Next Wave, a festival of creative attentiveness

Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

CAMEL, Next Wave 2016

photo Sarah Walker

CAMEL, Next Wave 2016

In her program notes, Next Wave artistic director Georgie Meagher writes that this year’s festival, unlike its predecessors, focuses on “learning” rather than “development.” For Meagher, learning can be “slow and meandering. It can be useless. Learning can make things seem more complicated and interconnected than we ever thought.” An invitation to learn is an invitation to listen more deeply, and be less intent on finding a work’s final meaning. We become creators too. This is an important framework with which to approach pieces like CAMEL and The Horse, which are, to use Meagher’s words, “stuffed with disparate things banging around against each other,” and the presence of so-called peripheral cultural voices in the festival, as in BlaaQ Catt and [MIS]CONCEIVE, produced by Indigenous artists.

CAMEL

With questions around the nature of creative intuition at its core, young Victorian choreographer, auteur and couturier Geoffrey Watson’s CAMEL produces compellingly clear motifs. Following them is not the point, but they’re glorious to revel in. The staging is simple: a white dance floor expanse before the Arts House main hall stage, on which sits a drum kit, and above which, smaller than you would imagine, hangs a backlit portrait of snowcapped peaks by local image-maker Thomas Russell. Two performers are present, sprawled over white plastic patio chairs, facing each other across the dance floor. Each is in a Blue Man Group-esque, full-body morph suit, a costume choice that hints to the work’s overriding humour. Later, for example, in a section parodying romantic love, the robotic voice-over incants, “I’ll harden to ice and wait for you in the fridge.” The same voice blurts the jussive, “fuck Debussy in the ass,” when classical ballet and its modes are being run through the ringer. It could easily be a live version of a viral video made on the website GoAnimate.

CAMEL, Next Wave 2016

photo Sarah Walker

CAMEL, Next Wave 2016

Experiencing CAMEL through knowledge of Watson’s background in classical ballet illuminates one particular strain of the work’s farraginous constitution. As suburban debris, slurpees play a big part in the second half. They’re sucked, spilled and their cups are rhythmically ground into the floor. They leave tracks, reminding me of a 7-Eleven on a 40 degree day when the machines overheat, no longer pumping out sludge but a gushing sugar water which mocks its drip tray by cascading onto the tiles. Here, the track follows a grovelling and ungraceful folk dance pass-through, while an androgynous and bedraped sylph in the back row of the audience—a puppeteer—pulls two ropes that extend to the ceiling, eventually attaching to two sheets mounded on the stage. Jerked up and down, the sheets parody our image of the mountain summit. The sylph, a common figure in classical ballet, here behaves like another ballet figure, Dr Coppélius, originally the malevolent master-tinker of ETA Hoffman’s nursery tale, The Sandman. But there is no consistency in our string-puller’s narrative. That person begins as an audience member and ends as a kind of techno-erotic behaviour enactor like the other performers.

The Horse

photo Zan Wimberley

The Horse

For Dylan Sheridan’s The Horse, the Arts House’s Rehearsal Room feels like a moderately temperatured but atmospherically intense hotbox. A bit of smoke and no lights render the room pitch black. We sit on rows of high chairs. There’s a slight, deliberate buzzing audible. In the ensuing concerto, of sorts, Sheridan crafts infinitesimally small moments of attention and stimulation. Part of his craft seems to be to articulate elements on three distinct sensorial planes: visual, aural, and olfactory. The work is funniest when these smell elements are introduced: a standard bathroom fragrance dispenser occupies centre-stage at one point, column-mounted in a single down-light. It is allowed three squirts in its own time. A small square of turf lies close to us and is ‘expressed,’ in the culinary sense, by saxophonist Benjamin Price’s missing left boot, which falls on a string from the lighting grid.

As in CAMEL, the relationship between automation and manipulation plays a key role in the work’s symbolic order. Its image-object of centrality—not necessarily its most significant image—is a mechanised violin and bow, again mounted, upright at chest height at the rear of the space. It is perhaps no coincidence that each element of a work called ‘The Horse’ seems ‘mounted,’ in a literal or figurative sense. The piece begins and ends for us with strokes of the violin; ‘for us’ because there is the distinct feeling that the world of the piece extends both before and after our presence in the space. Its guiding aural vehicle is Sheridan’s score (with the composer on electronics) for saxophone (the unused parts of which Price places on a lazy susan), cello (Robert Manley) and violin (Emily Shepherd), whose movements sit, fittingly, next to each other but noticeably distinct.

BlaaQ Catt

photo Zan Wimberley

BlaaQ Catt

In contrast to these two works, the lyric voice of Maurial Spearim’s solo work BlaaQ Catt cuts a clear path through a history of cultural destruction. Spearim tells the history of her people, the Gamilaraay, through European invasion, the agony of children being forcibly removed from families, massacres and the effects of having these as formative, brutal incursions on her people’s story. As one of Spearim’s songs conveys, the challenge is to “let it go.” We, the recipients, are challenged to let go of our objectivity and understand that we are part of this wider culture. BlaaQ Catt enacts this message through Spearim’s remarkable engagement of her audience’s nervous systems, and with provocations to remember versions of history that listen to Indigenous voices, not just the European ones that pervade. Spearim linguistically weaves herself with her audience into what’s “bigger than me, bigger than you”—into “my old people”—and supports this with her embodied presence, especially the dance pieces. BlaaQ Catt feels more like a neurological reprogramming than a piece of objective art.

[MIS]CONCEIVE

photo Zan Wimberley

[MIS]CONCEIVE

Bundjalung and Wiradjuri man Thomas ES Kelly’s dance-theatre work [MIS]CONCEIVE has two distinct halves. The second is highly digestible, gestural and story-based, addressing stereotypes of particularly young, Indigenous Australian people. Kelly’s take doesn’t shy away from the ‘issues-piece’ nature of such an intention. It is direct and unapologetic, utilising repetition of physical motifs, audience engagement and the dominant stage presence of Kelly and his ensemble.

This second half carries themes of repression in the choreography and stagecraft through to vivid traditional dance and song at full power. But it is set up by the first, which is less Brechtian in its announcement of its own code. We arrive to Xavier Rudd’s song “Follow the Sun” and move into a section of dance with an institutionalised feel. The four dancers wear grey tracksuits and the choreography pressures and strains their bodies. They hunch, shunt and curve their backs, hips jutting forward, locked. They repeat brow-wipes and move through the space in false starts and redirections. They appear struck at times, frozen, not as if time has stopped, but as if they have been momentarily concussed. Noticing this is almost nauseating. My reading of this section is that it establishes paradoxical anonymity and cultural ignorance. Literally, signs and indications of the fact that we all exist together and under the same conditions go unacknowledged: emphatic pointing to the sky, for example, as if to say, “look at the cosmos!” The ensemble articulates this landscape deftly, and transform it into the intensely liberating final movement, driven undoubtedly by the imperative to convey a story and pass on a message: “Tomorrow’s a new day for everyone, brand new moon, brand new sun,” as Rudd’s lyrics go.

Art is probably violent—indeed it becomes startlingly unlike art when it ceases to be all the things that these works undoubtedly are: open to interpretation, transformative, decentred and connective. Hopefully such elements, although so conducive to strong communities, will not need foregrounding in future editions of the Next Wave Festival, or other Australian arts festivals. They may produce divergent thoughts and feelings, and that’s a good thing, providing us the opportunity to learn and simply pay attention.

–

Next Wave Festival: CAMEL, choreography, text, design Geoffrey Watson, dramaturg Nana Biluš Abaffy, performers Geoffrey Watson, Nana Biluš Abaffy, James Andrews, Matthew Hyde, Michael McNab, lighting design Amelia Lever-Davidson; Arts House, 11-15 May; Dylan Sheridan, The Horse, director, composer, performer (electronics) Dylan Sheridan, saxophone Benjamin Price, violin Emily Sheppard, cello Robert Manley; Arts House 13-22 May; BlaaQ Catt, artist, performer Maurial Spearim, director Pauline Whyman, music consultant Deborah Cheetham, sound designer Mark Cole-Smith, choreographer Sermsah Bin Saad, designer Leon Salom, projection Katie Symes, lighting designer Kris Chainey, dramaturgy Kirsty Hillhouse, Northcote Town Hall, 17-22 May; [MIS]CONCEIVE, choreographer Thomas ES Kelly, performers Thomas ES Kelly, Natalie Pelarek, Caleena Sansbury, Taree Sansbury; Northcote Town Hall, Melbourne, 17-22 May

RealTime issue #132 April-May 2016

Just released on DVD, this much lauded film from Todd Haynes—adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel about a lesbian relationship in 1950s New York—features fine performances from Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara.

There’s been intriguing debate about the adaptation which some felt lost some screen potential, for example by eliminating the lovers’ road trip. Others, like our reviewer Katerina Sakkas, were not convinced by the romance nor by what was perceived as a mannered characterisation of Carol by Blanchett. Sakkas concludes, “Carol is in almost every respect polished, considered cinema, its re-creation of the human dramas playing out in a stultifying era eloquent—but where is its beating heart?”

But the film’s partnering of Highsmith and Haynes, six Oscar nominations, plenty of good reviews and many fans, judging by long screening seasons are reasons enough for you to see Carol and judge for yourself.

5 copies, courtesy Transmission Films

Email us at giveaways [at] realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number. Include ‘Giveaway’ and CAROL in the subject line.

RealTime issue #132 April-May 2016

Open City has been granted four-year funding by the Australia Council for the Arts.

We grieve sorely for the many companies and organisations not funded, and for the multitude of artists they would have nurtured and who are already seriously underfunded.

RealTime will continue to support all those working in what is now a dangerously depleted arts ecosystem.

The time has come to protest vigorously the government’s abrogation of responsible arts funding, its undemocratic usurpation of the powers of a statutory authority and its destruction of the arms length principle that has long kept government from directly controlling artmaking.

Given the unlikelihood of the Turnbull Government returning the removed funds now that an Arts Minister has finally realised the dream of not a few to gain some direct control of arts funding, the best we can hope for is a Labor victory in the election – for art’s sake, for artists’ sake.

Perhaps protest will change PM Turnbull’s mind and perhaps it will alert voters to the damage done, and to come, from a government spending opportunistically (for electoral advantage) and chaotically (allowing some arts organisations to benefit hugely from both Australia Council and Catalyst funding while renownedly excellent companies and organisations are refused support and treated as ‘dead wood’). But given the large number of issues the electorate faces, artists, their organisations and supporters will have to speak very loudly to be heard.

Disappointingly, the Australia Council CEO is in denial, arguing to the media that four-year funding was always going to be highly competitive and that new groups would need to be allowed in. He simply does not admit that assessments and decisions were made with significantly less funds than initially projected, much of it for the small to medium sector. This is an issue not of Government funding strategy, but of political interference which is already re-directing previously targeted arts funding into the hands of large organisations and the commercial sector.

Add your voice to the protest. Write to Rupert Myer, Chair of the Australia Council for the Arts r.myer@australiacouncil.gov.au, challenging the four-year funding decisions, demanding their reversal, and copying your message to Arts Minister, Mitch Fifield minister@communications.gov.au. Keep informed by visitng #FREETHEARTS and signing up to Artspeak.

Keith & Virginia

RealTime issue #132 April-May 2016 pg.

Rebecca Jensen, Explorer

photo Gregory Lorenzutti

Rebecca Jensen, Explorer

For the second semi-final we more or less pick up where we left off with the first with a work by a VCA-trained choreographer, currently based in Melbourne, whose creative practice has strong links to ideas around both conceptual choreography and postdramatic theatre.

Rebecca Jensen’s Explorer plays out like an eccentric pantomime. First, Andre Jessop Smith, dressed in a marble-print bodysuit, enters from upstage. Advancing past a heap of white sheets, he switches on a sampler sitting on the floor beneath a tree branch suspended from the ceiling. Jensen enters, wearing snow goggles and wielding a leafblower. Dancers in white bodysuits are revealed under the white sheets. Jensen clambers over them to a crunching, rattling aural accompaniment.

Is this a winter scene? Is the leafblower in fact a snow blower? Amid the mess of props and idle bodies, a story of landscape exploration emerges. We hear a splash and the lights change to a rippling water effect. Jensen is now deep-sea diving. Crab-like, she scuttles around the edge of the stage. Later, supported acrobalance style by Smith, we watch her rise from the water and through the clouds (suggested by a smoke machine and printed backdrop), reinventing herself like Helene Cixous’ airborne swimmer: the figure who is dispersible, prodigious, desirous and capable of being others.

Carried on Smith’s shoulders up into the audience, all the way to the back row, she reaches out her hand as if to touch the face of—what? Here the work abruptly breaks off, and we are left to wonder at this image of a dancer in distant orbit.

James Batchelor, Inhabited Geometries

photo Gregory Lorenzutti

James Batchelor, Inhabited Geometries

The mood turns more contemplative with James Batchelor’s Inhabited Geometries, a visually attractive if somewhat opaque work. It has a similar science fiction feel to a piece called Island that he developed as part of a Dancehouse residency in 2015. Batchelor is one of the country’s most stylish young choreographers in terms of creating overall stage pictures, and he also knows how to find the right collaborators for his projects.

This new work opens with Batchelor, partially hidden by shadows, lying prone on a grey slab toward the back of the space. As he starts to move, the slab comes apart, separating into three blocks. In slow motion, he folds himself into a space between two of them. For an instant, his face is caught in a spotlight, and we see the glint of a long gloop of ectoplasmic slime slipping from his forehead. Has his body been punctured by one of the slab’s hard corners? Or is he liquefying, collapsing under the pressure of all that dark obscurity?

Intricate, abstract animations designed by Zoe Scoglio are projected onto a screen at the back of the stage, lingering for a moment, like Arctic auroras, then fading back to black. Faint splashes of prismatic colour slide across the floor and the walls. Morgan Hickenbotham sits with a laptop at a desk against the rear wall, live mixing the ambient score. Batchelor slowly crawls across the stage.

Is Inhabited Geometries, with all its dim intensity and shards of opalescence, perhaps a bit too refined? Is this really a dance about homelessness, as was suggested in early publicity material? According to the program notes, Batchelor spent time living rough on the streets as research, but I wonder if the image of exquisite pain he presents us with here is really adequate to that theme. And yet, if we think of this Inhabited Geometries as an aesthetic exploration of the stage possibilities for mobile architecture, a problem which was also touched on in Island, then it seems a more conceptually satisfying albeit narrower piece.

Ghenoa Gela’s Fragments of Malungoka—Women of the Sea

photo Gregory Lorenzutti

Ghenoa Gela’s Fragments of Malungoka—Women of the Sea

Ghenoa Gela, Fragments of Malungoka—Women of the Sea

The three dancers, Elle Evangelista, Melanie Palomares and Melinda Tyquin, come prancing onto the stage in black sleeveless tops, what look like crosses between black pantaloons and grass skirts, and white cut-out, mask-like headdresses. They advance diagonally downstage, taking quick steps in time with busy, shuffling beats provided by composer Ania Reynolds. Occasionally the dancers freeze, and one or two or three of them look out toward the audience, as if uncertain or mistrustful.

The headdresses are called dhoeri in the Western Torres Strait and are used by Islander women in ceremonial dances. Audiences will recognise them as the white device featured on the region’s flag. For choreographer Ghenoa Gela, herself an Islander, the problem is how to combine these traditional dances with her own background in contemporary western dance styles.

The air of uncertainty in the opening moments speaks to Gela’s own anxiety, which she describes in the program, about what happens to traditional dance when performed for non-traditional audiences by non-traditional dancers. And the great strength of this piece is the direct and unpretentious development of this theme. Gradually, hesitation is overcome; the dancers move with more attack and more feeling. Mistrust transforms into a kind of stomping, whooping joy.

One of the dancers, Tyquin, is fitted with a GoPro camera which, during one section, streams a live feed to a screen behind the dancers. This aspect of the work is underdeveloped, perhaps even superfluous, and there are some other design choices—such as glow-in-the-dark paint on the headdresses—which seem a bit naff; still, with its high-energy dynamic, clear dramatic arc and emphasis on actual dance steps, Fragments of Malungoka makes a clear contrast to everything that comes before it on the program. Whether or not it stands out from other attempts to develop a contemporary dance language out of traditional materials is a different question.

Paea Leach, One and One and One

photo Gregory Lorenzutti

Paea Leach, One and One and One

Paea Leach’s One and One and One also makes a strong contrast. Described as a trio for two dancers and a performance poet, the work speaks to feelings of and fear of loneliness. With loose, slightly ragged movements, the two dancers, Leach and Rhiannon Newton, seem always on the verge of falling out of unison, or losing contact entirely. It’s almost like they’re describing a relationship held together only by a mutual dread of being alone. There is anxiety here, and disappointment and frustration.

Poet Candy Royalle initially creates an atmospheric soundtrack of humming and chanting using a microphone and loop pedal, then shifts to a quietly menacing monologue on themes of isolation, fear and a failure to communicate:

“I said you never really suffered. She said you never really loved me. I said you never knew me. She said you never let me.”

Royalle seems to stalk the performers, following them around the stage, keeping them off balance with her words. We often see choreographers exploring the potential for experimental dance to unsettle language, but this is a movement in the other direction.

“Am I really always the savage animal you expect me to be?” she says, sneering.

Royalle is a charismatic performer giving a very strong performance. In the final moments, she seems to dominate completely. Standing centre stage, she turns to the audience while the dancers stand off to the side, finally submitting to the power of speech.

Now the words are addressed to contemporary dance itself. Why dance, she demands. Why not use words? Why not just say what you mean? The obscurities of contemporary dance, she suggests, are a symptom of fear, a fear of being misunderstood or rejected. Face the fear, she urges. Make dance that speaks explicitly to social issues: to racism and the plight of refugees and injustice everywhere. Don’t hide behind concepts.

It’s a bold message to bring to the KCA, this demand for legible meaning, this impatience with the ambiguities of the body. And it’s a message which, powerful as it is, does tend to diminish the significance of Leach’s choreography.

… and the winner is?

It’s interesting that neither Paea Leach nor James Batchelor, both of whom attracted plenty of support among reviewers and in post-show foyer conversations (and whose works were arguably the most formally satisfying of the semi-finalists), were picked for the finals. Instead, it was Ghenoa Gela, Rebecca Jensen, Sarah Aiken and Martin Hansen who travelled to Sydney for the season at Carriageworks.

Of these four, it seems to me that Aiken, Jensen and Martin all share a similar artistic genealogy, perhaps traceable to Jerome Bel’s assertion that choreography is a frame in which much more than dance is inscribed. The work they created for the KCA might be a little scrappy, but it does make new claims for how dance can be experienced, which fits with the stated goals of the KCA.

And yet, it was Gela’s work which took home both the overall prize ($30,000) and also the people’s choice award ($10,000).

Some commentators have already suggested changes to the commissioning process for the KCA, and no doubt there are things that might be tinkered with to encourage the creation of stronger individual works. One idea recently mooted is to downplay the competitive aspect of the award. This, I think, would be a mistake. It’s vital that the award remains competitive.

The function of the award is not simply to support artists, but also to foster a critically engaged audience. Competition gives audiences an immediate focus: a reason for thinking about what they value and why.

And, yes, it’s vital that a critical appreciation of the more expansive definition of choreography encompassed by the KCA is fostered. If we don’t, 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.

So, does a perceived weakness of this year’s field explain the judges’ decision to give the award to a less conceptually ambitious work, one directed more toward personal dance methodologies than shifting the choreographic paradigm? Maybe—though it does send a mixed message about what the award stands for.

Of course, another possibility—which is just as likely—is that the judges saw something radical in Fragments of Malungoka that I missed. In any case, it’s a point worth arguing about.

Keir Choreographic Award Semi-Finals, Program Two; Dancehouse, Melbourne, 27-30 April

RealTime issue #132 April-May 2016

Sydney-based RUCKUS describes itself as a “disability led theatre ensemble” determined to “smash stereotypes and challenge audience’s preconceptions of what people with disability are capable of achieving.” For their latest production, Speed of Life, RUCKUS is addressing how, in an impatient society, people of differing abilities engage with time.

RUCKUS asks, intriguingly, “Could tuning in to other people who share a similar nature hold the clues? Does nature itself show you the way? Perhaps the answers are buried in the sands of southern Cambodia? Or scattered in the stars above?” Speed of Life is partly inspired by a trip the ensemble made recently to southern Cambodia.

With a creative team and support crew, RUCKUS travelled to Epic Arts, an inclusive arts centre in Kampot, southern Cambodia, where for two weeks the ensemble worked alongside Epic Encounters, an ensemble of eight dancers who are predominantly deaf or have a physical disability.

“We visited rivers, mountain tops and beaches and used movement and video to explore and discover what it means to connect with others who may navigate their world at a different pace and speed to the busy-ness around them and how we adapt to keep up.”

Speed of Life is produced by RUCKUS Director Alison Richardson who co-directs the work with choreographer Dean Walsh.

Walsh is well known in Sydney and beyond as a leading dancer and choreographer and for bringing these roles into play in experiencing and protecting marine ecology. He’s worked with Ruckus since 2012 and elsewhere as a mentor for young and emerging artists living with and without disability across Australia.

Alison Richardson has been with RUCKUS since its inception in 2011 after working extensively as a theatre director and tutor for community theatre companies, Powerhouse Youth Theatre, Shopfront Theatre, PACT Theatre and Australian Theatre for Young People. Her interest and passion for working with people with disability goes back to 2007 with a variety of projects. She has been awarded a 2015 Churchill Fellowship which will enable her to research disability-led theatre practice and inclusive training programs in UK arts and disability companies and organisations.

The ensemble members are Chris Bunton, Audrey O’Connor, Gerard O’Dwyer, James Penny, Rachel Sugrim and Digby Webster. O’Dwyer is a Tropfest award winning actor and also the recipient of the Emerging Leaders Award at the 2012 National Disability Awards and four of the six members have been recognised by the NSW Government and asked to be Ambassadors for its Don’t DIS MyABILITY state campaign. Members Digby Webster and Audrey O’Connor were the faces of the campaign in 2010 and 2011 respectively. RT

The 2016 winner of the Keir Choreographic Award is Ghenoa Gela, a Rockhampton-born, Torres Strait Islander dancer and choreographer who was raised in mainland Australia. The final night audience at Carriageworks not only greeted Gela’s jury win ($30,000) rapturously but also awarded her the audience choice award ($10,000). These prizes will provide independence and a tremendous creative boost for a talented young choreographer whose Winds of Woerr at the 2014 Adelaide Fringe (and subsequently Next Wave) first excited my interest.

Trained in contemporary Western dance, Sydney-based Gela has a passionate commitment to sustaining Torres Strait culture and is clearly engaged in a quest to bring together not merely forms but peoples—evident in her casting non-Torres Strait Islander dancers to perform her Fragments of Malungoka—Women of the Sea. The final passage of the work entered fully, even winningly, into the powerful dance of Gela’s heritage while the preceding episodes seemed tentative, perhaps reflecting the uneasy engagement between dance forms and cultures but also evidence of the awkwardness of a kind of dance theatre in which abstracted tensions play out between the three dancers. These were complicated by the curious addition of video surveillance feed from one of the performers, suggesting perhaps a self-conscious monitoring, but one not clearly integrated, more a mysterious backdrop detracting from the tight weave of the trio.

The interdisciplinarity the Keir Award keenly fosters is felt in Gela’s meeting of cultures, but not so effectively realised in the work’s other dimensions—her competitors were more assured in that respect. Nonetheless, Gela is a talented and inspired artist, one in whom the judges, in no way short of expertise, doubtless saw great potential. Even so, in terms of the Award’s criteria, Andrew Fuhrmann in the second of his reviews of the semi-finals and the winning work, asks why the award went “to a less conceptually ambitious work, one directed more toward personal dance methodologies than shifting the choreographic paradigm?… [It] does send a mixed message about what the award stands for.”

The 2016 Keir Choreographic Award program has aroused more debate than the first in 2014. Andrew details some of the issues raised in his report. Debate is healthy, indeed invaluable, given that the KCA is the only award of its kind for Australian contemporary dance, let alone one focused on emerging choreographers and at a time when dance is going through many changes. The addition of a public program of talks and other events this year enhanced audience understanding of some of the discussion in contemporary dance circles; the KCA-Critical Path forum with four South-East Asian curators was especially informative (more about this in a future e-dition). But there are challenges to be met by the KCA organisers.

Of the four finalists seen at Carriageworks, Sarah Aiken in her Tools for Personal Expansion seemed to not a few in the Sydney audience to have created the most formally and satisfyingly complete work with its low key rhythms and subtly, and drolly, unfolding magic. But we in Sydney didn’t get to see the creations of Paea Leach and James Batchelor whose work Andrew Furhrmann thought “arguably the most formally satisfying of the [eight] semi-finalists.” The two-city creation of the Keir Choreographic Award is admirable and is developing (with the addition of Critical Path to the fold), but it’s frustrating for Sydney-siders not to be able see the whole competition and for those in Melbourne not to enjoy a final re-estimation, let alone the thrill of witnessing the win and having a hand in deciding the audience prize winner. In an ideal world, the eight works would be performed in both cities. The cost may be prohibitive, but we have to admit a somewhat schizoid feel to the final in Sydney, where we have only half the evidence with which to judge for ourselves. Perhaps as the Award grows in strength and influence it might be able to play out equally in Sydney and Melbourne and then beyond—live streaming even!

A not uncommon opinion was that the eight works were largely under-developed and, in some cases, over-propped and technologised. The Melbourne Fringe and Next Wave have long, and successfully, supported selected emerging artists with dramaturgical and other assistance. Again cost might be an issue, but the advice of independent KCA-appointed dramaturgs or experienced choreographers across the duration of creation might develop the emerging artists and present audiences with more cogent works. By its very nature, the Award is nurturing, but to what degree?

As for the discussion about the disappearance of actual dancing in the Award’s works, Andrew Fuhrmann opines, “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.”

We’ll certainly be talking about it in coming e-ditions as we grapple with “the choreographic.” What is it? Is it an appropriation or co-option of dance by galleries and art biennales? A new niche for dance? Concept or con? And how does it relate to the conceptual choreography seemingly central to the Keir Choreographic Award, this year’s idiosyncratic winner aside.

I happily add that I enjoyed Martin Hansen’s It’s All In My Veins, an intelligent and witty take on the importance and limits of realising a performable dance archive in which three performers mimicked classic caught-on-film moves by Isadora Duncan and Nijnsky through to de Keersmaeker and Beyonce’s blatant appropriation of her choreography. I rolled with Rebecca Jensen’s propulsive, physically bold exploitation of the large Carriagework’s space in Explorer, even though the cumulative meaning of its imagery of immersion and flight proved elusive. I’ll not forget the final moment of Sarah Aiken’s Tools for Personal Expansion when one of her fellow dancers offers with a spooky smile the ‘hand’ of Aiken’s fantastically elongated arm to a front-row member of the audience.

The Keir Choreographic Award has again provided welcome indicators as to where dance is now and might likely go, this time keeping us on our toes with its choice of a winner and engaging, via its public program, an audience eager for context, critique and debate.

The Keir Choreographic Award Jury: Bojana Cvejic (Belgrade), performance theorist and performance maker based in Brussels; Pierre Bal-Blanc, Documenta 14 curator and independent art critic based in Athens and Paris; US based choreographer Sarah Michelson; inaugural recipient of the KCA in 2014, Atlanta Eke and Phillip Keir, Keir Foundation founder.

This double-header of short multidisciplinary dance works, originally developed and shown at Catapult Dance’s retrofitted Newcastle headquarters with its two sprung floors, was transposed for a special two-night season to the cold hard concrete of The Lock-Up contemporary art space (a potentially unforgiving place for contemporary dance). The custodial impermeability of Newcastle’s old colonial-era police station soon took on a more chimeric quality.

In one cell, local filmmaker Neil Mansfield, collaborating with choreographer/dancer Kristina Chan, made the walls of the confined space liquefy with light as a body folded like origami on the floor. In the peephole of a padded cell was a tiny projection of hands fingering coal, raising the spectre of the industry to follow in Chan’s performance in the outdoor exercise yard. These filmic installations in the cells were a perfect precursor to the live performances in terms of merging distinctions between inside/outside, also in the sense of collaborators coming from elsewhere to work with local artists, and perhaps even bringing coal to Newcastle.

The crowd gathered in The Lock-Up’s more conventional gallery space for the first live work, a collaboration between choreographer Joshua Thomson, dancers Craig Bary, Angelyn Diaz and Omer Astrachan and local composer and musician Zackari Watt (known for his art rock performances with now defunct The Hauntingly Beautiful Mousemoon). It was a transfixing experience, with the audience sitting around the perimeter ad hoc and the dancers in jeans and sneakers coming tantalisingly close (close enough to see a bleeding scab on one dancer’s elbow, a bum crack, a tattoo of a pixie chucking a brown eye). The performance was refreshingly unisex: a girl lifting a boy, the two boys dancing interchangeably. If there was a triangular relationship dynamic going on, gender was irrelevant. In fact the trio seemed almost immortal, somehow avoiding whiplash as they grabbed each other’s necks. There was a very mixed crowd on opening night, including young children and teenagers, and there was awe on faces of all ages. I think it was sharing the floor with the dancers that made them at once so ordinary, yet so extraordinary.

The second live performance in the outdoor exercise yard was a darker affair and reached a more discordant crescendo. Kristina Chan writhed on top of a pile of coal like a banshee, her indelible lightness preventing what would have otherwise been a definite sprained ankle or other occupational health and safety issue. The dystopian future projected by this performance was undercut by the retro aesthetic of a single factory lamp hung overhead. The elemental force of electricity, at first seemingly administering psychiatric shocks to the dancer’s body, appeared to come from another era but, although coal can seem positively Dickensian, outside the Lock-Up is one of the busiest coal ports in the world. By the end of the performance, the teenagers especially were looking quite wired, and again the energy of live performance had literally infused the crowd.

This was the first time that contemporary dance had been presented at The Lock-Up and I was impressed by the way the performances integrated the very particular spatial dynamics. The visual, sonic and live elements resonated with the omnipresent architecture exceptionally well and despite the Lock-Up’s labyrinth of passageways and openings, it was never claustrophobic.

The freedom of the walk-through was immersive, rather than constrictive, and in general reflects the Lock-Up’s attitude to making this otherwise heritage space continually responsive to contemporary practice. It’s also heartening to see collaborations occurring between the contemporary arts sectors in Newcastle, given there is nothing like the presence of purpose-built contemporary performance venues that exist in many metropolitan centres available here (which would also open up the touring of live works, including dance). This is also where Catapult Dance, a relatively new kid on the block, is working under director Cadi McCarthy to foster a local contemporary dance culture that is more connected to national and international contemporary dance communities. The works in PROPELLED were initially part of Catapult’s collaborative residency program in 2015. Titled PROPEL, it provides artists with a one to three-week creative space (and live-in apartment) in which to develop work, a program set to continue in 2016 (see the RealTime interview with McCarthy).

The two collaborations presented at The Lock Up were enticingly metonymic: small vignettes that were both decidedly local in engagement but also displayed vast accumulative experience and contemporary dance literacy.

Coming around once every two years, Melbourne’s Next Wave Festival positions itself at the forefront of where the arts in Australia are going, programming works by the the artists who will take us there. Extending across the city, in theatres, galleries and streets, artistic director Georgie Meagher’s first festival can be read as an inquiry into diversity, continuing the festival’s focus of challenging emerging artists to create their most ambitious work to date.

Ecosexual Bathhouse

“Now remember,” our concierge says to us as we are about to enter the Ecosexual Bathhouse, “no glove, no … ?” “Love?” someone tentatively offers. “No glove, no love.”

Onto our “touching finger” we roll down a single white glove finger. With it, we’re invited to stimulate the stamens of the delicate white orchids, flushing ever so slightly with pink. We are instructed to move to another flower: some concentrate on the one plant; others are more adventurous, moving from plant to plant, cross-pollinating as they begin their no-judgment ecosexual journey.

Most embarking on this Next Wave adventure will be the eco-curious, rather than those fully embedded in the eco-lifestyle. But Pony Express (Perth playwright and performance maker Ian Sinclair and Loren Kronemyer, an interdisciplinary artist from Los Angeles) has created a welcoming environment for all types, postulating that we are all at least a little experienced in the practice: flowers have been smelt deeply; shoes have been discarded to walk barefoot in the grass; bodies have been plunged into lakes and oceans.

Consent and comfort run through the heart of the work. Ecosexual Bathhouse is simply a safe-space—complete with a safe word—to explore this lifestyle further. Company members move though the bathhouse: some inviting you on side journeys, some simply appearing, like you, to be exploring ecosexual pleasures. This normalises the world created and is an easy headspace to slip into.

The real achievement of this installation piece, set in a building on the outskirts of Melbourne’s Royal Botanical Gardens, is how utterly ordinary and joyous this whole subversion seems. As you flip through some of the eco-erotic literature, as you are doused in the scent of dirt or grass, as you lie down in a bed and lightly caress leaves, it all, somehow, makes sense.

On opening night, slight tech issues mean not everyone is able to experience all of the components of the work. Still, when I leave, I have flowers in my hair, dirt under my fingernails and the whiff of bushfire on my wrists. As I step out under the night sky I feel just a little more connected to the park around me and a little more reluctant to re-enter the city beyond.

The Voices of Joan of Arc

In bringing old stories to our stages—be they adaptations of classic plays or retellings of global history—their connection to the time we occupy now is the key to letting these stories resonate. They can exist on our stages today because humanity shares the same echoes through time. If we don’t learn from our past, we are doomed to repeat it.

In The Voices of Joan of Arc, lead artist, Janie Gibson (an Australian actor and author who has been working with companies in Poland and the USA) brushes over the connections between Joan’s life and ours with the lightest of hands. She touches on questions of the place of outspoken women in society; on the notion of occupied lands; on the relationship between religion and country; on how we talk about terrorism—and who is prescribed the label of terrorist. But they are only ever the lightest of touches: notations that swim around the edges, rather than a philosophy that skewers the core.

A two-hander theatre piece, this telling of Joan pits her against a member of the clergy (Daniel Han) after she was captured by the English. She is adamant she acts on the word of God; he believes she is lying. As for the audience, we are left unclear as to where we are supposed to stand. On the side of Joan, certainly; but Gibson never reveals enough to let us know if this Joan is hearing God, or if she is a teenage girl suffering delusions in a world that cannot help nor understand her.

On stage, The Voices of Joan of Arc lacks urgency and a sense of intellectual rigor. In a world where women are increasingly able to claim space and raise their voices—and where women consistently face punishment for doing so—Gibson’s Joan doesn’t raise her voice enough. This production may tell us something about Joan of Arc. Unfortunately, it fails to tell us anything about ourselves.

Under My Skin

There may be four bodies, but we can’t really tell. Limbs and torsos move over and around each other, passing a body towards the front of the group before it is threaded back and another body takes its place. Over this writhing mass more bodies are projected: faces made of light swimming over stomachs made of flesh; projected and physical limbs wind around and meld into each other. The faces of the physical dancers look flattened, misconstrued. Eventually, we realise they are covered in masking tape.

Under My Skin is at its most intriguing when it sits in spaces of discomfort: bodies in half-light encased in a latex sheet; the physical struggle of tape being prised off faces; a scream through sign language—uninterrupted and, physically, painfully clear. These components, however, don’t extend their reach throughout the full 60-minute work, creating a production of many interesting elements but no cohesive whole.

Jo Dunbar and Lina Limosani often play with the unique physical vocabulary of The Delta Project’s deaf/hearing Melbourne-based dance theatre ensemble: signed words extending out of limbs and integrated as dance are a natural fit for such a physically potent medium, while also drawing on a particular skill of these dancers.

Too often, though, the choreography has a tendency to expose the weaknesses of the dancers, rather than support their strengths. Leg extensions are elevated at radically different heights; feet are often not uniformly stretched. One dancer lacks the lower body strength the choreographers demand of him. Much of Under My Skin however evokes a beautiful disquiet.

As bass notes throb through our bodies, it is interesting to consider how few people will have access to all of the elements of this work: the precise text of the Auslan components as well as the deeply layered soundscape of Russell Goldsmith’s composition and sound design. This speaks loudly to the central theme of Under My Skin: a look at the means by which we experience the world. If only this work could rest in those moments more often.

Mummy Dearest

Annaliese Constable, a writer, performer and queer-rights activist from Sydney, was raised by her alcoholic mother. There is no pussyfooting around it, and in Mummy Dearest she lays it all out on the table. It’s a look back at the pain of being a child forced to find her own two feet too soon; the heartache of watching someone you love hurt themselves; and the humour with which you can look back on a life as you keep soldiering on.

Downstairs at Arts House has been transformed into a bizarre bar. Horse racing airs on the big screen; footy scarves drape over the backs of chairs; inflated goon sacks decorate the ceiling. On each table sits a teddy bear—in case things get a little bit too much.

Mummy Dearest is clearly a story Constable felt compelled to tell, and she often finds a connection to her audience through it. There’s personal heartbreak, certainly, but also moments of real pride and love. And yet in its premiere season, it feels like Constable hasn’t quite found the words—or perhaps the right genre—with which to truly share this piece of her life with a room full of strangers. The work shifts between theatre, stand-up and storytelling, but rather than becoming a rigorous collaboration between these elements, the genres are weakened. Jokes are lost to hesitation; narrative cohesion has yet to be found.

It’s a big ask for any artist to put their life on stage so rawly: especially when it’s not just their life, but their family’s too. The strands of a show that could be exciting—devastating and hilarious—occasionally shine through. Hopefully after a week in front of an audience Constable will find the way to to knit them together.

GROUND CONTROL

The interstellar traveller is alone on her spacecraft, on a solo mission to reach a new planet for the human species. Communication with Earth has been lost. All that is left to talk with is the disembodied voice of the operating system.

Created and performed by Rachel Perks, and directed by Bridget Balodis (both are Melbourne artists), GROUND CONTROL is a violent, feminist telling of the end of the world. Chris is tasked with finding Earth 2.0. She is alone except for her plant, Terry, and her operating system, Tina. That is, until she is not.

Are we watching a woman losing her mind or an uprising of sentient robots? Or, Perks and Balodis ask, are we watching a play? If we, the audience, exist, and this is just a play, is nothing real? Or is everything? These splinterings between constructed story and the construct of theatre are gently threaded throughout the work, constantly destabilising our understanding of the world of Chris and the world of us.

Chris is desperately alone: millions of miles away from Earth; communications system down; girlfriend…where? Possibly dead. The statistics aren’t worth considering. Yet, once she was unexpectedly chosen, Chris knew she had to take this job. Even if a woman getting the job was an “administrative error,” she was told. She believes. Perhaps.

It’s these very real fears many women hold today that wallop through the work like a heart on anxious overdrive: the fear of being alone in the wrong place at the wrong time; the fear of hurting someone and the fear of being the one who is hurt; the pressure to be the best, to prove things not only for yourself but for your gender; to survive in the face of being told you only got that job because of quotas—or because of administrative errors. The fear things won’t get better. And still, as in life, Perks and Balodis build in jokes and levity. We laugh through the pain.

The details of Perks and Balodis’ future and destroyed Earth remain hazy, only one thing is shatteringly true: the women will suffer at the hands of the men. And it will be terrifying.

GROUND CONTROL is a taut and devastating, yet often frankly funny and beautiful, look at the future of our world—and an exhilarating look at the future of our theatre.

Angkot Alien

Our hosts wear silver ponchos that billow out and take up as much space as they please. We wear eyes of confusion and maniacal smiles as we sit on gold benches installed in a white van, slightly decorated on the outside, but it’s the inside where it really comes to life. A string of green neon light above our heads, walls covered in sketches, words, a musical score. A map to where we’re going that no-body can read. Karaoke.

A collaboration between Melbourne artist Rafaella McDonald and Indonesian artist Natasha Gabriella Tontey, Angkot Alien is a small shot of live art joy. In a journey across a city (Jakarta) and between cultures (between McDonald and Tontey), the Indonesian Angkot van becomes an interstellar spacecraft: destination unknown. The audience is small and there is no escaping participation. For this economy of means to work, everyone is going to have to play their part.

It’s ramshackle and it’s confusing and you never quite know where you are, or how you got there, or where you’re going. At just 35 minutes it’s over all too soon. Angkot Alien is a glorious mess of ideas that finds truth in the sentiment it’s not about the destination; it’s about the journey.

microLandscapes

The title of Emma Fishwick’s microLandscapes is all we need for the gentle nudge to contextualise her dancers’ bodies as representing fragments of the natural world. In the centre of the main hall at Northcote Town Hall, Ella-Rose Trew and Niharika Senapati are dressed purely in white: soft white wide-legged pants that refuse to stop flowing when they do.

Their movement captures a tree’s branches creaking, rocks tumbling down cliff-faces, the gentle brush of wind over a field of wheat, the incessant power of a snowstorm. Their bodies move in constant communication with each other and the space, but perfect unison begins to fracture and they splinter apart: the land, the environment, the weather are always spinning off onto new paths. Kynan Tan projects CGI landscapes on screens on the edge of the performance space—the world codified into the artificial; his filmed streetscapes glitching out until all we have are lines and colours—the world reduced to pixels.

It is physically demanding on the dancers. As it crescendos the intensity of the demand is passed onto the audience and, under flickering lights and reverberating sound, several audience members are compelled to leave the space.

microLandscapes is an audacious full-length debut for West Australian choreographer Fishwick, and an exciting response to Next Wave’s challenge to emerging artists to create their most ambitious work to date. She creates not only compelling and emotional images via her dancers’ bodies, but also expands her ambition to explore this in an installation work that surrounds and relies on her audience.

Occasionally, the dancers move beyond the boundaries of their white dance floor. This fracturing of the divide between performance space and audience space forces us to confront our own bodies and the way we have chosen to position ourselves within the landscape of the sculptural installation. Among small white rocky outcrops—mountains growing from the wooden floor—we stand or lean or sit on stools or, mostly, sit on the floor. The option is to move around the hall, but mostly we stay still, not wanting to disturb the energies of the performers and of the space.

Sedih // Sunno

Among the performance work in Next Wave’s opening weekend, Sedih // Sunno stands out as a quieter state of affairs. It’s an intimate setting: shoes removed, we sit in a tight circle on wooden stools. Rani Pramesti welcomes us to the space, and asks us to take a look around at the batik—traditional Indonesian dye-patterned cloth—that drapes the walls. With this batik, Pramesti introduces us to Indonesia, to her family, and to her mother—the woman whose story we’ve come to hear.

A quietly devastating story of childhood sexual abuse, Sedih // Sunno (‘sedih,’ ‘sadness’ in Bahasa Indonesian, ‘sunno’ ‘to listen’ in Fijian Hindi) delicately explores its trauma and on-going repercussions, and the way sadness permeates a life.

Created collaboratively by artists who live in Australia—Rani Pramesti Indonesian/Chinese/Javanese), Ria Soemarjdo (Indonesian/Javanese/Australian), Shivanjani Lal (Fijian/Indian) and Kei Murakami (Japanese, raised in Germany)—the work carries a strong sense of responsibility, the artists taking great care with their audience. We are told before we enter we can leave and move into a safe-space at any time; the offer of tissues is gently extended to a crying audience member. There are moments of lightness as, childlike, we play with the artists, covertly wrapping ourselves in Fijian Hindi saris, playing illicitly with pearls from a mother’s jewellery box. It’s only after we leave these moments of joy we realise the weight of revisiting childlike wonder while in a story of childhood pain.

Ultimately, through sadness, Sedih // Sunno becomes a story of connection and care between mother and daughter, about passing on cultural histories and heritage down generations and through to audiences, and about the way we look back on our lives: dropped stitches, mistakes and all.

Adding up

The performance works presented over the opening weekend revealed artists who want to question who they are and the art they make, responding to the challenge to push themselves and their practice beyond their previous limits, and beyond traditional artform boundaries.

Most excitingly, when viewed as a totality, is the way Next Wave acts directly to tear down the hierarchy of voices that have traditionally been elevated in the arts in Australia. Female creatives dominated the performance program of the opening weekend, with works from disabled, queer, feminist and Asian Australian artists. As the festival continues, the festival’s focus on Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander artists, already evident in the visual arts program, will come to the fore of the performance curation.

The quality of work is mixed: some pieces arrived as startling and exciting achievements, while others haven’t yet found their feet in their first seasons. But, in the spirit of Next Wave, you feel these young artists will do nothing but keep pushing themselves—and their forms and practices—forward.

Next Wave Festival 2016: Pony Express, Ian Sinclair, Loren Kronemyer, Ecosexual Bathhouse, Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne, 6–14 May; Janie Gibson, The Voices of Joan of Arc, Northcote Town Hall, 3–14 May; The Delta Project, Under My Skin, Arts House, North Melbourne, 5–8 May; Annaliese Constable, Mummy Dearest, Arts House, North Melbourne, 5–21 May; Rachel Perks & Bridget Balodis, GROUND CONTROL, Northcote Town Hall, 4–14 May; Rafaella McDonald & Natasha Gabriella Tontey, Angkot Alien, secret CBD Location, Melbourne, 7–22 May; Emma Fishwick, microLandscapes, Northcote Town Hall, 4 – 8 May; Rani P Collaborations, Sedih // Sunno, Arts House, North Melbourne, 5–15 May

When I first arrange to Skype with Australian sound artist Leah Barclay she’s momentarily confused about what city and time zone she will be in the next day. This is hardly surprising—her schedule of activities encompassing acoustic ecology, environmental conservation and community cultural development is extensive, inspiring and exhausting.

She eventually realises she’ll be in New York presenting her work at the Atmospheres symposium at Brown University. This follows her attendance at the Fourth World Congress of Biosphere Reserves in Lima, Peru. Last year saw her trialling her augmented reality sound walk project, Rainforest Listening, in Austin (Texas) with subsequent presentations in New York and Paris.

When she’s not zipping around the world, home for Barclay is Brisbane where she is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Griffith University, the President of the Australian Forum for Acoustic Ecology and a convenor of the upcoming Sonic Environments Conference hosted in collaboration with NIME 2016 (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) and the Australasian Computer Music Association. We finally settle on a mutually acceptable time (though brutally early for New York and a bit sleepily late for Sydney) to talk about her global sonic adventures.

Biosphere Soundscapes

UNESCO has 699 biosphere reserves around the globe—areas designated as learning laboratories for sustainability with the aim of finding new approaches to conservation while maintaining cultural diversity. Barclay says that at the recent UNESCO conference in Lima the mission was summarised as such: “world heritage is about protecting the past…biosphere reserves are about creating the future.” Back in 2012 Barclay approached UNESCO to undertake a number of sound-driven projects in some of these areas and to date has worked in 14 of them.

“The process is basically going into the biosphere reserve, working directly with the community and developing the project in a very responsive way. Initially we run a lab where we teach the local community about sound and in return they teach us about the local biosphere reserve. We often run residencies bring[ing] in artists and scientists and sett[ing] up various partnerships so that communities can continue the projects. And then with all of the field recordings we create artworks that range from immersive performances to augmented reality projects using mobile phones, to large-scale installations that tour conservation congresses to bring awareness of biosphere reserves. Biosphere Soundscapes has, I would like to think, a strong structure, but then it’s very flexible and responsive with how it works with each of the communities onsite.”

I ask Barclay how this process plays out for the communities involved. She cites the most recent project in Mexico’s Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve as a good example. “In Mexico last year we ran a residency and as a result of that all these partnerships [were formed] with local conservation groups, the Ministry for Environment, a conservation conference they’re having there and Fonoteca which is the national film and sound archive. The project became a catalyst for forming a lot of interdisciplinary collaborations for the local community and the biosphere reserve.”

Rainforest Listening

Under the banner of Biosphere Soundscapes, several ongoing projects have developed—River Listening, Ocean Listening and the most recent project, Rainforest Listening, which Barclay discusses in more depth.

“I was working with an organisation in Austin, Texas called Rainforest Partnership…They work directly with Indigenous communities throughout the Amazon in Peru and Ecuador mainly…finding things that the community is passionate about doing and help[ing] them build up those projects so that the forest becomes more valuable standing than it is cut down.

“We decided to start this project looking at ways that we can use sound to monitor environmental change in the Amazon, but then [also] as an awareness and education tool…So the creative approach was to take a lot of my Amazon field recordings [and] creative responses, then geo-locate these compositions throughout urban environments, and take people on soundwalks. We launched that in New York City, in Times Square, for Climate Week last year.

“The success of that project sparked the idea of expanding this to different places around the world. So we did it for [the United Nations Conference on Climate Change] COP21 in Paris. We developed it further so that we could work on a vertical axis as well. We took the recordings I have from four different layers of the Amazon and planted those on each observatory deck of the Eiffel Tower…The evolution of that project is that we are now installing these live nodes in the Amazon Rainforest so the App will actually connect to live streams. [We are also] building on that idea of being able to [place] the four layers of Amazon onto different iconic structures, hopefully across the world.”

The power of listening

I ask Barclay why she thinks sound is so successful at generating discussions around conservation.

“We put so much more emphasis on our visual perception than our auditory perception. If we have opportunities to listen more or are encouraged to listen more, [we] experience the environment in a different way…I had the opportunity to work in a lot of Indigenous communities throughout my PhD and I was fascinated by this idea that in almost all of the communities I was working in—although they approached this in different ways—the idea of listening to the environment was really at the core of their life and a lot of things they were doing…So coming from a background as a musician with a strong interest in conservation and climate change, it seemed obvious to connect the dots and find ways that sound could bring awareness to these environments and be a tool to really engage people in the richness and diversity of these environments at risk.”

When asked about uncomfortable overtones of exoticism, imperialism and exploitation that potentially accompany a Western field recording practice, Barclay cites the development of the Biosphere Soundscapes model as a direct response.

“Probably eight or nine years ago I shifted away from that idea of going into a community, doing lots of field recordings, leaving, making a bunch of works, touring them around the place. It’s been much more about developing these long-term relationships with communities and having them be an integral part of process… [making sure they] have a voice.”

She also suggests that there is a shift in the conservation community towards understanding sound as a powerful tool. When she recently attended the World Congress of Biosphere Reserves [http://en.unesco.org/events/4th-world-congress-biosphere-reserves], held every six years, she was happy to see that acoustic ecology and sound were now on the United Nations agenda.

“When I’ve presented acoustic ecology and the Biosphere Soundscape project in the past there has been support but, I guess, confusion for a lot of the delegates as to why we would be talking about sound and what on earth acoustic ecology is. This year there was a lot more interest and general understanding of the way that sound can be a tool to understand cultural and biological diversity. There was a lot more interest from other [biosphere reserves] in developing projects and university curriculums and working with communities on the ground. Now it’s just a question of how, really, do I do it all!”

Sonic Environments (ACMC 2016), Queensland Conservatorium, Brisbane, 10-11 July

Bright World opens with a chilling recollection by co-playwright Elise Hearst. As a child on Jewish school camp, she was warned by her elders that the local townsfolk were suspicious and fearful of her kind, having been told stories of their wicked ways. Hearst wasn’t the only kid left crying. In the end, it was all a bizarre lesson—see how easy it is to fall for a story? The truth was not in what was recounted, but in the telling. It’s a lesson that underscores every aspect of the play.

The work began when Hearst learned of William Cooper, the legendary Aboriginal activist whose struggles to achieve racial equality in Australia were notable enough, but who also led the world’s only private protest against the horrific treatment of Jews in Europe during and after Kristallnacht. This was at a time when Indigenous Australians were a long way from being recognised as citizens—as humans, in many cases—and outspoken protests were more likely to result in ration cuts than global change. Today Cooper is a hero in the Jewish community both in Australia and Israel, but in 1938 he was merely doing what he knew was right.

Hearst has co-written the play with fellow playwright Andrea James, herself a descendant of William Cooper, and the work’s two historic threads trace the long life of Cooper alongside that of Hearst’s grandparents, who would flee Austria during the period of Cooper’s protest. Given the obvious potency of these two narratives, it’s odd that the strictly historical sequences in the play are the least engaging, though not at all dull. They’re relatively straightforward reconstructions, however, at least compared to the frame into which they’re placed.

This is a work that deeply and effectively problematises the act of telling. Hearst and James perform as versions of themselves, describing the way their troubled working relationship unfurled throughout the creative process of writing, and admitting to their prejudices and presumptions regarding the other. “I think it’s cool to be Aboriginal,” Hearst confesses to James during an online exchange, while James is scornful of her “posh” collaborator. Cooper’s story can be seen as the coming together of two oppressed communities, but James and Hearst don’t paint their own union as a rosy one.

Bright World is richly invested in intersectionality and the difficulties it presents. The intersection of Aboriginal and Jewish cultures is the most obvious case in point, and there are musings both charming and melancholic on the ghettoisation of writers—is James always and necessarily an Aboriginal writer? If Hearst creates Jewish writing, why doesn’t she produce red-headed writing?

These questions are embedded in the structure of the work, too. It’s a shocking moment when an Anglo-Australian actor slips into the role of Cooper’s teacher, a Tamil from Mauritius, complete with his attempt at an accurate accent. James eventually lambasts Hearst for thinking it’s okay to cast a white actor in the role, to which the latter objects that Indigenous actors are playing Jewish figures in other historical scenes. Actors are playing across gender, too, and the struggle to nut out the thorny issues of access, opportunity and authenticity ultimately culminates in a fully fledged fight over who can claim to be most oppressed, a battle that turns physical at one point.

None of these issues can be compromised, but the playwrights realise they’re working with limited resources to bear witness to a story too few know. If they don’t tell it themselves—problems and all—who will?

Paige Rattray’s direction appropriately emphasises the constructedness of the enterprise, setting the whole thing within a school gym and largely eschewing period costume for basketball shorts and t-shirts with slogans or emoji nodding to the character being played (“WHITE ACTOR” elicits big laughs by the time it appears). The playfulness of the mise-en-scène plays counterpoint to the seriousness of the themes explored, though that playfulness runs throughout the meta-theatrical written frame too.

Against all this the historical moments can seem dialogue-heavy and overly expository. James and Hearst do an excellent job illustrating the knotty challenges of telling these stories in Australia in 2016, but Bright World doesn’t seem to resolve those problems internally. Perhaps it’s a necessary contradiction. To leave the theatre fully satisfied would be to fall into the lie that the work has finished. When William Cooper finally makes his appearance in Bright World’s meta-narrative frame, James and Hearst tell him that there’s still a lot of work to be done. He doesn’t skip a beat: “Get on with it then!”

Bright World, writers Andrea James, Elise Hearst, director Paige Rattray, performers Elise Hearst, Andrea James, Kevin Kiernan-Molloy, Shari Sebbens, Guy Simon, dramaturgy, lighting Emma Valente, design Romanie Harper, sound design, music Tom Hogan, choreography Kurt Phelan, presenter ARTHUR, producer Belinda Kelly; Theatre Works, Melbourne, 13-30 April

Brisbane-born dancer and choreographer Larissa McGowan has built a formidable reputation as a performer and maker of works of intense physicality. Her ‘bone-popping’ style, combined with an overarching desire to make accessible contemporary dance works that are both dark and comic, shaped her first full-length piece, Skeleton, in 2013 (interview, review). McGowan returns to popular culture themes in her new work, Mortal Condition, which employs a two-part structure to juxtapose the real world with the virtual as portrayed in computer games.

In the first part, American singer Mike Patton’s 1996 experimental album of nightmarish vocal improvisations, Adult Themes for Voice, soundtracks a viscerally expressive conversation between bodies in space. In the second, computer game characters and tropes drawn from games as disparate as Pac-Man, Call of Duty and Minecraft are used to explore a virtual world unconstrained by rules. True to form, McGowan also appears in Mortal Condition; she is joined onstage by Thomas Bradley, collaborator on McGowan’s 2012 work Fanatic, Spring Dance, and fellow former ADT luminary Kialea-Nadine Williams.

McGowan tells me Mortal Condition’s development has been a protracted one: “Kialea and I first started on this almost two years ago, on the second half of the show, which was the gaming side of it, the virtual world. And obviously that’s just due to funding, when you get it, when you can move forward with a production. And then Tom and I, in response to that development, spent some time in a studio without funding, just to find that first world, which is reality, based on the Mike Patton album. It felt like [the work] needed something to contextualise the fantasy world that we were creating, something to bring it back to reality, to remind us why we were there in the first place.”

The Patton album provided an anchor for the work’s first half, McGowan elaborates, its guttural quality suggesting a particular kind of choreographic language—heavy, dense, strenuous—suited to McGowan and Williams’ robust physicality. “We’re built to take quite a pummelling,” she quips. “It felt raw, naturally emotive, kind of organic in some ways,” McGowan says of Patton’s music. “The first half of Mortal Condition is very much a conversation between bodies in space and we go through everything from a nice ‘hey, how are you,’ to a fight, to a romantic duet, to a total explosion of something bad happening. So it’s a huge range of naked human emotion that then transitions into this other world. We knew we needed to find a similar kind of soundtrack that could be as epic as Mike Patton’s, and DJ Tr!p—Tyson Hopprich—really found that for the second half. It feels like he’s made the soundtrack to an actual game.”

The work’s dramaturg and associate director is Steve Mayhew, who previously collaborated with McGowan on Fanatic, a short work that playfully deconstructed the Alien and Predator film franchise (It premiered at Sydney Opera House’s Spring Dance in 2012 and was subsequently presented by Sydney Dance Company in 2013 and 2015). Although dramaturgs are normally associated with theatre rather than dance, I suggest to McGowan that this is increasingly changing. She agrees, telling me that Mayhew’s objective viewpoint, and his guiding of the three dancers’ many research tasks, has been crucial to the development of this work.

Mortal Condition initially came out of a conversation McGowan and Mayhew had and the work evolved from there. “It’s so good having someone from another background, particularly theatre, because we are trying to emote something without it being character-driven. What’s also good is someone who isn’t a dancer saying, ‘I like this,’ ‘I don’t like that’ and being so honest. He always challenges me. He goes, ‘here’s something– I’m not necessarily going to tell you what I want it to be’ or ‘here’s an idea’ or ‘here’s a sound’—and I have to go away and find my own dance dramaturgy from his theatrical dramaturgy. It’s a very interesting way to work.”

Not much of a gamer while growing up, McGowan’s research focused on the mechanics of game-playing and which aspects of computer games might possibly be replicated choreographically. In Mortal Condition, Bradley portrays a gamer, McGowan and Williams a shifting array of computer game characters and player avatars. “Kialea and I,” says McGowan, “asked ourselves what computer game characters would be capable of doing in reality. We found that, although many things were impossible, some things weren’t, so our process became to take parts of these games and try to reenact them in some way, in an abstract form.”

McGowan gives the example of a section of the work inspired by a popular breed of YouTube video in which (almost invariably male) gamers narrate their progress through certain games in order to display their prowess and to provide tips for less experienced players. During the section, a voiceover by actor Patrick Graham describes how to purchase and ‘pimp-up’ a car while McGowan and Williams embody the vehicles being ‘molded.’ While for McGowan the gendered nature of gaming—exposed so vividly by the recent Gamergate controversy—is not a central theme of the work, she does acknowledge its presence: “There are two women in the piece playing certain characters and obviously women are depicted a certain way in games. You can’t not read it [in that way] with two women and a guy who is gaming, exerting a certain degree of control over those characters in the work.”

She continues, “We also played with things like, in a game you can stop and start it, you can wind back, you can die and return to life.” Hearing this, I ask how Toby K’s lighting and projection designs will help to create the ‘virtual world’ of the work’s second half. “He’s built screens with robots that can turn them for us—it’s quite amazing, “ says McGowan, “and the screens can be closed and projected onto. The projections will include elements of computer game interfaces such as maps, health bars and weaponry displays, as well as images of virtual environments that the characters portrayed by Kialea and I pass through. So he’s got a lot to play with, but it’s there to complement what we’re doing. We’re getting into the theatre next week to tech all that.”

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

It’s no secret that the biennial Keir Choreographic Award aims to foster an expansive, cross-disciplinary vision of contemporary dance, one in which choreography is re-imagined as an associative process, a way of bringing together multiple artistic, philosophical and critical practices in performance.

This agenda may well unleash howling fantods in dance fans worried about a developing trend toward exhaustive intellectualisation; but, looking at the eight semi-finalists competing for the 2016 award, there’s no doubt that the vision has been embraced by a generation of emerging choreographers—and particularly those who trained at Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts.

Deep Shine

Opening the first of two semi-final programs is Chloe Chignell’s Deep Shine. Or, rather, it had been called Deep Shine. As we enter the space, we find a figure, all in gold, standing on a motorised lazy susan, stage left, cordless microphone in hand, repeating in an icy monotone that the work has been retitled. It is now called ‘Shine’. Depth, it is implied, is no longer interesting. The surface and its glamour is all.

Sheathed in Spandex bodysuits, elasticised fabric covering hands, feet and faces, the three performers are like personifications of pure gloss. One body, all in magenta, lies on its side against the back wall of the space. Another, also in magenta, stands on a downstage plinth. Which one is Ellen Davies and which is Bhenji Ra? We know that the figure with the microphone is Chloe Chignell because she tells us so. But, on reflection, can we be sure?

The work suggests a kind of generalised anxiety around the labour of identity construction, a paradoxical need both for self-exposure and also self-preservation. In one memorable scene, Chignell removes herself from an orgiastic tangle of shiny bodies, returns to the spinning dais and strips off her jumpsuit, revealing yet another jumpsuit. One skin is sloughed off to reveal another. We imagine that the figure is nothing but jumpsuits all the way down.

Sarah Aiken (Tools for Personal Expansion)

Sarah Aiken explores a similar complex of ideas in her piece, Sarah Aiken (Tools for Personal Expansion). As in Chignell’s work, the dance begins with the choreographer speaking her name into a microphone. Claire Leske and Emily Robinson then enter the space and each repeat the same name—Sarah Aiken. Aiken then slowly paces out the width of the stage, moving back and forth with Leske and Robinson in her wake performing in canon.

In the middle section, the dancers use the panorama function on an iPhone camera, live streamed to a large screen at the back of the stage, to digitally manipulate an image of Aiken’s body in real time, making it appear as if her arms and legs stretch around the entire room.

There are echoes here of Atlanta Eke’s Body of Work, which won the inaugural Keir Award in 2014, but Aiken is undoubtedly on her own investigative trajectory. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Sarah Aiken (Tools for Personal Expansion) is the surprising way that it builds on her previous work, SET, which was part of the Dancehouse Housemate program in 2015 and which also explored ideas of bodily extension and video manipulation. The final scene of her Keir entry, in which she advances toward the audience with her arms open wide, extended with the help of trick sleeves, seems a particularly clever re-imaging of the closing moments of SET.

If It’s All in My Veins

Martin Hansen’s if it’s all in my veins is a much darker and more overtly physical work, one which seems to suggest that the history of dance—and its future—is little more than the endless reproduction of fundamentally empty appearances.

A laptop sits onstage with a clock counting down on its screen. Performers Hellen Sky, Maxine Palmerson and Michelle Ferris busy themselves aiming mobile spotlights and arranging fluorescent tubes. When the clock hits zero, an animated GIF appears on a screen at the back of the stage showing an iconic dancer—a Nijinsky or a Pina Bausch, say—captured in a rapid loop. The three performers then throw themselves into a rough imitation—not of the dancer, as such, but of the representation of the dancer, with all its glitches and distortions.

The work has a bit of a scrapbook feel, with a lot of different ideas stuck around the central theme of imitation and simulation. And to a greater or lesser degree this same scrappiness is a feature of each of the first four works created for the Keir Award this year. Perhaps there was some pressure on the artists to cram full their entire allotment of 20 minutes, but I think in several of the works a shorter, less fragmented, more focused presentation might have had more impact.

