HIGH UP IN THE TREES

'The number is complete,' said Poirot.

{The Affair at the Victory Ball}


{The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor}

A Catalogue of Bodies is a 77 double page zine available for pre-order through our online store. It will dispatched Monday the 7th of October. A huge thank-you to those of you who have already placed your orders for this forthcoming zine with blood red spine.

'The number is complete,' said Poirot. 'Everyone is here.' There was a ring of satisfaction in his tone.
(from Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd)

A Catalogue of Bodies harvested from the television adaptations (1989-2014) of Agatha Christie’s stories featuring Hercule Poirot as played by David Suchet. Included in this grisly catalogue, pretend deaths (such as Magdala ‘Nick’ Buckley’s staged overdose in Peril at End House and Norma Restarick’s staged suicide in the bathtub in The Third Girl, and what appears to be Arlena Stuart’s strangled body on the beach but is actually Christine Redfern in disguise in Evil Under the Sun), suicides, deaths, and murders. In some cases, where the body is not shown, the moment just prior features, giving us Dorothy Craddock, having been earlier injected with bacteria, falling ill in Egypt in Cards on the Table; Rosaleen and Gordon Cloade just before the bomb blast in Taken at the Flood; Major Richard Knighton shown standing on the train tracks at mystery’s culmination in The Blue Train; and because both were simply too good not to include, on a newspaper in Hastings’ hands, a headline announcing Felix Bleibner’s mysterious death in The Egyptian Tomb, and Lady Muriel in the play attended by Poirot and Arthur Hastings in The Third Floor Flat.


{The Murder of Roger Ackroyd}


{Dumb Witness}

Whilst several pretend deaths have been included, any thwarted attempts and near misses have been left out of the catalogue as they did not produce an actual body to document. For example, Nurse Hopkins’ thwarted attempt to poison Poirot (Sad Cypress), Mrs Rendell’s failed attempt to push Poirot before a train (Mrs McGinty’s Dead), Miss Phyllida Campion being “pushed down the moving stairs” (The Case of the Missing Will), and in order to throw suspicion onto others, Miss Gilchrist’s illness as a result of consuming a non-fatal, self-poisoned piece of wedding cake (After the Funeral). Deaths referred to in conversation only, such as Richard Abernethie from After the Funeral, have also not been included in this catalogue.


{Death in the Clouds}


{Murder on the Links}

A Catalogue of Bodies is ordered by original publication as opposed to televised adaptation. At time of printing the final five television adaptations that will conclude the series have not yet aired.  Elephants Can Remember (1972), The Big Four (1927), The Labours of Hercules (1947), Dead Man’s Folly (1956), and Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case (1975) will be added to the catalogue when they screen in Melbourne, Australia, and the zine will be re-released to include all titles that offer forth a body to record.


{Hickory Dickory Dock}


{The Yellow Iris}

Pre-order your copy of A Catalogue of Bodies through our online store

+ Thank-you for your recent congratulatory cheer shared in regards to Art Almanac's seal covergirl
+ Yay! (phew) Hawks!
+ A rare Sunday Green-capped Parrot (Thanks for coming along to Geelong Gallery, C, R, M, D, S, and W)

A fish-eating aquatic mammal with a streamlined body and flippers.

{Seal something in. Seal something off. Seal someone's fate. Under seal. A seal can be a device or substance used to join two things. It can be a piece of wax, lead, or other material with a design stamped into it. Ever busy is the seal, but the seal I like best of all sports a streamlined body and flippers.}

A conversation with a seal has been had and it was not quite as I’d imagined it. Few things ever are. Having seen the cover of October’s Art Almanac, our printer Bernie calls, and delights in making arrupph, arruph, arrrruph noises down the line. It is one of the nicest congratulatory back pats I’ve had. From both a seal and our printer.

It has been such a pleasant surprise to see my postcard collage Wet whiskers drying on the cover of the Art Almanac.
 
Our exhibition at Geelong Gallery is on until the 13th of October. Come the morning of 14th, we’ll be coaxing our furred, feathered, and scaled creatures back into their shoeboxes and folios, and puttying 900+ tiny holes in the gallery, restoring all to smooth calm order.

