Postcard from Perth #54

Perth Festival 2018 Week 3: Senses of Place

Visual Arts: Lisa Reihana, Emissaries; Zadok Ben-David, Human Nature; Pilar Mata Dupont, Undesirable Bodies; Christopher Charles, Banjawarn; Kimsooja, Sewing/Walking and Zone of Nowhere

Most of the Festival works I’ve engaged with this week have awakened my sense of place. This is an especially fragile and contested question for white Australians generally, white Western Australians in particular, and even more specifically white Western Australian artists and audiences - who (to paraphrase Shaun Tan, writing about the ‘stick-people’ in Tales from Outer Suburbia) are constantly asking ‘who we are and what we are doing here’ – on this continent, in this region, in this city, in this theatre or art gallery, and perhaps on this planet. For Aboriginal Australians and First Nations peoples generally, the question of place is no less urgent, but perhaps more consciously recognised as such, since land along with language and culture is acknowledged as central to identity and indeed survival.

It’s a question – and a sense – that a festival is well-placed to raise, stimulate and reflect on, since historically festivals take place in, are identified with and celebrate or commemorate particular places or events. Last week I wrote about this dialectic of celebration and commemoration in the context of performance works. The focus of my blog this week will be on the Visual Arts program, not only because of its content – which has a great deal to do with place – but because the visual medium itself invites us to spend time with works, to move around them, to dwell with them, and even to leave and return to them (and the spaces within which they are installed), rather than having our spatio-temporal orientation, perspective and itinerary prescribed for us, as is generally the case with performance works and venues.

In regard to the latter, however, it’s worth noting that I’ve spent the past two weeks in a workshop on immersive site-specific theatre with choreographer Maxine Doyle and fellow creatives Sarah Dowling and Conor Doyle hosted by STRUT Dance, exploring non-theatre sites as the inspiration for creation and performance, and culminating in a showing hosted by the Festival at King Street Arts Centre. I’ve also appeared onstage as a guest performer in Iranian playwright Nassim Souleimanpour’s ‘down-the-rabbit-hole’ play Nassim (which I’ll write about in more detail next week in the context of other Festival performance works). So my sense of place and emplacement has also been thoroughly attuned by these experiences.

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I spent last Saturday on the Art Adventure: a gallery-crawl across Perth visiting the major Festival exhibitions with a small group of art-lovers accompanied by Festival co-curator Anna Loxley; each visit was hosted by the exhibition curator and/or the artist themselves.

I started at 10am at the John Curtin Gallery, where director Chris Malcolm introduced us to New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana’s Emissaries, which features her monumental three-panel video work In Pursuit of Venus [infected] shown at the 2017 Venice Biennale. The title is an ironic reference to the (nominally astronomical) purpose of Captain Cook’s voyage to Tahiti (its secret purpose being to continue on a voyage of discovery through the South Seas in search of a mysterious great southern continent); and the work is supplemented by a series of towering portrait photographs representing its titular ‘emissaries’ (played by actors in costume): the expedition’s chief scientist Joseph Banks, the Tahitian Chief Mourner who led Banks on a ritual funeral procession across the island, and a shamanic ancestor figure from the North-West Pacific, representative of later voyages; as well as an array of original antique telescopes with digital transparencies mounted on the lenses; and a collection of historical material assembled by Malcolm. This includes early copies of drawings by Sydney Parkinson, the artist who accompanied Cook and Banks on their first voyage to the South Pacific; the original specimen cabinets made of red cedar harvested by Banks from the east coast of Australia and used to house his collection in London; and a facsimile detail from Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, the panoramic French printed wallpaper panels manufactured in 1805 with designs based on Parkinson’s and others’ drawings, but depicting indigenous people from across the Pacific in a way that made them look more like idealised white people in paintings of classical antiquity by Poussin or Lorraine. It’s this detail – including a representation of the death of Cook in Hawaii – that inspired Reihana to make In Pursuit of Venus [infected].

The supplementary material is a fascinating journey in itself, but nothing could prepare me for the overwhelming visual, sonic and emotional impact of the main work. Approaching it through a darkened vestibule I could already hear music and voices shouting; emerging into the main gallery space I was confronted by a vast panorama scrolling slowly from right to left across three huge screens. Reihana has digitally scanned and recreated in stunning colours the idealised composite South Pacific landscape from the wallpaper, and populated it with animated figures and groups of Islanders and European sailors played by actors and engaged in real or imagined activities and episodes from Cook’s voyage. Members of relevant Pacific First Nation communities were consulted about and performed these scenes, which feature dances, songs and other culturally specific practices. Recurring characters include Cook (played by both a man and a woman, in reference to the fact that his gender was unclear to the Islanders because of his clothing and wig); Banks; the Tahitian navigator and translator Tupaia who accompanied and guided them across the Pacific; and an anonymous and increasingly despairing marine. The journey of the panorama follows no particular geographical or cultural logic – we see Australian Aboriginal people and landscapes reappear alongside Polynesian ones – but essentially tells the story of first contact, initially harmonious interactions and then the inevitable mishaps and misunderstandings, culminating in Cook’s death and mourning by the Hawaiians (a haunting song that becomes a kind of lament for the larger catastrophe of colonisation that was already unfolding).

The effect is somewhat similar to an early Renaissance narrative painting in which the same characters reappear in multiple scenes distributed across the canvas, except that in this case the ‘canvas’ is moving; and this sense of movement is further augmented by the soundtrack, which features fragments of music and dialogue that overlap and cross-fade as the video travels (Banks also collected musical instruments and other cultural artefacts from the places he visited on the voyage). There’s an overall sense of the inexorable flow of time and tide, history and tragedy; and beyond this, perhaps, of some greater cosmic cycle – the entire work is on a one-hour loop (I watched it through twice, from two different places in the room, following different characters, scenes, details and narrative strands each time). The work’s peculiar fusion of space and time apparently invokes the indigenous Pacific concept of Ta-Va or ‘time-space’, which reminded me of the Australian Aboriginal notion of the Dreamtime and Einstein’s theory of a space-time continuum. The effect is that one feels as if the entire tragedy is still unfolding, endlessly, as in a dream – as indeed it is, for First Nations peoples around the world. History, as Joyce wrote, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. In short: Pursuit of Venus [infected] is not only a dazzling technical feat and a brilliant political act of cultural re-appropriation, but an overwhelming emotional experience, and one that will stay with me forever.

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After spending two hours at Curtin, I decided to miss the next designated stop on the Art Adventure – Latai Taumoepeau’s Repatriate at Fremantle Arts Centre – having already spent some time with it the previous weekend (see my earlier post on Week 2). Nevertheless I was haunted by the implicit connection between the two works. Instead I headed on to the Lawrence Wilson Gallery at the University of Western Australia for my next ‘adventure’: Israeli artist Zadok Ben-David’s Human Nature.

On my way, I stopped off at the Sunken Garden on the UWA campus near the gallery to rest and reflect on what I’d seen, and noticed an inscription on a low semicircular stone wall: ‘Tangaroa clear away the clouds that Ru may see the stars.’ I looked it up online, and learnt that Tangaroa was the Maori god of the Sea, and Ru-enua a South Sea Island chieftain and explorer. I wondered what the inscription was doing there. Perhaps the gods and celestial navigators were guiding me; or perhaps that was just wishful thinking. In my current state of political and spiritual ambivalence, hovering between hope and despair, both seemed possible, and perhaps necessary. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will, as Gramsci wrote from his prison cell.

