Scene from the ELISION performance of The Navigator (2008)
Since playing their first concerts at the Footscray Community Arts Centre in 1986, ELISION have become one of Australia’s most successful new music exports. Their close relationships with composers working at the edge of instrumental virtuosity and notational complexity in the UK and the US have redefined the possible in music. In 2016 ELISION return to Australia to celebrate their 30th anniversary with, among other events, concerts at the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music and an exhibition at the Melbourne’s RMIT Gallery. Matthew Lorenzon speaks with ELISION’s Artistic Director Daryl Buckley about the ensemble’s past, present and now sprawling influence around the globe.
LOOKING BACK
Your forthcoming exhibition at the RMIT Gallery reflects 30 years of groundbreaking work by ELISION, much of which has taken place overseas. Audiences who have only come to new music in the past decade (including millennials like myself) might not even realise that ELISION is an Australian ensemble. Can you fill us in on how ELISION started out and grew?
Essentially we began as a group of Melbourne students from the Victorian College of the Arts. Our intention was to engage with and perform a diverse range of Australian contemporary music; it was a thrill to just have contact with living composers. There was a great deal of instrumental activity in Melbourne, but even so the circumstances of the day were limited. It all happened in a fishbowl. There might have been one significant critic—Clive O’Connell writing for The Age—and one or two bureaucrats relevant to [our seeking] support for funding.
Did you have an audience?
Audiences for new music were amazing and I believe they have since declined in Melbourne. They were fuelled by the combined pedagogical activities at La Trobe, the VCA and to some extent Melbourne University. We were seriously annoyed if we got anything less than 150-200 people to a show.
How did you broaden the conversation to include, say, overseas artists?
One instance of internationalisation occurred when I discovered that we could make submissions to the Italian Ministry of Culture and secure funding to engage Italian composers and conductors. We brought conductor Sandro Gorli out, from Milan to Melbourne, over 11 times in the following decade. He became like a father to the ensemble with his warmth, intellectual engagement and care, and fully developed the group’s latent potential with his detailed attention to the scores we were playing. I really doubt that ELISION would have become what it did without his input.
By the early 90s I was also writing applications to the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Canadian Arts Council and the Holst Foundation in the UK to either commission composers like Richard Barrett or Alistair MacDonald, or sponsor recording releases. With Richard we were able to access not only his publisher, who publicised our work in Europe, but British arts funding and philanthropy for a CD that came out on the boutique Dutch label etcetera. We sold over 3,000 copies of it and received rave reviews around Europe. Our first European concerts, in Milan 1991, secured a massive audience. The internationalisation of the ensemble that began in those early years fuelled our later capacity to shift base and survive.
Eventually you all found yourselves overseas on a more permanent basis. What were the key elements encouraging that shift?
Well, in the early ‘90s a prodigious talent called Carl Rosman joined the ensemble. Liza [Lim, composer and Buckley’s partner] and I would make absolutely all of the scores and information we possessed available to him and he would just strip the house of it and consume it all. Given the size of the Australian scene, it was evident that such a talent needed to be overseas. I made opportunities for him through ELISION, such as a joint commission with Ensemble Modern of a new work by Liza, Alchemical Wedding.
Also, I was younger! I had no hesitation in arguing with a funding agency. A massive spat with Arts Victoria in 1994 led to us being defunded by the State. We moved to Sydney for a year, then Brisbane. Each shift was like a rebirth for the ensemble. There were new contacts and new possibilities.
Queensland began an important phase in the ensemble’s story. In our Queensland period we engaged heavily with site-specific performance installation work. We worked with visual artists such as Domenico DeClario, Heri Dono, Judy Watson, Judith Wright, Justine Cooper, Araya Radjarmrearnsook and curator Rhana Devenport of the Queensland Art Gallery. We had some amazing projects at the Third Asia Pacific Triennial, which were documented in RealTime.
Yes, RealTime hit the scene in 1994.
The Queensland adventures also saw a huge amount of beautiful documentation in RealTime. Keith Gallasch came up for Dark Matter (read his response), another insanely large performance installation piece with CIKADA ensemble from Norway, Per Inge Bjørlo, and Richard Barrett, all at the Brisbane Powerhouse. RealTime covered the Adelaide Festival in 2000—Robyn Archer’s amazing Adelaide Festival where we were able to do Liza’s Yuè Ling Jié on an eight-sided barge on the River Torrens.
Daryl Buckley in ELISION performance of The Navigator (2008)
SHIFTING GROUND
So when and why did you definitively shift your operations overseas? Was there an exodus of players at some point?
No, very early on we fielded players from all over Australia, and then the world. In those days it was expensive to fly people around, but we refused to be defined by a single geographical location. While our impact in Europe was felt from the early 90s, we only moved our fundamental base of operations in 2007 and 2008. First of all, Liza had the opportunity to live in Berlin for a couple of years through the DAAD [German Academic Exchange Service], so we pursued that. That coincided, disappointingly, with a deterioration in our relationship with Arts Queensland, also resulting in the eventual loss of our Australia Council funding.
So you had one foot in Europe and one in Australia. When the rug was pulled out from under one foot you just shifted your weight. This sounds like a common narrative in the Australian arts scene.
Perhaps unusual for an ensemble though! Our joint decision was, however disappointing and disruptive those attitudes coming out of Arts Queensland and the Australia Council were, they were not going to be the epitaph for the ensemble. It was only when I left the country for six or seven years that I could really see the ensemble’s work from the outside. You might know that something has had an impact when you’re inside the bottle looking out, but to be outside looking back in is a completely different experience.
You’re back in Australia for your 30th anniversary celebrations, how does it feel to be back in the bottle?
The impact of the Global Financial Crisis in Europe and Australia is a huge point of difference. The rolling impact it has had within the social fabric and the arts in the UK has been devastating and has underwritten Brexit and a stack of other events. The wealth, opulence and opportunities present here—this is not to say that the arts are funded well here, or funded enough—means that a lot of practitioners aren’t propelled to make the most of the opportunities available. Australia is fearful for and protective of its wealth and that projects onto how it deals with refugees and immigration policy as much as it does on how art is made. Although there are exceptions, it is happily unambitious.
REFLECTING AND EXHIBITING
You are now reflecting upon your own artistic production by curating an exhibition at RMIT. What kind of a story are you going to tell?
The initial idea for the exhibition came from Associate Professor Lawrence Harvey, who was my PhD supervisor at the time. We’ve been involved with both the RMIT gallery, who commissioned work from ELISION through the RMIT Art Committee, and with SIAL Sound Studios as a long-term collaborator. That provides a natural framework for an exhibition, a story of this group of people who had a certain arts adventure that had consequences and a meaning, not just for us, but for many other practitioners and audiences elsewhere in the world, and how we have become part of other people’s practices. For instance, in the US you’re now seeing an increasing presence of what I term the “American choreographic school,” including composers Aaron Cassidy and Timothy McCormack. Particularly through the recording legacy and performance advocacy of Tristram Williams and Benjamin Marks, a new generation of players in the US is really rocking and rolling with it.
Are you surprised at some of the things that you have found trawling through the ensemble’s archive?
Yes! A lot of it is in the National Library of Australia in Canberra. There’s a massive amount of stuff there that I deposited when we left Queensland in 2008. It’s all catalogued and organised into years, correspondence with particular composers, and particular projects. There are some great objects there. When we first performed Yuè Ling Jié on a barge on the Torrens River the conductor’s score fell into the water. Simon Hewett did some wild gesture and the whole stand went into the river with the sconce—which was attached to a socket—still lit. So when Simon reached into the river to rescue the score we had looks of frozen horror on our faces. The river was potentially live.
And live in multiple ways. How did the score look when he pulled it out?
The soprano Deborah Kayser and the rest of the singers took turns drying it out with hair dryers in a nearby rowing club. I put the score into the archive with a note about the incident. The NLA’s Curator of Music Robyn Holmes recently told me that a PhD candidate has been researching the collection and came across the score, which had gone all mouldy.
You inadvertently preserved the biodiversity of the Torrens River in this petri-dish of a score.
There are a lot of memories in there!
ELISION performing The Navigator (2008)
TURNING 30 AT BIFEM
As one of Australia’s most distinguished contemporary music ensembles, you are performing this year in Australia’s youngest new music festival, the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music. You are comprehensively represented through three concerts.
I really have to thank David Chisholm for including us. David stands squarely outside some of my earlier remarks. He is indefatigably himself and is pursuing his vision in his own rugged, inimitable way. He’s not appreciated enough here. As you gain a broader perspective it’s often the people who stand for something, who have a vision that’s not being shaped by or filtered through compromising to meet funding constraints, the people who are chasing down their vision, they’re the people that you really value in the music community.
There are three strands to our program at BIFEM. There’s our collaboration with ANAM [Australian National Academy of Music] which sees the first performance of Enno Poppe’s massive orchestral work Speicher in Australia as well as Liza Lim’s Machine for Contacting the Dead. Machine… is a beautiful work dedicated to the women, the courtesans, musicians and entertainers at the court of a Chinese Marquis who were interred in his tomb alongside weaponry, jewellery and other material belongings.
The second strand is purely ELISION, which includes a new work by Liza. She hasn’t written a new work for us since The Navigator (directed by Barrie Kosky, 2008; read the RT review) which was about eight years ago now. The soloist is the amazing sheng player Wu Wei. It is called How Forests Think and was completed in the world’s largest remaining rainforest—the Amazon. How this unusual circumstance came about would take another 10 minutes of interview. Lastly, Aaron Cassidy has written a work for the two giants of trumpet—ELISION’s Tristram Williams and Peter Evans. It’s massive.
I look forward to hearing it soon! Thanks for speaking with me.
Jane Sheldon, James Wannan, Brenton Spiteri, Sydney Chamber Opera, Notes from Underground, 2016
Reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is hell. Sydney Chamber Opera’s adaptation tempers the agony with musical and theatrical beauty, easier to take than a lone reader’s dark imaginings, but still painful and, in its final image, more nightmarish than the novel.
Librettist Pierce Wilcox’s layering of the second part of the short novel—a series of incidents which the 24-year-old Aboveground Man precipitates—over the first, in which his 40-year-old self, Underground Man, monologues, makes lucid sense of the ramblings of the embittered, retired public servant. Everything in the opera—score, direction, design—services this dynamic. The stage is a wide, white platform, backed by a soft, semi-transparent curtain-cum-screen of equivalent width and colour; together they provide a canvas for transformative hues from dreamy pastels to nightmarish primaries. This is the world of the Aboveground Man. Below and forward of the stage is the lounge chair of Underground Man, from which he addresses us directly, as an imagined audience of his hated peers. Aboveground Man is a tenor (Brenton Spiteri), his older self a baritone (Simon Lobelson), each with his own musical language.
Aboveground Man lives out the past, neurotically strategising and ineffectually avenging himself for an imagined slight by a police officer (a crazy musical march culminating in a mere nudge); forcing himself on former school mates whom he detests but feels a desperate need to impress, with embarrassing consequences; and, drunk and humiliated, sleeping with a prostitute, Liza. The sallow, alcohol-consuming Underground Man observes, comments and philosophises, caustic, righteous but rattled by what plays out before him.
Jane Sheldon, Simon Lobelson, Sydney Chamber Opera, Notes from Underground, 2016
The opera’s binarism is transcended as worlds merge. Underground Man cannot help but enter Aboveground Man’s terrain, to observe his younger self close-up, to mock, to warn, to predict, to regret. There are moments when the two voices eerily become one, early on with the desperate “I am” motif they share with the opera’s other principal character, Liza, and at its end in an anguished battling of selves. Liza is the novel’s and the opera’s reality check. Underground Man finds solace for his self-hatred, inertia and paranoia in anti-Enlightenment posturing, priding himself on his cruelty to others and applauding human irrationality. Aboveground Man, failing to feel empathy or love, decries German Romanticism, but finds himself helplessly acting out compassion for the prostitute, warning her, in near sadistic detail, of an early death, advising she marry and offering her his address. His lyrical account of how he would treat a daughter reveals the fantasist in full flight. Despite her flatly spoken objection, “You sound just like a book,” (the opera’s only unsung words) Liza takes up his invitation.
Spiteri and Lobelson bring home with force the bewilderment recalled and newly felt when she arrives, full of hope, expressing her desire to live, asserting “I am,” at Aboveground Man’s apartment, spinning him into tantrum, attraction, physical aggression and then rejection while Underground Man declares “only do evil.” Aboveground Man forces money on Liza and she leaves. In one of the opera’s most exquisitely painful passages, he rationalises furiously that he has purified her with the knowledge of her condition. Finding she’s left behind the money, Aboveground Man falls into doubt and regret and Underground Man admits having lived “under life”. Both men collapse into protracted annihilation in which the “I am” of one is asserted against the other’s and the notion of “we” rejected in a physical struggle in the Underground, music fading, words stuttering and breaking up. Darkness.
Brenton Spiteri, Sydney Chamber Opera, Notes from Underground, 2016
It’s a far more emphatic ending than Dostoevsky’s which is open-ended and still resolutely anti-idealist, his character’s failure “to live” an illustration of a pervasive social and intellectual malaise. That character in the novel even posits that, given his experiences, “perhaps I turn out to be more alive than you, [the reader].” The opera’s hyperbolic obliteration of the character (and the concomitant elimination of the novelist’s voice) suggests the out and out failure of the kind of thinking that drives Notes from Underground, rendering it just nihilist thinking. It feels like a moral conclusion apt for our own times, that a failure of empathy will, in the end, destroy us. This is amplified by the powerful onstage embodiment of Dostoevsky’s “anti-hero” (his term) in palpable conflict with himself. Aboveground Man’s pain, frustration, anger and near psychosis render him a complex figure whose self-destruction engenders pathos as we and Underground Man witness the appalling inevitability of his unravelling.
Jack Symonds’ score captures Dostoevsky’s voice. A writer has described the book’s style as progressing “in his ejaculatory, stop-and-start way.” The composition is aptly turbulent, frequently aggressive (Claire Edwardes’ percussion is pivotal), heavily punctuated (intensely dramatising the sung dialogue) and full of comment—a wah-wahing trumpet and a hee-hawing trombone are self-deprecatingly and defensively deployed (Underground Man: “I am not funny!”). Vibes ‘dance’ playfully to a nasty recollection. Strings whine with complaint. The two male characters fall in and out of sync, apart in their discrete worlds or sitting side by side, lingering simultaneously on long anxious notes or mutually and pathetically revelling in “ecstasy” after vengefully nudging the offending policeman.
Spiteri—youthful and nervously vigorous—and Lobelson—sombre, slow-moving, threatening—sing the demanding score with passion and conviction, deftly realising their characters’ wild mood swings. Jane Sheldon seems an earthier Liza than Dostoevsky’s idealistic innocent, in part because librettist and composer have interpolated an episode from a poem mentioned by the novelist which does not appear in the book. Aboveground Man now first encounters a vampish Liza singing of love, accompanied by an exotic viola d’amore player (James Wannan). Although deliciously sung and staged, the song pre-empts subsequent episodes and has Liza giving voice to unlikely sentiments (“for you I am a symbol”) and images (of herself as “a vision wrapped in skin”), while some lines suggest a previous encounter. The episode, however effective in itself, is essentially a literary conceit that muddies the progression of the opera’s narrative, otherwise so judiciously realised. Perhaps it was incorporated to suggest a more complex, contemporary and knowing Liza or simply to underline Dostoevsky’s anti-romanticism, which is already evident.
This one reservation aside, Notes from Undergound is a deeply compelling, finely composed, written, directed, designed and performed work which effectively draws us into a frightening world where absolutes throttle nuance, an all too familiar feeling in our own. It profoundly tests our own capacity for empathy as we witness its failure in a man, withdrawn to his underground, living “under life,” as we might too be tempted.
Sydney Chamber Opera, Notes from Underground, 2016
Sydney Chamber Opera & Carriageworks, Notes from Underground, composer Jack Symonds, librettist Pierce Wilcox, conductor Jack Symonds, director Patrick Nolan, performers Simon Lobelson, Brenton Spiteri, Jane Sheldon, design Genevieve Blanchett, lighting Nicholas Rayment; Carriageworks, Sydney, 13, 15, 17, 19 Aug
One tiny arts grant; one month of summer; 14 young people; one dynamic dance practitioner; one public park; one newspaper article; some black and white flyers. These components comprised the founding of Stompin’ Youth Dance Company (now Stompin), the development of its mission and its first show in the summer of 1992. To the group’s shock and delight, a thousand people turned up to the park to see the show and they discovered they were onto something.
Driving home from Stompin’s 2016 show Panorama, I found myself wondering about the nature and history of this company, which has continued to thrive, producing shows yearly since that first production almost 25 years ago. Devised for an ex-industrial headland in Triabunna on Tasmania’s East Coast, Panorama included a contingent of local school children in the choreographic sequences and involved members of the community in a wide range of ways. I was curious. Was the expression of ideas through dance still the company’s first priority, or had the emphasis and energy shifted to other goals, such as community engagement? I spoke with founding director Jerril Rechter (1992-2003) and outgoing creative director Emma Porteus (2010-2016).
Jerril Rechter, Emma Porteus
Remarkably, 24 years on, the founding mission of the company has remained at the core of what Stompin does today: bringing great arts practitioners into the company to co-create works with young people, using dance as a vehicle to allow them as a group to learn about and express themselves, performing in and “owning spaces that they don’t normally own,” says Rechter. Even in that first month of development in 1992, the initial group of young people co-created the Stompin mission and the choreographic language of the show with Rechter. Working within the community and mentoring have been woven into the company mission since that time. All of these aspects have been distilled into the company’s current tag-line ART/YOUTH/COMMUNITY/4 EVER.
Site-work
Stompin has continued to seek and ‘own’ sites, producing work in vast industrial warehouses, in aircraft hangars, on beaches, in local swimming pools, on expansive industrial sites. While her favourite show is possibly still that first one, Rechter fondly remembers many others, including Arboreal from 1996, a performance she developed with the group for Hollybank Forest, north of Launceston. The ambitious work involved a large dance group, several bobcats, horses, fire, woodchoppers and opera singers.
Building community
While the early days were definitely about building community, they initially related to the young company members and their immediate locale. This has expanded to include building long-term relationships with communities around Tasmania. Stompin worked with the community in Triabunna for a year leading up to the performances of Panorama in 2016, conducting fortnightly workshops with students at the local school and meeting with other town stakeholders. Porteus describes how it took six months, beginning with storytelling strategies, to build trust among the participants to the point where they could comfortably express their ideas through movement. She explains how working with those grade 5-8 students “cracked their world view open,” and reflects on conversations with one young participant, who was not only amazed and moved that people would come from all over the state to hear his story, but also became interested in joining Stompin as a result of his experience. At the show’s culmination, Emma found herself in conversation with Triabunna’s local council about funding for further Stompin work in the town.
6000 to 1, Stompin
Show-making: matching concept with skills
Collaborating with young people presents challenges, let alone choosing unconventional spaces for performance and bringing in other members of the local community. The shows that Emma sees as being most successful are those that matched the concept of a show with the skills, interests and passions of the performers: WeTubeLIVE and 6000 to 1. WeTubeLIVE allowed audience members to wander within a grid punctuated by one-metre marked squares, each containing a performer recreating or reinterpreting a YouTube clip of their own choosing. This wonderfully chaotic format supported a very broad range of skills. Skill levels became irrelevant when thrown into the kaleidoscopic mix. Together these young people presented a complex portrait of a moment in time that was particularly relevant to them. 6000 to 1 also keyed into the preoccupations of the age group, exploring the consequences of choice and chance, sometimes reflecting upon traumatic stories from the dancers themselves. Here, these personal connections and the atmosphere of trust and cohesion generated by the process fuelled the presentation by the dancers. These aspects were palpable within an emotional performance. Interestingly both shows were presented in enclosed spaces within Launceston, removing some of the standard site-specific challenges usually facing Stompin.
WeTube Live, Stompin
Anyone can dance
Shows where all of the elements come together are the goal, but the notion of success for Stompin is broader and more multifaceted. As both Rechter and Porteus describe it, bringing a young person to the point where they are performing before an audience, in concert with the group, music and a set might appear simple, but there is a tremendous amount of work leading to that moment. Free of auditions, any young person can dance with Stompin as long as they commit to the program of creative development and rehearsals. They are offered a “safe, fun environment” within which to “challenge where and what their limits are,” Porteus tells me. They may become part of the company for several years and are equal players in the development of shows, working alongside established professionals to develop everything from the initial concept through to the dance language and the details of a production.
Emergence
Through a peer-to-peer program established with Australia Council funds in Rechter’s time, particular skills are passed on to those who demonstrate interest. Mentored in choreography, sound, lighting, production or administration, young performers Bec Reid, Luke George and Emma Porteus became Stompin artistic directors. Then there are the accomplished young adults who leave Stompin to build careers across Australia and around the world, such as dance artists Becky Hilton, Adam Wheeler and Stephanie Lake.
Rechter now works as the CEO of VicHealth and while that may seem a world away, she doesn’t view it that way, continuing to work with young people. With the knowledge gained from research into youth, she knows that a company like Stompin is critical to building resilience in its members as a protective mechanism against the difficulties of adult life. In answer to my question about the company’s priorities, the sense of continuity evident in the reflections of Rechter and Porteus confirms that dance remains central to the Stompin mission, with performances that are conceptually and aesthetically strong, but which also reveal that a bigger, richer story is created in the lengthy journey to reach each artistic outcome.
Stompin’s new Artistic Director is Caitlin Comerford who holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Dance Performance) from QUT and a Bachelor of Arts (Dance) Honours from WAAPA through LINK Dance Company. She has been a Brisbane-based dance practitioner, working in performance, installation and choreography and is a co-founder of MakeShift Dance Collective, which was nominated for an Australian Dance Award for Achievement in Independent Dance in 2015.
Mira Oosterweghel, The Conditions Were Simply Perfect to Catapult into Infinity, The Screen as a Room, The Substation
At one point in Fanni Futterknecht’s video Across the White, a character moves across the screen stating, “when I walk to the left, your eyes follow me to the left and when I walk to the right, your eyes follow me to the right.” The scene neatly demonstrates how we view a performance on a screen compared with seeing one live, a distinction that is explored in the group exhibition, The Screen as a Room, at The Substation. Curated by Nikki Lam, it brings together video works by Eugenia Lim, Christian Thompson, Mira Oosterweghel, Fanni Futterknecht and Caroline Garcia, alongside opening and closing night performances by Garcia and Oosterweghel.
Taking aesthetic and narrative influence from Chinese opera, Futterknecht’s Across the White follows an artist-curator character who, “to keep away [the] boredom of white,” arranges minimalist sculptures in a gallery-like space. Later in the video, his authority is undermined when he finds himself in a debate with a female character who alters his sculptures and accuses him of being “predictable.” With playful humour, Futterknecht compares the decisions that create meaning in the gallery with the fixed connotations of camera angles and film techniques. As when he is holding our gaze in the earlier example, the artist-curator character is happiest when in control; in another scene, looking down to the camera he claims that having “power is when you are on top of things.”
Fanni Futterknecht, Across the White, The Screen as a Room, The Substation
In ensuring that nobody questions his “composition,” he overlooks the complexities of the works he’s arranging. The woman who alters the sculptures invigorates them by literally pulling shapes like shimmering silver tongues or pale pink spikes from their insides. As she draws out each one, “to deliver itself from its form,” her act implies deliverance, not only from within the sculptures, but from the strictures of the camera that the artist-curator represents.
Responding to surface and shape in a completely different way, Mira Oosterweghel’s videos, Holding a Point, show her suspending herself for as long as she can between brick pillars in the gallery. In her works, immovable architecture not only supports the body, but the screens themselves, as each one is fastened on a steel pipe, squeezed between the walls and held there only by pressure.
Caroline Garcia, Plantation Dance, The Screen as a Room, The Substation
In another room, a video of Caroline Garcia twerking in a skirt strung with banana peels is projected on a wall. With the recording sped up slightly, we see her whipping the skins about her waist until all of them have fallen. The skins—now black and shriveled—are to be found on the floor of the room in which the video plays, revealing this is where the performance took place. Titled Plantation Dance (Reprise), Garcia’s work references Josephine Baker, the black American star of the 1920s Paris theatre world, and the exploitative practices of Chiquita Brands International, the American banana market corporation. Using the empty banana skins, Garcia strips away the value of the fruit and, in turn, the brand’s remodelled image [the company was prosecuted in 2007 for bribing terrorists to protect its interests in Colombia -Eds]. The skins, as traces, create a compelling middle-ground between live action and documentation.
Blurring these distinctions, Christian Thompson’s three-channel video, Heat, shows the faces of three young Indigenous sisters, each framed in front of a pale orange background, sweating and being buffeted by wind. Or is it air from a fan? Using the simulation of a desert environment to blur fact and fiction, Thompson subtly questions the discrepancies between performance and screen.
If I start thinking about the constant expansion of infinity, other than getting a headache I might imagine room for spontaneity and, more importantly, room for potential. The closing event for The Screen as a Room was Oosterweghel’s performance The Conditions Were Simply Perfect to Catapult into Infinity. It hinted at the potential for change in a situation designed to thwart it. Performed by a collaborator, The Conditions… comprised eight cement blocks placed one by one at the end of a see-saw like structure while the performer balanced at the other end. As the disproportionate weight increased, the wooden plank holding the tension warped enough to unnerve me. Eventually, the performer curled around one end in the air, throwing her weight into the effort. The other end lifted slightly, then lowered with repetitive thuds as it hit the ground.
Mira Oosterweghel, Holding a Point, The Screen as a Room, The Substation
When the potential for radical change—a catapulting into infinity—is fixed to fail from the beginning, the performer can only aim to usurp the inevitable for so long. As the performance ends with the performer lying on the raised plank, her arms dangling over the end, the title accrues a sarcastic ring. Evident in everybody’s hesitancy to leave the room or talk once it had finished, The Conditions… controlled the space in an uncomfortable way. Perhaps accentuated by the performer’s plain grey uniform and sombre mood, The Conditions… lacked casualness or the openness that I prefer to see in performance.
Behind the black ropes hanging in front of a stairwell and down into a cave-like room covered in black tarp is Eugenia Lim’s video installation, Nest 2011. Exploring Japanese mythology and the phenomenon of hikikomori—a condition in which people stay in their rooms subsisting on computer entertainment while being fed by their family—Lim creates an isolated space in which the focus of our attention is the screen.
The video shows Lim’s collaborator, butoh performer Yumi Umiumare, dancing erratically as if acting out the anxieties that come with screen-based isolation. In this dark nest, fixed on the screen, we too take on the role of a hikikomori addict and dissolve the boundaries between screen and performance.
–
The Screen as a Room, curator Nikki Lam, The Substation, Melbourne, 16 June-7 Aug
Stiff Gins, Force Majeure and Kristina Chan, Jon Rose, Ross Manning, Mish Grigor, Tina Havelock Stevens, Liesel Zink and Asian artists Choy Ka Fai, Xiao Ke and Zi Han, Rianto and River Lin are the featured artists in 2016 Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art. Even at first glance, it looks impressive and, as you’ll read, concentrated and immersive. Dance figures well with five works (Chan, Zink, Xiao Ke and Zi Han, Rianto and an exhibition focusing on 21 Asian choreographers by Choy Ka Fai), alongside contemporary performance/live art (Grigor, Lin), music/installation (Rose, Havelock Stevens), visual art (Manning) and Indigenous duo Stiff Gins taking their music into contemporary performance.
Gender, protest, climate change, Indigeneity, the body and the politics of cultural history manifest strongly as festival themes. In an era of arts festival gigantism, Liveworks offers audiences an inclusive, intensive and highly focused exploration of experimental art. With turbulences large and small unleashed by festival works, Liveworks will loop us into its storm of creativity.
A few days before the release of the program, an exuberant Performance Space Artistic Director Jeff Khan fills me in on key components of his programming. The current vision for the event, first taking shape in 2015, is now firming, especially in terms of the festival’s engagement with Asia.
THE CARRIAGEWORKS TAKEOVER
We’re activating the whole of Carriageworks with a range of works for people to really immerse themselves in the festival. We’ve looked at last year’s three-week model and condensed it into two with a view to really amplifying the energy of multiple works. So, it’s over a shorter time-frame but it’s much denser in programmed activity.
ENGAGING WITH ASIA
We’ve expanded our focus on the Asia-Pacific region with not only more Asian artists but also three streams of exchange running through the festival. The Producer and Presenters Program brings in leading Asian producers, presenters and curators to see works and explore further opportunities for the artists in the festival. In the longer term, it means opportunities for Performance Space to collaborate with these visitors.
There’s also the Artists Exchange Lab which is about bringing Asian and Australian artists together to experience the festival as observers and to critically respond to it, to learn more about each other’s practices and to then decamp to Bundanon for a more intensive dialogue. They’re from across Australia and Asia—four Australian and four Asian—coming as festival guests and representing a range of experimental art-forms and career stages. It’s really about seeding long-term conversations with the aid of two facilitators.
The third aspect of the exchange program is a Taiwanese Arts Manager Exchange in partnership with the Taipei Performing Arts Alliance. Every year for the next three years they’ll send us a Taiwanese arts manager to be embedded in the festival for a program of professional development and exchange and we’ll send an Australian producer to Taiwan.
River Lin, Liveworks 2016
RIVER LIN, CLEANSING SERVICE (TAIWAN)
There are a lot of interesting parallels between Australia and Taiwan in the experimental scene. Many Taiwanese artists are crossing art-form boundaries and engaging with new technologies—the sort of work we’ve been interested in at Performance Space for a very long time. It seemed like a natural fit to deepen. As part of it, we’ve curated into the program River Lin, a Taiwanese performance artist who visited Liveworks last year. He makes one-on-one performances and other quite intimate exchanges with audiences. He also makes durational works where he evokes an expansive and very different sense of time.
All of Lin’s work is centred in the body and is about invoking a sense of ritual exchange between himself and the audience. One of his well-known works of recent years is titled Kiss It Better. With a small audience, Lin is blindfolded and his lips painted with bright red lipstick. One by one he approaches his audience and asks them which part of their body hurts. The ritual performance involves kissing it better.
The brand new work he’s developing for us is called Cleansing Service and it continues that sense of intimacy in the exchange between performer and audience by looking at baptism rituals and the role of water in spiritual practices around the world.
Rianto, SoftMachine, Liveworks 2016
CHOY KA FAI, SOFTMACHINE: RIANTO [INDONESIA]
I’m really excited that we’re bringing two works from Singapore artist Choy Ka Fai’s SoftMachine to Liveworks. [The artist has been creating an “inventory” of Asian dance since 2012 which includes performances and a multimedia archive. Eds] One is by Indonesian dancer Rianto, whom I saw at a festival in Japan last year, Kyoto Experiment, and was absolutely blown away. As you know, we do a lot of programming around gender and sexuality at Performance Space. This is a very traditional dance, called Lengger, in which men have been performing as women for centuries. It’s an erotic fertility dance that has a completely different reading in tradition than in a contemporary context. His solo is all about unravelling that gender dynamic. He’s also an extremely accomplished contemporary dancer. As the performance progresses, there’s this slow transition from traditional Lengger garb as an Indonesian woman, stripping away those layers to become a man as the movement style shifts to a much more contemporary vocabulary. There’s also documentary film Choy Ka Fai has shot, which documents Rianto’s life. It’s a portrait of the artist as a kind of bridge between male and female, between traditional and contemporary art forms.
Zi Han, SoftMachine
CHOY KA FAI, SOFTMACHINE: XIAO KE AND ZI HAN [CHINA]
Chinese duo Xiao Ke and Zi Han make dance works in public spaces in China, practising their art outside traditional institutions. A lot of their work is politically and socially engaged to the point where they’ve come under fairly constant surveillance and scrutiny by the Chinese government. Their performance portrait is really about these conditions that inform their practice. Over the years they’ve been able to create a very detailed, very beautiful choreographic style and a spoken narrative with which they open up about the motivation for their practice and their experience of friction with authority. As with the whole SoftMachine series there’s also a documentary film component.
There’s also the SoftMachine exhibition for which Ka Fai has built an archive of interviews with 21 Asian choreographers alongside other visual material.
Nardi Simpson, Stiff Gins, Liveworks 2016
STIFF GINS, SPIRIT OF THINGS
One of the major commissions is the Stiff Gins’ project, Spirit of Things. You might know them as Indigenous musical duo Nardi Simpson and Kaleena Briggs; this is their first step out of that frame into contemporary performance. It arose from a residency they did a couple of years ago at the Australian Museum in its permanent collection of cultural objects. They have a keen interest in that very current debate around Indigenous objects held in museums and the call to return items to their communities as living objects that have a lifespan and a broader cultural resonance beyond their materiality.
Nardi and Kaleena had a really interesting experience during the residency where they felt the objects speak to them, each with a story or quite distinct vision or series of images. These turned into stories and songs. They knew they needed a broader performance frame than just a music gig to be able to convey the weight of that cultural information that came to them and the pressing need for it to be released, which parallels the need for us to re-think how Indigenous culture is positioned more broadly. They’re collaborating with Felix Cross, a British theatre director who established Nitro, the first black theatre company in the UK. He’s very experienced in creating experimental theatre works that incorporate music.
Jon Rose
JON ROSE, THE MUSEUM GOES LIVE
Another key work involves much-loved Performance Space collaborator Jon Rose, whom I know RealTime has written about quite extensively. We’ve really reignited our collaboration with Jon in the last few years, presenting WRECK with Sydney Festival in 2013 and Ghan Tracks in 2014. This project, The Museum Goes Live, is an exhibition of the vast archive Jon has amassed over his career of violin-related iconography and ephemera. There’s a whole series of hand-made instruments—he’s a prolific instrument builder and experimenter. He’s also collected representations of the violin in advertising, the violin in commercial products, finding links between the violin and consumerism and capitalism. Every night over the two weeks Jon will come in with a team of experimental musicians and activate the exhibition in a concert format.
Kristina Chan, A Faint Existence
FORCE MAJEURE: KRISTINA CHAN, A FAINT EXISTENCE
A Faint Existence, a collaboration with Force Majeure, is the full-length choreographic debut of Kristina Chan, one of Australia’s most accomplished dancers who has been making forays into choreography of late (see this review of her contribution to Catapult’s PROPELLED in Newcastle). This work, in which she also performs, is being co-directed by Victoria Hunt. The two struck up a great relationship in the making of Tangi Wai in last year’s Liveworks in which Chan performed. So it’s wonderful, after fostering that connection between two artists, for Performance Space to be presenting this new work.
A Faint Existence looks at Kristina’s sense of responsibility and futility in the face of environmental change. She’s collaborated with Clare Britton to design an expanded elemental installation within which the performance takes place and James Brown will be doing a live sound score to create weather effects that also reflect internal states and are about the struggle of the individual to act in the face of such a globally scaled phenomenon.
Mish Grigor, The Talk, Liveworks 2016
MISH GRIGOR, THE TALK
Mish is in Edinburgh at the moment doing a season of The Talk at Forest Fringe. I’m delighted that she is presenting this work about the ways a family talks about sex She’s structured it around the style of her own family gatherings. (Read a review of a performance of The Talk at Field Theory’s Site is Set).
TINA HAVELOCK STEVENS, THUNDERHEAD
I’m really delighted that we’re presenting Thunderhead by Tina Havelock Stevens, which has just premiered at DARKMOFO in Hobart. It’s an enormously scaled projection of this incredible storm that Tina filmed from a car window as she drove on a road trip in Texas last year. Tina is an Australian artist who spends a lot of time in the US.
The storm is an incredible form that doesn’t even look real, an almost divine manifestation of the turbulence of the climate captured in an extended tracking shot. It’s projected onto a large wall, so it’s very imposing, overwhelming. Tina is a musician as well as a video artist and will perform to her recorded score every night of the exhibition. The video loop is about 15-20 minutes and the storm itself is a loop so the whole work becomes hypnotic and the musicians, Tina on drums and Liberty Kerr on guitar, enter a trance-like state, drawing themselves musically into the storm. This is another work for me that engages with the environment in a really interesting way. At DARKMOFO the audience was completely riveted, drawn into the storm. The sense of foreboding is very tangible.
ROSS MANNING: MELODY LINES
With Carriageworks we’ve co-commissioned a large-scale installation work, Melody Lines, from internationally exhibited, Brisbane-based visual artist Ross Manning. Using lo-fi mechanics and industrial materials, it’ll be a constantly moving, psychedelic landscape of light and colour in the vast Carriageworks foyer.
WE THE PEOPLE
We the People has been curated by Tulleah Pearce, Performance Space’s Program Manager, pairing four contemporary artists with four of the idiosyncratic community organisations in the Carriageworks neighbourhood. Artists are currently in residence working towards creating a site-specific performance or installation or intervention into the host organisation. Activist artist Deborah Kelly is paired with the Association for Good Government, which occupies a tiny building on the way from Redfern railway station. It involves a group of concerned citizens who hold government accountable, addressing the principles of good government. Ben Forster, a visual and media artist, is paired with Esperanto House, one of the last bastions of Esperanto enthusiasm. He’s an artist interested in self-generating data and random connections, so I think the idea of an invented language fits very well with his conceptual concerns.
Aunty Beryl Van-Oploo, a local Indigenous elder who runs a whole range of Indigenous catering, hospitality and employment training programs, is collaborating with Anna McMahon, an installation artist who uses live plants and food in her practice. The fourth is visual artist and performer David Capra who is making a work with the Sydney Arabic Choir who practice in a beautiful venue at Sydney University. Given his interest in religion, ritual and speaking in tongues David and the choir are going to create a ceremonial performance.
We the People is a kind of satellite project happening on the first weekend of the festival. Audiences will be invited to come to Carriageworks, receive a map and take themselves on the tour to each of these spaces.
The Stance, Liesel Zinc and company
LIESEL ZINK, THE STANCE
We’re working towards staging a different aspect of Liesel Zink’s The Stance (read a review of the Brisbane premiere) every night in the Carriageworks public space in the festival’s second week. It looks at the history of protest in Australia and translates its physical language into choreographed movement. It’s a durational work and quite gruelling for the dancers as they speak to the physical commitment of activism and protest. That will be on every night in a different part of the Carriageworks public space, culminating in a full-length presentation in the morning of the final day of the festival at the Eveleigh Markets, using the thoroughfare [between the market and the Carriageworks building] as shared civic space.
A FESTIVAL-BASED PERFORMANCE SPACE: PROGRESS
We were so excited to see Liveworks unfold last year and to see audiences take up the offer to really immerse themselves in the festival. We’re really keen to build on that and to refine the programming to create an even more intense experience for audiences. For me, the international aspect locking in—the Asian artists, the Artists Exchange Lab, the Producer and Presenters Program and the Arts Manager Exchange with Taiwan—and our other programming create a festival on a much bigger scale than we’d be able to achieve in a year-round program; and at the same time we’re seeding future possibilities and collaborations between Australia and Asian artists. The festival model is very much alive and we discover something new about it each year.
–
Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art; Carriageworks, Sydney, 27 Oct-6 Nov; see the program here.
Gerard O’Dwyer, Marnie Palomares, Off the Record, Force Majeure
The first indication that we are about to enter an unusual, indeed discombobulated world, one “off the record,” is seen on a row of video screens built into a black monolith. The arms of five digital clocks rotate at very different speeds, some ticking to the minute, others blithely sweeping their way through 24-hour cycles. In the background, a deceptive sense of order is conveyed by quiet classical piano. Each clock bears the name of one of the deeply frustrated characters in Force Majeure’s Off the Record, the first production from the company’s new artistic director, Danielle Micich, co-directed by Dance Integrated Australia’s Philip Channells.
These people—the performers use their own names: Alex, Jana, Gerard, Marnie, Neil—desire identity, social intimacy and sex. For those with disabilities there are additional hindrances—how to communicate, how to resist assumptions—but, for all of them, telling the truth—about themselves and each other—is deeply challenging. Off the Record moves quite laterally, character by character and in various couplings, towards revelation—uncomfortable truths and inescapable relativities.
Atop the monolith and above the action is Auslan interpreter Neil, who eventually finds himself with the others on the floor, embroiled physically and emotionally in complex interactions, making him a sensitive avatar for the audience. Other characters assume his role at times as they engage with Alex, who is deaf, manipulating and embracing him.
Brief movement duets are among the the work’s key motifs, first seen as Gerard attempts to gently embrace Marnie. She slithers up and down, resisting but still touching body to body until she enters into the play with passion, before exiting abruptly, something she will do in a more elaborate and disturbing encounter later with the desperately lonely Alex. Her audio diary entries and a subsequent scene reveal her desire for sex, despite painful experiences, communication misunderstandings and the enduring damage done by rejection in a dance competition—her impairment is psychological.
Gerard, who has Down Syndrome, is also lonely, meeting his needs by identifying with an actress in The Bold and the Beautiful and holding a fixed view of himself—his mantra: “I don’t lie, don’t do drugs, I’m not judgemental”—until he encounters Off the Record’s most complex character, Jana.
Neil Phipps, Marnie Palomares, Off the Record, Force Majeure
Initially slumped upstage, Jana is barely intelligible, muttering as if perhaps brain-damaged, but it’s a voice she can turn on and off. Similarly, her movement oscillates between seemingly difficult to control—wide, staggered stances, odd-angled arms, if with a determined elegance—and, partnering with Marnie, a fluent, unconstrained duet. Later, in a somewhat confusing episode of further shape-shifting and contradicting earlier instances of awkwardness, she stands behind the clocks, head invisible, stripped down to a bikini, striking convincing body-builder poses.
Likewise, she plays with the truth. Does she have Tourette’s Syndrome? She declares, “I never tic on stage,” dismisses the notion that Touretters all swear and in the end refuses us certainty about what we’ve witnessed in general. Jana’s a classic trickster figure, but not entirely in control. In their duet, Marnie, typically, exits, leaving Jana to solo, but her dancing and music glitch and break down. In a later pairing, Marnie attempts to control Jana’s wayward limbs.
Jana, whose ‘sin’ is having introduced another child to sex play with Ken and Barbie dolls, adroitly lies to adults about it and repeats the ‘act’ with a submissive Alex as Ken (another fine pairing). She lectures us: “Not everyone needs to know the truth.”
It’s Jana who throws Gerard, already feeling he’s an imposter, into confusion. He becomes disruptive, singing a wild Irish folk song at the top of the long ramp on the other side of the stage because no-one is listening to him. After lamenting feeling “old, cold” he calls a hiding Jana to “come out and be Jana again.” But which Jana will it be? This time it’s Jana with the awry voice. After infuriating Alex by signing meaninglessly, she apologises to him via Neil. Alex signs, “Apologise to me! He’s just an interpreter!” underlining the complexity of communication when a third party has to be involved. It’s a funny-sad moment, prefacing darker scenes to come.
Alex Jones, Marnie Palomares, Off the Record, Force Majeure
By the end, Jana admits, “Sometimes people do need to know the truth.” Alex knows that he should have admitted his fault in crashing his girlfriend’s car, the crisis which, recalled at the beginning of the performance, has unleashed all his anxieties. It’s after his gentle duet with Marnie—feeling each others’ weight, one carrying the other in a scene of hopeful intimacy until she walks away—that Alex reveals the full extent of his pain, surprising us with speech: “I could love…[but] I avoid and fear you.” He’s profoundly alone in his deafness, which is “a dull noise,” the truth of his condition profoundly felt before the work’s riotous coda in which the characters ‘fuck’ each other, themselves, walls and floor in a celebration of liberating, primal desire beyond the complexities, lies and painful revelations we all experience but which can be overwhelming for those disadvantaged by physical, intellectual and emotional limitations. In Off the Record we see minds and bodies at work, honestly, confidently and proudly defying those limits.
Micich and Channells have been careful to keep their choreographing of movement and dance within a tight frame so that the difference in skill levels between the actors and the dancers is never too pronounced. Where an actor and dancer come together the pairing is subtly and convincingly played out and not as simple as it might at first look. Not everything felt right: Jana’s body-builder posturing; Marnie’s protracted dance competition angst; the awkward alternation of fragments of two stories in one scene; and the extreme width of the performance space sometimes disappearing words and movement. The density of the material in the first third or so of the work was daunting as I put names to bodies, adjusted to different forms of delivery and absorbed a lot of information. I wondered about the limited use of the screens, especially when text was projected onto walls, and why the clocks that prefaced the show didn’t make a return appearance.
Direction was assured, design starkly striking, lighting effectively austere and sound in tune with the variety of dramatic needs and moods. The script, though word-heavy, returns consistently and playfully, sometimes head-spinningly, to matters of truth. Alex Jones revealed great range: amiability, anger and despair. Gerard O’Dwyer (seen recently at PACT in Ruckus’ Speed of Life), a bold presence with fine diction and a great sense of humour, extrovertly delineated his feelings of isolation with finesse. Marnie Palomares’ oscillation between easeful engagement with the other characters and her ‘turning off’ was chilling. Neil Phipps’ persona was gentle, responsive and became more complex as he found himself at once trapped in and freed from his service role. Jana Castillo created a bewildering character, sometimes closed, sometimes a catalyst, embodying the work’s relentless dialectic of truth/lies, real/not real, able and not so, but never limited. She and Palomares gave the work a lyrical dimension with expressive dancing in their solos. Although the work doesn’t reveal the extent of new artistic director Danielle Micich’s choreographic artistry, the well-crafted, inventive couplings she’s created with Channells provide a very busy work with an engaging and thematically rich through-line that keeps movement centrestage.
Off the Record is a promising start for a new era for Force Majeure, one in line with the company’s distinctive dance theatre, issues-based model, with a new edge and defiant in the face of inexplicable defunding by the Australia Council.
Jana Castillo, Marnie Palomares, Alex Jones, Off the Record, Force Majeure
Carriageworks, Force Majeure with Dance Integrated Australia, Off the Record, directors Danielle Micich, Philip Channells, performers Jana Castillo, Alex Jones, Gerard O’Dwyer, Marnie Palomares, Neil Phipps, set, lighting Benjamin Cisterne, sound design Kingsley Reeve, text dramaturg Zoe Coombes Marr; commissioned by Carriageworks for New Normal National Arts and Disability Strategy; Carriageworks, Sydney, 17-20 Aug
Mahdi Mohammadi, Jawad Yaqoubi, Karen Therese (background), Gholam Nabi (screen), Tribunal, Powerhouse Youth and Griffin Theatre
Tribunal is raw, conversational theatre built, rather fragilely, on a conceit: the holding of a public tribunal overseen by a female Aboriginal elder before whom refugees living in Australia tell their stories. It’s a highly flexible hearing that allows for singing, dancing, re-enactments in which refugees deal with threatening Australian Government officials and tender accounts of life in their countries of origin and in their new home. Above all, it allows the elder, Aunty Rhonda Grovenor Dixon, to herself speak as a witness, providing a point-by-point analogy between the treatment of refugees and our Government’s maladministration of the lives of Aboriginal peoples. When one of the refugees asks if they can tell their story in their own words, Grovenor Dixon replies, “It’s theatre, you can do what you like.”
Charismatic performers and the work’s informal structure lend Tribunal necessary cohesion and warmth. Two young Afghan Hazaris, Mahdi Mohammadi and Jawad Yaqoubi, bringing wit and casual energy to the performance, offer unfamiliar tales. Mohammadi is a theatre director, formerly the leader of a women’s rights theatre troupe built around Hazari women’s dance. In Kabul they played to audiences of women—whose husbands had to be bribed into ‘believing’ the women were going on a picnic—as well as performing in schools and a women’s prison. They also toured to India. However, back home, Sharia Law’s hostility to dance resulted in threats and the death of a relative, a prelude to Mohammadi’s leaving Afghanistan.
Another speaker addressing the tribunal is an impassioned community worker, lawyer and here, a strong performer, Katie Green, who worked for three years for Red Cross, supporting refugees released from detention. Her account of the arrival of refugees in Australia tells of “chaos,” always “a mad dash,” night time, “always dark,” herself carrying a large amount of cash in an Aldi bag to be distributed $400 per person to arrivals. The upside for Green was the sheer joy of seeing refugees re-united with family. But, with only 89% granted of a Centrelink payment per week, long-term prospects did not look good for these people. Given the intractability of the situation, “I felt like a cog,” Green says.
Karen Therese, wearing headphones, reproduces verbatim the words of a Human Rights lawyer, now based in London, who feels profound guilt at not being able to help a mother “who lost the plot,” washing herself compulsively after her child was sexually abused. After some four years the woman and child were granted refugee status and admitted to Australia but denied justice and compensation. It’s not precisely clear why the lawyer had to leave Australia, presumably compelled by the helplessness he shared with the Red Cross worker and, as he says, knowing “we were biting the hand [the Government] that was feeding us [Legal Aid]” and the likelihood, as has happened, of a reduction in funds.
Not long after his arrival in Australia and with a bridging visa, Mohammadi is bluntly advised by a Department of Immigration officer (Paul Dwyer playing all the baddies) to abide by a code of conduct including not “running a red light” if he didn’t wish to lose his visa. It’s this which triggers Grovenor Dixon to declare that she recognises similar codes her people have been compelled to live by. But first she invokes her own proud standing as elder and grandmother, recites the names of her totems, displays a magnificent possum coat (with artwork on the inside) and recounts her father Chika Dixon’s activism on behalf of his own people, having defeated his alcoholism. Grovenor Dixon then recalls the code that led her grandfather, a fine tenor, to fear the loss of welfare payments if he spoke in language. The codes by which Aboriginal people are compelled to live today has resulted in mass imprisonment, the Intervention and suicide. Mohammadi says he can take no risks, there’s “no more party”—a neighbour might complain. Grovenor Dixon sings “Miss Celie’s Blues” from The Colour Purple and Mohammadi and Green dance, but the reprieve is short-lived, Mohammadi telling of young refugees killing themselves: “four while we were making this show.”
Grovenor Dixon offers consolation, acknowledging shared resilience in the face of these nightmarish circumstances. As a buzzing and a rumbling pervade the theatre, the performers form an awkward, slow-moving tableau, shifting back and forth or repeatedly half-sinking to the floor. Its significance eluded me. But, we are saved by tea, offered by traditionally dressed Iraqi members of Fairfield’s wonderful Parents Café which supports new arrivals to Australia.
Karen Therese opens the conversation to a hesitant audience—so much had already been said, so much to accommodate, all of us doubtless feeling the burden of privilege. A psychologist and guest of the production, Sarah Coconis, joins the artists, explaining that the impact of Australian racism (and our denial of it) “is worse than the original trauma” of being a refugee. We are, she says, like a bad parent, betraying those in our care.
Two final ‘scenes’ lift Tribunal to another plane. First a young man and woman (Bilal Hafda and Iman Etri), further guests of the production, step out of the audience and rap poems with verve, he telling us to “reclaim your honour” and “atone for your apathy,” and she, traditionally attired, declaring in her last lines, “This is what a feminist looks like,” having taken exception to an attitude that argues (as close as I can recall), “you’re the norm, my clothing oppression, yours fashion.”
Mahdi Mohammadi and Jawad Yaqoubi take centre-stage and fill in the missing part of their story, their coming to Australia. There were three of them in Indonesia after they fled Afghanistan. Mohammadi arrived here by boat, Yaqoubi by plane, having been granted refugee status, and Gholam Nabi Hayati who went by boat too but has now been on Manus Island for three years. The pair sing a song for their friend. Tribunal doesn’t so much end as open us anew to the plight of others and our responsibility for them. Closure seems as yet barely conceivable, but as public concern about refugee and Aboriginal suffering grows, Tribunal compels us to apply greater pressure to the Australian Government to respond to the needs of those in its care—in reality, our care.
Rhonda Grovenor Dixon, Tribunal, Powerhouse Youth and Griffin Theatre
PYT [Powerhouse Youth Theatre], co-presenter Griffin Theatre Company, Tribunal, concept Karen Therese, creative collaborators/text/performers Paul Dwyer, Katie Green, Rhonda Grovenor Dixon, Mahdi Mohammadi, Karen Therese, Jawad Yaqoubi, design Province Studio (Laura Pike, Anne-Louise Dadak), sound, video design James Brown, lighting Emma Lockhart-Wilson; SBW Stables Theatre, Sydney, 12-20 Aug
It has been hard to avoid spiritual and emotional fatigue in the face of the policy turmoil that has characterised Australia of late.
“The arts in general have been in a state of free-fall,” said Angharad Wynne-Jones, AD of Arts House, in conversation with Esther Anatolitis on Audio Stage in October 2015. The industry, characterised by precarious employment and low wages at the best of times, in the last two years has been hit by a string of far-reaching, non-consultative and thinly explained funding and policy decisions which have left the sector in a state of collective burn-out.
These decisions are charted and analysed in Ben Eltham’s Platform Paper Number 48, When the Goal Posts Move, which reaches wide, from direct reporting of the political situations as they took place to broader cultural analysis of the spirit of these policies. For those whose income, professional practice, and sense of social belonging, are tied to the arts economy, the tally is devastating: $105 million removed from the Australia Council at no notice in 2015, followed by $87 million removed in 2014; $52.5 million further removed in December 2015; a grant round cancelled by a shocked Australia Council in June 2015, followed by the suspension of the eagerly awaited new six-year funding program for small-to-medium companies; one-third of the $105m returned to the Australia Council; and, finally, 65 organisations defunded on 13 May 2016, the ‘Black Friday’ for the arts in Australia.
In response to the policy decisions that affect Australian culture, the arts sector has historically tended to be idealistic, politically naive and disunited, with large, well-funded organisations rarely willing to side with the independent arts, and the independents too often consumed with basic survival to engage with politics on a larger scale. However, the severity of the impact of recent policy decisions has prompted changes in the ways the sector engages in the political arena, as well as in industry conversations. We now talk about burn-out in a way we haven’t before. Under the banner of #freethearts, artsworkers, for the first time, are speaking to the public with one voice. And grassroots political organising put the arts on the 2016 parliamentary election agenda to a degree unprecedented in Australian politics. All of this, too, is described in Eltham’s essay.
“It’s one of those fraught times, when the challenge is to reflect back that confusion in a way that shares the empathy, frustration and concerns that we all have, while communicating the confidence that the arts are stronger than any arts minister,” said Esther Anatolitis, CEO of Regional Arts Victoria. Importantly, a lucid and impassioned analysis of cultural policy has been on the rise, creating a serious discourse around an industry that, as we can now say, with data on our hands, employs more people than the mining sector. Ben Eltham’s paper forms part of that discourse.
Ben Eltham
When the Goal Posts Move is, first and foremost, an excellent work of political journalism, describing what happened behind the scenes as important decisions were made. Historians will be able to consult it for a fine-grained account of the general political atmosphere that poisoned cultural policy-making in Australia in this period. The essay sketches the role of the right-wing Institute of Public Affairs in public discourse, as well as the general spirit of the Abbott government years, initially with Senator George Brandis as Arts Minister. It also documents the wider political dysfunction of the Rudd-Gillard years that nonetheless delivered Simon Crean’s 2013 Creative Australia, the nation’s first cultural policy in 19 years, only to have it undone with ideological sleight of hand by the succeeding Abbott government. It records the political aftershocks of the artist boycott of the Sydney Biennale in 2015 and notes how Australia Council CEO Tony Grybowski cut short a family holiday in Britain to rush back to Sydney when his agency’s funding was slashed in the 2015 federal budget [Brandis had dined with Australia Council Chair Rupert Myer at the Venice Biennale on the eve of the announcement but did not consult with or forewarn him about the forthcoming cut. Eds]
The essay is less interested in documenting the grassroots activism that the cuts have spurred, though here, too, Eltham’s reporting is meticulous. Noting the country-wide protests, the galvanisation of the arts community in response to the Senate Inquiry into Brandis’ policy decisions and the establishment of the Free The Arts alliance, he takes time to chart the advisory role of the SLAM (Save Live Australian Music) organisers, who bring their know-how to Tamara Winikoff of NAVA, Norm Horton and Sarah Moynihan of Feral Arts, and Jade Lillie of the Footscray Community Arts Centre, in mobilising independent artists. The essay is not, however, a manual on how to build a grassroots political movement—though perhaps that would be even more useful to know.
A single, uninterrupted line of thought runs through this essay: we could be doing cultural policy better. At regular intervals, almost as a way to breathe out between reporting the workings of a cultural milieu, Eltham digresses into spaces of deep reflection on what cultural policy is meant to be. What is culture? What is power? How have the two historically met in Australian arts policy? How do Australians actually engage with the arts? He delves into the toxic combination of neoliberalism and cultural cringe: “There were times during 2013 and 2014 in which Abbott and his Conservative ministers seemed more interested in fighting culture wars than in governing the country,” he writes. Most notably, Eltham compares the discourse around arts funding—essentially seen as propping up an unsustainable industry—with the discourse around the ANZAC Centenary, demonstrating how “arguments for culture in and of itself can be powerful forces in the intellectual life of a nation.”
This is Ben Eltham speaking as a cultural policy scholar, deeply engaged in fundamental questions of what cultural policy could and should do, and it is a shame that neither the limited scope of a Platform Paper, nor the highly politicised state of arts policy in Australia, allows for those questions to be at the fore of this paper. Arts funding decisions should be a reflection of what we value, and who we want to be as a nation. One can only hope that clear, considered essays like this one will pave the way forward.
–
Ben Eltham, When the Goal Posts Move, Platform Paper 48, August 2016, Currency House, Sydney
On 11 December 2005, a crowd of approximately 5000 mostly young white men converged on the Sydney beachside suburb of Cronulla with the aim of ‘taking back’ the beach from what they saw as an encroaching Middle Eastern community. Escalating into attacks against lone Middle Eastern men, this initial riot kicked off retaliatory violence in the following days, both in Cronulla and other suburbs. Opening with grotesque documentary footage of the event, Abe Forsythe’s dark comedy Down Under propels us back to an ugly period at a time when organised racism is again gaining traction in this country.
The film follows two groups of men, one made up of Anglo-Australians, the other Lebanese, both seeking retribution in the wake of the riot. Each group contains a more reluctant member: Hassim, a diligent student (Lincoln Younes) and amiable stoner “Shit-Stick” (Alexander England). With a misguided sense of familial loyalty, each ultimately succumbs to the zealots surrounding him. While Down Under’s scenario is mired in its characters’ bigotry, it’s also a study in the sort of toxic masculinity that defines itself through clannishness and violent exclusion of the other.
Down Under
All sorts of strutting, posturing masculinities are unflatteringly displayed: the beer-swilling ‘Aussie’ numbskulls are virulently racist, but some of the Lebanese cohort are just as quick to lash out at innocent bystanders. A gay underworld clique of bare-chested South-East Asian men led by a camp white Australian (David Field) flaunts its potential for violence along with its pecs. Forsythe assembles all the markers of male aggression: cars, alcohol, weapons, the promise of a fight and the desire to link incipient thuggery to some vaguely articulated greater cause—the legacy of Gallipoli, or of Ned Kelly.
Down Under’s subject is as grim as any other Australian film examining toxic masculinity in the context of actual events, but unlike The Boys or Snowtown, which would have been obscene as comedies, Forsythe gets away with his unsubtle humour because his subjects are dangerous buffoons rather than calculatedly evil. The joke, sour as it is, is on them. The gags in Down Under are for the most part heavy-handed and reliant on stereotypes, a case in point the token ‘Aussie’ girlfriend who’s a foul-mouthed, heavily pregnant chain-smoker. Elsewhere, it’s the characters’ sheer offensiveness that’s meant to be funny, though laughing at those whose speech is a barrage of crude bigotry can feel uncomfortably close to laughing along with them.
Down Under
Despite drawbacks in some of the writing, Forsythe has gathered a compelling cast whose performances transcend caricature. The film’s cinematography, editing and pacing convey a pulsing energy and ominousness. Once the warring factions hit the road, the heady build-up to confrontation is captured with sickening immediacy. Lachlan Milne’s cinematography perfectly combines night-time suburbia and rampant testosterone as a car, viewed aerially, does 360 degree burnouts, smoke pluming while that menacing ode to female seduction, Kelis’ “Milkshake,” plays over the top. Claustrophobic scenes in crowded cars show a revolving tableau of sweat-dripping, lank-haired figures caught mid-yell. In these moments the film’s comedy and seriousness coalesce in a vision of adrenalised ridiculousness.
The characters in Down Under may be clueless and inept, but they’re not softened around the edges. The film doesn’t pull its punches when showing the consequences of knee-jerk behaviour, whether fuelled by hatred, misguided loyalty or a wish to belong. In one scene, the white Australians sing along to the title track from 80s fantasy film The Neverending Story—a timely reminder that the lessons of the Cronulla Riots are yet to be learnt.
Down Under
Down Under, writer, director Abe Forsythe, cinematographer Lachlan Milne, music Piers Burbrook de Vere, editor Drew Thompson, production design Nicholas Dare, distributor StudioCanal, 2016
In the latest Currency House Platform Paper, described by Jana Perkovic as “an excellent work of political journalism,” cultural policy scholar Ben Eltham guides you through the history of the LNP Government’s assault on artists and the Australia Council.
4 copies courtesy of Currency House.
Email us at giveaways [at] realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number. Include ‘Giveaway’ and the name of the item in the subject line.
Offer closes 7 September.
Giveaways are open to RealTime subscribers. By entering this giveaway you consent to receiving our free weekly E-dition. You can unsubscribe at any time.
RealTime issue #134 Aug-Sept 2016
The Three Dancers, Dancenorth
The Three Dancers represents a departure from Lee Serle’s recent works. Since the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative 2010-11, when he was mentored by choreographer Trisha Brown in New York, Serle has turned to creating interactive sonic and choreographic installations (such as Multimodal, coming shortly to Melbourne’s The Substation). The Three Dancers, however, is pure, abstract dance performed to a recording of Elena Kats-Chernin’s orchestral 2015 composition of the same name (premiered in the UK in 2015 by the Rambert dance company, choreography by Didy Veldman). The only interactive option Serle has given us this time is to “…let the audience find their own narratives within the dance” (program note).
Kats-Chernin’s composition was in turn inspired by Picasso’s painting The Three Dancers (1925). The arts-astute audience gathered at Dancenorth for this leg of the annual Australian Festival of Chamber Music (AFCM) Sunday Concert Crawl is presumably not short of reference points from which to derive meaning for this dance work.
The canvas is a black stage, with a series of black curtained wings. The simple lighting grid is utilised judiciously to alter the mood during the 25-minute piece. The five ensemble members, three of them on stage at the outset, are topless, dressed only in loose black trousers. Nothing detracts, yet everything suggests a passion play. The deliberate visual minimalism allows full focus on movement and music—and these elements amply bring colour, albeit darkened, like blood slowly drying.
Kats-Chernin’s piece is rich with emotion, drama and mystery, lifting and dropping the audience with each aural rise and fall. It is spare and sinister one moment, all bass-y cello resonating in the gut; lush with accordions the next; then descending again into frenzy and discordance. I read with some surprise after the event that Serle has partly structured the choreography without reference to the music. The movement, without narrative, is difficult to describe, but it appears complicit with the score, elucidating parallel emotional tangents. It is in turn (and sometimes simultaneously) balletic, contemporary, athletic and gymnastic.
The Three Dancers exudes unrelenting energy, capitalising wonderfully on the strengths of the young ensemble. The motif of the trio is constantly shifting, re-integrating and separating again. I cannot help but read into it the story behind Picasso’s painting, the melancholic inevitability of a tragic outcome to his friends’ love triangle. It reeks of love, sex, jealousy and death. The dancers outside of the transitioning trio are perhaps implicated bystanders (like Picasso?) or external forces influencing or observing the disintegration.
Mason Kelly, The Three Dancers, Dancenorth
Among graceful arcs and staccato contractions, a small gesture of fingers clenching and unclenching, eerily sidelit, suggests a fuse burning, and I see a momentary reference to the shadowed figure on the right in Picasso’s painting. There’s a passage where the whole ensemble rushes forward and back repeatedly, all five in a row, then oppositionally as two and three. The movement appears compelled rather than co-operative, individuals chasing direction, not a deliberately shared experience. Yet it is beautiful and paradoxically cohesive, and sticks in my mind.
The Dancenorth ensemble is maturing apace under the canny directorship of Kyle Page. In the program the dancers are credited for their input in Serle’s choreography. Even with such a consistently bold troupe, each choreographer and performance this year seems to bring a particular dancer to the fore: Ashley McLellan in Rainbow Vomit, Jenni Large and Harrison Hall in the double bill If_Was_. In The Three Dancers, it’s Mason Kelly’s solo of graceful, controlled elasticity which provides the ‘whoah’ moment, revealing Serle’s choreographic breadth, even outside his usual oeuvre.
At last year’s AFCM closing concert, Kats-Chernin’s The Three Dancers was performed live by a septet in the presence of the composer. I feel wistful knowing that perhaps it could have been within the realm of possibility to repeat the live performance in tandem with the dance work this year. There is a precedent for live collaboration between Dancenorth and AFCM, with Iain Grandage creating the score for Gavin Webber’s poignant Remember Me in 2008. Live music would have taken The Three Dancers from wonderful to sublime.
–
Dancenorth, The Three Dancers, choreographer Lee Serle, composer Elena Kats-Chernin, performers Harrison Hall, Mason Kelly, Jenni Large, Ashley McLellan, Georgia Rudd, lighting design Bosco Shaw; Townsville School of Arts Theatre 31 July-2 Aug
Lee Serle’s Multimodal will guide randomly selected audience members through a series of physical, sonic, olfactory and choreographic experiences in Melbourne’s The Substation, 30 Aug-4 Sept.
Agata Dmochowska, Metamorphoses, music theatre work written and performed by students at the Centre for Theatre & Performance, Monash University
The notion of the New Australian Musical has become something of a unicorn in the Australian performance imagination, and any number of factors—the costs and complexity of mounting a musical, the dearth of appropriate venues, and the relatively small amount of funding, training and support available—make a fully-realised new music theatre work a rare beast indeed. Ten years ago, after its third outing, the Pratt Prize for Musical Theatre ceased to exist as an open competition after judges noted that outstanding entries tended to come from a tiny pool of the same names.
The enthusiasm for new work created locally has only grown, however, and the talent pool has certainly expanded as well. Monash University’s Centre for Theatre and Performance has taken an encouraging new direction in recent years with a substantial rethinking of its music theatre units. Where training institutions such as WAAPA or VCA might focus on voice, acting and other practical elements of music theatre, Monash now includes the history and historiography of music theatre, along with dramaturgy, songwriting and assistance in imagining innovative new ways of approaching the form.
The Centre’s Head of Section—and actor, writer and director—Jane Griffiths calls it a “very holistic course” which is “very, very different from a traditional musical theatre course where it’s more about learning performance skills.”
This new approach has won praise from high places: recently Dr Jeanne Pratt announced a $1 million donation to the Centre to bolster its music theatre teaching. The funds will allow the number of units taught to be doubled and, as of next year, a new residency program will see professional music theatre artists putting down roots at Monash.
Similar residencies at the university have already proven highly successful for non-music theatre artists. “So far we have a very good reputation in the independent theatre sector for providing residencies and as much support as we can to companies like Fraught Outfit or THE RABBLE,” says Griffiths. “We feel that we’re part of an ecosystem. We don’t just want to be a university; we want to be contributing to the industry. With music theatre now we can take that one stage further.
Sticks and Stones, music theatre work performed by students at the Centre for Theatre & Performance, Monash University
“We’ll have two year-long residencies for professional artists who are mid-career, established but still wanting to have time to work on their own practice. They basically come and live at Monash for a year, work on their own material but also mentor the students who are creating new work.”
The benefits students will derive from contact with professional music theatre artists are obvious, but for the artists themselves the residencies offer an opportunity to take stock in what can often be an anchorless job hopping from gig to gig.
“We’re hoping that this will appeal to artists who may already have had a busy career but want to take some time out. That’s important. And the collegiate atmosphere. I think lots of practitioners get to a stage in their career where they need to readdress what they’re doing and we have the collegiate atmosphere where you’re allowed to do that.”
Many practising artists don’t necessarily come from academic backgrounds, either. For them, Griffiths says, there might be appeal in “an environment where there’s a vocabulary or methodology or theory which explains your practice and interacts with your practice.”
The Centre’s expanded, holistic approach to the form and its incorporation of pedagogy and practice has been further amplified by its new ties to Monash’s School of Music. In combination this allows students both comprehensive instruction in what the musical has been in the past as well as encouragement to rethink what it could be in the future.
“I think that one of the exciting things that we’ve discovered and that the students are certainly keen to explore is the different range,” says Griffiths. “They don’t all have to be massive musicals like Wicked, great though those are. They’re exploring smaller scales, exploring site-specific musicals, theatre-in-education musicals. There’s potential for what we think of as the musical to really alter quite radically, in the same way our conceptions of traditional theatre have. At the same time we can really enjoy and celebrate tradition. You can’t beat a good Broadway musical and we understand that.”
Of the enhanced music theatre course and its residency program for experienced music theatre professionals, Jane Griffiths says, “I very much hope our program won’t just nurture our students but nurture practitioners.”
A call for expressions of interest in the Centre’s residencies program will be announced shortly.
Dr Jane Griffiths
Associate Professor Jane Griffiths is an active theatre performer and writer and Head of Section of Monash University’s Centre for Theatre and Performance. She will appear in the lead role in the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama winner, Wit, by Margaret Edson, at 45 Downstairs, 1-17 September. Read more about her here.
Reading of Melodie Reynolds-Diarra’s Skylab, National Play Festival 2016
Successor to the long-running Australian National Playwrights’ Conference, Playwriting Australia’s National Play Festival is now in its ninth year. At its centre is a program of full and partial readings of new works developed through PWA’s various strands. There are also regionally focused showcases featuring excerpts by emerging playwrights; industry forums and artist panels; talks and master classes. A litmus test of Australian playwriting, the festival is also a community of spirit: a rare opportunity for playwrights and other stakeholders—directors, dramaturgs, actors and producers—to come together over the course of four days to debate, discuss and embolden.
This year’s festival, held at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre, was notable for being the last before it shifts from an annual to biennial format, a consequence of funding cuts to the Australia Council. Happily, the high level of artistry evident throughout the festival’s four days of readings assuaged lingering discontent with this state of affairs.
Cultural diversity in play
Perhaps most impressive were this year’s two regional showcases, Lotus and Aotearoa Now, which featured works by Asian-Australian and New Zealand playwrights respectively. Formally daring and possessed of a striking energy, excerpts from these plays provided tantalising glimpses into cultures and dramaturgies that remain woefully under-represented on Australian stages. They also reflect a welcome and sustained focus on cultural diversity at PWA: of the festival’s 13 playwrights, seven were non-Anglo, as were 15 of the 27 actors involved in the play readings.
This diversity was also evident across the main program of six plays, four of which were by female playwrights, including the wildly inventive Skylab by Indigenous actor Melodie Reynolds-Diarra. An emphatic, almost sui generis fusion of her Wangkathaa heritage, pop culture influences and an alternate history of the falling to Earth in WA of the Skylab space station in 1979, the play marks the first time Australia’s three major Indigenous performing arts companies—Yirra Yaakin, Ilbijerri and Moogahlin—have collaborated on a single work. It could be described as magic-realist, but it is wholly distinct from the Latin American tradition.
