessively cleaning his home. A key figure in the play he eventually has the courage to address (“I know you blokes are not fuckin’ real”) and banish them, not that they ever quite disappear, seeks help and is finally reconciled with his wife. He’s the most detailed of the characters. Another soldier (Craig Hancock), even more remote from his wife and suicidal, becomes the first’s friend, easing the way to repaired selves and marriages for both. I did feel that having two not dissimilar couples (although the acting is finely discrete) weakened the play, but it did suggest collective hope. Nor does the play go near the kind of therapy the soldiers receive—it’s just a relief that they’re motivated to get some. The wives’ roles are slender and again similar. I assume there are those who take stronger roles in the recoveries of their partners. Female soldiers (Emma Palmer and Sarah Webster) performed strongly in the production and suffered major wounds and taxing recoveries but we don’t learn just how they made it through. Of course not every story can be told in detail, but the play’s neat symmetries and resolution feel a little too comfortable.
Countering the pervasive sense of on-going trauma there’s plenty of humour—stoic, ironic, bitter. James Whitney’s stumbling attempts to become a stand-up comedian at the Black Dog let loose his guilt about a war-time incident. Another, in a very funny, ‘fuck!’ filled monologue in the Afghanistan desert at night worries that boredom is destroying his mind; another (James Duncan) hallucinates a refrigerator standing in the distance: “Where would they plug it in?” His understanding mate (a perpetually droll Will Bailey) leads him away.
Other comic scenes, like the afore-mentioned public liaison talks, don’t fit the work and should be removed. The enlistment scenes, which reveal three out of four applicants for the army are drongos, are also taxing even if we follow them into the army. Not all the scenes with the children, well acted as they are, connect either, especially a late and too laboured one centred on a dead crow. Of course, as the production is already making its way around the country, revision is unlikely but a 90 minute interval free production would make more sense, and impact.
Very effectively framing the play is a wounded, brain-damaged man whose doctor coldly offers little hope. His muttered words—from the opening of The Odyssey about not being able to save one’s companions—appear line by line on the screen but are not understood by his friends. They are completed at the play’s end when the soldier (Gary Wilson) leaves his bed, walks downstage and speaks to us confidently if with difficulty. The Long Way Home is a fine collaboration between the STC, ADF, Daniel Keene and director Stephen Rayne, one that speaks of a great need, of the kind brought to our attention by Black Diggers, to understand and look after those of whom we ask so much. Of the soldier performers, Tim Loch, Craig Hancock and James Whitney gave performances that suggested total belief in what they were doing on a large stage before a huge audience, with skill and courage. They have given much again, for their comrades.
Belvoir and ILBIJERRI Theatre Company, Coranderrk, writers Andrea James, Giordano Nanni, concept Giordano Nanni, director Isaac Drandic, Belvoir Upstairs, 7 Dec, 2013-3 Jan 2014; Sydney Festival, Black Diggers, writer Tom Wright, director Wesley Enoch, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, Jan 18-26; Sydney Theatre Company and the Australian Defence Force, The Long Way Home, writer Daniel Keene, director Stephen Rayne
Julian Louis recalls attending a lecture at NIDA delivered by Lyndon Terracini, founder of Northern Rivers Performing Arts (NORPA). “He was talking about creating theatre around the culture of place. I remember writing in my notebook, ‘I should call this guy for a job one day.’” Several years later Louis, by then a successful freelance theatre artist, was invited to apply not for just any job, but Terracini’s, taking over as NORPA’s artistic director in 2007.
Based in Lismore, NORPA has a three-fold role in the region. It presents an annual curated program of touring shows; creates its own work through the Generator program and is also the venue manager of Lismore City Hall. Previously NORPA was in charge of both the current venue, an old dance hall, and the Star Court Theatre, an old cinema, but under Louis’ reign the decision was made to concentrate on one space. In 2012 the owners of Lismore City Hall, the Lismore City Council, secured a $5m development grant from Regional Development Australia, enabling significant renovations to the city hall which re-opened as a shiny, new full equipped 496-seat theatre in 2013, just in time to celebrate NORPA’s 20th birthday.
