A RETURN TO THE TREES – ARTS HUB

May 22 2012

By Lynne Lancaster

A Return to the Trees is an astonishing piece of physical theatre, created by Strings Attached, a group of artists whose common aim is to create innovative theatre that challenges and transforms their audiences by reflecting on the mystery of human nature. Formed in 2007, the company’s style incorporates contemporary dance, physical theatre, aerial acrobatics, contraptions and multimedia – imagine a cross between Legs on The Wall, Force Majeure and Circus Oz and you’ll some understanding of the Strings Attached aesthetic.

A Return to the Trees is in some ways an apocalyptic imagining of the future. Set in the lowest rungs of a sci-fi/futuristic society where the Earth’s surface has been devoured by human greed and consumption, the company explores what it means to be human, in a world where survival is more important than custom.

The production investigates the transformations society may experience as a result of technical advance, overpopulation and climate change. As we continue to relinquish grass and grassroots for concrete floors and social complexity on computers, when artificial environments replace nature, will ‘Nature’ one day only be accessible to humans like wild animals in a zoo?

Dominating the stage is a towering, almost overwhelming eight metre high scaffolding structure; a futuristic, urban metal forest (are Tap Dogs in the next clearing?) upon which the fearless cast perform. These three men and two women seem boneless, and are death defying in their aerial acrobatics, bouncing, soaring, swooping and swirling with amazing balance and control.

Paul Selwyn-Norton’s choreography is often anthropomorphic, sometimes writhing and sculptural, sometimes oddly angular, though mostly fluid and based on the circle. Sometimes the cast are sloth like, sometimes they are slithery, or tumble in cascading rolls down a section of the looming structure; other times they are like mischievous monkeys. There is also a delightful romantic ‘bat’ scene with two cast members hanging upside down to close the show. At other points in the performance the cast were a wary, watchful group, aware of something just outside our line of vision but visible to them.

The highlights are a jaw-dropping, visually spectacular, extended aerial acrobatic/bungee solo and a section where the whole cast are bungee jumping/flying/hovering in harness. Dazzling stuff.

Nicholas Rayment’s lighting was extraordinarily atmospheric and lyrical. Benn De Mole’s rumbling, throbbing score, which also includes tinkling bells, pulsates, clicks and hisses like a weird forest creature. Pamela McGraw’s costumes could be described as ‘feral casual’, and allow great ease of movement even with safety harnesses attached.

A mesmerizing and visually stunning performance about the preservation of our fragile planet.

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

A Return to the Trees
A new work by Strings Attached
Devised by Alejandro Rolandi and Lee-Anne Litton
Director: Alejandro Rolandi
Choreographer/Assistant Director: Paul Selwyn-Norton
Performers /Collaborators: Rick Everett, LeeAnne Litton, Kathryn Puie, Tim Ohl and Lee Wilson
Understudies: Triton Tunis-Mitchell, Venettia Miller
Visual Artist: Chris Wilson
Lighting Designer: Nicholas Rayment
Costume Design: Pamela McGraw
Rigging and Structure Design: Alejandro Rolandi
Composer: Benn DeMole

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Carriageworks, Eveleigh

May 17 – 19

NOW ON SALE: THE ILLUSION

The National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA) and Carriageworks present

THE ILLUSION

By Pierre Corneille
Adapted by Tony Kushner
Directed by Kate Whoriskey

‘What in this world is not evanescent? What in this world is real and not seeming?’

This is the core question in Pulitzer Prize-winner Tony Kushner’s adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s 17th century virtuosic comedy of illusion, love and the theatre. This production is led by Kate Whoriskey, one of the most important young directors working in America today. A director on and off Broadway, Kate comes to NIDA to make her Australian directorial debut, with the support of the Girgensohn Foundation.

Featuring NIDA final year acting, costume, design, production and properties students.

13-15, 18-19 June | 7.30pm 
Carriageworks

Book tickets

NIDA website

DIZZYING VIEW OF DYSTOPIAN WORLD – DAILY TELEGRAPH

11 May 2012

By Chris Hook

Here’s something you don’t see on the average building site. In a new work by the Sydney-based physical theatre company Strings Attached, performers clamber, fall, leap and bungee across, down and through a forest of grey scaffolding.

A Return To The Trees is a non-verbal blend of dance and theatre exploring a dystopian vision of people desperately scuttling about a treeless world.