Thank-you to all who've been to see our work and sent word, and to those who came along to our recent talk. It’s proving one fantastical ride, thus far, and much like a fairytale, operating to its own rules of time and passing by all too quickly.

From flippers to glass slippers, she slides. Having now seen Cinderella twice (on Friday evening, and again on the following Tuesday) fairytales are much in my mind of late. Suitably, at just before the clock chimed twelve times, and the topiary hedges transformed into metronomes and gave chase about the lounge room, I finished my response to Alexi Ratmansky’s Cinderella. Until it is published on Fjord Review, I’ll leave you with this a look at the costumes sported both onstage and off.

(Who knows, perhaps we’ll get to see La Bayadère or Chroma or Manon together, when next you are in Melbourne, Hila? We can compare favourites as we did paintings in the NGV’s permanent collection.)


{Louise heads to the opening night of Cinderella with her Mum.}


{Louise and I take our costume influence from the Celestial Bodies and head to the ballet.}


{My Mum and I sway back and forth to Prokofiev's Waltz-Coda.}
 

{Ratmansky's Cinderella}

+ With pencil in hand
+ Inside a time capsule

The indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.

For our part of Materiality's Time issue, Louise and I created A Jungle Grows in all Spaces, a collage of thirty-three moving parts to appear in the lower left-hand corner of every printed page. A flip book tale in which all returns to nature, or does it?

And Time is officially being launched tomorrow. At the brilliantly subterraneus Sticky Institute. Perhaps we'll see you there. Making time. Frittering time. Killing time.

Friday the 20th of September
5.30-7.00pm
at the Sticky Institute
10 Campbell Arcade, Degraves Subway, Melbourne 3000

For those not in Melbourne or who can't make it along to the launch, you can purchase a copy of Time as either hard copy or as pdf download through Pinknantucket Press.

Tick-tock, tick-tock. The sound of a large clock ticking. On the subject of time, I am very much looking forward to hearing Prokofiev's beautiful score with its quality of measuring time when I attend Ratmansky's Cinderella ball. From what I have heard and seen, I know I am in for a tremendous celestial treat.

+ Materiality's Book issue
+ Flies, Chipmunks and Other Tiny Creatures See the World in Slow Motion (Smithsonian Magazine)
+ Ancient Egypt, magical roses, and animal skins, do read all about Cinderella's Many Faces (Behind Ballet)

Those tortured Romantics, they do love their anguish.

{A La Sylphide Marie Taglioni paper doll. (Image courtesy of The United Federation of Doll Clubs, Inc., with paper doll courtesy of Laurie McGill)}

The Australian Ballet

La Sylphide (1836)
Choreography: Erik Bruhn after August Bournonville
Music: Herman Løvenskjold
Costume and set design: Anne Fraser
Lighting design: Francis Croese

Paquita (1847)
Choreography: Marius Petipa
Music: Ludwig Minkus
Costume design: Hugh Colman
Original lighting design: William Akers
Reproduced by Francis Croese

Tuesday 3rd September 2013
Friday 6th September 2013
(and Full Dress Rehearsal, Wednesday 28th August 2013)

“... I continued for a long time to live in that delightful but short-lived state where love and innocence can co-exist in one heart. She had sent me away. Everything called me back to her, I had to return. This return decided my fate, and long before I came to possess her, I lived only for her and my whole life was in hers. Ah! if only I had satisfied her heart and she satisfied mine! What peaceful and delightful days we should have spent together! We did indeed have such days, but how brief and fleeting they were, and what fate followed them!”
Tenth Walk (unfinished), Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1776–78

So wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau about not an ethereal being but of Madame de Warens upon recalling her memory some twenty-eight years since they met. But I can just easily imagine our Scottish farmer, James, in La Sylphide (1836), uttering similar sentiment in the woodland glade of Act II to the ethereal creature flitting weightlessly before him: “We did indeed have such days, but how brief and fleeting they were, and what fate followed them!” How fleeting indeed. When we think of Romanticsm, be it in literature, opera, art, music or ballet, we think immediately of the movement’s fascination with nature. Grass underfoot is not soggy but “damp with dew,” and happiness no lasting state “for man in this world”. Simplicity and naturalness, and affection and sorrow all tied up with a ribbon of romantic longing. Communing with nature and abandoning the senses and the heart to enjoyment, and love, the motivational force behind one’s actions, the Romantics, for me, have come to define what it is to be human: glorious and fallible sensory beings. And it is perhaps part of the reason such romantic ballets, like La Sylphide, live on and continue to entrance.

