Vitals spoke with sound artists and composers Cat Hope and Jason Sweeney, about their extensive experimental music practices and their current works in development with Vitalstatisix.

Cat Hope is a composer, sound artist, performer, songwriter and noise artist. She is a classically trained flautist, self-taught vocalist and experimental bassist. She is the director of Decibel new music ensemble, musical director for the Australian Bass Orchestra, and currently Professor of Music at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia where she is Head of Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music. She is developing her new opera Speechless with Vitalstatistix and Tura New Music, and will present showings of the work-in-development with us on 28 and 29 July.

Jason Sweeney is interdisciplinary practice in the last 17 years has been in the emerging, risk-taking and constantly developing fields of digital art and technology, music, sound installation, performance art, interactive community art projects, online art, curation, experimental film and screen culture. As a composer of electronic music, he has also been releasing music internationally with two bands, Panoptique Electrical and Pretty Boy Crossover via the record label, Sensory Projects. His new work, Climate of Cruelty, has been commissioned by Vitalstatisix for Climate Century.

Vitals: For those not familiar with experimental music and sound, and new music, can you each tell us a little bit about this field and its influences and communities in Australia?

Jason Sweeney: To be honest, I came to this world of experimental music through playing in bands and the DIY culture of pop/punk. I imagine Cat will be able to give a really good potted history of this field better than I! I’m just lucky enough to be exposed to this rich culture of sound and music through different events and festivals, past and present, such as Liquid Architecture, What Is Music?, TURA and the incredible work that such artists as Gail Priest have been doing to collect and anthologise the Australian history of experimental music.

Cat Hope: Australia has a wonderful and rich history of experimental sound and music practice that is acknowledged internationally. I have written about how important it is for a healthy cultural fabric here.  Every state in Australia has a community of experimental practice, but how much the different strands – improvisation, sound art, new music – come together or stand apart depends very much on each state. Where I come from, Perth, they are intertwined making it a great place to make music focussed on sound.

What kinds of platforms are there for your music and art, say in public, commercial, independent and/or academic worlds?

CH: I found that experimental music isn’t really a commercially viable activity in Australia. It survives in funded, academic and community environments.  It pops up every now and then in public forums – public art or large scale festivals. But it is difficult to get it reviewed or discussed outside academia. It’s a shame, because often, it’s really fun!

Work by established experimental sound practitioners such as Amanda Stewart (voice), Jon Rose (all manner of violin) and Ross Bolleter (ruined piano) is very engaging and rewarding.

JS: A great deal of my sound-based art works have existed online via net projects. It’s sort of how I began to get really interested in sound art. So there was an immediate portal to creating works that were audio driven, interactive and publicly accessible. But since those beginnings I’ve connected to different spaces and opportunities that are either by commissions or self-driven.

Right now, a lot of my focus is on being a musician who plays gigs and releases music – it’s where it all began really. Somewhere along the way I got swept into the art world but I know that my real home is in music venues and in the ‘industry’ of bands and recording artists. And it’s a great challenge because since I first started playing in bands way back in 1991, so much has changed and labels are fewer and those that have remained are less able to take risks.What’s more, it’s an incredibly saturated world of new music, new bands, new recording artists – which is exciting but daunting for both maker and listener. But I’m swimming in that pool and hoping to come up for air soon.

Cat, Speechless is a very ambitious new work and it is your first opera. Could you tell us a little bit about it?

CH: I have always loved opera, but until recently could never imagine writing one. It just seemed too old and stuffy for me, even new ones I had seen. I’ve spent time living in Italy and that helped me to love the form and the way it can entangle everyday life.

Then I began to think of the reasons opera was important to me – its large scale, its interrogation of important themes around the human condition, the formulae and it how it all works together. That helped me realise I could make an opera – one of my own, relevant to my time, my experience, the important themes of the current human condition of which I am a part.

I needed a bit of courage and confidence that my own way of making music could make something meanings. I think it will be the first animated notation opera.

Jason, you have a new collaboration called Winter Witches. Could you tell us about that?

JS: Winter Witches is a live band and recording project that I do with my partner, Em König. We actually started using that name as a DJ duo but over the last 6 months have transitioned to focusing purely on song-writing, performing and being an active band on the live circuit.

Our music is driven by the intimate collaboration between Em and I.

He and I spend most of our spare time writing, rehearsing and developing new material at our home studio. We’re developing live sets all the time and we’ve got a bunch of gigs coming up this year. We’re also writing our debut album which is currently under the working title “Masc”.

Jason, Winter Witches’ project Climate of Cruelty is addressing a huge issue, and one some find hard to talk about or accept – the human consumption of animals, and the cruelty and environmental destruction this causes. It may seem daunting to make an artwork about this – how are you approaching it?

JS: Well, it’s certainly daunting. How do we commemorate and memorialise the animals that have died at the hands of humans in order to literally feed our insatiable desires? Both Em and I are passionate animal rights activists and practicing vegans so it’s sometimes hard for us to simmer down the heat on our fury when it comes to this subject – but doing it through music is actually a perfect way of communicating this often dark and despairing material.

I suppose our task as musicians and song-writers is to keep a focus on the commemorative aspect of the work. We want to keep the work as open as possible to allow audiences to listen and to reflect upon this difficult subject.

What we don’t want to do is just pour guilt upon our listeners but rather open up their ears, hearts, minds and eyes (through added visuals and the performative aspect of the work) to the present sadness – but also find potential hope that one day we as humans will realise we don’t need to partake in industrialised animal suffering in order to satiate our cravings.

It’s also just a cold, hard fact that the livestock industries and factory farming practices are contributing far more to emissions and environmental destruction that any aspect of transport or other industries (the ‘popular’ culprits of climate change). So we’re finding ways to incorporate animal memorials set against some facts that may shock and surprise our audiences… hopefully into beginning a process of understanding and moving towards personal change.

https://soundcloud.com/winterwitches/swollen

Cat, what has drawn you to make a work about children in detention? Why is the work wordless?

CH: ‘Speechless’ is my response to people who have had their voice taken away. The work is not really about them, and I am not speaking for them, rather – I am trying to express my own response to some of the terrible things that are happening in Australia. I have felt so helpless in the face of them, this is my attempt to act in a personal way.

‘Speechless’ is a ‘noise opera’ that uses the report Gillian Trigg’s oversaw for the Human Rights Commission, ‘The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in detention’ as its basis. But the work responds to people who have lost or are challenging their ability to be heard in Australia more broadly – from women, to indigenous people, to refugees. I was keen to know how music – without words- speaks, in this specific instance.  Through my own attempt to respond, can it offer others a way to respond too?

Cat, this year you have moved from Perth to Melbourne to take up the position of Head of Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music – congratulations! You’ve been forging some new directions and initiatives at the School – can you tell us about this?

CH: Yes! I have started by introducing quotas for the performance of music by Australian’s and women into the final year recitals of all performance students.

I am striving to make Australian music– including the study of the complex, rich, mixed fabric that defines it now and in the past – a key to the school’s identity.

Through this I hope to create graduates who engage with a music making that is linked to who we are, how we fit in the world, and enable greater equity of opportunity for all that take part in the making of Australian music.

Jason, you have a body of work that addresses silence and quiet ecology. In the face of distressing global politics, increasing levels of anxiety, and social media addiction, what is the field of quiet ecology offering?

JS: Essentially the field of quiet ecology is offering both a physical manifestation and a conceptual realisation of ‘quiet’ that in order to survive as a species we need to keep finding the balance between calm and chaos. It’s been a long-term project that has allowed me to engage with a global community of quiet seekers, a wide and diverse range of people who are invested in pursuing a better world through advances in ethical and smart architecture, explorations into acoustic ecology and sound preservation, silence/quiet as imperative requirements for introverts, and to help those with acute anxiety and the treating of mental illness.

My hope is that this work has a low-volume resonance into the future and contributes to the ever-growing desire for a quieter world.

Cat, this is the first time you have worked with Vitalstatistix; Jason you have worked with us many times! You will both be undertaking residencies with us as part of the development of your works, later this year. Residencies and labs are a big part of what we are offering artists this year. How are residencies valuable, and what are are you looking forward to about working with Vitals later in the year?

CH: I have done a number of residencies during my career, and their value really depends on what else is happening in my life at that time. But the common factor they all offer, if you are open to it – is focused time. With my new position, this residency is so valuable – it gives me a block of time away to really focus on this project. I can’t imagine getting it completed without a residency opportunity.

I am looking forward to being absorbed in making work with a great team of people for two whole weeks!

JS: Residencies are so important for artists and projects. They allow a slow-burn approach to creativity, rather than just rushing out product.

They allow collaborations to unfold and find their shared language. You can really start to understand who your creative family is through residencies.

Both Em and I are looking forward to having dedicated time to work with Jennifer Greer Holmes, Geoff Cobham and Sebastian Tomczak and to really begin to build Climate of Cruelty into something beautiful, compelling and strange.

What are you each listening to at the moment?

CH: Well, you will be surprised to know – contemporary opera!  This includes works by Anne Le Baron, Eryk Abecassis, Thomas Ades, Hermman Nitsch, Fausto Romitelli, Gerogy Ligeti and my usual rotation of obscure Ennio Morricone albums and songs by Low.  Oh – and a revisiting an old favourite, Adriano Celentano’s  Prisencolinensinainciusol.

JS: My favourite albums at the moment are ‘Party’ by Aldous Harding from New Zealand and the new album by Venezuelan musician/producer, Arca. For me they are the best albums to be released this year. I’ve also just recently been introduced to the wonders of Ivo Dimchev who is an incredible queer musician and performance artist from Bulgaria. He’s all over Youtube. Some of his songs will break your heart.

Vitalstatistix spoke with artists Nicola Gunn and Steve Mayhew about their thoughts on theatre making and collaboration, other obsessions, and their current projects with Vitalstatistix.

Nicola Gunn makes contemporary performance that combines text, choreography and visual art in a self-generated impulse to tell a story or explore a form. In June she and collaborator Tamara Saulwick will undertake an Incubator residency with Vitalstatistix developing an ambitious new performance called Super Imposition. They will present showings on 30 June and 1 July.

Steve Mayhew is a director, dramaturge, curator and creative producer with many interests including regionality, dance dramaturgy and digital theatre. In 2017 he is working with Vitalstatistix to produce a series of projects co-presented with Performance & Art Development Agency, an organisation co-founded by himself and Vitalstatistix Director Emma Webb in 2015. This year Steve is also co-curator of the 2017 Australian Theatre Forum, alongside Alexis West.

Vitalstatistix: Tell us about something you are currently obsessed with?

Nicola Gunn: I am thinking a lot about shame and humiliation lately because of another work I’m making. But I generally have the same three recurring thoughts that I suppose you could say I’m obsessed by – and those thoughts are about work, getting old and dying alone.

Steve Mayhew: Wow it’s pretty busy inside my brain at the best of times… Here’s a list…

• Twin Peaks S3 (David Lynch is back with an 18 hour dream sequence and it’s so excellent to be in his world again)
• Cultural safety and the impressive first nations festival that was Yirramboi in Melbourne
• Cher and ageing female icons in the entertainment industry
• How we might talk openly with honesty to constructively shift Australian Theatre into new and exciting places?
• The dystopian futures as presented in 1984 (the stage play and the film) and Mr Burns (the stage play)
• Master of None S2 (Aziz Ansari is seriously addictive)

Vitals: You have each travelled quite a lot in recent years; what kind of perspective does this offer you about the arts in Australia (if any)?

NG: Our funding mechanisms are good, comparatively! (Although it might also depend what Australian state you live in.)

SM: I was in Paris, a place where art and culture just oozes out of everything, on November 8^th 2016 the day Trump was elected and I began that day in a bit of a daze, not wanting to get out of bed and transfixed to the Deutsche Welle TV station’s German influenced indignant and shocked commentary.

I eventually dragged myself outside and found myself surfacing from a Metro station and I suddenly felt this compulsion to visit the little Statue of Liberty that I had a sense was nearby.  You see 40 years had passed since I had last visited Paris as a child of 7 years and so I was having this almost déjà vu recollection of knowing exactly where I was.  I quickly located it on Google maps and I wasn’t far away at from where it stands at the end of the Île aux Cygnes, so my 40 year retained memory was pretty good!

I got there and then I looked up at Liberty almost apologetically and asked ‘what the fuck happens now?’

I then walked to Palais de Tokyo to see an immersive and participatory work by Tino Sehgal that (PADA commissioned) artist Chris Scherer was working on and performing in.  A part of the work involved me talking to a child aged about eight years in which she asked the very simple question “What is progress?” that led me to reflect expansively on what had happened in the world that day, she passed me onto a young man who carried on the conversation and after a while he passed me onto a woman about my age who passed me on to an elderly woman who was in her 70s.  All the while we carried the conversation as we walked and talked in this huge picture-less gallery space.  Finally the woman left me standing alone once she conveyed her happiness at being able to live by the beach and not worry as much about things, suggesting that maybe I should to.

Walking back to my apartment after that experience I recalled Nicola’s moral conundrums and complexities about the duck in Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster.

I suppose this story is a long way round of saying that the type of art experiences I love, and the life I aspire to lead, is one where one is informed by the other’s permeation.  I suppose when you travel you can be more susceptible to having that type of experience just occur, whereas at home in Australia I often feel I have to separate it, section it off and MAKE TIME for it.

Vitals: Nicola, tell us about Super Imposition. What is the work exploring and where are you at in its development going into the Incubator residency with Vitals? How are you approaching your residency and the opportunity to show the work-in-development in front of an audience at the end of the fortnight?

NG: We’re coming at the project from slightly different perspectives around the idea of ‘controlling the narrative’ – who gets to control the narrative and who gets to decide what’s in the public’s interest, as opposed to what’s of interest to the public. Primarily we’re interested in the confrontation of our practices with that theme in mind – and what kind of work it might generate.