Before the Fact

The final work on the first night’s program is Alice Heyward’s Before the Fact. Heyward has invited artist Ilya Milstein to illustrate a book of imaginary dance notations, which she here interprets for us as a kind of performed sketch. Slowly and carefully, she walks across the stage, folding at the hips, crouching, partially extending her arms, all while reciting a manifesto-like statement on her archive of a future choreography.

The work does have the feel of something that has been unpacked for the first time, like something that has just arrived from the future. Matthew Adey’s set design even includes drifts of bubble wrap, piles of loose cloth and plenty of packing tape. And it all has some incipient interest, but Heyward doesn’t quite manage to suggest the full choreographic potential of the fragmentary moments inspired by Milstein’s drawings.

Keir Choreographic Award Semi-Finals, Program One; Dancehouse, Melbourne, 26-30 April

Next week in RealTime: Andrew Fuhrmann reviews Semi-Finals, Program Two, and we’ll report on the Finals, playing this week at Carriageworks, Sydney, 5-7 May.

In “Never turn your back on the sea,” her review of Derek Kreckler: Accident & Process, Laetitia Wilson writes of one of the show’s works, Wet Dream,

“Here [Kreckler] lies, partially submerged within a moment of abandonment, the water streaming over and around his body. There is an element of chance here, of the accident, the flight of fancy, while at the same time the work is highly constructed and follows a predetermined process leading to its realisation.”

Wilson embraces the range and depth of Kreckler’s output: “As an oeuvre focused on experimental, conceptual and post-minimalist arts practice across a diversity of media, it is propelled by a perceptive vision engaged in issues across art history, the environment and Indigenous and non-Indigenous politics.”

This is the first survey exhibition of this leading Australian conceptual artist. Curated by Hannah Matthews it opened at PICA in August 2015.

Kreckler and Matthews speak lucidly about the artist’s work in an engaging film by Peter Cheng made for PICA which also features illuminating footage from the exhibition.

2016
Bunbury Regional Art Gallery: 5 March-10 April
Geraldton Regional Art Gallery: 23 April-25 June
SASA Gallery, Uni SA: 15 July-10 August
Horsham Regional Art Gallery: 9 Sept-6 Nov 6

2017
Contemporary Art Tasmania: 13 Jan-4 March
Plimsoll Art Gallery Tasmania: 13 Jan-4 March
Bathurst Regional Art Gallery; 31 March-28 May
Maitland Regional Art Gallery: 24 June-3 Sept
Wollongong Art Gallery: 14 Oct- 26 Nov

L-R Willow Conway, Ange Arabatzis, Nick Stribakos, Lucia Brancatisano, Dirty Pictures

There is an odd sense of déjà vu about Dirty Pictures, a new Australian work made up of silent, and sometimes static, tableaux, performed against a large screen on which a violent mash-up of images is projected. It is a heavily visual performance, even though a monotone voice sometimes overlays the stage happenings, and the images are familiar, resonating.

A couple shoots up; makes out. A sex worker smokes on a street corner; is approached by a customer. A man slouches on the couch, in a drug-fuelled sleep. Drugs are exchanged for money; money for drugs. A man violently gropes a woman, while one of her hands is searching for her handbag on the floor. A woman stands on a street corner; a man appears out of nowhere and grabs her by the hair. A man turns a chair upside down, feeling all its nooks and joints for a secret stash of…drugs, money? Two women make out with a man; then with each other, peeling away from the man’s mouth, his crotch, onto the floor. A man runs in the night, his open eyes bewildered, searching. A woman cries on a bench. More money is exchanged: for a bigger packet of drugs, or, condescendingly, for two small pills and a nasty laugh.

This is the iconography of heroin in Melbourne: the iconography of St Kilda, of the 90s, of two dozen novels, films and plays. It is already-seen in the sense that these images are iconic: we feel we have seen them before even if we haven’t, because we know that this is what addiction is. These four characters are stock characters in the commedia dell’arte of this genre: a couple hungry for each other and for a drug, a pimp, a sex worker. Both women are in high heels and short skirts, both are present exclusively as objects upon which sex and violence are inflicted; a lot of arse is bared, a lot of crotch.

Dirty Pictures is of another time, and not just because it tells a story that is no longer new. The juxtaposition of video projection and silent movement has an industrial harshness and an emphasis on flat image instead of the current more immersive performative experience; it speaks of the experimental theatre of the 1970s, 1980s—it is what Angus Cerini would have been making had he been born three decades earlier.

And yet, it merits recognition. In a city in which so much new work concerns itself either with pure form or fairly self-indulgent personal concerns of rather young and inexperienced makers, it is a breath of fresh air to see a work tackle deep societal trauma. Because Melbourne remains a city steeped in drugs.

Writer-director Tony Reck frames this as a “play about corruption. Corruption of the self; corruption of innocence; corruption of the body; and corruption within relationships occurring within a corrupt society” (program note). There is a raw, emotional tingle to Dirty Pictures, an authentic trauma trying to voice itself, and it comes out not in the stale images, but in their rhythm and repetition. The roles shift: all four characters inflict and suffer pain, sell and buy drugs; it is hard to keep track of character and plot, there is only a sort of rhythm to follow. The ensemble cast—all excellent—glide seamlessly between these arrested moments of violence, despair, relief, mania and boredom.

For those who know cycles of addiction, co-dependency and despair, it is this mindless, banal repetition and variation, same scenes with different actors, that will trigger recognition. Depicted here is the brutal anything-goes-ness of people caught up in vicious cycles they don’t understand: the same aimless violence of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or Dance of Death, just in the key of heroin.

Dirty Pictures, script, direction Tony Reck, performers Ange Arabatzis, Lucia Brancatisano, Willow Conway, Nick Stribakos, sound design Hugo Race, lighting design Matt Barber, La Mama Courthouse, Melbourne, 14-24 April

For cineastes, for horror devotees in search of weird new thrills and provocative perspectives, for viewers tired of the all-too-often disappointing characterisation of women in genre cinema, Tasmania’s Stranger With My Face International Film Festival is a significant event on the Australian calendar. Started in 2012 by Hobart-based filmmakers Briony Kidd and Rebecca Thomson, the festival showcases and provides professional opportunities for women who make horror and dark genre films—an especially under-represented group in a broader industry guilty of woeful gender disparity.

The Directors Guild of America found in its 2015 Feature Film Diversity Report that just 6.4% of directors of features released in 2013 and 2014 were female; and closer to home, in December 2015 Screen Australia announced Gender Matters: a three-year, $5 million plan to address gender imbalance in the Australian screen industry.

Over a packed four days at Hobart’s Salamanca Arts Centre, the 2016 festival (this year directed and programmed by Kidd) opened with a session of Australian and international shorts before continuing with a program consisting of eight feature films, industry events and the festival’s regular Mary Shelley Symposium. Kidd had secured some notable Australian premieres among the features, including Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Evolution (2015, France), Anna Biller’s The Love Witch (2016, US), Ginanti Rona Tembang Asri’s Indonesian slasher Midnight Show (2016) and Bernard Rose’s visceral adaptation of Frankenstein (2015, US), which screened at the Museum of Old and New Art’s Cinemona. With the exception of the latter, it’s unlikely Australian audiences will get the chance to see theatrical screenings of any of these films outside the festival circuit.

Talking horror

Part of the fascination of a carefully curated festival like this one is seeing what common threads or ‘conversations’ emerge across the program. While the previous festival in 2014 offered several harrowing perspectives on female victimhood, 2016 reversed that ratio by giving us female perpetrators in The Love Witch, Evolution, Abigail Blackmore’s darkly comedic short Vintage Blood (2015, UK), Australian revenge fairytale short Can You See Them? (Polly and Mike Staniford, 2014) and Izzy Lee’s sexed-up Lovecraftian short Innsmouth (2015, US). In her symposium talk, Shock and Awe, Emma Valente, co-artistic director of feminist theatre company The Rabble, spoke about the taboo topic of female-perpetrated violence. The one powerful exploration of victimhood came, interestingly enough, from the festival’s sole male-directed feature, Frankenstein, with Australia’s Xavier Samuel delivering a searing performance as the monster/victim.

An overarching topic emerged in director Q&As, in a panel discussion on “Horror Now” and in Kidd’s explanation for the 2016 festival name change from SWMF “Women’s Horror Film Festival” to “International Film Festival.” This concerned the blurring of genre boundaries and the difficulty of confining ‘horror’ to a rigid definition. The most interesting horror cinema is difficult to categorise, slipping between gore and arthouse, realism and the uncanny, folklore and sci-fi—thus presenting a challenge to those who prefer to put stories into neat boxes: funding bodies, ‘traditional’ horror audiences, the US film industry.

This ambiguity was certainly applicable to Frankenstein, which, while containing explicit enough violence to make it unequivocally horrific was also profoundly dramatic and moving, with strong artistic production values. Rose spoke in a post-screening Skype Q&A about “arthouse horror” not being a genre that’s generally acknowledged. The cheap horror film, he said, has jump scares; so-called ‘art horror’ leaves the audience deeply disturbed.

Powerful women & imaginary worlds: Evolution, The Love Witch, Girl Asleep

Ambiguity permeates Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s extraordinary feature Evolution, centred on an isolated community of 10-year-old boys who live with their mothers in austere proximity to the seaside. Striking oceanic iconography is used to build an enigmatic narrative that offers an unsettling perspective on puberty, parasitism, birth and surrogacy—with radically reimagined sex roles. Characterised by a sparseness and fluidity, the film’s strange combination of matriarchal ritual and watery science fiction brought to mind Gauguin’s paintings of Breton women, HP Lovecraft and Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring.

The Love Witch, written and directed by Anna Biller, also depicts exploitative female power, but rather than inverting sex roles in the manner of Evolution, simply turns up the dial on existing gender stereotypes in a gleeful parody of 60s sexploitation cinema. With the aid of magic potions, spells and her own considerable charms, “Love Witch” Elaine reduces her conquests to quivering wrecks and worse, all the while espousing flowery Mills & Boon-ish sentiments. With her elaborately camp set design and hand-made costumes, the multi-talented Biller serves up a visual feast in which Elaine is the centrepiece. In a role that would have been merely decorative in lesser hands, Samantha Robinson imbues Elaine with a poise and conviction that’s subtly disturbing amid the wackiness; the film might be a parody but she’s compellingly delusional. (Biller writes eloquently about Robinson’s performance on her blog).

With a constant emphasis on appearances, artifice, the femme fatale trope and superficial romantic fantasy, Biller’s extravagant recreation of celluloid retro-sexism evokes a toxic femininity that’s as disturbing as it is hilarious.

Like The Love Witch, Girl Asleep (2015, Australia) is an arresting period piece, its meticulously stylised sets a glorious tribute to the browns and oranges of 70s interior design. In a Skype Q&A after the film, director Rosemary Myers described the era as a pertinent time in which to situate a girl’s story: a time when feminism was ascendant yet women were still perceived as presiding over the home.

Adapted by Myers and actor and screenwriter Matthew Whittet from their production for Adelaide’s Windmill Theatre, Girl Asleep is a fairy tale of adolescent empowerment every bit as charming as its predecessors, Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz. A heightened imaginary world is realised through a range of theatrical techniques, from fantastical puppet-like figures to stylised landscapes. As the heroine ventures into the night woods behind her suburban Australian house there are echoes of Tracey Moffatt’s Bedevil (1993) and Ann Turner’s Celia (1989), which opened the 2014 SWMF—though the latter is ultimately more waking nightmare than empowering dream. Cinematographer Andrew Commis (The Daughter, The Rocket) is adept here as in his previous films at creating an otherworldly atmosphere.

The merging of the cinematic and theatrical evident in Girl Asleep was another of SWMF’s mini-themes, arising in the Symposium talk by Emma Valente as well as in Tasmanian playwright Alison Mann’s discussion of the influence of cinematic body horror on her works She’s Not Performing and The Surgeon’s Hands.

Thrillers: The Invitation, Crushed, Midnight Show

Stepping away from the supernatural into the realm of human wickedness were three suspense-driven features.

The Invitation (Karyn Kusama, 2015, US) is an intensely disquieting ensemble piece whose action takes place at a dinner party in the Hollywood Hills. It builds tension through a masterfully handled, gradually escalating disruption of social mores—a slap, a personal anecdote that turns unexpectedly sinister, the hosts’ jarring claims of spiritual enlightenment—while at the same time casting doubt on the protagonist’s suspicion that something is awry. From the opening scene, strategic use of discordant strings, slight slowing of movement and blurred backgrounds create a sense of things being off-kilter.

Midnight Show, the debut feature from young Indonesian director Ginanti Rona Tembang Asri, situates its slasher narrative in a struggling Indonesian cinema in 1998, the year of the country’s financial crisis. This, a more gruesome version than that passed by the censors in Indonesia, skilfully uses the cinema’s empty corridors and darkened auditorium as the setting for a bloody cat and mouse game; as you’d expect from any self-respecting post-Scream slasher, the plot is self-reflexively entwined with the concept of horror as a form.

SWMF closed with another strong debut, Megan Riakos’ Crushed (2015, Australia), a finely paced family intrigue set in Mudgee vineyards that makes intelligent and very atmospheric use of its location, which is not just scenic backdrop but integral to the plot.

Community & The Attic Lab

Riakos and Asri were participants, along with US filmmaker Shoshana Rosenbaum (whose impressive short The Goblin Baby was part of this year’s program), Rebecca Thomson (TAS), Donna McRae (VIC), Isabel Peppard (VIC), Carrie McLean (TAS), Katrina Irawati Graham (QLD) and Natalie James (VIC) in a new SWMF initiative, The Attic Lab, “an intensive mentoring program for women genre filmmakers” (press release) involving the development of pitches that were presented to invited members of the film industry and festival-goers.

The Attic Lab is representative of one of SWMF’s best aspects: the festival’s public spiritedness and supportive community atmosphere, evident not only in this opportunity afforded to women for the development of new projects, but also in the hard work of the festival team and the generosity of its volunteers. Stranger With My Face seems set to continue to expand into the future: may the closely-knit community it has created flourish alongside it.

Stranger With My Face International Film Festival 2016, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, 14-17 April

AUSTRALIANS, END THE INCARCERATION OF ASYLUM SEEKERS. End sickness, mental illness, self- and sexual abuse. End suicide, torture, manslaughter and murder. End hopelessness.

AUSTRALIANS, ADMIT RESPONSIBILITY. For first making war on Iraq. For creating refugees, denying them basic human rights, treating them as criminals.

AUSTRALIANS, END ‘THE PACIFIC SOLUTION.’ It is no solution. Move beyond compassion. Exercise imagination, strategise and act.

AUSTRALIANS, CLOSE OFFSHORE DETENTION CENTRES. Respect the rights of refugees. Bring them to Australia. Invite those whose claims have been processed to live and work among us. Treat other asylum seekers rapidly with new, humane processing.

AUSTRALIANS, END THIS REFUGEE HELL OF OUR MAKING. THIS HELL WE TOO INHABIT, WITH GUILT AND SHAME FOR THE HURT WE DO.

Rainbow Vomit is a joyous romp from beginning to interactive end, transporting the audience for 40 minutes into a childlike state of engagement somewhere beyond the reach of care or distraction. Its brilliance lies in its simplicity—the use of lo-fi elements we all remember the feel and smell of—to peel back the self-conscious veneer of our wordly armour. Dancenorth achieves this without compromising the sophistication of the choreography or patronising its audience in the slightest.

The choreographers, artistic director Kyle Page and rehearsal director Amber Haines, together with the dancers and the company’s cultural engagement staff, delved into research on the effects of digital media technology on developing brains.

The show opens with a voiceover by four-year-old Bella: “When I’m watching TV, my brain feels smooshed, and my body feels sick and lumpy…The back of my neck feels scrapey and itchy when I use my iPad. When I do the iPad, my eyes get stuck open for the whole night and then I get tired the next day…It’s too fun, I can’t stop” (Moving to Learn, exploring the Effects of Technology on Children, 7 May, 2015).

The dancers, who have been sitting, unmoving, in black and white patterned pyjamas on clear bubble-like fitballs as the audience enters, mime the scrolling of hand-held devices to Bella’s words, which echo and distort. They all gaze forwards at a screen’s cold glow, craning their necks from side to side. “Wow,” “Whoah,” they exclaim louder and louder as they rock from side to side on the balls, faster and louder until they are bouncing and laughing, they forget the screen and potential energy becomes kinetic.

The large balls are thrown, balanced on, swapped, compressed, transformed into caterpillars and three-headed monsters, a Mexican wave, as the dancers dissolve and reassemble formations without missing a beat. Lights go out, back on, repeatedly, and each time the balls have changed colour. The audience, comprising all ages from toddler to elderly, responds with oohs and aahs and laughter to these seamless switches.

To music reminiscent of old-school 8bit game sounds, the five dancers form a machine of upended and connected bodies which scoops, passes and quite literally spits ping pong balls, which seem to have appeared from nowhere. There ensues a sort of spitting contest, the dancers attempting to vocalise and sing with the balls in their mouths, looking like sideshow alley clowns for just a moment. The music gets bigger and funkier and they ricochet across the floor ejecting the balls with whole body contractions which lift them off their feet, nailing every hit in Alisdair Macindoe’s soundtrack.

The music slows to a heavier beat with an almost industrial wail, the mood shifts from jolly to ominous. The other dancers begin herding, climbing the scaffolding in slow motion while Jenni Large holds the floor with a low solo of athletic shapeshifting. The crew run and slide as though on the deck of a ship in high waters, heaving from one side of the floor to the other. Mason Kelly’s intense solo has the feel of someone trapped inside a huge pinball game, as the others fade out.

Large and Georgia Rudd reappear in playsuits of splatty electric colours, swaying head to head like conjoined twins, their hair forward and completely hiding their faces. They move, jump and roll in tandem, forming creepy creatures. Harrison Hall joins the blonde movement for a solo with a breathtaking forward slide in which his long hair takes on a life of its own.

The others return with a shiny motorbike helmet. When they place it on Hall’s head, lightning flashes, there is deafening white noise, and he looks as though he’s being electrocuted. They remove it and instantly the sun shines and birds sing. Like a delighted toddler who’s found how switches work, it’s compulsively on and off for a while, then they all move away and the helmet is left floating in the air.

Ashley McLellan next assumes the helmet, and with shifts in the music and lighting, we are briefly in outer space and under water. Hall holds the helmet still, and McLellan’s body ‘hangs’ from the helmet as though she is made of rubber, in the most astonishing, liquid dance. McLellan, freed from the helmet, continues the rubbery isolations with her expressive face, slow-motion girning of the highest order. The audience is in stitches.

From there, Rainbow Vomit segues into its final quarter, in which audience participation becomes key in a totally unexpected way, and the title makes perfect (non)sense. The show has been immediately picked up and will be touring, and it would be unfair to totally blow the premise and deprive future audiences of their moment. Suffice it to say, there are unicorns and a forecast of rainbows, and Page is willing to reveal that it involves kilometres of neon rope.

This show is a rare achievement, a resonant sensory journey into our inner, earlier, less convoluted childhood state. Or, as Bella puts it at the start, “Family game night is better because it doesn’t have any sore or wrinkly feelings.”

Dancenorth, Rainbow Vomit, direction, choreography Kyle Page, Amber Haines, performers, co-choreographers Harrison Hall, Mason Kelly, Jenni Large, Ashley McLellan, Georgia Rudd, composer Alisdair Macindoe, lighting, set design Govin Ruben, costumes Andrew Treloar; Townsville School of Arts Theatre, 11-16 April

This year Zoe Coombs Marr won the comedy world’s second most prestigious prize, the Barry Award at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and it’s not a stretch to imagine her going on to scoop the number one at Edinburgh too. That double-win has only occurred twice before, but for several reasons she’s in with a chance. Firstly, those other two-timers were Dr Brown and Sam Simmons, both of whom are running mates in a kind of loose pack straddling comedy and performance art that also includes Coombs Marr. Secondly, the show in question, Trigger Warning, is such a meta-theatrical tour de force that it threatens to alter the comedy landscape in profound ways. And finally, it’s just that funny.

Coombs Marr has been playing with her alter ego Dave for a few years now, and at first the character seemed an easy if welcome mark: a straight, white, male stand-up comic whose casual prejudices and blind privilege are as cringeworthy as they are familiar. That Coombs Marr can make Dave more laughable than lamentable is worth lauding, but with Trigger Warning the figure expands accordion-like to such unexpected lengths that his audience is left reeling.

The conceit of the show sees Dave left becalmed by the ‘feminazis’ and politically correct spoilsports on Twitter who have responded with outrage to his misogynistic gags. Desperate to find a form of humour that will offend no-one, he enrols at the exclusive Philippe Gaulier school in Paris—exclusive in terms of the price, not the talent required—and embarks upon a quest to find his inner clown. His inner clown, as it happens, is a cranky lesbian in her 30s, who bears a remarkable resemblance to Zoe Coombs Marr, and whose own inner clown in turn looks a lot like an unreconstructed male stand-up named Dave, whose inner clown is… you get the idea. This recursion is only the beginning, and as the attempt to create a kind of “clownception” spools out it becomes an almost unwinnable challenge to work out exactly how many layers deep we are at any one point.

This is a conceptual juggling act whose technical mastery works not simply to illustrate Coombs Marr’s genius but to shift our perspective on more than one artistic field. It’s not satire, really, since Dave is ultimately a sympathetic figure, a product of an extremely narrow and confining comic culture who honestly can’t see an exit from his box. It says something that his sexist jokes are actually funnier than those of the real comedians he’s based upon, too. As recognisable as he is, Coombs Marr’s drag and the layers of auto-referentiality she employs reveal that the real Daves are playing characters themselves, without necessarily being aware of it. Any comic who witnesses this work will have to ask big questions of themselves between laughs.

The alternate world of “art comedy” isn’t paraded as an ideal retreat from the problematic mainstream of Daves, either—the clowning and mime of peers such as Dr Brown and the many, many comics he has influenced is made just as much fun of here. Dave himself admits he’s no fan of these comedians—most of their repertoire is just exaggerated shrugging, he says—and he protests the pretentiousness of comics who think they can get the crowd laughing simply by making eye contact. By the performance’s end, Coombs Marr is doing precisely that, of course.

In more conventional parody there must be posited some kind of normalcy from which the object of ridicule is set clearly apart. The brilliance of ‘Dave’ isn’t that Coombs Marr has made fun of the figure who typically occupies that position of normalcy, and whose jokes are at the expense of anything that deviates at all from himself. It’s that in unseating him from his position of power, she goes on to destabilise any sense of a norm whatsoever, both within comedy and beyond. Our laughs become the kind of mad flailing of someone drowning, and when the work ends with a wordless act of extremely visceral, physical excess, it is both inexplicable and entirely necessary, as if Coombs Marr is channelling the collective frenzy she’s whipped up in her audience.

For many RealTime readers Zoe Coombs Marr will be better known through her work with the trio Post, and these solo forays into comedy might seem a departure from the excellent path that collective has already charted. This isn’t a side project. I’ve heard more than one commentator describe this as Coombs Marr’s masterpiece, and for any artist to achieve a triumph such as this just once would be enough. I think there’s even more to come.

Melbourne Comedy Festival, Zoe Coombs Marr, Trigger Warning; Victoria Hotel, Melbourne, 24 March-17 April

Perhaps it’s the constant butting up against barriers in daily life that makes Indigenous artists so good at traversing creative boundaries. Leading filmmakers such as Ivan Sen and Warwick Thornton, for example, effortlessly move between drama, documentary and video art. Bangarra Dance Theatre director Stephen Page continues this form-crossing tradition with Spear, moving for the first time from stage to screen with his directorial feature debut.

Based on the Bangarra production from 2000 of the same name, Spear opens on a stunning clifftop beside the sea. A group of Indigenous men are dressed in jeans, their naked upper bodies marked with paint. The image stakes out Spear’s key concern: the difficult negotiation of tradition and the demands of modern life. The images in the opening moments feel tactile, with close-ups of sand, skin and hair alternating with wide-shots of the stunning landscape. From this seaside setting we move to the city, where the play of light in a shadowy world replaces the sun and sweeping natural vistas. Here Spear’s central character—a young Aboriginal man played by Page’s son, Hunter Page-Lochard —encounters crowds, tunnels, substance abuse and confronting street life in a city haunted by an Indigenous presence. Aaron Pedersen turns in a disturbing performance as a raving drunk, eaten up by anger, pain and mental ill health. Page-Lochard as the young man is trailed through the streets and tunnels by a line of red sand, carving a bloodline, a trace, a wound, across the city’s concrete skin.

Cinematographer Bonnie Elliott captures a string of recognisable Sydney locations in stunning high-definition digital images, from outdoor stone staircases in the Rocks to the grim public housing towers of Redfern. Elliott launched her career in 2009 with one of the strongest Australian features of the past decade, Granaz Moussavi’s My Tehran for Sale, and since then has turned her talents to a consistently diverse body of work, including the post-apocalyptic These Final Hours (2013), the TV drama The Slap (2011) and Lesley Branagan’s documentary A Life Exposed (2013). In Spear she draws mainly on a dark palette characterised by gradations of black, brown and silver grey.

While Elliot’s work is admirably cinematic, less well-realised is the translation of Spear’s dance-like drama for the screen. The film is surprisingly static, the images pregnant with a slow-building action that never quite comes to fruition. Bodies are too often arranged in immobile tableaux rather than fluid combinations of movement. Their restraint is matched by the camera, with rhythm conveyed more often by rapid-fire cuts than the motion of the lens.

The most effective sequences are the few where Page allows his performers to cut loose. Ironically, one of these is set in a prison, where twisted contortions of limbs and bodies convey the tortured strain of containment. Another great sequence is set to the 1961 hit by British comedian Charlie Drake, “My Boomerang Won’t Come Back.” One of George Martin’s less admirable productions, this song tells the story of a young man who is a “disgrace to the Aborigine race” due to his inability to throw a boomerang. Fortunately, a local “witch doctor”—with a bizarre Cockney accent—is on hand to give advice. The Bangarra dancers perform a set of suitably buffoonish, caricatured moves to this jaw-droppingly offensive track, in a hall festooned with a banner proclaiming, “Welcome to Country.”

Indigenous screen work has offered an ongoing reflexive commentary on its intervention into a century of astoundingly racist images in Australian cinema and art. Sally Riley’s Confessions of a Headhunter (2000), for example, irreverently decapitated statues symbolic of British colonisation scattered across the land. Warwick Thornton rewrote the cinema legend of Jedda in Rosalie’s Journey (2003). Ivan Sen subtle reflected on divergent black and white views of the same landscape in Beneath Clouds (2002). Spear’s “Boomerang” sequence adds another chapter to this ongoing reappropriation of the objectifying and dehumanising power of words, images and songs.

Yet despite these flashes of brilliance, Spear never quite coalesces into a convincing whole. The episodic story, such as it is, alternates between the city and the bush, an aphoristic set of encounters with different people and situations. The final scene plays out on Sydney Heads, the city skyline forming a backdrop to striking surrounds that mirror the film’s opening setting. Reunited with his fellow dancers, the young man appears to achieve a reconciliation of sorts, acknowledging his roots and the demands of modern life, enacted in a borderland between city and bush. Given the fragmented experience of the previous 80 minutes, however, the resolution fails to convince, and the dawn setting skirts the realm of cliché.

Page has described Spear in terms of a question rather than a statement, “What is men’s business in this contemporary Indigenous world that we live in?” The film is perhaps best understood in these terms: a probing experiment, a first step into a new realm by one of our leading dance makers. Experiments are becoming increasingly rare in our constricted screen environment, so let’s hope this is a beginning, and not an intriguing one-off for Australian Indigenous dance on screen.
Spear

Spear, director, co-writer Stephen Page, producer John Harvey, cinematographer Bonnie Elliott, co-writer Justin Monjo; Arenamedia and Brown Cab Production in association with Bangarra Dance Theatre, 2015

Quiet as a prayer, The Silences is a crystalline memoir, an unearthing of secrets, a solemn ritual of provisional forgiveness, a healing. In her own voice, filmmaker Margot Nash very simply lays out her family’s history over three generations, rendering each complex with re-evaluated recollections and revelations wrought from research—the family album, letters, history and the recorded words of her mother and sister. The silences of the title are things long unsaid, denied and refused but finally spoken, requiring not just attention, but action—the making of a film as memorial.

Narrated memories and photographs are tellingly juxtaposed with excerpts from Nash’s film fictions—a father slumped, weeping in a hallway, a mother turning slowly in a golden gown, a drawer full of jewellery opened by an inquisitive child. In the course of the film’s making Nash comes to understand something of the nature of her body of work, with its focus on neglected and abandoned children. In The Silences, her voluble mother, who cannot express her love for her daughter, tells her that she tried to abort her by drinking gin and jumping off the piano. Nash asks:

”What madness possessed her to tell me this story when I was still a little girl? I grew up feeling unwanted and unloved and somehow to blame for everything. How can I move past blaming her now, except by speaking my truth and following her story like a detective, uncovering clues, digging deeper and deeper into the archives, questioning everything. I try to listen to the voices in the gaps and silences. How attached am I to being wounded?”

The more Nash learns the more she comes to understand her mother and father and the more there is to repair in her life. Both parents suffer mental problems, the mother depression, the father paranoia, his condition kept secret from the child Margot until it’s all too clear. The marriage is weakened by the mother’s thwarted aspirations, to be an actress and a “lady”—the latter came within her reach, but what happened? Did Nash’s father’s World War II experiences generate his madness or was it inherited? We watch the detective work carried out by both the child and the adult Nash. The child knows there are secrets and searches for clues, finding a hidden album of photos of an unknown child. Meanwhile the mother’s cultured piano playing and tales of high times in Ireland, Scotland, England and India are the noise that covers the silences, that entertains her children but veils the truths that the film reveals step by step.

The embittered, caustic mother cruelly projects her sense of failure onto the “naughty” Margot—child, teenager and young adult anarchist, radical feminist and alternative theatre actor. Sister Diana had been regarded as beautiful, talented and well-behaved. At 10 years of age, however, she was burdened with the knowledge of her father’s illness, expected to support her mother when her husband turned violent and told not to tell Margot. Diana felt this unfair, “it robbed me of my childhood in a way” and allowed Margot, who, like her mother wanted to become an actress, to be a free spirit: “you carried the comic edge in the family,” says Diana. The gentle tension between the sisters adds another layer of feeling to the film. At its beginning they cannot agree on the words for the plaque on their mother’s memorial. As the film progresses our sense of a need for resolution grows—between sisters, mother and daughter, and with some deeper understanding of their father, which comes with his letters, although we are horrified by the extent of his Cold War paranoia and sexual jealousy.

The power of The Silences doesn’t reside alone in the growing, tangled complexity of the lives of a traumatised family and the detective work that unknots it, but in the faces that we quickly learn to recognise, interpret and re-estimate as Nash discovers more about them. She thinks that photos of each of her parents at the time of their honeymoon already suggest discomfort, but qualifies the thought: “I search their faces. What can photographs tell us about the heart, about desire, about longing?” Other photographs are read by Nash with a sense of certainty. One is of her father, back from the war, holding the baby Diana, staring into the camera with a brooding intensity that suggests a damaged psyche. Another image becomes central to the film, a secreted photograph found in the back of the frame holding one of Diana. The mother denies that it’s of her, but the daughters concur, Diana imagining the seemingly troubled mother looking watchfully at someone out of frame, Margot seeing a rare, atypical absence of artifice. This, they believe, is a portrait of a woman who never dealt with grief. The image returns to preface the film’s credits.

Simply framed within black space, photographs are juxtaposed with historical film, Nash’s own screen fictions and images and sounds captured specifically for The Silences—reeds bending in a gentle breeze become a melancholy motif; or one–offs, like the poplars she loved as a child, in which, she says, the wind held its secrets. The intoning of “silences” and “secrets” acquires a liturgical resonance. At the film’s beginning, explaining the motivation for her quest and recalling the idealism of the 1970s, Nash says, ”I thought I could build a new family and leave the past behind. No matter how hard I tried, the past returned again and again and the silences whispering their secrets demanded to be heard.” Text, sound and image become a poem.

The film’s sense of history is finely tuned and inherent in the lives of its protagonists—the well-to-do young at play on shipboard and in English society in India in the 1930s; Nash’s mother working as a radio broadcaster, talking music and literature, in the 40s when men were at war; images of the Petrov spy scandal that inflamed her father’s paranoia; photos of street protest in the 70s and footage from Nash and Robin Laurie’s activist film We Aim to Please (1976), in the which the words of the title are texta’d onto a naked female body. The latter contrasts strikingly with the dozens of genteel snaps and street portraits taken across generations.

For me there are many resonances in this film, historically and personally, which made for painful viewing. My father’s silence and my mother’s bitter volubility (though in her case there were no secrets, everything was laid bare) provoked resistance and protest in the 60s. I felt as Nash did, when she says of her mother, “I hated her and at the same time I craved her love.” Both were women who denied they were depressed and whose sense of potential was thwarted and its hurt turned on others, especially those closest to them.

There is comfort at the end of The Silences, in the symbolic coming together of the family in one serene place and the return of a lost child to the fold. Nash’s understanding of her parents and her art has deepened, as has ours of the artist. We assume she has found the answer to her opening question: “How attached am I to being wounded?”

One image in particular, a delightful one, of Nash’s mother posing elegantly in her wedding gown made of “magnolia silk encrusted with tiny pearls” has stayed with me, because of the dress’s unfortunate origin but moreso its fate. Later in the film, Nash in her 20s asks her mother if she can have the dress, which then, she tells us, she cut in half and wore, partly stuffing it into her jeans, partied and then “went home with a notorious womaniser who broke my heart.” The perhaps vengeful cutting up of the dress wrenches at me, as does its cool telling. More than any other moment in the film, this is where I felt, or simply imagined, the depth of Nash’s wound and an anger not revealed elsewhere in a film which contains its pain, just as its soundtrack of pieces by Chopin, Schumann and Debussy (performed with apt delicacy by Elizabeth Drake) recalls the relief the mother’s piano playing brought to her distressed family.

This is not to say that The Silences is without drama—scenes from Nash’s earlier films, standing in for her childhood, are disturbing—but, above all, it is a finely crafted meditation from the perspective of a melancholy maturity, ready to uncover and address truth and accept compromise, with love.

The Silences, writer, director, producer, editor, voiceover Margot Nash, composer, pianist Elizabeth Drake; 71 minutes; As If Productions 2015. Distributor Ronin Films.

Margot Nash’s other films are Speaking Out (1986), Shadow Panic (1989), Vacant Possession (1994), Call Me Mum (2005) and, with Robin Laurie, We Aim to Please (1976). Nash is Senior Lecturer in the School of Communications at the University of Technology, Sydney. In 2012 she was the Filmmaker in Residence at Zürich University of the Arts where she began developing The Silences.

How can a festival strengthen a community? How can an environment be created that reflects the way we would like society to be? These questions were posed by organisers of the BUZZCUT festival, artists Rosana Cade and Nick Anderson, as they launched their fifth annual program of performance and live art in Glasgow.

Held in a stately century-old community centre in Govan, a little out of the city’s centre, BUZZCUT managed to side-step a lot of the debates that come with mentioning community, particularly those looking at ‘artistic engagement’ with specified groups. Instead it focused inwardly on an artistic community, ensuring all was accessible and comfortable for those involved over the four days. There were no signs of a defeated clan licking wounds as one might expect in a city that last year lost one of its most important performance venues with the much lamented closing of the The Arches. A robust and congenial arts scene featured many local artists and attendees, as well as delegates from throughout the UK and abroad. A pay-what-you-can system of support further recognised economic barriers to participation.

Mish Grigor; Aby Watson

Many of the shows dealt overtly with sexuality and gender identity. Australian Mish Grigor’s The Talk foregrounds the artist’s heterosexual exploits while telling an achingly personal story of a family member’s coming to terms with HIV. Grigor’s reliance on the audience as actors is tricky but skilfully handled, paying off with a huge sense of camaraderie. There is synchronicity between The Talk and Aby Watson’s This is Not a Euphemism. Where Grigor plays a soundtrack of herself allegedly having sex, Glaswegian Watson employs four retro TV monitors to screen her ‘sex tape.’ With Watson in an ill-fitting flesh-coloured leotard, the frankness of the screening is cushioned by awkward live dance sequences and apparent attempts to seduce an audience member. She insists he be a man who is assigned the name “Dicky” via Watson’s sign-language interpreter. The naturalness of the artist’s performance is also grounded in her being a “proudly dyspraxic” dance practitioner. (Dyspraxia, also known as Developmental Co-ordination Disorder, DCD, is a condition affecting physical co-ordination. Eds).

Kayleigh O’Keefe

Another work putting sex ‘in your face’ is Gash Land, an ongoing project by Londoner Kayleigh O’Keefe in the form of a durational interactive performance. You feel as if you’ve arrived at a debauched party in full swing —Jabba the Hutt’s alien nightclub comes to mind. “Glorious Leader” O’Keefe reclines while yelling commands and accepting offerings for her graces. Participants fill in Gash Land citizenship application forms, to be reviewed by the leader. The main qualification for acceptance is that you appear to be having a “Rayt Gud Time.” With the limited attention span of much social media, karaoke segments with invented lyrics, a telephone hotline to the leader, virtual fisting (cardboard fist emojis on a pole and string for waving at the Leader’s bottom) and dancing were ‘scrolled’ through, all framed within a cardboard cut-out, pink acrylic aesthetic. Later, I enter the internet domain of Gash Land and discover I can make offerings to the Leader by paying for the paint and other equipment she’s deployed—an ingenious support method.

For me, O’Keefe’s use of Yorkshire dialect softens any obscenities she utters, as if they are part of another culture; that might be the point. Gash Land is an imaginary place where you can feel safe in your sexuality and was made in response to O’Keefe feeling “slut-shamed” at a sexual health clinic, as she mentions in this interview. Using online platforms aesthetically integrated with interactive live performance can be effective in building an alternative community.

Ria Hartley

As sure as there is sex there is death, although the latter is arguably more taboo to speak of in the modern West. In Descansos, Ria Hartley, from Bristol, offers a performance of mourning involving one participant at a time building a memorial that forms part of an installation growing over four hours. In each cycle a spectator is invited by Hartley’s imploring eyes and an outreached hand to join the ritual. I walk hand in hand with her along a timeline drawn on the stone floor charting recent years in the lives of participants. I try not to step on the black marker scrawlings, sensing their sentiments, and brush past boxy grave-like structures on either side.

Now facing me, Hartley leans in and whispers an instruction, “Write down a death, a moment of rupture, perhaps a path not taken or a loss you are still feeling.” Afterwards, Hartley sets a square of bricks alongside my writing. I am prompted to throw down dirt, make a bed with soil, select and lay flowers, light a candle and place a cross, thus personalising these familiar symbols. The cross is not explicitly Christian, the arms being of equal length, and the stick and twine construction suggest it could be pagan, or Voodoo, which is significant given that Hartley often deals with postcolonial themes. Descansos is a gesture for those unable to mourn in traditional ways. The time and care given by the artist in considering death was reciprocated by her audiences, all of whom I witnessed sincerely taking up her offer.

Louise Doyle

Rock’n’roll came in the form of Dark Side of the Boob, one of the more technically ambitious shows. Conceived and directed by Glasgow-based Louise Doyle, its surreal papier-mâché odyssey enlists half a dozen student puppeteers from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s Contemporary Performance Practice BA to attentively bring alive a massive puppet woman, constructed from the groin up with spinning breasts, seaweed hair and red eyes that light up. A professional erotic dancer develops a little agency within the wisp of a story while another pole-dances for over an hour with athletic, slightly bored eroticism. She becomes an anchor or a kind of metronome for the weirdness that unfolds.

We are crammed on the floor around and between ‘tracks’ on which the action, including a deathly chuffing train with puppet skeleton driver and plumes of smoke, is paraded. There’s a fantastic live band, albeit under-utilised in favour of a cheesy pop soundtrack, and sperm-headed dancers who burst aggressively onto the scene and later offer some delightfully nuanced, imagistic choreography. It’s evident that Doyle’s DIY puppet works will develop and grow more coherent; as with many of the works in the festival, BUZZCUT has provided the platform to road-test new performance.

Tilley Milburn

On the penultimate day of the festival, I find myself in a workshop-style piece, a how-to, in Tilley and Del’s self-styled relaxation technique, Puffing and Wooling. Entering a blanket-covered, lamp-lit and stuffed-toy populated room, I am apprehensive. But after airing some of our grievances about what stops us from relaxing, we hear a little from Londoner Tilley Milburn and stuffed-pig Del about why they advocate for doona days and de-stigmatisation of mental illness. I’m swept up, building a fort with sheets and soft things and curling up within it. Strangely, the group becomes somewhat self-directed, sharing their feelings about relaxation, with one charming man even attempting to hypnotise people into falling asleep. With a new age soundtrack overlayed with recordings of Tilley’s guinea pig’s little grunts, everything feels finally okay. Within contemporary performance, the workshop approach seems to be a trend. However, given Milburn’s transformative aims and her previous work involving people with disabilities in creative processes, the model makes absolute sense.

Lucy McCormick

Back in the main hall, things are abuzz. There is proper coffee, a kiddies’ crèche, hearty café fare for breakfast, lunch and dinner and BUZZCUT’s symposium organiser, Phoebe Patey-Ferguson, stalwartly holding a drop-in discussion table for hours every day, creating an environment that feels open, accessible and welcoming. Later that night, London-based Lucy McCormick, with two male dancers, performs a raucous ‘re-enactment’ of the “Easter bits” of the Bible with herself as Jesus in Easter Performance. It has the power-ballads, popping and locking and feminist performance art one expects from this performer from GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN.

Afterwards I got a text after from a friend who had come along that said, “What a show. The woman got fingered on stage. Damn.” He was referring to McCormick’s version of the moment when Thomas places his finger inside Jesus’ wound. I admit, I looked nervously around the room to see if families were present. Still, you can’t fault McCormick on her ability to entertain and provoke.

BUZZCUT was outrageous, its boundless openness extending the exploration of sexuality in performance and allowing artists to take risks. Perhaps it was frustrating for those expecting more polished works, but there was a sense of enjoyment felt by a community built through feedback and mutual support.

BUZZCUT, Directors Rosana Cade, Nick Anderson, The Pearce Institute, Glasgow, Scotland, 6-10 April

Walking through the Turbine Hall, you notice that the Tate Modern feels different this weekend. Loud, not unhappy screaming is heard in the distance, dads sprawl on cushions with children draped across their laps, families sit on floors as though at a music festival, people are gathered in groups strategising, plotting and scheming.

At first glance you can see a different set of permissions is being performed, there is mess, dressing up, wearing masks and holding signs. You can’t help noticing the way play inhabits the body; it’s like an irrepressible force erupting within the tired old halls of the museum. As you wander the landing of the Turbine Hall finding a mum dressed as a Lone Twin Beastie (2010), children Freeing the Voice (after Marina Abramovic, 1976), tiny Guerilla Girls campaigning for less chilli and more ice cream, these live art works intersect and grind against one another.

Taking place over three days in the Turbine Hall, Playing Up launched a live art education project of the same name—a game designed by Sybille Peters of Hamburg’s Theatre of Research. Thirty-six live art projects are presented on cards via illustration and description with instructions for participants to re-perform these artworks.

We queue up to join the game and are asked to invent a live art name for ourselves. In our group we had peter(pizza), big bird, spaghetti, metal and an image of a horse. Students from Wapping High School enjoy telling us what to do and leading us through the simple process of choosing a card from the deck. There are six subject headings: Beings and Things, Dare and Danger, Science and Tinkering, Body and Perception, Memories and Collections and Out and About. We choose Dare and Danger (of course!). Handed a large card on the back of which is Santiago Sierra’s Person Saying a Phrase (2002), we are directed to another area to collect our materials, including a small pile of change (£1.57), a piece of paper and a pencil. The game has begun.

The game involves inventing a phrase about money and then paying someone to say it. We come up with a sentence, deciding on having them say to us, “You don’t have very much money but I earn (fill in the blank) per year.” We think this pretty much nails the challenge and we set off to find people to take our change. Our first participant is very agreeable, letting us film him making an impassioned plea for people to give money to homeless people. He tells us he is unemployed, but is very well dressed and when we wish him well at the end he tells us we don’t have to worry about him. We give him a penny for luck. The next participant has to be convinced to take our money, but simply and quietly tells us what he earns. It sounds riskier than it felt and in the interest of full disclosure I was participating in the game with a group of live artists and this kind of interaction comes easily to most of us.
Drawing for The Guerrilla Girls

We learn the next day that 60% of people attending over the weekend chose Dare and Danger, perhaps indicating that both children and adults are more interested in risk than we give ourselves credit for. It seems clear that we need to create spaces for experimenting with risk or we will all find other ways to thrill-seek. One of the most exciting and radical things about this game is the way it brings live art projects that may once have been consigned to the shadows of history out into the open to be playfully experimented with by middle class families at the Tate.

The instructions on the cards don’t shy away from risky subjects, including experimenting with gender in Marcel Duchamp’s Rrose Sélavy (the artist’s female persona, 1921) or talking about the artist crawling through glass and shooting himself in the arm, when describing Chris Burden’s Transfixed (1974), though the game itself only involves lying on a car, staring at the sky. Chinese artists Mad for Real’s Soya Sauce and Ketchup Fights (2000) is one of the most popular of the weekend’s events which we didn’t see but heard tales of families lined up along the banks of the Thames in garbage bags, squirting ketchup and soy sauce in each other’s faces. In a lovely closing of the circle, Mad for Real began their working life as a performance duo in the late 90s with their disruptive action Two Artists Jump on Tracey Emin’s Bed (1999) at Tate Britain’s Turner Prize Exhibition.

While I love seeing these works being paraded around the gallery in miniature form, and even enjoy taking part, I’m aware that the effort, context and politics of the originals is absent. What is missing from the event is permission for ‘kids’ to take a critical stance. In the accompanying symposium Gregg Whelan of Lone Twin and ANTI Festival remarked, “There is a turn in participation where resistance is the thing that you are working with and becomes the object of study. The smart stuff would endlessly signal the exit; you should always be asking questions. Am I now in agreement with you? Am I complicit? Am I responsible?” So perhaps in every game we need to be building in an exit, an outside, making it possible to play your own kind of game.

The instruction manual that accompanies the game reads, “Kids are explorers of the everyday; for them to light a match can be something extraordinary that needs focus and time and creates an experience.” In the symposium Richard DeDomenici comments, “Children are natural live artists and the best time to learn the language of live art is when you are young.” I just hope that in the re-enactments something of the original urgency of these artworks lingers. I hope too that these games enable children as political subjects to realise agency and create critique in their daily lives. Adults are constantly trying to get back to a place of ‘curiosity and wonder’ and, playing this game, this actually seems quite easy. The question we have to ask ourselves is: is it kids learning about live art or is live art learning from kids?
Young participant at Playing Up (Lone Twin’s Beastie)

Young participant at Playing Up (Lone Twin’s Beastie)

PLAYING UP, Live Art for Kids & Adults, 1-3 April; PLAYING UP Symposium, 4 April, Tate Modern, London

PLAYING UP’s cards include: Mammalian Diving Reflex’s Haircuts by Children, Tehching Hsieh’s Rope Piece, Vito Acconci’s Following Piece, Joshua Sofaer’s Name in Lights, Lone Twin’s Beastie, Yoko Ono & John Lennon’s Bagism, Bobby Baker’s Cooking the Sunday Dinner, Bow Gamelan Ensemble’s Concrete Barges, Stephen Cripps’ Roundabout for a Crashed Helicopter and more.

PLAYING UP produced and published by the Live Art Development Agency (UK), FUNDUS THEATER/Theatre of Research (Germany), Tate Early Years and Family Programme (UK), Best Biennial (Sweden) and Live Art UK, with the support of the Goethe-Institut London and the Collaborative Arts Partnership Programme (CAPP).

Arts Minister Mitch Fifield’s Catalyst grant scheme has become a showcase for highly publicised and strategically staggered grant announcements that have about them the whiff of pork barrelling.

Recall that Catalyst’s funds were taken from the Australia Council’s budget for the small to medium arts sector. Now Catalyst is funding a Brisbane commercial art gallery, the WA Ballet and Kaldor Arts Projects. In an announcement last week that Sydney’s Art Gallery of NSW, MCA and Carriageworks were “going national,” creating a biennale of Australian contemporary art, Carriageworks’ director Lisa Havilah is reported as saying “additional funding has been sought for the event from the federal government's Catalyst program (SMH, 21 April).

Clearly, Catalyst is not going to be an alternative funding source for the small to medium sector. Artspeak is forming a National Election Strategy Group, holding a National Arts Debate and providing updates: sign up here.

We are standing on contested property, clustering on an exposed headland looking to Maria Island in the east and the small Tasmanian towns of Triabunna and Orford to the south and north. We are within the grounds of the large, decommissioned Spring Bay woodchip mill. We pause, the voices of local young people in our ears, as the dancers of Stompin and young performers from Triabunna fill the semi-circular embrace of this remnant industrial structure. They raise their arms up and outwards. They look up. They flick their wrists back and forth. They cup their palms. Taking in this extraordinary view, we are experiencing Stompin’s Panorama.

Throughout Tasmania, small towns, often within astonishing landscapes, are experiencing change as the state shifts away from primary industry to secondary and tertiary forms. Many consider this to be a positive, sustainable change, but the residents of small communities like Triabunna feel the transition directly through threatened salaries, dislocation of their families, loss of local businesses and the consequent disappearance of life within their towns. Triabunna’s mill was closed in 2011 and then sold to private developers, instigating a lengthy period of limbo while plans evolve for new uses. This is fertile ground for Stompin, a Launceston-based youth dance company focused on issues relevant to young Tasmanians. The company worked directly with the townspeople to create Panorama, which leads an audience to several locations within the mill. The issues presented mix local concerns with wider interests and fears held for young people.

The work is divided into three parts. In the first, the audience splits into two groups and each led by a local child throughout the site. All of us wear tuned headphones that pick up a transmitted soundscape. The initial dance episode, as described above, happens at the walk’s mid-point within a concrete structure. Small solo or paired dance vignettes occur as we complete the site loop. The second act takes place on the spacious plateau just beyond the entry to the site, with dance formations bookended by large earthmovers, their giant claws made for log movement. The final act takes place within one of the mill’s industrial buildings, its steel cladding offering a percussive surface for the performers.

Dancers are costumed to represent different roles and interests. They are mill workers, they are tradies, they are environmentalists, they are high-vis-clad bystanders. Within the lexicon of Panorama’s choreographic language there appear to be representations of trees, the organic lines of the local landscape, the muscular language of workers and the line of the horizon, underscored by continuous movements back and forth—a macro theme of ebb and flow. A particularly successful sequence within the mill building sees the dancers moving as though parts of a machine, their piston-like action underscoring the theme.

The soundscape components by sound designer Dylan Sheridan and sound artist Alisdair Macindoe comprise the strongest dimension of Panorama. They draw together local voices and sounds, often using field recordings as the basis for rhythmic sequences or establishing the sense of change. The compositions establish the emotional tenor of the work, ranging from an angry industrial feel to sweeter, anthemic sounds that cast a sense of optimism over the final sequences of the show. I particularly enjoy a section that uses the thump of large machinery as the rhythm for the dance.

The use of headphones is very smoothly managed in the first section of the show and is so successful in creating intimacy and connection and reducing the problems of sound projection within a vast landscape that I wonder why it wasn’t used more extensively as a soundtrack for all the movement sequences. When the dance later kicked in, the transmitted soundscape dropped away and external speakers took over—a missed opportunity.

In an increasingly unsupportive environment for the arts within Australia, Stompin must be applauded for continuing to take on challenging sites and situations. This show is no exception, contending with an unsettled town, a languishing industrial site and the ghosts of a politically charged situation. To this Stompin brings empathetic commitment, engaging locals for the show as storytellers, performers, volunteers and audience members. The site becomes a strong player in the work and the soundscape connects all of the pieces (introduced prior to the visit with a podcast). Yet amid these challenges of production it seemed as though the dance received less attention, particularly those sections performed outside and incorporating local performers. While it is obviously quite challenging to work in this context, building more complexity and breadth into the movement could have helped pull the choreography into line with stronger elements of Panorama.

Stompin, Panorama, director, choreographer Emma Porteus, guest choreographer, sound artist Alisdair Macindoe, lighting, spatial designer Matthew Adey, sound designer Dylan Sheridan, costume designer Bones Sylvan; Spring Bay Mill, Triabunna, Tasmania, 8-10 April

Dan Edwards writes in RealTime’s On the Dox column, “Tehran Taxi is the third instalment in Panahi’s ‘cinema of confinement’—a cycle of inventive and self-reflexive features shot following the director’s arrest in 2009 and his subsequent 20-year ban from filmmaking and overseas travel” (see RealTime 107 for Dan’s review of Panahi’s This is Not a Film, 2011).

Dan writes of Tehran Taxi:
“Judging by the new film, the restrictions on Panahi’s daily existence have loosened somewhat since This is Not a Film, which was shot under conditions of virtual house arrest. In a nod to the classic Ten (1990) by his former mentor Abbas Kiarostami, Tehran Taxi is shot entirely from inside the eponymous vehicle, a conceit made possible by the miniaturised cameras of the digital age. Despite the constant driving across 82 minutes in which we never leave the cab, this is not a road movie. There is no destination and the journey itself is immaterial—most of the film is spent circling utterly nondescript streets. This car is certainly not a symbol of freedom.

“Instead, Panahi utilises the taxi as an interface between public and private space—a mobile interior in which the filmmaker can construct his work as he moves through a public realm from which he is officially excluded.”

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Xavier Le Roy, Temporary Title Open Rehearsals. Commissioned by Kaldor Public Art Projects and Carriageworks

We—me and the other clothed humans—are an outer circle of eyes and flickering attention. We are on safari, watching the behaviour of the human lion, where the being, playing, resting of some 20 bare-skinned creatures unfolds in a large light-filled studio as a play with no drama. So, what are we seeing here? And what else are we sensing?

We see the performers are present—on all fours or down on their haunches—watchful, ready, but without any sign of performance adrenalin. As time passes we feel the lions’ and our own imperceptible shifts of state and intention, a flux of movement that ripples across the imagined grassy savannah of the carpeted Track 8 in Carriageworks. We experience a long-range choreography with no discernible beginning or end, a plateau of existence with intimate high points of individual motion and group interaction. Bodies seeking comfort, or company. Formations evolve effortlessly from scattered topography to clumps of action and then the unexpected appearance of a line of human animal figures in a queue stretching diagonally across the plains of the floor. With nowhere to go, the queue proceeds, then dissipates.

Time stretches. The singular figure or the whole group make transitions on a continuum of transformation between states of alertness and relaxation, between action and passivity, between human and animal, between plant and machine. The group body spreads horizontally, a rhizome-like organism, and limbs entangle. I find my mind letting go, letting desire for spectacle subside, desire for meaning drop away. Not in any evident order but with tacit agreement, a small clump begins a group metamorphosis from animal to vegetable. The collective tone of their bodies changes as limbs begin to reach and sway in the language of plants, dancing in air.

Sitting in on an earlier studio rehearsal I hear French choreographer Xavier Le Roy and his collaborator, dancer Scarlet Yu, discussing the emergence of the performance language. For them this is not an exercise in imitation or representation; instead, by observing the behaviour of lions, they have evolved a ‘vocabulary’ of movement and attitude. The performers learn this vocabulary of the lion, and of plants (I’m not sure if it was a specific dialect of grass or bush or vegetable) and with practice are more able to be simple in their embodiment. Receiving and transmitting through skin the qualities of vegetal permeability, bare arms and legs adrift become a soft, mobile meadow. Falling/dropping to the ground through the hips with their full weight speaks the movement of big cats as they simply give up/give way to gravity.

Xavier Le Roy, Temporary Title Open Rehearsals. Commissioned by Kaldor Public Art Projects and Carriageworks

Seeing humans do this offers an uncanny glimpse into animal behaviour and physiognomy. I become aware of the human lion’s occasionally flared nostrils and a quality of cat-like panting and notice the whole body engaged in a breathing pattern that has a different speed and depth from normal human breathing. When slowed it is more like a sleeping breath or the breathing of a baby. The human lion’s gaze is altered, more diffuse in a resting state and dropped back behind the eyes in a way that alerts me to my usual sharp frontal focus.

I am not the only one to become languid. In Track 8 the audience are stretching themselves, some lying on the floor. This is not a sign of boredom but of ease. In the circle of watchers, I’m not sure if this young lion is looking at me or straight through me or taking in the periphery. I feel the stirrings of empathy and unnameable identification as you might with a real non-human animal. Then, like a switch, the quality of their gaze snaps to attention. Being approached by a naked crawling person/creature could be confronting, but somehow my position, seated on the floor at the eye level of the animals and all the other spectators, equalises the dynamic. The lion’s approach precedes from a respectful distance with: ‘May I ask you a question?’ Then settling in —‘How is growth for you?’

I’m wondering what it takes to move between states: from immersion in the bodily/ animal breathing/ being weighted/ fleshy /succulent plant to the psychological sense-making of the human question? I sense no assertion of will but wish to simply choose a partner for dialogue. The odd naturalness of speaking, exchanging on profound questions of love or transformation with a naked person who is about to turn back into a lion or a plant, in a roomful of clothed and unclothed people, starts to feel entirely normal.

We are all animal, vegetable and mineral, are we not? It makes me ask, why don’t we come to this place more often?

Kaldor Art Projects in collaboration with Carriageworks: Project 13, Temporary Title 2015, Xavier le Roy, Scarlet Yu & Collaborators: Natalie Abbott, Christine Babinskas, Geraldine Balcazar, Georgia Bettens, Eugene Choi, Matthew Day, Lauren Eiko, Peter Fraser, Ryuichi Fujimura, Alice Heyward, Becky Hilton, David Huggins, Marcus McKenzie, Kathryn Puie, Amaara Raheem, Darcy Wallace, Adam Warburton, Ivey Wawn; Carriageworks, Sydney, 2-22 Nov, 2015

Kaldor Art Projects brought Xavier Le Roy and Scarlet Yu to Sydney in November 2015 to collaborate with 18 Australian performers on an open rehearsal work, Temporary Title 2015, which “experiments with the process of pattern recognition, exploring forms which are not quite distinguishable as human—yet not completely anything else—and the idea of movement as a continuous process of transformation. The performers transition between strange and familiar forms and formations, challenging our perceptions of the human body and its capacity for physical expression and representation” (Kaldor Public Art Projects).

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.

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“If you are trapped in the dream of the Other you’re fucked,” says French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, quoted in Circa’s new work When One Door Closes at La Boite’s Roundhouse Theatre.

Deleuze’s words frame the major inquiry of the work: what if the three greatest heroines of modernist drama were to meet? What if Nora, Hedda and Miss Julie were acrobats? The show begins with a routine of high impact tumbling as the male acrobats use the full scope of the in-the-round configuration to run in from off-stage and collide with and cross one another. This virtuosic performance sets the benchmark for the show—stunning routines whose immediacy has been amped up with clever use of the Roundhouse space.

The mood of the work then shifts from contemporary spectacle to something more ominous. A pair of male acrobats don hats and read us a short and camp précis of each of the heroines’ trajectories in their respective plays. Each introduction culminates with the quotation from Deleuze. The polemic is simple but powerful—the women are trapped, not only by the structural injustice of the othering that arises from their original contexts but in this dream world too where they must navigate their own desires and vices.

The first three routines by each of the women are electric, particularly one by the orange-haired contortionist Bridie Hooper as Hedda, who chalks the floor with the outline of her dead body. These solo pieces with the individual women in striking colour-blocked costumes (pink/red/orange) are contrasted with male choral routines—indistinguishable husbands, clad in blue, wearing bright-red lipstick.

The score by Oonagh Sheppard is cinematically atmospheric and underpins the intriguing concept—how will the highly psychological characterisation of these women be expressed in circus form? Suddenly, the show changes trajectory and the dreamlike atmosphere is shattered by the fall of the black silk that covers the circus apparatus hidden in the rigging above. What follows are some extraordinary routines: playful duos of dominance and subjugation built around lollies, undies and bags of flour; whole company set pieces where a single performer carries the entire cast; and a mournful clean-up of the dirtied stage as a ratty old office chair spins in the centre holding two performers miming to the sounds of a vacuum cleaner carried on the back of one of the performers like an old-fashioned carnival instrument.

Circa never fails to deliver this supremely entertaining yet edgy aesthetic and the audience relishes every moment. Yet somehow the original promise of the work disappears. The women do not meet again in a routine until the climax. Indeed it is the charismatic male performers who take centre-stage. While this is interesting too—the burden of otherness expressed through the male body, the power of camp to disturb traditional gender assumptions—I still mourned a missed opportunity to fully interrogate the delicious premise of the show: three of our boldest heroines trapped in a room together.

La Boite Theatre Company & Circa: When One Door Closes, creator Yaron Lifschitz, Libby McDonnell & the Circa Ensemble, directors Yaron Lifschitz, Libby O’Donnell, dramaturg Todd MacDonald, set design, lighting Jason Organ, costumes Libby MacDonnell, composer Oonagh Sheppard; Roundhouse Theatre, Brisbane, 6-23 April

“Realness.” The word suggests an art grounded in truth, but also ‘fabulousness,’ exaggeration, the illusion of real; It has its cake and eats it too. No wonder it’s a staple of the drag lexicon, where the construction of both truth and illusion is so playfully muddied.

The American Realness festival—which took place at Abrons Art Center in January, in its seventh iteration—has become a flagship for experimental dance and performance in New York City. Founded and curated by Thomas Benjamin Snapp Pryor (that “Snapp” really fits the bill), the festival brings together artists who “expose issues and questions around identity, ritual, blackness, history, pop-culture, futurity and consumption.”

A breeze through the festival program reveals a penchant for pinks—lipstick smeared, hair-dyed, skin blushing, pearlescent light through fog. This is the “future,” where we will witness “transformation,” taste the “erotic,” the “ecstatic.” (This language loses its power through so much repetition. One artist knowingly fills the space for his program note with a solid black box. Words just won’t do.)

One word that hovers over the festival, although it doesn’t actually appear, is “queer.” That word is now wielded like a brand, along with its difficult relationship to definition, but here it feels relevant, perhaps due to its omission. There is a strong queer presence among the artists and their propositions, but any political agendas, rather than being trumpeted, are more covertly entrenched in the art, a queerer act in itself.

So much of a festival is about catching glimpses of other people’s reactions, gauging the ‘vibe,’ looking for someone to agree or disagree with. If post-show talk is anything to go by, Americans seem to want to love things so badly. Their praise, sometimes offered with evangelical levels of enthusiasm, renders any dissenting voices threateningly cynical. There’s a spirit of community championing: the more positive the feedback, the stronger the art becomes. This raises plenty of dilemmas: again the question of truth and illusion (or delusion), and the endless challenge of critical evaluation. We are completing a qualitative circuit with the work; we are responsible for its actualisation as much as the artist. We create our own realness.

One artist who directly engages with this confusion is Heather Kravas. Over her 20-plus years of making work in the US, Kravas has examined a politics of the body—particularly the female body—by unpacking choreographic conventions, and at Realness she continued this line of questioning in her methodical and affecting work titled dead, disappears.

