{Always, always, in the last week. Catching Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei at the NGV, and leaving with a colourful souvenir.}
Mice? Play? What's that you say. Away from the (cat) desk, we indulged in a little silliness behind the silver curtain of Studio Cats. Why leave it all for the little people?
{Makin' faces "while U wait".}
Right, intermission over. No, really. Back to it.
Recently Seen & Read
Monday, 18 April 2016
You and me and a little theatre.
| | |
|
Friday, 08 April 2016
In colour.
{A tiny collage in moving parts featuring treasure from the Performing Arts Collection.}
From yesterday's silhouettes to full colour at speed, I proudly present 150 frames in 15 instagram-able seconds. The 'filled' version, lest it feels neglected, is also going to be made into a zine, flip book style. Though yet to be printed and hand-bound, it will be one of ten new titles created especially for our stall at the Melbourne Art Book Fair.
And, here, a fragment of the whole, paused. Sixteen random frames between six and one hundred and thirteen to enable a closer peek. Enjoy!
{Slowed down, and ready for their close-up.}
+ Lottie Long Legs is following in the footsteps of our dearly departed Percy and marking her New Life journey by participating in the RSPCA's Million Paws Walk this May. We're walking with Lottie to raise awareness and funds for all animals, the great and the small, long-legged or otherwise, and you are most welcome to chart our progress and/or donate to the good cause.
| | |
|
Thursday, 07 April 2016
Borrowed and cut.
{Collage from Cutting the Collection, Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, digitally printed zine, edition of 100, 2016.}
A love of collage led to a love of ‘collaging’ with words. More specifically, collaging with words about dance. Combining two things I love in the one place, for the time being at least. To me, the means are the same: an image is arranged until it can be ‘read’, until it can communicate something close to what I saw (in the case of dance) or see (in the case of a collage created from ephemera).
Cutting the Collection, a new collaborative zine made with Louise, features treasure found within the digital archives of the Performing Arts Collection. Skimming the surface of their dance, theatre, and circus collections, we harvested digital copies of raged-edged programmes, costume designs, and juggling balls. A mixed bag of images we in some way responded to and thought we could combine within the pages of an A6 zine to be created especially for the forthcoming Melbourne Art Book Fair at the NGV. Chiefly in the role of the fan, whilst also acting as the visually curious, we selected images of Moya and Fred Brown juggling cushions, c.1920s and Patricia Redmond and Owen Laurence performing as ‘Latasha and Laurence’. We collected more than we needed to tell a tale, all the better to whittle away the excess later on in the studio. This was our process. We dug about in the archives and left with a wealth of sepia-toned gems.
In the collages within Cutting the Collection, we have layered two or more elements one atop the other. In echo of the process of creating collages by hand, layers serve to mask or reveal, and all in some way to alter. And so you have illustrated costume designs replete with ruffled collars and long feathers atop photographs of stage sets for musical comedies. At first glance it might appear as though we have blanked out what was once a part of the scene, but the closer you look, the more you will see that the additional silhouettes are from a different period or of a different scale. A circus poster collides with a set from a vaudeville show. Our interest here is shape, yes, but mainly the new story it tells.
Pared back, in this way, whilst making these works we were thinking about the ephemeral nature of dance; the thrill of a live performance and the trace it leaves; notions of recording what was, whilst not ever able to capture or document it fully; and the importance of such collections. The transitory nature of all performance, filtered through our own memory of it or through the imagined memories documented by others before us, in the sense of the earlier material held within the Performing Arts Collection, is something we wish to explore further.
A live performance cannot be siphoned in its entirety into a recording (unless specifically created and/or staged for film). It cannot be ‘relived’ fully just by looking at a piece of staging; the work was beautifully fragmented before the curtain closed. The very idea of something so impossible to harness holds great appeal to us. Serving as an exquisite metaphor of life’s cycle, what occurred on the stage at the very moment can never be seen nor felt again. We are left with trace memories, borrowed or otherwise, with costumes that yellow and fade; we are left with silhouettes that tell a little of what was. This “state of vanishing,” as the choreographer Crystal Pite described, is both powerful and quite tragic.
Working digitally, we were able to cut up precious artefacts, and such temptation we can never refuse. Wish fulfilment! Stop the clock! Rewind!
{Two costume designs, one with gold trims and pink flowers, and the other with green sash and four strands of beads under the chin, by Attilio Comelli for act two from the musical The Girl From Utah, c.1913, upon a photograph of the stage set for the musical comedy Follow Through, 1930 or 1932.}
{Black and white photograph of Patricia Redmond, performing as ‘Latasha,’ upon a poster sign for Holdens Circus’ Saturday Big Matinee, and a black and white photograph of ‘Carter’s’ featuring Patti (Patricia) Redmond and Owen Laurence.}
{Photograph of Mona and Beryl Ferguson in costume for Going Up, 1919, upon a programme for A Tivoli Show presented by the Allied Works Council (Amenities Branch), featuring Jenny Howard, Tibby Roberts, Eddie Marcel, Marie Doran, Percy King, June Holms, the Loretta Twins, Fred Brown, Flannagan, Ted and Flo James, Mavis Reed, 1940.}
{Poster for Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Combined Circus featuring Con Colleano, ‘Wizard of the Wire’, United States of America, c.1930s, upon a black and white photograph featuring Ursula Irving and Gordon Girdwood.}
{Costume design, replete with orange sash, silver trims, and light green fan, by Attilio Comelli for act two from the musical The Girl From Utah, c.1913, upon a photograph of the stage set for the musical comedy Follow Through, 1930 or 1932.}
All images borrowed and cut with permission from the Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne. Thank-you for having us.
| | |
|
Tuesday, 29 March 2016
Kylián, Forsythe, Wheeldon: boundary markers in the geography
{Amber Scott, Lana Jones and Karen Nanasca; Scott and Adam Bull, in Forgotten Land (Image credit: Jeff Busby)}
Vitesse penetrates the heart of being and the beauty of matter through perpetual change in the Australian Ballet’s triple bill and first ballet for 2016. And like its predecessors, 20:21 featuring the choreography of George Balanchine, Tim Harbour, and Twyla Tharp; Chroma featuring choreography by Wayne McGregor, Jiří Kylián, and Stephen Baynes; and Vanguard featuring the choreography of Balanchine, Kylián, and McGregor, our journey is one to spark imagination by presenting the unfathomable as an inexhaustible force.
Especially for Fjord Review, my response to Vitesse, Ballet Without Borders. (Thank-you Penelope. Until next time.)
Vitesse
The Australian Ballet
State Theatre, Melbourne
Monday 14th March, 2016
Tuesday 15th March, 2016
Forgotten Land
Choreography: Jiři Kylián
Assistant to the Choreographer: Roslyn Anderson
Music: Benjamin Britten Sinfonia da Requiem
Set and costume design: John F Macfarlane
Original lighting design: Jiři Kylián (concept) Joop Caboort (realisation)
Lighting redesign: Kees Tjebbes
Technical adaptation: Joost Biegelaar
In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated
Choreography: William Forsythe
Repetitieur: Kathryn Bennetts
Music: Thom Willems in collaboration with Lesley Stuck
Set, costume and lighting design: William Forsythe
DGV
Choreography: Christopher Wheeldon
Repetiteur: Jason Fowler
Music Michael Nyman MGV: (Musique à Grande Vitesse)
Set and costume design: Jean-Marc Puissant
Lighting design: Jennifer Tipton reproduced by Jesse Belsky
"... for the only human race to which it is forbidden to sever the bonds of time is the race of those who create art." —Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps
In Vitesse, Jiří Kylián is our trusted guide and cartographer, joined by William Forsythe and Christopher Wheeldon. Together they map our course and broaden our understanding of what dance is and can be. In their hands, Vitesse is shown to be a heart, furiously beating, of that there can be no mistake. This is ‘ballet without borders’ where cause and effect relationships are explored and fleeting moments glorified.
A squally wind blows into the theatre, pursued by beat after beat on the timpani. Kylián’s Forgotten Land is set to Benjamin Britten’s symphonic memorial for his parents and dramatic statement on the horrors of war, Sinfonia da Requiem. Beginning with a funeral march, Lacrimosa (Weeping); there is still a sense of hope in this work, namely in the final movement, Requiem Aeternum (Eternal Rest), and in Kylián’s known fluid movement, which affirms "in a wartime context ... that one day there will be peace… And Kylián’s choreography gets inside the essence of the music, even when it’s not interpreting it literally, and he perfectly reflects the moods and implications of the Sinfonia in Forgotten Land."[i]
Just as humans are altering the landscape to devastating effect, causing Antarctic ice shelves to melt, in Kylián’s hands, we’re not just looking at the landscape but at how we (through the dancers) can carve out and alter a space. And just like weathering a storm, it is never easy to find new ways of being. So whilst the dancers appear battered by wind and try to keep themselves anchored in the face of wild terrain, they, themselves, are actually the forceful energy.
Recalling Edvard Munch’s painting The Dance of Life (1899–1900), there are three distinct periods: youth, in white, full of hope and serenity; red for passion and intensity; black, wise, strong, and determined. Lana Jones beautifully symbolises black’s ‘what will come’ awareness. Heads whip round and recall sea birds buffeted but steadfast in their promenade. With their backs to the audience, the dancers are individual and community, constancy and change, hand in glove. As Amber Scott and Adam Bull make footprints in the eroding coastline, "each footstep is a form of measurement that mediates between [the] body and the landscape"[ii]: Humans have created the world around them and as such have the power to reshape it. With a melancholy undertow that echo’s Munch’s own lament: "my art is rooted in a single reflection: why am I not as others are?"