Among Skylab’s creative team is Iain Sinclair, PWA’s Resident Dramaturg, who spoke to me about the special challenge of applying dramaturgy to works arising from, or incorporating, non-Western playwriting and performance traditions. It’s a conversation that seemed especially pertinent given not only the festival’s majority non-Anglo makeup, but also its overarching theme of ‘craft,’ which saw much discussion—flowing on from Michael Gow’s keynote address (“The Agony and the Agony: A Totally Impractical Guide to Playwriting”)—turn to dramaturgical first principles rather than the big picture questions which predominated at last year’s festival.
Aotearoa Now acknowledging the audience, National Play Festival 2016
An emergent dramaturgy
Sinclair describes Skylab as a “beautiful dance,” a metaphor that neatly suggests a reciprocal, non-hierarchical model of dramaturgy that is flexible and needs-based. “When the idea of craft is applied as a closed system,” he says, it can imprison ideas rather than release them.” If pioneering companies such as the Australian Performing Group (APG) initiated the breakdown of a British dramaturgical model based on the well-made play in the 1970s, then Sinclair sees culturally diverse artists as those most likely to lead what he calls a “post-enlightenment” dramaturgy that is responsive to the needs of individual plays, emerging “somewhere in the meeting point between cultures as a new Australian dramaturgy.” Sinclair nominates Indonesian-Australian playwright Shari Indriani’s Squint Witch, which featured in the Lotus showcase, as an example of this emergent dramaturgy, freely mixing “sacred performance, Gen Y neuroses and traditional Indonesian puppet theatre.”
As a further illustration, Sinclair points to Isaac Drandic, actor, writer and Associate Director of Ilbijerri, whom Playwriting Australia is now in the process of teaming with playwrights who the company feels stand to benefit from his craft—as a kind of dramaturgical gun for hire. This is, in conjunction with PWA’s dramaturgy mentoring program now in its fifth year, all part of a long-term strategy to centralise the role of dramaturgs in the development of new Australian work.
“Australian dramaturgy,” says Sinclair, “is in a process of evolution. We have largely moved on from the typical dramaturgy of the 80s and 90s—a ‘Pinterising’ style led by deficit thinking that was always asking ‘what is wrong with this play, what can we cut to fix it?’—to a next level dramaturgy that is fluid and artistically orientated. But unquestionably we are still a few years behind America and Europe.” The key for playwrights who want to develop their craft, Sinclair believes, is industry exposure (easier if you’re based in New York) and familiarity with the work of as many other writers as possible. Exposure is crucial for dramaturgs too. Sinclair reckons it takes being in the room for 10 to 15 productions before anything teachable can be learned, but humility is also vital: “dramaturgy,” he tells me, “is less about dictating form or taste than being an advocate for what the medium does best.”
In the first instance, Sinclair believes, this is simply the art of rendering ideas into behaviours. It’s an idea that can be applied equally to the Lotus plays, with their often complex interaction of inherited and contemporary cultural traditions and to the six works—Skylab, Melissa Reeves’ The Zen of Table Tennis, Steve Rodgers’ King of Pigs, Olivia Satchell’s I Sat and Waited but You Were Gone Too Long, Chris Summers’ Pedagogy and first-time playwright Emily Sheehan’s Hell’s Canyon—that comprised this year’s main program.
Workshop, Melissa Reeves’ (bottom R) The Zen of Table Tennis, National Play Festival 2016
Stage-ready
At various stages of development, only two of these works feel stage-ready: King of Pigs and The Zen of Table Tennis, the latter surely in danger of what Sinclair calls ‘shop spoiling,’ so long has the script been around under different titles. Both plays are bold, finely crafted takes on difficult issues—domestic violence and trauma respectively—but it is Reeves’ signature humour and eccentricities of character that add up to the richer vision; all the more reason to wish for its rapid progress to full production. Taken as a whole, it might be argued that it is a shortage of ambition rather than craft that undermines the progress of some plays; small casts, narrow concerns and an absence of politics confirm in my mind Hannie Rayson’s assertion during her master class that Australian playwrights are, broadly speaking, reluctant to write about those in positions of power.
But that, I suppose, is a question of inspiration, and perhaps a topic for another festival—one that will no doubt build on this year’s considerable achievements in diversity and craftsmanship—to unpack.
–
Playwriting Australia: The National Play Festival, Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, 27-30 July
Julie Vulcan is kneeling on a white rectangle, counting the indentations in a white blanket draped across a structure that constitutes a narrow white bed. It’s barely half an hour into her 23-hour stint in this two by three-metre wall-less ‘cell’ but Vulcan already seems restless, and perhaps she must be, not only for her sanity, but for the work to function. A computer program, or “virtual room,” is monitoring the state of the cell and its inhabitant through qualities such as movement, heat, light and sound. In this moment, the system is filling the space with a quiet static, a swooshing reminiscent of sliding doors.
Though the work is focused on the experience of solitary confinement, Vulcan is not entirely alone in undertaking the durational performance that is RIMA. In a corner of the room, a short distance from the confines of her rectangle, Vulcan’s collaborator Ashley Scott mixes the soundscape. On the back wall a series of short correspondences are projected in groups of three, fading, reappearing and being replaced as they’re triggered by Vulcan’s movements. The text, simultaneously posted on Twitter, is a nonlinear series of dual dispatches from a dystopian future, or perhaps futures. One persona details an exploratory mission through science-fiction techno-jargon, exemplified in lines like, “In CN0 we wait for the initiation procedures. We wait for the signal from Umbraz. I am in awe.” In contrast, another persona narrates the harrowing physical and emotional struggle of being held captive in a state of solitary confinement, expressing growing despair in phrases such as, “Here is human desolation. Here is human desecration.”
Watching Vulcan pace around her cell is at times uncomfortably voyeuristic, but the problem RIMA’s audience faces is not whether or not they should avert their gaze. Instead the difficulty exists in locating a sizable point of entry amid the cross-platform, cross-medium, inter-textual content. As a work that can be watched in person or via a live stream, as well as sought out on Twitter and contextualised via a series of accompanying essays, RIMA makes gaining a holistic sense of engagement a challenge. However, it is apt, maybe even necessary, for a work about incarceration to refuse to provide its audience with an easy way in, or out.
In a week where images of abuse within Australia’s juvenile detention system have filled newsfeeds, a work such as this could become tethered to, or oversimplified by broad political debate. Yet RIMA’s concern is with the internal, with how we can, or must, narrow in on particular ideas, feelings, gestures, in order to make sense of the present and our shared humanity. Checking in on the live feed, searching the Twitter dialogues for something recognisable, something representative of my understanding of the world, I felt the vastness of abstraction in the work, rather than the claustrophobia of confinement, become actively oppressive. Consequently, for all its ideological reach and technological dissemination, RIMA is asking its viewers to hone their gaze, focus their attention. It is, as Vulcan writes “a cry for vigilance” (the title of one of her essays is “A sliver of wood and a drop of blood: Keeping the lines open) in an age where constant updates and data streams can lead to overwhelming apathy.
Julie Vulcan, RIMA
In the piece’s accompanying notes, Vulcan includes an interview she conducted with paralegal and human rights activist Charandev Singh. Commenting on the emotional toll of incarceration Singh says, “All of the impacts of solitary confinement are intentional.” There is a parallel kind of intentionality in the performance of RIMA that seems jarring. Vulcan begins the performance standing, arms crossed, glaring at the ceiling. Later she clasps the white mug that has been set on a table for her and peers dramatically into it. These actions, in conjunction with the Twitter updates (composed pre-show and triggered by Vulcan’s movement), disrupt the reality of her present situation with a sense of the scripted. The actuality of her personal experience registers only durationally and in the minutiae of the computer’s environmental tweaking. Though exceedingly self-conscious, these theatrical elements serve to blur the lines between past, present and future, contributing to what Theron Schmidt, in his accompanying essay, “Living in augmented times,”calls “a form of augmented reality.”
After 23 hours, the piece ends as Julie Vulcan slowly stands and exits her cell, leaving the room still and silent. RIMA is a work fascinated with the way in which memory and imagination can be torturous, but also harnessed as survival mechanisms, as tools of comfort and hope. This idea is echoed in the Twitter correspondence: at one point the incarcerated character laments, “Sit with me please sit with me now. I try to conjure you from somewhere in the back of my memory. Try to bring you into focus.” It’s in the final image of absence that the audience may truly focus on the presence of moments past and potential futures; filling the space with a reality separate from that of the present, from the world outside. This is itself a kind of freedom.
–
Squidsolo, RIMA, performance, text, set design Julie Vulcan, music, web, computer programming Ashley Scott; Arts House, North Melbourne, 30-31 July
Tim Darbyshire, one of Melbourne’s most idiosyncratic dance artists, is in-residence for two weeks at Campbelltown Arts Centre re-immersing himself in Stampede the Stampede, a solo work he premiered at Dance Massive 2015. He tells me by phone that the residency is allowing him to recapture the work’s spirit and to experiment with possible changes. At the residency half-way mark, a substitute dancer will take on Darbyshire’s role, providing the artist with a short-term opportunity “to zoom out and take a look at the picture from the outside” before resuming his role for the 19-20 August performances.
Catch a glimpse of the magic of Stampede the Stampede here, ponder the title in which “stampede” as verb and object doubles—or dismisses—panic and note in the publicity a reference to a performance staged “within a turbulent yet controlling choreographic apparatus.” Although a solo work, Darbyshire sees his choreography as extending to set and lighting (Jenny Hector, Bosco Shaw) and sound (Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey), such that they are performers too.
Stampede the Stampede looks to be a work about extreme involuntarism for performer and possibly audience, hence a description of the work as “[a] stampede of the senses.” In More or Less Concrete, a work that impressed me in Dance Massive 2013, Darbyshire used low lighting levels, slow sculptural movement and headphone sound to induce sensory confusion to great effect (see Keith Gallasch, “Dance and disorientation”). Of that work Darbyshire wrote in his program note, “The bodies are abstracted as they transform between human, animal, monster, machine and ‘other’.” Very little sense of agency was evident in these bodies; they moved as if primally and organically driven.
Involuntarism seems central to Stampede the Stampede—you and your collaborators have created a device that buffets you about. When I saw More or Less Concrete in Dance Massive 2013, its three figures appeared to have no agency, functioning cellularly or mechanically. A stampede is a state of panic, doubly so in the work’s title. What is it about lack of agency and involuntarism that preoccupies you?
I guess I’m trying to work out what that grey area is, the paradox of [agency versus] very mechanised and controlled, prescribed environments or prescribed choreographic structures. In the case of More or Less Concrete, a lot of that prescription came from the sound. It was almost like we three dancers were figures enslaved to it or moving surfaces in the creation of sound. And that leads into trance-like states. The sound in that work was driving the structure. In Stampede the Stampede, it’s the mechanics of the kinetic structure we’ve made that govern the body.
For this project there were many weeks focused on the development and implementation of the machinery, the mechanical elements, with the body kind of waiting in line—waiting to be activated. And in that waiting time, there’s a natural rebellion—the body reminding us that it’s there, that it’s an animal and it has a different kind of energy. That’s what I’m looking at, that kind of paradox between pre-determined mechanical structure and then the animality and rebellion of the free-willed body.
So there is a sense of rebellion in the work; you’re not just battered and panicked. You’re stampeding the stampede, panicking it, banishing it?
For a long time in the early stages of development I was particularly focused on the determinacy of the mechanics and imagined that the body was more or less a cog in the machine or like a crash test dummy—completely passive. I had fantasies of the machinery moving the body throughout the entire show. There was no free will at all. Then towards the end of the period, I became interested in the middle-ground and changing the ratio: the body as both passive crash test dummy and rebellious animal.
How much energy does it take from you to get through a performance? Reviewers have noted the extreme stress you appeared to be enduring.
A lot of it is about putting the body on the line because I’m working so fundamentally with ideas around rupture, rebellion and turbulence—volatility—and the body is a part of all of that. My body does take a battering but we’ve implemented precautions and ways to protect it. We’ve gone through most of the material this week and at the moment I’m feeling quite good, a little bit sore and tender in places, but not like the first season. We’ve implemented strategies to allow me to survive the work.
How deeply does this work reflect your feelings that we live in a constricting and buffeting time?
I’m in a very privileged situation. I’m a white Australian male who hasn’t had any horrendous things happen to me or my family. I feel very lucky generally speaking. It’s when zooming out—and I don’t have to zoom out very far to see the issues faced by people around me, within Australia and around the world—situations of real political and social turbulence as well as environmental disasters. All of these are catastrophic situations. Where do I put myself? My position is one of not knowing what to do or how to react. I have a sense of empathy, but a very limited one. In making this work, I put myself inside that chaos—albeit very superficially—figuring out from a performative, a choreographic perspective, what is the grain of that experience.
In the broader spectrum of experimentation I need to stay true to my exploration, about being a very passive body, a dead weight, one in reaction to the machinery functioning around me. I’d also say that I consider the sound and the mechanical structure to be performers in themselves. I’m taking the definition of choreography outside of the body and into the spaces of kinetic objects and architecture.
In the development time, I needed to hold myself back a lot from creating choreography in the traditional sense. There were times when I thought I needed to make movement phrases and rhythms and do something more along the lines of More or Less Concrete. But I had to keep reminding myself that there was a whole other layer of meaning I have to stay in check with.
Tim Darbyshire studied Dance at Queensland University of Technology, graduating in 2003. His education continued through programs including DanceWEB (Scholarship recipient in 2006 and 2009), Formation d’artiste choréographique at Centre National de Danse Contemporaine (France 2006-2007) and Victoria University’s Solo Residency program (2008). He has worked with many choreographers including Vera Mantero, Emmanuelle Huyhn, Nuno Bizarro, Meg Stuart, David Wampach, Marianne Baillot, Antonio Julio, Christine de Smedt, Eszter Salamon and Shelley Lasica.
Subject undergoing George Khut’s interactive brainwave experience, 2016, National Portrait Gallery
George Khut looks a little coy. “I want to help people appreciate being alive!” he says. “It sounds naff, but I mean it.” From childhood practices in martial arts to later learnings in Feldenkrais, Khut finds somatic awareness invaluable, particularly in a culture where our bodies are problematised as things we love, hate or need to control and where authority over our wellbeing is often handed over to others.
Khut works at the interface between art, technology and neurophysiology. He is a passionate and compassionate man. In an earlier project he devised interactive software for iPads to help children in hospital lower their anxiety levels before undergoing intrusive medical interventions. His new project, Behind Your Eyes, Between Your Ears, a video and installation work, is designed to provide insights into ways in which concepts of embodiment, agency, self-efficacy and cognitive/emotional self-regulation are reproduced and/or transformed through the experience of neurofeedback self-regulation. Over two weeks in July at Canberra’s National Portrait Gallery, in single sittings, volunteers were invited to become part of an interactive artwork that included being video-recorded, then interviewed and later asked to make drawings.
Khut is artist, observer and researcher. The ‘artist’ part is significant: portraits are ‘tweaked’ in situ, both aurally and visually, and later as Khut renders and edits in studio, adds segments from the interviews and then posts a finished aesthetic result online. But the experiment also moves beyond the usual interface of self-presentation versus re-presentation by another to tap into a subject’s agency.
As a volunteer, I arrive at the National Portrait Gallery with my signed ethics clearance forms. We are situated in the nexus between feeling and function, about which any researcher must be careful. I follow Khut into a labyrinthine corner of a gallery space, separated by a false wall. It is dark here, and a little secretive. Gallery announcements penetrate the space, as if from another world. Spectators—here, my family and friends—can huddle in a small corner, but their presence is incidental.
Subject undergoing George Khut’s interactive brainwave experience, 2016, National Portrait Gallery
Essentially I am given a goal to increase and sustain an alpha-wave brain state. A sensing device is fitted to my forehead and, over that, I wear headphones. After a calibration, where Khut’s software senses my threshold levels, the experiment begins. The software reads my brain-wave states and transforms them into sound and colour. The spectators see abstract geometric imaging—ranging from dark reds through to blue-green—which overlays my live video portrait projected on a screen. Initially I do not see these overlays as, eyes closed, my own attention is focused on the brainwave-influenced sound spectrum which varies from a crackle (linked to the alert, beta state) through to a sustained, gong-like sound. I only see the colour fields during the subsequent interview, when I see and talk to the full video document.
A natural synaesthete, curiously I see no colours in my head. But then the experiment is about sustaining an alpha, not a theta or delta state. I wonder if that would make a difference. I forget to ask. Or rather, that is a question that only comes up much later.
Within 10 minutes I score ‘high’ on sustaining the gong-like sounds and eliminate most of the crackle. But this is not meant to be a competition. In fact, I observe that ‘needing to do well’ causes a crackle, from thinking about thinking. Even certain kinds of penetrative focus I associate with meditation seem to interfere. I undergo my own inner calibration. Quite suddenly, the space around me becomes viscous, my bones clarify, spinal segments lift and fill. I become a clearer architecture, my attention sifting and settling through the silt of my body’s geology. I sit in all-time: old and new.
It is a quiet and sustained pleasure, similar to but different from meditation. It is perhaps the self-regulation that is important: the crackling is definitely less pleasant than the other vibratory sounds, the gong-like vibration much more inviting. So is looking for pleasure a part of the project? Do we fundamentally desire peace? I have taken to the exercise like a duck to water, swimming in calm. I wonder if George Khut has ever observed an experimental subject who resists this.
He finds it important for a subject to respond visually before verbally. At the completion of the sustained alpha-state exercise, I am taken into a second room. Here I am given two black A4 sheets, one with the outline of a body drawn on it. The other is a birds-eye view of a head. I am given a soft white pencil and invited to draw my experience of being ‘hooked in.’ I draw a cone spiralling from my head. I draw the awareness of my family watching. I draw a sense of weight in my feet. Only then do I view the video recording, with colour and sound, and give words to the experience.
I emerge from this contemplative haven into a screaming world—cold sharp air, long queues, loud music, bad curries, conflicting needs. Oh brave new world. The discrepancy makes me reflect on how agency and volition to be well and calm are so heavily influenced by context. George Khut’s experiment has invited me into a state of being I can’t, for one day, maintain. Such contemplations, to make a sustainable difference, need practice, and contexts that want us to sustain our agency. If only, if only.
George Poonkhin Khut, Behind Your Eyes, Between Your Ears, Artist Residency and Open Studio; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 27 June-17 July
Dr George Khut is an artist and designer working across the fields of electronic art, interaction design and arts-in-health. He lectures at UNSW Art & Design. He was the winner of the 2012 National New Media Art Award, Queensland Art Gallery.
For much more about George Khut see our extensive coverage of his work in the RealTime Media Art Archive.
George Khut, Kaldor Public Arts Project Meeting of Minds event with UNSW Art & Design, 2015
Interactivity: self to self, self to Earth
Keith Gallasch: interview, George Khut
I spoke with George Khut shortly after he’d completed his residency at the National Portrait Gallery. Next, he says, he’ll analyse and edit the tapes he’s recorded, look at making an electronic book compilation of the portraits, interviews and the drawings the subjects made, and write an academic paper about the project. I asked him about the work he’s doing at UNSW Art & Design.
Are you lecturing and teaching as well as doing research?
Absolutely. Lots of teaching, lots of lecturing. So far I’ve been teaching a lot in the Design degree and in an in-between stream in the Media Arts degree we’ve re-branded recently as “Interactive Media.” It’s taking the place of subjects being taught within what was called “Cross-Media Arts.” We’ve put a more explicit focus on computation and interactivity. It’s available to students in the Fine Arts, Design and Media Arts programs in the second and third years of their degrees.
The subjects are studio-based, but include the history of media arts practice, using it as a way for students to think through what they might want to explore and as a reference point for reflecting on their studio practice.
What kind of work do they turn out?
It tends to be fairly playful explorations of the behaviour and materiality of electronic systems; for instance, a video that responds to input from sensors that might be worn on a jacket. A couple of students had works in VIVID this year. You can say what you like about VIVID but its program offers a great space for students to cut their teeth and to observe how a mass audience engages with their ideas.
One of our students, Jonathon Bolitho, co-created Attune, giant fibreglass crystals the public can sing into and which sing back with electronic melodies and drones which are paired with internal colour lighting.
As a supervisor I’m interested in working with people, who already have a practice, thinking about the impact of their practice in public situations. I get really excited about how critical practice engages with and pushes ideas. One of my Masters students, Leanne Thompson, is an established artist with a background in sculpture and public sculpture in particular. She’s researching how she might incorporate real time environmental data in a public setting, in some sort of interactive sculpture. Leanne’s focus is on people’s relationship with threatened plants. She’s bringing her project to a very local level, starting with a tree species in Bathurst.
Since you began working with interactivity in the 1990s, has there been significant progress in the field—by increments or leaps?
I think it’s by increments. What’s interesting is that there’s a lot more critical debate around the meaning of participation these days, which is really healthy. Just because something allows people to participate doesn’t mean it’s intrinsically good. Issues around information and social media are obviously a big part of the [lives of] undergrad students I’m working with and when we’re thinking about media technologies.
They’re already well-equipped to make work?
Media technology is part of the fabric of their lives, but their ability to actually work with or hack into it can sometimes be limited. There’s a big transition to be made from being the consumer to being the producer.
You’re still working using a highly developed bio-feedback practice. Is that an area you’ll continue to explore?
Yes. We’re doing a series of research partnerships at UNSW Art & Design with the Black Dog Institute. Professor Jill Bennett is working on Anxiety 2017, a cultural program involving many institutions looking at art/science/medicine connections around anxiety and mental health. We’ve received some Catalyst funding for a suite of programs; one of those will include a version of the work I’ve been doing with heart rate and interactive visualisations. I’m also trying to work on a new project about ‘situatedness’ and geography but it’s very slow to get going. It’s something I’m working on with programmer and media artist Warren Armstrong.
Situatedness—you mean having a sense of place?
Yes, I’ve spent so long on body experience and the relationship between embodiment and identity and subjectivity, I just really want to move beyond a very individualistic idea of identity. How do we experience the idea of Earth? The intuitive experience of it is as flat but we know conceptually that it’s a rock in space. It’s really hard to embody that. We’ve got the blue marble icon but are there other ways we can spatialise Earth? I’m really interested in working with virtual reality technologies, augmented reality and very simple ways to spatialise so that people realise, ‘Oh, right. Yes, we are on a rock in the middle of space’ [LAUGHS] and all the limitations and precarity that goes with it.
I’m trying to take the simple embodied, concrete, sensual things I’ve been doing with bio-feedback; figuring out how I might transfer that from the individual body and to the planet as a whole. Ambitious?
I’ve been so conscious of the limitations of the bio-feedback approach and how it’s appropriated by Neoliberalism—everything is the individual’s responsibility and ‘here are some tools to relax and be more resilient so we can make your working conditions even more unbearable.’ I’m painfully aware of that aspect of it.
Let’s talk about the structure of the course.
In the first year are the keystone courses—introductions to everything. In the second and third years we get the students interested in interactivity and computation and such. Fourth is the Honours year where we focus on various research clusters. I teach in a cluster on health which is primarily for students in Design. That will change from year to year as we move onto different research themes.
In what sense health?
How you might support a health education campaign or designing for dementia sufferers, lighting environments, things like that.
Finally, what was the outcome of the BrightHeart project you wrote about in RealTime in 2013 in which patients at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead used your heart-rate controlled artworks on electronic tablets to manage pain and anxiety?
We completed the pilot trial and the results are all in. We’re just waiting to confirm the publication of the data. The next stage is to do some kind of randomised control trial. We also ran trials in high schools as well.
Thanks George. Love your work!
Philippa Cullen, improvising, Australia 75, New Music Centre, Melbourne
In a lovingly curated exhibition, Stephen Jones resurrects the richly creative years, 1969-75, of the too short life of dancer and technological innovator Philippa Cullen whose aim, above all, was to free dancers from what she saw as the ‘tyranny’ of music by having them generate their own as they performed. The show exudes a potent sense of the late 1960s-early 1970s: years of protest, intensive collaboration, technological experimentation and enormous curiosity—a world the young video artist Jones was himself entering.
While the many posters, reviews, photographs, diagrams and the artist’s notebook drawings in the exhibition convey a palpable sense of the excitement of the period, the videos offer eerily fleeting visions of Cullen and her dancers in motion. I experience them as if ‘through a glass darkly.’ There’s a pervasive sense of mortality—of the loss of a pioneer whose work was not completed—and of a corresponding techno-archeological dig. Video ages and dies and the equipment that once played it is often lost. Thanks to unceasing commitment, Jones has digitised the video record and maintained the machines. Even if the figures in the images are frequently ghost-like and it’s not always easy to ascertain the precise shape of the dancing and its connection with the sounds generated, there’s so much to treasure here.
Philippa Cullen rehearsal Homage to Theremin II, NSW Conservatorium of Music 1972
Dance freed of music makes its own
The exhibition’s narrative reveals that a large number of innovative artists in Australia and beyond constellated around Cullen as she tirelessly built on the relationship established between dance and electronic devices initiated by Merce Cunningham and John Cage in 1965 in Cage’s Variations IV. Here dancers triggered signals via antennae or photo-electric cells when they interrupted light beams. Jones explains in the exhibition’s catalogue that the actual musical output in the Cage was still made by musicians (David Tudor and Gordon Mumma), whereas Cullen’s use of the theremin allowed her and her dancers to actually generate sound and her pairing of that instrument with the synthesizer was truly innovative. Cullen pushed beyond her peers, later adding pressure-sensitive floors and biofeedback to her systems to allow dancers the freedom she sought.
Philippa Cullen, Helen Herbertson, Sydney University Quadrangle, 1974
Dance: natural, communal, political
The rise of electronic music, computing and video art in this period corresponded with a new sense of freedom in dance. In America, Judson Church drew on everyday movement and improvisation, as did Cullen in Sydney, “highlighting the movement of natural activities.” She was fascinated with the sounds the body could make (slaps, claps, cries) when integrated with dance. Her preoccupation with dance as a communal activity led her, in 1968, to commence open workshops on Sunday afternoons in the University of Sydney Quadrangle (one image includes a young Helen Herbertson, subsequently a leading dance artist, performing with Cullen) and to create events on public transport and in city spaces including “confrontational” performances at the time of the Vietnam War. In a very clear recording by Melinda Brown in Martin Place in 1974 we witness Cullen and two dancer collaborators gently engaging with the public until a military band arrives, a wreath is laid and the trio stage a simple tableaux of opposition. The subsequent exchanges with the observant crowd are funny and fascinating in a recording that gives us the strongest sense of Cullen’s charismatic presence.
She also investigated communal dance, specifically on a trip to Ghana, where, she says she witnessed dance as “an act of rejoicing… participation, not performance.” She likewise saw the technological tools she was developing as potentially part of the public domain.
Philippa Cullen with wire loop antenna
Finding her way
The six years of Cullen’s explorations were busy with an astonishing number of critical discussions, experiments, collaborations, performances and events. Vision, determination, a capacity to find the right people and to make the most of fruitful chance encounters all drove the work forward despite the frustrations and failures that came from innovating with new tools and systems prone to breakdown.
The cultural intensity of these years, evident in posters and reviews and further detailed in Jones’ catalogue essay, is found in a rich litany of artists, computer scientists, technical engineers, venues, galleries, events and festivals. Cullen studied jazz and primitive dance from eight years of age at Bodenweiser Dance Studio where she performed in works by Jacqui Carroll, who later became a key collaborator. It seems that Cullen first found her niche at the University of Sydney Fine Arts Workshop (the highly influential Tin Sheds) in 1969-72 meeting artists and members of the experimental music scene, which included David Ahern’s AZ Music. At the Tin Sheds in 1969 she saw a theremin-based installation in which the audience “triggered sound and light patterns”. Cullen made a note that the electrical engineer on the project “wants to compose music for ballet.” She had also met Karlheinz Stockhausen when he visited Australia in 1970 (and would later spend time with him in Europe in discussion and performance). In Jilba Wallace’s 1976 documentary, A Life’s Work, Philippa Cullen, 1950-75, Jacqui Carroll describes Cullen as “initially, strictly a dancer,” but one with “a single-minded focus on experiment and process.”
Rehearsal, Homage to Theremin II
Dance with theremin
Cullen commenced work on performing with the theremin in collaboration with electrical engineer Phil Connor and technician and composer Greg Schiemer who connected the instrument with a VC3S audio synthesizer (courtesy of the University of Sydney’s Music Department), principally to yield better sound. Architecture student Manuel Nobleza designed an elegant set of theremin aerials. With dancers added, the group became Philippa Cullen’s Electronic Dance Ensemble. The work came to its fruition with Homage to Theremin II in 1972 (apparently a 1970 version, Electronic Aspects “was not particularly successful,” writes Jones) with four aerials and a photo-electric cell.
The stately, slender wire loop theremins, seen in the exhibition on video and in photographs (taken by Lillian Kristall), appear as simple exemplars of Modernist design and vehicles for human-scale interaction with technology. In one photo you can make out Cullen and Carroll with the loop aerials and, in the background, Schiemer, Connor and Nobleza. In another the two dancers are caught poised on the low pedestals, Carroll with arm raised high. On video we see Cullen and another dancer transitioning from supple arm movements to rapid, joyful bouncing, yielding corresponding sounds.
Poster, Philippa Cullen’s Homage to Theremin II
In 1972 Sydney Morning Herald reviewer Beth Dean wrote of Homage to Theremin II, “Jacqui Carroll took her place upon a circular pedestal base (aerial A). This created a quiet humming tone. As she slowly extended her arm upwards the pitch (frequency) [of the] sound rose louder and higher. The mood developed to an intensity of yearning. The fingers opened. She reached out, stretching both the sound and the body to taut heights of thinnest strain, she clenched her fist. The tone of audible sound and visual tension receded.”
Video images reveal Cullen, with two other dancers, rehearsing for Homage to Theremin II. She balances, one leg raised, arms shaped elegantly, hovering between stillness and the movement that will trigger sound. A tilt of the head, a sudden drop from the waist, the swing of an arm engender sounds ranging from long sustains and swooping glides to rounded whip-cracks. With arm extended slightly up, a reaching hand seems to touch a sweet sound. Another dancer joins Cullen on the small pedestal, the pair moving in and out of synch and sinking low to to generate a deep siren that becomes a growl. The trio moves about the theremins, unleashing staccato burblings, blips and zips. For a moment towards the end of the tape, a smiling Cullen suddenly comes into radiant focus.
Dancing experimental music
In the same period, Cullen continued to perform with musicians while also addressing sound, language and movement. Teletopa, an AZ Music-related electro-acoustic group, responded directly to her dancing. In an enthusiastic review in The Australian, in which she mocked conventional ballet, Maria Preauer (years later a vigorous opponent of innovation) wrote, “In some strange telepathic way [Cullen] became almost composer and conductor.”
Dancers given voice
Cullen expanded the engagement between voice and the dancing body in Utter (1972), a work for five dancers which, Jones tells us, was based on the sounds from the four languages spoken by writer George Alexander. It received a special mention in that year’s Ballet Australia Choreographic Competition. The video of Utter is not easy to interpret but the sounds heard are indicative as recalled in George Alexander’s account for Writings on Dance 4, 1988: “noises of unamplified voices, feet, hands, mantras, open chord droning, noisy yoga exhalations, gibberish, screams of rage, groans of agony, yesses of willing victims.” As for the movement, “Dancers were choreographed into amorphous turbulence, eating up gobs of audience or making carpet patterns of writhing bodies.” Stephen Jones confirms what is glimpsed on the video: Utter was “a free-wheeling radial performance centred on the cast of a spotlight on the centre of the stage.”
Cullen’s adventurousness was also evident in Lightless—at her most radical, comments Jones—a university lunchtime performance in a pitch black, carpeted room in which the dancers (identified only by different aromas) moved, according to dancer Patrick Harding-Irmer, among the scattered audience “rubbing up against bodies” and gradually removing layers of clothing. A very 70s performance but also related to Cullen’s interest in reaching out to “the threshholds of perception.”
Not merely bodies
Cullen says in Wallace’s documentary, “Dance in Australia has been too limited to those who want to learn it as a performance skill. The dancers are merely bodies used by the choreographer. This is unsatisfactory for an intermedia type of production. The performer must have an acute awareness of the media involved.” Many years later, Darren Tofts in “Cutting the new media umbilicus,” RealTime 27, Oct-Nov, 1998, argued for “intermedia” to replace “new media,” a term he regarded as redundant. “Intermedia” did not take on, but it’s fascinating that Cullen deploys the word at a time when hybridity in the arts was profoundly in the making.
Philippa Cullen in composite with electromyogram, 1974
Europe, Ghana, India
A grant from the Australia Council in 1972 to explore “the medium of electronics and its potential for extending dance as an art form” took Cullen to Europe where she failed to find fellow explorers of interactive dance, but studied with Pina Bausch for a month and at The Institute of Sonology at Utrecht where she developed ideas for pressure sensitive floors (there’s a photograph of her tilting back on one) and investigated the potential of bio-sensors (seen in a colour image by Sydney artist Ariel of Cullen, eyes closed, with electromyogram readout made after her return). She worked with electronics at STEIM (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music, Amsterdam, where Jacqui Carroll joined her), learning to become, out of sheer necessity, “a technical director,” visited Stockhausen, appearing in his Summer Nights Concerts, and spent three months in Ghana and then India “presenting workshops and learning Indian dance technique.” She saw India as the ideal place for bringing together the Ghanian sense of community and her work with technology within a cosmological dimension.
Back in Australia
In September 1974 Cullen presented 24 Hour Concert at Hogarth Gallery, Sydney, an event taped by Stephen Jones that involved dance (without electronics), a protracted chess game (Aleks Danko and Ian Robertson), cooking and the playing and deconstruction of an old upright piano by Chris Mann. The dancing also took place at the front of the Art Gallery of NSW and on the Domain and the train network.
Wayne Nichol, Philippa Cullen on pressure sensitive floors, Australia 75
Challenging times
Philippa Cullen continued her investigation into the possibilities of electronics and dance, presenting seminars and giving workshops and demonstrations of the findings of her travels. In 1975, she was invited to give workshops at the Computers Electronics in the Arts exhibition at the Australia 75 Festival of the Arts and Sciences (March, 1975) in Melbourne and to perform at the 6th Mildura Sculpture Triennial. Jones reports that she used the combined fee to buy a Synthi A (a portable version of the VCS3) to work with a set of pressure sensitive floors for Homage III. Computer failure, which meant that the dancers would not able to create sound, led to a chance encounter with two computer scientists who enabled movement on the floors to generate “computer images and video feedback.” There are impressionistic photographs of Cullen dressed in golden silk, her back to us, facing the bank of video monitors on which appear images of her dancing alone and with her company. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see the video recording of the performance, but I hope to do so.
Jones writes of the pace and generosity of the last-minute collaboration that “all this happened almost overnight and illustrates just how much interest there was in integrating all sorts of disparate systems as well as how willing everyone was to do everything possible to make the convergence work.” There were other challenging times, “a disastrous theremin breakdown.” Towards the end of his account, Jones reveals Cullen’s increasing feelings of frustration after the Australia 75 and Mildura events, one artist citing “a rapid falling out and shorter and shorter collaboration periods.”
On the thresholds of perception
However, she pushed on, developing pressure-sensitive floors. Noting the potential accessibility of her equipment for the public and “even children,” Cullen wrote, “The hard part is to program the synthesizer so that you are controlling a variable which is satisfying for the operator of the floors. And this is precisely the part of the system which is completely unknown to all but the initiated few. But I shall go on exploring the field because I am interested in the threshholds of perception.”
Although she spent some productive time with composers Vineta Lagzdina and Tristram Cary at Adelaide’s Elder Conservatorium in discussion and in workshops, including with ADT dancers, Jones writes that Cullen felt “somewhat alienated from computerised interactive work” and left for India where, sadly, she died on 25 July, 1975.
Before leaving, she had planned to work with friend and videomaker Melinda Brown in India on “a collaboration…which involved aspects of geology, astronomy and DNA—loosely working titled Dance of Life.” Had she lived, perhaps interactive dance technology would have found a place in Cullen’s expanded vision given her persistent drive to bring together diverse peoples, artforms, systems and philosophies.
Achievement & legacy
Cullen’s achievement, writes Jones, is the making of “perhaps the most technically sophisticated interactive systems of the period, many of which have not been surpassed since.” Clearly, she was a great experimenter. Jacqui Carroll says of Cullen in a videotaped discussion between friends after the artist’s death, “she was interested mainly in the process of dance, the process of experiment.”
Stephen Jones’ exhibition, simply and effectively staged, is a fine, archivally thorough tribute to Philippa Cullen, to an artist who might be too easily forgotten, and to the collaborative experimentalists of the 1970s who gathered about her. Cullen could well become an inspiration to a new generation as she already has for Adelaide composer, musician and sound engineer Iran Sanadzade. As part of her Honours project in Sonic Arts at the University of Adelaide, Sanadzade devised her own movement-sensitive floor panels using updated electronics and staged a performance for four performers, titled If/Then (read Chris Reid’s review).
In this exhibition, its catalogue, in his book and articles, in collected images notebooks and extensive digitisation of the record, Stephen Jones has admirably secured the rightful place of Philippa Cullen in the history of Australian experimental art.
Stephen Jones
Dancing the music: Philippa Cullen, An Archival Exhibition for Philippa Cullen 1950-1975, curator Stephen Jones, SNO (Sydney Non-Objective Gallery), Marrickville, Sydney, 23 April-22 May
Video artist, historian, curator and electronic engineer Stephen Jones is the author of Synthetics, Aspects of Art and Technology in Australia 1956-1975 (MIT, 2011) which includes a substantial section about Philippa Cullen. From 1982 to 1992 Jones was a principal member of the electronic music group Severed Heads.
A confession: my experience with James Brennan’s remarkable collaborative work The Chat might have been coloured by my sitting in on a brief slice of its rehearsal, though ‘rehearsal’ is an inadequate word for the hour I witnessed. There was a point during that practice run when I lost all perspective on where ‘rehearsal’ ended and where the performance really began. The Chat doesn’t so much erase the boundaries between artifice and reality as multiply them, to produce a head-spinning kaleidoscopic effect. It wasn’t just me. On the evening I saw the final work, audience members were actually storming the stage to intervene in the action.
The rawest premise upon which The Chat operates is provocative enough: real ex-criminals and actors play out an improvised parole interview. The ex-offender decides on the nature of the crime and the circumstances surrounding the possible probation, and the interview goes on to assess whether it should be granted.
While the parole officer is clearly an actor (David Woods), the ex-offender himself is playing a role too, albeit one he is particularly qualified to inhabit. Since we don’t know his real background, the level of fiction or veracity in the history of crime and punishment being explored in front of us is unknowable.
Once the if-not-fictional-then-at-least-fictionalised roleplaying scenario is established, parolee and parole officer switch sides. Woods steps into the role of the offender and the real ex-offender playing an ex-offender begins playing the parole interviewer. He tests Woods, digging into his past or making propositions about his motivations, perhaps getting angry, perhaps attempting to penetrate his defences. All of this is improvised, remember, but the shifts in power come thick and fast as the inherent authority dynamics of the parole interview format become clear.
The Chat, Arts House
All of this is being assessed not just by the audience but by the ensemble of fellow ex-criminals who are rotating their roles throughout the season. At various points they interject, lambasting Woods for caricature or the performing ex-offender for going too light on him. Other actors play facilitators or directors pushing the fiction this way or that, but this only makes it harder to distinguish the structural dynamics of the work as a whole —just as the parole interview is both a performance and a power play, so is every one of the various frames around it.
There are many, many more reflecting surfaces in this ‘funhouse,’ not least of which is Brennan’s in-built criticism of both the parole interview (he’s a former parole officer himself) and the very format of inverted role-play that he has invented for this work. It’s hugely intriguing, the idea that criminals can gain new perspectives on themselves by switching roles with an interviewer, but Brennan knows the limits of utopian thinking, and keeps that in the spotlight here, too.
In the end, the audience plays the parole board who will decide whether the man in the chair goes back to prison or whether he walks free. But we’ve gone so far into the woods by this point—watching a real ex-convict don a fictional role, who then dons another fictional role, which then interrogates an actor simulating one (or more) of those roles, while many others criticise and direct both performances—that by the time the question of how we’re to finally pass judgement on the man is put to us, it’s no wonder that some audience members lose sight of the fact that their decision isn’t that of a real parole board.
On the night I attended, people were shouting out offers of jobs, mentoring, cooking lessons, all in exchange for the freedom of the man they thought they’d just seen reflected in this endlessly complicated house of mirrors. That a performance so embroidered with artifice, embellishment and absurdity can somehow seem to connect with such a deeper reality is astonishing, and like many of those in the room I could have stayed in this realm for many more hours. It will stay with me for much longer.
The Chat, Arts House
The Chat, concept, lead artist JR Brennan, co-creators J R Brennan, David Woods, collaborating artist Ashley Dyer, performers Nick Apostolidis, Arthur Bolkas, JR Brennan, Ashley Dyer, Ty Luke, Nick Maltzahn, John Tjepkema, David Woods, lighting Jennifer Hector; Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, 27-31 July
Alexander Garsden walks quietly behind a wide arc of four large gongs, each suspended in front of a transducer mike affixed to their rear faces. He adjusts things slightly as his mixer channels their sympathetic frequencies. Messages To Erich I & II (2015-6) is the opening piece for this evening of membranous sonic events. You can call it music if you want. I certainly do.
The resonant riches of gongs have long been appreciated both within and outside the academy as an aural portal into the dense verticality of tone (over, sub, upper, hyper, psycho etc). The ringing gong, cymbal or bell—each notably circumscribed by celestial circularity—is like Narcissus’ pool in terms of its attractiveness. Yet unlike narcissistic drive, listening to these enriching tones has long granted listeners consciousness of the fathomless depth of the sonic. Their distinctive harmonic drone and its transmogrification from one pitch constellation to a range of shared resonating shapes holds the power to extinguish human centricity.
The Inland concert series is clearly committed to this appreciation of the sono-musical excitation of sound. Garsden’s piece is a perfect hors-d’oeuvre for the evening’s tacit remit: to foreground the experiential through compositional, performative and improvisational strategies. True to the surfeit of sensation which inevitably arises from this approach to welcoming sound as extant rather than extracted, my mind cruised through a semiotic pathway, recalling how the histories of analogue and digital synthesis pursued sympathetic resonance as an enlightened plateau which returned artificial electronics to naturalised sonics. Some moments of Messages sounded wholly electronic.
A counterpoint to this piece was Rohan Drape’s sumptuous dive into the microtonal mist unleashed by live processing of his digital keyboard. He mimicked grand organ tones in order to transform them into dense clouds of partials and harmonic transitions of originating diatonic notes. Titled which, unlike the heliotrope, turn timidly away from the sun (2016), the work, performed in darkness, commenced and finished like an hallucinated interruption to the evening. It presented more than an exploratory excursion down the well-worn safety-roped pathways of alt tunings. The listening experience hinged on the simultaneity of conflicting tunings, granting the slippery ear both an indoctrinated framework and its programmatic alteration. This powered the piece beyond pure sonic sensation.
If Drape’s piece hovered at the membranous aural periphery between the diatonic and the microtonic, Jim Denley’s masterful improvisation actualised and physicalised this epidermis. Performing on a bass flute modified with a thin membrane affixed to its end, Denley deftly shifted the instrument to his right so that the membrane touched three thin rods spinning furiously, courtesy of a modified power tool. We should all by now know of the predictable sonic occurrences of these devices rigged this way, but in the hands of some performers and their configurations, the result remains transfixing.
Denley notably displayed a range of extended techniques which shaped his performance through an agitated dialogue with his instrument’s fundamental architecsonics and its transformation via the vibrational induction of rods spitting onto excitable membrane. Whenever I hear such performance of wind-based instruments, I can never not forget the legacy of the shakuhachi—particularly that instrument’s unique ideological grappling with materialism, physicality and its near-mystical transduction of human breath into a resonating energy source. More importantly, the fact that noise—or rather, the overload of frequency specificity—is entirely embraced by the most traditional strictures of shakuhachi performance highlights the narrow binaries with which even Western-based experimental practices make their claims as being somehow ‘beyond music.’
Denley’s performance circumnavigates this critical shortcoming which I feel plagues so much exploratory music. How? By exciting possible semantic tangents. His rhythms grounded the improvisation, as he articulated both the determinants of his physicality (height, posture, arm-reach, breathing cycle) as well as their transcendence (shifting body weight, circular breathing, proximity sensitivity). Once he turned on the power tool and commenced breathing, the effect was like a Rube Goldberg event predicated on causal balance. The aural result was a series of passages which formed envelopes of sound, each carrying miniature algorithms of his performative situation and moment. Listening to the tubular flanging of the vibrating membrane and its frenetic aural speckling resembling spectral equalisation, I was reminded of urinating into a stainless steel toilet—sadly a pleasure disappearing from our contemporary soundscape. This is no mere vulgar assertion on my part: an enriching sonic experience in concert can propel the listener into the most unexpected locations and moments. If sound is to be truly regarded as something greater than the listener, this is where the open ear can end up.
Anthony Pateras, Anthony Burr, Inland 16.4: Through Savage Progress
Threaded through the evening’s pieces was a suite of interactions between Anthony Pateras on piano and Anthony Burr on bass clarinet and sine waves. Two compositions by Burr presented his rigorous articulation of how breathing, listening, intoning and toning can generate a choral dialectic for a composer-performer of his calibre. A fixed tonal chord of maybe two or even three sine tones droned from his laptop. Now, we have heard sine wave tones many times before. I wrote a potted history of the sine wave tone last year as a chapter in the book Abstract Video Art (University of California Press), so it’s hard to make small comment about it.
Burr’s pieces—Life seen by life (2016) and Word And Also Its Echo (2016)—made me think of many things. The first is the weird occurrence of hearing sine waves in a church. Who would have thought such a sonic thing would ever happen? Yet this very juncture between the ‘acousacred’ and the ‘sinospritual’ frames the semiotic substantia of how experimental music thankfully will always exist beyond prescription. Second, the uniqueness of experiencing these sine waves.
Treated as orthodoxy, Burr’s compositions are inevitably aligned with the activated listening required by and for Alvin Lucier’s excitable frequencies and Pauline Oliveros’ excited spaces. But how dull to attach an exciting performance such as this to the historicist template of what now is a modus operandi of over a half-century’s standing. Burr’s compositions granted a specific experience which—true to the Eastern perceptual philosophies which shaped certain early experimental practices—were more about the space between events rather than the events themselves.
Even that reduces the sensation of the performance. I was amazed by my doubting the sine tones’ fixity each time Burr stopped his channelled breaths and tense embouchure. Was the pitch higher now, or lower, or constant? The greatest depth of any sound lies in one doubting its presence, its identity, its characteristics. For when one doubts while listening, one knows that sound is greater than can ever be heard.
Burr’s sonically invisible tones—countered by Pateras’ measured interjections of data-sets summarising the harmonic interaction between Burr’s notes and the sine wave tone—guided the audience around the sine wave tone. It was like being taken for a walk around a superstructure which patiently invited close inspection of its form and surface. These compositional techniques informed the evening’s concluding improvisation, The Long Exhale (2014-16), which re-interpreted moments from the tracks on the gorgeous Immediata CD of the same name released this year.
As Pateras and Burr sounded their final lingering tones, the membranous returned to its infinite equilibrium, like the aerated skin of water in a glass. The Inland concert series evidences a wealth of talent dedicated not merely to being ‘transgressive’ or ‘avant-garde’ (terms as radical as Bruce Willis singing the blues), but to quietly conducting contemplative research and presenting fascinating results. Sound by nature, but music by name.
–
Inland 16.4: Through Savage Progress; All Saints Church, Melbourne, 18 July
In these challenging times for publishers, journalists and reviewers, it’s encouraging to see UNSW School of the Arts & Media offering a new one-semester intensive course, Reviewing the Arts, which includes consideration of the role of the critic in the digital era. While the future of quality criticism in a mutating mediascape is uncertain and payments to reviewers diminish, new platforms and innovative models for criticism will emerge. In the meantime, such a course can at the very least help sustain the artform that is reviewing.
The course has been devised by Senior Lecturer Dr Erin Brannigan who has written extensively for RealTime, wrote Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image (Oxford University Press, New York, 2011) and co-edited, with Virginia Baxter, Bodies of Thought: 12 Australian Choreographers (RealTime & Wakefield Press, 2014). She is currently conducting research towards a book on dance and the visual arts. Brannigan’s extensive writing career and depth and breadth of arts knowledge as well as engagement with the practicalities of dance film curation for film festivals (she was founding director of Reeldance in 1999) make her an ideal teacher in this field.
I first ask Brannigan where the idea for the course came from. She tells me, “I was asked to contribute to Performance Studies and was looking for something I was really interested in teaching and also for ways to teach across disciplines. I really enjoyed doing that in the Dance Major I used to teach—I had a subject called Composition across Music and Dance which I co-taught with a music lecturer and it went really well. So I proposed Reviewing the Arts, which would be open to all of the students in our school and also as a General Education subject for students in other programs as well. I’d have a mixed cohort and also be involved in team-teaching, something in which I’d had expertise. So it seemed like a good idea.”
The course has a wide ambit: dance, theatre and performance, music, visual arts and film. How are they all accommodated? “There are two strategies. One is to bring in experts from those areas; the other is to find generic concepts and frameworks for students to think through their disciplines.” Central to the latter, said Brannigan ”is the big one, the subjective/objective framework and the various ways it manifests in different kinds of reviewing and evaluation.” She adds too “the tension between getting something on record—particularly for the more ephemeral arts—and the making of judgments.” Judgment, she points out, has to also be balanced with advocacy, for example “the kind RealTime has focused on, its writers educating and bringing readers with them by introducing artists and their processes.”
Students taking the course will find that they have to acquaint themselves with some less than familiar artforms. This will require a willingness to engage. Brannigan notes, however, that “some students identify with disciplines other than the ones they’re enrolled in. You might have an Economics student who’s very interested in music reviewing or a Literature major writing about film. I have worked with different discipline groups at various times [and found] they had areas of interest in their private lives which were quite different from what they were being trained in. Some are already blogging and contributing to substantial online publications.”
The course also deals with ethical issues like conflict of interest. In our experience at RealTime the rise of social media and blogging has led to a widespread misapprehension that it’s fine to review the work of friends or professional associates. Brannigan sees this issue in terms of “communities of criticality,” not just the difficulty of writing about artists one knows but, more broadly, of talking to and writing about your community. She cites her own experience of moving away from reviewing: “the dance community in Sydney is so small that eventually it became too difficult for me to write critically about the work of people I knew.” She thinks that in a larger community, “the writer thinks in terms of the the artist reading their words as a way of opening up a conversation, as might happen in publications like New York Times Review.”
The course involves studying 20th and 21st century arts journalism and coming to understand various modes and styles. There are any number of review formulae; we all recognise the standard ones. Brannigan says she adapted a set of formulae developed by guest lecturer Sacha Molitorisz “when he was having to write short, punchy pieces for Sydney Morning Herald’s Metro for many years. They’re a very good starting point to thinking about what makes a good review.” At the other end of the spectrum, the course includes Virginia Woolf, Gilles Deleuze (his fascinating little book on Francis Bacon) and the literary taste-determiner of the moment, James Wood.
“Of course,” says Brannigan, “there is no formula for a good review—it’s an unquantifiable ‘something else.’” As well as discernment and judgment, ‘voice’ is critical, a recognisable style as opposed to “the anonymity of blogging voices” that Brannigan’s students tell her they find generic. With a voice, she says, “you garner attention and gain a readership. Good reviewing is so much about the quality of the writing, the deployment of metaphor and voice.”
The course’s practical approach entails “seminars of 90 minutes each with writing exercises in the first half-hour to unlock new approaches, new voices.” Brannigan thinks that descriptive writing is a good way into developing quality writing: “it forces students to be specific and to think beyond clichés.” She adds that it also encourages them to be critical about their writing. In her writing workshop at Melbourne’s Dancehouse earlier this year, leading American dance reviewer Deborah Jowitt likewise emphasised the importance of description as fundamental to writing criticism.
I notice in the course outline the term “post-descriptive” criticism. Brannigan explains, “There was an excellent conference at the Walker Center a couple of years ago on digital arts journalism in which a number of people spoke about the possibilities for online reviewing that weren’t so text-based. If video excerpts or complete performances are now available online, do we need to recount what we’ve seen or do we just need to move on to judgment? Another possibility is not to respond with text but with image. One of the speakers talked about the Instagram review, where you respond with a series of images that becomes the commentary. We play around with these ideas.”
I comment that some non-descriptive approaches have yielded very personal, quite poetic accounts of artworks, valid responses that might be enlightening for those who’ve also experienced the work, but not for those who were not there. Brannigan notes that RealTime writing often strikes the balance between the descriptive and the poetic, “but when a piece refuses to give me that I get very frustrated.”
I point out that it’s largely dance reviewers who are inclined to poeticise. “It’s a big debate in Dance Studies,” says Brannigan. “I think it was in the late 1980s that Deborah Jowitt and Roger Copeland went head-to-head on this. He accused the Jowitt ‘school’ of being all description and without substance. And Jowitt’s famous response was that the substance was in the description. I really believe that. To be fair and respectful, I think it’s very important that you paint a clear picture of the work.” I concur, pointing out that it’s what we call in our RealTime writing workshops, “fidelity to the work.”
Descriptive writing doesn’t come easily. It requires heightened sensory awareness and much vocabulary-building to be able to translate the experience of a work into words that will be sufficiently evocative for the reader to have a sense of it. It’s easy to make judgements, but to describe the qualities, say, of sounds in music or sound art can be very challenging. Brannigan thinks “music and dance suffer similarly in this translation when you don’t have a character or a story or a set to describe. Expanding your vocabulary and practising the use of artform-specific language is part of the project, of being accurate and being faithful to the work.”
I’m amused to see that Brannigan’s students are tasked with “writing a crap review.” The parodying of reviewers has a substantial history and requires accuracy, as Brannigan notes, “in pulling apart a review and working out why it’s bad. It’s a huge help in understanding what to avoid.”
There is a big-picture dimension to the course: aesthetic philosophy and also major shifts in aesthetics, as evident in tensions between Modernism and Minimalism in the visual arts in the 1960s. Brannigan describes the course as “running the gamut from short, blog-type reviews to quite dense, high-end reviewing and writing, which is why the seminars are quite long. We need to spend time with the writing and what we’re reading.”
Brannigan tells me that Reviewing the Arts attracted 40 students, “a good number for a first time course. It has potential but I don’t want it to grow too huge because I like the intimacy of the writing workshops and being able to be across everybody. If it attracts Media students, we’ll look at including audio and video reviewing.” We end the interview concurring that specialised artform and genre knowledge is vital to reviewing but that looking beyond one’s niche is critical, and that’s what this course offers.
Doing a course in art reviewing not only broadens horizons. The act of translation from experience into words for an audience of readers deepens aesthetic and critical responses, as any experienced reviewer will attest. Not every student will become a reviewer, but as the course description puts it, “Reviewing the Arts supports those of you who may find yourselves in arts administrative and freelance/portfolio careers where writing for and about the arts plays a central role.” I’d like to think that the course will generate new reviewers and, in the long-term, new ways and kinds of reviewing.
The One Day of the Year, Performance/Theatre students, University of Wollongong
Chris Ryan’s great pleasure in teaching and directing is evident at every stage of our discussion about the courses he and his colleagues conduct in Performance and Theatre in the University of Wollongong’s School of the Arts, English and Media. He says it’s about taking students “into the unknown” in an era of pervasive social media “where not having some sort of integrity in just being can interfere in what it is to perform.”
Ryan’s accomplished fellow staff are Professor Sarah Miller, Head of School of the Arts, English and Media, a writer, producer and curator; Janys Hayes, Lecturer in Theatre and Performance and theatre director; Tim Maddock, Lecturer in Theatre and Performance, director and designer; and Catherine McKinnon, Lecturer in Writing, Theatre and Performance and novelist, playwright and director. Ryan is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance, a director and dramaturg. Postgraduate scholars include some key figures from Sydney’s performance scene: Malcolm Whittaker, Deborah Pollard, Nikki Heyward, Eleanor Brickhill and Nigel Kellaway, while tutors include Pollard, Linda Luke and Matt Prest.
Independence & ensemble
I associate the University of Wollongong with inventive, idiosyncratic, independent artists—the ensembles Team MESS and Appelspiel and individual performance makers like Malcolm Whittaker and Nat Randall. I ask Ryan why this is so. “Because,” he says, “our students get to work with a lot of independent artists and the post-dramatic world has really shifted the nature of training.”
He emphasises the importance of ensemble—“how you encourage students to be responsible for the whole work. It comes from task-based responsibility”—and the benefit of working in “a very trusting climate” at UOW. He also says that he and his fellow teachers engage about their work with students in “a dialogue that goes on beyond the rehearsal room,” providing a shared view of student development. As well, students commit themselves contractually to courses and productions. It’s not surprising then that UOW graduates are notable collaborators and facilitators—Ryan reels off examples, which we’ll come to later. He believes that independence comes from the way courses and productions are structured.
I ask how a teacher can generate a sense of ensemble. “With a cast of say eight to 15, it’s group dynamics and really we can have no control over it, but we expose everyone to the pragmatics of mounting a production. I’ll often ask, what do we need to do to get this show on; including things like, what to do about absences from rehearsals?” Dynamics will vary: “Each production has its own way of working.”
Process & progress
I ask how students prepare to work on a play. Research comes first, “with Bachelor of Performance students in their second year working in pairs on plays for two to three weeks and then presenting their findings—the cultural undercurrents, the politics, the life of the writer. A base in research gives you choices.”
Is there much subsequent discussion once work has begun? “Not a lot of talk. I say, put your thoughts online so I can see what you’re thinking. Do, Do. Do.” At the same time Ryan ranks reflection highly, “asking course tutors—the fellow artists we bring in—to encourage it, for example to make students do a score: detailed documentation of their journey through an evolving production. In the bigger picture, it becomes, “Take time off and look at what you’ve done and ask does it fit with why you’re here.”
Ways of working: dramatic & post-dramatic
Students are exposed to a range of plays, adaptations and ways of working. Ryan cites a third year production in which director Deborah Pollard had students read Alan Seymour’s Australian classic The One Day of the Year (1958) and use it as a jumping-off point for creating a performance that “managed to merge the ‘rage cultures’ of the Melbourne Cup, the Cronulla Riots and Anzac Day.”
Ryan himself relishes having someone rewrite or adapt a classic: “then you can do the post-dramatic thing, looking at and making choices.” Alex Tutton, a 2012 graduate of the UOW Bachelor of Performance program, has adapted the Frank Wedekind plays Franziska and Spring Awakening for Ryan. The latter became Teenage Wildlife. Now the pair are working on a version of the Lulu plays. Ryan underlines the value of the teaching model of “having the writer in the room,” and one who is pedagogically aware. Tutton, he says, “pops in once a week to rehearsals and often gets on the floor, directs and answers students’ questions.”
Another kind of experience comes from having a play written for the students. Cath McKinnon, herself a playwright, brings writers to the course. “Tom Holloway came with a concept for Lyrebird, saw the students he was writing for, went off to write, came back several times, right up to changing the ending. About texting and sexting in the last two years of high school, it was the perfect play for students.”
Very different works, says Ryan, come with Linda Luke, tutor, Body Weather exponent and performance maker, in her “pulling apart Bergman’s Through A Glass Darkly, The Seventh Seal and Persona or doing Jenny Kemp’s Still Angela. Each of our productions are totally different animals.”
Luke and Ryan (Feldenkrais) share movement teaching for second year students. Ryan especially “likes to use fight choreography. It’s a, b, c and you’ve got to be safe and you’ve got to act on top of that. So it’s actually quite difficult. Get fit. Watch The Bourne Identity!” Then there’s training in voice and singing. It’s the responsibility of the students to put their skills together in their own tool box. You can’t do that for them.”
Teenage Wildlife, Performance/Theatre students, University of Wollongong
UOW doesn’t offer a directing course per se, which hasn’t prevented graduates from making significant work, like Jackson Davis and the re:group collective’s Lovely, a tribute to the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, or the creations of Team MESS. Lovely (read the RealTime review) was a masterful choreographing of swirling bodies, props and cameras, which as Ryan observes, “meant that everyone was right on the same page.”
There is a mentoring program for students who want to direct as part of their final year and opportunities to direct in SIP—Student Initiated Projects—which is run by Ryan. Applicants propose and are selected to create 20-minute works for which they are responsible for all aspects of production, including front of house, letters of agreement and publicity, guided by Professor Sarah Miller so that students build a sense of what’s involved in being a self-producing artist.
I ask what the works are like. “Interesting and all over the place. Maybe they’re making works of genius? Tim Maddock and I mentor, dropping in and out. One of our current students, Steffani Gardner, has just directed her second SIP production, the first was a devised work mentored by me and the second Vanessa Bates’ Checklist for an Armed Robbery, mentored by Tim.”
When does the course finally come to fruition? Ryan says that he asks of his final-year students, “What is it you want out of this last semester? Write it down. Let’s talk about it. That may be the basis for a scene in the show.” Final year productions, usually text-based such as with Teenage Wildlife and Jackson Davis’ adaptation, Ur-Hamlet, are then staged at PACT Theatre for a welcoming Sydney audience.
Recent graduates at work
We chat about UOW graduates of the last 4-5 years who are appearing in or making a fascinatingly diverse range of productions. Solomon Thomas, says Ryan, “is a bundle of positive energy,” who graduated with Honours in 2013, has worked with My Darling Patricia, touring with The Piper to Edinburgh and now with Erth Visual & Physical Inc to Japan as a puppeteer. Christine Woodhouse (2013) was awarded the PACT BMM Travelling Fellowship which took her to UK, then undertook a development project mentored by Latai Taumoepeau and is currently part of PACT’s Rapid Reponse Team. Cath McNamara (2014) worked on Victoria Hunt’s production, Tangi Wai…the cry of water and also has been working with Erth and was in producer-director Christine Dunstan’s The Defence performed in Sydney and at Perth’s The Blue Room in 2015.
Franziska, Performance/Theatre students, University of Wollongong
Kevin Ng started out as a youngster at Shopfront Contemporary Arts & Performance in Sydney, trained at UOW and has returned to Shopfront where he recently directed three senior ensemble members— Maud Mitchell, Emma Douglas and Adara Eyre—with Steve Wilson-Alexander, another UOW graduate, in Welcome To My World. Ryan was impressed by Ng’s clever exploitation of the theatre workshop model. Appelspiel’s Nicole Kennedy is the Co-Artistic Director of Crack Theatre Festival 2016, part of Newcastle’s national arts event, This is Not Art (TINA) and Jackson Davis is now a casual teacher at UOW. Nat Randall, of the collectives Team MESS and Hissy Fit has performed solo works, appeared in the UK and in the 2016 Next Wave Festival, which was directed by Georgie Meagher, a former Team MESS collaborator. And Jen Medway is resident dramaturg at the Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP).
Chris Ryan’s wowed by Canberra science-theatre ensemble Boho Interactive’s The Best Festival Ever: How to Manage a Disaster, which featured in Performing Climates (part of the Performance Studies International 2016 Performance Climates conference in Melbourne after appearing in London and Stockholm and then recently played in Sydney where Ryan saw it (see review). The cast includes UOW alumni and Appelspiel members Nathan Harrison, Rachel Roberts and Nicole Kennedy in a work that interactively sharpens its audience’s minds about managing and changing systems of thought.
Ryan tells me about a new work from Appelspiel (Kennedy, Harrison, Roberts, Emma McManus, Mark Rogers, Troy Reid, Joseph Parro and Simon Binns). Titled Jarrod Duffy Is Not Dead, the performance is based on the disappearance in 2010 of a fellow student two weeks before he was due to perform in an Honours show. The work, supported by Adelaide’s Vitalstatistix through their Adhocracy program and a HotHouse Month in the Country residency, concerns the loss, search and recovery of Jarrod and was seen in development in April this year in Merrigong Theatre Company’s Make it @ Merrigong program.
Ryan says of Appelspiel that “they turned the distance of Wollongong from Sydney to advantage, going to see everything they could in the city and then arguing about it all the way back on the 90-minute train trip. It established the sense of playfulness you see in their work. Seeing them with Boho, I thought, perfect.”
Chris Ryan
About Chris Ryan: from performer to director & teacher
Although I know of Ryan’s impressive history in his work with the Sydney Front, version 1.0, PACT productions and numerous outside-eye roles, I’m curious about his background. He tells me he nursed in Adelaide for a few years, directed the annual hospital review and then left that career behind, attending movement classes run by the legendary Madam Zora Semberova (1913-2012) who had just left Flinders University and set up a studio in the back of her home to teach mime and movement. “Her practice was not always…pleasant but hugely influential, not only physically but visually. I’m a bit dyslexic but the advantage is that I see patterns and structures very easily; that combined with her work has been a great foundation. She’d say, ‘You have the jellyfish buttocks.’ At 6pm would lock out anyone who was late for class.”
He then worked with director Gale Edwards’ company Energy Connection before moving to Sydney where he took classes with Kinetic Energy and made use of tuition and space made available to performers by the One Extra Dance Company. He also encountered Richard Lawton, ex-KISS: Theatre Research Company, Rotterdam. In 1985 a performer pulled out of a One Extra production, so Ryan was invited to join Clare Grant, John Baylis, Roz Hervey and Julie-Anne Long in Dinosaur (1985), a highly structured, improvisation-based work directed by One Extra choreographer Rhys Martin, who had worked with the Reinhild Hoffman’s dance theatre ensemble in Germany. The work featured music by Elena Kats Chernin. The Dinosaur experience, says Ryan, in part triggered the formation of The Sydney Front with Ryan, Grant, Baylis and Hervey among its initial members (the company’s works are available on DVD or for streaming from artfilms as is Clare Grant’s documentary Staging the Audience: The Sydney Front).
Ryan cites Clare Grant as a significant influence on his teaching, visiting her performance classes at UNSW, where she taught and is now an Honorary Lecturer, and observing her “incredibly generous ways of working with a group and seeing her pull something out of an impro that I didn’t see coming. And then there is our ongoing conversation about the pedagogy of performance making.”
After The Sydney Front disbanded in 1994, Ryan became Artistic Director of PACT Theatre (1997-99) and set up the IMPACT Ensemble. After which he taught movement classes and “hung out with PACT directors Regina Heilmann and Chris Murphy as outside eye.” He taught at ACTT (Actors College of Theatre and Television, now AFTT, Academy of Film Theatre and Television) as a movement tutor and was involved in the early years of version 1.0, one of the most significant Australian performance ensembles of the last two decades.
I ask Ryan about the move from the performance scene (where he continues to make notable contributions) into the academy. He tells me, “I felt I’d lost my mojo for performance over a couple of years and then Tim Maddock approached me to teach at UOW. It felt serendipitous ‘to put up my ballet shoes’ and teach.” Many are the students and graduates grateful that he did.
Lyrebird, Performance/Theatre students, University of Wollongong
For details about the University of Wollongong’s School of the Arts, English and Media Bachelor of Performance and Bachelor of Creative Arts (Theatre) degree programs, visit the website.
RealTime issue #134 Aug-Sept 2016
Winyanboga Yurringa, (L) Tessa Rose, Alexis Lane
Lost children have a strong grip on the national psyche, as documented by Peter Pierce in The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety (Cambridge University Press, 1999), reaching from the 19th century to the present in fiction, film, painting and real-life. Pierce could have more accurately written “White Australian Anxiety” for a phenomenon generated by settlers’ fear of an alien landscape. Angela Betzien’s The Hanging perpetuates the anxiety while Andrea James’ Winyanboga Yurringa returns Aboriginal women to country hitherto lost to them and in doing so suggests, in turn, that endangered young women’s lives need not be lost. Both are conventional plays, but the originality and, for white audiences, unfamiliarity of James’ vision makes it a special experience.
Winyanboga Yurringa
Winyanboga Yurringa is Yorta Yorta for Women of the Sun, the title of the four-part TV mini-series Women of the Sun (1981), co-written by Hyllus Maris and Sonia Borg, which inspired James to write, as she explained in a recent RealTime interview, about a new generation of Aboriginal women.
Winyanboga Yurringa opens and closes ritually. Initially a lone female elder bearing a ceremonial digging stick stands astride a small circular rise and finally a teenage girl is dressed in the centre of a sacred site with traditional female attire. In between, the play is an ever-darkening comedy of conflicts between six very different Aboriginal women as banter turns bitter and anger and despair threaten to take hold. Below the rise is another circle—camping space and sacred site—girded above by a semi-circle of exquisite suspended sculptures and several in the distance, from which hang curled, leaf-like shapes. Transforming dramatically with the play’s mood shifts they suggest a magical place, of serenely floating trees that can become eerie presences.
The elder, Neecy, has invited five women to the site with a purpose (something to do with the contents of a large box) but is thwarted by joking and bickering, Carol’s need for alcohol and her fear of spiders and snakes, the teenage Chantelle’s urgent desire to call her exploitative boyfriend (reception’s too weak) and tension between two sisters—Margie, a lesbian with a white girlfriend, and Wanda, a mother of six with an abusive husband and a dislike for anyone insufficiently ‘black.’ A late arrival, Jadah, a pale-skinned photographer becomes the perfect target for Wanda’s prejudices which she relays with relentless hostility: “do you make art for white people;” “why does she want to be a blakfella now?” That Jadah has made an artwork in which she has her family paint their faces black (as Bindi Cole, the AV artist for this production, did in a controversial photographic series) unsettles the whole group.
Tessa Rose, Winyanboga Yurringa
Neecy manages to corrall the women from time to time: they weave long grass, sing “Pretty Woman” rawcously, joke non-stop from the outset—“you can’t go wrong with a small businessman”—and conjure a scary spirit, but increasingly share moments of sombre insight: “If not for grandmother weaving in the dark, we wouldn’t be weaving in the light,” and they rally to defend Jadah. A greater problem is the vulnerability of Chantelle with her mother in gaol, no job and, as she says accusingly, “you all argue.” Rejected by her money-demanding boyfriend (reached on Jadah’s phone), she wanders into the night and is assumed lost, causing panic (and some funny business about Aboriginal people using GPS). But her carer, Neecy, knows that the absence of a sense of belonging could lose the girl to drugs and a pointless life. Chantelle’s return is nonchalant but coincides with growing conciliation between the women. At last, through ceremony, Neecy can make these individuals one, with a place at their centre for Chantelle. From the box come items of traditional adornment (bravely “borrowed” by the usually cautious Carol from a museum archive) with which to dress an accepting but slightly bemused Chantelle in the manner of her great, great grandmother. Once lost, she is now found, if symbolically, but with great hope.
Winyanboga Yurringa is a work of great feeling, fraught with tension, leavened with laughter and racked with gut-felt anger. Tessa Rose brings stately authority and determination to the role of Neecy. Pamela Young is a gently funny, unsettled Carol; Kylie Coolwell an unfussed, benign Margie who sees though her sister’s anger; and Alexis Lane’s Chantelle a wounded adolescent, played with just the right reserve. Matilda Brown’s sensitive Jadah is initially scared off by Wanda but grows in strength. And Angeline Penrith’s portrayal of Wanda, racist against her own people, played without exaggeration, is consistently unnerving. Her anger could undo this fragile community of women, but their coming together on country finally does its magic. Andrea James has drawn a variety of talents together for a perfect ensemble performance.