Human Nature is a collection of three installations, each in a separate room. Blackfield consists of twenty thousand tiny metal silhouettes of flowers planted in a vast square bed of white sand (the installation required the assistance of a large team of Festival volunteers). On one side the flowers are painted black, so that on first approach (and especially when lying down to view the installation at floor level) you have the impression of looking at a miniature landscape of burnt trees after a bushfire, or perhaps barren trees in winter. Walking around the room it becomes apparent that on the other side the flowers have been painted in vibrant, almost hallucinatory colours. The effect is that the landscape bursts into life; and then, as one completes one’s circumnavigation, it dies again.

The Other Side of Midnight is a more sombre work. The room itself is very dark; in the centre hangs what appears to be huge sphere painted with tiny multicoloured forms. As one approaches, the image resolves itself into a disc; the illusion of three-dimensionality is generated by the cleverly painted receding perspective of the coloured forms, which reveal themselves to be miniature human figures with butterfly wings and what appear to be black spaces between them. Walking further into the darkness on the other side of the disc and then turning around, one sees that the reverse sides of the human butterfly forms have been painted black, while the interstices between them now bear the images of white insects, possibly beetles, or cockroaches.

The third room, Conversation Peace, is a video installation intended to mediate between the two other works. Two human silhouettes frame a landscape that changes from summer to winter; human butterflies fly about, fall and turn into white insects, and are then reborn and rise again, endlessly.

Ben-David has a background in magic, and illusion lies at the heart of his practice. As such he belongs to a tradition of the artist as illusionist and trickster with a serious purpose that stretches back to the Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasios – the former more literal, the latter more conceptual – and forward to the visual and philosophical games of Magritte, Escher or the installation artist James Turrell. The works in Human Nature are beautiful, intricate and clever, and have an obvious eco-spiritual content: the cycle of seasons, of life and death, the little butterflies like human souls, and insects inheriting the earth. Blackfield felt more optimistic; the future in The Other Side of Midnight seemed grim. Personally I didn’t find the attempted resolution of Conversation Peace convincing. Outside the gallery, the Perth summer sunlight bathed the serene grounds and Spanish Mission architecture of UWA; but in the world, midnight loomed on the Doomsday Clock, as it did on the internal clock of human mortality and frailty.

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From the Lawrence Wilson gallery at UWA I drove into the Perth CBD and parked in His Majesty’s Theatre Carpark for the remainder of my day and evening. This was the first day I’d navigated my festival commitments by car rather than by public transport or on foot, as I would be traversing the length and breadth of the city; and this got me reflecting on how my experience of space and time, place and pace, are conditioned by how I move through them, as well as the environmental impact of doing so. It turned out to be the subject of my next visual art encounter as well.

Perth artist is based between WA and the Netherlands. Her exhibition Undesirable Bodies is at FORM Gallery, a WA visual arts organisation focused on nurturing a ‘creative ecology’ between art, arts access and communities.

Undesirable Bodies is an intriguing and meditative three-channel colour high-definition digital video installation. The video content was recorded at Miliyanha pool, a natural waterhole formed by Jirndawurrunha, a freshwater spring in Millstream Chichester National Park in the Pilbara region of northwest WA. Millstream was a pastoral station in the 1920s and is now a popular tourist destination – in part because of the oasis of exotic flora (in particular, date palms, passionflower vines and waterlilies) introduced around the former colonial homestead that was established near the waterhole. Needless to say, these invasive species now threaten the local ecology, which is also of great spiritual significance to the local Yindjibarndi people; the waterhole itself is associated with a powerful Dreaming spirit snake.

After visiting the site, and in consultation with the local community, Pilar Mata Dupont returned with a film crew and two performers, who were initiated by local Yindjibarndi elder Michael Woodley in a welcome and protection ceremony and ritually daubed with mud from the bank of the stream before entering the waterhole. (A fascinating short video accompanying the main installation documents this ceremony, as well as Woodley singing a spine-tingling song by his grandfather Bambardu, ‘the blind one’). Using high-definition-digital cameras (some of which were mounted on aerial or underwater drones) the crew then filmed the (white, and variously clothed or unclothed) bodies of the performers re-enacting activities regularly performed by the local Yindjibarndi custodians in an effort to hold back the tide of invasive species by collecting, gathering, weeding, poisoning and burning waterlilies, passionflower vines and palm fronds.

The action and images are beautifully performed, filmed, edited and juxtaposed across the three screens, and accompanied by a haunting and slightly ominous soundtrack; the 16-minute loop ends with some fragmentary lines of translated text from the song by Bambardu about ‘alien eyes’, which for me simultaneously evoked the white artists and their cameras, the invasive flowers (including the trees when viewed from overhead), and the waterhole Dreaming spirit snake.

There’s a sense of quixotic hopelessness about the staged and actual efforts to turn back time; FORM curator Mollie Hewitt even told us that the local ecology had now adapted to the presence of the invasive species to the extent that removing them completely (even if possible) would lead to further disruption. Indeed there’s a pervasive melancholy to the whole work, which made me think that it was as much about clinical depression or obsessional neurosis as psychological states preoccupied with the impossible task of undoing the past or warding off death, as it was about the history of colonization.

When I asked about the involvement of the actors, Hewitt said they were somewhat intimidated by their task, as even Woodley himself said he would be reluctant to swim in the waterhole because of the spirit snake. She also related that when they were subsequently told the title of the work, they initially thought it referred to their own ‘undesirable bodies’.

Who are we, I thought? What are we doing here?

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Across the railway tracks at Perth TAFE Gallery Central in Northbridge, WA artist-explorer Christopher Charles ventures into even more ominous and disturbing territory in an even more intriguing, consciousness-expanding and even mind-altering mixed-media exhibition, Banjawarn: Through the Shadow and Light of a Doomsday Cult. Artfully installed on two levels of the gallery, the exhibition comprises found objects and artefacts, variously framed and treated photographs, archival video material and a 38-minute video installation documenting the artist’s visits to two sites separated across the globe by the Indian and Pacific oceans. The first is a remote abandoned WA sheep station, which was purchased in 1993 by Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo; evidence uncovered there by the artist suggests that they manufactured and experimented on sheep with the nerve agent sarin, which was later used by them in the 1995 gas attacks in the Tokyo subway system. The second site is Kamikuishiki, a village at the base of Mount Fuji outside Tokyo, which was the base of the cult’s activities and the location of their chemical manufacturing plant.

The found objects and artefacts in the exhibition include a hunk of sheep wool in a glass case (recalling the work of Joseph Beuys); rows of inverted rusted iron shearing-combs (that look like Paul Klee or Shaun Tan figure-heads with little eyelets and comb-tooth crowns) and plastic ear-tags elegantly mounted on plinths; a sheep’s skull; the sole of a shoe; termite mounds; an electrode cap (which looks a bit like a lifeguard’s bathing cap, but with electrodes attached, and was apparently used by the cult for initiation purposes); a pile of paperbacks by Isaac Asimov (whose work was apparently inspirational for the cult); two open bird cages; and two live canaries (again recalling Beuys and other Fluxus artists) that fly freely around the gallery space, and inevitably evoke the gas attacks, thus making the gallery itself into a potentially lethal site of entrapment. The photos and video works include a series of small blurred colour photos – printed on Fuji (pun surely intended) photographic paper with outsized white frames like projection slides – of Tokyo commuters sleeping (as if dead) on subways, taken at Kasumigaseki subway station (where the opened sarin gas cylinders were discovered); six looped videos on small screens, including archival TV and cartoon footage of the Aung Shinrokyo cult and its leader with his distinctively Christ-like hair and beard, as well as material relating to Nostradamus and his prophecies; a series of black-and-white photos of the landscape of Banjawarn Station, printed from negatives treated with methylphosphonic acid (a by-product of sarin, traces of which were found in sheep’s wool on the site), which produces strange coloured stains on the prints that look almost like ectoplasm emerging from the trees, fences and skies; another series of black-and-white photos juxtaposing images from the two journeys; a haunting black-and-white photo of Mount Fuji obscured by rainclouds from an approaching storm; and a huge semi-abstract bleached and toned cyanotype on canvas of the forest where the artist took shelter from the storm, which he remarked anecdotally was referred to by local villagers as ‘the suicide forest’ (one wonders if they had Dante in mind).  