We watched this amazing interview of Helen Mirren by Michael Parkinson from the 1970s and Helen Mirren said, “You are who they say you are and you are who they think you are.” Or something like that. Helen Mirren said something like that in an interview with Michael Parkinson in the 1970s when he asked her what she thought of all the media headlines alluding to the fact her sensuality and her ‘figure’ overshadowed her acting ability.

Parkinson asked Mirren if it was true, all these things said about her in the press, and that’s what she said. “You are who they say you are and you are who they think you are.”

Vitals: Nicola, this is your first collaboration with Tamara Saulwick. In the past you have made series of works through collaborations that explore form as well as ideas (such as your recent works with dance artist Jo Lloyd, Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster and Mermermer). Can you talk to us about how you approach these types of collaborations – is it like a duet or a duel or a bit of both?

NG: Oh um probably a bit of both. Collaboration is hard and I don’t agree with this idea that a collaboration is about finding accord or consensus; I think it’s often the conflict of materials that is most interesting.

Vitals: Both of you tend to play multiple roles in any given project that you are working on. Nicola, you explicitly state that you take responsibility for each of your productions from concept to realisation. Steve, you often blur lines between artist and producer.

NG: I’m not really sure how to answer this. I make performance as a writer, director, designer and performer and it’s always been like this for me because that’s the way I choose to work. I don’t want to be defined by one role. Of course, I would love an administrator to take on the day-to-day running of my company (of one) because I am inundated by grant writing, budgets, tour producing, pitching and it’s beginning to be a bit overwhelming and I fear my artistic work is suffering as a consequence.

Unfortunately our funding system hasn’t quite caught up with contemporary practices; I won’t be recognised as a company or eligible for organisational or structural funding until I become incorporated and get a board. And this, I’m sure, comes with its own set of problems.

SM: In the year I graduated from university (OMG 26 years ago!!!) I realised that I could be much more than just a theatre director and that it was actually only a very small part of how I could participate in art making.

I’ve purposely made decisions in my career so I could gain experience in the so called ‘non-artist’ side of the arts – you know managing arts companies, programming festivals, producing art works and art projects and programs.  I’ve done it to understand the environment we operate in and the leadership that is required to navigate it.

I suppose you could say I’ve approached those roles with a certain ‘artistry’ combined with ‘strategy’ – call it ‘creativity’ if you will.  I’ve done creative residencies and collaborate with other artists so as to satiate my ‘creative’ and ‘artistry’ chops.

I’ve approached making the recent soundtrack for the work in progress Cher in a similar way to how I have helped produce it and assisted in giving its dramaturgical shape.  Whenever I do anything with anyone I ask the same questions of us all: WHAT is it? WHO is it for? WHY is it a thing? WHERE is it? WHEN is it? and HOW should we do it?  Oh … and … none of these questions have to be answered in full immediately or from the start, it’s often in the making that you find these answers.

Perhaps it has always been this way for many artists or perhaps it reflects something about current economies and modes of art making – what do you think?

Vitals: What are your thoughts about theatre in Australia at the moment? How do you feel about the function of theatre, or art, or how it might critically engage with the world? How is theatre being reimagined? What are some trends and interests and dilemmas for theatre makers that you are experiencing or hearing about?

NG: Recently I was invited to a meeting to discuss ‘the lack of opportunities in theatre available to women, people of colour and gender diverse theatre makers.’ Unfortunately I was unable to make it, but would be interested to know what the outcomes were.

The kind of things I have been thinking about recently are the lack of opportunities for career progression as an independent artist in Australia. The idea of continually applying for project funding every year is an extremely depressing and demoralising proposition. So what does career progression look like for an independent artist?

SM: All I can say is that everyone must pay attention to the First Nations companies that have recently received four year funding through the Australia Council across the Theatre, Dance and ATSIA Sections.  Yirra Yaakin, Ilbijerri, Marrugeku, BlakDance, Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, Moogahlin and many more.  These companies are overflowing with excellent ideas and stories to share, often in art forms that converge, blur and combine.

Vitals: Steve, this year you are co-curating the biennial Australian Theatre Forum, which will be held in Adelaide in October. Can you tell us a little about ATF in general and how you and co-curator Alexis West are approaching this year’s Forum?

SM: I’m really excited about co-curating ATF with Alexis – we’ve had some great laugh and tear filled discussions working on it.

Three days is just not enough to really give justice to all the amazing thinkers and makers out there to have their voices heard (especially from our First Nation’s artists listed above).

An incredible amount has changed since the last one at the beginning of 2015 – funding and organisational landscapes changed overnight in May 2015 and then again in May 2016.  So we’re thinking we will begin there: looking at the last two years, examining and celebrating our actions and the foundation it is providing for us as we move forward.

ATF will be held alongside OzAsia and this also gives us the opportunity to invite an Asian point of view for comparison and influence as a part of our very ‘Australian’ discussions and issues.

There are some important discussions we believe we need to nurture through the forum, such as the evolution of an AMPAG framework and the retrieval of the women in theatre discussion, to name only two.

The EOI process for independent artists is now open and we really encourage them to apply NOW.  We want to structure the forum so that a number of independents are leading the discussions.  We are also inviting all the festivals, small-to-medium and major theatre organisations to bring and support an associate artist or producer to attend, encouraging the future leadership of our sector to be a part of the conversations now.

Vitals: What do you value about Vitalstatistix in the current arts landscape? What role can small organisations play in supporting independent artists and art form development in these lean, interesting times?

NG: Vitalstatistix has played an intrinsic role in supporting four of my projects now, through either residencies or presentations. One of those works will be touring to Europe, Canada and Chile over the next 12 months. The support artists receive from organisations like Vitalstatistix is not just project-based but it’s a long-term investment in an artist’s practice. I personally value the space and time Vitals offers: for me, creating in a residency model away from my home city is the most productive way to make work.

SM: Vitals is SO important to Adelaide and South Australia in these times.

It’s one of the very few organisations in this state that is constantly engaging with individual and independent artists practice, giving them a solid and safe platform to take risks and innovate.

People have to realise that this platform is very VERY different to a theatre company that is run by an Artistic Director who is fundamentally leading a development or rehearsal processes with a group of independent or freelance actors, designers to their vision.

Vitals’ current platform provides a multiplicity of voices, actions, experiences and strategies that are creative and artist led.  It effectively acts as circuit breakers for these times where a certain kind of self (and often government led) aggrandisement in our arts and cultural landscape creates an ever infuriating and ridiculous caudal lure.

Vitals: What are you each reading or listening to at the moment?

NG: I just finished reading Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit and before that, I read The Faraway Nearby by the same author. At the same time I was reading Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. I’ve been listening to this Canadian podcast called Someone Knows Something about unsolved crimes. I have a weakness for true crime. I’m terrible with music. I still listen to the radio.

SM: This year I have been impressed with these ear worms…

• Memories Are Now by Jesca Hoop

• Mourning Sound by Grizzly Bear

• Green Light by Lorde

• Saturnz Barz by Gorillaz

• Shine A Light (feat. Thaddillac) by Shabazz Palaces

• The Puritan (Julianna Barwick Remix) by This Will Destroy You

This piece about why some countries drive on the left side and others on the right is actually quite an interesting overview of empires, wars, swords and camel trains…thanks to Sascha Budimski who posted this on his Facebook page recently.

Vitalstatistix spoke with artists Mish Grigor and Rebecca Meston about feminism, new writing for performance, the value of residencies and their relationship to Vitalstatistix.

Rebecca Meston is a South Australian-based writer and theatre-maker. Her work has a particular focus on contemporary storytelling, tragi-comedy and the exploration of subversive female voices. In May Rebecca and her creative team will undertake an Incubator residency with Vitalstatistix, developing a new performance work called Drive. The team will present showings and talks on the 12^th and 13^th of May at Waterside.

Mish Grigor is an artist whose work investigates the relationships between popular entertainment and experimental art practices. She has an ongoing fascination with new writing for performance. In August Mish will co-lead this year’s Adhocracy residency project, Second Hand Emotions. Applications by South Australian artists to join this residency close on the 29^th of May.

Vitalstatistix: Each of you is engaged in new feminist writing for contemporary performance, sometimes in a collaborative process with other artists. Can you talk about your process as a writer? 

Rebecca Meston: My theatre practice began at PACT centre for emerging artists in Sydney –where I began exploring how I wanted to write, and the type of processes that fit with my ideas. At this time I worked with very rigorous practitioners like Chris Ryan (Sade/Marat), and Nikki Heywood (No place. Like home). In this black box space opposite a railway line in Erskineville, we created brand new work in a deeply collaborative way, pushing ideas and experimenting with form.

Since then I have created a number of original shows, just-about-always in a collaborative way, and with artists from a range of disciplines including writer/director Daniel Evans, sound designer Nathan Stoneham, choreographer and dancer Leah Shelton, comedian Nikki Britton, clown and theatre maker Hew Parham, performers Ray Chong Nee, Kate Skinner, Amy Ingram and Miranda Pike and Brisbane-based dramaturg Saffron Benner, who is a champion for the seeds of original ideas and where they might venture on stage. In 2015 I was awarded first prize in HotHouse Theatre’s Solo Monologue Competition for my piece Last of the Corsetieres about a very complex lingerie fitter named Gloria.

Mish Grigor: My process as a writer is messy, unformed and constant – I have hundreds of half-filled notebooks with indecipherable sentences. Recently in Britain I was at the theatre and someone pointed to an empty chair next to me, saying: “Is anybody sat there?” a sentence structure that I found delightful at the time.  I noticed it in my notebook this morning, surrounded by three boxes and four ticks, with an arrow from the next page saying ‘USE THIS. GOOD.’

I’m not sure where it’s going, but I suppose it’s useful to know what you like.

I ALSO WRITE IN ALL CAPS IN FIRST DRAFTS, NOT SURE WHY. IT ALLOWS SPACE FOR A SECOND DRAFT THAT LOOKS DIFFERENT MAYBE?

When it comes to turning my musings and weak jokes into performance material, I think it’s a strange alchemy of formal experiments and weird hunches that force a sentence off the page and into action.

One of my favourite things is co-authoring a piece with someone. I think because I started making performance with POST when I was eighteen, I’ve learned to think best when with, or against, other brains. It seems bonkers to me that one person can form an idea, and birth it into the world perfectly formed. I don’t know anyone who works that way, even novelists, so I suppose it’s about finding the right place on the sliding scale of collaboration for each project.

V: What is the place of humour, comedy or satire, in your work or work you love?

RM: Satire, along with contemporary clowning, bouffon and comedy, is where the truth and the most devastating and heartfelt parts of humanity in art live. Stripped-back, ugly, shitting the bed, everything-Instagram-feeds-aren’t, honest truth. It’s the only place that can be truly funny, but also that holds any real meaning. All five seasons of Louis C.K’s Louis (but particularly the 5^th) is a perfect example of this.

More recently his tragedy Horace and Pete with Alan Alda and Steve Buscemi, mines the territory of nostalgia, time, politics and grief – and somehow captured a feeling of hopelessness ringing so loudly in the lead-up to the US election when it was released.

On stage, the creation and performance of Dave, by Zoe Coombs Marr, is triumphant in provoking deep humour and thought in equal measure. I really, really like Dave. He’s likable.

And if you’ve ever seen it [Dave], you’ll know what an accomplishment of performance and character creation this is, given that in Dave she’s pulling apart the complexity of misogyny and ingrained sexism. Yet for the entire show s/he is charismatic, sincere, surprising, and truly laugh/cry funny.

MG: As a human I find laughter a useful strategy for survival in a world where days regularly seem insurmountable. As an artist, I think humour is a nice way of getting instant feedback from an audience – you really know that you’ve lost people if your ‘quip’ is met with stony silence… As an audience, I think I’m seduced by jokes into reconsidering the banal or taking the pressure off awful awful realities.

I have to say I am also suspicious of the potential tyranny of searching for laughter in an audience. I think we do this a bit too much in Australia sometimes.

But then again, life is hilarious. The construction of such everyday things – museums, dinner parties, queues, Le Snacks. How did we start doing things in certain ways? And how did we teach each other the rules? So much time is spent exercising rituals of nonsense, I can’t help but laugh.

V: What are some of the most interesting discussions and debates within feminism, for you right now? How has your feminism changed over time?

RM: A key cultural touchstone for Drive has always been Thelma and Louise, Ridley Scott’s 1991 revolutionary film, as it tracks a female road-trip across America. It’s so boring to keep banging on about this, but the film is revolutionary because the story was written by a woman (Callie Khouri); at the time of filming Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon were 35 and 45 respectively; they talk to each other a lot on screen; and their pursuit is about something other than a man, or men, or being validated by having someone put-a-ring-on-it. This film is now 26-years-old.

During the last International Women’s Day a lot of friends posted pictures of Beyoncé on Facebook and her lyric, “who run the world? Girls”.  After the critical first turning point, when Thelma suggests that they turn themselves in, Louise says, “Who’s gonna believe us? We just don’t live in that kind of world” and then Thelma’s final line, “Something’s crossed over in me and I can’t go back…I mean, I just couldn’t live”. That this film is so one-of-a-kind still, and tells such a pertinent, relevant story, and that the same old power structures across all of the institutions remain the same, is hugely motivating for me, and the work I hope to make.

MG: I think it would be strange for someone’s feminism not to change, because it’s a lived experience, rather than a dogmatic belief system. My feminism right now is totally the feminism of a white, thirty three year old, Australian who makes angry art, who takes holidays and who has no dependants. Some of those defining features may change, some won’t.