Designer Daniele Hromek’s ‘tree’ sculptures make her set a work of beauty, given colour and depth by Karen Norris’ superb lighting, Bindi Cole’s haunting projections and an aural depth of field created by Phil Downing in which, instead of a conventional composition, an array of wonderful, highly articulated sounds evoking nature and the night have been scored to amplify the immersiveness of the setting and a sense of very special country. With wit and passion, Winyanboga Yurringa generously invites us into a world of Aboriginal women in search of heritage, belonging and spiritual unanimity, a rare and treasured offering.
Winyanboga Yurringa plays 17-20 August at the Playhouse Theatre, Geelong Performing Arts Centre.
(L) Luke Carroll, Ashleigh Cummings, Genevieve Lemon in Sydney Theatre Company’s The Hanging
The Hanging
At a time when crime fiction devotees are steadily fed with television series and novels of great depth and complexity, Angela Betzien’s STC commission, The Hanging, proved to be an entirely frustrating procedural, short on logic, insight and suspense. Three 14-year-old students in an all-girls private school have gone missing. One of them returns, tight-lipped, to be interrogated by a young detective sergeant (Luke Carroll), at first out of his depth in dealing with a sulky, snarky adolescent (Ashleigh Cummings) and the girls’ droll teacher (Genevieve Lemon) who had introduced the trio to Picnic at Hanging Rock and other novels in private sessions at her home, feeling that the school had become authoritarian (after another mysterious event) and that the girls needed a sense of freedom.
A long, slow stretch of getting nowhere is broken when the detective suddenly reveals a pile of evidence he had all along, girl and teacher turn on each other and revelation is in sight. Save for a few of the teacher’s witticisms, the dialogue is dull underlining the absence of serious characterisation—the detective is nothing more than an earnest policeman and family man, the girl, a real pity, is allowed limited psychological complexity and the teacher, in love with one of the missing girls, borders on cliché.
The conceit of updating Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, shorn of its supernatural dimension, is laboured, having to do work not done by the script. Projections on a wide screen atop a ground-level long stone wall periodically show the girls wandering through deep forest right up to the climactic reveal, overtly recalling imagery from Peter Weir’s 1975 film. The found girl appears on top of the wall in the director and designer’s awkward attempt to integrate live performance and film—with melodramatic consequences. Other reviewers of The Hanging were uniformly gripped and thrilled, but I couldn’t engage with a play that is too casual with procedure to be suspenseful, seriously evasive about what would drive young girls to an extreme fate and relying on associations with the novel and film without suggesting anything more than an impressionistic updating.
–
Carriageworks & Moogahlin Performing Arts: Winyanboga Yurringa, writer, director Andrea James, assistant director Liza-Mare Syron, dramaturg Patricia Cornelius, performers Kylie Coolwell, Alexis Lane, Angeline Penrith, Tessa Rose, Pamela Young, Matilda Brown, set design Danièle Hromek, AV artist Bindi Cole, lighting Karen Norris, sound and AV design Phil Downing; Carriageworks, Sydney, 3-6 Aug
Sydney Theatre Company, The Hanging, writer Angela Betzien, director Sarah Goodes, performers Luke Carroll, Ashleigh Cummings, Genevieve Lemon, design Hannah Gadsby, video design David Bergman; Wharf 1 Theatre, 28 July-10 Sept
RealTime issue #134 Aug-Sept 2016
Best Festival Ever
Imagine wading ankle-deep in mud for 300 metres only to be blinded by floodlights and greeted by a herd of bleating sheep and a passionate, rain-drenched festival crowd singing the chorus of “Jolene” accompanied by Dolly Parton on acoustic guitar. This is the emotionally charged and comically chaotic finale to The Best Festival Ever, an interactive performance work in which the audience addresses the ecological viability of an outdoor musical extravaganza and how it came to be so vulnerable to the elements.
Thankfully for us, seated around a green-felted banquet table, the festival manifests as a collection of miniature figurines, plastic toy trucks and wooden blocks strewn across a scaled-down representation of sprawling cattle farmlands.
Billed as “part-theatre show, performance lecture and board game,” this immersive experience is a Boalian exercise in confronting the ecological impact of collective decision-making and the brainchild of an alliance between two distinct interdisciplinary collectives, Boho Interactive and Applespiel. Boho is represented by theatre-maker David Finnigan and science writer David Shaw who provide the directorial and scientific framework drawn from their research into game theory and systems science, while Appelspiel display the ‘rockumentary’ credentials they established in Appelspiel Make a Band and Take on the Recording Industry. Putting together a music festival provides the narrative scaffolding for a board game punctuated with instructive climate science sound bites in a fast-moving 80-minute production.
Appelspiel’s Nathan Harrison, Nikki Kennedy and Rachel Roberts serve as a tight team of presenters, straddling the duties of game hosts and lecturers while recounting the emergence of the festival through the experience of three avatars: Valerie Kay, an emerging festival producer; Liz Hausman, a local independent musician looking for one final taste of guitar heroics on the eve of enlisting in the army; and Eliot Bulson, the hyped-up festival-goer who works at the local carwash, who helps measure patron experience and is a subtle romantic foil. Audience members are occasionally called upon to be scene partners with prepared dialogue cards to read from.
Tightly-timed and stress-inducing tasks are administered as we build the festival, while being reminded of the scoring system in which we can win “happy festival goer” figurines and avoid accumulating miniature garbage bags which signal negative environmental impact. When bags outnumber figurines, the festival is deemed a failure and vice versa a success.
Best Festival Ever
The first act takes the audience through the early stages of project management. We begin with a festival programming exercise that is tied to a sponsorship procurement that involves keeping mini-barrels balanced on an inverted umbrella through which we summon the unholy trinity of News Corp, Uber and Nintendo to pledge cash for Parton and her support acts, generically named the “aging 90s band” and “YouTube Sensation.” We are swiftly directed to unlock wooden blocks with coloured dice in order to accumulate resources—food stalls, roads, toilets and smaller stages—all the while considering patron and vehicular egress. After Parton’s likeness is displayed at the head of the table in what has been designated as the main stage, the rest of the lush farmland undergoes transformation.
With the festival underway, we are reminded to consider the environmental impact of the volume of patrons and the catering businesses, our instructors take us through an adrenalin-inducing game of waste collection and management up and down the site.
Bite-sized lectures—revealing links between energy consumption, waste and pollution feedback loops and impact on the farmland—allow us to catch our breath and reflect on the complex analogous relationship between event management and the ongoing climate crisis. These scientific adbreaks do not detract from the denouement, an extreme weather event that triggers a fraught evacuation plan. Sweeping through the festival site, the violent storm threatens to wipe out the farmer’s livestock, destroy the patrons’ camping gear or drain generators meant for other performances but now diverted to rescue efforts.
The big unknown we are asked to invest in is whether Dolly Parton will fulfill her role as festival saviour. In the end, campers are left without their temporary shelter, but it’s all worth it. We end up with more happy patrons than garbage bags.
Heaving a collective sigh of relief, we are gently led into a post-show discussion with climate ecologist Linda Beaumont from Macquarie University, whom the artists call upon to report on the real world application of systems science and game theory to illustrate the fragility of our habitat and our part in it.
–
Boho Interactive, The Best Festival Ever, How To Manage A Disaster; 107 Projects, Sydney, 22-23 July
Emma Serjeant’s new work appears heartbreakingly simple, exploring the last five seconds in the life of a woman named Grace. The work feels as much dance theatre as circus with a hypnotic soundscape, swirling, cloudy video projections and the narration of those last seconds as Grace faces the oncoming truck that will inevitably kill her.
As noted in my RealTime interview about Grace, Serjeant is part of a close-knit circus community in Brisbane and has had a long career with much international acclaim. The work emphatically signals a new direction for this talented performer and a new collaboration with UK-based improvisation and ensemble director John Britton (DUENDE), composer Ben Ely (formerly of Brisbane 1990s band Regurgitator) and lighting and video designer Penny Cunningham.
There is, as always, Serjeant’s trademark circus virtuosity in her work with aerial rings, balancing apparatus, a sequence where she stands on wooden planks laid on treacherous looking assorted glass bottles and an impressive contorted, repetitive floor routine. These are the heart of the show alongside an extraordinary sequence where she falls, smashes weightlessly onto the ground only to bounce up again and again while chanting a final sing-song monologue that charts Grace’s thoughts as she faces death. This routine is repeated across the work, building to climactic intensity in the final dramatic sequence where Grace ascends her tight silver aerial ring up to the top of the theatre space to hang askew above us.
Emma Serjeant, Grace
The childlike candour of Serjeant’s delivery is beguiling. With her charisma marshalled alongside the physically arresting splendour of the floor routine—teetering on the brink of contemporary dance—Grace is a mesmerising exploration of inner psychology through physical form. However, the two monologues about Grace’s childhood and her fear of monogamy suffer from a paucity of physical movement, feeling more like easy naturalism rather than offering genuine insight.
I longed for a heady cocktail of words and movement to experience the full intensity of this portrait of a woman in transition from life to death. A penultimate sequence, that involved taking Polaroid photos of the audience and wrapping us and the stage in police tape, felt like padding rather than the deeper and more difficult work of pushing the boundaries of form evident in more successful scenes.
While individual elements of Grace were admirable, including Cunningham’s ambient video and intimate lighting and Ely’s eclectic soundtrack with its trademark catchy riffs, somehow the work didn’t quite knit together. What was clear was Emma Serjeant’s ambition to make an arresting hybrid: a meld of voice, video, music and physical form that sits somewhere between theatre, contemporary dance and circus with the potential to cement Serjeant’s reputation as a brave and ever evolving artist.
–
Grace, performer Emma Serjeant, creator-writers John Britton, Emma Serjeant, director John Britton, composer Ben Ely, lighting, video designer Penny Cunningham; Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane, 27-30 July
Basin is a play about a fictional town of that name where a man-made lake has been diminishing as a result of drought and an older town revealed as the water recedes—as happened in the Snowy Mountains town of Adaminaby when Lake Eucumbene evaporated during last decade’s drought such that the foundations of the old pre-dam town became visible. The imaginary Basin is also reminiscent of Lake Jindabyne, another dam site in the Snowy Mountains and the setting for a film (director Ray Lawrence, 2006) where the lake took on a menacing character, as the Australian landscape does in so many stories.
It’s neat that the title Basin refers to a fictional town but also a much bigger geographic area, such as the Murray Darling Basin. The fluid in this vessel is water, the subject given to the seven writers in this Eastern Riverina Arts project. Director Scott Howie’s set design reflects the writing with seven bowl-like basins circling the stage. In the middle sits an empty rowboat that unnerves the locals. At first it’s covered with a sheet as though unneeded during the drought but later used for a refugee to tell of her sea journey to Australia.
Basin is populated with a variety of characters reflecting the demography of regional Australia: mostly older people but with a new arrival, the refugee Lily who provides contrast and holds a metaphorical mirror up to the society. With slight adjustments to costumes—unbuttoning a shirt or adding a headscarf—and subtle changes of facial expression, the capable cast of three play multiple characters in stories more tragic than comic, including a number of deaths, caused not by drought but by drowning. The lowering of the lake’s water level triggers dark recollections. With set and seating positioned on the stage of the Wagga Wagga Regional Theatre, this touring production was intimate—the actors within a few metres of us and firmly in focus.
Stephen Holt, Virginia Anderson in Basin
If you’ve ever lived in a country town, the difference from living in a city is the feeling that everyone knows everyone else’s business. It’s through conversations that the stories of Basin are told—of old affairs, love denied, a suicide by drowning, another by accident—along with expressions of fear and admissions of feelings of guilt. Robert delivers Meals on Wheels to the older residents, Arnie and Patsy, who gossip about each other. Mary misses her drowned brother. Jacob, who talks to the lake, worries that this death was caused by the lake being insulted when dammed—not so crazy if you’ve seen prayers made public in periods of extended drought.
Eastern Riverina Arts’ CEO Officer Scott Howie developed the project with Newcastle-based playwright Vanessa Bates. “She had to develop a model which allowed for seven writers to write rather than sit around and talk about what to write,” he explained. “By the third workshop none of us really knew what the play was. Then Vanessa deftly explained a structure that fitted. There were pages and pages of writing left on the floor. The workshops included the writing of monologues, but once the characters started interacting, the writers had to let go a little of theirs and let the others write them.”
The ‘water’ theme was realised from various perspectives, but I wanted the lake to feature more strongly and with a more consistent character, like the landscape in Picnic at Hanging Rock. It would have made Basin more cogent. However, the short scenes resonated strongly, both for their dramatic impact and sense of authenticity. Six of the writers live in country towns and a couple of the names I recognised as published novelists. Basin defies the adage that “too many cooks spoil the broth” with a succinct and well-paced production that reveals concerns that lie beneath the surface of regional Australia.
After its eight-town tour of the the Riverina, Basin will next be performed in Dubbo at the Artlands 2016 National Regional Arts Conference and Festival, 27-30 October.
Stephen Holt, Haya Arzidin and Virginia Anderson in Basin
Eastern Riverina Arts, Basin, project playwright Vanessa Bates, writers Marty Boyle, Diana Lovett, David O’Sullivan, John Riddell, Sulari Gentill, Freda Marnie Nicholls, Craig Palmer, director, designer Scott Howie, performers Virginia Anderson, Haya Arzidin, Stephen Holt, lighting design Sophie Kurylowicz, sound design Dave Burraston, textiles Julie Montgarrett; Wagga Wagga Regional Theatre, 23 July
To describe an artist as self-indulgent is one of the harshest forms of dismissal. Most other slurs are directed at the work itself: to decry its excessive length or muddled premise or cliches is only to criticise its maker in an indirect fashion. To call it self-indulgent, however, is to tie its faults back to those of its creator. It’s a self-reflexive criticism, of course. Pretty much all art involves the interests, obsessions or idiosyncracies of the artist. To label only some works ‘self-indulgent’ is to reveal that you don’t share those concerns or would never express them in such a way.
Zoey Dawson, Conviction
Zoey Dawson certainly isn’t the first artist to make a work about herself, but Conviction got me wondering whether self-indulgence can be a potent tool. I’d heard someone call the work self-indulgent prior to seeing it myself; thankfully this didn’t colour my experience, since one of the production’s many fascinations is its overt and explicit foregrounding of the very notion of self-indulgence.
The piece begins with a fairly overwrought scenario set in Australia’s convict days. A young woman and her mother attempt to establish their life in the colonies with the help of a handsome military officer and an earnest worker from the lower classes. There’s an overlay of unreality to it all, though, that goes beyond the slightly-too-loud sound design, the is-that-wall-swaying set and the occasionally ham-fisted performances. It’s almost a camp take on the colonial genre—and it bears obvious similarities to director Declan Greene’s outrageous burlesque on that genre, The Sovereign Wife (2013)—but at the same time it seems to be camping camp itself, denying us the twin comforts of knowing superiority and affectionate recognition afforded by camp in favour of radically destabilised viewing.
This becomes more literal as the young woman’s plight is infused with the problems of a middle-class 20-something today. Baulking at the idea of teaching (she’d have to work with orphans) or nursing (ditto sex workers) she decides to become a writer, that most selfish of roles. She drunkenly quizzes her mother before declaring the results: “You got Carrie Bradshaw!” and soon enough the artifice of her situation physically dissolves to leave her sucking bongs on a sharehouse couch in contemporary Australia.
Dawson’s program notes make it clear that an impulse to write a ‘proper’ play about important subjects such as women’s colonial experience was never going to entirely jibe with her own practice, and this work would be a mess if it simply ended in the playwright’s living room. It really just starts there, however, and the next hour torpedoes through kitchen sink realism, post-apocalyptic horror, adventure tale, meta-theatrical implosion and a recursive looping back to the work’s opening. And it’s all wonderfully self-indulgent.
Perhaps one of the funniest tiny details I’ve ever spotted in a live production comes when the wallpaper projected onto the set’s rear is replaced by a computer desktop and we see an image search for an Australian landscape bring up the autofilled text “Australia Council” for a fraction of a second. Of course a theatremaker’s browser has searched those words before. Why should that be omitted from this story?
Conviction doesn’t try to paint its writer in an attractive light—her self-absorption and inability to act ultimately leave her grizzling like a helpless baby in a nightmare deathscape. But that’s a depiction of the playwright’s avatar as much as any flattering fantasy would be, too. The question posed here is whether work that is unashamedly self-interested can be just as engaging as work that is more circumspect about the process. Rather than bringing everything back to Dawson in a solipsistic manner, Conviction presents an artist pulling herself apart at the seams, and it’s telling that its playwright, who seems so central to the production, is only actually present in it via a very brief, ironic and presumably prerecorded voiceover in its final moments.
Cain and Abel, The Rabble
THE RABBLE, Cain and Abel
It’s easy to imagine a newcomer to THE RABBLE’s work writing off its latest production, Cain and Abel, as self-indulgence taken to the extreme. Over the years the company has proven itself increasingly confident in erasing obvious appeals to the common denominators that usually signal ‘proper’ art. Its adaptations of classic literature can appear to bear no resemblance to their source, and aesthetic choices can seem based on a logic impenetrable to an outsider. Most absent is an authorial voice, something declaring ‘and this is why this work is important.’ With Cain and Abel, the results are electrifying.
Long-time RABBLE regulars Dana Miltins and Mary Helen Sassman respectively play the Biblical brothers of the work’s title. Cain kills Abel (spoiler) again and again in a succession of vignettes that evoke different associations. One draws on the realities of domestic violence as Miltins interrogates and murders Sassman over a stove; another conjures the abject violence meted out to women in cinema and television. The design is clinical and dazzling, the blood spatters and gore visceral in contrast.
Sex and gender are central here—two women are playing two men, but it’s unclear at what level, or if they’re ever, playing ‘men.’ On a surface level there are no reliable indicators of gender at all, even though they’re everywhere. Is that menstrual blood? Is the domestic abuser necessarily male? At the same time, the very fact that these roles are being enacted by women screams out for interpretation. Co-creators and company founders Kate Davis and Emma Valente produce particularly vicious scenes of butchery here, but it’s unmoored by anything approaching overt condemnation.
One possibility is that Cain and Abel requires that we fill the deliberate void of meaning it produces—that the audience is God, in a sense, making us at least in part responsible for the violence we’re witnessing (and the sacrifices we’re demanding). Another is that the audience is made conscious that theatre is not the communal sharing of space and time it’s so often touted as, but is just as much a fantasy of private voyeurism, that what we make of this work is finally saying something about ourselves.
I found yet another entry point in the way that ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’ were mentioned several times in the work: “It seems natural…” “Naturally…” The aesthetics of Cain and Abel are so heightened that these phrases stand out. What, in all of this, is natural? Is human violence natural? Is male violence, especially, somehow part of nature? By denaturalising this foundational myth, THE RABBLE make the constructedness of cultural assumptions on these matters more apparent, but by leaving open-ended the answers Cain and Abel puts our own complicity in determining them out there on the stage.
–
Darebin Arts Speakeasy & The Zoey Louise Moonbeam Dawson Shakespeare Company, Conviction, writer Zoey Dawson, director, dramaturg Declan Greene, performers Ruby Hughes, Caroline Lee, Dushan Phillips, Troy Reid, design Romanie Harper, lighting Amelia Lever-Davidson, sound design James Paul; Northcote Town Hall, 21 July-6 Aug; THE RABBLE, Cain and Abel, co-creators Kate Davis, Emma Valente, director, lighting, sound design Emma Valente, design Kate Davis, AV/video design Meg Wilson, Emma Valente, Kate Davis, performers Dana Miltins and Mary Helen Sassman; The Substation, Melbourne, 20-30 July
Gustavo Capanema Palace, home to the Rio de Janeiro office of Brazil’s Ministry of Culture, is no Versailles. It was created in the image of the Brazilian people, bearing the socialistic influences of figures like the painter Cândido Portinari and architect Oscar Niemeyer and recognised globally as a leading example of the unique Tropical Modernism style. In Brazil’s arts community in particular the building is remembered as a site of artistic sustenance during the years of dictatorship between 1964 and 1985, a period which saw prominent (and heavily sanctioned) resistance from world famous cultural figures such as Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso.
As Brazil faces another move on its democracy in the form of a not popularly elected President, Michel Temer, artists are again showing their colours. This time it’s in the performative shape of Ocupa MinC (Occupy Ministry of Culture), the movement that has seen Ministry of Culture buildings occupied in 22 of 26 states across Brazil in a deeply embodied response by Brazil’s classe artística to the illegitimate removal of former President Dilma Rousseff by Temer and his right-wing cronies. In Rio de Janeiro, Ocupa MinC has animated the Gustavo Capanema Palace for over 60 days, brightening Rio’s downtown government and consular district with anti-Temer graffiti, colourful banners, makeshift shelters and music and conversation running late into the night.
“It was after we heard that the golpista (coup plotter) Temer had closed the Ministry for Culture,” says Bruno Falci, a young film historian, showing me his tent on the building’s mezzanine. “The Ministry directorates in Curitiba, Brasilia and Belo Horizonte had been occupied by artists in response, already. We called the community together—collectives from dance, theatre, cinema; other artists, workers, activists, students—to meet at the Palace. We all joined together in a huge group hug. And that’s how Ocupa MinC Rio de Janeiro began.”
The occupation is in operation across three floors of the building and reflects the organised logistics and aesthetics of opposition that the world came to know during the days of Occupy Wall Street: tents, hand-crafted signs, a communications centre, a communal kitchen, spaces for relaxation, a women’s space, a queer space. That the building is currently undergoing renovations adds an extra layer of provisionality and anticipation to the visual effects of this political performance: furniture covered in tarpaulins and masking tape, artworks cordoned off with signs that warn against touching them, the building’s facade dominated by tradespeople and scaffolding as well as the canvasses and graffiti of the occupiers. The building is still operational as an arts bureaucracy, and the public servants who come there to work every day are largely supportive of the occupiers, agreeing that the country has undergone a coup d’etat and that the resistance of the cultural sector is vital. In its day-to-day operations, Ocupa MinC is careful not to extend any of the resources already in use by the building’s workers (including electricity for the lights, which gives my photographs a mellow haze), and prides itself on keeping the floors clean and the cultural patrimony intact.
The stakes of losing the Ministry were high for Falci and his colleagues. Government support and funding for culture-making was hard-won in post-dictatorship Brazil and the community is not willing to let it go quietly. Under the government of Rousseff’s predecessor and mentor “Lula” (Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva), artists who had been targeted by the dictatorship found space to flourish, with Gilberto Gil, for example, serving as Minister for Culture. One of Gil’s best-loved innovations as Minister was the Pontos de Cultura (Points of Culture) program, where any group who could make a claim to be producing culture in Brazil could apply for government funding to do so.
“We have made a Ponto de Cultura here!” notes Bruno, and he’s right. As a visitor to Rio I have already attended concerts and debates at the site, taken photographs, found lively and thoughtful conversation, often in English and Spanish as well as Portuguese. Free performances, talks, dances and debates are held every evening, organised through social media and attended by people from all over the city. Events have included a panel discussion with radical geographers Ananya Roy, Oren Yiftachel and Ken Salo; and a concert featuring composer, singer and activist Caetano Veloso and singer, songwriter and actor Seu Jorge.
Temer re-instated the Ministry of Culture after just two weeks of Ocupa MinC across the country, but the occupiers want more than their Ministry back. They want Temer gone, and the legitimate President re-instated, and they think that cultural production is critical to this project. “We don’t know what’s going to happen,” says Bruno. We don’t know if we will have to end the occupation and we don’t know the destiny of the country. Our occupation is tied up with the destiny of the country….”
Most of the other occupations across Brazil have been disbanded under threat of prosecution, but Rio’s Culture directorate has had more flux than some (indeed, as Bruno tells me, nobody seems to want the director’s job at the moment, and negotiations with the occupiers have been handed over to the national department for cultural heritage while the state challenges their presence in the courts). When I visit in late July, the impending Olympics and its aesthetic concerns seem to have created some urgency among the authorities about removing the occupation, but it remains unclear whether efforts to disband them will succeed.
In keeping with the philosophy of Occupy across the world, the performativity of Ocupa MinC is key to its power. “We are using a public space for the public,” says Bruno, as he guides me in fading light to a Cândido Portinari (1903-62) wall painting in the Palace’s auditorium. “This is controversial because the public space wasn’t quite public before.” Indeed, in a speech made during his time as Minister for Culture, Gilberto Gil laid out his vision of creating an “unparalleled infrastructure for public visitation” of the building, with respect to its particular cultural heritage, referring to “the commons that impel the construction of public policy, here in its cultural expression”—allowing “the city of Rio de Janeiro… access to itself” (Gilberto Gil, “In Praise of a Modernist Monument,” The Rio de Janeiro Reader, Duke University Press, 2015). In this sense, Ocupa MinC feels less like the “invasion” it has been called by the authorities and more like the fulfilment of a promise. As my eyes adjust to the Portinari painting, I realise it depicts the Palace being carried by the people.
Over four years the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music has grown a committed audience with its unique combination of ambitious contemporary music, community engagement and affordable or free ticketing. During the highly-anticipated weekend, Bendigo’s historic performance spaces come alive with some of the finest performances of contemporary music from Australia and abroad.
Each part of the festival has its own flavour, from the inevitably sold-out solo showcases in the historic Old Fire Station to rare, large-scale contemporary masterworks in the Goldrush-era Capitol Theatre, performances by internationally renowned visiting ensembles in the superb new Ulumbarra Theatre (built into and around the former Sandhurst Gaol), intimate performance lectures and a bespoke acousmatic sound projection space.
It’s a lot to take in over three days, but the exploratory spirit runs high and stays with you for weeks. This year BIFEM looks bigger than ever and hopes to become an international cultural exporter. Artistic Director David Chisholm spoke with me about what’s in store this September.
Is the fourth BIFEM the biggest yet?
In the first year we had 42 musicians and this year we have 120. It’s insane. It’s a completely different scale of event.
Part of that scale comes from increasing the size of your house band, the Argonaut Ensemble.
That, and the ELISION ensemble’s collaboration with ANAM (Australian National Academy of Music), as well as having 40 musicians from the Bendigo Symphony Orchestra performing the festival’s grand finale, André and Michel Décosterd’s PHO:TON. The orchestra is arranged in rows on stage and when a light shines on a particular musician they play a module. The lights are triggered by a digital piano. You never hear it but somehow the work is like a giant organ console that plays people with lights. It’s a beautiful amalgam of what grand organ writing originally was: a symphonic substitute. The patterns are beautiful and even though some of the modules for the musicians are single notes, it is very effective as a half-hour work.
In the program you say that the piece “completely reframes the traditional orchestral concert experience” and sometimes people will do this by opening a bar or playing the Lord of the Rings soundtrack, but here you’re really doing it.
That’s right! One of the Décosterd brothers is an industrial designer and the other is a designer and composer and their father is an engineer as well. They grew up in La-Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland, which is Clock-Making Central. You can think of this work like a cuckoo-clock. There is something so precise and patterned about it, something so Swiss. They look at the symphonic orchestral experience through the lens of a visual medium and that is true reinvention. I haven’t seen anything like it. There are no sconce lights on the music stands so the music really appears out of darkness. It’s like looking at a Flemish master’s painting, but instead of a bowl of fruit or a face appearing out of dark clothing, you get a musician and sound. It’s very clever.
The Décosterd brothers specifically asked for the Bendigo Symphony to work on this project. You can almost only work with community musicians on this. Professional musicians would be too precious. This is apparently what happened with the Montréal Symphony. They did a fabulous job, but a work with straightforward musical language and experimental design doesn’t work so well with professional musicians.
Negotiation between composers and musicians is the focus of this year’s Composers’ Colloquium, which has become an incredibly popular part of the festival. The theme is “Codes, taboos, and permission-giving in the compositional process.” Who came up with that?
It was Liza Lim! As well as being a featured composer this year, she is a great convenor. To me the theme addresses all the strange things composers ask musicians to do and the problems this raises for non-specialist musicians. Why is the gap so wide between contemporary musicians and musicians who might work in an orchestra full-time? Why aren’t there more fully-rounded artists who can say, “Sure, I can blow through that or scrape this. I can understand how one of [German composer] Helmut Lachenmann’s physical techniques needs to be made musical.” What is the resistance point for some musicians? What do musicians need to be given to allow themselves to do these things?
What other large-scale works have you been able to program because of this increase in forces?
There are double concertos by Jack Symonds and myself which will be played by Argonaut. Our aim throughout the previous festivals has always been to grow Argonaut to chamber orchestra size. When I did Kursk in 2011, that was a proof of concept to show what a chamber orchestra would look like and what sort of work they could do. To come back five years later and put on another work with 29 musicians shows what the festival can achieve.
Aaron Cassidy, Liza Lim
It’s ELISION’s 30th anniversary and they are celebrating with three concerts at BIFEM.
Yes, that was a no-brainer! They’re collaborating with ANAM to present Speicher, a 75-minute, large ensemble work by the German composer Enno Poppe. Part of our mission is to present Australian audiences with important, under-represented composers and to mount works of scale and duration. Poppe is a missing voice in Australia, just as Olga Neuwirth was last year and Claude Vivier the year before. It’s like putting together a puzzle and saying “what’s missing in our ecology here?”
As well as being ELISION’s 30th anniversary, it is also Liza Lim’s 50th birthday just before the festival and given her close connection to ELISION the ensemble will play the world premiere of How Forests Think, along with the Victorian premiere of her Machine for Contacting the Dead and Aaron Cassidy’s The Wreck of Former Boundaries. How Forests Think is like a concerto for the 37-pipe sheng performed by the Chinese, Germany-based sheng player Wu Wei, who is pretty much the sheng master. These are difficult, substantial works that only ELISION could pull off.
Alongside these large-scale works is BIFEM’s prized series of solo recitals.
These have been insanely popular. So much so that we are presenting each recital twice with a break in between each performance.
That is going to be a huge job for Peter de Jager, who has to perform a recital of keyboard works by Iannis Xenakis twice in a row!
That’s why we’re calling that concert Marathon. An hour-long Xenakis program, an hour-long break, then another hour-long concert all over again. There are very few people who can do a program like that, let alone twice.
And two of these works, Khoaï and Naama, require a rare, modern harpsichord. Did you find one?
We found one in Tasmania! It’s costing us a bomb to transport it, but if you’re going to do something, do it properly.
What’s the difference? There’s a pedal to change the register…
It’s my understanding it’s also the physicality. The instrument can take what is needed in the same way that the modern piano developed from instruments that Liszt would wreck. Peter actually bought the harpsichord so that he could perform this repertoire in the future. I said, “This is exactly what our festival is about.” The recital programs should be a) a breakthrough, b) a showcase and c) a pivot-point in the performer’s musical life. These programs are the most intimate relationships I as director have with the performers. I say, “It’s your program. Don’t think of yourself as a musician. What do you want to do as an artist?” Inevitably, it has been a transformative occasion for everyone involved.
You’re also shining a spotlight on Leah Scholes, who must be one of Australia’s most meticulous, refined, not to say busiest percussionists.
Leah has been the warhorse of percussion in Australia for years now. She’s always there, always part of the team, but it’s time to turn the spotlight on the work she’s really doing. This concert pulls together the solo repertoire she has been working on into a dramaturged program that will have a life long after the festival is over.
So many great programs like this receive their premiere at BIFEM, it would be wonderful to see them toured.
In this festival we’re taking our first steps into international market development. For the first time we have presenters coming to experience the festival and hear artists whom they might like to collaborate with or tour in the future. Graham McKenzie will visit from the UK’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and Mauricio Peña from Bogotá. People don’t usually look towards South America for touring, but Peña runs the equivalent of the Melbourne Recital Centre in Bogotá and programs over 24 other venues around Colombia. Plus he’s a lovely guy. Creative Victoria have really stepped up to support these initiatives.
There are some other high-profile collaborators involved in the festival, interestingly around the Sound Gallery.
Sound Gallery, curated by Mauricio Carrasco, is going to be great. It’s so rare to have a dedicated space for high-fidelity acousmatic music, and this year Christopher Boots—a Fitzroy-based industrial design company specialising in lighting—is designing the space. We’re working on a donors’ club for people under 40 to build a new generation of donors and we asked Chris to be an ambassador. He agreed and also embraced the opportunity to enhance the Sound Gallery experience.
Performance lectures are always a great way to start the day at BIFEM, though I’ll be busy workshopping reviews from the Music Reviewers’ Workshop with RealTime editors Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter. This year the performance lectures feature Melissa Doecke and Luke Carbon, both working with live electronics by José Miguel Fernández.
Melissa will introduce the audience to Embedding Tangles by Lara Morciano, a fiercely virtuosic work. Luke will present one of José’s works from the performer’s perspective: how do you approach it; what are the challenges?
David Chisholm, Jack Symonds
Kids are going to love the Friday morning Cushion Concert by the harpist Jessica Fotinos. I understand this is a fiercely sought-after slot.
They all want it! You think you know everything about performance at such a high level and then you’re faced with a room full of five year-olds and they’re brutal. None of your tricks work any more. You have to go back to the very fundamentals of performance and ask, “How do I hold their attention? What is it about what I’m doing that will actually captivate them?” For that reason alone musicians want the slot. It makes you ask, “What happens if you strip the etiquette around ‘challenging’ (though I feel that is such a misnomer) new music? What do you need to do to make it immediate and make it work?” Because if your attention slips or you are distracted these kids will leave you. They will leave you in a heartbeat. There’s no middle ground, whereas adult audiences are so malleable and negotiable.
Kaspar T Toeplitz and Myriam Gourfink are presenting two noise programs.
I’m really fascinated by Kaspar’s music. He has worked with Zbigniew Karkowski, who died a couple of years ago, as well as Daniel Buess, who died tragically earlier this year. Kaspar has been very much the custodian of Karkowski’s wall-of-sound ritualistic noise. You think that things can’t get any louder or denser and then they do and it’s very powerful and physical. You give people earplugs out of kindness, but really you want them to be able to take that threshold, audio-physical experience.
Toeplitz will be working with Myriam Gourfink, a proponent of “micro-gesture,” which has been an important stream in contemporary dance for about a decade. Gourfink wears body sensors that provide input to the sound and lighting. Very slowly but surely over an hour she might shift 90 degrees in her chair. It is a very weird illusion, somebody moving that slowly. The smallest movement seems like the greatest leap because everything has been slowed right down.
The Argonaut ensemble is even venturing into chamber opera this year. XXX_Live_Nude_Girls. The title says it all.
This is a great chamber opera by Jennifer Walshe, who is a real rogue. The makeshift nature of this production—which has been shipped in from Chicago—is really in her spirit. She uses everyday objects in much the same way as junk theatre did 10 years ago. If there is junk theatre then this is junk music. It breaks down hierarchies by using materials anyone can afford. It’s a 13-year-old work and our doing it in a slicker environment is a way of recognising it as an historically significant work. Again, it’s unbelievable that no opera companies big or small have done it in Australia. Who wouldn’t put a work called Live Nude Girls in their program?
And the Argonaut Ensemble is fielding another all-star string quartet. There is something so honest about string quartet writing. You can’t hide a bad piece in special effects.
I have a piece in this program, and after the excesses of the double concerto I feel like this is a really serious work. The piece is called “Down South” and it’s about what happens when you bring new music to a very old culture in a very new place. I think it’s funny that we talk about the “old world” as Europe in a country like Australia which is ancient, or the Americas which are ancient. Europe is new. Modernity is new.
It’s a packed program, but I see there’s a bit more time to eat this time. Maintaining adequate nutrition has to be one of the main challenges of the festival.
We’re getting food trucks in, serving good quality food quickly.
No way! Finally! Thanks so much for the interview and see you at BIFEM.
A Perfect Specimen is a new work by young WA playwright Nathaniel Moncrieff. It portrays “human oddity” Julia Pastrana, an indigenous Mexican woman who suffered hypertrichosis and was exhibited as a “human ape” due to her thick facial features, heavy jaw and beard. Pastrana died shortly after giving birth in 1860 while touring Russia with her husband, impresario Theodore Lent who toured on with the mummified bodies of Pastrana and her child.
Pastrana’s remains were still on display in 1976, when they were stolen and vandalised. She was laid to rest in Mexico 2013 at the intervention of artist Laura Barbata who was prompted by her sister Kathleen Culebro’s staging of Shaun Prendergast’s 1989 play The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death of Julia Pastrana, the Ugliest Woman in the World. [A musical, Pastrana, by Australian writers Allan McFadden and Peter Northwood was performed by Melbourne’s Church Theatre in 1989. Eds]
Such human exhibits have attracted theatre-makers since Bernard Pomerance’s Elephant Man (1977). Their frequently tragic lives offer an opportunity to explore the darker side of theatre’s love of spectacle and display, while the relationship between ‘freaks,’ their managers and the public, is typically shown to be tangled. In Pastrana’s case, although Lent was domineering and controlling, the couple did have a child together. Lent later married Marie Bartel, who shared Pastrana’s condition, and they too toured. The pair settled in St Petersburg around 1880 before Lent became mad, dying in 1884. Bartel however remarried and toured with the bodies of Julia and Julia’s son, becoming an impresario in her own right.
Tangled passions also characterise Suzan-Lori Parks’ superb 1996 play Venus, which the playwright calls “a tale of love.” Critic Karen Kornweibel notes that the audience sees how Venus’ subject, Saartjie Baartman, was “singularly ‘unloved’” by history (South Atlantic Review Vol 74, 3, 2009). In the play The Venus Hottentot, as Baartman was publicly known, is constantly crying out for recognition—to be loved, to be touched and, in the last line of the play, to be kissed.” The attentions she receives however do constitute a kind of love, inadequate as it may be.
A Perfect Specimen
Adriane Daff embodies well the slight, high-voiced woman who comes to occupy both the centre and the margins of the play’s narrative. Pastrana does little other than tragically endure her lot, intermittently protesting to Lent and imploring him to spend the night with her again—which he refuses. Pastrana’s otherness is initially signalled by a veil and beautiful embroidered costume, ironically allying her with the famous “Circassian beauties” exhibited throughout the 1860s. The Circassians supposedly represented a remnant of the original white race which was said to have come out of the Caucasus. The veil here however is soon removed, highlighting how in all other respects Pastrana was graceful and ordinary. Nevertheless, the lack of a visual signifier in director Stuart Halusz’s staging, unlike the comically enlarged buttocks with which Parks’ Venus is usually equipped, renders Pastrana if anything too ordinary. But Pastrana is not the freak on display: rather it is Lent.
The play alternates between scenes in which Lent (Luke Hewitt) encounters various moral and philosophical interjectors: his wife, a small town Russian doctor (Igor Sas), his trapezist lover Marian Trumbull (Rebecca Davis) and business partner Cornell Wurlitzer (Greg McNeill). In between, Lent delivers bleak monologues. Lit from above in dark blue, heavy draped curtains of the show-tent behind him, he stands centre-stage like someone about to be drawn into an infernal pit below. His deeply resonant, basso-profundo voice and heavily marked out bags beneath his eyes, give these interludes the sense of dark truth-telling by a man who has seen his share of evil. Lent describes the horrible, aberrant appearance of his wife and her mummified remains, and how this may instruct us as to the cruelty of evolution and of God.
The slightly static staging and dialectal mode of the intervening scenes means that much of the dramaturgical force resides in vocalisation. Hewitt’s gravelly growl partners well with Greg McNeill’s heavily accented, lilting delivery in his portrayal of Wurlitzer. While Wurlitzer will only scrabble so far in the professional showman game, Lent transcends his own limits. The back and forth between Lent as carnie promoter and his more ambiguous demeanour in the dialogue scenes keeps alive the possibility that he might not believe the words he recites or the role he plays; that he might truly love his “beastly” wife. The play effectively, if perhaps predictably, charts his apparent loss of compassion.
The play closes with a meeting between Wurlitzer, now in charge of his own troupe, and the Russian doctor. Wurlitzer relates Lent’s fate, but has no time to converse further. A snowstorm threatens, and these characters too disappear into the chilly whiteness of the past. It is a slightly trite but nevertheless visually superb tableau on which to end Moncrieff’s modern-day morality tale.
A Perfect Specimen
Black Swan State Theatre Company: A Perfect Specimen, writer Nathaniel Moncrieff, director Stuart Halusz, performers Adriane Daff, Luke Hewitt, Greg McNeill, Igor Sas, Rebecca Davis, set design Frances Danckert, lighting Joe Lui, sound Brett Smith, costumes Lynn Ferguson; Studio Underground, WA State Theatre Centre, Perth, 30 Jun-17 July
On Space Time Foam, Tomás Saraceno, 2015 installation
Performance Studies as a discipline was developed by director Richard Schechner and others out of the crucible of 1960s counter culture. Drawing upon anthropology, the study of ritual and political activism, its masthead The Drama Review was scrutinised by Australians, introducing many to Artaud, Grotowski, Fluxus, Kaprow, Cage, Cunningham, Hijikata, Barba, Kantor and more. Conceived as junctures for artforms, cultures and politics, performance studies institutions have waxed and waned. The University of Sydney’s Performance Studies department recently became Theatre and Performance Studies in a retreat from the formal impartiality long espoused by the discipline’s scholars.
While global in outlook, Performance Studies International has been held predominantly in the northern hemisphere. In 2015, PSI distributed the conference to multiple locations, describing it, with a touch of hyperbole, as “a year-long, globally dispersed and cross-cultural” performance of “UnKnowing.” This year, the conference was held in Australia, hosted by the University of Melbourne.
The challenge addressed by those who attended was nothing less than world climate change and the environment. Ironies abounded, much carbon being burnt to transport us to Melbourne. But then location and locally situated actions were espoused by many as entry points for political efficacy. Samoan poet and writer Albert Wendt’s formulation of the Pacific as an arc of oceanic interconnections between Polynesians and others might exemplify this coincidence of geopolitics and proud provincialism. However, the championing of ‘nomadic’ mobility and digital diasporas so prevalent in the 1990s recedes in the face of Brexit and the hyper-policing of Australia’s and Europe’s national borders.
New Materialism
At the heart of PSI 2016 was a slightly belated acknowledgement of the so-called New Materialism and its centrality to environmentalist alternatives. New Materialism reminds us that matter is never static. Atoms move, objects and systems interact. If we think of things, rocks, animals and systems as co-actors in the world—as subjects, capable of actively doing things; and the weather now is certainly ‘acting on’ us—then perhaps we might become sensitive to what Jane Bennett calls “vibrant matter” and “thing power” (Vibrant Matter: The Ecology of Things, Duke University 2010). Objects and weather systems perform as part of a complex dramaturgy within which we are interwoven, and to which we—like those made ghosts by the Fukushima tsunami—are all subject.
Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour, Professor at Sciences Po, Paris where he is director of Sciences Po médialab and a Centennial Professor in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics, is a founder of the New Materialism and his keynote placed him firmly at the centre of Performance Studies. He recently translated his book We Have Never Been Modern (1991) into Reset Modernity (ZKM, 2016), an exhibition which abounded with uncertain—one might say abject—artworks such as Pierre Huyghe’s Nymphéas Transplant (2014). This was a tank containing murky pond-water harvested from beneath the famous floating lilies of painter Claude Monet’s thoroughly sterilised garden.
Latour insists that art, science and politics must be messily collapsed into each other. Art remains a place to stage the impossible and hence a realm within which to grope towards apprehending anything which eludes our rational control or even our ability to think of it. Latour also cited Tomás Saraceno’s extraordinary installation On Space Time Foam (2015; see video), in which figures clambered awkwardly across fluctuating, clear film-enclosed packages of air located 24 metres above the audience. He noted that passing beneath the piece was terrifying, a reminder of the forces which the atmosphere exerts on us, and which we also influence, as illustrated by the movement of participants above as they pushed gases into fragile new shapes to be negotiated. In 2015, Latour staged a “theatre of negotiation” in Nanterre-Amandier, in which students were invited to participate in a virtual climate conference, lobbying on behalf of non-human assemblages such as swamps. Latour challenges us to experimentally act as if we are “objects,” without seeking to dominate; to be “objective” in thinking about our being and actions, but not in a Cartesian, Rationalist or Instrumentalist fashion.
Antipodean Epic – Interloper, 2015, Jill Orr
Peta Tait
Peta Tait, Professor of Theatre and Drama at La Trobe University and a Visiting Professor at the University of Wollongong, extended this notion by proposing Jill Orr’s deliberately ridiculous but oddly moving Antipodean Epic (2015) as an example of performance that elicits a strangeness regarding one’s own subjectivity. Orr squats and cavorts birdlike in a wheat field at sunset, scrabbling in a mound of seed for a nest or perhaps food. Her comic and atypical movements embody, according to Tait, an emotional dysphoria which we cannot place, eliciting a destabilising empathy in audiences. Tait proposes that such aesthetic journeys beyond familiar human emotional expression unsettle our tendency to separate ourselves from the mise en scène we inhabit. We share performance networks with non-human actors.
My own contribution to the conference consisted of a call to move beyond thinking of “site-specific” performances and to identify sites—especially resonant and unknowable historical sites such as the Ring of Brodgar stone circle in far north Scotland—which themselves ‘perform,’ oscillating between filling us with a sense of their pregnant presence and rich history and then evaporating into the very absence of this history, now signified only by the tangible, haptic surfaces of turf and stone. Sites here not only provide stages, but also actors, who come and go as audiences move through their spaces.
Richard Frankland
Richard Frankland, Aboriginal singer/songwriter, author, filmmaker and Head of Curriculum and Programs at the Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts and Cultural Development, interrupted such reveries by reminding delegates that when Indigenous Australians are asked to discuss climate change, or to share the sense that many have of their country as brimming with potent, tangible spiritual presences, most have more immediate social matters foremost in their minds. He offered an account of the Cultural Safety workshops he runs, dramatising in devastatingly simple terms the “cultural load” most Indigenous people carry, from the horrific regularity of funerals through to conflicts in negotiating land rights claims (who can make what claims on whose behalf), to the need to support and care for relatives and to deal with high levels of home invasions and assaults and interruptions to work and the financial stresses which arise from such unpredictable disturbances.
Frankland ran through three prerequisites for enabling Indigenous peoples to become the cultural leaders they should be, across all fields. Firstly, we need to move beyond viewing Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders as an “undifferentiated Other,” in the words of activist and historian Marcia Langton. Secondly, as historian Patrick Wolfe put it, colonisation is a process which continues beyond initial violence and the appropriation of lands. To put colonisation to rest one might begin with basic rituals honoring the dead. Thirdly, we must find a way to make home actually be “home” for displaced and harried Indigenous people.
Handprints on the walls of Pech Merle’s caves, France
Rebecca Schneider
Rebecca Schneider, Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University, USA, too insisted on the racial implications involved in thinking about the environments within which we are embedded. She described imaginatively touching the ancient handprints emblazoned on the walls of Pech Merle in France (comparatively modern interventions compared with Australia’s, though coincident with the Brodgar stone circle). She identified their authors as hailing her. This gesture of greeting “inaugurates a relation” through call and response. It acts across distances of time between two subjects and generates distinction as palm is placed against stony palm. In touching the hand or the rock, we come to see that we stand apart from the other. Schneider claims that “performance is another word for the intervallic.” It acts across spaces between bodies or things, encouraging us to recognise alterity even as we empathise across it. The interval is the space of performance, which can be violent, as when US police execute black men for allegedly failing to respond to their hailing. Schneider nevertheless insists that because such calls act across distance, free exchange is possible.
From an environmental perspective, we must attend to these spaces of distance. The Pech Merle “performances,” and those of the modern woods above the caves, generate “cross-registers of time,” of things and events which act at different paces: mosquito time, rock time. Schneider argues that dramaturgical reflection enables us to encounter radical distinction. It is not only police who hail us, but protesters. On the streets, they call out “black lives matter” and by recognising such hailing we reconfigure relations between entities, groupings and populations.
Schneider’s model of performance is characterised by fissures at the fault-line of interaction. I am tempted to call it dialectical. It is based not only on immediacy, but also distance and reflection; on touching, as well as on drawing away. Schneider warns us that possibly uncritical celebrations of “liveness” and physical immediacy might be complicit with Capitalist exploitation. Capital also seeks to animate the world as ever moving, labouring bodies and productive systems. An intervallic pause might be what is required. Schneider’s keynote was a virtuosic rhetorical display, as much speculative poetry as academic analysis, providing a striking example of how metaphor might be deployed by artists and commentators to enchant and critique the world.
Watch Bruno Latour’s keynote lecture:
Performance Studies International 2016, No 22: Performance Climates. Keynote speakers: Bruno Latour (France), Peta Tait (Australia), Richard Frankland (Australia/Gunditjmara), Rebecca Schneider (USA). Conference convenor: Eddie Paterson & committee; University of Melbourne, Meat Market and Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, 5-9 July
Image: Sally Smart, The Choreography of Cutting, 2015 (detail), installation view; Purdy Hicks Gallery, London
“So you want to be a critic? Isn’t there a conflict of interest?” Or so I’ve been asked, since starting to write.
This conflict of interest—between someone who dances and someone who thinks deeply about dance and writes about it—rings true as long as dancers are perceived as merely physical agents, incapable of deep scrutiny, and critics as crotchety outsiders.
Regardless, popular logic agrees: artists and critics are rivals. Criticism (reflection) is secondary, while art (experience) is primary. Certainly most criticism assumes a secondary position, directly responsive to someone else’s art. What about a criticism in which the primary subject is the critic, observing the critical mind in a Proustian way, whereby “the seeker is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking?”
…here Matthew Goulish in 39 Microlectures: In Proximity of Performance (2000): “If a critic believes in his or her own power to cause a change in audience thinking, that critic lives in delusion. Any changes of this kind are peripheral effects of a more central event. Criticism only consistently changes the critic—whether further narrowing the views of the art policeman, or incrementally expanding the horizons of the open-minded thinker. If we accept this severe limitation—that in fact the first function of criticism is to cause a change in the critic—then we may begin to act accordingly.”
Criticism at its most enthralling, is more like a thought process rendered than a judgement delivered. The critical mind arrives on the page structured, the order of words fixed, linear. This form is a necessary part of the translation: “to preserve the works of the mind against oblivion” (Coleridge and Valéry). The mind itself however abounds with contradictions, tangents, multiple voices, fog.
Thought process is action. Can writing be said to be in action? The mind wanders…
…to Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text (1973): “[The text] produces, in me, the best pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly; if, reading it, I am led to look up often, to listen to something else.”
…now Maggie Nelson in The Art of Cruelty (2011): “True moral complexity is rarely found in simple reversals. More often it is found by wading into the swamp, getting intimate with discomfort, and developing an appetite for nuance.”
I’ve never taken to the notion that ‘Opinions are like arseholes; everybody’s got one.’ Just because everyone has an arsehole, doesn’t mean the arsehole is not without its pleasures. Doesn’t everyone also have a face, eyes? Are those features rendered redundant because of our daily encounters with them? And, while everyone may be capable of having an opinion, not everyone is equal in the powers of articulation.
… now Oscar Wilde—flaunting his snobbishness ironically as much as taking himself seriously; an enviable skill—in The Critic as Artist (1891): “More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it.”
All this navel-gazing, this centring of the critic, may also arouse suspicions of snobbery, of self-indulgence. Remembering Goulish’s ideal of the critic as “incrementally expanding the horizons of the open-minded thinker,” I imagine such horizons calling for a vast outward-looking. That in locating myself as a site for change, what I actually reveal is not myself, but the world around me.
…now Eileen Myles in Inferno (A Poet’s Novel; 2010): “‘World’ always just means mind.”
…now David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd (1950): “…of course, one must always ask whether, in changing oneself, one is simply adapting to the world as it is without protest or criticism.”
If a critic becomes the site for change, they must also remain the agent of that change, not merely swaying to culture’s presumptive values. If the disdain for the critic is born of the art policeman’s narrow-mindedness, the adverse risk for the critic is to become so agreeable as to become insignificant, a yes-man. In this era of aggregated scores and Metacritics—of generalised tastes—the critic has an indispensable opportunity to speak for him/herself and dissent from popular opinion, whether by challenging what is routinely lauded or celebrating what is routinely dismissed.
…now Margaret Atwood in Negotiating with the Dead (2002): “There has been a widespread suspicion among writers… that there are two of him sharing the same body, with a hard-to-predict and difficult-to-pinpoint moment during which the one turns into the other… that one half does the living, the other half the writing. As for the artists who are also writers, they are doubles twice times over.”
How to observe the exact moment of writing? Thoughts are collected over time, sparked by conversations, art, unremembered sources. Tenuous connections are made, consciously, or congealing peripherally in such a way as to be indecipherable when looked at directly. Time is needed so that the mind might work its way towards self-comprehension without conscious interference; a picture slowly fading into focus. Ideas that seem self-evident easily fall apart when I try to explain to others. The mind completes one puzzle, then language must complete the same puzzle over again.
Now sitting at the computer: a flurry of typing, fragments of thought all pouring out, sometimes with words I don’t know that I know, this unknown double emerges, needing translation, a clearer phrase found, or a murkier one, another memory, another writer who said it better, cutting and pasting, new meanings created with each rearrangement; and then I read it back and it’s no longer simply my voice. Now the writing talks back to me.
…now Rebecca Hilton (Australian dancer, choreographer), a maverick when it comes to succinct insights about one’s dancing, telling me “You pick up movement very quickly. That means you don’t really have to do the labour of processing the co-ordination internally; it just arrives full-formed, like mimicry.” I’ve since imagined my self-hood as a collage of copied behaviours, borrowed ideas, influences. Which leads to an inescapably philosophical question: What is the essence of a person uninfluenced? Is there even such a thing?
A critic’s opinion is never wholly their own. Might criticism, once translated and expunged from the critic, who has drawn on a multitude of other voices, belong equally to the reader who resuscitates it in the reading, coerced into voicing the writer’s collected thoughts as their own, if only momentarily?
…again Wilde: “The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.”
If all art is quite useless, let’s acknowledge the critic is also useless. That affords some freedom at least. No longer beholden to the burden of functionality (and hopefully not aspiring only to evaluative authority), criticism might now aspire to admiration in the same way the artist does; admiration requiring of the reader a critical mind—the very thing the critic is trying to advocate and cultivate.
…now an older woman, I forget her name, a self-proclaimed veteran of New York dance audiences, telling me “A choreographer has to make a decision. And really what they choose is arbitrary, but you have to pursue the decision so that it can lead you somewhere. And that is when things can get interesting, but still the decision is arbitrary.” I like how counterintuitive that sounds.
…now Connor, a friend, over dinner at my local Nepalese Indian restaurant, in whose company conversations like this are chewed over for hours. I repeat, “An artist has to propose something, they have to make a decision and follow through. And I have always had a conflict with that, the decision moment, the taking of perceived sides, even among the arbitrary.”
Connor says something about power always calling for resistance. (Connor is preoccupied with power, and usually steers the conversation this way.) Wherever authority is claimed, resistance to that authority makes itself known. To consider this conflict, between authority and dissent, within your own thought process, and to make that conflict visible, the doors of a privately-working mind flung open, exposed, in action, risking humiliation and judgement; now here is a celebration of criticism.
…now Keith Gallasch, who edited this piece, suggesting about my first-draft ending that “it does not allow the critic a body of work—surely the writing is a representation of an experience—the review translates one experience into another for the reader, and decisively.” To which I responded, “I will have another look. I think the final paragraph could be clearer, as to my interest in things being decisive without necessarily being wholly conclusive.”
Rennie McDougall
Rennie McDougall is a performer, choreographer and writer, originally from Melbourne, and now living and working in NYC. Rennie currently writes for RealTime and New York performance blog Culturebot. He is currently studying for a Masters of Journalism, Cultural Reporting and Criticism at the Arthur L Carter Journalism Institute at NYU.
Rennie and the Editors thank Sally Smart for allowing us to use an image of her installation The Choreography of Cutting. Rennie sees the image as corresponding to “the critical mind…in a state of movement.”
Many images cross our screens at the RealTime office each week but something about this one suggests more than meets the eye.
Curiosity takes me to Paddington’s Barometer Gallery where photo-media artist Julie Williams ushers me into a darkened annex to view her 13-minute video The Tears. It opens with richly coloured images of the natural landscape near the artist’s home on the western edge of the Blue Mountains, gradually zoning in on a sharply defined tear-shaped hole in smooth red granite. This womb-like waterhole is regarded as sacred by the local Wiradjuri people: “It sits at the head of the east/west flow and is a site for women to tell their stories” (room notes). It is also significant for the non-indigenous Williams.
The woman in the video turns out to be the artist herself. From a bed, as if actively conjuring her own dreamscape, she observes and sometimes generates via a switch on the wall the myriad properties of a flowing river. Light breaks across the surface forming patterns, fleeting figures and eventually a sort of liquid calligraphy. Watery sounds meld with the movement of air, birdcalls and finally a strange, pulsing animal cry. At times, Williams, in what looks like an attempt at psychological immersion, rearranges the elements of her small world and attempts to enter the waterhole projected above her bed.
In the gallery, a series of seven subtly coloured still images capture moments from the video. Williams tells me that when she was offered the possibility of this exhibition she was in the throes of a long convalescence from surgery. Returning to water, the source of much of her imagery for the past decade, she decided she would make the work from her sickbed. In this idiosyncratic multi-layered series, Julie Williams, visits a familiar place as a spiritual “point of departure into the landscape” to find her way out of confinement and back into the world.
Julie Williams, The Tears, 2016, an ARTHERE Exhibition, Barometer Gallery, Paddington, Sydney, 13-17 July
“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” says TS Eliot’s J Alfred Prufrock. In The Astronaut, Samantha Chester measures her protagonist’s withdrawal from the world in cups of tea, jigsaw puzzles and weather reports, punctuated by Elvis Presley movies and replays of the 1969 moon landing.
Gently mesmerising, the absence of narrative movement emphasises the sense of life passing by Gwen, a composite of women from Chester’s family. She rises with smooth confidence from her armchair by the television, makes a cup of tea, carries it about the room and nestles it in its allocated place in the mounds of jigsaw puzzle pieces strewn across her table. The careful progressive arrangement of tea cups sends puzzle pieces tumbling to the floor in a clatter as Gwen takes the next unperturbed steps of her ritual, sorting through cassette tapes. Inserting the chosen tape in the machine and listening as she picks over puzzle pieces, we hear Chester’s voice reminiscing about her childhood, from the minutiae of the movement of doors to a description of mandarin trees growing along a fence. The work is built from repetition of these rituals, along with delicately interspersed memories of the moon landing and politely declined invitations to social events.
The mundane takes centre stage, the kitsch of Elvis Presley movies attaining hallowed status in the shrine of memory. The shock of Presley’s death echoes some unspecified trauma that hides at the centre of the performance, with distorted sound and tortured movements suddenly marking the pivotal moment without revealing details. Chester shares her own memory complete with childhood confusion, shock and betrayal; someone has left and Gwen subsequently isolates herself.
Chester is a constantly engaging presence, a small smile attracting and holding the eye both as she moves and as she embodies stillness. She constructs regular patterns to structure Gwen’s rituals, fixing attention in each moment. Her total absorption in a mandarin is compelling, as she loses herself in the smell, examines the texture and then gobbles the segments down in a citrus orgy of consumption. The choreography is stylised and restrained, echoing the constraints of Gwen’s housebound life.
Samantha Chester, The Astronaut
Director Frances Barbe resists the temptation to use the moon landing motif as a metaphor, Gwen’s interest in space exploration instead leading her to find the cracks in her existence. Matthew Osborne’s tight lighting design—featuring whimsical video projections of a bicycle moving across the surface of a lampshade and evoking the course of a rainy afternoon and evening—drives proceedings. Patterned cracks craze their ways along the wall, tempting Gwen to trace their sharp edges before they fade into troubling mysterious reminders. Composer Ekrem Mulayim’s beautiful soundscape evokes detached, timeless calm throughout.
Samantha Chester’s biographical inspiration and choreographed movement produce an engagingly atmospheric work, her stylised stillnesses creating moments that flow together to suggest the life of someone stepping out of the rhythm of the world on long, timeless afternoons.
Read a review of Samantha Chester’s 2014 work Safety in Numbers.
–
The Blue Room Theatre and Samantha Chester: The Astronaut, creator, performer Samantha Chester, director Frances Barbe, dramaturgy Julie-Anne Long, design Isabel O’Neill, composer Ekrem Mulayim, lighting, sound design Matthew Osborne, collaborator/operator Timothy Green; The Blue Room Theatre, Perth, 21 June-9 July
The arts have always provided a mirror on our relationship with the environment. The epic poems of the ancient world in which heroes sailed forth to do battle with terrifying monsters in unmapped regions register culturally specific ways of thinking about nature, its concealed resources and potential transformations. This is also true of the cave paintings at Lascaux and Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, for the landscape paintings of Li Cheng and Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake.
But is the ancient role of sensitive and receptive observer enough in an age when we are beginning to feel the impacts of anthropogenic climate change? For many artists, the answer is no. Today’s issues are too important. There is a feeling in the air that now more than ever the artist must make a conscious effort to be useful, to be the hammer and not the glass, to advocate for collective global action on emissions management and to warn of the dangers of failing to act.
And so artists—with plenty of support from arts and other organisations around the world—are increasingly looking to new methods of performance that prioritise community participation and aim to shift cultural attitudes.
Best Festival Ever
The Best Festival Ever
This seems to be the motivating impulse behind a short program of events curated by Arts House and presented as part of the 2016 Performance Studies International Conference at the University of Melbourne.
In an attempt to convince audiences of the everyday utility of the interdisciplinary field of systems science, David Finnigan, Nathan Harrison, Nikki Kennedy, Rachel Roberts and David Shaw (going under the name Boho Interactive) have created a participatory performance event based on a series of tabletop games.
In Best Festival Ever, audience members play the role of music festival organiser, following a kind of choose-your-own-adventure storyline inspired by some of the great music festival disasters, including the floods at the infamous 2005 Glastonbury Festival. All the while Boho Interactive cannily sneaks in quick lessons on the basic principles of systemology.
The set-up is very attractive. We sit at a long table covered in green cloth with a model stage at one end and a serpentine strip of blue running down the centre representing a creek at the festival location. The games involve coloured building blocks, dice, toy quadbikes and lots of negotiations. There’s a charming homemade quality to the props, but it all works smoothly and the evening hums along. The apt use of Captain Planet figurines gives me a special sentimental thrill.
It is hard to judge the pedagogical value of the show. If it’s any measure of success or failure, I’m not sure that I gleaned enough to go out myself and preach the importance of tipping points or hysteresis or whatever. However, as a social event, it is brilliant fun and consistently involving. It’s no surprise that Best Festival Ever has had success as a team-building exercise with corporate clients both in Australia and in England.
The show has an optimistic spirit and an ultimately comforting message, reassuring us that science provides the conceptual tools needed to manage environmental disasters, even those of immense complexity, as long as there are enough people at the table.
Enfold
In Enfold, a meditative installation and dance piece by Ria Soemardjo, Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal and Paula Van Beek, we shift to a different model of participation. If there is a sort of creeping philistinism about Best Festival Ever in the way it reduces art to mere communication, Enfold heads in the other direction, insisting on the connection between art and the sacred.
Enfold attempts to engineer a sense of participation and flow by moving the audience around the space as the performance shifts from one corner to another, using a few small props to indicate a shifting shoreline. At different points we are given small cup-like structures made from a kind of crude felt, about the size and shape of an oyster shell. With these we are invited to carry water with us while we watch.
Vocalist Soemardjo sings a brief but haunting arietta that sounds like a disappearing lullaby while Tyas Tunggal improvises from fragments of traditional Javanese dance, undulant and slowly vibrating. The two performers, who previously collaborated on the very impressive and highly atmospheric Opal Vapour (2012), often touch throughout early parts of the performance, resting on one another, as if connected by a shared breath. Later, Soemardjo accompanies herself with a single-string Brazilian percussion instrument called a berimbau while Tyas Tunggal cruises around the space wearing a small square of plastic tarpaulin as a wrap. Much of this work feels like the eroded remnant of some larger symbolism.
The show is performed in a small room upstairs at the North Melbourne Town Hall. It’s such a stripped down presentation that I had a strong feeling that we really were in an out-of-the-way place, caught on the inside of a fold. The narrow dimensions, hard walls and the absence of furnishings in the room give Soemardjo’s voice a pleasing fullness and depth.
The idea is to create a mobile ceremony that can be adapted to different kinds of venue. Rituals require that participants understand the steps, or are initiated; here there always seemed to be some confusion about where to stand and when to move, which prevented our complete immersion in the experience. There were lots of nods and puzzled smiles and misunderstandings as Janette Hoe, a dance artist in her own right but here playing a kind of usher, attempted to shepherd audience members around the space.
And the earth sighed, Josephine Starrs, Leon Cmielewski
and the earth sighed
A large video installation, titled and the earth sighed, represents a more confrontational and in many ways problematic approach to the performance of climate. It features footage of Australian landscapes and seascapes recorded by drones and underwater cameras projected onto the floor of the main performance space at the North Melbourne Town Hall. Entering the space from above, via a scaffold platform, we stare down as the land is subjected to post-production manipulations, showing encroaching sea water and desertification.
And there is text, too, digitally scrawled across the land, erasing the kangaroo tracks and wild flowers. In a brief catalogue essay, Fiona McGregor asks how one can empathise with an environment. Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski seem to suggest that the way to do this is to subject the environment to a recognisably human torture. Their defacement of the desert echoes the punishment described by Kafka in a short story, “In the Penal Colony,” in which prisoners’ sentences are carved onto their bodies. It’s as if humanity is a machine with which to judge and then destroy the Earth.
Even without these dynamic manipulations, the work manages to create an atmosphere of menace. With the camera looking down, the shadow of the quadcopter drone is always visible, gliding over the landscape. It looks like crosshairs and feels like the artists are targeting the Earth. The projections are arranged so that the audience can wander across the images, as if traversing the land; but when I visited, no one seemed game, preferring to observe from a safe distance. Who would willingly place themselves in the crosshairs, especially when the pilot seems so callow and unstable?
In contrast to other pieces in the Performing Climates program, which includes Marrugeku’s Cut the Sky, this is a work that seems to encourage a kind of inhibitory fear of the new climatic regime. And the earth sighed suggests that the threat is ineluctable and that action is pointless: all that we can do is record our doom-struck fascination with the planet’s coming transformation.
–
Performing Climates, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall; 6-10 July
Visit Fremantle Arts Centre and you’ll find yourself in a forest of 300 PVC pipes on which are inscribed words that will only add up from certain fleeting perspectives. Your exploration will be surveilled in real time and projected onto large screens. In the context of a work about democracy—the words come from 10 Singaporean citizens’ thoughts on the subject—this is possibly ironic, as is the way in which the statements form and dissolve without allowing certainty. Such is the nature of democracy today, threatened by a widespread rise of demagoguery and intolerance.
But irony is incidental to Matthew Ngui’s Every Point of View; rather it’s a celebration of co-existence and tolerance, a purpose underlined by the work’s singular beauty as glimpsed in images from its appearance as one of five major works commissioned by Singapore Art Museum to mark 50 years of the nation’s independence.
Sonic elements lend the work an even greater immersiveness: the voices of the 10 subjects can be heard and the audience can have their own thoughts about democracy broadcast through the space by speaking into the pipes.
Quoted in a press release, Ngui makes it clear that Every Point of View is about complexities of perception rather than making definitive observations: “[it’s] an exercise in seeing, but not necessarily understanding. You have to be at a particular point to understand each perspective.’
Also showing is Ngui’s Swimming; at least 8 points of view (2008) “a 15-metre wide projection, which follows the artist swimming up and down a pool; [it] will fill the main gallery” (press release).
Matthew Ngui works in both Singapore and Fremantle. His creations—in sculpture, photography, installation and performance—have been exhibited internationally and widely in Australia. He was Artistic Director for Singapore Biennale 2011. RT
Every Point of View, 2015, Matthew Ngui
Matthew Ngui, Every Point of View; Fremantle Arts Centre, 30 July-17 Sept
RealTime issue #133 June-July 2016
Winyanboga Yurringa
I meet Andrea James—playwright, director and Artistic Associate at Carriageworks—early evening at the end of rehearsal: the room is littered with props, the desk with scripts, design plans, empty cups and intriguing signs of traditional Aboriginal craft. It’s only a few weeks til bump-in and I’m wondering how James, who looks calm enough, is feeling about what she immediately describes as “a really big beastly new work.” Clearly, she’s still at work on the final shaping of the play.
In Winyanboga Yurringa (Yorta Yorta for Women Under the Sun), six Aboriginal women gather at a campsite in Yorta Yorta country in regional Victoria, hoping to connect with the land. But the fun of being together and their bickering about identity, love and appearance get in the way of spiritual communion until an ancient cultural practice provides a way through.
How long has Winyanboga Yurringa been brewing?
It started with a commission from Belvoir for a large-scale stage adaptation of the four-part TV mini-series Women of the Sun (1981), co-written by Hyllus Maris and Sonia Borg. There were five writers in the team. Four were to adapt a story each, and my job was to write a new episode, asking ‘who is our Woman of the Sun today and what are her major concerns?’ So, I set about interviewing lots of women I knew. I was working at the Koori Heritage Trust at the time, doing community arts work. It was a really inspiring place actually because it’s one of the very few community-controlled, fully accredited museums and they had an incredible collection. Also, I was visiting the 38 Aboriginal nations of Victoria coordinating weaving workshops and [encouraging] the revitalisation of culture. This was around 2012-13 when we started it.
The script was workshopped and pitched to the Major Festivals Initiative, but didn’t make it, so I had this little play in my back pocket. I put it in the drawer and didn’t really think about it. Then an opportunity came up to workshop it with Playwriting Australia. So I built it up from 20-30 minutes to a full-length work. It went to the National Play Festival in Perth in 2013 and, after that, I came back here and did another development.
Has it retained its relationship to Women of the Sun?
It’s influenced by that work in that Women of the Sun was the initial spark.
The Belvoir project never came to fruition?
No, unfortunately it didn’t. It was big and ambitious but it didn’t make it.
But the impulse remained, to say something about Aboriginal women now?
Definitely. The first port of call was just to have conversations with lots of women in Melbourne and also up in my Yorta Yorta country.
Was the weaving initially a focus for the play?
No, that was separate, but kind of fed into it. I was just really interested in watching our mob engage with cultural objects.
In your own country?
Everywhere. The Koori Heritage Trust collection is fascinating. One of its founders was Jim Berg, an incredible man who was working in a department of the Australian Museum. He really struggled with Aboriginal artefacts being kept in an institution and how difficult it was for him to get a hold of them, even to exhibit them himself. Also, because he was working in the museum sector, people kept coming to him with important objects that they were finding on land, like stone-heads from axes and digging sticks. He was thinking that he didn’t want to put them in a museum. Jim Berg was one of the driving forces behind the Koori Heritage Trust plan to put cultural objects into the trust of the community, rather than in non-Aboriginal institutions.
What they collect is really interesting: things we might think of as everyday objects—leatherwork stubby-holders and aunties’ woven rugs made in Koori colours—are included. These things have meaning for the community. Other people might think, ‘Oh yeah, it’s just a stubby-holder and a rug,’ but for us, we knew the people who who made them. So it’s a really important collection.