“[Heather Kravas’] dead, disappears invites the audience to view the performer as simultaneously woman and object—and to see their own observation as completion of the artistic act.” [program note]

Pillow heaved over body and thrashed against floor. This sequence on repeat, this incessant rolling with a pillow. Now comes the exhaustion, hers and mine both—surely more than this rolling with a pillow could actually generate. Her heavy breathing, her frustrated heave intensifying. Rolling with a pillow. My bottled frustration. Her trapped activity, there’s nowhere to go. This ritual of effort. This rolling with a pillow. Stop this, please, end this now.

We discourage each other from assessing art in terms or liking or disliking, or at least from only thinking in those terms. Any unreasoned response then feels shameful, incorrect. My physical act of watching takes on an object quality, a mirroring of the ubiquitous contemporary object performance.

Kravas, “simultaneously woman and object,” complicates this relationship, presenting herself as both an object-body, complicitly executing a roster of tasks in the prescribed order—sometimes literally reading them off the wall—and as a woman pushing back against these self-imposed limitations, full of frustration, absurdity and power.

Citing Richard Serra’s 1967 verb list, To Collect, as catalyst, Kravas performs a series of choreographic actions: to stamp heels in a precise number sequence; to walk a fine line on tiptoe, shrouded by a garbage bag, shouting “Bimbo” repeatedly (Kravas’ voice so wonderfully brash, so Jennifer Jason Leigh); and to roll, with a pillow.

There’s a masochistic pleasure to be had—a rebellion against my own object-hood—when finding myself in a state of anger over something as inconsequential as rolling with a pillow. Kravas inflicts her own flagellating ritual, and I inflict mine by watching it.

If my observation is the “completion of the artistic act,” surely I have to accept this generous invitation and observe all my readings, however inappropriate, including my unaccountable disdain for this rolling with a pillow.

Each of Kravas’ actions is self-contained, the space between a jump-cut, an A-to-B. My sense of time keeps refreshing, fracturing my impulsive habit to connect the images, to follow some kind of holistic logic. Instead: Now this, look at this. Look closely. Now forget that, what about this?

Kravas ties the aforementioned pillow to a chair and metronomically beats it with a wooden pole, while reciting, alphabetically, a lengthy list of verbs. The virtuosity of the task—the fastidious recitation coupled with the violence inflicted on the pillow—brings the two performative proposals, the object and the woman, into their greatest tension. She is sustained by the thankless task, wielding her exhaustion like a weapon. The collective desire of the audience to drive this action together with Kravas was palpable. And that pillow had it coming.

“Women are not objects” is an unimpeachable maxim and one that Kravas now momentarily disrupts, confusing my perceptions somewhere between the troublesome, the funny and the commonplace. Who wields more power in this exchange? Is it me, observing through my ‘male’ gaze, sitting cross-legged, arms folded, vainly qualifying her actions? Or is it she, owning and subverting her representation, offering equally “woman” and “object,” leaving us to grapple with the responsibility of that dichotomy? While tempting to choose her side of that coin, it never actually lands resolutely, such is the potency of Heather Kravas’ rich dilemma.

Australia’s Luke George and Singapore’s Daniel Kok will appear at the Abrons Arts Center 20-23 April with Bunny, a co-production of Campbelltown Arts Centre and The Substation (Singapore). Read the review of the Australian premiere performance here.

Heather Kravas, dead, disappears, American Realness, Abrons Art Center, New York, Jan 7-11

The death of any stellar figure in rock and pop’s pantheon of propped-up puppets instigates numerous public relations crises. Most entail pseudo-ethical means of exploiting while commemorating, honouring the star’s passing while recouping long-term investment in their career. This is entirely acceptable: rock and pop stars work within an industry. Fawning outrage over their post-mortem commercialism is disingenuous. Far more offensive is the angsting over how one should respectfully acknowledge their legacy.

The post-mortem hagiography of David Bowie is a salient demonstration of this irksome moralising over the assignation of tributes to his audiovision. Out from the damp chipboard of rock and pop’s image-hoarding crept a gaggle of singer-songwriters on whom the industry could confer the temporary crown for voicing their respect to their fallen gladiator of Glam. The uppermost echelon of this hustling tower of pop Babel is the Grammys. What worldly—nay, universal—responsibility the chosen performer will carry upon his or her Olympian shoulders. Who would have thought so many people would come to bury David Bowie?

Bowie had been preparing himself for erasure from the world of rock and pop for quite some time. The most recent signs were managerial. From his incorporation of economic selfhood via the securitising of bonds signed with his name-brand to the start of near-death lyrical projections with Hours (1997), to the projective haunting symbolically threaded through the musical Lazarus (2015, with playwright Enda Walsh) and his final albums The Next Day (2015) and Blackstar (2016). But the early signs were theatrical. He killed off the fictional Ziggy Stardust in his tacky messianic narrative of The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars (1972)—a great-sounding proto-Glam hyper-electric album, but textually on par with a Ken Russell script. Then not too long afterwards on his 1974 US tour, he ditched the mash-up of Broadway showbiz glitz and wannabe-Burroughs dystopianism for the staging of Diamond Dogs (1974)—possibly Bowie’s best album despite its literary portentousness. Halfway through the tour and embattled by frightfully expensive logistics, Bowie radically reduced the staging. The concerts are documented on the second worst live double-album ever released: David Live (1975). (The worst? David Bowie’s Stage, 1978.) The only saving grace of this debacle is the weird image Bowie crafted, dressed in a baby blue zoot suit and vibrant Henna-red hair combed back like an androgynous 50s delinquent. Most of the concert photos from the tour are fuzzy and indistinct, contradicted by harsh arc-spot lighting. Did Lady Gaga think similarly when she chose to reference this look for her live tribute performance on the Grammys?

Let’s do the semiotics. In his original get-up, Bowie looked like a white bayou ghost of James Brown made up like Marlene Dietrich and wearing a stage outfit stolen from The Stylistics. He dreamt he was all three Staples Singers rolled into one, but as evidenced on David Live, he sounded like Foghorn Leghorn doing Rufus Thomas. In her haute-couture homage, Lady Gaga colours her shoulder-padded suit white and adds some naff brocade. I’m sorry, but she looks like a squat theatre student doing drag king cosplay of Lt Gay Ellis from Gerry & Sylvia Anderson’s UFO (1970). But bizarrely, she sounds like Bowie on David Live: hoarse, dull, barking. Watching her performance initially was a cringeworthy experience. Then I remembered how woeful David Live is. At the time of that album’s release, it dawned on me that despite all the great momentary fragments, images and poses, Bowie left a trail of embarrassing tchotchkes. That’s how Bowie’s career panned out: a long line of stunning fake gems threaded onto long stretches of plastic barbed wire. Was this what Lady Gaga was honouring? Was this what the Grammys came to mourn?

Within America’s post-70s over-therapied self-obsessed culture, all successful rock and pop music intent on flaunting ‘newness’ seems equally bent on facilitating plurality and eclecticism for its populace. Maybe it starts with Alice Cooper. One can easily draw a low-brow suburban through-line from him to Marilyn Manson to Insane Clown Posse to Lady Gaga. They all psycho-babble about society, tribes, identity, self, expression, communality, difference and reflection. Bowie’s long-standing fascination with reflecting the sci-fi decay of the United States (from “Panic In Detroit” to “Fame” to “Black Out” to “Fashion” to “This Is Not America” to “Day In Day Out” to “I’m Afraid Of Americans”) formed a tacit backdrop for the staging of these recording artists. Consequently, Lady Gaga has over the last decade succeeded in being a quasi-feminist version of this anthropological averment of Otherness. It has been curious to witness her strategy limp forward: riffing off Madonna’s sampling of Abba’s “Gimme Gimme Gimme” (1975) for her hit “Hung Up” (2005) while performing tacky pantomime interpretations of Matthew Barney’s deluded follies. Essentially Billy Joel in Rocky Horror drag, Lady Gaga’s songwriting displaces her from Madonna’s trajectory, which always aimed for a hedonistic utopian nexus between Warhol’s Studio 54 and Sondheim’s Broadway. So despite all that feels wrong about her initially, Lady Gaga is the logical successor to the American reconstruction of David Bowie.

While I entertain the perversion that Gaga and Barney are the Siegfried and Roy of desperately modish contemporary culture, Lady Gaga’s David Bowie Tribute for the 58th Annual Grammys was more pathetically Las Vegas than I could have imagined. It starts off with her in close-up, holding still while murmuring “Space Oddity” as facial-mapped animation is projected on her face. It’s as artful as an aisle in K-Mart selling Venetian masks. This is but one ‘hi-tech’ feature of her Intel-sponsored showcase.

Released online simultaneously is an embarrassing documentary showing the overwrought ‘creativity’ behind-the-scenes that resulted in the Grammys’ flaccid live televisual event. Following her Smartphone booth intro of ‘technology placement,’ Gaga the performer bursts forth with a 20-piece show band. What follows is a frenetic overture compacting eight Bowie hits into undifferentiated musical drivel: “Changes,” “Ziggy,” “Suffragette City,” “Rebel, Rebel,” “Fashion,” “Fame,” “Let’s Dance,” “Heroes.” Even though the band boasts Nile Rogers, it’s on par with the Paul Shaffer Band from Letterman’s Tonight Show. For six minutes, we hear nothing but predictably professional playing and alarmingly anaemic arrangements. The sound is numbing, typical of contemporary instruments, amps and FX being corralled into a thin, amplified reality. The implicit ideology behind this televisual aesthetic desires to counter ‘studio trickery’ with the direct sound of ‘real players’ with ‘real instruments.’ It always sounds lame and insipid, by attempting to suppress the aural transfiguration unleashed by the studio’s laboratory environment. This is why Stage sonically sucks: hearing all those unworldly anacoustic songs from Low, Heroes and The Lodger played by session musos through bad stage acoustics. David Live is the sound of Glam dying right before your ears. Weirdly, Intel’s sponsorship attempted to claim the opposite. The ridiculous robotic piano stand (about as thrilling as watching the robot Twiki dance from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century [1980]), and the downright stupid Curie Ring™ (a glorified Bluetooth mouse which generated facile trail-graphics on screens behind the singer) were meant to unleash unimaginable creativity. Gaga’s frenetic, flailing live performance perfectly captured this contradiction, because its live sound reinforced the obvious: David Bowie is dead.

In an age of apathy amid bombardment with information, it is often said that science has “a communication problem,” so artists are called on to shine a light on it in ways that are more effective than academic writing and mass media accounts. The video art exhibition Emergence features screen works made in partnerships between seven research scientists and eight artists who reside in northern Queensland. The artists were challenged to draw upon, visually communicate and expand the reach of scientific research.

In the eMerge space at Townsville’s James Cook University, three walls are filled with four imposing projections, each comprising two video loops. Seven of the eight works focus on reef or water-related studies. With sound heard only through headphones and the imagery being mostly acquatic, the exhibition space is flickeringly reef-blue and silently thought-inducing. With seamless editing, Matt Whitton’s Water depicts the journey from liquid to vapour while Posse’s textural montage, Reap What’s Sown, blends various textures to hint at the threats to the reef from connecting industrial waterways.

There is a tension in the works between the need to be didactic—to uphold the science—and to produce something with creative strength; some films were either simply meditative or too pedagogical. Aaron Ashley’s ambitious sweeping history of the Earth and the mineral zircon and Johan Larson’s description of cacao pests each work as a form of communication but less so as conceptually and visually robust art.

The films that use science as a point for creative departure are the strongest. Ashley and Ruby Holmes’ Immanence and its Distortions is a moving visual ode to the process of coral spawning. The film shows the rhythmic night-time dance of spawning pink egg and sperm bundles as they are released from coral polyps and and float up into azure liquidity. Even though made under scientific conditions the filming is mesmerising, the quality of the rendering glossy, the colour sharp and sexy.

As Chopin’s Nocturne sounds, the camera zooms out and the viewer realises they are not watching coral spawning once-removed, but through a screen, one framed and gilded. As the camera continues to zoom outward, the image reveals a Spanish or Mexican shrine-like installation with many more frames and an inset tiny scroll. A wunderkammer collection of lit candles and dried white coral forms fills the final shot. So framed, the coral spawning feels aligned with the past, as if already lost.

Donna Maree Robinson’s Pathogenicity is also a lustrous creation, despite its imagery being drawn from water samples collected for the Mackay Council Water and Waste Laboratory. The video displays concentric, boldly coloured disc shapes twisting within each other. Inside each circle is a kind of lava-lamp movement—unctuous, gleaming, rolling. Exploring the microbiological colour change processes used by scientists to measure water bacteria, Robinson takes us through a portal to reflect on the invisible aspects of a finite resource that flows within all things. Synthesised sounds and the rubbing of a finger around a wine glass reinforce the work’s cyclical motif, evoking water’s essence. The hypnotic fluidity of the movement of the disks inclines the viewer to slowly tilt their head from side to side in another mesmeric and contemplative creation.

Some of the works, while conceptually and visually strong, jeopardise the original meaning and purpose of the scientific data. In Katya Venter’s Un-In-Vaded, for example, created in partnership with Reef HQ Aquarium, the silhouette of a cityscape is overlaid on film of a seabed with ocean rocks and inquisitive reef fish. Animated black drawings combine human features with tentacles to create hybrids that swim in this ‘city in the sea’ with the fishes. It’s a big departure from the original film data and the reason behind the juxtaposition is not clarified beyond pointing to the similarities between humans and reef life.

Graeme Sullivan writes that the status of the artist is one of a “cultural lamplighter, human visionary, and educator” (Art practice as research: Inquiry in the visual arts. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2005). Emergence provides examples of the magic with which artists can illuminate complex knowledge as well as underlining the challenges of shining light on data and expressing it in a captivating, communicative way.

Emergence, curator Michelle Hall, JCU eMerge Gallery, Townsville, 19 Feb-27 March

The works in Emergence will be screened at COCA Theatre Cairns, 15 April and shown at CQU Conservatorium, Mackay 13-23 May.

“There are more armed soldiers than non-armed dancers in public spaces.”
Boris Charmatz

Recent threats to public space in Europe come from terrorism on the one hand and the incursion of the state with surveillance and weapons on the other. We have felt the latter in Sydney—after the Cronulla riots in 2006 and the 2007 Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit and the government’s consequent purchase of a still unused $700,000 water cannon. Increased restrictions on public protest, over-determined security laws and the commercialisation and constant threat of appropriation of under-funded public and national parks have grown to alarming proportions, potentially undoing the enlightened beneficence of our 19th and early 20th century forbears.

French choreographer Boris Charmatz, director of Musée de la danse, framed his keynote address for the 20th Biennale of Sydney (the session was chaired by the Biennale’s Artistic Director, Stephanie Rosenthal) in terms of current threats to public space and the loss of communality and democratic confrontation that accompanies it. In this context he presented the intriguing notion of a living museum of dance and, in doing so, suggested a possible relationship between performance and public space to include the traditional art museum, if conditionally.

Charmatz’ vision is vigorously political. He addressed the anxieties shared by many of us regarding the “contemporary stress about togetherness.” He says of his own country’s public spaces, such as town squares, that as well as offering communality they have been “places of paroxysm and questioning…historically places of confrontation in the 1960s and since then peaceful, even asleep, sites of anaesthesia.” But “recently everything has changed; public space has almost disappeared as a place of creation for the common, the encounter, the open construction of identity and differentiation.” He ascribes this condition “to social exclusion, homelessness, the abandonment of refugees… and more armed soldiers than non-armed dancers in public spaces.” He decided that “public space would become the place of Musée de la danse,” creating a series of actions minus “the cliches of street theatre.” There would be no costumes, sets, special lighting, just “dance as fire, burning all day, noon to midnight.” In the process, social dance would become an artwork “with the absence of sharp demarcations on all fronts” between dancers and the public, and creating “new moving postures for the body for civic communion.”

Charmatz sees “dance as the medium to encounter political failure, [bringing together] bodies that would otherwise not touch; a medium adapted [to undo] the malaise of the public space.”

Dance and maybe the museum

Charmatz was emphatic that his and his collaborators’ mission is not to treat art galleries, referred to throughout as museums or art museums, as venues for dance performances. Rather, his Musée de la danse, based in Rennes in Brittany, is “a living archive,” as yet without a major building of its own but embodied in Charmatz and his dancers who have performed the work we were about to see, Manger. This and other works have been performed in town squares, parks, at MoMA and Tate Modern, occupying those spaces with a site-specific intent to create living, ephemeral art objects in, as he put it, “permeable spaces.” (See Charmatz’ 2009 manifesto for a National Choreographic Centre.)

Museums are not ideal for dance, Charmatz said, citing critical issues of humidity and temperature control for the preservation of artworks. Working in a space with an architect in Utrecht he had “visitors dance like hell.” Once they’d left, he could “sense the space was still hot, a white box wet with sweat.” Exhibiting dance in a museum is no simple matter.

Rosenthal’s vision, manifest in her dance-oriented Biennale performance program (still unfolding; see our guide) and her questions to Charmatz after his address is to open up the museum to the ephemeral, expanding the sense of it as a public space and questioning the nature of art. Charmatz was again clear: he does not wish “to integrate dance with art museums or challenge their limits.” What Musée de la danse brings to a public space, he says, is an “archaeology in the body” which “can dialogue with the space and its art objects. We deal with their collection [by juxtaposing it] with ours.”

A key work exhibited in a variety of spaces is Charmatz’ 20 Dancers for the 20th Century first performed in a regional gallery and then MoMA. In Paris’ Palais Garnier opera house its audience strolled grand hallways, stairwells and the library, encountering 20 performers each demonstrating three solo gestures from 100 years of dance steps, including those of Charlie Chaplin, Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, Michael Jackson and Trisha Brown. (See below an account of Meryl Tankard’s personal archival performance at the MCA.)

Charmatz was in agreement with Rosenthal about the current condition of contemporary art museums: “they are not so stable, not so far apart now [from Musée de la danse],” given technological and other changes in the arts. Rosenthal said that while the visual arts are “getting away from the object and saying we want to embrace the ephemeral, you [Charmatz] ask how to collect the ephemeral. Your radicality lies in using the word ‘museum’.” He laughed. “Everyone was against it… Dancers thought they would be musée-ified.” But “it’s not a laboratory for visual art and dance collaboration… [it’s] a place to welcome the muses. If we [dancers] can’t welcome them who can?”

On Performance Curation is the subject for a discussion between Stephanie Rosenthal with Edward Scheer at the IO Myers Studio, UNSW, 20 April, 6.30pm (reservations). Australian choreographers, dancers and the public will gather to discuss their relationships, actual and potential, with the art museum in Choreography and the Gallery, a 2-8pm gathering at the Art Gallery of NSW, 27 April (reservations).

Nina Beier’s The Complete Works: Meryl Tankard

On Sunday 10 April at the MCA, for the Danish Berlin-based artist Nina Beier’s The Complete Works series, Australian dancer Meryl Tankard, long-time principal member of Pina Bausch’s Wuppertal Tanztheater and choreographer, performed a series of dance fragments for some 90 minutes in a crowded gallery, carving out space in which to dance. Each fragment was a physical recollection of part of a work performed across a long career; each was unannounced, some revealed an exertion of memory or the odd moment of amused forgetfulness in an informal presentation. Most revealed a well-preserved subtle dexterity of movement, fluent gesturing and some demanding articulation: a hip that constantly and comically drops as the dancer attempts to sustain an elegant walk. Moments from Bausch works that we recognised, like Kontakthof (1978), were the most potent and affecting. Above all there was Tankard’s dance theatre sensibility—a sly smile, flashes of comic anger and engaging if fleeting characterisations, including those of semi-autobiographical childhood memories in her own work, Two Feet (1988).

In The Complete Works, Beier “invites a retired dancer to dance every piece of choreography that they have learnt, enacted in chronological order. The piece is simultaneously a history of a choreographic vocabulary, collectively recognisable, while also invoking the personal history of the dancer’s experiences.” Despite the specificity of the brief, the outcome was inevitably impressionistic, save for those in the audience who might have seen many of Tankard’s performances. What was recognisable was a particular identity and presence. Pleasure was felt in watching a dancer engage in active recall, in witnessing a personal archive flickering by and delighting in recognising and having immediately called to mind performances experienced long ago. This is the ‘archive’ as ephemeral art, not as object, unless made so, say as a video of the performance, if Beier’s intent goes that far.

Boris Charmatz, Keynote Address, 20th Biennale of Sydney, Carriageworks, 19 March; Nina Beier, The Complete Works, dancer Meryl Tankard, MCA, Sydney, 10 April

Phillip Keir’s done beginners’ dance classes at the Merce Cunningham Studio in New York, read scripts and directed youth theatre for the Royal Court in London, learned German in order to study Regietheater (directors’ theatre) in Cologne, directed and translated plays for four years at the Sydney Theatre Company, published the Australian Rolling Stone music magazine for 20 years, in 2004 formed the Keir Foundation with Sarah Benjamin, to principally support visual arts and dance ventures, and in 2013 established the Keir Choreographic Award, first given in 2014. The semi-finals and finals of the 2016 Award are fast approaching.

Arts benefactors are not often arts practitioners (there are notable exceptions of course, like Margaret Olley). They variously come to benefaction through curiosity, invitation, board appointment or simply keen amateur interest in connecting closely with an artform. Keir’s early art experiences have shaped the vision he has for his foundation and the dance award. His passion is not simply for dance, but for cross-artform collaborations, high/low cultural morphing and the bringing together of organisations, including his foundation, as co-commissioners, for the sharing of visions and the making of works between cities (he has no time for the Sydney-Melbourne schism) and internationally.

Jump this paragraph if you already know about the award. The announcement of the founding of the Keir Choreographic Award—a collaboration between the Keir Foundation, Melbourne’s Dancehouse and Sydney’s Carriageworks—was enthusiastically welcomed by Australian independent contemporary dance choreographers and their supporters. While visual artists, writers and playwrights have long benefited, if to varying degrees, from awards and commissions, there’s been little if any private support for independent dance makers and certainly not an award like this. Atlanta Eke received the first award and Jane McKernan the public prize. Now in its second round, the KCA funds the development of eight 20-minute works, selected by the judges from submissions. These are staged in semi-finals at Dancehouse. The four winning works are then presented at Carriageworks where the jury winner [$30,000] and the people’s choice award winner [$10,000] are announced. These are significant amounts that doubtless generate choreographer confidence, aspiration and recognition.

Keir is a straight talker, fluent, amiable, eye contact unwavering. He speaks with a sense of certainty about where he’s been and what’s made him, but is open about how long it’s taken to become an effective benefactor. We meet at his home, seated at a very long dining table, framed by large contemporary art works and visited by a fine cat with a penchant for conversation.

STARTING OUT

Your connection with art, was it something you were born with, or did it come with your family or experience or…?
It very much came out of experience. I was born in Wollongong and I don’t think I went to the theatre for the first time till I was 16. We moved to Sydney when I was about 14. Art was something I very much discovered for myself. It was something outside my family experience. At the age of 16, I got very interested in popular music and also used to go along to the early Nimrod plays. I ranged across music, film and theatre—I even went to some dance events. Then I went off to Sydney University as one did at the time and began studying philosophy. I did the usual thing of getting involved in SUDS and so on. And then I had a kind of epiphany or a break-down… I decided I didn’t find it interesting enough or compelling enough so I decided to go to the UK but via the US.

NEW YORK

I ended up in New York intending to stay for a week but I found the whole place so exciting I actually stayed for a year. I’d seen the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at the Sydney Opera House, when the company toured to Australia. So I wound up at the Merce Cunningham Dance School, taking a class there. I’d arrived with 100 dollars in cash and no job, no contacts really. The school very generously got me a student visa which allowed me to stay. So I became part of that Downtown Manhattan scene—well, the scene I aspired to I guess. I was about 20 at this stage. I worked in restaurants and bars and composed my own education in the arts. At the time, there was a very interesting course being run by New York University’s Experimental Theatre Wing. I had no money to do the course. American universities, as you know, are quite expensive but I’d ring up each of the workshop groups and ask, “Could I join the session because I’d be very interested to be part of it.” I did some work with what became the Wooster Group. In fact, it was the year they became The Wooster Group so it was very early days. As payment for the course, I did technical work, assisting with the set and lights and so on. I worked on their first production called Rumstick Road, written by Spalding Gray. I guess I got lucky in one sense. I was in the right place at the right time.

And it was a time when New York was bankrupt. You could live there for almost nothing. It’s what allowed that whole Downtown scene to really grow because there were lots of people from different persuasions in art who worked together. I performed at The Kitchen in 1976. There were interesting mixes. Laurie Anderson was there, Talking Heads had played their first gigs the year before in a bar. There were visual arts people. I remember meeting Cindy Sherman because she was part of that set. I guess it gave me a grounding in art across a whole lot of things but dance was actually the most generous—there is a kind of fundamental humanity about the way dance works. I always had an interest in contemporary dance. The Merce Cunningham School itself had that sense of combining John Cage’s music with movement and the work of Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. So it was always multi-art form.

So you took classes at the Cunningham School?
I did beginners’ dance classes. I never aspired to be a professional dancer but I just liked the idea. Lessons must have been fairly cheap because I had no money. It’s a thing you could do on a come-and-go basis. They took a very open view as to the kind of students they took. You didn’t have to have done eight years of ballet or six years of ‘modern dance’ as it was called at the time. It had a kind of looseness about it that I found really attractive.

LONDON

After that year my visa was up so I travelled on to the UK. I had an English grandmother so I didn’t have any problems with visas and so on. I started to pursue a more conventional theatrical process even though I started at the ICA in 1978 which, again, had that multi-art form element to it, though I worked at the theatre end of it. But that’s where I received a lot of my visual arts education because there was always something going on in the gallery.

The ICA was a pretty adventurous place at that time.
People don’t realise because London is now a capital of the visual arts but at the time the ICA was contemporary art. So that was my education in this multi-art form and it’s always interested me. To some extent as an artist I ended up doing more conventional theatre work, with the youth theatre at the Royal Court. I was a script reader and became part of their literary process as well as doing fringe productions and community theatre around the East End.

GERMANY & SYDNEY

Towards the end of that period I became quite interested in the European Regietheatre process. I learned German at the Goethe Institut in London and then arranged an internship at Schauspiel Köln in Cologne run by a German director called Jürgen Flimm who’s still active in his 70s. I then came back to Australia, did some student productions around Sydney University and was offered the job at Sydney Theatre Company because, although it’s fairly common these days for Australian theatre directors to have some German experience, at that time there was no-one. I was the only person who’d done it at all.

Richard Wherrett who was running STC at the time was interested in the whole ‘dramaturg’ thing. At that stage we still called that role ‘literary manager,’ the way the British did. Richard wanted to dress everything up so, even though it wasn’t my role, the Literary Advisor became the Dramaturg and all productions had a dramaturg. I spent four years there and directed maybe six or seven plays, some I translated as well. I directed one of the first three plays that opened the Wharf Theatre in 1984, a version of Brecht’s The Bourgeois Wedding, which I translated from German.

Was it a good experience, life at the STC, overall?
It was a very good experience but I became a bit frustrated with the process, the commercial constraints. I would always defend [Wherrett] in the sense that he would always like a new idea, but then sometimes he’d get bored with those ideas. So he decided that this European theatre model was not quite so interesting and we parted ways.

THE ROLLING STONE YEARS

I had a period of freelance work and then oddly enough, the Rolling Stone thing came along and, having been a poor artist for my whole life, I thought wouldn’t it be great to have a little bit of money behind me. I was still under 30 and had been dealing with subscription audiences who were not in my age range. I’d always been interested in popular culture and music in particular. So the idea of actually spending time on something that appealed to people more in my age group was quite attractive. But that said, I thought I’d do it for a couple of years and get back to the theatre but that didn’t transpire.

And in that period did you sustain your art interests?
Rolling Stone was by and large music first, some film and some visual arts. Initially there was a very small staff who did everything, it became more commercial, more commercially viable and ultimately I ended up buying my partners out. We developed a whole lot of other products. We were very good at launching new magazines. Rolling Stone was, obviously, a pre-existing American title that had been published under license prior to us and had fallen on hard times, but we were very lucky to be in the right place at the right time. It was in the late-80s that Australian music broke through from being to some extent a niche to being quite mainstream in terms of charting. At the same time there were quite a few bands that had something to talk about because Rolling Stone always did best with acts that had strong ideas, strong lyrics. Bands like Midnight Oil and to a lesser extent, INXS, Cold Chisel became the staple of that coverage. The ‘Australian-ness’ and the fact that we put in much more local coverage combined to assist the title and it grew very strongly over some years. It was quite exciting to be part of that process. Ultimately we developed a lot of other titles in the popular culture space. We launched the first Computer Games and PC Gaming titles and ended up with 70 staff and 13 full-time titles. So it kind of took me over to some extent.

BECOMING AN ARTS BENEFACTOR: THE FOUNDATION

What did you feel at the end of the Rolling Stone years? Did you leave with a new ambition?
I guess it’d become a commercial thing and I was completely overwhelmed by it. Towards the end, I formed the Foundation and started to fund certain arts projects.

Do you remember the moment you decided or the rationale, when you decided to become an arts benefactor?
I guess it had been brewing for a while and it was a way of re-engaging. And also I had all the finances I hadn’t had before, more money than I needed at this stage. It started fairly small in about 2004 and right from the beginning it linked back to where I started, with my interest in visual arts and dance and that’s where the Foundation has gone full-circle, back to the beginning, as in New York in 1976.

And that kinship between the two?
It also worked closely in with the music which at that time was Patti Smith, Talking Heads, The Ramones, who all had a strong visual art element. Velvet Underground, Lou Reed and so on. It’s always one of the things I’ve been interested in as well as the high art/low art schism. I’m interested in things that don’t just sit in what I would call a traditional high art box. I have some knowledge of traditional ballet but I’m interested in what’s contemporary, what’s saying something to people now about what is of now. Dance to me is very much part of that in the local context because it is about a contemporary performance practice which is often quite open. It’s that interest I’ve held throughout. It’s fair to say that if there’s a sweet spot in what the Keir Foundation covers, it’s work that’s multi-disciplinary, that works between areas and sometimes does have a high/low culture kind of [mix].

THE FOUNDATION AS A WORK-IN-PROGRESS

The Foundation was very much a work in progress. We had no knowledge of how to conduct one and we were probably a little slow initially trying to work out what worked and what didn’t and so it’s taken the best part of 10 years to get a strong definition of what we think is interesting and where a foundation can work. There are many kinds of philanthropy and people give to arts and culture for many different reasons. Sometimes there’s a social dimension. Sometimes there’s an interest in one particular form—all kinds of reasons. It took us a while to work out what exactly we could do best and also in a practical sense. For instance, with large theatre projects the production costs are such that, as a relatively small foundation, we can’t “move the dial” as the Americans say. The attraction with, say, visual arts is that sometimes things can be large in scope but they’re also very modular so you can deal with individual projects and these don’t necessarily cost that much. Dance is a kind of poor man’s craft in one sense; artists often have to work under very tough budgetary constraints. From a pragmatic point of view we can actually make a difference because government funding in some of these areas is very modest.

THE POWER OF CO-COMMISSIONING

So your Foundation contributes to the developmental costs of a work or production costs or… Is that the kind of support you’re giving?
Our view is to always work closely with existing institutions, encouraging small to medium organisations to work together. We take the view that sometimes pooling funds from different places helps with the budget in a pragmatic sense, but also that the process of working together is part of what the project is about [as happens] in Germany, the UK and the US. [But then] you come back to Australia and find that there are state arts infrastructures that seem to encourage people not to work together and people live in their bubble in their city in their home state and don’t collaborate very closely with their peers in other states.

Garry Stewart’s ADT has been a stand-out example of a company finding European co-commissioning partners who then also present the work.
Certainly that’s what a lot of the big European performing arts companies do. Not only do you get money to actually make the work but also, you don’t have to go back and sell it to them later because they’ve already to some extent bought in. It means that they have a commitment to that artist’s work. I find arts markets difficult things; the process of commissioning and buy-in has more potential.

The Foundation has a relatively low profile. There are no ‘apply now’ advertisements.
We don’t want to set up an infrastructure and that’s why we don’t have that process of application. By and large if you have an open application you end up with a lot of paper and phone calls and so on. A lot of the money that could go out in the form of a grant winds up in administration. And really, the arts scene in Australia is not that large. If we’re partnering with organisations it’s a matter of having a conversation. That’s often how the commissions come about.

It often comes out of us having an interest in a particular artist and the organisation having a similar interest. A recent example was a film work made by Melbourne-based visual artist Nick Mangan, a co-commission between Chisenhale Gallery in Bow in East London and Artspace in Sydney. The nature of film is that by visual arts standards it’s a relatively expensive medium because you’ve got to go to places and shoot the film and edit it and you usually have quite a few collaborators. The good thing about film is that you don’t have that conventional problem with freight, which is the big killer with visual arts. If you’ve got a big bulky object, you’ve got to get it from one end of the world to the other and most of the budget can be sunk in shipping costs. The project needed extra commission money. It was an innovative work between two institutions of similar size with an Australian artist with an international reputation. One of the things that still really interests me about the visual arts is that it has become the most international of forms. We don’t support scripted theatre because it often has limitations as far as language goes. Watching a two and a half-hour play in German is hard-going if you’re not understanding the text at all. I’ve always been interested in this international question so that’s another reason why dance and visual arts, to me, are the most international forms, and music too.

THE KEIR CHOREOGRAPHIC AWARD

Is the award something you instituted or were you approached?
I started talking to organisations that I thought would be receptive. Dancehouse in Melbourne is virtually unique in that it’s a centre for dance and it has a full range of outcomes, including performances as well as workshops and rehearsal space and so on. Critical Path in Sydney does some of the same but has some limitations in terms of performance because of a licensing issue.

We’d already done some projects with Dancehouse and also I was keen to work with Carriageworks in Sydney so we looked at various ideas, existing commissions they were keen to gain support for. At the same time, I had been aware that in Europe there have been some choreographic prizes. I also did some due diligence and discovered that the visual arts have about 160 prizes each year across Australia. The literary world has probably 110 or 120. The dance sector has none, not a single one. I was interested in developing more of a profile for choreographers and to some extent prizes, in the common imagination, seem to denote value because you can read in the newspaper, “Oh, someone won an award of X dollars.” If there’s no money attached, the conventional press ignore you. It was an effort to give contemporary dance a profile that I thought it wasn’t getting and, at the same time, to have commissions. Just having an award or a prize on its own can appear a bit of a novelty. It becomes about the press and nothing else. [I wanted] to combine a commission series with an award—and just under half the money actually goes to the commissions.

What we’ve tried to do with this most recent Award is to add a third component—public programs [talks, workshops]. Again, this is an idea from the visual arts world—talking about what you do. One of the interesting questions that came out of the last award was that people started to ask, “Is this choreography?” “Is that dance?” [See the review of the 2014 Award, “Was there dancing?”] And what each of the eight individual commissions is doing to some extent is asking those questions. I thought, we have some eminent international jurors here, why not expose them to the broader audience as well as the wider dance community?

Sometimes contemporary dance falls under the radar because it doesn’t have critical mass. That’s one of the things we’re trying to do, to say, well you might not like this piece but there are three other works in the program. You might not agree with that person’s opinion in terms of dance or choreography but there’s a bunch of others on a panel [discussing the works] and another panel the next day. With more of a festival process with lots of things happening, hopefully you get more of a critical mass.

How closely are you involved in the process? You’re one of the judges. Obviously your attitude is not about putting your name up there but also about being a player, a part of the process?
Yes, I’m one of five. The sourcing of the judges is developed by three parties, that’s me and Dancehouse and Carriageworks. We try to seek consensus. I think the exciting thing is that already this jury is quite different from the last one. To some extent this time I’ve sat back more because I know more of the people involved already and I’ve been through the process. [Decision making] must be a huge challenge for government funding bodies—many of these artists have been around for a long time and at the same time, many of the people have been in positions of supervising the process and it has a certain circularity to it. I think it’s often one of the challenges with so-called peer assessment that there are a lot of pre-existing relationships usually between the peers. One of the strengths of the jury process we’ve set up is that new people come in and the internationals, by and large, have not been here before. The work is very much judged on merit. There’s often no preconception. What is presented on the CD [submitted for selection] is all that that jury member knows. We ask for a video. We don’t ask for a text-heavy application.

What are the long-term outcomes do you think? It’s nice that one artist wins a big prize and another receives a smaller prize. Is there a hope that some of the works will become larger ones taking off from their 20-minute origins? And do you hope, given the judges you have, that some international interest might come out of this?
Absolutely. Atlanta Eke’s Body of Work has re-appeared. She applied for funding to do a full-length version of the work, which has just been at the Adelaide Festival. She’s also performed the original length version at Mofo [formerly Mona Foma] within a music context. Shaun Gladwell’s piece was done in a black box format in Melbourne and then I saw it in UNSW gallery re-done in a white box. That’s one of the things contemporary dance artists are exploring at the moment—white box versus black box. It’s now called ‘grey box.’ So we hope that these works go on into lots of other outcomes and even into completely different outcomes. Shaun told me that out of working on his commission he ended up doing a set of prints with the Australian Print Workshop in Melbourne. That’s one of the things that fascinates me about art. You can go back to people like Rauschenberg. There was a very interesting exhibition in the gallery at London’s Barbican not so long ago which took the work of Cunningham—which, of course, I know and adore—and looked at how it affected other things. Rauschenberg is an interesting case in point. He’s maybe a far better known artist than Cunningham; certainly his works sell for stratospheric prices. But it was interesting to see the curator of that show trying to say that Rauschenberg’s interest in dance influenced the look of his work. I guess I’m hoping that the Award will spin things out into different forms, influence other things—culture as a kind of chain.

In answer to your second question, we absolutely hope that Australian artists will become part of an international conversation. For instance, one of the judges in this round, Pierre Bal-Blanc, is a curator for Documenta dealing with its performance program. I think part of his interest in coming here is to see work. He’s already had input into which eight artists have been chosen for the 2016 Award. So he’s already involved in the process and so hopefully there might be interest in some of the works, though we don’t see the award as a platform or any kind of market.

2016 Keir Choreographic Award Semifinalists: Sarah Aiken, James Batchelor, Chloe Chignell, Ghenoa Gela, Martin Hansen, Alice Heyward, Rebecca Jensen, Paea Leach.

Award Jury: Bojana Cvejic [Belgrade], performance theorist and performance maker based in Brussels; Pierre Bal-Blanc, Documenta 14 curator and independent art critic based in Athens and Paris; US based choreographer Sarah Michelson; Perth International Arts Festival Artistic Director Wendy Martin; choreographer Atlanta Eke, winner of the 2014 Award; Phillip Keir, Keir Foundation

2016 Keir Choreographic Award Semi-finals, Dancehouse, Melbourne, 26-30 April; Finals, Carriageworks, Sydney, 5-7 May

A huge, tired, unused Carriageworks space, flatly and brightly lit. Thirteen performers scattered singly through the space, lying stretched out or writhing on cold unforgiving concrete or standing and slowly consuming A4 sheets of paper—each performer has a neat stack—murmuring, groaning, speaking, self-preoccupied. For an hour or so their obsessiveness, feigned hunger and pain will escalate as we wander from dancer to dancer, attracted by a wild cry or a sudden display of extreme movement or, pausing, recognising a yoga-like pose or intrigued by a strangely graceful movement.

A crowd gathers about a performer building small houses with her paper. We catch words in French and sometimes English, spoken as the performers chew and gulp down paper in an apparently mindless continuum of ingestion and expression. Some of us glance at the text in the program—shouted, variously pitched, spoken and sung. It’s Un homme de merde (Shitman), excerpted from a poem by Christophe Tarkos in which the speaker encounters a man whose appearance, his innards, his brain (“two turds of very dense shit”), his thoughts and his dance are all shit. The delivery is shrill or guttural, wrenched from the inside. The image of humanity reduced to valueless function appalls the performers—“It can’t be that a man is completely full of shit”—but they continue to eat and contort, living their shit lives.

Slowly swelling up from these disparate abject bodies come harmonious voices, singing the beautiful Allegretto from Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. The song fills the vast space, connecting performers far distant from each other, making us all, for the moment, one. This choral togetherness comes as a relief, however the singers’ faces yield no shared joy. The song fades. It’s as if beauty is real but incidental, a residue of a lost culture.

A grim communality ensues, as couples and trios form, twisting arms and legs, standing on each others’ feet or hands and torsos, on bodies which gasp and choke, coughing up chewed paper. Where pain first seemed internal now it is imposed with brutal realism. A contorted, interlocked foursome appears like a living sculpture. At one end of the space a performer, standing tall and repeatedly executing a strange twisting leap, is gradually joined by others as he sings Tom Waits’ “King Kong,” a grinding, bluesy chant: “they shot him down/ they thought he was a monster/ but he was the king.” Again, widely scattered individuals come together in song, this time lamenting human arrogance and further evoking a species that has debased itself.

A kind of slow panic completes the work, each performer nibbling small paper leftovers picked up from the floor or hurriedly gorging their last sheets. They all gather in the centre of the floor, some licking fingers, until the last of the paper is consumed, soft voices resonate (“you have made me smile again,” though no one does) and the one performer still moving completes his compulsive little dance. Stillness. Exit.

Speaking with Biennale director Stephanie Rosenthal after his 20th Biennale of Sydney keynote address, Boris Charmatz, the choreographer of Manger, said, “I am more visited by dance than I visit dance.” Manger’s sheer strangeness was a visitation, a work that created its audience rather than playing to it. We were uncertain where to put ourselves; we looked for dance (where were the steps?); we became anxious (the performers’ suffering looked too real, the floor too hard for them, the paper picked from the floor likely toxic); we were surprised and embraced by the swell of choral voices; we were distressed by the darkness of Charmatz’ vision, its violence and utterly tenuous sense of community so central to Charmatz’ work, in public spaces and with the public. We know from his keynote address that he despairs over the diminution of public space. Dance, he thinks, can regenerate it. However, Manger, with its fecal imagery, suffering, torments and only temporary respite, suggested, indeed induced, a profound anxiety about the state of human communality.

At the end we welcomed small signs of togetherness and vigorously cheered the performers, who might not have danced recognizable steps, but whose trained, expert bodies could express with movement at once raw and precise the extent and depth of human pain and cruelty and with their voices the sound of hope. Manger appears to be a work of protest, one against ourselves. But you wouldn’t know that reading Charmatz’ stream of consciousness program note which focuses on the mouth, eating, singing, swallowing, “the Dance in the palate In the teeth In the tongue and above all with no end…” But the bodies in Manger do more than eat and sing.

Manger literally means ‘to eat’ and the poem which provides the text for the work is The Shitman. While there was eating in Manger (of rice paper standing in for the real thing) and much more in the way of physical activity, I recall no evocation of shitting (such were the bodily contortions, cries and grunts, there may well have been), just the all too vivid metaphorical images of Tarkos’ excremental poem. Physical performance in Manger, though delivered with Artaudian force, stops short of the scatological.

When interviewed by Francois Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock revealed he’d fantasised making a film about 24 hours in the life of a city, commencing “at 5am, at daybreak, with a fly crawling on the nose of a tramp lying in a doorway.” The film would track the arrival of all the city’s food supplies and follow them all day, cooked and consumed and “showing the sewers and the garbage being dumped out into the ocean… the cycle would show what people do to good things…[The] theme might almost be the rottenness of humanity” Hitchcock (1968). Charmatz only goes so far: “the choreography of people also becomes a choreography of food that traverses the inside of space then of the body the essence is packed down the throat we don’t want to die…” The Shitman text aside, Charmatz’ vision in Manger is not excremental, although it shares some of scatology’s unblinking view of the fundamentals of our existence, making for an unnervingly powerful, complexly suggestive and viscerally memorable work.

20th Biennale of Sydney, Musée de la danse, Manger, choreographer Boris Charmatz, Carriageworks, Sydney, 19 March

In commissioning an original composition from French composer Eliane Radigue and her US collaborator Carol Robinson, Perth’s five-piece Decibel has entered the history of experimental music. Radigue’s creations are part of the canon of contemporary music. She was a student of musique concrète in Paris in the 1960s, before branching off to make electronic music that aspired to the state of Tibetan meditation. She did this with a synthesiser, slightly and slowly drifting ethereal sounds alongside each other. In the 21st century she turned for the first time to acoustic instruments, and Decibel’s commission is for one of these ‘sound fantasies’ that make the meditations of her electronic work palpable through live players.

In Decibel’s recent concert, Radigue and Robinson’s OCCAM OCEAN HEXA II was followed by two other commissioned compositions by Lionel Marchetti, a younger French artist who remains dedicated to musique concrète. In Marchetti’s Une Sèrie de Reflets and Première étude (les ombres), players sit next to speakers so that the sound of instruments and recordings becomes indistinct. Sèrie creates a spectacular, loud and brilliant atmosphere from the registers of instrumental and recorded sounds, while Première synchronises recorded and pre-recorded ocarinas, in a virtuosic aural simulation of a forest.

While Marchetti wants to obscure his players with clever, buzzing confusions and atmospheres, the Radigue and Robinson piece allows listeners to tune in to one instrument or another, as wind and acoustic instruments pluck long, ethereal notes from the air. So it was that the concert created a space between tonal intensities and individuating sounds, the mind’s interest in precision washed over by an immersive, atonal atmosphere.

The quality of these original works lies in the way that they turn conceptual gravity into dazzling affectivity, something typical of new and experimental music since the 1960s. While the West Australian Symphony Orchestra is currently playing a program of Bach, Haydn, Mendelssohn and the interminable Mozart, Decibel is forging ahead with a new classical canon, one in which composers like Radigue are central.

The meaning of classicism is however something that many Australian arts organisations have not yet come to understand. For classicism describes a return to the aesthetics of an older period in order to set standards for the present time. Yet ideas of romantic composition like harmony, melody and expression are barely comprehensible in a discordant 21st century, that must look instead to the 1960s for its ideals.

For the 60s was the decade in which anti-war, civil rights, feminism and decolonisation movements changed the cultural landscape, and art reflected these changes. Composers became interested in feedback (Robert Ashley), indeterminacy (John Cage), extended techniques (Meredith Monk) and repetition (Terry Riley), creating a classicism for our contemporary times. In being rigorously conceptual and yet achieving intense sonic affects, composers like Radigue and Marchetti aspire to this classical condition. In the face of Decibel’s venture, classical Australian orchestras need to think through what it means to keep playing golden oldies, when the very material from which music is made has been so radicalised by electronic and recording technologies.

The Nature of Sound, Decibel New Music Ensemble, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Perth, March 23

One of a mere handful of films to deal with the horrendous personal impact of the Global Financial Crisis on homeowners, Ramin Baharani’s 99 Homes (2015) tells of one victim who, to survive, abandons his conscience and crosses the line to join the evictors. It’s a finely performed, directed and emotionally demanding film that presents quite a different perspective from the GFC films and documentaries that address the backroom, big business machinations that resulted in and sometimes exploited (as in wonderful The Big Short) the opportunities created by the GFC.

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.

Almost three weeks into the Sydney Biennale and we’ve already sampled some pretty striking performances. In Boris Charmatz’ Manger (see our 13 April E-dition) an incredibly dedicated company of dancers defied all manner of OH&S by putting themselves though 40 minutes of peristaltic convulsion and ecstatic seizure on the concrete floor of Carriageworks, all the while consuming a stash of edible paper. In a tight spot on Level 2 of the MCA, Adam Linder’s Some Proximity (one performer of the three down on the day we saw it) wove prose into gliding movement, using randomly gathered texts pinned to the wall as an impetus for some eloquent locomotion, not always revealing in the juxtaposition.

Meanwhile, Norwegian dance artist Mette Edvardsen worked some quiet magic in two contrasting and poetic works. I couldn’t get to it but word on the first, titled Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine, was glowing with many people signing up for a second visit. Staged at Newtown Library, it involved a group of local dancers/performers memorising chapters from a series of books. Audience members chose a volume from a list of possibilities and then located their reader who, in turn, led them to another part of the library and, seated opposite or casually strolling alongside, imparted the text from memory.

In her solo performance No Title, Edvardsen is interested in “how reality exists in language and how this extends into real space… how memory and imagination blur” (artist’s website www.metteedvardsen.be). The use of lists is a commonplace in performance but in this case, the framework is powerfully deployed.

Edvardsen stands before her seated audience, her appearance unremarkable except for the fact that her eyes are closed. In a while she announces, “One leg and one arm—gone. Balance—gone. Me—not gone.”

And so begins a subtly unfolding tragedy in which our fears of death, of unstoppable destruction, of vanishing landscapes, the extinction of species are called up as Edvardsen in plainly articulated speech moves undramatically through the space of Carriageworks Track 8, simply reporting one by one the end of the world of ordinary things we have come to know and love.

“Facing the light
Being warmed by the light
Falling
Floating
Flying
All gone.”

Blindly, she walks in a circle around the empty space. It’s more of an ellipse but not bad, considering. Returning centrestage she reveals flatly, “Going in circles—gone.” There’s a ripple of relieved laughter. Who needs circles anyway? Gradually, as in Peter Handke’s play Kaspar (1967), the language becomes more surreal: “Me not all/ Me not gone/ Not all/ But gone.”

Edvardsen draws a straight chalk line through the middle of the space. Again, it’s not too shabby whereas erasing it ramps up the degree of difficulty. Again, tension eases. Later, in the one seemingly superfluous gesture of the performance she places a set of painted paper eyes over hers. But it’s the visions playing behind our own eyes holding our attention.

“First row—gone
Closeness—gone
Floods and dimmers
Power supply
Green Emergency Exit light gone
The corners of the room are gone
The foreground and background gone
What this space has told you already
Gone.
Clouds sliding in opposite directions
Gone.”

I’m thinking, she’s forgotten the sound of trains travelling back and forth on the tracks so close to Carriageworks and the barely detectable rhythm of the audience breathing. Maybe these will remain?

20th Biennale of Sydney, Mette Edvardsen, No Title, Track 8, Carriageworks, Sydney, 19 March

The curtains part to reveal what looks like the interior of an abandoned warehouse. Streaks on the wall. Opaque windows on swinging doors. Electrical boxes. A massive black girder driving from ceiling to floor. Fluorescent lights casting a sickly glow.

Several piles of thick, coiled electrical cables sit next to the girder. An ominous sound— part storm, part wrathful static—descends upon the theatre. The cables slowly uncoil like sentient plastic snakes. They crawl across the floor and up the walls. I feel an overwhelming sense of dread in every part of my body.

I know I’m not alone in this. And so here comes the full disclosure. Betroffenheit is about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and addiction. It’s about surviving unspeakable trauma. There’s no particular trauma specified but many of us in the audience know that performer Jonathan Young of the Electric Company has sourced his own story. And we know the mind-breaking details. Although these are left unnamed it’s easy to connect the dots. Some people, much closer to Young than I, spend the entire show weeping. With effort I’m able to pull out of the emotional morass and take Betroffenheit in as a work of art.

Young is revealed in the corner of the room, head between knees. A pre-recorded internal dialogue begins. The room is Young’s fractured consciousness and his inner voices are distributed throughout it. They speak from a fuse box, an intercom or a door. Every part of the room has a voice. It’s always Young’s voice. His mental state is described in psycho-therapeutic terms. One voice speaks with the authority of a therapist. Other voices answer back, agreeing, protesting and negotiating. There’s frequent reference to a room holding “the victims” and an attempt, a failed attempt, to rescue them.

Cabaret-type figures appear on the periphery. They gradually make their way into Young’s warehouse of the mind. In keeping with the Electric Company’s nostalgic penchant for late 19th and early 20th century entertainment genres (vaudeville, flea circus, melodrama, Busby Berkeley, Film Noir), the figures become his showbiz alter egos. They represent his craving for escape from the pain of trauma (and to be clear, I’m speaking of Jonathan Young as a stage persona). They lure him with the promise of putting on a show and forgetting it all. This makes Betroffenheit an intriguing mix of virtuosic dance-theatre and ritualised therapy. Young seems to be having it both ways: he gets the drug—the show (referred to as an “epiphany”) —and he gets it as therapy. Where traditional therapy has perhaps failed him, an audience might still offer absolution.

The “show,” the addictive drug, emerges as a series of routines performed by Young and the sublime dancers of Kidd Pivot. The main performance score is Young’s pre-recorded voice. Director-choreographer Crystal Pite has the dancers lip- and body-sync it with astonishing physical articulation. Add to this the genre numbers—a tap routine, a vaudeville duet, a salsa—and we get a sense not only of the spirit-crushing effects of PTSD but the attraction of the colourful performance world Young can’t help turning to in moments of weakness.

Young is a precise, articulate mover and speaker. The dancers embody these traits and take them to a higher level. Where Young is nimble, his main alter ego Jermaine Spivey positively floats, seemingly able to independently lever and pulley any part of his face and body. Where Young is flexible, Tiffany Tregarthen is absolutely plastic, molding and unmolding herself to any available surface like a rubber doll. Where Young has pizazz, David Raymond’s self-choreographed tap routine exudes menace.

After a while though, the routines and internal monologues start to feel like mere accumulation. Like going over the same ground. There’s a logic to this. The victim can’t help returning to the source of trauma. But it feels to me like a writer and director trying too hard to achieve a predetermined dramatic goal. Pite has discussed learning about the three-act structure from Young, and of plotting out Betroffenheit with sticky notes on a board. How the creative process flowed between wall chart and studio improvisation I’m not privy to, but the dramatic structure of Betroffenheit doesn’t grow organically from the moments. It lacks the dramaturgical nuance of a practised playwright. I can see the manufacturing of each plot complication, the obstacles thrown in the protagonist’s way, and the attempt at an incremental ascent to climax, turning point and resolution. Despite the laboured attempt at a three-act story structure, however, Betroffenheit’s inventive choreography and scenographic turns make for compelling viewing.

And then there’s an intermission. What comes after it is both puzzling and predictable.

Most of the set is gone. Only the massive black girder remains. The girder is a performance unto itself. Designer Tom Visser casts a light and shadow play around it that projects mental force and impenetrable mystery. If we are still witness to Young’s mind, it’s something we can never really come to know. Nor can Young. So far so good.

Then the dancers dance—fantastic dancers dancing fantastically. But to what end? It’s all very familiar. As in Dark Matters (2009), another Pite piece considered “theatrical” (in that the set played a dramatic role and elements of Japanese bunraku were approximated) and in which the post-intermission stage was cleared of set elements, we are left with what might be called social-group dynamics dance. Half a dozen performers cluster and uncluster. Individuals are pushed out and pulled back in to the group, they lift one another, or run in a kind of slow motion glide. I guess this is Pite’s signature style but I wonder if it represents a lack of confidence, a compulsion to re-assert her dance credentials by removing set elements that distract from the human body. That’s my best guess. The earlier set/dancer interactions made for surprising physical combinations. Now I feel like I’m watching a different piece, a choreography that is very similar to what I’ve seen in many Pite shows over the past seven years. Where did the vaudeville figures go? The dancers now wear drab dance sweats. I suppose they’re meant to represent the truth of depression and addiction.

In addition, the lights, sound and dance are all doing the same thing—conveying a sense of tragedy. No longer a dialogue between conflicting inner voices, the questions at the centre of the work are gone. I’m left to contemplate a choreographic style, a type of dancer training, the bombastic soundscore that is telling me exactly how to feel. I start to wonder if this can really be called contemporary dance. I muse about the influence on Crystal Pite of companies she once belonged to—William Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt, Ballet BC. I think about the contemporary ballet aesthetic running through her work. I conclude this is indeed contemporary dance but at the conservative end of the spectrum. I think about the presenter, Dance House, and its bias toward the same contemporary ballet aesthetic. It has something to do with ballet training equalling ‘real’ dance. It starts to feel like a cultural night out rather than a vital engagement with art.

I try to erase the second act from my mind and get back to what was powerful about the first. It returns. The trauma, as embodied by the dancers and Jonathan Young, haunts me for days to come.

Kidd Pivot and the Electric Company, Betroffenheit, Vancouver Playhouse, Feb 25-27

A functioning dance ecosystem is fuelled not only by talent, training, education and the making of works, but by choreographic hubs—like Sydney’s Critical Path and Perth’s STRUT—and Melbourne’s Dancehouse, an incubator and producer of new work. These have become organic components of Australian independent contemporary dance, fuelling emerging and established artists with classes, national and international guests and the exchange of practices and ideas. In coming weeks we’ll interview Claire Wickes, director of Critical Path, and Angela Conquet, director of Dancehouse, but first, we spoke with Cadi McCarthy, director and founder of Catapult Dance, the latest addition to Australia’s evolving dance ecology, one which adds a significant and much needed regional dimension for dance in New South Wales, embracing Newcastle and the Central Coast and Greater Hunter regions.

One of the key components of Catapult’s activities is the Propel artist-in-residence program in which McCarthy invites innovative choreographers to Newcastle, pairing them with artists from a variety of fields to create cross-artform works. Two Propel works from 2015-16—one by choreographer and dancer Kristina Chan and Newcastle filmmaker Neil Mansfield and the other by choreographer Josh Thompson and local composer and musician Zackari Watt—will soon be shown in re-worked versions at Newcastle’s Lock-Up, an adventurous gallery showing visual, sound and performance art.

The other 2015 Propel collaborations teamed choreographer Adam Blanch with Neil Mansfield, choreographer Marnie Palomares with fashion designers High Tea with Mrs Woo; and choreographer Miranda Wheen with visual designer Jessica Coughlan.

McCarthy, a 2007 Churchill Fellow, has had an extensive career as dancer and choreographer, in dance education and as Artistic Director of Perth’s Buzz Dance Theatre, 2009-2013, making work for a variety of age groups including Look the Other Way, winner of a 2014 Australian Dance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Youth and Community Dance. Now she’s created a dance home in which to house her talents and a vision for the benefit of a new generation of artists in regional Australia.

I spoke by phone with the passionately committed McCarthy about Propel. She told me that there had been Propel showings from August 2015 to January this year. She hoped to soon commence a new cycle, depending on funding, but in the meantime Propel will live on in the form of performative installations at Lock-Up, a repurposed police station and women’s prison. In Propelled, Chan and Thompson and their respective collaborators will each occupy a half of the gallery with duets danced in various rooms, promising, says McCarthy, “quite a beautiful experience.”

I asked McCarthy about her motivation for establishing Propel? She explains that after running Buzz dance company in Perth she’d come to Newcastle where she found there were many artists “but not so much contemporary dance or professional dance practice. I thought, wouldn’t it be fantastic to bring contemporary choreographers to collaborate with Newcastle-based artists working across disciplines in a three-week intensive program to see what they could come up with. I also wanted to open Newcastle artists’ eyes to contemporary dance because it hasn’t been so much part of the culture here. There was also the idea of bringing regionally based artists together with nationally based artists to see how that collision of ideas could work.”

McCarthy said that the choreographers “have been mainly creating solo works but Joshua Thompson worked with a cast of five dancers and Adam Blanch, who was involved in our first residency, worked with a cast of two. It’s up to each of the choreographers. Some have worked with film or created work on themselves. Some of the dancers are local. I’m trying to create opportunities for emerging artists in Newcastle to work at a professional level.”

Is the talent there in Newcastle, I ask. “Yes, there’s an amazing number of dance schools and young people who train in dance here, but they often leave once they get to a certain level. What I’m trying to do is to bring them back and say, hey, there are some opportunities here, some professional practice starting to happen, so come back and work with the artists [I’ve invited]. It springboards them into the professional dance world. I also try to provide work experience for Year 12 students so they get an understanding of what the practice is. So it’s about education on many levels about contemporary dance, as well as interdisciplinary practice between dance and other art forms, which I’m very interested in—the idea of pure collaboration where you both walk into the space and no-one is dictating what the terms are, and you’re working together.”

Do these artists have any prior knowledge of each other? “No, they don’t. I set up a situation where they can talk to one another for many months before the residency begins. They come up with ideas, they Skype, bounce ideas off each other. The works that have come out of these collaborations have been incredible.”

How do you choose the artists? “With the first residency I curated it based on artists I thought would come up with interesting and diverse things. Adam Blanch was formerly with Sydney Dance Company; Kristina Chan has worked in numerous collaborations. They interested me as emerging choreographers and I’ve had a lot of interaction with each of them throughout my own career as they’ve been growing as artists. They’re all NSW-based artists. That was my starting point because I wanted to have people who were close by, but I’m hoping the next Propel is going to expand beyond that.”

McCarthy says she’s still quite new to Newcastle, so some of the building of collaborations has come though word-of-mouth. I wanted a range of disciplines—composers, filmmakers, fashion designers…I just took note of what was happening in the community and asked, would you be interested? Since the first program, I’ve had lots of Newcastle artists approach me and ask, can I please be part of it. I actually have a waiting list of artists who are desperate to work in this way. It’s fantastic.”

What is Catapult, the structure within which Propel works? “We’re a not-for-profit organisation with three strands. There’s the Propel professional residency program. Then throughout the year there’s the Flipside youth project. Marnie Palomares is currently working here and Kristina Chan coming up—high calibre choreographers working intensively with young people. Then there’s the community program where we run classes, master classes and other programs for young people and adults who are interested in dance. So everyone gets to work with these professional artists and see how they approach choreographic practice. What I also try to do with the Flipside program is to provide some paid work in the form of opportunities for Newcastle-based artists to compose music alongside the choreographers. So I’m really trying to engage the whole community in different ways.”

And what are the practicalities of survival for Catapult? “The initial Propel program was funded by the Australia Council and the Flipside project by Arts NSW. We also receive some support from the City of Newcastle. Community support has been quite good. Basically, I just arrived and set up and said, ‘this is what I want to do and the community has embraced that’.”

And you found a building in Newcastle to house your vision? “I’ve established a purpose-built space with two quite big studios with sprung floors. I did it independently. And then I built the organisation around the space. Always, part of the battle is to find the right space so that was really important to me, to find a space that I could then fill with activities.”

Do you feel a strong commitment to Newcastle? “Yes, I do. Now that I’ve started Catapult I’m committed to making it work and to bringing artists here. My long-term goal is to make Newcastle a regional hub for contemporary choreographic and interdisciplinary practice. It’s a rather large town—the second largest in NSW—and there just hasn’t been this kind of support for contemporary dance in the region. Hopefully it will all work.”

Our discussion returns to the forthcoming Lock-Up season, a free access exhibition for the audience to move through. McCarthy suggests taking a look at a video of the Chan-Mansfield work which she describes as “absolutely stunning.” Joshua Thompson and Zackari Watt add to the excitement with their installation featuring well-known dancer Craig Bary and Newcastle dance and theatre practitioner Angelyn Diaz performing with reactive light and sound technologies. For Newcastle, already a city with a strong artistic bent, the addition of a contemporary dance hub with cross-artform inclinations should be a very welcome development.

In a world familiar but not, we come face to face with profoundly strange humans, their bodies gloriously embellished with but made awkward by volumetrically eccentric head pieces, leggings and skirt-coats. Two equally odd characters, if of a different ilk—elegant, fashionable women—hymn ambiguously to the sun:

“immolateus plasmaperfect
we crave your soft little red little
nucleus/ nuke-kiss/ nuke-kiss/ new kiss/ kiss me
kiss/ (nuke) my skin all cancertender
kiss me.”

The singers are characters in a recreation of Victory Over The Sun, the seminal Futurist opera conceived and staged in St. Petersburg in 1913 by Russian futurist artists Aleksei Kruchenykh, libretto, Mikhail Matyushin, music and with set and costumes by Kazimir Malevich. The work has been re-invented in 2016 by visual artist Justene Williams and Sydney Chamber Opera.