Passing through
In terms of its curated program, NORPA tries to strike a balance between what’s described on their website as “risky productions” and “sure-fire entertainment.” Highlights from the 2014 program, just announced, include Lisa Wilson’s ambitious dance piece Lake (see RT111); Force Majeure/Belvoir’s production Food directed by Kate Champion and its writer Steve Rodgers (RT109) and Bell Shakespeare’s Henry 4 . For kids there’s Wulamanayumi and the Seven Pemanui by Blak Lines, directed by Eamon Flack—a Tiwi take on Snow White—and the season finishes off with a family favourite, Circus Oz.
Home grown
Through its Generator program NORPA aims to present one full production a year as part of its main season, with multiple projects at various stages of development bubbling away on the back burner. With the move to the new venue Louis says he felt the need to “amp up” new work creation to ensure balance: “there’s a demand and a real hunger for it.”
Louis steers the Generator program towards site-specificity and multidisciplinarity with projects that connect to the region through a combination of ideas and the people creating it. The program has completed four quite diverse works to date including a circus performance in a private home, Open House; a multimedia dance work, Beautiful Bones; and a community-based project with homeless people, culminating in an evening of installation and performance at the local soup kitchen in the Winsome Hotel. There’s also been the sell-out hit Railway Wonderland, directed by Louis, a site-specific performance on the disused railway station exploring stories of the town (see RT109, p29). Louis will continue to develop this work in 2014 with a view to touring.
Also in 2014 the second-stage development of a collaboration between Louis and the Animal Farm Collective (creators of Food Chain, see RT101) will take place. Cock Fight is a dance theatre work looking at male identity, aging and power play in an office environment. Commencing development in 2014 is Bundjalung Nghari: The Gathering, a collaboration between Louis and leading Indigenous artists, most of whom originally hail from the Northern Rivers: David Page, Frances Rings, Rhoda Roberts, Djon Mundine and Melissa Lucashenko. Louis says, “I’m interested in the multi-artform process so that we don’t end up having a dominant style in the work. There are so many stories [from the area] it’s overwhelming, [but] I think the right story will present itself.”
Phoebe Rose, Lydian Dunbar, My Radio Heart,
video still Sam James, photo Donatella Parisini
Phoebe Rose, Lydian Dunbar, My Radio Heart,
My Radio Heart
The major Generator presentation for 2014 is My Radio Heart, a collaboration with the local music group Tralala Blip which includes performers with and without disabilities. Louis approached Rosie Dennis to direct the show after seeing her large-scale community live art project Minto Live (2011, RT101) for Campbelltown Arts Centre. In My Radio Heart the audience will be immersed in the audiovisual world of the performers—a virtual reality game space in which the characters are on a quest to find something that’s missing—love, family, connection. The performance is driven by the band’s beautiful brand of sweet pop electronica.
Via email I asked Rosie Dennis about the process: “We’ve worked predominantly with local artists to realise a reasonably experimental work, in the sense that there is no real narrative, which leaves the ‘art’ open to interpretation. I started working on My Radio Heart when I was a freelance artist. Part-way through the development I was appointed Artistic Director of Urban Theatre Projects. While it hasn’t changed our creative process, it has meant that we’re able to do a season in Bankstown immediately following the Lismore premiere. I think this is a really interesting model, making/creating/devising work (whatever you want to call it) in the regions and then ‘exporting’ it to the city, or in our case Western Sydney. So often it’s the reverse, work made in our major capitals and toured to the regions.”
My Radio Heart, in both its development model, community engagement, and its performance style exemplifies Julian Louis’ mission for NORPA: to produce shows “that [are] about activating the whole space and putting people in close proximity to the story. I think that’s really the hallmark of the works that are most successful for us.”