From seascape to the electronic score by Thom Willems in collaboration with Lesley Stuck, William Forsythe’s In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated at first appears to disturb nature's order. Is there no limitation to the range of actions the human body can perform? Energy unleashed gives the impression of being beyond rule, where in fact the very opposite is true. Discipline and courage, this power is controlled, but the dance, from the audiences’ vantage reads as fantastically chaotic; it is triumphant and in parts downright destructive. Movement appears like hot glass before it sets, and it is the colour of malachite. Hard and brittle, it expands before it shrinks and cools. Glass (like the dancers) has enormous tensile strength.
The beauty of this work is that movements are rooted in the classical. The same building blocks but spun anew! Achieve equilibrium, an interactive balance, or be doomed. Slippage! The potential for danger in the choreography is never far away. And so we have the heel weighted walk as reprieve in the sidelines. To read this as diverging from the formal is to misread turbulence, this is showing us the way things are as organisms collide and evolve. This is physics as materials morph, reshaping dance’s evolution through choreography that lets the audience feel the play, release, and hyperextension of muscles and joints. Fleeting moments, suspended, offering an abundance of shapes both in the positive (dancer) and negative (background) space, and for me it was symbolised by Nicola Curry, Jill Ogai, Valerie Tereschenko, and Alice Topp (on Monday) and Ako Kondo, Kevin Jackson, Robyn Hendricks, and Benedicte Bemet (on Tuesday).*
From here we spin, or rather hurtle, punching holes into the burnished steel of industry as we go, into Christopher Wheeldon’s DGV (Danse à Grande Vitesse). As with Forgotten Land, where the score becomes entwined with movement, the perpetual motion of Michael Nyman’s MGV: (Musique a Grande Vitesse) ensures unity. As the world flies by, the suggestion of changing scenery and train are not separated, but one. Time, whether recalled in Kylián’s poetic dream or shown by Forsythe as a dancer (never just) travelling from A to B, to the linear steam engine of cause and effect is given shape. This symbolic train is moving forward to the present and in turn it refers back to Munch’s cycle of life where we began.
Suspended and swift! In the manmade steel railway of DGV, rapid elevations are forged by human might. The dancers appear directed by their own movement, orientating themselves according to their own senses. A steam of dancers! A mutable image! Just like the capricious coastline of East Anglia. Amy Harris and Andrew Killian, Bemet and Rudy Hawkes, Hendricks and Jackson, and Kondo and Chengwu Guo make themselves chimeras, in the sense of being hybrids capable of mutating shape through movement. Part love letter to the romance of travel and its peculiar intimacy, part high speed blurred landscape, this requires couples and corps de ballet to become greased pistols and cogs. And with two beautiful moments of complete silence to replicate the hush of a tunnel or evoke wifi disconnection, it’s not the destination that’s of importance but the new way of seeing things which travel affords, even in the theatre.
The Vitesse triple bill: an indivisible whole. All three works shown in this manner become interconnected. Dance as "élan, a ‘current’, absolutely distinct from inanimate matter but contending with it, ‘traversing’ it so as to force it into organized form ... it refuses to put life’s essential spontaneity in bondage to any kind of predetermination."[iii] Disquieting and real, enlightened and inexhaustible, "the world we live in is a revelation that can be 'read', experienced. Everything we experience or are able to experience is significant for itself and for everything." Yes, "the world is my chance/ it changes me every day/ my chance is my poetry."[iv]
* Inescapable vim, it is infectious! As with all contemporary triple bills, I especially enjoy the egalitarian casting of principals, senior artists, and soloists alongside coryphées and members of corps de ballet.
Notes:
[i] Nicolette Fraillon, 'Music Note,' Sinfonia da Requiem by Benjamin Britten, The Australian Ballet’s Vitesse programme, p. 25
[ii] Michael Auping, 'A Nomad Among Builders,' Places, volume 3, number 4 (1987), pp. 4-7
[iii] Jacques Monod, extract from Le hazard et la nécessité. Essai sur la philosophie naturelle de la biologie modern (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970); trans. Austryn Wainhouse, Chance and Necessity, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), pp. 25-33
[iv] Herman de Vries, “the world we live in is a revelation,” in Vittorio Fagone (ed.), Ars in natura (Mazzotta Edizioni: Milano, 1992) as on website
| | |
|
Saturday, 19 March 2016
Come what may, “I said to myself, keep dancing.”
{Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch's in Nelken (Carnations) (Image credit, top to bottom: Oliver Look, Tony Lewis, Ulli Weiss)}
"Up startled the whole forest in [not] violet fire," but blush of pink, in echo of George Meredith’s spring carpet for Richard Peverel. Where Peverel found a night-time forest floor of bluebells that "drooped glimmeringly" and filled him with “awful rapture,” I found, in Pina Bausch’s piece, Nelken (Carnations), my own prepared forest floor and I gasped. Here now, especially for you and Fjord Review, a little Romance in the Dark.
"Darlin', oh so near," at last. Hold on!
(Thank-you Penelope.)
Nelken (Carnations) (1982)
A piece by Pina Bausch
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch
Festival Theatre
Adelaide, South Australia
as part of Adelaide Festival of the Arts 2016
Thursday 10th March, 2016
Friday 11th March, 2016
3,000 pink carnations standing upright on the stage. A dreamscape! My “spirit rose, …. let it be glory, let it be ruin!”[i]
A flame grew from just a spark
When I found romance in the dark with you.
In the dark, with Tanztheatre Wuppertal Pina Bausch, nature has been brought indoors, and in the process it has changed its makeup. Petals and stems were plastic (all the better to fray the hem of your evening attire, my dear), and unruly wilderness was ordered in near-perfect rows. In this fake field, carnations grow to a uniform height with no colour deviation: flesh incarnations. Pink carnations to say, ‘I’ll be there for you.’ Carnations, artificial or otherwise, the symbol of Bausch’s fascination with love.
My own love affair with the unique humanist core of Bausch began late and unknowingly. Introduced by Pedro Almodóvar in his film, Talk to Her (2002), which featured her performing in her own work with Malou Airaudo, the heart-breaking Café Müller (1978). It was followed by Wim Wenders’ 2011 film Pina, which “after half a year of intensive work, and only two days before the planned 3D rehearsal shoot, the unimaginable happened: Pina Bausch died on June 30th 2009, suddenly and unexpectedly.”[ii] Caught in an exquisite and demanding tribute, within the dark embrace of the cinema my eyes were opened. Film had introduced us, and I was keen for more. Here for the first time in sixteen years, and exclusive to the Adelaide Festival of Arts*, the Australian premiere of Nelken was worth the wait I knew it would be.
In Bausch’s ‘space where we can encounter each other,’ generous as it is confronting, charming as it is unsettling, open as it is restrained, the landscape was raw, private, unblinking, and real. It feels a little like recounting a dream. Also, given Bausch’s apparent "mistrust of words [that] made her rely all the more on her eyes, but in a very particular, unique way of her own. She honed her gaze into an extraordinarily sensitive tool for recognizing and analyzing everything we say and express with our movements and gestures, for everything we reveal about ourselves through them.”[iii] In showing us an “interpretation of our humanity that was wholly new and unexplored," her work "hit[s] us right through the heart." Gesture, her palette.
In Nelken, created in 1982, five years before the Berlin Wall fell, movement was initially imposed as the dancers stepped, almost gingerly, through the artificial wilderness with their armchairs held aloft. As with all her work, it is ‘not how people move, but what moves them,’ and until the suited official that was the achingly elegant Andrey Berezin asked for your ‘passport, please,’ you’ve ‘permission to hop.’ In the transitional space, tangled in dream before you open your eyes, much of Nelken balanced. With its stalking, almost menacing introduction undercut by the jaunty second theme, the East St Louis Toddle-O further emphasised the balancing act Bausch favoured: where happiness can wobble over into sadness, where freedom can tip into a controlled state. As the low clarinet of Duke Ellington and his Orchestra growled the music conjured what Ellington described as "an old man, tired from working in the field since sunup, coming up the road in the sunset on his way home to dinner. He’s tired but strong, and humming in time with his broken gait." Sweetness, in music as on stage, is always undercut with grittiness. Cue: the appearance of four suited officials and their accompanying German Shepherds. In the blink of an eye, an innocent childlike arena revealed itself to be a police state. Beautiful men in beautiful dresses freely tipping themselves in the air in playful hop was now deemed unsuitable: ‘put some decent clothes on.’ The offence: punishable by spanking. Humorous acts have given over to improper and finally now teeter on the edge of shameful and humiliating. For as much as Bausch lets you sit back and marvel at and celebrate beauty, if you slouch too comfortably in your seat, you’ll soon be pulled upright brutally by your collar. You may even find yourself ejected from the theatre altogether. Her infamous gaze continues to be not just on the dancers on the stage; it is also fixed on the audience.