As their hymn turns into a defiant tango, these Strongwomen, fierce, glamorous sopranos, reveal their determination to capture the Sun, box it in concrete and celebrate the “multi-faceted” dark. The work’s non-naturalistic characters embody various states of being—Bad Man, Vast Man, Time Traveller, New Human etc—and the plot is a broad arc full of bewildering events that lead up to and observe the consequences of the Sun’s capture. A New Human celebrates its digitised body but is anxious, “We have executed our own history,” while the one formally named character, who symbolises history, Nero/Caligula (the remarkable Mitchell Riley executing huge vocal swoops), despairs, “I will slide into another century/ hidden in the folds of a quotation mark.” A Traveller reports, “In the future?where I visited, yesterday,?some of my best friends are weaponry.“

In 2016, we seem to be helplessly living out our escalating digitisation, but the points of reference in Victory Over the Sun are equally those of the Russian Futurists of 1913, their aspirations and fears juxtaposed with ours via the recreation of a pivotal 20th century avant-garde anti-opera. This new version implicitly claims Victory Over the Sun for opera, but without relinquishing the dark energy, eccentricity, wit and passion we imagine of the original and its bold ‘what-if’ scenario. It’s a remarkable fusion, oscillating between past, present and grim speculation but with an acerbic, often comic sense of pervasive nonsense, resonant with extreme vocal delivery, exaggerated movement and bizarre costuming. Much of it flies past, sung and declaimed words and surtitles grasped for, but it doesn’t matter, the scale and sweep of the vision is enthralling.

This contemporary Victory Over the Sun sings, dances and moves to an engrossingly propulsive keyboard-led score from a tight ensemble seated in a circle at one end of the traverse staging, an integral visual component of the work. From within a tight framework, the music embodies and reinforces the extravagance of the rest of the production with theremin, sounds and effects that belie the scale of the small ensemble. There’s little known of the original 1913 score; all that remains is a badly transcribed fragment. But the 100 years between now and then is heard in the theremin, invented in 1928, Minimalism maybe, the tango certainly, the Moog sound familiar from Wendy Carlos’ Switched on Bach (1968) and, for my ears, not a little Prog Rock in the keyboard alongside the more ambiguous tonalities and jagged shapings of ‘contemporary classical.’ Keith Emerson died 10 March; I wasn’t a fan of Emerson, Lake and Palmer (founded 1970), but recognised Emerson’s agility with the Moog and admired the keyboardism of fellow prog rockers Rick Wakeman of Yes (founded 1968) and Tony Banks of Genesis (founded 1967), often forgiving their many musical excesses. I was doubtless hearing things, but Victory Over the Sun is nothing less than a treasure house for a century of associations and is, above all, dreamlike, if verging on nightmare when we are faced with the future we are inventing for ourselves—very different from the one envisaged by the Futurists, but no less alarming in the ways we continue to challenge nature and our bodies.

At a forum held at the MCA (Translating History: Justene Williams and Sydney Chamber Opera in Conversation, 31 March), composer Huw Belling said that when Justene Williams described what she was doing as “baroque grunge,” he thought, “You beauty… I can be myself.” With ravishing ornamentation, Belling has composed a tight-knit, swirling chamber score centred around the keyboard (Jack Symonds) alongside theremin (Symonds also), piccolo and alto flute (Jane Bishop), viola and viola d’amore (James Wannan) and electric and bass guitars (Joe Manton), collectively elevated at times to orchestral dimensions and space opera theatrics by electronics and sound design (Belling, Matthew McGuigan, Alex Goldstein). The theremin’s glides are echoed in voices and other instruments while the sources of, say, percussive sounds—a beautiful gonging over which soprano voices soar—were not evident. The Futurists’ Victory Over the Sun was in part a reaction against a Wagner opera craze in Russia at the time, resulting in a work with only a piano, no arias, neither characters nor plot in the conventional sense. Belling’s new score for the work is at once challenging and engaging, sustaining the impulse of the original.

Victory Over the Sun depicts a revolutionary overthrow of the star at the centre of our planetary system, provider of our energy, determiner of our sense of time and space and symbol of traditional power. The Strongmen in the original capture the Sun in a black box, aiming to create a new future for humanity. From the original text, designs and a fragment of the score, visual artist Justene Williams and Sydney Chamber Opera have fashioned a largely new work brimming over with invention, anarchic fervour and a sense of artistic, if not political, transformation. Save for its revolutionary artistic drive, even the original was politically opaque. As librettist Pierce Wilcox explained at the forum about the work, insider knowledge was required to recognise political references amid the nonsensical lexicon and neologisms of ZAUM, the anti-language deployed by the Futurists to undo logic and the literary establishment.

The black box in the production of 1913, painted on a stage cloth, anticipated Malevich’s famous painting of 1915, Black Square. In the traverse staging of this new production, it’s an impressive, tall, black perspex box dominating centre-stage in an old timber-beamed building on Cockatoo Island; above it, in a transparent case, is the Sun, its rays at times blazing across us before it’s captured and slowly lowered into the black box.

For Malevich and the Futurists the removal of the Sun’s rays would allow our senses greater play in the dark, realising a new awareness of time, space and human potential. However, their vision was neither programmatic nor rational; the work was, and is now, invigoratingly nonsensical, but nonetheless loaded with striking images, observations and, in the end, potential contemporary meanings.

Malevich’s costume designs are wonderfully realised by Justene Williams with a mix of fidelity and invention. In particular, the artists collectively felt the need to reflect the much transformed gender relations of our time compared with those of 1913. As Rosamund Bartlett—a British specialist in Russian literature and translator of the original text from which librettist Pierce Wilcox worked—explained in a deeply engaging and entertaining lecture at the MCA (Malevich and the Black Square: 100 Years On, 23 March), the Russian Futurists followed the masculinist code of their Italian peers in the making of Victory Over the Sun—no female characters and a libretto using only masculine nouns. In this new version, the Strongmen are now Strongwomen but, unlike the other characters, Williams has not dressed the pair in Malevich’s disjunctive collaging of geometric and volumetric shapes (soon to be expanded on in Picasso’s costumes for the dance work Parade in 1917 and The Triadic Ballet in 1922 by Bauhaus visual artist and choreographer Oskar Schlemmer).

The two near-identical soprano Strongwomen—wonderfully sung and performed by Jessica O’Donoghue and Sarah Toth—are glitteringly high-hatted, long-legged, high-heeled and draped front and back with a transparent plastic that stylishly aligns them with the centre-stage perspex boxes. They are clearly 21st century women. The other 13 characters—distributed between seven actors, singers and dancers accompanied by an 18-strong chorus—are largely costumed in the Malevich mode, with some witty variations. Another costume with a heightened contemporary look is given to a Time Traveller, a female figure (Hannah Cox), appearing to be a self-illuminating cyborg, clothed top to toe in a tight-fitting metallic-sheen jumpsuit evenly covered in hundreds of small nodules that refract light. The Malevich costumes noticeably distort and restrict bodies (something Williams says she delights in), making for intriguing appearances and movement, collectively suggesting a mutant ecology. This meshes finely with the world of our own evoked in Wilcox’s libretto.

If the Futurists aspired to create a new non-naturalistic art free of restraint, to override nature and exult in masculine power, we aspire to ‘de-gender,’ globalise and make a better future for ourselves out of the Singularity of becoming one with digital technology: “Live/ Where the datasphere whispers crack, fizz, /the blood shouts with narcotic truth/ the eyes read every spectrum?/Take my body for raw material.”

At the MCA, Wilcox commented that in the original, despite the joy of capturing the Sun, the work ends on a sombre note, as if the revolution has gone too far. Artistic speculation has unleashed fear. Similarly in this new version, the erasure of difference results in entropy, nothing grows, “[everything] changes everyday, so no-body knows where to have lunch,” and, as musical director Jack Symonds described it, the final part of the score becomes “a cloud of unknowing, dismembered, single grains of sound.”

Victory Over the Sun makes explicit concerns about progress; the New Human points to its ambiguities, “We built an organ factory where you can get anything: eyes for the blind, hearts for the psychopath, arms for the pacifist. Another character asks, ”whose hand can I hold in a thousandyear?/ will you still have a hand/ will it be warm and willing/ will it be gunmetal tentacle spiked/ and where did you put all your skin? … what is victory/ without a fleshmatefriend to share it with?”

It occurred to me that in an era of extreme dependence on electricity and, above all, digital tools and massive electronic networks, we should re-estimate our relationship with the Sun. A major solar flare could be more than merely disruptive and the consequences regressive, in ways good and bad, but most likely disastrous. It’s not enough to just back up your files.

Any future for Victory Over the Sun?

Is there a ‘back-up’ of this production of Victory Over the Sun? At the MCA talk it was made clear that video of the performance will become part of Williams’ installation, still a work-in-progress on Cockatoo Island. Biennale Artistic Director Stephanie Rosenthal, who chaired the session, hoped that a copy of the performance would be made available to researchers and that the production might be remounted at some time and tour, although admitting the financial investment was considerable and of the kind biennales can manage but which might be otherwise challenging. It’s a pity; although sold out, the three performances of this remarkable work were for small audiences. The scholar Rosamund Bartlett, who revealed she’d seen unimpressive versions of Victory Over the Sun, thought this one “an absolutely brilliant recreation,” a sentiment shared by we lucky few who experienced it.

Special tribute is due to the brave, expressive and highly skilled performers—Simon Lobelson, Jessica O’Donoghue, Sarah Toth, Mitchell Riley, Hannah Cox, Danielle Mass, Eleni Schumacher; the dancers—Nicola Enrico Bruni, Olive Dwyer Corben; and the Inner West Voices choir. All were sustained and propelled by the musicians conducted by Jack Symonds within the precise staging by Justene Williams and Pierce Wilcox.

Victory Over the Sun offers a different perspective on Stephanie Rosenthal’s mantra for the 20th Biennale of Sydney, William Gibson’s “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” The future shared here is distributed chronologically, resurrected after 100 years; here again, same, same, but different. For all their masculinism, the Futurists share with us a challenge to comfortable art in uncomfortable times.

20th Biennale of Sydney, Justene Williams & Sydney Chamber Opera, Victory Over the Sun, Cockatoo Island, Sydney, 18-20 March

Georgie Meagher is firing, exhilarated by and optimistic about her choice of works by emerging artists for Next Wave. Her background in visual arts—as artist, writer, curator and director—and performance—from an MCA in Performance from the University of Wollongong to presenting her works at ANTI Festival in Finland and You and Your Work Festival at Arnolfini, Bristol—make her an ideal Next Wave artistic director, one with considerable breadth and depth of experience, practice and a commitment to contemporary art. I spoke by phone with Georgie shortly after the launch of her program.

How did you go about the process of programing and what was your time-frame?
I started in this role in September 2014 and from about week two or three we were going out and having artist meetings and travelling to capital cities and sitting down with as many artists as we could, getting recommendations from friends and colleagues in different cities, as well as past artists and just letting it be known that we’d be in town and open to meeting with any emerging artist or curator we had time to see. We go out with guns blazing at the beginning to meet as many people as possible. Then there were a series of open calls for proposals.

Talking about works is one thing. What about experiencing work? For emerging artists it’s often difficult to get attention. What are the experiential things you’re looking for? Are you looking at images of works, recordings…What else goes on beyond talking?
We definitely trying to look at recordings or preferably the real thing, as much as possible. One thing I’ve repeated to many artists is if you’re a performance artist you need to send video of your work. You can’t assess performance through still imagery. But [we look at] the Fringe Festival down here and visit artist-run spaces that provide lots of good context and real experience of artista’ works. We also have a big network and opinions that we trust.

What’s the age range of Next Wave artists?
Next Wave has gone through a shift from the early days as a youth-focused organisation to one focusing more on emerging artists and we are continuing that trend. We have quite a broad age range this festival and that’s because we haven’t actually set an age limit, particularly for our key learning program, Kickstart. That’s because we think you can be emerging and over-30 and there are lots of things that might affect when an artist is able to start developing their practice in earnest. These can include having children or not being able to afford it. These things, of course, disproportionately affect women and people from lower socio-economic sectors. We didn’t want to exclude them. The youngest artist is 23 and most, if not all are under 35. So it’s still mostly in that younger range but we’re thinking more about where people are in their careers rather than anchoring it to, you know, five years out of university or under-30 or something like that.

Tell us a bit about Kickstart and how much is invested in it.
Kickstart is the major development program that we run. Artists are selected at the end of 2014 and begin their development from a residential intensive which happened in March 2015 followed by a series of other intensives in Melbourne where we bring the whole group together to speak about the development of their work but also about issues that are important to them, that concern their practice more generally—in the first instance, issues of identity and representation, which are often concerns for emerging artists. [There] are also issues of cultural diversity and seeing that reflected in programing as well as the ethics of engaging on many different levels with communities and audiences and participants. These were among many meaty topics that came up in that first intensive and really showed us where we needed to be providing support.

This, I suppose, would relate in particular to the significant number of Indigenous artists you have in the program.
Yes, although a lot of artists are thinking about these issues, whether or not it comes through in the content of their work.

How many artists or works are supported as part of Kickstart?
We had 14 projects this time.

That’s a lot and presumably quite labour intensive?
Absolutely. Each of the projects is supported by an Associate Producer, which is a model that Next Wave has worked with for quite a long time. They are often artists in their own right and this year all three producers are artists who understand the artistic process and have empathy for it.

Let’s talk about some of the works in the program. Decolonist, for example.
Katie West’s exhibition Decolonist is on at West Space. I met Katie at Artsource Studios in Fremantle. She was incredibly shy and hadn’t exhibited much publicly. She applied to us with a project that investigated the merging of Indigenous and non-indigenous world views into a kind of third space—a kind of meeting of the two. She wanted to create an installation that was an image of what this third space could be. [In the process of] her research and development throughout the year, as often happens, the project completely shifted as you will have noticed from the title, Decolonist. She had quite a personal realization, along with an artistic and creative one, that informed the work—that the merging of these two world views was actually perhaps impossible and that the Indigenous world view needed to be [made prominent], placed at the centre, focused on and cared for and cultivated in a unique way. The way that non-indigenous world views can sneak in, seep through the corners of all parts of practice and of identity is something she began to notice in many different aspects of her life and practice.

I think conversations within the Kickstart group were quite important to Katie. When we talked in Fremantle, she spoke about how jealous she was of the community in Brisbane, where there are groups like the Indigenous artists collective ProppaNOW. Hannah Bronte, another Kickstart artist, was assistant to Richard Bell and had moved in those circles when she was growing up and going through art school and Katie really didn’t have anything like that. So I think bringing that conversation into the room at Kickstart where there were a lot of very politically engaged people, whether Indigenous or not, was important for her.

And what kind of work is this?
It’s an installation with video and sculptures made from natural materials. Katie does very delicate woven textile work but with found leaves, flowers and string. She encourages audiences to touch the work and to understand the feeling of it, which will essentially destroy it over the course of the exhibition and take it back to the earth in some way. She shows these sculptures alongside videos of herself. She’s developed meditation videos that show breathing in and breathing out in a ‘decolonised’ state of mind. This process of meditation she’s developed over the 12 months is demonstrated in these videos.

As well as your own performance work, you have a strong background in visual art. Is this a strong element in this Next Wave?
There are some really incredible exhibitions that I’m excited about. We’re also working with a number of new partners for our Emerging Curators Program including Arts Projects Australia, which works with artists with intellectual disabilities, and Liquid Architecture, an interdisciplinary organisation centred in sound. Thinking about visual arts practice but also curatorial practice in a more expansive sense is something I’ve tried to do this festival, seeing curation as more than choosing things to put on walls in an exhibition. There are a number of significant visual art works. One of them is by Eva Abbinga whose work is titled Arrival of the Rajah. Eva is another Kickstart artist and this work has been made with a community of quilters in Melbourne and Geelong. It’s a large textile sculpture that is made in response to the Rajah Quilt, one of the most precious textile art works in Australia. It’s in the NGA collection and it was made a group of convict women who were travelling on the ship called The Rajah to Australia in the early 1800s. This quilt provides an alternative colonial narrative from a feminist perspective. The original work is incredible, so meticulously detailed, an amazingly beautiful image of female collaboration and collective work.

Is this a recreation of that work?
Eva’s made a quilt that is about 12 metres wide, but it’s a large circular sculpture. She has told the story of The Rajah Quilt to many different women and asked them all to contribute different pieces to what is basically an homage or a response to it. It’s quite different aesthetically because Eva’s used natural dyed materials. It’s not mainstream quilting. The project took on a life of its own with Eva mailing out small squares to women and having them mail the completed pieces back to her and then bringing this large sculpture together through a long term process of exchange.

There’s a strong dance and performance component. What were you looking for in dance?
I’m not sure I had a specific thing in mind. The Melbourne dance scene and community is quite tightly interwoven and so we definitely wanted to make sure we were looking both within and outside of that. Two of the artists we’re working with—Angela Goh (Desert Body Creep) and Geoffrey Watson (Camel)—are both very inter-disciplinary in their practices as artists and in their collaborations. Geoffrey is into design, costume and fashion and Angela into visual arts. And that’s quite interesting to me about their practice and what it brings to their choreography and their projects. Really, we were just trying to look at—and this is the case across the board—who’s making work, who has ideas that we really want to see.

Within the dance program there’s some intriguing collaborations, for example Amrita Hepi (Bundjalung NSW/Ngapuhi NZ) and Jahra Wasasala’s (NZ) Passing, a collaboration in hip hop and contemporary dance with costumes styled by installation artist Honey Long and music by Lavern Lee.
The work’s still in progress, so I don’t want to lock anything down about it, [involves] design, installation work and amazing costumes. [Another kind of collaboration] is Emma Fishwick from WA working with composer Kynan Tan to bring a really strong audio-visual and sound component to her practice of writing and photography.

The Indigenous scope of your program looks very strong: BlaaQ Catt (Maurial Spearim), Blaksland and Lawless (Lorna Munro, Merindah Donnelly & Tjanara Talbot), Decolonist (Katie West), Thomas ES Kelly, Hannah Bronte and Amrita Hesp and Jahra Wasasala whom we’ve just mentioned.
That’s something we’re committed to in an ongoing way. One thing I’m thrilled about is that there are also Indigenous artists in two of the curatorial projects. And Indigenous voices are coming through in various publications and events. We’re trying to embed Indigenous presence in everything we do, ensuring those voices are being heard.

Going back to the dance program, is there an example of a dance work and its evolution in the Kickstart program you can describe?
Angela Goh came through the Kickstart program. Her work, Desert Body Creep, will be performed by herself and an over-sized Gummy Worm. Angela is very interested in the line between reality and fiction. She began at the outset of Kickstart thinking about Yvonne Rainer’s Dance is Hard to See and looking at everything being dance and everyone potentially being a choreographer. She’s opening that out and asking questions about it. Through her research, she came across the Devil Worm, which is found in prehistoric groundwater a number of kilometres towards the centre of the Earth. [Its discovery] completely changed the way people thought about what sort of conditions are necessary to sustain life as we know it. It’s one of those moments that completely shakes the ground upon which we all stand, theoretically speaking, in terms of what we know and don’t know. This idea of mystery Angela takes to the next step, looking at intuition and almost going to magic. Angela’s work in development— which I’m sure has changed a lot since I last saw it—is remarkably funny in a way that I didn’t expect at all. She’s incredibly intelligent and articulate in the way she speaks about her ideas and her work but also can come across as a very serious person. I have to say it was quite surprising, and hilarious, when she commenced animating a large Gummy Worm with a broomstick during a work-in-progress showing.

Another of the dance projects I’m really excited about is Under My Skin. I can’t wait to see how it unfolds. The Delta Project (VIC) is a group of both hearing and deaf dancers. Their choreography weaves Auslan into the movement. There will be parts that only deaf audiences will understand and there will be text and sounds at other times that only hearing audiences will understand. And the artists have created the work with these parallel experiences completely in mind.

What do you think you’ve brought to Next Wave?
I think this festival has been made in collaboration with the artists who are part of the festival, and particularly the Kickstart artists. The conversations that began in that first Kickstart intensive really drove the direction of what we knew we needed to think about and talk about in the festival itself. Keeping myself open to those conversations is the reason I didn’t set a theme for the festival this year. [More crucial] is to be able to be responsive to what is urgent and important to those artists we’re working with and particularly to artists who may be Indigenous or TSI or culturally diverse or who might have disability.

What happens, of course, is that regardless of the absence of a theme, some big shared ideas will doubtless emerge.
That will definitely happen but I’m leaving out the one single lens through which to look at everything. That allows more openness and for different types of connections to form between projects that I might not have thought about, which I think is much more exciting.

“A groundbreaking version of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya…the fourth wall of traditional theatre resoundingly broke down as the audience perched amid the action, inside and out.”
Norie Neumark, Real Time

This acclaimed two-day, live-in, site-specific production, premiered in Avoca in 2015, now travels to the regional Victorian towns of Steiglitz, April 9 & 10, and Eganstown, April 16 & 17. The audience, with the performers, will move through and around the buildings in which they are staged. As well, “between the acts audience members can speak to the characters as they go about their lives. They will be invited to attend a number of talks presented about the history of the houses and the local area. They also have time to explore the local areas” (press release).

Melbourne’s La Mama, producer of this event, declares Uncle Vanya to be “the first environmentalist play. Written more than 100 years ago, it is every bit as relevant today. The character Dr Astrov says, ‘Forests are disappearing, rivers are running dry… the climate is spoiled…’ words which resonate with growing urgency. The play (subtitled A Portrait of Country Life in Four Acts) depicts the lives of its characters—the economic difficulty of living on the land, isolation, tensions around property and family inheritance, people’s resilience and deep family bonds. The themes of the play resonate strongly with contemporary issues of people living in regional Victoria” (press release).

For information about bookings, accommodation etc go to the La Mama’s website.

While discourse about climate change increases daily in the media, we remain largely ignorant of what is happening on our doorstep in the Pacific. Latai Taumoepeau is one artist combatting this, making work for years now that focuses on the effects of this calamity in her ancestral homeland Tonga and its neighbours (read a review of Taumoepeau’s Repatriate I and II).

Disaffected, drawn from a concept by the work’s creative producer Katy Green Loughrey, is a collaboration with performers Valerie Berry and Ryuichi Fujimura and director Kym Vercoe, developed in residency at Blacktown Arts Centre over a four-year period. The large Pacific community in Sydney’s west was a contributing force, most notably in Sean Bacon’s accompanying video Affected, which played in the adjacent room. Affected cut interviews with residents about their threatened homelands with imagery of the three performers dancing chest deep in the ocean. Loss of country is a familiar story in an immigrant nation, yet climate causality is new.

With its immersive darkness and Tom Hogan’s audio building with gradual menace, the beginning of the performance promised a dynamic experience. Moving through story, image and movement, Disaffected placed the individual firmly in context and brought emotional resonance to the issue. In a trio combining skill and personality, Berry’s account of the 2009 dust storm in Sydney was one of the most deeply affecting scenes, especially for this writer who experienced the event as images only when living overseas.

Fujimura spoke of the single pine that survived from a forest of 70,000 after the 2006 tsunami in his native Japan. The pine became a sort of cenotaph, invested with so much symbolism that when it began to die, a process of preservation was embarked upon that was so costly and arduous it elicited much criticism. The pathos of the ‘Miracle Pine Tree’ was emblematised in a blue sculptural prop, garlanded with fairy lights, carried with reverence from the edge to centre stage.

The effect of natural catastrophes on cultural materiality came to the fore more than ever with Taumoepeau’s monologue about the fabrication of long shell garlands—Beroana, or ‘shell money’, displayed in certain ceremonies. Taumoepeau used a giant ceramic replica gifted to her by artist Taloi Havini, of Bougainville heritage. This ancient blend of resource, ritual and ‘art object’ is one of a myriad that die with the environment. Taumoepeau’s great gestural gifts carried this monologue as eloquently as her words.

The power of these individual stories was not matched by the recorded voiceover, partly since it provided more impersonal information, also because the production as a whole was so busy, effects overlapping one another to the point at times of swamping them. Storms were naturally frequent, Amber Silk’s lighting in turns flickering, glaucous, glowing hot and, at its most subtle, conveying empty devastation.

Props such as corrugated iron and blue tarp were used to varying success. The iron, such a familiar workaday material of colonised Oceania as to be totemic, crescendoed to violent tempest in the hands of Fujimura. The blue tarps, signifying waves, were less convincing.

The energy and commitment of the performers was relentless, as they shouted, wailed, ran and rolled across the floor. We sat around the perimeter of the room on mattresses and cushions, the setting reminiscent of a disaster shelter, our comfort compared to their duress making for slightly uneasy viewing.

I did sometimes long for more space and reflection. The Butoh and Bodyweather training of the performers could have been drawn upon more. Viewed in terms of Taumoepeau’s single body of work on these themes, I felt the impact of Disaffected not as strong both in aesthetic and political terms. Yet that is not the main point. Disaffected is a refined and captivating piece of theatre: it should have seasons elsewhere.

It is striking how much good art, from visual to performing, at reasonable prices, is going on out west—Campbelltown, Penrith, Bankstown, Casula. Once upon a time, Disaffected would have received a season in the inner city at Performance Space. This seems unlikely now. So forget Sydney Theatre Company and its $80 pageants. Check the bills of our outer suburban arts centres, consider the conviviality of a train trip from Redfern: the balance of a reasonable ticket price is sure to get you a great meal out there as well.

Disaffected, concept Katy Green Loughrey, director Kym Vercoe, performers, devisors Valerie Berry, Ryuichi Fujimura, Latai Taumoepeau, composer Tom Hogan, dramaturg, designer Carlos Gomes, movement consultant Victoria Hunt, lighting designer Amber Silk, creative producer Katy Green Loughrey; Blacktown Arts Centre, 17-20 March

Brett Dean’s Pastoral Symphony is by turns tranquil and terrifying, a beautiful and passionate decrial of the destruction of pastoral idylls so lauded in 19th century music. Led by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s new principal conductor David Robertson, the work opens with distant sounds of natural chaos: viola murmurings, a gong and lengths of shaken aluminium foil mingle with an electronic track of recorded birdsong—a sonic forest. Piano notes drift longingly and in the vast concrete and metal space of Carriageworks the lighting design mottles like sun filtering through a canopy.

Dean is the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s first ever Artist-in-Residence and this work was a highlight of the inaugural concert of the orchestra’s new contemporary music series in partnership with Carriageworks.

The Symphony (a name chosen for its associations more than as a description of musical form) begins as a celebration of the natural sounds of the Australian bush, but there is a sense of menace. Pianist Jacob Abela leans into the instrument to strike the strings with a percussion mallet. The steady beat of axe on wood thumps through the sound system, first one tree falls, then the next. The chaos becomes more insistent, panicked even, the strings rhythmic as whip birds crack. The forest screams and goes quiet, rages and deflates. The brass cry out and before long the forest is filled with the fast snare drum rhythms of pop music and the sound of cars speeding past. The work fades out with a rattling of industrial noise and a final deep-echoing crash.

The Pastoral Symphony is followed by a very different evocation of the natural world. Based on pencil drawings of seascapes by Latvian-American artist Vija Celmins, Australian composer Lisa Illean’s Land’s End is a new work commissioned by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Her music is hushed and understated. Strings slide delicately on the edge of hearing, the bass drum rumbles softly, the work inhabiting a liminal space on the edge of silence. The use of a sheet of aluminium foil as an instrument is a visual as well as aural motif linking Land’s End to Dean’s Symphony. A creeping sonic figure softly crosses the ensemble over gently weeping pitch-bends. Microtonal tunings create a mildly unsettling dissonance that threads through the work. The sound-world is so fragile that small gestures gain enhanced significance; glissandi become soft tears across the fabric of the orchestra’s sound. A gentle lapping conjures the movement of tides and waves, before the music evaporates like steam.

The soft hiss of bass drum skin opens the first movement of Gérard Grisey’s Quatre Chants pour Franchir le Seuil (Four Songs for Crossing the Threshold). Like Land’s End, Grisey’s Quatre Chants… brushes the borders of sound and silence, but here the chilling effect of the almost imperceptible entry is disfigured by a wash of lighting, the border between darkness and light awkwardly well-defined. Grisey’s final work—the last before his unexpected death from an aneurysm at age 52—employs Javanese gongs and, like Illean’s work, microtonal tunings.

The first song, La Mort de l’ange (The Death of the Angel), is a setting of poetry by Christian Guez-Ricord. Chicago-based Australian soprano Jessica Aszodi’s articulate, accented interjections and soft sustained notes give the grief of the text a disturbing clarity. Her keening voice reaches out to that of the trumpet, their timbres mingling. Hissing skin decorates the silence between movements, Grisey’s “insubstantial musical particles intended to maintain a level of polite but slackened silence” (program notes).

In La Mort de la civilisation (The Death of Civilisation), a setting of Egyptian sarcophagus inscriptions, a repeating plucked figure in the harp proceeds solemnly. La Mort de la voix (The Death of the Voice) opens with bell-like chiming and jagged soprano line, high violin notes disintegrating into bright shards. The interlude between the third and fourth movements is a threatening rumble and hiss before the cataclysmic climax of the work, La Mort de l’humanité (The Death of Humanity). The text Grisey set for his final movement comes from the ancient Mesopotamian poem The Epic of Gilgamesh, and depicts an apocalyptic flood: “Squalls, Pelting rains, Hurricanes.” Brushes on the bass drum mutter of rain, thunder rolls across the percussion section and cries of violin, piccolo and piccolo trumpet rend the air. Aszodi screams above the carnage, delivering her lines with jabbering, unhinged vigour. A bass drone introduces the work’s denouement: a cathartic lullaby from Aszodi to an uneven, swaying accompaniment. There is a sense of peace. It is, as Grisey writes, “music of the dawn of a humanity finally unencumbered by nightmare” (program notes).

The program opened with a late addition: Pierre Boulez’s Dérive 1, in memory of the composer who died in January this year. Robertson, a colleague of Boulez, conducted a small ensemble of musicians from the SSO who, along with French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard—appointed by Boulez as Ensemble InterContemporain’s first solo pianist—deftly navigated Boulez’s trill-laden fluttering and crisp subito dynamic changes.

Crossing the Threshold was a beautiful, challenging and elegantly programmed tribute to both Pierre Boulez and new music more broadly; the sell-out crowd a vindication of David Robertson’s vision and an encouraging sign that Sydney can sustain, indeed craves, more of this kind of concert.

The second of the two concerts for 2016, on 20 November, is titled Oblique Strategies. Conducted by Brett Dean, it will feature works by Steve Reich, Frederic Rzewski, Dean himself and premieres from Australian composers Natasha Anderson and Alexander Garsden.

The SSO at Carriageworks: Crossing the Threshold, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, 13 March

There’s a slight danger when a highly regarded artist in another medium makes a feature film that the result will fail to meet expectations raised by the artist’s expertise in their accustomed field. Novelist Julia Leigh’s thematically interesting yet aesthetically flat Sleeping Beauty (2011), which she both wrote and directed, is a recent case in point. Theatre director Simon Stone, simultaneously acclaimed and criticised for his signature reinterpretations of classic plays, dispels this fear with a cinematically assured debut feature, following an initial experience directing one of the short films that make up The Turning anthology (2013); Stone also has a background as a film and TV actor.

The Daughter is an extension of Stone’s customary theatrical practice, being loosely based on his stage production of The Wild Duck, itself a significant reworking of Ibsen’s play. The film presents us with a similar array of characters: Geoffrey Rush’s unendearing landowner, Henry Neilson, whose impending nuptials follow the closure of his timber mill (which heralds the town’s demise); Christian (Paul Schneider), his returned estranged son; Sam Neill’s broken patriarch Walter, who lives with his happily married son Oliver (Ewen Leslie)—a far more sympathetic character than Ibsen’s Hjalmar Ekdal—daughter-in-law Charlotte (Miranda Otto) and their luminous daughter Hedvig (Odessa Young), possessor of the wild duck.

Despite the reinvention of the story as a contemporary Australian scenario, the narrative set-up still suggests a theatrical, larger-than-life contrivance, a sense of archetypes being brought together to lock horns; the title itself bears this out. The Daughter is more mythic than naturalistic, beautifully realised in Andrew Commis’ cinematography which, with its sylvan scenes of mist-shrouded woods and lakeside landscape (alpine scenery that recalls the Scandinavian setting of the source material) coupled with the elegiac appeal of the rapidly depopulating Australian country town, creates a domain that seems to hover fantastically outside time and place. Hedvig has a tryst with her boyfriend in a massive grove of towering trees. Characters laugh and argue in darkened interiors that are softened and dreamlike. Much of the film takes place at dusk, or later. Imminent betrayal and destruction loom like storm clouds over this Edenic locale, a microcosm of which is found in the small bushland animal sanctuary created by Hedvig and her grandfather.

Anti-naturalistic too is the film’s minimalist use of sound. The most heightened scenes of anger, sadness and bliss are characterised by the deliberate avoidance of diegetic sound, with the occasional exception of the merest hint of a heartbeat. In one slowed-down sequence, Hedvig is pulled behind a speedboat, reclining and laughing, the silence that blankets the scene lending a transcendent serenity. A less effective decision, perhaps, was to have dialogue frequently overlapping two or more scenes. There’s an interesting initial fluidity to this, but the more it’s repeated, the more it seems like an affectation with no deeper significance.

The Daughter shows its dramatic heritage in a range of emotions writ large. Ewen Leslie’s Oliver is an exuberant jokester whose warm-hearted devotion to his family somewhat belies his behaviour towards the end of the film, even considering the revelation which prompts it. Paul Schneider skilfully conveys the darkness that can emerge when good intentions are perverted by despair, while Neill’s performance as the eccentric Walter is engaging and comparatively understated. Odessa Young, an impressive new performer who was also very strong in Sue Brooks’ Looking for Grace (2015), is a standout, embodying Hedvig’s youthful passion with utter conviction.

While Miranda Otto and Anna Torv make a pair of graceful spouses to Oliver and Neilson respectively, their characters aren’t written with a great deal of complexity. Not even skeletons in her closet can make Otto’s decent, loving Charlotte (an interesting diversion from Ibsen’s Gina, who exists more solidly as her own person) much more than a foil to her husband and, to a lesser extent, her daughter.

As events spiral towards a drastic denouement, the cinematography begins to mirror what’s happening, moving away from still, stately shots to handheld camerawork that captures the agitation of a husband’s confrontation of his wife. Towards the end, some of The Daughter’s fine cinematic sensibility is marred by histrionics (a contrast with the deliberate suppression of sound in previous scenes). This excessiveness makes it a little harder to invest in each character’s personal fate. Yet the powerful atmosphere evoked over the course of the film, of an idyllic community slowly leaking its lifeblood, ensures The Daughter’s overarching theme of innocence lost is ever striking and tangible.

The Daughter, writer, director Simon Stone, cinematography Andrew Commis, production design Steven Jones-Evans, art direction Maxine Dennett, editing Veronika Jenet, score Mark Bradshaw, distributor Roadshow Films, 2016

Australian Dance Theatre, Habitus & The Beginning of Nature

Australian Dance Theatre Artistic Director Garry Stewart has stated that the exploration of humanity’s relationship to the natural world will form the basis of a number of works by the company over the next few years. The first fruits of this focus, Habitus and The Beginning of Nature, received their premieres at this year’s Adelaide Festival and WOMADelaide respectively. They could hardly have come at a more apposite moment, recent reports indicating that civilisation is heading towards disastrous, human-induced climate change even more rapidly than previously thought, with 2016 set to break global temperature records for the third successive year.

In Habitus, our conflicted relationship to the excesses of the materialist economy is highlighted by Stewart and Larissa McGowan’s richly humorous choreography in which the movement of bodies through space is shaped by a cornucopia of consumer goods: books, sofas, ironing boards and the like. These familiar items are rendered comical, uncanny like the decontextualised objects of surrealist art. They are also malignant: a key moment sees one of the performers crushed beneath a sofa, fighting for life. They draw out, both by their suffocating corporeality and sheer proximity, extreme physical responses from the dancers, such as heavy, urgent breathing and violent retching. “The sad thing is,” Thomas Fonua tells us in one of the work’s spoken word sections, “all this shit—chairs, tables, sofas, whatever—is ultimately going to end up as landfill.”

But the work also foregrounds our inseparability from “all this shit.” Echoing economist Victor Lebow’s claim that “our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life,” the dancers’ bodies become integrated with, and extended by, the objects of our consumer desires, stacks of books, for example, becoming monstrous stilts. Performers Zoe Dunwoodie and Michael Ramsay, meanwhile, swap “sofa memories” of disarming, sometimes unsettling intimacy (“this is where I lie when I listen to Miles Davis/ this is where I cried when I learned my father had died”). Brendan Woithe’s sound design is correspondingly split between ironic rhapsodising (the deployment, for instance, of baroque music during a Regency-like passage in which the dancers lovingly balance books on their heads) and banal metronomics (the incessant ticking of clocks and dripping of water).

Stewart notes in the program that “an undercurrent to our consumerist excesses is the thought that some day ‘all of this’ will be reclaimed by nature.” The work’s finale, bringing to mind King Lear’s “blasted heath,” sees an apocalyptic storm reconfigure the stage’s detritus as a kind of midden, the accumulated, un-biodegradable domestic waste of multiple generations stacked high. Human figures—worshippers, scavengers, ghosts?—circle it cautiously. “Where are we?” one of them asks, “what is this place?” It is, I suppose, a kind of monument to human folly, a 21st century equivalent of the “martyred village” of Oradour-sur-Glane that Charles de Gaulle ordered be conserved as a permanent reminder of Nazi barbarism. “As I exhale my last breath,” Fonua says in a final monologue, “none of this will disintegrate with me, but will persist and persist and persist, stretching for an eternity well beyond the traces of this brief existence.”

ADT’s The Beginning of Nature, premiered at WOMADelaide, might be Habitus’ ‘origins’ story or, perhaps, a more fleshed-out account of its vision of a post-apocalyptic world repossessed by nature. Arguably it is both, the work seeing Garry Stewart’s familiar choreographic vocabulary supplemented with rhythms and shapes drawn from the endlessly returning cycles of the biosphere: “day and night, the seasons, tidal patterns, migration, hibernation, sleep and waking, weather patterns, the binary of growth and decay, and the various systems of the body” [program]. Its object world is populated by the natural rather than the anthropogenic: rocks and trees transported through the space with the assiduousness of ritual and revered as in pre-Christian religion. The work is underpinned by images of birth, death and rebirth, situating divinity in nature and suggesting the sacred feminine as the originating principle of all life.

Brendan Woithe’s score (read an interview with the composer), an immense, shuddering wall of tonal sound generated by the composer in real time by stretching and looping the live orchestrations of the Zephyr Quartet, reinforces Stewart’s interest in feedback systems. In one part it resets every few seconds with a deep growl like a giant turntable starting up with the needle already in place. Two vocalists, Shauntai Batzke and Vonda Last, sing in the recently revived language of the Kaurna People, the traditional owners of the Adelaide Plains (Tarndanya). The simple vocal lines and bell-like voices recall the ‘holy minimalism’ of 20th century composers Henryk Górecki and John Tavener, even if the decision to incorporate Kaurna language into Woithe’s score remained, for me, confounding.

Like Habitus, The Beginning of Nature is an unsubtle, though less didactic, work that questions humanity’s place in the natural order. To my mind, Habitus is the more successful of the two, its nuanced twinning of humour with accessible dramaturgy the more adroit vehicle for exploring our increasingly vexed relationship to the ecological systems that simultaneously sustain and are most threatened by us. I wondered if, conversely, The Beginning of Nature’s retreat into Rousseauian longing for an imagined golden age didn’t in fact signal a kind of defeatism, a (gentle) refusal to confront the global environmental crisis on anything but the most fabulist of terms.

The Holy Body Tattoo, monumental

Staying with Rousseau, it might be said that monumental, performed by Vancouver’s The Holy Body Tattoo, portrays humanity’s corrupting transcendence of nature, the endpoint of cultural and material progress in which human relations are no longer defined by ‘natural’ desires but by fear, jealousy, egocentrism.

Suggesting the public/private interface of the modern office, nine dancers in drab business attire occupy individual grey plinths. Their movements—hard and fast, full of obsessive tics—physicalise the anxieties of urban culture and the struggle to resist the corporate machine’s erasure of selfhood. Repeated gestures that resemble trichotillomania (the compulsive tearing out of one’s own hair) and the stance of boxers (fists held vertically in front of the face) indicate a tormented, internalised back-and-forth of self-loathing and self-preservation. The dancers tend to topple from rather than dismount their plinths, at which attempts to forge human connections are thwarted by frightening, mob-like group dynamics driven by the rising urge of each of the workers to competitively assert themselves. In this cut-throat atmosphere, embraces end up asphyxiating and violent shunning constantly undermines a shared sense of belonging. The plinths, when lit from internal LED strips, double as a cityscape in miniature, combining with William Morrison’s time-lapsed video projections of wind farms and multi-lane highways to lend the production a neo-futurist feel.

The work, however, does not for the most part share neo-futurism’s essential optimism. Noam Gagnon and Dana Gingras’ combined choreography and direction reflects a bleak view of contemporary urban life, evident in the doom-laden score—performed live by eight-piece Canadian post-rock collective Godspeed You! Black Emperor—and conceptual artist Jenny Holzer’s barbed text: “Obviously you strike out against people within range. It’s cathartic to affect someone when you’re angry. Alternatively, choose enemies impossibly far away so you never have to fight,” (Living, 1980-82). This is projected onto a scrim like a subverted PowerPoint presentation on corporate etiquette.

A final voiceover plunges us into the post-apocalyptic, its evocation of an “empty city flickering in the dark” a grim reckoning of our urban alienation. Bodies fill the stage (advice is offered on how best to walk around them), the band’s metal-inflected bombast trailing into an extended diminuendo of ringing drums and guitar feedback. Does this cataclysm anticipate the expunging of a decadent, disaffected elite, and a return to a less venal social contract, the kind Rousseau thought fatally lacking in the modern state? I was left wondering.

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Nelken (Carnations)

Seven years after her death, Pina Bausch’s legacy remains immense, her work while Director of Dance for the Wuppertal theatres (later Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch) from 1973 onwards significantly expanding the expressive range of contemporary dance through conventions drawn primarily from theatre. Nelken (Carnations) dates back to 1982, by coincidence the same year Bausch’s company brought a trilogy of pieces— Kontakthof, Bluebeard, and 1980—to the Adelaide Festival in the company’s first Australian visit. The work’s depiction of arbitrary authoritarianism, embodied in the figure of a suited man continually demanding to see the passports of members of the public, must have held a visceral resonance for its initial audiences in a divided Germany. Contemporary parallels abound, however, most notably in the ongoing European refugee crisis.

The abuse of power is the theme that connects Nelken’s lightly absurdist flow of images, each taking place in the incongruous setting of designer Peter Pabst’s vast field of calf-high pink carnations (an allusion, perhaps, to 1974’s virtually bloodless “Carnation Revolution” during which Portuguese citizens, celebrating the overthrow of an authoritarian regime, placed the flower in the rifle muzzles of soldiers). Andrey Berezin’s immigration official, almost a comic figure at first in his punctiliousness, becomes a model of petty domination, forcing one of the dancers to degradingly impersonate a succession of animals to his satisfaction; a Grandma’s Footsteps-style game sees the participants coolly reverse the leader’s oppressive enforcement of the rules; four men with live dogs (what else but German Shepherds?) frighteningly encircle the stage, carnations bowing under boot and paw alike.

The audience’s collusion in these oppressions is made explicit by the sustained employment of house lights and a weirdly exhilarating sequence in which (in a critique that has, admittedly, been dimmed by three decades of post-modernism) an increasingly frustrated Fernando Suels Mendoza exhausts his repertoire of classical ballet positions in a desperate attempt to gratify us. Bausch, anticipating Neil Postman’s famous articulation of the twin poles of tyranny in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), gives us both Orwell’s prison—subjugation by state control (Big Brother)—and Huxley’s burlesque—pacification by amusement (the centrifugal bumblepuppy). How else to account for the scene in which four stuntmen execute a spectacular fall in unison from a scaffold tower, or in which a vintage automated fortune teller is wheeled on while performers rub freshly sliced onions into their faces? As one of the dancers says, “When there’s trouble in the air, I just look away.”

Adelaide Festival of Arts 2016, Habitus, concept, direction Garry Stewart, choreography Garry Stewart, Larissa McGowan, composer Brendan Woithe, Space Theatre, 26 Feb-5 March; The Beginning of Nature, concept, direction Garry Stewart, choreography Garry Stewart & ADT dancers, composer Brendan Woithe, WOMADelaide, 12-14 March; monumental, concept, direction Noam Gagnon, Dana Gingras, music Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Festival Theatre, 4-5 March; Nelken (Carnations), director, choreographer Pina Bausch, set designer Peter Pabst, Festival Theatre, 9-12 March

From 21st-century social technologies to a photographer travelling on foot across Germany, Melbourne’s second biennial Festival of Live Art (FOLA) included a number of stage-based and installation works, complementing its expanding program of interactive experiences, unusual transactions and provocative encounters.

On stage, Per Aspera’s Skype Duet (USA/Germany) at Footscray Community Arts Centre and Volker Gerling’s Portraits in Motion (Germany) at Theatre Works sat interestingly, if not always unambiguously, within the ‘live art’ context. At the same time, local works—Aseel Tayah’s you are not a boy (Footscray) and Amelia Ducker and St Martins Youth Arts Centre’s Genius (Theatre Works)—fused installation/performance art and conversation/guided walk, respectively. Embedded in all four works, consciously or not, were questions regarding the degree to which audiences help ‘make’ the work, and of where the borders lie between participation, encounter and performance.

Skype Duet

In Skype Duet, Berlin-based US ex-pat, Brina Stinehelfer, sits at a desk onstage playing with her laptop. She scrolls through websites titled “How to make friends” and types in searches like “interact with new people online,” interspersed with half-hearted visits to chat sites and loneliness forums, or nostalgic trawling through Facebook photos. Her browsing is fed to a large screen for the audience’s benefit, including a webcam close-up of Stinehelfer’s face. We register every shift in her bemused, amused or forlorn expression, intimately projected. Over time, it’s significant that the screen tends to hold our focus, not Stinehelfer’s live presence.

The performance evolves into a patchwork of dropped and successful Skype calls, in particular to her friend, performer Arlene Chico-Lugo, in a New York cafe. But having connected, Arlene seems distracted by buddies showing up, a waiter she fancies or the beep of incoming SMSs. While Stinehelfer’s pained expression sometimes feels overdone, the sense of simultaneous connection and alienation online is deeply familiar. Especially telling is the practised hyper-naturalness of Arlene, each time she brushes Brina off. The digital world is stuffed with cloying sentiment, and it’s writ large here: the sing-song ‘I’m-so-sorrys,’ the whiny ‘I-love-yous,’ clingy ‘wish-you-were-heres’ and big, distracted webcam smiles.

Woven into—or, actually, creating—Skype Duet’s narrative is the audience’s escalating involvement in the work, and in Arlene and Brina’s conversation. ‘Technical difficulties’ at one point force Stinehelfer to leave her desk and enter the audience, awkwardly starting conversations with strangers. Back online, an audience member is introduced via Skype to Arlene, then Arlene introduces them to a cafe patron, and soon the exchange is purely stranger-to-stranger. The work opens out to include more strangers, until an eccentric lover of ballroom dancing in New York is ‘virtually’ waltzing with an audience member at our end.

While my later online viewing of a Berlin/New York performance of Skype Duet revealed that much of the apparently spontaneous action is scripted (certainly some of the New York ‘strangers’ are actors), the conceit reinforces rather than falsifies the work’s premise: how many of our own online connections are genuine, actually, and how much are they performed? As the audience, we embrace the flattering illusion that we’re creating the work with Stinehelfer and, indeed, by the end we are all enthusiastically waltzing with the strangers in the room, IRL. But what is largely a construction that deflates on close examination is perhaps Skype Duet’s achievement, successfully transposing Stinehelfer’s experience of the social internet’s false promises into our own bodies, even as we enjoy the real connection she injects into the piece.

Portraits in Motion

Conversely, Volker Gerling’s Portraits in Motion seems not to be ‘participatory’ at all: it is a ‘moving slide-show’ of sorts, in which Gerling uses live video to project his Daumenkinos (“thumb-cinemas,” or photographic flipbooks) while he gives a friendly lecture about his techniques and “travelling exhibition.” A photographic “journeyman” for part of each year, Gerling has captured images of strangers encountered during more than 3,500 kms of walks through the villages and towns of Germany. Travelling sometimes for months at a time, he takes no money with him, exhibiting his flipbooks from a tray strapped to his body and accepting donations from visitors to this mobile gallery. Each ‘photo’ he takes comprises 36 frames captured over a 12-second exposure; in flipbook form these become the flickering, intimate, time-based ghosts of his encounters.

Portraits in Motion is like the flipside of Stinehelfer’s Skype Duet. In Gerling’s work, it seems that the audience has no part in the process; superficially, it is simply photography. But Portraits in Motion unfolds as Gerling’s document of an extensive live art project, in which he re-invigorates the role of the travelling artisan, spontaneously engaging audiences from big cities and tiny hamlets alike, creating and entertaining as he goes. Time flexes as Gerling’s thumb sets the ‘playback’ pace of each book he shows us: it stretches, slows down, is reversed or paused. Most interestingly, the flipbooks reveal the live art collaboration at the heart of all portrait photography. His subjects —from happy nuclear families to retired farmers to shy teenagers to curious villagers—are illuminated as co-creators. Their consent, engagement, energy and intimacy with the photographer are all vividly apparent in the moving images.

you are not a boy

Young Palestinian-Australian artist Aseel Tayah’s you are not a boy is a gallery-based installation work, and as such its inclusion under the rubric of live art could again be queried. However, a weekend performance given by Tayah drew her audience literally into the fabric of the work, implicating onlookers in ways that were both political and intimate: it was both a one-off gift to the senses and a compelling call to action.

Tayah, appearing on the gallery’s outdoor balcony in a luxurious, floor-length gown, sings a haunting Arabic lullaby (I later learn it is about a girl-child listening to people tell her what to do). She pauses at intervals to recount stories as she walks amid the gathered audience—stories of women mutilated, verbally abused, chastised or prohibited from speaking out, and told every time that it is “because you are not a boy.” On her skirt are pinned squares of fluttering fabric on which the Arabic word for “taboo” is inscribed. As she sings, she removes them one by one and pins them to the clothes of audience members. In an entreaty that is both gentle and firm, she asks us to think about the things our cultures suppress, saying, “When you see these things in future, will you be silent or will you choose to speak?”

Tayah’s work is economical, minimalist even. Her installation is simply an illuminated column of translucent fabric inscribed with the Arabic for “you are not a boy” and a set of mirrors painted with the same words, with an invitation to share self-portraits on social media in support of speaking out. In the performance—graceful, gracious and ritualistic—the audience is pinpointed, literally, as the place where taboo might reside. Through the slightest of means, and the seductive, sensory entanglement of stunning song and pointed monologue, Aseel Tayah creates a fleeting yet memorable relationship between us all, uniting the fabric of our respective worlds.

Genius

Genius, by Amelia Ducker and St Martins Youth Arts Centre, introduces audiences to six young ‘geniuses’, all on the autism spectrum, who’ve each set up shop in purpose-built circular booths and alcoves within the polished grandeur of St Kilda Town Hall. Over an hour or so, small groups of visitors enjoy short, informative sessions in the Life Advice Boutique with Katrina Chong, the Museum of Endangered Animals with Ted Hargreaves, Will’s Art Factory with Will Hager, and The Lingual Lab with Christian Tsoutsouvas. We then come together to witness Julian Jarman revive Gough Whitlam, press-conference style, answering questions from the floor in impressive detail; and a talk from Max Beale in his Kingdom of Crowns, where he displays his comprehensive knowledge of (not to mention personal correspondence with) the royals of the world. Finally, we enter the Hall of Fame, where we view portraits of famous people on the autism spectrum, and mingle and chat with the young performers.

On one level Genius is a community engagement; an opportunity for us to meet one another. On another, it’s the performers’ gift to us: they put themselves on display, sharing their knowledge and inviting us into the minutiae of their interests. It’s a well-crafted live art experience, somewhat formulaic, perhaps—but here, formula doesn’t imply laziness. For these young people, the predictability of the format supports the possibility of our interaction; we are asked to enter their worlds on their terms, not ours. But beyond the notion of a ‘visit’ or interaction, Genius held a meta-layer for me: as a theatre work it created space to place myself in the performers’ shoes, to remember my own childhood and the gradual erosion of my unique, personal obsessions in the face of social expectations. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has regularly been framed in terms of lack of social awareness, but feeling this notion upended, I found myself considering an adult world in which there might be less ‘small talk’ and social generality, and more listening to the specificity of others’ interests, as we had done in this space.

What qualifies a work as live art is bound to remain arguable—and perhaps that’s as it must be for such a dynamic, evolving artform. From Skype Duet’s apparent-but-constructed spontaneity to Genius’ invitation and immersion, all four works reviewed here reinforced the breadth of the form by steering away from centre—often doing ‘more with less,’ largely avoiding the temptations of novelty and excess, and, not least, successfully negotiating ‘immersion’ without drowning.

Festival of Live Art: Per Aspera, Skype Duet, creators-performers Brina Stinehelfer, Arlene Chico-Lugo, Footscray Community Arts Centre, 10–12 March; Portraits in Motion, creator-performer Volker Gerling, Theatre Works, St Kilda, 1–6 March; you are not a boy, creator-performer Aseel Tayah, Footscray Community Arts Centre, 2 March – 2 April, performance 6 March; Genius, Amelia Ducker & St Martins, concept, director Amelia Ducker, Theatre Works at St Kilda Town Hall, 12–13 March

Howl

It’s the rebellious spirit of Allen Ginsberg, his savage indignation tending toward obscenity, that Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Thoms and Willoh S Weiland seek to honour in Howl, the latest Aphids Arts House spectacular.

As part of the Festival of Live Art, the trio has created a colourful march-past event at the North Melbourne Meat Market, complete with banners, floats and costumes, celebrating 15 more-or-less transgressive artworks from across the last 150 years, each in its way a kind of Howl-like protest.

The opening is stunning. Elizabeth Dunn, veiled in a gold lamé cape but naked from the waist down, accompanied by Mozart’s sombre but exalted Requiem, paces out the full 70-odd metres from the far end of the pavilion, slowly advancing through ragged drifts of theatrical smoke and eerie orange light. Then, standing before us, she raises her arms in a gesture of victory and sprawls supine on the bonnet of a sporty Mazda convertible, pelvis tilted, genitals displayed. Thus, Courbet’s L’Origine du monde.

There follow renditions of Duchamp’s Fountain, Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, Critical Art Ensemble’s Seized, Paul Yore’s Everything is Fucked and more. Mozart continues to thunder and pulse. There are golf carts and Segways, papier-mâché and tinsel, more nudity and plenty of knowing winks.

While Howl is impressive enough in its ambition—there are only three performers, but a small army of stage assistants helping them negotiate the enormous Meat Market space—it doesn’t really invite a carnival-like response from the audience. There’s no barracking, no tickertape, no flag-waving and no dancing in the bleachers, only the usual art world attitude of polite scrutiny: the right to create a personal art historical canon is accepted without question, and the parade moves on.

There might be lots of reasons for the coolness of the audience’s response, but I think it’s mostly because of Mozart. Why play the Requiem Mass in D minor the whole way through? It’s too solemn, too darkly hostile to the kitsch transformations of a community parade. Although it does give the opening scene a thrilling sense of monumentality, the irony soon becomes oppressive. The parade even starts to feel like a danse macabre, as if Howl were in fact a moralising comment on the vanity of artists such as Ai Weiwei, Andres Serrano, Marco Evaristti and the rest, as if their outrages were only so many ultimately inconsequential follies—which is presumably not what Aphids meant. But who knows—it might have pleased Ginsberg.

Hotel Obscura

Like Howl, Triage Live Art Collective’s Hotel Obscura is an ambitious large-scale work, but one which eschews spectacle, instead folding a series of small one-on-one encounters into a much larger immersive, site-specific performance event. It begins with an audio walking tour that leads us from the Lindrum Hotel on Flinders Street to a secret location, which turns out to be another hotel, the Sofitel Melbourne on Collins Street.

At the Sofitel we discover that an entire floor has been reserved for the performance—a tantalising extravagance. After a brief meeting with a sort of concierge who explains the event program, each participant is given a white bathrobe and an individually tailored itinerary.

I was sent first to the elevator lobby where a tall man in a cheap masquerade mask offered a rough-and-ready tutorial on the ins-and-outs of the Grindr smartphone app, giving full emphasis to the myriad hook-up possibilities in a large, luxury hotel. Next, I experienced a relaxing sound and light installation under the covers of a hotel bed. Finally, in another room, I was audience to a brief interactive play-ette about a man whose wife had abandoned him. These were only three of 15 possible one-on-one adventures designed by local and European collaborators. In the final part of the experience, participants retired to something called the Vinyl Lounge, where they could meet and talk with other participants.

What is most satisfying about Hotel Obscura is not the experience of any one or other room in particular but the rhythm and composition of the experience as a whole. There are no lulls, no blips. And nowhere does the confected mystery of the piece fade or falter. The work carries you smoothly in its shadowy dream across half the city and up 48 floors.

I suspect this is the advantage of having a dramaturg-director like Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy, with her extensive background in the theatre, as project leader. It’s particularly noticeable in the attention to small details: from the way in which our various guides are costumed to the drinks served at the final debrief. Whisky and elderflower cordial, of course.

Give Me a Reason to Live

For me, the festival highlight was Glasgow dancer and choreographer Claire Cunningham’s Give Me a Reason to Live, a brief but focused solo at the North Melbourne Town Hall. The work begins with Cunningham (who was born with osteoporosis and arthrogryposis) in the upstage left corner of the performance space, facing the wall, lit only by a thin strip of yellowish light, struggling with her crutches through a variety of exaggerated poses, gradually working her way backward, through the darkness, toward centre-stage.

Visually and aurally, the work is incredibly beautiful. At one point, using her crutches to hoist herself off the ground, Cunningham, originally a classically trained singer, breaks into the second verse of Bach’s cantata Christ lag in Todes Banden, showing off a fine soprano voice. The text of the verse is from an Easter hymn by Martin Luther in which he stresses the correlation between sin and suffering, a belief which led some in the Middle Ages to associate physical disability with sinfulness.

In another passage, with her hips supported by the handles of her crutches, she gradually raises her feet toward the ceiling, resting her palms on the floor. From the audience, watching her feet gently swaying, it looks almost as if she is falling from a great height, like the crippled god Hephaestus who was thrown from heaven and who fell from morn to noon, from noon to dewy eve. Or perhaps she is Icarus in the painting by Bruegel, the figure from whose pale white legs, Auden tells us, everyone turns away.

The Bruegel connection points to that intense quality I find so deeply moving about this relatively short work. According to Cunningham, the choreography was inspired by images of crippled beggars in the sketches and paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and his followers, the shapes of the dance’s first movement. But what is it Auden says about the old masters? That they were never wrong about suffering. That they knew how easy it is to turn away when someone else is suffering.

There’s a key section in the middle of the performance where Cunningham lays down her crutches and simply stands before the audience. This lasts for almost eight minutes, the tremors in her legs accumulating and intensifying until she is forced to reach again for her crutches. Standing unaided is something that Cunningham can’t do, at least not for any great length of time. The attempt is brave, but, even so, for us, in the audience, is it what Auden would call an important failure? Does it provoke empathy? And should it, is that what dance, or painting, is for?

Give Me a Reason to Live is a performance without sentimentality; its great strength is its simplicity of composition and its air of self-sufficiency. If we empathise with Claire Cunningham, she insists that we do it without pity. Again, this is like those paintings of the old masters: those moments of delicacy and tenderness, images of infinite compassion, but entirely without weakness.

Arts House, Festival of Live Art, Howl, Meat Market, 3-6 March; Hotel Obscura, Sofitel Melbourne, 3-5 March; Give Me A Reason to Live, North Melbourne Town Hall, 9-11 March

Participants from the Shoalhaven region in New South Wales have committed their stories, bodies and feelings for the land to collaborate with two artists to create on screen fantastical visions of their reality.

Hyperreal Tales emerged from a Bundanon artist residency in 2011 when Philip Channells ran dance workshops for the Shoalhaven community. The Bundanon Trust’s desire to connect with local health services opened up an opportunity to work with disability service providers. For three years, director-choreographer Channells and filmmaker Sam James have worked with 19 story tellers and artists to create a five-screen video installation featuring 12 interconnected stories and performances realised in natural and virtual settings.

In this video, courtesy of the Bundanon Trust, Philip Channells describes the evolution of this ambitious collaborative work and participants appear in excerpts from Sam James’ video creations.

My ‘coup de foudre’ re the performance scene at the Gold Coast at the moment is well documented (“Cultural Resurgence at Gold Coast”), so it was with great anticipation that I sailed down there recently to The Walls Gallery on Mountain View Road at Miami Beach to see a new showing, Now and Then, by Brisbane-based performance art ‘it-girls’ Clark Beaumont (Sarah Clark and Nicole Beaumont).

The Walls is a reclaimed industrial space: intimate but with soaring verticals and surprising angles that make it a rich site for artists to play within. Clark Beaumont’s eerily mesmerising trilogy of installations is sensitively curated by Danni Zuvela (also co-artistic director of Liquid Architecture) and The Walls founder and Artistic Director Rebecca Ross. Kudos needs to be granted this dynamic team for showcasing the small but distinctive Gold Coast contemporary art scene. There was a buzz at the warmly hosted opening night and a sense of (at long last) cultural dialogue between Brisbane and the Gold Coast with QAG curators and luminaries mingling with the stalwart community of local artists and eccentrics drawn to the edgy energy of The Walls’ agenda.

Clark Beaumont, Coexisting, 2013, performed by the artists and commissioned by Kaldor Public Art Projects for 13 Rooms, 2013

Drinking and gossiping in the driveway outside, we were able to step into the curtained hothouse (literally) of video pieces developed by the wunderkind female duo, to be engulfed by the cinematic aesthetic that dominates their video practice. The work that has put them on the map is their live performance art, most famously Coexisting at Kaldor Public Art Projects’ 13 Rooms in Sydney in 2013, where they co-inhabited a white plinth comfortable only for one body. The coltish elegance and fierce complicity of the two young women was arresting, inviting an oddly dispassionate gaze despite their relative youth and grace. This is the power of their collaborative force: they make us consider them through the prism of their friendship and cultural preoccupations rather than our own.

Their video work seems to engage with a different DNA from their live art practice. It is a satirical and filmic discourse, with moments of snort-inducing, playful irony and cinematic deconstruction. Their first installation for The Walls was a revived work, Stay Up (2015), a circular screen about the size of a large television set showing looping film of a close-up of one artist’s mouth holding a fixed smile. It is the smile that film actors are taught to develop—unnaturally wide, that shows both teeth and gums—horse-trading to signify health and status, but achingly uncomfortable to sustain.

On a second circular screen, a short filmic sequence, Now and Then (2016), is underscored by ominous horror movie motifs, a recurring strategy Clark Beaumont employed in The Descent (2015) and prior video works. This time our view is a wide aerial shot of the two women floating gently but inexorably towards each other in a glinting, twilit pool. For The Walls they placed this screen above us, framed exquisitely between two timber beams that descend from the corrugated iron roof. This Hitchcockian sleight created a lush vertigo as we looked up at the screen to look down on these pale, floating bodies in their simple one-piece swimsuits. The two bodies collided ever so gently and docked within the curves of each other’s necks, merging into one splayed geometric floating body, a Kali-Hydra that eventually dis-entangled itself as the two bodies floated away. It was an eerie and disquieting work because of its restraint, another hallmark of Clark Beaumont’s collaboration. You kept waiting for the horror/shark/blood, but all you got was the dread.