NORPA & Urban Theatre Projects: My Radio Heart, directed by Rosie Dennis, featuring Tralala Blip, 27-29 March, Lismore City Hall; 9-12 April, Bankstown Arts Centre; www.norpa.org.au
Australian Bureau of Worthiness, I Met Hindley Street
courtesy the artists
Australian Bureau of Worthiness, I Met Hindley Street
Two works appearing in Adelaide late last year sought to expose the city’s underbelly. They could not have been more contrasting—one coolly investigative in form and poor in aesthetic, the other richly fictive and classically ambitious—but both productions gave Adelaide audiences a rare opportunity to witness their home city reflected uncompromisingly back at them through scenarios peopled with outsiders, fringe dwellers and the morally ambiguous.
Australian Bureau of Worthiness, I Met Hindley Street
Like Sydney’s King’s Cross, or Melbourne’s St Kilda, Hindley Street is a uniquely evocative name among locals, redolent of nocturnal squalor, urban decay and the thriving, undeclared markets of the night: sex and drugs. No other Adelaide street provokes as much fear or scorn or giddiness. It is these feelings which the Australian Bureau of Worthiness tap into in the latest in their now long-running I Met… series of localised explorations, each one an ad hoc fusion of performance, documentary and visual art.
The series’ Hindley Street iteration saw the ABW team–performer Emma Beech, visual artist James Dodd and writer and director Tessa Leong—hole up for three weeks in a disused Bank Street basement, just off of Hindley Street and formerly home to an Indian restaurant. Some of the gaudy, amateurish murals are still there, faded flashes of the Taj Mahal’s white domes still visible amid the crumbling brickwork. The space is warehouse-like, the industrial atmosphere heightened by the sound of water or sewerage flowing through pipes overhead. In places, the walls are bedecked with sketches, handwritten notes, interview transcripts, business cards: the result of the ABW team’s interactions with the tourists, locals, shopkeepers, barflies, blue- and white-collar workers who populate the street above.
There is a traverse stage in the centre of the space. As the performance begins, an overall-clad Dodd pushes a broom languorously around the stage as though clearing away the vomit and the cigarette butts and, maybe, blood from the night before. Beech has described her core practice as “stand-up documentary” and it is hard not to think of this description as she takes to the stage, microphone and cue cards in hand. There are no punch lines, but Beech embodies her interview subjects fully and sympathetically in the manner of the best stage comics, and we laugh anyway because this is not a comedy predicated on jokes but on unsettling the familiar; the ubiquitous toupéed hustler in the ice-cream white suit, the Crazy Horse Revue’s unavoidable neon plumage. Dodd’s unpolished sketches, thrown onto the walls of the space by an old-fashioned overhead projector, achieve a similar effect, although their uncontextualised appearances occasionally jar.
Immersive and freewheeling, but constrained by Tessa Leong’s focused direction, I Met Hindley Street discreetly succeeds in making one of Adelaide’s most familiar—and contested—public spaces strange again.
Maggie Stone, State Theatre Company of South Australia
photo Matt Nettheim
Maggie Stone, State Theatre Company of South Australia
STCSA, Maggie Stone
Caleb Lewis’ new play, a commission by the State Theatre Company of South Australia, also asks its audience to think about the city in which it is taking place. According to Lewis the play emerged partly out of the playwright’s frustration with a seeming monopoly of new Australian plays set in the nation’s bigger cities: Brisbane and Perth, Melbourne and Sydney. As with Peter Goldsworthy’s Adelaide-set short stories, however, it is easy to mistake the thrill of recognition (a suburb or street name, or that of a local personality or business) for a bona fide investigation of place. Maggie Stone could, in fact, be set in any Australian city. Lewis’ themes are universal in scope: debt, both monetary and social; the nature of altruism; local and global charity and its consequences; immigration and multiculturalism; morality and self-interest.