It was four years in the making, and is finally premiering at CarriageWorks next week after much intricate preparation.

“My father was a bit of an inventor and I grew up playing with materials like this,” artistic director Alejandro Rolandi says. “About three years ago, when I became interested in using these structures, I began consulting with engineers and learning as I go.

“(I was) constructing models to scale, which allowed me to test the forces and so on, and once the model was built I consulted with an engineer.”

Once “the set” was built, the performers had to use safety harnesses; as Rolandi notes, they are employees subject to the usual NSW workplace safety regulations. But now they’re free.

“We need to wear harnesses if we are above two metres off the ground, except when you can prove you are an expert. So in order to be able to prove we were the experts, we needed processes in place to show we can do this without a safety device,” he says.

Picture: John Fotiadis

Carriageworks, 245 Wilson St, Eveleigh

Thursday May 17, 8pm, until Saturday, adult S30, conc S20,

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CARRIAGEWORKS LIGHTS UP FOR VIVID SYDNEY

Vivid Sydney, a festival of light, music and ideas, is a major celebration of the creative industries and the biggest festival of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. This year, for the very first time, Vivid Sydney has teamed up with Carriageworks as a major event collaborator on three great events.   

Carriageworks and ABC TV present
rage – celebrating 25 years – 6 – 17 Jun, 10am – 6pm, FREE
rage, the world’s longest running music show, is turning 25. You know you’ve spent countless nights watching your favourite guest programmers, or letting rage pick the playlist for your Friday night, The Carriageworks public spaces will be taken over by a large-scale installation of televisions, reflecting rage’s long history and reminiscing over the best guest programmers, specials and all-night mix tapes. Relive your rage memories and see how your former favourite videos stack up today.

YouTube Superstar – 7 Jun, 6 – 8pm, FREE
What makes an unforgettable music video in this age of sensory overload and viral content?  Convention-busting video directors SPOD and KROZM join Madeline Palmer, the woman behind the controls at ABC’s rage, to deliver honest advice on what makes a video a hit, what makes a video last the test of time, and how to get blockbuster impact on an indie budget. If you’re a filmmaker, musician, animator or VJ this one-off free event is a must.

Also don’t miss…
Finders Keepers Sydney Markets – 1 & 2 Jun, 6 – 10pm, FREE
The Finders Keepers create beautifully curated artist and designers markets across Australia, and no two events are the ever same. Their Autumn/Winter market at Carriageworks will present 65 handpicked designers from around the country, offering a unique mix of handmade ceramics, original textiles and fashion to stationary and homewares. Spend the day stocking up your winter wardrobe, enjoying live music from local bands, and discovering your next favourite design star.

Visit Vivid Sydney for more info

COPPER PROMISES: HINEMIHI HAKA - SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

Electrifying opus transports to another place and time

9 May 2012

By Julia Cotton

VICTORIA HUNT spent a decade researching and drawing on her rich Maori heritage in preparation for this performance.

It is a stunning production - a solo movement/butoh/dance performance with strong technical support in lighting, sound and projection. Hunt’s dance is at once organic, suggestive of primordial times, and electrifying. It is as if she is channelling the spirits of her ancestors and the very land they come from.

Her movement skills are impressive, ranging from lightning fast to incredibly controlled, and the imagery takes the audience to another place and time.

She begins in a cross light with jagged lights projected behind her and at once we are made aware of the elements. In the next section, she is, at times, barely visible and we get only glimpses of her moving through long shafts of diagonal light along the floor.

As this gradually builds, her movement is mesmerising - she has the ability to isolate parts of her body and create a dislocated kind of physicality.

The seismic sound effects build from a deep rumbling to a terrifying climax and we feel the effect of a volcanic eruption before an eerie stillness and quiet descend.

Shafts of light from above, as dust gently floats downwards, create a beautiful effect, reminiscent of underground caves or thick forests, until, accompanied by a strange creaking, it seems as if the earth is still shifting.

These images and Hunt’s ability to simultaneously be the force behind them and be affected by them creates an amazing synergy between the organic, visceral movement and the highly technical elements.

Hunt has a powerful presence and the fierce haka is a strong contrast with the serene composure of her final walk forward. This final move is one of deep reverence, her connection with her heritage is profound and the final image is a true coup de theatre.

Photo: Heidrun Lohr
Mesmerising … Victoria Hunt draws on her rich Maori heritage in Copper Promises: Hinemihi Haka.