Most striking of all is a video installation in an alcove behind a curtain at one end of the gallery, which I experienced alone on my second visit. One sits on a sofa facing a large video monitor on which a 38-minute video loops; below the monitor is a mirror that reflects the viewer’s silhouette; and behind the viewer is a translucent screen through which shines light from a projector. The video is in three parts: ‘Banajwarn’ juxtaposes video and sound from both locations in counterpoint, and includes haunting video material of more sleeping Tokyo commuters; ‘Analogous Episodic Memories’ juxtaposes footage from both locations of objects in autonomous but resonating or synchronised patterns of movement (for example, a loose panel in the wall of a shearing shed or cupboard doors moving slightly in the wind, intercut with the movement of overlapping metal floor-plates between train carriages or rows of handles swaying on overhead rails); and ‘The Clash of Instinct and Intellect’ subjects the viewer to a barrage of flickering light from the projector bouncing off the mirror while deep bass wave-patterns of sound in fluctuating cross-rhythms simulate the effect of brainwashing; this is followed by more video footage from Tokyo, while a robotic voiceover delivers a (for me somewhat redundant) sermon on the mediation of experience by technology and its social and psychological effects.

If at times bordering on the didactic, at its best this is a suggestive and thoughtfully installed exhibition that responds to the architecture of the gallery – with its wedge shape, large shuttered window frames facing the street and mezzanine walkway – and leaves the viewer to make their own connections and draw their own conclusions. Above all, there’s a pervasive sense of locations, objects, bodies and minds resonating across time and space; tempered by a critical reflection on the excesses of both technologism and spiritualism – or what Kant called ‘the dreams of spirit seers’.

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On the short walk from Gallery Central back to the Perth Cultural Centre I followed a trail of street artworks by South Korean-born, New York-based multidisciplinary artist Kimsooja, who is arguably the most significant international guest artist in the Visual Arts program of this year’s Festival. To Breathe – The Flags comprises a series of seven huge translucent, softly coloured, multilayered flags, images of which appear on the facades of buildings around Northbridge. Each image comprises two or more national flags, which have been superimposed.

The images derive from a video sequence with the same title commissioned for the London 2012 Summer Olympics, which shows the flags dissolving in a continuous loop in alphabetical order country by country. That video in turn forms part of Zone of Nowhere at PICA, the first Australian solo exhibition of the artist’s work from her 30-year career. The exhibition includes a breathtaking installation To Breathe – Zone of Nowhere, featuring 30 huge actual translucent silk flags (also derived from the original video work) which hang in rows as if floating in mid-air like rows of washing along the vast central atrium space of the gallery (they can be viewed from below at ground floor level, or from above if one wanders along the first-floor mezzanine). The atrium floor at PICA is also scattered with Kimsooja’s signature bottari sculptures – large sewn bundles of variously coloured bedcovers, which are traditionally used in Korea to wrap and carry personal belongings, especially when moving from place to place.

As such the entire exhibition – and indeed Kimsooja’s entire oeuvre – could be viewed as a layered, wrapped and sewn bundle or bottari, in which different materials, media and artworks are superimposed across time and space. Indeed she has described her own body as a kind of needle threading her way through the world; and she herself frequently appears in her work, either in performance on or video, often dressed in black and walking or moving through a landscape with her back to the camera in a manner reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting of The Wanderer – itself emblematic of the Romantic artist as subject moving through the world of nature and politics (Wordsworth’s Prelude being the emblematic example in English-language Romantic poetry).

A beautiful and deeply moving example is the installation Sewing Into Walking, currently on view an upstairs room at the Art Gallery of WA just across the Cultural Centre from PICA. This is a much earlier work from 1994 (which was purchased by the Gallery in 1998) and like To Breathe exists in a series of layers or incarnations. At the entrance to the room are three old box-shaped TV sets stacked on top of each other – the stack itself forming a kind of ‘bundle’ – displaying three short looped silent slow-motion videos of the artist at three different locations. In the video on the bottom screen, ‘Sewing into Walking – Kyung Ju’, she’s gathering large colourfully patterned bedcovers that have been laid out on a forest floor at the edge of a stream and bundling them over her arm; in the middle video, ‘Sewing into Walking – Yang Dong Village’, she’s depositing them in the otherwise deserted central courtyard of a village or dwelling-place, and then departing; and in the top video, ‘Sewing Into Walking – Mai Mountain’, she’s in a long dark coat, walking away from the camera along a road with a mountain in the distance.

Passing into the room, which is dimly lit, one comes across a number of old bottaris scattered across the floor or piled up in corners like garbage-bags, some of which have become worn and even split open at the seams, revealing the bundles of old clothing inside them; according to the Gallery’s Curator of Contemporary Design and International Art Robert Cook, the artist’s instructions for the installation were to literally hurl them across the floor. On the wall at the far end of the room is a large-scale projection of the central video featuring the slow-motion image of the artist gathering up bedcovers in the forest: the scale and corresponding pixilation of the image enhances the granular texture and exquisitely framed composition of the slowly moving tracking shot, which ends with the dark silhouette of the artist partially obscured by overhanging leaves forming a unified pattern with the printed cloths, the leaves on the ground and the dark river in the background. The juxtaposition of the bedcovers in the video with the bundles on the floor of the room lends an added materiality and poignancy to the work; and this poignancy intensifies when one learns about the events commemorated by the work (which the exhibition itself doesn’t mention): Kyung Ju (or Gwangju) was the site of a democratic protest again the military government of South Korea in 1980, which led to the deaths of hundreds of protesters.

Kimsooja’s work thus reveals itself to be a deeply political as well as spiritual practice; and this political spirituality (which needless to say is at the farthest remove from the ideological spiritualism of Aum Shinrikyo) is evident throughout the works on display in Zone of Nowhere at PICA. Alongside the implicit pacifism and anti-nationalism of To Breathe: The Flags one might cite the mixed media sound-installation Mandala: Zone of Zero, a brilliantly coloured jukebox of concentric red and yellow circles playing a mix of Tibetan, Gregorian and Islamic chants and made in response to the US invasion of Iraq; the humanist compassion of Bottari Trucks: Migrateurs, another silent looped video-work in which the artist (again with her back to the camera) appears to float through Paris on a truck laden with bottari in a filmed performance commemorating the eviction of African refugees from a Parisian church; the images of brightly coloured cloth garments, coverings and bundles photographed in sites of extreme poverty in the series Mumbai: Laundry Field; and the minimal but haunting (and once again silent) looped video-work Bottari: Alfa Beach, filmed at a Nigerian slave-transportation site, but inverting the horizon-line so that the waves of the sea appear to rise and fall above instead of below the shifting clouds of the sky.