Andrea James
How did the weaving workshops relate to the Trust collection?
The women would come to the Trust and we’d go down into the Archives and show them the baskets that were made by the aunties who were no longer living. Oh, it will stick with me forever, the energy of that. But also as a theatre-maker, [I thought about] how interesting it would be to put those objects in a performance setting, and the weaving too. Here’s an incredible practice that’s been on this country for so, so long, that connects us to country. So, there’s now a place within the play which is just about weaving and the dance that relates to it. And the actors actually do it. [James shows me a small weaving].
What is it made of?
I can show you. [She reaches behind to select a strand from a large bundle of long, inch-wide strips of grass.] We got this from La Perouse with permission from the mob there. Look at the colour of it! When you strip it, you can smell it but it also does something to your body. So, in performance this will be so beautiful.
How did you go about selecting the objects which will feature in the production?
It’s hard to talk about it without giving it away. Part of me as a theatre-maker asks, “What if…?” So, what if all of the objects that are in this play are the ones that I saw as ‘trapped’ in a museum.
You’ve liberated them?
As part of my research, I sought out all of the objects at the Australian Museum that were from my country and they let me take photographs. I’ve put them in the play. So I’ve asked, what if the women in the play stole those artefacts and brought them to country to repatriate them? Identity and repatriation and evolving cultural practice are some of the really strong themes in the work. That’s a case of taking a story and running with it.
It’s a change from the dramatising of historical events which has been strong in Aboriginal playwriting.
I thought, well, if you’re going to make a political statement well let’s push it to its nth degree. There’s often an assumption that we’ll just rock on to country and know what to do. Actually, sometimes you don’t know what to do. I was interested in that awkward place, that place of re-connection which can sometimes be difficult and painful.
It’s great that we’ve got Pamela Young with us who’s making a comeback for the project. She was in the new wave of black theatre in the 1970s. She performed with Justine Saunders and at Belvoir in the early days. What’s fantastic is that she’s now working in Parks NSW and is involved in repatriation of bones and objects. So, we’re like, “Hello, come and be in our play!”
Things fall into place. What have you learned about the contemporary Aboriginal woman? Is that still central or has repatriation become more a focus?
To be honest, I haven’t discovered anything that I didn’t already know. If anything it’s reaffirmed things. I was interested in just seeing six Aboriginal women on stage—something we haven’t seen for a long time. A lot of women I interviewed talked about lateral violence and what it means in our communities.
What’s lateral violence?
Where community members turn on each other. It’s like internal violence, when we turn our struggle in on each other and where people get into positions of power. This affects both women and men, of course, but when I spoke to the women, there was a sense of a real struggle around that power and what people can sometimes do to try and cut you down for it.
Winyanboga Yurringa
So this has become part of your scenario?
It has. The last episode of Women of the Sun was about the Stolen Generation and how you bring yourself back into community. I think the community struggles with what to do with people who want to return. So, I’ve picked up on that theme. I’ve also used [photographic, video and installation artist] Bindi Cole’s story about people from the community questioning her Aboriginality and her work—that classic portrait of her family with black-painted faces—and how she was one of nine Aboriginal people who successfully sued Andrew Bolt for questioning their identities and breaching the Racial Discrimination Act. In the redrafting I didn’t want to give Bolt any more air, that’s done, but I was interested in what Bindi described, so her story comes into the play—the other women don’t know who she is and she has to kind of prove herself.
What kind of theatrical structure have you developed for the play? Has it emerged from your investigations and speculations?
It definitely has, from all the interviews I was doing. When I finished it I thought, ‘Oh I’ve written a naturalistic comedy. Where did that come from?’ But that’s just how the story wanted to be told. I’m in more of a magic realism sort of space, so it surprised me.
You’ve written a heist comedy?
Ha! It kind of is and there’s a lot of banter. It’s a comedy, which it sort of has to be. The biggest thing when you hang out with a group of women or you go out bush, it’s the laughter. That just poured out, given that they’re dealing with some really difficult issues like poverty and violence, difficult relationships with men. The massive thing that you just can’t ignore, particularly up around my home town, is drugs. It’s rife. You don’t want to fuel stereotypes but, at the same time, it’s such a force. How can we not think and talk about it? And in actual fact, women are so at the front line.
Managing it or involved in it themselves?
Both, and looking after the children who are the casualties. A lot of the removals of children that are taking place now are the result of drug and alcohol abuse. So it’s pretty big.
I feel it as an aunty with a little niece who’s just turned 13. In the play, there’s a young girl who is at risk. The central character, Neecy, has brought everybody back on to country because they’re straying off the path and need to regroup and re-empower themselves, particularly for the character Chantelle, who is kind of based on my sister and my niece. We want to watch for her and hold her and make sure she’s going to be alright, because our teenagers are so vulnerable and they could go either way.
Tell me about the design that contains these complex issues and feelings.
I’ve got a beautiful designer, Danielle Hrome, who is studying at UTS. This will be her first big design for theatre. It’s really abstract: a big round campfire and forms that hang in space that could be trees, they could be shell middens. In my country, river country, on the River Murray, middens are really important. They could be spirits, they could be female energy—Bindi Cole has photographed the actors and their images will be embedded in the design. The idea is that people have come to this place for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. It’s pretty simple really.
Phil Downing is doing the soundscape for us and the AV, with Bindi. Karen Norris will do the lighting. As with the design, we’re trying to cut against the naturalism, which is why we wanted something more sculptural in the design.
It’s a comfortable space for the audience too. We’re inviting you onto our land. Just come and sit with us for an hour and a half and we’ll share some stuff with you. Hopefully, through that you’ll come to understand your own relationship with this land and the people in it. If I can get to that, I’ll be very very pleased.
–
Carriageworks & Moogahlin Performing Arts: Winyanboga Yurringa, writer-director Andrea James; Carriageworks, Sydney, 3-6 August; Geelong Performing Arts Centre, 17-20 Aug
RealTime issue #133 June-July 2016
Two Dogs
The program for the 2016 OzAsia Festival reveals director Joseph Mitchell to be in an even more adventurous and expansive mood than for his groundbreaking first in 2015. Contemporary performance, theatre and dance are again central, digital screen art is deservedly prominent and freely accessible live music gets a major boost. Political alertness is evident in a number of performance works and exhibitions and there are intriguing cross-cultural collaborations that bring together Asian and Australian artists. OzAsia 2016 is deeply enticing.
Joseph Mitchell’s engaging smile confirms a joyful sense of purpose. He’s emphatic: he has not programmed OzAsia to display what’s new from Asia. His passion is for the best of contemporary practices, wherever they take place. His vision is about “a fertile belt of creativity in Asia at this point in time.” It might be inspired by innovative Western performance of the 20th century “but also draws on different cultures that have hundreds or thousands of years of history as well as new rules that are being written in places like China, Japan and Korea. The responsibility for an arts festival director is to think about where the arts are going. Personally, much of what is coming out of Asia keeps me interested and excited and always feeling like I’m seeing something new. That’s the thinking behind OzAsia rather than ‘Asia’ as such.”
Phare Circus
PHARE CIRCUS (CAMBODIA)
From Cambodia, you’ve programmed a circus, superficially Western in appearance but transformed by the culture that’s adopted it.
There are a couple of things that interest me about Phare Circus. First is the founding principle of the organisation to use art as a means to provide opportunities for young people in a Cambodia that had been decimated by the Khmer Rouge and to embed the value of art, ensuring that another generation doesn’t suffer the same problems. Secondly, these artists are rough and ready. They come from broken, poverty-stricken families and they’ve walked into a school and really given themselves over to education in the arts as a lifestyle choice. You see that in this edge-of-your-seat theatre. It’s not just a series of circus tricks; the company uses circus as a medium to tell important stories about Cambodian culture and particularly what happened under the Khmer Rouge. This 60-minute performance has narratives that draw on the individual experiences of the performers or those of their families or villages but told with minimal text. It brings a lot of gravitas to the circus form.
DIGITAL ART (JAPAN, HONG KONG)
Asian artists have contributed significantly to contemporary culture in the realm of digital media. From Japan you have Hiroaki Umeda and teamLab and from Hong Kong Kingsley Ng. How important is this strand of the festival?
I’ve heard this century referred to as “the Asian century” and “the digital century.” Multimedia has been around in the performing arts since Piscator and Brecht but there’s a sense that in this century there’s a deeper level of immersion in ideas around the body in performance, space and technology. I don’t take lightly decisions on works that are highly visual. There has to be some fundamental artistic dialogue with the technology in really interesting ways.
Umeda didn’t create a choreographic style and then project digital material onto it. He created a 360-degree visual environment with sound broken down to a very basic level. He then put his body in as blank canvas. Those elements are integrated without one preferred over another. He’s created a choreographic language which is unlike any other around the world. I think it takes really bold and innovative artist who can work in their own way to find a language as opposed to being bound by a traditional dance ensemble. Umeda works outside of that system and is breaking ground and that’s no different from Ryoji Ikeda or teamLab or Kingsely Ng.
Split Flow Holistic Strata
You have two works by Umeda in the program—Split Flow and Holistic Strata. He’s also involved with another Japanese choreographer in the program, Mikuni Yanaihara in a work titled Sequential Movement. What’s that work about?
I became aware that Hiroaki had started to create visual art installations in response to his choreographic pieces. I had also been looking at the work of Mikuni Yanaihara, a very influential choreographer and director in Japan and, weirdly enough, stumbled across the fact that she was doing the same sort of thing—digital video artworks created from the perspective of choreography. So we asked them very politely—because they don’t know each other or work together—how they’d feel if we curated some of their digital artworks in the same gallery space. We came up with the title Sequential Movement as an umbrella term to showcase the selection of works by those two artists.
One installation is almost like a 360-degree set; almost like being in a Umeda world. It’s called Holistic Strata, taking the dance work [which is one of the artist’s live performances in the festival] and, rather than you watching it, you’re inside it. There’s another work which involves you as a participant with your eyes closed and Umeda playing with the way light can work across you.
Participation and immersion are spiking now in many different ways. Tell me about your inclusion of teamLab who are well-known for creating immersive spaces.
It’s our 10th anniversary this year and I thought, let’s get some of the big contemporary artists who are making waves around the world. It turned out that Nick Mitzevitch, Director of the Art Gallery of SA, also really likes teamLab as does Erica Green, Director of Adelaide’s Samstag Museum. No-one can do teamLab on their own without many years’ lead-in. So the AGSA were in the process of acquiring a new teamLab work, we picked up another on loan and Erica secured a work via another exhibition. So we’re able to collaborate to present teamLab in Adelaide.
All teamLab works are ever-evolving so that no person will ever see one in the same way. Now, the variation that happens in the five minutes between when I see it and when you see it may not be drastically different but from a philosophical idea around what [constitutes] visual art, teamLab’s perspective is very much about it being a personal experience and everyone interpreting things in a different way and beyond that, everything is evolving and moving anyway. So this adds an extra dimension to the way we subjectively interpret visual art and in this case, a digital art experience. There’s a nice dialogue to enter when you explore these three works.
SK!N
TERRYANDTHECRUZ, SK!N (MALAYSIA)
Cross-cultural collaborations also figure in your program, in Bunny (read the RealTime review), a participatory work about bondage by Luke George (Australia) and Daniel Kok (Singapore) and in SK!N by Malaysia’s TerryandTheCuz with Australian artists Ashley Dyer and Govin Ruben. What attracted you to this latter work?
Ashley Dyer is an exciting choreographer and Govin Ruben is a successful lighting designer. They shifted into performance-making, drawing on choreography and production experience to create their own worlds. And they do it so well. I saw this work in development last year and came on board as co-commissioner to help them realise it. They’ll premiere the work in August in Kuala Lumpur and then come straight to OzAsia and then, hopefully, they’ll tour.
How did they make the connection with their Malaysian collaborators?
TerryandTheCuz is based in Kuala Lumpur, as is Govin, and Ashley comes in and out as a close collaborator. They’re a pretty tight-knit group.
The work is about people smuggling and trafficking; tough themes.
The thing about topical and political ideas in the arts [is] you’re generally preaching to the converted; you’re not going to change anyone’s views about migration. But what interests me about this work is more that the artists are putting us through a directly physical experience, using shipping containers. On arrival the audience will be asked to hand over their phones and valuables, be put into holding pens and then have completely different experiences—be given a drink, sung to, blind-folded or find themselves abandoned. I just don’t know how they are going to respond—and that’s a good thing.
Rianto, Softmachine
RIANTO, SOFTMACHINE (INDONESIA)
There are other challenges and border crossings to be found in OzAsia, as in the work of Indonesian dance artist Rianto.
He’s a stunning artist; a real internationalist. He’s a traditionally trained dancer from Central Java but has branched out to write his own rules around what constitutes dance. He draws on the classical, erotic, cross-gender Lengger dance form and has travelled around the world exploring different types of contemporary dance and working with exciting and boundary-pushing, non-conventional choreographers like Singapore’s Choy Ka Fai. He is now creating work that’s unlike anything else. Softmachine is very interesting; I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s dance or theatre or even verbatim documentary theatre—it’s all of those combined and it’s autobiographical. This one piece with Rianto fits into a larger series of four works by Choy Ka Fei called Softmachine Series, with which he’s mapped contemporary dance in Indonesia, Japan, China and India. It’s a huge visual art installation that demonstrates the depth and breadth of the mapping which is bigger than those four countries. It was exhibited in TPAM (Tokyo Performing Arts Market) in Japan but I’m hoping contemporary art spaces, festivals or galleries will pick it up.
600 HIGHWAYMEN, THE RECORD (US)
The Record, by much-lauded Brooklyn company 600 Highwaymen, is another participatory work—for 45 South Australians. How does it fit within your curatorial brief?
I wanted to ensure that our 10th anniversary is built into the curatorial framework of the festival with a work that reflects both the contemporary performance identity that OzAsia has established and captures the multicultural identity of South Australia right now. Two very highly regarded contemporary performance makers auditioned nearly 200 people from across Adelaide, whittling that number down to 45 people, who essentially make up a record of the society that we live in right now, [covering] multicultural background, age and gender range, occupational experience and postcode. We’ve got schoolchildren, taxi drivers, dentists, doctors, students, construction workers. They’re rehearsed over six weeks to present a contemporary movement piece. It’s a really powerful experience to sit in the audience and watch ‘the society that you live in’ onstage performing an abstract movement piece to a beautiful score. For me it evokes a whole series of emotional responses about Adelaide and our community.
God Bless Baseball
TOSHIKI OKADA, GOD BLESS BASEBALL (JAPAN)
I’m intrigued by God Bless Baseball. I like the idea that a former baseball champion’s onstage performance aligns with Butoh, in the relationship between bat and ball. It seems it’s linguistically interesting as well.
It’s always hard to talk about a favourite in a festival but I have to say that this beautiful, emotionally resonant performance reminds you that theatre doesn’t have to be complex. Here, one of the world’s most prolific contemporary theatre directors, Toshiki Okada, plays to the idea of the perceived and unresolved tension between Korea and Japan while pointing the finger towards the Western influence of America and this strange triumvirate between siblings and parent played out through the metaphor of baseball. That sounds a little heavy-handed but at the same time, it’s weirdly light and dense.
Toshiki Okada wondered if we would understand the work: “Australians don’t know baseball and it’s so particular to Japan and Korea and America.” I said, “No, the metaphor of sport is extremely clear and Australia’s relationship to America post-World War II is not dissimilar. It’s almost like we’re only reflecting on it now, the way America penetrated our countries and so successfully changed our cultures. Australians will completely understand this.”
MENG JINGHUI, TWO DOGS (CHINA)
From mainland China you’ve programmed a two-hander comedy, Two Dogs.
This is our third presentation of work by Meng Jinghui; last year it was Amber. He is the great theatre director in China. Two Dogs is an outright comedy, one of the most performed ‘small theatre’—they call it in China—plays. I think they’ve done over 3,000 performances and the two guys in the lead, Han Pengyi and Liu Xiaoye are real stars. Liu Xiaoye is trained in the Chinese comedy art of ‘cross-talking’— very improvisational, fast-paced, like the Hollywood screwball comedy of the 1930s. Two Dogs really goes to town on many of the challenging aspects of living in contemporary China. It’s about two dogs who leave their home in provincial, rural China and happily trot off to the city to make it big and, of course, they encounter [problems with] the medical system, the penal system, dodgy employment and horrible living arrangements. It really pokes fun at the challenges that everybody in modern China faces.
Cosmic Cambodia
OUTDOOR MUSIC CONCERT SERIES
A new dimension of the festival is an outdoor music program, with a great range of idiosyncratic artists and popular music from across the region.
Traditionally we’ve presented community events outdoors, like the Moon Lantern Festival. But I really wanted to bring contemporary culture to the wider audience. So we have 10 nights of free music programming with 23 major international acts. There’s quirky pop rock from Taiwan, underground music from Korea, the fantastic Cosmic Cambodia, the exciting Tenderfist techno duo from Kuala Lumpur and Jabin Law, who’s a big star from Hong Kong. It’s a real mix of very modern musical styles from across the region.
How and where will these concerts be staged?
As part of a huge outdoor environment we’ve called The Good Fortune Market. We’ll take over Elder Park for around 10,000 people to come any night during the festival. There’ll be food stalls and trinket markets, little DJ areas, community stages and roving performances. There’s also a performance tent for Phare Circus and Twelfth Night and other family shows. Right down the bottom of the park we’ll have a big stage for the international acts every night. Someone said, “This is like WOMADelaide,” but I said, “No, this isn’t a world music festival, this isn’t blues and roots, this is contemporary Asia.”
What’s one of the most important dimensions of the festival for you?
Asian performance directors are trying to engage in a deep dialogue with what’s happening in their countries right now—Japan and its tensions with Korea and the influence of the US; Two Dogs cutting into the challenges of living in modern China; and in Company Theatre Mumbai’s Twelfth Night, there’s a real sense of, ‘We were colonised and we’ve taken to Shakespeare, but now we’re gonna completely rip it up, rewrite it in Hindi and tell you our version of the story in a crazy, fast-paced Mumbai way that doesn’t obey the iambic pentameter.’ This is India’s Twelfth Night. Phare Circus is very much about young Cambodian artists re-telling their country’s history through physical performance. SK!N addresses human trafficking which is happening throughout Malaysia and the government doesn’t acknowledge it. Outside our key Indigenous artists, who do it extremely well, are we in Australia making cutting insights into who we are?
MORE HIGHLIGHTS
Also featured in Joseph Mitchell’s program is a retrospective of powerful films by leading Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To at the Mercury Cinema. To will also conduct a masterclass. For fans of the great Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray, there’s a rare screening of Goopy Gayen Bagha Bayen (1959), a fantastical, funny adventure film with music and dancing and quite unlike anything else the master made. The score will be played live on traditional Indian instruments with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.
Adelaide’s disability-led Tutti Arts is collaborating with internationally renowned Indonesian artist Andres Busrianto to create an interactive street art installation and, also on the Riverside Precinct, “a secret underground wonderland of temples. Inside each, you’ll discover performance art based around the theme of animals and iconography from South East Asia” (program).
From far western Asia comes Israel’s Vertigo Dance Company and from Hong Kong City Contemporary Dance Company, which combines contemporary Western choreography and Chinese tradition within a multimedia framework.
At the Adelaide Festival Centre, Damien Shen, a Ngarrindjeri man with Chinese bloodlines, and Chinese artist and political cartoonist Badiucao will collaborate on matters of identity and culture.
OzAsia calls
As other international arts festivals swell beyond a sense of community, Adelaide’s OzAsia stands out for its manageable scale, its cultural and regional specificity, its timeliness and its insightful engagement with issues and artforms. It demands our attention. RealTime will be there.
When we willingly give ourselves to a work of art, we form a relationship with it, a loop of ongoing recall, enduring emotional and sensory responsiveness and reinterpretation. It’s little different from the way we love and befriend and constantly re-estimate relationships. The special pleasure offered by Urban Theatre Projects’ Simple Infinity is that it reveals the difficulty of connecting, especially for those ‘on the spectrum,’ by evoking the loop of social engagement, literally and metaphorically, in all of its complexity: a not so simple infinity.
Writer-director Rosie Dennis writes in her program note that “at the core of Simple Infinity is a desire to spark a deeper conversation in relation to mental health.” In the play, the metaphor “on the spectrum,” a descriptor for degrees of autism, is expanded, in several ways, into its colour components and used informally to suggest a range of emotional states of being rather than specific psychological conditions.
Despite initial resistance, Simple Infinity grew on me as I watched; grew into me as I reflected on and wrote about it. This writing is the translation into words of my experience of the work; my speaking back to it; my sustaining the loop generated by our coming together. I’m replying at length, in order to make sense of the experience—and to bring you into the loop—regardless of uncertain recollection and notes scribbled in dim light. In an era of diminishing critical returns for artists, I make no excuse for the number of words that follow.
Even if I hadn’t heard that the set design for Simple Infinity is premised on an infinity loop, the work’s recursiveness—a series of scenes that commence with “A man walks into a bar…”—its motif-driven dialogue and the characters’ shifting estimations of themselves and each other clearly welcomed me into an interpersonal phenomenological loop—if an emergent, delicate and unstable one.
First, we enter a narrow gap in a white high-walled, circular structure in the Carriageworks foyer and sit cocooned within one half of it facing a semi-circular, convex interior wall that pushes out towards us. After a signed welcome by one of the performers, Cheng Moy Yeow, she and another, Vicki Van Hout, slowly pull open the two large doors that constitute the wall, revealing the full extent of the space, curtained in a deep blue and home to a humble bar, table and chair…and a string quartet. What we then witness is a seemingly whimsical fabulation about how we engage with others.
The weather’s always a good starting point for a conversation (“phatic” or ritual communication as linguists call it). Van Hout chats amiably to us about the weather, then eating, then travelling, but with a looping compulsiveness, recursively posing what I/you/we might be experiencing: “Very nice weather we’re having. Very pleasant weather I am having. Very nice weather everybody is having. Very nice weather you are having.” And so on and on, but voiced charmingly rather than anxiously or manically. It’s a closed circuit. The opening of the set’s inner wall suggested perhaps that we were being invited into a world otherwise closed to us. But who speaks like this? Can the circuit be broken?
Tone (relaxed, warm, funny), style (poetic, minimalist, the music too) and theme (otherness, looping obsessiveness) have been established. The words, from Bon Marche Weather (1911), are Gertrude Stein’s (made her own by Van Hout), as are those at the end of Simple Infinity. But in between, the rest belong, in the Stein spirit (if lighter and more conversational) to the work’s makers.
Vicki Van Hout, Simple Infinity
Ultraviolet (Van Hout) runs the bar. The barmaid is Olive Green (Cheng Moy Yeow). They have a recurrent customer, a man of the sea, Midnight Blue (Luke Waterlow) who always arrives as if for the first time, striking coconut shells, as if horse-riding, and prefaced by the announcement, “A man walks into a bar…” This allows for some amusing advice from Violet: “Make it believable.” “Just be authentic. You don’t get a second chance.” When he arrives the same way later on, Violet quips, “Haven’t you got any new material?” The running gag lightly underlines the lack of progress in their barely initiated relationship and reminds us that humour is frequently repetitive and its use can appear sociable while remaining evasive.
Blue is initially regarded with wariness by the women. Violet asks him why he’s in the bar; his worrying response is, “I’m not prepared to be broken.” Making the link between the colour names for the characters and their mental states, Violet asks him, “What part of the spectrum are you?” He answers, “I’m emotional.” She responds, “That you are. Cue violins.” They play. Of herself she says, “I veer if the topic is uncomfortable. I can be a different person.” He declares, “I’m Midnight,” and exits, his discomfort about opening up evident, but he returns, and returns, if only to exit each time: “Some days are so heavy, it’s hard to breathe.”
These are people functioning at fundamental levels. Discussions about colour, cocktail making and conversation all deal with how to cope in the world and how to categorise experience. Violet: “Be attentive…check for fascination, look for anecdote.., never let your guard down.” Blue: “Listen empathically…use human rapport…abort if necessary.” Drink-mixing mirrors relationship combinations. The subject of Violet’s 50s Beat-like meditation on colour (“turquoise sits on the fence of blue/green”), inter-colour coupling and colourism is intoned to a fast, cool double bass brightened with pizzicato plucking. Of her own name, she says, “Violet, she’s beyond,” a reference to her full name, Ultraviolet, a colour that is off the spectrum.
As the characters deepen their exchanges, in words, with movement and music, we appreciate more concretely their sense of ephemerality, of an infinity “that lurks in the shadows,” or “in a rainbow.” To a high bass melody, Violet’s slow movement casts soft shadows on the stage. Sweet high notes, whisperings and raw chords parallel Blue’s waverings. Olive performs gesturally with great delicacy to a fine arrangement by the quartet’s bassist, Hamish Gullick, of The Platters’ hit “Only You (And You Alone)” (1955). I wonder if she can feel the vibrations from the instruments, like the brilliant, deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie, or if the musicians play to her timing. It’s a little bit of magic, as if her not-hearing has been transcended.
There are signs that despite Blue’s cyclical comings and goings, this trio might be able to loop with the greater world. As if sensing some kinship between Violet and Blue, Olive urges them “to play.” Belief enters the picture as the relative open- and closedness of religion and science are debated. Blue declares himself to be “in a state of openness,” but is okay only “if I stand still.” For Violet, “if I stand still my inside and outside merge.” Swaying, body arching softly back, she “feels weightless” as the strings define a beautiful descent. Olive taps Violet, bringing her back to reality and signing. “She still wants us to play,” explains Violet. Whether or not that will happen is left open. It is clear that “before, he was on a precipice” but now Blue “has found peace” and “it’s time to go.”
The climax is gentle, but the string quartet provides a sense of catharsis with passionate playing, giving voice to the extremes of feeling that the work’s characters might not feel safe expressing, if even able to. To long, soft complex chording, the doors are slowly swung closed to the intoning of Stein’s Play, in word and gesture, “to play, make what you play, play everyday…” Simple Infinity ends with a quiet sense of optimism. The loop that binds Violet and Olive has been enlarged by their encounter with Blue who has become part of it, even if temporarily.
Vicki Van Hout is a magnetic performer with a great feeling for language (she contributed to the writing) and an embracing ease of delivery and fine movement that suggests Violet can drop her defences. Chen Moy Yeow, in her first stage role, graces us with a welcoming if sometimes enigmatic smile, an enticing playfulness and supple gesturing. Her Olive is wonderfully outgoing. The cards that translate her Auslan for us suggest a desire for acknowledgment and belonging, and, in “only You,” love. But where is she “on the spectrum” compared with her defensive companions? Luke Waterlow embodies the enigmatic man of the sea with a reserved, sometimes tense stillness and a dark vocal sonority that brightens as Blue begins to engage with the world, speaking of light that comes off the sea at midnight, as if he’s liberated by that image.
Alastair Duff-Forbes, Eleanore Vuong, Liberty Kerr, Simple Infinity
Liberty Kerr’s excellent score transcends its minimalist pulse atmospherically and melodically to produce a great range of feeling. David Hawkes’ set is a work of art in itself (and was available to be experienced in non-performance times), the wall around us lit internally with subtle hues softly reflecting the swathe of deep blue that wraps about the performers. The loop conceit of continuous exchange is embodied in the design and the impressive manner in which it opens out. But with audience on one side and performers on the other, the fourth wall still ruled such that we were almost in the loop, but not quite.
Initially, I resisted Simple Infinity for its rarefied scenario that might have come out of a European novel or film, its quaintly schematic character names, its string quartet and how little, beyond poetic evocation, we learned about the problems faced by the characters. As well, the work’s structure immediately called to mind Minimalist composer Gavin Bryar’s A Man in a Room, Gambling (1992); but Simple Infinity revealed itself to be something very different, not least musically. Gradually the work’s fine weave of motifs, its humour, multiple means of expression and caring attention towards fragile beings took hold as I began to identify with these strange strangers.
Will Simple Infinity be greeted with unanimous acceptance and understanding? Its whimsy, its engagingly casual performances and immersive score might well loop audiences (we’re all ‘on the spectrum’ to some degree) into the rewarding complexities underlying all of the work’s apparent simplicity.
Cheng Moy Yeow, Luke Waterlow, Simple Infinity
Carriageworks & Urban Theatre Projects: Simple Infinity, director, writer Rosie Dennis, with texts by Gertrude Stein and Vicki Van Hout, devisors, performers Vicki Van Hout, Luke Waterlow, Cheng Moy Yeow, designer David Hawkes, composer Liberty Kerr, musicians Liberty Kerr, Hamish Gullick, Eleanore Vuong, Alastair Duff-Forbes; Carriageworks, Sydney,13-16 July
There’s a lot of dust in Ivan Sen’s Goldstone: literal dust in the desert terrain of the film’s titular town, as well as the metaphorical variety, heard from characters who talk about “cleaning the dust away.” This accretion brings to mind an image of historical detritus that cannot be brushed off, a cultural legacy that’s foregrounded during the film’s opening credits that feature a series of photographs from Australia’s Gold Rush era. Over a sweeping instrumental score, shackled Indigenous men appear with shocking clarity, followed by images of the Chinese community at work, and white Australians at afternoon tea.
The music ceases and historical pictures are replaced by a shot of a car driving through a yellow landscape, heralding the return to the screen and the arrival in Goldstone of Detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen), last seen in Sen’s 2013 thriller Mystery Road. Notably the worse for wear, he’s arrested by the makeshift town’s fresh-faced policeman, Josh (Alex Russell), for drink-driving, before being grudgingly released to begin investigating the disappearance of a young Chinese woman. Here as in Mystery Road, Swan’s inquiries start to expose something poisonous within the entire community. Goldstone might be small and relatively isolated, but the problems Swan must tackle, of exploitation and corruption stemming from postcolonialist greed and racism, are enormous and all too familiar in reality.
Goldstone
Sen is a versatile director who can move from the most meditative ‘art’ cinema (Beneath Clouds, 2002) through naturalism (Toomelah, 2011) to the skilled employment of suspense and action in his genre pieces featuring Jay Swan. But in all these films there’s a common socio-political thread of characters caught between worlds: a questioning of what it means to belong and whether it’s possible to escape your allotted place. In Goldstone, Sen takes Swan’s outsider status, as flawed but principled Indigenous lawman, and pushes it into mythic territory, intensified by his most explicit exploration of spirituality yet, centred on local elder Jimmy, played by David Gulpilil.
Perhaps this mythologising—though not a flaw in itself—and the number of problems Goldstone seeks to encompass makes the film’s approach to real victimisation seem at times superficial. For all the talk of dust, the film doesn’t feel viscerally dirty enough. The horror of sex trafficking is skirted around, while characters like David Wenham’s mine foreman and Jacki Weaver’s mayor, who with a penchant for baking and corruption is a cruder version of her truly frightening matriarch in Animal Kingdom (David Michôt, 2010), are too broadly drawn to be deeply menacing. Sen doesn’t utilise the intense close-ups of Mystery Road: that portrait-like scrutiny of faces behind which lurk potentially devastating secrets. The secrets in this mining town are fairly open ones. Swan and Josh know how the land lies; it’s largely a question of whether they can shift a few monoliths.
While Goldstone’s mythic quality might simplify some of its themes, it doesn’t reduce the impact of Jay Swan, whom Pedersen renders as layered and believable as he is archetypal. Along with ABC TV series Cleverman (2016), the Jay Swan films mark the long-overdue arrival of Indigenous (super) heroes, as well as narratives that grapple with contemporary injustices via the myth genre. Cleverman has been approved for a second series; I’m hoping Jay Swan will surface in another troubled town a few years hence.
Goldstone
Goldstone, writer-director Ivan Sen, cinematography, editing Ivan Sen, score Ivan Sen, Damien Lane, production design Matthew Putland; distributor Transmission Films, 2016
Come Away with Me to the End of the World, Ranters Theatre
Ranters, Come Away with Me to the End of the World
There’s a sequence early in Ranters Theatre’s Come Away with Me to the End of the World in which an actor describes an unsettling meal she shared with a casual acquaintance. She finds her dining partner ordering stupid amounts of food, far too much for two people, and as the plates pile up they seem to suggest a crack, a glimpse into the dark interior of someone who is much more of a stranger than first thought. A fellow actor takes the story in, and then caps it off by stating that the teller sounds “eccentric.”
It’s a jarring moment, if typically played down by the company that could itself rank as one of the country’s most eccentric. The term—usually used affectionately—literally connotes being out of the centre, and Ranters has developed a singular theatre practice that eschews not just plot and character but conflict itself, which even the most avant garde theatre-makers generally still consider essential to works for the stage.
Come Away with Me to the End of the World will feel familiar to anyone with previous experience of the company’s work. Three performers occupy a fairly empty space, talking to each other in brief grabs about mundane experiences—anecdotes, memories, things they’ve read or heard, things they like or dislike. Occasionally they will launch into shared song or do some dancing, but these aren’t the transcendent moments of release you might find in musical theatre. No narrative as such is served up, and each audience member is left to decide individually what, if anything, ties any of this together, or why they should care. Despite the company’s lofty profile both locally and abroad, none of this can be said to position Ranters at the ‘centre’ of contemporary theatre practice.
Come Away with Me to the End of the World, Ranters Theatre
What is the centre through which Come Away with Me invokes the term ‘eccentric’, then? There’s a perhaps accidental motif of geographical distance that recurs throughout the work. Grottos and mountains and volcanos are referenced, as are real and imaginative flights to Iceland, Japan, Greece, France, Italy and Everest. Goats and wine crop up, perhaps hinting at the ecstatic realm of Pan, while the compulsive frenzies that have been associated with Tarantella dancers hover around the margins too.
Perhaps it is the self that is the problem here, and running throughout the work is the at times desperate desire to escape the oppressive confines of what in quainter times was called the ego. Though nearly everything here is delivered with the faintly beatific and at times almost smug half-smile that the company’s performers tend to project, there are tiny moments in which the facade seems like a death mask, as the words that emerge conjure instances of human frailty, mortality, paranoia and a sense of existential anxiety.
The people on stage here are profoundly incapable of exceeding themselves, and while they frequently speak of far-off places and extremes of living, it is almost always in relation to themselves. We are, of course, all bound by the same limitations, but this is a work that steadfastly refuses to offer promise of escape, even painting a depressing picture of theatre as just so many cruddy props to distract and allay our fears.
The most common and most kitsch resolution would be if Ranters implied that the one chance of escaping the self could be through sharing moments with others, finding some more authentic mode of communication that could aspire beyond the individual. That’s denied here, too. There’s no synthesis, in the end, no barriers hurdled or crisis averted. It just sort of ends. Because as nice as it might be to believe we’re all in this difficult existence together, what could be a real moment of human connection is just as likely to end with someone written off as eccentric.
Maude & Anni Davey, Retro Futurismus
Anni & Maude Davey, Retro Futurismus
Anni and Maude Davey’s Retro Futurismus is a work that inverts the notion of eccentricity by abolishing any sense of the normal. It’s the second incarnation of the project, bringing together a range of artists from various disciplines to produce a new kind of variety show based around the future as it was imagined by people in the past. Think Grace Jones, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 50s SF movies and 80s fashion.
It could be mere nostalgia or empty spectacle, so the most remarkable thing about Retro Futurismus is how often it produces genuine emotional responses. Physical performer Teresa Blake, in particular, produces a suite of acts both visually arresting and strangely impactful. Clad in a bikini made of real bricks, she plays a cello like an electric guitar. Appearing enmeshed in a wooden chair, as if a teleport has gone wrong, she attempts to dress herself as if life can go on as usual. Animating a tiny, infant-like ghost, she tries to find audience members able to provide it solace.
There are many equally compelling moments elsewhere in the piece but it’s often hard, if not impossible, to determine who is performing. A tentacle creature made from flexible air-conditioning ducting telescopes and contracts across the stage; rabbit-headed hula dancers refuse to hula dance; a blob-thing strains and groans its way across the space while shitting yet more bricks.
By looking backwards to see how others once looked forward, Retro Futurismus produces a kind of double vision in which hope and regret overlap. There’s great glee and energy in the romance of science fictions gone by, but also a painful realisation that this hope was let down by the reality in which we now find ourselves. Retro Futurismus doesn’t treat the past as merely eccentric, a dress-up box or playlist to get misty-eyed over, but it does act as a reminder that we can never go back, even to those who directed their dreams forward.
Teresa Blake, Retro Futurismus
–
Come Away With Me to the End of the World, director Adriano Cortese, text Heather Bolton, Beth Buchanan, Adriano Cortese, Raimondo Cortese, Patrick Moffatt, design Callum Morton, sound design David Franzke, lighting Govin Ruben, costumes Belinda Hellier, choreography Jo Lloyd, musical direction Evan Lawson, performers Heather Bolton, Beth Buchanan, Patrick Moffatt, Rosa Voto, Alessandra Barone, Natasha Colangelo, Tania Dionisio, Lucia Gareffa, Vincenzo De Simone, Joseph Sirianni, Ourania Vassis; Malthouse Theatre, 7-24 July; Retro Futurismus: New World, creators Anni and Maude Davey, performers Anna Lumb, Gabi Barton,Teresa Blake, guests Azaria Universe, Kira Puru, Yana Alana, The Huxleys; 45 Downstairs, Melbourne, 7-31 July
The smell of coffee, the taste of chocolate—things that move around us, through us, between us that we may not give pause to recognise. Lauren Simmonds shares these sensations with her audience in the opening moments of Unseen, passing around shards of dark chocolate on a silver platter and wafting a plunger of freshly brewed coffee under the nose of every audience member.
A small performance space is rendered cosy by this initial act of hospitality. Hard metallic surfaces seem to soften and glint with promise. In one corner there is a picnic spread of goblets and ornate silver vessels. In another, a mass of gold foil is surrounded by cosmetic mirrors. On the back wall, collaged coloured yoga mats are arranged shrine-like, peeling back from their mounting. Over the course of the performance Simmonds uses sound, light and her own body to activate each station, unleashing the concealed potential of the seemingly inert in a fascinating, playfully fragmented examination of the invisible forces that conjoin to form our perception.
Lauren Simmonds, Unseen
This fragmentation is both a strength and a weakness. While phrases such as one likening the postures of browsing Facebook and taking selfies to yoga poses sits clumsily amid more visually stimulating sequences, the work itself is unified by the overarching sense of curiosity and exploration that its episodic structure evokes.
Midway through the performance, Simmonds pours sugar onto the floor. With tender intent, she pushes a circular magnet through it until its pull exposes other magnets concealed beneath the grainy white mess. The process of making authentic connections amid the chaotically saccharine may be analogous to Simmonds’ favoured mode of expression, but she navigates the borders of sentimentality with quiet assurance.
This assurance must come in part from her knowing that the work’s final act will be utterly and ecstatically mesmerising. While Simmonds drapes herself in a string of party-lights, audience members are directed towards what appear to be 3D glasses, hidden beneath their seats. The lighting dims, The Flaming Lips’ anthemic indie-pop spills questions of the universe from the sound system, and Simmonds begins to spin and sway. There are audible gasps as the glasses render the space kaleidoscopic, the lights around the artist splitting into intricate parallel patterns of pure colour. It’s like magic, except that there is no deception; just a glorious revelation of the otherwise unseen.
Through her use of objects and techniques typically associated with illusion, Simmonds manages to penetrate the everyday and shatter the assumption that our perception of it is in any way complete. Yet her practice does not conform to cynical post-structuralist rhetoric. Rather, she achieves something rare with Unseen. Here is a work, full of joy, that uses deconstruction as a lens through which to ascertain a sense of unity. The warmth and genuine sense of wonder that Lauren Simmonds projects is not accidental. It is integral to the audience’s understanding of her thesis that we are part of something bigger, brighter, more mysterious: all of us, together.
Lauren Simmonds, Unseen
Metanoia: Unseen, Lauren Simmonds, Metanoia Theatre, Mechanics Institute Brunswick, Melbourne, 9-10 July
What is the nature of transformation? Is it sudden or incremental, a battle or a consummation? These questions about shape-shifting, both physical and cultural, lie at the heart of Raghav Handa’s highly anticipated new work, Mens rea: The Shifter’s Intent at the Judith Wright Centre.
Handa’s sinuous grace is on display from the first moment of his explosive choreography: a remarkable combination of athleticism and fluidity, where his body rolls, ripples and flows, a river of movement that is only stilled by the full extension of his expressive hands. The detail marked by the angle and rotation of those hands was one of the true pleasures of the three disparate choreographic vocabularies developed within the show.
In some sequences Handa evokes the whisper of animal or ritual, perhaps echoing the vocabulary of the contemporary Aboriginal choreographers whose works he has danced across the last 10 years. In other parts, there are hints of the seemingly arrhythmic Kathak dance form or the voluptuous invitation of Sita, one of the three characters from the Sanskrit epic The Ramayana from which the show draws its loose narrative.
The design echoes this sense of separate worlds by demarcating zones that showcase the contrasting choreographic vocabularies and the individual ‘characters’ that Handa inhabits. Dominating the stage is a large, rectangular screen. On one side of the screen is a waterfall of white material in a honeycomb pattern that drapes gently and asymmetrically like a willow tree, shivering at Handa’s touch as he crawls underneath, through and then climactically behind, to form a shadow in silhouette.
Periodically a long, rectangular spotlight cleaves the stage in two. Handa dances along and within this light, only occasionally darting across. Even when not visible that emphatic division haunts the stage.
Darren Blinkhorn’s soundscape is pulsing, thrumming, bass-braced electronica with percussive elements that move irregularly within the soundscape, lightly evoking both traditional Indian instruments and Indigenous motifs.
Raghav Handa, Mens rea; The Shifter’s Intent
Handa moves like a dream and there is much to savour in each of the sections of the unfolding work. However, the very characteristic that makes the choreography so pleasurable—its fluidity and dreamlike atmosphere—is lost in the transitions between each zone. Most of these occur in black-out and this sometimes adds a sense of intrigue—where will he emerge now? But at times if feels clunky, pulling you from your reverie as you glimpse a hurried figure in the dark moving across the stage. This seems the big dramaturgical dilemma for Mens rea: The Shifter’s Intent. How do we shift from one state or atmosphere to another? How do we hold one culture when we are working within the shape of another? Perhaps the full liminality of the work would be to light and showcase these transitions, to slow them down and explore opportunities for slippage or confusion?
This work’s rectilinear quality was further emphasised by the dominance of the screen as the vehicle for the 3D animation built by Deakin Motion Lab with Handa as one of the mythical shape-shifters, Ravana. A long sequence in the final part of the show portrays the climactic battle where Jatayu, who rescues Sita, is devoured by Ravana. Handa duels with his own animation and we are cued to put on our 3D glasses to receive the full impact of this arresting animated creature when a small wheel of fire appears at the bottom of the screen. While the skill of both performer and animators is evident, there is none of the trans-media wow factor of Deakin’s more large-scale work like The Crack-Up (2015) where a digital landscape is projected around dancers suspended in the air, or the intricate traditional scenography of their collaboration with Opera Victoria on the Flying Dutchman (2015). I found the intractability of the screen at the back of the stage hard to reconcile, despite the quality of both the digital and live content.
Raghav Handa’s bravery in trialling this new technology is to be commended and his talent as performer and choreographer is evident throughout the work. As Mens rea heads to the UK I am sure that delineations will soften and new discoveries will arise about the space between the shifting body and the atmospheres of this compelling new dance work.
Raghav Handa, Mens rea; The Shifter’s Intent
Mens rea: The Shifter’s Intent, creator, performer Raghav Handa, lighting designer Karen Norris, sound designer Daniel Blinkhorn, animation Deakin Motion Lab; Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane, 8-9 July
Walking into a solo artist’s rehearsal room is an intimate act and I was lucky enough to be welcomed by Brisbane circus icon Emma Serjeant, as she prepares for her upcoming show Grace, at the Judith Wright Centre.
Serjeant has had a long career in Australian circus, including a stint as an ensemble member with Circa and in 2011 as a founding member of international circus smash Casus, whose debut work Knee Deep is still touring and whose follow-up work, Finding the Silence, was reviewed in RealTime124.
Serjeant’s latest venture is ESP: Emma Serjeant Performance. The company is a platform for her solo work and an opportunity to challenge the boundaries of circus by exploring inter-disciplinary collaboration, including circus in conjunction with forms ranging from dance and hip-hop to clowning.
The backstory to this new chapter is heartbreaking. Serjeant injured her hand while on tour and with the customary stoicism of circus folk continued to perform for months with what turned out to be a broken wrist. While in the throes of navigating this bad news (three months to recover) she discovered that the real trouble was actually her shoulder. The surgery required to ameliorate this would require 18 months away from circus, unimaginable pain and a period of enforced self-reflection. She emerged from this winter of discontent with her trademark fortitude and strength and a determination to re-evaluate her practice.
Serjeant decided to rework her award-winning 2014 solo show Jerk, which investigates the hypnic jerk that we experience as we go to sleep, a phenomenon exacerbated in those who are highly physically active. Jerk had won her the Star of the Festival at the Brighton Festival and was a collaboration with experimental physical theatre and ensemble writer-director John Britton from UK-based DUENDE, who had taught her many years ago when she was a student at NICA (National Institute of Circus Arts, Melbourne).
Emma Serjeant, promotional image, Jerk
Jerk diverged strongly from her work with Casus in its use of pre-recorded voice-over and its emphasis on character, as the mise-en-scène is built on the idea that we are witnessing a real woman experiencing/remembering and then forgetting a series of extreme physical traumas. This story contextualises virtuosic routines within the perimeters of an authentic character and her emotional journey. Serjeant miked herself to enable the audience to experience what it is like ‘inside’ the body—the heartbeat, blood flow and breathing—that creates these marvellous feats. In sympathy with this vérité agenda, Jerk was performed in a Speigeltent under natural light.
After her injury, Serjeant could no longer perform and was forced to consider other options for generating work, including directing and writing. She loved directing, but found herself intrigued by the idea of exploring what had been simply a context for Jerk as an actual path for herself as an artist. What if she really committed to the idea of ‘the woman’ as a character and worked to understand and create her not just physically but also through a writerly process?
And so Grace was born. Serjeant worked lockstep with Britton, sending him fragments of text, ideas and footage. He sent back pieces of dialogue, suggestions and thoughts. Slowly, they built a theatrical world for the circus to sit comfortably within. Having found a composer, Ben Ely, and a lighting and AV-designer, Penny Cunningham, Serjeant is fully embracing the potential for a mimetic world. Grace is now staged in a black box format and, she says, will be lit and proceed like a theatre show, but with circus form and projection as the main storytelling devices.
The clearest evidence of this was the snapshot of the rehearsal room as I entered. The pages of the script had been precisely placed along the edge of the mat that sat underneath the show’s circus apparatus, highlighting how the text will cue physical action in the world of Grace.
The show will debut at the Judy and go straight on to the Edinburgh Fringe and if previous form is a guide, probably on to other exotic international locales. Serjeant is known for her tenacity and energy and Grace is only one of a number of fascinating new projects from ESP, including a collaboration with Chicago-based dance company Winifred Haun & dancers called Trashed, a world away from the tender dreamlike tone of Grace but a sign of Emma Serjeant’s desire to push to the very edges of circus form.
–
Grace, Emma Serjeant, Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, 27-30 July
“My fascist grandfather is coming to kill me, and I only have a pen to defend myself.” Pigman’s Lament.
Raoul Craemer plays Craemer, a stay-at-home dad, soccer player and actor; a haunted man, putting finishing touches to a play that may not make it to opening night. Life and its ghosts interfere. The spectre of Alfred—his fascist German grandfather—berates him, steals his script, challenges his virility and indeed his right to be alive. His Indian mamaji’s songs—how Alfred hated mamaji!—require practice. Craemer’s soccer and porcelain bathtub seem his only solace and shelter—neutral zones in a cultural battle. But even here, anxious, hyperactive Craemer finds no rest.
From this white vessel, he Skypes his strangely absent children, urging the girls to get dressed for their soccer games. Why is he not with them? He prompts, prods and unnerves them, burdening them with expectations of prowess while hinting that his grandfather might soon do him in. Soon. With a gun. Has this man no boundaries? He spends a few minutes appeasing a frightened daughter. We have no idea if he succeeds.
Craemer is a “pig” and a “man.” His life is a mess, his morals unsteady. For home life he folds socks. He can recite poems by Rilke with real heart but comes closest to his children only via a table soccer game in which Leila and Tara are little more than plastic players on swinging metal pins. Craemer is attached to the girls via headphones, but we never hear what they say. They could after all be figments of his imagination. But his anxiety when he suspects Grandfather Alfred has absconded with them is real, and perhaps the most emotionally virile moment of the play.
Raoul Craemer, Pigman’s Lament
Canberra playwright and performer Raoul Craemer has been working in this difficult territory—family secrets, tormented pasts, cultural rivalries—for the past three years. He has paired up with celebrated Adelaide-based Portuguese theatre-maker Paulo Castro for this final stage, the director capturing the restless uncertainty of the narrative, keeping Craemer moving, unnerving himself, constantly switching roles. Seven characters have been resolved into two, with the actor playing grandfather and grandson: a shared ancestry. The conceit is successful—after all, one’s nagging ancestors are like the blood coursing in one’s veins— but the staging is cumbersome. There are awkward transitions where the actor has to disappear behind the set’s back wall to become the grandfather, and vice versa. More significant, however, is how this device interrupts the work’s key psychic symbolism, where characters merge, living, breathing, arguing and threatening one another within the tent of one skin.
The staging elements suggest an amalgam of realism—a living room, the bath, an iPad, soccer shoes, a shed—and hyper-realism: an enormous lighting grid, balanced on an angle like the aftermath of a bombing raid, but shiny and hung with theatre lanterns. Each element carries symbolic meaning, but I find it distracting that the bath is empty (Craemer retrieves a mobile phone from its depths and speaks into it) and the lanterns illuminate nothing. It is as if their potential symbolisms are unrealised.
There are moments of gleaming poetry, translated by the playwright from Kabir and Rilke, which provide touchstones—places of value, or rest, where language gets to the bones—but I miss a certain tenderness, such as one sometimes experiences in the mundane acts of folding laundry. Sometimes. These are the socks worn by our children. Our fingers remember what we value. Sometimes.
That said, recklessness, restlessness and sharpness are right in a play about a “reckoning between generations.” Alfred turns the gun on himself and Craemer lays his head on his writing table, reciting Rilke. Unresolved and unabsolved. Life. Is. Sometimes. This.
Raoul Craemer, Pigman’s Lament
Pigman’s Lament, Street Theatre, writer, performer Raoul Craemer, director Paulo Castro, designer Christiane Nowak, lighting design Gillian Schwab, composers Lara Soulio, Sianna Lee; Street Theatre, Canberra, 24 June-3 July
In his performance-lecture This Filthy World, filmmaker John Waters suggests an exercise for film students. He recommends reading a newspaper in the morning and making a film inspired by an article that very day. He imagines the joy this would bring to people when driving home from work when they see a poster on a billboard for a film that only entered their consciousness that very morning. He cites his own movie, based on a death, as an example. Waters was screening The Diane Linkletter Story before the funeral had even taken place.
Rapid Response Team
This form of instantaneous making is the starting point for Rapid Response Team, one of the projects at the core of PACT Director Katrina Douglas’ current programming for PACT Centre for Emerging Artists in Sydney. Inspired by the ways that journalists were responding to the incarceration of colleague Peter Greste in Egypt, Douglas devised a program in which a cohort of young artists came together to present performative monthly “bulletins” in response to a news story—after a mere 48-hour devising process together.
The program began in 2015 and has continued with a new team in 2016. In this time the Rapid Response Team has staged theatre events including a tutorial in piracy, a town-planning meeting in relation to the Baird government’s lock-out laws and a premature funeral for corruption in the wake of the Panama Papers. These and others have taken place in theatres, town halls and at art fairs. Not that the outcomes are paramount. The project privileges process and the product is there to facilitate the development of resilience under pressure, as well as critical and creative thinking and collaborative modes of working, skill sharing and cross-pollination. With this in mind, the outcomes always have a fun sense of risk at play, in a supportive environment.
Talking survival
Earlier this year the members of the 2016 Rapid Response Team found themselves having to respond to news of the defunding of PACT by the Australia Council, which means the loss of operational funding for the company for four years. They organised a gathering at 107 Projects in Redfern for members of the PACT community past and present to discuss what the defunding meant and what could be done about it.
Conversations triggered by this event have carried on ever since. The recent launch of the Save PACT campaign, with a barbecue at the PACT theatre in Erskineville, included speeches from alumni including entertainer Graham Bond, writer-performer-comedian Zoe Coombs Marr and Greens parliamentary member for Newtown Jenny Leong. Coombs Marr talked of the formation of her performance group post (with Mish Grigor and Natalie Rose) through their involvement with PACT over 10 years ago, and regaled those present with hilarious anecdotes of some of the worst performances of her life—made in this theatre. This pointed to the importance of a space in which young artists can work on process, leading them towards future success. Such a space persists at PACT in the Rapid Response Team and other programs.
Other PACT programs
Vacant Room, in which artists are paired with mentors in short-term residencies, has long been central to PACT’s programming and will continue says Katrina Douglas. Longer-term investment comes with a three-year residency; the inaugural recipient is interdisciplinary artist James Nguyen. Then there’s the PACT COLLECTIVE, formerly ImPact Ensemble, which in 2016 comprises an ensemble of 16 emerging artists, half of whom will be Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.
Not all of PACT’s program is process-based. There are also presentation avenues for work that is ready to go. AFTERGLOW is an annual season of curated productions in which the space is free for the artists and they receive a cut of the box office. The AXIS scheme provides a subsidised rental fee for PACT alumni. As well, PACT also offers its theatre for hire to independent and experimental theatre artists at accessible prices; it’s already booked out for the year, indicating demand for this humble space and also highlighting how access to performance space continues to decrease across the sector.
Lachlan Philpott & Katrina Douglas during rehearsals for Listen I’m Telling You Stories, 2015
Communal strength
As Douglas puts it, “everyone should have access to make and experience art.” Her resilience in the face of the defunding of PACT is testament to what is at the core of the company: advocacy and community. She recognises that “a company like PACT is only as strong as its community” and points to the audience numbers who return to each Rapid Response Team event as demonstrative of that strength, as was the incredibly well attended AFTERGLOW season, comprising dance works from the 2016 Next Wave Festival. Douglas sees the engagement of dance artists with PACT as a trend, noting that in recent years Caroline Garcia, Natalie Abbott and Rebecca Jensen have all passed through the organisation’s programs and gone on to present work nationally and internationally to much acclaim.
Furthering the sense of community and advocacy around PACT, Douglas now invites artists to return to curate and assess programs, keeping them part of an ongoing conversation in a peer review-type process.
The breadth of PACT alumni is vast and includes artists such as Agatha Gothe-Snape, who was commissioned to create the 2016 Biennale of Sydney and City of Sydney Legacy Artwork. But Douglas is quick to stress that PACT should not be assessed solely on the achievements and profile of alumni in the art world. There are many in the Sydney community and beyond who may not practise as artists but who carry with them the impact of the programs facilitated by PACT over the past 50 years. Jenny Leong at the Save PACT campaign launch said, “It is not just the incredible artistic practice and skills and experience it offers to emerging artists; it’s that the community involved in PACT understands the intersection between this artistic work and the broader society around it.”
Douglas has created her current program with what she describes as careful consideration of the needs of emerging artists for support and for opportunities, for a sense of process and its outcomes for both themselves and their audiences. Despite the funding loss, the plan is for the current program to continue, which also includes hosting the Stephen Cummins Bequest residencies for queer performance practitioners (facilitated by Performance Space) and a resident photographer residency with mentor Heidrun Löhr.
Powering on
Douglas feels that “great things emerge in times of crisis; they make us stronger. PACT has always been ambitious, always doing a lot with nothing.” Nevertheless, when comparatively little money means so much to PACT, the sense of her frustration is evident. The defunding of this company, and others like Next Wave, is a shortsighted dismantling of the training grounds for the artists of the future.
Katrina Douglas remains ambitious, even cooking up international collaborations for the 2017 Rapid Response Team. Above all, emerging artists need advocacy like this and the will to fight to save communal spaces like PACT where training in process and production are finely balanced.
Too few non-indigenous Australians have an understanding of the lives and beliefs of the descendants of the original owners of this land. This needs to change as we approach amending the constitution in order to further reconciliation.
Nicole Ma’s feature-length documentary, a great labour of love, takes us into the life of one man, Tom ‘Putuparri’ Lawford, who grows over an exacting 10 years to understand the cultural life of his people—“the traditional rainmakers of Australia’s Great Sandy Desert who have fought a 20-year battle to win back their traditional homeland.”
Read more about the film on the Putuparri and the Rainmakers website.
Giveaways are open to RealTime subscribers. By entering this giveaway you consent to receiving our free weekly E-dition. You can unsubscribe at any time.
RealTime issue #133 June-July 2016
EGG, Terrapin Puppet Theatre & MTC
It’s become commonplace to preface any review of mainstage children’s theatre by noting how in recent years the quality of such work has come to rival its grown-up counterparts, but in most cases it’s not necessarily the place you turn for experiment or formal inventiveness. There are exceptions—Melbourne’s Polyglot, for instance, now produces conceptual playspaces rather than theatre—but the kinds of programming you’ll find in a state theatre company’s education season still tends towards conventional narratives done pretty straight. It’s a bit of a shock then to find children’s theatre drawing on Samuel Beckett for inspiration.
Terrapin Puppet Theatre’s Egg, co-produced with MTC, makes no secret of its debt to Beckett, centring on a pair of tramps inhabiting a post-human landscape with no knowledge of how they got there. The nearly-dead planet is named Meridia, the same name humans have given to a series of planets they have occupied and bled dry, one by one, learning nothing from each collapsed conquest.
In a slightly more Huxley-ish mode, the populace has become dependent on “forget-me-yes,” an aerosol spray that erases memories. The frequent application of the drug by our two wandering tinkers threatens to keep them in a permanent state of presentness.
Playwright Angela Betzien’s commitment to the Godotian implications of her setup isn’t complete, however. Egg’s absurdism is mostly mined for humour—and in this regard has a position in a long history of children’s entertainment that deploys absurdism—while allegorical and fable-like elements eventually reveal themselves in opposition to existential doubt or dread.
EGG, Terrapin Puppet Theatre & MTC
The tinkers adopt Ovo, a strange infant they find in the wasteland, seemingly part-bird, part-insect, and as it grows they learn it is a mythical creature who emerges above ground only when the planet is in danger of imminent collapse. The themes of anthropocentric climate destruction aren’t worn lightly, but the comedy of the work is such that proceedings don’t get too heavy-handed either.
There’s a more ambiguous and ultimately interesting handling of economic systems: our would-be heroes are rugged capitalists whose livelihood is based on the theory that anything they can get their hands on can eventually be sold for a profit, and even the adoption of their feathered charge is initially seen as a way to get rich. After auctioning the creature off to the evil plutocrats behind the mining company annihilating Meridia, they’re hired as its nanny and soon find themselves protecting the being they’ve just delivered thence. This establishes a curious dynamic between the folksy, small-c capitalism of the tinkers and the corporate big-C Capitalism of their 1% bosses, and this dynamic is never resolved into something comfortable.
Egg’s mise-en-scène sometimes tends towards the static, though this is partly due to the entire work being carried by a tiny cast, and the minimalist design seems an odd choice for a work aimed at eight to 12-year-olds. All live roles are played by Genevieve Morris and Jim Russell and it’s hard to think of a sharper pairing on a Melbourne stage lately. Puppeteer Michelle Robin Anderson brings Ovo to life and the thing is so adorable that it requires actors of Morris and Russell’s level to prevent it from upstaging them at all times.
–
MTC and Terrapin Puppet Theatre, Egg, writer Angela Betzien, director Leticia Cáceres, puppetry director Sam Routledge, performers Genevieve Morris, Jim Russell, Michelle Robin Anderson, lighting Andy Turner, set, costume design Owen Phillips, choreography Andrew Hallsworth, composition, sound THE SWEATS; Southbank Theatre, Melbourne, 29 June-19 July
Thinking twice about seeing Manifesto? Just another time-devouring video work? I think it’s a should-see, not just for Cate Blanchett’s virtuosic rendition of multiple roles in multiple guises; not just for its deeply ironic juxtaposition of 20th century art idealism and deep-seated 21st century cynicism; but also for Julian Rosefeldt and collaborators’ dexterous filmmaking, from intimate scenarios to the vast sweep of the camera work, synthesising a photographic and cinematographic vision while realising an effective, syncopated screen installation.
Experience tells you that, attracted to a screen work shown in a gallery space, you might stay with it for a while, possibly engrossed, but eventually wonder just how long it will play. The back tires, there’s no seating. You lean against a wall. You squat. You drift to the information plaque, one eye still on the screen, and sigh as you read “30 minutes” or gasp at “70.” And where are you anyway—at the halfway mark, near the end? Can you afford to wait for the beginning in order to make sense of the whole, knowing that non-narrative works have other kinds of organic cohesion. If you encounter a series of short works—10, 15, 20 minutes—how many can you attend to and jockey for space to see clearly amid the casual comings and goings of those not immediately seduced?
If you commit to Manifesto at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, knowing in advance (I’m telling you now) that you’ll need some two hours to take it in, you might just be convinced that the showing of video art and film in gallery spaces can work. Here, with 13 large screens spread across four spacious rooms, the length of each film, at 10 minutes, feels just right and the interplay of sound magical at certain key junctures. There are benches and well-illuminated, concise information panels. Few gallery-goers dash through; most seem to slow to the pulse of the films.
Blanchett realises her characters with incredible specificity, for example her exquisite manipulating of a puppet made in her own image—to her voiceover of Andre Breton’s First Surrealist Manifesto of 1924—in a room full of beautifully crafted puppets (puppet master Suse Wächter) of many of the world’s most famous people. Elsewhere she appears to drive the machinery in a massive indoor waste facility with convincing ease. There’s also humour when Blanchett doubles as newscaster and weather reporter or plays an elegantly obnoxious old-school 20th century choreographer to a 21st century dance work featuring a Busby Berkely-ish cast of glittering female aliens. Most chilling is her portrayal of a dictatorial middle class mother reining in her family over the dinner table while transforming a light-hearted 1961 manifesto from Claes Oldenburg into dogma.
Manifesto’s cinematography is special. In vast locations—the garbage tip, a stock market, an industrial wasteland—fixed shots, slow pans and tilts recall the breadth of vision of photographer Andreas Gursky. A huge, golden anechoic chamber and a vertiginous, pastel-tinted circular ramp feature in settings with an ominous futuristic feel. Others are banal—a bourgeois home, a humble worker’s apartment, tellingly no different from their 20th century incarnations.
Initially, competition between the soundtracks is distracting but the spatial design is such that proximity to each screen provides clear focus while allowing the mass of manifestos to burble in the background like a 20th century art crowd. There’s a wonderful moment in each room when—often with Blanchett directly facing viewers—three or four voices fall into synch with their own words but beating together like a song from a Robert Ashley opera. It’s as if there’s a sudden choral unanimity of passion, belief and intention, summing up an era before each manifesto returns to its idiosyncratic preoccupations.
Manifesto
Recalling Manifesto is like having seen a movie, its episodes coalescing into an affecting totality. Like many a feature film it has scale and a huge number of credited artists, collaborators and co-producers (largely European plus ACMI and AGNSW). Some of you might find it sleek, overblown, more cinema than video art and politically vague. You can read Andrew Fuhrmann’s ultimately disapproving review for RealTime or the many others available online including Christopher Allen’s response for The Australian which pinpoints the way in which the power of 20th century art manifestos (some wonderful, some bizarre) is undercut by scenarios of 21st century sterility and danger. At the end of an interview (with excerpts from Manifesto), Julian Rosefeldt declares that artists need once again to be politically active. Presumably he sees Manifesto as a call to action, revealing passions that have been lost or, if barely still with us, unlikely to survive environmental and financial disasters and cultural dumbing down. Clearly, Manifesto is not intended to be simply a celebration of braver times than our own; rather it stands as witness to substantial differences in attitude to the arts between the centuries and to the challenges that now confront the making of pervasively political art.
”…not just relevant, but also visionary. Art history is a derivation of history and we learn from history. Artists, as well as writers, philosophers and scientists, have always been the ones who have dared to formulate thoughts and visions whose consistency had yet to be proven. The John Reed Club of New York—named after the American communist and journalist John Reed—of which many artists and writers were members, published a Draft Manifesto in 1932, in which a scenario of a capitalist world order run out of control is described. It reads as if it were written yesterday. We’re well advised, therefore, to read artist manifestos as seismographs of their age.”
–
Manifesto, artist Julian Rosefeldt, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 28 May-13 Nov
Calling itself the “roving European Biennial of Contemporary Art,” Manifesta was originally created in the early 1990s with a view to building bridges between eastern and western European art scenes that had hitherto been kept apart by the divisions of the Cold War. While this task seems today less urgent, Manifesta continues as a ‘Europeans only’ biennial that moves from city to city with each new iteration. Compared with other, larger European events of this kind, such as Documenta and the Venice Biennale, Manifesta is distinguished by a more experimental curatorial approach, a tendency to include emerging artists alongside more established figures and a stronger commitment to engage with the social fabric of the host city.
Titled What People Do for Money, Manifesta 11 was curated by Berlin-based artist Christian Jankowski who focused on the ethics and aesthetics of paid employment. At first blush this theme seems surprising because it’s fundamentally the same as that chosen by Cuauhtémoc Medina for Manifesta 9. But on closer inspection the differences between the two events are clear. While Medina’s exhibition had a strong historical flavour, reflecting as it did on the mining heritage of Genk and Limburg, the Belgian towns that hosted the event, Manifesta 11 focuses very much on the here and now and has at its core over 30 new works commissioned specifically for the event.
The World is a Cuckoo (Clock), 2016
Jankowski’s main curatorial conceit was to pair the selected artists with Zurich residents representative of different professions. Artists and residents were asked to engage in a dialogue about the nature of work and to create artworks in two parts, one to be exhibited in a group show hosted in a mainstream art venue, the other installed in workplaces specific to the project. As a result, works were scattered across the city and in sites as diverse as police stations, pet shops, hospitals, exclusive jewellers, banks, tourist offices, fire stations, schools, churches and a sewage treatment plant. These commissioned projects were complemented by Site Under Construction, a show curated by Francesca Gavin, displaying historical artworks alongside those created specifically for this Manifesta.
I am very partial to this curatorial format because it mirrors very closely the structure of spaced, the program I run in Western Australia, which is also based on the idea of commissioning works that have multiple and inter-related outcomes, some of which are participatory/site-responsive, others conceived for mainstream group exhibition. This approach responds to what Peter Osborne in Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (Verso, 2013) calls the “distributive” character of post-conceptual art, a tendency to create works in which the same core concept spawns a number of different but interconnected public outcomes in different places, at different times and using different mediums and techniques.
Untitled, Teresa Margolles, 2016
Even though most of the commissioned works in Manifesta eschew the spectacular, there are exceptions, the most remarkable of which is undoubtedly Mike Bouchet’s extraordinary The Zurich Load. The work consists of 80,000 kg of treated human waste—Zurich’s typical output over the course of 24 hours—which the artist turned into a huge, regular grid of brown cubes. The work would be superficially reminiscent of a classic Minimalist piece if it weren’t for the fact that instead of looking at polished industrial surfaces one is confronted with the dried-up, odorous product of very familiar organic processes. The work’s topicality is unmistakable if one bears in mind that ‘money is shit’ and Zurich is the world capital of banking. Like the other commissioned works, The Zurich Load also included a second component that was located in a work site, in this case Zurich’s wastewater treatment plant.
Other artists opted for more restrained but equally impactful solutions. Teresa Margolles’ offering was especially moving. The artist was working with transgender Mexican and Swiss sex workers when one of her collaborators was murdered. Her simple but poignant installation in a suburban hotel room pays tribute to the slain colleague and reminds the onlooker of the violence that so often affects the lives of transgender people. Jon Kessler’s work addresses the opposite end of the socio-economic spectrum. The artist worked with a celebrated local watchmaker to create an amusing mechanical contraption that pays ironic homage to this most Swiss of commodities.
The Pavilion of Reflections, Tom Emerson
It’s unlikely that many visitors, even dedicated ones, would have the stamina and time to travel back and forth across the city to reach each of the satellite sites. But this is not a major drawback; as is often the case with these types of exhibitions, one can experience the work vicariously through audio-visual documentation and text descriptions. This also explains why this Manifesta’s most popular work is Tom Emerson’s Pavilion of Reflections, a striking timber structure floating on Lake Zurich. The pavilion comprises theatre, café, meeting point, a lookout tower and a swimming pool filled with rather unenticing lake water (I doubt many people, especially those who have already been exposed to Bouchet’s work, would be eager to take the plunge). In its function as Manifesta’s main hub, the pavilion makes it possible for visitors to experience many hard-to-find site-specific works indirectly through video features, talks and discussions.
Jankowski did a great job in creating an intelligent, open and dynamic curatorial framework for the event. His decision to base the core of the exhibition on commissioned works and his emphasis on site-responsiveness and participation are to be applauded. In the end, the strengths and weaknesses of this Manifesta are those inherent in any event featuring site-responsive works commissioned in the absence of a detailed project plan. For example, on this occasion some of the more established artists did not bother to comply with the participatory component of the curatorial brief. Younger and lesser known artists however, responded well to Jankowski’s challenge, creating works that reflect the time, place and social interaction from which they have emerged. And this is of course what one expects from an event so committed to engaging with the social fabric of the cities in which it is held.
–
Manifesta 11, Zurich, Switzerland, 11 June-18 September
Marco Marcon is Artistic Director and Co-Founder (1998) of International Art Space (IAS, formerly known as IASKA). In 2009 he created spaced, an international event of socially engaged art involving the participation of regional and rural communities throughout Western Australia. Spaced 2: future recall will tour nationally 2016-2019. Spaced 3: north by southeast will feature 12 residencies centred on an exchange between Nordic and Australian visual artists in 2016-18.
Experiencing Ireland’s Liz Roche Company’s Time Over Distance Over Time, my thoughts vacillate between the conceit of the work—“the physical and emotional distance” that the cast of six dancers from Ireland, Britain and Australia “encounter while living at opposite ends of the planet”—and the fragility of Europe in the immediate wake of Britain’s exit from the EU. This convoluted movement of disparate thoughts echoes the dramaturgy of the work: saturated points of entangled connection between bodies, considered and sincere, that suddenly splinter into individuated isles, adrift, but no less poignant.
The dance explores the realities of geographical distances between people and the means by which they attempt through distal technologies and memories to reconnect their dispersed lives. Roche draws on historical facts of mobility within Ireland’s history (“the Irish who left for Australia in the 1850s and 1860s”) and comments on more recent movement as a result of harsh austerity measures faced by a number of Irish people who have left their homeland to find work. Meanwhile both the political left and right confusedly either welcome or shudder at the first fallen domino in the EU structure. Stories of leaving home and family that are directly narrated and expressed through the movement vocabulary, bring me back to the debilitating economic precarity and social reality of growing homelessness in Ireland (and other parts of Europe), and the importance of being at and maintaining one’s sense of home in the dislocation of global mobility.
