Interview with Kristy Edmunds (Part 3)
In this final instalment of Spark Online’s interview with Kristy Edmunds, Bryan Lewis talks with the out-going Arts Festival director about her time at the festival and her future at the Victorian College of the Arts.
It has been a long-lived gripe within our community that, in Australia, artists do not have the time to allow works to fully gestate, we are not allowed the same time as our European counterparts. A company like Theatre du Soleil may take up to three years to fully realise a particular work. There is no funding in Australia to allow for that sort of development period. Most work that occurs here, even away from the Malthouse or MTC, still has to try and work within those theatre companies’ model of a six-week rehearsal period and a four-week run. Even new work can at best hope for a few weeks funded development period, and even then the chance of securing further funding to actually advance on the development is slim. And once a new work has had an audience run it will never be able to secure more funding for a remount, which means that most new works are simply unable to develop and mature and evolve to realise their full potential. It is easy to forget that often these international works we so admire at our festivals have had long and full lives before they arrive on our shores. They are works that have breathed with audiences for many runs, they have been tweaked and finessed over many performances, the show we witness will often bear little resemblance to the show that first premiered all that time ago. And as any new theatre maker will testify, a show finding its feet in front of audiences is yet another stage in its development. However, for an Australian artist to secure a show in a festival, as has occurred with many involved this year, there is a certain freedom in the creation process, enabling them to fully immerse within the creation unencumbered by the start-stop process of typical funding. Some of these shows were able to start development two years ago knowing that the show would definitely have a life with the 2008 festival.
“Look at Jenny Kemp, an artist who I knew about from overseas. This article continues, click here to read on…
Interview with Kristy Edmunds (Part 2)
An arts festival is like no other festival; everything occurs on such a large scale. Unlike a film festival where film stock is brought into the country, and maybe a handful of film makers and stars, with performance art the personnel count is enormous. You’re dealing with entire dance companies, entire orchestras, entire theatre troupes, as well as their sets, their costumes, entire catalogues of an artists work if an exhibition is part of the menu. One can only imagine the backstage mayhem at the Arts Centre, with different shows being bumped into each of the theatres every three or so days. And we’re not just talking about evening performances. Works perform around the clock, with audiences given the possibility to see sometimes up to four shows in a given day. Glancing at this year’s line-up I can already foresee the schedule-juggling I will need to master. Is twenty minutes enough time to get from the Malthouse to Hamer Hall, and then I have fifteen minutes to make a show in North Melbourne? Or should I risk seeing an act at the Spiegeltent and try to make do with only catching the second half of a concert at the Playhouse? Is it permissible for me to skip work so I can catch a lunchtime conversation with Philip Glass and then catch a performance of the Deborah Hay dance company? And more importantly, will I survive two weeks worth of late nights drinking at the Spiegeltent? This article continues, click here to read on…
Interview with Kristy Edmunds (Part 1)
The 23rd Melbourne International Arts festival is only a couple of months away, with the full festival line up recently unveiled at a champagne-bathed event at The Meat Market in North Melbourne. The audience of media, artists and festival enthusiasts audibly gasped and cheered and ooh-ed and aah-ed as each work was introduced by Kristy Edmunds, the festival’s Artistic Director, who finishes her four-year tenure this year. There was a loud cheer towards the end of her introduction when she-with a glint in her eye–unveiled this year’s trump card, a series of works and concerts by music icon Patti Smith. Kristy laughed and grinned behind her podium, a captain proudly docking her ship successfully for the final time.
What always strikes me about this vibrant, fiercely intelligent woman is the overwhelming passion and enthusiasm she displays as she talks about the festival and the myriad works that populate it. It’s akin to watching a young child talk with glee as they describe their favourite TV show, or show you their card collection. In fact, with Kristy at the helm, I can’t shake the sense that she magically transforms the festival each year into an intellectual candy store leaving all us art lovers gawping at the seductive offerings on display-minds drooling and eyes bigger than our wallets. As I arrive at the Melbourne Festival headquarters one Thursday afternoon I half expect to discover some Willy Wonkaesque theatrical emporium, complete with theatre troupes working their magic in long corridors and European orchestras tuning up their instruments in place of office workers at their keyboards. Of course this is fanciful: the festival is still months away, the Spiegeltent hasn’t gone up yet and the troupes and orchestras of my imagining have yet to descend on our calm and grid-designed landscape. But come October 9, the arts precinct and many other pockets of Melbourne will play host to many of the worlds most exciting theatre makers, artists, musicians, composers, choreographers, photographers, actors, dancers, singers and writers, while those of us cast in the necessary role of audience will once again lose two weeks of our year in a haze of beer, bright colours, baffling sights and passionate conversation.
It’s this notion of a continuous artistic conversation that begins my all too brief hour with Kristy Edmunds at her office in the heart of the CBD. Of course the festival head quarters are just like many other offices, a pleasant maze of white corridors and light rooms in the middle of an unimposing building off Flinders Street, but there is a particularly palpable air of excitement and energy with it being only a day since the line up was announced. Kristy greets me very warmly, her eyes clear and sparkling, her voice smooth and measured with a strong hint of something mischievous in it’s American-accented deep tones. It’s a face and voice I feel like I know well, having frequented many of the free conversations with participating artist that take place at lunchtime throughout the festival and always chaired by Kristy herself.
“These (conversations) are full of people who have literally come in during their lunch hour to gain some insight into something they have seen, or heard about. To me it’s about that stimulation of curiosity. And when you watch people experience that, that seeking of stimulation and knowledge, and they get it, something, from the conversation with the artist, or maker, I love that! It’s not inert, it’s very interactive and direct.” This article continues, click here to read on…
Melbourne Art Fair - Neon Parc and Viv Miller
With the 11th Biennial Melbourne Art Fair 2008 only a week away I managed to snare a brief chat with it’s long serving director, Bronwyn Johnson, in order to discuss the current state of the art scene in Melbourne and how the fair develops and supports contemporary artists as well as creating for them an international platform on which to showcase their work. As one of Melbourne’s most experienced arts producers, Bronwyn has worked across a wide range of arts projects and festivals, creating opportunities for dance, theatre and contemporary art works in a variety of events.