4 - 12 May

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Performance Space presents Copper Promises as part of the Dimension Crossing season

Read full article on SMH website

COPPER PROMISES: HINEMIHI HAKA - ARTS HUB

May 8 2012

By Lynne Lancaster

Copper Promises: Hinemihi Haka is a new solo dance work by Victoria Hunt, exploring the cultural and physical journey of a female ancestor of Hunt’s and the history of a ceremonial house in New Zealand connected with Hunt’s Maori iwi (‘peoples’), Te Arara Tuhourangi.

Hunt visited the Tarawera ancestral mountain and lake and learnt the stories of the 1886 volcanic eruption that shattered her ancestor’s lives and displaced them from their land. Hinemihi was the carved ancestral meeting house where many survivors gathered to shelter from the volcanic eruption. Afterwards, it was assumed that the area was abandoned; Hinemihi was dug up and acquired by the Earl of Onslow, and transported to his home in Surry, England. She remains there to this day. Thus the show is a protest for appropriated ancestral treasures, a lament, a pilgrimage through time and space, interweaving Hinemihi’s story with Hunt’s own life and experiences, blending gesture and feeling as they echo across generations.

Copper Promises is looming, ominous and eerie. As you enter there is only very low lighting; the lighting that follows in the show proper is gloomy but dramatic. A major aspect of the work is the computer imagery and effects, and the lighting by Clytie Smith and Chris Wilson. Clouds scud by and film flickers like lighting, evoking disjointed, angular movement. In one section we see Hinemihi’s spirit trapped in an imprisoning square of light, trying to escape. In another sequence the lighting gives the impression of a time travelling spaceship, accompanied by James Brown’s pulsing, shuddering and throbbing soundtrack deeply.

Hunt is a very strong, athletic performer. She wears a simple, short shift or petticoat-like dress, and stands at one point standing in a glittering silence. Her choreography is often sculptural, Graham –like, earthbound, with aspects of traditional Maori choreography visible. Sometimes Hunt is catlike, at other times she crouches or instead becomes a wading or flying bird. In another section she is spider-like, contorted acrobatically. Sometimes she twitches nervously, Cunninghamlike, or glides barefoot and pauses, posing on high demi-pointe.

At one point a mysterious ‘creature’( the spirit of Hinemihi?) emerges very slowly, Butoh-like in a corridor of light; in another section, featuring a most atmospheric use of mist and rain, Hunt/Hinemihi goes to step through a ‘window’ ( of light? Of time?).

Towards the end Hunt becomes the spirit of Hinemihi and is ghostlike in a golden light, lit from below, and she performs a monologue about the ancestral house, the economy and being transported, preservation of the land etc in a strange robotic voice while a computer generated image of a coin spins.

The finale, with the application of traditional Maori face paint, is absorbing and chilling. This complex work is visually stunning and inspiring. It needs to be seen several times to grasp the many layers of meaning underlying it.

Rating: 4 stars

Copper Promises: Hinemihi Haka

Concept/Choreography/Performer: Victoria Hunt

Lighting Design/Production Manager: Clytie Smith

Sound Design: James Brown, with sound by Horomona Horo, Densil Cabrera and Bob Scott

Video Design: Chris Wilson

Costume: Annemaree Dalziel

Installation Design: Hedge

Choreographic Consultant: Tess de Quincey

Cultural Informant: Charles Koroneho Running time: 55 minutes (approx) no interval

Performance Space at Carriageworks May 4 – 12

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Full article on Arts Hub

IN DEVELOPMENT - MOOGAHLIN PERFORMING ARTS

Moogahlin Performing Arts will develop The Aunties’ Epic, which tells the story of three older women living in a Redfern aged care centre. Two Aboriginal women, Toots and Dolly, and Anglo-Australian, Col, rediscover purpose in their lives as an unexpected outcome of a journey back to country.

In development here at Carriageworks from 23 April to 4 May with a showing scheduled for September 2012, we asked Moogahlin Artistic Director Frederick Copperwaite about the story and the development process:

What is the story that Moogahlin aims to tell with this new work?

What originally inspired us was the spirit, resilience and character we discovered in the three women in our story. We felt that a story about older Aboriginal women, marginalised and forgotten within our community, would be very interesting. We wanted to give voice to their experience, to understand and learn from them, pay respect and celebrate all that they are.

How many people will touch or contribute to the work throughout its development?