“I walked around in a kind of ecstasy, abandoning all my senses and my heart to the enjoyment of it all, yet sighing a little that I was alone in enjoying it.”
Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1770

Rousseau’s[1] ten lyrical meditations penned in the two years before his death in 1778 and other works, such as Confessions, for me, have always encapsulated this sense of simplicity and nature tied together. Greenery is here akin to earthly paradise. And greenery abounds and entices in La Sylphide, viewed at first through the large window of the farmhouse setting, so vivid in its refusal to be ignored, and in the sylph herself, hovering weightless en pointe, in turn encapsulating August Bournonville’s choreography of ballon. Of the air, our sylph barely touches the ground. She easily captivates James, and presents a female figure at ease with her affections.

Seeing this work recently performed by The Australian Ballet as a double bill with Marius Petipa’s Paquita serving as an irresistible 19th-century classicism appetiser, is like discovering a much sort after time machine. Both works feel so of their time that to see them is to feel transported to a theatre in the 1800s. This sensation comes from the choreography, from the way it uses the body, what it asks of the body, and from the emphasis upon the rapid feet movements in La Sylphide, a two act ballet synonymous with putting the dancers en pointe without the aid of overhead wires and ‘flying machines’. In La Sylphide we see memory of the first sylph Marie Taglioni, who, as Artistic Director David McAllister explained “used her incredible ability to balance on her toes for the first time in this work. The illusion of barely touching the floor, hovering on the tips of her toes, gave Taglioni a weightlessness that removed her from the earthly realm and enabled her to inhabit the role of the woodland fairy she portrayed. What Taglioni began has now evolved into a technique employed by every ballerina.”

In seeing these two works, though particularly La Sylphide, I am keenly aware that a ballet can be both timeless and of its time. This for me is part of its beauty. It is beautifully of its time. It shows us clearly what ballet was at that exact period. And in showing us what ballet was in 1836, it shows us evolution of technique and style. This production of La Sylphide has been handed down by Danish ballet masters since its 1836 debut appearance thereby making it a close-to authentic and pure work, and whilst not the same version as performed by Taglioni, in Erik Bruhn’s choreography after Bournonville I like to imagine we are seeing close to what audiences saw centuries ago.

In Paquita it is easy to imagine the audience in rapturous applause as legs fly so high they could detach, and hands give impression of pushing against the resistance of water, for this work, now more commonly performed as the one-act marriage scene between Paquita and the French nobleman whose life she has saved, is a work chiefly about impressive technique over narrative. Revised by Petipa, our Paquita remains our Spanish gypsy who discovers that she is of noble blood and thus able to marry her beloved Lucien, but what holds is the detailed classicism and Spanish-styled épaulement that seeks to convey aristocratic elegance. It is this that most evokes the period and thus delights. Audiences on the two nights’ I attended, and the full dress rehearsal too, delighted in those keenly awaited 32 fouettés executed to timed perfection as much, I can only imagine, as they did many, many performances ago.

Both timeless and of its time. The landscape paintings of Théodore Gericault and John Constable, for example, embody the Romantic sensibility and as such show us today how they viewed the world. Nature is dramatic, and there is a terrific sense of melancholic reverie. Romanticism, in rejection of Enlightenment’s values placed upon reason and order, is, as Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846, “a way of feeling”. And it is this “way of feeling” twinned with Bournonville’s lightness and beauty that sees us transported to liminal space between reality and dream, from farmhouse to cauldron-side and later woodland glade all by second act of La Sylphide. Nature is a great muse, and just like those dramatic paintings, it is not always the good hero who wins. There is heartache at the core of Romanticism, and one of the air and one of the earth cannot live together. And there is the grotesque, too, in Madge, the old fortuneteller serving as dramatic counter to ethereal and ultimately unattainable sylphs. Having cursed James as she is thrown out from the farmhouse for declaring that it will be his rival Gurn who will marry his intended Effie, there can be little doubt how this will end. James will end up with neither the supernatural sylph whom he is enamored of nor his fiancée Effie. A man divided between two loves, between two worlds, it is this very state of unrest and duality that we so closely associate with the Romantic period. For me this ballet is about the sad duality between the body and the soul, between reality and the unknown realm of dreams and ideas, and what it means to be human.