The final installation was nestled behind black curtains under the stairs that descend into the gallery. In a tight mid-shot the two performers, clad in gold lamé jumpsuits, roll between the walls of a carpeted corridor. Our view is dominated by their feet, their legs and the colliding flesh of their buttocks as they roll, grunt and recover from journeys across the floor between the wooden walls with their faded paint. Again, the soundscape cued the work and I laughed out loud with the pleasure aroused by the camp jumpsuits and clownish grunting. I felt that my journey through this small space had been oh so carefully constructed to offer a rich spectrum of associations and discomforts generated by a playful, narrative-drenched live art aesthetic from members of a rising generation of Australian performance artists.

Daniel Crooks has kindly provided RealTime with excerpts from Phantom Ride. Enjoy them as a prelude to reading the artist’s account of the inspiration for and the making of the work. The Editors.

The video work of Daniel Crooks presents folds and tears in reality—rifts in the fourth dimension and slippages beyond. His latest work, Phantom Ride, the result of the second biennial Ian Potter Moving Image Commission, is now showing at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) and while I haven’t seen it in situ, the preview video suggests Crooks is getting even closer to manifesting a multiversal time machine. But rather than stepping into a Tardis, Crooks’ chosen method of time-travel is by train.

Trainspotting

In the earliest days of cinema, there were non-narrative films called ‘phantom rides’ in which the camera was placed on the front or back of a moving vehicle (generally a train) showing views of the world silently gliding past, a stunning revelation for the audience of the day. Speaking to me by phone, Crooks cites perhaps the earliest version of these, the Lumière Brothers’ Leaving Jerusalem by Railway (1896), as a direct inspiration. However in his version of a phantom ride, Crooks has filmed railway tracks heading towards the horizon, mainly in rural locations but with some urban cameos, and then embedded them inside each other like Babushka dolls, so that the viewer passes through a seemingly infinite set of nested landscapes.

Trains have featured in Crooks’ practice from the very beginning. About Train No 1 (2002), he says, “I was commuting three and a half hours two days a week on the train, spending hours looking out the window. And then the experiments started to take form. Looking back it’s not such a coincidence given the train’s illustrious history in relation to the cinema and to our modern idea of time. [Standard time or railway time was established in 1840 in England to allow timetabling accuracy for the growing national rail system.] I think there’s something about the linearity and predictability… about seeing that line heading into the future and that line receding in the past. Then there’s that great echo of train tracks in film, the physical material of film.”

Time travel

Phantom Ride is a two-channel work projected onto a double-sided screen—one side offers a forward journey and the other a view travelling backwards. Crooks tells me that there’s a moment in the middle when the camera/point-of-view mounts a revolving train-turntable and the direction of each screen is reversed.

“You have one side looking into the future, the other side looking into the past and then the screen itself is this moment of now—a very thin meniscus where the present exists. I really love the idea that even the train lines themselves converge into the centre of the screen [in] classic one point perspective. It’s almost like the future and past converge into the centre of the screen as well. The light rays passing through [make a] lens—a time lens. That has some really nice echoes in terms of hourglasses, light cone diagrams, causal event diagrams. I love the idea of these cones emanating from a plane and the plane is always called ‘now’.”

The volume of video

Most of Crooks’ previous works have a marked horizontal orientation, either the camera or the figure shifting sideways. However in 2013’s An Embroidery of Voids there is a shift in technique as the camera travels down the alleyways of Melbourne, the point-of-view essentially moving forward into the screen.

A Garden of Parallel Paths (2012) offers the transitional moment in this approach. Here the camera pans horizontally but reveals a series of vertical views down the laneways. The other key difference in these later three works is a transparency and clarity of image. The time-space shifting happens with the physical movement of camera and editing rather than the additional extruded artefacts that are a signature of his earlier studies.

Crooks explains, “I’m still working with the other technique as well…it all comes from the same place. [The Garden of Parallel Paths presented] the laneways as slices that have been removed from the city, negative slices. So instead of me slicing a section out of the video frame, someone had already taken a slice out of the city. Applying that same strategy [I wondered if it might be] possible to link a series of slices together into a new whole. I’ve always been interested in the ‘multiple worlds’ interpretation—that there are parallel universes spiralling off from every possible causal event. It was a way to start talking about that a little bit more explicitly. And then works beget more questions for more works [to answer them]…So that’s where I found myself with these more recent ones. It’s less about trying to explore a physical time—looking at time from the side—and trying to look at how you can connect these discontinuous spaces into a single whole.

“I also think it’s trying to push more into that third dimension. It’s funny with the older works, a lot of the construction is done in a 3D [software] environment and I’m often thinking of the volume of a video as a three dimensional object—how we actually navigate that. So I guess that 3D thinking has started to permeate the practice a little more.”

Commission consequences

What has always made Daniel Crooks’ work stand out from the pack, especially considering the turn-of-the-21st century fondness for lo-fi performance video, has been his high production standards. Crooks bemoans the bed he’s made for himself: “They’re very simple propositions but to get the audience to this point where they can appreciate that simple proposition you need to get the video up to a level where they’re not being distracted by weird, anomalous mistakes that we’re so good at detecting. It’s also a problem when we’re installing these works. They’re almost stress tests for playback systems. I’m always taking them to museums and galleries and putting them up and it’s obviously not playing back at the right frame rate or there’s some sort of problem in the system that would normally be invisible. I think 99% of works played in that situation would look fine, but with mine, because the movements are so smooth, you notice it straight away.”

While the works have been successful so far using technology that Crooks says he’s “homebrewed,” the Ian Potter Moving Image Commission meant that he was able to approach a motion control engineer to assist in the design of a computerised dolly system to ensure a precision in the speed of the tracking shots. Most importantly the commission allowed him to create a work of far larger scale than he could have if self-funded (in particular moving up to two channels) and to work with what he quite simply terms “realistic” production methods. Of course the commission is also a partnership with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image who provide a significant exhibition opportunity and inclusion in the ACMI permanent collection.

Future-past projections

With Phantom Rides up and running (until May 29) Crooks is now onto the next thing. Coming up at the end of March at the Wellington City Gallery, New Zealand, is the exhibition Bullet Time, featuring Crooks and fellow New Zealander Steve Carr. Their work will be placed in relation to pieces by moving image pioneers Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) and Harold Edgerton (1903–90), a prospect he’s very excited by, although it’s Muybridge’s peer Étienne-Jules Marey who is Crooks’ real hero.

“Some of the images that he was making and some of my first experiments in the late 90s are freakishly similar and I had not even heard of Marey at that point…Marey was trying to break down motion—to stop the world and to see the little moments that are in it—and how those come back together to create motion. Whereas I was coming from an absolutely diametrically opposed situation of trying to break [filmed] motion down to recreate it and make [new] motion. And at the opposite ends of the circle we meet up.”

As with all things Daniel Crooks, past and present, time and space, constitute a looped and folded moment.

Chippendale is a suburb in an amplified state of renovation. Closing Galerie pompom’s door behind me on the Abercrombie Street assault of construction and heavy traffic offers an overwhelming sense of relief. It’s cool in here—white and uncluttered—and there’s a pleasing harmonic hum at Goldilocks-just-right volume. This is the sound of the first of three works that make up Tim Bruniges’ exhibition, Drones.

This extended tone-cluster is emanating from an autoharp propped on a small shelf to the right of the entrance. (An autoharp is not a harp but a zither-like instrument designed so that certain strings will be damped to produce chords.) Bruniges has placed electromagnets over the strings (as with an EBow) to keep them continuously vibrating, creating a potentially endless chord. This first sonic zone is like an aural-cleanser—the sonic equivalent of a tall glass of cool water.

You don’t really need to stay with this work, rather it stays with you as you move through the gallery, its harmonic concentrations shifting subtly according to the mysteries of architectural acoustics. I think of it as a ‘cool’ sound (in terms of temperature, not fashion) because of the way it underpins Bruniges’ second piece, a video work titled Horses.

On a large wide-screen monitor is a beautiful herd of tawny horses amid an equally stunning icy landscape of bluish-greys and white. It’s a breathtaking image but after a moment you notice something that can’t quite be called a movement, more a smearing in time. With an ultra-smooth blurring effect—perhaps closest to the movement of ink in water, or the swirl of smoke—a tail swishes, a mane is tossed and the central animal breaks away from the herd, but there is no clear sense of a beginning or end to the action, just a constant state of edgeless shifting. It’s reminiscent of Daniel Crooks’ confounding and mesmeric shifting of bodies and images through time (see the interview with Crooks), however Bruniges has his own unique technique. You might expect the figurative nature of the image to push against the homogenic thickness required to create a sense of the “dronal,” yet Bruniges has indeed created a successful visual equivalent.

After a few minutes contemplation, you begin to realise that the gallery is actually getting quite noisy. At the far end, the loading bay roller door is open, letting in a not insignificant swathe of real world noise—a garbage truck, impact drilling, shouts from the multiple surrounding construction sites. Facing the opening is a small bench which allows you to sit between two treble speakers with a sub woofer. Suspended above, a microphone connects with a discrete, yet aesthetically pleasing, triode vacuum tube amplifier and audio workstation.

Sitting on the bench you try to discern what’s going on. What is outside and what is inside and how is Bruniges combining the two? Admittedly this is not an unfamiliar conceit, but as in Horses, Bruniges distinguishes himself with the quality of the execution. Here it’s all about subtlety—finding the perfect mix of real world and processed sounds. There’s a low rumbling hum coming from the sub—perhaps a pitch-shifted sum of the autoharp and external noises, or maybe even well controlled spatial feedback—but it’s just on the edge of hearing, blending with the external world’s dull roar. It’s the higher frequencies that make occasional cameos, ringing out with a light application of reverb and some sculpted EQ-—the voice of the gallery attendant, the ping of a bottle cap being kicked as someone walks down the lane—rising out of the mix for fleeting moments that just grab your attention and then are gone again.

The open door not only lets in sound but also affords a theatrically framed view of the brick wall on the other side of the narrow lane. The work is titled Wall and this is clearly one reason why, but Bruniges’ sonic treatment also makes a wall of sound. Not in an ‘epic noise’ sense but rather via a fascinating flattening effect, the background and foreground brought into the one sonic plane. Actually, it’s perhaps not so much a wall of sound; rather the processing forms a screen or scrim, through which real world sounds are sieved to create a sense of flatness or uniformity.

Drones are generally associated with extended time frames and a certain thickness or density, yet each of Tim Bruniges’ works offers a surprising succinctness, lightness and clarity in their articulation of the concept. However, the real strength of the exhibition lies in the ways in which the three pieces literally resonate, bringing together internal and external sites in an all-encompassing cross-sensory drone that induces a state of nuanced awareness of both time and space.

Sydney based visual artist and musician Tim Bruniges works across installation, sound and video, centring on notions of perception, the fallibility of memory and our relationship with time. Often taking the form of site-specific installations, the works attempt to create immersive spaces that allow for a disruption of expected experience. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from COFA, University of New South Wales and a Bachelor of Arts (Mus) with distinction from the University of Western Sydney. He has exhibited works nationally and in the USA, Germany, France, Iceland and Russia and recently has been based in New York following completion of the Greene St Studio artist residency in 2013 awarded by the Australia Council for the Arts (from his website).

Ilan Volkov is an adventurous and internationally admired conductor. He is also creator and artistic director of Tectonics, a unique two-day immersion in the clashing of musical genres that is intended to catalyse new musical forms and directions. Tectonics Adelaide 2016 is the 14th Tectonics event held worldwide, and the second to be held in an Adelaide Festival.

For his 2016 program, Volkov focused on “new orchestral, chamber, electronic and improvised music and its contrasts” and the spatial and acoustic properties of the Adelaide Town Hall, where it was staged. It was also a visual experience, with some composers using video in their work.

By commissioning new kinds of work for Tectonics, Volkov expands music’s frontiers. He invites each city’s resident orchestra to experiment with improvisation and graphic scores, to work with ensembles and performers not typically associated with orchestras and, with guest performers, to use the formal space of the concert hall flexibly and experimentally.

Day 1

The 21 members of Sydney’s Splinter Orchestra mingled with the crowd, spending 70 minutes slowly, gently, sometimes imperceptibly making all kinds of sounds and exploring the acoustic properties of the Town Hall’s gracious entrance, with its marble staircase and ornate high ceilings, in a work appropriately entitled Air Hockey. We heard Splinter’s typically modified, improvised and symbolically suggestive instruments, such as a length of hose-pipe, a sax with a drink bottle stuffed into its bell and an electric guitar scraped against the stairs. A vocalist ascended the stairway performing slow-motion mime gestures. Ambient sound became part of the mix, as some performers moved onto the external balcony overlooking Adelaide’s main thoroughfare, their sounds competing with traffic noise. By the work’s end, everyone had drifted into the auditorium, our sonic, visual and architectural awareness refreshed.

The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra under Volkov then performed Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh’s In Talentum of Light. The stage had been extended well into the auditorium to accommodate the vast instrumentation required for the ASO’s performances, and for Hsieh’s work, there were additional players in the balcony and numerous percussionists located around the space, so that the sound came from all directions. A powerful work, it ends with the orchestra members playing wine glasses to produce a high-pitched shimmering sound. Composition with glass objects is an ongoing interest of the composer.

In Berlin-based Australian composer Cathy Milliken’s selection of exquisite songs for mezzo soprano and orchestra, Jessica Aszodi was an engaging soloist. The work sets texts ranging from Sophocles to Hollywood movie scripts. US composer Jim O’Rourke’s Come Back Soon for orchestra was a lighter work with a metronomic rhythm that exemplified a recurring theme permeating this year’s programming, that of time. The remaining works of the evening were all lengthy and unstructured, inducing us to surrender temporal awareness.

In 2014, Volkov conducted the orchestra in two quasi-improvisations with soloists, one with Jon Rose (violin) and the other with Oren Ambarchi (guitar/electronics). This time Volkov brought improvising jazz trio The Necks together with the ASO and also added Speak Percussion, creating an experimental composite of three ensembles, each with a unique musical sensibility. Necks bassist Lloyd Swanton led the untitled set with a quiet, deliciously seductive bass riff on which The Necks’ other members and Speak began to build. With his back to these musicians, Volkov conducted the orchestra using hand gestures and printed signs, with the ASO members playing from graphic scores. The music slowly evolved as the players introduced motifs taken up and developed by other players—at one point, a riff that the flautist had developed was taken up by Chris Abrahams on the piano. For 40 minutes they made magic, with Speak wonderfully enlarging on Tony Buck’s imaginative percussion and the orchestra expanding the depth, colour and sonority of what was essentially Necks-style music.

Reinforcing the musical potential of a large, improvising ensemble, Splinter then delivered a gorgeous set entitled Microphony, instinctively blending timbres, pitches and textures. They performed off-stage and in the dark, focusing our awareness on the sound heard in stereo over the PA. Splinter’s apparently anarchic playfulness belies the ensemble’s highly sophisticated sense of musical form and a performative approach that generates a unique aesthetic. To play like this, the musicians must first perfect the art of listening—to each other. The Necks and Splinter Orchestra have both proven that leaderless democracies can work if everyone listens appreciatively and co-operates.

The evening closed with legendary US minimalist composer Phill Niblock’s dramatic work Vlada, performed by Eyvind Kang on viola with electronics. The sound gradually built polyphonically until it reached the proportions of a cathedral organ with all stops out, saturating us with harmonics and microtones.

Day 2

David Shea’s The Trading Routes, for guzheng (Mindy Meng Wang), percussion (Speak), and keyboard, electronics and video (Shea), is inspired by stories of the Silk Road, with Shea’s video showing images of Buddha statues, ancient wall-paintings from caves along the Road and movie clips unfolding like a stream of consciousness. Together with his overtone singing, the sounds of the guzheng, ringing Tibetan bowls and the percussive whisper of poured rice, Shea’s composition suggests a deeply personal encounter with cultural history.

TQF4M1 was the title of a 25-minute set by five Splinter Orchestra members and TQM4F1 that of a set by five other Splinter members. With their absence of formal development, these enchanting improvisations again dissolved time. Some quirky instrumental elements included Jim Denley placing a ping pong ball on a tube pushed into his sax, the ball floating on his breath as he played.

US soprano Jessika Kenney’s wordless, vocal solo ONSDV (the acronym was not explained in the program), accompanied by her own video work, was for me the highlight of this Tectonics program. As her looped video shows an idyllic garden scene, the 25-minute work opens with Kenney singing sustained notes on a single pitch before descending from the stage and slowly moving around the auditorium. As she moves, we notice subtle shifts in the sound caused by her changing location. Her voice becomes emotional, sometimes distressed, sometimes squealing or rasping, and there are microtonal changes in pitch. A taped voiceover in another language emerges part-way through, as if a speech has inadvertently intruded into the mix. The work concludes with the sound of Kenney breathing heavily. The eternally repeating video may be a metaphor for life on Earth while her subtly changing voice suggests the fortunes of an individual life within it.

French bassoonist Dafne Vincente-Sandoval performed a second, untitled, Niblock work, similar to the composer’s earlier piece, with a single monotonal line growing into an overwhelming polyphony. Niblock’s captivating video of flowers in close-up accompanied it, the camera entering the flowers to reveal their fragile structure in micro-detail, perhaps a metaphor for the exploration of sound itself.

Speak Percussion then enthralled us with a quiet but intense 40-minute work, The Moon in a Moonless Sky (Two), by Austrian composer Klaus Lang. The four members of Speak, again sonically exploring the space, played instruments at nine points around the auditorium.

The Arcadia Quintet (flute, horn, oboe, clarinet and bassoon), which is rapidly making a name for itself in Australia, gave us the world premiere of Eyvind Kang’s Divertimenti, a vibrant work commissioned for them. Arcadia was then joined by Speak and Jessika Kenney for Kang’s The Mathematical Sciences Are Not the True Sciences, also commissioned for Tectonics—a 30-minute setting of texts by controversial Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Proceeding with mathematical precision, including one section in which four percussionists robotically play maracas, this work of Kang’s is more cerebral than his voluptuous Divertimenti.

In the final sessions of the evening Papaphilia (Fjorn Butler) pumped up the volume with her Disciplined Monad, for electronics, to which many in the audience danced, followed by a brooding work for laptop by Nik Kamvissis and a long improvisation entitled A New Hedge for guitars and electronics by Oren Ambarchi and Tetuzi Akiyama.

The range of music in a Tectonics program will not be to everyone’s taste—during the 12 hours of performance, audience members come and go—but the curation is artistically adventurous and offers sustained exploration of musical ideas. David Sefton has programmed some wonderful new music during his time as Adelaide Festival Artistic Director and is to be congratulated on bringing Ilan Volkov and Tectonics to Australia.

Tectonics, conductor, artistic director, Ilan Volkov, Adelaide Town Hall, 4-5 March

The evolution of the string quartet is continuing, as performers and composers rejuvenate and extend the musical forms associated with it, using augmented instrumentation and innovative presentation. In two great concerts, the Australian String Quartet worked with a percussionist and Zephyr Quartet with visual artists and sound effects.

The Australian String Quartet, Alleged Dances

The Adelaide-based ASQ is a standard-bearer for excellence in playing and for bringing us the best of the traditional quartet repertoire. The ASQ’s performances of the Beethoven B flat major quartet (Op. 18, no 6), the opening work on this program, and Schumann’s A minor quartet (Op. 41 no1), the closing work, were delightful. This was the first time the Australian String Quartet had performed with its two new violinists, Dale Barltrop (first violin) and Francesca Hiew (second). The Quartet musicians are of the highest calibre and their understanding of ensemble playing is excellent.

In between the Beethoven (a musical revolutionary in his day) and the Schumann, percussionist Claire Edwardes joined the ASQ for the premiere of Matthew Hindson’s fine new String Quartet No 4 for quartet and vibraphone, a magical work. The bell-like tones of the vibraphone contrast with the strings and while there is the potential for the vibraphone to dominate the sound, Hindson nicely balances the instrumental forces and brings each instrument to the fore. The first of the two movements is a bright, celebratory fanfare, written on the occasion of the birth of the composer’s daughter, and it proceeds at an allegro rhythm through a series of crescendi. The slower second movement is dreamily elegiac, even wistful, a lovely piece of writing for any combination of instruments, let alone one as challenging as this. The violin solo is built on a delightful melodic line, the interplay of the contrasting sounds creates a miasma of sonic light and colour and the mood gently invites thoughtful introspection.

The mood became light-hearted with the ASQ’s performance of Claire Edwardes’ arrangement of three excerpts—Habanera, Rag the Bone and Judah to Ocean— from US composer John Adams’ 1994 work John’s Book of Alleged Dances. Each of these has a strong dance rhythm but, as the steps had not been invented, they remain “alleged” dances. Adams scored the dances for a quartet using a pre-recorded tape of a prepared piano, but in her wonderful new arrangement, Edwardes has transcribed the taped piano element for percussion instruments that retain the playfulness and the sonic character of the original. The close understanding between the five performers that results from this transformation of Adams’ work makes for lively and enchanting music.

Zephyr Quartet, Exquisite Corpse with animations by Jo Kerlogue and Luku Kukuku, Adelaide Festival 2016

Zephyr Quartet, Exquisite Corpse

In 2015, Zephyr Quartet won both Arts SA’s award for innovation and the corresponding Adelaide Critics Circle award, acknowledging their extraordinary concert Music for Strings and iThings. Zephyr has a long history of collaborating with artists in a variety of media and they have an unlimited supply of new ideas. This program, Exquisite Corpse, is inspired by the parlour game created by the Surrealists in which several people contribute to an accumulating artwork. Zephyr has adapted the game by engaging a diverse group of contemporary composers—Zoë Barry and Jed Palmer, Zephyr violinist Belinda Gehlert, Jarrad Payne, Andrea Keller, Jherek Bischoff, Adam Page, Robert Davidson, Kate Moore, Erik Griswold, Jason Sweeney and JG Thirlwell—to contribute elements to the composition of a single work for string quartet. The result is a unique piece of music lasting an hour in total. Each composer’s contribution, of several minutes, builds on the previous contributions. As you listen you try to guess who the composers might be.

The work is supplemented by a video installation. The quartet sits behind what looks like a giant octopus with tentacles spreading across the stage. As the audience enters, the octopus emits smoke and, as the performance progresses, its tentacles glow with coloured lights and there are video projections on its body and on a screen behind the players. As the music unfolds we see a succession of cartoon drawings of bizarre, surrealistic, but very cute creatures. The delightful animations by artists Jo Kerlogue and Luku Kukuku evolve in tandem with the music. To emphasise the surrealist character of the composition, the players are closely miked and the amplified sound mixed to create subtle effects such as echoes, looping and distortion, underscoring the fantasy imagery.

There is some fine writing in Exquisite Corpse’s 11 continuous movements. The music is generally tonal and melodic, nicely voiced for a quartet, and many passages display a strong jazz influence. There being no single composer, no overarching character or theme emerges, but the result is a lot of fun and the graphics are superb. Exquisite Corpse should be made into a movie.

Zephyr’s artistic direction prioritises new ideas and collaboration, and they have again produced an experimental work that should inspire further development. In assembling what is in effect a collective of composers, artists and performers for this concert, their approach is a significant departure from the traditional role and functioning of a string quartet. Once Zephyr has realised an idea, however, they typically move onto the next; it would be interesting to see them further refine this kind of work.

Adelaide Festival, The Australian String Quartet, Alleged Dances, Adelaide Town Hall, 29 Feb; Zephyr Quartet, Exquisite Corpse, The Space, Adelaide Festival Centre, 7 March

In divergent ways, two works by local independent companies at the Adelaide Festival, Stone/Castro’s The Country and Tiny Bricks’ Deluge, both probed, with discomforting results, the difficulties of communication and meaning-making in an information-saturated world. That both took place away from the Festival’s CBD hub in desolate, warehouse-like venues heightened the alienating effects of each play’s depiction of the debilitating uses of language: too little, or too much.

Stone/Castro, The Country

British playwright Martin Crimp’s The Country (2000), like its thematically-linked successor The City (2008), is a tense study in Pinteresque menace that combines an ambiguous narrative with a fascination for language’s ability to conceal and distort.

A middle-class couple, Richard (Nathan O’Keefe) and Corinne (Jo Stone), have relocated from the city to a converted granary in the country. He’s a doctor, she a neurotic housewife who outsources the care of their children to a nanny. Richard claims to have found a young woman, Rebecca (Natalia Sledz), unconscious by the roadside, and has brought her back to the house. “She’s not going to wake up,” Richard tells Corinne ominously. She does, and punctures both Richard’s story—she claims he, a fellow drug addict, moved to the country specifically to be with her—and Richard and Corinne’s fantasy of a rural idyll (“the land, the stream, the beautiful house”).

Uncoiling in a predictable, stuttering rhythm, Crimp’s dialogue, like Pinter’s, is rife with elisions. Verbal obfuscation and aggression draw a permanent veil over unspoken thoughts and accusations. Each conversation, held at cross-purposes and thick with unaddressed questions, has an excruciatingly contrived feel. An additional, meta-theatrical layer is also present: “The more you talk the less you say,” Rebecca tells Richard, in what doubles as a comment on the playwright’s method: “There’s a limit,” Richard observes, “to what we can say—what we can achieve with words.”

Less elliptical than the later The City, a play that marked Crimp’s further move towards a more ‘post-dramatic’ style, The Country remains nonetheless abstruse. Rebecca disappears without explanation, her relationship to Richard still mysterious, and we are left to assemble Crimp’s myriad clues—embedded in, for example, a motif around cleanliness and purity and the involvement of an unseen character, Morris, Richard’s superior—that point to Richard and Corinne’s complicity in removing the tainting Rebecca from their immaculately constructed lives.

Director Paulo Castro has, rewardingly, defied the naturalistic trend established by previous productions. The house, in a design by David Lampard, is an abstracted mess of exposed woodwork and torn wallpaper, reflecting the play’s transmutation from British to Australian setting in its surrounding expanse of grass replete with woodpiles and scattered branches. The interior of the house, viewable through slats that frequently obscure the actors and, puzzlingly, require them to stoop in order to access the lawn, is a jumble of furnitureless, cubicle-like rooms duskily lit by Daniel Barber, whose cinematic, ever-shifting design makes intensive use of side lighting. The music, combining the brooding post-rock of Melbourne band Fourteen Nights at Sea with a short, astringent piece for cello and violin by Johann Johannsson (in Adelaide for the Festival’s experimental music program Unsound), effectively amplifies the prevailing mood of unease. The cast are restrained and balanced, if occasionally lacking in volume when within the house, and happily refuse the script’s occasional invitations to melodrama.

The production is not without its missteps: the presence of a lifelike toy cat is a redundant quirk, and Castro’s decision to omit between-scene blackouts in favour of continuous action throws up some odd stage pictures, such as when we see Richard piling branches into the house for no discernible reason other than to metaphorise the dissolution of his and Corinne’s pastoral sanctuary. Nevertheless, Crimp’s unjustly overlooked play—and this taut revival—compellingly bear out the old paradox that an idyll can only exist once it’s passed.

Tiny Bricks, Deluge

Out of a vast Perspex box emerge 10 actors, each buried to their waist—in this case by hundreds of white foam cubes—like Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days. A weave of multiple, mostly partnered narratives begins immediately and the audience, seated in the round, starts to snatch at the threads: disparately-skilled gamers playing a first-person shooter; a man enthusing to friends about his conversion to Baha’ism; an army whistleblower divulging classified information to “a crazy white-haired Aussie who can’t seem to stay in the same country for very long.” Most troubling is a disturbed man in a crowd, his anxious writhing periodically plunging his whole body back beneath the sea of cubes as he spouts religious-hued nonsense. “So many people,” someone says, “so much noise.”

Suspended above the box is a sculptural web of subtly pulsing LED lights, redolent of the transmission of data through fibre-optic cables or the neural pathways of the brain. Sporadic power surges produce visual and sonic flare-ups that punctuate the intermeshing narratives below.

Deluge, presented by Tiny Bricks in association with Brink Productions, dramatises information overload—or, more precisely, what is known as continuous partial attention—through the simultaneous unfolding of five ‘micro plays.’ Playwright Phillip Kavanagh’s text, three years in gestation over multiple creative developments and a rehearsed reading at last year’s National Play Festival, is musical in its construction, employing, for example, counterpoint and crescendo. Each play forms a sort of melodic line that shifts in and out of harmony with the others. Sections of the whole, although rarely sustaining the same mood, recall the self-containment of a symphonic movement. The dialogue never exactly doubles up but rather overlaps, making for some fascinating instances of textual and, sometimes, thematic congruence.

Kavanagh’s motifs are established quickly and vividly: religious compatibility (“different flowers blooming in the same garden”), the problem of making sense across barriers of space and culture (“we’re all saying the same thing but no-one’s stopping to translate”), and the impact of globalisation on human relationships (“I feel connected to everybody as though they’re distant family”). A further theme, which implicitly links violent video games with American war atrocities (specifically, the infamous ‘Collateral Murder’ incident exposed by WikiLeaks in 2010), left me feeling uncomfortable in its underexplored implications.

Deluge’s piecemeal nature, large cast, and brief running time of just 50 minutes (wise, given the assaultive effect of its storytelling mode on audiences) provides little scope for nuance on the part of the actors. Nonetheless, the young cast—all recent Flinders University Drama Centre graduates—does well to maintain clarity amid Elizabeth Gadsby’s restrictive set and the text’s non-linear sprawl. Nescha Jelk’s direction is canny, adding pleasing dramaturgical texture to Kavanagh’s dense script in, for example, the positioning of the actors in relation to each other and their manipulation of the foam cubes during moments of heightened tension.

But what of the deluge’s human cost—the drowned and the drowning? The polish of Kavanagh’s text—and perhaps too the production’s swamping, maximalist approach to design—prevents us from engaging passionately with this question. As verbal music realised through an impeccably wrought structure, Deluge is an impressive achievement but one that comes off, ultimately, as a triumph of form over feeling.

Adelaide Festival of Arts 2016: Stone/Castro, The Country, writer Martin Crimp, director Paulo Castro, design David Lampard, lighting Daniel Barber, State Opera Studio, 8-13 March; Tiny Bricks, Deluge, writer Philip Kavanagh, director Nescha Jelk, design Elizabeth Gadsby, Plant 1, 8-13 March.

The case for holding an event like the Australian Performing Arts Market (APAM) becomes clear when you consider that nowadays more than one in three Australian artists are engaged in international work (International Arts Activity Report, Australia Council for the Arts, 2015).

In gauche terms, APAM is a place where people buy and sell art. Unlike at Sotheby’s Australia, however, the bids are silent and there are costumes; it’s just a bit more fun. This year, running alongside the pitches and presentations, was The Exchange program, a series of panel sessions and less formally curated “encounter” opportunities, aimed at encouraging “new relationships and new dialogues” among delegates.

One of the event’s hosts, Kris Stewart, Brisbane Powerhouse Artistic Director, who dubbed APAM the “Air-conditioned Performing Arts Market” (an apt descriptor considering the event was held in Queensland’s high summer), confirmed that the conference is a pretty big deal these days; the opening keynote was attended by 650 guests from 30 nations. Hosted by Wesley Enoch, four artists and cultural leaders were invited to offer provocations to the gathered buyers and sellers of art.

The keynoters

Willoh S Weiland, Artistic Director of Melbourne’s Aphids, the first of the keynote speakers, was particular about setting some terms for the assembled players, those gathered to participate in this week-long “glittering swamp of culture.” For Weiland, the notion of a marketplace implies openness and transparency, although she acknowledged the potentially different experiences of the buyer and seller in this context. Presenters were likened to “smiley, bright-eyed Christians let loose on a speed date,” while artists were described as “pale with the existential trauma of talking about their art.” Weiland wrapped up with the sage advice that presenting partners, once in a relationship with artists, should honour their commitments: “Don’t be a jerk, call when you say you will.”

Darren O’Donnell, Artistic Director of Canada’s Mammalian Diving Reflex, the highly successful performance collective who brought Haircuts by Children to Australia and All the sex I’ve ever had to the 2016 Sydney Festival, works with non-professional performers. Comparing himself with mainstream artists, he described himself ironically as “a community loser,” and proud of it. According to O’Donnell participatory performance is the future. Likening his practice to “social acupuncture,” O’Donnell makes a case for recruiting non-performers while maintaining rigour throughout the creative process through curatorial considerations and the development of an agreed performance ‘script.’ O’Donnell sees this type of work as a rich contrast to the “hermetically walled-off works” regularly programmed.

Nakkiah Lui, writer, performer, activist and recent appointee to Queensland Theatre Company’s new National Artistic Team was the third keynote. Lui, a Gamillaroi and Torres Strait Islander woman, appealed for increased “complexity” of offerings across the performance landscape, as distinct from oft-referred to “diversity.” For Lui, complexity requires a different way of approaching things. “The notion of diversity doesn’t challenge the dominant culture” but instead reinforces it. For Lui, the stories we present and the ways in which we share them should always be “one step ahead of accepted community values.” Only then might we be able to see what is truly possible.

Kee Hong Low, the final presenter and current Head of Artistic Development for Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District Authority picked up the thread through each speaker’s provocations. Persuasive in his quiet insistence that we all carry prejudice within, his challenge to us was to consider that art is not found in big revolutions or grand gestures, but in our everyday engagement with others.

To illustrate his message, the artist gave an example of a recent work, initially installed in a cultural institution as an epitaph in stone challenging passersby to say hello and start a conversation. Later these same words were projected onto some of Hong Kong’s tallest corporate buildings, lighting up the night skyline, an unmissable example of art and activism. Kee Hong Low finished by encouraging each of those attending to take up the challenge of speaking to someone completely new to them at this year’s APAM and to consider the broader impacts of these transactions over the conference and beyond.

Zoom In: On…

A second stream to the Exchange program at APAM was the Zoom In: On…series, including sessions around Theatre for Young Audiences and Circus and Physical Theatre in Australia. The former was a breakfast gathering for theatre makers of works for children.

Much of the conversation centred on content, that is, making works for young people straddling the artistic and popular divide. For many delegates this begged the question, how do you get audiences to come to works other than adaptions of well-known picture books? Peppa Pig, that snub-nosed juggernaut of children’s television, it was widely agreed, “is a scourge.”

Another concern was the perception that children’s theatre tickets should be priced lower than those for works targeted at adults, an issue “systemic across the industry.” This disparity is odd, given that children’s theatre does not cost any less to make. And it is often the venue that bears the brunt of the shortfall, making it more difficult for presenters to take risks on new and original works.

As expected, given the format (a bunch of adults talking about what children should go and see), the question of relevance invariably came up: so what do the kids think? Perhaps Willie White, the Artistic Director of Dublin Theatre Festival summed it up best when he observed that the theatre maker should always consider “Who is the child you have in mind for this work?” An excellent provocation to munch on over your Coco Pops before moving onto the grown-up business of buying and selling art.

At the Circus and Physical Theatre in Australia session hosted by Yohann Floch, from the Fresh Arts Coalition Europe, participants were asked to respond in groups to two key questions: What is success for your organisation? And, what is success for your sector?

Throughout the impassioned discussion, a number of sector issues were perceived as current barriers to success. For instance it was felt by some in the room that ‘physical theatre,’ as a genre and a term, has had its day. Also cited as a concern was the rise of “circus missionaries.” As means to generate extra income, companies are taking circus training overseas, particularly to developing countries. As a result, circus is being introduced to places where there are already rich performative traditions linked to local cultures. The offer of skills exchanges was held up as a more desirable model.

The prevailing view from international APAM delegates was that Australia is a world leader in contemporary circus presentation and touring. Some exciting factors were identified as desirable: getting networks more connected globally to assist with touring opportunities; pursuing further dialogue with government regarding an appropriate funding model; establishing a dedicated circus festival (in the vein of events like Dance Massive); improving on the “tights and lights” model—still a cost-effective way to get circus touring locally; and shifting class perceptions around circus—getting shows out of tents and onto mainstages.

Yohann Floch summarised the morning’s work by affirming that ‘group-think’ had yielded some great innovations. He then threw down a new challenge: who would be responsible for putting these into action, an idea is only as successful as its execution.

First Nations’ Perspectives

Speaking of action, apparently the first thing panelists did at the First Nations’ Perspectives session was reorganise the chairs. Moving them from a straight line on the stage to a curve, ensured that the speakers and host Lydia Miller of the Australia Council for the Arts were able to interact throughout the ensuing conversation, which was based around Australia’s relationship to indigenous art and culture as seen through and with international eyes.

For each of the panelists “framing new cultural narratives in the 21st century” presents a number of challenges. Ryan Cunningham of Canada’s Native Earth spoke of the need for artists and presenters to avoid producing the museum-like diorama pieces of the past: works where a culture is “preserved as though behind glass.” For Santee Smith, of Canada’s Kaha:wi Dance Theatre, to move “beyond the fractures” and “decolonise art,” artists, cultural organisations and governments must employ a “re-” approach. For Smith, “A reconsideration, a reframing and a reconstruction (rather than deconstruction)” will ensure a move towards new and relevant cultural narratives and works.

Rachael Maza of Australia’s own pioneering ILBIJERRI Theatre Company expresses the view that “art for its own sake is a waste of money.” Instead for Maza, art at its best is always driven by provocateurs, “those wooden spoons of society.”

One of the next challenges, the panelists agreed, was the claiming of performance spaces. Black box theatres “have a code, with ways of operating within them.” The question for these artists then was “how can we turn these spaces into ours?”

Hone Kouka, of New Zealand’s Tawata Productions, acknowledged by the other panelists as a leader in creating opportunities for First Nation performance works, noted the changes to APAM programming over the last 15 years, with a significant increase in First Nation delegates attending. “I’m loving the shift,” he said.

Me too, and judging by the bright smiles and thrum of conversation in the foyer spaces, artists, producers and presenters were taking Kee Hong Low’s advice and making friends, as well as deals, at this year’s APAM.

APAM, Australian Performing Arts Market, Exchange Program, Brisbane Powerhouse and other venues, 22-26 Feb

Empathy, a key theme in the 2016 Perth International Arts Festival, is strongly in evidence in three works that challenge notions of cultural difference and disability and encourage us to pay attention to extraordinary lives.

Common Wealth, No Guts, No Heart, No Glory

From the City of Bradford, West Yorkshire, comes Common Wealth Theatre Company challenging global Islamophobia with an honest, intimate account of the lives of young Muslim women in Britain and the challenges and rewards of boxing for them in this context.

In Perth’s Queen Street Gym, with monologues, pronouncements, one-sided dialogues and protests, the performers deliver truths about the conflict between adolescence and family cultural expectations like punches in a boxing match. They declaim between blows to a punching bag, while standing on a bench before lockers, pacing under stairs or huddled on a stool behind a workout space. We hear a fighter’s internal monologue when she’s winning a bout. There are short sprints, bursts of rope skipping and more thudding whacks to punching bags. There are individual set pieces, group movement through the crowded room and choreographed ensemble work in the ring.

Each character is fighting her own demons: the claustrophobia of belonging to a small community, pressure to excel at school, anger at events in Gaza and the seeming inevitability of an early marriage to a chosen husband. A recurring theme emphasises a common desire to be “good”—good daughters, good citizens and good people. Each performer brings her story to her boxing, controlling her strength and fitness with a fierce, energetic joy. This direct expression of emotion, physical reaction and proud stories fills the gym.

Claire Cunningham, Give Me a Reason to Live

Provoking the audience to reconsider the notion of ‘ability,’ Glasgow’s Claire Cunningham stages a living memorial to the victims of the Nazi Aktion T4 euthanasia program, in which people with disabilities were murdered, as well as supporting the victims of ongoing “welfare reform” budget cuts in the UK. As in her first work in this 2016 festival, Guide Gods, so in this starkly beautiful dance piece Cunningham explores a traditional religious view of disability, motivated by the suggestion that in the work of 16th century artists such as Hieronymus Bosch cripples might represent repositories of sin.

As Cunningham moves around the space, tiny patches of light in Karsten Tinapp’s minimalist lighting design mark points for exploration of a series of movements in which she pushes her body to work with her crutches to perform amazing feats of agility, speed, strength and endurance. She holds us captivated as she steadily lowers herself towards the floor, using the crutches as a lever for her shoulder muscles, her pace slowing the closer she comes to the end point. She holds poses familiar from artistic depictions of crucifixion, her crutches a stage prop as well as physical support.

Time pauses as Cunningham exploits the starkness of silence. Leaving her crutches on the floor, she stands, her eyes holding each of us in turn, her breathing becoming laboured. Her face tautens with strain, her legs wobble and she pushes her limbs to their unsupported limit until dropping back to her crutches, her muscular upper body swinging her about the stage in liberation and relief. Pushing herself to the limits of her capacity, Cunningham poses against the black back wall and sings beautifully Verse 2 of Bach’s Cantata BWV 4, stirring every emotion and reminding us that there is no human who can defeat death.

The artist’s danced engagement with her crutches, her amazing feats of strength and the work’s movement from wretched moaning in a dark corner to a triumphant, defiant “Hallelujah!” from Bach at the close, create an intensely moving experience. Differently ‘accessible’ compared with her Guide Gods, Give Me a Reason to Live speaks directly through movement, imagery and sound, to old notions of sin and deformity, defying moral judgement made of those who do not meet conventional physical expectations.

The Empathy Museum, Walk a Mile in My Shoes

A more literal plea for empathy and understanding is realised by The Empathy Museum (read the RealTime interview with London-based director Claire Patey) which immerses participants in fascinating life stories, sending us each on a mile-long journey through another’s experience.

Arriving at an oversized shoebox in the Stirling Gardens, each participant’s shoes are exchanged for another pair of the same size with a matching digital recording on an MP3 player. Walking while listening to the recording takes the audience member about a mile, with signs posted around the garden to advise when to turn back or to take time to sit and listen in the cool green surrounds.

Each recording is of a carefully structured first-person narrative created from an interview, complete with sound effects to set the scene. Stories include moments from the life of Margaret Watroba, a Polish-born Australian who survived an avalanche at Everest Base Camp during the earthquake in Nepal in 2015; reflections of Dianne Lawrence, the mother of two sons, one born male and one transgender; memories of John Gilmore, an ex-POW held by the Japanese; and insights from Dalwinder Singh, a Sikh taxi driver. The stories come without warning, based on your shoe size.

Each story establishes basic facts before examining points of particular interest. Gilmore was a keen runner when he was in school—his recollections of school sports days seamlessly lead to his Army enlistment. His understated description of Changi, the Japanese prisoner of war camp – “it wasn’t very nice”—is breathtaking. Similarly, Watroba’s story begins with her childhood interest in hiking, before discussing the extent of the constraints on her life in Communist Poland, her difficult defection and pursuit of her childhood dreams. Singh and Lawrence, however, tell stories about empathy, supporting others around them in order to understand themselves. Each tale is captivating in its own way, simply told and clearly recorded.

This year’s focus on empathy by PIAF’s Artistic Director Wendy Martin is stimulating, a refreshing antidote to a world steadily becoming more focused on the needs and desires of the individual.

2016 Perth International Arts Festival: Common Wealth Theatre Co, No Guts, No Heart, No Glory, writer Aisha Zia, director Evie Manning, Queen St Gym, 23-28 Feb; Claire Cunningham, Give Me a Reason to Live, PICA, 2-5 March; The Empathy Museum, Walk a Mile in My Shoes, curators Clare Patey and Kitty Ross in collaboration with Roman Krznaric, Stirling Gardens, Perth, 18 Feb-6 March

Welcome to the Festival of Live Art at the North Melbourne Town Hall, where tablet computers and mobile devices are as numerous and conspicuous as on any peak-hour public transport commute. And why not, when so many of our day-to-day exchanges—from the most impersonal to the most intimate – are mediated by hand-held digital technologies? There’s no avoiding it: art inevitably reflects the culture of its time, not only in its content but in its expression.

Vanitas

And so we have Vanitas, written and performed by Robert Walton and Jason Maling, a very well put-together, mostly involving audio adventure for smartphones. It’s part art history lesson, part procedural drama, a story about impermanence, incompletion, imperfection and flowers. In the first three episodes, listeners are introduced to the curious tale of an abandoned flower shop around the corner from the Town Hall. The mystery recalls Adam Beckman’s very popular This American Life story “The House on Loon Lake,” with the difference that here you can actually visit the shop while listening.

To further extend the basic podcast format, participants also receive emails, text messages and robocalls between episodes. And it’s all very intriguing, up to a point, but also a little unsettling. With its somewhat arch mingling of fact, fiction and philosophical reflection, you’re never quite sure where you stand with Vanitas, never quite sure how much of it is documentary and how much fabulation.

Are We The One?

There’s intrigue, too, in Are We the One?, devised by Keith Armstrong and David Finnigan, a work that outwardly resembles an elaborate blind date. Two participants, unknown to each other and stationed in different rooms, are invited to create unique walking experiences for one another in and around the Town Hall using a custom-built smartphone app. During this gentle perambulation, personal information is exchanged via the app until, finally, at the end of the route, you have the option of stooping into the flesh and actually meeting in person.

Alter

Then, swapping smartphones for tablets, there’s Alter, a participatory installation piece for 16 iPads. Performance maker Tamara Saulwick and composer Peter Knight have created a meditative, slightly muted audiovisual experience in which audience members place softly glowing tablets in various positions around a large darkened room, creating an ethereal surround-sound symphony of faint murmurs, rustling crepitations and soothing hiss. It’s a subtle work, so subtle that it might at first appear slight, but one that, in that pale, strangely comforting light, does create a real, if fleeting, sense of shared intimacy.

The Naked Self

Sharing and intimacy is also the theme of Tanya Dickson and Michele Lee’s The Naked Self. In the first part of the work, armed with tablet and headphones, audience members listen to recordings of other participants telling stories and confessing details about their bodies. The archive through which these small acts of self-exposure are accessed is very easy to use and it all looks incredibly slick. Indeed, the overall design of the work is so simple and streamlined that full participation seems somehow inevitable, almost as if there were no way to opt out. And so it is that, in the second part of the work, you find yourself naked in a soundproofed cubicle, staring into a mirror, composing your own audio self-portrait.

How you feel about The Naked Self will probably depend on how you feel about the current culture of over-sharing more generally, and about the way in which new technologies variously encourage or contour narcissistic and voyeuristic impulses. But while some participants will no doubt find it a bit discomforting, it would be wrong to call the work transgressive or deliberately confrontational. It is in fact only a canny re-staging of the way in which social media is already used, particularly on hand-held devices. What else is the bathroom mirror selfie if not a confession of the naked self?

Programmed to Reproduce

Casey Jenkins’ Programmed to Reproduce is a sort of sequel to Cast Off My Womb, the 2013 durational performance piece in which Jenkins knitted a continuous scarf from yarn lodged in her vagina. The new work again involves vaginal knitting, this time in the construction of a large womb-like installation. As she knits, a monitor on the opposite side of the room plays a looped recording of Jenkins reading in a calm monotone a lengthy compilation of abusive comments posted online about the original work. It’s a simple set-up, but effective. The contrast between the bullying, conformist litany and Jenkins’ quiet but persistent industry is unexpectedly moving—perhaps even inspirational.

The relationship between Cast Off My Womb and Programmed to Reproduce points to an important though rarely acknowledged formal difference between performance art and live art. Where performance art typically involves a degree of provocation or shock, whether pushing boundaries or confusing expectations, live art tends to be more exploratory or contemplative, mapping patterns of social interaction or looking at ways to register or illustrate contemporary values and beliefs as performance. So, while both art forms are interdisciplinary and deal with problems around presence and participation, live art tends to be more research oriented, and not necessarily an artist’s primary creative practice.

Sex and Death

Contemplation is certainly the dominant mood of Samara Hersch’s Sex and Death, a playful work about the way we think about—or don’t think about—ageing. The first part involves a one-on-one interview with someone older and perhaps wiser at a nearby pub, where stories are swapped and life’s mystery is wondered at over a beer and a stack of cue cards. In the second part, audience members are offered the chance to get in on the current fad for recreating old childhood photographs: a fun way of emphasising not only the ways in which the body changes over time, but also the unexpected ways in which it stays the same.

Erotic Dance

But, of course, live art is only a category of convenience, and there is always leakage and contamination and overlap. Luke George’s Erotic Dance, for instance, appears to be a conventional dance piece, with a seated audience facing the front of the performance space, attentive but essentially passive. Sound designer Nick Roux poses languidly centrestage, propped on one elbow, his back to the audience, surrounded by effects pedals. As if to highlight just how traditional this set-up is, he lies before a long mirror, looking obliquely back at the audience, like the Venus of Velázquez.

As the ambient hum of an electric guitar lying to one side begins to swell and churn, George at last emerges from the front row of the audience, stumbling forward, as if drawn into the painting. Gradually shedding his clothes, he pushes his body through brief phrases and trance-like loops, moving faster and faster as the noise intensifies.

George cites Susan Sontag’s call for an arts criticism that is also a kind of erotics as the inspiration for this work. The question seems to be whether a purely sensual way of experiencing art can be translated into dance. Perhaps, then, his orgiastic plunge into a throbbing wall of distortion, his body convulsed between two amplifiers, is meant as a response to Velázquez?, or a representation of how he feels about Velázquez?

But what of the audience, witnesses to this sensual homage? In terms of the work’s eroticism, once again we are in the position of voyeurs. And it is interesting that, after an evening spent negotiating various digital hand-held devices, it is easy, perhaps too easy, to imagine that what is happening on stage is actually playing out behind a glass screen.

i might blow up someday

Fittingly, then, the last show on the North Melbourne Town Hall program in week one of the festival is i might blow up someday by Sydney’s Hissy Fit (Jade Muratore, Emily O’Connor and Nat Randall), an art punk performance concert combining glam rock theatrics and mosh pit anarchy. It’s an earnest attempt to smash the screen, reconstructing and redeploying the idea of female hysteria to disrupt voyeuristic habits of spectatorship and involve the audience in a sweaty free-for-all.

The attempt is only partially successful. Most audience members remain impassive, unwilling to join in the mayhem. But even where it fails, i might blow up someday seems like a sort of victory: finally, something that is unacceptable, something that can be refused, something that is more than just a reflection of the everyday and the banal. Something that is also a demand, however unappealing.

Festival of Live Art 2016, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, Week 1, 1-12 March

A large-scale screen fills the rear of the stage; a small one sits to the right. There are several plinths and a table, each holding large glass laboratory bottles, and a rusted corrugated iron trough of the kind used to water cattle. We are in an intimate space, where the story of a life will unfold against huge images from films that have in part shaped it.

When Romaine Moreton, a Goenpul Jagara woman of Stradbroke Island and Bundjulung of northern New South Wales, turns poet in One Billion Beats, I’m totally captivated by her deep, rich voice, her poems’ memorable images and forthright pronouncements, their end rhymes, internal rhymes, assonance and the extended, incantatory vowels of the Beats, the emphatic pulse of hip-hop and the poet’s increasing inclination to rise above speech and soar towards song as the performance goes on. Yorta Yorta Dja Dja Wurrung woman Lou Bennett’s spare, characterful scoring underlines the poetry’s inherent beat while layering it with sounds from nature and inflecting it with a variety of musical forms.

There are many other beats in this work, those of the hearts of the generations from whom Moreton is descended and whose lives she resurrects in her vivid autobiographical storytelling which alternates with her recitations. Her life has been complex from the earliest years on a farm to separation from her mother at age six, absorption into a caring network of kin, school challenges, the relentless pressure of racism and, later, enlightening if sometimes alarming research. Moreton is no lost soul. At one with her family and her culture, she thanks her mother for letting go of her, opening the child to a wider urban world of aunts and uncles.

It was her schooling that revealed to Moreton that she was different. She and other Aboriginal children were separated out, labelled ‘dirty’ and forced to shower. As well the headmaster’s sarcasm towards his black students about their competency “ensured we inherited his racism, the trick of it,” says Moreton. It’s this cultural “trick” of racism that Moreton, the scholar, goes on to explore in her maturity. She clearly owns her personal history, but yearns to see it in a larger context, to explain the persistent oppression of Australia’s Aboriginal peoples. She turns to popular culture: feature films made over the last 100 years in which Aboriginal people are for the most part consistently stereotyped and marginalised by white filmmakers, but which include the complexly ambiguous Jedda (Charles Chauvel, 1955) and Indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah (2009). As we watch Delilah lovingly wash Samson in a cattle trough, Moreton gently ladles water hand to hand from her own that sits onstage, an image resonant with that film’s sense of care and possible liberation. The trough also evokes water as a commodity historically competed for by Indigenous people and white men’s cattle (their presence overwhelming in the stampede excerpt from Baz Luhrmann’s Australia [2009]).

Moreton conducted her film research over three months in 2009 at the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra, where a particular encounter added another layer of telling and image-making to One Billion Beats. The building was formerly the Australian Institute of Anatomy and reputedly haunted. In a chilling episode Moreton recounts experiencing, while in-residence, a vision of Sir Colin Mackenzie, the one-time director of the institute and collector of Australian native animals which he dissected and preserved in jars of formalin. She sees him coming at her with a scalpel (Bennett’s sound design includes the shrill sharpening of a knife). “I feel the pain and wake,” says Moreton. Heightening her sense of being a mere specimen (Aboriginal remains were also part of the collection), Moreton appears onscreen, a drawing of a measuring device hovering about her head. In the 19th century, scientists were determined to define race types, criminals and the insane via the pseudoscience of craniology, also known as phrenology, as Moreton discovered at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, also in 2009. Donning a white lab coat, she takes on a key player and founder of the notion of ‘cranial capacity,’ Samuel George Morton (1799-1851), by delivering a mock demonstration of his theory.

In One Billion Beats’ film excerpts Indigenous people are for the most part simply displayed as cultural specimens, bereft of social status or narrative power. In institutional studies, they are merely scientific specimens, to be collected, defined and otherwise rejected. Towards the end of the performance, the stage darkens and the plinths become screens on which appear Indigenous people, ghost-like, but affirming the reality of the lives Moreton has invoked. They, and Moreton are, of course, not the specimens she fears they have become; they are the billion beats of tightly knit generations, past and present. Hence, Truganini, so-called ‘last of the Tasmanians,’ looks calmly out at us from the screen as Moreton says of the racist culture she has revealed to us, “ideological warfare more difficult still” than “the bullets we dodged.” But with pride, against slow, sombre strings, she iterates the chorus to her final poem, “We are here and we are many and we shall surprise you by our will.”

It’s interesting to note that while making a case against the discriminatory legacies of popular culture and science, Moreton distances herself and her people from short-term politics. An 80-year-old aunt tells her firmly that “skin,” not political movements, defines Aboriginality and that she was Aboriginal long before the invention of the Aboriginal flag. Moreton’s is therefore the long view, both of generations and of the history of discrimination. One Billion Beats is most certainly a performance with a message about enduring ideological manipulation, but being rooted in the specifics of experience and delivered with an idiosyncratic voice it is a message to especially value.

Co-directors Romaine Moreton and Alana Valentine’s lucid staging of One Billion Beats has Moreton moving in simple patterns about the stage (designed by Moreton and Sean Bacon), engaging effectively, episode by episode, with screen images, the trough, her ‘laboratory’ and her audience. Lou Bennett’s evocative sounds, Hugh Hamilton’s intimate lighting and Sean Bacon’s video design (of the film excerpts but also of the landscapes of a childhood including a haunting, misty valley of eucalypts) gently texture and enrich the performance. As co-writers, Moreton and Valentine have judiciously balanced the delivery of poems and stories, the writing in the latter as lucid as their staging, although the volume of information and keeping track of who’s who in the young Moreton’s expanding world is occasionally daunting.

Long after I experienced it, One Billion Beats continues to resound with the beating of hearts, poems and music, its engaging performer sharing with us her distinctive life, deep feelings and her intellectual challenge to racism.

One Billion Beats, writer-directors Romaine Moreton, Alana Valentine, music, sound Lou Bennett, video design Sean Bacon, set Moreton, Bacon, lighting Hugh Hamilton, producer Campbelltown Arts Centre, associate producer Vicki Gordon; Campbelltown Arts Centre, 26, 27 Feb, 4, 5 March

The Look of Silence is the second of Oppenheimer’s disturbing films investigating the mentality of those who perpetrated the 1965 mass slaughter of Indonesian citizens. While testing their eyes, an optometrist quizzes the people responsible for killing his brother.

“The one certain lesson contained in both The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence is that without the restraint of law, power of any political stripe inevitably drifts towards slaughter. Power will always be able to justify itself, but once the line of arbitrary violence is crossed and endorsed, no amount of contrition will bring back the dead. Just ask Reza Berati” (Dan Edwards, RT 128, 2015).

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Miranda July has many biographies. The strands of her work are so varied—threading through conceptual art, fiction and filmmaking—that it might be most accurate to say that she primarily makes ideas. The notion that an artist can be and do many things, unwedded to a single field, ran unstated and strong through July’s talk, Lost Child!, in the recent All About Women talks at Sydney Opera House.

In a one-hour multimedia presentation involving PowerPoint, readings from her books and clips of her previous work, July created something that encompassed autobiography, a live artwork and a stand-up comedy gig. Her career started out in the 1990s with a group of women doing things for themselves in New York and Los Angeles, printing zines, making punk music and working out their lives and their feminist politics in public. Her first play, Lifers, based on her correspondence with a prisoner, “wasn’t as good as I hoped it would be, but I decided I would make things and share them for the rest of my life”—as good a definition as any of an artist.

July then moved on to make performance art that she calls a type of live cinema, “always thinking of performance in the context of movies.” She showed a clip of an early live performance in which she used the light of a data projector to frame herself at some moments and project live feeds from film sets at others. The effect was inventive, weird and really impactful, fusing video art and avant-garde theatre in a one-woman show. Her DIY aesthetic, use of lo-fi technologies and total transparency of process called to mind the later cinematic work of Michel Gondry.

During this tour of her artist’s CV, July inserted slides of her failed ‘real’ jobs—retail assistant, stripper—revealing the messiness of an artist’s life, the patchwork of jobs that pay for an artistic practice and “the struggle to do what I wanted to do, which was to be free.” With statements like these, July engaged in a kind of self-mythologising of her life as an artist. Like the rest of her work, the talk was simultaneously exhibitionist and self-effacing.

I have never been able to discern whether Miranda July critiques or indulges narcissism. Since seeing Lost Child! I think she does both. Her work certainly speaks to the insecurities of just being a person today, the identities and images we self-consciously construct in public and online (she is a genius at Instagram), and the difference between living a life and inhabiting a persona. Think of her project, Are You the Favourite Person of Anybody? and how its title enunciates a type of solipsism contemplated almost two decades ago in Peter Weir’s film The Truman Show (1998). Perversely, it’s in their most narcissistic moments that July’s works really resonate, in all their needy, cringe-y truth. July knows shame, humiliation and vulnerability, and treats them compassionately. She understands that we’re all just little pixels trying to make ourselves heard. Think of how she used the digital space to connect people who don’t know each other. Her Somebody app arranged for strangers to personally deliver text messages between friends. It brought to mind the internet’s potential for community rather than the more usual loneliness of the silent, iPhone-lit bus commute. It did this by instigating performances by everyday people in everyday contexts, and making a reason for asking people to participate—basically, to communicate. The mandate was accessibility, said July, so “that people would automatically share” the work and pieces of themselves.

After moving into film (Me and You and Everyone We Know, 2005), July found herself becoming “known and bordered” as an artist, “so I didn’t make another movie for a while. I have to have different heights.” July’s artistic activities enunciate her core themes differently, but Lost Child! made me think that her greatest artistic act is the creation of the public persona of Miranda July. It’s probably appropriate that the Q&A following the presentation became a public group therapy session: how to deal with self-doubt and the paralysis of shame? How to be a new mother and an artist at the same time? Across every discipline, all her works are linked by a democratic ideal and a desire to articulate instantly recognisable intimate thoughts. Participating in this type of public programming of celebrity artists doing long TED-style talks to the general public merely marks for Miranda July the next logical component in a boundless body of creative work.

In the 1960s artists stopped making objects for galleries and arranged events in alleyways, houses and parks. Instead of artworks and exhibitions, there were environments and happenings. It didn’t take long for the gallery to hook artists back into the system with two catchy concepts. These were the curator and the installation, which would happily accommodate the new, expanded ambitions of artists to create experiences rather than artworks. The visual arts have been all the poorer since the 1960s, as artists aspire to secure a place in exhibition programs, rather than to change the world.

This was not so for one night in Perth recently, as the artists of Rumblestrip, a post-apocalyptic amalgamation of brutalist vehicles, ethereal projections and strange objects, created a total outdoor environment, a crowded happening that was also something of a poke in the eye for Perth’s flashy new city developments. With the surrealism of Mulholland Drive and the kitsch of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, the survivalism of Waterworld and the ridiculousness of Wolf Creek 2, Rumblestrip was an immersion in everything that is both dangerous and wrong about Australia: its obsession with vehicles, its love of a loud, drunken party, its long night drives through the bush.

It makes little sense to distinguish here between one artwork and another, the hotted-up Hilux hybridised with a Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Man from the endless sunset projected onto the side of a nearby building. For the one-night event was more than each of its elements, echoing with the maddening sounds of engines revving, car doors creaking and mechanical tapping. There was a lot of aluminium foil and a few tarpaulins, a towering wooden scaffold and survivalist trolleys of appetising green plants. There was a swamp and a rogue pushmobile that inspired road rage in its drivers.

Rumblestrip simulated a chaos that has long been missing in the hyper-organised events that Perth usually hosts for its law-abiding public. The recent audio-visual spectacle that opened the Perth Festival was nauseatingly sentimental about suburban life. Called Home, it had one foot firmly in the 1960s, and recreated a fantasy of Perth as a sleepy, beach-going country town. Rumblestrip was a dystopian answer to Home, capturing instead the city’s current predicament, dominated by roads and endless development. Time in today’s city is no longer spent on the beach or in the backyard, but with a foot on the accelerator navigating the sprawl.

The hundreds who turned up to Rumblestrip proved that there is an appetite in Australia for conceptual fun, for a visual arts scene that is also a party, and for a party that is also an artwork. Audience members were able to recognise their own hallucinations in the specular glow of in-vehicle installations and the amorphous shapes that dotted the space. Rumblestrip touched the raw nerve of automobility, the flash of anger and thrust of acceleration that comes after being cut off, or nearly run down.

Rumblestrip, concept Neil Aldum, Erin Coates, Simone Johnston, featured artworks by Erin Coates, Shaun Gladwell, Loren Holmes, Stuart James, Simone Johnston, Jack Sargeant, Snapcat; Northbridge, Perth, 5 March

Apocrifu

In Apocrifu, director/choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui performs alongside ballet-trained dancer Yasuyuki Shuto, former circus performer Dimitri Jourde and a near life-sized, visibly manipulated puppet. The framing is starkly modernist, a wide staircase running upwards at the left, echoing the ‘divine’ off-stage spaces alluded to by Gordon Craig. A loft runs across the upper horizontal, within which the Corsican men’s choir A Filetta clusters, composer-conductor Jean Claude Acquaviva’s gestures evoking the rising, spiritual urgency of this work’s slow burn. Amid the bare supports and struts below lie books. We begin with Cherkaoui dropping onto the stage a line of tomes and stepping out.