Touching on themes of war, violence, oppression, displacement, inequality and women’s work, but bearing witness mostly in silence and without commentary, these and other works on display are also marked by an extraordinary beauty and infused with a sense of inner harmony and peace, which makes them at once acts of commemoration and healing. Perhaps this derives from the artist’s philosophy, which draws together strands from many religious and cultural traditions. Many of the works are site-specific or deeply connected to a sense of place and time (hence the intrinsic importance of video as a medium), yet at the same time they seem to transcend both – from the superimposed flags in To Breathe, to the breathtaking multichannel video installation Earth-Water-Fire-Air, which records elemental landscapes of fire, ice, water and rock in a way that reveals how their features echo and intermingle with each other.

Indeed Kimsooja's work seems to transcend the preoccupation with identity that drives so much artistic, cultural and political activity today. Her choice of a one-word name, hints at this, since as she writes on her website: ‘A one-word name refuses gender identity, marital status, socio-political or cultural and geographical identity.’

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Next week Humph reviews and reflects on the final round of performance works in the Festival.

Postcard from Perth # 53

Perth Festival Week 2: ‘If We Could Turn Back Time’

Barbershop Chronicles, Il n’est pas encore minuit, Hand Stories, Katrina Ballads, Farewell to Paper, To A Simple Rock’n’Roll…Song

A festival is at once a communal act of celebration and of commemoration. The Dionysiad was a celebration of the God’s gifts and a commemoration of his dismemberment and rebirth; the Last Supper was a celebration of the Passover and an anticipation of Christ’s imminent sacrifice; and every Feast Day is held in honour of a Saint’s martyrdom as well as their life and works.

If the works I saw in the first week of the Perth Festival were mostly celebrations in dance, theatre, image, music and song of sheer physical, vocal, visual and auditory presence (or in the case of Latai Taumoepeau’s Repatriate or the Museum of Water, sometimes sheer survival), then this week I feel as if I’ve delved more deeply, more darkly and with more difficulty into the commemoration of pain, loss, absence and the past.

To paraphrase Beckett, how do we go on when we can’t go on? How do we reconcile justice and forgiveness? How do we work through anger, mourning and reparation? How do we distinguish between what we can and can’t change? How do we maintain our rage, and insist on the necessity for resistance, while at the same time letting go of the past, surrendering to the present moment, and opening up to the future? How do we embrace Nietzsche’s ‘love of fate’ and ‘the eternal recurrence of the same’ without succumbing to conformity or despair? How do we grasp the paradox Gramsci called ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’? These are the some of the questions – political, psychological, spiritual – I’ve been asking myself over the past week in the face of works which turn back to the past in order to try and understand the present, and perhaps move beyond it.

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At first blush, Bijani Seibani’s production of Nigerian-British playwright Inua Ellams’ Barbershop Chronicles is a joyous act of celebration. My companion and I entered the Octagon Theatre to find the pre-show in full swing. Rae Smith’s dynamic design saw the generous thrust stage of the Octagon transformed into a minimalist barber shop with little more than a few swivel chairs; on the auditorium walls flanking the stage were brightly coloured signs featuring silhouetted images of hairdressing tools and products and the names of places in London, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, South Africa and Zimbabwe; a network of electrical wires overhead converged above the stage to form the tangled outline of a globe and its continents, with nodal points that lit up in synch with the corresponding sign on the wall as the scenes shifted back and forth from city to city; and music pumped from a sound-desk at the front of the stage being DJ’d by one of the twelve all-male, African-British actors, while the rest were roaming the stage and auditorium chatting, fooling around and enlisting members of the audience to come onstage, take a seat and have their hair cut by the cast. This loosely choreographed mayhem went on for about ten minutes until it segued seamlessly into the opening scene of the play, with the cast coming together at the front of the stage to watch and cheer on a football match on an invisible TV.

This broad, physical, music and comedic energy was maintained as a base-line throughout the show, especially during the scene-transitions, but also in the repartee which constituted the bulk of the action and dialogue, as the actors entered and exited the stage playing multiple characters in six different barbershops from Peckham to Lagos, Accra, Kampala, Johannesburg and Harare in the course of a single day (marked by the progress of the football game as a unifying dramatic device). Underlying this however was a deeper root-note, which gradually became more insistent across the scenes as their tangled plot-lines began to converge like the electricity wires overhead. Beneath the obvious themes of racial identity and black masculinity was a more universal motif: the loss, guilt or failure of fathers, and the bitterness, recrimination and disappointment of their sons. This applied equally to the more personal storylines, like that of the young London hairdresser whose father (the former owner of the barbershop) is now in prison (and who he eventually discovers has plunged the shop into debt), and the more political ones, like that of the old South African barber who resents the leniency of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that followed the end of apartheid. It turns out that latter character is himself a father who abandoned his son; and this same son turns out to be a customer in the London barbershop, who comes there seeking mentorship in ‘how to be a man’; but we also feel as if an entire generation of ‘sons’ has been abandoned by their father-figures in the form of post-colonial leaders like Amin, Mugabe and Zuma (who was deposed the day after I saw the show).

Of course this is a story as old as politics, families and theatre itself: Agamemnon, Oedipus, Hamlet and Death of a Salesman spring to mind; and the theme of the absent father is central to psychology and even theology. The question then becomes: what do we (or I) do about it? The answer, for Ellams at least, seems to be: reach out to your fellow man (since in this case, the subject and object of the inquiry is very definitely a masculine one); forgive the past; and find a kind of global identity and solidarity in ‘brotherhood’ (in this case, both masculine and ‘black’ – but perhaps we can extend the notion to that of the human, and even the planet).

Ultimately I found Barbershop Chronicles stronger as a production than as a script (the latter seemed overlong and at times overwritten); and some of the performances stronger in physical energy than in psychological or textual nuance; but it got me thinking about globalisation, race, masculinity and especially fatherhood in a world that – for all its apparent ‘connectivity’ – seems more and more fragmented and urgently in search of healing.

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The following night, Il n’est pas encore minuit by French ensemble Compagnie XY began even more thrillingly. Two male acrobats entered the vast and undecorated proscenium stage of the Regal Theatre and almost immediately began to fight: no fake punches, but pushing, shoving, grappling, wrestling and throwing each other to the floor with increasing violence. More acrobats entered (twenty-two in all, male and female) and tried to drag the antagonists apart; more fights started; and an all-out brawl ensued. My companion and I began to laugh, then turned to each other in dismay. ‘Why are we laughing?’ she whispered; and I found myself answering, ‘Because it’s the world!’

The brawl gradually resolved itself (with some residual pushing and shoving) into a ragged group-formation, music began to play, and an incredible sequence of acts followed: walking human pyramids three storeys high, standing on shoulders and heads, balancing sometimes on heads, or one leg, or one hand; tosses, leaps, forwards-and-backwards somersaults (initially using no props, later introducing wooden planks on rollers, and finally large wooden boards) and catches (using only interlocked hands); and outbreaks of dancing (based on the Lindy Hop, sometimes solo, sometimes in couples or groups), clowning, teasing and embracing.