This article continues, click here to read on…
MIFF 2008 Media Launch
It’s almost that time of year again, when Melbourne’s (and, indeed, the world’s) cinephile population take it upon themselves to leave the warm confines of their homes, hotels, hovels and editing suites, and brave the winter cold to taste the flavours of grand celluloid conconctions from the world over. The Melbourne International Film Festival is coming up, launching tonight at the Sofitel. Compared to last year’s intimate Toff in Town setting, the 2008 launch seemed a bit corporate-box in its filmfest meets five-star surrounds; even so, such events are not measured by their sponsors, but by their content, and Richard Moore stepped up to the podium looking and sounding supremely relaxed and assured about this year’s programme. It was, he casually remarked, ‘an antidote to more commercial cinema - not that we mind being commercial.’
For his second festival, Moore appears to have displayed all the light touch and deep insight present in his first effort last year. His eye for the diversity of style among film makers and the tastes of audiences has been reflected somewhat in the byline of this year’s festival: Everyone’s a critic. There’ll certainly be a lot of discussion, with 277 films and 100 shorts brought together from around the globe.
This article continues, click here to read on…
2008 Australian Dance Awards: The Winners
The State Hall of the Arts Centre was the venue for the 2008 Australian Dance Awards last Sunday evening, and a massive night it was too for the industry - the inaugral night for Melbourne as home to the award ceremony (confirmed until 2010).
Shaun Parker, interviewed previously here on Spark, was a winner, as were Garry Stewart and Paul White for their creative work on Honour Bound in choreography and dance. The proverbial Everyman was also present amongst the winners, (as he proverbially is Everywhere) with the unstoppable Hugh Jackman securing a gong - but here, without further ado, is the full list…
The Winners of the 2008 Australian Dance Awards
OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE IN A STAGE MUSICAL
Hugh Jackman in The Boy From Oz, Choreographer: Kenny Ortega and Kelley Abbey
OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY A COMPANY
Lucy Guerin Inc for Structure & Sadness, Choreographer: Lucy Guerin
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN INDEPENDENT DANCE
Shaun Parker for This Show Is About People, Producer: Marguerite Pepper Productions
OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY A FEMALE DANCER
Lucinda Dunn in Don Quixote, The Australian Ballet
OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY A MALE DANCER
Paul White in Honour Bound, Choreographer: Garry Stewart
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN CHOREOGRAPHY
Garry Stewart for Honour Bound, Commissioned by Sydney Opera House & Malthouse Theatre
AWARD FOR DANCE ON FILM
Sue Healey for Will Time Tell, Producer: Sue Healey
AWARD FOR SERVICES TO DANCE
Dally Messenger & Karen van Ulzen
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN DANCE EDUCATION
Helen Cameron
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
Paul Hammond OAM
The Scoundrel That You Need (Interview)
The Scoundrel That You Need, directed by James McCaughey, is a rare staging of a play by Alexandr Ostrovsky, the founder of Russian national theatre. Unlike his contemporaries Tolstoy and Turgenev, Ostrovsky focused on the merchant middle class, with its bewildering array of rituals and standards. I spoke with Ben Pfeiffer, who plays the lead role of Glumov - a young schemer who charms his way up the social ladder. Pfeiffer is a graduate of the VCA, and appeared in last year’s productions of The Perjured City and A Dollhouse.
Ostrovsky is considered a giant of Russian theatre, but his work is rarely performed outside Europe. What makes him interesting?
He’s kind of the forefather to Chekhov. There’s something extraordinary in his writing, a certain clunkiness to the language, the way the words fall out of the mouth. It’s very hard to pinpoint how one thought leads to another, which leaves massive gaps for you to fill in as an actor. He uses visual metaphors that are almost a bit ugly - this play would have been received with great distaste in society. He looks at the hypocrisy within social ranks, he’s really brutal.
What sort of scoundrel is your character?
He comes from a peasant background, where’s he discovered the essence of hatred for the upper classes. Then he suddenly realizes he has this chameleon quality, and can actually use his skills with language to ease his way into society and manipulate it all to his advantage.
Is the audience supposed to “see through” his charm? How do you play that?
It’s such an easy thing to see this character as calculating. He sees an opportunity to use the skills that he has. He woos the older woman, he lands the pretty girl with the $200,000 dowry, he lands the best position he can, he starts rubbing shoulders with the high and mighty. But I really tried to remain true to his character, the desperation and reality of being a peasant in Russia in the 1860s.
I worked from an empathetic position, as in: “Yeah, this kid does deserve a break!” I think the things he does are slightly immoral.
The title of this play is usually “Diary of a Scoundrel”, but here it’s “The Scoundrel That You Need”, which almost implies “The Scoundrel You Deserve”, or “The Scoundrel You’ve Been Waiting For.” Does it imply that, no matter how cunning this guy thinks he is, he performs a service everyone wants?
One of my lines is, “You all need me, ladies and gentlemen, you can’t get on without a man like me.” He’s the only one who tells the truth - he’s the first to admit he’s bought into the corruption, the hypocrisy. You get to the point where you think, “This little bastard’s going to get found out,” but then suddenly the play exhales and it completely turns on its head.
There are a lot of farce and slapstick scenes in the play. How do you make sure the satire still has a fair amount of bite to it?
I think the stylistic nature has been invested in fully, that riotous Restoration style. There’s the whole relationship with his mother as well. In the opening scene, she thinks that his scheme is flawed, but then he says, “Mother, I’m smart, I’m crafty and I’m envious - I’m just like you.” They’re this classic vaudevillian duo of villains.
How was your experience at the VCA?
My perception is that they choose a vast variety of students, with different and interesting approaches to acting. It’s not so much about beaten down and re-built. There’s a fundamental focus on theatre-making, putting actors out there who can contribute to change and further the industry.
