ELSEWHERE

Happy Christmas! May it bring something wonderful

To both receive and give, we’d rather fancy the gift of a little quiet time to be spent as desired. Time to open a book and read it in one sitting, the process broken only by the need to cut another slice of chocolate ripple cake to ensure the belly remains full. Time to potter in the garden, gloves off, soil under fingernail. Time to lie in a hammock or stretched out on the grass. Time to snooze like your pets do year round. And time to be submerged in water, be it at pool or in the ocean, or feet dipped in a creek or body in a bath drawn and brimming with potions. Days and nights, a succession of them, to be spent as one chooses. In bright and noisy company. In the darkened cinema hush. In quiet seclusion. On a long walk. With purpose or ambling. Dreaming of the future.
 
Happy Christmas! May it bring something wonderful.
 
And here’s to the adventures ahead in 2013.

Yours in paper covered,
G & L

(Several collaborative collages by Gracia and me created especially for Janette and Leah in response to a Milly Sleeping suppliers/makers/designers Christmas wishlist call-out.)

(This is how December has looked of late.)

On display

Recently, Gracia and I made a new zine that features the altered postcards from our artists' book Beneath the screen of closed eyelids (Port Said). It is so recent that it is yet to be listed in our online store. Here, you can see it in hand. And here is a look inside. Those of you in Melbourne can pick up a copy at Sticky before the store closes for Christmas. Others of you may have been able to pick up a copy at Hand Held Gallery's one night only small zine and artists' book exhibition. Hand Held Gallery is open tomorrow from 12 until 5pm, and reopens on the 16th of January.

Hand Held Gallery
Suite 18, upstairs
Paramount Arcade
108 Bourke Street
Melbourne, 3000

We'll be listing it on our online store shortly, but Christmas is a busy time of year and it may take us a little while to do so. Mince tarts and nougat calls, and we've presents to wrap.

I'll let the image above that Megan of Hand Held Gallery sent through serve as a tantalising peek at all the zines and small publications awaiting your perusal at the Paramount Arcade. There are fifty-odd in total.

Thanks for inviting us to be a part of this, Megan. We wish only that i'd been able to make it along to the show.

Of Christmas sales and last minute things, we have recently delivered to the Brunswick Street Bookstore a big order of our cards, including the new stage cards.

On a different note, thanks so much for the beautiful gift sent, Hila. It is much appreciated. As is the link to our free festive print to download.

On the stage

In the frantic lead up to Christmas and the New Year, Gracia and I have prepared a little festive collage series for Milly Sleeping. Above is a little look at one of our celebratory works for Leah (that will be posted later on in the week). I thought it seemed an apt way to post today about G's recent written pieces for Fjord Review. One is about The Australian Ballet's 50th Gala and the other is about a performance of Pierrot Lunaire as part of the Melbourne Festival. Lest you missed them in the busy Christmas scheme of things, here, below, is G's response to the Gala that I was also lucky enough to see twice:

The Australian Ballet’s 50th Anniversary Gala
Thursday 1st & Friday 2nd November, 2012
Featuring guests from American Ballet Theatre, Stuttgart Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, National Ballet of China, and The Tokyo Ballet

There must be whooping. Lots of it. An abundance of whooping, cheering, hooting, and thunderous applause. This is what celebrations need in order to make them celebrations. And to make a performance a gala event: so it was for The Australian Ballet’s 50th Anniversary Gala, which I had the fortune of seeing twice.

The cast for both performances was chiefly the same, with the exception of the Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux (Thursday 1st November: Ty King-Wall and Leanne Stojmenov / Friday 2nd November: Kevin Jackson and Lana Jones) and Études (Thursday: Madeleine Eastoe, Yosvani Ramos, Chengwu Guo, Andrew Killian / Friday: Lucinda Dunn, Rachel Rawlins, Lana Jones, Madeleine Eastoe, Ty King-Wall, Adam Bull, Rudy Hawkes). Friday night was recorded and broadcast live at Federation Square in Melbourne and Martin Place in Sydney where you could watch the performance free underneath the starry canopy.

What amazement, the human body: capable of performing all manner of artistry and athleticism, capable of the illusion of weightlessness as it sails through the air, capable of wooing and beguiling its audience, of such tantalisation. The Anniversary Gala, which included a host of international guest artists, was a giddy showcase of the balletic body. Fouetté. Jeté. Pas de bourrée. Pirouette. Ballet’s lexicon was shown to brilliant extreme in this jewel box array from Giselle, Carmen Suite, Manon, and Tchkovisky’s White Swan Pas de Deux from Swan Lake and the finale, Harald Lander’s Études.