I was fortunate to see the full dress rehearsal before the varnish set and this only enhanced the magical otherworldliness of the ballet. Our Sylphide really does ‘fly’ up the chimney in Act I even though as is playfully revealed by David McAllister in a post-performance Q&A session it is owing to the aid of two unseen “corps de ballet boys pulling her up”. Knowing this does not alter the allure. How could it? You see only what you are meant to see: a view of the world through the borrowed eyes of the Romantics. Those tortured Romantics, they do love their anguish. As do I, it transpires.
 
Gracia Haby
8th September 2013
Especially for Fjord Review
The Last of the Romantics
(Thank-you Penelope)

[1] Curiously, Rousseau’s own appearance and delicate features were even described by Thomas Bentley as being of the supernatural world: “When Nature was making this singular being, one would imagine she intended him for an inhabitant of the air, but before she had finished his wings he eagerly sprung out of her hands, and his unfinished body sunk down to earth.”

+ BALLET INSIDER: Lisa Bolte talks La Sylphide
+ La Syl-fever by Caitlyn Lehmann, on Behind Ballet
+ La Sylphide otherworldly magic

And now, here comes Ratmansky's Cinderella.
+ Come behind the scenes
+ Surrealist Cinderella takes to the stage

Spring resprung.

{Sunk long time in trance.}

Because sometimes the very best thing you can do when feeling yourself spread too thin is to add something else to the list of things of to do and things to mend, I am puttying, sanding, sugar-soaping, and repainting the bathroom with Louise. It has, this additional task, worked wonders in the Great Business of Getting Things Done. It has served like a painter’s medium to extend the paint’s fluidity and coverage, prompting me to think that perhaps it had all been a question of readdressing the balance of things. One cannot be too much in the head. The body and its marvellous muscles need their workout too. And so, with gap filler in hand, we continue to plug holes in the bathroom where the garden tries to break through and wave green hand. We fix dodgy electrics in the last of the day's light before heading back to the task of new collage works (on my plate) and the hand-colouring of some 120 birds (on Louise’s plate). We scrub, polish, and scrape, all to the supposed delight of the pets. They inspect the work, gingerly. Sensory alert! Sniff, sniff, sniff. What’s this new earthen scent you’ve uncovered?   

Back to the brilliant toil.
(And see you in Melbourne soon, Hila.)


{A strange and silent place.}


{The Birmingham Freeze.}


{The Veracruz Tiptoe.}


{A strange kind of winter palace.}

+ Thank-you to all of you who have taken the time to go and see All breathing in heaven at Geelong Gallery. It has been so encouraging to receive your emails about the exhibition, and I am most grateful to those of you who have also sent me a few postcards from their own collection too. I have a new series of collages in mind and this has given me a great spark. An abundances of thanks to you, you brilliant and kind and curious souls.

+ Poles apart. Tickets for The Australian Ballet and Opera Australia for 2014 finalised. Ten delights await!
+ A teasing look at The Australian Ballet's 2014 season

I am looking forward to sharing with you my post on La Sylphide and Paquita once published, until then, sneak into the rehearsal room of Cinderella:


{Cinderella: Episode #2: in the rehearsal room}

Without an envelope.

{Hitching a ride; pray it be short.}

This coming Sunday you will find me at Geelong Gallery talking about animals and artworks, processes, patterns and idea harvesting with Louise and Stephen. Taking turns or perhaps prattling enthusiastically all at the one time, we three care not to predict. Come along and see for yourself, do.

All breathing in heaven floortalk
Sunday the 15th of September at 3pm
Geelong Gallery, Little Malop Street, Geelong
(Free. No bookings required.)