Can you tell me about your upcoming projects?
I’m working with Bryan Derrick’s company Theatre of the Oppressed. He works with a range of groups - autistic children and adults, the mentally ill, Somali taxi drivers. They talk about their life stories and experiences, with actors who facilitate the project. I’m also working on a solo project, a version of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, which is written for three actors: two men and one woman. I’m looking at playing all three.
The Scoundrel That You Need
Gasworks Arts Park, 7-24 May
Melbourne Jazz Festival 2008: Interview with Tord Gustavsen
Tord Gustavsen is a Norwegian pianist touring with his trio as part of the 2008 Melbourne Jazz Festival. With ECM the trio has recorded three albums, all to critical acclaim. Tord is renowned for his sensitivity and lyricism at the piano, and he spoke on the phone with Spark earlier in the week to discuss his music and touring plans.
The music that your trio has created is often described as being contemplative and introspective, can you talk about the place these two qualities have in your improvisation and composition?
“There is a lot of truth to those descriptions, although they’re not really describing the focus, because to me there is a basic or fundamental duality between emotional intensity and reflection, or introspection. So to me, the feeling of being in the music and also the qualities that I feel music needs for me to really appreciate it as a core music, is this duality of expressivity and reflection. Having said that, most of the contemplation in our music certainly comes from a taste or a passion for not playing more than really needs to be played. To go for the music as a universe of mood or a universe of places to dwell, rather than the music as an area of showing how much you can play or all the things you’ve rehearsed. So that’s certainly a core issue there. We all share this wish of being, even though the music is mild in some ways, we all share a rather drastic or radical passion for really stripping things down to what really needs to be played and to go for search for that. The intensity of what’s needed, rather than the intensity of density. So that really a major point there. Also the quality of contemplation seen as meditation almost is there, there are huge parallels to spiritual modes of being, although the music is not spiritual music in any direct sense of the word. There is certainly this feeling of ‘going to church’ when we start playing!”
This article continues, click here to read on…
Melbourne Jazz Festival 2008: Interview with Lisa Young
Melbourne is very privileged to have the opportunity to see Lisa Young and her quartet as part of the 2008 Melbourne Jazz Festival, as they rarely perform. Lisa is an Australian vocalist and composer, and has released three albums with her quartet. The most immediately striking tracks of her latest album, Grace, are her wordless compositions, in which she utilises the percussive qualities of her voice and draws upon Indian vocal styles. She has visited India twice, studying North Indian Ragas with Dhanashree Pandit Rai, and advanced Konnakkol studies (South Indian vocal percussion) with virtuoso mridangam player Karraikudi Mani. Ahead of her Jazz Festival appearance, I met with Lisa and began by talking about what attracted her to Indian music and how it slots in with her jazz background.
“For a rhythmic improvising singer - I love rhythm - it’s such a rich tradition because its so interesting, and vocally the sound of it is interesting.
Rhythmically it works so well with jazz, and vocally as a bank of sounds that you develop, it really works well as an improvising singer. You can continually develop these drum sounds and then morph them into what works for you.”
And how do these masters feel about Lisa using her studies in Indian music in a Western context?
“They don’t mind my developments with it — both Mani and Ravi whenever I’ve played them my works — they’ve gone, ‘Oh I like that ‘dway’ sound, maybe I could try it…’. They’ve been very open and kind to me about me developing my art form.”
This article continues, click here to read on…
WOMAD: Idan Raichel Project
Idan Raichel is an Israeli music producer and composer whose latest album release The Idan Raichel Project is the first to make a serious splash in the Western market for ‘world music’. Well-established in his own region, he came to Australia this month as part of Womadelaide and also to play at the Prince here in Melbourne. With around 70 contributing artists The Idan Raichel Project is a melange of musical styles and cultures, but Raichel’s production gives each track a consistent feel reminiscent of the electro-chill-out tunes favoured by European cafes and bars. With Raichel’s hectic itinerary, we managed to catch up with him via email. Here’s what he had to say…
There are clearly a lot of people involved in the Idan Raichel Project. How do you go about writing the songs?
The process is definitely collaborative. I am the producer, but everyone brings something to the table. I always start a song with the vocals and I let the melody and the rendition of the song guide how the rest of the song develops. Then I just add what the singer needs to support him or her. If he needs only an acoustic guitar then we give him that. If he needs something more electronic to contrast with what he is doing then we add that. I enjoy the process of collaboration and learning that comes from working with musicians of different cultural backgrounds. For me, music is about discovery, and I always discover something new when I work with musicians from places like Ethiopia, Colombia, Rwanda or anywhere, and hopefully the feeling is mutual. Sometimes, distance and language can be a challenge, but music has a way of overcoming these difficulties.
How did your time in the Israeli military affect your political outlook and music?
Like all young people in Israel, I had to join the Army when I turned 18. It is required service, but most people don’t actually do typical military tasks. My job in the Army was directing the Army rock band, where I gained a lot of experience and met some of the musicians that I ended up working with in the Project, for example Cabra Casey, one of the Ethiopian singers in the Project. It was actually a good training ground for music, and I must admit it was a much better way to pass my army service! I traveled around to different bases entertaining the troops. My time in the Army just furthered my belief that people everywhere want the same thing their neighbors in the region and everyone else in the world wants: a happy life, love, food, dignity and respect.
This article continues, click here to read on…
An audience with the Australian Ballet School
Stepping into the rehearsal room of the Australian Ballet School is a surreal experience: everywhere you see the the same body type uncannily reproduced - the same erect, long-stemmed, slim-shouldered form. I was struck by the poise of these pre-teens and adolescents, who are completely at ease with being looked at and scrutinized (when told to add more lightness to a jump, or to create a more expressive lift) - and also with being interviewed.