The profusion of bound volumes and a brief, rapid-fire monologue by Cherkaoui signals the theme as the relationship between the words of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Their common roots and subsequent conflicts were seeded from now little-known apocryphal texts. Reciting an online speech by evangelist Jay Smith, Cherkaoui resembles a multi-limbed Hindu deity. His fellow performers’ arms snake out to punctuate his conclusions or flip through scripture as he observes that the same characters appear in all three creeds, and that subsequent scribes have incorporated their exegetical commentary.

Smith’s claim is that the Qur’an is a “corrupted” version of an earlier Hebrew text which evangelists like himself now interpret. Lise Uytterhoeven points out that it is surprisingly Orientalist for Cherkaoui (who is after all of Moroccan-Flemish descent) to construct the Qur’an as a secondary, derivative and “corrupted” text. Cherkaoui’s interest however is not the restoration of the undiluted messianic truth which Smith is seeking. Cherkaoui quotes from the Qur’an that “He who takes the blood of one, takes the blood of all, and he who saves the blood of one, saves the blood of all.” Cherkaoui’s thematic contention is that these dimly perceived origins should lead us to consult texts with care and to recognise our shared holy lives.

Choreographically, Apocrifu is defined by the curve. Performers remain low, folding, gliding and collapsing into the ground before rising arcs bring them back to crouching and spin them before heading down again. Shuto’s ballet solo provides a counterpoint, but here too suppleness and circularity dominate. One is tempted to see echoes of the curve of the brush or pen here. Cherkaoui borrows from the films Kwaidan (Masaki Kobayashi, 1964) and The Pillow Book (Peter Greenaway, 1996) to stage a section in which one dancer disrobes to be manipulated, twisted and turned while kanji are inscribed across his skin.

Apocrifu is above all measured and meditative. Concepts are played out at length in a dreamy fashion. Its lessons are light not firm, and hence distinct from Jay Smith’s speech. The puppet metaphor, with Cherkaoui himself also becoming a puppet, poses questions of volition and control. Are our acts already imprinted within these books, and is this good or bad? The at times muezzin-like ambience of Corsican folk singing epitomises Apocrifu’s ambience, not least in the way that any melodramatic potential is held at bay. Ecstasy, joy and pain are alluded to, but do not emerge.

Pindorama

Brazilian choreographer/director Lia Rodrigues’ Pindorama, by contrast, is an intense, often harrowing experience. Performers strip, pour water over themselves, before moving onto a massive central ribbon of clear plastic. The remaining performers take the ends and undulate the sheet, first in gentle ripples, then in great angry waves. The sound of sheeting tearing the air dominates. A lone woman, and later a collective of dancers, enter this maelstrom. Water-filled condoms are rolled out, and initially the crouching figures massage and split these in fluid explosions. The anguished arched backs of performers on all fours are replaced by recurrent rolling, collapse and signs of failure. The central figure repeatedly falls, and in the subsequent group, bodies pathetically gesture towards each other. Even the reassuring clasp of one to another is not allowed. There is a spastic lack of cohesion and direction as they turn hopelessly into the waves and towards or over each other. A spray of mist reaches the audience, seated or standing at the margins. Empathy seems cruelly vexed. The values of Artaud and his imperious theatre of bodily necessity and non-human action are very present.

While Rodrigues cites Brazilian practices and performance art as influences, one might relate her practice to the Living Theatre or butoh. Certainly, the piece is close to such work. Once themes of physical struggle and failure are established, they are staged for a protracted period, as physical sculpture or durational performance. Rodrigues’ program notes explain that Pindorama’s watery allusions were originally conceived as elemental, evoking a fraught but positive relationship to landscape. Pindorama is an indigenous title for Brazil, “land of the palms.” However, since Pindorama’s 2013 European premiere, the vision of citizens standing by as migrants drown has become a frequent interpretation.

In Pindorama’s final act, the plastic is removed and the space carefully mined with condoms before the performers crawl amid us. Rodrigues, like butoh pioneer Tatsumi Hijikata, is obsessed with the architecture of the back. We observe the slippery, slithering crawl of the figures while deep grooves form and disappear along their spines. The depersonalisation of the dancer as flesh, face obscured, evoked for me Goya’s Disasters of War series: bodily fragments of a cataclysm both human and cosmic. After crushing the condoms, dancers come together and slowly exit from one corner. Figures roll and turn, their eyes facing downward or parallel to the floor (but rarely upward). A soundtrack of deep breathing replaces that of plastic thrumming.

Pindorama’s dramaturgy is experiential. Interpretative gambits are built into it, but it does not ‘speak.’ Its focus is the pathos and sensuality of flesh and water, with all that might flow from them.

Perth International Arts Festival 2016, Compagnie Les Ballets C de la B with A Filetta, Apocrifu, choreographer, director, performer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui; Heath Ledger Theatre, Feb 25-27; Pindorama, creator Lia Rodrigues; State Theatre Centre, Perth, 2-6 Mar

The metamorphosis of the old Albury Regional Art Gallery and its heritage building into the new contemporary art museum that is MAMA (Murray Art Museum of Albury) is all but complete. After an 18-month closure and rebuild, MAMA opened her doors last October. While not aiming to emulate a MOMA or MONA, the wink in their direction is appropriate. MAMA is a bold step toward a total transformation of Albury’s relevance in the cultural and contemporary art landscape and, in particular, the way Albury’s rather conservative population engages with art.

The director: the making of MAMA

“MAMA is everything the old gallery wasn’t, it’s the complete opposite.” MAMA Director, Jacqui Hemsley, is adamant that MAMA had to shake off every vestige of its previous incarnation. With minimal budget and only a skeleton staff, the Albury gallery wasn’t engaging with the changing art world or the community. “It was fast becoming irrelevant.”

Hemsley has invested considerable energy to change that. Heading up AlburyCity’s Cultural Services for the preceding six years, she was a key driver behind the significant achievement of securing community support and $10.5m to create the impressive new AAA-rated, 2,036-square-metre facility. Now, with the gallery yet to make a permanent appointment, Hemsley has been seconded as its caretaker director to ensure MAMA unfolds as envisaged.

Hemsley has been the director of other public art galleries: Latrobe Regional Gallery prior to moving to Albury; Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery, where early in her career she oversaw its $2.6m redevelopment; and Southland Museum and Art Gallery in New Zealand, where at the time she completed a Master of Arts plus post-graduate qualifications in both Accounting and Arts and Entertainment Management.

Given she’s worked exclusively in the arts, I was surprised to hear her undergraduate degree was in business. It wasn’t her idea. Her dad promised her a car if she would postpone archeology studies in favour of business. “An 808 Mazda station wagon! What was I thinking?” It does seem a rather unimpressive trade-off, yet perhaps it illustrates Hemsley’s pragmatism and willingness to embrace economic imperatives while maintaining the deeper cultural interests that also sustain her. It’s apparent she brings this approach to the direction of MAMA, which has her cheerfully and matter-of-factly using the term ‘bi-polar’ a number of times, to describe programming and operational agendas.

Albury public space as gallery

Blockbuster exhibitions like Marilyn Monroe: An American Icon, MAMA’s second and current major exhibition, might seem populist to some, but shows like this will be the bread and butter for MAMA, important in attracting visitors from outside the region and significantly higher attendance by locals. Getting people through the door is essential, and Hemsley articulates a completely revisioned model for the facility which focuses on enhancing the audience experience, even before one sets foot in the building.

“Albury is unique in that in the middle of a regional CBD we have a dual high street and public square (QEII), a one-acre green space smack bang in the heart of the retail, commercial and entertainment area, which sees half a million people passing through it. The gallery forms only one corner of this precinct, bounded also by the LibraryMuseum and Albury Entertainment Centre. Why not curate the entire space as a gallery?”

AlburyCity’s public art strategy and landscaping of QEII has allowed digital media infrastructure to be embedded throughout the public square and neighbouring city lanes, extending and building on the gallery and LibraryMuseum’s use of their glass frontages as digital galleries. Conduits for sound filaments and large video screens, CAD5 cabling and hollow poles to house additional cabling will enable the first of a curated new media program by the end of 2016. Hemsley says it’s part of creating ‘art by accident’ experiences which will be an intrinsic part of transforming Albury into a creative city.

Festivals like Sydney’s Vivid and Melbourne’s White Night have showcased the possibilities for application of new technologies, and a priority for Hemsley is to have MAMA play a role in developing the creative industries with artists, designers, architects and digital media professionals working together. Her long-term vision is for the region to become a mecca for the creative community. Partnering with LaTrobe University to deliver an arts degree in Albury is part of this plan.

The museum’s opening party featured Craig Walsh’s 2007 projection installation, Incursion, filling the foyer of Albury Entertainment Centre with water, floating furniture and giant fish. Opposite, on the southern edge of the public square, coloured light washes picked up Matthew Harding’s stainless steel sculpture, Cross-Knit, suspended atop MAMA, and the stonework and steeple of the church on the west side. It was a mini-taster of what’s possible as MAMA seeks curators for the various digital galleries and media elements, developing programs that integrate local, national and international artistic engagement.

Multiple spaces, forms, media

It’s not all about spectacle on the outside and blockbusters on the inside however. With 10 flexible gallery spaces, MAMA will present more than 50 shows a year, curating 70 percent of its exhibitions and commissioning new works. MAMA’s major opening exhibition laid out its commitment, not only to new and challenging contemporary work, but to contemporary Indigenous artists. Presenting new work by Wiradjuri artists, Wiradjuri Ngarumbanggu included a large-scale site-specific piece by Brook Andrew and Jonathan Jones’ Diamond Light installation.

The small Quest gallery, wholly dedicated to screen and digital media, recently showed Imagining Victory, a trilogy of provocative and political video works by Richard Bell dealing with the uneasy relationship between Aboriginal peoples and white Australian hegemony; and new work by Christian Thompson is on Hemsley’s wish list.

At minimum, half the program will feature screen works, installation and new media. The entire gallery has been designed to accommodate new technology, 3D and multi-media work. Furthermore, digital mediums present significant opportunities to engage and collaborate at an international level without the cost and transport logistics of material art forms. Hemsley’s intention is that MAMA build its own collection of new media and multimedia works.

The recent show, Current, occupied the Quest and adjacent galleries and featured new work by national and international artists working in photography, video and sound art to explore issues of sustainability and describe the industrialised landscape of the Bogong High Plains hydro-electricity scheme. It was a project of The Bogong Centre for Sound Culture, established by sound artists Philip Samartzis and Madelynne Cornish, as a site for facilitating residencies and works that interact with the place, its inhabitants, geographic space and memory.

Art local and regional

Sonic Splendour incorporated a survey of music video clips by local photographer and filmmaker Andrew Pearce and the Backyard Bonanza project, which teamed Pearce with Vic McEwan, regional music producer and installation artist, to support three local emerging musicians in creating world class music videos.

Four miniature installations by UK artist, Slinkachu, made use of child-height peephole wall cavities, continuing the art-by-accident experience inside the building. The Little People Project placed miniature figures in humorous and precarious situations, such as floating in an upturned bottle-top on a puddle of beer leaking from a stubby lying on its side.

New works currently on show include Sydney artist Julia Davis’ time-lapse video Consilience: as the world turns, projected to fill one wall of a small dark room, while another gallery has been transformed by Sydney-based Mona Ryder’s surrealist sculptural installation Dance me to the end of night. Upcoming works include AgX by Grayson Cooke, from Lismore, and One on One by Ella Sowinska from Melbourne.

The more frequently rotated, experimental and challenging shows, in tandem with the ‘art-by-accident’ strategy, are what Jacqui Hemsley believes will ultimately underpin the story of MAMA’s projected success. They might only be a peripheral part of the experience for many but will sustain a developing creative community, opening up perceptions and possibilities. For now, the task is to put Albury on the map as a destination for national and international artists to show their work.

Looking for Grace is a film marked by divisions: the deliberate dividing of the narrative with the same events revisited as ‘stories,’ as seen from different characters’ perspectives, as well as the perhaps not so deliberate tonal shifts that mark its three main acts.

The introductory segment, Grace’s Story, is evocative, presenting an aerial view of salty desert landscape before descending to follow teenage Grace (Odessa Young), who’s taking a bus to an undisclosed destination along wide flat roads with her best friend Sappho (Kenya Pearson). The arrival on the bus of a slightly older boy (Harry Richardson) sounds an ominous note that’s picked up in Elizabeth Drake’s temporarily noir-ish score as the three check into a motel for the night.

The adolescent tensions that surface within the triangle are subtly observed by writer and director Sue Brooks: the resentment, attraction and conflicting loyalties portrayed with skilful naturalism by the three young actors. This moody mini-episode creates anticipation.

Disappointingly, as the action switches to suburban Perth in order to track Grace’s escapade through other eyes, the film begins to shed its initial subtlety and suspense. In conveying the stories of Grace’s parents, Denise (Radha Mitchell) and Dan (Richard Roxburgh)—as well as that of Tom (Terry Norris), the elderly private detective who provides sporadic support—Brooks favours the broadly drawn Oz personalities that underpinned her 2003 film Japanese Story.

At a gathering of relatives and police at the couple’s home in the wake of Grace and Sappho’s disappearance, Brooks dials up the farcical quirkiness. The gags come thick and fast, with Dan’s secretary attempting to reassure Denise by inappropriately alluding to murder and rape, while her sister irrelevantly wonders aloud if they should use the good china. There’s fussing over the police detective’s dropped cigarette and deadpanning over Death Dog, the name of the band the girls have probably run away to see.

If this were a brasher film, like Muriel’s Wedding (1994)—itself a triumph of tragicomic farce—the relentlessness of this scene wouldn’t be a problem, but here it sits oddly alongside the naturalism of Grace’s story.

This tonal dissonance carries over into the roles of Denise and Dan, with Mitchell and Roxburgh emphasising their characters’ bumbling ineptitude and perpetual bemusement in a manner that occasionally tips into caricature. Denise is spacily suggestive of a housewife from a slightly earlier era (“Yoo hoo!” she calls, mounting the stairs in search of her daughter). The quirks might be intended to evoke a universal fallibility, but their exaggeration makes it difficult to see Dan and Denise as real people.

Other potentially interesting narrative threads and characters remain undeveloped, as with Bruce, a long-haul truck driver whose presence in the film is pivotal yet unexplored; perhaps the signalling in onscreen captions of various characters’ ‘stories’ leads us to expect more than the fragment delivered.

In her visually innovative 2005 feature Look Both Ways, the late Australian director Sarah Watt used similar tropes of everyday awkwardness to compellingly confront the spectre of death. Sadly, the tonal unevenness in Looking for Grace dilutes the sense of loss so crucial to its climax.

Looking for Grace, writer, director Sue Brooks, cinematography Katie Milwright, editor Peter Carrodus, composer Elizabeth Drake, Palace Films, 2015

The James Plays Trilogy, a cycle of historical dramas written by Rona Munro and directed by National Theatre of Scotland Artistic Director Laurie Sansom, like Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s Go Down, Moses assays the nature of complex inheritances from a distant time populated by beings that feel (at least superficially) like our psychological kin. The plays, first performed in Edinburgh in 2014, dramatise three generations of Stuart kings, variously enthusiastic presiders over a feudal, fragmented 15th century Scotland.

In the first, The Key Will Keep the Lock, James I (Steven Miller) returns to Scotland after 18 years of detention in an English prison to an impoverished nation beset by factionalism. His long exile and bookishness make him the subject of suspicion (“what sort of a king is brought up reading books and writing poetry?”) but his dutifulness and patriotism—he quickly marries Joan Beaufort (Rosemary Boyle), daughter of the 1st Earl of Somerset and decries the financial rapaciousness of the English—win grudging respect in a volatile parliament (though not enough, of course, to prevent his assassination).

In the second play, The Day of the Innocents, James I’s heir (Daniel Cahill, in place of an injured Andrew Rothney)—known as Little Red Face on account of a conspicuous birthmark—becomes King of Scots at just six years of age. Acutely aware of his tumultuous inheritance (“I have dark blood like snakes under my skin”), the boy is plagued by nightmares and seeks respite through friendship with an older boy, William, the future Earl of Douglas. Douglas’ powerful family, however, led by the mercurial Balvenie (Peter Forbes), has designs on the throne, an ambition unlikely to be jeopardised by an infantile king driven to hide in a box, fearful of fulfilling his dark fate. “You’ll grow to be a monster,” James is warned. In this world—where “God can take our lives in an hour, in a minute,” as John (Ali Craig) puts it in the third play—survival, let alone success, demands it.

The cycle is completed by The True Mirror, the longest of the three plays, in which the flamboyant James III (Matthew Pidgeon) leads a parliament increasingly ill-at-ease with his profligacy—he wants £60,000 to visit the cathedral at Amiens for inspiration for the European-style court of his fantasies and a choir (“just forty or so”) to follow him everywhere, so as to “cushion every moment with something beautiful.” The Queen, the prudent Margaret of Denmark (Malin Crépin), begins to steady the ship of state by taking control of the court’s finances. “This whole country,” she tells him, “is like a house we’re trying to hold together with our bare hands.” The King’s excesses, both fiscal and sexual (he takes a mistress, the first to appear in the trilogy, and has dalliances with numerous men), take on paranoid (“I’ve long suspected I’ve been surrounded by liars”) and, finally, hubristic dimensions.

The first play is the slightest of the three, reducing the courtship of James I and Joan Beaufort to pure soap opera; for the most part, the machinations of 15th century Scottish feudalism are little more than a suitably alien backdrop for comedy over-dependent on fish out of water-isms. Four nooses that overhang the stage during the first scene prove to be a red herring, presaging only Munro’s consistent difficulty in organically working up tension out of the drama. The Day of the Innocents is a significant improvement, in that it at least has an absorbing character arc at its centre, as is the final play, the most stylistically diverse of the three, which introduces some invigorating contemporary accents in Jon Bausor’s otherwise firmly period costume design, and which sees a commanding performance from Pidgeon as James III. The trilogy as a whole (able to be viewed in Adelaide in a single sitting, albeit with multiple meal breaks) benefits from a strong ensemble.

The texts themselves are problematic, tending towards the blandly expository. Munro and Sansom seem so frightened by the idea of a single audience member losing track of events for even a moment that everything is spelt out to the letter in the manner of a crude ledger. The result is staidness, a flattening absence of intrigue or subtext and unwelcome recourse to ‘edgy’ language and soap operatics to artificially enliven proceedings. In contrast to the plays’ publicity, their nearest TV counterpart isn’t Game of Thrones or House of Cards, both fine exemplars of long-form cable TV drama, but the soapy Tudors.

As with that series’ creator, Michael Hirst, Munro has been upfront about taking significant liberties with the historical record—perfectly admissible in the name of populist entertainment—but the real problem is the paucity of psychological depth. Few, if any, of these characters seem motivated by anything except generalised longings for sex or power, and none, until we meet James III in the final play, The True Mirror, exhibits a compelling personality flaw. Death comes and goes, usually offstage or antiseptically stylised, with few aftershocks. However cheap human life may have been in the 15th century, it’s strange, and ultimately distancing, that grief and guilt—those mighty catalysts of Shakespearean tragedy—are here in short supply.

The only theme to really emerge over the trilogy is the loneliness of governance (“the king has no friends”) but its treatment is insufficiently nuanced to prove insightful. Its claim to contemporary resonance is staked, mainly, on Munro’s use of demotic language, but there is little in the way of universality here: these plays may usefully synopsise a neglected period of history but no amount of colloquialisms, however tunefully rendered, can disguise their essentially hermetic concerns (initial reviews picked up on the trilogy’s timeliness in light of the then-current referendum on Scottish independence, but even that localised reverberation has already died away).

It can all, perhaps, best be summed up in the centerpiece of Bausor’s set: a gargantuan sword embedded, Excalibur-like, into the stage. For such an overwrought statement, it’s surprising how quickly you forget it’s there.

Adelaide Festival of Arts 2016, National Theatre of Scotland, National Theatre of Great Britain, Edinburgh International Festival, The James Plays, writer Rona Munro, director Laurie Sansom, design Jon Bausor, lighting Philip Gladwell, Adelaide Festival Theatre, 26 Feb-1 March

When I speak with Yaron Lifschitz, Artistic Director of the internationally acclaimed Brisbane-based ‘new circus’ company Circa, he’s just received a $25,000 Australia Council Theatre Award, has a show about to open that night at the Gold Coast’s Bleach Festival and is to premiere in a fortnight a new work created in collaboration with Wollongong’s Merrigong Theatre Company. He’s loving all of it.

Circa has enjoyed musical collaborations, for example with UK vocal ensemble I Fagiolini (How Like an Angel, 2012), France’s Debussy String Quartet playing Shostakovich (Opus, 2013), a violinist (What Will have Been, 2015) and with singers and instrumentalists (Il Ritorno/The Return, a version of Monteverdi’s opera, 2015-2016). Landscape with Monsters, however, takes Circa in a new direction—in a number of respects, as Lifschitz reveals.

Very different for us. “All new material,” as they say on those Chinese toys.

It came out of [Merrigong Theatre Company Artistic Director and CEO] Simon Hinton’s brain. I think Simon is one of the great unsung visionaries of Australian theatre. He has this idea that a company from Wollongong can make a difference on a national and global stage and can commission new kinds of work and take risks. We’d involved him in planning a sort of national touring strategy and, partly out of that, we put on a festival of Circa a couple of years ago. That worked well and Simon started talking to us about the idea of creating a new show based in and inspired by Wollongong.

I said, “Look, we’ve never done anything like that before. We make shows here in isolation in Brisbane. But I’m really interested in the idea of landscape and of the post-industrial landscape and how it influences bodies, how we shape it and it shapes us. Can we start there?” And we’ve done a couple of development periods and now we’re about to put on the show!

Circa has travelled a lot. So I suppose you’ve become a bit of an urban geographer. Are you sensitive to the cities you visit?

I hope so. It’s really fascinating to have the chance to go back to places many years apart and to notice the changes in their landscape but also in their psycho-topography, the sense of how people change with it. There are also the simple visceral experiences. Like [for the Merrigong project] we visited the Steelworks that used to have thousands of people working there, now it has 1,500. It’s just huge empty halls with machines and one guy sitting behind a console. It’s this extraordinary, ‘absent’ place. Obviously the jobs and the economy have disappeared along with it. But, of course, that doesn’t naturally talk to anything we do. We basically chuck people in the air and stand on them. There’s a limit. So we had to find a way to get those two things to talk to each other without getting too interpretive or metaphorical.

There are plenty of pitfalls in this business. We just don’t do ‘about’ very well as a kind of default setting. And we have to. We have to find some way of infusing the work with ‘about.’

You have a strong dramaturgical, musical and choreographical sensibility when working with bodies—their strength, flexibility, vulnerability—but what do you do when you have to convey a sense of a place?

It’s very complicated. What it does is to bring out the worst in all of my multiple personalities. At some point the musical side or the choreographic side wins. And what I ended up making through the initial developments of Landscape with Monsters was a series of things that I didn’t like very much. They all made sense but just didn’t have the oomph that I think our work needs. In the end I wanted to boil it down to a simple dramatic question that I felt we could deal with. And the question was: What happens when the body meets the right angle of the built environment?

As a starting point that was something we could work with, physically as well as conceptually. So we started to work with simple structures—a series of boxes. And we ended up with no circus apparatus in the show. We work with boxes, ladders, planks and with balance. We’ve had to learn a new vocabulary. There are acrobatics in the work but [ideas like] ‘let’s put someone on a trapeze or someone doing hula hoops for five minutes to a pretty piece of music,’ that’s not this show. It’s really built on a very different kind of architecture because we wanted to answer those questions with some sort of depth and authenticity.

Mainly boxes. We stack them and climb into them and jump off them. That transforms into very large trestle ladders and planks. It’s all very simple, industrial. At times, they’re used as projection surfaces. We’re still working through the dramaturgy of that, trying to find a way to make it work. As always with projection, there are some pretty things but are they good and meaningful? I’m not sure. It’s really reduced, a boiled-down set of languages about how bodies interact with right angles.

The angle versus the curve of the body—a great piece of aesthetic discipline for you.

We’re working with [Sydney composer and sound designer] Daryl Wallis and he’s been terrific. We’re finding our way through. We started with the music that was put on the Voyager spacecraft, of which a little bit is actually retained but not a lot. There was a bizarre set of eclectic tracks sent out that will continue to journey through space probably long after we’ve blown ourselves up…or drowned ourselves. The idea of these tracks without a civilisation behind them [suggested] a sense of a kind of eerie afterglow to our civilisation. There is a kind of post-apocalyptic sense about the show.

That said, it’s really easy for young artists, and performers in particular, to make ‘depressing’ kind of work. You know, ‘heavy’ for its own sake, and I’ve been working really hard to avoid that because that’s not the experience of being in Wollongong and it’s not the experience of the environment. It’s actually that complex negotiation where there are beautiful natural features, rotting industrial carcasses and new developments and apartment blocks going up. So I’m trying to make a show that spans some of those perspectives and [deals with] how we live in our environment from living in small boxes to building big structures to hanging precariously off things that may not even be there in a few seconds. That’s the range we’ve been working with.

You’re dealing with complex issues but I notice the publicity material says “suitable for 10-years old and up.”

Look, [as a circus company], we always have this issue with kids. It’s fascinating. I just saw a New Zealand dance company at APAM [Australian Performing Arts Market]. It was pretty terrific, five women dancing. And I took my son who’s a special-needs child who barely watches and who hates sitting in a theatre through my shows. But he sat pretty much transfixed through the whole 70 minutes of the show. He’s 14 and has a complex set of conditions, and I can’t predict [his response], but he loved it. So, I’ve long since given up trying to work out what audiences will like and what they won’t. I just think if the work has integrity…And, look, the first imperative of anything in circus is Do Not Bore Your Audience. In theatre you can think, ‘Look, I know I’m bored but I also know this is Eugene O’Neill and I need to see this play in my life.’ That never happens in circus. People just go, this is a boring show. So we don’t have the cultural imprimatur to carry through the kind of patches of tedium you might get with a classic play or opera or ballet. We have to keep an audience engaged. It doesn’t mean simply ‘entertained,’ but we work from a low boredom threshold and a high sense of audience engagement.

But it is critical that your work is not just for an audience with pre-conceived notions. Circa is a company that changes the notion of what circus can be.

That’s right. We’ve been working hard at this over the last two years. I think we became conscious of the fact that we had a choice: we could develop a house style or break with that. And we chose to break from it. That’s why we’re really keen to work in ways that are very different. So coming up tonight we have a show [Horizon with Angels by Circa offshoot Preposterous] that’s outdoors for the Bleach Festival [accompanied by local choirs].

We’ve got in rehearsal a show that’s going into La Boite’s subscription season based on a fantasia in which three heroines—Nora, Hedda Gabler and Miss Julie— encounter each other in some kind of after-life meets circus.

Yes it’s kind of joyous romp as well as quite a searching piece. We re-did all the dramaturgy the other day. It starts in a narrow physical theatre [format] with what you might expect—women being oppressed by men—and then it turns into a beautiful Steppenwolfian explosion of colour and circus-ness, hinged by those [same] issues and ideas. And that’s very different from something like Landscape with Monsters, which is much more compressed in its tonality and more ‘held’ and considered, but has humour in it.

It came from a couple of places. Derrida’s idea of the monstrous. We’re all faced with change from the obvious things that are happening, from Wollongong to the environment to Donald Trump. There are plenty of monsters in the world. But for most of civilisation and most living things, we are the monsters. We’re not just victims of the environment or just shapers of the environment, we’re in a complex negotiation with it; that idea’s really important. That’s how I conceived the work. So one of the questions for me is: who are the monsters here? Then, of course, there is Goya and the sleep of reason producing monsters and the monster is the thing to which you haven’t applied conscious thought, which seems to me to be not an unusual thing.

Circa & Merrigong Theatre Company, Landscape with Monsters, director Yaron Lifschitz, associate director Alice Lee Holland, sound designer Daryl Wallis, lighting, AV designer Toby Knyvett, costume designer Libby McDonnell; Illawarra Performing Arts Centre, Wollongong, 17-20 March

In Go Down, Moses, Italian auteur Romeo Castellucci reconceives the Book of Exodus’ story of Moses, liberator of the Israelites, as an elliptically sequenced dreamscape that “transfigures the various moments of the life of Moses” [program]. Each episode is filtered through a stridently contemporary aesthetic, narrative causality eschewed in a startling weave of deconstructed mythologies and mises en scènes almost overwhelming in their vivid, painterly composition.

In a prologue of sorts that commences while the house lights remain up, well-heeled visitors to an art gallery move about purposelessly. In the seeming absence of anything to look at, they begin to objectivise each other in an eerily impersonal exchange of touches and what look like measurements based on various body lengths (perhaps referencing the cubit, the ancient unit that appears in the Bible, describing the distance from elbow to fingertip). The movement is abstracted and unsettling, recalling the grim history of institutional attempts to classify individuals into discrete races and character types. A repeated gesture, something like the thrusting of a knife, periodically scatters the visitors, who nonchalantly regroup in different parts of the space, all memory of the earlier violence forgotten or suppressed.

One member of the party finds a reproduction of Dürer’s masterpiece of observational art, Young Hare, on the floor and affixes it to the wall as if to say ‘there—now you have something to look at’ (Castellucci is, in his own way, saying the same thing, both acknowledging and ironising our voracious relationship to his art). Unmoved by the painting, the visitors saunter off, Scott Gibbons’ elusive soundscape of muffled pops and clicks giving way to the roaring of an industrial turbine, the gigantic, captivating object—the one the gallery visitors, and we, the audience, have been waiting for?—having materialised during a blackout. The scalps of three women, long hair trailing, descend slowly from the ceiling, their ensnarement by the turbine’s rotor a profoundly unnerving inevitability (the sequence is, superfluously, later repeated without meaningful variation).

The drone of the turbine extends, momentarily, into the third scene wherein a young woman (Rascia Darwish) occupies a remarkably lifelike toilet cubicle, from which we are distanced by a scrim that remains in place for the duration of the work. Bleeding below the waist and in visible pain, she stuffs toilet paper between her legs and chaotically veers from cistern to sink, smearing the walls and mirror with her blood. Hemorrhaging after having given birth in secret, this is Castellucci’s Jochebed, mother of Moses, filtered through a contemporary lens that sees emoticons projected onto the scrim throughout her ordeal—a withering, if rather gauche, statement on our technologised indifference to suffering.

We are provided a brief glimpse of the baby’s fate—alive, put in a plastic bag and cast into a dumpster, reflecting the Biblical narrative in which Moses is abandoned on the banks of the Nile—before the woman is questioned by police (English surtitles accompany the Italian dialogue). Even allowing for the implausibility of such an interview occurring prior to medical treatment, this scene’s relative naturalism vexes, and feels overly self-conscious in its calculated, unimaginative appropriation of the conventions of the police procedural. It becomes interesting only when the woman’s refusal to reveal the location of her baby—an unthinkable dereliction of feminine duty in the eyes of the detective (Sergio Scarlatella)—gives way to apocalyptic ramblings (“there are animals all over the floor, they live in the same world as us”) and seer-like declarations (“we have meat to eat and we are sated but we are slaves”).

At the conclusion of the interview, the woman is placed in a CT scanner. As the platform slides into the tunnel, penetrative resonances are unavoidable given the significance of fertility in Castellucci’s reimagining of the Moses myth (a second baby, as well as heterosexual intercourse, feature in the final vignette). In an astonishing coup de théâtre, the woman emerges into a vast, exquisitely rendered prehistoric cave replete with opening that looks out onto a crepuscular, star-flecked sky. As mathematician John Playfair remarked in Scotland in 1786 when he saw the Siccar Point “angular unconformity”—discrete geological layers suggesting vast time spans—“the mind grows giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.”

Sacred choral music, contemplative in tone but resounding in volume, accompanies the arrival of a group of early humans (actors in prosthetics) who, manifesting the woman’s vision of sated slaves, consume a meal of dried meat prior to burying and, briefly, mourning a stillborn baby. Their balletic, slow motion movements are observed by a second group of humans, a competing tribe perhaps, who gather at the mouth of the cave. Two of the cave dwellers copulate, bringing to mind the doctrine of original sin, the Biblical Fall that Genesis tells us corrupted all human nature.

And yet the act, on reflection, feels cyclical rather than foundational, connecting these early humans across the gulf of deep time to both their ancestors and descendants. They have a message for us, scrawled in red pigment across the wall of the cave, SOS, that ripples through the space and time that separate us. The presence of the woman, our avatar, collapses temporality, spatiality.

We have, by this point in the evening, already heard Empire Jubilee Quartet’s take on Wade in the Water, the Negro spiritual whose lyrics (wade in the water, children/God’s gonna trouble the water) reflect the Israelite slaves’ escape from Egypt. But Castellucci’s most distinctive manoeuvre is to project the Moses myth beyond its established associations – its primacy, namely, as a symbol of African American emancipation – towards what he thinks of as ‘our incorporeal slavery’, that of ‘people exiled from being’ [director’s note].

Seen through this lens, all of humanity is subject to different slaveries: not physical and economic bondage à la the 19th century slave trade, but, for instance, helpless attachment to technology (the emoticons) and the perpetuation of gender-based oppression (one obvious reading of the pulverised scalps). Then there are those slaveries that exist beyond the physical world: subconscious drives, and a form of race memory – Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious – that links us to the early humans depicted in the final sequence. Seen in this way, the function of Moses is not so different from the Biblical myth: as a figure of salvation who can lead humanity out of servitude and into the Promised Land. What might it say about us that Castellucci’s Moses remains, for all we know, squirming unfound within an overflowing dumpster beside a forgotten byroad?

Adelaide Festival of Arts 2016: Go Down, Moses, direction, set, costumes, lighting Romeo Castellucci, music Scott Gibbons, text Claudia Castellucci, Romeo Castellucci, Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre, 25-28 Feb

On the first Saturday night in November 2015, Melbourne multi-instrumentalist Adam Simmons completed the first week of his month-long project, 100:25:1. As on most nights that month, Simmons played duets with four musicians from different backgrounds. With multi-instrumentalist Mal Webb he switched between a six-foot-high Slovakian recorder and a variety of reeds and woodwinds. On sax he accompanied Matt Bailey’s moody Wurlitzer ballads, stepping out the front door of the Conduit art space in Fitzroy during one song to play a screaming solo from the street. He wound up the night accompanying Domenico de Clario’s grand piano and introspective prose lyrics.

Simmons’ exhaustion was evident, although he had not missed a beat musically. He’d completed 24 duets in six days, and still had 76 to go over the next three weeks.

“He was really depleting at the end of the first week,” recalls John Fitzgerald, Simmons’ key partner in founding the project. “Then he was ‘up’ again. He was mainlining energy from the other musicians.”

“I was learning what the project was in the first week,” Simmons reflects. “Having audience members return over multiple nights was sustenance for me. I wasn’t doing this thing in isolation.”

Simmons has been active in Melbourne music for over two decades. Graduating from VCA in 1992, he is often identified as a jazz reeds player, but plays across a range of genres including free improv, rock, blues and world and contemporary art music. His instrumental palette ranges from contrabass clarinet to saxophone to piccolo, and over the past decade he has become adept at the shakuhachi.

“I think of myself as a performance artist, a storyteller, rather than just someone who plays an instrument,” Simmons says. “This project is a good representation of what I do.”

Performance as data

As well as the performative challenge of 100 duets, 100:25:1 involved the musicians as a data source to construct a map of Melbourne music with Simmons as the central node. The impetus for this idea was a conversation with Fitzgerald about the size of respective musicians’ pay packets.
“I was astounded at the difference [in our incomes]; at the way he is treated,” Fitzgerald says.

Fitzgerald is an Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne. His research looks at the structure of illicit social networks, such as those shared by drug users and criminal scenes, to quantify the value of non-monetary transactions. His ‘money on the table’ conversation with Simmons spurred him to do something to address “the inequity of what we understand about music in Melbourne. We only really count those people who make a lot of money,” Fitzgerald says. “It’s about quantifying the value of what we do,” Simmons adds. “Funding assessments miss half of what the arts is about.”

The 100 names Simmons selected (20 each from five genres: jazz, experimental/free improv, contemporary classical, folk/blues and world music) were all musicians he has previously played with. “There’s a Melbourne music heritage that we don’t celebrate,” Simmons says. “We’d rather look overseas for validation.”

Each musician completed a questionnaire including details of their income and who else in the 100 they had played with in the past year. Simmons and Fitzgerald represented these relationships by linking photographs of musicians with coloured yarn on a wall in the performance space.

Simmons curated each of the 25 concerts to include not only a diversity of genres, but also performer ages and experiences. Every day he wrote conversational posts on social media about his shared history with each musician.

Performance as community

“The posts Adam wrote were beautiful,” says Carmen Chan, one of the 100 musicians and a regular in the audience. “It made it more than just about the music; it was about connecting people.” Simmons offered free admission to each of the 100. “I don’t like travelling on my own,” Simmons explains. “You don’t get to share things.”

Vocalist, member of the 100 and audience regular, Carolyn Connors cites the composition written and performed by pianist Michael Kieran Harvey as a personal highlight. “It was a by-the-skin-of-your-teeth survival performance, just extraordinary.”

“It got madder as it went on, particularly in the last week,” Simmons recalls. “Andrea Keeble’s instruction was to just play one sound. Leah Scholes made rumballs as her performance.”

Simmons completed his 100th duet on the last Sunday in November with long-time collaborator, Nick Tsiavos. After a solo performance the following night, the map came down off the wall.

Carolyn Connors recalls approaching a weary Simmons after this final duet. “You’re a chameleon,” she said of Simmons’ metamorphic performance over the month.

John Fitzgerald will submit a statistical analysis of the data gathered to Music Victoria this year. There are also plans for the map to be digitised to an online platform where it can continue to grow. “It’s a way for the Melbourne music community to say ‘we’re here,’” Fitzgerald says.

On this page you can open a PDF that details many of the performances and several talks in the 20th Biennale of Sydney in an easily readable form. I made this after struggling to achieve an overview of the performance program that is clearly an important component of this biennale.

Before attending an event, you should check times, dates [these can change], venues and booking requirements on the sites of
The Biennale of Sydney, Carriageworks and the MCA.

Why dance?

Nowadays, you expect to find performance art in international art biennales, even more so because of its Marina Abramovic-led resurgence and popularity (if presented as spectacle). But dance? Occasionally, yes, given Modernist dance’s intimate kinship with the visual arts and the significance of some key 20th century collaborations. But, centre-stage? There are some obvious reasons: galleries and biennales are increasingly opening themselves to performance, performative installations and new media art—in the long wake of the 60s video art revolution. As well, the visual arts and dance have shared an intensive engagement with high theory and the academy, more palpably so than music and theatre. Even so, dance?

Clearly, Biennale Artistic Director Stephanie Rosenthal (chief curator of London’s Hayward Gallery since 2007) rates performance, and especially dance, highly. In 2010 for the Hayward she curated MOVE, Choreographing You, Art & Dance with a pronounced interplay of dance and visual artworks, public participation and a roll call of influential dance artists and videomakers. A book documenting that event appeared in 2011 (MIT). That Rosenthal is on a crusade to open up the gallery to performance is confirmed by her choice of biennale keynote speaker, the dancer-choreographer-philosopher Boris Charmatz, Director of the Musée de la danse-Centre choréographique national de Rennes et de Bretagne. Also telling is the presence of Brazilian-born, New York-based writer, curator and specialist in performance and choreographic studies, André Lepecki, whose interest in the dance-visual arts connection is evident in the title of his latest book Singularities: dance and visual arts in the age of performance (forthcoming Routledge, 2016).

Having absorbed the Charmatz-Lepecki takes on the performance/gallery nexus and the Biennale’s examples of its potentials, Australian contemporary dance artists, writers and scholars will gather several weeks later for “a salon” titled Choreography and the Gallery (2-8pm, 24 April, AGNSW) to discuss, and perform, their own responses.

Boris Charmatz

Charmatz’ appeal is certainly evident in his Manifesto for the Dancing Museum (2009), a radical challenge not only to the way dance is housed in France in regional institutions built around a Paris-based hub, but also to the functioning of the traditional art museum or gallery, or biennale even. Is it living, unpredictable, inclusive? Charmatz’s own extensive practice is all of these. He’s a relentless experimenter who honours tradition in exciting ways, as in his Flip Book tribute to Merce Cunningham and in another work, 20 Dancers for the 20th Century. Here performers demonstrate steps from 100 years’ worth of steps from Charlie Chaplin to Michael Jackson to Yvonne Rainer, performed for a strolling audience in the hallways, stairwells and library of Paris’ Palais Garnier in 2015, after a MoMa season in New York. Charmatz describes this work as “a living archive.”

Charmatz also engages with large numbers of the public. He took his ‘portable’ (another of his ideals) Musée de la danse to the Tate Modern Turbine Hall. Over two days, he and his dancers instructed amateurs and members of the public to create joint performances interpolated with Charmatz’ own. Enfant, which has played in London, Avignon and Salzburg, features nine dancers, 23 untrained children “with a lot of freedom,” a crane and a huge treadmill-like machine. The work appears to alternate between innocent playfulness and haunting images of the manipulation of inert bodies.

After his keynote address, Charmatz will perform in his own words, “the very strange piece” Manger with local dancers.

The works: A Selection

Adam Linder, Some Proximity
Berlin-based Australian writer, dancer and choreographer Adam Linder, who created the striking Are We That We Are for Sydney Dance Company in 2010 and has performed with Michael Clark, Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods and The Royal Ballet, will present Some Proximity. This is the the second of his hire-by-the-hour Choreographic Services. “Two dancers respond to the written observations of an arts writer, who minutes the artistic or social contexts of the location of the hired service. In responding to the observations with danced action, the writer seeks to collapse the viewers’ critical distance to the work” (ICA).

Adrian Heathfield, Ghost Telephone
On the page, some works look simply mysterious, like Ghost Telephone, a “one-month-long chain performance” curated by the UK’s Adrian Heathfield, a key writer about and curator of experimental performance and dance. The piece comprises, “interlinked new performances from internationally renowned artists. Working in situ, performers channel and transform the spirits of works in the collection and displays of the Art Gallery of NSW.” Open 10am-5pm (see BOS website).

Mette Edvardsen, Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine
In the live art world, one-on-one performances are beginning to inhabit galleries, as did the Perth’s Proximity Festival at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 2015. In Part of The Future of Disappearance, a Carriageworks-based program curated by André Lepecki, Norwegian dancer, choreographer and performance maker Mette Edvardsen presents Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. In the Newtown Library, you choose a book from a selection and a portion of it is intimately recited from memory to you by a performer.

Mike Parr: BDH
Australian artist Mike Parr’s much-anticipated new performance, BDH, to be performed in the Carriageworks’ carpark on a late afternoon, will reveal the meaning of its acronymic title.

Mette Edvardsen, No title
Edvardsen’s No title is “a simple performance” over 40 minutes which she describes on her website as being “about how reality exists in language and how this extends into real space. It is about how memory and imagination blur. It is about things and how things can be there and gone at the same time, and that what defines this is various. It is about things that are gone and about things that remain.”

Germaine Kruip, A Square, Spoken
Netherland-born Germaine Kruip’s A Square, Spoken is another one-on-one performance which will be performed many times at the MCA and on Cockatoo Island across the duration of the biennale. In 20 minutes, Kruip ‘walks you through’ our ever mutating notion of the square from Galileo to Malevich to Jung to the present. In terms of this biennale it’s interesting that in 2012 Kruip made A Possibility of an abstraction: Circle Dance, dervish-inspired movement in everyday dress incorporated into gallery or public spaces.

Nera Choksi, In Memory of the Last Sunset
In an example of a performer responding directly to an art work, Australian dancer Alice Cummins will engage with her collaborator, Indian artist Nera Choksi’s In Memory of the Last Sunset (a work featuring multi-layered sunsets) by performing for an hour near Choksi’s The Sun’s Rehearsal, 2016, “a site-specific billboard-sized installation” at Carriageworks. “Cummins’ cyclical performance asks urgent questions about the life of an ever-warming planet and the life of an aging body”[website].

Mella Jaarsma, Dogwalk,
Indonesia-based, Netherlands-born Mella Jaarsma will stage Dogwalk, a performative installation in which humans wear the skins of cows, sheep and goats while walking dogs. An interviewer in Trouble wrote, “The skins of frogs, squirrels, bats, snakes and chickens are all put to use in her wearable works, as well as moth cocoons, water buffalo horns, the bark of banana trees, and more. The garment becomes a symbolic protection and a visual representation of fear or a need for security. Her work also alludes to the isolation of human beings and the need for a filtered approach to the world.”

Nicola Conibere, Assembly
London-based artist Nicola Conibere’s Assembly, “designed for galleries, civic spaces and performance places…explor[es] shifts in relation between individual and collective bodies; its configurations respond to the presence of spectators in an investigation of how other people can appear to us.” Assembly acknowledges each spectator’s unique presence without asking them to do more than watch. Assembly is an element of the partnership between the Biennale and Sydney’s choreographic laboratory, Critical Path, where the work will be performed 2-5pm over three days for audiences to come and go as they wish.

Nicola Conibere and André Lepecki will be in conversation at the home of Critical Path, The Drill, Rushcutters Bay, Monday 14 March, 6.30pm.

Nina Beier, The Complete Works
The Biennale website account of this work is entirely abstract. A little Googling reveals that in her The Complete Works series, Danish-born, Berlin-based Nina Beier invites “a retired dancer to dance every piece of choreography that they have learnt, enacted in chronological order. The piece is simultaneously a history of a choreographic vocabulary… while also invoking the personal history of the dancer’s experiences” (Tate.org). The dancer in this case is Meryl Tankard, one of Pina Bausch’s leading performers in the Wuppertaler Tanztheater, director of Australian Dance Theatre and creator of many works since.

Agatha Gothe-Snape, Brooke Stamp, Here, an Echo
From Speakers’ Corner in the Domain to Wemyss Lane in Surry Hills, this work, performed over three weekends, comprises “site-specific happenings and discursive events.” The artist and the dancer “will develop ‘performative interferences’, literal and metaphorical markers that use language to choreograph the viewer, casting new light on quiet things in the process.” You’ll just have to be there to see what happens to you.

Lee Mingwei, Guernica in Sand
In an enticing one-off performance 12-5pm, 23 April, at Carriageworks, Taiwan’s New York-based Lee Mingwei and collaborators meticulously recreate Pablo Picasso’s famous Guernica (1937) with sand and then transform it, walk on it with the audience and finally sweep it away. In an era of increasingly erased protest and diminished democracy, this work should engender resonances beyond the sense of art’s impermanence.

Lilach Livne, TRANSCENDING, for Peace
Allow time too to participate in Israel choreographer and performance artist Lilach Livne’s TRANSCENDING, for Peace, in which you become part of “a temporary community” and “audiences and performers join hands, dance, pray and strive for an abstract way of being.” Livne’s works are not at all tame, as her frank, politically and pop cultural vimeo postings attest. The 75-minute work is presented in association with Critical Path and features local performers.

Alexis Teplin, Arch, The Politics of Fragmentation
London-based American painter, sculptor and performance artist Alexis Teplin will perform on Cockatoo Island amid her own paintings. Critiquing “the fragmentation of language in the digital age,” in her 15-minute performance, she asks, “When decadence fails us in our quest for utopia, where do we end up?” Teplin’s bright, abstract costuming and droll conversational scripting, as in P and C (2014), provide for an arch, theatrical commentary on art and, in Arch, the digital takeover of our lives.

And you won’t see…

Justene Williams, Sydney Chamber Opera, Victory Over the Sun
From the avant-garde Russia of 1913 comes this Futurist performative critique of opera, originally designed by Malevich and reconceived here by Australian visual artist and performer Justene Williams in collaboration with Sydney Chamber Opera, composer Huw Belling and librettist Pierce Wilcox. Sadly, all three performances on Cockatoo Island are booked out.

Korakrit Arunanondchai Boychild: Untitled LipSync #225
Also sold out, but you might glimpse it on YouTube, is Bangkok-raised Korakrit Arunanondchai’s intensely pop-theatrical Boychild…in which the female protagonist “recasts her body as cyborg.”

Art dances

The Biennale’s mantra “the future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed,” is true in many disturbing ways across the globe. As we await equitable redistributions of power and resources, and as the Biennale unfolds, we hope at least to witness dance draw the art gallery into the present rather than simply be accommodated by or absorbed into it.

20th Biennale of Sydney, The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed, 18 March-5 June

Adelaide audiences are no strangers to the work of British ‘post-dramatic’ playwright Martin Crimp. Geordie Brookman, currently Artistic Director of the State Theatre Company of South Australia, has helmed two of Crimp’s major plays, Attempts on Her Life (2008 for STCSA) and The City (2012) for former independent company nowyesnow. Curiously, however, it is Crimp’s adaptations—of Molière’s The Misanthrope (STCSA, 2011) and Botho Strauss’s Gross und Klein (Big and Small), (STC 2011)—that have been most enthusiastically taken up by the majors. The Country, a companion piece of sorts to the cryptic, less immediately accessible The City, has been only sporadically produced, for example by Melbourne’s Red Stitch in 2005.

As with The City, The Country is a nonlinear exploration of middle class ennui; the fillip, however, is that the neurotic couple at its centre, Richard and Corinne, evince the old maxim about the portability of unhappiness by relocating from the city to the country only to find themselves entangled in a mystery involving a young American woman apparently found unconscious by the roadside in the middle of the night. One can only surmise that the play’s relative conventionality has worked against it, that its idiom–lying somewhere between a plot-driven thriller and a Pinteresque exercise in sublimated menace—has made it a hard sell.

It is, in any case, now being presented for the Adelaide Festival by Stone/Castro, the production company of Portuguese-born, now Adelaide-based director Paulo Castro and his partner, actor Jo Stone, who will be performing the role of Corinne alongside Nathan O’Keefe as Richard and Natalia Sledz as Rebecca, the young woman. I spoke to Castro during a break in rehearsals, our unlikely surrounds the recently renewed St Barnabas parish church in Croydon, an inner suburb of Adelaide. Castro, in characteristically energetic fashion, sweeps a table clean as soon as I arrive and hastily assembles a model of David Lampard’s set that has clearly been kicking around for a while. Nevertheless, its bold abstraction is clear: a disintegrating house with multiple levels and telescoping rooms, no furniture (just a door that seems to have been repurposed as a table) and disconcerting irruptions of the surrounding countryside. I remark to Castro that the set seems to affirm UK critic Michael Billington’s contention that the play is “an assault on the pastoral myth.”

“Exactly,” he says. ”We wanted something conceptual, not a naturalistic house. Because here are two city people who think it’s a good idea to move to the countryside but it begins to consume them. It’s very metaphoric: the relationship at the centre of the play has fallen apart, so I said to David, the house should be falling apart too. We also decided very early on not to use furniture. There are no chairs, there’s no carpet. For a set designer to hear that…! We talked a lot about the Volksbühne in Berlin and the designs there, very big and architectural, often opening up onto room after room after room, back, back, back and open doors. I said to David, why don’t we create something like that?’

“We’ve been working on the set and lights for two months,” Castro continues. “So even before we started rehearsals we all knew exactly what set to expect and the lighting is very important because Daniel [Barber] is quite experimental; we don’t have general lights. Everything will be very lateral, lots of floor lights, and very cinematic. Atmospheric. Between the five scenes there are no blackouts—we show everything—because I like to direct what is between scenes, how the characters get from one moment to another. It’s something I experimented with when I worked on Benedict Andrews’ play CADA SOPRO [Every Breath] in Portugal. I found it creates much more tension.”

“You have a reputation,” I say to Castro, “as a director in what might be called the contemporary European tradition, as someone who puts production dramaturgy at the centre of your process. I’m wondering, though, if The Country has challenged that. As Jo has said [see video interview], in Crimp’s work it is the unsaid that creates the space; but it seems to me that The City, for example, is much more ‘finished’ than The Country.”

“I prefer,” Castro tells me, “to be on the floor, generally, to work up the production through improvisation and so on. I would say there wasn’t much room for that with this text. Everything has been very calculated during rehearsals because that’s how Crimp has constructed The Country—unlike Beckett, say, it’s never just conversation, there’s always much more going on. Each scene you feel the characters want to say one thing, but say another. At the beginning of the rehearsal process we spent a week around the table talking through this stuff, which is an unusually long time for me. Because Crimp hides so much in the text, there is so much to discover. It has a lot in common with, for example, contemporary Nordic writers like Jon Fosse, or the work of Thomas Bernhard, where you need to discover all the background of the play and the characters. We’re rehearsing here in this big church hall so one thing we did was to get each character to confess to God, alone. That was the key with which we were able to unlock the personality of each character.”

The production’s most recent development has been the almost 11th-hour securing of Melbourne post-rockers Fourteen Nights at Sea to provide the score (remixed versions of two pre-existing songs); otherwise the project has had a long gestation. Says Castro, “Ever since Benedict did The City (Sydney Theatre Company, 2009), I’ve been wanting to do this text, so it reaches back a long way. I was thinking about doing it then, but Jo and I have been delayed by other projects—movies and dance theatre and other things. We wanted Stone/Castro to go back to our roots: Jo’s are in acting in the theatre, mine in directing plays, that’s my form—contemporary writers. And I’m quite shocked why the big companies haven’t picked up this text more often. I don’t say that it’s better than Beckett but it is not inferior at all.”

Adelaide Festival 2016, Stone/Castro, The Country, State Opera Studio, 7-13 March

Three very different works in Artistic Director Wendy Martin’s first Perth International Arts Festival address major social challenges for individuals and communities: a Kathak dance work responds to sexual violence in India, another dance work—over cups of tea—reflects on religious attitudes to physical disability, and an audience takes to the streets to trade for survival through trading possessions and skills after the collapse of the cash economy.

Aditi Mangaldas, Within

A leading if controversial choreographer and teacher in the Indian Kathak dance tradition, Aditi Mangaldas has worked with international designers to present the two discrete works that comprise Within. Knotted is contemporary dance firmly rooted in Kathak. Evoking the tumultuous self-examination of Indian society in reaction to the Nirbhaya gang rape case of 2012, Mangaldas presents a relentless cascade of disjointed abstract movements. Individual and paired performances danced to the discordant industrial tones of the recorded soundtrack depict conflict and self-doubt eloquently expressed in the tortured repetition of arms reaching upward and bodies isolated in an island of light on a dark stage. Western dance movement is interspersed with rapid-footed whirls and arm movements straight out of Kathak, although the dancers never totally sacrifice traditional posture for the asymmetric poses demanded by the contemporary choreography. Ensemble sections appear particularly awkward, with conflict often conveyed through unevenly realised facial expressions. Kimie Nakano has designed the costumes in earthy colours, using a sombre palette and with the quintessential Kathak whirls emphasised by loose folds of cloth flying from the hips. Knotted is an interesting study in Kathak-Western dance fusion, but is unremarkable in execution. Capturing the restless spirit of contemporary Indian society, the work’s evocation of conflict is difficult to witness.

The other work, Unwrapped, is a stunning piece in the traditional style, with both male and female dancers performing with scarves: a defiant response by the choreographer to criticism made of her for not using them—as tradition requires—for female performers in other of her works. With a recurring mirror motif, Mangaldas’ choreography flows from striking individual scenes into a dynamic whole with an end that echoes the beginning. Onstage musicians add to the atmosphere, the dancers’ feet slapping the floor creating a counter rhythm in spectacular group pieces. In her extended solo Mangaldas is amazing, interacting with musicians and lighting to create memorable silhouettes and bursts of movement that turn to near stillness, that edge emphasised by her subtle control of Ghungroo—the bells tied around her ankles. Mangaldas has designed dignified traditional costumes for Unwrapped, marked by her use of scarves and the unwrapping and putting aside of veils covering faces. Unwrapped is masterful, the choreographer working in a dance tradition she loves and with highly experienced performers.

Claire Cunningham, Guide Gods

In Guide Gods UK dancer Claire Cunningham welcomes everyone to share her discoveries about the attitudes of religions to physical disability. Her inclusive performance presents thoughts on karma, and theological interpretations of healing along with an explanatory narrative, movement and audio recordings (with screens for the deaf).

Cunningham’s practice is informed by her own disability and especially her use of crutches. She takes us slowly through the challenges presented by simple movements, ascending and descending stairs, carrying a tea cup, then carrying a tea tray with both hands. This slow and steady precision is later replaced by exuberant celebration of movement as her crutches enable her to “fly” about the performance space, the tips of the crutches following her body in ecstatic whirls around teacups positioned on the floor. Her movement responds to the stories she tells and sound recordings of her respondents expressing a range of religious beliefs and teachings in various countries. She finds that while prejudice and discrimination may exist within these cultures, their religious doctrines or belief systems do hold room for believers with disabilities to participate and celebrate. Alongside her usual strong advocacy for body-and-mind, Claire Cunningham opens up space for consideration of the soul.

pvi, Blackmarket

Perth’s pvi collective takes us onto the streets of suburban Subiaco with their real-life gaming experience, Blackmarket. Participants are instructed to bring five items useful for survival. On arrival at Blackmarket headquarters we are briefed via a slickly edited video about how life is harsh and uncompromising in the wake of the great global economic collapse. We will need to use our five material possessions to survive by trading with existing providers of services and to develop our own skills to trade in turn with other players. We hand in our items, which are recorded into a smartphone app to allow us to trade out on the street. We then venture into the night to determine our chances of survival in a world without money.

The app provides a dynamic list of all skills and services currently on offer, with an audio description of the impact of each on our prospects for survival. On choosing an option we offer one of our items as payment, which may be accepted or declined by the trader offering the service. Earphones remain in ears at all times with a clear voice guiding, instructing and informing us, and featuring soundscapes evoking scenarios which are variously amusing, provocative, disturbing and alarming.

Trading duct tape for a course in weaponry sends a player down an alleyway to construct a Millwall Brick, an improvised weapon made from newspaper. A revolving cast of local actors provides wordless directions. In another trade, a cigarette lighter is declined but a tarpaulin accepted as a swap for “compassion,” an acted scenario forcing the player to reach past their own emotions and prejudices. After completing some trades, players are invited to provide skills of their own. If accepted, they follow the cues from the app to train their fellow players in subsidiary skills such as tracking and decoding in exchange for goods that will allow them to trade further. Some survival skills are communicated solely through the app soundtrack with props kept inside wheelie bins, labelled and locked against casual use, with an array of items for inspection and interaction.

High production values, interesting content and sharp delivery left Blackmarket audiences keenly aware of their place in the world and with a new appreciation for the conveniences and assurances that sustain us every day.

2016 Perth International Arts Festival: Aditi Mangaldas, Within, Heath Ledger Theatre, 11-14 Feb; Claire Cunningham, Guide Gods, Fly By Night, Victoria Hall, Burt Hall, St Georges Cathedral, 11-21 Feb; pvi, Blackmarket, Subiaco, 10-27 Feb

James Berlyn is a charming host. He greets spectators singly before inviting us to sit about a large, paper-wrapped round table accommodating up to 20 guests. He joins us, periodically moving between four positions located among our seats. He is an engaging speaker, leaning deeply across the board, shoulders typically slightly hunched, long arms pivoting on the tabletop as wide hands splay out at chest level.

Berlyn trained in dance before switching to acting, and some of the most beautiful moments in the work occur at the conclusion when he leaves the table to dance behind each of four paper panels located behind us. His movement is supple, a collection of relatively straightforward gestures and gentle, balletic arcs in which the physical accent is relaxed and free. Its unadorned kinaesthesia made this one of my favourite sections, although Berlyn was only visible in shadow throughout. When spinning, his arms outstretched at shoulder level, the shadow produced deformations of his limbs, making the artist’s hands appear to squash grotesquely into his torso—not an image of achievement.

Berlyn’s direct, generous delivery is the piece’s principal focus, largely to the exclusion of other elements. I Know You’re There is an act of storytelling, a text spoken aloud by an empathetic subject directly to his audience. To a degree, Berlyn plays with light and props. A ball of paper is passed about the audience, individually unfolded by each of us; we are then invited to tear it into a ribbon. Berlyn places four small LED torches at each of his stations. He raises one to represent a Russian satellite passing far above his child self; another becomes a miniature puppet of himself. In a memorable display of personal trauma, he points a torch deep down his throat. These are however minor flourishes in an otherwise very wordy piece.

Berlyn’s tale is that of his life, and more particularly his vexed yet loving relationship with his father and his own not always successful career in the arts. The story is not especially new. Oedipal stories of rivalry and fractured relations between fathers and sons is a constant of Western dramaturgy up to Star Wars. His father is both metaphorically and literally distanced from the son in this age-old tale. In a pleasingly melancholy touch, we hear a recording of the absent father playing guitar for Berlyn’s mother in an audio letter made at sea. The striking marginalisation of his mother elsewhere is unfortunate, since stories about men and mothers—particularly when not cast as the smothering maternal archetype of US film and TV—are less common. None of this is to say that Berlyn’s story is not a good one, nor not well told, but its form is familiar. This is a classic humanist narrative of coming to terms with oneself and overcoming obstacles in order to like the skin one is in. Berlyn tells this well and with generosity, if not novelty.

Also problematic is a reference to what Berlyn calls “the big pink elephant in the room.” He tells us he once repeatedly engaged in unsafe sex in Sydney in the 80s seeking death through AIDS. This lone allusion to Berlyn’s sexual identity creates a perplexing lacuna within a performance otherwise based on personal revelation.

For those seeking a direct, one-on-one empathetic relationship with a charismatic speaker in an intimate setting, I Know You’re There is highly rewarding. Having attended numerous intimate performances (Lloyd Jones’ superb Seven Brides For Seven Brothers in Seven Audience Parts at Melbourne’s La Mama, 1997, comes to mind), I found this one offered few surprises, with Berlyn’s physical performative strength marginalised in favour of words.

At one point Berlyn cites a moment from a work by Pina Bausch and director Jim Hughes claims her work inspired I Know You’re There. However, the rich physical dramaturgy of Bausch and Raimund Hoghe is not in evidence. I Know You’re There is in fact closer to Jacques Le Coq and John Bolton in its open-handed dependence on principles of verbal honesty supported by a simple, relaxed physical presence close to ‘clown’—Berlyn gently mugs and emotionally fails, and we love him for it. The work appeals to those with an empathetic narrative bent, who see the origins of Western theatre not in the affronting frenzy of Bacchus’ writhing priestesses so superbly evoked in Bausch’s Rite of Spring (1975) but rather in personal identification with characters described in the texts of the once recited epics of Homer and Virgil. For the latter, I Know You’re There succeeds.

Perth International Arts Festival 2016: I Know You’re There, creator, performer James Berlyn, director Jim Hughes; State Theatre Centre, Feb 19-Mar 6

French artist Aurélien Bory builds his dramaturgy by setting impediments to Kaori Ito’s movement and finding ways to use these as the impetus for novel scenic events. Ito is sandwiched between two horizontal platforms, one just over a metre above the stage, another about 20 metres above. Connecting these is a geometrically precise set of vertical threads which would do Op Artists like Bridget Riley proud. These run up/down in proximate rows, extending left and right as well as diagonally, depending on your viewing angle. To move, Ito forces a path through this net, driving her foot down in forceful, amplified stomps. This produces a work of dynamic sculpture, in which acoustic effects and the way Ito appears and disappears depending on spatial depth, visual obstruction and selective effects, become the dramatic focus.