Maggie Stone (Kris McQuade) is a loans officer. In the kind of politically incorrect parlance of which she would approve, the rough, tough Stone has been “left on the shelf.” She is not young anymore, lives alone and eats, smokes and drinks too much. She is permanently lugubrious, but some days are worse than others, and on one such day a recent immigrant from Sudan, Prosper Deng (Shedrick Yarkpai), walks into her office seeking a loan for a car so he can work. Stone turns him down and An Inspector Calls-like whirlpool of social irresponsibility drags Deng’s family deeply into debt, and into the clutches of improbably-named loan shark Leo Hermes (Mark Saturno).
Events unfold rapidly in short scenes—some elusively wordless, others seemingly redundant—giving the play a televisual feel which is at odds with the Aristotelian embellishments Lewis introduces much too late. Hermes’ gruesome slaying (by knife—Lewis’ ‘Chekhov’s gun’) is presumably intended to provide the requisite catharsis, but the mark is missed because the bloodletting—and Hermes’ final, overwrought speech in which he thunders the old fatalist cliché about blood having to be paid for with blood—feels under-supported by the play’s brevity and narrow dramatic focus.
Director Geordie Brookman can’t quite reconcile these differences in scale, although all of the cast—notwithstanding occasional slides into broadness—give strongly persuasive performances. Particularly impressive are McQuade, agreeably disagreeable in a part written for her, and Yarkpai who, in his first professional production, brings gravity and a keen sense of youth’s desolating ennui respectively to his roles as Prosper and Prosper’s son Benny. Victoria Lamb’s set, a labyrinth of oversized latticework and spookily reflective panels, allows for unfussy transitions between the many scenes. Its indeterminate depths and multiple sliding doors quietly gesture towards the inscrutable physical and corporate architectures of the West’s financial institutions.
If Maggie Stone is this system’s human analogue within Lewis’ play—hard, obdurate and accountable to no one—then she also shares its fallibility. Lewis mentions in his program note that greed brought about the Global Financial Crisis and it is greed which has literally hardened Maggie Stone’s heart to the point of ruin. It is, of course, the playwright’s job to expose the human within the inhuman, and Stone is ultimately shown to be the sentimentalist we like to imagine all sociopaths are underneath. Maggie Stone is not as trite as that sounds, but the play’s uneven form, and its imprecise connections between the bigger stories of the global movements of capital and people, diminishes its impact.
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Australian Bureau of Worthiness, I Met Hindley Street, devisers, performers Emma Beech, Tessa Leong, James Dodd, 27 Bank Street, Adelaide, 22-6 Nov; State Theatre Company of South Australia, Maggie Stone, writer Caleb Lewis, director Geordie Brookman, Space Theatre, Adelaide, 8-30 Nov, 2013.
In an open class demonstration, 20 performers walk carefully crossing lines of string stretched across the floor. Their bare toes curl and reach to find the string’s edge, bodies sway and wobble as core muscles try to hold gravity’s centre, eyes are either closed or zoned into a faraway elsewhere.
Each body presences itself differently. Indeed, the line of string, almost hard to discern for the spectator, seems to draw out of these balancing bodies those other lines of tension that Bodyweather practice so delicately focalises between sensation and imagination, perception and performance. For masters of the form, I imagine, a simple tread of this line might enable a complete retreat from oneself from view. What kind of force would be left, then, walking the line?
The demonstration follows a five-day Image Dance Think Tank masterclass led by Tess de Quincey and Frank van de Ven, hosted by the Sydney University Department of Performance Studies for both seasoned and new Bodyweather practitioners as well as for academic participant-observers. The culmination of a week’s introspection and investigation results in a rich public elaboration of some areas of critical urgency for the practice as well as for broader threads of enquiry into the role of performance in tuning us into those environments we more ordinarily omit from perceptual view. The program’s initiator, Chair of the Department Amanda Card, builds upon an earlier exchange between De Quincey Co and the Department held in 2001. It is in this way well served by the latter’s commitment to methods of rehearsal observation, which swiftly emerge here to unpick what surrounds the studied internality that Bodyweather practice so forcefully presents.