I spoke with Dimity Azoury and Chengwu Guo, two of the stars of the Australian Ballet School’s production of Coppélia (December 7-8, Sidney Myer Music Bowl). Both dancers are about to embark on careers with the Australian Ballet.
The role of Swanilda in Coppélia is quite challenging. It’s technically difficult, but also involves a lot of character acting. What kind of Swanilda are we going to be seeing?
Azoury: I think she’s more mischievous than child-like, although there are child-like qualities to her. She’s very confident and very sure of herself. Forthright.
And what about you, Chengwu? What’s your take on Franz?
Guo: He’s a sunshine boy! A “guy” - really simple. He doesn’t know women, although he has a girlfriend.
This ballet is mostly a comedy. Is it difficult to be funny on stage, through movement?
Azoury: The funny thing about this ballet is that you don’t really know you’re being funny. It’s just normal human action - it’s naturally funny.
The first time I saw you both perform was in Morning Melodies, dancing to Burt Bacharach. With songs like those, which don’t have a clear narrative, how do you get into the right mood?
Azoury: The music’s full of character, I find. The way it’s composed, you can really hear when it’s exciting, or happy. I think you’ve just really got to listen when you’re on stage, so it’s like you’re hearing it for the first time, feeling those emotions for the first time.
When did you first become interested in dance?
Azoury: I started when I was 4. It was the just the enjoyment of dancing, I used to love watching the older girls and seeing what they could do. I always said I wanted to become a ballerina, I’ve never really wanted to do anything else.
Are there any particular dancers you admire, or keep in mind when you’re performing?
Azoury: I love watching Lisa Bolte for her artistic qualities, and someone like Lucinda Dunn for her technical ability. The Paris Opera Ballet are incredible to watch.
Chengwu, how do you think our dance scene compares with the one in China, where you were raised?
Guo: At the Beijing Dance Academy, the [focus is on] energy - jumps and turns, feet, legs. But here they emphasize mime, creating a performance.
Both of you are about to take up contracts with the Australian Ballet. What would be your dream roles?
Azoury: I don’t know…the great roles, I’d want to do all of them, but I couldn’t do them justice at the moment, ’cause I’m not mature enough, obviously. I’ll wait.
Guo (without hesitation): Don Quixote! I want to do that.
Interview with Jerome Bel
While the big dance number at this year’s Melbourne Arts Festival has to be the Merce Cunningham residency, there are some other equally remarkable choreographers on show. Take Jérôme Bel for instance, the enfant terrible of French contemporary dance, whose work has garnered that heady mix of consternation, castigation and celebration synonymous with avant-garde.
A relatively small number of Melburnians saw Bel’s work at last year’s festival, when he appeared in a short run of Pichet Klunchun and Myself. That show, one of my personal favourites in a strong field, was a two-way interview between Bel and Klunchun, a classical Thai dancer. It placed the two artists on a bare stage, with nothing but bottled water, chairs and a laptop to call their own. In a little over an hour, they queried and conversed their way into some kind of mutual understanding of each other’s work to which we were also privy.
I spoke to Bel by phone from his home in Paris and, thanks to the time difference, his watch had just ticked over to 9am, which was, he noted with a dry rasp, an early start to the day. I began by asking him whether the person on stage with Pichet Klunchun was actually Jérôme Bel or a persona he invented for the purposes of the piece. “It’s me!” he laughed, then extrapolated: the piece that eventuated was not the original design, Bel was supposed to choreograph a solo work for Klunchun to perform at the Bangkok Festival but, because of chronic traffic jams and his cab driver getting lost, the ten scheduled rehearsals quickly diminished to only four. With opening night looming, the two had so far only talked and so, out of necessity as much as anything, created a work that opened the fourth wall to their rehearsal room and exposed their process as individuals and collaborators to the public. As to the identity of his on-stage self, Bel is gleefully assuring that there is no pretence. For someone who had become uncomfortable performing, he found the piece a liberating avenue to be himself on stage.
One of the strongest aspects of Pichet Klunchun and Myself was its dramaturgical coherency and efficiency. Bel emphasised that while aspects of the piece are still developing from season to season, the structuring of it as a strict two-sided interview rather than a free-form dialogue maintains an inherent tautness. It is, in his words, a case of “structure and freedom” rather than “structure and sadness”—a reference to Lucy Guerin’s work from last year’s Melbourne Festival that Bel missed seeing but whose title he clearly loved.
I wondered whether, though there has been no opportunity for further collaborative works, his time with Klunchun and their repeated conversations between Occident and Orient had impacted on Bel’s outlook on his work. After a moment’s thought, his response was emphatic, “yes, it has changed the paradigm of my work completely.” Previously, his work was trying to engage the political on stage but always with a sense of “how will Jérôme Bel do this?” Now, his emphasis has shifted towards an interest in the Other, in interviewing others for their ideas, rather than being constantly concerned with the “Jérôme Bel” of the third person.
His ability to deconstruct himself in an interview with such vigour is the sign not only of his intellectual credentials but a confidence in his capacity to bring these ideas to bear in his work. Indeed, his development from a dancer to choreographer was a thoroughly intellectual migration. He worked as a dancer for many years, an experience he urbanely sums up like so, “dance, dance, dance, enjoy, enjoy, enjoy, feel, feel, feel, express, express, express.” But amidst all the merriness and expressiveness, Bel felt something was amiss. While some would start reading their horoscopes a little more intensely or take up tarot cards, he took up books by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes. 
From post-structuralism to discourse theory, these big men of French philosophy and linguistics gave Bel reason to pause and, like Descartes, be certain only of his doubt.