Six movers, like flotsam, hook and grab passing limbs under a grid of naked light bulbs that hang long on their cords. They push, pull and yield into each other to close and widen gaps of intimacy, both symbolic and real. Their unity is flesh-bound, playful. Bodies mature and deeply experienced lean, fold, tumble and prop each other in conversations of two or three. They wait with patience to give and receive a multitude of surface areas for contact—inalienable territories of skin ranging in shape and size. The ‘touching-touched’ is temporalised as past, passing and possibility.
Time Over Distance Over Time, Liz Roche Company
The performers witness each other from different positions in the room as a carousel of meaningful vignettes turns seamlessly from one to the next. A solo by Kevin Coquelard explodes in stark contrast to the ease and flow of the relational sequences. His turning inside-out contorts the singular: upper body arches back beyond comfortable extension, torqueing and squeezing out the slack; he is left quivering alone on the tarkett.
Watchful from two medium-sized LCD screens cross-bracing the space with televisual gazes from above, the performers’ faces appear like portraits, circumspect in their quasi-telematic appearance; the when and where of their presence not clear. Other devices that bridge distances light up the stage with vibrations and buzzes: smart phones connecting two performers in the ‘here and now,’ not the ‘here and elsewhere.’ Text, movement and sound further enact the universal frustration of a poor Skype connection. These moments with, or about, technology are less compelling in their obviousness than the subtlety and intricacy of physical gestures that fill the gaps and eddies between dancers, and the arrangement of music as a fragmentary collage of conjoined electronic sounds harmoniously spliced with the occasional twang of a deep-fried Southern American roots guitar and the lilt of a fiddle. When recorded sound is absent, sneakers drag and squeak, sonically mapping out the motion. Distance and time are contemplated in these moments beyond any need for technology.
A camera captures the dancers in a still portrait, the real time image projected onto a wall with a temporal delay. As each dancer leaves the frozen tableau, the distributed image slowly disappears, lingering like a fading memory. In another section the dancers assemble a modular sculpture of a man’s image on a turning platform, slotting pieces of wood and mirror into right angles—its surfaces reflecting the revolving activity and light of the world in which it is immersed. The fractured figure looks to be frozen somewhere in between his geographical distribution. In a final scene, the sculpture is disassembled and laid out haphazardly like scattered bread crumbs to be followed home. Jenny Roche delicately drifts against this migratory flow in a moving coda: will she stay or will she go?
Time Over Distance Over Time is a somatically stirring meditation on the difficulties of negotiating distances of place and time, and what and where we call home.
Form Dance Projects and Riverside Theatres: Liz Roche Company, Time Over Distance Over Time, choreographer Liz Roche in collaboration with performers Simone Litchfield, Grant McLay, Henry Montes, Jenny Roche, Rahel Vonmoos, interactive digital media Jared Donovan, film Luca Truffarelli; Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, 22-25 June
“The reason we selected those rooms is because the audiences were so hip. We could just play what we wanted to play and everybody dug it, you see.” With its book-lined walls, high ceilings and brightly coloured carp swimming in a pond set in the floor, the People’s Republic in Sydney’s Camperdown might not be the kind of venue Cannonball Adderley had in mind when he spoke of “being hip.” But for pianist-composer Colin Bright and his Syzygy Band—performing a quirky set of improvised works—the receptiveness of an audience eager to embrace the unusual and experimental is no doubt an important part of the venue’s charm.
Adderley’s On Being Hip, recorded at a 1962 performance in New York’s Village Vanguard, forms the basis of Bright’s piece Hip. Snatches of Adderley’s speech underpin the music: the phrase “the real jazz audience” recurs. The word “hipness” becomes a motif, set to a descending semitone that spreads from Bright’s piano to Noam Jaffe’s violin as Jim Piesse’s jittering high-hat drives the rhythm. Bass clarinet arcs become dirty blues, electronics throwing Paul Cutlan’s sound into an ethereal distance. The jagged “hipness” motif is suddenly inverted as a now ascending semitone coupled with “to be hip.” Nick Polovineo’s trombone takes up the blues solo, the electronics leaving smears of far-off big band in his wake. Elegiac piano and violin—a pastoral gypsy melody with gritty slides—sing over Dave Ellis’ bass drone. Violin harmonics and mechanical piano fragments disintegrate before Adderley’s address is left to play unaccompanied, unbroken and from the beginning: “We made a lot of records in nightclubs… ”
The band now accompanies the syllables, pauses and inflections of Adderley’s voice with a robust precision. The synchronicity of recording and musicians creates the uncomfortable feeling that Adderley is following Syzygy rather than vice versa. The unison ensemble speaks the final “thank you very much.”
Colin Bright Syzygy Band
Bright and Syzygy had opened this concert of shaped improvisations—lightly supplemented with electronics—with the colourfully evocative Bird of Sticks. Repeated piano notes become Messiaen-like figures, Bright’s reverb generating beating dissonances. Piesse’s drumsticks clack against each other before his palette expands to encompass rims and frames. Noam Jaffe’s violin joins piano and kit in a driving rhythmic groove, but the balance is uneven and he’s swallowed by the other instruments. Piesse switches to brushes, caressing cymbals and skins, the electronics a smokey haze. One hand on the piano keys, Bright leans over to control effects on his laptop. Polovineo’s gravelly trombone punctuates the mist before a bass clarinet line emerges in a warbling, avian solo. Cutlan’s didjeridu-like bass clarinet screams and cackles the throaty laugh of a kookaburra. Bird of Sticks fades to a gentle acoustic finish, a sheen of delicate harmonics.
Earthly Tones is a tribute to the late jazz bass player and band-leader Charlie Haden—the title a critic’s description of the jazz legend’s playing. Ellis’ bass yields soft harmonics. His sound has an earthy richness as he draws primal, animalistic moans from the bass while Piesse’s fingernails tap over skins. The bass cries like a dolphin, the texture thickening as Jaffe adds sliding harmonics and Piesse switches once more to brushes. Guttural, repeated notes and chords add layered harmonics before Ellis settles into a walking bass-line. The bass clarinet growls and buzzes, the music a relaxed swing, a crisp tap of percussion against gurgling electronics. Ellis’ fingers dance nimbly in the high register, before a sliding descent into muddy tremolos marks a return to the ambient harmonics of the opening.
Dave Ellis, Nick Polovineo, Syzygy
Experimental violinist Jon Rose joins the ensemble for The Threepenny Violin. Bright introduces the piece: “I like fences and shapes but Jon just wants to be free.” This tension plays out in a furious improvisation bound together by samples of playwright Bertolt Brecht giving evidence in 1947-48 before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Rose propels the music forward with a flourish of crunching pizzicato, his bow bouncing radio static on the strings. “Bertolt Brecht” repeats over and over again. The music is a devilish hoedown, flecked with slapstick comedy and frenzied energy, the voice of the interrogator needling: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party of any country?” Chaos splinters into moments of lyricism with quiet impressionistic piano from Bright. Rose declaims loudly in German. A militant snare drum heightens the sense of anxiety and the bass clarinet lends a cabaret festivity. Rose’s bow shredding reaches a fiery climax: the band cuts off, leaving the violinist alone to play a blistering cadenza. Light taps from the drum-kit gradually bring the other instruments back in for a lighter, swinging conclusion.
The encore, however, is contemplative. Moon Over Long Reef —originally for piano—sees Jaffe trace a plaintive violin melody, ambient with vibrato, before Cutlan sweeps his bass clarinet from the instrument’s rumbling depths to a high register with the honeyed tone of an alto saxophone.
Colin Bright and Syzygy’s set burst with high-energy, high-intensity play, resurrecting the sounds of history in a quirky romp, under the surface of which lay a deeper exploration of music-making and politics. Whether or not the experience could be defined in terms as nebulous as “hip” and “the real jazz audience,” the listeners at the People’s Republic were clearly eager to play their part.
–
Colin Bright Syzygy Band, People’s Republic of Australasia, Sydney, 26 June
“We know that art is not a matter of taste. We believe there should be more than one chance. We think working conditions can always be better. We experienced that, if there is a problem, it is usually with the system.”
This is the manifesto of Perforations, a festival of small, intimate, politically charged works from the Balkans. Over almost a decade, Perforations has grown and shrunk geographically, with seasons presented as far afield as New York and with artists coming from as far as Bulgaria and Macedonia. At its core, though, are independent performance makers from Croatia. Widely considered one of Europe's best small theatre festivals, it is astutely curated by Zvonimir Dobrovic to emphasise the intersection of individual and collective identity: political, social, sexual or gender. This year, two works left an impression.
Speed-dating as art: Dragana Bulut's Market of Love
Berlin-based Serbian choreographer and dancer Dragana Bulut was inspired by her family's concerns about her status as a single woman to devise Market of Love, a performance based on the structure of speed-dating. The show—which comes with free wine and runs until very late—initially simply consists of 10-minute speed dates with other audience members. Halfway through, Bulut, who participates in the dating, stops the proceedings to introduce written scripts that she forces upon participants. Then speeches, long dialogues, film scenes and dances gradually emerge; a series of romance clichés and popular culture offcuts.
The audience was mostly a select, interconnected group of artists and friends, but this precisely lent poignancy to the work. In the preliminary assessment interview—of what, one wonders: attractiveness, goodness, long-term compatibility?—the mating ritual of dating is distanciated and made strange by conducting it on friends, friends of friends, straight and queer, partnered and single. The fatigue of choice, of decision-making, sets in quickly. Participants are gradually revealed to be performers: wonderfully enacted scripts of love, longing and reticence emerge in this community of daters. And yet, interestingly, many performers—quick to join in the scripted dialogues—are revealed to be general audience members. They simply remember that film, that song. What emerges in Market of Love is a surprising understanding of just how scripted our gestures of love are, a source text we all know by heart.
I found myself accidentally speed-dating highly respected artist, theorist and pedagogue Goran Sergej Pristaš, co-founder of BADCo performance collective. It is to Bulut's credit that we ended the night dancing together, though he claimed not to be a good dancer. Ultimately it did not matter: alongside its surface cynicism and pop-cultural critique, Market of Love maintained a levity and joyousness.
Denuded, Bruno Isakovic
Evocative nudity: Bruno Isakovic's Necastive
Necastive (Denuded) is something else entirely. Choreographer Bruno Isakovic commenced it as a solo project [which was seen in Hobart at the Salamanca Arts Centre in February this year. Eds], a formal exploration of the relationship between breathing and physical tension. At Perforations, the work had grown to 11 performers, all dancers, all performing nude. Not having seen other versions, I found Denuded flawless, and unimaginable in any other version. Whereas a solo piece would have emphasised the texture of the body—its breathing rhythm and moving rhythm, the space it demarcates and centres—the mass of bodies, of different sexes, ages and training, gives volume to that same texture, but adds tension, emotion, narrative and the unavoidable weight of visual references. The most remarkable choreography I have seen in years, Denuded is rigorous in concept and execution, yet immensely open to interpretation.
It opens simply, with 11 bodies standing still, breathing. With a slowness that makes changes in posture at first imperceptible, the performers start sliding into a series of tableaux. A lot occurs behind this simple description. The shifting images resonate with one's own visual library, activating memories of iconic paintings, yet somehow reduced to their cultural archetypes. The sharp lighting accentuates anatomy. There is Michelangelo in here, as well as Caravaggio. There are final judgements, falling angels, hells and heavens; there are bodies walking to their execution; and bodies blown away by natural or spiritual calamities. There are gardens of Eden, languidly erotic afternoons, mourning mothers of Christ; there is grief and salvation.
It is all so slow, so focused, yet one gradually becomes finely attuned to the rhythm of the performance, noticing that the tension is not flat, but ebbs and flows with an organic unpredictability. For a long time, the performers keep in uncomfortable balance, one foot always slightly lifted, torso always slightly contorted. It breaks, though: sometimes bodies collapse like dominoes, pulling each other apart with the slow inevitability of an avalanche or crumbling iceberg. At other times, a performer will simply change posture, or begin a series of movements that reverbrate through other bodies. Performers may all lean onto one another, hold, drop, break off. Somewhere along the line, you realise that breathing is the soundtrack to the work: the exaggerated, deep breathing of the performers. Like deep bass, it dictates the quality of the movement. And like deep bass, the audience can feel it viscerally: 11 deep breathers make one hell of a sound.
Necastive begins macabre and tense; it ends joyous and relaxed. Images of bodies flung by great forces, holding onto each other as if for dear life, transform into images of salvation, celebration and relaxation. It is simultaneously profane and profoundly religious, like the paintings it references. The uneasy relationship that Christianity has with the body—something to control, but never ignore—is constantly on one's mind.
And finally, in the very last minutes of performance, when the bodies break into laughter (a radical shift in breathing) and a comparatively unbound movement of rolls and skips, it is a momentous gesture of freedom. Of humanism.
See Bruno Isakovic speak about Necastive with excerpts from the performance below:
Participants in the Lotus Asian-Australian Playwriting Project, First Draft Intensive, 2016, Sydney
Look one way, and new Australian playwriting seems to be in a parlous state, underrepresented by the major performing arts companies and, through its closeness to the small to medium sector, at the coalface of swingeing cuts to the budget of the Australia Council. Look the other, and it’s possible to detect distinct signs of life, especially in the flourishing of work by writers from Indigenous and culturally diverse backgrounds, and a new formal adventurousness responding to the advance of live art.
Both of these views were covered during my conversation with Tim Roseman, Artistic Director of Playwriting Australia, ahead of the 9th annual National Play Festival, a series of play readings, artist talks, workshops and industry forums showcasing works from PWA’s various development programs. This year the festival is returning to Melbourne—“the source of so many of our great stories, and home to over one-third of all Australia’s playwrights,” according to Roseman—following its first time in Adelaide in 2015 (”Creativity, generosity and taking the pledge”).
Alongside the main program of six plays, there will be two regional showcases—highlighting work by Asian-Australian and New Zealand-based playwrights respectively—two panel discussions featuring impressive line-ups of speakers that include John Romeril, Hannie Rayson, Joanna Murray-Smith, Tom Holloway, Van Badham, Jane Montgomery Griffiths and Angus Cerini, various workshops and masterclasses and a keynote address by Michael Gow titled “The Agony and the Agony: A Totally Impractical Guide to Playwriting.”
Participants in Indigenous Playwrights Bundanon Retreat, 2015
In conjunction with the Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance’s Equity Diversity Committee, the Adelaide event saw the launch of a Diversity Pledge, intended to be incorporated by writers in their play scripts to discourage producers from what Roseman calls “presumptive Anglo casting.” I ask Roseman what his sense is of how the pledge has landed within the wider theatre community in the 12 months since its launch. “I would say,” he replies, “that it has been strongly embraced by the writing community and that since its inclusion in all of our application processes, around 70% of play scripts we’re seeing at PWA are engaging with it in some way.” Of the works showcased in last year’s festival, five, according to Roseman, “have had some kind of further life”—Phillip Kavanagh’s Deluge, Elena Carapetis’ Gorgon, Michele Lee’s Rice and Lachlan Philpott’s Lake Disappointment among them—but Roseman stresses the festival is not a marketplace but “a smorgasbord—I never want it to feel like if these plays aren’t produced then they have failed.”
I remind Roseman that in Adelaide a showcase of local emerging writers was a feature—and, indeed, for many, a highpoint—of the program but hasn’t been retained this year, replaced by region-specific programs Aotearoa Now and Lotus. Roseman explains: “We always at the Play Festival have some kind of showcase of emerging artists. Last year in Adelaide it was local playwrights because we didn’t think there were many opportunities for Adelaide-based writers to reach out and connect with the national playwriting scene. If you’re in Melbourne, chances are you’ve already got that access. So we wanted to use the opportunity to, again, introduce the industry to artists that they may not be familiar with yet. For the last two years we’ve been running the Lotus Asian-Australian playwriting program in Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales. We’ve chosen four of that program’s writers—Katrina Graham, Natesha Somasundaram, Ngoc Pham and Shari Indriani—to each exhibit a 15-minute section of first drafts of plays they have been working on at quite a high level of artistic development with leading playwrights from across the country.”
Roseman sees both showcases as redressing significant holes in Australia’s theatrical landscape—“We’re far more conversant,” he opines, “with new work from America and the UK, and even Canada frankly, than from New Zealand”—but it’s the paucity of Asian-Australian playwriting that is of palpable concern. “Lotus,” says Roseman, “evolved out of a tragic absence of new Asian-Australian plays on the stage. When we started the program, we looked at the tens of thousands of published Australian plays from the history of theatrical production in this country and could find less than five play texts that were published by Asian-Australian playwrights. So there’s a massive problem that our stages don’t reflect the culture of our population and this is our first step in putting together a cohort of talented, hungry playwrights who can address that.”
Melodie Reynolds-Diarra
As for the main program, featuring works by Melissa Reeves, Steve Rodgers, Emily Sheehan, Olivia Satchell and Chris Summers, it’s Skylab by actor Melodie Reynolds-Diarra (a Wangkathaa woman from Western Australia) that I nominate, from what I’m told of it, when Roseman throws back to me my question as to which of the plays he is most excited about. The play uses the 1979 crash-landing of the US space laboratory Skylab off the southern coast of Western Australia as a jumping-off point for an absurdist yarn about, in Roseman’s words, “how our Indigenous communities function outside of the main conversations that we tend to colour them with.” What is it about Indigenous sci-fi at the moment, a seemingly unlikely genre reflected in, for example, ABC TV’s Cleverman and Warwick Thornton’s video work The Way of the Ngangkari in the Tarnanthi exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2015?
I wonder aloud what next year’s festival, the 10th, will bring. A special celebration? A retrospective of past achievements? Then Roseman tells me there isn’t going to be one; the cuts to the Australia Council have seen to that. “We’ve lost around $150,000 a year from our Australia Council grants,” he says. “So we’re down exactly what it costs us to put on the Play Festival each year. What we’ve decided to do is change the Play Festival to a biennial event so it will return in 2018.” This is further evidence—as though any were needed—of the Turnbull Government’s shortsighted and irresponsible approach to arts funding but Roseman, despite conceding the “disabling” nature of the loss of funds, is characteristically chipper: “We’ll be in a position where the same number of plays will be coming out of our programs—in fact, a couple more plays a year I think—but it does mean a refocus for us and it means working out how we sustain our long-term mission to change the shape of the Australian stage when there are fewer opportunities for work that isn’t already connected to a producing framework.” It’s a question that will be on many minds when the Play Festival opens in Melbourne.
–
Playwriting Australia: The National Play Festival, Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, 27-30 July
Are video games art? It’s a question which, like most that can be answered with a simple yes or no, is relatively uninteresting. It’s also a discussion which both enthusiast and mainstream games discourse has largely moved beyond. Despite this, artists continue to interrogate the line between art and game by producing and sharing small, personal “artgames.”
While the aforementioned debate is for the most part over, art and games are still treated as separate entities in many ways. To understand this divide is to understand artgames. According to certain commentators, big-budget, mainstream video games simply cannot be art and therefore we need a separate category: we need artgames. So what places artgames closer to art than to game? From the outset, they’ve featured a distinctive or highly stylised aesthetic, which is perhaps in response to the tech-centric desire for hyperreal reproduction of physical space which permeates mainstream game production. They explore a distinct artistic, cultural or political condition, usually illuminated via artist statements and post-development reflections. They are the product of an individual or small collective with a specific vision: artists producing art.
The Graveyard
Almost above all, though, is a de-emphasis of the (still disputed) formal elements which traditionally constitute a video game. One of the foremost artgame partnerships, Tale of Tales, explicitly rejects rules, objectives and challenges. Their Realtime Art Manifesto (2006) called on artists to challenge dominant notions of what constitutes video games. From this thinking came The Graveyard (2009), a short game in which players guide an old lady through a cemetery. It’s a slow, laboured experience, but her frustratingly slow movement encourages empathy. Finally reaching the bench at the end of the path is a bittersweet relief, where the woman sings of dead friends and the constant shadow of death.
Mountain, 2014, David OReilly
Mountain
The anti-game sentiment of earlier works like The Graveyard has been reflected in similar manifestos and movements across the past decade of game design, with ideals which in turn can be traced back through the disruptive and playful art of the last century. Just as video games in general drew on ideas about audience participation and repeatable, sharable performances from Fluxus, artgames continue the Dada tradition by interrogating the artistic and cultural value of video games. Like Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) almost 100 years before it, David O’Reilly’s Mountain (2014) presents a game seemingly without purpose. It begins by asking the player to produce a series of drawings in response to key words such as “soul,” “children” or “the past.” They are then introduced to the mountain which gently rotates and occasionally makes comments, ranging from complete nonsense to the deeply profound as day, night, rain and snow pass over it.
By shedding almost all interactivity, Mountain asks: what is the purpose of such a game, and why were we asked to pay money for it? Tellingly, a large group of players simply didn’t know what to do with it. Mountain barely seems to react to input from either mouse or keyboard, save for some spinning of the in-game camera and some lonely piano notes echoing across the scene. It doesn’t have any discernible objectives, and there’s a complete lack of challenge or obstacle. In the same way Dada questioned what was expected of early 20th century art, Mountain questions what is expected of early 21st century video games.
The rise of virtual galleries
The link between contemporary video games and contemporary art is stronger still in the art of New Zealand-born game maker Pippin Barr. Virtual galleries are becoming a staple for artgames, appearing in everything from the work of English developer Strangethink https://strangethink.itch.io/, to Los Angeles-based collective The Arcane Kids, to indie darlings Cardboard Computer (have a look at Kentucky Route Zero). But the motif is a particular focus for Barr, whose recent work V R 2 (2016) virtualises Donald Judd’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum (1982-1986) to explore notions of digital presence and absence in game spaces.
V R 2: virtualising art
V R 2 consists of two virtual gallery spaces, each populated with 24 featureless white cubes. At the entrance to the first gallery is a sign, describing the contents of each cube, from a 13-word sentence to a sound recording of rain falling. The second building has a similar sign, with slightly different labels: 24 instances of “a cube in default material.” Barr states on his blog that the work isn’t really about playing a joke on the player, but rather an exploration of “invisible” objects in a virtual space and whether or not they create the same sensation for the player as Judd’s physical version did for him. By placing existing art in the virtual (he also produced a game based on a Marina Abramovîc performance, The Artist is Present [2010], among other works), Barr asks questions about these kinds of works that really couldn’t be asked otherwise.
Reflection, 2015, Ian MacLarty
MacLarty: interacting art and audience
Finally, rarely is the interaction between art and audience more important than in the work of Melbourne game designer, Ian MacLarty. His work Reflection (2015) continually generates a virtual 3D landscape based on the input of the player’s webcam, intertwining the form of the digital space with the player’s physical movements and environment. As well as the startling intimacy of the player’s own image staring down at them from the sky, any physical action the player makes is reflected in the virtual space in real time. Smiling causes murky yellow pillars to rise from seething, fleshy ground. Raising a hand or tilting the head can displace the avatar’s position in this world, as the ground is raised and lowered depending on the images the webcam is exposed to. It’s a fascinating work which integrates play, time, the virtual and the body in ways that few other games or artworks do.
Emerging from decades of politicised game design manifestos, a desire to challenge and expand ideas of both games and art, not to mention hundreds of years of art practice and theory, artgames in 2016 are beginning to step out of the shadow of their big-budget predecessors. Like most mainstream games, artgames are produced by a depressingly straight, Caucasian, male-dominated group of creators, but the diversity of artists and works is expanding every day. With support from artists, critics and audiences, artgames continue to challenge what it means to be both art and game.
What exactly is Virtual Reality? It’s not film. It’s not television or web storytelling. It’s not art. It’s easy to describe its characteristics: with the aid of an individual headset and headphones, VR creates a multimedia vision with depth of space and progression of time. But it’s much harder to get a sense of this nascent creative technology’s aesthetic possibilities, of the things that make it unique relative to art.
Until engaging with Down the Rabbit Hole, the 2016 Sydney Film Festival’s VR exhibition, I had not met a VR work that leapt beyond purely technological appeal. Its artistic possibilities strike me as still latent. The absence of hard-and-fast rules and conventions make it an exciting area for artists to work in—to play freely and experiment.
One recent experiment in applying narrative principles to the 4D world is artist Lynette Wallworth’s Collision, shown at Carriageworks last month. The winner of SFF’s inaugural UNESCO Sydney City of Film Award, Wallworth has made a career of using immersive technologies to create filmic works, with Collision forging a space between VR and documentary storytelling. But generally, without the progression of plot, VR is at the point of exploring the visual and spatial mechanics of the medium—an infatuation with the actual technology.
That was the feel of A History of Cuban Dance (US, UK, Cuba; lead artist Lucy Walker) and The Rose and I (USA; lead artists Eugene Chung, Jimmy Maidens, Alex Woo). Inspired by The Little Prince, The Rose and I reimagines Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s iconic illustrations as animations. In a candy-coloured galaxy, the Prince emerges on a small, lonely planet. He watches a rose bloom from a crater and tends to it within the wider expanse of his empty universe, the sun rising and setting all the while. In a sense, the Prince’s lone predicament should be well suited to the VR format. When attended alone, cinema can offer a type of public solitude, in contrast with SFF where you are likely to be in a packed auditorium with 800 strangers. Virtual reality, on the other hand, is a purely solitary experience. With your helmet on, the experience of the work is unsharable.
At five minutes and with a linear, single concept, The Rose and I feels most like an animated short film with a few 4D enhancements. Similarly, A History of Cuban Dance had the feel of a documentary from the online magazine Vice. In brief chapters of live action, dancers in various Havana locations perform the Afro-Cuban Santería rumba, mambo, cha-cha-chá, salsa, breakdancing and reggaeton with typographical information popping up to the viewer’s left and right. The project’s success lies in the way it harnesses the potential of VR to capture wide vistas. By combining traditional one-point-perspective with a 360-degree view, Havana’s long seaside roads and cavernous architectural interiors are made quite real and quite lovely.
Hossein Valamanesh, Char Soo
Though enjoyable, neither of these films felt more immersive than a fully-realised video work, such as Hossein Valamanesh’s Char Soo currently showing at Sydney’s Carriageworks and as part of SFF’s Beyond Cinema program. Here the artist places the audience at the centre of an intersection in an Iranian market, its roads extending out and away via four video channels with discreet edits to transition us through a whole busy day in this market’s life. Sometimes a motorbike will cruise towards you on one screen and turn the corner into another. The scale of the projection and the four-screen set-up make for a genuinely immersive experience barely matched by most VR works, which by comparison are small, intimate affairs offering an often passive and solo spectatorial experience. In a way, Char Soo is more cinematic than animation projects like The Rose and I. Indeed, it’s produced by art and film production company Felix Media, manifesting a much larger set of professional video skills than any single contemporary artist could ever muster.
The most engaging work of Down the Rabbit Hole, to my mind, made that isolation a strength rather than a weakness. Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness (UK, France; lead artists Arnaud Colinart, Amaury La Burthe, Peter Middleton, James Spinney) is an extension of Notes on Blindness, an experimental documentary in competition at SFF. When theologian John Hull’s sight began to dim in 1983, he commenced recording audio diaries in order to come to terms with the meaning of blindness. Filmmakers Middleton and Spinney rearticulated the diaries in filmic form for their documentary. The VR project (see the trailer) takes this one step further, plunging us into the eyes of Hull, who for several years could detect light at the periphery of his field of vision and as it bounced off forms. The effect in VR is very much like seeing images of light pollution around the world: dark and monochromatic with spidery pinpricks of soft light. We sit on a bench in a park, listening to Hull’s observations, seeing and hearing the world as he sees it. “I hear the footsteps of people walking past,” he says into our ears, and those footsteps appear aurally.
In this way, we come to understand the importance that sound holds for the blind. The work uses audio sourced directly from Hull’s tapes and presented binaurally, which means the sound changes depending on how you move your head. When sitting under a park pagoda, we look at a bird, we hear it chirp; when we look at a leaf, we hear it rustle with others; when we look at a duck in a pond, we hear it paddling. At Hull’s instruction, we look to the right, and hear a breeze moving through the trees. He says that all these sounds create “a world of activity. In the blind person’s appreciation of weather, wind takes the place of sight.” In particular, the sound of rainfall in the park creates a totally different auditory picture of the surrounding landscape. The work is a wonder.
The project’s great quality lies in the sense of empathy provokes. Through the specific technological and artistic capabilities of VR, we are pulled a step closer to knowing the sensual predicament of sightlesssness. As such, the work offered something more immersive than a regular film screening, even a 3D one, and genuinely marked an extension of the original documentary, which is in itself quite miraculous and experimental. With form and content bonded, it actually needed the technology of VR to realise its aim of giving the audience some sense of the experience of incipient blindness.
Up until Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness, my experiences with VR had felt most akin to those I’ve had with video games. This was especially the case with Björk Digital at Carriageworks in Vivid Sydney last month, which the artist admitted was not fully realised. The experience was marred by poor event management and overcrowding, but also possibly because the work was ill-conceived artistically. Staged inside Björk’s mouth with the audience situated on her tongue and with the back of her teeth visible, the work was interesting and worthy as an experiment, but I sense that VR is more suited to broad horizons, imaginable scales and tangible sets of spatial dimensions.
Perhaps VR is not so much a discrete discipline or a new branch of an existing artform as a platform and means of delivery; like television, its aesthetic application can vary depending on the project. Tellingly, all the works in Down the Rabbit Hole were put together by small-scale production teams, the kind that also produce short films, high-end commercials and video clips. This is not the arena for a solo artist, or even an artist with a production team behind them, as is usual with large-scale video works.
It’s exciting that a technology exists that allows for changes to the world of film and art far away from Hollywood. But until the content catches up with the form, VR will continue to be about experiments in form. Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness showed what might be possible in this emerging technology’s artistic future.
–
2016 Sydney Film Festival, Down the Rabbit Hole, Virtual Reality at the Hub, curator Mathieu Ravier, Sydney Town Hall, 9-19 June
The sunlit charm of dancer and choreographer Rhagav Handa burst irrepressibly through the phone from Cairns as he spoke candidly about the 12-year journey towards making his third solo work Mens rea: The Shifter’s Intent which debuted at the Cairns Contemporary Arts Centre and will travel to the Judith Wright Centre in Brisbane in early July.
While the artist acknowledges that his third work is “pushing at the very limits” of the solo form, its origins lie with Handa’s earliest and most enduring connections to dance. He tells a story of his mother—a familiar character to those who saw Tuk’re and clearly a force to be reckoned with—trying and failing to interest his sister in traditional Indian dance classes and, as a young boy, being corralled into taking her place. The enduring image he describes is his delight at dancing with bells on his feet.
Although the influence of these traditions lessened as he grew older, the pull of dance proved irresistible and his first stage role was as Chino in West Side Story. Dance captured him, but once again he pushed past traditional forms and, in the early noughties, in a series of those accidental inevitabilities that often occur, he met his mentor, the extraordinary Indigenous choreographer and cultural leader Marilyn Miller and made his debut with her ground-breaking work Quinkan in 2004 at the Adelaide Fringe (remounted in 2008).
Handa then embarked on a sustained career within the blossoming of Indigenous dance that we have been blessed to witness in the last decade, performing in Raymond Blanco’s Intentcity and Vicky Van Hout’s Wirad’journi, My Right Foot Your Right Foot and Briwyant (reviewed here and here).
Handa was born in India and raised in Australia, yet here he was learning ancient and important traditional dances, shapeshifting into fluid embodiment within the safe confines of the rehearsal rooms with powerful Indigenous choreographers. Nonetheless, he understood that this was work he could not begin in a room of his own. Yet the elders would watch him and say that he danced like a blackfella—a Darwin boy specifically. Why did he feel so comfortable, so at home within the gestural vocabulary of traditional and contemporary Indigenous forms?
Raghav Handa, Mens rea
His neglected Indian heritage and the malleability of his own cultural practice were to be the starting points for what he thought would be a single solo work. As it turned out, there were three works, with KumKum and Tuk’re being strongly autobiographical meditations on his lineage and the traditions of Indian dance and contemporary form.
Both shows were greeted with joy, not just their intimacy and charm but from a sense that at last there was a genuine, new cross-cultural voice for the representation of Indian-Australian performance. This is not to dishonour the long and often neglected connections between traditional Indian dancers and Australia, but rather to acknowledge the excitement of the integration by a choreographer fluid enough to hold multiple traditions within his gestural and choreographic vocabulary alongside a desire to experiment—and with a nuanced understanding of contemporary form.
Indeed, in an attempt to deeply interrogate his connection to Indigenous dance Raghav Handa set up two potentially antithetical processes to investigate the question at the heart of Mens rea. What triggers your intention to act, your shift of intent and the subsequent shift of atmosphere before you move into physical action? What is at the heart of this delicate and potent shape-shifting?
The first process involved visiting, with his mentor Marilyn Miller, Indigenous communities in Far North Queensland like Laura and Yarrabah and talking with elders such as King Vincent Jabaan Shreiber of the Gunggandji people.
The second involved a collaboration with the Deakin Motion Lab. Knitting together these two highly disparate interrogations is the section of the sacred Sanskrit Indian text, the Ramayana, preoccupied with motifs of shape-shifting, The Theft of Sita. Although there are many different versions of the story, essentially Sita, the wife of the God Rama, is kidnapped and then rescued by demi-God Jatayu, a shape-shifter who can become a vulture but who, in turn, is captured and mutilated by Ravana, a shape-shifting demon.
The Deakin team used their nifty motion capture system to record and then animate each of the characters, although Handa says that his characteristically energetic style meant that the Lab didn’t end up doing much additional animation over and above the capture.
Raghav Handa, Mens rea
Mens rea, unlike the personal and candid tone of Handa’s two works promises a more epic and ambitious form, with different aesthetic languages and spaces for each character as well as the arresting shape-shifting projections that he created with Deakin that engulf and transmogrify him at various points in the production.
Handa acknowledges that pushing the solo form that has served him so well previously is a risk, as is trying to ‘organically’ integrate technology into his intimate but intense and rhythmically complex gestural form. Finally, the potential sensitivities and protocols required to even begin to explore cultural and gestural connections between Indigenous and Indian dance forms such as Kathak are immense—these have grown in the 12 years of the artist’s career.
However, although Handa says he fears he might be “punching above his weight,” I cannot help but think of how the best artists I know do exactly that—they do what they fear they cannot. All of this bodes very well for an evening of intimate contemporary dance full of visual allure and shifting cultural engagement, truly the kind of work that pushes into the future and shows us what sophisticated cross-cultural form can be.
–
Mens rea: The Shifter’s Intent, creator, performer Raghav Handa; Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary Arts, Brisbane, 8 and 9 July
By turns measured and playful, entertaining and experimental, four films from this year’s Perth International Film Festival offer striking and unexpected perspectives on everyday habits, customs and sights, prompting questions about the nature of language, society, time and loss.
Aaaaaaaah!
With echoes of Will Self’s 1997 novel Great Apes, writer-director Steve Oram’s first feature presents a Swiftian scenario in which suburban humans behave like chimpanzees. Oram takes his place among an ensemble cast that includes off-beat comedy stars Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding as well as versatile character actor Julian Rhind-Tutt and Lucy Honigman, all of whom adapt their body language and vocal delivery with simian verve. Singer and actor Toyah Wilcox is notably expressive as the matriarch Barabara (sic).
As with Sightseers, the 2012 horror comedy directed by Ben Wheatley and co-written by Oram with Alice Lowe, Aaaaaaaah! (UK, 2015) explores domestic savagery in a distinctly English setting. The set-up provides a great excuse to poke fun at various social phenomena—TV celebrity chefs, stereotypical gender roles, ‘alpha’ males, shoplifting teens—while letting loose with scatological and sexual humour. But it also can be taken as something of a Dogma-style thought experiment posing questions about social rituals and niceties: eating with utensils, for example—or not having sex with your mother-in-law.
Aaaaaaaah!
Highlighting this anthropological approach, Oram occasionally uses nature documentary techniques: characters seemingly stalked by the camera; heightened naturalistic sound (eg heavy rain); zoomed-in close-ups of glaring eyes; and an ominous drone in the lead-up to a fight. In contrast, other passages are accompanied by driving rock instrumentals from King Crimson, situating the narrative more within contemporary cinematic drama.
In this world without elaborate language, where sound and physical cues are all-important, it’s surprising how clearly a wordless narrative emerges, how easily you’re drawn into the new normal. After the grunting, humping, shitting, murderous farce draws to a close, it takes a few moments to readjust to the more mannerly world of articulate speech.
All the Time in the World
With All the Time in the World (Canada, 2014), Canadian documentarian Suzanne Crocker chronicles her family’s experience living for nine months in a cabin in the Yukon wilderness, leaving digital devices, electricity, and—significantly—clocks behind. As with almost every task performed on camera—chopping wood, building a cache high above the ground to protect supplies from bears, digging an outhouse, berry-picking—the making of the documentary feels like a collaborative affair, one of the many imaginative projects that Crocker, husband Gerard and their three young children undertake during these isolated and rewarding months.
A few incidents occur that must have felt painfully tense at the time, but Crocker weaves them smoothly into an account that is largely one of unfolding delight. Her aim is not to create fly-on-the-wall suspense, but rather to relate retrospectively the transformative effects of her family’s woodland sojourn. This is both a warm portrait of a family adapting to nature’s rhythms and a contemplation of seasonal change in a part of the world where winter goes on for so long that “it has its own seasons.” The film is pieced together with exquisite long shots of the river freezing over, footage of children clambering through snow-laden woods, of woodland creatures and of the family’s ginger cat reacting photogenically to unfamiliar stimuli. Moving from the panoramic to close details of plants, animals and her children’s faces, Crocker evokes the rich diversity of the experience and the place.
Time, as the title suggests, is a recurring theme throughout. With this exploration of how our outlook changes when strict routines and time-keeping instruments are shed, Crocker issues a delicate call to reflect upon what is of value.
Invention
Invention
Invention (Canada, 2014), a compendium of several of artist Mark Lewis’ film installations, is an intense, inventive study of urban spaces and art objects, along with the incidental life that goes on within and around them. Like All the Time in the World, Invention concerns itself with the process of contemplation, but while Crocker’s documentary gently encourages its audience to slow down, Lewis offers no such choice, immediately immersing the viewer in a situation that proceeds at a luxuriantly unhurried pace, for example with languorous circling of a supine marble nude in a darkened museum. For most of its length, the film is silent. This is all about the eye: the act of observation; visual perception.
The camera moves almost imperceptibly. Action—of pedestrians, birds, vehicles—is slowed. Perspective tilts: down is up, up is down. There’s a sense of weightlessness, almost as though we’re underwater, especially in the gallery scenes. Lewis gravitates towards reflections, towards harmonies and repetitions within the landscape, whether random or architectural. The V-shape made by a window frame is echoed far below by a V-shaped path cleared of snow. This close observation and framing of scenes mimics the eye of a painter or photographer in search of a satisfactory composition.
The familiar is often rendered unfamiliar, the ordinary graceful, as in a scene of legs walking, viewed upside-down, making them appear oddly swanlike, or perhaps resemble marine life swaying in a nature documentary. In expansive aerial scenes, distant people become focal points, some reappearing, deliberately but unobtrusively, like ‘characters.’ Invention might require a concerted effort to breathe deeply, slow down and adjust to Lewis’ glacial pace, but the experience yields a fresh outlook that carries over into the real world. It’s hard to imagine a more absolute antidote to an over-stimulated age.
The Whispering Star
The Whispering Star
Slow pacing, extended landscape takes, use of repetition and the location of narrative interest within fine details also characterise Sion Sono’s reflective dystopian science-fiction feature. Like Invention, The Whispering Star (Japan, 2015) requires its viewer to slow down and focus. Shot almost entirely in black and white, exquisitely lit and composed, the film follows the methodical life of Yoko Suzuki, an android courier in a post-apocalyptic galaxy who travels from planet to planet delivering mysterious white boxes to the inhabitants of desolate locations. Everyone whispers, as though they have lost the power to speak.
The people Yoko encounters through her work are ghost-like, seeming to haunt the ruins of once populous places. Disconcertingly, the scenes where Yoko lands and walks with her box through various bleak vistas were shot in Fukushima. As Yoko makes her way along deserted roads lined by blighted trees; crosses a blasted seashore peopled with motionless black-clad figures; or cycles to an eerily derelict department store, The Whispering Star becomes a meditation on the loss of everyday life; a testament too to the stoicism of those affected by man-made disaster.
When Yoko is back on board her space-ship—a traditional Japanese dwelling on the outside with huge rocket booster, but banally humble within—the film’s progress is marked by the passage of days and the revolving set of mundane chores Yoko performs. In her life we witness routine, repetition, loneliness, perhaps—but also moments of inventiveness and curiosity side by side with quiet contentment; a meditation on what it means to be human and what it means to live.
Roy Andersson’s Venice Gold Lion Winner A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence captivated cinema audiences with absurdist humour loosely centred around two salesmen selling joke toys, badly.
Email us at giveaways [at] realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number. Include ‘Giveaway’ and the name of the item in the subject line.
Offer closes 6 July.
Giveaways are open to RealTime subscribers. By entering this giveaway you consent to being subscribed to our weekly E-dition. You can unsubscribe at any time.
RealTime issue #133 June-July 2016
If Form Was Shifted, Dancenorth
Somewhere towards the end of Stephanie Lake’s If Never Was Now I’m suddenly aware that I’m hearing a short section of music repeated from the first work in the double bill, Ross McCormack’s If Form Was Shifted. Apart from that moment of recognition detaching me ever so briefly from the action, it otherwise barely registers that the two choreographers are working from the same tight parameters set by Dancenorth’s Artistic Director Kyle Page.
Very few ideas overlap in the works despite Page’s challenge to Lake and McCormack to each create a 30-minute work with the same five dancers, selecting sound from a one-hour score by composer Robin Fox, creating costumes from one pattern and limited materials with costume designer Andrew Treloar and utilising lighting from one grid designed by Bosco Shaw.
Neither is there any sense that the choreographers have contrived to make the works different, they simply are. Page’s interest in how we construct self and meaning from the perspective of our unique experience is played out in this exercise, which is imbued with the mischievous rigour the Artistic Director brings to all of his creative explorations with the company.
McCormack’s If Form Was Shifted is dark, twilit from a single point overhead and centred around a cluster of speakers where most of the dancers initially stand unmoving. Mason Kelly bucks and writhes on the floor like something not quite machine nor organism, but newly born and trying to map himself and his immediate territory. He gives off a palpable sense of oppression and anxiety, described in impossible angles. He makes it to a speaker, sits and drags his clothes half off to briefly reveal the lithe lines of his muscular back, momentarily elegant, transfigured.
As rumbling industrial sound rises, the others place their hands on Kelly’s face, exploring and smothering. They stretch him out, each taking a hand or leg, the five forming symmetrical geometry for a few heartbeats. In a repeating gestural motif, they raise their hands to their temples, elbows out and then reach to touch the temples of the next dancer, again creating sudden shifts between awkwardness and coherence of form.
Kelly and the expressive Ashley McLellan twitch and entwine, pushing their fingers into each other’s faces, babylike. The music, its beat grinding and vibrating, becomes almost unbearably loud. Jenni Large opens her mouth wide and slowly draws a resistant Harrison Hall’s open mouth to her own, and shares breath, while pulling a flailing, anonymous hand from below to her groin. The orgiastic scene continues as she stands on top of and walks over the group, until it collapses again and it’s hard to tell whose limbs are whose.
The performers return to the orderly temple dance, connecting as if drawing on each others’ thoughts and energies and becoming a single organism or machine. Georgia Rudd sees out the piece with a solo of emotional flux between ecstasy and bewilderment, while the others slowly return to being transfixed by the speakers. Rudd sits on a speaker and flicks the off switch.
If Never Was Now, Dancenorth
In contrast to McCormack’s chiascuro, simple set and understated, neutral costuming, Stephanie Lake’s If Never Was Now has the dancers in playful neon pink pants, carving out spaces through a mass of tiny foam balls which form an ever changing landscape as they move. The lighting is vari-coloured, directional and shifting, at times creating a second cast of enormous shadow dancers on the periphery.
The action is bigger, with some precarious but controlled acrobatics, as the dancers lift, toss and manipulate. Jenni Large wallows in the foam, wild-eyed and exuding strength, flexibility and sensuality. She and Hall have a beautifully connected duo under blue light before fighting it out, lifting each other from the ground and literally butting heads. Hall is blown, rolled across the floor by the others fanning the foam, which forms a primal sea or shifting sands.
Kelly and McLellan mirror shrugs, influence each other’s space without touching, breathe to their gestures before running, crashing, embracing, hitting and spinning off one another.
All the dancers synchronise, an ensemble moving to a pounding beat and their own vocalisations, the squeak of the foam balls under pivoting feet adding more texture to the sound. The space grows darker and darker, the music softer and softer, four dancers retreating to the corners and using boards to fan the foam across the floor. It is so quiet now that you can hear the gentle shhhh of the waves of beads as McLellan is left in the centre where there is just a shaft of light and a trickle of ‘snow’ falling from above onto her head.
Both choreographers’ intentions are realised in their creations: about If Never Was Now, Lake writes, “this work and the dancers… are continually transmuting and being affected by rapidly changing conditions,” while McCormack describes If Form Was Shifted as “[r]eflecting the body at odds with its purpose—a device grappling with its complexities and placement…somehow spectacular yet also pathetic.” Page’s parameters may have limited choice in certain physical aspects of the production, but his If _ Was _ premise opened up limitless possibilities.
Dancenorth, If_Was_, choreographers, Ross McCormack, Stephanie Lake, performers Harrison Hall, Mason Kelly, Jenni Large, Ashley McLellan, Georgia Rudd, composer Robin Fox, lighting design Bosco Shaw, costume design Andrew Treloar; Townsville School of Arts Theatre, 9-12 June
Taeyoon Kim, Steady Griffins, five-channel video, random loop, colour, no audio, 2014
With a solo exhibition, 1980s-born South Korean video artist Taeyoon Kim once again brings fascinating video works to Brisbane. At the MAAP Space entrance is the two-screen work 1204, shot as if looking out from an elevator in an apartment building. One elevator per screen, each apparently moving in opposite directions. Unsynced. As the camera travels up and down we glimpse repeated sequences of stairwell landings and the blackness between floors. The landings seem to be places to leave bikes: kids’ bikes, bright plastic colours, solitary or clumped together.
After a while one recognises that the landings seem to repeat but it is not obvious at all if the sequence of landings and floors is the same each time or even if the lift travel is real. Maybe Kim has saved every landing to a separate file and then accessed those files at random, interspersed with another file that looks like a ‘between floors’ shot. These landings are of a muchness anyway and does it really matter if the journey is real or just an impression of a possible journey? All that lift experience blurs into a generalised representation of ‘In the lift going up. Still in the lift, but going down.’ I doubt I’d even notice if the floor sequence I glimpsed in an unfamiliar building on the way up was the same as the one I saw on the way down. I’m still not sure if it is or isn’t in Kim’s video. I would have to investigate.
Taeyoon Kim, “1204” two-channel video, random loop, colour, no audio, 2014, MAAP
The largest work is Steady Griffins, five screens scattered across floors and walls, wires trailing. Each screen shows a soft and blurry fragment of an iPhone screen streaming Family Guy. Occasionally a generic ‘Play’ icon pops up. The video fragments were taken by placing another iPhone hard up against the first, so that each of the five screens of Steady Griffins is playing back just that tiny array of cartoon pixels that a phone camera lens can span. Change is slow and randomised, courtesy of some everything-is-a-database media scripting. Although without getting into the database and code we don’t know how those little Raspberry Pi computers are actually being used.
The gentle pacing of the videos alludes to production methods in TV animation. In the old days (eg the Renaissance) a painter might be allocated costly pigments, like ultramarine, according to weight and volume. Higher beings commanded, ‘Paint my princely robes with that really expensive pigment and put shitloads of gold on them as well. Paint everyone else cheaper so they don’t look so important.’ Today digital colour is free, or at least all colours are equally specified, and there is as much of any colour as one can possibly want. The main input cost that can vary is labour, where so many hours at so many dollars/won/yen allows some specific number of unique drawings. As Family Guy is hand-drawn, most of the screen acts as a static backdrop to reduce labour hours and that budget move constrains significant action to a speaking mouth or blinking eyes and arms that flap rather than move realistically. And, as with the Renaissance, the important figure gets the money and every other character remains unnaturally still in the background.
Taeyoon Kim, “1204” two-channel video, random loop, colour, no audio, 2014, MAAP
I’m reminded of Brian Eno’s early generative videos in the way the screens act as both image for the aesthetic gaze and as light source illuminating those who gaze upon it. A beautiful amalgam of lo-fi—just a phone camera and cheap Raspberry Pi media computers—and ultra tech: billions of dollars of research into materials science, quantum tunnelling, free operating systems, image compression algorithms and undreamt of optical technologies packaged into a phone camera and a computer on a stick. Hard-shop or buy them online. You don’t have to know how they work.
A bit tucked away is Clear Away, a puzzling video of blurred and dirty particles hurtling across the screen. A conversation starts up in the gallery as we try to get a consensus on what the particles actually are.
1. Snow. Probably snow but the way the particles hurtle across the screen seems more blizzard-like, which would make standing out there problematic. And the video lasts seven minutes, by the end of which we can see the background is a sky gone from leaden cloud to patchy blue and the snow has dropped to nothing. Not that familiar with the possible time courses of blizzards, but doesn’t seem right.
2. Locusts. The whole effect of the particles is definitely one of swarming or streaming. I can see this as a window onto millions of hysterically frantic insects—except the particles are too blobby and varied in size. Plus, by the end the particles are falling more gently and a mass death of locusts mid-flight seems unlikely (although maybe they aren’t dead, maybe they are just exhausted and floating down to the ground below).
3. Dirt. Swirling in water. Sure, could be, but there doesn’t seem to be evidence of turbulence distorting the image.
4. Rain. Maybe, but there doesn’t seem to be any indication of high winds working the clouds with the sort of force that could drive the rain across the screen so quickly, and if there was a high enough wind then the raindrops would be the same size, much smaller, possibly breaking into high velocity white-out.
I don’t resolve my thoughts about what we are seeing until I get home and look at the information sheet and see a clue there in the title: Clear Away. The video is perhaps the output of a snow blower or similar. The clearing of a path, cunningly portrayed through its effects and not its mechanism. Like Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op detective, I’ve got my plausible story and that will do. Case closed. MAAP delivers, yet again, richly intriguing video from our timezone and to the north.
Taeyoon Kim, “1204” two-channel video, random loop, colour, no audio, 2014, MAAP
Increasingly, for contemporary feminist thinkers and creators, there’s no such thing as ‘too much information.’ It has been used to flag inappropriateness, a listener’s discomfort, perhaps concealing small-mindedness. Confronted by questions of intimacy, bodily functions or sexual idiosyncrasies, the phrase puts a lid on discussion, harking back to old-fashioned notions of ladylike propriety and, at worst, stymying progress on women’s reproductive health rights, as if what happens between the sheets or in a woman’s body is ‘too much.’
Mira Fuchs, the pseudonym Melanie Jame Wolf has employed in her eight years as a stripper, presents a performance ‘essay’ on her former life and in the chapter titled “On Shame” a short video loop displays a close-up of, we assume, Wolf’s genitals. But I tear ahead. The work is not confessional; in a way its dismantling of the notion of ‘too much’ is perhaps more successful than its exploration of sexual transactions and whether or not stripping can be considered feminist.
Like its subject matter, Mira Fuchs is revealing, most of all of how we the audience react, what level of comfort we cling to, what our own assumptions are on the exchanges of power that happen during a lap dance.
A consummate performer, Wolf is adept at withholding information; just as in her resume there are omissions so her years as a stripper are unaccounted for. In previous performances, most memorably a one-on-one as J Dark, she has absolute dominion over the performance space. “What’s your real name?” is the unimaginative nightly interrogation strippers endure and which Wolf can dodge like a bare-knuckled boxer. While seemingly letting you into her confidence, she won’t tell you anything she’s not prepared to part with.
With the audience seated in a circle, Wolf enters the room and holds the gaze of every member by turn. Often she will turn to address a specific person. “My job is to make you feel like you are special,” she says, this time while staring me squarely in the eyes. Put on the spot, I feel my body stiffen as the room turns to look at me. Soon she disrobes completely, but then slips on a flesh-coloured body suit and towering stripper heels.
Melanie Jame Wolf, Mira Fuchs
Presenting chapters that chart a career encompassing an estimated 30,000 lap dances and expose the group dynamics of her patrons, Wolf carefully feeds us information. What health and safety regulations must be adhered to—customer’s feet wide apart, bottom deep in the back of the chair to support the dancer’s weight as she gyrates on your lap. What men receiving lap dances would most likely say when her g-string came off—“So, what are you studying?”—as if ascertaining whether exposing herself was ‘worth it.’ How she saw her made-up face in the mirror looking back at her as her father in drag. The time she had only made $20 all night and in an act of defiance, spent the last 15 minutes of her shift supine, arms and legs raised stiffly like road kill.
When she redirects attention back to the audience, we watch each other receive or reject lap dances. One woman’s face becomes a mask of arousal and it feels wrong to watch. Is this act private? Is it too much? Tellingly, men are shy to accept, stripped as they are of the drinks, the throb of music, the late night blur; this strip show becomes a different beast.
In a video recording Wolf playfully imitates her own open-mouthed face of seduction, incrementally exaggerating it until her jaw is almost unhinged and her eyes feline-slits. “Too much?” she asks onscreen and the audience titters. The answer is no. Wolf files her essay with an intellectual vigour but also warmth. It’s a safe room in which to learn.
Perhaps the most powerful and, dare I say it, poignant admission came when Wolf told us that she was a stripper for such a long time because it meant that she could perform every night.
–
Arts House: Melanie Jame Wolf/Savage Amusement, Mira Fuchs, choreography, performance, video, text Melanie Jame Wolf, sound design Carl Anderson; North Melbourne Town Hall, 2-22 June
Lindsay Vickery, Scale Variable, Decibel, Tura New Music
The influence and the legacy of Roger Smalley (1943-2015) are somewhat legendary in Western Australian new music circles. Having emigrated from his European home to Perth in the early 1970s, Smalley spent over 30 years teaching composition at UWA before retiring in 2007; consequently many of his former students now hold senior positions in Western Australian universities and ensembles. As a young composer myself I feel his influence in many ways, despite having never actually met him, since nearly all of my teachers received his tutelage in some form. A notable ex-student is Cat Hope, Artistic Director of Decibel New Music Ensemble, a superstar of Australian new music and curator of Intermodulations, a recent concert in Smalley’s memory featured in TURA’s Scale Variable series.
In pre-show interviews and at the concert, Hope made a point of explaining how Smalley felt his early music inappropriate for Australian audiences, whose distance from the European scene and general inexperience with new music had cultivated a fear of the unknown and relative distaste for electronic music. This concert was, by and large, dedicated to those early European works, which Hope is adamant today’s Perth audience will enjoy—largely due to Smalley’s lasting legacy. She’s not wrong.
Decibel’s concert comprised four smaller chamber works in the first half featuring members of the ensemble in various iterations, and one large-scale work for ensemble and electronics in the second, for which the full ensemble assembled.
First up was Didjeridu (1974), an electroacoustic work for four-channel tape of samples of Australian Indigenous music from the Mornington Peninsula. The characteristic sound of the didjeridu is at first distinct, but gradually distorted beyond recognition, an unconscious—or was it conscious?—comment on the atrocious treatment by whites of Indigenous culture. Appropriating Aboriginal music for a European electro-acoustic work is at best kitsch and at worst racially insensitive. Today composers understand this (mostly) but in previous decades it was hugely popular, an exciting way to combine different musical styles. Doubtless Decibel leader Cat Hope isn’t blind to this, the work functioning more as a window into the past of Australian composition than as contemporary social comment.
Decibel Ensemble, Scale Variable, Tura New Music
Two works for piano and electronics follow: Transformation (1968, revised 1971) and Monody (1971-2). Both use the same electronic technique (ring modulation) to extend the colour palette of the piano and, although composed around the same time, they really sound nothing alike. Transformation is virtuosic and grand, featuring drawn-out sweeps and glissandi and fierce bass notes drawing as much colour as possible from the full range of the piano. It’s almost exhausting to watch guest artist Adam Pinto perform with such depth, from the most intense hammering sounds to suddenly subdued, glassy chords. If this piece is excessive, the second is refined, featuring a sole one-note melody throughout. It’s still extremely technically demanding on the performer but in a different way, as they must play piano with the right hand and control the sine wave frequency with the left, occasionally also moving to triangles and congas. The use of ring modulation in this piece is more melodic and seems to play a more active structural role than in the first. The tonal palette of the composition is unique, almost quirky, as many of the combined frequencies of piano and sine wave don’t conform to equal temperament.
We also hear Impulses (1986), an acoustic work for chamber sextet. This is a rhythmically driven conglomeration of sounds in which percussionist Louise Devenish and cellist Tristen Parr shine as the most assertive performers.
Decibel saves the best for last, assembling onstage to perform the 45-minute-long Zeitebenen. This unique and charismatic work, premiered in Germany in 1973 by Smalley’s new music ensemble Intermodulation, has never been performed in Australia until now, the score spending the past 40 years collecting dust somewhere in the University of Western Australia. It’s immediately obvious that this work draws on influences from each of the four smaller pieces performed earlier, sharing melody with Monody and recalling the electronic soundscape of Didjeridu. Here Smalley’s ideas are given the space they need to be completely aired. The work is politically charged, featuring sounds of warfare alongside those of children, storms, car horns, seagulls and whistles and, at one point, alluding to Tibetan throat singing and featuring colourful conversations between viola, clarinet, vibraphone and piano. This strikingly imaginative piece ends with a definitive thud from Devenish’s bass drum.
Intermodulations was extremely well-received by Perth’s new music audience. The resounding takeaway message was this: let’s not allow Roger Smalley’s music to be forgotten, as has happened to the compositions of so many Australian composers of his generation.
Decibel Ensemble, Scale Variable, Tura New Music
Tura New Music, Scale Variable: Intermodulations, Decibel New Music Ensemble; State Theatre, Centre Studio Underground, Perth, 7 June
Perth-based composer Alex Turley’s City of Ghosts was performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in the 2016 Metropolis New Music Festival. He was a RealTime-mentored music reviewer at Perth’s 2015 Totally Huge New Music Festival.
Site-specific performance improvisation, Louise Morris, Anne Scott Wilson, Lorne Sculpture Biennale, 2016
It had been something of a grey day in Lorne. I was there as the Lorne Sculpture Biennale’s guest writer and had spent the day wandering along the shore among uncanny sculptures. I almost missed a site-specific performance devised by Louise Morris from photographs by Anne Scott Wilson and carried through by some dedicated students apparently sunk in Samadhi [intense meditative concentration. Eds]. Rain was lurking somewhere out at sea, throwing a damp, chilly pall our way. Over the hill the ashes from the destruction of Wye in the Christmas Day bushfires had not long gone cold.
I was tired at this fag-end of a strange day and sat on a CCA-treated fence on the shelf of rock above the beach, waiting for the performers to arrive, passing the time analysing patterns of discarded cigarette butts, pretending I was a gumshoe in a film noir. (Conclusions: the person who sat there before me was shorter, a left-handed smoker, probably wearing a voluminous raincoat, who some time the previous evening had used binoculars to watch something unfolding in the car park about a kilometre distant).
As I was in this odd, distracted, forensically reflective state of mind, the performance began. Scene: a stretch of beach at low tide; a lagoon almost drained of water; sand churned up by the day’s beachgoers; wind backing into the west; dusk approaching; light becoming increasingly granular; a time of the day when the streets are emptying, so the world can feel a little forlorn. The Real is just outside your field of vision, eating away at the edges of your security.
Six women dressed in black moved across the sand. Silence bracketed by the distant rush of waves. Some of the women were dragging winding pieces of crimson fabric. They walked as though nobody was present. The watchers became invisible, became the impossible thing: the observer who isn’t there.
Site-specific performance improvisation, Lousie Morris, Anne Scott Wilson, Lorne Sculpture Biennale, 2016
The women fanned out across the beach; slow, slow-motion. But when my gaze returned to any one figure, she seemed to have moved further than time would have allowed, as though little glitches in reality, like edits in a strip of film, were parsing our cognition. Some women were down at waves-edge, in limicole. I felt a little anxiety rising in me, as though we were in the margins at the end of the world, an attenuated space where it was just, just, possible to speak of what really matters. I thought some random violence might intervene: black vans; radiation; something from the sky. Just below the knuckle of black rock where I was standing, kettled into my jacket by the cold air moving in from the ocean, a performer had burrowed under one of the sheets of crimson fabric, which was suddenly not like fabric at all, but something sinister and powerful, a little totemic. It began to undulate in slow convulsions. It seemed to be growing bigger, but the light was fading imperceptibly, things disintegrating an atom at a time, so that it was difficult to maintain a depth of field that one could trust in. It was still dusk and dusk was going on forever.
It was like a low-tech outtake from Bowie’s Blackstar: women in mourning carrying through the rituals that will annihilate melancholia, in the wastes outside the village of Ormen.
A woman lay on the sand. Jetsam. An omen to take into our dreams tonight. The atmosphere was of prophecy, the dance an oracle speaking, the women as they moved making images on imaginary Tarot cards. I tried to imagine a drones-eye view, the spatial relationship between one woman and another, to imagine a pattern, to fake up an analysis in different time signatures. But my mind—soaked up into the slow ritual movements, carrying, as rituals do, the things we cannot carry alone—couldn’t find a grip on a linear image.
Hours passed. Or perhaps only minutes, ticking. Two of the women crossed the lagoon. The others followed, as if slowly picking up a hidden current. They crawled and rolled up the steep bank toward the empty road, as though, having taken the measure of gravity they could match it, gram by gram, make it work against itself.
The next day, I took a cab out to the airport at Avalon with a driver who spoke to me of time-travel and passengers who vanished into air. I looked at him suspiciously and wondered if he had been on the beach, watching me.
Site-specific performance improvisation, Lousie Morris, Anne Scott Wilson, Lorne Sculpture Biennale, 2016
Site-specific performance improvisation, creators Louise Morris, Anne Scott Wilson; Lorne Sculpture Biennale, Lorne, Victoria, March 19
I ask Jack Sargeant, Program Director of REVELATION Perth International Film Festival (REV), how the 2016 event is shaping up. “Well, we have a spine now,” he replies drily. “I might be wrong but I don’t think any other film festival has a spine on their program. That’s a thick program. The festival has grown a lot. We have some 200 screening sessions.”
Sargeant describes his work on REV as “seeing a few films for half a year and in the second half working like a maniac watching films for 15 hours a day. As well as feature films, shorts and documentaries there’s an academic conference, industry panels and workshops. It’s a huge program. It just grows and grows each year. So the workload gets crazier and crazier. The way it works is that I search out films, we have the call for entries and then Festival Director Richard Sowada and I just watch everything.”
I assume Sargeant and Sowada watch a lot of DVDs, but I’m corrected. “I think it’s the end of the DVD. Almost everything we watch now is on Vimeo or some other platform. I don’t think anyone sends out DVDs any more. 90% of what I watch is online. Most of what we now screen in the festival is sent as DCPs (Digital Cinema Packages)—a lot cheaper than 35mm prints. So the whole exhibition system has changed.
“A lot of what I do for REV is chasing people, chasing films, following an interest, an emerging stylistic trend or whatever, and also, of course, [watching] hundreds of films that come from our call for entries—I watch all those online.”
I ask if the call for entries comes with criteria issued to applicants. “No criteria. As soon as you start putting criteria on things, you miss out on other things. You just have to be open to whatever is happening in the industry, whatever is happening artistically, in communities, with audiences. From all that, Richard and I will start noticing trends or ideas that are emerging and we’ll debate them. Sometimes we’re asked why we’ve rejected a film. It’s not because the film is bad; it’s because we have three other films that explore the same area.”
I assume that Sargeant has a big screen at home on which he sees many of the films he selects from. “No. That’s the thing. You love film but you’re not allowed to watch it properly. You have to watch and choose from a small screen. Then you don’t get to see how really beautiful a film is until the festival itself, same as everyone else.” But there are also films that Sargeant sees on big screens at other festivals.
All The Time In The World
All the Time in the World
One of these films is All the Time in the World (dir Suzanne Crocker, Canada, 2014, 89 mins), which, he explains, “is about a Canadian family who leave what’s already a rural community to go into the deep bush to live for winter where it’s -40 or so, the river’s frozen, there’s deep snow. It’s an amazing essay film, kind of intense and beautifully filmed. The family—and the kids are quite young—are just talking about their life. It’s an exploration of what it means to not be in the rat-race at all. I saw it at the Sydney Underground Festival October last year and thought, that’s great, we’ve got to screen it.
Invention
Palpable trends: slow, big and immersive
I wonder if there any palpable trends Sargeant has noticed, although acknowledging they might emerge over several festivals rather than in one year. He’s wary about declaring trends because there are so many people making films that trends can be identified in any number of ways. “However,” he adds, “one thing we have noticed—and this has been going on for a while now—I guess you could call it ‘slow cinema.’ You know, long, long takes, not a lot of action—maybe even no action. It’s about watching and listening. We have a film called Dead Slow Ahead (12 months of life inside a vast grain tanker; Mauro Herce, Spain, 2016, 74 mins), which is like that; another, Human (astonishing visual perspectives on relativities of scale; Yann Arthus-Bertrand, France, 2015, 190 minutes), has long, contemplative shots. There’s Invention (Mark Lewis, Canada, 2014, 87 mins), which is ‘just’ footage of architecture. You’re on an escalator watching someone walking along or whatever. It’s almost like one of those classic ‘city films’ from the 1920s and 30s, but instead of hustle and bustle, it’s all long, long takes. I suppose it has to be a reaction to all those Hollywood films that have edits every three seconds.
“The main trend we’ve noticed is an… almost immersive quality. It’s slow, it’s big. It’s spectacular without [being] spectacle. It’s not about explosions—although it can be. It’s not about fast editing.” Above all it reveals for Sargeant that “filmmakers are still making film for the big screen. There’s still an interest in the cinematic even though we’re getting ever more used to watching in smaller and smaller formats. Maybe this ‘slow film’ [trend] is almost a response to that. You need to watch these films on a big screen, you need to hear them properly.”
Human
It’s a short leap from a possibly significant trend to Sargeant’s passion for cinema on the big screen and the shared cinema experience: “I think cinema is such an important medium. However often people say that TV will replace film or computer games or VR will replace film, I don’t think any of that’s true. I think there’s something about sitting in a cinema with a group of people and experiencing something collectively that’s so important. It’s kind of intrinsic to the process of cinema that it’s a communal experience. I suspect people might be forgetting that. Lots of writers on film say things like, ‘This is so spectacular, so exciting…’ But it’s only spectacular and exciting when you watch it in a cinema. If you’re watching The X Men in a cinema with 200 people and they’re all getting wrapped up in the plot and cheering, that’s great. Watching it at home by yourself, there’s not really any fun.
“I would like to think that the films we have in the REV program will really work on the big screen with a crowd and that people come out talking about film. We screened The Tribe last year and people are still talking to me about it. To me that’s such an important thing—that film has that power to affect you forever. The year before we had Under the Skin and again, people are still talking about it. We need culture that stays with you, the ideas stay with you.”
All Things Ablaze
Creative documentary: All Things Ablaze
Sargeant thinks All Things Ablaze will have such staying power: “It’s a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the Ukraine with three or four camera crews among pro-democracy protestors. It’s the middle of winter. There are speeches which get more and more heated. There’s no didactic voiceover, no cutaways to talking heads, the cameras aren’t telling you anything—it’s just footage. It’s incredible to watch because we [as a rule in Australia] don’t end up in these kinds of conflicts. The film is visually very powerful and sounds great. Even though you don’t understand the language, you certainly understand the urgency. It’s a beautiful film.”
Sargeant stresses the creative calibre of the festival’s documentaries. They include Notfilm, the documentary by Ross Lipman (UK, US, 2015, 130 mins) about the making of the Samuel Beckett-scripted Film (featuring Buster Keaton; director Alan Schneider, UK, US, 1965, 20 mins) which will show on the same program. He also singles out an animated documentary, NUTS! (Penny Lane, USA, 2016, 79 mins), about Dr John Romulus who “somehow invented everything from junkmail to the infomercial” (program). “Coincidentally,” says Sargeant, “It’s a really strong year for documentaries about the arts.” There are films about Tony Conrad, Robert Mapplethorpe and Robert Frank, as well as Laurie Anderson’s documentary about her dog Lolabelle, Heart of a Dog (USA, 2015, 75 mins).
“We also have wilder documentaries, like The Other Side, set in poverty-stricken, rural Louisiana. It’s not really about poverty. It’s about giving people space who are not normally seen on TV or heard on radio, certainly not seen in cinema. It’s an incredible film—and kind of terrifying as well. The Land of the Enlightened (Pieter Jan De Pui, Belgium, Ireland, Netherlands, Germany, Afghanistan, 2016, 87 mins), about kids in Afghanistan, is also beautifully shot (in 16mm) and tells its story about the country slowly. [Because it stages re-enactments] there’s some debate about whether it’s documentary or a hybrid. Sydney Film Festival programmed it as documentary but they also draw attention to its hybridity.”
Notfilm
Feature films
We move on to the feature film program where some names will be familiar to REV audiences, says Sargeant. “We have works by younger filmmakers we’ve been following for a while, like Zach Clark (Little Sister, USA, 91 mins, in which a young nun returns home when her soldier brother returns from Iraq). We’ve screened three of his films at REV including White Reindeer (2013). This year, we’ve also got Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise (2015), his sixth feature film. We’ve previously screened his A Field in England (2013), Kill List (2011) and others. These are filmmakers who’ve emerged in the past 10 years and whom we’ve been following—not intentionally; it’s just that they’re producing consistently interesting work that draws you to it. Anna Billo who made The Love Witch is another filmmaker whose work we’ve screened previously. The Love Witch was shown recently at the Stranger with My Face festival in Tasmania. It’s another beautiful film.
“Der bunker (Nikias Chryssos, Germany, 2015, 85 mins) is a crazy film about a teacher who goes to study in a rural outpost and stays in a house which is a bunker and is asked to teach the owner’s child. It’s halfway between John Waters and David Lynch, so strange and very, very funny. If you like a good neo-noir crime thriller, Saburra (set in Rome’s waterfront suburbs; Stefano Sollima, Italy, France, 2015, 130 mins) is fantastic.”
Rating high in Sargeant’s opinion is “The Whispering Star (Sion Sono, Japan, 2015, 101 mins), a film about a woman whom we discover is a robot who delivers packages in outer space, spending years and years travelling between planets. It’s like a meditation on existence, with the planets she lands on all shot around Fukushima. These weird deserted landscapes are, of course, contemporary Japan. Cinematically it’s stunning. When SF film is really good, its contemplative aspect is really foregrounded. I think we saw that in Under the Skin.” Another film that plays with our sense of reality is Aaaaaaaah! (Steve Oram, UK, 2015, 79 mins), “which is like a kitchen sink drama but everyone in it is acting like a monkey. It’s quite fantastic and very funny as well. You could argue that films like this and High-Rise and All Things Ablaze are about the breakdown of society.” But what is REV without something from the outer limits? “ASMA HorroX (Pat Tremblay, Canada, 2016, 101 mins) is a wild, beautiful and psychedelic SF horror film.”