De Quincey and van de Ven explain that the legacy of their training with Min Tanaka’s MAI-JUKU performance group in Japan (1984-1991) involves the remarkable storage, in body-memory (as well as in journal descriptions) of original image-sets. Conceived as either ‘omnicentral’ (divided) or ‘full body’ images, participants have been revisiting images such as “Moonshadow” or “Penis Arms” 36 years later in a practice that, as Lecturer in Architecture Andrew Macklin comments, is fundamentally “translated” in that it is both “culturally other” and “locally specific.” The question of the body as translator is underpinned by Bodyweather imaging practices as well as by the Muscle and Bone training regimes that support it, which are understood by de Quincey as “agronomous:” the body is a mechanism for tilling the earth. This minimalist aesthetic, which seems to open out an interpretive practice for the body on an almost cellular level, Macklin explains, is deeply resonant of the Shibui approach to textural subtlety that informs a Japanese sensibility of beauty.
Walking the line, participants are asked to pass through a smoke curtain. How might a body make itself disappear in the smoke it imagines/images around it? For one participant, walking through the curtain requires a softening of the body into the sensory image of smoke. Mechanically, this means an extension of the body into space such that it will “stop wobbling” at the same time as “boundaries of the flesh [must] become smoke-like” so as to “touch” the imagined curtain edge. Questions of the image-sensing and image-making capacities of the body become central to the dialogue that follows. De Quincey explains that the logic of a body as an environment enables us to conceive it as being in compositional dialogue with another environment (indeed, the principle here might be that we are all always in such processes of dialogue even as they are disguised from bodily view). The goal here is to avoid mimetic representation and to instead feel the sensation of an image which may be received via any modal viewpoint. “It is the image doing me, not the other way around” observes one participant.
Provocations then arise around the ideokinetic frisson that happens when a body meets an image, as in the performance-enhancing techniques of athlete training (Stuart Grant), or what the spectator is exactly given to sense when watching a process of performing-sensing-feeling (Justine Shih Pearson). This last question interestingly resonates against the final phase of the showing, which involves performers Linda Luke and Peter Fraser in solos and de Quincey and van de Ven in a duo, performing pre-choreographed works. Here, the viewing lens shifts from rehearsal observation to performance analysis, and the terms of reference become more oblique. For one thing, the comical duo between de Quincey and van de Ven seems to move much of what was discussed of the body’s image-sensorium into a kind of lazzi around becoming dogs (de Quincey’s two pets were present for the duration of the workshop). The ethos of becoming environments, one which, as Macklin noted, promised to offer an everyday aesthetics of sensitivity and empathy, hovered strangely at the edge of the ever-strong demand for meaning-making in the theatre.
Image Dance Think Tank, An international collaboration between De Quincey Co and the Department of Performance Studies, Sydney University, led by Tess de Quincey and Frank van de Ven, Rex Cramphorn Studio, University of Sydney 4-9 Nov, 2013
Image Note: Directed by Tess de Quincey, Inner Garden was a performance installation in the grounds of Callan Park, Sydney, 6-8 Feb, 2014. Drawing on the site’s history as a former psychiatric asylum, 10 performers and visual artists created works embedded in this charged environment, exploring a number of what de Quincey calls “obsessions.” Performed at dusk to the otherworldly music of Kraig Grady, Robbie Avenaim and Jim Denley, it was a rich, multilayered and magical experience.
Gail Priest
Bryony Geeves, Sara Pensalfini, She’s Not Performing
photo Carlie Devine
Bryony Geeves, Sara Pensalfini, She’s Not Performing
Supported by the Tasmanian Theatre Company’s Associate Artists’ Program, this is the second incarnation of Alison Mann’s She’s Not Performing. The first was an acclaimed 2010 production at La Mama in Melbourne, directed by Kelly Somes. I understand that production made more of the visual symbolism of the piece. This apparently simpler production is directed by Belinda Bradley, with the playwright producing, and brings together a strong ensemble.