Titillation comes at a price. And nowhere was this better illustrated than in Fernando Suels Mendoza’s "okay, you want to see something?!? You want to see ménage?!? Here. Look! Ménage! Here! Ménage! Ménage! Ménage! Viola! What else do you wanna see!?! I can do anything!" In a black dress with a full skirt, he angrily pounds the stage ‘performing’ for the audience who in turn applaud all the louder. Venezuelan born Mendoza, who has been with Tanztheater Wuppertal since 1995, jetés across the stage in a fury, demanding we, the insatiable audience, take responsibility for the heavy expectations we have placed on the shoulders of performers. With the rough edges of the more challenging components (read: experimental gestures and quiet, unsettling bits) smoothed over, the familiar classical steps soothed the audience like a baby being rocked to sleep. Even if the rocking was being done by an outraged performing seal balancing a ball atop its nose, it didn’t seem to bother those seated around me, rather they lapped it up, calling for more and caring little for the creaks of the performer’s body. A series of chaînés: we could read this language. To me, this brilliantly humorous scene was utterly devastating. Free to interpret the thrust of this scene how I chose, I read this as being about the inevitable fallibility of the human body. Steps become harder and take their toll. The life of a dancer is short and the price their bodies pay is high. This was Mendoza as a symbol of all dancers facing the unforgiving brutality of a body that will one day not be able to perform. Backs’ stiffen, and the 'broken gait' of Ellington awaits us all.
"Most dancers have to stop dancing in their 20s and 30s — it’s not a sustainable lifestyle. That’s something that’s unique about Pina’s work; we have stayed here, and lived our lives as dancers,"[iv] affirms Australian born Julie Shanahan, who joined the company in 1988. At 53, she poured her 33 years of experience into a beautiful moment of heightened, quite literally, scene-stealing. Shanahan climbed atop the shoulders of a fellow male dancer, and magically lengthened her scarlet-red skirt so as to cover his body and reveal only their hairy and muscly calves. She appeared monstrously majestic as she towered over Michael Strecker, challenging his control during a game of Red Light, Green Light. But of course, being in the landscape that is Bausch, we are not just in the playground, but facing up to oppression and persecution, grasping for love, challenging the restraints placed upon freedom. As German born Strecker, who has been with the company since 1997, later fantastically spits at the audience, "this is a complete waste of time. You’re yawning already, and I’ve got sore feet," before hauling a younger and fresher model out on the stage to suggestively peel potatoes to the delicious strains of Billie Holiday. "Better for you; better for me." Four stuntmen in padded suits take to the stage in a tumble in a bid to sate the audience and it works. More fool you.
Encompassing everything from the swaying jubilation of a Brazilian marching band and the xylophone-tinkling Pink Panther (Shades of Sennet) by way of Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, elation always comes laced with sorrow, but above all, hope remains a permanent fixture. Typified by Scott Jennings’ bewitching solo in sign language to Sophie Tucker performing The Man I Love.
Jennings’ drew a smile upon his face using both index fingers. He traced a curve at the bicep for 'strength,' and for 'love,' his arms crossed across his torso, fists closed, making a letter 'x', or was that a kiss. "Just meant for two," his right hand swept forward to hold up his index and middle fingers. Suited and solemn, standing in a field of yearning, he juggled his hands left and right to portray ‘maybe’ and it was as beguiling as it was honest, this picture. "Maybe I shall meet him Sunday," he radiated both palms facing forward in slow circles, like rotations of the sun or washing a spot off the window, and for all the world you wished it so.
Whether permitted to dance on the table top or hunched beneath, I will carry the overwhelming sense of optimism and resilience with me for a long time. Though each performance was technically played the same, Thursday night slapped me across the right check (while rubbing my eyes in chopped onion) and Friday night caressed the left (while giving me a hug), both colouring my dreams ever since. If I close my eyes, I can still see the charming seasonal procession of the dancers weaving to Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five’s West End Blues.
"I became a dancer… because I thought it is easier than speaking."
"…by chance."
"I became a dancer because I fell in love with a dancer."
"I became a dancer… because I didn’t want to be a soldier."
Just as the dancers revealed, with arms in increasingly absurdist fifth position, why they became dancers, in own revelation, I went to see Nelken because of love.
* Bausch’s Australian debut was in Adelaide 35 years ago.
Notes:
[i] George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel: A History of Father and Son, (London: Penguin Classics, 1999), p. 42
[ii] Pina, the film by Wim Wenders, ‘About the Movie’
[iii] Wim Wenders’, on 4th of September, 2009, at the memorial ceremony for Pina Bausch in the Wuppertal Opera House
[iv] Julie Shanahan in interview with Alan Brissenden, 'Nelken's Adelaide Connection', The Adelaide Review, 2nd March, 2016
+ Adelaide in clove pink promise
| | |
|
Tuesday, 15 March 2016
Adelaide in clove pink promise.
{Sign (language) me Ira and George Gershwin's The Man I Love as I perform the four seasons from spring's new shoots to winter's brrr. All the world for 3000 pink carnations.}
{Playing tourist. Waiting for Pina.}
{Minerals organised by colour to appeal.}
{Paw to the glass. A Spinifex hopping mouse (Notomys alexis) pleads for cabinet release.}
{Cool respite, with mummies and amulets. In the museum.}
{From mounted specimens to glorious models, shuffling about in the South Australian Museum, dreaming of new works to make.}
{Never could resist a museum display of the scaled, haired, or feathered. (Lo! I thought I saw a thylacine.)}
{Art Gallery of South Australia, turning on the cloud charm.}
{In awe of the papier-maché mushrooms and fruit models in the beautiful Santos Museum of Economic Botany.}
{A collection of artificial fungi in different stages of growth. The papier-maché models were made in Germany by Heinrich Arnoldi and Co, and are labelled in three categories from edible (blue) to poisonous (red) to harmless (green).}
{Thank-you for your cotton-bud cloud formations and green grass underfoot.}
{The Divided House with divided title on the spine, by Mary Raymond at the library. "Note to subscribers: a fine of 2 cents per day as provided in the Libraries Act will be imposed for the late return of the book"}
{Ocean floor exploration. (2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Magic Object, Lovers of Neptune's Cabinet, @nellartist's The way of Saint shell, 2009, bronze)}
{flâneur:"a person who walks the city in order to experience it"—Charles Baudelaire}
{Thank-you for revealing the human condition (Gallery 13), unapologetically suspending Berlinde De Bruyckere's monumental We are all flesh, (2011–12) alongside J. W. Waterhouse's painting of Honorius meditatively feeding pigeons as his secretaries wait to discuss matters of state (The favourites of the Emperor Honorius, c. 1883). Thank-you for your seated cow playing Narcissus gazing at her reflection in a puddle (William Ford's Between the showers, at milking time, 1887, above a card table from Hobart, c. 1840).}
{Putting ourselves in the collection (I).}
{Putting ourselves in the collection (II). (Shinto deities (Shinzo), 15th–16th centuries, Usa shrine area, Oita prefecture, Kyushu camphor wood, pigment, ink, and you and me.)}
{From @samstagmuseum by way of @jamfactoryau and the Santos Museum of Economic Botany, back to @artgalleryofsa, we've peered in every crevice of @adelaidebiennial's Magic Object wunderkammer and found it true to premise: artist as conjuror.}
{Farewell Adelaide. Thank-you for your ladies in sun hats before Roger Kemp (Controlled Extension, 1972) and Segantini's nocturnal scene. Thank-you for the music. (St Cecilia: an allegory of music, c. 1650. "I am Music, who in sweet accents can calm each troubled heart ... and now with love, can kindle the most frigid minds.")}
{Tickle my soles. Colour me jewelled. Carnation carnage. Beautiful and brilliant.}
Because of Pina. Because of Carnations, 3000 of them. Adelaide at a glance. Three days, two nights, squeezed. Just for you, until my piece is posted on Fjord Review. From Welcome swallow to bunting roll, I can't wait to share more.
Adelaide playlist, courtesy of Nelken (Carnations)
The Man I Love
Composed by Ira Gershwin and George Gershwin
Performed by Sophie Tucker
String Quartet in D minor — 'Der Tod und das Mädchen' ('Death of the Maiden')
Composed by Franz Schubert
Performed by Melos Quartet
Sophisticated Lady
Composed by Ellington/Harwick/Brown/Mille
Performed by Duke Ellington and his Orchestra
Schön Ist Die Welt
Composed by Franz Lehár
Performed by Rudolf Schock and the Berliner Symphoniker
East St. Louis Toddle-O
Composed by Duke Ellington and Bubber Miley
Performed by Duke Ellington and his Orchestra
Shades of Sennet
Composed by Henry Mancini
Performed by Henry Mancini and his Orchestra
West End Blues
Composed by King Oliver
Performed by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five
Last Night I Dreamed You Kissed Me
Composed by Gus Kahn and Carmen Lombardo
Performed by Lillie Delk Christian with Louis Armstrong and his Hot Four
Pastorinhas
Composed by Noel Rosa and Joao de Barro
Performed by Banda do corpo de Bombeiros do Distrito Federal
Dama das Camelias
Composed by Joao de Barro and Alcyr Pires Vemelho
Performed by Banda do corpo de Bombeiros do Distrito Federal
Malmequer
Composed by Christovao de Alencar and Newton Teixeira
Performed by Banda do corpo de Bombeiros do Distrito Federal
Romance in the Dark
Composed by Sam Coslow and Gertrude Niesen
Performed by Billie Holiday
+ Welcome home
+ How I missed you
+ Truly
+ Lottie's own holiday, drawn I, II, III, IV
| | |
|
Monday, 29 February 2016
Lottie. Leap.