The Jim Henson Legacy
A major component of the 2016 festival program is a Jim Henson retrospective featuring two feature films, The Labyrinth (1986) and The Dark Crystal (1982), feature-length accounts of Henson’s commercials, experimental films, performance films, the Sesame Street story, plus Tales from Muppet Land and A Muppet Musical Moments and documentaries about the filmmaker at work. Sargeant says, “It’s a total education with some of it to be shown for free as Mini-Rev at the State Library. So it’ll be a real community event and get more children involved in cinema.”
Shorts and long-term values
Shorts feature in the Get Your Shorts On (WA emerging filmmakers), Experimental Showcase and ICS (Indigenous Community Stories) programs alongside another 40 or so short films. Of the latter, Sargeant admires in particular Upside Down Feeling by Eddie White (Australia, 2015, 10 mins) about a young boy preoccupied with death and disease “via the vivid images he sees in movies” and Clare by Tony Lawrence (Australia, 2015, 18 mins) in which a girl “finds herself in a strange place where she is confronted by desire” (program note).
One of the festival’s key pleasures for Sargeant is its Super 8 Masterclass and the showing of its outcomes on the final night of the festival. Central to it is hands-on filmmaking: “We’re keeping Super 8 alive. There’s something about the tactility of Super 8—and about working with actual film in general. It’s a magical aspect of cinema, being able to feel film. [The participants] might not necessarily be ‘Super 8’ people but they’ve done something in Super 8 and have learned something.”
REV in 2016 features 143 films, 14 world premieres and 42 Australian premieres. Sargeant muses, “Once I start talking about it, I think, ‘This is just insane. How did we do this?’” What pleases him above all, with his love of the big screen is a new generation of 18 year-olds who are coming to the festival and are excited by cinema in an era which challenges the form’s durability. Jack Sargeant is a believer: “People do actually like cinema and they need cinema and it matters to them.”
From the Editors: Don’t miss Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog, a funny, moving and philosophical coming to terms with loss—of a dog, a mother and a lover—and made with the experimental verve we expect of a great artist, not least in the work’s implicit homage to the home movie and 20th century experimental filmmaking.
Dale Harding, Mardgin dhoolbala milgangoondhi – rifles hidden in the cliffs, 2016
Dharawal kiskisiwin (remembering Dharawal) is a digital animation of Google map images charting the journey from the Dharawal Land Council along the roads, past the brick homes, through fields and into thick eucalypt scrub. We arrive at a scene of cliffs on private land in Appin, not far from the outer Sydney suburb of Campbelltown. In this animation, the cliffs are marked with a yellow pin titled “Site of Appin Massacre.” A parabolic sound cone above the animation wails an offering in Cree and English to the Dharawal for their loss. This pin is not just a mark made as part of the recent artwork by Canadian First Nations artist Cheryl L’Hirondelle—seeking to stand in solidarity—but in fact one of many such points that can be found on multiple Australian maps with a quick internet search: maps that identify over 30 such sites of frontier atrocities on the mainland that range from Appin in 1816 to Conniston in the Northern Territory in 1928.
“The upper scene depicts a massacre that took place early in the 20th century,” explains a text about the work of Gija artist Queenie McKenzie, which she painted in 1996 to map one of many stories from the Kimberley. “It is part of Aboriginal oral history but is not reflected in Western written histories of the area.” This statement is, in essence, the key curatorial premise of Campbelltown Arts Centre’s With Secrecy and Despatch; a bold political response, it protests the national amnesia about colonisation and, in particular, the denial of massacres—stories of great loss that have been written out of our nation’s history. This is an undeniably important topic deserving of attention. The only issue is that the exhibition presents this notion at such volume and from so many focal points that it could have in fact benefited from being three separate shows.
Visitors are welcomed into the gallery by two imposing black walls that block the standard sightlines through to the sunlit garden. The black vinyl title and introductory text on these walls is intentionally hard to read without making an effort and moving across the space. It is a clever device that gives the text the appearance of having been etched into the wall, as on a stone memorial, and implicates us in a responsibility to seek out the knowledge it offers. These words explain that using April 17 2016—the bicentenary of the Appin Massacre—as a catalyst (it could have been exhibition one), this show features 10 newly commissioned works by First Nations Canadians and Aboriginal Australian artists to “not only speak of the Appin Massacre,” as curators Tess Allas and David Garneau explain, “but to brutalities that have occurred globally” (exhibition two). A three-year-long project in the making, With Secrecy and Despatch—titled after the words Governor Lachlan Macquarie used to describe the way in which the Dharawal people were to be forcibly removed from their land and killed if they resisted—also brings together 13 existing works by 11 Aboriginal artists that map massacres across the country, on loan from three major cultural institutions (exhibition three).
Fiona Foley, Annihilation of the Blacks, 1986, courtesy National Museum of Australia
Regardless of the show’s scale, there is one very strong and pertinent leitmotif that, as you enter the large open-plan central gallery space, is made immediately and unapologetically apparent; it is just simply ‘massacre.’ The earliest work in the show, Fiona Foley’s 1986 sculpture Annihilation of the Blacks, commands centre stage and sets the tone. A political work at its outset, Foley’s sculpture—as Allas explained in her curatorial walk-through— is now also bound up in the Howard-era History Wars once its removal from public display at the Australian Museum had been requested.
The work comprises a branch suspended between two stripped-bare trees from which hang nine coarse ropes, of the type used to dry fish in the tropics. Only on this occasion, the ropes are nooses that suspend nine small, black, carved wooden bodies, while a single white faceless figure stands by below. In this display dramatic lighting scatters shadows of the bodies across the plinth below and well beyond, over the floor of the gallery, so that visitors cannot avoid their presence. Like McKenzie’s, Foley’s work was made in reference to a story passed down via oral history; relating the atrocities at Susan River in Queensland, as well as the actions of colonial soldiers in suspending the bodies of those killed from trees as a warning to any survivors. Each work in this show carries this intensity, this weight of words spoken and unspoken, stories that have been told—as this show reminds us—in contemporary Aboriginal art for over 30 years.
Tony Albert, Blood water, 2016, courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney.
Colour is also used to dramatic effect in tying together the show’s 30 diverse works. Allas explained that a distinct shade of red emerged independently in the commissioned works of Tony Albert, Vernon Ah Kee, Frances Belle Parker and Marianne Nicolson, as well as already being present in the works of Judy Watson, Freddie Timms and re-enforced in a second state of Laurel Nannup’s woodblock print. It is of course a confronting and unmistakably ‘bloody’ shade that was also selected for the exhibition room brochure’s paper. As well, the same dense matte black of the entrance walls that defines Albert’s works punctuates the soft grey and white of the main open gallery space, as well as all four smaller rooms off to the sides. This darkness sucks the light out of any perception of depth in these rooms and there is a sense of claustrophobia, particularly in the space featuring works by Nannup, Ah Kee, and Dale Harding.
Harding’s commissioned installation, Mardgin dhoolbala milgangoondhi—rifles hidden in the cliffs 2016, presents just that: a ‘cliff-face’ of rawhide marked with ochre outlines—“splatters,” Allas calls them—of handprints, shackles and period guns. Indistinct in dim lighting, like a sepia-toned recollection, for Harding this work honours both the loss of and the acts of resistance by his ancestors, for whom the sandstone cliffs of their country in central Queensland became “keeping and hiding places.” On the opposing wall, Ah Kee’s ‘portraits’ of violence, Brutalities 2016, offer the singular refection in this show on the image of the perpetrator. The three images present faces dehumanised, almost dematerialized: eyes and mouths blackened depths with all surrounding form and skin seemingly blown apart.
Genevieve Grieves, Remember, 2016.
In this room the air feels thick and sound is muffled by the carpeted floor; visitors speak in whispers. An awareness of periods of silence weighs heavily in this exhibition as it is punctuated every 15 minutes by the crackling melody of God Save the King and a gunshot, marking the start of Adrian Stimson’s two-channel video AS ABOVE SO BELOW 2016, a drone footage homage to the landscapes that bore witness to the massacres in Canada’s Cypress Hills and in Appin. Stimson’s loop is accompanied by the haunting voice of a child repeating “remember,” part of Genevieve Grieves’ memorial installation of the same name. At other times, and across other spaces, it is also possible to glean Nardi Simpson and Amanda Brown’s commissioned soundscape: the whip of a lyrebird and an eerie melody that echoes a child crying—the sound believed to have given away the Dharawal people’s hiding place to colonial officers.
Tying the concept of this incredibly ambitious and timely project in with a local atrocity, the Appin Massacre, its bicentenary and with an international residency is the brilliance and complication in the messages the show leaves us with. What is unequivocal, however, is the overall greater historical and political purpose. In her commanding video work HUNTING GROUND (2016), Julie Gough instates snippets of accounts of violent encounters from over 170 texts about violent encounters found online over just the one mapped record that references massacres which took place across Tasmania. She writes in the accompanying text, “The evidence of what happened here is often marked with absence…absence of an acknowledgement of these ‘difficult’ histories…” Secrecy and Despatch not only acknowledges, it adds a much needed layer of visual, conceptual, personal and political context to those pins that map the true histories of colonial Australia.
Vernon Ah Kee, Brutalities, 2016, courtesy the artist & Milani Gallery, Brisbane.
You’ll find more images from the exhibition and an interview with the curators here.
–
Campbelltown Arts Centre: With Secrecy and Despatch, curators, Tess Allas (Australia), David Garneau (Canada), Campbelltown, 9 April–13 June 2016
As the performance draws to a close and I’m wondering what to do with a welling tear, a woman sitting behind me promptly reminds me where I am with, “Well, that was cheery!”
Commissioned by Ilbijerri Theatre in 1993, Jane Harrison’s Stolen is now a classic, studied by many in school and extensively toured, though for me, this production is a first. Mounted by the newly minted National Theatre of Parramatta, directed by the ever inventive dancer/choreographer Vicki Van Hout, the production is clearly attracting an even wider audience.
Rather than a stark re-telling of painful history, Stolen is an often playful account of dark times initially seen through the eyes of five Aboriginal children who’ve experienced the dire effects of a government assimilationist policy of enforced removal from their families and institutionalisation.
Sandy (Kerri Simpson) is constantly on the move, searching for home. Ruby (Berthalia Selina Reuben) is forced to work as a maid, mistreatment leading her to the edge of madness. Ann (Matilda Brown) is adopted by a white family and forever conflicted. Removed from her parents, Shirley (Henrietta Baird) in turn has her own children removed. Jimmy (Matthew Cooper) suicides when he learns the mother who spent her life looking for him has died before they can be reunited.
Van Hout’s production whirls into vivid life as each member of the agile ensemble embodies versions of themselves at different ages as well as other characters, animals and mythic figures. They’re aided in these transformations by design elements created by Imogen Ross and Van Hout. Sheets of cardboard littering the stage are casually folded into objects: a reclining chair, a kennel, a gift package, a cut-out baby. Van Hout describes these objects in her program note as being used “like we would dancing feathers which when finished with are tucked back into the folds of our skirts, to be replaced by leaves or small branches acting as spears or the beaks of cranes, perhaps the motion of the west wind or of the fog rolling off the mountains.” Recalling the wildly idiosyncratic work of the Tjanpi Desert Weavers, a large onstage tree, its branches snaking into the stage space, is yarn-bombed with strands of multi-coloured wool.
Stolen, National Theatre of Parramatta
photo Amanda James
Stolen, National Theatre of Parramatta
The swirling shift between character and place is enhanced with tightly executed choreographed sequences. Speech is frequently accompanied by movement: Shirley distractedly snaps her fingers as she speaks; Ruby becomes a lifeless form pushed across the floor on the feet of the others as they spit out the instructions of her oppressors: “Cook for me, Ruby,” “Clean for me, Ruby.” As Sandy tells us how his mother was charged with child neglect by welfare authorities when they discovered an out of date can of peas in her cupboard, he performs a version of that ‘magic three’ shell game involving a cup and a disappearing pea and concludes by angrily kicking the table away. Jimmy, now incarcerated, is a fighter who turns violence on himself and has to be restrained, red gloves peeled from his fists and laid at the foot of the tree.
In these and other scenes in the play, memories cut like sharp stones tossed by a whirlwind. Despite the pace and humour of Van Hout’s production, an overwhelming sense of sad inevitability pervades.
Phil Downing’s score adds to the urgency of the telling. On the run again, Sandy’s flight is accompanied by rapid percussion followed first by a sudden flurry, like the wings of a disturbed bird, and then the beat of a train. “Can’t I stay here?” he pleads. Other sequences combine sounds (rooster crows) and words (“Willy, don’t get caught!”). Visual elements in the form of projections are also effective. A domestic blind becomes the page on which Jimmy’s mother writes the letters to her son that he never receives.
The indignities suffered by the children intensify as the performers regularly form a line to compare skin colour or fitness to be “chosen” for weekend release or adoption. The threat of “the Welfare” is ever present. Strangely, this is a mantra many white kids of the era will also recall. It’s as if the evils of government policy were seeping through the entire population via its most vulnerable.
The children and their adult selves fight back. To calm Ruby, who has been molested and “promised not to tell,” a dreaming story is re-enacted in the form of a fight with an invisible Mungee spirit that is devouring humans who are afraid of the dark. Bones are ground and thrown over the evil outcast, rendering it white and therefore able to be seen and defeated. Sandy reassures Ruby “It’s not the dark you need to be afraid of.”
Ann, ostensibly the most successfully assimilated among the children is also among the saddest. Her sense of identity destroyed, she can find no equilibrium with her Aboriginal family who live, not on the land but in a Housing Commission flat (“I just thought it would be different”) and loses all sense of belonging (“Who do I think I am?”).
From time to time, one of the performers sits cross-legged at a small typewriter resting on the roots of the tree. With the echoing of the slowly tapped keys comes a sense that someone, somewhere is getting this all down. Whether in the form of Human Rights reports such as “Bringing Them Home” or plays like Stolen, the truth will be told.
Stolen, National Theatre of Parramatta
National Theatre of Parramatta, Stolen, writer Jane Harrison, director Vicki Van Hout, performers Henrietta Baird, Matilda Brown, Mathew Cooper, Berthalia Selina Reuben, Kerri Simpson, design Imogen Ross, Vicki Van Hout, lighting, video design Toby K, composer, sound designer Phil Downing; Lennox Theatre, Parramatta Riverside, Sydney, 2-17 June
I have never understood the hang-ups people have about white cubes. The more you try to remake and remodel its void—let alone vanquish it—the more you prove its power. Surely the white cube has become a most promiscuous public space wherein anything is acceptable and all is possible.
How many times have you walked into a gallery or museum whose white cube zone has been deterritorialised, deconstructed, demolished? Walls are punctured, flooring is covered, air ducts are exposed. Or, frames, partitions, boxes, shelving and rooms are constructed as metaphorical refugee encampments or sites of resistant occupancy. For many, this enlivens contemporary art’s critique of architectural politics—a shallow view, considering the cultural context within which galleries and museums ape lifestyle trends of customisation and empowerment, while IKEA and Bunnings encourage you to transform your domestic space into a personalised white cube. The Block vs The Sydney Biennale. Grand Designs vs The Turner Prize. Is there really a difference?
In an exhibition featuring Cassandra Tytler’s video installation, I’m Sorry (2016), this familiar scenography appears once more. Another artist-run space with concrete floor, white walls, track lighting. Another box-room built within the space, sitting like a defiant edifice, reclaiming the space to make a personalised art statement. That’s how it looks from the outside, what with its ugly exposed ‘interior’ wall studs and framing, the kind that Institutional Critique loves to ‘expose’ within a gallery or museum.
The difference with I’m Sorry, though, lies in its awareness not only of the pitfalls of even bothering to critique ‘art’ (what is it with artists doing it all the time?), but of the precise reasons for making a shitty Bunnings box construction inside a gallery space. This work is not about where you are in the gallery: it’s about where this box comes from. Like a random container drop, it imports a plain suburban room into the gallery. You enter through a Bunnings door to find yourself inside a scaled-down living room of sorts—low ceiling, white walls, faux-Afghan carpet, a small table with flowers in a vase. Two ‘windows’ (actually flat-screen monitors) on the left and right walls are each positioned at chest height. It’s neither a house nor a home; it’s just a dumb space, a petite hell for its inhabitants. This room is a domestic void, placed within the void of the white cube. As a visitor to the gallery where art and reality pathologically mirror each other, one is now trapped inside this portal to the domestic world where shit happens.
All public galleries these days run boutique vodka tastings, kids’ craft workshops, comedian talks, themed cooking classes and senior citizens’ walk-throughs—for even the most rabidly, politically oriented contemporary art exhibitions. Like the medieval ‘city square’ notion of congregational activities which contemporary urban planners flaunt in all global cities desperate to be socially relevant while hysterically building pseudo-inner-city lifestyle developments, public galleries domesticate their space as an antidote to the solipsistic core which silently throbs in so-called socially motivated art. Amid this neurotic, curated reassurance that art and society miraculously mandate each other’s co-dependency, how does an artist today even frame the outside world, let alone provide commentary from an artistic perspective?
I’m Sorry, Cassandra Tytler,
The ‘window’ flat screens of I’m Sorry feature Tytler dressed and made-up as a man. It’s ineffectual and unconvincing: elfin short hair, some fake stubble, no lipstick or eye-liner—a drag king shopping at IKEA. He first appears on the right screen, banging on the glass, barking again and again and again, “I’m sorry.” We know the story: he is the lover/partner/husband singing a pathetic refrain of repentance which fuels the cyclical nature of domestic violence. It’s never a one-off or last time; only ever a loop, a return, a repeat. He exits the window on the right and appears on the window on the left. And starts up again with his banging and pleading: insistent, dogged, irritated by having to state his case. He gets angrier with each mantric utterance. He moves to the right window again. Then the left. Then the right. Then the left. By now, he has dissolved into a breathless, indignant cartoon of frustration. The remorse faked earlier has been retracted; he’s now insulted by having to even acknowledge wrong or be engaged in any ridiculous reconciliation. The apologetic has now transformed into the apoplectic.
It’s a queasy performance. Firstly, Tytler moves from drama school acting into eventual full-blown melodramatic mime. Unlike most contemporary video art which now employs the Cate Blanchetts of the world to sycophantically infuse its art with cinematic performativity, Tytler’s performance in I’m Sorry mirrors the inauthentic posturing of the repeat offender inured to both clinical strategies by therapists and passive-aggressive manipulation by do-gooders.
Secondly, I’m caught remembering how embarrassing it is when you see how pathetically people act when cornered, exposed, caught, tried. No-one hangs their heads in shame these days. Everyone feels they have the right to fuck up how they choose. The socio-cultural persistence of domestic violence is bound to send subliminal messages to the ethically-skewed mindsets of its perpetrators, who feel violated by the humiliating exposure of their private domestic hell. Like Tytler’s ‘everyman,’ the abuser feels more wronged than wrong. Standing inside the crappy Bunnings room built by the artist, I thought of countless dads fixing up their houses, smoothing over their problems, patching up their relationships, plumbing their anger, building up their frustration, hammering away in self-loathing. The proliferation of TV reality shows predicated on constructing dream homes built by hunky metrosexual elves accrues an icky reactionary prescience under these conditions. The flaccid melt-down performance of I’m Sorry amplifies these connections: dad is just a dick.
And then there’s that sound heard throughout the video. A non-stop banging on the window, like the Big Bad Wolf pleading to be let in. It’s the distinctive sound of a hollow boxy boom, frail in force yet ungainly, articulated by upper-bass-range thudding. It’s the sound of someone gagged and trapped in a box begging to be let out. Or the sound of yet another temp employee with a clip-board wandering through the suburbs trying to get you to change from one branded service to another, for no good reason other than flat-lined marketplace competition. Or the sound of a million tradesmen fabricating a million boxes for designer shanty towns, bashing away with tools bought at Bunnings. Or the sound of your neighbours banging on your wall. Or you on theirs. It’s the sound of the outside world, never leaving you alone, even after you have modelled your petty square meterage into that IKEA image of retro-Euro-Modernism aping Bauhaus-revivalist contemporary art museum café design. Ironically, it’s also the sound of pseudo-cinematic video art projections inside black boxes inside white cubes (or disused industrial sites à la mode) for biennales around the world. A psycho-acoustics demonstrating the deafness of video artists fawning over their hi-res imagery but deaf to anything sonic, aural or vocal. Here, it’s the sound of the outside world banging on the windows of art. With its consistent performativity and tonality, I’m Sorry unapologetically has nothing to say about art, galleries, white cubes and their glorified relevance to the outside world. Apology gratefully accepted.
–
Cassandra Tytler, exhibition, Tock Tock, work I’m Sorry (2016), video installation, Gallery One Trocadero Art Space, Footscray, Melbourne, 18 May-4 June
Cassandra Tytler works with single channel video, performance and installation, focusing “on processes of embodiment of the gallery space and how movement, vision and audio can create an intersubjective feedback between viewer and artwork… [with] an ongoing examination of masquerade and mimicry in video-based practice.” She has presented live video performances and exhibited works in Australia, Paris, Turku (Finland) and Miami, has a Masters degree (RMIT University, 2003) and is currently a PhD candidate at Monash University, Melbourne.
Studio One at Chunky Move headquarters in Southbank has been converted into a 21st century videodrome: a place where real life and screen life merge, with elements of the techno-surreal.
In the centre of the room a large white panel obscures our view of half the stage space and a flat screen monitor off to the side. Stephen Phillips stands in front of the panel, staring intently into a small video camera on a tripod. A live feed from the camera is displayed on the television screen. A few lights flicker and we hear the crepitations of an old vinyl record playing out its groove at the end of a side—a signal that something needs to be flipped.
A lurid flash, like green lightning, reveals Lauren Langlois standing in the shadows directly behind Phillips, ghosting his slow movements, hidden from the camera. Then she’s gone again.
It’s a spooky scene, artfully composed. Phillips, an actor who worked with Anouk van Dijk on Complexity of Belonging (2014), moves to the other side of the stage. Now he stands watching the television. Langlois begins to rotate her upper body in large circles over her hips, long hair flaring toward the camera. He follows, imitating her screen image.
Lucid, Chunky Move
What does the camera reveal? And what is hidden from the camera, outside of the frame or in the shadows? The action moves behind the large panel. Five cameras, some fixed, some directed by the performers, bring us close-ups and partial views projected in impressive high-definition onto the white panel. We see part of a face resting on the ground, or fingers drumming and dragging, chipped black nail polish glinting under the portable studio lights. Feet or arms appear briefly from behind the screen, and we try to reconcile this glimpse of the real with what the cameras show us.
Throughout, Lucid teases at the edge between screen space and real space, with the performers constantly slipping from one side to the other. With Ben Cobham’s atmospheric lighting and Jethro Woodward’s nervy sound design, it’s not so much an exploration as a mystification. Lucid revels in the glamour of the camera’s incomplete transformations; and our relationship with screens becomes a kind of dark romance.
In one scene, Langlois, partially visible behind the screen, vogues for the camera, smoking a cigarette with exaggerated sensuality; meanwhile, in front of the screen, Phillips plays the role of Hollywood casting agent. “She’s hiding a secret,” he says, wistfully. “She’s hiding a secret but it’s not in her eyes.” He’s looking at the TV, which has been turned away from us. Is he looking at the same image of Langlois as we are, or at a different fantasy woman?
Lucid, Chunky Move
As in a dream, one episode flows easily into the next. It’s as if the world behind the screen were an unconscious mind, a churn of desires and fears. Langlois and Phillips act out scenes from Oliver Stone’s film Platoon (1986) and discuss what it felt like, as a teenager, to see Charlie Sheen inhaling blowback through a gun barrel. Then there are a few lines of an Anne Sexton poem, a fragment of a Greek tragedy and an impersonation of Kayako from the Japanese-American horror trilogy The Grudge. And much more. Formative influences jostle in what seems like a psychoanalytical duet.
And the projected visions that the audience sees? Are these the unreliable insights of a lucid dreamer?
Lucid seems less a work of high-concept contemporary dance than physical theatre with a digital twist. There’s plenty of energetic rushing around as Langlois and Phillips—both wearing nondescript grey—organise the cameras, screens, lights and various props. There is very little dance, and yet the movement is constant, a restless cavalcade of scenes.
There are some interesting similarities in the way that screens and live camera feeds are used in both Lucid and in director Eamon Flack’s Belvoir production of The Glass Menagerie, which, by coincidence, is playing simultaneously next door at the Malthouse Theatre. In both, the screen works like a mechanism of fascination, amplifying our uncertainties about the real and unreal, the material and immaterial, stirring vague passions and deflecting critical reflection.
Compare this with the much edgier, more disconcerting ways in which, say, Benedict Andrews or Atlanta Eke use screens. Although it looks very slick, there is nonetheless something a little vulgar about Lucid. But there are some beautiful stage images, particularly in the use of the large central panel which is attached to the floor at one end like a giant flag and can be rotated in a full circle.
In the last moments of Lucid, Phillips and Langlois push this panel around and around and around, a vast sweeping motion, scattering the dream material. And then suddenly the performers are gone, disappearing into the shadows. All that is left is the spinning screen, slowing to stillness.
Lucid, Chunky Move
Chunky Move, Lucid, concept, direction, choreography Anouk van Dijk, dramaturg Anny Mokotow, performers Lauren Langlois, Stephen Phillips, composer Jethro Woodward, lighting Ben Cobham, video realisation Blair Hart, video system design Pete Brundle, James Sandri; Chunky Move Studios, Melbourne, 26 May-17 June
In Yirra Yaakin’s So Long Suckers—cheekily promoted as “Bangarra meets Beckett”—three ochre-faced men (Ian Wilkes, Emmanuel James Brown, Peter Docker), each bearing in stately fashion a tombstone-like box, enter a black corner stage draped with a veil of dangling chains. The ensuing action mirrors Beckett’s dramatisations of the self-conscious discourse of characters imprisoned within an indeterminate theatrical space. Although the text has a slightly laboured poetry about it, the performance rests upon the simple but powerful bearing of the performers, with choreography by Dalisa Pigram (with Jacob Lehrer) supporting Kyle J Morrison’s spare, occasionally knockabout direction.
Darren Reutens—Dazastah of the leading Perth hip hop band Downsyde—is visible throughout providing low-key atmospheric music while the fall and clinking of chains provides the drama’s acoustic signature. Short movement interludes evoke mournful dancing. Wilkes’ steely balanced poses, arms wide, and measured liquid dance phrases, are choreographic highlights.
Suckers is closer to Beckett’s precursors such as August Strindberg (Dream Play, 1907) and the German Expressionists of the 1920-30s. Echoing Sartre’s No Exit (1944), we observe three ghostly presences marooned in an uncertain afterlife wherein they struggle to recall their past and atone for their failings. This is very much an Australian post-colonial limbo. Encounters with “police, grog and jail” recur, with recollections of a party—or parties—that went wrong and a drunken drive along country—or urban—roads—that ended in a crash. The men have lost their heads—literally and metaphorically.
So Long Suckers, Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company
The narrative, if that’s the right word, is cyclic and enclosed. Motifs are introduced like keys in a choral development. The characters proclaim that they may be identified by their braces—red, green and white—leading to scuffles over ‘colour.’ Uncertainty permeates their memories as they grope for clarity. That horrendous motif of colonialism, the theft and display of the heads of natives and criminals, recurs as a particularly painful recollection. Each has lost his head, partly through his own actions—compromised, addicted—and partly at the hands of violent, legally protected oppressors. The tombstone-like boxes become, in the end, the tightly clasped heads which they reclaim.
As in Expressionism, the work is rife with Christian symbolism. Aside from redemption through suffering, the trio is initially introduced as the Three Kings or Wise Men, now Fallen, having (like the archangel Lucifer) lost their kingdoms and been forced to cross the desert. They joke that the cars are their camels, but the humour is sporadic and slurred by the grog.
The text for the production was compiled by Peter Docker from workshops and storytelling sessions with Bunuba Cultural Enterprises in Fitzroy Crossing, which involved his fellow performers. Tales of encounters with transit security guards on late night trains, of near misses on the road and the telling of jokes at parties, rest within the overarching Judeo-Christian poetics of the work. These half-remembered yarns act as sketches within a ramshackle structure. Suckers would benefit from dramaturgical and directorial sharpening. There are also several false endings which lead into weighty pauses before the work builds again. Finding heads or identities does not seem to conclude the characters’ journeys and the work drifts on.
So Long Suckers, Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company
The thread which binds these tales is the search for identity, the protagonists coming to realise that they embody Perth warrior Yagan (Wilkes), Bunuba warrior Jandamarra (Brown, whose portrayal introduces the Bunuba language) and Ned Kelly (Docker). The condensed narratives of Yagan and Jandamarra provide a strong historical reference point, locating the origins of contemporary racial torment in the past while sketching a distinguished lineage of Aboriginal resistance into the present.
The history of Kelly’s death mask and its public display received an intriguing twist with recent discoveries regarding the post-execution travels of the bushranger’s head. Docker’s uncritical acceptance of Kelly’s claims to be a displaced Irish resister of British rule and proto-republican recalls the attitudes of post-WWII Australian artists like Sidney Nolan or playwright Douglas Stewart (Ned Kelly, 1942). To compare a self-interested bank robber like Kelly with those who fought to stop white incursions into their territories jars.
Like many new Australian plays produced in a limited funding climate, So Long Suckers would benefit from further development. Nevertheless, it’s a great success, its charm lying in a slightly awkward but engaging blend of Expressionist moroseness and a vaudevillian desire to reprise and reinvent. The combination of motifs and a cyclical structure produces an evocative choral effect well supported by effective design and strong physical expression.
–
Yirra Yaakin & Bunuba Cultural Enterprises, So Long Suckers, director Kyle J Morrison, script Peter Docker and the company, performers Emmanuel James Brown, Ian Wilkes, Peter Docker, sound Darren Reutens, choreography Dalisa Pigram with Jacob Lehrer, design India Mehta, lighting Chris Donnelly; Subiaco Theatre Centre, Perth, 26 May-4 Jun
I’m sitting with 20 spectators on a small wooden platform. We’re very close to performer Sean Marshall Jr who is at a table with a small stack of books. Next to him is an ancient brass bed covered in a mountain of white sheets. Hidden under the linen, someone (Delia Brett) has been rolling back and forth in an almost imperceptible wave-like motion. The wrinkles in the sheets are what hold my attention—it’s more about the fabric than the figure beneath.
We’ve been confined to a very small room. Clues to a greater expanse are evident in Nancy Tam’s sound design—small creaks and a clarinet-like drone issuing from beyond the room suggest distance. The man begins to read from one of the books: “The reward of patience is patience. The cure for boredom is curiosity.” Aphorisms. The more I hear, the funnier and more meaningless they become. And the queasier I get. For some time I’ve been feeling mildly disoriented. I notice the bed has moved away from me. When did this happen? I realise with astonishment that it’s actually the audience platform that’s been moving—backward, inch by inch. The man has been following with us while the bed and back wall have receded. The plywood walls have stretched: the room is becoming a tunnel, longer by the minute. The bed is now way back there, and even the aphorism-speaker is getting smaller.
His search for some kind of truth in the book has felt sincere, as if finding the right tired cliché will give him the key to something. As the interior setting becomes somewhat miniaturised through distance, the whole scenography becomes less about the man’s search and more about relationships between things, audience included. I’ve read that the making of Revolutions was influenced by philosopher Jane Bennett’s theory of “vibrant matter” with its agency of things, human and non-human, and how “assemblages” of matter (a term from Deleuze) work in confederation to produce situations of shorter or longer duration. Fight With a Stick claims to have rehearsed “in confederation” with found and constructed materials to create Revolutions.
This becomes most evident when cracks appear in the walls and new objects begin to slide into the long tunnel. They’re rough, discarded objects: beach-worn planks or small timbers with large rusted hinges. As the man fades, the objects take over. They become aggressive. A huge stone-like block pushes in and out on the right. Then the back wall presses forward, sweeping the bed, table and other objects along, compressing the space (the man has disappeared unnoticed). Just before crashing into us, the carnage screeches to a halt.
Revolutions, Fight with a Stick
With an earth-shaking rumble the whole scene now explodes in slow motion. The wall on the right breaks apart in many sections. Each section floats away into the now visible warehouse. A far-away wall of concrete is revealed. It seems to have broken into geometrical sections that slide in and out of each other like puzzle pieces. This is a video projection of the wall onto itself. Closer, on my right, the moving pieces of wall pick up another projection—the grain of the plywood surfaces projected onto themselves. Video artist Josh Hite employed this technique—taking content from the actual space and disorienting the viewer by projecting it back onto itself as a moving image—in Steppenwolf, the company’s previous show.
When one of the walls suddenly rockets across the warehouse, followed by a second, a third and then several more, the effect is both terrifying and exhilarating. Tam’s sound installation thunders in sympathy. She’s mixed outside traffic, including rumbling transit trains, with the natural reverberating chamber of the venue. The walls, debris and rolling audience platform (all designed by performance artist Jay White) have been freed from the earlier human-scale domestic setting. We’ve been set adrift in an expanding cosmos. Revolutions seems to be about this relationship between our little domestic worlds and a nonhuman immensity of which we are only a part. The title suggests the traditional impulse to change society, but through a spatial exercise of portraying entropy we come to see our efforts in a much broader context.
Fight With a Stick, in only its second production, has put down a marker. The company’s collaborative approach is truly interdisciplinary and its spatial performance design is unique, both in concept and visceral affect. I find it particularly exciting that the work appeals to theatre and visual arts audiences alike. Historically, this relationship has been fruitful but uneasy. In Revolutions the opposing time-scales of gallery art and theatrical performance find revelatory convergence.
Sean Marshall Jnr, Revolutions, Fight with a Stick
Fight With a Stick, Revolutions, co-directors Alex Lazaridis Ferguson, Steven Hill, set design Jay White, sound design Nancy Tam, video design Josh Hite, collaborators Delia Brett, Beckett Ferguson, Sean Marshall Jr, Carmine Santavenere, Paula Viitanen; The Warehouse, Vancouver, Canada, 19-29 May
From Ladyfinger Press a copy of Margaret Cameron’s book of her performance scripts, reflections on the very personal roots of their creation and an emerging philosophy of being and performing.
Email us at giveaways [at] realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number. Include ‘Giveaway’ and the name of the item in the subject line.
Offer closes 22 June.
RealTime issue #133 June-July 2016
Margaret Cameron, Opera for a Small Mammal
Margaret Cameron was one of those idiosyncratic performers who—like Judy Davis, Gillian Jones and Cate Blanchett—refashion language as they speak, finding unanticipated spaces and patterns that yield surprising meanings and emotions and thrillingly blur demarcations between character, persona and self. When I read Cameron’s I Shudder to Think: Performance as Philosophy (2015, launched 2016), I hear her and, something more, having seen her perform since the mid 1980s, she is present. But Cameron’s aim is not to revive the memories of privileged audiences, but to deeply engage any reader.
“I hope to lift the words off the page and invite you to audience the stage of acting in the body of the performer.”
She will do the lifting, you will be an active recipient (recipiency is everything in I Shudder to Think and “audience” is a verb with “muscle”) and the stage is not a room, it is the performer’s body.
To achieve this, Cameron’s language has to be special. It is, because it stands alone as poetry of a high order, not only in the performance texts but also in in the essay (part of her PhD) which occupies the first 65 pages of the book, drawing in threads from the scripts that follow in order to weave thought that is restless, theoretical and anecdotal, exulting in a sense of creative renewal, always personal. The theorising lightly anchors the restlessness so that the shifts between thought and recollection, feeling and method cohere and, as in the effect of Cameron’s speech, surprise.
“Feeling thought” is central to the book, experienced by Cameron when a child before the arrival of language, “before form” and, like a Romantic poet, yearned for thereafter. But how do you conceptualise, without divide, the oneness of feeling and thought? Through language, and in Cameron’s case, through performance. She was a prize-winning young elocutionist, if told by adjudicators “my voice was a little shrill. (in-breath) I was highly strung. Who wouldn’t be?”
“All that poetry and all that speaking aloud of thought and sensation had given me a sense of sound…I responded to cadence, caesura, lilt and syntax, was sensitive to modulation, could inflect, articulate with precision and I resonated, Yes, I resonated, but I do not think I resounded.” The desire to ‘resound,’ to be responsive and responded to by others, nature, objects and self drives Cameron throughout I Shudder to Think, but it is both acutely realized and hard won, and it requires thought.
If elocution was to give Cameron a voice, thought did not come easily; at high school she feared “the ‘amputation’ of my sensibilities by the fear of this fear” of thought. A sense of threatened wholeness sat side by side with anxiety about ability right up to the point when the adult Cameron who will write this book “decided to to ‘stop acting’ and start writing. I wondered if I could find words that were not a source of ridicule and alienation.” She manages this late in her career by creating a persona, Regina Josefine del Mouse (in Opera for a small mammal, 2012-14), who is proud of being small and thinks big, thus assuaging a sense of inferiority, and acknowledging “that an artist very often moves towards their greatest difficulty. It is the very thing in the way, the uncomfortable grit of one’s nature and biography that rubs.” So she proceeds to think, working at her irritants, making a PhD, yielding pearls. “The very Grit that worries is to become Pearl./ In the nitty-gritty We change Our Self /By way of Our Reception” (Opera for a Small Mammal).
The ‘grit’ is deeply felt. Two brief poems prelude the essay proper, each involving a panicky exit from a theatre—one in profound envy of a male singer (“Is he the only living being in the whole eternal universe?”). It leaves her howling: “I have swallowed the night in my lungs.” The other, motive unspecified, results in a dash into the dark to “gulp… down the wind and the rain./ (On the out breath) Ah the night!” Feelings are frequently portrayed in terms of extreme physical states, highlighting a strong correspondence between Cameron and nature: “I am a tree stars now for eyes…” Elsewhere it might be a rock and always the move “in/out” between self and nature. When she comes to write her solo performance Things Calypso wanted to say (1989, published in R Allen and K Pearlman, Performing the Unnameable, Currency Press with RealTime, 1999), it was another young mother she turned to, director-writer Jenny Kemp: “With Kemp’s vision and reception the work becomes cartography, a mapping of inner and outer perspectives that change place.” It is Kemp’s “conceptual dramaturgy” that aids in completing the looping of thought and perception. Her project receives sustenance from the thinking and writing of Helene Cixous, Trin T Min-Ha, Luce Irigaray, Marguerite Duras, choreographer and dance conceptualist Deborah Hay and Kemp and Cameron’s conviction that she is writing as a woman, no matter at times how difficult she feels it.
To explain her thesis, Cameron keeps her thinking performative: her works are “scored;” she will “unpack a kind of traveling methodology” in a “performed exegesis;” her work is “sculptural;” “scripts or scores are defined but the actual performance is ‘played’;” “It is easy to do the moves and say the words, but what else is happening?” That is the question. The answer was to be found in perception. She writes that the American choreographer with whom she worked closely from the mid 90s returned her to her body: “…a dancer asked me what I was doing with my body [in a performance]. I said, ‘I am checking I have one’.” This was not simply a physical return, but one rooted in perceptual phenomenology and with conceptual potential to arrive at ‘feeling thought.’ She learnt from Hay that “perception…is the work…. a rule of art and artistic practice. Now the question always returns to how—returning and returning as an infinitely regenerating and self-generating proposal.”
There are blocks to this regeneration, not only ‘the grit,’ but in one of the most alarming of ‘felt’ and panicked images in Cameron’s writing, something larger: “[I have] a crab clamped on my face.” She asks, “How might I…prise from my body a socio-political personal (and cultural) narrative that clings and gags? What is it—a kind of exoskeleton? It is on me and there is no space at all between it and me. Instead I ask: how is it?” She will meet profound anxiety with thought.
A small irritant—a dress purchased but then not wanted—can provoke thought: “What if the dress is a question?” And larger thoughts: “A costume a question?” And on to the nature of performance. “The artist is always first audience to…kinetic transformations. She is the ’I’ yearning for a dimensional experience of the world, the ‘I’ that hears herself hearing herself hear, sees herself seeing herself see, feels herself feeling herself feel. She is the questioner.” In this perpetual loop of self-interrogation “Thinking becomes “an experiment, a practice of thought…Nietzsche’s preparation for the ‘eternal return’ as perceptual …” But some blocks to regeneration are large: where does one fit in the Cultural Corpus?
One of the artist’s irritants is about feeling insignificant, as artist and person, “of not being perceived.” A joke Cameron hears in Berlin is liberating, “The elephant said to the mouse, You are very small, The mouse said to the elephant, I have been sick.” Cameron adopts a persona, Regina Josefine del Mouse, for Opera for a small mammal. She writes, “The mouse stands in for the ‘I’—also the ‘I’ of a larger body, the Cultural Corpus,” asserting that “Difference in Size is is not the thing/ That makes the Difference,/ but rather it is the State of Our Self.” This beautiful final work by Cameron is a declaration, a performative lecture, a summation of thinking with feeling, with and through the body and an 18th century neoclassical ‘I am dealing with big ideas’ boldness, capitalising the first letters of key words. Her self is firm, she is the Cultural Corpus, a mouse and much more despite her introduction: “her domain is the lowercase letters of art,” her people those “who live in the dark behind the scenes.” She is always the democrat, challenging her own status by crying out, “Off with Our Head!”
Cameron arrives at art’s purpose and nature, “Germinating possibilities and delaying closure, opening a view elsewhere, art is a mutable knowledge practice …” “Art is a friend who takes my hand with irony and a libido to generate possibility when closure threatens.” In her performance texts, closure is flatness—domestic for Calypso and mocked “flat flat flat” by Regina—or a drying wind spoken against by the child of a drunken father in a 2005-8 work, the proscenium. The flatness of not being perceived is felt at its worst in Knowledge and Melancholy (1997-2005)—“If you do not perceive me / I will cease to exist”—a devastating account of love betrayed in which Cameron’s Actress persona becomes the maddened Charlotte Corday of Marat/Sade, her final words, “remember me.”
But there’s life in her yet: “The actress dies or falls asleep from boredom. Wait four beats and snore loudly. Fin.” There is wisdom too in Knowledge and Melancholy: “Understanding loss is the recognition that we have loved/ What a strange lesson.”
Questioning, thinking, writing, these will regenerate the writer: “[B]ecoming palpable, palpable/ Engendering Our Pearl against/ The drying wind of all that is Known” returns dimensionality and body.
Language, at one with and in perpetual dialogue with thought and body, powers Cameron’s writing. Her poetry, its sensual and sometimes visceral engagement with the world, makes the exchange palpable in the act of writing: “I shuck the flesh from the shell of the word to hear it resound in the empty pencil-line of its shape. The word, like a conch and like your presence, becomes a greater ear through which to hear my writing amplified (made more not necessarily louder).”
When young Cameron knew she did not ‘resound,’ but in Opera for a small mammal, she knows what she can achieve and with what means: “we hunt the Scent of Thought/ with the pores of Our Flesh…./ Our ears and nostrils flare for Resonance.”
Margaret Cameron will be remembered, her presence felt: “The words are not over once they are said, Speaking is a choreography of the breath…I place the hands of my voice on words, on you who listen and touch a touch that is also within me.”
Read Cameron aloud, starting not with the essay, but in the middle of the book with The proscenium, a necessary return to childhood pain vividly realized, and you will feel the pulse of her poetry and be touched. She writes, “Language is a tool to revolutionise my reception of the world.” Hers does ours.
A last word, about the book’s title. It’s not simply negative, a very real physical response to anticipated fear, but for Cameron a necessity, a shuddering with which to think and to begin again: “[In] the dark depressions of the flat-flat-flat/ We do shudder to think.”
Profound thanks to Ladyfinger Press for publishing an invaluable work, more than a book, that will profit performers and readers for many years to come.
Margaret Cameron died in 2014 after an extensive career in which she worked on stages large and small and other spaces with Richard Wherrett, Nico Lathouris, Chris Barnett, Arne Neeme, Murray Copeland, Rex Cramphorn, Jenny Kemp, Deborah Hay and David Young, among others. The writing in I Shudder to Think was originally a component of her PhD in conjunction with a series of live works: Bang! A Critical Fiction, Knowledge and Melancholy and the proscenium.
–
In 2000, Virginia Baxter interviewed Margaret Cameron and Ian Scott when they were performing Joanna Murray-Smith’s Nightfall, directed by Jenny Kemp, for the Sydney Theatre Company. It offers further insights into Cameron the actor.
Our obituary for Margaret includes links to RealTime reviews of her performances.
Margaret Cameron, I Shudder to Think, Performance as Philosophy, Ladyfinger Press, Brisbane, 2016
When I interviewed Larissa McGowan about her new dance work, Mortal Condition, the dancer and choreographer quoted YouTube video tutorial maker Evan Puschak’s conceptual account of the virtual world of video games: “A meditation both on the unspoiled image of what we want, and its profound unsatisfactory reflection—what we are.” Introduced into the work’s development process by dramaturg Steve Mayhew, Puschak’s idea fed into Mortal Condition’s bipartite nature and remains pivotal to the finished work, which is divided into two distinct halves, titled Condition and Mortal Condition.
The first part, sound-tracked by the short, guttural vocal improvisations of Mike Patton’s 1996 album Adult Themes for Voice, is a duet between McGowan and Thomas Bradley, which interprets Patton’s electronically processed squeals, growls and rapid-fire jabbering as a series of miniature vignettes that evoke basic human interactions: fighting and love-making, casual greetings and aggressive separations.
There is no pretense at fluidity: each eruption of movement, hard and fast, is synchronised precisely to the Patton tracks, many of which are less than a minute long, and the dancers simply pause in between each, their breathing heavy in the silences as they wring the sweat out of their retro video game T-shirts. There is a disquieting sense in which they are being danced by, rather than dancing to, the recorded vocalisations, especially when their mouths yawn widely or frantically open and close in a nightmarish form of lip-synching. Bodily too, there seems to be a loss of control, limbs flung out to lead wildly gyrating torsos in short, demented arcs.
Nevertheless, the robust physicality of McGowan’s choreography is, characteristically, shot through with humour, the dancers often exchanging puzzled glances in between the vignettes as if to say, “What on earth are you doing that for?” There’s also an emphasis on taboo bodily functions—one of Patton’s tracks is titled “A Smile, A Slap in the Face, A Fart, A Kiss on the Mouth”—that manifests in gestures that resemble vomiting and furious, exorcism-like purges of the body. The dancers’ athleticism is unwavering as they continuously rise, fall and roll across designer Toby K’s rectangular, off-centred floorcloth, which, in its radiant whiteness, produces stage images of sharp relief.
The earthy preoccupations of the first part are contrasted with the second, which plunges McGowan and Bradley—now joined by Kialea-Nadine Williams—into the digital world. The casual T-shirts and track pants of the first half are traded for quasi-militaristic garb that recalls iconic video game character Lara Croft, while Bradley is reconfigured as the archetypal gamer, hunched over an imagined controller in a corner of the stage. Seven white banners suspended along the back of the theatre, a dozen or so squares punched out in each like a microchip or early video game cartridge, swing to face the audience, Toby K’s projection design emblazoning them with crude, pixilated icons of humanoid figures and a variety of weapons in the manner of a game user interface. Patton’s soundtrack is substituted for an original score by DJ Tr!p, which draws on the blippy simplicity of video game music from the 8- and 16-bit eras, as well as the increasingly cinematic lushness of contemporary soundtracks to games such as World of Warcraft.
Mortal Condition
photo Daniel Purvis
Mortal Condition
As in the first half, the interactions of the dancers—proximal but often contactless—can be read as explorations of human power dynamics, but here these are complicated by their gendered nature, McGowan and Williams the subjects of Bradley’s gaze. In the first sequence, the mechanics of a car-making game are invoked, a male voice-over dully intoning the attributes of a fantasy sports car while McGowan and Williams ‘model’ the vehicle using their bodies. This dynamic is later reversed as Bradley appears to corporeally transition into the virtual world where, as in a massively multiplayer online game, he slugs it out with McGowan and Williams, each cycling through a vast inventory of weapons—these depicted in increasingly rapid succession in the projections while the dancers contort their arms and bodies into the appropriate shape. He is ultimately vanquished.
Trading oppositions between the organic and the digital can be a fraught business in contemporary performance, establishing arbitrary hierarchies of value and disallowing that the relationship between the two is almost always a fluid and interdependent one. Perhaps this is why Mortal Condition felt, for me, weakened by its binary structure, the correlation between the halves too elusive to provide a fully satisfying conceptual framework. The design is similarly misconceived, especially in the second part where, curiously unintegrated with the dancers, its effect seems largely cosmetic. It’s not clear, finally, what the desiring, rapacious bodies of the first part’s corporeal world see in their virtual reflections, or whether, in looking back, the ‘unspoiled image’ contains within it the power to alter their—and, by extension, our—reality.
–
Mortal Condition, concept, choreography Larissa McGowan, associate director, dramaturg Steve Mayhew, dancers Thomas Bradley, Larissa McGowan, Kialea-Nadine Williams, composer DJ Tr!p, lighting, projection designer Toby K; Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, 11-14 May
What would a documentary of emotion look like? How can a documentary film make us feel the complexity of a situation without simply reverting to the manipulations of melodrama? Can the form be about feeling without becoming something else? A trio of titles at this year’s Human Rights Arts and Film Festival (HRAFF) provided some clues.
Tunes from the Berrimah Hilton: Prison Songs
Booze, songs and tears—they’re not ingredients typically associated with the documentary form, but Prison Songs is not your typical documentary. Inspired by the “musicals” of British filmmaker Brian Hill, such as Drinking for England (1998) and Feltham Sings (2002) (see RT 63), Prison Songs features inmates of Darwin’s Berrimah Jail telling their stories through song and dance numbers intercut with skilfully shaped interviews. Subtitles sprinkled throughout sketch facts that speak louder than any longwinded exposition: 98% of the inmates in Berrimah are Indigenous. At the time of filming, the facility built to house 115 prisoners was home to over 800. Director Kelrick Martin homes in on around half-a-dozen in his hour-long work.
There is anger here, as one would expect, particularly from one inmate imprisoned for inflicting punishment in what he claims was an enactment of tribal law. His song is all about “doing the white man’s time,” illustrating the meaninglessness of European-style criminal codes for some Indigenous people. More surprising is the humour and joy, especially in one number celebrating the pernicious pleasures of alcohol. The upbeat tune is a good example of the way Prison Songs deploys music to mainline the emotional experiences of these men and women for viewers—we feel the appeal of alcoholic oblivion even as we are confronted with its ugly social effects. The film also doesn’t shy away from some less attractive aspects of Indigenous cultural politics, featuring two young men of mixed-race parentage who sing and speak frankly about their experiences of marginalisation by both white and black Australia.
Above all, Prison Songs is a study in forging cinematic empathy. Martin blends images, interviews, songs and telling statistics to take us inside the emotional world of a group of Indigenous people locked up in Australia’s Top End. It’s also a celebration of creativity in the bleakest of environments. Building bridges of emotion with real people we might never otherwise encounter is perhaps documentary’s greatest—and rarely realised—potential as a creative form. Kelrick Martin admirably fulfils this potential.
Chasing Asylum
Crushing complacency: Chasing Asylum
I’d like to describe Eva Orner’s Chasing Asylum as incendiary, but more likely it will flare brightly before burning out, leaving a wisp of smoke and a discomforting smell we’ll disperse with a wave of a hand. Let’s face it, you can only explain the abuses a film like this documents by accepting that Australians are either gratuitously cruel or monumentally complacent. I tend to think it’s the latter—the harder of the conditions to change.
Nonetheless, Chasing Asylum is valuable for a number of reasons. Firstly it documents how Australia has systematically forged a bureaucratised system for inflicting extreme cruelty on people seeking refuge who arrive by sea. This record means that none of us can claim “not to have known” when later generations look back on us with disgust.
Secondly, the film features extensive footage shot secretly inside the detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island, locations long cut off from journalists and documentarians by the Australian Government. Of course, many other sources have detailed the horrific conditions in these places, but there is value in making Australians feel what it is like to rot in the hellish surrounds that we have created.
Lastly, through the secretly shot footage, along with accounts of Australians who have worked in these camps and snatches of testimony from incarcerated refugees (also recorded in secret), Chasing Asylum conveys something of the mind-numbing boredom and relentless pressures detained refugees face. These include searing heat endured in the tents and metal huts in which they live, toilets so squalid a cut foot can—and has—led to fatal infections, sexual abuse of refugee children and extreme violence from local police and security forces. Watching Chasing Asylum is to feel the faceless, bureaucratic callousness of a system that offers no way out except a return to the nightmares these people have fled. Again, this information is not new, but a film can make us endure something of what all this means for the people involved much more effectively than a UN report.
Much of Chasing Asylum comprises interviews with young Australians recruited by groups such as the Salvation Army to ‘help’ the refugees. Their naivety is telling. Despite the many years during which Australian politicians have openly proclaimed the need to create conditions so appalling they will stop people seeking refuge here, all of the young Australians interviewed recall their profound shock when they first saw conditions inside the camps. Are middle class Australians so disconnected from hardship that we don’t even realise what cruelty entails?
I’d like to think Chasing Asylum will function as a wake-up call, but everything it reveals has been on the public record for some time. All the evidence suggests we simply don’t care.
Hooligan Sparrow
Everyday fear: Hooligan Sparrow
Wang Nanfu’s debut documentary powerfully conveys what it is like to live under a state that knows no restraint—a salutary lesson for the Australian public. Wang wrote in The Guardian earlier this year that she wants viewers to “understand more deeply the sense of fear that so many Chinese people feel every day.” It’s the kind of statement often dismissed as pandering to Western prejudices by apologists for China’s ruling elite, but Wang is from a small Chinese village and has lived the depths of the dread she describes.
Hooligan Sparrow is ostensibly about the well-known Chinese activist Ye Haiyan—also known by her eponymous online nom de plume—but the emotion at the centre of this work is the creeping trepidation that overtakes the filmmaker as she documents Ye’s activities. The attempts we see by the state to prevent any recording of the abuses it inflicts reveal its true face, brutal and terroristic. The fear is palpable from the opening frames as Wang speaks to her camera while awaiting a visit from the police towards the end of her shoot. As we watch her earlier experiences play out over the next 90 minutes, it becomes clear her trepidation is well founded.
Hooligan Sparrow is a highly polished work from this first-time director, continuing a budding tradition of Chinese documentary films that dramatise the stark violence and intimidation on which China’s one-party state is founded. Depressingly, other works at HRAFF such as Chasing Asylum show that Australian authorities are quite prepared to inflict similar abuses on marginalised groups. We would be fools to think the same cruelties couldn’t be applied to us with the flick of a bureaucratic switch.
–
2016 Human Rights Arts and Film Festival 2016.hraff.org.au, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, 5–19 May, national tour 24 May–8 June
“If watermelon was chicken,” Kyle Page, Artistic Director of Townsville-based Dancenorth asks, “then…?” If _ Was _, the company’s new work, is more than a title, it’s a provocation for two prominent choreographers, Stephanie Lake and Ross McCormack, to create discrete works from shared materials, making dance that springs, says Page, from “mental simulations,” from the ways each sees the world.
“If I say ‘vegetarian lasagne’ you have an image and so do I,” Page explains. “They might be very different images or quite similar, but they’re unique to each of us. That image is based on your history and all your past experiences of vegetarian lasagne.” But If_Was_ asks the choreographer to take an image or a concept and implicitly address what happens if it becomes something else, say, “if blood was green” or “if war was harmless.”
Mental Simulation Theory is about how we build mental constructs and ‘read the minds of others’ in order to, in turn, construct ourselves, working by analogy and metaphor (to understand how pervasive this is, read James Geary’s wonderful I Is an Other, Harper Perennial, 2011). Part of the pleasure of If_Was_ will be seeing what images and meanings are conjured within the same parameters by two very different minds. Mental simulation is very much about creativity, as much for scientists as for artists in that both frequently work from images rather than concepts or formulae.
If Form Was Shifted, Ross McCormack for Dancenorth
photo Amber Haines
If Form Was Shifted, Ross McCormack for Dancenorth
Page tells me about the parameters he’s set for the choreographers: “You’ve each got one hour of music. Choose half an hour of it, chop it however you want. There’s one costume designer with one design pattern to work with, two fabrics to choose from and one bonus fabric to throw in the mix. You can shorten an arm or a leg and work around the edges of the framework. You have the same amount of time, the same dancers to work with and a lighting designer who’ll create one grid to light both works.”
A press release just to hand from Dancenorth reveals some of the thinking of the choreographers. Stephanie Lake has responded to the logic of change inherent in the proposition “if _ was _” by creating “a surreal hive of buzzing life….From marching automatons to wild hybrid creatures, the dancers are continually transmuting and being affected by their rapidly changing conditions. It’s about survival, symbiosis and rebirth.” McCormack’s focus is on “thought process structured through group manipulation…I see the body as a device grappling with its complexities and place, how it rather unnaturally manipulates itself is somehow spectacular yet also pathetic.”
For this impressionistic experiment in mental simulation, each choreographer’s proposition will be found in the program handed to the audience who will then bring their experiences, concepts and imaginings to bear on the works. “It’s quite a beautiful thing to celebrate different responses to shared experiences,” says Page.
Read an interview with Kyle Page about Dancenorth’s remarkable program and the fascinating vision that underpins it.
If_Was_, Dancenorth
photo Amber Haines
If_Was_, Dancenorth
Dancenorth, If _ Was _, Dancenorth, Townsville, 9-11 June; Mackay Entertainment Centre, 15 June; Proserpine Entertainment Centre, 16 June; Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane, 23-25 June; The Substation, Melbourne, 29 June–2 July
Kyle Page is Artistic Director of the highly regarded Townsville-based company Dancenorth to which he is bringing new vision and reach. In this interview he recounts the beginnings of his dance career, its extensive professional outcomes, his experiences in India and the Arctic, with partner and Dancenorth ensemble member and Rehearsal Director Amber Haines, and his desire to explore creativity and collaboration through cognitive science and neuroscience. These experiences and ideas fascinatingly cluster into a practice and far-reaching vision for Dancenorth that extends to the Torres Strait and extensive national and international touring.
STARTING OUT
I read you began your professional career at Dancenorth back in 2004, nearly 12 years ago.
When I was young, my first dancing experience was with Jangarra, an Indigenous dance group in Dubbo where I spent the first 11 years of my life. I was the first whitefella in the ensemble. I absolutely loved it and really connected with the movement and Indigenous culture as well. Then I started doing jazz, tap and ballet.
We moved to Brisbane when I was about 12 and I started dancing every night of the week really. I desperately wanted to do a full-time dance course at the Australian Dance Performance Institute but to do that I had to have completed Year 10 at school. I was in Year 8 at the time and we had a big meeting with the Principal and the Careers Guidance Counsellor and managed to convince them to allow me to skip Year 9. So I went from Year 8 to Year 10 in conventional school and then did Years 11 and 12 by Distance Education while studying dance full-time.
When I finished that—it was a very ballet-focused course—I was getting a bit older and I didn’t really feel such a connection to the lifestyle that a career in ballet would have demanded so I was a bit lost for six months. I did an audition for Jane Pirani, Artistic Director of Dancenorth, who was really interested in me but didn’t have any jobs available but said we could look at a long-term secondment. So I moved to Townsville, to work on the weekends to pay my way through a 12-month secondment. After about three or four weeks one of the ensemble members broke his ankle and I was thrown onstage and I’ve been working full-time ever since. Right place, right time. So I continued dancing there with Gavin Webber for four years and then moved to ADT in Adelaide.
THE CAREER
You’ve had an extensive career working with ADT, Lucy Guerin, Gavin Webber, Antony Hamilton, Jo Stone, Paolo Castro and Larissa McGowan. How have these experiences shaped your vision do you think? Did you have the feeling that you were heading towards being a creator yourself?
Not until three or four years ago. I worked with lots of amazing choreographers with very different approaches to physicality and making work, which really excited me. That was probably where my passion for collaboration and for engaging with a range of different creative partners on a project was really born.
As I was wrapping up my six years with ADT, in the last two I was really fortunate—following a few chats with [artistic director] Garry Stewart—to be able to perform in all the mainstage touring with the company but also work on independent projects with Lucy Guerin and Stephanie Lake and a few others. I moved out of my apartment in Adelaide, my wife Amber [a fellow ADT dancer] and I bought a little caravan and parked it on a friend’s property up in Woodside in the Adelaide Hills. The longest period we spent in the caravan was probably about five weeks but we did that over a number of chapters as we were either re-mounting or rehearsing work with Garry. Then we’d tour internationally with ADT, then internationally with Lucy Guerin Inc. We had a five-week development in Japan for Spectra, our first full-length work. And all of these programs and projects fell into place in quite an amazing way.
At the end of that two-year period, we were planning to leave ADT and maybe move to Melbourne. There were quite a few options; we had a full-year of independent projects lined up including premiering our duet, Syncing Feeling, and then Spectra at the OzAsia Festival. We also had a three-month residency in Varanasi in India. So all of these things lined up back to back. The other amazing thing was participating in an Arctic Circle residency.
Spectra, Dancenorth
photo Ash McLellan
Spectra, Dancenorth
ENTER DANCENORTH
And then the job at Dancenorth came up. Amber and I had kind of entertained the idea of one day running a company well into the future, but I thought, what a great opportunity. I had a connection with Dancenorth and I was moving into this territory more and more. So I figured it would be a wonderful experience to apply—these jobs don’t come up very often—to throw my hat in the ring and go through that process. In the final interview I remember leaving and having a very clear sense that we were going to move to Townsville and take over Dancenorth.
We managed to maintain a few of the projects we had lined up—like the Arctic Circle residency—while other projects we’d been funded for as independent artists we pulled under the banner of Dancenorth.
In 2014 we ran these two programs in parallel. Dancenorth had a program for their 30th anniversary inviting various guest choreographers to come and make work while Amber and I developed our work in parallel. It meant that for the first year at Dancenorth, one, I rarely had a weekend but, two, we were incredibly prolific and Dancenorth was seen on a number of stages around the country and in big festivals. It really felt like an an amazing catapult into this space.
THE VARANASI EXPERIENCE
What was the value of the Varanasi residency and how did it relate to your work?
India is extraordinary in so many ways. We decided after the first few weeks that we loved it, we hated it and in the end, we liked it—the contrast of old and new, rich and poor, death and life. The opportunity to spend that much time (three months) away from home, from friends, from phones, from internet—all those day-to-day routines that chew up life and easily form distractions or commitments—we had none of those things in Varanasi. We were free to explore creativity, choreography and to identify an artistic and conceptual base or trajectory. I don’t think I would have formed such global perspectives on creation had we not been afforded that experience. Asialink is an amazing program for providing such opportunities for artists and I think the three-month duration was really important. Being in the spiritual hub of the world was an intense time for personal development. It felt like I was really pushed and prodded and had to explore my values and belief systems.
Was there a spiritual dimension?
It became quite a spiritual experience but not because of chanting or yoga although we visited a few ashrams in Varanasi and felt a very tangible sense of something much greater. For me it was a very personal investigation of things I found challenging—walking along the streets and seeing death. In the West, death is practically taboo whereas in Varanasi not a day would go by when you didn’t see someone’s body burning on the funeral pyres down by the Ganges or someone’s body floating in the river or a group of people carrying the body of a loved one through the streets singing and chanting. It gave me a very different perspective on big things, like death.
CREATIVE THINKING IN THE ARCTIC CIRCLE
What did the Arctic Circle residency do for you and Amber?
The space! The space on the ship. You basically spend the entire time sailing on a barquentine, which is an old three-mast tall ship, around Svarlbard. Then you get off and spend time on landings. You’ve got three polar bear guards in a triangle around the group of artists. You have time and space to create. The whole trip we had no internet and no phone and, again, I loved feeling that detachment. The time for reflection, for thinking, brought so many ideas to the fore and really allowed us to carve out a vision, a creative trajectory for Dancenorth.
We took with us quite a few research papers relating to neuroscience, cognitive science and the cognitive processes of creativity and choreography. We had time to think through those ideas but also to be creative in a unique and very strange space—out in the snow, in beautiful, rocky mountain terrain or on the ship with its rocking buoyancy or swimming in water that was four degrees or sitting on massive icebergs. It was otherworldly, magnificent and beautiful—but humans don’t belong there. We watched monstrous chunks of ice falling off glaciers into the ocean and understood how that’s affecting sea levels and climate. We spent a day on the boat with five blue whales swimming around the ship for about two hours. These are solitary creatures and rarely spend time together. We came away with a real sense of reverence for the natural environment. In Townsville, I’m very connected to the natural world and frequently captivated by the magnificence of places like Magnetic Island and the ocean. But being in the Arctic where there are no people and it’s untamed highlighted all those things about the natural environment that I find so interesting and so engaging.
Syncing Feeling, Kyle Page & Amber Haines
photo Gregory Lorenzutti
Syncing Feeling, Kyle Page & Amber Haines
THE BRAIN, BODY & DANCE
Let’s turn inward to the Mind/Body. You have a mentor, Scott deLahunta who has worked with Wayne MacGregor, William Forsythe and Garry Stewart among others. How did you come to his work and your interest in neuroscience?
Scott was doing a research project with ADT while I was a dancer there and we really hit it off. My interest came earlier than that. I’m really interested in neuroscience and reading books like The Neurotourist and The Brain That Changes Itself and about neuroplasticity and mirror neurons—these scientific and cognitive theories that support some Eastern philosophies and ways that people have often viewed the world [in terms of] inter-connection, empathy and innate human capacities for engaging with one another. Working with Scott has allowed me to unravel a few of the mysteries about what creativity is and how it works. I still don’t know the answer but I’m starting to be more aware of priming techniques and how they can alter the course of a creative development in the studio.
I’m also starting to be aware that not all of it can be cognitive or can be explained. There’s a sensation, a feeling of “rightness,” when you just know. What is that? There’s an intuition that you have to follow when you’re being creative and sometimes that is very clear or overwhelming and sometimes it doesn’t appear for days or weeks. So there’s curiosity for me [somewhere] between the very literal, well-studied aspects of creativity and the really ephemeral, very beautiful, intangible space that creativity offers up.
Have you applied this sense of “rightness” to the practice and training of your company?
We begin each day with a mindfulness practice and that can be various forms of meditation—breathing, movement, Tai Chi. All of us separate the space outside the studio from the creative realm to be solely focused on the task at hand for the day. It’s not only generated a great sense of rigorous investigation but also an amazing culture around the company. People who join us on secondments or whatever often comment on it.
We also work with themes that come out of this arena. Syncing Feeling, for instance, investigates mirror neurons and some of the developments in that field in terms of empathy and decoding another person’s facial expressions, or imitation learning. Amber and I are collaborators, dance partners and lovers, and we decided that was a really interesting space for us to investigate, to try and go as far down that rabbit-hole as possible, to pour ourselves, our bodies and our brains, into that point of absolute connection, absolute empathy and understanding and connectivity on stage.
We’ve just premiered Rainbow Vomit in Townsville, a work for young people that investigates the effects of technology on cognitive development in the young. What we found from some of our research is that children playing games on iPads or Facebook don’t engage in divergent or open thinking because they’re working on set trajectories and don’t get to create or affect outcomes.
We also had Scott deLahunta working with the company for a couple of days on choreographic thinking processes and we’re currently working with him on “What happens in the studio,” which is a unique project in Australia. This year Dancenorth dancers are working with five different sets of choreographers on five new projects, so we thought it would be interesting to pose two series of questions: one set for the second week of development, the other in the final week. These highlight nuances and variation in approaches to creativity, how they work and which are more engaging for some dancers and not others, an opportunity to investigate various modes of creation.
How does this thinking connect with If_Was_ which comprises works by Stephanie Lake and Ross McCormack?
This is an idea that came to me when I was on that tall ship in the Arctic Circle. I was thinking about the Mental Simulation Theory. This is something that excites me about collaboration. If I say “vegetarian lasagne” you have an image and so do I. They might be very different images or quite similar, but they’re unique to each of us. That image is based on your history and all your past experiences of vegetarian lasagne.
[If_Was_ asks the choreographer to take an image or a concept and implicitly address what happens if it becomes something else, say, “if blood was green” or “if war was harmless.” Part of the pleasure of If_Was_ will be seeing what images and meanings are conjured within the same parameters by two very different minds. Mental simulation is very much about creativity, as much for scientists as for artists in that both frequently work from images rather than concepts or formulae. Ed. Read more about If_ Was_.]
[Page has set parameters for the choreographers, telling them] you’ve each got one hour of music by a composer [Robin Fox]. Choose half an hour of it, chop it however you want. There’s one costume designer with one design pattern to work with, two fabrics to choose from and one bonus fabric to throw in the mix. You can shorten an arm or a leg and work around the edges of the framework. You have the same amount of time, the same dancers to work with and a lighting designer who’ll create one grid to light both works.
So your investigations into the neuroscience and cognitive science realm provide a foundation for the vision that runs across the kinds of works and choices you make.
Yes. I really want Dancenorth to be recognisable and for audiences to relate to it not just as a commissioning body that employs a range of choreographers to create work on the company but as a company that has through-lines that ground the creative choices not only in terms of who’s making the work but also the kinds of works that are being crafted for various outcomes and touring opportunities.
How does that relate to Lee Serle’s The Three Dancers which is part of the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville this year?
Well, that one is slightly different in that the company had commissioned Elena Katz-Chernin to create a new composition based on Picasso’s painting “The Three Dancers” in 2014. I inherited the work and the relationship with the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, which is very important to us. We chose Lee Serle based on his extraordinary physicality, his experiences with the Trisha Brown Dance Company and the fact that he has a very different aesthetic from the physicality that Amber and I explore in our works.
COMMUNITY: FROM TOWNSVILLE TO THE TORRES STRAIT
Dancenorth is a regional company and it’s become increasingly viable for such companies to become influential nationally and globally. You’re working in a number of directions. You have a national tour of If_Was_ soon and Spectra is to show in Japan, but you’re also working with Indigenous people on a 10-year program. Now, that’s very long-term.
[In funding application forms] you are asked, “Are you engaging with various communities?” I thought, what an amazing opportunity to have a cultural and community engagement and education program that sits equally alongside the creation and development of virtuosic mainstage work. We’re engaging with Poruma Islanders. Poruma is a tiny island in the Torres Strait where 180 people live. It’s 1.4 kilometres long and 400 metres wide [and is under threat of submersion due to Climate Change. Eds]. The other issue with this communities ‘box-ticking’ thing is to ask, what’s the legacy? I would like to leave a powerful legacy, to generate a really sincere and genuine connection between the islanders, Dancenorth and Townsville. The only way I could foresee that happening in any meaningful way was to look long-term and 10 years seems to be fitting. If I’m not here in 10 years, I’d like to see the engagement continuing.
We’ve been to the island a couple of times. It’s a gorgeous part of the world and the culture of song and dance and storytelling is very alive. It was a beautiful experience for the dancers and me to spend time there. This year we’ve invited a number of the Urab Dancers, the local dance ensemble from Poruma, to come to Townsville to work with the company on a new project that will premiere next year in the Strand Ephemera outdoor sculpture festival in Townsville and then on to other locations around Australia. And we’re chatting about a few really large-scale, high visibility performance outcomes.