From this departure point of doubt, Bel wondered how he could intellectualise dance. In order to link thought to dance, to mesh the physical and the cognitive in his work, he felt that something radical was needed. He began with the notion of erasure, “to bring the mind on stage, I had to remove the physical.” For those familiar with Derrida’s work, the notion of erasure (sous rature) is of course a central concept underpinning his deconstruction of signifiers. For those unfamiliar with Derrida, it would be an impossibly long day in the office if I were to try to decode that last sentence. In any case, the point for Bel in bringing deconstruction to dance was that it would make people look twice and hopefully reconsider what was being attempted on stage. In his excitement at piecing this together for me, Bel worked his way down a cul-de-sac of logic and came up with the phrase “physical discourse” before exclaiming, “No! That’s an impossibility.” But there was a discourse of some kind, or at least a problematising of contemporary dance. However, this process of erasure is also a limitation—if the only way for Bel to bring thought on stage is through subtraction, eventually he arrives at zero. In this respect, Bel cites his heroes, William Forsythe and Trisha Brown, as choreographers who manage to make “thinking dance” without subtraction.
This limitation that Bel discovered in his own methodology has, in concert with the revelations of his work with Pichet Klunchun, moved him further away from dance and closer to language-based theatre. Describing his experience of choreography, he noted that typical rehearsals are largely talk and that there is a sudden break with that when it comes time for performance—the dancers, who are normally verbal interlocutors with one another, become mute in front of the audience. Bel feels that the performances should reflect the rehearsals, just as it did so clearly in Pichet Klunchun and Myself. But “I won’t direct Chekhov or Beckett” he assures me, though he has been offered the chance. Indeed, his move to theatre is not so much about directing but about devising. He has a fundamental suspicion of printed texts, feeling that the (absent) playwright can still exert an unacceptable “authority” over performers and directors. So, in response, he imagines a theatre of oral authorship, where the performers are the living writers of a language whose existence is isolated to performance and not reproduced in printed forms. In other words, the performance is always “live”, always focused on performance rather than adaptation. Clearly there are precedents for this kind of work in theatre’s long history but that is not to say that what Bel is working towards is somehow redundant, if only for the sheer passion and experience that he brings. Bel speaks with the eager and mercurial energy of someone still in that luscious moment of epiphany. Consumed by remounts and touring, he has not had the opportunity to put his new paradigm in motion, but his previous paradigm will be here for our enjoyment (or enervation) come October.
Jérôme Bel’s The Show Must Go On will be part of the 2007 Melbourne International Arts Festival. Click here for more details and booking information.
Melbourne Arts Festival: Interview with Shaun Parker
In the midst of rehearsals for his upcoming Melbourne Arts Festival production, This Show Is About People, Shaun Parker took time out to talk to us about the work and what brought him to it.
Parker graduated from the VCA dance school in 1992 and is credited as the director-choreographer of This Show Is About People but, as became clear in our conversation, music and song has been just as vital as dance in shaping his artistic vision. In his childhood, up until the age of seven, Parker struggled with a speech impediment. However, his mother quickly noticed that his stutters vanished whenever he joined in with the songs on Playschool and thus began his continuing fascination with song. While working as a dancer with Meryl Tankard’s ADT in Adelaide, Parker researched mediaeval music. Being a natural countertenor, Parker’s voice was inherently suited to the style and he was taken under the wing of Leslie Lewis who developed his knowledge of baroque and early music. Parker’s talents as a singer led him into work with groups like Adelaide Baroque and artists like that doyenne of avant-garde voice, Meredith Monk.
In This Show Is About People, Parker’s passions for music and dance have come together in a thoroughly entwined manner. Of course, dance and music are hardly odd bedfellows, but Parker started this project with the conceptual undertaking of using live music and dance as interactive elements that, through the development process, would react with each other in a loop of mutual inspiration. This development of the project began well over two years ago with an initial three weeks of work in January 2005. A collaborative understanding of the rehearsal room was key, especially in this early phase, and Parker was keen to have the idiosyncrasies of the dancers feed into the work. He set tasks for them, with each individual’s personal style and background ensuring a plurality of responses. At the same time, musicians came into the process on a regular basis in order to begin matching the growing physical vocabulary of the group to songs.
A year later, Parker returned to the project with a further fortnight of development, this time focused on music. During his seven year stint with Tankard at ADT, Parker was involved with the production and tour of Songs with Mara, which brought him into contact with Mara and Llew Kiek - musicians who are now the musical directors of This Show Is About People. Their involvement ensures that the show is steeped in the rich vocal heritage of Bulgaria, but their work with Parker has been as much about finding a coherency for the musical smorgasbord that has made its way into the show: word art, beat box, baroque, Hawaiian slide guitar and pop. And now, with only weeks to go until the world premiere at the Melbourne Festival, director, musicians and dancers alike are applying the finishing touches to Parker’s debut major-cast work.
In Kristy Edmunds’ recent chat with Spark Online, she stressed how important it was for the local artists she commissions to have a confidence in their vision and aesthetic. In Parker’s case, seventeen years in the dance world has given him the opportunity to absorb the processes of many significant choreographers. He is a strong believer in aspiring choreographers taking the time to dance and learn through rehearsal and performance before looking to stamp their own footprint.
Indeed, the harsh realities of the arts world can be a daunting slap in the face for the unseasoned. Making This Show Is About People a reality has taken Parker several failed grant applications and several successful ones over the course of several years. Keeping a large-scale project such as this one afloat for so long has at times felt overwhelming for him. Nevertheless, he has been staying afloat and supporting his family thanks to a Robert Helpmann Scholarship from Arts NSW and the fiscal bonuses of commercials and film work. In the end, it was Edmunds’ support that guaranteed Parker’s hard work would receive an audience.
The effect his work has on an audience - its capacity to transform them - is fundamental to Parker’s approach. He wants This Show Is About People to be viscerally engaging and thought-provoking, with meaning that is neither obscure nor ham-fisted. From a thematic point of view, the piece began its evolution around various perceived dualities: life/death-afterlife, religion/war, violence/undoing it, man/woman. They are grand themes all and it is an ambitious undertaking to render such weighty matters in a coherent and unsentimental manner, but for Parker they are tied together.
Why belong? This seems to be the question at the heart of Parker’s investigation of the human condition. The answer for him has been an optimistic affirmation rather than a bleak abyss, though Parker is quick to point out the distinction between optimism and cheesiness - there will, we can thankfully assume, be no Hallmark cards folded in with the program.