Margarite (Sara Pensalfini) is a troubled woman with a younger lover, Iain (Campbell McKenzie). A chance encounter pushes her from a precarious stability into turmoil. On a night out, watching a stripper performing she notices that the young woman bears a striking physical similarity to herself. She begins to suspect that this girl, Annie (Bryony Geeves), is the daughter she gave up for adoption as a teenager. Iain struggles to understand her sudden emotional intensity so Margarite turns to an old friend, Hamish (Joe Clements), for support. But that relationship too becomes fraught as Margarite’s obsession grows. Once the idea that she may be Annie’s mother has taken root, it consumes her—her confused sexual identity, the traumas of the past and her tendencies towards self-harm converging.
The play’s strength is its unusual, skilful blend of realism and stylised forms of expression. The dialogue is often naturalistic and restrained, but a scene can transform into a dream, such as Margarite recalling the pain of childbirth, with the fully-grown Annie emerging from between her legs. Another scene transforms Annie the stripper into Margarite the schoolgirl in Hamish’s mind, so that we are in his world for a time, seeing Margarite’s situation through his eyes. Such shifts in perspective and tone are difficult to achieve in theatre and not often attempted. There’s a sense of controlled experimentation to She’s Not Performing, a blending of cinematic and genre influences which helps to elevate it to something more than an ‘issues’ play or a melodrama.
Crucially, there are electric moments of revelation and catharsis—particularly during the climactic scene in which Margarite finally faces the depth of her emotions and uses them as a weapon against the bewildered Iain. Sara Pensalfini’s performance here lifts off to become something extraordinary, raw and teetering on madness yet utterly grounded in human experience.
There’s no doubt this production suffers from budget constraints. Margarite’s oppressive, hallucinatory world warrants a bolder, more cohesive aesthetic, particularly in regard to costuming. But aspects of director Belinda Bradley’s staging hit the mark, making the best out of limited resources. The childbirth scene uses simple physical techniques to evoke a familiar yet unexpected scenario that highlights the story’s most compelling aspect, its sense of transgression. Margarite has watched her ‘daughter’ perform semi-naked, after all, and Annie herself is possibly developing an attraction for Margarite, regarding her as a client at first but then as a friend. Where is this all going?
There’s an understated remark from Joe Orton’s Loot that I’m fond of: “It’s a Freudian nightmare.” So too is She’s Not Performing, not only in the sense that it touches on taboos and dark sexuality, but in the even more complex sense of its attempt to define the nature of parenthood. What makes a woman a mother? Who, or what, is she without the child she’s borne? Is the loss of a daughter a pain that can never be redeemed, or the loss of a mother? Perhaps something fundamental is forever damaged when that bond is betrayed.
Orton’s characters put up a front of respectability but betray themselves with unconsciously hilarious and shocking utterances. She’s Not Performing, although coming from a different theatrical tradition, shares that kind of ruthless clarity. Margarite is more in the vein of Blanche Dubois or Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf?—all too aware of the danger she finds herself in, and of the knowledge that her connection with ‘normalcy’ is hanging by a thread. At any moment she might be compelled to sever that thread completely and fly off into some frightening new place from which there is no return. In Margarite’s case it’s the legacy of past injustices, which somehow she must live with. This is a powerful work that exposes audiences to difficult truths.
She’s Not Performing, writer Alison Mann, director Belinda Bradley, Theatre Royal Backspace, Hobart, 27-29 Nov, 2013
In Douglas Kahn’s Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, the premise is holistic. Signals are everywhere, running through us, the earth, the sky, bouncing off the ionosphere, and the best way to tune into them is by listening. By the time you’ve finished reading this book you feel like you’ve tapped into a magnificent universal circuit. It’s almost religious. 