In visual summation. Green new-shoot summer.
{Because. Blue.}
{Post yoga class, mountain dog variation.}
{Measurements have been taken and checked twice for good measure. (@pasadenamansions is knitting dear Lots a jumper for the winter, and it has already been the subject of a daily drawing.)}
{'Look out now, Five! Don't go splashing paint over me like that!' Painting white roses red on the Queen's Croquet-Ground. (Taking the longer route homeward with Lottie since always.) }
{Once upon a time, to paraphrase Jazmina Cininas, we entered Castle Counihan and considered unfurling our wings in the beautiful works of Deborah Klein. (Standing between Cotton Harlequin Bug Woman (2014) and Splendid emerald Wasp Woman (2015) by Deborah Klein, exhibited as part of Modern Myth, curated by Domenica Vavala, at Counihan Gallery until the 6th of March. Congratulations Deborah, Paul, and Jazmina. Exquisite works!)}
{In echo of ol' Perce, on the edge, flouting the rules.}
{From Milly to museum, showing Lottie about the traps.}
{Tightrope. Frank. (We've been here before. I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX. Patterns, like grid, sucker for 'em.)}
{Lenni showing Lottie how to garden. (Little Lottie Long Legs is from Mildura, like Perce. She was rescued by Starting Over Dog Rescue, and they believe she is two-years-old. She had overgrown claws, and she needed to be treated for bush tics and fleas, microchipped, vaccinated, wormed, and desexed. She's fallen on her (long) feet.}
{For Animal Instinct, we have created four costumed Salvaged Relatives on cartes de visite (by me) paired with drawings (by Louise) of the same collage element in a new and arguably more natural setting. Like this one, In the borrowed evening jacket inspired by the heavens, designed by Elsa Schiaparelli, c. 1937, with an American bittern (Botaurus lentiginosus) paired with Closer to natural (American bittern (Botaurus lentiginosus)). (Animal Instinct at Metropolis Gallery from the 5th of March.)}
{Never met a grid I didn't like.}
{Impromptu training session with Miss Long Legs. (Take II. Because it is all about the pattern. Always.)}
The last day of summer. Leap! Time, just enough, to introduce you, officially, that is, to Lottie Long Legs, the newest charm-rolled addition to our menagerie. Adopted three weeks ago now through Starting Over Dog Rescue, Lottie is a Jack Russell on elegant pins. Part Italian Greyhound and all adorable, when carried in your arms, the look of Lady Di. I'm not half smitten, I grant you.
Asta, we're one step closer to your talents. Contentment, she wears long legs.
(For more, you know where to find it.)
{Lottie and Lenni, shootin' the breeze.}
+ For those of you who couldn't make it along to the Sticky Institute zine fair, please allow us to bring our stall to you. We've three new zines to share, and all are available through our online store for gold coins' song. What's more, from now until Sunday the 6th of March we are offering FREE POSTAGE on all orders over $10 (AUD) when you enter the code 'freepost' upon checkout.
+ It's going to be great, Louise! XO
+ Dogs on laps I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII. (A just for kicks (or rather, tails, snouts, chew toys) collection, with more to come, naturally.)
+ When Percy met Lottie. (Thank-you Inez. Your drawings, always a delight.)
+ Inside the front fence post. Beloved Omar 9th May 2014. Beloved Percy 4th January 2016.
| | |
|
Monday, 22 February 2016
On stage, as in laboratory.
{Stephanie Lake's Double Blind (Image credit: Pippa Samaya)}
Charged, my response to Stephanie Lake's new work, especially for Fjord Review. (As always, thank-you Penelope.)
Double Blind
Stephanie Lake Company
Choreographer: Stephanie Lake
Dancers: Alisdair Macindoe, Amber Haines, Kyle Page and Alana Everett
Composer: Robin Fox
Lighting Designer: Bosco Shaw
Northcote Town Hall
Monday 15th February, 2016
"Please continue."
"The experiment requires that you continue."
"It is absolutely essential that you continue."
"You must go on, there is no other choice!"[i]
Stanley Milgram framed his notorious social experiment of subservience as an inquiry into the Holocaust. Building on Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments of 1951, Milgram’s own 'obedience studies,' which began in the early sixties, can be seen to demonstrate the banality of evil in a controlled environment, in a laboratory, in life.
The dark heart of the human animal, ripe for translation both direct and indirect, the Milgrim paradigm has since made countless appearances in literature (Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader), and film, Henri Verneul's I as in Icarus and Paul Scheuring's The Experiment, to name a few, and now dance, in Stephanie’s Lake’s new work, Double Blind. Fresh from its Sydney Festival premiere at Carriageworks, Double Blind explores internal and external conflict, action and reaction, cause and effect, through a series of its own choreographed behavioural experiments. On stage, as in laboratory, roughhouse quickly gave over to cruelty and torture. Whether "seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions”[ii] or driven by fear: "how far can [one] be pushed to act outside of one’s moral code when instructed?" Lake asks. In a sixty-minute performance, it transpired, quite a bit.
Lake has freely drawn upon the psychological experiments of Milgram, but perhaps also upon the sense of theatre within his experiments. “Milgram was a fantastic dramaturg. His studies are fantastic little pieces of theater. They're beautifully scripted.” [iii] The Milgram Experiment could almost be said to have been in play before the work began. As I waited near to the front of the queue, the usher (read: person in authority) informed the crowd (read: willing subjects gathered to see Lake’s new daring) to fill the theatre from the back rows downwards, thereby leaving the best seats for the last in line. A technique favoured by ushers because it is easier to manage naturally makes early birds bristle as perceived stragglers receive premium seats, front and centre. I found myself heading to the back of the venue before realising I could rebel, in part, and sit in the middle, albeit to the far end of the row.
Asked to look closer at our own animal instincts, Double Blind was an uncomfortable and powerful work. If you want to understand the human animal, sit back, prod it, and watch. Grim and episodic, as befits a series of experiments, I played the alternating role assigned to me of 'passive observer' and 'active participant.' In a work, like the experiments, that felt geared to evoke a specific response, I, too, was manipulated to administer electric shocks to another out of a sense of obligation. Yes, in order for an electric current to flow, the circuit needed to be completed. With audio-visual artist, Robin Fox, behind the console on the sidelines, a lab coat and black frames suggested by his impassive face, a gritty, disquieting subject was charged by and revealed in the frenetic movements of four dancers.
Alisdair Macindoe and Alana Everett, Amber Haines and Kyle Page alternated between being experimented on and being those in charge, an extension of the definition of ‘double-blind.’ With the ringing of a boxer's bell, following voice commands, they alternated between playing sated or hungry rats competing with one another for air, water, food, shelter, space; survival, in short. They lurched from defensive to aggressive. Revealing their backs in echo of the vulnerability of a blue hospital smock in costumes designed by Harriet Oxley, each one was a conduit for electrical charge. At times they moved like machinery parts, both in terms of the precision demanded and without fluidity of joint. Fox's compositional audio barrage enhanced the effect. The clunk-clunk of the cogs and the hissing of the pistons, the ticking of a human motor not quite working in time with the current was made audible and then some.
Lake has replicated ideas behind the Milgram experiment with its snaking red and blue electric cables, but in a broad and visual sense, and in doing so, other psychological experiments were referenced. We also learnt that the human form, once hooked into the amplifier, is a noisy beast; a tap-tap on the shoulder of another sounds like a jackhammer. Clipboard in hand, in this session, where you stood ethically was also pulled from the recesses. In keeping the work open to interpretation, but precise in its choreographic execution, for me, a wealth of imagery, from the twisted surgical experiments of Vladimir Demikhov’s two-headed dogs to the deprivation of Harry F. Harlow's tragic monkeys isolated within steel 'pits of despair', leapt to mind. Thanks to the subterranean lighting of Bosco Shaw, pit ponies and canaries in a coalmine also got a look in. Bedded in a viscous sludge was every bit as alienating as the white noise confines of a sterile laboratory.
And it was this hideous and macabre imagery that Lake’s choreography hauled from the dark cavity as Haines appeared in a second position plié over a kneeling Macindoe. Her elbow upon his head, they moved as a surgically grafted Cerberus[iv]. Operating like an inkblot to interpret, this 'wrong' cohesiveness, this mutant form soon shifted. Haines appeared as controller over Macindoe, where she willed him to move, he followed suit. Before again, in role reversal, he donned a laboratory assistant’s rubber glove and appeared to ‘blow’ into her forearm.
Shadowing the metronome sequence between Everett as the friendly controller issuing prompts to continue and Macindoe in an initially comic, but increasingly frantic bid to keep up, I saw the movements of a baby monkey released from an isolation chamber in Macindoe's arm held up in right angle to his head almost as if cradling himself. One brief but recurring action read as an echo of the repetitive gestures of a monkey, a nervous tic of detachment from the self and others.
In such a landscape, it was not unusual for all manner of unfixed imagery to collide. The power of suggestion! To me, coupled with its intensity, this was one of the work's strengths. It made you think about all manner of things, and most of them were deeply unpleasant. This manipulation was many. People will do awful things if asked to by a person in authority. Compliance then and in Lake’s hands now, brutal.