I recently found myself sitting in between a seventeen year old still in her school uniform and a sixty five year old sociologist who had fought many public battles. They were locked in argument about their feminisms, about extremism, about revolution, about naivety, about change. They were both relishing driving each other mad with their different perspectives.

I think that the most interesting debates right now are the messy ones, the angry ones, the ones where intersecting ideas at cross purposes sit right in a loud conflict. I used to want to ‘solve things’, but these days even clarity sounds like the patriarchy talking.

V: Rebecca, can you tell us about your new work Drive? What fascinates you about the real-life story it is inspired by?

RM: Drive is exploring the 2007 story of astronaut Lisa Nowak – as its point of departure – to make a highly physical theatre show. In February of that year, seven months after she was launched into space on the Discovery shuttle, Nowak drove for 14 hours from Houston to Orlando to confront her lover’s much younger lover, while wearing a wig, trench coat and glasses, and was subsequently charged with attempted kidnapping and initially, attempted murder.

I live in regional South Australia, so started thinking about this story a lot when driving across long stretches of freeways and highways at night amid trucks and utes and a world and language of men – the world seeming so big and so terrifyingly small at the same time.

These thoughts were combined with an ongoing interest in biography and autobiography and the dance between truth and facts; in the mythology of NASA/space travel; and the mythology of women having it all. I was also intrigued by disguise and alter egos and the question: how can a woman so accomplished, so at the top of her game, fall so far from grace?

V: Mish, you have been presenting your solo work The Talk over the last year or so. Can you tell us about this show and the experience of taking it to different audiences? 

MG: In The Talk, I ask audiences to re-enact with me a series of interviews I undertook with my family about sex and sexuality. Presenting my work most recently in the UK feels at once entirely instinctive and completely alien. There’s an artistic lineage (one of ‘live art’) that lands me back there quite comfortably, and yet the cultural and social conditions are complex mysteries.

The Talk is also a properly confessional overshare of a show. Performing something so intimate, full of inside jokes and wobbly family politics, so far away, has created a new tension in the work that I’m still getting my head around.

Some things fall flat (they don’t know what Pizza Shapes are!) and other things grow enormous in a new significance.

I’ve also been gobsmacked by the survival instincts in the UK performance scenes, soldiering on together against all odds.

V: Each year for Adhocracy, Vitals host a collaborative residency project where guest artists lead a process or creative development with participating South Australian artists. Rebecca, in 2014 you participated in this residency (in that year a project called Future Present, led by Rosie Dennis.) How did you find this experience and what is the value of this annual opportunity for local artists?

RM: The experience was extraordinary. At the time I had a 5-month-old baby (with me most of the time), and this project allowed me to return to my practice and engage with one of the most brilliant arts makers in Australia. This would not have been possible without Adhocracy.

It’s also where I worked with artists like Ashton Malcolm, Josie Were, Meg Wilson, Susie Skinner, Edwin Kemp Attrill and Alysha Herrmann for the first time – who have all become critical people to either work with or watch. Plus, I was developing work about one of the most urgent and critical issues to date – and in fact, the ideas we grappled with then, and ideas I started turning into story, have never left me and I hope to push them further in coming years.

V: Mish, also in 2014, for Vitals’ thirtieth birthday, you spent time with us developing your residency-made work Man O Man with local collaborators, after first presenting this performance event at Arts House, Melbourne. Can you tell us a bit about this experience and the work itself?

MG: In ‘Man o Man’ I invited Anne Thompson, Josephine Were, Celeste Aldhern, and Jane Howard to think about what might happen on the last night of the patriarchy. We were also joined by Meg Wilson, Gemma Beale, and Sophie Byrne.

The project, which also had a Melbourne iteration, was about providing a fantastical notion as a starting point for generative writing and the creation of performance possibilities.

It was also a context for a bunch of angry feminists to sit in anger together.  I say without irony that it was one of the most special times of my art/life.

V: Mish, you are co-leading this year’s Adhocracy residency project Second Hand Emotions with SJ Norman and Sarah Rodigari. You will be joined by up to ten local artists, to explore the theme of ‘love and feminism’. What are you looking forward to with this residency?

MG: Last time I was at Vitals I started to learn about the feminist histories of the company and of the area. I think I’m looking forward to delving more into that. Also Sarah Rodigari and SJ Norman – what legends!

V: Rebecca, how are you approaching your Incubator residency for Drive and the opportunity to show the work-in-development in front of an audience at the end of the fortnight?

RM: Working with Roz Hervey and Larissa McGowan, dramaturg Saffron Benner and two very vital performers Ashton Malcolm and Jo Stone, Director Sarah Dunn and I are excited about prizing upon the material to find the scale and the stakes of this story.

It’s a true collaboration and we’re working from the ground up. As I’ve spent almost ten months researching this world, reading everything I can get my hands on, watching endless rockets blast off into space, it’s feeling like a very charged moment in time: turning all of this reading and writing into theatre. And to be honest, it’s a relief to finally have other people to share my obsession with.

V: Other than championing feminist performance and art (which goes without saying!) what do you value about Vitalstatistix in the current arts landscape? What role can small organisations play in supporting independent artists in these very lean times?

RM: Vitalstatistix is a centre for new Australian work that’s original, progressive and often developed from scratch on its beautiful wooden-floor boards. Like PACT was for me as an emerging artist, Vitals is a safe space (space to fail, and home away from home filled with like-minded souls); a space of deep exploration and risk; a space to challenge yourself and push your potential. In this current arts landscape – but also political, social, global landscapes, that are screaming out for original work that responds to the here and now,

Vitals invests in artists, understanding that new work takes time, nurturing, and a space for ideas to reach their proper fruition.

MG: What I observe in Vitals is an investment in practice, an investment in long term conversations with artists that might take many forms across a lifetime. Generosity goes both ways in this model – Vitals works hard to provide a space for artists, and the artists work hard to honour opportunities – as well as being ambassadors for the company elsewhere. This is very special in what feels like a tumultuous time to be an artist in this country.

With the funding bodies struggling to reassemble after the lacerations of recent political tyrants, namely the defunding of the Australia Council for the Arts by the current government, and the resulting instability. With organisations squirming to survive whilst doing more for less, I think it’s important to remember that as artists we are, in some ways, at the bottom of the food chain. We love our job so much, we feel enormously privileged when we are given space to voice our ideas or to be seen – and yet our survival can be entirely precarious.

We must be sure that we’re not becoming perfect neoliberal subjects, pleased to work always and wherever, without pay or protection or sometimes even community. Small organisations can be instrumental in valuing the place of artists who might otherwise be at sea in these circumstances.

I think things are changing in the Australian arts in ways we cannot quite see yet – these last few years have been a storm we’re still weathering. And the last eighteen months in politics, near and far, seem farcical and tragic. I think everyone is scrambling and determined and relentlessly stubborn in our fight to continue, to listen to each other, and to find resilience in solidarity. Also, coffee helps.

V: Current favourite feminist writing (fiction or non-fiction)?

RM: This is almost exclusively via the stage: Emma Beech, Patricia Cornelius, Betty Grumble, Briony Kimmings, Zoe Coombs Marr, Adrienne Truscott. Then there’s Carrie Brownstein’s memoir Hunger makes me a modern girl, and a world I just didn’t want to leave.

MG: I’m always hesitant to name a ‘favourite’, but this week I’m sitting in Karpathos, an island off Greece. I’m staying in an abandoned yoga retreat owned by a Norwegian but currently squatted by a Romanian gardener. I’m saying this partly to boast but also because it gives me plenty of time to have four or five things on the go – I’m reading Rachel Cusk which I’m loving, Siri Hufsted’s book of essays ‘Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women’, and the Documenta catalogue that’s looking at cultural imperialism as a curatorial context. I’m revisiting Bojana Kunst and Elena Ferrante for research. And next I’ve got Sarah Schulman’s ‘The Gentrification of the Mind’. In that mix there’s lots of good thinking.

Vitalstatistix spoke with artists Chris Scherer and Larissa McGowan who are both developing solo dance works through a partnership between Vitalstatistix and Performance & Art Development Agency (PADA).

Chris is a South Australian-born cross-disciplinary artist and performer currently working between Berlin and Australia. Larissa is a SA-based choreographer and dancer, who has worked and toured widely with Australia Dance Theatre and now works independently.

Vitals: Could you each tell us about your artistic practice?

Larissa McGowan: I am a contemporary dancer and choreographer and I love challenging myself to find new body pathways. I am always working to develop movement that I haven’t explored before. This is always going to be a challenge as the body wants to develop and learn your natural body pathways. I find it difficult yet exhilarating to challenge it.

My artistic practice is always made more interesting by using a collaborative process. I work closely with a director and a dramaturg to challenge my ideas and to develop a stronger overall concept or vision.

Dance is a visual and ephemeral world that allows us to feel things through our body. I love being able to evoke a feeling for an audience through the emotive qualities dance can offer.

Chris Scherer: My artistic practise is always jumping around and is super specific to what I’m working on/with. My story is basically this: I danced as a kid and then quit when I became more interested in theatre as a teenager. I went to acting school at AC Arts and then, once I had graduated, decided to go through the dance program to get in touch with my body again.

The goal at the time was to do more experimental theatre, not to become a dancer… and then it kinda just happened. I was really into making films and devising work and then I moved to Europe. It was only when I was there [in Europe] that I realised I had a pretty flexible skill set.

I don’t think I’ve ever worked in a traditional artistic form, like dancey-dance or a classical play (which I’m starting to think could be kind of fun) but it does make it hard to articulate a clear practice. I just do what I do, I don’t think I can be any more articulate than that. Whatever I feel like the work needs, I give it a go. What do they say? Jack of all trades, master of none?

V: You are each developing solo works about iconic artists who inspire your own artistic practice. Chris, your work Duncan responds to the philosophies of dance pioneer Isodora Duncan; Larissa, your work Cher explores the persona and characters of this singer, actress, icon, and ultimate pop chameleon. Could you tell us about these women and why you are investigating them?

LM: As a woman, I am constantly drawn to those iconic female figures that have somehow paved a way for empowering us. I love how Cher has been able to move with the times. She has remained relevant by doing this and has repeatedly reinvented herself through various personas. She is able to transform by breaking convention and challenging the system while remaining a constant in a male dominanated entertainment industry. She has qualities that rings true for me as an artist and help me question my ideas, work and presence within my industry.

CS: I have been researching Isadora for quite some years now. In 2014 I made a dance work with AC Arts students called Izzy D, which was actually shown as a double bill alongside Larissa’s work.

I find Isadora to be such an incredible woman. The more I read about her, the more she inspires me. Isadora was really such a radical and pivotal artistic figure in history. Her work is hugely significant for many reasons, but to me, I am continually impressed by her commitment to, and belief in, her work. She really had a dream for dance.

She was a social and political radical. She practiced free love, advocated for women’s rights and was a living symbol of revolt and revolution. She was an educator and an intellectual.

V: How are you each exploring these women through the art works you are creating?  What is your approach?

LM: I feel like Cher is more of a totem for the overall theme of the work. The work is forming ideas around reinvention and changing with the times. The work can explore all of these things and play with gender roles; power and dominance; popular culture and identity.

I think this will be a work that shows transformation and power but also over-the-top entertainment. And with the range of stimulus to work from it will be a crazy experience – I am particularly excited to play with auto-tuning.

CS: I’m using the work of Isadora Duncan as an artistic score. I’m looking at her contributions to art; her influence on other artists of the time and her work as an educator. I’m trying to capture her radical, intellectual and political qualities. And I am really trying to honour her ideology, and working method, while generating something suited to a contemporary context in my own artistic voice.

I’ve been inspired by Isadora, but in Duncan I have tried to use an expanded choreography that questions what her work could have been now.

Isadora encouraged her pupils to have a sense of authorship – so I have taken plenty!

V: You have both spent time working and training in South Australia; what do you think is particular about being here as an artist?

LM: I think SA has an excellent range of artists from many fields and this allows for a more collaborative way of working. For a close-knit community it really thrives on developing ideas and finding unique ways to put art out there.

SA is the festival state but this also happens all year round on different scales and I believe people here are keen to see work of any level.

CS: I love the sense of community in South Australia. I have always felt really supported by peers and people working within the industry. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Adelaide is smaller (than say Berlin) and a lot of artists have come through the same institutions here. I think it generates a warmth and long-term relationships within the industry.  Well this is my experience – to be honest I don’t know what people say behind my back! 😉

V: What are some current key influences (ideas, collaborators, other artists, other forms or experiences) on your practice? What excites you about dance globally at the moment?

LM: I have recently been interested in popular culture themes to help an audience understand, or be more engaged in, the abstract world of contemporary dance. Movies, music, video games – anything that connects us to our own reality or has become a part of our everyday life – I am able to combine these themes with an abstract style of movement.

I am also still fascinated by the human body and how it moves. So I guess I will always come back to making movement that tests how far the body can actually go.

CS: Over the last few years I have been ping-ponging between a theatre context and a visual art context in the work I’ve had as a performer. Although there is a vast difference in what I do, and how I do it, I have to remind myself that my body doesn’t really morph that radically. Working in this way has been a major influence in the type of work I am making with Duncan. I have this diverse performative history, and now I am just selecting what to pull out. I can’t deny that working with colleagues, and for employers, has really helped shape the work I am making. Their influence is too strong to ignore.

What excites me about dance at the moment is that it is super open. It can be anything.

V: Your creative development with Vitals/PADA will end with a public showing of your work-in-development. What are the benefits of putting work in front of an audience while you are in the process of making it? How does it contribute to your process?

LM: It is always a blessing to test ideas on an audience. I feel a work is only finished, or fully put together, once it has been observed. Art is about connecting and I can only develop my ideas further after constructive feedback.