I found myself emotionally overwhelmed within minutes. The title of the show – ‘It’s Not Yet Midnight’ – kept echoing in my head. The previous week, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists had announced that the Doomsday Clock was now two minutes to midnight – closer than it had ever been, and thirty seconds closer than last year, because of the threat of nuclear war, climate change and global disinformation posed by the Trump Administration and others. Misunderstanding, aggression and conflict seemed to be endemic to our species, and perhaps the cosmos; yet at the same time, these performers seemed to be wordlessly saying, we were capable of incredible feats, if we worked together, were disciplined, focussed, vigilant, humble, and trusted each other – and ourselves – as acrobats must. It was never too late to turn back the clock, collectively or individually.

At the end of the show, after the cheers and applause, one of the performers stepped forward. She put on a pair of spectacles – ‘She needs spectacles!’ my companion gasped – and read a message from a piece of paper. She explained that the company was a collective without an artistic director or leader; all artistic and administrative decisions were made by consensus. How was this possible? Because of a simple miracle, difficult but not impossible to achieve. She paused. ‘We agree.’

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Hand Stories is the major work in the Festival by its 2018 Artist-in-Residence, Yeung Fai, a fifth-generation traditional Chinese glove puppeteer based in Paris; the Festival has also commissioned The Puppet Show Man, a revival of a show he originally created in Bolivia, to tour local schools, community organisations, hospitals and other non-theatre spaces; and he’s also running a workshop for local artists in collaboration with Spare Parts Puppet Theatre.

I saw Hand Stories last Wednesday night at the relatively small, nondescript, humble black-box pros-arch Dolphin Theatre on the University of WA campus; half an hour into the show, you could hear the hip-hop beat from the opening sequence of Barbershop Chronicles pounding next door through the walls. In fact humility is one of the hallmarks of Hand Stories, and of Yeung Fai himself, despite his prodigious skills. He learned these from his father, and is the last in a direct line of father-son puppeteers. The show uses puppetry and other media to tell the story of his father (moving archival footage of whom is projected onto a black vertical rectangular flat at the rear of the stage), who was ‘re-educated’ during the Cultural Revolution, forced to take up other forms of manual labour, and eventually died, broken in body and spirit. Yeung Fai himself was imprisoned, and later fled to Bolivia, where he lived a hand-to-mouth existence living and working on the streets before being discovered by a French producer who encouraged and supported him to start a new life and career in Paris.

The show also uses contemporary glove-puppets (with large white faces resembling death-masks) to represent Yeung Fai himself, his father, his mother and brother (who fled to the United States); in fact the most touching moment in the show for me was that of the two brothers parting, the only visible difference between them being their hairstyles, and the miniature US flag one of them held in his little hand. There’s also a larger, more sinister puppet-dragon representing the Chinese government/Communist Party as well as Yeung Fai’s inner demons; a puppet-angel with a somewhat grating predilection for Queen songs who appears as a saviour when Yeung Fai is living in exile (and whom I learned later represents his French producer); and more traditional glove-puppets are used throughout the show to demonstrate the art of glove-puppet theatre (these demonstrations seemed a little redundant, and the pace dragged during them).

By far the most interesting element in the show for me was the relationship between Yeung Fai (who spoke only in Chinese) and a second performer (Yoann Pencolé), who translated some of his words into English, and shared in the manipulation of the puppets. I wanted to know more about this relationship, the significance of which was only alluded to in the final scene, when Yeung Fai passed on a ritual flame in a small bowl to Pencolé, who finished the show with his hand in a spotlight, practising the same finger-and-thumb stretching exercises that his master had demonstrated at the start, while the latter quietly exited the stage.

As with Barbershop Chronicles, this was a story about filiation and brotherhood, and about the destruction and creation of families – genetic and artistic. Yeung Fai and Pencolé are primarily puppeteers rather than actors, and I felt that the show wanted the guiding hand of a director, and perhaps even a writer, to fully realise its potential. Nonetheless, it was another link in the conversation about how to deal with the past, which for me is a major through-line of this Festival.

*

New York composer Ted Hearne’s 2007 oratorio Katrina Ballads is a heartfelt, rage-filled and at times blistering response to the hurricane that devastated New Orleans in 2005 – and more specifically to the indifference, negligence and underlying racism that contributed to the scale of the catastrophe and its aftermath. Hearing it performed in the Inner Courtyard at Fremantle Arts Centre last Thursday night, I felt the work had renewed and poignant resonance in the context of the Festival’s Museum of Water, the advancing urgency of climate change, the increasing polarisation of wealth and poverty, and the resurgence of racism in Trump’s America.

Scored for four principal vocalists – soprano, mezzo, tenor and baritone (with the additional tenor of Hearne himself, who also conducted) – accompanied by a classical chamber ensemble (augmented by electric and bass guitar), the work follows the more or less prototypical format of a baroque or classical oratorio or cantata (from the religious and secular masterpieces of Bach, Handel or Haydn to more obviously socio-political twentieth-century protest-works like Schönberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw or Tippett’s A Child of Our Time). The score (as with Tippett – and indeed Bach) borrows from popular and folk music as well as more self-consciously ‘art music’ traditions; in fact Hearne (like Tippett, but for more obvious reasons) weaves African-American music into the score – in this case, not spirituals (as in A Child of our Time) but jazz, skat and gospel. More provocatively, the verbatim libretto is derived from broadcast-media and other ‘found’ texts from the week following the hurricane; and the performance is visually accompanied by filmmaker Bill Morrison’s montage of contemporary news clips, satellite images and other found footage (this was projected onto a screen behind the musicians, and splashed across the buildings and trees at the back of the courtyard to impressive effect).

Katrina Ballads is an angry work. The concept is brilliant, but it’s the music that carries the day. Highlights for me were Hearne’s own spit-flecked sarcastic solo-tenor skat rendition of George Bush’s fatuous words to Michael Brown (head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and responsible for the botched clean-up operation after the hurricane), ‘Brownie you’re doin’ a heck of a job!’; and African-American tenor Isaiah Robinson’s spine-tingling melismatic Gospel version of Kanye West’s on-camera off-script fundraising speech about racial injustice (with a nonplussed Michael Myers standing beside him), concluding with the knockout punch-line: ‘George Bush doesn’t care about black people!’

Sometimes it’s important not to forget the past, and to maintain your rage.

*

Farewell to Paper is also about dealing with loss, but it’s a less political work than Katrina Ballads, and less personal than Hand Stories, although Russian writer-director-performer Evgeny Grishkovets illustrates his lecture-performance with plenty of anecdotes about himself, his family and friends. It’s also less narrative-based than the other works, but rather takes the form of a reflective, even meditative essay, in the great European tradition of Montaigne or Descartes; and its mood is gentle, elegiac, even ironic, rather than traumatized, angry, or even directly critical of the social, historical, technological and above all impersonal forces and processes it describes.

Grishkovets advances into the future backwards, as it were, with his gaze fixed on the wreckage of the past, like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History. He treads lightly, with a soft gaze, and a smile on his lips, withholding judgement on whether what’s occurring is catastrophe or progress, tragedy or comedy, or perhaps both. The irony is that he can’t see where he’s going; none of us can; indeed his delivery is so casual and the writing so digressive (Grishkovets has a performance background in improvisation) that at times he seems to be feeling his way in the darkness and almost making it up as he goes along. This invisibility is of course the very essence of the future; but perhaps it’s a peculiarity of our age (as speculative fiction writer James Bradley argued on Radio National just the other night) that we’ve stopped visualising or even being able to imagine the future at all; perhaps this is because we feel as if history has come to an end, that ‘the future is now’, and that consequently we’re living in an eternal present, which is itself now unknowable, so that we’re all feeling our way in a darkness without end.