As sound and movement was passed from one dancer to another—or was that electrical current?—the effect was often beautiful. And genuinely humorous, like the nose-to-nose pecking from Everett to Page to Macindoe, who in order to peck the shorter Haines, compressed his form by bending his knees before shuffling forward to touch her nose. Back and forth, in a line, a movement, a charge, it was passed. And a little faith restored in humanity.
The work is tight, the references many, and the effect: devastating.
Notes:
[i] Instructions issued to the participants of the experiment (until they rebelled) to increase the electric charge in increments from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 volts (XXX). Stanley Milgram, 'Behavioural Study of Obedience,' Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 67 (4), October 1963, pp. 371–378
[ii] Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: an Experimental View, New York: Harper and Row, 1974, p. 123
[iii] Stephen Reicher, quoted by Cari Romm, 'Rethinking One of Psychology's Most Infamous Experiments,' The Atlantic, 28th January, 2015
[iv] In 1954, on the outskirts of Moscow, Demikhov, in a bid to create a single circulation of two forms, surgically grafted the head, shoulders, and front legs of a two-month-old puppy onto the neck of an adult dog. As the puppy drank milk, it dribbled out the unconnected stump of its oesophagus. Of the 20 hybrids, the longest survived for 28 days.
+ Earlier pieces for Fjord Review
| | |
|
Tuesday, 08 December 2015
Eight bouquets.
{From when it was the 7th of December no matter which way you looked at it.}
bouquet |bʊˈkeɪ, bəʊˈkeɪ, ˈbʊkeɪ|
noun
1 a bunch of flowers presented in the form of a collage during the lead up to Christmas.
Eight December days in and our advent calendar continues to sprout whiskers, new shoots, and the odd long tail. In case you missed it, here is a look at what was, from the 1st of December through to the 8th. Created in equal parts for the fun of it and for you, an advent calendar with the intention to see you lightly to Christmas Day.
+ Suspended at Milly Sleeping. Small brooches. Many animals. Hand-cut ornaments. All December long.
+ Horse chestnut. Yellow-lark nasturtium. Buttercup. Sweet Woodruff. Toadflax. Blooming papier mâché from University Melbourne's Herbarium. (My learned object: collections & curiosities, The Ian Potter Museum of Art)
+ Hurrah! Hurrah! Our artists' book, A deck of Salvaged Relatives, was recently acquired by the State Library Victoria.
+ In the museum, with her trusty 2B pencil, Louise drew the portraits of an obedient long-nosed potoroo and a tame echidna. (Expect a Museum Victoria zine in 2016, to be sure.)
| | |
|
Monday, 16 November 2015
'Ordinary people doing ordinary things'.
{Three stills from Roy Andersson's film, You, the Living (2007), and Caroline Meaden and Alice Dixon performing This is What's Happening (2015).}
Beloved Be, my response to This is What's Happening, drawn up especially for Fjord Review. (Thank-you Penelope.)
This is What’s Happening
Alice Dixon, Caroline Meaden and William McBride
The Oratory, Abbotsford Convent, Collingwood
as part of Open Spaces 15
presented by KAGE
Sunday 8th November, 2015
Head down, an old man shuffles with the assistance of a wheeled walking frame past the ghostly blue façade of a building. Unbeknownst to him, his dog is tangled in his own lead and is being dragged on his back through the grey streets. In the background, a traditional jazz band plays.
A man in his lounge room practices his sousaphone. A half drunk glass of beer on the table beside him. Unbeknownst to him, his playing is driving his wife to despair. She enters the room through the doorway behind him, raises her hands to her head and screams. Moments later, somewhere off camera, she slams a door causing a picture frame to fall into the fish tank below. The man keeps playing.
This pair of black-humoured vignettes of 'ordinary people doing ordinary things'[i] are from Roy Andersson's 2007 film, You, the Living, but equally, they could be from Alice Dixon, Caroline Meaden and William McBride’s recent performance, This is What’s Happening, winner of this year’s Melbourne Fringe Festival's Best Dance.
“In a caravan. In a caravan park”, standing side by side, facing forward, a couple recount the mundane moments of their holiday: cleaning spilled chicken noodle soup off the floor, and an unremarkable meal shared when they “ate out, once”. Delivered with deadpan assurance, the staccato chit-chat (to the audience) of Meaden and McBride, as the underwhelmed beige pairing, encapsulated all that it is to be human. Twiddle thumbs. Talk about the traffic. The weather. Alone. Together. Viewed in this way, the small, unfiltered trifles actually revealed the whole picture.
Absurdist tragicomedies of the trivialities of everyday life; one told through the medium of film, the other through dance and spoken word. Both with controlled aesthetics, bleached of colour, albeit the second, to be fair to the dark and meticulous genius of the Swedish film director, Andersson (who received a Gold Lion for Best Film for his recent work, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014)), presented with less refinement.
But still, seated in the Oratory of the Abbotsford Convent, the connection to Andersson's work for me remained. From the light timber panelling on the back wall, the stained glass windows to my left and right, and the muted palette of a soft smudged sage green, I could well have been within my own Andersson hand-built tableau the other day. Presented by KAGE as part of their curated dance series for the Convent’s Open Spaces festival, alongside Amy Macpherson’s meditative piece, SOMA, the leap from my reality to imagined film set was small. Encompassed by Andersson’s hallmark hues: the pale washed-out green of a bathtub in which a woman soaks, singing a Russian folksong full of sorrow; the bilious yellow of boiled potatoes; and the steel blue of the Louisiana Brass Band playing Mozart's lullaby, 'Sleep My Little Prince, Fall Asleep', throughout a thunderstorm. Flanked by the dreary grey of rainfall during the peak hour commute, and finding no shelter at the crowded bus stop; the ashen pallor of a carpet salesman weeping: "A lot of things are going wrong today; It’s just not my day."; and the trench coat beige of a worn out doctor’s despair brought on my bemoaning patients, the effect was absolute for Andersson’s reduced palette is also that of the beige long john-like pants worn by McBride and the bloomer-like shorts of Dixon. In costumes designed by Margaret O’Donohue, the emphasis was upon the bruised form beneath it. The emphasis: the smallness of your very existence.
Owing to the temporary nature of the former oratory/rented-space, when strongly lit so as to obliterate shadow, I was afforded a little of Andersson’s "light without mercy". The stark mise en scène laid bare the flaws and vulnerabilities of the human condition. The minimalist staging empathised the loneliness and weakness of each character[ii]. The natural depth of the performance space, thrice that of the seated area, echoed Andersson’s favoured deep-focus shots. Throughout the performance, I became Andersson’s static camera, but my characters, Dixon, Meaden and McBride, moved without my control. Their often tilted, outward movements suggested the inner states of their minds as they grappled with the “peculiar, slippery.... logic amidst the chaos — the permission to not know what is happening."[iii] Breaking the stillness by leaning to the side, almost about to tip, greater weight was given not just to the supporting leg, but to how the subsequent movement was read. With its salient movements and familiar elliptical dialogue, delivered facing the audience, the performance was a mirror. Quite literally in the sense that as I watched all three performers stand with their hands clasped before them, quietly, contentedly, twiddling their thumbs, I realised I, too, was holding my hands in the same way (though I resisted the urge to join in the liberation of the letting my thumbs encircle one another lest it was read as mockery or boredom, which neither it was).
Where Andersson has given us the poems of César Vellejo spoken aloud[iv], This is What’s Happening gave us the all-too-brief yet perfectly timed high-pitched heartache and jubilation of a Cajun two-step. What better way to reference the mundane 9 to 5 world than with a few Cajun tears to oil your fiddle and squeeze box? The beautiful oral poetry of the everyday life, where ‘la maison’ is a metaphor for love, marriage and fidelity, a perfect near-wail to the woman who rises at 4.30am and eats "because she really should have something" and packs some fruit and a muesli bar for her morning commute. Think: Iry LeJeune 'Lacassine Special' or Joseph and Cléoma Falcon 'Allons a Lafayette'. The timeless poetry and true beauty of the commonplace unifies us all. With one short musical interlude, the importance of comic timing and expression was confirmed in their dancehall pas de trois.
In continued link to Andersson’s self-contained, self-called "trivialism" films, movement in this work performed a comic function as well as an expressive or symbolic function. It was found in the playful fingers that sought out another’s nose to poke, and in the brilliant wriggly worm vibrations and (the impression of) inflatable buttocks in the opening vignette. It was found in the borrowed hand gestures of everyday characters plucked from t.v. programmes (BBC's Gavin and Stacey, and the Australian '70s soap, Number 96), which shown in a new context took on an entirely different meaning. Dixon, who I have previously seen perform in Reckless Sleepers’ A String Section and Nat Cursio's (work in development) Tiny Slopes, was fantastically poker-faced. All three were characterised by a mordant humour and a humanist ethos encased within a fumbling banality, and it was refreshing to see a performance in which the expressions of the face were given equal weight to the expressions of the body. Humour, good, black, abstracted, and just how I like it, requires a great face to deliver it. Moreover, it must be tempered by tragedy to leave one a little unsure.
This is What’s Happening erred on the lighter side of dark, but it (like You, the Living) hinted at Goethe’s Roman Elegies (1790): "Be pleased then, you, the living, in your delightfully warmed bed, before Lethe’s ice-cold wave will lick your escaping foot.” It formed the inescapable undercurrent to McBride’s: “Okay then. Love you all. And stay well."