The company consists of seven actor/devisers, two cultural consultants/dramaturgs and one director. What is so deeply engaging and empowering about this process is that the entire work is a shared story process, created and devised by the company. This means that all of us hold the story very close, all of us are custodians of the story and the characters. As the process has developed the actors have become very protective of their characters and the story.

When developing the story and authentic voices, how do you support each other when you touch on individual’s personal pain or own story? How does this influence or contribute to the development process?

To me, theatre is all about feeling and feelings. Actors embody feeling. That is their bravery and their courage … to feel the story, to explore them selves in order to feel what it is like to be somebody else without judgement, so that the audience can share that insight and hopefully find empathy and understanding into what it is to simply exist in this world. But for an actor to do that it can be very emotionally taxing and demanding. For the process to work and the actor to be protected there needs to be trust in the rehearsal room at all times.  We have been working on this project for about three years now, with the same company so we have got to know each other very well. What was inspiring in the first week was the speed at which everyone just committed to the work and connected up with each other. There was great trust and support and respect from each of us. In the shared story process we are calling on our own experience a lot and this can be difficult to reconcile at times especially when exploring painful material. But if we are allowed to really take risk and make mistakes and fail with support from each other then we can do anything. We create theatre because it’s a fun thing to do and so fun is an important element in lightening the work at times. Games and laughter and a sense of playfulness bring great balance to the work and keep us all grounded and level.

How important is place and the land to this story?

We are all inextricably connected to the land. With out the land we are nowhere, without a sense of place we are lost. The land, the soil, the dirt, the ground, the earth holds all of the stories of humankind since forever, so the land is always with us and interconnected with us because that is where the story takes place and lives on long after we have passed on. We consider the land a character in our story. Certain things happened in certain places and those places need to be revisited in order for the story to be resolved. So even though the story lives in the characters hearts the memory of the story lives in the landscape.

Become friends and follow the project on facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Moogahlin-Performing-Arts-Incorporated/283062791717091

DONATE YOUR OLD TV TO CARRIAGEWORKS

WHEN: SATURDAY 5 MAY 10am-6pm
WHY: CARRIAGEWORKS AND ABC TV PRESENT RAGE CELEBRATING 25 YEARS
MORE INFO: 8571 9099

Bring your old (working) TV to Carriageworks this Saturday 5 May to be included in an exhibition celebrating 25 years of rage.
As part of Vivid Sydney 2012, a large scale installation of televisions will be presented at Carriageworks in early June
At the end of the exhibition all televisions will be donated to charities or e-wasted.

http://www.vividsydney.com/events/rage-celebrating-25-years/

A RETURN TO THE TREES - A Q&A WITH STRINGS ATTACHED

Strings Attached are a physical theatre company based in Sydney, spending hours each day suspended above the ground. In their upcoming production, A Return to the Trees, they have built a complex structure that towers above the audience. This aerial stage commands a committed performance from each cast member. The story is about a world ravaged by climate change. We spoke with Alejandro Rolandi and LeeAnne Litton from Strings Attached about their craft and the creative development of A Return to the Trees.

Tell us about Strings Attached, how it came into being and the direction of the group’s work?     
Ale:  Strings Attached came into being from a group of students that I had when I was teaching a physical theatre class. I was trying to gather all the knowledge that I have accumulated over the years doing courses and workshops in Argentina. Mainly I was trying to create a practice for us to play and express things with our bodies.  And I found a group of really dedicated people. They were so keen that the end of the year’s showing became a full show that went really well. So that really encouraged us to keep on going. And then other opportunities came across and some people moved on, so the group became smaller.

LeeAnne: The group really shifted when Alejandro and I were successful in applying for a residency with Legs on the Wall, called Feet First Program. From there we got more opportunities to collaborate with other established companies, and also obtain mentoring from them.

With this project, how did you approach the creative development?

Ale: We approached the creative development first with a great emphasis on safety. What we’re doing here has the potential to be really dangerous, so it is important that there’s appropriate training and a process for familiarising with the complexities of the set.  And we also put a lot of emphasis on the dynamics of the group because the main risk factor here is when we get tired and fatigued, so we start getting a bit grumpy.  And that can potentially become a distraction that you cannot afford when you are working in the 8-metre tall set, which is entirely hard steel tubes with sharp joints that are very unfriendly for the human body.