So do you feel this multi-faceted program is manageable?
I’m really confident with the team around me here at Dancenorth. We’ve got great support through the Tim Fairfax Family Foundation which has enabled us to employ a full-time Community and Cultural Engagement Facilitator (Susan Van den Ham) who has an assistant who helps her to deliver these projects. The Poruma Island one I’m overseeing because it’s a collaboration with the company. Susie is working with a number of disability organisations here in Townsville and developing a pro-active, reciprocal community action plan. Before we premiere a full-length evening work we have a soft performance for the three local disability organisations. Our projects are kind of big but also simple once they become an intrinsic part of the company, then they’re no more or less challenging or difficult.
And finally, how are you nurturing local talent?
We have a number of different engagement programs. Part of our school program involves engaging with refugee/asylum seekers and new arrivals. In April this year we performed with Townsville State High School kids. They spent two days at a full-time workshop with the Dancenorth ensemble finalising the creation of a work for Harmony Day. Then there’s our normal school program and working with dance schools to teach and host workshops throughout the year. The company hosts open classes generally taught by Dancenorth dancers. It’s a really excellent way for us to engage with the community of Townsville, which is our home and where our heart is. We’re very passionate about being a regionally based company and very proud advocates for this part of the world.
Well, it’s such a lovely total vision. Thanks for talking with me.
Such a pleasure. It’s an interesting opportunity to be able to chat through the progression, where we’ve come from and where we’re going. Thank you.
You can download the 2016 Dancenorth program here and see excerpts from Syncing Feeling and SPECTRA here.
–
Dancenorth, If _ Was _, Townsville, 9-11 June; Mackay Entertainment Centre, 15 June; Proserpine Entertainment Centre, 16 June; Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane, 23-25 June; The Substation, Melbourne, 29 June–2 July
We watch tropical landscapes, sunsets and waterways, hear birdcalls and the buzz of mosquitoes, but calm surrenders to quick-fire archival images from the mid 20th century onwards on two 60-degree angled wide screens tracing war, protest and key events (like Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s returning of Gurindji land to Vincent Lingiari in 1975) but also including footage of Pol Pot and the victims of the killing fields. RUCKUS, a Sydney-based disability-led contemporary performance ensemble, visited those fields when in-residence this year with Epic Encounters, a Cambodian company of principally hearing-impaired dancers. The weight and speed of history as well as the pace of the everyday are writ large in this ambitious production.
In the first part of Speed of Life, we feel the familiar, stressful pace of contemporary life escalating almost out of control as the performers work at vast banks of moveable pigeonhole cabinets designed by Kate Shanahan and eerily lit by Fausto Brusamolino. Wheeling in great circles to a pounding score (Peter Kennard), the workers manically empty the contents across the floor. The long disturbance is counterpointed with seductive video (Martin Fox) of a boy relaxedly and happily swimming underwater, evoking a very different sense of daydreaming time before a belligerent boss appears and berates his charges. Everyone literally hits the wall while images of Pol Pot flicker behind.
Recurrent phone calls interrupt the action. “Is it you, Rachel?” the performers ask, but the caller won’t identify herself, limiting her utterances gnomically to the likes of “I need to slow down so I can think about love.” There are other motifs, some built around traces—outlines of hands and bodies and plaster casts of the feet of several audience members. Performer-visual artist Digby Webster creates a complete work across one of the screens at his own pace while action proceeds elsewhere. These unhurried actions open out time leaving behind the workplace mayhem and grim politics of the first part of the work to engender a vision which is palpably artistic and cosmological.
Onscreen, a Cambodian man dances subtly and eloquently on a beach; on stage Chris Bunton informally mirrors him, moving with grace and spirit. The sole female performer, Audrey O’Connor, breaks from her role as documentary-maker to dance a circle around the stage. As a cone of sand is levelled and carefully raked, James Penny declares, “I’m becoming The Sandman,” spins dizzily, sinks into the sand and is cocooned in it by the others. It’s an escape from time or into some unhurried transcendent time, an image at once serene and funereal but, above all, one that encourages taking time out for reflection and release.
Speed of Life, Ruckus
photo Heidrun Löhr
Speed of Life, Ruckus
There are moments of telling humour—in a drolly funny exchange about sweeping, mopping and workplace dignity at Maccas, Gerard O’Dwyer and James Penny reveal the challenges of communication, in particular the time taken to react and to playfully embrace the rhythms of conversation.
A brief video appearance at the show’s end by the mystery caller brings home the importance of the show’s theme. Rachel Sugrim provided text and key ideas for the show, especially its poetic finale, but the speed of the production process apparently proved too challenging for her.
The time theme emerged from these performers’ lives. O’Dwyer decries how speed tongue-ties him—“the words won’t come.” But he comes to believe “it’s time to be heard; to breathe!” O’Connor’s mother’s fear that her child “won’t be able to keep up” is recalled. Her daughter is now able to say of her, “You’re proud that you were wrong.” This is not about the overheated time of the everyday, but the long-term time of development and maturation and its distinctive pressures.
It would have been interesting to understand what other temporal impediments impinge on the lives of these performers, but the creators principally opted to create a generalised workplace scenario in the first part of the work with everyone under the same pressure. However, a subsequent Q&A revealed that the pigeonhole cabinets reflected Digby Webster’s experience of working in a mailroom.
Set against a background of the turbulent rush of history and juxtaposed with a sinuous time-defying Cambodian dancer, Speed of Life’s transition from fraught labour to artistic freedom and philosophical reflection was magical. Although some sequences were dauntingly repetitive and over-determined and some images elusive, Speed of Life was admirably well-produced by a large team of collaborators fronted by utterly confident performers who engaged us with commitment, artistry and intelligence. For those of us without disabilities who struggle with time, we now know how much more difficult it is for others. But we also know they’re dealing with it.
Speed of Life, Ruckus
photo Heidrun Löhr
Speed of Life, Ruckus
Ruckus, Speed of Life, co-director, choreographer Dean Walsh, co-director, producer Alison Richardson, performers Chris Bunton, Audrey O’Connor, Gerard O’Dwyer, James Penny, Digby Webster, Rachel Sugrim, set, costume design Kate Shanahan, sound design Peter Kennard, video design Martin Fox, lighting design Fausto Brusamolino; PACT, Erskineville, Sydney, 25-28 May
Much contemporary art involves pointed social commentary. Current concerns with racism, domestic violence, the erosion of democracy, the failure to prevent conflict justified on the pretext of religious difference and the challenge of climate change, preoccupy many artists as well as activists to an unprecedented degree. Three compelling exhibitions explore the varying approaches taken by artists to address such issues.
Giving Voice, Art of Dissent
This touring exhibition was initiated in 2014 by Hobart’s Salamanca Arts Centre to show how artists go beyond mainstream media to respond to significant political and social issues. Curator Yvonne Rees-Pagh has assembled a body of work created over several years in which artists address racism, asylum seekers, the environment and armed conflict.
The exhibition includes some significant works that demonstrate Rees-Pagh’s theme. Richard Bell’s incisive and ironic 2008 video Scratch an Aussie probes white Australia’s psychological predisposition to racism by placing Indigenous people in the role of psychiatrists treating both themselves and privileged, white youth. Khaled Sabsabi’s video Guerrilla (2007), made in response to the 2006 Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, is a quasi-documentary in which three unidentified speakers discuss their different strategies for dealing with the conflict.
Richard Bell, Scratch an Aussie
video still courtesy the artist and Flinders University Art Museum
Richard Bell, Scratch an Aussie
Cigdem Aydemir’s video Bombshell (2013) shows a woman’s black burqa swirling in the wind, recalling storm clouds and also ironically parodying Marilyn Monroe’s billowing dress in the film The Seven Year Itch. In Aydemir’s photograph Site Occupied (2011), a woman’s black niqab is enlarged to envelop a gallery space like a shroud to prevent entry. Both of Aydemir’s images reference restraints on women through control of their appearance.
Megan Keating’s The Ministry of Pulp and Smoke (2014) addresses the repudiation of the Tasmanian Forestry Agreement and its consequences for the environment using video imagery constructed from paper cut-outs. In Pat Hoffie’s drawings, Smoke and Mirrors (2012), storm clouds gather over sinking refugee boats.
James Barker’s Lest I forget (2014) is a confronting photographic triptych in a hinged, head-high frame showing images of sculptures of the stacked corpses of people killed in conflicts. The framing suggests a memento of deceased relatives. Locust Jones’ Everyday Atrocities (2008) is a drawing on a three-metre-long scroll resembling a giant stream-of-consciousness doodle. He redraws images of conflict shown in the news, thus distilling and aggregating key events to create an epic tale of unfolding, unending horror. Michael Reed’s many-faceted installation includes a pair of carpet runners, entitled Right, Might, Profit & Carpet Bombing/ Runners for Corridors of Power (2009) that bear texts such as “guns will make us powerful.” His work questions how anyone could work in armaments industries knowing the destruction they cause.
The artworks in this survey take a range of approaches from documentary video (Sabsabi) to expressionistic painting and drawing (Jones and Hoffie) to parody (Bell). Bell’s video Scratch an Aussie is unique here in offering an alternative position and a glimpse of a way forward by inverting stereotypical roles and directly challenging racist thinking. Former political adviser Pete Hay’s probing catalogue essay articulates the failure of democracy and suggests that recent social and technological developments require its renewal. He declares that “democracy will be refashioned from within the realms of dissent, if it is to be rescued at all.”
Night falls in the valley, Deborah Kelly
image courtesy Contemporary Art Society of SA
Night falls in the valley, Deborah Kelly
Planning for Tomorrow
Exhibited at the Contemporary Art Centre of SA, Planning for Tomorrow is also curated around the idea of the collapse of ideological and political systems that characterise recent decades. To explore this theme, curator Logan Macdonald has selected works by local and international artists and, in his persuasive introductory essay, discusses art theorist Boris Groys’ view of aestheticisation as an agent of change. The exhibition title is ironic, the principal message being that there is no such effective planning.
Viewers first encounter a selection of Damiano Bertoli’s posters of 2014-15 in which he has rendered texts by the 1960s Italian activist group Autonomia using the graphic design styles of Italy’s Memphis Group to create a postmodern blend of ideas that seems to trivialise both Autonomia’s calls to action and Memphis’s colourful and sometimes outlandish designs, suggesting that both movements were ephemeral. Cleverly counterpointing Bertoli’s posters is Deborah Kelly’s ironic take on unionist and activist banners, Night Falls in the Valley (2014), a huge version printed with the words “The billionaires united will never be defeated.”
Keg De Souza’s If There’s Something Strange in Your Neighbourhood… (2014), is a documentary video in which squatters, about to be evicted from a Yogyakarta district built over two cemeteries, talk about their experiences of ghosts and ghost removal—which becomes a metaphor for the squatters’ impending displacement. De Souza’s camera shows each interviewee reflected in a mirror rather than facing us directly—superstitions about mirror images imply that the speakers are already ghosts. The mirrors used in the video are separately displayed in the exhibition, inviting viewers too to look for ghosts.
Destroyed World, Santiago Sierra, Planning for Tomorrow
split-screen video still courtesy Contemporary Art Society of SA
Destroyed World, Santiago Sierra, Planning for Tomorrow
The central element in Planning for Tomorrow is Santiago Sierra’s video Destroyed Word (2010), a split-screen image of 10 elements, each showing one letter of the word KAPITALISM in monumental physical form being systematically destroyed by labourers. The letter K, constructed from brush fencing, is incinerated; P is timber systematically sawn into pieces; and M concrete, demolished like a building. Here, Sierra employs ‘proletarian’ labour to symbolically destroy the ideology that oppresses labour.
Macdonald’s exhibition demonstrates a variety of formal, conceptual and strategic approaches to activist art within an overall theme of the failure of government. Bertoli’s reference to the Autonomia movement in 1970s Italy begs us to consider the effectiveness of more recent movements, such as Occupy. De Souza involves a community in her video production, potentially sensitising that community and positioning it as an opposition and making us aware of its cultural traditions which may soon be lost. By contrast, Sierra’s artwork frequently involves paid labourers undertaking demeaning activity. Implicitly positioning himself as entrepreneur and overseer, he both enacts and critiques the capital-labour power structure.
The generation of an aesthetic response to human-induced crises is central to both Planning for Tomorrow and Giving Voice. In confronting us with the issues that preoccupy these artists, the curators provide insightful meta-narratives on the nature of activist, political art. They introduce us to artists who, to a greater or lesser degree, are themselves political activists. Art is now often seen as an alternative mouthpiece to the political left, filling a vacuum in post-socialist dialogue, and we’re reminded that the right to express dissent is hard-won.
The Photographs Story, 2004-16, 3 channel video and sound installation, Peter Kennedy
video still courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane
The Photographs Story, 2004-16, 3 channel video and sound installation, Peter Kennedy
Resistance: Peter Kennedy
At the Australian Experimental Art Foundation is a survey of Peter Kennedy’s pioneering video work since 1971. In the 1970s, video was a new medium that defied traditional commodity art-forms and enabled exploration of wider subject matter and the inclusion of sound. Kennedy was not only a pioneer of video as a medium but of politically and socially engaged art, concerned with the way in which communications media structure our perception. This landmark exhibition includes Kennedy’s video Introductions (1974-1976), a record of his initiation of interaction between four diverse social clubs—an embroiderers’ guild, a bushwalking club, a hot rod club and a marching girls club. Bringing them together emphasised women’s art in the burgeoning feminist era, raised environmental issues and challenged gender-based social barriers. In working outside the gallery to connect communities engaged in cultural activities, Kennedy prefigured work that would today be described as relational art.
Resistance: Peter Kennedy also includes the artist’s On Sacred Ground (1983-84) concerning Aboriginal land rights and self-determination, and November Eleven (1979), a collaborative work analysing the dismissal of the Whitlam Government in 1975. Also included is a new work, The Photographs Story (2004-16), involving Kennedy, his wife and son as subjects in a moving response to media coverage of the apparent death of a small boy caught in crossfire in Palestine in 2000.
Exhibition curator Matthew Perkins notes in his catalogue essay that “Socially engaged practices have returned to the contemporary art agenda with great force in recent years, encouraging a critical reflection of avant-garde practices that emerged from the counter-culture period of the late 1960s.” In his talk at the exhibition opening, Kennedy made clear that aesthetics and politics are closely intertwined, as his work over 45 years amply demonstrates. Peter Kennedy’s ground-breaking approach to the forms, the subject matter and the role of art helped set the stage for the kinds of work we now see in exhibitions such as Giving Voice and Planning for Tomorrow.
Viewers looking at activist art simultaneously occupy two positions: as engaged citizens, potentially encouraged by the artwork to protest, and as a detached audience, appreciating the work as art. While placing activist art in a gallery has been seen to commodify and neutralise it, such art has the potential to provoke viewers into deeper thought and possible action, and to sow seeds in the wider community. The art in these exhibitions is a crucial component of the continuum between artistic apprehension and activity on one hand and collective, public action on the other.
–
Planning for Tomorrow, Contemporary Art Centre of SA, 9 April-15 May; Giving Voice: The Art of Dissent, Flinders University Art Museum, 23 April-26 June; Resistance: Peter Kennedy, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, 3 June-9 July
A sharply observed, wickedly satirical ABC TV series about bungling and corruption in the lead-up to the 2000 Sydney Olympics, The Games is a mockumentary classic featuring performances by John Clarke, Bryan Dawe, Gina Riley and Nicholas Bell.
For development-mad Australian cities, The Games is more relevant than ever.
If you enjoyed ABC TV’s Utopia, The Games is the perfect complement.
The Games DVD boxset comprises both the 1998 and 2000 series with a total of 26 episodes. Also now available for digital download.
3 boxsets courtesy of ABC Video Entertainment and Distribution.
Email us at giveaways [at] realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number. Include ‘Giveaway’ and the name of the item in the subject line.
Offer closes 15 June.
RealTime issue #133 June-July 2016
Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Monster Maker, 2016, painted wood, image courtesy the artist and This Is No Fantasy + Dianne Tanzer Gallery, The Fraud Complex, Next Wave 2016
Four Next Wave Festival exhibitions keenly illustrate contemporary preoccupations with identity, both cultural and sexual. It is exciting to witness both issues squarely at the forefront of artists’ and curators’ creative concerns with individual artists questioning the past and present and making propositions about the future. With a commitment to a new generation of artists who explore diversity and inclusion, these exhibitions are solid examples of the festival’s concerns.
Something Less exhibition
photo Kieren Seymour
Something Less exhibition
Alasdair Doyle & Liam James, Something Less
In Something Less at The Stables, part of the Meat Market complex, Liam James personalises his quest for cultural and sexual identity using performative strategies with lens-based media to create an intimacy that is both compelling and unnerving. Through still and moving images we see James foregrounded, pale-skinned and blonde, staring straight at the camera. In the series of still photographs we see a young man holding flowers and in the video James is a red-eyed young man in a dress. In a detailed replication of the setting of Tracey Moffatt’s seminal photographic image Something More #1 (1989) James places himself in the foreground. The video—and the title of the exhibition—is something of an homage. Unfortunately, the sound is played too loud, the hard acoustics of the room making this a tough, if not impossible, listening experience. In both works, Liam James presents a sensitive questioning of self, yet an insistent and unabashed one. By demanding our attention in this way, associations with our narcissistic selfie era are hard to avoid.
James’ works are installed in two gallery spaces, separated by a third connecting space which is the setting for the book Where Contradictions Collide by Alasdair Doyle. This gallery contains two videos and a hard copy of the book. One video documents Skype discussions concerning the content and, in the second, the book is silently leafed through with white-gloved hands, suggesting a preciousness towards the material. Full of information and critique concerning Tasmanian Indigenous experience from writers and artists of various generations, the text is a rich resource.
Something Less exhibition
photo Zan Wimberley
Something Less exhibition
Sharing the physical space rather than collaborating as such, Doyle’s text operates as a conduit between his own and James’ works and places an emphasis on the textual component over the visual works. The mixing of the visual art works with text and publication is topical given the large number of practice-led PhDs that artists are undertaking these days, but achieving an equality between the two forms requires a delicate balance.
The Fraud Complex, curators Johnson+Thwaites
Fraud, fake, fake it till you make it, deceit, imitation, feeling like a fake in our lives; the imposter syndrome is a common experience for many of us these days. The title of The Fraud Complex can be read as both a psychological state and a pun on Freud’s name, particularly as the Westspace opening was held on Sigmund’s birthday (6 May). On entering the gallery the viewer is faced with a large mirror by Hany Armanious (Body Swap). With psychoanalysis in mind it is hard not to read this literally as Lacan’s mirror stage, which initiates a world of perception rather than of imagination. A fitting start to a curatorial premise that questions what appears to be one thing but could easily be another.
Perception is what is at play in this exhibition and Técha Noble, Casey Legler and Jordan Graham’s captivating video That Self is a good example of how gender can seem to be in flux, an immersive embodiment of Judith Butler’s concept of gender as performativity. What amounts to an accusation of cultural fraud is the raison d’être of Bindi Cole’s chillingly witty series of digital prints, Not Really Aboriginal, portraits of herself and her fair-skinned family wearing blackface, while Megan Cope’s ironic Discover your Aboriginality offers a counter to Cole’s series by giving visitors the chance to experience something of how it feels to be Aboriginal. The artwork is presented as a written test that can be taken and submitted on the spot to see if visitors have been, as Cope puts it, “touched with the tar brush.”
The Fraud Complex exhibition
photo Alan Weedon
The Fraud Complex exhibition
Johnson+Thwaites’ curatorial choices are mostly effective with a robust mix of established and emerging artists. The works explore a number of possible frauds including sexual (Tyza Stewart’s Self-Portrait), cultural (Yoshua Okón’s The Indian Project) and art (Artsheaven.com’s painting-8598 Guernica and painting-9752 Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue) with varying degrees of success. Humour, at times very dark, is put to good use in most of the works, easing the show’s unevenness. Guided by the trickster, the wag, the Australian larrikin, the viewer wonders what is real and what is not, what is fiction and what is fact. Nothing is clear as boundaries blur and reference points vanish. With the impossibility of perceiving a single truth, the curators seem to be concurring with historian Hayden White’s assertion that fiction is more real than fact (“Historical Fiction, Fictional History and Historical Reality,” in Rethinking History 9, vol 2-3, 2005).
Katie West, Decolonist
Katie West’s Decolonist, also at Westspace, is a meditation exercise where the visitor is guided through a process through which to unlearn the impact of colonisation or, as the narrator describes it, to decolonise. “When we meditate we decolonise our bodies,” suggests a female voice gently and persuasively. I hesitate at first but as I sit on the wide Westspace window sill covered in crushed eucalyptus leaves the pungency is seductive and I stay put. The narrator continues: “this is a space to sit still” and I do as I am told.
The video is of a eucalypt forest rendered in purple-ish monochrome. In the centre are two overlapping circles with the overlap shaded in. West describes this intersection as “a space where both western and indigenous philosophical traditions inform our social norms and values” (“My art is a personal antidote for the effects of colonisation,” The Guardian). Ephemeral in its realisation, with the room dim, the video is projected on thin muslin which moves with the passage of air through the gallery, echoing the natural cycles that the meditation exercise promotes.
As a young Yindjibarndi woman based in Perth, Katie West is offering non-Aboriginal Australians a means to recognise our collective responsibility through this meditative process. This gesture, generous in intent and representative of her people, is the core strength of the exhibition. As an installation it seems to be a work in development, but it engages with a refreshing lightness of touch with an issue that bears heavily on contemporary Australian society.
Ua numi le fau exhibition
photo Zan Wimberley
Ua numi le fau exhibition
Ua Numi Le Fau, curated by Léuli Eshraghi
At Gertrude Contemporary, a range of disciplines and media are represented in Ua Numi Le Fau that identify the wider setting as Narrm, the great bay, where the settler colonial city of Melbourne is built. The curation of the exhibition by Léuli Eshraghi emphasises indigeneity as the way of knowing that links artists, artworks and site, “binding time and space for brighter days to come.” The curation is well handled and tight, using the two gallery spaces thoughtfully, allowing well-chosen works space to breathe individually but also to make connections.
The exhibition is entered through Megan Cope and Robbie Thorpe’s Makin’ Waves, a transparent mapping work on the gallery window that turns the bay of Narrm literally upside down. In the front gallery Mandy Nicholson’s abstract painting honours Wurundjeri artist and 19th century cultural spokesman William Barak. A bright sunny Saturday afternoon almost completely bleaches out Frédéric Nauczyciel’s experimental videos that blend dance with cinematic interests, and makes for difficult viewing. So too Carlos Motta’s two videos of unknown stories of the colonisation of Colombia in the main gallery are surprisingly washed out and make immersion in the content a struggle.
Ua numi le fau exhibition
photo Zan Wimberley
Ua numi le fau exhibition
Yuki Kihara’s monochromatic photographs address issues that face contemporary S?moa. The images are of an anonymous female character in a hooped Victorian dress, back turned to the camera, in nuanced settings that range from the more covert construction of nature to the overt construction of culture. The anonymity of this woman contrasts with Atong Atem’s brightly coloured and highly patterned photographic portraits of groups of women from the African diaspora of Melbourne staring confidently out of the picture’s frame.
Three embroidered works by Bidjara, Ghungalu and Garingbal peoples artist Dale Harding explore the untold histories of his communities. Including stereotypical symbols of Australian identity such as the kangaroo, cockatoo and xanthorrhoea, known pejoratively as ‘the black boy,’ and visually referencing a pixelating retro online game with his technique, Harding embraces a form historically considered a domestic craft for women. Humble in their realisation the works are full of a wicked and sassy humour around identity and the body.
Léuli Eshraghi, Ua numi le fau curator
photo Lisa White
Léuli Eshraghi, Ua numi le fau curator
Next Wave Festival 2016: Something Less, Alasdair Doyle and Liam James, The Stables, Meat Market, 13-22 May; The Fraud Complex, curated by Johnson+Thwaites, Westspace, 6 May-4 June; Decolonist, Katie West, Westspace, 6 May- 4 June; Ua numi le fau, curator Léuli Eshraghi, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 6 May-25 June
Lizzie Thomson, TACET: Rhythmic Composition (after Roy De Maistre’s Rhythmic Composition in Yellow Green Minor, 1919)
photo Document Photography
Lizzie Thomson, TACET: Rhythmic Composition (after Roy De Maistre’s Rhythmic Composition in Yellow Green Minor, 1919)
Since the 1990s conceptual choreography (and its antecedents since the 1960s) has expanded and mutated dance. At their humblest, choreographers now declare themselves directors of idea-driven works in which there will be varying degrees of dance among other things; at their most elevated, choreographers label themselves artists who make objects (dance, dance-related) for art museums. The latter works sometimes enter permanent collections and when re-exhibited display traces of the originals but will become, in turn, newly ephemeral—but objects nonetheless.
The notion of dance as object (let alone dancers as objects) can be unsettling, as has been the move away from ‘steps’ in conceptual choreography and associated Non-dance. There are fears that dance will lose its primal distinctiveness, that it is being rendered invisible—indistinguishable from the current mergings of contemporary performance, performance art and live art.
There’s been some mocking of audiences who love dance for its ‘steps,’ its anti-gravitational magic, fluidity, radical angularity and non-verbal expressiveness, for its felt pleasure and tensions. While we watch in stillness, our neural system vibrates in synch with dancers’ bodies—with any bodies, as it has from our earliest years and, indeed, in utero. For many, this is what compels us to dance and to watch dance. Other observers feel that it’s not just dance that’s disappearing in conceptual choreography, but the body.
Feelings run high over the challenge of conceptual choreography to dance. At the end of his impassioned essay “America without tears” in the current Dancehouse Diary, American cultural critic Andy Horowitz writes, “that strand of conceptualism in contemporary choreography that seeks to remove the body from the consideration of dance, when favoured by elite American arts programmers, curators and institutions, has real consequences. ‘Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism,’ and when the labouring body is erased by (white, male, of European origin) philosophical constructs, we are complicit in devaluing human lives even as we are destroying the democratic American body.”
But instead of being co-opted by galleries for “experience economy” ends, is dance simply seeking new niches in the arts ecosystem, making itself more visible and regenerating? The emergence of the term “the choreographic,” however, has further complicated a sense of dance’s place and its viability.
The Choreographic
The adjective “choreographic” has lately been definitely articled and noun-ed. Choreography, as in the making of dance, has been appropriated, metaphorised and newly theorised in order to liberate art museums and biennales from a sense of stasis, to provide expanded sensory and cerebral engagement for gallery-goers in the era of “the experience economy.” Of course there is a long 20th century history of the ‘authentic’ body from time to time intruding ‘disruptively’ into the gallery and reinvigorating our sense of art. The choreographic is the latest of these moments, enveloping and activating the bodies of those who were once viewers and, ideally, bringing into greater play a fluid relationship between artist, curator, gallery space and audience,
“The choreographic” covers dance performed in galleries (or, in biennales, on the streets and elsewhere), dance and other performances that engage with artworks, and the physical movement of gallery-goers—whether of their own volition or shaped by curators (the compelling placement of images) or by artists (choreographers or not) who create ‘walks’ or ‘journeys’ or even encourage all too willing gallery-goers to dance en masse, as was the case with Biennale of Sydney keynote speaker and conceptual choreographer Boris Charmatz’ Musée de la danse at Tate Modern and other galleries and in squares and parks.
Jenn Joy’s The Choreographic (2014) is publicised as “mov[ing] between the corporeal and cerebral to tell the stories of encounters as dance trespasses into the discourse and disciplines of visual art and philosophy through a series of stutters, steps, trembles, and spasms.” For Joy, choreography—conceptual and postmodern—becomes a role model and an infiltrating agent (it “trespasses”) for expanding notions of movement within and across disciplines and genres and is exemplified in contemporary works which in their ineffability elude categorisation.
Meryl Tankard performs Nina Beier’s The Complete Works
photo Ben Symons
Meryl Tankard performs Nina Beier’s The Complete Works
Jess Wilcox in The Brookyln Rail writes, “Joy relates this thinking to the choreographic nature of the artistic endeavor as it highlights the unfixed relationship among the maker, the image and the viewer…In this, movement, language, writing, composition and articulation emerge as tangled manifold concerns.” She adds,”…the tension of the age-old binary of mind/body dualism lies below the surface. Embodied thought seems to be what Joy is seeking.” And choreography, actual and metaphorical, offers, it seems, a way into this embodiment.
However, adds Wilcox, “Joy’s silence on performance and dance in the museum is curious considering the topic’s currency and how she emphasises visual arts in the first chapter. No doubt a great deal of recent museum performance treads the line of spectacle and is not worth spilled ink. Yet, her astute understanding of the triangular relationship between artist, performer, and audience is valuable as the prevalence of performance in the museum increases. As more museums embrace the experience economy model, they claim an authenticity for visitors.”
Choreography & the Biennale
Artistic Director Stephanie Rosenthal has placed choreography of many kinds, actual and theoretical, front and centre in her Biennale of Sydney program, yielding much discussion. In a number of forums she’s declared that she’s not attempting to institutionalise dance in galleries and is wary, for example, of the notion that dance can interpret visual artworks (“an old-fashioned art-plus-performance idea”), although performances by Chrysa Parkinson (whom I didn’t see, but who impressed watchers) and Lizzie Thomson engaged intriguingly with paintings at AGNSW. Rosenthal described bringing performance into the gallery as “interesting but painful” and “very different in theory from reality.” But she is clearly fascinated, intellectually and experientially, by possibilities for the ephemeral arts in otherwise materially oriented galleries. Her doubts aside, Rosenthal’s program and previous work represent the encroachment of “the choreographic” into the gallery if, it would seem, experimentally and with the freedom, as she mentioned, that a biennale budget and resources allow.
Where does “the choreographic” sit in the world of dance? In the form of conceptual choreography it accommodates and rationalises the radical expansion and transformation of the dance palette across recent decades—not only with dance’s increasing diversity of forms but also in its hybridising mergers with performance art, contemporary performance, live art, digital media and, emphatically, in its romance with the academy, sharing, alongside visual art, some of the most esoteric of writing and theorising. The latter was in full sway in the Biennale’s six-hour Choreography in the Gallery Salon, a mix of talk and performance at AGNSW facilitated by UNSW’s Erin Brannigan. The language of academics and curators who spoke was highly coded, sometimes obscuring insights and conjectures, while dancers spoke lyrically but also quite abstractly. Other speakers addressed the issues with a blunt pragmatism.
Xavier Le Roy, Temporary Title Open Rehearsals. Commissioned by Kaldor Public Art Projects and Carriageworks
photo Zan Wimberley
Xavier Le Roy, Temporary Title Open Rehearsals. Commissioned by Kaldor Public Art Projects and Carriageworks
Time, the gallery & the object
AGNSW curator Anneke Jaspers’ focus on time detailed museums’ “multiple templates”—their set hours, calendars, seasons, cycles, loops—and how artists working in performance are adapting to and exploiting these “temporalities.” A year at the Stedelijk: Tino Sehgal (2015), for example, comprised a 12-month cycle drawn from Sehgal’s opus with 12 live works of varying scale programmed to respond to seasonal change and varied gallery spaces. For audiences, said Jaspers, there was “no possibility of a total reading” across the year; a situation akin to showing of multiple long films and videos in exhibitions. Nonetheless, the work’s unfolding attracted a strong audience according to its curator and has been acquired for the museum’s collection, a move, says Jaspers, that is still rare. French conceptual choreographer Xavier Le Roy has also, she said, created a program of works 1994-2010 in which “a retrospective becomes a mode of production” for creating new work from old.
In these ways choreography grants itself a greater degree of materiality for dance as object with which to justify its place in the gallery—with the gallery’s archival criteria—while at the same time creating new ephemera. But it does mean that if dance steps outside of theatre time into gallery time and space, it possibly becomes something else, certainly from an audience perspective where privileged scheduling, viewing and optimal attentiveness are not guaranteed. If they are, then the evils of ‘spectacle’ are severely invoked.
Curator as dramaturg
Hannah Mathews, senior curator at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), introduced another perspective on the choreographic in which she attempted to find equivalence for herself not between choreographer and curator but rather curator and dramaturg—a “co-imaginer” working with artists. It’s a good match and a telling one although the analogy is not a simple one: the hierarchy in performance is still largely headed by a choreographer or a director over and above a dramaturg. In a fascinating aside Mathews suggested that text (written, spoken, performed to, danced about) was more central to Biennale performance than choreography—an indicator of even higher conceptualisation or more diversification and cross-over?
Avoiding & Invading the gallery
Phillip Adams, choreographer and artistic director of the Melbourne-based BalletLab dance company described his strategies for inserting works into galleries without losing integrity and audience attentiveness and Tang Fu Kuen, a Bangkok-based, Singaporean curator and producer, sounded alarms about live performance’s potential loss of authenticity when presented in galleries.
Tang spoke of “the performance turn” in which “exhausted” museums and galleries aim “to produce subjectivity, so that individual (gallery-goers) feel spoken to.” He sees the phenomenon as a part of a Neo-liberalised culture which reduces art to well-being and lifestyle. He wonders precisely what these strategies say about art to audiences. Tang expressed concern about performance in galleries without committed audience attentiveness and in a context of competing visual artworks already rich in associations. He also highlighted a lack of care for artists performing without the usual professional safety nets and requisite budgets. Care was an issue that the Biennale curators spoke to in this forum. I witnessed the admirable Meryl Tankard performance for Nina Beier’s The Complete Works at the MCA where there was no strategy in evidence for dealing with an at times far too crowded gallery space in which staff vigorously protected the installed and hung artworks but not the dancer.
Phillip Adams, After, Proximity Festival 2015
photo Matt Sav
Phillip Adams, After, Proximity Festival 2015
Phillip Adams drolly explained how he “graduated to the gallery,” having long been averse to dancers suddenly appearing like aliens in gallery spaces in their T-shirts and whites only to be avoided by audiences. He opined that “dance in the gallery has not evolved much since the 1960s” and entails “a truckload of problems.” Adams described After (Proximity, AGWA; Sarah Scout Presents, 2015), a work he created for exhibition in which a sole visitor enters a structure and stretches out for a 15-minute encounter with Adams’ “naked mature body” (too much art has been about youth and beauty, he declared). So that the work maintains its integrity, timing is fixed and manageable, there’s a $20 ticket price, a guide and a white walkway to the installation’s black curtain. It’s better, says Adams, than offering the gallery-goer “the freedom to watch three minutes of a 30-minute video work.”
Ephemeral objects
In the first of three works presented in the AGNSW Central Court, “spatial practice” specialist Helen Grogan quietly created OBSTRUCTION DRIFT, a “performative and sculptural situation” in which gallery staff delivered stacks of chrome angle barriers used to demark function spaces. Grogan and an assistant arranged them about the court and left. Save for those in the know, viewers perhaps suspected that the activity was preparation for a work that never happened. The artist’s claim to test, in galleries, “the potentiality for obstructions, parameters and demarcations—both spatial and conceptual—to destabilise, shift, drift” was barely felt.
Melbourne choreographer-dancers Shelly Lasica, Jo Lloyd and Deanne Butterworth danced through the Wednesday night gallery crowd in their How Choreography Works, an iteration and extension of “the discussion” that comprised the 2015 original which “included original and archival performance.” With Lasica as a kind of grande dame and Lloyd and Butterworth as sometimes aberrant acolytes (displaying some exhilaratingly precise twinning of movement), the trio carved up the space and generated diverse patterns of cause-and-effect with energy, subtlety and wit, un-fazed by the casual movement of the audience. At close quarters and great distances—as Lasica opened out the length of the space—we witnessed not a totality, but fragments as we moved to gain sight or shift perspective or surrendered to the dancers’ disappearance into the crowd. Making aesthetic sense of How Choreography Works as it shape-shifted over a long duration, let alone understanding it as some kind of archive (unless perhaps we’d been committed Melbourne dance followers), proved challenging, recalling comments in the forum about the pitfalls of uncontextualised dancing in galleries.
Roy De Maistre, Rhythmic composition in yellow green minor (1919)
Sydney dancer Lizzie Thomson similarly created a space in which she danced amid the audience, engagingly, fluidly and passionately as ever. It looked like another dance in a gallery. However it was the coda to TACET that made sense of the performance for those who had not read the program notes. Catching her breath, Thomson read aloud a letter addressed to Virginia Woolf about her encounter with both the novelist’s The Waves (she’d learnt part of it to recite to single visitors to Biennale artist Mette Edvardsen’s Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine, presented at Newtown Library) and artist Roy De Maistre’s Rhythmic Composition in Yellow Green Minor, 1919, located in an adjoining gallery room.
In her letter to Woolf, Thomson recalled standing in front of the painting and finding herself “thinking about the rhythmic composition of The Waves, and how the intensity produced by reading it over and over again out loud would sometimes make me feel seasick. I had to train myself to read it without rocking backwards and forwards in time with your words. For a few years now I have been working intermittently with a score of rocking, a kind of rocking between the past and present, shifting my attention between working with embodied memories and also generating new, or renewed, movement material.” [The complete letter will be published as part of the Time has fallen asleep… project.] Thomson’s performance moved beyond apparently abstract dance into the conceptual when spoken, revealing the artist’s musing over dance, words, darkness and silence.
As Andrew Fuhrmann wrote, contestably, in RealTime about the prevalence of conceptual choreography in the Keir Choreographic Award works, “we risk falling into repetitive and needlessly divisive debates about whether this is really dance or not. Simply put: there is conceptual choreography that works, and there is conceptual choreography that doesn’t. And this is what we should be talking about.” There are many exciting, conceptually driven works, including those that with devices—and without dancers—mobilise the bodies of the public, like William Forsythe’s Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time, no 2, 2013, in which the audience move amid swinging pendula. It’s exhibited on Cockatoo Island as part of the Biennale of Sydney until 5 June.
Likewise, “the choreographic” might inspire a greater awareness of the creative fluidity of artist-artwork-audience relationships across and between all forms. Or it might amplify the challenges highly theorised art dance has set itself in a gallery economy hungry for commodifying audience experience, possibly at the expense of the dancing body in—as one dance loving observer put it to me—“a visual arts takeover.” At the same time, beyond the conceptual choreography prominent in the Keir Choreographic Award performance and this year’s Next Wave Festival there is a plenitude of exactingly choreographed works being created and performed across Australia without surrendering dance, let alone the body, some of it enriched by conceptualism and the far-reaching concept of “the choreographic.”
My thanks to Lizzie Thomson for permission to produce an excerpt from the text accompanying TACET: Rhythmic Composition (After Roy De Maistre’s Rhythmic Composition in Yellow Green Minor, 1919).
–
20th Sydney Biennale, Choreography and the Gallery, a one-day salon, facilitator Erin Brannigan; Centenary Auditorium and Central Court, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, 27 April
For the last two years I’ve been pondering what art will sound like in the future. One of my wilder speculations suggests that we will choose to dispense with the corporeal and upload ourselves into a hive mind. Because a hive mind shares hopes and dreams, and everyone’s secret dream is to be a rock star, I conclude that at the end of time we will manifest as a band—The Omega Point Band—transmitting to infinite space.
As I was working on this scenario I came across cellF, a recent project by bio-artist Guy Ben-Ary, in which he grows neural networks (a proto-brain) developed from his own cellular material. And what does this brain want to be when it grows up? A rock star of course—well, an improvising musician really.
CellF has been in development for over four years, initiated when Ben-Ary received a 2012 Creative Australia Fellowship. It had its debut performance in Perth in October 2015, presented by SymbioticA, and will soon have a second iteration in Sydney as part of The Patient, the upcoming bio-art exhibition curated by Bec Dean at UNSW Galleries. I talked with Ben-Ary last year when cellF was still in development and followed up recently to see how his other “brain” took to its debut performance and their combined feelings around the upcoming tour.
To grow a brain
Ben-Ary has been a key member of the SymbioticA team, along with Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, since 1999. His particular interest is in growing neural networks outside of the body “because of the uneasiness—the idea that masses of them, when organised in a particular way, create consciousness or intelligence…I was interested in their erratic existence—how do they communicate and what do they do outside the body? Can they learn or would they be able to demonstrate emergent behaviour in the future?”
What Ben-Ary terms his “Eureka moment” occurred in the early 2000s when he discovered the work of scientist Steve Potter who has developed an interface to work with Multi-Electrode Array dishes. “It’s a Petri dish that you can grow neural networks in and it has 60 electrodes fitted on the base. You can record what the neural network is doing in 60 areas of the dish but at the same time you can stimulate the neurons in 60 areas of the dish. The stimulations can be variable from weak to very strong. So, symbolically, we can inform [the neurons] about events that are happening in the outside world and we can ask them to respond.”
For this project, which Ben-Ary refers to as “self-portrait,” he was determined to grow a neural network from his own tissue. “I had a biopsy done and skin cells taken off my arm [and then] took this piece of flesh back to the lab, chopped it, processed it and grew my own fibroblasts—connective tissue. Then I shipped those cells and myself to Barcelona to work with an Australian scientist, Dr Mike Edel, where we reprogrammed them to stem cells. Once we were sure that the clones were pluripotent [viable stem cells], we started to push them towards the neuronal lineage. When they reached the neural stem cell phase, we froze them and sent them back to Perth [where we] started to look at how to differentiate them from neurons. It’s quite complicated and it did take me about 18 months. I mashed up maybe 12 or 15 protocols [biological techniques]. I grew billions, and I’m not exaggerating, billions of cells and hundreds of cultures.”
The final result is a neuronal network grown onto the Multi-Electrode Array Interface ready to be stimulated. Which is where the aesthetic decisions—the life choices perhaps—began.
cellF, Guy Ben-Ary & collaborators
photo Yvonne Doherty
cellF, Guy Ben-Ary & collaborators
To find a body
While Ben-Ary’s intention is to make a self-portrait, he wanted to avoid a predominantly visual representation. “I look at myself in the mirror enough, and I kept looking at the cells for 18 months—every single day—so I just couldn’t think about humanistic portraiture, or describing myself in these terms.” In previous works like MEART and Silent Barrage Ben-Ary has used robotics to physically manifest the work, but for cellF he wanted to go in a different direction.
He talks of his long-held fascination with music—“when I was 12 I’d put David Bowie’s make-up on my face.” In particular he developed a passion for experimental music and jazz—“John Zorn changed my life”—but he just never developed the skills to be a musician. So he decided that this self-portrait—this auxiliary Ben-Ary brain—could live this dream for him. Finally he could become a rock star.
In reality cellF might be a bit too experimental to be a mainstream rock star; rather it’s aiming to be respected in the underground experimental scene. In discussions with his artistic collaborators, musician Darren Moore, analogue synthesiser specialist Andrew Fitch (Non-Linear Circuits) and artist/machine maker Nathan Thompson it was decided that the ultimate sonic manifestation—the sound body—would involve analogue synthesisers. Ben-Ary explains that the neuronal mass “is wetware but it’s analogue: micro-voltages are passing between components. It’s oversimplifying how neural networks work in the brain but modular synthesisers work the same way with control voltage.”
The actual physical body of the neurons has been designed by Thompson to fulfil both practical and aesthetic needs. The system not only has to house the spaghetti monster that is a modular synthesiser system, but it also has to be a functioning bio-lab with a fridge, incubator, the neural interface as the “head” and a class 2 sterile hood because of the use of modified human cells. Drawing inspiration from Futurist Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori noise machines, 1950s-60s giant gramophone speakers and the spiral structure of the cochlear, the neuronal network’s body is quite a magnificent sculptural object.
To play with others
As the whole point of cellF is that it is an improvising musician that wants to play with other musicians, the primary presentation mode is as a performance in which a human musician improvises with Ben-Ary’s “mind.” The musical output from the human is sent to the FriGate circuit, developed by Thompson, which converts certain frequencies into voltage information which is then passed on to the neurons. The neurons respond to this by outputting voltage information to the synthesisers and the two begin to ‘play together.’
In the Perth manifestation the drummer Darren Moore went head to head with cellF. Ben-Ary was extremely happy with how this went, saying there was “a clear sense of responsiveness, of communication between Darren and the neurons. [It was] a jam session or improv scenario where it wasn’t Darren playing with a programmed machine or the neurons doing something really chaotic—there was a sense of improvisation between them. It was just incredible to see.”
Darren Moore playing with cellF, Guy Ben-Ary & collaborators
photo Yvonne Doherty
Darren Moore playing with cellF, Guy Ben-Ary & collaborators
For the upcoming Sydney manifestation there will be three performances featuring different musicians each night— Chris Abrahams (10 June), Claire Edwardes and Jason Noble of Ensemble Offspring (11 June) and a trio comprising Clayton Thomas, Jon Rose and Darren Moore (12 June). The plan is to allow the performers to have a little more time than previously to rehearse with the system, to get to know each other. Ben-Ary is curious as to how the neurons will respond and develop over the performance series. He is also planning to use the same culture—the same neuronal mass—across the series: “Cultures like to be stimulated and the more you stimulate them the more chance for them to change their functional plasticity and produce more activity.”
When the neurons are not performing, sleeping off their rock star hangovers in their fancy multi-electrode array hotel beds, the project can be experienced via image and video documentation and prototype displays. Hoping to tour the work further, Ben-Ary also sees the opportunity for developing an installation version where the neurons can be allowed to spend their days composing—singing to themselves.
While cellF has a very playful presentation mode, it is a serious exploration of posthuman futures and our sense of ‘self.’ It probes fundamental questions: what makes a mind, what is consciousness and how are we connected to flesh and physicality? Guy Ben-Ary’s approach illustrates the idea of art as a tool for speculative dreaming. He says, “Art can help us with imagining the future. We don’t need to do it, we need to suggest. Symbolic gestures are sometimes enough, and pushing the technology to the limits, the nowadays limits, is enough to look at contestable futures.” I look forward to checking out cellF’s chops, and then I’ll decide if this is a sonic future I want to come true.
cellF, Guy Ben-Ary in collaboration with artists Nathan Thompson, Andrew Fitch and Darren Moore, and scientists Douglas Bakkum, Stuart Hodgetts and Mike Edel, presented by SymbioticA
Performances as part of The Patient: Chris Abrahams, 10 June; Claire Edwards, 11 June; Clayton Thomas, Jon Rose, Darren Moore, 12 June; The Cellblock Theatre, National Art School, Darlinghurst, Sydney
The Patient, The medical subject in contemporary art, curator Bec Dean, artists Ingrid Bachmann (CAN), Guy Ben-Ary (AUS), John A Douglas (AUS), Bob Flanagan & Sheree Rose (USA), Brenton Heath-Kerr (AUS), Carol Jerrems (AUS), Eugenie Lee (AUS), ORLAN (FRA), Helen Pynor (AUS), David McDiarmid (AUS), Jo Spence (UK), John Wynne & Tim Wainwright (UK); UNSW Galleries, 3 June-6 August
Parts of this interview also appear in audio format in the installation by Gail Priest, Sounding the Future, exhibited in ISEA2016.
“Who is it that can tell me who I am?” The Tragedy of King Lear, Act I, iv
“Amidst his daily routines, a famous actor tries to recall the lines to Shakespeare’s King Lear, but they are starting to escape him. He develops tricks to fight his forgetfulness as it follows him into every corner of his private life. He forgets the name of his sons, cannot recognise a picture of his mother, and when he finds a sock in his soup he eats it without questioning. As his memory increasingly eludes him, he obstinately fights with all his might but is gradually left with no choice but to embrace his new reality. Important things become unimportant, feelings become stronger than thoughts and his inner child is revived” [program note].
So there you have it, reader: the full story of what Alzheimer Symphony is ‘about.’ I probably can’t do better than this.
Except, I can report that I cried for the whole 70 minutes of it. I can report that what I saw was a work by a former denizen of the Austrian Schauspielhaus who now lives and devises in Tasmania and performs mostly in Europe. That this is the work of a man who does not perform much in his adopted homeland, but has initiated a business teaching others confidence and presentation skills (not theatre), because theatre translates into life in this way. Art is life is love is life is art. Is this why I am crying?
This one-man show cuts to the heart of what we fear as we emigrate from one part of our lives to another. For what is the value of a man, when his mind slips, his memory sags, his world becomes a delimiting cage?
Justus Neumann’s demented actor now lives in one cubic metre squared. The cube—his house, his stage, throne and prison–both restricts and enables a little life around him. Within that fantastical square, he conducts his ablutions, cooks his toast and eggs and recites. But then the phone rings. He has forgotten something. What is it? He receives an instruction, something logical, simple, everyday.
The protagonist of Alzheimer Symphony is both King Lear, mad on the moors, and Vladimir [or is that Estragon?] from Waiting for Godot, but he is also, brilliantly and painfully, Neumann himself contemplating inevitable decline, as we do ours—every one of us—in watching. Neumann’s eyes are both haunted and eager, looking to the past he can’t quite remember and to the future he still hopes for.
Waiting for Godot is a play of containment in time, where ‘nothing happens’ and ‘nobody comes.’ The characters are mad enough to stay, but not maddened enough to leave. In truth, what choice have they?—that terrifying question, forever lurking from just off-stage. Maybe there is nowhere else to go: in the midst of the great architecture of their world, little progresses and nothing arrives. There is perhaps nothing else.
Justus Neumann, Alzheimer Symphony
photo Wolfgang Kalal
Justus Neumann, Alzheimer Symphony
Lear, however, is a personage who can make things appear and disappear at will—divide land, execute bodies, drown kingdoms. Nonetheless, Shakespeare’s tragedy shows greatness losing the architecture that supports a great man’s power. On the wind-blown heath, Lear loses his mind.
Neumann’s “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks” is electrifying, despite the residual smell of toast and eggs, and the grasping for mnemonic objects such as a hairdryer and balloons to represent ‘wind’ and ‘cheeks’ respectively. He crows, “I can do it; I can still do it,” with desperate bravado.
But as the piece progresses, mnemonics fail. This Lear is left with the objects themselves, synecdoches of their own plastic worlds and nothing more. Yet, named and celebrated, they become a concrete poem of spatulae, eggs, ballons and photographs, which constitute an alternative virtuosity. The sweet beauty here is that Neumann takes pleasure in the forgetting, in constructing a narrative that falls apart in order to restructure, that reminds us that we are homo ludens—creatures that play. As we begin, speaking in the tongues of babes, so perhaps do we end.
The work’s title refers to Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, excerpts of which we hear throughout the show. Musicologists disagree as to whether Schubert failed to complete a great work or whether it is ‘perfect’ outside of expectations of classical form. The tension between ‘Here am I’ and ‘Where have I now wandered to’ is central to the greatest of all performances. In Neuman’s small and brilliant work, ‘imperfection’ resounds as tribute to the beauties which stab at the heart even when we cannot contain them in what we expect and already know.
A post-show forum with members from Alzheimer’s Australia generated a moving discussion on the effects of dementia on sufferers and their families. Members of the discussion panel—including doctors and spouses—spoke of the liberations that come from accepting one’s condition. The great challenge to our society, and how we identify ourselves within it, is not just about what we know and remember, but what is valued.
Justus Neumann’s work is vigorous, subversive and tragically funny. Even while watching it, I knew I would never forget its impact on my body and mind. I stand on the heath of my own ageing vulnerability, feeling and watching.
You can see excerpts from Alzheimer Symphony here and an interview with the artist here.
The Street Theatres’ Segue festival: Alzheimer Symphony, performer, co-writer Justus Neumann, co-writer Hans Peter Horner, director Hans Peter Horner, designer Greg Methe, original music Julius Schwing; Street Theatre, Canberra, 5-8 May
Director Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s engrossing 2015 feature-length documentary account of the life of Peggy Guggenheim conjures an empathetic portrait of a wealthy woman whose aesthetic tastes were ahead of the times and whose support for male artists in particular (especially Jackson Pollock) was significant if sometimes reciprocated with insults and romantic betrayal (Max Ernst). Excellent documentary footage, including of Guggenheim herself—frank, droll—and much of it unfamiliar (Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Paul Bowles, Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy), finely rounds out the film’s sense of an era. Art Addict screened for months in Sydney as word spread of its finely tuned account of a troubled but sympathetic nurturer of great 20th century art.
3 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment
Email us at giveaways [at] realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number. Include ‘Giveaway’ and the name of the item in the subject line.
CLOSING DATE: 8 June, 2016
RealTime issue #133 June-July 2016
photo Joan Cameron-Smith courtesy National Association for the Visual Arts
A musical proto-brain, an Alzheimer Symphony and the rise and rise of conceptualism in dance constitute food for vigorous thought in this e-dition. But a real no-brainer is the necessity to rigorously protest the Turnbull Government’s brutal depredation of Australia’s complex, highly effective but extremely vulnerable arts ecology.
Artists and supporters are now mobilising to demand the return of Catalyst funds to the Australia Council and a return to the status quo—a single federal arts funding body insulated from ministerial interference. Labor (yet to announce its election arts policy) has promised to return unspent Catalyst funds, the Greens all of them. The big challenge for artists is how to convince voters of any persuasion of the extremity of the crisis and how it will sooner than later affect them too. We can endlessly recite figures that prove what this government ignores—the substantial jobs’n’growth and innovation which art generates. For all that, the arts and, unbelievably, creativity have not figured in Turnbull’s policy announcements.
The issue is principally ethical: the Government and Arts Minister Fifield’s treatment of the arts has been dictatorial, disrespectful, divisive, non-consultative, secretive and opportunist—in a word, un-democratic, not least in its plundering and diminishing of an independent statutory authority, the Australia Council. The moral case has to be put, that a government that does not believe in the integrity and creativity of artists cannot be trusted by Australians as valuing art. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull can only gain the trust of voters by returning to the funding status quo. Beyond protest we all need to think big about the place of the arts in this country.
Signs of strength & unanimity
At a “town hall” meeting, titled Let’s Talk and presented at The Gunnery in Sydney by NAVA and Artspace on 30 May, anxious and angry artists and artworkers bristled with strategies for convincing the electorate of the need to return Catalyst funding to the Australia Council. There was an unfortunate degree of self-laceration, that the arts has not strongly represented itself to governments over recent years. However, it had to be acknowledged that the enormous collective energy expended in 2015 in protesting the Brandis-Fifield depredations, the writing of a remarkable 2,500 or so submissions to a Senate Enquiry on the subject and extensive media coverage of the Free the Arts campaign revealed the potential strength of the united front presented by Artspeak, Feral Arts, Theatre Network (VIC) and other organisations and thousands of artists from across the country.
Not so long before, the arts community had advocated for and contributed significantly to both the Australia Council review (2012) and the Labor Government’s Creative Australia: National Cultural Policy (2013), both of which laid foundations for continuity and development, if within the limits of vulnerability to changes of government, ideological fixations and absence of bipartisanship.
The decline of art’s dialogue with government
Perhaps we believed that tinkering with the structure of the Australia Council and urging the implementation of a cultural policy—with art at its core, alongside generalities about the value of culture—would be our salvation. Meanwhile peer assessment and contribution to Australia Council policy-making was steadily being eroded, transformed into a mysterious three to four level hierarchical assessment model applied to four-year funding applications. If artists cannot dialogue with and contribute to policy with the Australia Council, how can they even begin to engage with government? The Australia Council Charter requires peer assessment, but it has been weakened and ignored and needs to be seriously re-visited. But within what larger context? If the arts indeed do constitute an ‘industry,’ then we need to be treated like one and consulted by government as they do other industries.
Thinking big, thinking culture
This is where we need, from the bottom up, to think big so that, instead of waiting for a Whitlam or a Keating or even an arts-championing Crean to come along, we embed a safe but progressive place in government for culture. It could take a while, but the notion has been strongly argued for.
David Pledger, in his Platform Paper “Re-valuing the Artist in the New World Order” (No 26, Aug 2013; Currency House) and Julianne Schultz in her paper “Where to from here…after the National Cultural Policy”(Currency House Art and Public Life Breakfast, 14 08 2013) cite the successes of cultural ministries in a range of countries. An Australian Ministry for Culture would, according to Schultz, position the arts alongside “sport, heritage, national collecting and training institutions, broadcasting, screen, tourism, science as its core elements. It would need to have strong links to education, industry, trade, foreign affairs, Indigenous, communities, immigration, regional affairs, digital economy, defence and health. It would need a Cabinet level minister and a skilled and effective head of department with deep connections across the bureaucracy.”
Of course, such a Ministry of Culture would only work if it was a cogent assemblage of independent statutory authorities championed by their Minister.
Were it not for examples of such ministries in other countries—with South Korea an exemplar and regional inspiration—you might think Pledger and Schultz naïve utopians. You might object that art could get lost in such a ministry. You might also baulk at the inclusion of sport, but perhaps not science given the ideological thrashing dealt its facticity and creativity by a neo-liberal government. But sport is integral in how many Australians imagine themselves, white and Indigenous. And we make art about sport. Not explicitly on Schultz’ list but worthy of inclusion are the creative industries.
Art & the creative industries: a shared plight
To understand the relationship between the arts and the creative industries, you should read Justin O’Connor’s impassioned, nigh apocalyptic “After the Creative Industries: Why we need a Cultural Economy” (Platform Paper, No 47, May 2016). If Pledger delineates Neoliberalism’s radical devaluing of the artist, O’Connor targets its role in eroding the notion of public value (in health, education, the arts…) and of the citizen. He describes the failure of UK and Australian governments to run with the creative industries they so keenly adopted but in the end expected to be entirely self-monetising, in the process making a travesty of ‘creativity.’ At the same time, Neoliberalism’s managerial virus invaded the arts ecosystem, infecting creativity and risk-taking with numbing degrees of accountability. The virus has been injected into the CSIRO, another independent statutory authority being run down, this time by a former venture capitalist and physicist, Larry Marshall, eager to abandon data collection-based research for money-making applications of previous research.
As O’Connor sees it, culture, the arts and creative industries are all under threat when creativity “can easily be translated into no more than a production input” and then culture loses its meaning. The cultural and creative industries divide, he argues, “is a false distinction and divisive,” “sneak[ing] in all sorts of old hierarchies.” Both are prey to Neoliberalism and giant content-capturing techno-corporations.
“…the vision of a new creative economy in which anyone could sell to anyone, and creative labour was self-fulling and abundantly rewarded, was as far from the truth as it was possible to get. Monopoly control now happens on a global scale. It favours those companies who do not actually produce its aggregated content and so have little interest in cultural production…While our publicly funded arts sector remains committed to openness, participation and engaging the diverse experience of its audiences, the large cultural corporations have become more commercial, more centralised and less committed to anything other than the maximisation of profit. States have little inclination and less power to make change. This is the reality the term ‘creative industries’ masks.”
Alarmingly, O’Connor worries that “if the creative industries sink they will take down the arts with them,” presumably because the arts are increasingly technologies and also content-ripe for technological and “fair use” copyright exploitation (about to accelerate if Productivity Commission recommendations are adopted by the Government). The arts increasingly appear on and are made for the everyday technological devices that deliver what is experienced and understood as culture—private rather than shared. O’Connor fears “the wholesale privatisation of culture with government acting as an infrastructure provider and or consumer protection regulator.” Is it then an ironic blessing that Turnbull left the arts out of his innovation and jobs’n’growth policies?
Resurrecting Public Value, raising the Public Voice
We need to argue passionately for the value of culture, but Neoliberalism’s reduction of all things to economic metrics, “the ‘real cost’—early school leaving, work days lost to depression, the value of a university degree or investment in a museum—have made it hard to talk of value in a way that does not sound soft, wishy-washy, and so very chattering class.”
The denial of serious debate (for example the one we didn’t get to have about taxation reform) is, writes O’Connor, “an erosion of a shared language of public value, one that has had a more direct impact on culture than on almost anything else.” What we need, he argues, is a robust public discussion towards “an understanding not just of the ‘market’ but of the social, political and cultural underpinnings of this market that I prefer to call cultural economy, and it is only with this knowledge that the cultural values that are central to the economy can be secured.” In a climate of fear, this discussion of public policy must take place, he writes, “before the very space for such an argument is shut down.”
O’Connor does not indicate how this discussion might take place nor the political or structural outcomes he has in mind. How would he feel about a Ministry for Culture argued for and shaped through public debate and consultation between culture makers and government? Will we be comfortable with the term “cultural economy” in such a discussion, given the evils done in the name of economics?
Justin O’Connor’s Platform Paper is an exhilaratingly angry if often depressing read, offering insights into the tectonically shifting semantics of culture, art and creativity across some five decades and their ramifactions. Read it now, while it’s hot and utterly timely.
Art in the short-term
When the art community came together in a show of strength in 2015, the promise of a mostly united arts community bloomed; now that many major performing arts companies and galleries have emphatically joined the protest there is a sense of communality, of shared responsibility to a complex ecosystem. In coming weeks, ArtsPeak and others will announce a range of strategies you can engage with beyond your own letter writing, emailing and tweeting. We’ll keep you posted.
Culture in the long-term
The fight to protect the arts is part of a larger battle against Neoliberalism’s pervasive devaluing of artists, culture and the public good, all of which have been reduced to economic outputs and consumer preferences. We need a vision that is not merely a rear-guard defence against ministerial incursions and funding cuts, but one which creates an enduring space in government and the minds of all Australians for culture.
Robert Spano conducts Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Metropolis New Music Festival
photo Daniel Aulsebrook
Robert Spano conducts Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Metropolis New Music Festival
The 2016 Metropolis New Music Festival explored the city’s problems and to a lesser extent their solutions. For the first time in the world’s history over half of the world’s population lives in cities. If ancient settlements arose to solve problems such as the need for safety and trade, cities now pose their own problems to which we must adapt as a species. Addressing these problems is not only the realm of civic planners and concerned citizens. The musicians of Homo Urbanus also face the economic, environmental and sexual situations of the modern city.
With a larger local population comes anonymity and the sexual deviance that anonymity affords. Or at least this was the old Subcultural Studies line. While there is no denying the continued conservatism of some quarters, the late capitalist city resembles more of an open marketplace of sexual desires than a Victorian den of iniquity. This was the take-away message of the bold opening to Forest Collective’s Sensuality in the City program. “I wanna fuck Chris Hemsworth,” proclaimed Christian Gillett in the darkened Melbourne Recital Centre salon, “I wanna fuck Chris Hemsworth forever.” Philip Venables’ F**k Forever suggests there is nothing closeted about sexuality in the contemporary city.
The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s guest conductor Robert Spano painted the city on a grand scale in three concerts. How could a music festival dedicated to the city not include works like Michael Daugherty’s Sunset Strip, Steve Reich’s City Life, Jennifer Higdon’s City Scape or Aaron Copland’s Music for a Great City? Each of these pieces depicts a city bustling with construction and economic activity. They are clearly pieces of the late 20th century, composed during a period of unprecedented economic growth and general obliviousness to the environmental effects of greenhouse gases. They present the city as a place of opportunity tempered only by the social inequalities that arise in free markets.
These works also address social stratification by evoking local places, quoting popular music and incorporating speech patterns recorded on the street. In doing this they participate in a centuries-old tradition. The Song Company highlighted this historical continuity with a series of “street cry” pieces from the Renaissance to the 20th century as part of the MSO’s City Scapes program. The company’s superb performance of Luciano Berio’s Cries of London, including the refrain “These are the cries of London town, some go up street some go down,” brought the economic subtext of these pieces to the foreground.
Street-level details were also found in stunning orchestral works by Unsuk Chin and Michael Kurth. Chin’s supposedly non-programmatic (though to my ears extremely evocative) Graffiti begins with ‘scratching’ strings like the furtive carvings on the walls of ancient cities. The audience is then taken through an eerie “Notturno Urbano” and an uproarious “Urban Passacaglia.” Graffiti was an epiphany. We don’t get enough opportunities in Australia to cheer Chin’s work performed live. The composer Michael Kurth also takes the streets as his inspiration in Everything Lasts Forever, which includes three movements inspired by Atlanta street art. The cartoon feet of the street artist Toes are represented by swaggering slap bass. The pathos of a bird singing on a boarded-up door is conjured in a sadly lyrical movement. A loping movement in an additive meter presents an ironic commentary on the message “We Have All the Time in the World.”
If 20th-century composers saw the city as a place of opportunity and social inequality, two pieces presented as part of the Cybec 21st Century Australian Composers Program paint the city as an existential threat. Alex Turley’s finely atmospheric City of Ghosts considers a city without people. Modal melodies arise from a subtly thunderous bed of pianissimo tuba and double bass. The melodies move wraith-like across the ensemble, describing towering buildings and arches. With its profound palette, City of Ghosts is testament to Turley’s musical imagination and honed talents as an orchestrator. Chillingly, the piece presents us with a world without humans, leaving us guessing at where all the people have gone.
Michael Bakrncev’s Sky Jammer considers urban problems of the future. Will the environment be able to support Melbourne’s projected population of 10 million by 2050? What about the social ramifications of urban expansion fuelled by property speculation? With median house prices at or near one million dollars in Melbourne and Sydney, young people can’t afford to buy property near their families or where they grew up. Tax breaks intended to increase the supply of housing fuel intergenerational inequality instead.
Complex subject matter requires a complex sound world and Sky Jammer so clearly draws on Bakrncev’s musical influences. In its dense, rapidly changing textures one can hear the influence of Australian complexist composers. The instrumental timbres have the grit of a piece by Anthony Pateras. With its attention to instrumental colour and formal cohesion one can hear the influence of Bakrncev’s teacher Elliott Gyger. Though this description might make him sound like the love-child of dour modernists, Bakrncev brings his own crowd-pleasing style to the piece, in particular during a virtuosic violin solo for Sophie Rowell, who needs to be congratulated for several incredible solo passages throughout the festival.
Lina Andonovska (flute), Sonya Lifschitz (piano), Crashing Through Fences, Press, Play program
photos courtesy Metropolis New Music Festival
Lina Andonovska (flute), Sonya Lifschitz (piano), Crashing Through Fences, Press, Play program
Sure, they may be totemic tributes to property speculation, but I am not so down on Melbourne’s skyscrapers as Bakrncev. As Le Corbusier told us in Robert Davidson’s City Portraits (as part of Press, Play’s program), in order for everyone to have access to “sun, space, and green,” 2000 people must live in a building connected by a “vertical road.” Sure, many of Le Corbusier’s brutalist apartment blocks were barely habitable, but when his words are set to Davidson’s bitter-sweet piano part and performed by Sonya Lifschitz I am almost ready to believe again. More importantly, enlightened high-density development in the spirit of Le Corbusier will be necessary if 10 million people are to minimise their impact on the environment. The bustling, free-market, “Cries of London” urban model is not sustainable. Through varied and thought-provoking programs Metropolis starkly captured the liminal time in which we live.
Neither the future of Australia’s Indigenous peoples nor the environment yet figure in the election campaign. In this E-dition reviews of political visual arts exhibitions and documentary filmmaking (image above from Kelrick Martin’s Prison Songs) keep us mindful of this, but art is busy now protecting itself too from government.
Today, 12.45-3.00pm, the streaming of an Artspeak National Arts Election Debate between Labor Shadow Arts Minister Mark Dreyfus, the Greens’ Adam Bandt and Government Arts Minister Senator Mitch Fifield effectively marks the beginning of the public campaign to rectify the appalling damage done to the arts by the Australian Government. The Greens and Labor have announced their arts policies, reinstating all or a large part of funds removed from the Australia Council, abolishing the Catalyst program and offering additional funds. There will be a return to a highly productive status quo if the government loses the election or has an unlikely change of heart.
Artists and organisations large and small are uniting to change the Government’s mind, if not its heart. The Confederation of Australian State Theatre Companies (CAST) and Live Performance Australia (if pro a “reformed and transparent Catalyst”) have welcomed the Labor and Greens policies, especially for their support of the embattled small to medium arts sector.
Watch the National Arts Election Debate streamed here and ready yourself for the 17 June Arts Action Day, which you’ll being hearing about very soon. With an unprecedentedly united arts industry and sense of community, we might effect change, but need to add to our own the voices of our audiences. Keith and Virginia
RealTime issue #133 June-July 2016
Jacob Boehme, Blood on the Dance Floor
Over the last decade and a half, life has changed considerably for people living with HIV. Consider this passage from John Foster’s celebrated memoir, Take Me to Paris, Johnny, first published in 1993 but recently re-released, about the death of his lover Juan Céspedes:
“The virus makes you obsessive. It settles in your head. It distorts your vision. In the first flood of knowing—or believing—it can make you regard your own body with horror. The blood that is in you is lethal. It could drive you crazy if you dwelt on that knowledge, if you said to yourself, ‘I am the embodiment of death.'”
Now picture Jacob Boehme, an HIV-positive Melbourne-based artist, glamming it up in a billowy turquoise kimono jacket with deep sleeves, smoking a cigarette, teasing the audience and reminiscing about life and death at the height of the AIDS crisis in Sydney.
It’s a prologue to the main event, and the humour is very camp and more than a little facetious, with exaggerated descriptions of doomed drag queens lingering over their final bows.
Apart from lightening the mood, what is Boehme doing with this brief introduction? Is he really parodying narratives of emaciation and death? In any case, it’s clear he has a different story to tell.
Boehme, 24 in 1998 when he contracted the disease, is part of a generation for whom ‘positive’ is not a death sentence. Today, life expectancies for young people living with HIV are almost normal. For a man like Boehme, the struggle is not so much with the enemy in his blood—which can be managed with pills—but with the persistent stigma associated with infection, particularly in the male gay community.
Jacob Boehme, Blood on the Dance Floor
And so—Blood on the Dance Floor, a moving and highly polished one-man show presented by Ilbijerri Theatre. Deftly directed by Isaac Drandic, the piece combines dance interludes choreographed by Mariaa Randall with a well-composed series of autobiographical vignettes by Boehme.
The show’s central conceit is simple enough: Boehme has a date. Wearing singlet and slacks, he paces nervously from one end of the stage to the other. He tells us that he’s terrified. He’s been seeing this man for a while, and everything is going well, but now it’s time to have the conversation. Boehme plans to reveal his most intimate secret—and it’s not that he buys his washing detergent at Aldi.
A second narrative strand engages Boehme’s Aboriginal heritage. He acts out a series of touching conversations with his dying father about the importance of family and the perils of loneliness. In both stories, with father and with lover, the fear of rejection looms large.
Throughout, Randall’s choreography emphasises Boehme’s compact, muscular build. During one passage Boehme—who attended NAISDA with Randall—performs in silhouette against a white background, moving slowly but nimbly through a succession of athletic poses. Later he appears to be performing against a video recording of blood viewed under a microscope. He moves in smooth almost languorous phrases, bending, crouching and extending, as if turned by the gentle current.
Some of the more delicate passages—for instance, repeated gestures where Boehme strokes the veins in his arm or flutters his fingers—can seem a bit awkward. But, overall, what we get is a visible index of his apparent health. This is not a man who regards his body with horror.
Jacob Boehme, Blood on the Dance Floor
The idea that potential lovers expect him to look sick is a recurring anxiety. In one scene, he describes a nightmare orgy in which everyone gets what he wants, except Boehme. A handsome stranger emerges from the shadows and they start making out. Boehme can smell the sex: he wants it raw. Everyone always wants it raw. But then, the inevitable question, “Are you clean?”