Notes:
[i] "An ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday...." Virginia Woolf, 'Modern Fiction' (1919) in The Common Reader, (University of Adelaide ebook, accessed 9th November, 2015), chap. 13.
[ii] "For Roy Andersson what makes a scene interesting has to do with a character’s relation to the space around them.... According to Andersson, this effect is achieved by emphasizing the room, by placing ‘the human being in an environment that (...) helps depict human beings as unaware of their own behavior. They are positioned in the room in a way that brings out the subconscious in the dialogues, and the human condition is exposed, so to speak: A small individual — comic, tragicomic, tragic — in this big world during her short time on this earth, with all her ... dreams, and so on’.” Julianne Qiuling Ma Yang, ‘Towards a cinema of contemplation: Roy Andersson’s aesthetics and ethics’, PhD diss. (University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, March 2013), p 99
[iii] Alice Dixon, Caroline Meaden and William McBride, This is What’s Happening artists’ statement, Dance Series Curated by KAGE, Abbotsford Convent, single page programme, 8th November 2015
[iv] “Beloved be the one who sleeps on his back. The one who wears a torn shoe in the rain. Beloved be the bald man without hat. The one who catches a finger in the door.” César Vallejo (1892–1938), ‘Stumble Between Two Stars,' as recited in Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor, 2000.
| | |
|
Tuesday, 03 November 2015
And blue was a viola’s arabesque.
{Juliette Barton and Richard Cilli in Les Illuminations (Image credit: Peter Greig)}
A union of sensations, 'syn' (meaning union) and 'aesthesis' (sensation), synaesthesia, or the effect of through metaphor, lets us 'hear' colours and, in the broadest sense, question our perception. And question my perception was exactly what Illuminated did. My response, Britten & Baroque, especially for Fjord Review. (Thanks again Penelope. Always a thrill.)
Illuminated
Australian Chamber Orchestra
Sydney Dance Company
Sunday 25th October 2015
State Theatre, Melbourne
one-night-only
Variation 10
Choreographer: Rafael Bonachela
Music: Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Op.10 (Composed 1937) by Benjamin Britten
Les Illuminations
Choreographer: Rafael Bonachela
Music: Les Illuminations, Op.18 (Composed 1939) by Benjamin Britten
Project Rameau
Choreographer: Rafael Bonachela
Music: Jean-Philippe Rameau (Sommeil from Dardanus; Air tendre from Les fêtes d’Hébé; Tonnerre from Hippolyte et Aricie; Overture and Chaconne, Air de Triomphe from Naïs; Contredanse en rondeau, Première contradanse from Les Boréades; Danse des Sauvages from Les Indes Galantes), Antonio Vivaldi (Presto from ‘Summer’ from The Four Seasons), Johann Sebastian Bach (Sarabande from Partita No.1 in B minor)
For Matisse, who 'carved' into colour, blue was the sound of a gong. For Kandinsky, blue was instead evoked by the sound of the cello, which he played. For the poet Arthur Rimbaud, blue was the vowel 'O', and it was a "sublime Trumpet full of strange piercing sounds." Arranged in a line, Rimbaud’s Vowels (1871), from 'A' to 'O' in colour read: black, white, red, blue, green. On Sunday night, Sydney Dance Company became a body of sound to the Australian Chamber Orchestra's sounding body. For one night only in Melbourne, a soundscape became a landscape! And blue was a viola’s arabesque.
Building upon an earlier collaboration, which stemmed from a shared love of the melodic dance work of Baroque composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, the artistic director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Richard Tognetti, and the artistic director of Sydney Dance Company, Rafael Bonachela, have created Illuminated. Three ballets, one from an earlier full-length work re-worked, Project Rameau (which premiered in 2012), and two new pieces inspired by the changing colours and directness of composer Benjamin Britten. Before taking Illuminated to Hong Kong, and further adding to the unexpected glow of a gala performance, neither Project Rameau (in either full or reworked guise) nor the two works which enable Britten's sound to be 'seen' have been performed in Melbourne before. The intrinsic relationship between music and dance, making one where there are two, is in line with Stravinsky and Balanchine, Cage and Cunningham. "If the word and the note are one thing, not two,"[i]—the same can be said of Illuminated's splendid fare.
In silvered-grey costumes, designed by Toni Maticevski, the dancers appeared in the cool foreground before the elevated orchestra. Seen simultaneously, the warmth of the moving background comprised of violins and cellos in flight visually advanced and became a part of the dance. Negative space to inform the figures in the foreground this was not! This was Variation 10, and it never let the eyes nor the ears settle, as it threw light upon both music and dance. Presented so, my perception was inevitably altered and gloriously unsettled. A harmonious synthesis, in which the music enhanced the dance and the dance enriched the music, the transferral between the two provided the sought-after "mutual illumination"[ii] Tognetti referred to in the programme notes. Referencing dance scholar, Rachel Duerden’s paper, 'Dancing in the imagined space of music,' for Tognetti are the very ideas that course through Illuminated and describe his collaboration with Bonachela. Upon closer inspection, the apparent harmony between music and dance “reveal[ed] subtle divergences which offer[ed] a glimpse into another world, a parallel universe.”[iii]
Where the two converged, "sometimes consonant, sometimes dissonant," pleasure was found though a "process of suggestion .... Musical notes can 'move' much faster than the human body. Physical movement, perceived visually, is much more sluggish than movement in sound can be; this is a spatial issue, of course—a human body has to get from here to there by passing through all the space between; it cannot simply be 'here' and then be 'there'."[iv] As a way around this, knots of dancers in notes of three or four appear to perform the same sequence simultaneously. Bonachela’s responsive choreography suggesting that with an ensemble of dancers you can show 'super human' movement; he has found a way around the impossible 'movement per note.' Splitting one section of dancers from another would surely have delighted Britten.
Composed in ten days in 1937, Britten's Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Op.10, presents a series of character sketches (of his teacher, the composer Bridge, who inspired him to be true to himself[v]). From the dark Adagio punctuated by violin burst of Bridges' 'integrity' to a quick March ('his energy') and the absolute beauty of Romance ('his charm'), we gallop through 'his wit,' hear a little of the Baroque in 'his tradition,' delight in the burst of the playful 'enthusiasm' before falling into the haunting lament of Variation's Funeral march and the otherworldly 'chant' that leads us to the marvellous triumph of the Fugue and finale. Dancers marched in unison only to splinter into free form, peel off, and re-bundle anew. With their upper bodies swaying languidly one moment, upright and forceful the next, it is, as Bonachela enthuses, "as if this music were made to be danced."[vi] Britten created what few could ever dream of coming close to, and now I have 'seen' what it is to move in the manner of Romance.
Laid back gestures tipped into the formal, athletic into sensual, furious into delicate: the pleasing juxtapositions and intimate connections of Variations 10 extended into Les Illuminations. With darkness undercutting the apparent charm of Britten’s 1939 sound-picture, Les Illuminations, significance was given to the expressive gestures of the hands that at times appeared to mark out a choreographic sequence like a dancer in class. Drawing upon the poems of Rimbaud, the quartet of dancers were "endowed with [the] frightening voices" of the poet’s desperate underworld Parade. "A cruel swagger of faded finery" best observed from the position of outsider/artist, Britten’s key to Rimbaud’s poetry seems also that of this work ("I alone have the key to this savage parade").
Accompanied by Opera Australia soprano, Taryn Fiebig, the dancers revelled in "their magnetic stagecraft. Eyes inflamed .... Their raillery and their terror last[ed] a moment, or months entire" (Illuminations IV: Parade). Under “canopies of night” (Illuminations XVI: Ornières) the dancers "move[d] on invisible rails and pulleys" (Illuminations XVII: Villes), later circling "their feet in the waterfalls and briars,” they represented "the dream [that] cools." (Illuminations XX: Veillées). "Chords chime[d]" in their arms, as they "gently mov[ed] that thigh, that other thigh and that left leg" (Illuminations V: Antique). As the music soared in love’s declaration: "Oh, our bones are clothed with a new amorous body!" (Illuminations VI: Being Beauteous).
Juliette Barton and Charmene Yap gave us the "thunder and lightning rise and roll" (of Illuminations I: Après le Déluge) in their duet with lifting, which played in contrast to the tender duet between Cass Mortimer Eipper and Richard Cilli. The relentless 'savage parade' that is life was sung, played, and danced, exclaimed, murmured, and offered forth as a prayer for peace.
Project Rameau offered a brilliant court dance of a different kind, with the full ensemble of dancers once more returned to the stage. Operating in the same time and yet not, moving through the real and the imagined, the musical gestures of baroque are embedded in the choreography and throw light upon how I engaged with what I heard. Summer’s arrival, a thunderstorm! The backcloth cracked to red! Through the air, a figure flew, tossed. Orchestrated before my eyes, the playful, fast moving musical lines wove in echo of Rimbaud’s earlier "chains of gold from star to star." As dancers sank to the floor interlaced with chords, I was made to work to keep up. In the thoroughly modern court dance, the secret sign language of lovers replete with hand-claps, palms connecting with cheeks, fists, thumbs-up signals, forearm rotations, and bum wiggles. A line of music was pulled as a leg snapped to a close. A dancer was lifted to 'see' a high note from a flute.