LeeAnne: The development spans three to four years’ worth of research in this vertical set. We have made other shows using smaller structures that are now components of the big set. That’s how we created the set for Return to the Trees. But although the material was different for those smaller shows, the discoveries we made are directly informing what we do in A Return to the Trees. We use quite a bit of partnering work and we also play a lot with complex pathways and intricate movement through the set. For this last period of rehearsal we are also working with a very experienced choreographer who is helping us to craft the show to it’s full potential.

How is this new work challenging the cast and crew?

Ale: The challenge for the cast and crew at this stage of the work has to do with the short time-frame that we’ve got to polish the physicality and detail the movement and basically to prepare the final show for presentation. The good news is that the cast is amazing.  They’re really great, they are well prepared and extremely fit. Very professional.

What is the message behind this new work by Strings Attached?

Ale: The message of Return to the Trees, it’s mainly about climate change and the very contradictory nature of us human beings.  How is it that we came to put ourselves and the whole planet into this situation where our future is now so very uncertain.  I’ve always been curious about what is inside us that makes us think one way and act another way.  So if there are any poetic references in this show, they will mostly try to make us reflect on how we are and the very contradictory nature of the human mind. That is why we think the message is really for the heart, not for the head, and the work takes an abstract approach to narrative. There is enough information for our brains out there, but it means nothing to us.

LeeAnne: In our heads we all know what’s going on, but I think we really need to open our hearts to what’s going on in terms of climate change and the overpopulation of the planet, unequal distribution of the resources, and how we are with each other, and really start caring and looking after everyone and nature a bit better.                               

What different techniques are used by Strings Attached to tell this story?

Ale: For this work we use a variety of techniques.  Mainly we use a style of theatre that speaks from actions, not from texts, with a great component of dance and unusual physicality, like aerial dance.  We draw a lot from contact improvisation, which is a practice that we are very familiar with, and we really enjoy the duet and the partnering and also the group working as a chorus.  Because the set is so unfriendly for the human body and everything is hard, sharp and vertical, it’s even more beautiful when people collaborate with each other

LeeAnne: We also use a variety of aerial apparatuses, mainly some bungie systems that we have designed specifically for this work, which allows us to move vertically for 8 metres in one push. That’s really, really exciting.

How do you hope the audience will respond when they experience this show?

Ale: We hope the audience will love the show! We have been working really hard on finding the right level of metaphor and poetry to direct the message to people’s heart, while still exiting the intellect with clever ideas and ultimately, learn and have fun.  We also want to expose the contradictory nature of ourselves and hopefully get everyone to reflect a little bit about how we are and how we can be better with the planet.

LeeAnne: We hope that people will identify with our characters and will take a journey with them through this fantastic but somehow very plausible vision of the world in the near future.

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A RETURN TO THE TREES FORESHADOWS A WORLD RAVAGED BY CLIMATE CHANGE - SUN HERALD

29 March 2012

By Andrew Taylor

Rising eight metres above the ground, the vertical set of A Return to the Trees is one of the more challenging stages for an actor.

Not only must LeeAnne Litton and her fellow performers climb, scramble over and jump off the towering scaffold structure, but for most of the show they also don’t use safety equipment.

At times, the performers wear specially designed safety apparatus borrowed from bungy jumping that Litton says allows them to plummet eight metres and then bounce back up to the top of the set.

”I think it’s a good thing to have fear of falling because it keeps it real,” she says.

”There is a risk there but I don’t feel danger.”

However, the director, Alejandro Rolandi, has more to worry about watching his performers swing all over the set.

”They know exactly what is going on. I’ve gotta …” Rolandi trails off, miming a look of fear.

A Return to the Trees, Rolandi says, was inspired by the lack of agreement on how to address the potential effects of climate change.

”It was born a little bit out of desperation and anger at that time, maybe two or three years ago, when climate change became big news,” he says.

”We tried to imagine what would be a world without trees [sic].”

Unlike the tonnes of hot air so far released in the climate-change debate, no words are spoken in A Return to the Trees.

Instead, Rolandi’s five performers depict various emotional responses to a heat-ravaged environment through the use of movement, dance and acrobatics.

”I imagine in a world that is [less civilised] … there would be a fight over food or a fight over clothing or shoes or something like that,” Litton says. Other scenes are more visceral, Rolandi says.

He points to a childish game in which characters repeatedly throw themselves off the set and into the arms of their fellow performers.

”I find situations like that really illustrate how we really are,” Rolandi says.