All breathing in heaven is on until the 13th of October
2013 Geelong acquisitive print awards is on until the 24th of November


{By the Roaring River of Jamaica, I lost my legs to nature.}


{Official opening of the 2013 Geelong acquisitive print awards, reproduced courtesy of the Geelong Gallery. Photography: Reg Ryan}


{Paths crossed, stranger aligned.}


{Official opening of the 2013 Geelong acquisitive print awards, reproduced courtesy of the Geelong Gallery. Photography: Reg Ryan}


{The Jamaican Flip.}


{Official opening of the 2013 Geelong acquisitive print awards, reproduced courtesy of the Geelong Gallery. Photography: Reg Ryan}


{Passing through Malta undetected.}

Thank-you for the Happy Birthday cheer, dear all. And the songs sung as well. xo

+ Pleat of Mind, Mary Gray and Alicja Kuzmycz, Stephen McLaughlan Gallery
+ Shimmering Light: Dora Meeson and the Thames, Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum
+ Percy's occassional appearance on Pasadena Mansions
+ Secret fore-edge paintings revealed in early 19th Century books Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer by Robert Mudie at the University of Iowa (Colossal)
+ TORAFU's Haunted Play House at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo

+ She will go inside: "Looking at Gracia & Louise's instagram photos always makes me feel good. This photo in particular is one of my favourites since it not only features fine felines draped ever so elegantly, but also a plaque my mum hand-painted as a gift for them in the bottom left corner (the pansies) hanging below the beautiful artwork of Gracia’s own mum. This photo never fails to bring a smile to my face." (le projet d'amour)

Happy, Happy, Happy Birthday!

I've stolen your blog for a day to say Happy Birthday, dear Gracia, Happy Birthday to you. May the day ahead make you as joyous as this White-plumed Honeyeater (Lichenostomus penicillatus).

xolj

With head in the sand indefinitely, thirteen early spring views.

All is impending doom, as Hila recently described. Doom and gloom. Gloom and doom. Every which way one turns in dispirited lead up to election day. Having already voted earlier today in a crowded Baptist Church in Northcote, I am this evening making like one of Louise's birds and burying my head in the sand. (The view's not bad, under here.) It is the most bird-like I've ever been, I am told. Normally more feline or rodent in mannerism than feathered friend, tonight I am the ostrich. I will focus on the cracking progress Louise's A Year of Southern Hemisphere Birds is making, and the hand-coloured edition of ten that accompany this unique-state artists' book, A Flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds, too. Launching side-by-side come late October at the Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne, today afforded the chance for show and tell in the library. Owing to the day's downpour, trusty garbage bags made good the carrying of artists' books in state of progress. A gold-lined solander box and precious contents received not one drop. So, here assembled, recent views, from a teddy still lost and awaiting collection in a storefront's window to our reflected readiness to visit to a woodland glade (in the form of The Australian Ballet's La Sylphide, and Paquita at the State Theatre), a Father's Day feast and leisure, and back once more to Geelong Gallery, this time with Louise's parents. And tomorrow I turn 38. This is something of a relief to me as I have spent the year thus far already believing myself to be eight and thirty.

Thank-you. Thank-you. Thank-you. A nonet of what was.

Keeping it brief, this Sunday morning post on Father's Day is just to say a huge thank-you to all of Louise and my family and friends and new faces too who made it along to our exhibition opening with Stephen Wickham of All breathing in heaven at Geelong Gallery. Twinned with the 2013 Geelong acquisitive print awards, of which our artists' book As inclination directs is a part of, the opening night passed in a mad whirl. Here, for those who may have missed these quick captures shared on instagram, twitter, and facebook, a nonet of what was, on the last Friday in winter.

All breathing in heaven is on until the 13th of October
(We three will be giving a floortalk on Sunday the 15th of September at 3pm. Come along, do.)
2013 Geelong acquisitive print awards is on until the 24th of November

+ Downdload All breathing in heaven 13-page catalogue pdf
+ SHOW OF THE WEEK: Take flight, handmadelife (Thanks Ramona)

+ Omar farewells winter
+ Juan Fontanive's great flying Flipbook Machines

Happy Father's Day, Dad. xo