CS: For this process specifically, having a work-in-progress showing for the public really shifted the way I approached the development with Vitals/PADA. I have spent many months working on Duncan, but I was really caught in my head. I was working through it conceptually, doing a lot of research – diving deeper and deeper in an attempt to build what I hope is a strong ideology – but once I got to the studio I knew I had to apply it.

This really was a major step and was super hard. I don’t know if I would have made this step if I didn’t have the push of having to show something. Of course I have been in this position before, but with this project specifically it was a major challenge. When you are working alone, sometimes a strong push ‘like now I really have to do it’ is what you need.

V: You have both worked with larger institutions, as well as having your own independent practice. What is the value of working with smaller organisations like PADA and Vitals –what do you get out of a relationship with an organisation?

LM: It is extremely necessary to work with smaller organisations. I feel like the work is strengthened even more by the people curating them.

The close relationships between independent artist and smaller organisations often means working much more closely together on a project, the artist’s vision, and the overall outcome. I also like seeing my work performed in places and spaces I wouldn’t normally use. Smaller organisations are truly amazing at finding a way to make art happen.

CS: I love working between larger and smaller institutions. Firstly the type of audiences you reach are very different. You only have to look around at the audience within different sized organisations/venues to realise that.

Generally speaking, I have found that when working with smaller organisations (such as Vitals/ PADA) the artistic community is more concentrated in these venues. This is always nice, especially in terms of constructive feedback and for a sense of community and support. The support from within the organisation is also important in facilitating the project to the final stages, rather than just programing finished works. Additionally, working closely with people within smaller institutions has helped me clarify and refine my ideas.

On a practical level, the types of support I have received from Vitals and PADA would not have been possible from larger institutions. Whether the programs are there or not, I am still developing my practice and my career is still evolving. But in saying this, I think working within larger institutions and for ‘larger’ names has also given me experiences that have made opportunities available in smaller institutions. Somehow for me, this has gone hand in hand.

V: How do you feel about the role of artists and art in the current conservative global climate?

LM: Hmm, I have personally found it very challenging to make work and develop ideas with the funding opportunities currently available. I would like to know that my work has a way to be seen and toured after developments or small performance outcomes. I always feel sad knowing that a work only has a certain life span due to lack of money or assistance for independent artists.

I also feel like dance has become so commercialised that contemporary art is becoming a style that people just don’t go and see because they think they don’t understand it. I hope people can become more informed about art and the positive impact it can have on a healthy mind, and creativity and a wider view of the world. It can teach us to be open and question our own feelings and opinions about the world.

CS: We gotta keep going!

But, really, it is one of my motivations for making Duncan. Given the dominant ideology of our times: neoliberalism, I’m interested in addressing notions of individual freedom, democratic artistic space and the lineage of revolutionary trailblazers.

V: What’s up next for you, after us?

LM: I have a second stage development of a work called Owning the Moment. The work looks at our needs and desires to acquire things. It allows the audience to bid and remove parts of the work from the show; allowing them to change the viewed performance for the entire audience. I’m making it in collaboration with Sandpit – we are currently exploring how this acquisition can be made possible with technology.

CS: I have some really nice gigs coming up – I can’t talk super specifically about them as they have not been publically announced – but I have work in Bulgaria, Russia and Switzerland taking me through to the end of the year. After that, who knows?

There are also shows in Berlin with Schaubühne, where I am a guest artist, and I have a few new projects up my sleeve.  I plan on getting stuck into my own work between travels as I try to keep up with making while working for others.

You gotta mix it up!

Vitalstatistix spoke to artists Emma Beech and Ashton Malcolm about what they hope to get out of their yearlong residencies with Vitals this year.

Both Emma and Ashton are Adelaide-based theatre makers and actors who have a continuing relationship with the company. This year Emma Beech is Vitalstatistix’s Shopfront Studio artist and Ashton is one third of Points in the Plane along with Josephine Were and Meg Wilson.

Vitalstatistix: Can you tell us a little bit about what you’re hoping to develop with Vitalstatistix this year?

Emma Beech: In a change for me, I am looking not to develop a new work but to develop some new ideas and new ways of engaging with Port Adelaide and its people. I’m also looking to see how Vitals and its Port location could interact creatively with other companies internationally. What are those Port towns across the world doing? How can we speak with each other through art?

Ashton Malcolm: We are hoping to come out of this year with a clearer idea of who we are as a performance making collective. We love working and experimenting together, and have been collaborating as a trio for the past few years. So it feels like the right time to focus on our identity as artists and how we would like to shape our work and our collective going forward. And maybe we’ll even come up with a name!

V: What does it mean to have a yearlong relationship with the company?

EB: It means supporting the company, it means bringing a new set of eyes with a lot of fondness and seeing what myself, Emma Webb and all the others in the mix can cook up for the company in the present and in the future – in these highly un-plan-able times. How can we keep bringing what we do and the place we do it (Waterside) to life? The year is a chance to have one hell of a long conversation.

AM: I am so excited and feel very lucky to have a yearlong relationship with Vitals. Vitals have always been a shining light for me. Ever since I was at uni studying drama, Waterside was a place to see experimental work, to meet contemporary artists and to build new ideas. It is also where Josie, Meg and I first collaborated, so it feels very fitting (and rather romantic) to be there again this year, as we grow and develop into a more established collective.

V: Emma, how do you feel now you’ve had some time since Life is Short and Long wrapped up? And how do you think using the shopfront will shape your engagement with the Port this year?

EB: I feel like I’ve done the very best I could with the artistic process that I have, and I have now come to the point of putting my practice in a very attractive box and putting it on the shelf. I’m proud of what we made and did, and now is the time to soak up ideas, put out some ideas and work with others on what they are doing – to allow some space for me to come back to my practice at another time.

I see it as a whole year of working for and with the company, doing what needs to be done as guided by [Vitalstatistix Director] Emma Webb.

The shopfront: from working in that space during Life Is, many people passed the door to ask me where the shops were, what was I doing, to collect mail and gain access to the hall. I think the presence, any presence, will remind people that this space is very much alive and kicking and even kicking goals. I’m excited to be the interface.

V: Ashton, how do you juggle collaborating and working independently? 

AM: It is always a matter of pulling out diaries and finding any time to be together that we can! We are all very driven and hardworking, which is part of why we work well together, but it also means that we are all very busy! Usually though, we block out some time throughout the year to develop new projects and to present work. Applying for grants together is helpful too because it forces you to plan timelines well in advance! The best thing though, I think, is how honest we are with each other and how much we support each other’s individual careers. When independent work comes up we tell each other, we celebrate our personal joys, and we do our best to be flexible and make it all work.

V: How do you balance the competing demands of your creative work with non-artistic pursuits?

EB: Ahhh, I don’t really. I’m writing this after a big day on the home front with my eyes bulging from their sockets. So I wouldn’t say balance. I’d say it’s the thing I have to do, want to do, and so I squeeze it in and around the other incredible life I have running around at knee height. So I don’t balance, I squeeze.

AM: I am in a very fortunate position at the moment in that I spend most of my time working on creative pursuits. When I’m not acting or making work, I work at the Starlight Children’s Foundation providing positive distraction for sick kids. That is highly creative too so all of my different worlds seem to compliment each other quite well, which helps. I’ve also had to become very good at compartmentalising – every morning I check my diary and whatever I am doing that day gets my full focus. If I think too much about balancing it all, it just gets way too stressful!

V: What do you get out of working with Vitalstatistix that you don’t get out of working with larger companies?

EB: A sense of continuity, a sense of community, a sense of possibility, a sense of being regarded and a sense of building something together. But also sometimes, a sense of how much harder it is for small company to have to pull together outcomes that are of as high a quality as the big companies. A sense of struggle. I do value that challenge.

AM: I’ve worked with Vitals a lot over the years and what I’ve always loved is the incredible freedom to take creative risks, to make brave work and to be unashamedly who I am. The great strength of a smaller team is that you get to know everyone very well. Vitals gave me my first big acting job out of uni (Cutaway: A Ceremony) and I’ve always felt like myself there.

They allow artists to be all that they are, to develop and grow, and to embrace their complexity. As a young woman, this kind of space can be a very hard thing to find- both at work and just generally in the world.

V: What else are you working on this year?

EB: I’ll be working at the SA Museum, I’ll be brushing up my straight acting skills because I love the idea of someone handing me a script instead of conceiving the script, writing the script, getting funding for the script, and then performing the entire script. I’ll be working on getting fit and eating really well and being nice to people.

AM: It’s going to be a very fun and busy year! I’ll be working with Vitals again in May to develop Rebecca’s Meston’s new work, Drive. I’m also making and performing in Patch Theatre Company’s new work, Yo Diddle Diddle, performing in a return season of McNirt Hates Dirt in the Dream Big Festival, and touring Grug with Windmill Theatre Company.

V: Do you see your art and processes as political? What do you think is the role of arts is in politics?

EB: I never have seen my process as political; I see it as social. Social may well be political but my first call is social. Social, because talking to people is connecting and connecting to strangers in this way is not a regular daily thing for most people but the practice of it – for all and sundry – could bring some big changes in the way we all do things.

People say the social is political but I think the political is social, and if we really knew how to speak and if we really knew how to listen, we could be doing a few things quite a bit better.

I don’t know if art does have a role in politics – art is art and it can be political and the act of making art is counter cultural, but where politics and art meet for me is uncut and unclear, and relates differently to different artists and different artworks.

AM: Yes. Especially the work I make independently, and with Meg and Josie. I am and always will be a fierce feminist, so that undoubtedly comes through in all of my work. I actually think it is kind of impossible to live in the world as an aware, engaged, human and not have that affect your work. If you are a politically engaged human, who is making work for a contemporary audience, then it can’t help but be of this world and time, which means it is bound to be politically and socially engaged. I think the role of arts in politics is to playfully provoke, to question, to open conversations. In my dream world, people would see a show and then spend the rest of the night in the foyer bar not talking about how good the actors were or how big the set was, but rather about the ideas raised.

Vitalstatistix spoke to dance artists Atlanta Eke and Erin Fowler about the changing face of local and national dance practice.

Atlanta is a Melbourne-based choreographer and dancer who is developing her new work I CON with Vitalstatistix in November. Erin is a choreographer and dancer, co-director of creative hub The Mill, and recently participated in Vitalstatistix’s Aeon residency.

V: Could you each tell us about your artistic practice?

Atlanta Eke: I am a dancer choreographer working in Australia and internationally. My work with dance is currently project specific, and has been for some years. I work in collaboration with fellow dancers, artists and arts administrators in variety of contexts. Having recently had opportunities to present work in exhibition spaces, I am interested in how an exhibition space and timeframe can be utilised as a resource for developing dance.

Erin Fowler: My practice is based primarily in dance and music but has a strong focus on collaborative and audience driven/immersive work. As founder and co-director of The Mill I have the privilege of being surrounded by over 38 artists from a wide range of disciplines and am constantly inspired by their creative projects and passion. I am always looking for ways to place myself out of a ‘normal’ context. For example, I find myself a lot more free and uninhibited to create work when I am surrounded by artists of a different discipline, or am in a different country or culture, which has certainly been a big part of my practice over the past few years.

More specifically, as a choreographer, one of my biggest influences has been my experiences in China training in traditional martial arts including tai chi and kung fu. Tai chi allowed me to experience a more internal sense of energy in the body and this led to a continuing fascination with the energy systems of the body and how they can be expressed through the external medium of dance. I am interested to see if these subtle energy states and shifts can be perceived by an audience.

I also approach choreography as if I am writing music.  I think my brain works more in that sense than in physical generation of movement.

I see patterns, harmonies, polyrhythms through movement and am almost mathematic in my approach.

V: Atlanta, you have presented your works in black box/performance and white box/gallery spaces, as well as sites such as Cockatoo Island. Your work has been described as performance art meets dance. How do you feel about these descriptions?

AE: Is it like Juliet’s contemplation on Romeo’s status as a Montague? “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Or is it rather more like “roses really smell like poo poo-oo”, Outkast’s revelations that Caroline thinks her shit don’t stink?

My work is with dance and choreography. Performance art, by the very nature of its title, requires an audience. I practice dance mostly without an audience. As my work is presented in a variety of places, a part of my role as choreographer is to consider how these places can produce different opportunities for an audience to experience a dance.

V: Do you think there is a specific, new interest in experimental dance in Australia, or do you think it is simply that artists are making works in different ways and more readily working across disciplines? Or perhaps both?

AE: Dance is a collaborative process, especially the relationship between dancers and choreographers. The Keir Choreographic Awards was the first opportunity I had to work with artists outside of dance, this was an invaluable experience. The chance to realise ideas beyond the limitations of the body is very exciting and now the impetus for ongoing collaborations with composer Daniel Jenastch, video graphic artists Ready Steady Studio, visual artist Claire Lambe and lighting designer Matthew Adey from House of Unholy.

There are a plethora of reasons for the increase in the variety of contexts dance is presented. I could speculate that a growing number of visual artists are intrigued by dance, and interested in working choreographically. Maybe all alone in the studio, they long for its collaborative nature.

Dance will continue to expand its horizons. Australian dance is currently generating an enormous amount of interest, from local audiences to major international presenting platforms, as a growing number of independent Australian dancers and choreographers are producing genuinely experimental work with great urgency.

V: Erin, you recently participated in the creative development of Aeon, through a residency with Vitalstatistix. Aeon is described as “a listening manoeuvre”, a participatory experiment of sound, movement and group dynamics. Tell us about that experience and the process of working with a multidisciplinary team of artists across sound, choreography and social engagement.

EF: Aeon was a fascinating experience of a multidisciplinary project that brought artists together from a really exciting range of backgrounds as well as places. For me, it was a joy to be able to enter a project purely as an artist, rather than having to facilitate or manage aspects of the project, which has been my main activity over the past few years through The Mill.