The piece is relentlessly formal without text, narrative or humanised nuance. Ito is impassive apart from intense concentration—which is not to say that Plexus is not rich in emotional resonance. Responses arise, though, in our viewing alone. Plexus makes some of Beckett’s late choreographic works seem almost Expressionistic.

This resolute attention to the relationship between body and environment produces an impressively varied set of responses. After a prelude with Ito standing before the platforms running a microphone between her chest (we hear the heart), throat (breath) and across skin (a rich, thunking crackle), she draws the massive black curtain behind her through a gap between two previously unseen threads, producing a deep vulval cavity into which she disappears. After wending her way horizontally with relatively little force, she reveals the full depth of field by progressively beating out a set of parallel corridors, each one further from the audience.

The strings’ resistance creates a choreography of jerks and jolts, of highly measured and directional punches and stabs, alternating with glacial, all but weightless action, as the net holds her weight. At times Ito seems to have the viscous support of water. At others she surges forward, treating the strings as little more than a field of wheat through which she powerfully strides. Plexus consequently acquires the tenor of Classical or Absurdist tragedy, of human struggle against a vengeful god or universe. Ito is literally woven into the fabric of the Hades she struggles within, dropping into supported leaning poses at acute angles while rich, sproingy tones suffuse the space. If Plexus were to represent the Sisyphean torment famously described by Camus, then it is one co-extensive with her actions and her being. Hell is not other people, as in Sartre’s No Exit. It is oneself.

If the space rapidly takes on the character of a cage suspended in an Existential no-place (or Magneto’s prison in X-Men), Ito is far from being simply oppressed by it. Having established its limits, she toys with its possibilities. Fixed by the toes of one foot clasped about a vertical, Ito inverts her body, clothed in a velvety black costume which sensuously encases and breaks up the downward extension of her body. Later, staring out of her prison from under a parted shock of black hair, she sways left to right, and the floor responds. Threads swing to nearly 45 degrees and an infernal whooshing encases all of us in the theatre. Later Ito scuttles up to the top horizontal, suspended like a grey crab in the weave. She repeatedly drops down, defying gravity and danger, her recurrent survival a miracle of the ‘teknos’ within which she acts.

For all of these cosmic and tragedian suggestions, Plexus largely functions within the realm of the technical sublime. The stage is literally a marvel. One can more or less consciously determine how effects are achieved, but on an emotional or intuitive level, as with circus, rationality baulks. Ito becomes a magical Nietzschean Ubermensch, able to fly from rope to rope through the application of her will. The all but incomprehensible difficulties of moving in such a space make Ito’s resilience a wonder. Joan Cambon’s musical accompaniment, which alternates with the amplification of Ito’s exertions and the creakings of the set, enhances this sense of an unknowable, threatening yet ecstatic mechanism. Her score moves from watery musique concrète to droney, repetitive and scintillating phrasings recalling Steve Reich, and moments of purist electronic noise in the mode of Ryoji Ikeda. As the physical force of the sound reverberates through the auditorium, we see Ito’s body marked out by a band of light which travels from her head to her feet, before the angle of diffraction tilts. It’s as if the strings have become pinprick LEDs marking out a triangle of white in the blackness (very much in the style of Ikeda’s installations and his work with Dumb Type).

Nor does my account exhaust Plexus’ scenic imagination: moments of black theatre, with Ito appearing like a wraith out of nowhere; transformation of the set into a giant loom while Ito drags black cloth in a circle behind her; and the dancer, seated, calmly playing the strings. These and other moments reflect an enormously inventive creation, at once formally astonishing and affectively endless. Bory and Ito definitely benefit from the massive logistical power they are able to deploy. Plexus—like works by Ikeda, Dumb Type and others—tends to obfuscate its own means of production. If I were to be an ungenerous Marxist, there is much one could say about such works as fetishes of an expensive, labour and energy-intensive global capitalist festival circuit. This was however far from my mind while enraptured by Plexus, and I would make a case for the intelligent deployment of such an aesthetic given its immeasurable rewards.

Perth International Arts Festival 2016, Campagnie 111, Plexus, choreographer/director Aurélien Bory, performer Kaori Ito, composer Joan Cambon, lighting Arno Veyrat, costumes Sylvie Marcucci, sound designer Stéphane Ley, technical conception of the set Pierre Dequivre, Heath Ledger Theatre, Perth 17-20 Feb

You might be able to hear it from where you are—a kind of buzz, growing into a thunderous hum of meticulously sculpted noise. This is the sound of analogue synthesiser enthusiasts’ collective anticipation, as they await their first visitation to MESS—the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio.

MESS is the creation of Robin Fox and Byron J. Scullin. Fox has appeared many times in RealTime with his audaciously awesome laser noise spectaculars (see realtime tv). Scullin is an educator (currently at RMIT), audio engineer (mentored by the famous Francois Tetaz) and sound artist collaborating with many of Melbourne’s contemporary performance companies.

MESS is a little like a lovechild of the 1960s BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the Electronic Music Studio, but true to 21st century preoccupations, it’s all about interaction. What’s getting everyone so goddamned excited is that MESS will offer unheard of levels of public access to a staggeringly large and unique collection of analogue synthesisers and electronic instruments.

Living history

For Fox, the idea has been incubating since he inherited Keith Humble’s collection of rare electronic music-making machines. Humble was the driving force behind La Trobe University’s transformative Music Department (1975-99) and hugely influential in the development of Australian electronic music (see Experimental Music, Audio Exploration in Australia, editor Gail Priest, UNSW Press, 2009).

Fox came across the collection via his step-father, Jim Sosnin, Humble’s technician during this period. Given Fox’s hectic touring schedule, he had been feeling lately that it was a waste to have these machines sitting unused in his studio and began scheming to allow others access to them.

Humble’s original set of machines has been significantly augmented by other impressive collections on loan from generous, anonymous benefactor/backers. All up, there is a pool of around 300 machines, with each “season” offering a differently curated set of around 80. However, Fox and Scullin are keen to stress that this is not just an exercise in heritage and hoarding. Fox expresses frustration with “the museum culture around electronic music and synthesis. A lot of these machines aren’t really that old in terms of musical history [but] are locked behind glass. The musical project isn’t over.”

From Scullin’s perspective, “As well as being tools and devices for making sound, [these machines] all tell stories. They all talk about the bias of their designers’ thinking about how electronic music can be made and articulated.” Through the use of these machines it’s hoped that stories will be relived, embedding this legacy in contemporary practice and providing continuity.

Detail of the Transaudio Pro Case 6. One of only three ever built and part of the output of a company started in Melbourne in 1976. Designed by Bruce Bryan with additional design (sequencer and pitch to voltage follower) by Jim Sosnin

The joy of knobs & sliders

Putting historical importance aside for a moment—given there’s so much music-making potential in the slim, shiny lozenge of a laptop—what is so good about these bulky machines with no screens, a spaghetti of patch leads and more knobs than, well…any online tech forum?

Fox believes that digital audio work stations (DAWS) offer the “façade of facility.” Software makes so much possible without ever really knowing why, whereas working with analogue synthesisers is about “opening up the physics of electronic music…actually sculpting electronically.” He believes that the absence of a screen makes you listen to the sound itself rather than being guided by its visual representation. But perhaps most of all he likes the unpredictability of these instruments: “You’ll build [a patch] from the bottom up…and then [you may] never be able to recreate it on that machine again—because it’s just the nature of these things. The temperature in the room can have an effect on it. How you’re feeling probably has an effect on it…Digital technology is very precise and very predictable and sometimes working with [these analogue] machines is going to end up in a more interesting musical situation.”

Scullin is quick to de-emphasise the fetish factor that often comes with these kinds of tools. He draws an interesting parallel: “Tradies don’t stand around debating the merits of hammers…whereas in the culture of sound-making there’s a lot of talk about which hammer is better for which job. And there’s a lot of magical thinking that goes along with it, that using a particular hammer to drive in a nail [offers] an incantation, an echo of all the other records and cultural things that were made with it…We don’t really want to say software is bad and analogue is superior…but it’s all about the subjective experience of sitting behind an instrument and discovering a sound…and how the machine as an object embodies the designers’ intentions and feeds you through this process or journey.”

Given the attendant fan culture for these machines, high on the MESS agenda is accessibility for a broad range of people. Fox says “It would be easy for this place to fill up with beardy white synth nerds like me and while I love those guys—essentially they are my people—it would be a really annoying place if that was the only dynamic.” With that in mind, the two will be implementing proactive strategies in terms of engagement, education and employment to ensure that non-bearded folk—women for example—will be an integral part of the growing community.

The grand plan

There are four aspects to the program to be rolled out over a three-year incubation period. First is the members’ studio which will offer 500 subscribers the chance to get their hands on the machines. To enable access to a larger number of people, the organisers are offering a hot-desk model rather than a solo studio situation. Members can book a desk, select some machines from the season’s collection, don headphones and dial up some noises, recording them for later use.

The MESS school will offer workshops and courses taught by artists along with guest presentations. Fox and Scullin are very clear on the idea that these are courses to be undertaken for the joy of learning, rather than any form of academic or vocational accreditation. Fox is particularly excited by the prospect of curated listening sessions (an idea inspired by composer Warren Burt) where you sign up to listen to examples of interesting music, discussing it with other artists and experts.

MESS Show will be the presentation arm of the organisation, comprising performances and recordings from artists working in the studio and from visiting guests. There are also plans for a residency program to allow artists to have a more intense engagement with the collection.

Finally MESS Schematic is the technical workshop component. Not only will it conserve and maintain machines but will bring in senior artists and engineers to train up younger enthusiasts to ensure that specialised knowledge is retained. In the far future there are also plans for MESS to produce its own range of Eurorack-style modular synthesisers.

Choose your baby

To gain some sense of the collection I ask Fox and Scullin to each name their favourite. Fox proposes the Transaudio Pro Case 6, an Australian invention of which only three were made. It has a six-oscillator synthesiser and an unusually numbered 10-step sequencer that Jim Sosnin designed. “It’s a beast of a thing and it’s unique in the collection. It’s the one that I like to spend the most time with. But it’s a really tough choice because we did just take delivery of the reissued Moog System 55,” the iconic mammoth unit used by pop royalty in the 1960s and 70s.

Scullin also opts for the Transaudio Pro Case 6, but for more poetic reasons. He suggests that because of its rarity “it’s like a 40-year-old flower, it’s only just blooming now,” a simile that he extends to electronic music in general. “Sometimes we like to think that electronic music is a bit old hat, but it’s not. It’s not even up and running…We’ve only had 75 years of electronic sound and people are writing it off as old hat?…I’d like to think that if Tristram Carey [English/Australian composer and cofounder of the EMS studios London] was around now he’d be happy to see that we’re doing this. In all the correspondence of his that we read there was this utopian and very open idea of [how he wanted] more people…to be able to experience the fascination of these machines to make these incredibly unique sound worlds. Electronic instruments are the latest embodiment of that essential human spirit to find new ways to make new sounds, to express new ideas and new thoughts.”

If you’re being deafened by the hum of anticipation, just hold on until Member Subscriptions to MESS open in early March, when it’s bound to get wonderfully noisy.

Extras

In recent years contemporary performance has seen a renewed interest in tactile perception. Theorists talk of lingering in the texture of what you see. Artists create new ways to experience time and the materiality of a performance space. Sound designers speak of hearing with your whole body. The shows that affected me most at this year’s PuSh Festival had these qualities of lingering, of spatial tactility and deep listening.

Le Temps scellé (France)

Textural repetition structures the choreography of Le Temps scellé by Compagnie Nacera Belaza (France). A figure, a woman, ethereal in the dim light, spins gently over and over again. It’s a quiet turning that promises nothing but self-involved action. She never stops, so I can’t get a fix on her, only on the motion. The near darkness gives her a grainy quality, as in an under-exposed video. Looping samples of recorded vocals (gospel?) and North African drumming swirl through a number of speakers placed around the room, contributing to the subtle sense of vertigo. Sometimes I feel I can see a second ghostly figure at the very edge of available light. This turns out to be more than an apparition. She seems to be the twin of the first woman—the same braided hair, fluent body and loose fitting clothes—and joins her. Together they spiral through the space. I enter a slightly altered state. Eventually the dance subsides, but the turning continues within me for some time.

Eternal (USA)

Eternal by Daniel Fish (USA) offers repetition of a starker kind. We watch two video screens hung next to each other. On the left: the face and upper body of a woman in a red sleeveless top against a white wall. On the right: a man in a pale striped shirt. Although they’ve been recorded in the same room they seem confined to their respective frames, unable to cross over to each other. The impression of isolation is reinforced by Fish’s decision to have the actors’ eyelines turned slightly out, away from each other, rather than the traditional manner of having them look in toward each other. This creates room for audience inclusion—not literally, but I do feel like I’m getting between two people who keep missing each other. For two hours the actors cycle through the same five-minute scene, taken from the end of the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004): “I’m not perfect,” “I can’t see anything I don’t like about you,” “But you will.” While attempting variations of rhythm and tone, the actors endure the delights and tortures of repetition. I ride waves of interest and boredom.

Repetition gives way to analysis: as the woman and man play out a middle-aged mating ritual I suspect their behaviour is simply the by-product of our evolutionary machinery. I then ponder their socio-economic backgrounds. Who are these two white, seemingly middle-class New Yorkers, and why should I suffer them? Sometimes the actors’ faces twist or crumple into the weirdest shapes. The woman cries and gets mascara on her cheeks. The man’s grey stubble seems to grow longer. Analysis gives way to self consciousness: how am I supposed to behave in the face of this? How much longer can I stand it? Then it’s over. It’s been frustrating and intriguing. After 23 repetitions of the same scene I feel a sense of accomplishment. (Watch an excerpt posted by the artist.)

Intimacy (Australia)

Intimacy by Ranters Theatre (Australia) begins with one man gently asking another about his life. “So you’re a history teacher. Do you like history?” “Not so much the teaching of it anymore.” After a number of exchanges the two men turn to the audience. They seem to be listening as much as looking. We look back, perhaps mulling over the questions and reflecting on our own lives. Or maybe we’re just observing the two men more intently. There’s something in the way they’ve opened the space that invites closeness. This reflects Ranters’ practice of developing a show through a process of deep improvisation. It depends on the level of ‘nakedness’ each performer brings to the exercise. The resulting nuance of interpersonal exchange in Intimacy leads to surprise after surprise: confessions of self-harm, of paranoid deceit and quiet suffering.

The very notion of personal revelation is, however, put in doubt. The performers don’t tell their own stories but stories others have shared with them. In the talkback, director-performer Adriano Cortese says, “It’s really about us.” What does it mean when an actor reveals himself through someone else’s story: “this is me, this isn’t me”? Not being able to know for sure is as it should be. To make someone else fit what is familiar to you is to confine them to your own projections. Anyway, how well can you really know someone? Maybe you can only know the feeling of them.

Riding on a Cloud (Lebanon)

Rabih Mroué (Lebanon) returns to PuSh, this time with his brother Yasser, in Riding on a Cloud. Yasser’s is a story of surviving a sniper attack during the Lebanese civil war. A bullet in the brain has left him partially paralysed and unable to recognise things or people in pictures, including himself. Yasser reclaims his past and takes control of his present by making videos that reflect the way he now sees images—less defined, washes of colour rather than precise figures, transformations of light. There’s usually no inherent story to the videos. Instead they provide a variety of textures: ways of seeing, but also of feeling the world.

Yasser, however, finds it hard to escape a personal narrative that turns on the before-and-after of the sniper event. Director Rabih Mroué challenges this narrative: as a reading of history, personal or societal, it’s too narrowly causal. It ignores too much. On the one hand we watch Yasser on stage fatalistically playing the contents of a stack of about 20 DVDs, one leading to the next—each one a video he’s made since recovering from the attack. On the other hand we are told that Yasser’s story is banal, unimportant, one of many such stories. The sniper’s action can’t be the singular cause of his current situation. It was part of a complex network of actions. And the effects on Yasser’s life are part of a broad spectrum of consequences. It was never a certainty he would live or die, suffer from aphasia, make art videos, marry the woman he married or perform Riding on a Cloud.

Leftovers (Canada)

Unlike the works described above, Leftovers by Neworld Theatre (Canada) isn’t concerned with texture, space or theatrical form. It is, however, a sharp critique of capitalism by avowed socialist, former communist and stand-up comedian Charles Demers. With satirical wit and self-deprecating charm, Demers reminds us of a time when concepts like universal health care, the welfare state and old age pensions weren’t shorthand for weakness of character. In one incisive passage he describes how pension cheques and the Medicare system allowed his family to survive the ordeal of his mother’s struggle with cancer. Point well made.

But while Leftovers is an entertaining and intelligent critique of capitalism, it isn’t a great critique of bourgeois theatre. In the latter part of the show Demers and director Marcus Youssef fall into the trap of collapsing the political into the domestic. Sentimentality becomes the dominant note when Demers seeks hope for the future in the birth of his daughter. Family videos, snapshots and a quavering voice unnecessarily soften his previously cutting political rhetoric. Having said that, I loved seeing Neworld return to a theatre of aggressive political satire. It’s what they do best.

In Refuse The Hour, visual artist William Kentridge and composer Philip Miller transform their installation The Refusal Of Time into an abstract, operatic work of the German muzik theater tradition. Kentridge himself appears, delivering rambling monologues on how we experience time in the wake of the invention of photography (1839), cinematography (1894), relativistic science (1905), telegraphy (1830s), railway travel (1820s), the international standardisation of time (1840+) and other developments in the history of Modernism.

The piece is an energetic, scattershot chamber work, overflowing with action. As a small cabaret ensemble plays, dancer Dada Masilo turns, flips and rotates in surprising loops about her ever supple hips, Ann Masina moves from singing Bizet to delivering a resonant defence of the right of locals to set midday according to their own local conditions (“Give us back our sun!” she exhorts at different registers), while Joanna Dudley performs vocal flights of fancy, sprechstimme and near-concrete poetry (at one point she reconfigures Masina’s text into assonant nonsense combinations). Actor Thato Motlhaolwa and the musicians often also move centrestage to join in.

Kentridge’s trademark films of charcoal-drawn animations, stuttering black and white filmic fantasies and ripped fragments of books, maps and text in motion, also appear, most of these adapted from the earlier installation. The stage features an assortment of antique-looking contraptions and noise-makers, notably a mechanised drumkit suspended from the ceiling, and numerous megaphones through which the singers holler and which also have speakers lodged in them. Singing, Dudley holds one of these at her waist; after a small delay, a distorted, processed version of the same is emitted. Techniques like the use of an acoustically amplified violin (a stroh, or horn violin) such as were employed in 1900s recording studios render the production of sound very much a spatial and theatrical event.

The mixed cast performs in a way which neither obfuscates racial and ethnic origins, nor focuses on them. Masilo’s dance synthesises African elements into a multidirectional fluidity and African percussion contributes to songs and interludes. Apart from noting that the enforcement of clock-based time was central to colonialism, Kentridge elides his status as a post-Apartheid artist emerging from South Africa’s fraught history. The presence of a weighty, charismatic, cerebral white man who speaks for humanity as he stands beside a slight, mute, black, female dancing body does nevertheless rankle.

The history within which Kentridge places his work is, however, ultimately European and global far more than it is regional or specific. Indeed, he makes obsessive reference to those Euro-American artists who responded to international Modernism and its effects. His videos have long recalled the work of early filmmakers such as Georges Méliès, here represented by a sequence set in a Faustian astronomer’s laboratory. Kentridge’s illustrations are straight out of German Expressionism and woodblock prints of 1880-1935. The overall mode of Refuse the Hour is Dada or Futurist cabaret, with its blend of performance art, projections, faux-lecture, sculptural elements, vaudevillian action, and sense of play. Dudley is fitted out as a “New Woman” of the 1920s, complete with page-girl haircut and a simple, angular, blue dress. Masilo’s costume is adorned with red and black Russian script in Constructivist style, though no reference to Russia or revolutionary Socialism occurs. In one attractive tableau, Masilo places her arms and legs into the megaphones and is rotated by Kentridge on a small round platform, literally embodying Bauhaus dramaturg Oskar Schlemmer’s figure The Abstract from his Triadic Ballet (1912-32).

Moreover, in a film Masilo appears as Loïe Fuller in the latter’s signature Serpentine Dance (an 1894 imitation of which was famously filmed for Edison), complete with batons under her dress to manipulate the fabric in swirls about her. Although much of Miller’s score has a delicate, fractured gestural quality punctuated by brass flourishes, several sections felt like Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weil’s Threepenny Opera (1928), with their wheezing, corrupted music-hall feel.

William Kentridge’s genius is to popularise historic Modernist avant-gardism via his immersive installations, but I wonder what he adds? Relativity has inspired everyone from Marinetti to Robert Wilson and Phillip Glass, and as far as relativistic multimedia opera goes, the familiarity of Refuse the Hour’s language lacks the wondrous sense of mystery which the recent revival tour of Einstein on the Beach maintained. While the sculptural formalism of performance art means that logical associations can be loose, Refuse the Hour seems dramaturgically dissolute. Its thematic links function at a level of high generality, and the alternation of monologue with explosive action produces a remarkably predictable rhythm. Refuse the Hour is immensely enjoyable, but I question the critical positioning of Kentridge as an equal among those whose work he so effectively sews together.

Perth International Arts Festival 2016, Refuse the Hour, by William Kentridge, composer Philip Miller, dancer Dada Masilo, video design Catherine Meyburgh; Perth Concert Hall, 12-14 Feb

Dance in Francophone countries has held its own interests for a while, separate from the lineages we are more familiar with in Australia (butoh, American postmodern and the German Tanztheater). It is characterised, I would naively generalise, by a movement away from the body and towards philosophy, concept. Through the efforts of the formerly Paris-based Artistic Director of Melbourne’s Dancehouse, Angela Conquet, we have been exposed to important French choreographers—recently Xavier Le Roy and Boris Charmatz (who will deliver the keynote address for the 2016 Biennale of Sydney). Still, immersing oneself in Francophone dance is always like attempting to converse in a slightly foreign language, with the realisation that dictionary knowledge sometimes falls short in a real conversation.

Kevin Trappeniers, Asymptote

Théâtre de L’L is one of Brussels’ most important independent venues for dance, with an emphasis on research and exploration (as well as posting performances online as a small part of their annual program). It was in this generous context that I saw young artist Kevin Trappeniers’ Asymptote, a product of long research into dance (or rather, in his words, “wordless performance”) as an exercise in creating a multisensory landscape on stage.

Asymptote, in mathematics, is a line to which a curve approaches ever closer, without ever touching, and the dance I saw used lighting, bodies, sound and space to create a number of such slow movements towards and away from unity and clarity. A body resting in front of a mirror, in almost total darkness, splits apart into two dancers. It is extraordinary to note, later on, that the bodies which appeared identical are not even of the same sex, let alone physically alike.

From this moment of closeness, the male and the female dancer start to diverge. Unison movement splits into dissenting limbs. The scenes morph at snail’s pace, but the tension is intoxicating. By the end of the work, an hour later, the man is walking into a wall of bright light, the woman standing apart. The landscape of a medieval purgatory, an in-between place hard to represent because hard to imagine, has been transformed into a harshly contoured industrial hell.

Asymptote is the work of a young maker, but one who knows how to control his weaknesses. The stage landscape of Asymptote is held together less by choreographic mastery of body, or conceptual mastery of themes, than by the rigid chiaroscuro of the lighting, which imposes an extremely strict control on what the audience sees and perceives. The barren, purgatory-like landscape of a stage is revealed, as the light rises, to be no more than a heap of magnetic tape—and yet, as long as the light controls our perception, it is more ominous than anything I have seen.

Indeed, ‘control’ is the key word in trying to explain the qualities of this work, which offers very little playfulness. There is an unmistakable visual reference to northern European religious art, of the Matthias Grünewald sort: limbs are chiselled out of darkness, classical poses abound. And just as in medieval representations of crucifixion, a macabre selective lighting is used to camouflage a technical ignorance of the material represented. Where another purely visual painter of stage, like Philippe Duquesne, may use the same ingredients of space, flesh, objects, and silence, to build and dismantle entire worlds of associations without losing a light touch, Trappeniers must hold us in a choke to achieve the same effect.

Daniel Léveillé, Solitudes Duos

Montreal-based Daniel Léveillé is at the other end of his career: he has had an independent choreographic practice since before Trappeniers was born, and his Solitudes Duos showed precisely the playfulness and confident fluidity that is lacking in Asymptote, a playfulness that comes from mastery of material. (This is not to say that Trappeniers should be compared to Léveillé: rather, that watching dance works in a sequence makes one ponder the artistic qualities that come at different stages of an artist’s creative practice.)

Solitudes Duos builds on Léveillé’s multi-award winning Solitudes Solo, a work which marked a change of direction for the choreographer after a decade of intense exploration of nudity in performance. As in the Solos, the dancers are dressed only in briefs: it is a gesture, however minimal, that shifts focus from the muscular expression of the individual body and towards the interaction of two bodies between each other and with the music.

It takes a while to understand what Solitudes Duos is about, as pairs of dancers—two men, two women, man and woman—appear in six parts, composed carefully to six musical pieces, starting with Bach and ending with The Beatles. Each duet brings two bodies into a relationship that seems not illustrated, but decided, by the music: synchronicity and distance in Baroque gives rise to tight interlocking and the embraces of rock’n’roll. It is as if the historical era, via its musical production, enables or limits the intimacy and interaction between two bodies. There is creeping, crawling, enmeshment, slow descent into each others’ arms, frenzied seated hugs; there is politesse, formality, first love, throes of passion, power struggles. It seems like every possibility of the duet form is explored in these six choreographies, but all the technical virtuosity accumulates without offering a theme until the very end.

The movement becomes increasingly athletic and tricky: dancers jumping onto and spinning each other; complex interlockings; until eventually, and not without humour, the man is suspending a woman, her belly balancing on his shoulder, every limb spread, to the incessant repeating riffs of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”, John Lennon’s passionate ode to Yoko Ono, one of the greatest songs about the weight of desire on one’s soul.

In a lesser choreographer’s hands, this would be the apex of glib, but Solitudes Duos comes together, spectacularly and masterfully, in that culminating moment, showing the rawness of two bodies held together by invisible threads of emotion, desire and intent.

It is as if all of humanity is nakedly displayed on stage, regardless of how clothed Léveillé’s dancers are. The philosophical musing on sociability and desire, so French to my eyes, re-acknowledges the body as fact: limiting and enabling. Employing the same precision with which his dancers catch each other mid-tricky-flight, Daniel Léveillé lets the conceptual threads of the choreography come apart, and the work ‘works.’ It may take decades of practice for Kevin Trappeniers to develop the same lightness of touch.

Asymptote, concept, direction Kevin Trappeniers, performers Manon Avermaete, Kevin Trappeniers, L’L – Brussels Dance!, Brussels 23–25 Sept, 2015; Asymptote will be performed at Arts Centre De Werf in Bruges (BE) on October 12, 2016.

Solitudes duos, choreography Daniel Léveillé, performers Mathieu Campeau, Ellen Furey, Esther Gaudette, Justin Gionet, Brianna Lombardo, Emmanuel Proulx, Simon Renaud, Faits d’hiver festival, Théâtre de la Cité internationale, Paris 25-26 Jan

On her acerbic, off-the-cuff podcast, I Seem Fun, comedian Jen Kirkman regularly riffs on the modern annoyance of being forced to engage in customer service small talk so gratuitous it becomes ridiculous, involving both participants in a meaningless charade of sincerity. Kirkman would surely sympathise with the protagonist of Anomalisa, Michael Stone, a motivational speaker specialising in customer relations who, despite his occupation, reacts to every customer service platitude with terseness and a growing sense of alienation.

The erosion of authenticity in relationships is at the fore of Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s Kafkaesque fable for our corporatised age. The painstaking craftsmanship of stop-motion animation, so often used to depict fairy tales, proves the perfect medium for heightening the dreamlike subjectivity Kaufman so favours: that sensation of the unreal coexisting with the real. The world of Anomalisa is warm-hued and fuzzy-edged as Michael is propelled through the soft, anonymous surrounds of plane, airport, taxi and hotel—those contemporary limbos in which the film’s action occurs.

All the characters have sturdy figures and clearly segmented faces, like masks—a not insignificant fact as the film progresses. Despite this, Michael’s face, with its frequently furrowed brow, has a realistic and moving expressiveness, contrasting with the crash test dummy-like blandness of every other visage he encounters. As he exits the airport, listening to Delibes’ opera Lakmé through headphones (sung not by sopranos but by an undistinguished male voice) the realisation dawns that there’s something very strange going on in Michael’s world—yet something strangely familiar.

It’s a world—here represented by an animated Cincinnati—characterised by the rote phrases that mediate commercial interactions everywhere: the safety instructions on the plane, the commonplace courtesies of the hotel staff. Everything relates to marketing: for the taxi driver, the Flower Duet from Lakmé is a British Airways ad and nothing more. The ubiquity of all this corporatese is soporific, stultifying; ultimately horrifying. Parts of Anomalisa are particularly reminiscent of that scene in Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovitch (scripted by Kaufman) where the eponymous actor steps through the portal into his own head, only to flee moments later from the hideous proliferation of selves that confront him.

Crashing through the uniformity comes Lisa, a character whose spontaneity and individuality seems to embody what Michael has been missing until this moment. Her anomalous appearance, contrasted with the film’s cultivation of oppressive sameness, has the impact of a miracle. In a continuation of the film’s commercial refrain, however, she’s also in a sense Michael’s client, an employee of a snack food company here to see him present his talk on customer service. Might Lisa represent an escape for Michael from the banality that torments him?

For almost its entirety, Anomalisa is a journey inside one person’s head (echoes of Malkovitch again) that leaves us pondering universal questions. How genuine are our relationships? Can love really set us free, or are we ultimately prisoners of our own minds? “I’ve been running for a long time,” Michael says. As underlined by the perpetuated triteness in the title of his book, How may I help you help them?, there’s a strong suggestion Michael Stone will never outrun this hell of his own making.

Anomalisa, directors Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson, writer Charlie Kaufman, cinematography Joe Passarelli, art direction John Joyce, editing Garret Elkins, score Carter Burwell, distributor Paramount, 2015

Visceral is one of the first words to spring to mind when experiencing the works of Dani Marti, peering into layers and layers of necklaces, circular mounds of twisted reflectors, fecund protrusions of scourers and densely woven rope. The show really hits home, however, with the video works that are uncompromising in their almost abject viscerality.

Currently showing at Fremantle Arts Centre is a solo exhibition by Marti titled Black Sun, the first time his work has been seen here in such depth and diversity. The title refers to both the literal and metaphorical layers of darkness within the works, which hold you with their physical materiality and psychological resonance.

The exhibition includes a number of works from the series Mother. Here Marti has collected thousands of necklaces and painstakingly woven them into dense tapestries. The traditional feminine craft practices of weaving and macramé he was taught as a boy in Spain come to fruition here, reclaimed as contemporary art. The necklaces are intentionally selected as personal and intimate objects, having been worn so close to the skin. The works have stories and memories embedded in them. Together they also constitute a kind of memorial portraiture of women, acknowledging their history and a mother—Marti’s own. In the same room, on the floor, a television monitor displays a video work titled Llorana in which Marti’s mother is recorded listening to a piece of music, immersed in it to the point of tears, releasing her anxiety about her impending death.

Already with this abstract series of bead works and the related video, there is a sense of the intimate, of tangled flesh and personal relationships. Marti’s broader practice revolves around questions of identity, the self and the many possible threads of experience, struggle and existence. The relationship with his mother is a central theme, as are relationships in general. Marti is fascinated by their formation, their various idiosyncrasies and the disclosure of moments of intimacy.

In a project titled Notes for Bob [a work developed during an Australia Council residency in New York in 2012; Eds], Marti sought out a gay, blind man for the purpose of exploring intimacy and acknowledging sexuality despite disability. He met Bob, who became sexually aroused by a close embrace when sitting on Marti’s lap and guiding the artist to sing specific notes. The resulting video is physically confrontational and potentially ethically troubling—do we have the right to gaze upon such vulnerability? Deeply sensitive in the way it is filmed, it is technically, cinematically exquisite and in its quasi-documentary style Bob appears as the one in control with Marti submissive to his demands.

This project extends to another room occupied by a series of yellow and white polyester and nylon abstract works. Here a sound element is added, where the notes that so appealed to Bob are sung by 21 gay male volunteers, aged 17-72, in New York. As part of his engagement with Bob, Marti made this recording and gave it to him, gifting him the experience of ongoing stimulation and connection with the gay community.

It is this kind of complex, interwoven, fetishistic narrative of personal entanglements that drives many of Marti’s works, making them both brutal and aesthetically striking. He effectively communicates a sense of closeness to his subjects, to the point of claustrophobia. For the Black Sun exhibition a new work was commissioned. Titled Prelude 1, it is a large, bulging circle of customised corner cube reflectors [three-sided glass prisms; EDs] and glass beads. It conveys the layers of darkness, layers of shimmering black that are alluded to in the idea of a black sun. Its clash of beauty and ugliness makes it both attractive—because of its dark pearly allure—yet repulsive, given its writhing, medusa-like materiality.

The obsessiveness in Black Sun gets under your skin, forcing a confrontation with the very real presence of bodies in the world. The works traverse multiple paths of meaning from the maternal relationship to the darker realms of various sexual encounters. Marti refers to his practice as Baroque Minimalism. The word Baroque originates from the Portuguese term ‘barroco’ or Spanish ‘barrueco,’ both of which translate as misshapen or imperfect pearl. This image of a pearl, all shiny and opulent, as distorted and flawed, is a fitting point of entry for considering Dani Marti’s works. They exhibit all the drama, exuberance and tension of the Baroque within the tight frame of Minimalism—outrageous excess contained.

Pitting art against science rarely does favours to either, but when the science is of the mad variety and the art follows its own rigorous surrealist logic? That’s a fight that may be worth betting on. Or, at least, that’s what I was thinking throughout a recent show at La Mama which was by turns baffling and welcoming, generous and alienating. POINT 8 SIX is a work that is deliberately broken, and it challenges its viewer to reconstruct something from the pieces. There’s a sense that that assemblage will take as many different forms as there are audience members.

I’ve followed writer Tim Wotherspoon’s work for several years, over which he has demonstrated a sustained interest in the tactility of language, the way words can be played against one another like billiard balls and whether meaning or nonsense can result from accidental collisions and unexpected associations. Here he has produced an intriguing premise that puts that kind of experimentation into context, though it takes some time to get to.

Wotherspoon himself plays a crazed scientist in 2142 (I think) who has been tasked with sending operatives back in time to eliminate two genius sisters responsible for some kind of revolution that seems to extend to the breakdown of reality itself. We’re dumped right in the thick of this, with bizarre fragmentary dialogue, characters in time loops, alternate realities overlapping and metatheatrical devices juggled in at whim. That nothing makes a lick of sense for so long is very much mitigated by the fact that much of it is still entertaining—director Kirsten von Bibra maintains a shaggy-dog-story mood through which all of this seems to be going somewhere, if we only stick with it. Everyone overplays their roles with scenery-chewing glee, most notably Adam Cass as the idiot American would-be hero sent into the past again and again, eventually suffering “temporal spread” and scattering all over the spacetime continuum.

Early in the work the audience is addressed as ‘the system’ and positioned as a network of computers, and it’s possible that the strangeness of what we’re witnessing is just about what an intelligent machine would make of the messiness of human interaction. In the fallout is an East German army captain from 1971 who comes into possession of some David Bowie records from the future, and while this thread seems more indulgent than the rest—Wotherspoon admits he was listening to Bowie’s Berlin trilogy throughout the writing process—it’s also concrete enough to allow the observer some anchor amid all the narrative fractals.

The shredding of spacetime along with some serious damage to the sanity of the players gives Wotherspoon ample reason to mess around with language. Someone “talks like a bowl of Alsatians” while another complains, “You two sound like my ears.” There’s much delight behind this linguistic play, and a final opening out of the theatre itself sent an equally cheery ripple through the audience. It’s rare to find a theatremaker who trusts the crowd enough to throw them so far from the shore of sense, but reassuring that those behind this production are up to the task of reeling us back in.

Red Stitch’s The Village Bike is another production with a great deal of faith in its audience. The work, by UK playwright Penelope Skinner, shifts from hilarious to confronting and back again without warning, and cunningly merges British sex farce with dark psychological drama.

The central figure is Becky, a young pregnant woman who has recently moved to a rural village with her husband. She’s one of the more fascinatingly ambiguous characters in recent memory, and one bound to incite powerful responses. A third of the way in I heard a voice behind me mutter, “I don’t think I like her at all…” and half an hour later followed up with an angry, “Now I’ve just about had enough of her!”

Becky’s pregnancy has coincided with a sudden blooming of sexual desire but partner John spurns her advances, preferring to bury himself in parenting books. She turns to porn for relief but soon takes up with a local Lothario and begins an increasingly destructive affair that includes rape fantasies, a young girl forced by necessity into prostitution and a kind of emotional abuse of a local tradesman.

Skinner seems to be consciously playing with the discord between various narratives of female sexual liberation—from Lady Chatterley’s Lover to bodice rippers—and the dangers of blurring fantasies and reality. The work is aware of the long, long tradition of women punished for expressing desire, but it doesn’t soften its conclusion with any type of redemption, either. It comes dangerously close to a morality tale, in fact, though where fault lies is left painfully open to debate.

If Becky’s choices both challenge the viewer while begging our empathy, husband John is a kind of caring villain of the sort I’ve not seen on a stage before. His attempts to provide for Becky eventually amount to controlling behaviour, and while he insists that caring is all that he does it comes across as patting a dog to death. That his partner may have any sort of interior life doesn’t seem to factor into his thinking, and neither does the possibility that she may know her body better than his books do.

The play was first read by the company some years ago and its difficulties—both thematically and in the large stage it demands—meant that it was shelved. But it lingered in company members’ minds enough that they had to present it, in the end, and the work will no doubt stay with its audiences, for better or worse or, more likely, a little of both.

POINT 8 SIX, writer Tim Wotherspoon, director Kirsten von Bibra, lighting Kris Chainey; La Mama, 10-21 Feb; The Village Bike, writer Penelope Skinner, director Ngaire Dawn Fair, design Sophie Woodward, lighting Clare Springett, music & sound Ian Moorhead; Red Stitch Actors Theatre, Melbourne, 2 Feb-5 March

EXIT (2008-2015) installation view. Collection Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris © Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Mark Hansen, Laura Kurgan and Ben Rubin,in collaboration with Robert Gerard Pietrusko and Stewart Smith

Paris, France. The Palais de Tokyo—an ostentatious ground zero for Contemporary Art. You enter a darkened circular room, about five metres in diameter. No seats, so you plonk yourself down on the black carpet. A loud sub-harmonic drone will continue for 45 minutes while you move your head around to watch a 360º computer animation, continually evolving from left to right, projected from a metre off the floor rising up to a low ceiling. The animation is in six sections, each being a dramatic data-scape of global activity.

Time and again, the screen rolls out a wire-frame-style global map in what looks like the standard Gall Stereographic design. Reams of data stream across the inverted screenic cylinder in which you are interred. The point conjectured continually is that the fluxive state of the world’s territories is defined not by geography or even borders, but by the movement between those zones by migrants and refugees, be they welcomed, employed, displaced, terrorised, interred, settled or expelled. Their shifting presence is charted by a suite of markers manifesting their transient occupancy in those six sections: (i) Population Shifts: Cities; (ii) Remittances: Sending Money Home; (iii) Political Refugees and Forced Migration; (iv) Natural Catastrophes; (v) Rising Seas, Sinking Cities; (vi) Speechless and Deforestation.

Titled EXIT and based on quotes from Paul Virilio’s Stop Eject (2010), it’s a prestigious immersive data visualisation of the frightening momentum of transmigratory changes in ‘the world.’ The result is a mix of futurologist trend-casting, statistical white paper reporting to agitate government policy, theoretical discoursing on the rootless identity resulting from such flux and indeterminacy, and a good dose of Cold War-era spookery for those who get scared at just the mention of the word ‘future.’ Each of the animation’s six sections has been precisely mapped and motioned in accordance with data which has been statistically recorded, encoded, analysed, translated and extrapolated into the near future, utilising a variety of motion effects which literally remap a panoramic image of the global map.

The production itself is formidable, wrangling not only the data but the crew assembled for its materialisation: philosophical ‘urbanist’ Paul Virilio, artists/architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, architect-artist Laura Kurgan and statistician-artist Mark Hansen, plus additional input from even more scientists and geographers. EXIT’s six parts build upon the first four, initially exhibited as Stop Eject in 2008 at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. With its big concepts writ large, EXIT ultimately smacks of grandstanding, intimidation and the type of passive-aggressive address to which so much politically committed art succumbs despite its often laudable concerns. Reviewing the installation within a contemporary art space—and considering that so many of its producers insist on hyphenating their role with the word ‘artist’—warrants an assessment of what art is occurring here if any, and why it can or cannot be detected.

Feeling like a child seated in the dark at a high school hi-tech geoscience presentation, I am not at all impressed by the avalanches, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions of numbingly symbolic data which drive EXIT’s data simulation. Firstly, it plays the cheap trick that contemporary art continues to fall for due to its infatuation with being contemporary above all else: verifiable statistics are presented to determine outcomes in form, tone and visualisation, as if nothing is being ‘interpreted.’ The implication detourned through Foucault is that ‘the artist is dead’ and is now merely the conduit for passing along data researched from the world. This reality effect rarely escapes its own semiotic limitations. In EXIT’s dour anti-aesthetic visualisation, we get throbbing red for patches of burning forests (plus the sound of crackling); wavy numerical data for cities’ rising sea levels (plus the sound of glooping); national flags being eaten into for their currency being propped up by external exchanges (plus the sound of crumbling); and so on. It’s not much different from watching the news on TV.

Secondly, EXIT attempts a harshly ahistorical revision of centuries of artistic interpretation born of egocentric drive, by concocting an artsy take on McLuhan’s notions of mediation to present data ‘inartistically’ in order to let the facts speak for themselves. Its evocation of rollercoaster New York Stock Exchange data porn is as vulgar and delusional as U2 concert video banks. Plus its solitary bass drone is the work’s most tacky manipulation, using the same spook-fx of PlayStation shoot-em-ups, Hollywood dystopian sci-fi and ominous theatre sound design for international arts festivals. Here, symbolically, it bluntly declares the absence of music in the work to be the reality of our dehumanising world. Peddling ‘hard’ statistics in an art context—while claiming to be creating art like some newborn Duchamp—borders on insulting in the way the art hides behind statistics for fear of being rejected on purely personal, emotional, persuasive and anxious grounds.

The salient issue here is EXIT’s data visualisation implicitly escaping visual linguistics and semiotics. Undoubtedly, the hyper-vector fx-atomisation meta-algorithmic software for digital effects of today achieves its reality effect not via artist manipulation of renderable veneers, but by sheer complexity of pixel actioning and motioning which can be programmed to behave according to physical properties, modulations and simulations. However, this face-off between computer simulation and data visualisation unexpectedly echoes 19th century debates. Back then, the arguments were over Academic art (think Bouguereau, Cabanel, Makart, Gerôme) which strove to perfectly render and replicate the ideal essence of form, and Realist art (think Goya, Courbet, Millet, Corinth) which opposed art looking at its own techniques and surfaces rather than acknowledging the outside world and forging a way to depict its actuality. Paris is full of amazing museum collections which include both these politicised arguments in image-making. Hindsight allows one to be less fierce with judgement: Academic art is full of allusions to critical textuality and medium-based problematics, while Realist art can be utterly pompous and deluded in its grasp of the real.

Hindsight is absent in EXIT: it has its eyes fixed so firmly on a frightful future its persuasive data-visualisation borders on a digital recoding of Stalinist social realism. Paul Virilio is undoubtedly eloquent with his long-standing notions of speed being a material which shapes contemporary life, and is now angsting (just like Courbet et al) over how he can best represent the world outside as it flashes by. But like politicians painting landscapes on Sunday afternoons, EXIT is as audiovisually engaging as an Excel spreadsheet. Before entering the darkened 19th century panopticon-cum-zoetrope theatre to be regaled by the statistical apparitions of EXIT, one views a short vertical flat-screen film of Virilio (dressed, like all male intellectuals, as if they’re going fly-fishing somewhere in nature) walking along a cobble-stone boardwalk next to some idyllic Mediterranean seascape, waxing lyrical about crises, citizens, nomads, sedentaires, geopolitics and ultracities. As I listened to his ambling feet on pavement stones next to lapping waves, a phrase from another era came to mind: “Sous les paves, la plage!” (“Under the stones, the beach!”) Rethinking May ‘68 here with EXIT, I wondered how much he and the EXIT team thought about the very ground under their feet.

EXIT was timed to correspond with COP21, the United Nations Conference on Climate Change. See also Sumugan Sivanesan’s vivid report on the Paris Climate Games and Minneapolis-based Northern Lights’ survey of exhibitions, installations and video works in ARTCOP21.

There’s that tired analogy: the dancer is the paint to the choreographer’s canvas. Sigh. For a medium that is activated by the people who perform it, it seems that dancers are often relegated to compositional elements—the choreographer just splashing and dabbing them into shape—rather than artists in their own right. Once, in a group conversation, a prominent Melbourne arts writer was surprised to learn that dancers sometimes even “contribute to the choreography.” Suppressing that same exasperated sigh, we all politely informed her that this happens all the time.

I spoke with Miguel Gutierrez, an artist who cringes at the limited titles of choreographer or dancer, although he reputedly claims both. He was about to present a trilogy of works, collectively titled Age & Beauty, at New York Live Arts. “I just get so bored of the fact that we can’t accept interdisciplinarity now without making a big stink about it. So many choreographers are also writers or are also painters.”

Having been friends with Miguel for several years, I feel compelled to refer to him by his first name. In arts writing, this familiarity is sometimes frowned upon. I have found it impossible to divorce intimacy from dance and criticism, and prefer it that way. Miguel also has foregrounded intimacy and personal relationships throughout his body of work, and Age & Beauty has focused that interest.

“I feel like it’s always, in a way, how I start. From thinking about who the people should be, and how they are in the work, that’s always where it goes. And then I think—in the writing of some fucking grant [application]—I was talking about how this assembly of people is sort of like my idea of a future notion of a dance company, or something…knowing that the cast would be this kind of motley crew of folks [and] that I wanted to foreground the idea that ‘Here is a group of dancers. This is the dance. These are the dancers.’”

We dancers refer to the “body,” as if there is one essential body universally possessed, rather than distinct people with different histories, character and autonomy. A dancer’s moment of execution is exactly the thing we observe; their own artistry revealed. Why then should it seem strange to centre conversation around a dance work on the dancer who danced it?

In Part 1 of Age & Beauty—Mid-Career Artist/Suicide Note or &:-/, there is Mickey Mahar—a 20-something, translucently white, avian male, his aloofness disguising sexual hunger. With no warning he is four feet in the air, unsure of how he will find the floor again, his limbs cartoonishly long. Mickey makes for a deliberately strange coupling with Miguel.

“I also think of the old adage, that the quickest way to see the difference between two people is to make them do the same thing. Right? So I love how it highlights this insane difference between Mickey and me. A place that Mickey and I really meet is in our shared interest in this hyper-specificity. You know, like anal let’s-go-for-it kind of dancing, because he was trained as an Irish step dancer. And he’s incredible—he’s like champion calibre.”

Boulé’s reputation precedes her. Her work is performance and when she is at work you marvel at it. It’s hard to detect a trace of self-consciousness because she’s so attentive to the job of performing. In Part 2 she performs the entirety of her role from Miguel’s Last Meadow (2009), including her now-famous James Dean impersonation, all in hyper fast motion. It’s a race between her and the work. Inexplicably, she never falters, arriving in precarious place after place with utmost assurance at lightning speed. How does she arrange herself for a half-second and imprint the wholeness of that moment in your mind, and do this every second?

“It’s become almost alarming to me when I see dancers who don’t seem to have any kind of self-consciousness around that. Everyone’s between 25 and 35, often they’re all white, certain kind of body, and even a practice that feels uniformly shared. It just seems kind of strange, that that’s just an inherited idea.

“At some point it became interesting for me to really look to theatre and to film as a kind of inspiration for how casting is thought of, where you’re getting these specific, different people to fulfil different visual representations. Because, of course, visual representation is a part of (Ha! ‘a part of!!’)—an enormous part of the experience when you’re an audience member.

“But I feel like we’re just entering this moment where it’s impossible to not think about who we place on stage. It just feels so major to me. Especially in this moment of discussion of representational politics in this country with the Black Lives Matter movement and especially in queer politics—the emergence of transgender discourse becoming really the frontline. It just feels like as far as I’m concerned we’re forever shifted. And dance can choose to stay behind or move with it, you know? Or even advance it, I’m not sure yet.”

This article has been distilled by Rennie McDougall from a conversation with Miguel Gutierrez which appeared on Culturebot.

Read Jana Perkovic’s vivid account of DEEP AEROBICS, in which “Gutierrez employs every weapon in the arsenal of immersive performance to create a collective dance experience…that soon [has] us rather un-self-consciously dancing, touching walls, rolling on the floor, fondling each other and undressing to a serious level of nudity as the space heats up.”

Miguel Gutierrez, Age & Beauty Parts 1, 2, and 3, New York Live Arts, Sept 16- 26, 2015

However stylised, folk dance inevitably follows a basic walking pattern. The foot may flex, stomp or hover but, as choreographer Russell Dumas used to say, dancing is so often a matter of left-right, left-right. Pichet Klunchun’s Dancing with Death (see video) is no exception. Large figures move through the audience to rhythmic, melodic Thai music. They wear masks and sport garish, psychedelic outfits woven from bright nylon threads. But they walk just like us…bipedally. The Gods have come to Earth. They are playful and plentiful. Swaying from left to right, they tread lightly on the land of men and women.

The music gives way to high pitched sound, an amplified tinnitus that ruptures the folksiness. The figures retreat. We enter an abstract space and time, able now to focus on the solitary shape that dominates the space.

A twisted ellipse rises and falls, creating a perpetual, deformed, oval pathway for the dancers who enter one by one and slowly walk in a daisy chain of continuous action. The work becomes durational, quietly existential. While everyone treads the same path (of existence), there is room for individual expression: a woman skips joyfully, a man lunges, another arches backwards. There is thus a play between the personal and the impersonal.

When the dancers come together they exert a palpable force, the force of common humanity. After a while, a handful of the dancers swoops along the sloped pathway, slowly turning at its peak to swoop down again. This is where the technical challenges of the piece become apparent. These dancers are classically trained. Their daily practice is conducted on flat ground, whereas this set design calls for the ability to manage its changing gradient. The dancers struggle with this: we see the tension in their faces, heads and necks and in certain mannerisms—defensive habits.

Pichet Klunchun displays none of this. His body is at one with the rise and fall of the oval pathway. There is no mannerism, nothing personal, just consummate skill. His gestures—the continuous rolling of hands and arms—offer an experience of pure duration. In a work that addresses life and death, this is key. We the audience need to feel the spaciousness of time, the universality of matter. Klunchun is at once godlike in his dancing yet human in the need to compose himself, to achieve what he wants to achieve. He is mortal like us.

There is another way of looking at the dancers’ difficulties with this piece, beyond the criticism that the work is not yet settled in highly skilled bodies, and that is that these dancers are in the midst of life, encountering that which lies beyond the known. If the work is not a theatrical representation of life in the face of death, but rather a lived enunciation of it, then perhaps we can accept their struggle. They are like us and we are like them.

Dancing with Death is situated in the spiritual everyday. It boasts liminal figures: gods and the godlike. The work ends with the return of the folkloric gods. Yes we die but that’s not all. Existence is fringed with the incorporeal, a beyond that appears in our peripheral vision. This is something we may feel but cannot know for sure.

Dancing with Death was commissioned by Esplanade—Theatres on the Bay (Singapore) and co-produced by Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama 2016 Executive Committee, Arts Centre Melbourne and Adelaide Festival Centre OzAsia Festival.

Pichet Klunchun Dance Company, Dancing with Death, choreography Pichet Klunchun; Kanagawa Arts Theatre, Yokohama, Japan, 7 Feb

Over 300 years of hard-won rights (read AC Grayling’s Towards the Light or Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights, both 2007) are being eroded every year by neoliberal governments in the name of endless growth, lower taxes, heightened security and deregulation, the latter creating a new kind of ramped up ‘free market’ which erodes the likes of copyright and an artist’s right to be properly remunerated. Copyright (established in the form of England’s Copyright Act of 1709) entails many complications (hence intellectual property lawyers). Here are two stories about rights and complications that we came upon recently.

The first appears to involve a standard problem: the licensee might not have secured the right licence. But the resolution was odd. Publisher Samuel French, the licenser of performing rights for the Harold Pinter estate, informed The Wooster Group that the rights to perform a preview of the writer’s first play, The Room [1957], in New York did not extend to Los Angeles where the work was due to be premiered. This was then modified: perform it, but ‘it must not be reviewed’—an artistic and marketing challenge for The Wooster Group and a restraint on the freedom of the press.

The second story, which also involves Samuel French, is stranger. The publisher and Dramatist Play Services [DPT] sent a ‘cease and desist’ letter to Gay City, producer of That’swhatshesaid. Playwright Courtney Meaker has taken text and stage directions from the most successful plays of 2014-15, all but two by men, and ‘cut and pasted’ them into a critique of current male writing about women and the challenges for actresses who take on the roles. (Accounts of the performance suggest that Jen Pike is an artist to watch out for.)

Gay City’s attorney Jeff Nelson has mounted a fascinating fair use case, stating in particular that the use of the writers’ plays is “transformative,” that Meaker is not copying or appropriating them.

Australian artists have done battle with the Samuel Beckett estate, as have their international peers, and Belvoir with the Arthur Miller estate over director Simon Stone’s changing the end of Death of a Salesman. It’s not inconceivable that sooner or later we might have a case like Samuel French and DPT versus the makers of That’swhatshesaid, given an increasing number of theatrical works no longer comprise just storytelling, but make rhetorical, often political statements that draw on the public, governmental, theatrical and literary record. Appropriation grows more complex. RT

Cerita Anak (Child’s Story) Project, Polyglot Theatre, Papermoon Puppet Theatre

How many times have you heard it said that a conference was okay but the real work was going on in between-sessions socialising? In sociology the distinction has long been made between overt (or manifest) and latent functions. The latter is often unintended let alone understood or quantified. These days arts festivals and conferences strive to exploit this latency with ever more supplementary and central events that mimic informal social exchange—the ‘extra curricular’ activities, as 2016 Australian Performing Arts Market Program Manager Dave Sleswick puts it. I spoke by phone with Sleswick about his task and the innovations he and APAM are bringing to it.

Describe your role for me.
As Program Producer I assist with the management of the overall program, with all of the Showcases, but I also curate the Exchange, a program of ‘extracurricular’ activities, I guess. This involves all of the keynotes and panel sessions.

There’ve been a lot of changes in the Australian arts over the last 18 months and what we’re trying to do is to put the art and the ideas front and centre, to make this APAM really about generating new relationships and new dialogues and showing the rest of the world that the Australian art scene is very strong and vibrant with a lot to offer.

What forms do these events take?
The primary focus is around networking and building relationships. There are encounters where we provide opportunities for artists, producers and presenters to meet one-on-one. There are small group networks where people are able to throw ideas back and forth. Those groups are generally based around a specific country or art-form or a particular idea or socially relevant topic. For example a roundtable might be about touring in a particular country.

Which countries are in focus this year?
New Zealand is our right hand in this endeavour. [Beyond that relationship] we have a particular focus on South Korea and on Canada. These relationships have stemmed from our engagement at different levels of government and with stakeholders but also the long-term partnership that Australia has built with South Korea over the last 10-15 years. Korea’s proving to be one of our biggest partners. Our relationship with Canada this year is also very strong, as the Australia Council has been paying particular attention to working with international First Nations people both in terms of presenters and artists.

In APAM 2016 we have a massive delegation of First Nations New Zealander, Maori and Pasifika artists and presenters as well as a huge North American First Nations delegation. That conversation with Canada around their First Nations people has provided a catalyst for our growing relationship with Canadian artists and with the Canada Council for the Arts as well.

You mentioned “socially relevant topics.”
Something that I have been putting a huge focus on in this market is socially engaged art practices and works that push the boundaries of what art or performance is and sometimes bridge the line between art and activism. As a part of that conversation I’ve engaged three artists-in-residence. One is from Sydney, one from Brisbane and one from Toronto. All of their practices are about engaging with communities, tackling socially relevant issues, working in the public sphere. One of the key ideas in having these artists as part of the program is to interrogate institutions and their role when talking about dealing with politically and socially engaged work that maybe sits outside of venues. How do you maintain integrity between programs? What are the kinds of things that venues and presenters need to do before programming this kind of work or before engaging with artists who aim to instigate social change?

That venues issue figured prominently in discussion at the recent Dana Waranara Convergence in Brisbane. How will your artists-in-residence be involved in the Exchange program?
They’ll be present at APAM the whole time, give keynote addresses and appear on a variety of panels. There are two key events as part of the Artist in Residence program. Sydney-based artist Lenine Bourke works with children and young people and so we’ve invited a delegation of children to the market—something we haven’t done at APAM before. We should have about 15 eight- to 12-year-olds as young delegates and their job within the market is to see work that is designed for them. One of Australia’s largest exports is theatre for young audiences—we’re right up there with the rest of the world in terms of making it but when you’re in a marketplace like APAM it’s usually all adults.

So children will then talk to adults about what they felt about the works?
Yes, and it’s also about [them] coming into this place where everything is being taken very seriously and being a high-pressured environment for a lot of artists. We think that having a delegation of young people present and active in the market will be such a joy. It’s going to make delegates stop for a second and view what they’re doing through the eyes of very young people with the world in front of them. These are the kind of things we’re trying to put in place to keep the art present.

Who are the three artists-in-residence?
Lenine Bourke, as mentioned, Toronto’s Darren O’Donnell, Director of Mammalian Diving Reflex (the company that brought us Haircuts by Children in 2008 and All The Sex I’ve Ever Had, 2016, both for the Sydney Festival) and Nathan Stoneham, a Brisbane-based artist who works a lot with queer audiences and young people. He also works with South Korean artists and people from other cultures. The three of them have spent time mentoring and being mentored by each other. They [comprise] another overarching framework to the Exchange program. I really want delegates to think about legacy and the idea that decisions we make here at this market are what we’re going to leave behind. So I thought that these three artists-in-residence who are all socially engaged and involved in community, who have all had some level of mentoring and are all at different stages of their careers [could deliver] really neat way of threading these major curatorial ideas together.

Who will deliver the keynote addresses this year?
Four arts leaders, hosted by Wesley Enoch. One of the speakers is Darren O’Donnell from Toronto and the others are Indigenous writer-performer Nakkiah Lui from Sydney, writer-curator Willoh S Weiland from Aphids in Melbourne and we have Kee Hong Low, a curator and policy planner from West Kowloon Cultural Province in Hong Kong. They’ll all have the same provocation [about legacy] and all will come at it from very different backgrounds and perspectives. It should make an interesting and, I hope, fiery start to the whole market.

It sounds like a great program, moving away from simply selling shows to providing big contexts and ideas.
People are coming here to buy and sell but my big question is what is it we’re selling and what are we buying? Is it just ‘product’ or are we buying ideas or visions for the future? Are we investing in creating relationships that are going to last for the next 15 years? What are [presenters, producers] actually doing here besides just trying to organise tours?

I see you’ve made room for a few heightened social events.
Yes, there’s a bit of partying. To be honest, the organisers of this event have been to many markets and we know that often the best way to do things is by making friends in social situations, so we try to create environments where that kind of thing can happen.

Let’s talk about a couple of intriguing works on the program, like Cerita Anak (Child’s Story).
It’s going to be presented as a pitch at APAM. It’s by Polyglot Theatre from Melbourne and Papermoon Puppet Theatre Company from Indonesia. They’re doing a co-production of a work that’s in development—an interactive and intimate performance for young people that’s based on stories from Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Australia. This is a great example of some of the work that’s coming through APAM and the kind of work that Australians are producing at the moment as part of this trend towards cross-cultural collaboration.

What’s involved in the pitching sessions?
Artists and companies are given the opportunity to talk for seven minutes before taking questions. They can use audiovisual elements as well. The pitches give the delegates a chance to get quick, sharp shots of new ideas, the next projects that are happening. They’re for works that don’t exist yet. There are 15 all up, divided into three groups of five. The first group is for works that have a premiere date planned—the idea is happening, they’ve done a few creative developments, the work hasn’t happened but they’ve got a solid first plan. The next grouping is that the artists have perhaps done a creative development, the idea is flowing but they have no presentation plan yet. In the third group nothing has happened yet and what they’re delivering is a brand spanking new idea and they’re looking for co-commissioning partners or initial presentation for it.

This is based on the assumption these days that investors might step in early rather than waiting to see a finished product. This notion has taken a long time to take hold.
We’re finding that even though money is tight there are many presenters out there who really want to be part of conceiving and part of the initial stages of a work. It’s an exciting development and it moves away from that idea of simply buying and selling product into investing in relationships, new ideas and long-term processes.

The other show you’ve mentioned is Liesel Zink’s The Stance. What’s important about this work for you?
We’re really excited as a Brisbane host of APAM to be able to showcase Brisbane artists. The Stance is great because it’s positioned in public space so we’re able to not only offer delegates the chance to see a beautiful durational work but also get to see it in the context of the city. The work will be presented in the Southbank Forecourt just outside QPAC, which overlooks the Brisbane River. It’s a highly politically engaged work and Liesel has done a lot of research into the idea of occupying public space and the politics around it, what protest means and its history. This is an important work that is pushing form—each of the delegates will receive headphones and will listen to a live soundscape in real time featuring lots of grabs from real life protests. The sound designer Mike Wilmett has also composed music to accompany the work. Liesel will present it with nine dancers. Originally it ran for nine hours but but I think for APAM she’s doing five hours. She’s creating it with Australian dancers but eventually what she wants to do is to tour the work to other countries in the region, potentially with [a mix of local and Australian dancers] to explore what protest and occupying public space means in different parts of the world. It’s an ongoing exploration.

What has been the international response to the market?
We have a really strong contingent of international delegates this year. They’re coming from everywhere and it’s been quite a shock, the players who’ve emerged as wanting to be part of the event. I think it puts a really strong light on the quality, scope and diversity of work that’s coming out of Australia. We’re very excited to have the world at our doorstep here and we intend to make the most of it.

2016 APAM, Australian Performing Arts Market, Powerhouse Brisbane, 22-26 Feb

SPOILER ALERT: THIS PRODUCTION WILL BE PLAYING IN THEATRES AROUND AUSTRALIA THIS YEAR.

The Events, by UK playwright David Greig, may well have been lauded in the UK for its moral acuity and compassion, but I was angered by its loaded scenario and an absence of thematic thoroughness in its approach to post-traumatic stress disorder.

A young man (Jonny Carr) possessed by extreme right wing fantasies slaughters members of a church choir. The vicar (Catherine McClements) tries to rescue her remaining “choir of vulnerable people” by putting them back to work, but as her own post-traumatic stress disorder takes over she tests her relationship with her partner and ventures on a quest to understand the killer. She speaks with a provocative journalist, with a friend of the young man (“We were both unpopular…You see how bad people are”), a politician (opposed to “state-funded multiculturalism”) and the boy’s father. She discovers the boy’s mother died when he was 15 and that he’s gay. His intemperate father accepts it, he tells her, having yelled at the loner, “Get out and get yourself a boyfriend!” (Carr also plays all the characters the vicar seeks out.)