Farewell to Paper is a lecture-performance on the disappearance of paper, handwriting, typewriters, letters, postcards, telegrams, books, and in general what might be called ‘the archive’: all those intentional and accidental records, relics and traces of human activity, written or otherwise, that might be said to constitute the ‘matter’ of memory. In other words, it’s about the advent of digital technology, the information age, and the dematerialisation of thought and existence, as more and more of reality becomes ‘virtual’. As Marx memorably wrote of capitalism, but in words prophetic of the third industrial revolution he didn’t foresee: ‘All that is solid melts into air.’

Like an ark in the deluge, the stage is crammed with material things: two chairs, a coffee table, a desk cluttered with papers, boxes and other miscellaneous stuff, and four doorways set in a false wall upstage, which open periodically to reveal an ever-changing array of fake vistas and objects, as surprising as those behind the doors in Bluebeard’s Castle: a forest of birch trees (which once provided bark for writing on in medieval Russia); a giant post-box; a fanciful network of pipes through which mail is imagined to travel to its destination. There are also occasional sound-effects and lighting changes, which more than anything else remind us that we’re in an artificially constructed theatrical world – a kind of vast aide-memoire or mnemonic space which, to borrow a phrase from Frances Yates, we might call kind of ‘memory palace’.

Grishkovets’s writing, performance and staging are all charming, delightful, whimsical, intelligent, witty and even poignant at times, but for me the most theatrical and indeed memorable thing about the production was the presence of a second figure onstage: translator and interpreter Kyle Wilson, who was graciously introduced to us by Grishkovets at the start of the show, and who translated every word he spoke (and he spoke entirely in Russian) from then on. Of course surtitles would be inappropriate in a show about the disappearance of physical and tactile (as opposed to merely visual) communication; but I soon became fascinated by Wilson’s modest, gentle, softly spoken persona, his focus on his task, and the evolving stage relationship between the two men. This was opening night, and as I later discovered, the first time they’d worked together onstage; Grishkovets had apparently never performed the work in an English-speaking country before. Wilson had of course seen the script and written his own translation; but there was an element of free-play, extemporization, listening and exchange between them that I found enchanting and intrinsically theatrical.

As Grishkovets duly warned and occasionally reminded us, the performance went for two hours, and my attention wandered at times from what he was saying, which in essence was a kind of extended personal reflection on the back page of The Guardian, and in the end his insouciance made me wonder why I should care. However my attention was continually engaged by his translator-interpreter, and the interplay between them. As with Compagnie XY, the double-act of Yeung Fai and Pencolé, the cast of Barbershop Chronicles and perhaps the people of New Orleans, it was all about working together, and the simple act of helping or even listening each other. Hand-in-hand we go on, advancing into the darkness.

*

Later that night, on our way home, my companion and I got into an argument about politics. It was an argument we’d had before, but this time we both dug in more deeply, and for a while it seemed as if we couldn’t make any headway. I noticed myself becoming intransigent, and thought of the acrobats brawling at the start of Il n’est pas encore minuit. Then we began to concede to each other, and ended up agreeing, at least, that perhaps both of us were right, that perhaps we could build on that, progress could still be made, and there was more than one possible future. It was not yet midnight, after all.

*

On Saturday night I saw the Michael Clark Company dance To A Simple Rock’N’Roll…Song. I’ve never seen Clark’s work before, and was expecting something more flamboyant, perhaps because of his bad-boy reputation, but was pleasantly surprised by the hard-edged rigour and minimalism of his latest show.

Act I: Satie Studs/Ogives Composite was a homage to Clark’s choreographic precursors and mentors, Fredrick Ashton, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Yvonne Rainer, all of whom have created works to Satie’s music. It was a cool, hard, clean, austere, surprisingly restrained amuse-bouche. The dancers wore black and white bodysuits that stood out sharply against the super-saturated colours of the cyclorama behind them, lit by regular Cunningham collaborator Charles Atlas. Even the music wasn’t one of the composer’s more familiar or sentimental pieces, but a more astringent selection, ferociously played and recorded.

Act II: Land was a more energized piece, danced to a Patti Smith track from Horses. The movement was still tightly controlled, but more driven, suiting the relentless beat of the music and Smith’s vocal urgency. The dancers now wore silver bodysuits, and the backdrop now displayed a video by Atlas, which consisted of numbers tumbling frantically in dizzying formations.

Act III: my mother, my and CLOWNS! was the most substantial piece of the night, set to a series of David Bowie tracks stretching back across his career, beginning with his valedictory Blackstar and then segueing into ‘Future Legend’ and ‘The Ever-Circling Skeletal Family’ from Diamond Dogs, before ending with the sinuous, slightly insidious title track from Aladdin Sane. Here the choreography and dancers (their bodysuits now in shades of orange, apart from one mysterious deathly figure veiled and robed entirely in black) really began to take off. Moving like otherworldly androgynous insects, they began to resemble Bowie himself, and the selection of tracks emphasised the darker, more forbidding aspects of his music and persona.

I felt as if Clark’s musical, choreographic and staging choices reflected an artist in the latter period of their career, attempting to distil or crystallise the essence of their style in the face of mortality – and perhaps also in the face of a world that had grown darker and colder. Once again I found myself thinking about the past, and the future: Patti Smith, and Bowie, and the 70s when they were in their heyday, and everything still seemed possible; and the cool, inhuman, sci-fi vision of the future that Bowie embodied, even back then. There was something thrilling about revisiting those memories, but there was no turning back.

*

Next week Humph reviews the visual arts program of the Festival and his own participation in the next round of performance works.

Postcard from Perth #52

Perth Festival 2018: Voices and Bodies

Opening Ceremony, Siren Song, Beyond Time, Repatriate, Museum of Water, Attractor

The opening week of the Perth Festival has me reflecting on voices and bodies: the voices and bodies of women, first nations and other minorities; the voices and bodies of non-artists, audiences and participants as well as artists, producers and curators. This is a Festival that gives space, time and even priority to these voices and bodies.

The opening ceremony Gnarnk-Ba Karla Waarnginy (‘Speaking Fires of our Mother’) took place at the west end of St George’s Terrace: hardly the most obviously scenic spot, despite what must once have been an impressive streetscape running eastwards through the CBD, and before that a glorious natural site overlooking the river beneath what was now King’s Park. It was now hemmed in by corporate high-rises obscuring the river and the park, and even dwarfing the Tudor-style convict-era relic of Barracks Archway that stands at the head of the Terrace, and in turn blocks the view of Parliament House behind it.

I sat on a low wall outside the new Channel 9 buildings with a group of onlookers, mostly older women. One of them told me she was in Perth because of the international golf tournament – she’d been a volunteer there for the last twenty years. She and her companions seemed to be regular Festival opening ceremony attendees. They proudly pointed out the branches of eucalypt that had been assembled beneath the temporary outdoor stage for the cleansing smoke-ritual, and remarked on the fact that this year the Noongar elders seated onstage to perform the Welcome to Country were all women – as were the dancers and singers who would be performing. Festival Director Wendy Martin was there amongst them, black hair and voluminous red scarf flying in the wind that barrelled down the ‘canyons of commerce’, as she called them. I wondered how the speakers and singers would cope with the eucalyptus smoke blowing straight into their faces – or for that matter how the helicopter that would soon be making its appearance to broadcast Siren Song would cope with the wind, and whether the sound of the sirens would prevail against it.