The experience unfolded and became more and more comprehensible to me as the two weeks progressed. It taught me the value of patience and time and of allowing things to emerge organically rather than forcing an outcome which I think I often fall victim to, especially when you work in low budget contexts where you feel a pressure to deliver an outcome immediately.

It also really fuelled my fascination with audience driven works and how to lead, guide or prompt audience members during a performance. For this project we weren’t able to speak which made it more challenging in one sense, but also really interesting for me as a dancer to see how we can push this non-verbal communication. It’s also interested in this phenomenon of the crowd and how people’s behaviour, even at a reasonably experimental and open-minded event such as Adhocracy, is still governed by responding within a perceived range of “appropriateness”.

V: Atlanta, what is your experience of working across the ecology of dance platforms in Australia (larger dance organisations through to independent artist-run-initiatives)? How important is this ecology of different sized organisations, with different artistic and curatorial approaches, to developing the careers of artists like you?

AE: I continue to work across a variety of contexts and each dance is shaped by the conditions of its production. I have learnt an enormous amount through continuously navigating different territories for the development and presentation of my work. The opportunity to work with a diverse range of organisations has benefited my practice at large and provided each individual work a unique time and place to be realised.

A multiplicity of experiences is essential and an indispensable element to a sustainable career as a dancer and choreographer.

V: Erin, the independent dance sectors in Sydney and Melbourne, for instance, feel very different from here. There also seems to be flux and change in the dance sector in South Australia. What kind of platforms, initiatives, organisations and development do you think is needed here in South Australia?

EF: It is definitely an interesting time for dance in South Australia. I am really passionate to develop our independent sector so that we can properly celebrate, promote and champion the work of our talented artists and provide platforms for them to make and work in SA, rather than having to find supplementary work interstate or overseas as is often the case. The flow on effect of that happening is that there are few independent work opportunities for dancers who then also feel the pull interstate and overseas. It then becomes challenging to feel like there is an active and energised sector outside of our peak festival seasons.

That said, the industry has been coming together in really exciting and encouraging ways over the past year or so, and I am hopeful that this will lead to some positive developments to support our SA dance artists.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the various problems and challenges and think it’s one particular factor or another that is the cause. There are definitely a string of things that I think need to happen to support the sector more sufficiently. For example a dance-specific hub in the CBD to support independent practice, more pathways or opportunities to present work in an experimental, contemporary arts venue, etc. However, I think as a first step, the sector coming together and articulating their needs and vision from within, rather than waiting for it to be dictated to them, be it through funding decisions or initiatives can only be a good thing.

If we can empower artists to create opportunities for themselves, to go after big ideas, and make things happen for themselves, then we are creating a culture of self-sustainability and independence that I think is going to be required of us more and more in the future.

V: Atlanta, I CON continues your interests in simulation, popular culture and the corruption of the present tense, which we also saw in Body of Work (your performance that Vitalstatistix presented at this year’s Adelaide Festival). Tell us about this new work.

AE: I CON is a performance interrelating the two themes of death and illusion to ask the question; what is contemporary? I CON is in long-term development, the first stage of development in 2014 was supported by Lucy Guerin Inc and Arts House.

I CON will explore methods of impersonation, learning how to impersonate artists who have died and artists that in dying have become iconic, beginning with Ian Curtis 1956-1980 (age 23). It is study of how artists of a particular time in history are perceived in the present day and ways in which they are immortalized through a culture of nostalgia and reproduction, in order to question the possibility for contemporaneity today.

V: Erin, tell us about the projects you are currently working on.

EF: I have a few of projects on the go at the moment.

I was fortunate to be invited to work with Australian Dance Theatre for their Ignition season earlier this year and created a short work, Epoch, inspired by Garry Stewart’s theme of history. It was an awesome opportunity to work with such talented and responsive dancers. We only had a few days but they worked so quickly and it was a really great experience. I am really excited to be able to undertake a second development with the company at the end of the year.

I’m also planning a second development of my solo work, Femme, which I developed as part of the Mill’s Choreographic Futures Residency in 2015 under the mentorship of Swedish based dancers Israel Aloni and Lee Brummer. The work has been a very personal exploration that touches upon ideas of beauty, self-control, perfectionism, anxiety and surrender. It’s a very vulnerable exploration of my relationship to my body, myself as a sexual being, and my own self expression. It draws on a number of personal experiences including my time as an international model during my teens, where external image was the main focus of my work, and which was an experience that affected me more than I perhaps realised until recently. Beyond that, it’s been a challenge I have set for myself to really find my voice as an artist, to not self-censor and to embrace my own expression.

The Mill is also about to undertake a residency in Indonesia at Ramah Sanur – a creative hub in Sanur, Bali. I am really excited about this project as Amber Cronin and I, along with six other artists from Australia and Indonesia will be collaborating to make a new multi-disciplinary work for a festival context over the four weeks. The Mill is really invested in long term, genuine international exchange, with projects in Sweden, Canada and now Indonesia so I am really excited to take the first step with this one in November.

V: For each of you, how do you feel about feminist performance and art? Do you feel there is a new generation of the feminist art movement? Do you think about these questions choreographically?

AE: My experience of feminism is that it is neither a tradition nor an aesthetic. Feminism renews itself all the time by necessity. It exists within a multitude of contexts and understandings that have never shared a collective consensus defining what it is and what it does. I am a feminist, therefore my work is inherently so.

EF: I think my perspective on this again comes back to some of my Daoist/Chinese explorations and recent work in Kundalini Tantra. Both of these fields see feminine and masculine energies present within everything – from individual beings, to the planet. I believe we currently idolise an unhealthy version of masculinity valuing outcome/progress/the individual/competition (patriarchy) leading to violence (war), greed (climate change) and inequality. I believe it is of benefit to all to shift our society and culture to cultivate more feminine traits such as introspection/intuition/community and feeling. When these qualities are valued in our society as much as our idolisation of what believe is an unhealthy version of masculine qualities then I think we will be in a much better place.

I see art reflecting this frustration with inequality in a whole range of ways. Some choose to respond to by “fighting” back, or “growing balls”,  essentially playing within the masculine structures, and I see a definite place for this. In the past I have been driven and passionate to do this both personally and through my work.

Choreographically, my thinking on this has led me to create from a much more intuitive place. At the end of last year I burnt out from overworking, trying to prove myself and taking on way more than I could manage. When I work from this place my creativity freezes. And so it’s only since tapping into my feminine essence and giving those qualities value over achievement and “fighting the system” that I’ve been able to create freely. Perhaps that’s my current version of feminism!?

I am a fan of Beyoncé as someone who is completely in the mainstream and who is “allowed” to embody a range of female archetypes that most pop starts are not. Beyoncé is one of the few in my mind who can be highly sexual and provocative, intensely powerful and independent, vulnerable, a mother, and is still able to perform for the president. I think this is a healthy role model for young women to not feel like they will be boxed into one or another.

V: Each of you has worked with Vitalstatistix this year for the first time. Like Erin’s organisation The Mill, one of Vitals’ functions is as a community for artists interested in new ideas and forms. What is the value of organisations that create this space for artists, particularly those that prioritise development programs?

AE: The emphasis on development programs at Vitalstatistix is imperative to the production of my work. Vitalstatistix provides the time for the rigorous research required for strong conceptual framework and the space for experimentation and contemplation in the creative development. Vitalstatistix provides a multidisciplinary meeting place where things are made possible.  Organizations such as Vitalstatistix that foster community, offer a range of initiatives, value experimentation and address intensity of experience are perpetually crucial to my work.

EF: It’s crucial that these organisations exist, particularly in South Australia. It’s wonderful that we have access to so many amazing festivals and international artists through being the festival state but I find that pathways for the development and intensive making of work in SA is less strong. I would love to see residency programs attached to each of the festivals or more pathways for local artists to engage with and be presented in these programs. This would also help with building an audience that can better understand the developmental stages of making work, or work that is more experimental in nature and aren’t just expecting big budget main stage works all of the time.

V: How is each of you feeling about the future of the arts in Australia at the moment?

AE: The future of the arts in Australia is already here, historically excellent and infinitely expanding into the unknown.

EF: The last 18 months have had some pretty distressing moments. It’s been frustrating and disheartening to feel like at a broad cultural and political level, our country doesn’t see the value of the arts. That the clichéd lazy bludging artist stereotype is still alive is tiring. But, to quote a cliché “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

During this time I have also really felt the artistic community band together, think more strategically, articulate our value and become more generous and community driven to support each other. I think if this can continue, combined with the support our sector deserves, then the future of Australian art is exciting and something I want to be a part of.

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Vitalstatistix spoke with performance-maker and conversationalist Emma Beech and curator, producer and director/dramaturge Steve Mayhew, who is also Creative Producer at Country Arts SA.

Vitalstatistix and Country Arts SA will premiere Emma’s new work Life is Short and Long, in Port Adelaide and Wirrabara in October.

Vitals: Could you each tell us about your current artistic practice?

Emma Beech: I say that my practice is essentially having deep and meaningfuls with (mostly) strangers and then re-telling the gold moments of those conversations in a theatre show that I create and perform in.

To be in a position where I created the most obscure of pastimes for myself into an actual art practice still surprises me.

The essential drive behind this practice though is about connection – connection through the knowledge and experiences of people we walk by in the street being re-created into an intricate theatrical yarn.  I am always, always more connected and therefore caring of a person or a thing or an opinion or a way of life if I know more about it.  This is my contribution to that opening up of ourselves to others.

Steve Mayhew: As a curator, producer and director/dramaturge, I often find myself in dual roles, where one part of the job is very technical and practical; ensuring agreements are signed, budgets are made or adhered to and meetings are arranged and held.  The flip of that is the role of a researcher, a thinker, questioner, strategist and outside eye.  It’s in that part where I often get to reflect an artist’s decisions and work back at them through discussion, consider larger themes, ethical concerns, and so on.

Over the past decade, inside and outside of Country Arts SA, I seem to have forged quite an idiosyncratic specialisation in three areas of interest where I produce, curate, direct or dramaturge digital / participatory works, dance pieces and works that embody regional experimentalism.

I have also been known to make sound tracks, most recently for Larissa McGowan and her work Fanatic with Sydney Dance Company.  I am currently working with NSW based director Alicia Talbot as a dramaturge/sound designer for a work that will premiere at Bundanon Trust’s Siteworks in a few weeks time where I will play live a DJ mix set of original and well known tracks to a six-hour improvised durational performance work.

V: Each of you has spent significant time working and living in regional South Australia. Can you tell us about some of your favourite places?

EB: Every place that I form a relationship with through work becomes a favourite place.  It adds itself to the list.

I loved Goolwa for its surprises and quiet passion, and I love Wirrabara (the town I am currently gathering stories from, three hours due north of Adelaide in the Southern Flinders Rangers) for its quietness, complexity and history.

SM: For food you can’t go past The Metro Bakery in Mt Gambier; they serve excellent cheap meals and their staff are always happy and friendly.  The Stone Hut Bakery in Stone Hut (on the way to Wirrabara) is also a find, when it’s open.  In the last 12 months I discovered Arrosto Coffee, boutique coffee roasters from Renmark whose ‘Columbia Hacienda Black Label’ is pretty tasty.  I always make sure I drop by Di Giorgio Wines in the Coonawarra, to top up my thirst for their sparkling.  When possible (unfortunately rarely), I love relaxing near the flowing waters of the Murray River and by the beach in Goolwa or Port Elliot during winter.

V: Artists and cultural experiences contribute to places, towns and cities, especially when they are embedded rather than imported. Place-making is the jargon. How do you think artists contribute to making places? And what are the dangers of expecting artists to revitalise places?

EB: I think my work is more about reinvigorating the relationship locals have to their place.  I think artists can help locals and outsiders to see beauty, to remember beauty and interesting details now forgotten or overlooked, through the reframing all forms of art provide.

It is a form of lovemaking, and artists do this lovemaking for a town with fresh eyes.

The issue I think with expecting artists to be place-makers is that there is a strategy to place-making which I think can halt the creative process and frame the re-experience of a place, even though art, into a sales pitch rather than an unique and chaotic artwork.  A sales pitch only shows the good stuff, and in art and life I would argue you also need complicated, unresolved and unnoticed stuff.

SM: Here are three tasks all artists, funders, gate-keepers, cultural shapers and the general public should familiarise themselves with before even thinking about place-making.

Firstly: Read ‘The New Rules of Public Art’ by a UK organisation called Situations.  (I just love these simple and direct tenets.)

Secondly: Equip yourself with an ethical and trustworthy practice and outlook in order to follow and/or accept the new rules.

Thirdly: Be brave, trust your instinct and don’t settle for the “I want one of those” or “This is the way I’ve always done it” syndromes.

V: Emma, Life is Short and Long is about crisis and resilience in three very disparate places. Do you have any advice about coping with crisis and developing resilience that you have learnt from your research for this show?

EB: It’s tricky.  There are many different approaches, of course, as there are different people; but I have noticed that an exterior crisis, one that happens to you beyond your control, tends to do a lot of work in developing a person. Developing in a wise way.

However, after a long enough time, if that wisdom is not continually cultivated and worked on, it will go away.  One must work at change, must work at resilience, on an almost daily basis.  You need to be prepared to make some choices about the way you live. Be flexible.  You need to know a couple of things that make you happy and keep doing them through any crisis situation and beyond.  And you can’t expect external circumstances to prop you up. They will, of course, always change, and from what I’ve seen, holding on to something too tightly – a thing, an idea, a person – actually inhibits resilience.

You must also fight for what you believe in.  This means knowing what you believe in and fighting for it; this fight will probably come to be fought at some time in your life.  And if you don’t find it, it seems that most people later regret it.

V: Steve, what are some of the most exciting regional arts practices and models that you are seeing at the moment around the country?

