PianoLab

The Lab, Light Square, Adelaide
Thu 17–Sun 20 Nov

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

I was in Adelaide last weekend with my friend and colleague Humphrey Bower for PianoLab, a micro-festival devoted to the art of the piano, which was hosted at The Lab, a venue on Light Square that incorporates LED screens across three walls.

 

The festival was curated by pianist, writer and director of the Elder Conservatorium of Music, Anna Goldsworthy, and featured an eclectic mix of performers and genres, including local music students, scholar-musicians, interstate and international pianists playing repertoire ranging from Mozart to jazz, improvisation and other contemporary idioms. The performances also varied in terms of how they used the LED screens (with visual content provided by resident Lab technicians Allen Macintosh and Frazer ‘the Wizard’ Dempsey). 

 

The first recital I attended at midday on Friday was The (Absolutely) Final Meeting of the Satie Society by composer, performer, writer, critic and Head of Sonic Arts at the Elder Conservatorium, Stephen Whittington. This charmingly illustrated lecture-performance featured pieces by Satie juxtaposed with projections of artworks by his contemporaries the painter Henri Rousseau and the photographer Eugène Atget, as well as related musical items by Mompou, Duchamp, Cage, and living composers Philip Corner, David Kotlowy, Howard Skempton and Whittington himself. The latter delivered unassuming, matter-of-fact, no-nonsense and perfectly judged renditions of the works in question interspersed with similarly deadpan verbal commentaries. My favourite items included some rarely heard pieces from Satie’s ‘Rosecrucian’ period juxtaposed with an equally haunting series of Atget photographs of a vanishing pre-World War I Paris; Whittington’s Custom-Made Waltzes written in homage to Satie and Rousseau and accompanied by vivid projections of Rousseau paintings including The Snake Charmer, The Country Wedding and The Sleeping Gypsy; Mompou’s evocative Jeux d’enfants accompanied by Rousseau’s strangely adult-dwarf-like portraits of children; Duchamp’s Erratum Musical and Cage’s similarly aleatory One accompanied by photos of Duchamp playing musical chess with Cage or smoking a cigar in front of his readymade urinal masterpiece Fountain; more Rousseau paintings featuring out-of-proportion and anthropomorphic dogs and cats accompanied by Satie’s equally bizarre Preludes flasques pour un chien (‘Limp Preludes for a Dog’) and David Kotlowy’s Well-Fed Preludes for a Cat; and Satie’s cartoon-like sketch of himself accompanied by the uncharacteristically maximalist mockery of his Embryons déssechés (‘Dessicated Embryos’). All in all it was an illuminating musical and visual tour of a vintage and variety of French modernism (and its Anglophone aftermath) characterised by calculated naiveté, subversive wit and (in the case of Satie, Rousseau and Atget) a deep vein of melancholy. 

 

That evening at 6pm I was present for Nocturne, a recital by Anna Goldsworthy and Humphrey Bower of Chopin piano works and excerpts from George Sand’s novel Lucrezia Floriani accompanied by a montage of images from Delacroix’s double portrait of Chopin and Sand. This hybrid multimedia performance was inspired by the artist’s account in his letters of a reading by Sand of the novel-in-progress in the presence of Chopin and Delacroix during which the latter recognised that the novel’s protagonists were based on the composer-musician and his cross-dressing novelist-lover. Herself dressed in a man’s suit, Goldsworthy gave sumptuous renditions of Chopin Nocturnes and Preludes as well as a playfully extemporized Barcarolle, while Bower in a woman’s dress read excerpts from the novel from his iPad. This took things to a level of auto-fictive perversity that even Sand would have baulked at (as perhaps dear reader you do too).

 

Things got progressively queerer and more hybrid later that evening with Pieces for Piano and Body, a recital by pianist and performance-maker Dan Thorpe of contemporary works by women, trans and non-binary composers that involved a more visceral interaction between performer and instrument as well as a more interactive relationship between musical score and onscreen content. NYC-based inti figgis-vizueta’s A Bridge Between Starshine and Clay saw a progression of ascending or expanding and descending or contracting notes/intervals/chords simultaneously translated onscreen into an ever-shifting rainbow of rising, falling and overlapping bands of colour. The graphic-notated scores of British composer Sarah Westwood’s more introspective Of Minerals and Ventricles and Melbourne-based Cat Hope’s brutal Chunk were even more directly represented onscreen by abstract ideogram-like figures from Westwood’s score and a computer-program-generated real-time visual mapping and rendition of Hope’s that looked like a jagged abstract 3D landscape being flown over at high speed. West Australian vocalist/writer Sage Harlow’s Other(ing) was accompanied by a pre-recorded video of the pianist’s hands spanning intervals on a keyboard (as a teenage virtuoso Thorpe like Schumann and Scriabin suffered a self-inflicted hand-injury). Finally Philadelphia-based Sam Erin Erulis’s DIAPHRAGM involved live-feed video coverage from iPhones hastily hand-rigged by Thorpe onstage as well as pre-focused cameras on tripods while the pianist grappled with a score to be ‘played’ while making as little sound as possible, as explained in a short instructional video by the composer that preceded the work. These pieces demanded more and more from Thorpe physically and cognitively; as well as imaginatively and emotionally from those of us who rose to the challenge.