This Show Is About People will play from Thursday October 11 to Sunday October 14 at the Malthouse’s Merlyn Theatre as part of the 2007 Melbourne International Arts Festival. Further festival dates in other cities can be anticipated in 2008-2010.
Melbourne Arts Festival: Interview with Kristy Edmunds
On her last day in the office before taking a well-deserved overseas jaunt, I caught up with Kristy Edmunds, Artistic Director of the Melbourne International Arts Festival (MIAF), to talk about this year’s program from her perspective.
There is something wonderfully seasonal about Melbourne’s festival circuit. The winter solstice comes and goes and, even though the winter winds still chill everyone in their tight black jeans, the Arts Festival program launch and the Film Festival screenings get Melburnians out on the streets, all of them flipping the bird at the frost and the rain and looking ahead to the warmer, longer days to come.
My experience of MIAF has been limited to the two previous years that Edmunds has led but something that struck me as noticeably different about this year’s program announcements was the flurry of names familiar from last year’s festival - Robert Wilson, Dan Zanes, Jerome Bel, William Yang and Daniel Bernard Roumain all return with fresh engagements. In an industry where festival spots can be vital career catalysts, there may well be artists feeling that they’ve been left out in the cold when others are getting a second go, but Edmunds’ reasoning for the decision is convincing. As she related to me, each artist is coming back for very specific reasons.
In the case of the Grammy-winning children’s musician Dan Zanes, Edmunds explained that, for the kids who went to see him last year, it would have been their first encounter with him. This year, the kids will be familiar with his songs and excited about the chance to see him again, instead of him just being a funny guy in a green suit that their parents thought they might enjoy.
Edmunds cites her curatorial responsibility to both audiences and artists. In bringing these performers, directors and choreographers back, she is able to develop an audience for their work and sustain their practice while also enriching the experience of audiences by giving them the opportunity to garner a broader and deeper understanding of an artist’s work. Edmunds suggested an analogy with visual artists whose work is constantly retrospectively surveyed and considered, whereas the performing arts have an inherently more ephemeral quality. As such, repeat appearances allow us to see the evolution of an artist’s style.
From a practical perspective, it would be impossible for MIAF to mount two Robert Wilson pieces in one festival, but the 12-month interval also allows for audiences to fully digest the epic I La Galigo in advance of seeing this year’s The Temptation of St Anthony. Where I La Galigo was an opera inspired by the story and musical tradition of the Bugis people of Indonesia, The Temptation pairs Wilson with Bernice Johnson Reagan (founding member of Sweet Honey in the Rock) for an African-American-meets-Flaubert musical.
In the case of Jerome Bel, The Show Must Go On is a seminal work of contemporary dance that Edmunds has been working on getting across for the last two years. Last year, Bel was here with a delicately understated and hilarious piece of conversation-cum-dance-lesson with Pichet Klunchun that was one of my festival highlights. So, for those who witnessed that work, The Show Must Go On has already been contextualised by a sense of Bel’s aesthetic and sense of humour.
The program for this year’s Melbourne Interantional Arts Festival also brings to our shores a number of works by international artists with long-established reputations. Renowned theatre-maker Peter Brook, aleatory choreographer Merce Cunningham, butoh master Ushio Amagatsu and multimedia whiz Laurie Anderson are names that have been reverently honoured for decades. All of these artists have left an indelible mark on their artform in terms of their legacy, but Edmunds is quick to point out that they are still active practitioners, not taxidermies of a bygone era.
The Merce Cunningham residency, with its myriad offshoots into the intertwined worlds of John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, is a festival within a festival. With exhibitions, installations, films, discussions, new works, old works and happenings, there’ll be plenty of opportunities for older generations to revisit a choreographer whose work they may have first seen half a century ago. For those of a more youthful disposition, who perhaps thought that Cunningham had already danced his last mazurka on this mortal coil, the old master’s form is still du jour, with iPod shuffling used as part of Program A, as well as hip, Sigur Ros perform live as part of Program B.
The inclusion of big-ticket international items like Cunningham is conversely also part of Edmunds’ focus on developing the local arts scene. By bringing important practitioners to town, she hopes to aid in the artistic edification of emerging creatives who have barely enough cash to pay their rent, let alone to catch a flight to New York for a premiere. Of course, she also wants to put Melbourne and Australian artists on show to the world. This year sees the return of wunderkind Barry Kosky with another show originally conceived in Vienna (his home away from home) that promises to follow up his sell-out success Boulevard Delirium. Edmunds also commissions local works for the festival and I asked her what it was she looked for in developing projects. The festival arena allows Edmunds to shine a beacon on artists ready to make the next step onto the international arts scene but she highlighted that the arts festival circuit “is not what I would call a hyper-nurturing environment for artists”. The investments are large, the criticisms quick and scathing, so Edmunds looks for artists whose vision is solid, like Lucy Guerin with last year’s Structure and Sadness and Shaun Parker with this year’s This Show is About People.
For those local artists who will simply be audience members come October, Edmunds has a treat for you too. Since coming to the festival, she has established the Artist Card initiative that provides practising artists with concession pricing, rush-ticket specials and Artist Lounge access in the hope that one’s professional research can afford to be broader and richer with this assistance.
With only a few moments left on the clock before Edmunds had to get to her next appointment, I asked her what was next for her (she departs after the 2008 festival). “Nothing” she said. She’s never considered herself career-driven but, though we joked about the possibility of her opening a very entertaining hot dog stand, her skills as a facilitator of artists will surely be snapped up by an appreciative body somewhere if she doesn’t decide to return to being a full-time artist herself. Indeed, it was because of a sense of responsibility to her fellow artists that she originally donned the cap of facilitator/artistic director/curator. Edmunds felt she could be a conduit between living artists and the impersonal monolith of institution that provided their livelihood, but she has never given up on being an artist herself and it would seem that there are still paths in her art that she has yet to explore and which we may yet be witness to.