SM: The regional arts practices and models that excite me the most are ones that embrace local artists whilst looking to the nation and the rest of the world for collaboration, nourishment and benchmarking.

In terms of regional dance, Dance North (Townsville, QLD) currently with ex ADT dancer Kyle Page as their Artistic Director seem to be doing some interesting works.  It’s always worth keeping an eye on what Dalisa Pigram and Rachel Swain at Marrugeku (Broome, WA) are doing and Tasdance (Launceston, TAS) are very consistent with their engagement of nationally and local dancers.

As for regional theatre practitioners, I’ve been in conversation with Julian Louis from NORPA (Lismore, NSW) a bit recently and their work in development Three Brothers could very well be the next big thing.  I also keep my eye on students graduating from the Bachelor of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong (NSW), where Sarah Miller and ex South Australian and Red Shed Theatre alumni Tim Maddock and Catherine McKinnon lecture.  Lyn Wallis’ directorship at Hot House Theatre (Albury, Wondonga, NSW/VIC) is starting to take shape also.

I think my colleague Eleanor Scicchitano at Country Arts SA is really doing some excellent work in making regional visual artists extend their practice whilst at the same time dragging the many regional South Australian volunteer run galleries kicking and screaming into the 21^st century.  The biennale visual arts festival Cementa (Kandos, NSW) held next April 2017 is also growing in stature.

I admire the true experimentalism of The Wired Lab (Cootamundra, NSW) and Punctum Inc (Castlemaine, VIC) who have managed to embed their practice deep within their regional communities and still have time to nurture people in sound art and live art (respectively) through residences and their own projects.

V: There is both a global and a localised sensibility to Life is Short and Long that could be likened to a large tree – deeply rooted with long branches. For each of you, how does this analogy (deeply rooted with long branches) extend to the ways you work with artists, communities and other collaborators?

EB: I think for me it is knowing that for any story there is rarely a simple tie off.  One story goes on and on and on forever in a way.  So when you talk about deep and long I think this applies to every person I have ever told a story about.

When I collaborate with artists I think this sense of ongoing time, and timelessness, ends up becoming represented in many different forms in the work, and I hope we all work towards creating the anti to the ‘happily ever after’ myth.  With collaborators, I seem to find my people and stick to them.  Not because I feel we have to, but because I seem drawn to continuing this longness and deepness with them as well. We grow, our work grows, life goes on.

In terms of community, and how I work with them, it is so simple.  It is so simple, and basic, and ancient really, this oral story telling, this meeting and sharing our lives and then re-sharing them in a dramatic performance, and I think this relates to the idea you are talking about.

SM: I was only reflecting the other day to some other artists that I believe I discovered my fascination with a global and local sensibility between the age of eight and seventeen when my family dislodged themselves from an easy Adelaide suburban lifestyle and chose to travel across Europe and the UK in a small van for nine months and then immediately after, chose to reside in my great-great-grandfather’s house in Kadina on the Yorke Peninsula.

This literal local/global/local experience affected me at this young and formative age.  I have always been innately aware that there is a bigger picture to the smaller one and vice versa, that many things are connected and don’t happen in isolation and that the only constant is change.  This practice of zooming in and out seems to be reflected every day in my collaborative work and life.

V: You each have long-term associate relationships with Vitalstatistix. Emma you have developed and produced a number of works with us, been part of Adhocracy and you are also a very regular audience member! Steve, Vitals and Country Arts SA collaborate on projects each year and you have an artistic collaboration with our director Emma Webb.  What value does these types of long-term relationships between artists, organisations and collaborators hold? What do you see as Vitalstatistix’s place/role locally and nationally?

EB: You can see just what that artist is capable of and be ready to give opportunities to that artist when you can see they are ready.  This is a great gift for both parties.

I love knowing I can go to Vitalstatistix with an idea, go to Adhocracy with something really risky, and have a chance to try it.  That I am trusted, that I trust.

I think this builds an artist, it allows them to grow bigger and stronger and richer and that is good for everyone – for the art, for audiences, for travelling interstate / overseas even.  This is growth, I love to grow, and I think that long-term relationship allows this to happen.

I therefore feel that this says what Vitals role is locally and nationally – allowing artists to grow their flavour and style in a local setting, with its own nuances and details and quirks, and then getting them out there nationally to share in the artistic results of that.  Vitals is an incubator of significant proportions.

SM: Long-term relationships are built on trust and alignments of ethics. Collaborations are the building blocks to long-term relationships. Trust and ethical alignments lead to collaborations. It’s a bit Escher and Vitals is on the continuum of a Penrose Triangle.

V: How are you feeling about the future of the arts locally and nationally? What kind of arts initiatives and arts organisations do you think are most critical at this time?

EB: I am excited.  I can’t help it – I know now that this kind of shift we are seeing, this kind of change will bring something new and dynamic.  So I’m excited.  I think places that keep people supported, keep people developing are really important right now – there needs to be places to do our thing and audiences to see our thing and this is critical.

I also think that we need to become extremely smart and work out what we need to do to be the professionals we’ve always wanted to be, or to maintain what we already are, to be thorough, to be sure of what we are doing and why and that requires some attention, that rigor, and often we are busy busy making so that the space and time and money to answer those questions is not really available.

So seeing those become available I think will be crucial, especially in SA where I see there may be less options available to us to do this.  To be challenged to do this.

SM: South Australia seems to be currently suffering from a weird style of leadership that I think is unsure of itself, where it might be going, slightly inward looking and lacking confidence.  All played very publically through a very opposite tone on social media, which is constantly provided by certain leaders in the arts.

I find social media feeds fascinating.  You have your ‘broadcasters’, the “what about me’s?” this is the “everything I do other than work feed” or “this is the work I do” or “family family family” and of course “cats and star wars”.

I see the style of cultural leadership in South Australia and Adelaide to be very different to say Victoria and Melbourne who on the other hand seem to be developing and attracting a serious amount of diverse and measured leaders.  From the outside, it seems it’s about many and not just about a privileged few and their positions.  They relate locally with a national and international perspective, they have that global/local view, the ability to encourage and gently persuade with vision.

David Pledger is writing some excellent stuff of late – I really enjoyed this article…

And as an addendum I recently got caught down a rabbit hole around entrepreneurship. Listen to this Adelaide born podcast and then talk to me about the future.

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Vitalstatistix spoke with Melbourne-based artist Lz Dunn, whose work Aeon features as this year’s Adhocracy residency project, and South Australian artist and creative producer Alysha Herrmann who will be participating in the Aeon residency.

V: Could you each tell us about your artistic practice?

Alysha Herrmann: My artistic practice is a shifting mess of questions. I currently describe myself as a parent, writer, theatre-maker and cultural organiser.

I make things. I help others make things.

I am interested in projects that explore connection and vulnerability.

I am interested in projects that are cross disciplinary and are in conversation with non-arts experiences (like theatre + farming). I am interested in collaboration and experimenting and exploring and not knowing.

My independent works in 2016 have been intimate (for between 1 and 8 audience members at a time) and have delved into soundscapes/audio and installation rather than traditional ‘plays’. I am interested in theatre-making that blurs the lines between roles and focuses instead on what collaborators bring to the table and making something that wasn’t there before.

I am interested in projects that are in direct conversation with audience – that might be literally through live text message conversations, or by here and now subject matter or by ancillary experiences (like feasts and dress- ups pre or post show) – especially audiences who have felt left out or intimidated by theatre/art spaces/worlds. Regional communities and young people have my heart. I like urban discoveries and old people too.

I have stepped in and out of many roles – performer, director, producer, writer, co-designer, dramaturg – some roles fit more comfortably than others, some roles come more easily than others, some roles I have fumbled my way through.

Being in the room and on the floor making things is one of my favourite things. I like to say yes.

Lz Dunn: I’ve realised that what I continue to be interested in is creating experiences and spaces for people to move through. I get excited by quite large concepts and look for ways to craft a time and space that invites people to consider ideas through an experience of doing something somewhere rather than watching something happen. I’m reading a book at the moment, which compares Western and Chinese philosophies of time and processes of change, where I came across a phrase I really like. Rather than trying to create ‘being’ by insisting on precision and distinction, it speaks of a need to ‘advocate the outline’. I think this might be what I try to do.

Walking seems to recur as a form and birds as a theme. The possibilities of queerness are key too. In process, collaboration is really important for me. I have some key collaborators that I work with regularly (most of them are working on Aeon) and I really love the way things diverge and explode when I’m working with other brains and bodies.

There’s a generosity and reciprocity in collaboration that is really energising. I really think I get as much out of artistically leading a project as I do out of working to support and share someone else’s initial vision because I get to go places I wouldn’t have otherwise taken myself.

As well as my collaborative projects I sometimes make videos that either capture field recordings or field performances and I’ve started a solo dance practice over the last two years that has been really fun. I’m presenting my first public performance at the end of this year, which is very exciting and pretty terrifying.

V: Lz, Aeon is part of a body of work you have made that takes birds as an inspiration and is informed by queer ecology. Can you tell us about your interest in these fields of inquiry?

L: Aeon evolved from an earlier project called Flyway (that I made with Lawrence [English] and Lara [Thoms]) where I was interested in linking migratory birds with how we experience ‘nature’ in urban environments and our acculturated perceptions of boundaries. I’m interested in birds both personally (yes, I do enjoy some bird watching) and culturally. Birds in cities, like pigeons, are often viewed as pests. Still we accept them as belonging there but not in the ‘natural world’ beyond. Queer culture is also something that has historically been naturalised in cities–seen as the deviant product of human culture, not nature.

Queer Ecology is about questioning dominant ideas of what is considered ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’, by asking what powers influenced this way of thinking and who or what might be excluded or made invisible by that.

For me, birds have become this very visible, specific lens through which to meditate on interconnection, how we share space with humans and other species.

V: Alysha, you have previously participated in an Adhocracy residency project called Future Present with artist Rosie Dennis in 2014. Can you tell us your thoughts on the value of this annual residency opportunity for South Australian artists?

A: I’m still wrestling with the questions Future Present woke for me. That alone speaks to the value it had for me.

Fight this footprint/ with the fire in your fear/ the legacy in your belly/ we can begin this #futurepresent // #tinytwitterpoem 2014

I think that there are multiple points of value in the annual residency opportunity as a whole but the ones that most stand out to me are:

• Engaging with the practice and project of another artist – and specifically an artist from elsewhere – is particularly useful to spark new ways of thinking and working. Although artists often collaborate, we also often work in isolation or often work in familiar teams with people we trust. We don’t always get to see inside the process and practice of artists who might work in very different (or quite similar) ways to us. Working with an interstate artist/team can also open up a doorway to other interstate artists/ideas/collaborations.
• Meeting and working with other SA artists. Seeding friendships, future collaborations and networks of support. Stumbling upon those excellent local projects and people that you just aren’t aware of because your circle hasn’t organically found them by itself.
• Attachment to and nurturing of a relationship with Vitalstatistix as an artistic organisation and a creative community. The sense that we are not alone in these big hungry questions we are wrestling with. The opportunity to have our work and our voices amplified by something bigger than our own networks.

Since Future Present, I’ve employed other artists from that residency on projects I’ve Creative Produced, become friends with others, continued to share information, ideas and support with all of the SA artists, continued to be inspired by Rosie Dennis and the work of UTP and Vitals. Future Present was only two weeks but it had a significant and ongoing impact on me and my practice.

I came away from Future Present asking why art? Is that the best use of your time, does it actually achieve your mission? Or would you be better off using your time as an activist, a social worker, a teacher, a farmer?

So far I’m still making art.

V: Aeon is a site-specific work, which invites audiences on a sound walk. You both have experience making works for sites, whether that is parks, city streets, lounge rooms or other locations outside of formal performance or gallery spaces. What are some important things to consider when making a site-specific work?

A: Why are you making site specific work? I think asking yourself that question first of all is pretty important. Because your reason might be about testing a way of working, or about who your audience is, or about something else entirely. All of which can, and probably should, shape how you might approach making whatever it is. Depending on the exact specificity (loungerooms vs a particular loungeroom) I think spending as much time in that space as you can before you start making the thing is good. I think thinking about what that site might mean to the people/creatures who already use it and how your use might interrupt or challenge their use is really important – especially if that use takes power away from those who already have less power than you – that doesn’t mean don’t use it, but I’m saying I think we need to have considered those impacts.

Considering the logistics is also important – like where will I go to the toilet, what happens if it rains, what’s our evacuation plan, who do I need permission from to work here, am I okay with things being stolen or vandalised (and how does that change the experience I intend?).

L: I tend to work from a kernel of an idea or question that expands slowly. So the interest is often conceptual and may not be reliant on a specific site but the idea itself is reliant on considering the specifics of sites. To make site-specific work you need to be interested in the realities of working outdoors, in public space or in non-traditional art venues; it’s unpredictable and lots of elements are out of your control. This needs to be central to the idea and the form so that you’re not feeling anxious about needing things to be a certain way for it to ‘work’. It will always be different and that’s what keeps it dynamic.

V: You are both parents to young children/babies. Has the experience of parenting changed your perspective on art making or sustainable arts practice?

A: I have an almost 13 year old and a 2 year old. I became a parent for the first time before I became an adult – and before I stumbled into the arts – and it was my first child who actually led me to art making. I became a participant in a community arts and cultural development theatre project that was a co-production between Riverland Youth Theatre and Vitalstatistix about teenage mothers (which I wrote about for the Griffith Review in 2014). It transformed my life and led me into this rabbit hole of art making.

Parenting my second child has been different in many ways, because I’ve grown and changed so much and my life and its circumstances have shifted so significantly. There are questions I asked myself this time around that weren’t even on my radar in the slightest the first time around. Questions about gender and language and clothing and parenting practices and lifestyle that with my first child I just did what everyone else was doing, I replicated what my own parents had done. With my second child I questioned everything. I think if anything my artistic practice changed my perspective on parenting more than the other way around.