 

The next day I returned to The Lab at 3pm for Dance to the Music, an engaging recital by Melbourne-based pianist, teacher and Associate Professor at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, Stephen McIntyre. The program focussed on works associated with nature and dance, featuring alternately robust and tender accounts of Schumann’s Waldszenen (‘Forest Scenes’), scintillating renditions of three waltzes and a polonaise by Chopin, two sultry Brazilian Tangos by Ernesto Nazareth, and a climactic version for solo piano of Ravel’s La Valse which was even more delirious than the orchestral version. The onscreen visuals were more modest than on the previous day, displaying a slide show of digitally rendered artworks featuring picturesque forests, hunting scenes, haunted ruins, dancing and ballrooms. 

 

This was followed at 6pm by Scriabin: Transformation, a chronological survey of the composer’s oeuvre from the early Piano Sonata No. 1 Op.6 to the later Sonata No. 10 op.70 by Adelaide-based Russian pianist and Lecturer in Piano at the Elder Conservatorium Konstantin Shamray, who played entirely from memory and riveted us with his technique and sensitivity as well as delighting us with his humble and almost childlike onstage persona. Lighting by resident Lab technician Oscar Lewis was focused on Shamray’s hands, his long fingers probing and dancing across the keyboard to coax a seemingly endless variety of colours from every note. Background visuals reflected Scriabin’s own interest in synaesthesia and use of stage lighting for his own concert performances. Here the Romantic Chopin-inspired 1^stSonata was illustrated by more figurative digital effects resembling demonic faces, while the later Symbolist and Schoenbergian-sounding works were accompanied by more abstract visual patterns.

 

Finally on Sunday I returned to the Lab for a closing recital by Finnish virtuoso Paavali Jumppanen featuring Mozart’s early Sonata in F Major K.280 followed by Beethoven’s late ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata Op.106. In terms of onscreen content this was relatively conventional, with digitally rendered marble busts of Mozart and Beethoven appearing against backgrounds respectively showing a Viennese concert hall and a stormy landscape. Musically I found the Mozart a little hard-driven, but Jumppanen came into his own with the ‘Hammerklavier’, especially in the final movement with its titanic triple fugue and sense of architectural and tonal disintegration, which eclipsed anything in Dan Thorpe’s recital in terms of the physical and intellectual demands it makes on the performer and the listener. No wonder (as I learned from Jumppanen at the start of the concert) the first documented performance of the work was by Liszt in 1836, almost a decade after Beethoven’s death.  

 

Overall, I was captivated by the format of such a wide-ranging festival devoted entirely to a single instrument (in this case literally a single Steinway), and by the intimate ambience of The Lab itself. As for the use of the LED screens: I’m full of admiration for the Lab technical team and especially the work of Frazer Dempsey; and was intrigued if not always convinced by the content and role of the screens from one recital to the next. The images had a tendency to dominate the music and delimit its meaning, and sometimes I found myself watching a movie and listening to a soundtrack, or alternatively closing my eyes. The happy exceptions were when music and image were in a dialogue of equals, whether in mutual agreement, ironic counterpoint or even outright conflict. On these occasions both became part of a larger and more complex work. It will be interesting to see how the festival and the venue develop in future – and indeed what the future holds for concerts and recitals in general, multimedia or otherwise.

 

*

 

PianoLab was at The Lab, Light Square, Adelaide, from 17–19 November. 

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer, critic and non-conceptual artist based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. He was the lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen) in the late 1970s. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the paraphenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Paraphänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s student and literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the election of the far-right coalition federal government. He is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.  

 

 

 

Situ-8: City

STRUT Dance and Tura New Music
The Liberty Theatre, Perth
Nov 1–11

 

Situ-8 is an annual program of site-specific short dance works co-produced by two of Perth’s most vital arts organisations, STRUT Dance and Tura New Music. Featuring a suite of collaborations by local and interstate choreographers, composers, dancers, musicians and other creatives made for a different non-theatre venue each year, it’s a fantastic opportunity for artists and audiences to access new spaces and make new connections, and to ‘re-situate’ contemporary dance and music in relation to the unique physical and cultural architecture of the city itself. It also gives artists, audiences, artworks and artforms that heightened sense of collective presence in time and space which is essential to all live performance and which site-specific work is especially conducive to.

 

Previous Situ-8 sites have included the Old Perth Girls School, Cyril Jackson Senior College, the entire WA State Theatre Centre (including the courtyard, foyers and staircases) and the foyer, bar, rooms and rooftop of the boutique inner-city Alex Hotel. This year’s Situ-8: City is STRUT’s first production under the new leadership team of James O’Hara and Sofie Burgoyne and is co-curated by Burgoyne and local contemporary performance maker Timothy Green with curatorial assistant Ashleigh White. It takes place in The Liberty Cinema, a long-disused and abandoned cinema on Barrack Street Mall in the Perth CBD. The building hails from the Goldrush era and from the 1950s through to the 90s hosted foreign-language and arthouse films but has been empty over the past 25 years and fallen into a state of spectacular disrepair that heightens its ambience of history and transience. 