For now, get hold of a MIAF program and book your tickets before all the decent concession seats are snapped up. For those interested in theatre, Edmunds couldn’t stress enough that Dood Paard and Teatre Lliure’s respective productions are must-sees for those wanting to see cutting-edge stuff.
The Melbourne International Arts Festival takes over the city October 11-27, 2007, with select shows touring regionally.
Robert Draffin and the Asialink Connection Part I
Theatre maker, director, and educator Robert Draffin has a body of artistic work that spans thirty two years. He has directed a total of 65 productions, more than half of them original and devised works, and has been involved in a number of international exchanges across China, Indonesia, Singapore, India and Japan (among others). In addition, he has taught at Melbourne, Monash, Latrobe and Deakin Universities, as well as serving as the Acting Teacher for Opera Australia, and most recently as Lecturer in Acting at the VCA. Draffin’s experiences have culminated in his establishment of Liminal Theatre and Performance in Melbourne (alongside other, equally distinguished practitioners), where his investigation into the dramatic art continues. SPARK speaks to Draf about his work with Liminal, his creative travels across Asia and the help provided to him by Asialink, and what the future has in store for him.
You have worked with a great many companies and practitioners across Asia. Could you tell us a bit about these experiences?
In 1987/90/92 I went to Indonesia to study Topeng with Ida Bagus Sutarja (Dancer/Carver/Braham priest of MAS Bali). In 1992, I went on to work with the poet Rendra (Bengkel Teatre) in Java. In 2000, I was asked to join TTRP (Theatre Training Research Program), set up by the late Kuo Pao Kun to investigate links between traditional and contemporary theatre training. In 2001-03, over a concentrated three-year period with TTRP (27 months working in the programme- 15 months full-time and 4 x three-month periods), I worked with traditional artists from Indonesia, China, Japan and India and with two contemporary theatre directors from the Beijing Central Academy of Drama. I have directed actors from India, Philippines, Malaysia, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia and Japan. I collaborated with two acting/theatre directors from China (Ma Hui Tian & He Bing Zhu) exploring the intersection of my own methodology with the methods of the Chinese, based on a system developed at the Central Academy of Drama Beijing. I was fortunate to observe master practitioners in Beijing Opera (Zhou Qing Ming & Li Qiu Ping/ Shanghai China) for 14 weeks, Bharatanatyam (N Yagna Prabha /India) for 12 weeks, Wayang Wong (Sardono Kusumo/Indonesia) for 14 weeks, and NOH theatre (Kanze Yoshimasa /Japan) for 7 weeks. I was also part of regular seminars debating the issues that the programme raised. The pure weight of this experience, especially the traditional forms, challenged and redefined every aspect of my work. I had to work across cultural, linguistic and aesthetic boundaries and it forced me to establish the placement of my own work in the programme.
This article continues, click here to read on…
A Conversation with Rodney Afif
 
Victorian College of the Arts graduate Rodney Afif talks with SPARK about his role as Iraqi refugee Youssif in Michael James Rowland’s excellent new feature film, Lucky Miles, as well as providing some tips on how to handle acting for the camera, and a tantalising preview of his next project with the Eleventh Hour Theatre Company.Â
Â
This article continues, click here to read on…
Rod Quantock - An Convenient Interview
Rod Quantock is perhaps known to most Australian’s as the eponymous floppy-hatted former mascot of Captain Snooze, but all that was just a cover (and cash-cow) for more subservise activities - redefining and refining the art of Australian satire. His last show, Court in the Act, was a chaotic shambles of audience participation poking fun at due process, while his latest show for the Comedy Festival, An Convenient Lie, looks set to go straight for the jugular of the body politic. In the lead-up to An Convenient Lie, Rod talks about how politics really does suck, the plight of the ABC, and his vote for master satirist of the age…
This article continues, click here to read on…
The Imagineer’s Manifesto
by The Invisible Actor
‘the only boundaries to our imaginations are the ones we imagine ourselves.’ – Jan Kiam
I. the strange sun
From the fireside chants of ancient Man to our blazing ascents into the firmament, humanity’s expression has been driven by a source so mysterious yet so tangible that it can only be called MAGICK. Despite the protestations of Oxford critics and fundamentalists of all ilks, intuition leads us to assert that Magick is the Great Mother of both Science and Religion; and of Art also, the first and most beloved child.
The earliest manifestation of magick took the shape of drama; the creation of signs, rituals, language: actions to engage theurgically with the self and the environment, the better to understand the interplay of one with the other. But any description of the thing is not the thing itself. There is mystery in it. It is mercurial and primordial. Metaphorically, it is the bone that becomes the spaceship, ala Kubrick’s Odyssey. It is what our mad prophet Artaud was blinded by when he spoke of the strange sun, where ‘the difficult and even the impossible suddenly become our normal element.’
The light of that strange sun is cast across the solar systems of our collective mind; the radiation from it is the language of creation; bathing in its emanations, the artefacts of our species are the planets and satellites that have accreted through its gravity, revolving through vast reaches that eternally beckon. What then shall we call those who seek to understand and chart these reaches, so as to bring back the maps of their ever evolving dimensions?
‘magick is the art and science of causing change to occur in conformity with the will’ – to mega therion
II. transmission
It is an Age of Apocalypse. Powerful visions unleashed upon us from millennia past continue to influence the drama of humanity. Mundane objects and effects of the everyday have become principles of terror. Meaning is continually debased by master dissemblers adroit in the massacre of language. Our most powerful ally against a tide of banality resides in our own selves – the Imagination. This article continues, click here to read on…
Higher Than You: Individualism and the race for status in creative communities
by Cobina Crawford, VCASU Community Development Officer
If I’m higher than you,
It only means that I’m a better liar than you,
It doesn’t mean I’m better than you,
It only means I’m a better competitor than you,
So I’m above you,
So I don’t love you.