Having said that –

My youngest was 5 weeks old when I participated in the Future Present residency with Vitals. I was still breastfeeding, so expressing milk throughout the first week while they were home with my partner and then they were with us in the room during the second week of the residency. That residency was exploring climate change through the focus of primary production. Everything about that experience, from the themes, to the reality of having baby in the room while ‘making’ honed and shifted my perspective in myriad ways. It still hasn’t settled. I’m still discovering and figuring out what that means. What I have to sacrifice, what I don’t have to sacrifice, how I make, what I make, when I make, who I make with, where I make.

My perspective as an artist is completely shaped by my role as a parent though, absolutely, and I try to always name that in my bios and introductions because it does inform me as ‘artist’.

L: I’m sure it has but I’m not even three months into it–still in the magical twilight zone– so I might need to get back to you on that in another 10 months! But basically I think all artists are thinking about the sustainability of their practice all the time and parenting is just one version of a big life change. If you decide having children is also important, and you get the opportunity to make that happen, then you’re just really lucky. A couple of years ago I had a chat with an artist who is also a parent to three kids and she had just taken a bookkeeping job. And she saw that work as part of her practice too. She’s a trained dancer but is really expansive about what she brings into her practice – she lets everything she does have a creative value that can feed into her making process. I think it’s a great way to move through the world.

Saying that, I’m always scheming towards setting up a utopic art commune where my family and my friends can all live in some permacultured, beachside paradise where awesome humans from the big wide world come to stay so we don’t all implode.

V: Lz, you are an associate artist with Melbourne-based experimental arts organisation Aphids. Your Aeon creative team also includes some long-term collaborators. How has your connection to a group of artists and collaborators informed your practice?

L: Yes! I feel so fortunate to work with the artists I do and they massively inform my practice. I’ve been working with Lara [Thoms] and Willoh [S. Weiland] as part of Aphids since 2010, and Lawrence [English] since 2011 through our project, Flyway. Collaborating is really important for me; it means ideas can develop in conversation with other brains and that I’m constantly opening up to new possibilities and processes.

I think maintaining collaborations does take a lot of effort and as Aphids, Willoh and Lara and I have invested a lot in our collaborative relationship and worked really hard to keep making art together. I have huge respect for their brains and their art. In every project we do we learn more about our process and how our specific skills and interests complement each other. We all initiate quite different kernels of ideas but share key approaches and aesthetics, which keeps a healthy tension alive.

I think my work with Lawrence draws on his interest in the act of listening, particularly in relation to field recording. His methodology for combining site-specific sound and musical elements really resonates with the ways I approach the performative experience of moving through and relating to space–it’s somewhere between a tangible, factual, very specific encounter and a sort of dreamscape of infinite possibilities. We use Flyway as a reference point in Aeon a lot. That shared understanding that crosses over projects is really valuable.

Also, working with other people is mostly more fun. Important.

V: Alysha, in 2015 you won the Australia Council’s Kirk Robson award which recognises young leadership in community arts and cultural development. What do you see as the future for CACD, socially engaged and community-based arts practice in Australia?

A: I feel like I’ve been asked this question before and I didn’t have a good answer the other time either. I think CACD, socially engaged and community-based arts practice is always shifting and redefining itself and will continue to do so into the future. I see more and more CACD and related practice creeping into mainstream artistic conversations nationally. I see a stronger recognition for the hunger communities and audiences have for experiences that have relevance to their lives and experiences. I see CACD and socially engaged practitioners continue to have a key role to play in advocacy at every level and they are more nationally organised and effective in doing so. I see CACD work pulling major institutions into the here and the now and the conversations we all keep avoiding.

I see regional practitioners that stop taking every else’s advice and start forging their own identities. I see less organisations and more organised individuals. I see organised individuals inserting themselves into the work of non-arts organisations as integral and valued players. I see less money. Less ‘opportunities’. I see ‘opportunity’. I see smaller scale and larger scale. I see echoes of 20 years ago and promises of 20 years from now. I see continued commitment and increasing need.

How do each of you feel about the future of the arts nationally? What kind of arts initiatives and arts organisations do you think are most critical at this time?

A: I keep looking back and thinking about all the amazing opportunities and pathways and connections that got me to where I am now – so many of them no longer exist. So I am angry and demoralised and worried about the future, especially for young and emerging artists. But I also think in the biggest picture, the longer ‘game’ and how sometimes old structures have to entirely collapse to make space for new foundations. So I feel both disillusioned and hopeful. There is both grief and excitement. The challenges and complexities of this moment in time feel like an invitation to tear down and replace the things that are broken, to question everything. I’m not saying that’s easy. It terrifies me and I question my ability and skill to even contribute to that, but it feels important and valuable and ‘right’.

I think arts initiatives and organisations that foster collaboration and questioning and are local in action but global in thought are critical at this time.

Initiatives that actively question who is in the room.

Initiatives that talk to the here and the now and the future maybes. Initiatives that invest in people, not product. Initiatives that explore the borders and the boundaries and all the blurriness. Initiatives that make people feel invited and welcomed AND manage to also be thought-provoking. Initiatives that build on and learn from the past and imagine new futures. Initiatives that give artists and audiences a framework and a space to ask questions.

Initiatives like Adhocracy are critical at this time.

Organisations that are willing to stick their neck out for everyone who hasn’t been invited to the table. Organisations willing to challenge themselves and their own history. Organisations willing to champion others, even when those others might be competitors. Organisations who foster connection, community, conversation and a willingness to not have all the answers. Organisations who share. Organisations who dream big and deliberately and act locally and intentionally.

Organisations like Vitalstatistix are critical at this time.

I consistently look to Vitalstatistix as a source of inspiration, provocation and reassurance. Adhocrary as a framework is totally something I want to see stolen and copied in as many locations as possible. I’m not even trying to suck up.

L: I feel really confused about a lot of the decisions that have been made. It can feel like a bit of a disaster.

There’s obviously a whole plethora of stuff to rant about on this topic but just to focus on a personal perspective, my practice has grown absolutely through the support of small to medium organisations. Every key opportunity I’ve had has been enabled by organisations that, like Vitals, value experimentation and give emerging and established artists support to test out new ideas and forms. They offer programs that encourage process as well as production. They provide residencies, laboratories, workshops, classes, development programs as well as presenting artist’s works. I think it’s this range of activity that builds artistic connections and conversations. It’s as valuable for emerging artists as it is for established ones because it’s the cross-pollination of practices that keeps the whole community dynamic. I moved to Melbourne six years ago not really knowing anyone and it’s through local organisations like Next Wave, Dance House, Arts House, Lucy Guerin Inc. and Aphids that I was able to make connections with my local peers and art heroes. And that’s because they intentionally offer accessible programs to engage artists at various stages of their practices and in various contexts. They’re not operating behind closed doors. They invest in creating connections.

I think this residency program at Vitals is a great example of this. That we can come and work with local artists and share ideas and processes and experiment and play and then share with audiences is really valuable. That applications are open to artists and thinkers across disciplines broadens the dialogue. That it’s quite difficult and uncertain and that there’s a real risk of failure is also important. It takes a lot of consideration and effort to bring a group like this together and we don’t really know what’s going to happen and it’s not a finished work and we need to find methods for many people to establish a connection with a process and an idea that’s already underway but certainly not finished! That’s where the interesting and exciting challenges are and organisations like Vitals take that on because they value artistic risk. We all really need that.

I guess the positive side to the whole arts-funding debacle has been the energy and action it’s provoked within the arts community. People have been spurred into action and into being really articulate and vocal about the importance of what they do within the arts community and what the arts do within the broader social structure. It’s also prompting us to scrutinise the existing ecology and have these conversations and be advocates for what we all do and carry placards that yell, ART MATTERS!

 

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Vitalstatistix spoke with Adelaide-based independent artists Sasha Grbich and Jason Sweeney. Sasha is a visual artist, writer and lecturer; Jason is a singer-songwriter, composer and multidisciplinary artist. Both have long-term associations with Vitalstatistix and each is involved in our five-year climate change project Climate Century.

Climate Century asks artists to consider how will we commemorate and memorialise the climate century? The project includes a series of projects, commissions and events.

Join us on Sunday 17 July at Waterside for Climate Century – An Afternoon of Artist Talks. 

V: Could you each tell us about your artistic practice?

Jason Sweeney: At the heart of everything, I make sound. Melancholy responses to the world. In recent times my focus has returned to song-writing with my band Jason & Silver Moon. But the past has seen me making live performance, online projects, films and installations. I work hard every day to make life and art the same thing. To practice quietness, to embrace melancholy, to live within my means, to give back to the planet in some way.

Sasha Grbich: I am interested in the ways places, things, communities or stories contribute to an artwork happening. My works are open to their local worlds. For example, I have worked with singers to find and record notes for and from fragile environments, made works that respond to the flickering of light in the windows of urban streets, pressed vinyls of uncomfortable silences and broadcast soundscapes from empty rooms, abandoned buildings and moving shopping carts. I am currently building a ‘wind sound effect machine’ in order to respond to gales in upcoming performance and video works. These are the kinds of absurd and poetic acts I undertake to reflect on how I exist within the places and communities I am part of.

V: You are both based in Adelaide and maintain solo studio practices. What are your thoughts on the opportunities available to mature, contemporary artists in South Australia – what are the benefits and disadvantages of working here?

 SG: I go to work each day in my studio space at Fontanelle studio surrounded by wonderful artists and exciting half-formed things. I teach at the Adelaide Central School of Art and enjoy being amongst the vibrant art practices of my students and colleagues. My more personal communities also contribute to making my work. I collaborate with my brilliant partner Heidi Angove and try out new video ideas with my ever-patient sisters, friends and parents. I take great pleasure in these daily engagements within strong creative communities. Working with Vitalstatistix over the past five years has provided important, intense and rewording pockets of activity and openings to national and international art and performance practices. The benefits of working in Adelaide all stem from being part of close, collaborative and supportive industry and communities.

The disadvantages of working in South Australia can be illustrated through the example of recent Australia Council funding cuts. These upheavals have been debilitating to the small to medium sector in contemporary and experimental arts. In Adelaide my sector is small (although vibrant and exciting) – and it is very vulnerable.

JS: I’m an absolute advocate for Adelaide. It’s a place where you can still breathe clean air and make work without too much noise of cultural saturation.

In a world falling apart and a global population increasing beyond measure and pressurising the planet, I choose Adelaide as one of the remaining possible bastions of sustainable life, both in my day-to-day existence and in my work.

I need to be near nature all the time, so South Australia is a perfect place. I suppose it’s the ideal place for an introvert – and the internet connects me to all the people and things I need.

V: Sasha, as well as co-curating last year’s Climate Century exhibition, you made an artwork called Small Measures. Can you tell us about this work?

SG: ‘Stand in a place you feel to be vulnerable. Listen to the sounds happening. Now find a note, tune-in and hold it. Breathe. Hold a note again.’

This is the instruction I gave to volunteers from the Born on Monday choir when making Small Measures for Climate Century 2015. In some louder industrialised environments, the sounds sung became somewhat adversarial and lament-like. A sensitive registering of the small differences between places was played out in the variations between notes the choir members improvised. In the resulting video and sound installation the notes mixed unpredictably across the upper-floor of an old bank building. At once a love song and a lament, the work also held the feeling of ‘tuning up’ reminiscent of moments where a person and instrument (here a person and an environment) start a negotiation. In making the work I was driven by an image of sonography – the way ships tentatively feel their way along the ocean floor by bouncing sound off it.

V: Jason, can you tell us about Climate of Cruelty, a new commission from Vitals as part of the Climate Century commissioning process?

JS: Climate of Cruelty will develop as a song-cycle and live performance event working with writer Em Koenig and my band Jason & Silver Moon (with Zoë Barry and Jed Palmer) – as well as creating an online activist space, writing portal, and resource. It is a way to redress the balance for individual animals slaughtered at the hands of humans in environmentally-impacting commercial industries in Australia and globally.

In my own life, the time arrived when I needed to face the evidence of the history of cruelty against animals to literally feed our human desires; how the livestock industry exists because of our human need to consume animals; how such an industry has a major impact upon the planet, upon the environment, and upon biodiversity; and on the act of needless killing.

V: With climate change being the greatest challenge facing humans, other species, and the planet, there has been a burgeoning of artistic and cultural responses to this condition. Are there things to be mindful of when investigating climate change and the Anthropocene through art?

SG: I am excited by the potential of art to prompt new ways of feeling and thinking within this situation. A great example of this can be found in Sundari Carmody and Matthew Bradley’s collaborative work Winds of Increasing Magnitudes. During the Climate Century exhibition last year their huge semi-transparent silk flag (stripped of all the markers and signs that may suggest ownership or claiming of land) traced movements of air on sky. To visit the work, audiences trekked out to the windiest part of Port Adelaide where loose hair and scarves joined in the action of the flag. Standing in heightened awareness of the wind, people might remember growing up under the hole in the Ozone Layer, checking the UV index, and wondering at the air quality whilst inextricably breathing in. Experiencing Matt and Sundari’s work I was brought into new relation with memories and ideas while becoming sunburnt and windblown.

The ‘Anthropocene’ describes the current period of time in which human acts take on geological proportions. Like many artists, I understand my practice as part of ways of being in, and reflecting on, my world. It is no surprise then the condition of climate change has become a situation within which my own (and other’s) works act.

JS: In order to make responses about our planet as artists I truly believe there has to be equal response in one’s personal life. As humans making art about climate change, surely the only way to fully express an idea is to practice – fully – an investigation into the way one lives.