A gracious Welcome to Country speech from Noongar elder Aunty May McGuire acknowledged the generosity and inclusiveness of the Festival as well as gently reminding us of the history of violence, removal and segregation that haunted the site. She passed her ceremonial spear to Wendy; singer and dancer Rikeeta Walley took the stage; and a group of young women dancers, Kwarbah Djookian, crept through the crowd and joined her. After several songs and dances (Wendy joined the last one) and a tribal pop song by Honey Webb, the melody from the last song was taken up by the disembodied voice of Karla Hart through the speakers above the stage, and I felt a wave of emotion as more women’s voices began to echo and canon the same musical phrase down the corridor of buildings along the Terrace, and the beautiful, mournful sound of Siren Song began. The focus drifted away from the stage, and people began to drift out into the street, gazing up into the sky in search of the source of the sound.

Moments later, a helicopter appeared above Barracks Arch, and a single amplified voice pierced the sky. It was a dramatic change of tone, the source of the sound suddenly becoming visible in the form of this almost malevolent insect-machine, with its associations of war and conflict, reminding me that all was not sweetness and light. Like so many sacred sites across the country, this was a place of violence as well celebration; and the Sirens themselves, lest we forget, were harbingers of death as well as voices of seduction.

As the crowd applauded and dispersed, I wondered how Siren Song would affect the city over the next ten days, sounding each dawn and dusk, reminding its inhabitants of less comfortable times and places.

*

Alongside the sense of celebration and inclusiveness, then, there’s a more determined, uncompromising, even unflinching aspect to this Festival: an inner toughness in its acknowledgement of hard truths. This is evident in the choice of Beyond Time – which I went to straight from the Opening Ceremony and debut of Siren Song – as the opening show of the Festival. It’s a demanding, even austere production, that doesn’t pander to its audience, but makes us work almost as hard as its performers.

As I learned to my surprise when I opened the program, Taiwanese company U-theatre has its origins in the work of Grotowski, the Polish avant-garde director and teacher who sought to reconnect theatre with its origins in ritual and a sense of the sacred. Closer to home, the work of the company is grounded in Taoist philosophy – and more literally in the company’s base on Laochaun Mountain near Tapei. Drumming and meditation are the core of their training as well as their creative and performance methodology; and while watching them I was reminded of the fact that war and conflict – in the form of martial arts – lie at the heart of moving meditation practices like Tai Chi, just as the fact of suffering lies at the heart of Buddhism (as it does in the case of Christianity and the other monotheistic religions). As such, it’s rich material for drama. Despite its search for serenity and peace, there’s nothing supine or pacifistic about The Way.

The show unfolds in a sequence of scenes – the titles are listed in the program as ‘A Downpour’, ‘Reflection of the Moon on A Thousand Rivers’, ‘Wading Through the Air’, ‘The Eclipse’, ‘The Vortex’ and ‘Beyond Time’, and are followed by short poetic descriptions that refer somewhat elliptically to events and experiences in nature, the mind and the cosmos. As such I’m reminded of a cycle of Chinese nature poems like those that inspired Mahler’s Song of the Earth – but in this case we don’t hear any of the words in the performance, which indeed doesn’t directly refer to them at all. Instead we are presented with a series of movement-tableaux, alternately peaceful and violent, accompanied by live drumming and percussion (sometimes the drumming is the movement and the image in one). Set, lighting, movement, image and sound are all spectacular; there’s even a huge backdrop on which abstract images of a moon and later falling rain are projected. The physical and musical skills of the performers are prodigious, but (apart from the set and lighting, and the visual and spatial orientation of the staging) there’s a sense that none of this is being performed for our benefit, so much as for the performers themselves – or rather, for itself, since they are to all intents and purposes its servants. As such, we are witnessing a form of meditation in action; and the task demands a corresponding degree of focused, disciplined meditation from us.

Personally I could have dispensed with the accoutrements of lighting and set, beautiful as they were, since these seemed more like concessions to the circumstances of cultural consumption, while the essence of the work seemed to me to be the bodies of the performers - and by extension their instruments, including the literal skins of the drums. Indeed, I found myself transported – if not beyond time, then beyond the stage and auditorium of His Majesty’s – to somewhere outdoors, in nature, or at least, in my mind; somewhere beyond narrative or conceptual discourse; a place of pure embodiment.

Apparently the work was developed after the company embarked on a 38-day trek from the north to the south of the island of Taiwan. Appropriately, the day after opening night, the Festival hosted a free early-morning participatory walk in King’s Park led by the director of the company Liu Ruo-Yu. Regretfully the Festival Navigator failed to attend. Other events and other forms of participation awaited him the following day.

*

The body – and more specifically her own brown female body – is at the centre of Australian-Tongan visual and performance artist Latai Taumoepeau’s powerful video installation Repatriate at Fremantle Arts Centre. Seven small vertical iPad screens are arranged in a row along one wall of an artificial corridor down which only a single line of viewers can be accommodated at a time; you enter at either end, and have to wait your turn to move from screen to screen, and finally leave again. In the same room, but outside the corridor, a subtle but faintly ominous soundtrack plays; it’s hard to distinguish the sounds themselves, which could be mechanical or natural. On the screens, the same looped video plays, at different points in the loop, with the timings displayed at the bottom of each screen, from 00.00 to about 38.00 minutes, at which point the video fades to black. The video shows Taumoepeau in underpants and floaties dancing – or attempting to dance – using movements and gestures that appear to be derived from various South Sea Island traditions while sitting, standing, floating and eventually submerged in a Perspex water-tank which is being gradually filled by two streams of falling water. The top and sides of the tank are outside the frame of the image, which heightens the sense of entrapment – as does the claustrophobic set that frames the installation itself, and the spectator’s experience.

The effect is that of watching a kind of perverse vaudeville act – ‘woman in water-tank’ – from which there is no escape. The subject of the work is obviously the impact of climate change on the inhabitants of low-lying poverty-stricken non-white communities like those of the Pacific Islands; but it’s the emotional and even visceral impact of the work (as well as its artful staging) that makes it hard to tear oneself away from.

At the artist talk I attend, Taumoepeau identifies herself as a dancer who crossed over into visual art in order to express herself politically – which she describes as being unavoidable for artists who are women of colour, as their bodies are already politicised. The specific impetus for this work was her attendance at the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali in 2007, where she also encountered other artists from affected island communities, and learned some of their movement traditions, which were subsequently incorporated into Repatriate. She also identifies her ancestors as ‘celestial navigators’; I can’t resist asking her what this means, and she talks about Tongan and other indigenous traditions of navigation that involve reading the stars and even feeling the tides with one’s hand.

Like Beyond Time, this is a work centred on the body – but in this case a singular, gendered, skin-coloured, politicized body, rather than the comparatively abstract, philosophical and even spiritual bodies that collectively make up U-Theatre. Interestingly Repatriate is also a video work rather than a work of live performance: in part because of the unrepeatable and even unendurable nature of what it represents; but also because as a work of visual art there’s something essentially solitary rather than communal about the experience of the viewer, even though that experience is necessarily conditioned by the presence of other viewers, especially in such a narrow viewing space. In effect Taumoepeau forces us to identify with her experience – including the essentially solitary experience of death – in a way that live performance could never accomplish.

*

Repatriate is situated as a kind of adjunct-work to Museum of Water, the remarkable brain-child of UK artist Amy Sharrocks currently housed at Fremantle Arts Centre, although after the Festival the collection will be preserved (insofar as that’s possible) by the new WA Museum. Having attended the opening last Wednesday evening, and then further talks and activities over the weekend, I find it’s a work that keeps on giving and expanding in my heart and mind like…well, ripples in a pond.