It is a language to be read on the bodies of dancers. It is a conversation we are cognisant of between the dancers themselves, in the aching intimacy of Demis Volpi's Little Monsters in love and the sigh inducing partnering in Christopher Wheeldon's  After the Rain. Equally, it is a conversation between dancer and audience. You do not need to know the terms nor the history (though this helps, and many, of course, do) for it is a language that cuts across this. There is a directness, a clearness to movements we all understand. Longing, love, elation, exuberance. This is something we can read no matter our background. It is a story told yesterday; it is a story told today. It is timeless, and Love and Loss and Joy prove unfailing guides. They whisper, they coax, and they play. They tell a story orchestrated to reach into one’s very chest and grab at the heart. They must know that they pull long golden ropes from inside the fleshy trunks of all seated in the theatre. Pulling at heartstrings—this is the stuff to make your forearms prickle. Goosebumps! These physical sensations, all part of the thrill. Not merely a heady experience, this ride is for the body too.

The dancers, those beautiful alien creatures, seem to be carved from something else (the result of years of training and dedication and the endless pursuit of excellence). Some, like the Tokyo Ballet’s Mizuka Ueno give impression of being a towel wrung such were the twists she performed in Alberto Alonso’s Love Pas de Deux from Carmen Suite. Where the body’s organs go is anyone’s guess. Amber Scott’s delicate backbend into a bridge supported by not the palm but the back of each hand, in Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain, had my mum, a Yoga teacher, in complete awe. So too, did the ethereal qualities and liquid moves of Zhu Yan and Sun Ruichen from National Ballet of China in their Giselle dreamscape on stage.

“For as long as the body is relevant in our society, ballet, dance, non verbal forms of communication have a unique role in the communication of ideas. Ballet is relevant because it still has the capacities to move, challenge, excite, inspire, provoke, our human sensibilities in ways no other art form can.”[i]
Wayne McGregor, choreographer, The Royal Ballet

From the opening Overture, this honey-laced trap calls for endurance. What is it common folklore says about being mindful not to step inside a fairy ring of toadstools lest you have to dance for eternity? Something of this rings true for me in this lineup that asks its audience to come along for the fast-paced journey, only our limbs are not as fluid moving and capable as those of the dancers and I find I’m limping by the time we reach the White Swan Pas de Deux. Thrown into the middle of “the best bits” cannot make for anything other than one super endurance test that sees us plucked from Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel and plunged into Giselle’s realm, another landscape to navigate and footing to quickly find.

And so it continues, springing from bedroom (Manon) to another story altogether before things culminate in the Wedding Pas de Deux (Don Quixote). Add to this, all those elements which ensure a company can present such a spectacle polished for the audience to lap up like the bug-eyed child in a sweet factory. Costumes, lighting, teaching, direction, this tight mesh that is the performing arts, to an outsider from the visual arts, reads like a dream.

“I don't experience it as me standing behind the girl looking at the back of her head, with my hands on her waist. I'm feeling what's going on inside her body. And what two people can execute and create is a lot more than one person can alone… Letting go and trusting yourself and your natural reflexes and instincts. It's shedding and taking away all the technical expectations and being sincere with yourself. That's what comes out of it for me.”[ii]
Damian Smith, dancer, San Francisco Ballet

Manon, danced by Australian Ballet principal Adam Bull and guest Julie Kent, principal with American Ballet Theatre, and After the Rain danced by Australian Ballet principal Amber Scott and guest Damian Smith, principal with San Francisco Ballet, the latter in particular, illustrate for me what love is. In Little Monsters (created especially for Stuttgart Ballet’s Elisa Badenes and Daniel Camargo), we see that arms can be made to arc that of a bird of prey. A mighty wingspan that is as beautiful as it is controlled. And when again to the stage the Little Monsters duo take, they bring with them their obvious enjoyment, and assured familiarity to Don Quixote. They love the audience and the audience, naturally, loves them. Hearing feet upon the stage floor, the smell of hairspray (or am I imagining I can smell this from where I sit?), the snap of fingers clicking, the clack of a fan opening, all the little nuances peculiar to a live performance run through me.

Beginning with one dancer’s plie, in Lander’s Études beautiful repetition is used as exquisite pattern to describe to the audience the work of a dancer. This is groundwork, the barre, the training, the repetition of steps. And so, after an early part of the evening spent atop mountain’s peak, we are now presented with a work to read from start to finish. We get to revel in the now seemingly slow assent; the steady build to bang that is Études.

Dancers’ legs are spot lit and shown at the barre as though in class. At one point, the line of dancers look almost like a centipede with its many legs all moving in the one direction, all part of the one body. We see, too, the figure used as inventive silhouette play with the dancers lit so as to become almost from black paper cut. This work is one to delight in, with its chorographical challenges clear. It is, in the vein of the previous highlights, a work for a dancer to open their bag of tricks much like a magician and say, You like that? Well, look, look at what it is I can do now–and the audience lap it up eagerly, feeling truly part of a 50th knees up.

This is play. This is evident in many parts of Études. Dancers taking delight in the things that they can make their bodies do. This is emphatically the feeling I come away with after the curtain call with its flowers, and fireworks on stage, in literal sense, a crowd enraptured and applauding so enthusiastically I’m sure my ears were splitting. How I love this audience for showing its admiration and love for the company, its work and all it stands for. This is how a 50th milestone should be marked.