Curiously, for someone who felt that her soul left her when she and a friend were threatened with the last bullet in the killer’s gun and asked by him to choose which of them should be shot. Instead of her church, she turns to guru-led therapies for herself and her choir, which they reject: “We just want to forget.” Her greatest desire is to understand the killer, despite the advice of her partner and her psychologist; so she campaigns to be allowed to speak with him, becoming in the press “the forgiveness lady.” She doesn’t want to think he’s a psychopath: “It’s something else…beyond reason.” Was it his fault? Is there such a thing as evil? Is he ‘empathy impaired’? Her partner sees this quest as masochism.

Greig’s scatter-gun approach is loaded with complications—the priest is lesbian, the mass killer gay and, pivotally in a late ‘reveal,’ he tells the vicar he took in a girl who had just been assaulted outside his home by three Arab males. And played a computer game with her. This man? With his attitude to women?

What is interesting about The Events is the priest’s decline, not least into kinds of violence: a kiss with her partner turns into a struggle; she unconsciously shoplifts; she imagines herself as a nurse smothering the killer when he was a baby; fantasises herself and her partner finding and adopting a lost boy (“He’s happy; he’s dead”); she almost kills herself; and in her encounter with the killer in prison is infuriated with his inability to account for his motivation and smashes his coffee cup to the floor. What kind of catharsis for her is this, if any? If the ‘message’ is that there is no answer, the vicar certainly doesn’t countenance it. Anyway, the visit seems enough to return her happily to her multicultural choir, her “one big crazy tribe,” as she calls them. We, however, recall the killer’s elaborately realised dream of a return to tribalism, to “buy back our souls.” Has the vicar found her soul again? The final joyous song seems as ironic as it is feelgood. At least Greig makes that point.

Jonny Carr, Catherine McClements and choir members, The Events, Sydney Festival, 2016

This highly portable work is plainly staged with its two actors and choir (mostly a different one each night). Catherine McClements subtly grades the sorry trajectory of the vicar’s moral confusion, growing isolation and potential self-destructiveness. The choir, admirably coached and conducted by Luke Byrne from the piano, not only sing with verve but deliver lines individually and collectively join in a witty Q & A with the characters. It’s a dramatically effective device, providing both a sense of community and vulnerability, although the choir ultimately plays no role in the vicar’s salvation; but she can at least return to it.

Carr is a solid presence and best as the killer (that’s where the writing shines), but all his characters speak without vocal differentiation (as in UK and US productions), the audience often only aware of who’s speaking once clues are picked up from the conversation. Save for moments of anger there’s a flattening of overall affect and limited opportunities for nuance. At best it emphasises that we are party only to the vicar’s increasing delirium as her post-traumatic stress disorder unravels her—until an unlikely recovery. Will she now simply forget ‘the events’?

Belvoir, Malthouse, STCSA, The Events, writer David Greig, director Claire Watson, set & lighting Geoff Cobham, musical director Luke Byrne; Granville Town Hall, Sydney, 13-17 Jan

RealTime has followed the emergence of Marrugeku’s Cut The Sky with an interview with choreographer Dalisa Pigram and poet Edwin Lee Mulligan, who both perform in the work, a glowing response to a first-run performance in Broome (the company’s cultural hub) and a review—with strong reservations about the work’s scope—of the Perth International Arts Festival premiere. Cut the Sky has otherwise received laudatory reviews.

I’ve admired some, if not all, of Marrugeku’s past creations, especially Burning Daylight, a more lucid and cogent work than Cut The Sky. The performance I saw of the new work in the Sydney Festival was beset with several technical challenges: a performer appeared in an aerial harness but did not fly, words yelled in a huge storm (set in the future according to the program notes) were drowned out by effects and a protest scene made no sense when a character with a loud hailer could not be heard. These problems were doubtless incidental. Putting them aside, Cut the Sky is still a less than coherent work—a series of often elusive, unrevealingly juxtaposed episodes. Intention grows clearer (indeed crudely literal when dancer Miranda Wheen has to recite ‘information’ while dancing), but comes too late, so awash is this production with unintegrated components—a jumble of contents, images, styles and musical forms recalling earlier contemporary performance.

There’s also a lack of clarity about who’s who and specifically about the Dungkabah or Poison Woman (the coal gas buried in the earth) and her relationship to singer Ngaire Pigram’s rock diva and Dancer Dalisa Pigram. There are slight moments—two black characters share disapproving glances when Wheen ‘co-opts’ the Aboriginal flag during a protest and scales the set’s gas pipe with it—amid epic visions of global climate change and the Kimberley’s political past.

Dalisa Pigram (choreographer with Serge Aimé Coulibaly) appears at one point to be inhabited by Poison Woman, recalling the originality of her dancing in her own Gudirr Gudirr; otherwise the choreography looks conventionally ‘contemporary.’ There are momentary pleasures: Edwin Lee Mulligan speaking his poetry, a cleverly realised marionette-like kangaroo-man and the sheer scale of the Kimberley landscape (cinematography Sam James) projected on the huge upstage screen, the camera sweeping forward and then disorientingly backwards.

The grand sweep of issues, images, history, ideas and forms in Cut The Sky leaves in its wake impressions, generalisations and, in the end, a sense of unwarranted optimism as longed-for rain finally falls. There’s no denying the talents of the performers and other artists involved in Cut The Sky, nor its momentary strengths. But the work’s “shifting of time and cause and effect” (program notes) disadvantages the cogency of its account of the destructive coalescence of mining and climate change in its impact on Indigenous culture and country and the Earth. If the need for clarity requires a somewhat more literal approach, without surrendering the work’s evident magic, so be it.

Sydney Festival, Marrugeku, Cut The Sky, director Rachael Swain, designer Stephen Curtis, musical director Matthew Fargher; Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, 14-17 Jan

In Between Two

In a logical but equally lateral extension of the modus operandi favoured by photographer-performer William Yang, In Between Two features two artists, life stories, projected photographs and live music. Where Yang has often been accompanied by a musician, here the performers are both musicians and accompany each other. Having two artists allows for both solo turns and dialogue, all framed conversationally and at a trot, contrasting with Yang’s engagingly deliberate rhythms which are also attuned to the way he paces his slide projectors. The overall design (Eugyeene Teh) is more palpably an installation with its angled screens and, in the distance, a long trail of vines, descending as if from branches far above and about to spread onto the stage. It’s evocative of Darwin and the Philippines which both figure strongly in In Between Two. Yang and Annette Shun Wah are the show’s dramaturgs, doubtless aiding the performers in whittling their complex tales into shape. The director, who has enabled these relaxed and confident performers, is Suzanne Chaundy. Visual designer Jean Poole seamlessly melds photographs, film and video.

The performers are Chinese-Australian spoken word and hip hop artist Joel Ma aka Joelistics and Filipino-Dutch-Australian guitarist, producer and songwriter James Mangohig. Both are well-known in the music world but will be new to most theatre-goers with whom they generously share their family histories, having first swapped them with each other as they became friends.

Mangohig’s Filipino father and Dutch-Australian mother, who were initially Christian pen pals (he would send her his sermons), married and lived in Darwin where Mangohig played with the rock band in his preacher father’s church until doubt set in and he left for surfing and the hard-drinking life of a musician. There followed two marriages, eventual professional success and reconnection not only with his father (“Tatu became less judgmental”) but with his Filipino heritage through the beloved Lola (Tagalog for grandmother), who visited Australia and whose farm he recurrently visited and helped sustain.

Joel Ma’s beautiful, energetic Chinese grandmother came to Australia from Hong Kong when she was 17, had several children and co-founded Sydney’s legendary Chequers nightclub in Sydney in the 1930s (there are wonderful photographs and film footage). She entered into a ménage à trois with her husband (a drinker and gambler) and a business associate in the 40s and years later watched her business fail as the Vietnam War broke trade relations with Australian markets. Ma’s admiration for his grandmother suggests a deeply felt emotional and creative kinship.

Ma’s parents were inveterate travellers, his father in love with music, his mother politically engaged, inheritances immediately evident in the opening number in which he raps about dope, jobs, racism, ghosts and, aptly for the musical form, “a galloping mind” to Mangohig’s supple bass accompaniment. Later he speaks about his sense of being defined as an outsider in the era of Hanson, Howard and the Cronulla Riot and how hip hop spoke to him and many others as a way to express themselves (as he did with the band TZU).

Joel and James speak of themselves as each other’s therapists. They’re good for us too, expanding our sense of what it means to be Asian-Australian, to achieve a sense of cultural heritage, to escape the strict dictates of religion and family but also to reconcile and be able to turn life into art with music and wit. The sooner In Between Two is restaged and widely so, the better.

Yudai Kamisato, Wataru Omura, Mari Kodama, +51 Aviacón San Borja, Okazaki Art Theatre

+51 Aviación, San Borja

“We can’t overthrow the government through theater. Youth is wasted and society just ignores their passion. And above all, it’s a complete lie that there is truth on the Internet.”

These words are spoken by a disaffected theatre director in Okazaki Art Theatre’s +51 Aviación, San Borja. It’s one of the festival outliers, an oddly engaging, highly lateral work about cultural displacement. The show received little critical attention, a pity. Let me recall the ‘story’ that +51 Aviación, San Borja tells because the mode of performance is at once informal, complex and often not at all literal.

On a wide stage with a carpet striped with bright colours and surtitles on the walls behind, the performers wander in and out of frame with bags and suitcases, a few domestic props and a portable radio that mutters away for most of the show, as if the story is just… happening. A young theatre director (Yudai Kamisato) of Japanese heritage returns from Japan to the country of his birth, Peru, after 20 years absence. In Japan he’d failed to establish a sense of connection with his ancestors, his predecessors before his family left for Peru in the 1920s (as many had since 1898 hoping to make money as labourers and return home).

Attempting to make sense of his predicament, Kamisato creates a kind of avatar, the radical leftist Japanese theatre director Seki Sano (1905-1996), a political exile who went to Europe and Russia, worked with Meyerhold, was purged by Stalin as “a dangerous Japanese” in 1938, visited the US and went on to found contemporary theatre in Mexico. Having felt empty at the gravesite of his father’s predecessors in Okinawa, Kamisato fantasises conversations with Sano (a masked Wataru Omura) and a hostile theatre critic, preparing himself in effect for his return to Peru. But politically he’s no Seki, having no understanding, for example, of the island ownership disputes between China and Japan he hears about in Okinawa.

Yudai Kamisato, Wataru Omura, Mari Kodama, +51 Aviacón San Borja, Okazaki Art Theatre

Once he’s home in Peru, Mari Kodama takes over the elliptical narration, leaving Seki Sano behind (we never learn what he did to justify being labelled “Father of Mexican Theatre”). Living with his grandmother in Lima (the play’s title is her address and country phone code), Kamisato commences the difficult process of re-assimilation. He finds an immigrant culture obsessed with Japanese food and watching NHK TV. The city’s streets and plumbing are poor, but there is a centre, established by the entrepreneur Ryoichi Jinnai in Lima—and in other countries with Japanese immigrant populations—which busses in the elderly for day care, a fine thing but another example of cultural dependency unlike Seki Sano’s break with Japan.

Things get whacky when the unsettled Kamisato is shoved in the street by a sociopathic religious zealot and nearly taken into a cult. More to the point, in the final scene, while attending the opening night of a theatre production and surrounded by Lima’s well-to-do in the foyer, Kamisato asks himself, as Seki Sano would have, “where are the people on the street?” Then he has to admit, “I’m not the people on the street,” perhaps realising he’s no Sano. Perhaps, having understood his condition by making +51 Aviación, San Borja, Kamisato—if he is in fact performing as himself—will be able to newly address the challenge of making political theatre.

The performance is casual, played directly to the audience and often as if improvised (a neck pillow of the kind used by passengers on planes on buses is grabbed from a pile of items to frame Seki Sano’s masked head, giving him the appearance of an Aztec god). But it’s also injected with moments of stylisation—Kamisato strikes emphatic Kabuki poses, his voice turning aptly guttural. Elsewhere there’s a discombobulated angularity and the voice slips registers. Omura’s Seki Sano is puppet-like, manipulated by the other performers—a gesture towards Bunraku. Those familiar with traditional and contemporary Japanese theatre would have detected further cultural signals in this fascinating work. It made an intriguing companion piece to In Between Two.

O Mensch!

A grand piano sits to our left. Centre-stage, a casually attired, lone male figure stands on a short, steep set of steps. A cube of the same width and breadth hangs immediately above, emitting pastel hues which increase in intensity and frequency as the man’s feverish night-time imagination dwells on the delights and power of nature and on the social world that limits him in love, literature and more. As he compulsively returns to his querulous mantra, “For such an ambition, is this Earth not too small?” he tests the spatial limits of his confinement, discards clothing and courses emotionally from guttural utterance to falsetto flights to finally intoning gently against a steadily pulsed, repeated piano note—failure? resignation? He leaves his ‘cage,’ joins the pianist and delicately taps out the work’s last few high notes.

The work’s title—and its sung poems—come from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus sprach Zarathustra: “Human! Hark! What is the deep midnight saying?” The man, Nietzsche, is revealed in all his passion, vulnerability and arrogance in Pascal Dusapin’s fluent, finely graded and richly varied vocal score with its spare piano accompaniment (Jack Symonds) and baritone Mitchell Riley’s superbly integrated singing and acting—directed by Sarah Giles who partnered Riley for the gripping SCO production of the György Kurtág Beckett cycle…pas à pas-nulle part... . Riley’s restrained, subtly detailed naturalism engenders a believable young Nietzsche, allowing the moments of pain and anger to gain full expressive weight and sustaining a challenging 70-minute performance.

There’s no production design credit for O Mensch! Presumably it was a collaborative effort, leaving much of the responsibility for making a spare set theatrically effective to lighting designer Katie Sfetkidis whose otherwise simple forward and shadow-casting side lighting allowed the LED colouring from the cube above to mirror Nietzsche’s volatility. Simply produced, O Mensch! is a work of huge emotional scale and another success for Sydney Chamber Opera.

Not forgetting Beethoven

In the top rank of festival highlights is another small outfit, the Belgian orchestra (or “period band” as such ensembles are often called) Anima Eterna’s complete Beethoven Symphonies, played on original instruments. I caught the 5th and 6th as a double bill in the intimate City Recital Centre, the ideal venue for a small orchestra, and the 9th in the vast Sydney Opera House Concert Hall where the woodwinds and sometimes the small Brandenburg Choir felt underpowered, certainly for those of us at the back of the first level of the dress circle. Nonetheless there was much to wonder at: a captivating scherzo realised in all its surging, swirling glory and an engrossing adagio with a slightly quickened pace that did justice to the capacities of the period instruments. The finale, with its expressive soloists, was forceful but, up the back in the reverberant Concert Hall, felt less than cogent.

As reviewers of the Anima Eterna Beethoven CD recordings have noted, there’s a revealing compactness in conductor Jos van Immerseel’s responses to the symphonies. This was most keenly in evidence in the performances of the 5th and 6th in the City Recital Hall; recurrent dynamic shifts from lyrical calm to tense pondering or passionate outburst were acutely marked and felt without being laboured in the 5th. Similarly Beethoven’s pervasive ‘minimalist’ repetitions in the 6th were mesmeric, heightening the sense of being immersed in the natural world which he portrays with such love. Even the relatively small-scale storm movement seemed more apt than the near-melodramatic turbulence unleashed by some modern orchestras. This compactness and its correlative lucidity allowed the period instruments to speak with clarity and character.

I felt blessed listening to the 5th and 6th, as if hovering, suspended between late Mozart and Wagner. It might be a fiction that we were hearing what Beethoven’s audiences heard, but it’s a happy fiction where the orchestra sounded sufficiently alien to make me re-think my relationship with the symphonies and the 6th above all.

Sydney Festival: Performance 4a, In Between Two, writers, composers, performers, Joelistics, James Mangohig, producer Annette Shun Wah, 21-24 Jan; Okazaki Art Theatre, +51 Aviación, San Borja, 21-24 Jan; Sydney Chamber Opera, O Mensch!, composer Pascal Dusapin, performer Mitchell Riley, director Sarah Giles; Carriageworks, Sydney, 22-24 Jan; Anima Eterna, Beethoven 5th & 6th Symphonies, City Recital Hall, 23 Jan; 9th Symphony, Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, 25 Jan

We attend so many industry events these days—conferences, seminars, showcases and even summits—but I’ve never been invited to a ‘convergence’ before, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect from Dana Waranara. Now, weeks after the event, I can say that it has had a significant impact on me. It’s not yet totally clear to me how that impact will manifest itself in my work, but I’ll try and explain why I think this gathering will end up having a deep and lasting significance. For now, the best word I can come up with for the impact is to say that I have, in the best possible way, been disturbed by it. To quote the movie of the moment, “I feel a disturbance in the force”. More on that later.

As the Dana Waranara program unfolded I started to feel quite privileged to have been invited into that space (as a presenter, non-artist and whitefella). This was driven home in a session honouring the pioneers of black dance in Australia. To hear from artists such as Carole Johnson, Roslyn Watson, Michael Leslie and Monica Stevens about the beginnings of this movement in the 1970s, was an historic and humbling highlight of day one. I had some knowledge of this history, but much of it was new to me. I don’t think the significant, ground-breaking contribution of these artists is understood as widely in our industry as it should be, so sitting there hearing their extraordinary stories felt a little like the sharing of a secret history, that one day will be recognised by more and more people.

Although this gathering was not a showcase or performing arts market type event, for me as a presenter it was a great opportunity to gain an overview of the artists, choreographers and companies working in this field, giving me a greater context, and certainly inspiring me. To be surrounded by this extraordinary group of artists was quite humbling. Some are well known and recognised in our industry, others are early in their careers, filled with the infectious energy, enthusiasm and invincibility of youth. But I have to say that I was most inspired by some of the brilliant, more mature artists who’ve continued to nurture their practice over many years, creating beautiful, meaningful work away from the glare of larger festivals or venues (which in the industry we sometimes mistake for success). To hear from them about their work was quite special. That an artist such as Gary Lang is producing work of the calibre of Mokuy in the Northern Territory, that (to my knowledge) has not been seen elsewhere in the country, is exciting but highlights the need for us to find ways for such work to be seen more widely.

In this mix of inspiring artists were also a few handpicked international voices, most significantly First Nations artists from the US, Canada and NZ. I was particularly struck by the wisdom and maturity of Maori choreographer Jack Gray. The gentleness and warmth with which he shared his significant experience as an artist highlighted for me how the Australian black dance movement, unique though it is, is strengthened by its international links. This is not only true of the important link with other First Nations artists and communities, but also of the very significant contribution evidently made to the movement by African American artists such as Carole Johnson who was in attendance, but also others who were mentioned, like Ronnie Arnold and Aku Kadogo.

All of this sounds quite inspiring and energising, and it was (as well as being pretty intense, overwhelming and exhausting!). So, why do I say that I have been disturbed by it? Because my experience at Dana Waranara has further strengthened in me a belief that our current models of presenting are not serving us well. They do not easily allow for the type of truly impactful community and artist encounters that we need to be facilitating or inviting into our venues. Outmoded conventions, physical infrastructure and business models are barriers to venues being all that we could be for our communities. This of course, not only relates to the challenges of presenting contemporary Indigenous dance, but represents a wider challenge for presenters.

I’m writing this in New York, having just attended two other industry events here which have served to reinforce this welcome disturbance in my thinking. I don’t yet know what new models we might reach for, but I think I know some of the questions that I (we?) might need to address to start the process, and Dana Waranara has been a big part of firing me up to try and find some ways forward. For me, in my job, some of these questions would include:

What mechanisms might allow us to give up “expert curation” and allow our community greater power in programming our venues? Could we successfully hand over the programming reins to a wider, more diverse and representative group in our community? How?

What different financial models would allow us to transcend the transactional nature of the relationship between artist and audience? Can we really expect to facilitate meaningful shared experiences between artists and audiences while we use a model that reduces the art to a product that presenters buy from producers and then re-sell to audiences? What might new financial models look like? Collective community fundraising/investing? Giving free access to events and asking the audience to contribute something afterwards?

How could we remove or replace the conventions of theatregoing to allow a more inclusive experience? What could we do to break down the barriers between audience and artist, and between audience members, and create the conditions for more authentic, shared human experiences?

There are lots more questions like these. Dana Waranara certainly didn’t provide any easy answers, but it did highlight the incredible work that Indigenous artists are doing around the country, and the need for us to find new ways to support, promote and connect that work with our audiences. It has inspired me to try and do this. BlakDance and Performing Lines should be thanked for initiating this important and historical convergence.

BlakDance & Performing Lines Dana Waranara, An Indigenous-led convergence bringing together choreographers & presenters, Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, Brisbane, 8-10 Dec 2015, www.blakdance.org.au

Have you seen this change.org video from 2015 about children on Nauru? If not, watch it now; it’s a rare occasion when we get to see incarcerated refugees, especially the young, for who they really are—not the criminals nor the terrorists they are treated as.

If you have seen it, watch it again to remind you to immediately add your voice to the growing revolt against the Turnbull government’s decision to return 267 asylum seekers—whether en masse or secretively ‘case by case’—to the Nauru concentration camp, for that’s what it is, whatever the lies about the refugees’ ‘freedom’ to wander the island.

This six-part TV series makes a significant contribution to the family comedy/drama genre focusing on the lives of the fractious and funny Asian-Australian Family Law as they navigate the parents’ potential divorce. Featuring a strong cast and scenes that range from satirical to self-deprecating to deeply emotional this is an unusual and entertaining hybrid.

3 copies thanks to our friends at Madman Entertainment

Email us at giveaways [at] realtimearts.net with your name, postal address and phone number. Include 'Giveaways' and the name of the item in the subject line.

Internationally exhibited Spanish-Australian artist Dani Marti, trained in Catalan tapestry techniques, is a master of knots and maker of densely woven relief works. In this video, he talks about his solo show Black Sun, now at Fremantle Arts Centre for the 2016 Perth International Arts Festival.

Marti’s complex, large format entwinings of industrial, domestic and personal materials—including, for example, fibres, rubber, wire, rope, necklaces, and, in one glittering work, steel scourers—generates immersive viewing. His films are contrastingly documentary in style, but as rich in intimate detail.

Barcelona-born Marti divides his time between Sydney and Glasgow, working in video, installation and public art. His website declares that his “unorthodox woven and filmic works [address] notions of portraiture and sexuality in Modernism, Minimalism and geometric abstraction.” Marti’s frank and often sexually explicit films are labelled portraits, but so too his seemingly abstract works. Just how “abstract” are they? They are deeply personal for the artist, a form of self-portraiture. John Morgan Falconer writes,

“[Marti’s] The Pleasure Chest (2007) tangles necklaces and Rosary beads into a design with the all-over infinitude of a Jackson Pollock and the rich materiality of a Piero Manzoni. Meanwhile, as a filmmaker, Marti delivers catharsis by drawing us into his subjects’ lives of desire: Time is the fire in which we burn (2009), for example, telegraphs the confessions of John, a male prostitute.”

Look out for Laetitia Wilson’s review of Black Sun in our 24 February E-dition.

Dani Marti, Shield – Study for a Portrait – Take 1, 2015, stainless steel braided hose, polyester, nylon, rubber and leather on aluminium frame.

Image courtesy of the Artist; GAGPROJECTS | Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide; ARC ONE GALLERY, Melbourne; and Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney

Dani Marti, Shield – Study for a Portrait – Take 1, 2015, stainless steel braided hose, polyester, nylon, rubber and leather on aluminium frame.

2016 Perth International Arts Festival, Dani Marti, Black Sun, Fremantle Arts Centre, 7 Feb-28 March

Sue Dodd, Airhole Screentests, Everything is Nothing Wendy (Pop)
2013, single channel HD video with stereo sound, 12:26 min

Busy, voluble and visually hot, Campbelltown Arts Centre’s engrossing Video oediV is alive with colour and intense performativity. Even the aesthetically sublime Lux (2014) by Silvana and Gabriella Mangano projected onto two large screens pairs its moodily impressionistic colouration of clouds and trees—and a sometimes racking earthquake score —with black and white footage of a darting woman holding a mirror which at times obscures her face, dazzlingly reflects light and becomes a screen for inserted images. Elsewhere performing bodies are ever more prominent.

Nicole Monks, in another engaging work for two large screens, Finding Grannie Laurie (2009), realises a more contemplative performativity with an intense stillness in juxtaposed landscapes—one forested, the other open, dusty, ochre-red—in which she morphs symbolically, identifying with her grandmother (mother of a child of the Lost Generations) as hip modern clothing ultimately surrenders to kindred nakedness.

A different kind of morphing is realised in Sue Dodd’s Wendy Airhole (2013) video series. It’s the artist’s take on the creation of celebrities à la Andy Warhol, in which Dodd appears in various popular culture music guises from country to hip-hop with personae and songs of her own making. The power of this work resides above all in the large black and white video portraits (meant to recall Warhol screen tests it seems) of Dodd’s characters and the attention we can dedicate to these ‘same but different’ manifestations of performers revelling in their ironic art. It’s quite the opposite in Angela Tiatia’s Woman’s Movement where a blonde-wigged trio of faceless ‘sexy’ women dance vigorously, if mechanically, with exercise balls and red bananas until exhaustion begins to set in.

Like Dodd, Brazilian artist Berna Reale too appears in her videos, but as one of the frightening agents of social inequality and political threat. Though emphatically didactic, the work’s fantastical images are complex and memorable. In Cantando na Chuva (Singing in the rain; 2014) a bulky figure in gold suit and gold gas mask wobbles along a red carpet across a vast field of garbage to the sound of Gene Kelly’s “Singin’ in the rain,” while indifferent scavengers go about their daily work in the distance. There is no rain. In Soledade (2013), a woman relentlessly drives a golden chariot pulled by a team of pigs through the dusty street of a poor village. While these two works are grimly funny, Palomo (see an excerpt, 2012) is intimidating. A security force figure dressed entirely in black and wearing a protective wire grid that looks like a muzzle, rides a bright red horse through near empty city streets as if ready to crush any protest with the force of a horseman of the apocalypse. The heightened clatter of the hooves on the road is additionally unnerving. Each work is finely shot: Soledade with action movie verve and Palomo with austere arthouse calculation.

Another work that mixes message and mystery is the aptly titled Opaque (Germany, 2014) in which Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz in a wreck of a building announce that having been “underground for five years” they are making a film to combat colour barriers and racism. Roughly shot, Opaque ‘documents’ the process. Glittering backdrops are pulled back and forth, there are speeches (some from notes) and finally the lighting of colour smoke bombs, pink and blue, that merge into a swirling purple cloud that fills building and screen, reflecting the gender indeterminancy of the characters and the dissolving of boundaries. Calculatedly naïve, its performances raw and filming rough, Opaque is irritating but still demands attention for its sheer strangeness—and its refusal to adopt the screen and performance values of the likes of Monks, Dodd and Reale.

The exhibition’s vivid performativity is loudly announced by the song at the centre of the first work encountered on entering the exhibition, Rosie Deacon’s Bit Fat in Da Back Kangaroo Rap (2016). In an expertly realised ‘video clip’ (Sam James), kangaroo-like figures (Deacon and companions) dance with abandon. Around the large screen are mannequins dressed in the dancers’ costumes and other creations (tea towels etc), revealing Deacon’s astonishing weaving together of Australian tourist kitsch, frequently endowing it with comic detail, like a silken koala in a kangaroo pouch. Though making a political point about the denaturing of Australian fauna, Big Fat in Da Back Kangaroo Rap above all revels in pushing kitsch into camp excess but with the meticulous attention to detail rarely afforded toy koalas and kangaroos.

Among other works are further varieties of performance: Thai-Australian artist Kawita Vatanajyankur performs a series of surrealised domestic labours (see Virginia Baxter’s response); Hissy Fit (Sydney) go verité at great length with nebulous car trip chatter (you look on from deckchairs); New Yorker Anne Hirsch appears in provocative short works, some personal, some satirical, including Semiotics of the Camwhore, playing on a tiny screen in a corner of the gallery; and Soda_Jerk (Australia, currently based in New York) pay tribute to the pioneering work of VNS Matrix (I can’t comment, one screen was not functioning and the sound, even with earphones, had to compete with “Kangaroo rap,” as did Gillian Wearing’s 2 into 1, an estimation by its subjects of the relationship between a mother and sons—the only males to appear in the exhibition).

Video oediV is a distinctive exhibition of Australian and international artists, all of them female, revealing an expanding range of performative possibilities in video art. These were inherent in the beginnings of the medium in the 1960s alongside ‘painterly,’ photographic or filmmaking approaches less preoccupied with the body or the makers themselves.

I didn’t sight a written curator’s statement for Video oediV. It might have explained the show’s the title, but it suggests a mirror image, recalling arts writer Rosalind Krauss’ much debated accusation in 1976 (“Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October, Vol. 1, Spring, 1976) that video artists were self-obsessed. Most of the artists in Video oediV are mirrored variously as themselves, extensions of themselves or adopted personae; the intriguing results for the most part seem exploratory rather than narcissistic, finding or inventing liberating ways of being.

See Video oediV before it closes on 20 March; you’ll be delighted and intrigued.

In its 2016 incarnation, Mofo remains a slippery and amorphous festival. The maverick energy that defined it has not so much diminished as relaxed somewhat, but there’s still that subversive element that hopes to make people think a little while having a fine time among the artworks.

The Long Weekend in Alice Springs

Joshua Santospirito’s graphic novel The Long Weekend in Alice Springs has been something of a phenomenon since its modest arrival in 2013. Santospirito’s adaptation of a meandering, meditative essay by Craig San Roque, an Alice Springs psychologist, has gone on to win multiple awards and is now in its third printing. The live reading of the text by its author was accompanied by Santospirito’s delicate and understated improvised guitar that also provided a soundtrack for the projected drawings. Given much of what makes graphic novels successful is the intimacy of holding the printed book which seems to speak solely to the reader, it was surprising how well this very different iteration succeeded and indeed filled the large space of the Odeon concert hall. It was great to see Santospirito’s images so large, but the real surprise was the reading by San Roque, his presence managing to command attention from a slightly rowdy opening night crowd. For those familiar with the graphic novel, it was a minor revelation, underlining the book’s powerful commentary on the challenges endured by Aboriginal people living in Central Australia.

No More Public Space, Only Public Order (water cannon)

Some of the most radical aspects of Mofo 2016 were to be found in spaces outside this year’s festival hub, Mona. No More Public Space, Only Public Order (water cannon), a performance work and sculptural installation by Amy Spiers and Catherine Ryan, appeared on the Salamanca Lawns on a Sunday morning. Motivated by the introduction of anti-protest laws by the Tasmanian Government, the work celebrates the arrival of a newly purchased water cannon in a pantomime of the low-rent fascism that has emerged from middle-management and over-regulation.

Wearing a high-visibility orange security vest and deftly wielding traffic cone and megaphone, artist Ryan appeared to relish her polite-but-firm marshalling role and held the attention of a crowd who barely noticed as actual police vehicles slunk quietly into place. The water cannon was wheeled in, accompanied by German Shepherd dogs and shrill bagpipe music, and a demonstration ensued. Life sized silhouettes of ‘protestors’ were erected and sprayed with water by now numerous ‘security forces’ with their sunglasses, peaked caps and orange armbands. It was a bit silly and clearly intended as such, but things took a nasty turn when a group of ‘guards’ quite violently beat a fake protester to the ground and tore him up.

Looking like a giant Dalek made of safety materials (road cones and fencing) the cannon was uncovered and hurriedly wheeled about the lawn by the ‘security forces’ who had dropped all pretence of politeness and were simply screaming “MOVE!” at the audience. The work was by no means subtle, but its point well made. The water cannon now resides in Kelly’s Garden and may be seen in all its camp glory until 24 February.

We’re listening and we can’t sleep, Josh Foley, Gillian Marsden & Ashley Bird, mixed media, interactive drawing

Exhaust

Contemporary Art Tasmania’s Mofo contribution, the overwhelming exhibition Exhaust, curated by Erin Sickler, was an awful lot of art to take in. Sickler, a curator and writer from Upstate New York, gathered 15 artists and attempted to examine what it’s like to “work, survive and thrive on a planet in crisis” (from the Exhaust website). This could mean just about anything and, given the extraordinary breadth of content in the exhibition, probably did. The result is a collection of works that, as a whole, imitated the overload of first world life. There was more to be gleaned from dispensing with the curatorial premise (such as it was) and considering the merits of individual works.

Sickler assembled artists whose engagement with contemporary art is certainly forward thinking. We’re listening and we can’t sleep—Josh Foley, Ashley Bird and Gillian Marsden’s mixture of torn paper forms and direct scribbling onto a gallery wall—was bathed in a glowing UV light had an urgent DIY energy. Ariana Reines’ beautiful throne, La Pieta, was covered in books, feathers and objects that conjured primitive folk ritual and domestic occult practices. James Newitt’s Conundrum seemed like a map of a mind in decay: terrible thoughts—”a profound and seemingly endless state of depression”—and actions—“self-admission to an institution”—were mapped with pencil on a wall. Among the standout works were Dirk De Bruyn’s Swayers—a lush projection-based work that married analogue and digital forms, such as treated film and found images all tinted with bright colours—and Sally Rees’ archly conceptual Rowan Reynolds Project. Rees had long admired the work of the fellow Tasmanian artist Reynolds and discovered that though she had not been visible in the local exhibiting world she was in fact still working. This project spoke volumes about how we view art and artistic success and was very poignant in the context of Exhaust.

Oren Ambarchi & Will Guthrie

“Pulverising” and “bestial” may seem hyperbolic choices for describing the collaborative energy generated by Oren Ambarchi and Will Guthrie. But it was truly monstrous. Guthrie’s drumming assault is always astounding, but here he unleashed a wave of ecstatic noise that forced Ambarchi to meet him with a bludgeoning tactic that ripped the air into brittle shards. They made a wall of noise and punched through it in grand style, their sound a true demolition of form. ‘Brutal,’ as young folk say today, but all the more transcendant for it.

Kate Tempest

UK artist Kate Tempest is lauded for her performance poetry, but for Mofo she was accompanied by a drummer and a keyboard player, clearly making a transition from her roots to a more populist form. Tempest has been called a hip hop artist, but this is not quite what we experience; her language has a more primal rhythm—not quite as ordered as hip hop in the strictest sense. It’s not that important though, because above all she is astonishingly passionate without being angry (although moments of righteous rage emerge) and she’s hopeful without being naive. She’s seductive, non-standard and even daggy in presentation—there is nothing of the star about her as a performer. Instead you glimpse a real live human being, a magnetic, singular artist who has a way with words and the drive of an activist, directly and indirectly addressing class warfare in many of her pieces.

Viewpoint

There was a lot more to Mofo 2016, but one more thing warrants mentioning: Amanda Shone’s Viewpoint. A six-metre-high umpire’s chair that allowed one a moment above the wandering throng, soundtracked with Matt Warren’s pleasant headphone work of soft scrapes and dark but gentle tones that hovered somewhere between tide and traffic noise. Viewpoint provided an exquisite still-point that reminded anyone who sat in it where they were: on the river, below the hills of Tasmania.

Northern Lights.mn is a non-profit organisation whose mission is “to transform our sense of what’s possible in public space. Northern Spark is one night, but Northern Lights.mn shines through the year with projects such as Creative City Challenge for the Minneapolis Convention Center, Art(ists) on the Verge, The Giant Sing-A-Long at the Minnesota State Fair, and permanent interactive public art for Saint Paul’s Union Depot.

“In January we bring you…President+Artistic Director Steve Dietz’s thoughts about his visit to ARTCOP21 in Paris in December, including a review of the artworks he saw there.”

In 2007 RealTime co-hosted a forum in which Steve Dietz, then Director of Zero One Biennial Festival In San Jose, California was interviewed by Keith Gallasch.

South Australian director Justin Kurzel (Snowtown, 2011) continues to address the nature of evil in this striking rendition of Shakespeare’s Macbeth featuring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. In a crowded field of Macbeth films from Welles to Kurosawa, Polanski, Australia’s Geoffrey Wright (with Sam Worthington) and many other adapters, Kurzel brings a distinctive focus on action and violence not seen since Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, along with the requisite psychological intensity felt as criminals are undone by their crimes.

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.

For several minutes, two dancers simply look at each other and breathe. Their loose white jersey pants and tops ripple with the effects of prior exertion. Then one starts to draw in breath and the ‘vacuum’ created draws the other forward until they are temporarily stuck, lips to arm; then released with a rush of air like a valve under pressure. The pair continues connecting like this across bodies until they are frozen, lip to lip. They embrace. We are caught with them in a moment of silent passion.

The program notes for Dancenorth’s Syncing Feeling at Mofo 2016 in Hobart describe the intent behind this work as an exploration of the kinds of neurological connections possible between people, stating that science now confirms the truth of centuries-old knowledge—there is little that separates us beyond skin. Often such notes feel as though they are many translations away from the work presented, but in this case the thought invested in the concept is tangible in the work.

Against an evolving soundscape of industrial, found and recorded sound, performers Kyle Page and Amber Haines open the work with a series of choreographed vignettes that fade in and out of view within a darkened, smoky stage. Using fabric or simply their bodies, they interconnect or interlock with movements that appear to mimic neurological activity—ripples, twitches, flickers, kinks—travelling through their torsos. At times the separation between their bodies is ambiguous or indiscernible. An illusion is created as one climbs the other’s shoulders under the fabric, as though a cloaked human form were stretching unnaturally towards the ceiling. In another, Page lifts Haines so that she appears to swim, just above the floor, her body rippling like fluid. The effect of touch seems to stimulate or smooth the other. While much of the work focuses just on the duo, dressed simply in white within a black space, there is also a magical interlude using moving light behind perforated fabric, once again simulating patterns of firing neurons. At each point the soundscape, which runs from drone to static to gamelan, feels closely connected with the movement as though music and dance have been developed in parallel.

While all components of this work are stripped back, the staging, sound, light and movement establish an atmosphere that is visually rich and intimate. It is unsurprising to find that Page and Haines are a couple and have shared a number of residencies for developing their work. The unique movement language, the refinement of the visual composition and the flow of the work suggest considerable time working together. Their riffing on ways to interact with each other choreographically supports the premise that indeed little separates us but skin, with the line between the dancers often difficult to identify. There is even a sense that the boundary between the dancers and the rest of the world is in question, as they establish fast repetitive movements that appear to turn limbs to a liquid blur.

Mofo 2016, Dancenorth, Syncing Feeling, concept, design, direction, performance Kyle Page, Amber Haines, sound composition Alisdair Macindoe, costume design Fiona Todd-Logos, lighting design Bosco Shaw; Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, 13-15 Jan

Fruitful collaborations often seem to emerge from an almost organic symbiosis, each party bringing their abilities to bear for mutual benefit through a constant process of creative negotiation, experimentation and feedback. Such is certainly the case for Sydney-based composer Brendan Woithe and Garry Stewart, Artistic Director of the Australian Dance Theatre (ADT), the pair set to premiere two new works in March: The Beginning of Nature at WOMADelaide and Habitus for the Adelaide Festival.

Woithe is a versatile compositional gun-for-hire, as likely to produce soundscapes and composition for advertisements, short films, television, computer games, public installations and events such as the State of Origin as he is to complete commissions for the likes of the Australian String Quartet, Adelaide’s Zephyr Quartet and ADT. Indeed, he’s been particularly active over recent years producing music for ADT’s Multiverse and Be Your Self (2010), as well as collaborating with Stewart on the short films Collision Course (2014) and Mood Machine (2015).

Chatting over coffee at KLANG Studios, the production company he runs in Sydney, Woithe is effusive in his praise for Stewart and the dancers he leads. “ADT is different to any other company in Australia, I think it goes further in its physicality. The talent and the type of people they attract down there is simply phenomenal…the types of moves are different from what you’d expect and that informs the kinds of pieces that they do.”

This partly results from Stewart’s “extremely conceptual” way of working. For Habitus (in which ADT’s performers will literally enact Frank Zappa’s dismissive quip about music journalism that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” They’ll do the latter. Woithe recalls, “Garry asked me to go and see the new Frank Gehry building in Sydney, take some photographs and write a piece based on that structure, that space. I really enjoyed it. It forced me to think about particular concepts Garry is trying to express and [come] up with hopefully interesting musical expressions within an aesthetic [frame]. And we do talk about the aesthetic in the process…In the past it’s been quite monumental and abrasive and very electronic and minimal, although we’re slowly moving into a less abrasive kind of world.”

The Beginning of Nature could perhaps be seen as the first fruits of this change in direction, Woithe suggesting that future work will delve into the softer lyricism of composers such as Tim Hecker, Clint Mansell and Dustin O’Halloran. In over 40 minutes of lush electro-acoustic explorations, this work delves into the patterns that repeat across the micro- and macrocosms of the natural world, asking “Where does [nature] start? What is our place in it? And, are we a part of it because of the fact that we know that we’re a part of it?” Nine dancers will respond to the Zephyr Quartet’s realisation of Woithe’s score, with the composer himself electronically manipulating their performance in real time, while singers Shauntai Batzke and Vonda Last perform lines written in the Kaurna language of the First People of the Adelaide plains.

Very minimal in terms of harmonic development, yet richly evocative in its textural and tonal evolution, the work consists of relatively static, striated rhythmic textures that gradually evolve as particular elements–dynamics, articulation, speed, harmonic pattern or rhythm—effect one another in layers of gently unfurling and overlapping loops. At times unsettling, at others broadly ecstatic, as constellations of harmony emerge and dissipate, Woithe’s morphing textures inescapably suggest the thrum of life and the inexorable cycles of mating, death and rebirth that constitute the natural world.

“Most things that will be heard come from manipulations of the stringed instruments in real time,” he explains, “so there’s a palette [that] I stretch as far as I can…It’s a bit scary given the very small amount of rehearsal time we have, but also exciting, as at no point in the entire show do you hear the sound of ‘the string quartet’ without something happening to it. The sound is entirely manipulated.…In many ways, the tonal outcomes of the piece are just as important as the harmonic and rhythmic elements, as all three are interrelated—they modulate each other at different times. [The music] is a dynamic system built of feedback loops. It feeds into itself all the time, which makes it unpredictable [with a] degree of ‘what’s going to happen at this point?’”

This dynamism perhaps lies at the heart of the work and indeed the creative partnership and process that has produced it, with Woithe often travelling to Adelaide to work with Stewart and the dancers in the studio, the music being literally written as the choreography has been developed. “It’s amazing,” says Woithe, “you get this incredible backwards-and-forwards and immediate reactions to things. [We] can try something out on the floor with the dancers, see if it’s working and, if not, [Garry] is able to feedback very quickly about what exactly is or isn’t working, rather than composing in isolation where you’re just preparing a bunch of music beforehand and hoping it works. We get much more done more quickly.”

WOMADelaide 2016, ADT, The Beginning of Nature; Botanic Park, Adelaide, 12, 14 March

“[Music] frames my basic nature…[it provides] order in the highest degree of chaos.” Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker

American composer Steve Reich, born 1936, was a decade older than the late French composer Gerard Grisey (1946-1998), but the work of both flowered in the mid to late 1960s, Reich as co-founder of Minimalism and Grisey of Spectralism. Although they worked in very different idioms, each radically expanded the sonic range of contemporary music and challenged it structurally. One of the most exciting ways to experience their music is to see it performed to by the great Belgian dancer and choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and her company Rosas.

FASE

Minimalist in conception, with its repetitions and cyclical movements, De Keersmaeker’s exquisitely patterned FASE (which premiered in Brussels in 1982) was inspired by Reich’s pioneering ‘phasing’ which had unleashed astonishing complexity from the apparently most simple of means.

In Reich’s Piano Phase for two pianos (1967), danced to in the first part of FASE, a short phrase is repeated and then counterpointed with a new, rhythmically very close one played at a slightly different pace. This generates a new sound out of the synthesis, which in turn becomes a kind of unison open to the arrival of another complicating rhythm. In the ‘phase moment’ the dancers (De Keersmaeker and Tale Dolven) turn on the spot, dresses swirling, arms extending almost to finger touch until one goes with the new beat, putting the two ever so slightly out of synch, fingers unaligned until the second dancer catches up. It’s magical because you are uncertain when and how it happened. What’s more, the phasing is heightened first by the ‘twinning’ of the dancers—similarly attired in simple frocks, white socks and exercise shoes and hair tied back tight—and second by the angled lighting which produces a third shadow on the wall behind, a phasing, double shadow—a new dancer. Music and dance are perfectly partnered.

The climactic phasing is framed by a walking pattern, left and right in a line, arms swinging out horizontally and forearms gently folding into torsos and then backs. This is transposed mid- and then downstage, in new lines of light and in tune with the music’s growing complexity and urgency. Fists form as arms are raised and forearms lock hard against the body, shoes skid and there are gasps of effort and release. Then the pair moves back to the second line, then the first where they and their shadows find sheer un-phased unison.

Seeing minimalism danced—whether by Lucinda Childs to Phillip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach (Melbourne Festival, 1992) or Molissa Fenley and Dancers to Andrew Davis’s Hemispheres (Adelaide Festival, 1984)—is a very special pleasure, at its best in De Keersmaeker’s Piano Phase. The other parts of FASE are also wonderful. Come Out (1996) is one of the phased tape loops out of which sprang Reich’s brand of Minimalism. As in Piano, the dancers’ centre of gravity remains at the same height throughout. Here, in shirts and trousers, they are seated on stools in a rectangle of light beneath two orange lampshades. They gradually if quite sharply rotate 360 degrees, more palpably in and out of synch this time with an array of identical gestures—arm raised up from waist level, hand behind head, head turning sharply back and an almost lunge that suggests a potential gravitational shift. The music of Come Out —the transformation of a fragment of speech into an astonishingly layered, reverberant and rhythmically complex soundscape—provides the work’s momentum but also an eerie context.

De Keersmaeker performs to Violin Phase (1967) alone, working to the points of a circle and its centre. In a dress again, arms swinging, she walks circling in one direction and eventually the other. As the music re-shapes itself, she introduces a near skip to her tread, moves to the centre, skirt swirling, arms raised high and completes and repeats an unusual calculatedly awkward turn, a knee raised, leg kicking out, body momentarily angling down, but the centre of gravity constant as ever. However at points of the circle she bends, touches the floor, as if playing a game, spins furiously, flicking up her dress, baring her underwear and moving with the joy and ease of a young woman (there’s a fine version shot in a park).

The final part of FASE has De Keersmaeker and Dolven, once again in shirts and trousers, dancing in profile to the rapid phasing of Reich’s Clapping Music (1972). Leisurely stances, soft shoulder lifting and casual single arm swings wonderfully suggest abstracted tap dancing. After FASE I head home to listen to Steve Reich anew, the excitement of many years ago reignited and FASE, an undoubted 20th century classic, vividly inscribed in my memory.

Vortex Temporum

In 2012, thanks to Carriageworks, we witnessed two large-scale works by De Keersmaeker, Cesena and En Atendant (read the RealTime review), demanding but deeply rewarding performances that evoked a sense of continuity between the Middle Ages and now and which were imbued with a sense of community and especially ritual—focused in Cesena on the Sun—in which the circle is all defining. De Keersmaeker returns to the circle in Vortex Temporum with its many overlapping circles inscribed on the floor (just as one had been for Violin Phase). More accessible than its two predecessors, if more musically demanding (strange notes, harmonics, overtones), this 2013 work made sense of the music in the matching of individual or grouped dancers with particular musical instruments or clusters. Watching the dance was at times like reading a score. The pianist would pounce (yes) on the keys and the ‘piano’ dancer would, with his idiosyncratically squared-off bouncing movements, jerk in response and go off on his own trajectory.

Primacy is initially given to Grisey’s music, to the instrumental ensemble, Belgium’s Ictus, who performed the opening movement of Vortex Temporum minus scores, minus conductor, minus dancers, the pianist’s aggressive playing (‘out of which’ might flow delicate string and wind flutterings) providing the initial sense of heightened, raw theatricality that is to ensue. The musicians exit, replaced by dancers standing in their stead, heads down, sinking into a half turn, leaning back and then breaking into units of individual and collective expression before uniting with the now standing, and playing, musicians. All glide like planets around the huge stage, the grand piano ‘joining in,’ pushed, while being played, by the conductor—who has just appeared—in wide circles until positioning it upstage where the musicians gather, an ensemble once again on the edge of a turning cosmos with its discordant music of the spheres.

Often, as in Cesena, the dancers move backwards, only sometimes glancing behind but relying mostly on heightened proprioception and a predetermined trajectory. This suggests not only a kind of freedom but also that the performers belong to a more determined order. However, amid the repeated circlings as the work moves towards its conclusion, individual dancers break into their own patterns and cross lines. For example, one dancer develops a limping run, falls and spins, strikes a shoulder stand and falls back to a viola glide (the score is rich in evocative glissandi). There are mass movements, a frolic with everyone running and then a strange gathering at the end, dancers in a small cluster, heads down, some bodies bending and reaching as if, having at last paused, they’ve found something elemental in the earth beneath their orbiting. However intangible the ending, the work’s overall sense of unanimity amid incredible diversity and potential chaos is very powerful.

In Vortex Temporum, as in other recent De Keersmaeker creations, there’s ample casual movement—walking in and out of the dance— alongside formal expression. This perfectly suits the dramatic unpredictability of Gerard Grisey’s score with its bursts of energy, just as the individual performances and circlings align with its tonal complexities.

Although FASE was created at the beginning of De Keersmaeker’s career and Vortex Temporum very recently, they reveal great kinship, not only with each other but with all of this remarkable choreographer’s creations. The works are rooted in walking—which becomes magical. As De Keersmaeker has asserted (RealTime 111), “our walking is our dancing. With walking we organise space and time. Walking is the basic architecture of movement.” And her works pay homage to composers with superb bodily and spatial realisations of their scores. Festival director Lieven Bertels honoured De Keersmaeker, Steve Reich, Gerard Grisey and audiences with these superb Sydney Festival pairings.

Sydney Festival, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Rosas, FASE, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, 9-11 Jan; Vortex Temporum, Carriageworks, Sydney, 15-16 Jan

It’s a truism, but one worth repeating: not all literary forms are possible in all eras. Today, the manifesto is an impossible form. Of course, people do still write manifestos, just as people do still write mock epics in heroic couplets, but almost without exception these are failures.

Yes, the age of the magnificent screed has passed. And yet the great manifestos of yesteryear continue to fascinate, even if only as dazzling curiosities rather than roadmaps to revolution. We can still thrill to the wild surmise, the oracular speculation, of a Marinetti or a Malevich, a Picabia or a Breton, to the urgency and ecstasy, without believing that what art needs today is a new generation of polemicists.

German-born installation and video artist Julian Rosefeldt certainly seems free of any revolutionary pretentions. His new 13-channel work, Manifesto (2015), jointly commissioned by a half dozen institutions and festivals from Australia and Germany, takes a contemplative, somewhat ironic view of the art of the artist’s manifesto.

The work features none other than Cate Blanchett performing a series of brief composite manifestos in everyday contemporary situations. The texts have been patched together by Rosefeldt mostly but not exclusively from writings by artists associated with the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde—the Dadaists, Futurists, Situationalists, Suprematists, Surrealists and all the rest.

And so we have Blanchett as a primary school teacher and a choreographer, a newscaster and a eulogist at a funeral, a homeless man and a puppeteer. The idea, as explained by Rosefeldt, is to see how, if at all, these manifestos resonate with life in the 21st century.

On one screen, we find Blanchett playing a tattooed punk rocker in a crowded backstage band room. As the camera pans across tables littered with empty beer bottles and packets of crisps, she gives a hedonistic twist to the maxims of Vicente Huidobro and Manuel Maples Arce, exponents of Creacionismo and Stridentism respectively.

“Man is not a systematically balanced clockwork mechanism,” she sneers, while roadies in the background snort lines of coke.

On another screen, she plays an American financial analyst or trader in the employ of an enormous – and necessarily sinister—multinational corporation. Is there a connection between the Futurists who worshipped the glories of speed and today’s globalised financial markets? The possibilities tantalise.

On some screens the conjunction of text and scenario creates a charming and very watchable absurdity. On other screens the associations seem less productive. In at least one instance, where Blanchett plays a crane operator at an incinerator plant, a Müllbunker, the effect is unexpectedly poignant. Here Rosefeldt’s text is taken from a medley of architectural manifestos, including the wonderfully dithyrambic Daybreak by Bruno Taut, written in 1921, an example of manifesto writing at its most uplifting:

“How day will eventually break—who knows? But we can feel the morning. We are no longer moonstruck wanderers roaming dreamily in the pale light of history.”

And architecture is a favourite subject right through Manifesto. Although Blanchett adopts accents from America and the United Kingdom, on almost every screen there’s some fond tribute to a recognisable feature of Berlin’s built environment.

Manifesto was shot on a relatively tight budget over 12 days around Berlin in the winter of 2014. Given this difficult schedule, Blanchett has done remarkably well to transform these generic character types into sympathetic individuals. And she really seems to savour and enjoy the texts themselves, which, after all, were written for the mouth and for the ear.

But she is never unrecognisable. Even costumed as the homeless man, wandering the ruins of an abandoned fertiliser factory in East Germany with a beard and prosthetic nose, face smeared in ash, even there she is Cate Blanchett. And to be surrounded by this face, to see it territorialising every surface, creeping in its variations, is a fairly disconcerting experience.

The ACMI exhibition also features three other Rosefeldt works, including his miniature masterpiece Stunned Man (Trilogy of Failure, Part 2) (2004), a two-channel video installation in which a man simultaneously destroys and rebuilds his apartment. It’s a marvel of detail and craft.

And so is Manifesto. Every scene is meticulously composed. The camera lingers on crowded surfaces, trails slowly over bench tops and piles of interesting rubble. As you settle into the space, secret patterns emerge, verbal coincidences, parallel ideas, repeating visual themes.

As the primary school teacher, Blanchett implores her young pupils to remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: it doesn’t matter where you take if from, it’s where you take it to. The question, then, is where does Manifesto take its manifestos?

In spite of its technical strengths, its cinematic lustre, its cleverly coordinated sound design, the work is a bit sterile or academic. Or perhaps factitious is a better word: there are moments of joy and melancholy and eeriness, but you can hear the fluttering of an empty sleeve. Manifesto feels more like an intellectual exercise than an homage: like 13 moves in a glass bead game.

Julian Rosefeldt: Manifesto, multi-screen film installation, writer, director Julian Rosefeldt, performer Cate Blanchett; commissioned by ACMI in partnership with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Hamburger Bahnhof-Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin and Sprengel Museum, Hannover; ACMI, Melbourne, to 13 March

Early on in Todd Haynes’ Carol (2015) the two protagonists catch sight of each other across the Christmas toy display in a 1950s department store. From this interlocking of gazes—the first of many—between diffident young store clerk Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara) and sophisticated matron Carol (Cate Blanchett), an intrigue develops apace; the younger woman pulled along in the other’s slipstream with such rapidity (“I always say yes to everything,” Therese says much later on) that we have no choice but to accept their burning attraction as a fait accompli.

While Haynes has stressed his intention for Carol to be purely a love story rather than an ‘issues-based’ film, all the obstacles to Therese and Carol’s love are external ones springing from attitudes at a time when male homosexuality was criminalised and lesbians were considered mentally ill. Carol becomes hostage to her resentful soon-to-be ex-husband who threatens to withhold access to her daughter should she continue her involvements with women.

The relationship between Carol and Therese itself is not internally conflicted, however. It is one of unadulterated passion, a little stiffly negotiated initially given the formality of the period, but always moving towards a destination of high romance. Carol and Therese are unequivocally in love, so why does their relationship feel so null? It’s not for lack of commitment on the actors’ part.

Blanchett’s every gesture (the raising of the hand to the hair, the arch sideways glance), her every low-cadenced utterance is weighed and considered in a mannered performance that recalls her role in Blue Jasmine (2013), as another woman attempting to shrug off her past, with that film’s theatrical echoes of A Streetcar Named Desire. It’s a style of acting that draws attention away from the couple’s interactions and towards its own evocation of 50s femininity.

Mara’s Therèse is terse, curious and wide-eyed, not yet quite at ease with herself, in contrast to the experienced Carol. The uneven dynamic between the two at times causes Blanchett’s character to seem faintly predatory; something I assume was unintentional. But beyond these performative quirks, a more fundamental issue arises, something that’s crucial to films depicting love—how do filmmakers and actors go about conveying chemistry between characters?

In this aspect it seems pertinent to compare Carol to another rare mainstream lesbian love story with similar themes of self-discovery. The chemistry between Adèle and Emma in Blue is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013) comes across as vivid and heady. This might be because Blue is the Warmest Colour takes more time building up a sense of Adèle’s nature and circumstances so that when she first encounters Emma we can understand what has led her to fall for that character. Or maybe it’s due to the point-of-view cinematography that immerses us in Adèle’s world. Then again, as in life, perhaps chemistry is a simple matter of chance.

Carol is in almost every respect polished, considered cinema, its re-creation of the human dramas playing out in a stultifying era eloquent—but where is its beating heart?

Carol, director Todd Haynes, writer Phyllis Nagy from the novel by Patricia Highsmith, cinematography Edward Lachman, score Carter Burwell, 2015

The composer and conductor Pierre Boulez died on 5 January at the age of 90. His 90th birthday was celebrated with a flurry of box-sets and articles stressing the two sides of this influential but divisive figure. On the one hand, there is the enfant terrible who entered Messiaen’s analysis class after the Second World War and, in Messiaen’s words, “quickly became angry at the entire world.” Boulez the avant-garde iconoclast urged his readers to “burn down the opera houses” and famously claimed that those who did not feel the necessity of the Second Vienese School were “USELESS.” At the same time he scolded the school’s founder Arnold Schoenberg for not following the consequences of his own dodecaphonic technique far enough.

On the other hand, Boulez is remembered as the generous teacher and conductor who fostered into being some of Paris’ iconic musical institutions into being including Ircam (the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music), the Cité de la Musique, and the Philharmonie de Paris. As a conductor he is remembered for the analytical clarity of his direction and his transparent orchestral balance. His recordings reveal the detail of Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, or Berlioz’s scores in the belief that hearing more of the score’s information will elicit a stronger emotional response in the listener.

Boulez the militant iconoclast and Boulez the avuncular mélophile. Ironically, Boulez did not want to be remembered as any sort of ‘character’ at all. He was highly secretive about his private life and boasted that he would “be the first composer without a biography.” If Boulez’s 90th birthday offered ample opportunity to reflect on his life’s work, perhaps his death is a good time to consider what he leaves to the future. Boulez is perhaps best remembered as a symbol of the musical 20th century, his death drawing to a close a period of unprecedented experimentation that we ignore at our peril.

Boulez led the most distinctive musical coup of the twentieth century. In his piano pieces, Structures, he extended the principles of Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic music to all parameters of musical sound including pitch, duration, dynamics and timbre. This style is now referred to as “total serialism” and it enjoyed a short but intense vogue at the Darmstadt Summer Music Courses during the 1950s. Its principles were adopted and then expanded upon by some of the century’s most distinctive composers, including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio and Henri Pousseur. When writing up the balance sheet of the 20th century, it is important to note that total serialism in its strict form was used in only a handful of pieces by the “Darmstadt school.” Its institutionalisation in conservatoriums and schools of music throughout the 1960s and ‘70s has given it a greater and more maligned profile than it deserves. The story of post-war European modernism is one of diverging paths between Boulez and his generation.

Though Boulez declared himself during the 1960s “300% Marxist-Leninist,” he avoided politicising his music (at least with a big ‘P’). Not so Nono, whose involvement in the Italian anti-fascist resistance resonated throughout his music, in particular theatrical and vocal works such as Il canto sospeso, Diario polacco; Composizione no. 2, and Intolleranza 1960.

Though Boulez founded one of the world’s most important institutions for electroacoustic music, Ircam, Stockhausen is best remembered for his early extension of serial organisation to unprecedented areas of timbral and temporal organisation at the Studio for Electronic Music of the West German Radio.

Where then was Boulez while Nono protested and Stockhausen experimented with wave oscillators? He was conducting and founding institutions, as well as composing sporadically. He was ensuring that new generations of composers could experiment as he did. Boulez was the avant-garde’s animus and his death draws the long, musical 20th century to a close. For that he will be remembered.

An enormous blast rings out in Verbruggen Hall. Organ, strings and percussion fire off a shattering chord: a short roar that repeats again and again, becoming a deliberate march of inexorable force. Trumpet is added to the multi-layered blasts, which don’t give any sign of stopping. As the onslaught continues, it triggers shifts in perception. Shapes and patterns are audible in the dense cacophony. Pitches and tones seem to echo and resonate longer in the sonic afterglow of each explosion; they stretch and contract, creating the illusion that the pulse is moving faster and slower.

Exit Ceremonies, presented by the Australian Art Orchestra and Ensemble Offspring as part of the 2016 Sydney Festival, harnesses the ritualistic power of the organ in premieres by Australian composers Austin Buckett and Simon James Phillips. Buckett’s Aisles is built of episodes, diverse periods of repetitious textures that develop from the formidable beating of the opening figure. The introductory section is brought to a close by Sonya Holowell’s clear soprano. The explosions abruptly cease, replaced by her chant “On a soun-ding bo-dy,” one syllable per beat on a single note.

She’s cut off by a powerful, seething wall of noise. As the shock subsides and the ear adjusts, repeating patterns become audible in the writhing. Rumbling percussion and trumpet ornaments settle the music (in the listener’s ear) into a short repeating cell, which evolves periodically at a signal from Claire Edwardes, who leads from the bass drum. Episodes of disorienting loudness alternate with quieter reprieves. White noise bursts out of speakers, the experience akin to sensory deprivation, and subsonic throbbing shudders through the audience. An unsettling organ cadenza bends and stutters, the notes drooping like the abandoned drone of a bagpipe. Buckett’s complex deluge of noise and extreme volume is confronting but also fascinating, an immersive experiential adventure.

Turntablist Martin Ng stands alone at the beginning of Simon James Phillips’ Flaw decorating silence with sparse beeps and slides, twists and whorls of electronic scratching interspersed with pauses. The other musicians solemnly assemble on stage. Layers build imperceptibly from the silence. A soft hum permeates the air, quiet static or rain comes through speakers surrounding the audience. Edwardes drags her fingers across the skin of the bass drum while bows slide quietly against strings. Peter Knight blows air through his trumpet into a microphone, adding wind to the rain. Ng intrudes periodically with brief, chaotic solos. A sustained organ note emerges from the fog. Holowell intones pure prayer-like syllables. Flaw builds agonisingly slowly, pitches accumulating until the organ’s low register can be felt physically and the bass drum is a continuous booming roll. Phillips presides over all, exalted above the ensemble at the organ’s console. At the high water mark, Ng’s turntable cracks and bellows like thunder, full of aggression even as the storm begins to recede. The crescendo is reversed, fading into dripping electronics and Sonya Holowell’s breath through the microphone.

Exit Ceremonies was a hypnotic exploration of sound, time and perception. The changing patterns of Buckett’s Aisles drew the audience into a spellbinding maelstrom of sonic discovery. Although the turntable seemed superfluous at times, Phillips’ meditative Flaw traced a compelling rise and fall, blurring the passage of time.

Exit Ceremonies will be performed on 6 February in Melbourne Town Hall with a newly commissioned work, Swings, by leading American composer Alvin Lucier.

Sydney Festival, Exit Ceremonies, The Australian Art Orchestra and Ensemble Offspring, Verbrugghen Hall, 23 Jan