In fact this is its third iteration – previous versions took place in Bristol and Rotterdam – but the process of its creation and installation here in WA is unique. For the past two years a team of local artist-custodians have been travelling around Perth and the surrounding region with a trailer (designed by local theatre designer Zoe Atkinson) collecting samples of water donated by the public together with stories about those donations. The samples are still in the containers they were donated in, but a selection are displayed on a beautiful white raised wave-or-ripple-like topographic structure (also designed by Atkinson) that undulates through the main exhibition space. The viewing platform, exhibition space and entire Arts Centre have been lovingly lit by Martin Langthorne (including the use of lighting gels in some of the windows to tint the daylight streaming through), and the rooms and corridors also have a subtle immersive sound design by local musician and sound artist Rachael Dease that includes sound-samples of water, rain falling, and even field recordings she made of ice cracking in the Antarctic.

Down the corridor from the main gallery another room provides access to the stories from a catalogue of voice-recordings of the donors which can be access on iPads, and tables displaying postcards, photographs and other documents that were donated along with the samples. There’s also a permanent screening of four short films by local high school students on the theme of ‘water that is important to you’ that were commissioned and assisted by the Festival and Screen West. Adjacent to this room is another, sound-proof room (also designed by Atkinson) separated by a false wall with a window, which serves as an interview-room for further donors during the exhibition.

The ‘custodians’ (who are all incidentally women, and wear blue aprons, again designed by Atkinson) are also present to guide visitors and interview donors; and on Saturday mornings they present ‘morning yarns’ in which they share new acquisitions and stories. Beyond this, there’s a series of events, talks and other activities each weekend for the duration of the Festival.

It’s hard to know how to begin to describe the effects of this extraordinary multi-disciplinary, multi-platform work. Beyond the obvious current social, political and environmental resonances – in a week when Cape Town has just become the first city to officially run out of water because of climate change (a distinction which might previously have been expected of Perth, as the capital of Australia’s driest state) – there are all sorts of other resonances that seem to confirm the status of water as the elemental metaphorical substance par excellence of life, transience and emotion itself. Indeed I found myself deeply moved several time, listening to one of the custodians tell a story, reading one of the documents, watching one of the short films, listening to Amy Sharrocks and WA Museum CEO Alec Coles enthusiastically discussing ‘Future Museums: Ways of Sharing History’, or participating in a workshop called ‘Distilling Memory: Rosewater, the Festival Scent’ on how to make double-distilled rosewater with Iranian immigrants Mahin Nowbakht and Farangeez Ahmadi, inspired by Nowbakht’s gift to the museum, the vial of rosewater and packet of dried damask-rose petals she brought to Australia in her suitcase.

A custodian tells the story of a schoolgirl donating a jar half-filled with water containing a paper boat, and struggling with tears to tell the story of how she’s now spent half her life living in Perth separated from her family back in the UK. A photograph of a well in Turin is accompanied by a piece of paper with a typed account of how the donor’s grandmother used to meet her lover by the well before her family arranged a marriage for her and she moved to Australia. A short film by a high-school student shows images of him interacting with water in various ways – washing, cooking, drinking – while his voiceover tells the story of how he was mistrustful of tap water when he first came to Australia because in Indonesia water had to be laboriously collected and boiled. Alec Coles explains how the water travelling up the pipeline inland to Kalgoorlie built by the legendary engineer C.Y.O’Connor is now desalinated water from the Indian Ocean – and I reflect on the fact that it’s the same Indian Ocean into which O’Connor later rode his horse and shot himself, so that in a sense his molecules are now feeding the desert heart. A man distilling rosewater with me in the Arts Centre courtyard explains that he’s visiting his mother in Perth but now lives in Kyoto where he studies Japanese gardening; he plans to visit Iran, and tells me that word ‘paradise’ comes from an old Iranian word meaning ‘a walled garden’.

Beyond the images, objects, samples of water and even their containers (which are also metaphors for the fragile vessel of the body itself), Museum of Water is a collection of stories; and as with Siren Songs, driven by the power of voices. This was brought home to me most vividly on Sunday morning, when I participated in the Walyalup Water Walk along the Fremantle shoreline, led by Noongar artist and storyteller Sharyn Egan, and accompanied by singer and sound artist Mei Sarawati, musician Matt Aitken and the Koondarm Choir. Listening to the songs of First Nations peoples, and hearing stories about coastal land-features and broken songlines, I understand more clearly than ever before how country and story, body and voice are one. Sharyn tells the story of how a giant ancestor – some say a crocodile, but she thinks a specimen of megafauna, and I speculate about a giant goanna – came down from the north and did battle with the river snake Waugul who bit off his tail; how that became the natural limestone barrier that partially blocked off the mouth of the Swan River and made it suitable for fishing by Wadjuk-Noongar people; how O’Connor dynamited the barrier to make the harbour deep enough for commercial shipping; and how this led to the salination of the river and its ecosystem upstream.

As Mei, Matt and the choir sing, I notice artist Amy Sharrocks become emotionally overwhelmed, and feel myself similarly affected. ‘It’s the idea of these voices,’ she shares with me, ‘connecting us all across the world,’ and she tells me a story about her daughter back in the UK singing a Nina Simone song – ‘a white girl singing a black woman’s music, and being connected through it to women everywhere’. Later on the walk, before leading us all in a song about knowing your cultural roots, Matt Aitken says: ‘We’re all indigenous from somewhere.’

*

From voices back to bodies again – and the participatory dance/trance work Attractor. It’s an exercise in pre-personal, tribal group-identity that crosses the boundary between performers and audience and doesn’t use words, but employs voice in a singular and heightened way.

Created by Melbourne choreographers Lucy Guerin and Gideon Obarzanek for eight dancers from Townsville-based company DanceNorth in collaboration with live Indonesian music duo Senyawa, the work is inspired by a trip Obarzanek took to Java where he witnessed a ritual trance ceremony during which members of the community became possessed by the spirits of the dead and were then exorcised by shamans. In the last fifteen minutes of the show, volunteers from the audience who’ve been equipped before the show with earpieces delivering unrehearsed verbal tasks join the dancers onstage. Needless to say, your Festival Navigator couldn’t resist being one of them.

It’s an extraordinary concept; Guerin’s distinctive, tightly-wound choreography is gripping; Obarzanek’s interest in formal hybridity is everywhere in evidence (especially at the end); the dancers are phenomenally skilled and committed; and the musicians are transfixing – one playing an amplified hand-made string instrument, the other doing amplified vocals inspired in equal measure by heavy metal, traditional throat-singing and animalistic grunts and growls (one powerful duet involves a solo dancer contorting her body as if possessed in interaction with the vocalist). As with Beyond Time, the work unfolds as a series of scenes, which have no particular narrative or thematic content other than an evolving relationship between individuals and the group, insiders and outsiders, which eventually expands to include the audience participants.

I loved being a part of this work, and wished I could have seen it again without being a participant; a friend and colleague who came with me had exactly the opposite wish; such is the nature of desire; but we made up for it by comparing notes on our experiences afterwards. As a performer, I found myself in a fascinating borderline state of threshold-consciousness during the first part of the performance while sitting beside my friend in the audience watching the action onstage and waiting for my cue to join in. As for sharing the stage with the dancers, following the instructions and losing myself: pure joy.  

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