Crossing the bridge in the direction of home, I stopped at Federation Square to catch the tail end of the performance I had just seen live. It was a good ending to see the crowd assembled on a chilly spring eve, watching the screen. To see a small child preforming its own interpretive solo before those seated. To see people dressed in their work clothes tucking into sushi or sipping lemonade as they looked up at the big screen, transfixed. Once more, the fireworks, the ‘50’ projected on the backcloth. The company on stage saying thank-you, from artistic director David McAllister and Nicolette Fraillon (chief conductor with The Australian Ballet) to Maina Gielgud (artistic director, 1984 to 1996), Marilyn Jones (a principal dancer from the earlier years), Marilyn Rowe (dancer now director of The Australian Ballet School), and Dame Margaret Scott (founder of the school). From here I float home, head wrapped in gauze, nostrils still detecting the smell of hairspray.

Notes:
[i] Wayne McGregor, choreographer at The Royal Ballet, in interview with dance writer Brandan McCarthy in 2006, quoted by Valerie Lawson, arts writer for The Sydney Morning Herald in her piece for the Manon programme of The Australian Ballet, 2008
[ii] Damian Smith in interview, Chance event sparks a leap of faith, Philippa Hawker, The Age, 30th October, 2012

(Published High Up in the Trees and on Fjord Review)

...and here is her piece on Pierrot Lunaire (Moonstruck Pierrot), The Shock of the New, for Fjord Review.

Happy reading, my friends.

A festive announcement!

Dear friends, dear newsletter subscribers,

We're pleased to announce that we’re having a 25% off everything sale until midnight Christmas eve and to offer you this print to download free.

+ To receive 25% off your order at checkout, simply enter the word FESTIVE when asked for the sale code.

The print, Onward, is a new collaborative piece by us two, and, should you wish to download and print, it is A5 in size. Download, print, and pin to wall or with magnets hold to fridge door.

+ Download this PDF file (4.2MB), or simply click on the image above and send to print.

It is all our way of saying thank-you for your support this year, dear and marvellous ones.

G & L
xo

Delighted

I could not be more delighted. The State Library of New South Wales are purchasing for their collection all of our artists' books recently seen in Port Jackson Press Print Room's Little Window of Opportunity. What a thrill! We are leaping and cartwheeling with glee. Such good news to return home to post rigorous pilates class.

To spend a quiet day (Interlaken Berner Oberland); A different picture with every look (Kjøbenhavn); Beneath the screen of closed eyelids (Port-Said); With you my destiny I'd steal (Venezia); and All that’s bewitching by the water (Capri) will soon make the journey interstate. I'm especially looking forward to wrapping them in bubble and tissue.

They will reside in their collection alongside other recent purchases including Copenhagen Extension; Gracia's modified King Penguin series (A headdress to show you how much I care; Testing the laws of hazard; One step ahead; This is where the dormouse lives; The first aerial travellers); Among such company; Modifications in Pictorial Education (I) and (II); An unexpected gathering and A meeting of parrots that shouldn’t;  Sleeping during the day; This evening, however, I am thinking of things past; and Exhausting all possible avenues and I chanced upon the unexpected and found I liked it (a pair of artists' books exhibited as part of twenty-one unique artists' books as part of A key to make your own world visible, Craft Victoria).

In addition to this five purchased today, a handful of recent zines, including our two collaborative zines with Hila, The Glimmer of Armour and It's the Dusty Hour; Whose lights were now seen glittering; A beating of wings (I) and A beating of wings (II); Collection; as well as  Conveyed by the postal system from the postcard travels series that keeps on going and going.

Also in their collection, a boxed set of my zines, An aurora of polar bears I have dreamt of; Five proud birds; Quadrupeds drawn from London’s Natural History Museum collection; and Birds that have caught my eye in print, but I’ve never been lucky enough to see in reality; and a boxed set of Gracia's But I just got here a minute ago too.

(Which reminds me, do you know what a deltiologist is?)




















(Nice to see copies of Dear Dad with Australian Poetry for sale at a recent launch of the art issue of Australian Poerty Journal.)

Let there be light!

Since taking down our window display, it has been especially nice to wrap a handful of zine orders over the weekend ready to post come the morning. Some are addressed to names I know (hello! to you, dear friends) and others are not (hello! to you, new faces). Some are to places I am familiar with and others are more of a mystery.

This is a closer look at The Glimmer of Armour made recently with Hila and Gracia, which only last week you were privy to the assembly process.

You can purchase, The Glimmer of Armour, the bookend to It's the Dusty Hour, individually here or as part of a trio of our newset titles here.

You can also purchase the zine direct from Hila too. Her store, le projet d'amour, also features her own prints of her poems and they can be found here.













Before I go, I'll leave you with this visual of how Mr Percy ushered in the first day of summer. Rolling on the grass. Yep, seems I could learn a thing or two from him. I am looking forward to a little lazy afternoon lolling in January. I've so many books I want to read. Preferably outside. And on the grass. With my dog.

Should that not be enough to sate your Blue sky lust, G's taking you to Copenhagen (in the warmer months).

(All instagram photos can now be seen here.)