”We believe ourselves to be immortal in so many ways; no one thinks this is going to happen to us.”

The climate-change debate has been a rich source of inspiration for aerial performers.

Earlier this year, Nigel Jamieson’s As the World Tipped was performed during the Sydney Festival.

Inspired by the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, it featured a stage that slowly became vertical, leaving performers hanging in the air.

Rolandi’s vertical set is no less ambitious, taking his Strings Attached company three years to design and a crew of 10 scaffolders one day to erect.

”Slowly and shyly at first, we started to design a set that grew to this monster,” he says.

Rolandi is also trying to practise what he is preaching.

He has created a recyclable set that does not need to be stored or transported if the show tours.

”We were concerned about our carbon footprint, really,” he says.

A Return to the Trees opens at Carriageworks in Eveleigh on May 17.

Photo: Matthew Syres

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Go to the article on the SMH website

Still All The Rage After 25 Years - The Australian

23 April 2012

by Michael Bodey

ONCE there were Sounds, Rock Arena, Nightmoves, Countdown and numerous others. Today there is only rage.

The ABC’s shouty night owl celebrated its 25th anniversary at the weekend and remains the longest-running music video show in the world.

And given the weekend music video show’s resilience within the ever-changing public broadcaster, it might stick around longer than the world’s longest-running music show, the Eurovision Song Contest.

While the music industry focuses on the launch here of digital clips service Vevo and awaits Spotify, rage has become a latenight comfort for generations returning home after a big night out, or waiting up to see the latest and greatest music videos or the eclectic selections by the guest programmers.

And all the while, free-to-air television has experimented with and jettisoned other music video formats, while subscription television’s MTV and channel V turned themselves into inane reality TV platforms, moving the music to second-tier channels.

Rage producer and programmer Maddie Palmer says her program retains its point of difference in the digital world.

“A lot of people think music video is moving online, which is true to an extent, but it’s important not to discount the value of curation,” she says.

“Social media might show you music all your friends are into but it’s not great for discovery.” The curatorial aspect of the program took a positive turn in 1990 when rage began commissioning guest programmers. The first was Andrew Denton, who led with Julie Brown’s Homecoming Queen’s GotA Gun before going on to play Prince, Art of Noise and then Herhie Hancock.

Artists have enthusiastically taken to the task of scheduling music videos from a library totalling about 34,000 tracks.

“Although I’ve always wondered whether there’s a slight bias in their selections towards artists beginning with A and B,” Palmer laughs of a catalogue now thicker than two telephone books.

A thesis being written about rage asserts that nowhere else in the world do artists have the degree of autonomy they have in programming videos.

“And the international artists seem to be shocked by some things we can play,” says Palmer, citing Aphex Twin’s provocative Windowlicker clip as an oft-played clip foreigners see as “a really rare, cult clip”.

But rage is fairly free in its latenight MA classification before it resorts to a PG rating at 5am and the Grating from 6am to lOam.

“It does feel like chart music is becoming a bit more risque, though,” Palmer says. “Artists like Rihanna and Lady Gaga are becoming more adult and sexually sophisticated.” On the other hand, Palmer adds, a mainstream dance star would not be seen smoking in a clip, as Madonnawas, or be caught driving a motorbike without a helmet, as almost every rock star did in the 1980s.

Palmer says the current crop of guest programmers tend to select clips by the major bands from their formative years, mainly postpunk and rock from the late 70s and early 80s: Joy Division, David Bowie, the Birthday Party and the Saints’ I’m Stranded. “But everyone from Meatloaf to Mastadon likes Beyonce’s Single Ladies,” she laughs. “That songs transcends genres. The fact that she’s smoking hot doesn’t hurt either!” As part of the 25th anniversary celebrations, the ABC will copresent an exhibition with Sydney venue Carriageworks, “rage Celebrating 25 Years”, as part of Vivid Sydney 2012.

Caption Text:
Musician Tim Rogers celebrates the 25th anniversary of the ABC’s rage, the longest-running music video show in the world

MASTERCLASSES AT CARRIAGEWORKS THIS MAY

Writing for the Stage – Playwriting Australia

TUESDAY 8 MAY  2-5PM   $20   (30 PLACES)

Led by artistic director, Chris Mead, with playwright, Jane Bodie, in conversation about new writing for the stage. What are the necessary elements of dramatic narrative? How do you fix a play that is broken? And what do you do with the script when it’s finished? This masterclass shares the insight and expertise of the national script development agency.