Higher Than You, by Chilly Gonzalez, from the album, Entertainist
It’s a popularity contest,
You just gotta put it in context,
So you got a minderwerigkeits complex,
Try living your life as a concept,
Try living your life as a conquest,
And get out of the way, ’cause I’m on next,
Do what you can to fight the blues,
But, uh, you snooze, you lose.
You gotta press the flesh and impress the press, too, Presto.
Promotional rescue.
I got aluminium eyes, don’t assume it’s a lie,
Real figgas don’t lie, they revise,
They just calculate who to hate, whose ego to inflate,
And whose traits to imitate.
You Snooze; You Lose, by Chilly Gonzales, from the album, Entertainist.
Whilst the Roman Empire was in its final death throes, one of the most popular forms of mass entertainment was gladiatorial conquest. Similarly, contemporary Western culture seems to have glued itself to the winner-takes-all narrative, in a context of almost perpetual war and resources that are dwindling dangerously. Survivor, The Apprentice, and Australia’s own Big Brother reinforce the idea that life is a race to the top. That deliberately stomping on your team-mates fingers (if they happen to appear below you on the metaphorical ladder) is a legitimate act. Welcome to the neo-coliseum of capitalism, folks. Thumbs up, you live. Thumbs down, EVICTED! VIA SMS!
This power-of-the-thumb fixation is not limited to the conveyor belt of glamorous guinea pigs, eagerly consenting to the Reality TV microcosm. It is rippling through the audience as well. I wonder how many developing artists absorb this spectacle, secretly surrendering to a life of selling themselves like a brand. Swimming against the tide of conformity seems to pose a very real threat to the already thin chance of artistic success, and its no secret that a high percentage of young, increasingly ambitiou$ people associate collectivism with failure.
Given the ideological climate after over a decade of conservative rule, this is probably not surprising. But what can be done about it? This article continues, click here to read on…
Pulse at Next Wave
As part of the 2006 Next Wave Festival, an ensemble of VCA Drama students, known as Throwing Room, presented an installation of Pulse at the Container Village in Shed 14 at the Docklands. Originally conceived by VCA lecturer Tanya Gerstle, Pulse is a process of ensemble improvisation based on a set of principles including group awareness and an appreciation of the architecture of the space. Audiences witnessed four unique and entirely unprepared hour-long pieces which arose out of the collective imagination of the ensemble.
The unusual performance venue of the Village afforded the opportunity for a small ensemble of actors to engage with a transient audience over an extended period of time. A Pulse is often an ephemeral thing, lasting ten minutes or so, and is used as a generative source for theatre-making. However, in this instance, Throwing Room were investigating the extent to which the principles can be used in creating live non-literal, non-lineal theatre that is valid in its own right. An hour of continuous improvisation pushed the limits of imagination, stamina and awareness on the part of the actors. It also demanded an attuned sense of what the piece needed in order to sustain itself so that it would remain engaging for an audience who could choose to move on at any point.
A Brief History of Pulse
Tanya Gerstle’s process for ensemble theatrical improvisation, Pulse, finds its precedent not in theatre but in the distinct format for improvisation developed by the cornetist Lawrence “Butch” Morris.
Morris, born in Long Beach in 1947, developed his musical acumen in the “new jazz” scene of Los Angeles in the early 70s. By 1976, Morris was working in France and experimenting with diverse ensemble structures and frameworks that ranged from solo performances, trios and jazz big bands to a 29-member saxophone choir. The common denominator in all these ensembles was that Morris’ selection of musicians was strongly linked to their personality and the blend they would create with other members. His method for leading these ensembles is known as conduction. As one of Morris’ press releases states:
Conduction (conducted interpretation/improvisation) is a vocabulary of ideographic signs and gestures activated to modify or construct a real-time musical arrangement or composition. Each sign and gesture transmits generative information for interpretation, and provides instantaneous possibilities for altering or initiating harmony, melody, rhythm, articulation, phrasing or form.
In other words, Morris composes live with his baton and hands. The process, known as comprovisation, relies on the improvisatory capacity of the musicians as much as it does on Morris’ on-the-fly authorial decisions. Conductor and musician are thus involved in a kind of symbiotic feedback loop where both are influenced and directed by the other, though the conductor clearly retains a greater deal of authority. Hence, the results of a conduction are spontaneous and emerge out of the creative interplay of the conductor-composer, whose aesthetic takes precedence, and the musicians, whose personality, playing style and improvised offers strongly affect the final nature of the music. It is interesting to note that while Morris was bringing conduction to the new music and jazz scenes, Frank Zappa had long been using a similar method for conducted improvisations during live rock concerts–Zappa similarly used encoded hand gestures to communicate to his band members.
Having attended workshops in 1989 at the Whitney Museum in New York, where Morris was artist-in-residence, Tanya Gerstle began examining how comprovisation/conduction could be used in devising theatre. Drawing inspiration from Morris, she imagined actors working improvisatorially while receiving live feedback from a director. However, getting the attention of actors who were moving about a space and interacting with each other proved to be far more difficult than it was for a conductor to direct musicians sitting still. The most practical solution was for Gerstle to instil in the actors basic precepts that would guide their work and, thus, largely free the director from having to interrupt–she called this mode of working Pulse. While Gerstle may still call out some side-coaching, the true directorial influence and aesthetic development comes in the post-improvisation breakdown and debriefing, where Gerstle can comment on what worked and what failed, the opportunities missed and the ideas that should have been dropped. Through these sessions a common language of improvisation is established. Hence, the actors and other collaborators (providing improvised lighting and music) gain an understanding of how the format can be used to devise engaging theatre.
When the Pulse begins, the actors have no idea what will emerge. They are attempting to allow the piece to evolve organically. To work from a place where the unconscious and conscious meet. To synthesise inspiration with technical understanding. The only structure that exists for them is a shared performance language developed over this working period of 8 weeks, a strong trust in each other and faith in this process.
Photo courtesy Emily Sexton.