I could have listened to the music alone. I could have watched the dancers accompanied only by the sound of their feet as they fell or their hands as they clapped. But put together in this way, I became like Remy in the film Ratatouille (2007). I experienced combined flavour combinations as colour, shape and sound—I become enraptured. If I can greedily have my baroque with dance and my dance with a chamber orchestra on stage, I will. Heightened. Elevated. Glorious. For though this is cerebral, this collaboration, it is also from the heart. It made of me an animated rodent extolling the delights of cheese AND strawberries.
To the movement of music and the music of movement: bon appétit.
{Fiona Jopp, Todd Sutherland, Petros Treklis and Alana Sargent in Variation 10 (Image credit: Peter Greig)}
Notes:
[i] Myfanwy Piper quoted on working in collaboration with Britten on opera libretti, in Philip Rupprecht’s Britten’s Musical language, (U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p 9.
[ii] Rachel Duerden, 'Dancing in the imagined space of music', Dance research: the journal of the Society for Dance Research, Society for Dance Research, Volume 25, No. 1 (Summer 2007), pp 73–83.
[iii] Duerden continues: "In the complementary relationship of dance and music, dance seems to have moved into what Roger Scruton describes as 'the imagined space of music' and, at the same time, to have drawn music into the 'real space' of performance. The relationship is steeped in metaphor as we are invited to perceive one in terms of or in light of the other, and to consider the potential transfer of attributes from one to the other. Dance and music share significant features, such as rhythm, metre, tempo—the fact that they are structured in and through time—but also intrinsic differences, they each ‘mean’ differently...."
[iv] Rachel Duerden, 'Dancing in the imagined space of music', pp 73–83.
[v] Richard Tognetti on Britten: “Britten’s Frank Bridge Variations may be the principal reason people know of composer Bridge. But for Britten, he was an outstanding teacher who instilled in him excellent technique and discipline, including two cardinal rules: 'One was that you should find yourself and be true to what you found. The other—obviously connected with the first—was his scrupulous attention to good technique, the business of saying clearly what was in one's mind.'" Note, Illuminated Melbourne programme, 2015, p. 6.
[vi] Rafael Bonachela, 'The making of Variation 10', Sydney Dance Company’s YouTube channel, accessed 26th October, 2015.
| | |
|
Thursday, 29 October 2015
Childhood thrills brought on by orchestrated spills.
{Heather Holliday in Limbo at the Spiegeltent, Melbourne Festival 2015 (Image credit: Tony Virgo)}
Travelling the world without leaving my seat, Fire-eater, for Fjord Review. (Thanks Penelope.)
LIMBO
Spiegeltent, Alexandra Gardens
Tuesday 20th of October, 2015
as part of Melbourne Festival
Coloured fanciful and utterly distorted, the window onto the world, trumpeted the circus of former glory: Let me show you the fantastical, long-necked "cameleopard"[i] of yore; behold “300 dancing girls in entrancing revels"[ii]. The promise of “the marvels of many nations,"[iii] straight to your door, open up, and say yes!
The circus of old had what today with knowledge and awareness it cannot. We now know the cruel price the animal performers[iv] and freak show amusements paid. But the circus today, why, it can still entertain, with contortionists, musicians, and sword swallowers who give the impression that there is no place else they’d rather be than beneath the big top, whip in hand, whipping the audience into a lather (or is that submission?). All the sounds, colours, and smells to sate the senses and evoke childhood thrills brought on by orchestrated spills. The Greatest Show on Earth: with all the aerial tricks and none of sorrow. To tease: plenty of navels on display[v].
With scant costumes, for both male and female performers, for reasons of allure (and practicality too), the audience, then as today, gets what it wants. Had Thomas Mann been seated alongside me in the Spiegeltent tent the other night, I could easily imagine chancing over my shoulder to read, scrawled upon the back of a cardboard coaster, the lines: "[hung] head-down from a trapeze.... She was an inapproachable Amazon of the realm of space beneath the canvas, high above the crowd, whose lust for her was transformed into awe." The thoughts expressed within the unfinished pages of Mann’s 1909 tale, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man as true then as of aerialist Evelyne Allard as an incarnation of Venus swinging from her hoop.
Roll up, roll up, and watch these muscles flex. With white feathers on his shoulders and a little of Dr. John the Night Tripper beneath his hat, Ringmaster Elyas Kahn has brought his ensemble to town. On the banks of the Yarra River, direct from the U.K., Limbo is here, as part of Melbourne Festival. Unpacked from the chest, the death-defying, hand-balancing, internally-sprung tomfoolery of Danik Abishev; the Chinese pole and beat-boxing smooth stop-and-start controlled hijinks of Mikael Bres; the out-of-this-world fire-breathing, sword-swallowing, gum-chewing sass of Heather Holliday; the magnificent ‘mind-bending’ contortions of the tattooed Tigris (with forearms not unlike Popeye’s, and something of a measured roar); and the heavenly aerial acrobatics of Allard. With Mick Stuart on 'polymba', drums and bass, and Eamon McNelis (of The Band Who Knew Too Much and Flap! fame) on trumpet and sousaphone, bringing a little of the New Orleans brass band sound, the objective is clear: if you’ve a pulse, you will be entertained.
Limbo draws not only on circus stock roots, but also on the titillation of cabaret. With my waist un-synched, I may not quite have been transported back to Le Chat Noir in Montmartre in the late 1880s or Le Lido on the Champs-Élysées in the 1940s, but on a balmy spring eve, it came close, this melange, very close. In the blue smoky haze and dim lighting we all became a little of our own inner Toulouse-Lautrec or Marlene Dietrich.
While it may feature many tantalizing ‘how do they do that?’ back bends to accompanying musical creak-crack score, Limbo, in this case, borrows its name from the free-rule positioning between heaven and hell. Operating on an alternate plane, it is from here that the theatrical play occurs, with its symbolic flames from Lucifer’s domain below and its floaty white feathers falling from the pearly wings of angels above. In a state of limbo, anything is possible: which way will you go?
Flouting rules always holds appeal, especially in the world of cabaret and the burlesque, where it never fails to seduce with its offer of escapism without the consequences. Hailing from the South of France, Bres, in Breton-stripes and red neck kerchief, charmingly plays up his literature and art major credentials as the romantic artist-in-a-garret only later, sans top and atop the sway pole, revelling in shaking his sweat upon the agog audience below. With one swoop, Bres descended upon the crowd and successfully retrieved a woman’s purse from her lap, eliciting excited squeals. Picking pockets by sway pole, making Fagin proud, never has someone so appeared to enjoy being ‘robbed’ as on the night I attended. Holliday, too, as the embodiment of all things Coney Island, pleasured in spraying the peep show crowds as she released her fiery Dragon’s breath. With fire blanket and safety gloves on, the wide-eyed Spiegeltent usher, with a near unbroken focus during her act, added to the sense of sideshow danger I craved. My face hot, my eyebrows singed, or so it felt. To my nostrils: the smell of fuel.
Inverted, with legs in the air, Abishev, who joined the circus at four-years-of-age, single-handedly appeared to hop with relative ease from one hand-balancing post to the next. In a display of extreme composure and focus, topped with a bowler hat, I could not see the beginning of the motion that propelled him so. How is the supporting arm not bent? How can the body balance upside down, not in a vertical line, but with legs askew? Through training, trust, and dedication, the impossible off-centre balance had been achieved, and all dressed up with a few cheekily calculated wobbles to test the nerves of the most seasoned punter. Indeed, perhaps Allard, whose mid-air hoop routine seemed to draw less of a collective gasp from the audience, needs to include a few ‘whoops! almost!’ moments. Unlike the world of ballet, where effort is often hidden to the delight of the crowd, in this arena, the thrills come from perceived corrected teeters; think: Marilyn Monroe’s high-heeled totter.
This sense of playful risk culminated in Abishev, Bres, and Holliday's sequence atop the sway poles. As the pace increased, so did the sense that they might collide in spectacular fashion. Echoing jack-in-the-boxes of the underworld, the three swung back and forth, meeting in the middle, but crash they never did. Abishev was especially masterful at dipping his head to the side and back like a gull, and Bres called upon the brakes he employed earlier with his Chinese pole routine to hover mid-flight.
Purgatory never looked so good as when the flames licked the (free-standing) ladder up which Abishev scaled. Runaway to the circus, if you’ve no fear of heights! Josephine Baker, she would have been proud and Ernest Hemingway’s sentiments sill ring true: "The circus is the only spectacle I know that, while you watch it, gives the quality of a happy dream."
Notes:
[i] The "cameleopard" turned out to be a giraffe, as the mysteries of the world moved from the 'discovered' realm of explorers to the big top’s window on the world.
[ii] Ringling Brothers advertisement from 1913, in an essay by Dominique Jando, 'Wonders of the World Await You', The Circus 1870s–1950s, ed. by Noel Daniel, (Germany: Taschen), p. 111.
[iii] The world map depicted on W. W. Cole’s 1881 circus courier sent a clear message to its readers: The circus will bring them "the marvels of many nations".
[iv] Stefan Moore and Susan Lambert's 2015 documentary, Tyke: Elephant Outlaw, should be compulsory viewing.