Behind him, projected onto the screen at the back of the stage, we see—in devastating high-definition–a close-up video of naked flesh. It’s as if Boehme is haunted by these night-time yearnings for the intimacy of skin on skin.
There are many large issues at play in Blood on the Dance Floor, but the work’s emotional pulse is in the ordinariness of Boehme’s need for love and for a sense of belonging. Thanks to modern regimens, he has a future against which he can balance the present: he can dream, and his dreams might one day be reality. And yet he remains understandably sensitive to the attitudes of those around him. The history—and the myth—of the “gay plague” is a constant burden.
But it’s history that makes Blood on the Dance Floor such an affecting piece of theatre; and it’s the implicit contrast with Juan Céspedes, who was also a dancer and who died in 1987, that gives poignant substance to Boehme’s story, and to the apparent banality of his desires.
At last, Boehme is ready to meet his lover. He faces the audience and somehow seems to step out of the performance. Here we feel the full effect of his sincerity. “My name is Jacob Boehme,” he says. “I’m Aboriginal. I’m HIV-positive. I buy my laundry detergent from Aldi. And I’m in love.”
–
Ilbijerri Theatre Company & Jacob Boehme, Blood on the Dance Floor, writer, performer Jacob Boehme, director Isaac Drandic, choreographer Mariaa Randall, video artist Keith Deverell, sound designer James Henry; Arts House, North Melbourne, 1-5 June
At the end of a two-week investigative process, Strange Attractor, a choreographic platform now in its fourth year in Canberra at Gorman Arts Centre, presented showings by eight choreographers gathered nationwide. On the eve of the 2016 federal election, this year’s mentor/facilitator David Pledger set the tone of provocations by insisting each artist address their role as an agent of political and social force who can make/think/speak in and to the world.
Pledger called in CSIRO ecologist Brian Walker and University of Canberra designer Susan Boden to cut edges into the frame of this dialogue from their respective disciplines. Boden discussed the relation between stability (of practice, of context) and moments of disturbance and unknowing. Walker talked about the difference between brittle, overstretched systems that will fail and resilient systems that can transform. Both prompted the artists to each consider and challenge their practice ecologies.
Alice Dixon felt provoked to “embrace mess, free radicals, not knowing.” Her performance involved a ladder, a screen, a captive tree, the sawing off of its limbs from astride the ladder and, once she was back on the floor, mischievous pliés and jetés. There were satisfying disjunctures in this work, hinting at a relation between human obsessions to cut things down—ecological disasters when nothing is left—and the fantasies people concoct to try to stabilise shifting ground. Dixon ended with a wink: her lightness of touch suggested it could all be performed again, differently.
Liz Lea showed an excerpt from her richly delicate film Red, which enters the territory of sickness, wounding and healing. Lea’s provocation became, “How much do I really want to share?”—which is also a question around our expectations of others’ empathy. Over two nights, she both danced in, to and out of a ‘show and tell’ model. One night we saw the film, the other night we did not—a rare opportunity for such a seasoned performer to experiment with incompleteness.
Ella Rose Trew, Strange Attractor
Shona Erskine choreographed to her research on 18th century ‘scarlet’ women, unjustly hanged or wrongly freed, depending on social status. Among dancer Ella Rose Trew’s nerve-electrified shakings were more literal enactions of being hung, shot or decapitated. She slid one leg in a deep curtsey: the woman as scapegoat for a culture that can’t accommodate her sexuality or mendacity. It is a bow the grace of which transcends prejudice and the finality of sentencing.
Erskine remained unresolved in her initial intention to include narrated text. Which of dance or narration better represents personal emotion versus social injustice? In the end, her choice for silence rather than text or constant musical overlay allowed for a finer interplay of ironies.
William McBride explored a fine calibration of shifting awarenesses in relation to his audience. His eyes and body rolled away from and then directly towards spectators’ bodies and fields of vision. He whispered an intimate exchange—does it matter no-one else heard?—as he rolled up into the stalls and between legs before hanging from the aircon duct, like a lost bat. Disappearing over the rails, he reappeared again, only to reverse the roll into blackout. He had worried into crevices, melted as into a stream: a survival instinct. There was much his beautiful work hinted at but did not fully reveal.
Daisy Sanders found herself questioning her complicity with social/political/environmental forces. Federal polling booths had shut one hour before her second night’s performance, providing a direct context for her questioning. She inhabited the Canberra Contemporary Arts Space foyer over 10 days as a quietly restrained yet occasionally volatile presence. Her work played with paper, balloting, voting, inscriptions—on walls—and boundaries between public and private life and emotions. The walls were both fragile and resilient—any moment’s marking or decision-making could also be its undoing as she occasionally unscrolled or shredded paper.
Loren Kronemyer created two short films. In one, in a low-angle shot, we see a woman through a window repeatedly leaping from her bed, grabbing a knife, heading to a door just out of frame. Frame cut: the motion is obsessive and paranoid, repeated again and again. We are on the outside, as if physically part of the deafening cicada chorus that constitutes the sound track. Are we animal, vegetable, mineral or human? Friend or foe?
Her second film shows close-ups of Kronemyer peeling skin from belly, ribs and face. The ’skin’ is a layer of glue, but by golly it’s convincing, like an animal shedding in the wild. In extreme close-up, she removes the ‘skin’ (contact lenses) of her eyes. Empathy sits in an uncertain state between self and other, discomfort and revulsion.
Alison Plevey gathered courage in her plan to start an Australian Dance Party, a performative arts advocacy group working towards a public launch. Her action to illustrate the word ‘artist’—upper torso forward, arms outstretched, a leg stretched behind—was both a joke on supplication, an awkward yeti in distress and a demand to be seen. Her work captured the tension between vulnerability and force that all the dancers feel. With Trew and Fyfe, she practised almost daemonically over the two weeks. “The Art of Conversation,” she realised, “needs practising.”
David Pledger
Mid-week, facilitator David Pledger had delivered a public “launch” of his projected role as Minister for Empathy. How can empathy survive and answer to ‘policy’? He seemed fighting-fit for both immediate successes and possible failures in that role, triggering a spirited discussion among the gathered audience.
Pledger asserted that “artists are the canaries in the coalmine of democracy” and therefore (presumably) necessary to the foundation and operations of any social organisation—otherwise who would be aware of the health or toxicity of a system? Somehow, in the scrum of this shared residency, Pledger’s positive demeanour overrode any ‘lamb to the slaughter’ connotations implicit in the canary metaphor.
The ‘last say’ in this event came from Matt Shilcock, in the venue’s central courtyard, dancing the intersection between everyone’s investigations as spectators moved from one presentation space to another. An almost selfless act of generosity—the still point of a seven–pointed star, performing a subtly reflective commentary that needed no words.
–
Strange Attractor 2016, Make-Think-Speak: artistic director, curator Adelina Larsson, facilitator, mentor, David Pledger, writer-in-residence Zsuzsi Soboslay, participants Liz Lea, Alison Plevey [ACT]; Shona Erskine, Loren Kronemyer, Daisy Sanders [WA]; Matt Shilcock [SA]; Alice Dixon, William McBride [VIC], additional dancers Ella-Rose Trew, Olivia Fyfe; David Pledger is running for office, June 22; supported by ArtsACT, Ainslie Arts Centre, Gorman Arts Centre, QL2 Dance, Canberra Contemporary Art Space; Gorman Arts Centre, Canberra, 19 June-3 July
Angela Goh’s naked bottom is rippling uncontrollably. Standing unclothed atop a vibrating platform her wobbling flesh seems to synchronise with the rock guitar soundtrack. As the speed of the vibration increases, so does her involuntary reaction. On a dancer, it’s an unexpected bodily response and a fitting climax to a work dedicated to mesmerising us with the qualities of movement.
Desert Body Creep, Goh’s solo dance work for Next Wave 2016 opens on a room scattered with debris. Surrounded by discarded fabrics, the platform and a sound sampler, Goh begins her episodic work with two languid dances accompanied by a sultry guitar-laden soundtrack. Recalling her short video works where she tested sending vibes to absent friends via dance, she generates a series of hypnotic pivoted torso twists and controlled backward rolls within the perimeter of a spotlight. A lush sense of being irrevocably connected to the earth is always present.
What begins as a meditation, evolves into a playful performance piece. She introduces her leitmotif: the worm. Its first incarnation is a half-metre gummi worm. Here ensues a surprisingly tender interaction, with Goh carefully animating the worm, twirling it across a stick until we are captivated by its undulating, unfurling form. It’s emblematic of her approach: we are calmly invited to marvel simultaneously at the silent, hypnotic charm in movement and the grotesque. Placing the invertebrate worm along her spine, she crawls slowly across the floor, before undergoing a radical transformation.
Allowing sound the same attention as motion, Goh samples her voice singing high, sustained notes, replaying them as a layered siren call. Entering a trance-like state, she shuffles prostrate across the floor like some B-grade horror movie monster with gaping mouth. Notes merge into a soundscape of screams, and she disappears into a velour casing: becoming a worm and devouring the debris in her path. In this ‘post post-everything’ scenario, as Goh describes it in the Next Wave program guide, it’s easy to imagine the Goh-worm devouring civilisation itself.
In the current context of Melbourne choreographer covering their performers in head-to-toe fabric to divest their bodies of gender and identity (for example: Geoffrey Watson’s Camel, Bec Jensen’s Explorer, Chloe Chignell’s Deep Shine), I wonder what it means for a dancer’s body to disappear into- and re-emerge naked from- a fabric worm. The humble worm may be a hermaphrodite, but Angela Goh emerges unequivocally, unashamedly female. There’s a clear sense of being cleansed of cultural conditioning. Stripped of gender expectations, it’s a pleasure to witness Goh commanding, even proud, in her role. She calmly packs these shed skins into a plastic bag and uses another worm— a vacuum hose— to suck any remaining life out of them before politely setting them aside.
Angela Goh seems to be book-ending for the audience a journey in what we recognise as conceptual choreography: from minimal dance, through performative movement, before returning to an appreciation of pure motion. Nudity is key in her transformation: Desert Body Creep is a meditation on re-claiming and re-seeing the body in motion…as it vibrates naked on a motorised platform.
–
Next Wave Festival 2016: Desert Body Creep, choreographer, performer Angela Goh, sound designer Matt Cornell; Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne, 17-22 May
Maximilian plays with fashion, dance, choreography, photography, video, performance production and direction in no particular order or hierarchy. His formal training is in design. His recent work includes Bless the Beasts: Shibuya Summer (Melbourne Fringe 2015).
This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.
DanceWrite was conducted by RealTime editors Virginia Baxter and Keith Gallasch with mentors Andrew Fuhrmann and Jana Perkovic. The workshop was an initiative of Hannah Matthews as part of her Australia Council-funded Sharing Space program and was presented in collaboration with Next Wave and RealTime.
Lilian Steiner, Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, Next Wave 2016
photo Gregory Lorenzutti
Lilian Steiner, Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, Next Wave 2016
When the doors open to the North Melbourne Town Hall for Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, we walk into a thick haze, there’s a heavy drone. Yes!, I think, skirting around the people wrestling, we’ve zoned into some weird medieval bash or dusty Olympic quadrangle. We haven’t, but the fact that this scene is already underway is a clue to the nature of director and choreographer Lilian Steiner’s work. It will evolve into an installation, constituted by light, sound and space as much as by dance.
There are four performers (including Steiner) soberly costumed in navy T-shirts and loose knit pants. A man and woman grapple, slapping their weight calmly into each other; it looks like a kind of sport or a martial art. The top of his head slumps into her upper back and he rubs it blindly up and down. Another man jogs through a large, precise semi-circle with the other female dancer (Briarna Longville) at its centre like the fixed arm of a compass, and when she shifts, their connection dissolves; he drops away. Circles (and semi-circles and arcs) are already everywhere: they’ll be a major motif in both the movement and spatial design.
They hold and shove each other in pairs; a man jumps onto Steiner and she clutches him for a while, straining to support his weight. We’re in a realm where the body’s latent energy can be corralled, drawn out, exchanged by touch or ritual. Longville’s hands hover a hand’s width from her partner’s sternum, then execute a sudden slap. Hands are remarkable agents in this work that can: perform benediction (index and pointer fingers raised), or hold a rock, now stretch an archer’s bow, and execute myriad flicking, stirring, swatting, patting, jabbing motions. Time stretches while the two men become icon-like, hieroglyphs flooded by an intense red light, their chins fixedly inclined. They rotate very slowly with one palm up (a rock fills it) and the other down.
In periods where the movement is radically slowed or repeated, we might be invited into a meditative self-consciousness. The traverse seating makes visible the range of audience responses to the duration of this sequence, which seems to include both transfixion and fidgeting (two people leave). Maybe it depends on your appetite for this ‘nothing-happens-ness.’ Though compared to some more extreme examples of durational performance across noise music, visual art and dance, where very slight shifts in sensation become tectonic, there were much more stimuli here.
Steiner and Longville return to pony around the semi-circular lines established in the work’s opening, every now and then bursting into a stag leap. When they dance it’s fluid and expansive, ribcages shift and spines roll. They’re visibly sweating and we realise that these women (presumably because they’re the two trained dancers of the four) have performed most of the labour, at times literally bearing the weight of the men. Nevertheless, the choreography allows for a variety of restful states, the performers frequently appear drowsy or slumped, as if there might be only a thin membrane between activity and sleep. Longville picks up a rock and moves it near to our feet, then collapses. The two resume dancing but they’re scribbling now, arms scoop and fling, they shake, wriggle, shoulders dribble jerkily down, elbows shimmy. This is very much about the joints—hips, knees, elbows, wrists all hinge. Patterns are mercilessly interrupted, a pose no sooner assumed than abandoned.
By this time the men have receded, sitting on plinths in the shadows at one end of the space to generate the layers of drones, whirs and growls making up the sound production. When the women assume similar positions, the sound- and light-scape takes over for another long period. We stare, necks craned, as Ash Keating’s enormous artwork is gradually revealed. The sublime, with its potential for awe and veneration and its aesthetic complexity, is an ambitious concept to invoke. Lilian Steiner has said that she wanted to lure the audience to “states of energised tranquility.” Perhaps this is what a reconciliation of the everyday and the sublime would feel like? Keating’s final image could be many things—a hole, cigarette burn or navel, mere circle, ‘the source,’ or God—to me it looked like the interior of a chapel dome with its tiny aperture, viewed from below. Higher up, the circles of the Town Hall’s ceiling roses appear, and the rows of circular lights in their rigs; another neat conjunction of the everyday and the potentially sublime.
–
Next Wave Festival 2016: Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, choreographer Lilian Steiner, performers Atticus Bastow, Briarna Longville, Jonathon Nokes, Lilian Steiner, sound Atticus Bastow, Jonathon Nokes, lighting Matthew Adey, costumes Shio Otani, commissioned artwork Ash Keating; Arts House, North Melbourne, 18-22 May
Alison Finn works in criminal law in Melbourne, with particular interests in the law and the philosophy of human dignity, privacy, surveillance and ‘big data.’ She also writes creatively in various forms and continues a contemporary dance practice.
This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.
DanceWrite was conducted by RealTime editors Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter with mentors Andrew Fuhrmann and Jana Perkovic. The workshop was an initiative of Hannah Matthews as part of her Australia Council-funded Sharing Space program and was presented in collaboration with Next Wave and RealTime.
Emerging choreographer Thomas ES Kelly’s first full-length show, [MIS]CONCEIVE repurposes recognisable elements of a well-established, but still expanding, vocabulary of contemporary Indigenous dance. Charging some gestures with greater energy (a thrust, a whip-quick spin, a starkly pointing arm), others are subdued, made circumspect or soft (heads are bowed, hands gently wipe over faces). Ultimately the work deploys humour and political optimism to counterpoint sequences of stormy movement.
Four shadowy figures (Kelly and three female dancers) step out from the curtains with solemn purpose and are quickly skimming, sinking and folding. They steadily accumulate the physical motifs that will structure their repetitions—an out-struck leg puts the sole of the foot on display, an arm cuts a clean arc then hinges to tap the back of the neck. Kelly is a large-framed, striking-looking man. The other three performers fluctuate between developing their own distinctive characters to foil his inevitable prominence, and acting as a collective. Sitting in the front row I can see one of them make a deliberate short exhalation as she falls or contracts—their dancing has a feel of easeful effort rather than strain.
A familiar gesture can expose an unnerving nub of truth. When the dancers each wave their ‘pick-me!’ arms in the air, writhing in their chests with wanting to give an answer, only to be overlooked (again, we understand), you have to ask how dysfunctional our policies and institutions are that such a plaintive representation of discrimination still has urgency. In [MIS]CONCEIVE, the classroom is a predominant site of contest where language and history must be brought to account for their garbling and their omissions. The dancers speak out to find each other and themselves: “me, you? same? different? same but different.”
Interrupting the activity abruptly, Kelly strides to the front of the stage to give us a good-humoured history of the playground game known as ‘Chinese Whispers’ or, he tells us, ‘Arab Telephone’ or ‘Russian Scandal.’ In this section Kelly has capitalised on his easy charisma. When the audience is asked to play along, we all know how it’s meant to end—with baffling and preferably hilarious gobbledygook—but it doesn’t quite work this time, maybe we misunderstood the instructions?
That misinformation leads to mistaken beliefs continues as the work’s central preoccupation when the dance resumes, which from here is at its most theatrically gestural. The dancers invoke a litany of caricatures and grotesques that veer from complaints (“they’re lazy”) to fears (“they steal”) to mythical beasts (drop-bears and unicorns). The poses are cartoonish but the statement is clearly made—it doesn’t take an especially sharp pin to puncture assumptions that are full of hot air. It’s the more ambiguous shifts of character that intrigue—a dancer briefly transformed from hoodie-shrouded brute to sashaying doll. The hoodies worn by each of the dancers are employed throughout as tools of conjuring and concealment; they’re folded and rolled up, pulled over heads, used to make frantic writing on the floor.
In the final section of [MIS]CONCEIVE a recorded voice ranges over the issues already represented in the dance, making the work’s politics explicit. Again in the schoolroom, we’re rightly asked to read “from the first page, not starting in the middle” so that all contributors to history are acknowledged. The work presents evidence that damage and confusion result from accepting the smooth, potentially fictionalised surface of cultures, from wrong assumptions about appearances. But are we really all the same underneath, as this voice tells us? Is the audience let off lightly by this optimism? The threads that connect our watching bodies in the present to our complicated shadows in the past are tugged, but only gently. We’re left with a clear and measured, not furious, claim for identity.
–
Next Wave Festival: [MIS]CONCEIVE, choreographer Thomas ES Kelly, performers Thomas ES Kelly, Natalie Pelarek, Caleena Sansbury, Taree Sansbury, Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne, 17-22 May
Alison Finn works in criminal law in Melbourne, with particular interests in the law and the philosophy of human dignity, privacy, surveillance and ‘big data.’ She also writes creatively in various forms and continues a contemporary dance practice.
This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.
DanceWrite was conducted by RealTime editors Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter with mentors Andrew Fuhrmann and Jana Perkovic. The workshop was an initiative of Hannah Matthews as part of her Australia Council-funded Sharing Space program and was presented in collaboration with Next Wave and RealTime.
The opening twangs of Beyoncé’s “Formation” resound through the theatre at the close of Amrita Hepi and Jahra Wasasala’s performance of Passing. This is no mixing desk accident. The recent release by this pop star—a self-possessed woman whose public persona embodies both sensuality and aggression—canvases the problems inherent in enduring Western constructs of cultural value and authenticity, and offers a loud call to arms to women of colour, to embrace and act on the power of their various heritages. Big claims for a catchy tune that features several lines of “I slay (hey);” but it felt like a simultaneously playful and knowing gesture from Hepi and Wasasala with which to send off the audience.
Hold up. How did we get to heady “Western constructs of cultural value and authenticity” so quickly? Let’s backtrack a moment to reflect on the picture that Hepi and Wasasala painted for the audience over the course of an hour, before that Beyoncé moment. The two women begin the work with an homage to centuries of voyeurism in the representation of women in a quiet moment of private reverie, and certainly not returning the gaze.
Stationed in the far corners at the back of the stage and silhouetted, the commanding forms of Hepi and Wasasala—dressed minimally in low-backed leotards and shorts—enact a stylised sequence of hair-washing over large steel buckets. They are accompanied by Lavern Lee’s soothing, watery sounds and a growing organic pattern projected on a screen behind (the only moment in which this screen-based element added aesthetic value to the performance on the night viewed, perhaps due to a technical error). This first image by Hepi and Wasasala firmly establishes us in the position of viewer.
The sensuality of this serene image quickly descends into violence. The women, bent over the buckets, push their heads below the water as though by an unseen force. They retreat, spluttering and gasping for air, only to return to the action seconds later. This sequence gains terrifying momentum as they force the buckets around the room, heads submerged. Are they drinking, drunk, possessed? The dramatic end to this anxiety-ridden passage occurs with their abrupt collision in the middle of the space. Here, they engage in a gentle, and rather witty exchange while hovering, with relative ease, in powerful squats. What ensues is a discovery of self and ‘other,’ of recognition of the self in the other, and of establishing difference. They pass between them gestures and sounds, a physical and verbal process of mimicry and repetition to find a common language.
A strong rhythm of exchange is established, but also of sensuality and violence: compelling sequences of aggression and affection. A moment in which Wasasala’s palm is pressed firmly against Hepi’s face, while Hepi grips Wasalsala’s throat, dissolves into a tight embrace, before the two recoil. The contrasts and emotions suggested by such actions are particularly moving when witnessed within one body, as in an extended sequence where Wasasala is tossed around the stage, simultaneously self-propelled and resisting her own motion.
A costuming device (designer Honey Long) introduced towards the middle of the work heightens the push and pull between the performers. It is a silky (and not inconsequentially) Caucasian skin-toned shirt with long open arms, part-straitjacket, part-designer wear—both associated with control. The extended arms, first only worn by Hepi, are used to evoke a battleground between the two. Seated, or at times crawling and low, Wasasala attempts to consume the lengths of fabric, while Hepi writhes to loosen them, at the same time seeming to be almost attempting to train or tame the other. Eventually Hepi wrestles free and neatly winds the arms around her body in a swift movement of elegant constraint, before doing the same to Wasasala. The latter had uttered the words, “I am both the colonised and the coloniser” earlier on; is this what we are seeing here? Are they mastering the oppressor’s language as a way of fighting back? This work boldly attempts to unpack the contemporary legacy of imperialist conceptions of the exotic.
The program guide tells us that Sydney-based Hepi is a woman of Bunjalung and Ngapuhi heritage (locating her ancestors in northern New South Wales and New Zealand), and New Zealand-born Wasasala is described as “having roots in many places around the world, but her Pacific heritage comes from the islands of Fiji” (Next Wave, artist biography). It’s not usual for a critic to mention the cultural origins of performers at this point in a review, rather than foregrounding them at the start. Such reference is in itself both necessary and problematic. What is to be included? What is left out? What does it do to geographically and culturally locate an individual? What struggles does this set up around perception, stereotype, authenticity and understanding?
These questions are really at the core of Passing. Indeed, there is a bold verbal sequence in which racial percentages are thrown around as value statements about connections to culture, to authenticity and skin colour. Amrita Hepi calls it at a moment in the middle of the performance. Jerkily moving as if to cleanse herself, to rid herself of a misconception about appearances, she halts in a moment of clarity and self-possession to cry out against the rigidity of categorisation: “That certificate of authenticity, I burnt it.”
–
Next Wave Festival: Passing, choreographer-performers Amrita Hepi, Jahra Wasasala, music producer Lavern Lee, costumes Honey Long, headpiece and flora design Jesse Carey, lighting Sophie Penkethman-Young; Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne, 12-18 May
Sydney-based Miriam Kelly is currently the curator and collection coordinator at Artbank, sub-editor of the visual arts and culture publication Sturgeon and Chair of the online magazine Runway Experimental Australian Art. Kelly has curated exhibitions independently, for Artbank and for the National Gallery of Australia in her former role as assistant curator of Australian paintings and sculpture and published on a range of contemporary and historical areas of Australian art.
This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.
DanceWrite was conducted by RealTime editors Virginia Baxter and Keith Gallasch with mentors Andrew Fuhrmann and Jana Perkovic. The workshop was an initiative of Hannah Matthews as part of her Australia Council-funded Sharing Space program and was presented in collaboration with Next Wave and RealTime.
Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, Next Wave 2016
photo Gregory Lorenzutti
Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, Next Wave 2016
Squinting through a dense cloud of smoke, I find my way to a seat on the far wall of the theatre. So focused are the performers, moving through the space to low vibrating sounds, that our entrance goes unnoticed. Only after the show do I realise how important these first few moments were: the audience softening their vision, preparing to let go of spectatorship and allow sensation to move between us and the performers.
Admission Into The Everyday Sublime merges aesthetic and kinesthetic experience, translating the visual and sonic into sensation. The precise design of the space works to seduce the audience into the body of the work—four symmetrical plinths, two neatly piled cloths, the edges of the space invisible, borders erased by smoke. The performers, two female dancers and two male musicians, move with precision, each decision seemingly purposeful, yet abstract.
Repetition gives the work a sense of ritual. In Separating Hydrogen From Water: A Primer, a Next Wave publication, Steiner writes: “There are words or sentences that I write over and over again, each time meaning something new to me.” This was evident throughout: persistent repetition toward the possibility of transcendence. The two men slowly rotate, a rock in one hand, the other palm open in a gesture of receiving; the dancers’ voices grumble into microphones. In another long passage, the two dancers prance and skip, tracing a long crescent shape, as if following the circuit of an equestrian track. With each repetition the actions become more expressive and the dancers’ attention deepens.
The two men slowly lower the rocks towards the floor: as the music ceases the rocks are dropped in perfect unison; a small but resounding gesture. The two female dancers walk toward the rocks, arms across torsos, as if drawing bows, ready to release the dance. They dance with chaotic exactitude, a sublime unison. Loose limbs are tossed, the energy released reverberating through their bodies in unexpected ways. There are quick flicks of the hands, light elevation as weight transfers from foot to foot and legs swipe spiralling through the body. The sequence breaks briefly, the dancers re-positioning themselves each around a rock. Movement returns, delicate and fiery.
In an earlier scene, warm light glows through the still-pervading smoke; two sources of light cast the dancers as silhouettes. Each man lies atop a long fabric sheath, the women pulling them along parallel lines. With only the outline of the bodies and cloth visible, the lighting removes the detailing of the bodies so we observe the weight slowly dragged. The space, lit by Matthew Adey, feels expansive; his signature minimalist style is essential to the transformation of the theatre.
In the opening scene all four performers are moving in the space; intermittent duets, male and female. The relationships evoke transmission—of energy. The women, accessing a trance-like state, weave energetic pathways through the space, returning to the men to enact transmission—for example with a resounding slap to the chest. There is an emotionality and sensuality to the relationships, as in a kind of healing practice. Lilian Steiner lowers Atticus Bastow toward the floor, their legs intertwined. She stretches out her arm and firmly plants it on his chest. Then stillness: the transmission. She leaves.
At the show’s climax the lighting shifts our attention to a large painting revealed at the end of the space. Its size and position suggest something almost sacred, an atmosphere of mingled terror and fascination. A deity summoned by the performance? The light on the painting alters in colour, transforming between organic and inorganic textures. These become felt sensations until white light reveals grey metallic paint, its ‘true’ surface. The sound grinds, loud motors burble, yet something about it feels animalistic, a purring rhythm.
It seems a belief in the work’s potential for transcendence is vital, much like the importance of faith in spirituality and religion. In the first few moments, I decided to go with this work, to believe in the performers’ sincerity. Yet at times this was hard work. Did being positioned as outsiders on the edge of the performance space prevent fuller engagement? Although Lilian Steiner created a powerful sensorial experience, I wonder whether the work offered true admission into her cult of the sublime?
–
Next Wave Festival 2016: Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, choreographer Lilian Steiner, performers Atticus Bastow, Briarna Longville, Jonathon Nokes, Lilian Steiner, sound Atticus Bastow, Jonathon Nokes, lighting Matthew Adey, costumes Shio Otani, commissioned artwork Ash Keating; Arts House, North Melbourne, 18-22 May
Chloe Chignell is an artist working with dance and choreography in an expanded field. She is co-curator of Dance Speaks, was assistant editor of Dancehouse Diary and developed Indigo Dance Magazine through Performing Arts Forum, France.
This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.
DanceWrite was conducted by RealTime editors Virginia Baxter and Keith Gallasch with mentors Andrew Fuhrmann and Jana Perkovic. The workshop was an initiative of Hannah Matthews as part of her Australia Council-funded Sharing Space program and was presented in collaboration with Next Wave and RealTime.
Early in Desert Body Creep, amid scattered clumps of fabric recalling road-kill, Angela Goh enacts her own abduction. Tumbling feet over head in a spotlight beam, she stares up and out at some sight unseen. The synthetic guitar twang of the soundtrack together with Goh’s grungy tracksuit pants and sneakers give the moment the strung-out feel of so many backwater x-file narratives.
The piece’s title goes some way to evoking this half-way-to-nowhere landscape, where mundanity merges with the otherworldly. This is a land forsaken, where life slithers through the cracks, coiling and recoiling beneath the almost-too-bright light. In this harsh environment Goh performs her becoming and eventual unbecoming.
Connecting an almost metre-long, giant gummi worm to the base of her neck, and animating it with the movement of her spine as she crawls on hands and knees towards the audience, Goh submits to a world in which the dead and un-dead are playfully symbiotic. The worm is, from this moment of invasion, Goh’s mode of conceptual excavation, embodied or reflected in each new episode.
The dancer is able to conjure its presence physically and, in a striking sequence, aurally. Sitting before a sampler, microphone in hand, she multi-tracks herself singing wordless harmonies. The sounds are extracted like vermicular parasites from Goh’s gaping mouth. Harmonies breed and loop to form a cacophonous other, the cycle rendering the voice abject, no longer a voice but a creature in its own right, stretching and writhing the length of the space.
As in any dreamscape, one thing is always in a state of becoming another. Shadows climb the walls, human screams emerge from the indistinct mass of noise. Goh, open-mouthed and sliding prone, ‘consumes’ the strewn fabrics, only then to rise and hunch beneath them—zombie-like, road-kill reanimated.
Abduction, possession, reanimation—it’s the stuff of midnight movie specials, and apt, given that the piece is, in many ways, a horror story. Yet it’s never quite clear what, or who, is the monster, as every object, no matter how seemingly benign, is made monstrous, only to be consumed, or contained, so that the audience comes instead to be haunted by a cool and unflinching emptiness. The audience’s fear then, is drawn not from things being given life, from spent objects rising from the dead or the dancer transmogrifying behind ever more hideous guises. The fear is that there will come a point, maybe inside this very room, when there is nothing left to consume or transform. The fear is not of an insatiable hunger, but of infinite reprisal without chaos, art-making without desire or fear.
As the performance draws towards its conclusion, Goh becomes the worm, only to emerge naked from its signifier, a velour cocoon. In an act of domesticity no less horrifying, she stuffs her cast-off skin and its contents into a zip-lock bag and uses a vacuum cleaner to render the package airless and without excess. This action is accompanied only by the faint vacuum scream, the sound of empty space being torn from one place to fill another. Here the piece loses its momentum, gaining clarity to its detriment. For in this moment, Angela Goh seemingly unintentionally becomes the model post- post- artist, turning nothing into nothing to say something about nothing in a way that fails to give the exchange the silhouette of something more sinister.
She then stands on a vibrating exercise platform, the kind that a tracksuit-wearing UFO enthusiast from the suburbs might use to tone her glutes. With her back to the audience, Goh allows the machine to shake loose the last vestiges of herself as concrete, the image of her rippling skin rendering her core-less.
The artist is incomplete, empty, and she is free. As the lights dim, she sits at an upright piano at the side of the stage, and plays a tune. It’s almost familiar, leaving the audience to make contact with the piece from a place they’ve since left behind.
–
Next Wave Festival 2016: Desert Body Creep, choreographer, performer Angela Goh, sound design Matt Cornell; Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne, 17-22 May
Elyssia Bugg is a Melbourne-based writer, filmmaker and dance teacher. Her writing has appeared in Voiceworks, Lip Magazine and the RMIT Creative Writing Anthology. She is currently working on a short film about aliens and oblivion.
This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.
DanceWrite was conducted by RealTime editors Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter with mentors Andrew Fuhrmann and Jana Perkovic. The workshop was an initiative of Hannah Matthews as part of her Australia Council-funded Sharing Space program and was presented in collaboration with Next Wave and RealTime.
Two Indigenous ‘sisters’ come together to bond over the simple ritual of bathing. Their presence is arrestingly physical; Amrita Hepi and Jahra Wasasala are defiantly strong, sensuous women, similar in appearance. Dipping into buckets of water, they wash and spit. Together, they vocally tease out the words and attitudes society throws at them, along with those they’re adopting.
Before the performance, Hepi acknowledged the presence of her mother and her “mother’s mother” in the audience tonight. The inter-generational significance of sisterhood in Passing couldn’t be more apparent. Although ostensibly examining the racial stereotyping of Indigenous peoples of Australia and the South Pacific encounter—at one point the performers cite percentages of difference in skin colour—Passing is more a testament to Indigenous women of the past and their relationship to those of the present. Passing holds the much broader responsibility of bearing the legacy of continuous storytelling, of developing new languages to replace those lost. As Wasasala asks, “So, what happens when your first language is dead?”
Passing’s new language is spoken, cried and danced. Aggressive floor work, writhing and wailing remind us that beyond the performers’ physical grace lies a history of relentless struggle, assault and suffering. The two women inhabit distinct physicalities: Wasasala attacks the floor with her body, Hepi uses hers to articulate words with staccato precision, but the chemistry between them is never in doubt. They move within each others’ space with intimacy and familiarity. The movement quality of Passing is highly tactile: skin against skin, full body against tarquette. Honey Long’s tonal costumes—long swathes of fabric binding and defining the performers’ bodies—further accentuate an awareness of skin and possession in the work.
Colonial eras are evoked in a short series of vignettes—a patronising early movie-reel sound recording asserts male, distinctly British propaganda, “All of me,” sung by Billie Holiday, resonates with the power of absent solidarity—before Passing arrives at its crux.
Hepi binds Wasasala, then addresses her prisoner. The hip-hop influenced articulation of her monologue—the body pops, the crisp hand-flicking—implies a distinctly 21st century attitude towards her heritage. “We’re all the same in the spirit,” she utters, not as a platitude. She climbs onto Wasasala’s prostrate body, forcing her further into the ground.
Elsewhere in the work, Wasasala’s poem ‘bloo/d/runk’ is recited: “I savour the after-taste of an apathetic ancestor.” With the mention of spirit and acknowledgment of previous generations it’s a small leap to read Wasasala now as a captive ancestor. Ancestor or present-day sister, her response is forceful rather than complacent. The result is a confrontational physical conversation. The women are well-matched in physique and their struggle feels genuine. Hands at each others’ throats, the balance of power shifts uncertainly before they finally arrive at a kindred understanding.
When their struggle subsides, the water in their buckets is combined into one source. Hepi crouches before Wasasala, and invites her to drink. Wailing, but more quietly than before, Wasasala repeatedly kisses Hepi’s forehead, gently releasing water across her face. The water traces the contours of her open eyes and cheeks; tears shed and shared.
–
Next Wave Festival: Passing, choreographer-performers Amrita Hepi, Jahra Wasasala, music producer Lavern Lee, costumes Honey Long, headpiece and flora design Jesse Carey; lighting Sophie Penkethman-Young; Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne, 12-18 May
Maximilian plays with fashion, dance, choreography, photography, video, performance production and direction in no particular order or hierarchy. His formal training is in design. His recent work includes Bless the Beasts: Shibuya Summer (Melbourne Fringe 2015).
This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.
DanceWrite was conducted by RealTime editors Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter with mentors Andrew Fuhrmann and Jana Perkovic. The workshop was an initiative of Hannah Matthews as part of her Australia Council-funded Sharing Space program and was presented in collaboration with Next Wave and RealTime.
Through the wilderness of birdsong and a thumping, urban score, a school bell rings. Class is in session and, in Thomas ES Kelly’s MIS(CONCEIVE), the curriculum is one of unlearning.
Kelly is interested in constructing and then deconstructing, through sound, movement and speech the preconceptions of what it means to be an urban Aboriginal person in Australia. Early on he evokes a classroom, where each of the four dancers, in a uniform of grey tracksuits, hoodies tied neatly around their shoulders, take it in turns to raise their hand. They do so enthusiastically, desperately, as they wait to be called on. Though they have the answers, they’re made to stand in silence.
They take to folding and unfolding their jumpers, rolling them up to suggest pens that they use to complete assignments unseen. In light of recent events involving racial profiling, this image is potent: a supposed costume of thuggery used as a means of expression, albeit not the one many assign to it. As the dancers repeat the folding phrases, stereotypes and assumptions are carefully unpacked and repacked.
This sequence escalates as one of the four dancers tries harder, works longer and faster at completing each gestural repetition. Eventually the other three dancers isolate her, donning their hoods and performing violent pivoting movement punctuated by moments of rigid pausing as she clutches her jumper and loiters with uncertainty some distance away. The lone dancer is faced with the decision to either embrace exception or expectation. It’s a simple equation, one or the other, but the sequence ends before it’s resolved.
There is a mathematical thread woven through this work, illustrated most clearly as the dancers alternately take centre stage and try in vain to articulate verbally the simultaneity of their difference and similarity. Eventually, Kelly will deliver a monologue warning against assumptions drawn in black and white. And yet, there are no grey areas in the physical execution of his choreography. Instead there is an exactness, a sense of the well-rehearsed that implies the dancers have given this lesson many times before.
In a sequence in which a voiceover conveys the results of a survey comparing the fictions people associate with indigenous experience to the characteristics they attribute to mythical creatures, the dancers strike poses—vampires, mermaids and unicorns are mixed in with all manner of assumptions about welfare and substance abuse. The sequence is funny, until later, the outlines of the same poses are perceptible in what otherwise appears to be a phrase of pure movement—dragon fire, nicotine suck—among a pastiche of rhythmic circular stomping that is equally familiar in its distinct Aboriginality. The precision of each recognisable posture is striking as without the set-up, the repeated motifs would likely go unnoticed by the audience, taken for granted as just movement in a medium that dictates it.
Thomas ES Kelly is privileging his audience by revealing to them the kind of preconceptions that might otherwise slip by unnoticed in the movement of the everyday. Yet he is also illustrating how these notions can shift, how given time they can become warped, or disappear entirely, for better or worse. He is at play with this concept, encouraging the audience to be implicated in the process as he instigates a game of Chinese Whispers where, though the original phrase is inevitably lost, the intention of the piece as a whole takes on new clarity.
This sense of play and imagined realities takes the audience back to the place or time where notions of race and class are first conceived. It’s here, in the fictitious schoolyard, that the audience must partake in doing the math. Kelly declares in his closing monologue that “we are all the same,” a claim that he seemingly has been trying to dismantle over the course of the previous 45 minutes. From nobody, to many bodies, different bodies, to one experience. Is it possible to arrive at one utopian whole? It’s here that I wish to raise my hand, raise the question, as to whether I’ve drawn the right conclusions. Instead, I go back to the start and begin again.
–
Next Wave Festival: [MIS]CONCEIVE, choreographer Thomas ES Kelly, performers Thomas ES Kelly, Natalie Pelarek, Caleena Sansbury, Taree Sansbury, Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne, 17-22 May
Elyssia Bugg is a Melbourne-based writer, filmmaker and dance teacher. Her writing has appeared in Voiceworks, Lip Magazine and the RMIT Creative Writing Anthology. She is currently working on a short film about aliens and oblivion.
This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.
DanceWrite was conducted by RealTime editors Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter with mentors Andrew Fuhrmann and Jana Perkovic. The workshop was an initiative of Hannah Matthews as part of her Australia Council-funded Sharing Space program and was presented in collaboration with Next Wave and RealTime.
Walls lined in grey metal, hanging cords, piled fabric and electronics litter the space; I am in the carcass of a theatre. Angela Goh stands casually, fully illuminated, the theatre baring its skeleton; what expectations can I have of something so dead?
In a “post post-everything world” (cited by Goh in the Next Wave program guide), we are left (and begin) with an endless expanse of time. A wasteland of used parts, the theatre sags. What came before? And what is left? Desert Body Creep moves without urgency, Angela Goh performs with clarity, patience and endurance; she seems not to make promises.
In this work, choreography is understood as the assemblage of elements: the body becomes a material, much like the space, lighting and sound. A series of images and scenes is constructed through careful marriage of sound, object and body. In a powerful moment, Goh sits with microphone in hand, mouth open, to sound a long high note. It strikes me as a visceral gesture, her physicality so involved in this simple and haunting scene. A looping echo multiplies into a body of sound.
A sense of excavation pervades the space, moving beneath the ground and below the skin. The dancer executes a continuous backward roll and burrows under a floating smoke landscape. The body grinds down, inverting the dancerly ideal of flight into that of digging. In another scene, a series of erratic passages across the space, Goh crawls under the sheets of fabric, momentarily becoming monster or ghost.
The long green worm-girl slowly labours across the space, making no apologies, continuing and continuing. A brief pause as the body contorts inside the fabric, then labouring, labouring, until it digests the last piece of fabric. The feeding leaves me exhausted, the worm rests heavy; so do I. The mouth opens once more and Goh crawls out, now nude. Suddenly the worm seems much larger. The body looks tiny as the flesh emerges, all heaviness left inside the deflated green tube.
A guitar solo blasts as Goh steps onto an electronic wobble board, her flesh in a furious shake. Sound ceases. Goh presses a button increasing the machine’s speed, and sound returns. Each element in this scene is given the time it needs. As the pause-click-and-play repeats, the flesh ripples furiously. And I notice myself calling it ‘the flesh’, becoming detached from Goh, who’s now a vibrating light pink mass in the formation of a body.
When I watch dance I find myself looking for what the piece is asking of me: how am I being asked to participate? Am I performing my role? Yet during Desert Body Creep, I realised I was, in fact, fine just where I was; our relationship was simple, I was there and so was Angela Goh. I felt comfortable at a distance, I didn’t need to go ‘into’ the work; illusion was of no interest, but instead what became important was a fiction located firmly in the actual. Constructed with stark visibility, the scenes dealt in real affect—absurd images in real space and real time. As Goh slid inside a long green velour tube and began to eat piles of fabric, she didn’t become a worm, but remained girl-as-worm, feeding on dead costumes. I felt a desire to believe in the transformation, to slip into the imaginary, but the performance did not ask that of me. It was far more absurd and revealing to remain in the actual.
It was all right there before us, a fiction so mundane it became unbelievable. If the imaginary implies a certain elevation from the actual, Desert Body Creep uses fiction to burrow down—a deep fantasy. With sharp persistence Desert Body Creep avoided illusion, posing an interesting problem: what is left to imagine in a post post-everything world? Does fantasy now lie in the actual? A girl, in a worm, eating fabric?
–
Next Wave Festival 2016: Desert Body Creep, choreographer, performer Angela Goh, sound design Matt Cornell; Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne, 17-22 May
Chloe Chignell is an artist working with dance and choreography in an expanded field. She is co-curator of Dance Speaks, was assistant editor of Dancehouse Diary and developed Indigo Dance Magazine through Performing Arts Forum, France.
This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.
DanceWrite was conducted by RealTime editors Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter with mentors Andrew Fuhrmann and Jana Perkovic. The workshop was an initiative of Hannah Matthews as part of her Australia Council-funded Sharing Space program and was presented in collaboration with Next Wave Festival and RealTime.
Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, Next Wave 2016
photo Gregory Lorenzutti
Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, Next Wave 2016
As bright white lights dim to a dull red glow in a thick haze of smoke, all sound drops to a dull, bass-filled growl. Two male figures stand motionless and strikingly silhouetted, foreboding, almost threatening in this dark redness. I trace the outline of the human form, the shape created by loose strands of hair, the curve of a shoulder, the formlessness of loose clothing, and that forearm, outstretched to support a rock the size of the open palm. This is one of those moments that I will take away from the performance that personally resonates for reasons that I may never quite know. It is neither from start nor finish, I can’t place what happened before or after, and as other memories diminish and merge, this stays crisp.
Is this some kind of experience of the sublime? Can we in fact witness the sublime in the present day? In the everyday? The word ‘sublime’ carries heavy associations of danger and wildness and a positioning of the human race as belittled in the face of the insurmountable grandeur of nature. There are certainly those moments when the mundane delights; the way a beam of light gleans dust particles along its journey towards the earth momentarily quickens the breath and sharpens the senses. But those moments are so fleeting that we mostly miss them within the pace and distractions of the everyday. Lilian Steiner invites us into an immersive space that seeks to encourage a renewed state of awareness.
Over the hour of her Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, Steiner offers a compelling and hypnotic rhythm, reaching both extremes of feverishly fast and achingly slow across platforms of vision, sound and movement. Steiner’s work is highly stylised and tightly choreographed. She and co-performer Briarna Longville move almost seamlessly at times between simplified motion—running, turning, walking—and contrasting phrases characterised by open graceful lines suggest Steiner’s balletic training. In one extended sequence they traverse the space, bodies elongated in a type of elegant ‘trot,’ as in a human form of dressage, while in another their frantic motion feels as though they are completing a full day’s mundane movements in the space of a minute. I started to read playing basketball, washing the body, hailing a taxi among other things in their wild abstract gestures.
This work slows us down, requiring an extension of focus to engage with the subtlety and evocative power of its abstraction. In a superbly drawn out sequence, the two petitely built women drag their male counterparts Jonathon Nokes and Atticus Bastow on long lengths of cloth across the stage. The men are curled up at one end, while the women hold the length close to the opposite creating a cradle effect. Completed in near darkness, the action is slow and purposeful, sculpting visual form out of the effort of shifting such weight. When the women reach centre stage they turn to face the resting men. They carefully re-grip the fabric and with feet firmly planted on the floor, bodies erect, they lean back in an exquisite cantilever. Even in the low light we can see the sweat glistening on their necks. It crosses my mind what an extraordinary evocation this is of women’s unseen labour; the thought passes just as quickly as the performers enter a new movement phrase. Steiner writes of her desire to create “kinesthetic experiences;” there is certainly an unavoidable empathetic response elicited from such passages.
It feels like Steiner is non-verbally training the audience in a form of meditation. The audience is positioned within a traverse arrangement—part chapel, part valley—bookended by four ominous podiums at one end and blackness at the other. Splitting the audience either side of the stage at once heightens our awareness of each other, but also of the roles that attention and observation play in this piece. These ideas are eloquently articulated in Steiner’s finale: a classic ‘slow art’ moment.
Steiner and her co-performers settle statue-like on the podiums, and one performer provides experimental sounds that are like fragments of information being gleaned from all that is buzzing soundlessly in the world around us. In the blackness at the opposite end of the room, red and green lights slowly reveal a central ovular form. As the colours intensify, they also illuminate the surrounding textural quality of an expansive painting. Is this an aerial image of the Earth, perhaps the cosmos? Incrementally, over what must have been about 10 minutes, earthy tones in Ash Keating’s canvas shift as the light whitens to expose the oval to be in fact bright blue surrounded by silvery black. I can’t shake that feeling that I am staring at the sky through a hole in the wall, despite knowing that it is night outside. It is a process that rewards in a way not dissimilar to the perceptual experiences within the ‘sky space’ installations of American visual artist James Turrell.
Hypnotic and mesmerising, Admission Into The Everyday Sublime reminds us that art and abstraction are often most enriched with extended viewing. Ironically, one of the things that thrills me most across all art forms is not necessarily technical prowess, but this capacity of something or someone to re-awaken the value of a mundane moment—providing the perceptual tools of insight that can admit us into the everyday sublime.
–
Next Wave Festival 2016: Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, choreographer Lilian Steiner, performers Atticus Bastow, Briarna Longville, Jonathon Nokes, Lilian Steiner, sound Atticus Bastow, Jonathon Nokes, lighting Matthew Adey, costumes Shio Otani, commissioned artwork Ash Keating; Arts House, North Melbourne, 18-22 May
Sydney-based Miriam Kelly is currently the curator and collection coordinator at Artbank, sub-editor of the visual arts and culture publication Sturgeon and Chair of the online magazine Runway Experimental Australian Art. Kelly has curated exhibitions independently, for Artbank and for the National Gallery of Australia in her former role as assistant curator of Australian paintings and sculpture and published on a range of contemporary and historical areas of Australian art.
This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.
DanceWrite was conducted by RealTime editors Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter with mentors Andrew Fuhrmann and Jana Perkovic. The workshop was an initiative of Hannah Matthews as part of her Australia Council-funded Sharing Space program and was presented in collaboration with Next Wave and RealTime.
Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, Next Wave 2016
photo Gregory Lorenzutti
Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, Next Wave 2016
The audience files into Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, to find themselves entering a work already in progress. Four dancers move through the smoke-filled space, administering light pressure to the spines of their counterparts, jogging when the desire appears to overcome them, wrestling vigorously with one another only to mutually yield. It’s a scene of wellness-seeking that the audience is eased into tenderly through the softening of spatial and temporal boundaries.
In her 2016 book, Cure Jo Marchant investigates alternate healing practices, positing that the more time a practitioner spends with their patient, the more likely it is that the patient will feel better on leaving the clinic. Like Marchant, Lilian Steiner’s latest work is similarly concerned with restorative practices, drawing on everything from tai chi to crystal healing to yoga in an ever more abstract evocation of the question, “and how does it make you feel?”
Throughout this process, Steiner applies time, or rather, duration as a kind of salve. It is used liberally and as a means of elevating the atmosphere of the work to a higher, meditative state. In an extended phrase in which red light fills the space, the two male performers, heads tilted slightly, turn on the spot like slow-motion Dervishes. Each cradles a rock in the palm of a raised hand, axis points within the repetitious spinning. This sequence is drawn out to what feels like an age, yet it never truly achieves the revelatory quality that the work’s title suggests. Instead the incremental nature of the choreography drove me to distraction.
Perhaps unfortunately, the visual proximity of other bodies in the room provides ample means of diversion. Steiner has arranged the space traverse style with two seated rows on either side. The audience is consequently always looking, consciously or unconsciously, at their counterparts on the opposite side of the room. Though it promotes a sense of connectivity and an awareness of one’s own body, it is of a body, bodies, on the outside of the work—admission into the everyday sublime without the option of complete submission.
There are simple aesthetic moments, near-still images through which the work touches on the title’s promise of transcendence. In one phrase the four dancers stand backlit in the dense white fog, so that the negative space that rings them becomes a kind of aura. In another the dancers oscillate minutely, leaning at alien angles as a deep, bass note reverberates through the space. These moments are beautiful, but largely unmoving.
The work culminates with the dancers retreating to settle atop individual plinths, their bodies lit from above. Four humours, or temperaments, unmoving except for the two male performers, who sit behind laptops, one with microphone in hand emitting a heavily distorted gurgling. As the phrase stretches on, the score bloating with intensity, a painting at the opposite end of the space comes into focus. Using the grand dimensions of the room to advantage, the image stretches nearly floor to ceiling. Slowly, in keeping with the meter of Steiner’s work, the light transforms the image from carnal red to exultant gold. As the house lights come up and the dancers exit discreetly, it fades to dull metallic grey. The doors open, but the score continues; the audience waits, uncertain whether this is their cue to leave. After a time they applaud and confusedly file out, the temporal environment of the piece once again tapering to a point outside of my involvement.
Endurance has the potential to bring one closer to the divine. People seek it out in the form of physical challenge, religious experience and art. Yet time, and the ability to withstand great undiluted doses of it, is not a cure-all. It cannot necessarily alleviate the recurrent symptoms of exhaustion that are produced by the actively languid. That requires some level of preconceived belief in the effectiveness of the practice. As I left the venue I dwelt on the question, “and how did that make you feel?” only to come up blank but for the conclusion that I felt nothing much at all.
Next Wave Festival 2016: Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, choreographer Lilian Steiner, performers Atticus Bastow, Briarna Longville, Jonathon Nokes, Lilian Steiner, sound Atticus Bastow, Jonathon Nokes, lighting Matthew Adey, costumes Shio Otani, commissioned artwork Ash Keating; Arts House, North Melbourne, 18-22 May
Elyssia Bugg is a Melbourne-based writer, filmmaker and dance teacher. Her writing has appeared in Voiceworks, Lip Magazine and the RMIT Creative Writing Anthology. She is currently working on a short film about aliens and oblivion.
This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.
DanceWrite was conducted by RealTime editors Virginia Baxter and Keith Gallasch with mentors Andrew Fuhrmann and Jana Perkovic. The workshop was an initiative of Hannah Matthews as part of her Australia Council-funded Sharing Space program and was presented in collaboration with Next Wave and RealTime.
“What happens when your first language is dead?” A rhetorical question asked by one of two dancers who stand firmly; yet these very words uproot them. Displaced from a point of origin, languages dead. This is why this performance is so vital. Passing produces new dialogues through the performers and through us.
Next Wave likewise attempts to create “new discourses in contemporary art and culture, listening hard to whose voices are not being heard.” The festival program reveals diverse cultural representation reflecting contemporary Australia—a more radical and inclusive conversation.
Described as a “physical dialogue” (program note) the movement in Passing is heavy with symbols, at every moment feeling a responsibility to communicate. Amrita Hepi and Jahra Wasasala perform with urgency, their explosive gestures reaching beyond themselves. I feel the tone in their bodies, as if the movement presses out against their skin and stretches toward the audience.
However, movement often feels less essential than the dramatic physicality of the performers. Wasasala, lying flat on the floor, performs rapid rotations, the movement sequence somewhat clumsy as a bold leg swing is repeated; yet the strength of her energy expanding across the floor carries this moment.
Hepi and Wasasala offer an intimate look at the complexity of cultural identity. In the opening image, two pails of water frame a bathing scene, a private moment made public, and an invitation into the personal. Hands draw over the contours of faces to pull long, black hair skyward in a slow and deliberate action. The performativity of this gesture invites our gaze.
The costumes, designed by Honey Long, take on a sinuous quality; elongated sleeves are held taut, connecting the two bodies. This is the first moment of physical contact between the performers; the clothing’s colour evokes skin, wrapping the bodies in further layers of identity. Hepi, as aggressor, roughly ties the sleeves, forming a bodice on Wasasala. Their relationship throughout is fraught, hurtling between aggression and tenderness. Is this tumultuous relationship descriptive of the tension between cultural heritage and contemporary identity?
The use of spoken word is very powerful; it feels essential to the work. Yet when performed with movement, the detail of the text sometimes makes the movement material seem underdeveloped. In one moment, Hepi climbs over Wasasala’s body as if it’s terrain, calling out percentages, referring to an earlier moment of dialogue when percentages of full cream milk were used as a metaphor for race and skin colour,“10%, 35%, 70%.” Here, the movement in the duet lacks the potency of the text.
Passing exposes the complexity of cultural identity—degrees of skin colour, tradition and the contemporary—not offering solutions or answers. The final image sustains the tension within the relationship between the two performers: Wasasala holds Hepi’s head, lips to her forehead, water trickling down Hepi’s face. It is a curious ending: an unfamiliar ritual, an act of tenderness, or aggression?
Next Wave Festival: Passing, choreographer-performers Amrita Hepi, Jahra Wasasala, music producer Lavern Lee, costumes Honey Long, headpiece and flora design Jesse Carey, Sophie Penkethman-Young; Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne, 12-18 May
Chloe Chignell is an artist working with dance and choreography in an expanded field. She is co-curator of Dance Speaks, was assistant editor of Dancehouse Diary and developed Indigo Dance Magazine through Performing Arts Forum, France.
This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.
DanceWrite was conducted by RealTime editors Virginia Baxter and Keith Gallasch with mentors Andrew Fuhrmann and Jana Perkovic. The workshop was an initiative of Hannah Matthews as part of her Australia Council-funded Sharing Space program and was presented in collaboration with Next Wave and RealTime.
Performed by its maker, Angela Goh, Desert Body Creep gives us two shape-shifting protagonists: the female body and an oversized gummi worm. The opening sequences establish Goh in preludial mode, spot-lit and dressed in unremarkable, slightly retro leisurewear, she revolves with a gentle robotic slide, making inchoate arm gestures. Loud vintage-sounding pop and moody light suspend her in a kind of cinematic, soft-focus disco, but after a brief black-out the music changes to a twanging guitar soundtrack and she’s on the floor, looping repeatedly through a carefully decelerated backwards roll.
Enter, worm. Goh crawls towards the audience with an invertebrate sitting casually down the length of her spine (a nice visual pun). From William Blake’s invisible worm that flies in the night, to those in Frankenstein that “inherited the wonders of the eye and the brain,” to Mercutio’s howl in Romeo and Juliet that he will soon be food for worms—this is a powerful signifier that death is in the room. On the other hand, here is a rubbery, very cute, super bouncy-looking and slightly pitiable lolly worm. Are we to be horrified, or charmed? When Goh runs a pole up and down the underbelly of the worm, intermittently animating it with absurd but believable character, she does so with attentiveness. There seems to be profound emotional content in this relationship.
From here Desert Body Creep is in full command of its themes—consumption, mutability, horror and decay are enacted in a series of transformations of Goh’s body. She moves to a microphone and multi-track recorder and after establishing a screeching choir of high notes, wheels slowly backwards in terror, her mouth a petrified O. Once more there’s a strong cinematic feel to the music and the slowness of it all, horror and sci-fi film tropes of invasion, gore and monstrosity are increasingly conjured.
Transformation is a central concern in dance, which is fundamentally a licensed invasion of performers’ bodies by the choreographer; Yvonne Rainer used the word “transmission” to describe the process of transferring movement from one body to another. After handling the worm, Goh becomes one herself, jerking along the floor consuming pieces of fabric, which she then uses to throw cartoonish monster shapes. It’s funny and silly, but the replacement of one body with another, the work of worms, is still discomfiting. Rainer famously pointed out that “dance is hard to see.” Desert Body Creep gives us a plain symbol of the body’s (and therefore dance’s) inevitable decay. It also reminds us that if we are only looking for dance where we expect to find it (in a ‘performing’ body, in a ‘choreographed’ body) it’s hard to see in other movement.
The work is structured around successive, not integrated, scenes. Although Angela Goh seems to undergo a full metamorphosis when she is entirely swallowed by a green velour sheath, there’s no illusion. In fact, here she’s almost at her most human, the outline of her bowed head and shoulder clearly visible as she slides around, vacuuming up the clumps of fabric in her path. When she emerges naked (perhaps new) she unfussedly ties back her hair and drinks from a water bottle. We’re suddenly and awkwardly aware that the work has itself transformed into domestic, potentially private activity. Dance is hard to see.
Un-costumed now, Goh’s body achieves its most complete transformation when a motorised muscle-vibrating platform is put into the service of oscillating her flesh into increasingly intense ripples. The guitars are back and totally wailing, it’s unabashedly comical, yet somehow triumphant. After a while every part of her is jiggling and wobbling; even the folds of her elbows spiral.
There’s a modest denouement when the dancer walks calmly to a piano at the side of the stage and plays a few bars, perhaps a nod to the childhood lessons that are no longer necessary in this transformed desert.
Next Wave Festival 2016: Desert Body Creep, choreographer, performer Angela Goh, sound design Matt Cornell; Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne, 17-22 May
Alison Finn works in criminal law in Melbourne, with particular interests in the law and the philosophy of human dignity, privacy, surveillance and ‘big data.’ She also writes creatively in various forms and continues a contemporary dance practice.
This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.
DanceWrite was conducted by RealTime editors Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter with mentors Andrew Fuhrmann and Jana Perkovic. The workshop was an initiative of Hannah Matthews as part of her Australia Council-funded Sharing Space program and was presented in collaboration with Next Wave and RealTime.
We all have our monsters, our demons, those things we wrestle to come to grips with, to quash or overcome, perhaps daily. Right now, my monster is how to do justice to Angela Goh’s Desert Body Creep, a work in which Goh, alone on stage, struggles with her monster, evoked in the form of a worm.
Goh’s stage is furnished sparsely, like a contemporary installation art piece: a pile of fabric here, another flat on the floor over there; a microphone, a broom handle, some electronics and a piano. I didn’t notice the piano at first. It felt like the only natural presence in that space, perhaps a left-over from that morning’s community choir rehearsal at the little Northcote Town Hall studio. Goh has delineated a stage with black tarquette, but the rigging of lights is left exposed, as are the walls of the studio; hence the sense of the piano as natural.
I am surprised to see Goh standing patiently on stage, shifting from one foot to the other, not nervously, just slowly. She wanders to the side of the stage and drinks from a metal water bottle. Her face is emotionless, a mask framed by thick black hair dyed bright blonde. She’s dressed casually, in sneakers and mis-matching patterns, which give her the appearance of a child who has combined her favourite clothing with no regard for convention. Or perhaps she is just a woman, dressed as herself. It feels like she needed to see the audience enter, to clock us, before we spend 45 minutes watching her body and her battle. I remember this opening image—set and performer—in such detail as it is so intriguingly unspectacular and sets such a distinctive tone for the performance.
Lights dim and a familiar yet indistinct pop track plays. In one of only a small number of dramatically lit sequences, a spot reveals that Goh has entered a trance-like state, she won’t look at us again until her curtain call. She shifts her body slowly, almost imperceptibly at first. Sliding her feet across the floor, she establishes a series of purposeful shapes that are repeated slowly—hand following elbow, torso following legs—as though hearing the beat of the track at one-twentieth the speed. Here, Goh adds texture to her opening image, setting up a series of parameters—slowness, repetition and surreality—that she carries across the performance.
In these early stages, I am intrigued to find out how Goh will actually perform with “an oversized gummi worm,” as promised in her written introduction (which is accompanied by a digital image of the artist fancifully surfing a pink and blue serpent-like form through a desert). She knows we want to know—it is such a bizarre premise—but makes us wait. In the opening two trance-like scenes she starts a kind of journey towards the floor—perhaps the centre of the Earth—towards her worm, her monster.
It is thus almost unceremonious, a little humorous, when Goh introduces the flaccid, sticky form of the large but not exactly “oversized” worm. Her first actions of discovery and mimcry are equally hysterical and wonderful. On all fours, she positions the worm in relation to her own body by placing the invertebrate along the length of her spine as though training both it and herself. Then, like a puppeteer, she rolls the worm backwards and forwards over the broom handle, in deep concentration. These are delicate and sensual scenes that give no warning of the horror to come as Goh charts an eventual descent into full embodiment of the worm.
One of her most moving and unsettling images is achieved as she finally lowers herself all the way to the floor. Outstretched, she places her arms by her side and slowly rolls her shoulders to inch forward the chest, then stomach, pelvis and legs. Her chin pushes her head back to reveal her open mouth. It looks exceedingly uncomfortable as she wriggles forward pushing one of the outstretched fabrics with her mouth, as a worm would to dirt but as a woman should never have to. It is a bold evocation of the abject.
The long, following sequence—intended to be even more horrific, as indicated by a screaming soundscape—is a blur of Angela Goh in a state of possession traversing the stage, wrestling both with and as fictive monsters, until she herself has become an enormous, writhing worm form in a tube of pale green velour. In an allusion to both environmental destruction and personal cleansing we see Goh enact a frantic, yet still predominantly slow-moving and repetitive passage, cleansing the already sparse stage by ‘consuming’ all in her path into the belly of the beast.
Goh eventually emerges from the tube fully naked. This is another bold statement, that feels at first clichéd until it becomes apparent that no costume could convey the outcome of her battle sequence more accurately than her own skin. She stands, self possessed and for the first time since she began, breaks her trance. Goh punctuates the seriousness of her persona and the inferences of this work with moments of dry humour and this is one of them. Sweaty and naked, she takes a moment to drink from her water bottle, adorning herself only with a purple hair tie, then perfunctorily vacuum shrink-wraps the discarded ‘skin’, placing it to the side of the stage. I half expected her to dust off her hands.
While there is an implicit progression, Goh’s performance feels more like a striking collage of tableaux vivants. She ends the work with two of the more enduring images—which in themselves feel worthy of an essay contextualised by the work of Marina Abramovi? and the history of feminist performance art. In the first, Goh standing on a vibrating weight-loss machine, her back to the audience, slowly increases the speed of the vibration in several stages as the (minimal) fat on her taut body flails wildly until her whole flesh seems to have lost its solidity—all somehow perfectly in time with the increasing speed of a screaming guitar solo. Is she showing us that in embodying the qualities of the invertebrate, her monster, she has come to terms with it?
The second scene is Goh’s perfectly unspectacular finale. Still naked, she seats herself at the piano and slowly plays a simple two handed and vaguely familiar tune, as though recalling a muscle memory from the past. It is an ending that leaves the audience with more questions than answers. Is this a recollection of the song we heard at the start? What was the real nature of her battle, what did she learn from this time in/as the worm? Was this an allusion to the journey of a woman from childhood to adulthood? Or an acceptance, a harnessing and taming of her own internal monster? Is this final scene an indication of her new beginnings or a re-entry into an infinite loop?
Next Wave Festival 2016: Desert Body Creep, choreographer, performer Angela Goh, sound design Matt Cornell; Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne, 17-22 May
Sydney-based Miriam Kelly is currently the curator and collection coordinator at Artbank, sub-editor of the visual arts and culture publication Sturgeon and Chair of the online magazine Runway Experimental Australian Art. Kelly has curated exhibitions independently, for Artbank and for the National Gallery of Australia in her former role as assistant curator of Australian paintings and sculpture and published on a range of contemporary and historical areas of Australian art.
This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.
DanceWrite was conducted by RealTime editors Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter with mentors Andrew Fuhrmann and Jana Perkovic. The workshop was an initiative of Hannah Matthews as part of her Australia Council-funded Sharing Space program and was presented in collaboration with Next Wave and RealTime.
Lilian Steiner, Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, Next Wave 2016
photo Gregory Lorenzutti
Lilian Steiner, Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, Next Wave 2016
A gigantic navel—or rather, an image of one—hovers before us. Or maybe it’s an orifice. Or a hole in the heavens. In her program notes, choreographer Lilian Steiner promises “a performance unlike anything we’ve experienced before.” I have to agree: I can’t reconcile what I’m seeing. The moment falls near the end of the work. The journey here has been by turns tedious and exquisite, filled significantly by two men with small rocks in their hands turning slowly for a long time.
Admission Into The Everyday Sublime is apparently rooted in the belief that holistic practices, alternative therapies and somatic dance can themselves lead to transcendent experience. It also offers a reflection of the first world obsession with those practices and their commodification. Steiner re-assembles the creative team from her acclaimed project Noise Quartet Meditation (2014). While the team has synergy, the work takes time to find its own.
We enter a hall filled with smoke. Four performers—two men, two women—wear matching jersey uniforms. They could be day spa employees. They could be New Age devotees. In pairs, the performers wrestle each other to the ground. Their quick contact improv tackles release into erect poses. Each couple reaches a desperate stillness with one partner offering reiki-like healing gestures to the other. The performers separate and run until a new collision forms. The sequence repeats until the audience settles.
The performance simplifies; the pace declines. A bell sounds. The hall could be a temple. The temple darkens. The men are dragged slowly across the floor on lengths of fabric. The women quietly wrap the male performers with the fabrics, then unwrap them. From my viewpoint, the men seem to be asleep. The man seated next to me is asleep.
Now upright, each man holds a small rock in one hand and they turn in unison. Slowly. For what seems like a long time. Repetition and extended duration are hallmarks in the work. Are they intended to break down our resistance? I resist. What am I resisting? Investing in the premise? I shift uneasily in my seat. Three women opposite me hold heads in hands. The men keep turning. Exasperated, I shift my attention to the lighting grid. The light state changes to red and I start to appreciate Matthew Adey’s lighting design. Helped by the ever-present haze, the lighting feels concrete. Adey matches the work’s cosmic allusions by confidently pushing our perception of the venue’s volume. His investment reminds me that nothing here is incidental. I’m newly curious about the work’s potential outcome.
The energy in the room increases as Steiner and Longville prance pony-like around the floor’s perimeter. The dance erupts into release-technique torso twists and body sequencing. The dancers share a powerful drive as their low leaps surge through space. Both women have remarkable focus in their body placement, projecting gravity beyond poise. Their fingers and toes reach and curve the air. The sequence unravels from tight unison into urgent improvisation, but the attention to detail remains.
By now, the male performers have retired to sit guru-like atop plinths at one end of the room. Bastow and Nokes’ soundscape samples and augments the performers’ own guttural moans, developing them into deeply resonant throbs or animalistic growls.
Their dance over, Steiner and Longville join their counterparts. Seated slightly above our eyeline, there’s something mildly condescending in their distance from us. Steiner’s work is titled Admission, rather than Invitation, Into The Everyday Sublime. For me, there is a disconnect between the experience of being directly involved in these practices and watching others involved in the moment. Participating in durational scores where one experiences the body changing, releasing its resistance before arriving at a new state of sensation, is different from watching them. For the observer, these may elicit a powerful, even physical empathy. Or it may not.
The final moments form an experience that certainly feels transcendent. After the tedium and frenzy of movement, an apparition provides catharsis. On the wall opposite the performers, an immense canvas emerges from darkness as the soundscape intensifies. Its form, representation and meaning are ambiguous. From where I sit, I cannot even determine how it exists. Is it a projection, and if so, where is its source? What initially looks like a crater changes colour and texture as the lighting shifts. My perception of it vacillates. It could be skin, or a static storm. Or a hole piercing the sky, forming an oculus to another sky beyond. I never fully define what I see, but I’ve definitely arrived at a state of wonder: wonder about that second sky.
After the performance, several people touch the canvas: a painting by Ash Keating. I talk to a few of them. Understanding its physicality doesn’t explain our experience. Our impressions differ, but we’re all still transfixed.
Next Wave Festival 2016: Admission Into The Everyday Sublime, choreographer Lilian Steiner, performers Atticus Bastow, Briarna Longville, Jonathon Nokes Lilian Steiner, sound Atticus Bastow, Jonathon Nokes, lighting Matthew Adey, costumes Shio Otani, commissioned artwork Ash Keating; Arts House, North Melbourne, 18-22 May
Maximilian plays with fashion, dance, choreography, photography, video, performance production and direction in no particular order or hierarchy. His formal training is in design. His recent work includes Bless the Beasts: Shibuya Summer (Melbourne Fringe 2015).
This review was written in the DanceWrite dance reviewing workshop. Read more reviews here.
DanceWrite was conducted by RealTime editors Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter with mentors Andrew Fuhrmann and Jana Perkovic. The workshop was an initiative of Hannah Matthews as part of her Australia Council-funded Sharing Space program and was presented in collaboration with Next Wave and RealTime.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
In the latest Currency House Platform Paper, described by Jana Perkovic as “
.jpg)
.jpg)
_H110_x_W160_cm,_Inkjet_prints.jpg)
.jpg)
,_Tale_of_Tales.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
![[MIS]CONCEIVE, Next Wave 2016](https://www.realtime.org.au/wp-content/uploads/art/89/8933_[MIS]CONCEIVE_Photo__Zan_Wimberley_2.jpg)
![Thomas ES Kelly, [MIS]CONCEIVE](https://www.realtime.org.au/wp-content/uploads/art/89/8938_[MIS]CONCEIVE_Photo__Zan_Wimberley_1.jpg)