Book now. Contact Playwriting Australia:

ph: 02 8571 9177 or email: info@pwa.org.au

pwa.org.au

Devising Physical Theatre for actors – Force Majeure

SATURDAY 12 MAY   10AM-4PM   $88   (10 PLACES)

Aimed at actors interested in learning how to create physically based devised theatre. Kate Champion, Artistic Director, will introduce participants to the methods, techniques and trainings employed by Force Majeure towards creating material for a performance outcome.

Book now. Contact Force Majure:

Ph: 02 8571 9084

forcemajeure.com.au

Asia pushed into wings by cultural policy - SMH

16 April 2012

by Steve Dow

Kevin Rudd is joining the government’s critics over the sidelining of Asian arts, writes Steve Dow.

Australia’s first national cultural policy in 16 years shows little promise of engaging Asian arts, despite the region’s culturally rich treasure chest on our doorstep, arts curators warn.

The federal government’s national cultural policy discussion paper is ”horrible” and ”leaden” and has failed to inspire discussion, a former Sydney Festival director, Lindy Hume, believes. ”I don’t think it’s been a big success,” she says.

The founder of Asialink, Alison Carroll, and a former cultural attache at the Australian Embassy in Beijing, Carrillo Gantner, argue that the Minister for the Arts, Simon Crean, must rectify the paper’s failure to mention Asian arts, when he releases the policy next month.

Many Australians and Australian arts leaders are ”ignorant” of Asian arts, culture and languages, Carroll and Gantner argue in an essay in Platform Papers, ”Finding a Place on the Asian Stage”.

The essay, to be launched in Melbourne today by the Mandarin-speaking former prime minister, Kevin Rudd, charts a fall in the Australia Council’s share of Asian arts spending from more than 50 per cent of international funding under the Keating government years to between 10 per cent and 20 per cent today.

The Herald understands Rudd agreed to launch the essay after he resigned as foreign minister. The paper praises the former Liberal foreign minister, Alexander Downer, as having been the ”strongest supporter” of Australia’s arts engagement with Asia while criticising successive Labor and Liberal arts ministers for their lack of interest in forging art links with Asia.

Carroll and Gantner argue that arts programmers are ”timid” and that the Rudd and Gillard governments have only ”modestly rebalanced” Asian arts funding.

”All of us in the sector have failed in allowing the programs and policies that Keating supported to be seriously diminished and ignored,” they write. They quote the former director of the National Institute of Dramatic Art, Aubrey Mellor, as being ”depressed” at seeing ”no sign” of Asian performing arts in Sydney when he visited recently from Singapore, where he is a dean of performing arts at LaSalle College of the Arts.

While the authors praise Hume for bringing some Asian shows to the Sydney Festival, such as the crowd-pleasing The Manganiyar Seduction, they criticise most festival directors for being ”more comfortable in the better-known corridors and green rooms of Europe and North America”.

Hume says Australian audiences have a ”potential hunger” for Asia-Pacific performances that needs nurturing, adding that ”we should have a big aspiration, as a national culture, to be of our time and place, and this is the Asian century”.

Curators say that exchanges in the visual arts are far more advanced than those between the performing arts.

The Sydney arts space Carriageworks, for example, is organising an exchange between a Mumbai artist, Nikhil Chopra, and a Sydney artist, Justene Williams, who will exhibit their work in both cities.

Younger audiences particularly crave the kind of international performances that are in short supply on Australian stages, says Carriageworks’ chief executive, Lisa Havilah, who argues that national cultural policy must reflect a greater diversity and stop subjecting international arts funding to the ”whim” of political cycles.

Lieven Bertels, the new director of the Sydney Festival, who will bring traditional and contemporary acts from China for next year’s festival, says ”ninety-five per cent of the white population of Sydney, to put it very bluntly, looks at Asia as still the yellow fellow from the corner shop”.

Australians in general ”love it when everybody tries to speak English, and they are very lenient and accepting of other people not speaking English very well”, Bertels says, ”but that also defines Australia to a point where everything has to be English.

”In the performing arts, we still find it difficult to present work with surtitles, for instance,” he says.

Bertels disagrees with Carroll and Gantner’s suggestion that the Sydney Festival should join the Association of Asian Performing Arts Festivals, of which the Melbourne Festival became a full member this year.