[v] In 1943, the two-piece costume of aerialist Ethel Jennier of the Russell Bros. circus "anywhere but the circus or in musical productions.... would have been considered inappropriate." Jano’s essay, 'Venuses of the Age: The Female Performer Emancipated', The Circus 1870s–1950s, p. 167.
{(Today, I am the (burrowing) owl.) In the borrowed costume from Petrouchka, designed by Alexandre Benois, c 1911, with a Burrowing owl (Speotyto cunicularia).}
{In the borrowed costume for a star, designed by Pavel Tchelitchew, c 1928, with a West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus).}
{In the borrowed costume (for a Maiden) from The Rite of Spring, after Nicholas Roerich, 1913, with an Olive colobus (Procolobus verus).}
+ Salvaged Relatives, recently
| | |
|
Friday, 23 October 2015
Motion is steady. Motion is frenetic.
{Last Work performed by Batsheva Dance Company (Image credit: Batsheva Dance Company website)}
In absolute awe. Especially for Fjord Review, Craftwork. (Thank-you, Penelope, I enjoyed taking you in my pocket.)
Orhad Naharin’s Last Work (2015)
Batsheva Dance Company
Performances seen:
Saturday 17th October
Sunday 18th October
State Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne
Melbourne Festival
Performed by Batsheva Dance Company dancers season 2014/15
"The soul desires to dwell with the body because without the members of the body it can neither act nor feel." —Leonardo da Vinci
Motion builds slowly. In the form of a wave that ripples through the body. Omri Drumlevich moves as if possessed, eyes fixed on a point somewhere behind me. With his left arm outstretched in counter balance and his supporting leg bent, the right side of his body gives over to an undulation of controlled movement. His right hand rests upon his bent suspended right leg, his forearm in direct line with his shin, as if fusing two parts of the body previously independent. The hand now fixed on the knee, the familiar line of the body altered, through Drumlevich's body courses an inward sensation made outwardly visible. As his stirring builds, the pace quickens, and I am mesmerised. Without theatrics and pomp, he appears to have altered the range of movement in the ball and socket workings of his knee joint.
Motion is steady. In the form of a lone dancer on a treadmill, tirelessly running. Dressed in bright blue, the runner remains a constant, adjusting how I perceive time and space. Their pace never alters, their direction never changes, their destination, never reached. The runner remains steadfast as the dancers on the stage before and around them explore an impossible range of motions. The juxtaposition between the runner's enduring pattern and the uncertainty of the dancers, itself a beautiful conversation. Both represent unwavering determination, but both runner and dancers reach it differently. The message I read in Ohad Naharin's Last Work (2015): more things unite us than divide us.
Motion is frenetic. In the form of wild energy unleashed, unmasked, unrobed. It pulsates and shakes to the relentless 4/4 beat of Hysteric’s 'Club Life'. The driving sound of Baltimore rapper, Sagat’s aptly named 'Few Mysteries Solved in a Year of Contact' and the accompanying action on the stage above all reveal to me how hard it is to remain true to your own course as those around you do otherwise. As Oscar Ramos, in low runners’ crouch, moves his head forward and back, forward and back, as if 'eating sound', Zina (Natalya) Zinchenko thrusts her hips side to side as she whips her right hand in-out, in-out, in-out before her face. In a tight knot on the stage, each dancer repeats their own looped, instinctual movement and a machine is made of varying parts: all linked, all different. Converting movement into heat and energy, an engine of dancers appears, with Maayan Sheinfeld, a spark plug, and no shortage of dancers vying for the role of crankshaft, connecting rod, and piston. For though I’m likening this engine to a machine, it is completely animal. Primal impulses, unmistakably, front and centre, an echo of Nijinsky’s erotic Faun.
Motion is carefully measured. In the form of the pas de deux performed by Hsin-Yi Hsiang and Adi Zlatin. Moving as if one body, side by side, the cruelty of this metered tenderness comes from the fact that I cannot truly look at both their expressions at the one time. I leap from face to face, limb to limb, like some frenzied bee in search of nectar, trying to take it all in, again noting more similarities than differences. And while I cannot understand the words of the four Romanian lullabies that feature alongside the likes of Luminox’s high-key tinkling 'Tantrum', I understand their universal meaning, or rather, I feel their meaning. As Naharin explains, lullabies are "sung by horrible parents and wonderful parents, too". And it is this expression of "joy and pain and sadness [living] in the same space; [that] don’t contradict each other"[i] that Last Work drives home for me.
Though we don’t remain in the nursery for long, as William Barry, clad in yellow shorts, relentlessly wields a grogger, a Purim noisemaker, and drowns out the gun-polishing suggestive actions of his fellow dancer, the Haman villain to Purim's story, perhaps.[ii] With momentum causing the board to clack against the gearwheel, Barry has become an instrument. On the heels of the joyous Decadance (one night only at Melbourne Festival), fresh from its Tel-Aviv premiere, Last Work challenges me to work. It demands the audience work at keeping pace. It demands and deserves engagement.
{Last Work performed by Batsheva Dance Company (Image credit: Batsheva Dance Company website)}
In the temporary seats installed in the State Theatre above the filled-in orchestra pit, the audience participation that only the other night I had longed for. In the second row, I feel in the midst of the rapidly shifting convulsions of the eighteen dancers. Bathed in the bright lights, up close, real close, so close as to reach out and touch, the reverberation fells almost forbidden. Privy to every twitch and flex, above my head soars the embodiment of Naharin’s Gaga. "Body builders with soft spine," aware of their "explosive power"[iii]. When Ian Robinson lands crouched at the foot of the stage and appears to look right through me, I fail to return his gaze. Seated up close, the intensity of expression across the faces of all the dancers is fantastically unnerving so as to feel almost voyeuristic.
As Hsiang crouches like a small pebble atop Shamel Pitts, I am reminded of moments within Sadeh21 when one dancer stood atop another in a cat-like pose. As Iyar Elezra in small white tutu vibrates before the convulsing Berry: the familiar tapping into of unconscious, animalistic movement. As Pitts slithers beneath three dancers in bridge pose, the fluidity of their upper bodies, hypnotic. The recurring motifs of balance, sensual connectedness, and the ability to yield, are all in evidence. "Gaga is a lot about developing bigger awareness, so what is delicate becomes more delicate, what is wild becomes more wild, what is quick becomes more quick. It’s about the flow of energy and being available, open. Even if we don’t move, it is a state of mind that you are available — for anything."[iv] Just as there are recurring motifs within the choreography, within Gaga there are recognisable tendues, arabesques, and bourrées alongside jaw-dropping backbends that hover, teasingly, just above the floor from a wide-legged stance (Elezra and Zinchenko: I’m looking at you). The emphasis feels always about expression over an overt display of virtuosity, even though I am frequently left in awe by its energy and power.
As coloured confetti not gunfire rains, a white flag is proudly waved, and Robinson sets to making a structure from packaging tape, radiating from a standing microphone. A cacophony of noise! The screech of tape, that deafening sound! Binding the dancers together, one at a time, with an endless roll (a seamless transitioning between three rolls of tape worn as bracelets), the independent parts become one. Resistance, in this case, literally means tape garrotting your neck. The tape at first seems playful in its futility, but the resulting restrictions read as anything but. Unable to move in the free means previously relished, Last Work draws to dramatic, inevitable close. However, I read a message of hope in the curtain call where the dancers share two pairs of small scissors[v] and cut themselves free. As with Decadance beginning before it started, so too, Last Work does not end, and I cannot wait to see what follows.
Notes:
[i] Ohad Naharin quoted by Anna Della Subin, ‘Going Gaga of Ohad Naharin’, The New York Times Style Magazine, 19th September, 2015 (accessed 16th October, 2015).
[ii] Rabbi Shimon Apisdorf, 'Grogger: The Purim Noisemaker', excerpt from The One Hour Purim Primer: Everything a Family Needs to Understand, Celebrate and Enjoy Purim, Leviathan Press, 1995 (accessed 19th October, 2015).
[iii] Naharin on his movement language of Gaga, Batsheva Dance Company website (assessed 19th October, 2015).
[iv] Naharin quoted by Francesca Horsley, 'Deca Dance, by the Batsheva Dance Company', New Zealand Listener, 9th January, 2014 (accessed on 16th October, 2015).
[v] A small aside: as someone who works with collage, I especially delight in seeing scissors being used on the stage. To anyone who has even wrapped multiple packages: you will undoubtedly enjoy the brown packaging tape sequence as you marvel at Robinson’s dexterity. The tape doesn’t split! The end of the roll appears easily found!
| | |
|
..
Traveller dear,
Louise Jennison and I make artists’ books, we make all sorts of things, and most usually we make things on paper. Collaboration comes naturally to us both; it is an enjoyable process that yields treasure not possible without the other. Working side-by-side, as we do from our home-based studio in Melbourne, Australia, it is a pattern we are familiar with, a path we are delighted to tread, seeing what new scenario evolves. Collaboration throws up the unexpected, and what is not to like about that?
When not with scissors in hand, I can be found writing about ballet and contemporary dance for Fjord Review, and (upon occasion) painting and collage for RMIT.
With paper sufficient to cover the moon and sincerely yours,
Gracia Haby
(High Up in the Trees since 2006)
+ EXTENDING WARM WELCOME
+ WHY BOOKS?
+ INTERVIEWS & REVIEWS
+ PUBLISHED WORKS
+ SEEN in 2016
Tweets by @gracialouise