 

The curators of Situ–8: City have wisely chosen to keep additional design elements to a minimum and focus on the building itself as a character and ‘work’ in its own right alongside the work of the choreographers, composers and performers. A crucial exception to this austerity is Lucy Birkenshaw’s sensitive and evocative lighting, which deploys carefully chosen, framed and positioned digital lamps and LED strips, overlaid by her characteristically rich use of colours. This (along with consistently well-judged and artful use of music by all the composers ranging from vaporwave or dance beats to ambient and electronic soundscapes) provides a kind of visual-spatial (and musical) dramaturgy which effectively frames and unifies what might otherwise be a somewhat disparate experience in terms of the works themselves, the various parts of the building in which they take place, and the brain-teasing structure of the evening.

 

This structure consists of two overlapping performances for two different audiences, with each performance beginning at a different starting time. Both performances are in two parts separated by an interval, but each performance consists of the same two parts in the opposite order. This means that the first audience experiences the first part of the first performance and then mingles with the second audience (of which I was a member) during the first interval as well as sharing the first part of the second performance (which is also the second part of the first performance). The first audience then leaves during the second interval, and the second audience is left to experience the final part of the second performance (which repeats the initial part of the first performance). For the performers, this means that the entire evening has the form of a triptych, with the first part repeated as the final part (but for a different audience).

 

To make things even more complex, one of the two parts consists of five works which are performed in sequence in five different spaces on two different floors inside the building, concluding in the vast ruined space of the ground floor cinema. The other part features three works performed in sequence in the cinema space, including the raised stage at one end and the upstairs ‘VIP room’ at the other end, the interior of which is visible from the floor of the cinema. (This is the order in which I saw the two parts.) I found the latter part more absorbing and transformative in terms of my relationship with the performers and the space; whereas in the former part I felt somewhat alienated from the works and uncertain about where to be in the building or the room at any given time, whether the overall experience was meant to be self-navigating/immersive or scheduled/promenade, and more generally about my role as a witness or participant. To be fair, this element of uncertainty is a feature of all immersive performance, but in this case it was heightened by my sense of uncertainty about the form itself.

 

As for the individual works: the curatorial brief invited the artists to respond to ‘a key element from a film, reimagining it to speak to the artists’ identities’ in order to examine ‘how stories, bodies, voices and characters have been included and excluded from The Liberty Theatre and the history of cinema’ (I’m quoting from the program). For me the most interesting works were those that interrogated the relationship between live performance and cinema (considered both as a medium and a venue) as well as specifically between film, identity and embodiment; perhaps unsurprisingly all these works were staged in the cinema space. 

 

‘Mercury Bones’ by Olivia Hendry and Kimberley Parkin, which closed the first part of the performance I saw, featured a hauntingly sparse live and pre-recorded score by David Stewart and Nonie Trainor, culminating in thrilling live voice loops generated by Trainor and mixed by Stewart; an energetic and enigmatic solo dance performance by Parkin in a blue veil and body stocking; and a huge video projection by Edwin Sitt across the entire length of one wall. This showed gritty low-fi home-movie-style footage (made even grittier by the delapidated state of the wall) reminiscent of early Warhol/Paul Morrissey films and featuring people from various minority communities (queer, disabled, culturally diverse) disporting themselves in various domestic or outdoor settings and states of dress-up or undress. 

 

At the start of the ‘second’ part, Sarah Aitken’s ‘Demake/Demaster’ had a minimal electronic score by Alice Humphries, while on the stage at one end of the cinema two medium-sized video screens showed found and constructed footage featuring hands, arms, legs and other body segments, while Aitken coolly and deftly inserted herself behind and ‘into’ the footage. Finally, this part of the performance ended with ‘The Melody Haunts My Reverie’, a hilarious and macabre interactive tour de force by Antonio Rinaldi and Celina Hage, in which Hage progressively removed items of clothing while dancing with selected audience members (and finally a white mask and pair of dismembered mannequin arms) across the ground floor of the cinema, while upstairs in the ‘VIP room’ Rinaldi in lipstick, pushed-back hair and a trench-coat interacted with a hapless audience member (delivered to him by Hage) while answering phones and lip-synching snatches of dialogue from classic Hollywood melodramas (including a fabulous sample from Rebecca); this soundscape was stitched together in a heavily processed montage by Eduardo Cossio. Birkenshaw’s saturated monochromatic lighting came into its own during this work, especially as it honed in on the closing image of a reverse-masked Hage dancing topless with the mannequin arms beneath Rinaldi in a bowler hat with a stocking pulled over his face cavorting on the balcony with the audience member frozen in terror beside him.

 

In sum, Situ-8: City is unquestionably the most complex and ambitious iteration I’ve seen in this remarkable series, and a triumph of programming and curatorial vision by Green, Burgoyne and the producing team at STRUT Dance and Tura New Music. Its prevailing sense of liberty is as appropriate to the venue as it is inspirational. As Mrs Danvers whispers to Rebecca: ‘Why don’t you jump? Go on! You know you want to.’