”I’m not overly enthusiastic about these gentleman’s clubs [in which you have] friendly meetings over lovely dinners,” Bertels says. ”There is a tendency to think that’s going to solve anything.”

An Australia Council spokesman, Cameron Woods, confirmed that the council’s share of international funding that was spent in Asia had fallen since the mid-1990s, but the ”dollar value” had been higher in 2010, when the council spent $1.1 million, than in the 1990s.

Arts organisations had made ”strong inroads” into Asia, Woods says, but a ”greater investment” for Australia’s cultural engagement in Asia was required.

DIMENSION CROSSING – THE BRAG, SYDNEY

16 Apr 2012

By Roslyn Helper

In a world where 2D is passé, 3D is overrated and nobody can agree on what 4D actually means, directors Bec Dean and Jeff Khan have an interesting question. What happens in the spaces between? Where is dimension 2.5? What happens when you cross over from one world to another, from natural to man-made? From real to virtual? From life to death? Dean doesn’t have all these answers, but she is at Carriageworks on Easter Monday, in the throws of pulling together the final elements for the launch of Performance Space’s 2012 program, Dimension Crossing.

“My approach to programming work and certainly for Jeff as well, is to start with the artists and what their interests are. So the themes are built around the kinds of works we’re seeing,” begins Dean. In this case, Victoria Hunt’s Copper Promises: Hinemihi Hake was the catalyst that inspired Dean and Khan to think about the different ways in which we cross dimensions, disparate cultures, histories and physical states.

Hunt has been developing Hinemihi Hake since 2007, when she did her first residency with Performance Space. The dance movement work deals with Hunt’s Maori ancestral heritage as she comes to terms with its erosion over years of colonisation. Dean explains that ‘Hinemihi’ is the meeting house of Hunt’s Maori tribe, and the embodiment of an honoured female ancestor. “It is a very complex space because it’s almost like a living entity. It’s made out of trees that have been specially selected and carved into an ancestral representation, so the place is very bound up with beings.” In a sense, Hinemihi is the space where you cross from one dimension to another, “Where sometimes you’re travelling from the space of the living to the space of the dead,” says Dean.

The second movement based work in the program is EnTrance by Melbourne butoh dancer, Yumi Umiumare. Dovetailing nicely with Hunt’s work,En Trance explores the line between life and death from a different cultural perspective. Inspired by the Japanese metaphor of the ‘near shore’ of life and the ‘far shore’ of death, the work draws audiences into the ‘crack’ the moment of transformation where the spirit and the body are propelled into another world or existence. Dean says, “Yumi is looking at this idea of being an ‘inter-person; someone who has a very specific cultural heritage but is living in this other context in Australia and the duality of that.” Umiumare combines butoh, cabaret, large-scale video projections, electronic costumes and installation elements into the piece, and this interdisciplinary process is somewhat typical of the work that interests Performance Space.

“We do try to focus on practice that is more experimental,” says Dean, “Work that is trying something new, either in the form that it takes and the technologies it’s using or with the kinds of relationships that artists seek to establish with audiences and one another”.

Dean cites the third performance work in Dimension Crossing as an example of this experimentality. Computer Boy, created by the Blood Policy collective “is about this mixed reality environment that a lot of people live in, where they have this one life that is completely virtual and fantastic, and then the physical world that they occupy the real, which might be the opposite of that, where they’re actually situated in the domestic environment, in a bedroom with very little contact with other aspects of humanity.” The ‘cult of youth degeneracy’ is at the core of this work, and Blood Policy have taken their cues from the sensationalist popular media that invades our public consciousness from every angle. The performance piece uses puppetry and machinima animation amongst other multimedia elements to tell the Computer Boy story. (He is a puppet with a 12-inch LCD screen for a face.) DJ TRIP has also produced an original accompanying score made entirely with video game consoles.

Dean is excited to see the works as they emerge and says, “You don’t really know what you’re going to get until the night opens. I mean, you can plan a lot but you don’t know what it’s actually going to be like to experience and I think this season is a very experiential season of work.”

So what do Dean and Khan hope audiences will encounter? “I know that bandying around this idea of transformation is a little bit hackneyed, but I’m going there anyway!” Dean laughs. “We do hope people are transformed somehow by the experience of these works. The program will have different registers for people that have different investments in the ideas.”

What: Dimension Crossing

When: April 18 until May 26

Where: Carriageworks

Find out more information on our events page