For me, I can’t make a work about animal cruelty and the adverse effects of the livestock industry on the environment, and then live a life that promotes cruelty: especially to animals. Climate of Cruelty is about being mindful that cruelty can often be silent or silenced or disguised as comfort, especially where the use, consumption, and abuse of animals is concerned.

I’m always confused when artists who say they are environmentalists are still contributing through excessive use of resources in their work, or are not working with recycled materials, or – dare I say – are not vegetarian or vegan. Artists, in so many respects, should be the voices to the dire situation our planet faces – we are, after all, part of the human impact that has led to the coming catastrophes. In a way, all that artists – and humans – should be concerned about now is our place on the planet and our own actions in contributing to climate change. It’s an emergency.

V: As artists working in the space of climate change, how do you grapple with feelings of melancholy and feelings of hopefulness?

JS: Once you’ve made the commitment to live a cruelty-free life, which includes being vegan, there are things you can never un-know. Sometimes I feel such urgency to communicate what I’ve learnt about animal suffering to other people, but then I watch them continue to consume animal products as if nothing were wrong.

My greatest share of melancholia is derived of human behaviour. When it comes to the dire impact of climate change as a result of human greed it seems impossible to not despair. This planet doesn’t need humans. We suck the earth dry. When humans disappear I am sure the earth will breathe a huge sigh of relief. The animals, plants and trees can finally get on with living, as they always have, in a sustainable way with the planet.

Knowing humans have created an industry that literally churns out animals for our desires, our plates, our bodies – creating an even greater impact upon our planet – how can I not exist in sadness?

Sometimes, when I look at the damage humans have inflicted upon the earth it renders me inarticulate, silent.

Hopefulness will come when I begin to observe those around me really beginning to embrace a cruelty-free, animal product-free life. Only then will I know an important change is starting to happen. In the meantime, I will keep my polite silence at the feeding table as I watch those around me continue to be sadly misinformed about the suffering of animals at the cost of our planet and our bodies.

SG: If there was no hope, I wouldn’t make work. I believe artwork always has radical potential to open new ways forward in any situation. I watch for these glimmering moments where art is part of the making of wild associations, and in them find great hope against the backdrop of a very difficult and depressing global condition.

V: You both have made multiple works that explore urban sound and quietness. Tell us a little bit about this area of interest.

JS: Quietness and silence is innate in me. Introversion and seeking solace has been with me since I was a child, in fact I never wanted to leave the womb! Now, I think my quietness has been worn down as I continue to observe the sadness and horrors of the world. Idle chatter is pointless. So it seems only natural in my later years my obsession with quiet seeking has found its way into my work.

My largest project, Stereopublic (Crowdsourcing the Quiet), asks members of the public around the world to use an app to contribute quiet spaces in their cities as a way to respond to the noise, din and anxiety of our urban environments. A participant can record audio of that space, and I gift back to them an original ambient composition. To date 65 cities around the globe are participating with almost 2000 quiet spaces found. It’s pretty inspiring. And, to reflect back on the idea of ‘hope’ above, it gives me hope there is a global community around me seeking the peaceful, seeking out spaces away from the din of industry and crowds and ‘vibrancy’. So I’m continuing this exploration in a more personal sense this year with something I call Quiet Ecology – which maps sonically, culturally, and environmentally the impact of noise on the planet and the real benefits of quiet preservation for our continued well-being.

SG: Heidi and I temporarily “borrowed” a shopping trolley for five Saturdays in a row in a shopping centre plaza in Noarlunga. I clanked about with a mad scientist set of wires and 3G dongles that let me stream online the intimate, sometimes harrowing and delightfully banal soundscapes and conversations I had with passers-by. Nothing was recorded. These sounds and conversations were for those who tuned in and for those who were there.

I am often led by sound, although I don’t describe myself as a sound artist. I love the immediacy of sound and the gentle touch of quiet. I like listening more than creating sound, and as such my works often make heightened situations for the act of listening or tuning-in to an occurrence or community.

V: You have each worked with Vitalstatistix before, on multiple projects in addition to Climate Century, such as our annual experimental art hothouse Adhocracy, and as commissioned artists for Cutaway, a three-year project completed in 2013. What value does these types of long-term relationships between artists and organisations hold? What do you see as Vitalstatistix’s place/role locally and nationally?

SG: My relationship with Vitalstatistix has been (and continues to be) intrinsic to my development as a professional artist.

For Adhocracy, Heidi and I chartered a boat, put an internet radio transmitter on it and took it out to the edge of the broadcast network. This was an act that sought failure, ‘dropouts’ and lost communications. Adhocracy provides a forum for experimentation, failure, and conversation. It is a place for audiences to come close to tentative and fascinating early stage projects. The program brings together experimental artists from many fields, and the conversations had over toasted sandwiches and between showings spark new trajectories.

There is a symbiosis that occurs when an organisation is fueled by, and fuels, the communities it participates in. Long-term community embedded projects like Cutaway and Climate Century allow time for meaningful collaborations to bear fruit.

In order to lead, you have to break new ground. Vitalstatistix is the only place in South Australia for audiences and artists to experience and make works that play with the expanding and increasingly blurred edges of performance and the visual arts. Vitals is a natural and national leader.

JS: My first real long-term connection to an organisation was with Doppio-Teatro/Para//elo between 1998-2004. This was such an important time of my life – and, in the history of contemporary art and experimental performance in SA, they were one of the more significant companies to exist. That involvement, particularly with Teresa Crea, was the best mentorship I could ever hope for. Teresa was really setting the stage for events like Adhocracy – unfortunately people just didn’t seem to get it or appreciate it at the time and that history, especially of Para//elo, isn’t acknowledged. SA needs to honour Teresa and how much she invested in young, experimental artists – particularly artists from diverse cultural backgrounds. Teresa taught me art, culture, and community are intrinsic, interconnected. She’s a legend.

And so my next longer connection has been with Vitalstatistix – a logical connection after so many years with Para//elo. Vitals is a company I’ve always loved as a feminist/queer space for performance and personally as a queer artist I saw much comradeship. My deeper connection from 2010 onwards has been so important to my artistic development – allowing me both an artistic and a curatorial platform in which to work. Vitals is the only company in SA dedicated to a national conversation around the delicate practice of emerging and experimental live art and performance.

V: How are you feeling about the future of the arts locally and nationally?

JS: We’re living amongst one of the world’s oldest living cultures and so I’m consciously aware I’m a queer, white, male existing in a place of deep spirituality, mystery and ancient Indigenous creativity. Art has always been here and will continue way beyond my years. Art exists in nature, in people, in the everyday, in the spiritual. The inheritance of this slightly icky European model of contemporary art in Australia has always made me uncomfortable so I struggle to talk about that, but I’ll try.

I’ve always felt it is within the power of the culture itself to sustain and drive forward its future. Like most of our society, we rely so heavily on government bodies to shape and make our lives. Lately, the destabilising funding cuts have made me think about this addictive feeding tray that arts funding has become – and I’ve certainly had my fair share and that’s amazing, I’m very lucky. I am committed to being an artist and making work as a response to the world no matter what – I just happen to be in a country where the option of seeking government funds is possible. Yet, I am worried artists and the art world’s reliance on funding may impact our future. It’s like we align getting a grant with making work or having status – or if a curator selects you then you must be better than those who were not chosen. Sure, it’s great when it happens, when you get the ‘yes’ emails – but would I still make a work if there was no funds or project selections?

Perhaps it’s analogous to the way we consume food. We rely on a supermarket or grocer to provide for us – and yet, you eat a pumpkin, save its seeds, put it in the ground, and in a few months you’ll start to see a new pumpkin grow and you’ve got dinner – and it cost nothing but the time it took and diligence you had to plant a seed in the earth.

At the end of the day we need to eat, so we need sustenance – and it can come for free. In these times of global crisis, the future holds so much for some real creative gardening to take place – literally and figuratively. Let’s get back to the earth and stop worrying about money all the time. Money and the desire for it are killing our planet. It’s up to artists to lead the charge. To create work, live a frugal life, and respect nature – give back to it rather than tear away at the planet’s resources. The death of the arts (in that ‘industry’ sense) will be an all-consuming anxiety around ambition, competition, and the bloody fight to the last dollar or status position. We need to be conscious the arts don’t start to mirror the corporatised and patriarchal systems most of us are fighting to escape from.

SG: Thinking to the future, I feel depressed.

Even as I begin to answer this question I find myself winding up into a rant-like answer about the importance of arms-length funding and the potential of a well-funded industry. But it has all been said, and seems to be unheard by those who need to act.

This isn’t a reason to give up on hope or activism.

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Vitalstatistix spoke with Hilary Kleinig from Zephyr Quartet and Jennifer Greer Holmes, independent creative producer and ZQ’s manager, about contemporary and experimental music, their focus on collaboration and how they are feeling about the future of Australian arts three weeks after what’s become known as Black Friday.

V: Zephyr Quartet is really forging a reputation for experimentation and interesting collaborations. Tell us about some of your recent projects.

HK: Our most recent major project in the Adelaide Festival, Exquisite Corpse, is a musical version based on the Surrealist parlour game of the same name. Instead of passing fragments of text or drawings from one person to the next, we commissioned twelve composers from Australia and the USA to write a 65min seamless score, whereby one composer would pass the last fragment of their section onto the next composer as a starting point for the following section. For this project we also worked with visual artists Jo Kerlogue and Lukukuku who created an animated visual response to the music that was projected into the performance space.

Another of our favourite recent projects is Between Light, which draws together five jazz musicians to compose a new piece for Zephyr in response to the theme of ‘chiaroscuro’ – the Italian art term used to describe the effect of contrasting areas of light and dark in a painting or drawing. We then invited Geoff Cobham and his team of Chris Petridis, Lachlan Turner and Alexander Ramsay to respond, not only to the music but also to the space in which we were performing the pieces (for the premiere season this was at Queens Theatre). They created a ‘house’ for each piece by using different parts of the building and utilising separate installations that responded uniquely ­- using varying notions of light and dark – to each piece of music and the space. During the performance, the audience moved around the space with the quartet as we performed and joined us in an intimate conversation of  music, light and space. We liked this project so much that we wanted to do it again and are really thrilled to be able to explore Between Light in a new space at Vitals’ wonderful Waterside Workers Hall.

JGH: Zephyr’s approach to collaboration is what drew me to working with them. It’s at the heart of everything we do: artistically; the way we make decisions; everything is a discussion, everyone plays a part. I’m constantly bewildered by how successful the collaborative process is with ZQ – sometimes we are talking about projects with more than twenty artists involved, often from multiple cities or countries. It’s an interesting and satisfying process of working.

V: There seems to be flux and development in contemporary and experimental music in South Australia at the moment – why do you think that is?

HK: I am very proud to be a part of a dynamic and talented music community here in South Australia, and I think the quality of music making here is extraordinary and world-class. Whilst there are things that I personally would like to see more of in the music scene, what I see as a big part of the success in the form of flux and development is the sense of community from a large part of the sector – a willingness to support each other in playing for projects, by going to each other’s performances, recording each other’s music and getting excited about what other people are doing. I think that COMA (Creative Original Music Adelaide), who run a performance series at the Wheatsheaf Hotel, have had a large impact on bringing together musicians from different genres and supporting a creative community, too.

V: ZQ’s recent projects have seen the Quartet collaborate with other established South Australian artists across artforms. What is the collaborative experience like for the Quartet?

HK: Collaboration is key to what we do, and the nature of the collaboration changes from project to project. We are very interested in adopting theatre and dance models in terms of creative development for producing work (although on a smaller scale), however this is rarely supported by funding bodies because it is a practice not utilised in music, especially not on a collaborative level.

I feel that there is a great depth and authenticity within work generated from a ‘ground-up’, collaborative practice and we Zephyrs are interested in making work that speaks deeply, uniquely and personally to a people, a time, and a place.

Sometimes this means finding existing music and placing it within a certain context or environment, but often it means creating from scratch ­– which of course is more risky and hard to promote because you don’t know exactly what it will be like until you perform it! For instance, when we premiered Between Light, I remember such a profound sense of relief after the first performance that it ‘worked’ – I really couldn’t tell if it would from an audience perspective! (I then proceeded to tell all my friends to come along!)

It is great for us to be able to have opportunities to present projects again. Aside from the vast amount of energy, time and money it takes to create projects such as Between Light and Exquisite Corpse, a remounted presentation (again, not such a common occurrence in the music sector) offers us a certain peace of mind, in that we have an idea of what the outcome will be for us and our audience, as well as the chance to make something good even better!

V: What are you thoughts on the opportunities available to mature independent contemporary artists in South Australia – what are the benefits and disadvantages of working here?

JGH: On the one hand, the opportunities that Adelaide offers are largely due to the ease of making relationships with people. It means that, personally, I have found work easy to come by because after all this time I have a really diverse network of peers in multiple art forms, and outside of the arts. It’s the main thing that’s kept me in Adelaide – I haven’t wanted the challenge of rebuilding that. Also, it’s a relatively cheap lifestyle: a person can live fairly easily on a fluctuating income. This means that there are loads of artists doing interesting things.

Of course, there’s also access to funding, and some initiatives for development, in-kind support and residencies.

Having said all that, and with the bright eyes of someone who is currently travelling in Berlin, the disadvantages are more apparent. Over the past few years, the isolation of being in Adelaide has got under my skin. Shows that I want to see don’t tour here (whether that’s an experimental intimate theatre work, or someone as mainstream as Madonna) – so to remain engaged in national and international performance we have to travel. I love travel, but it’s disruptive, expensive and not always possible. I’m interested in what’s happening right now – although I have concern for the future and respect for the past – and I feel I am neglecting my professional responsibilities if I don’t see contemporary performances. So, it’s either travel, or waiting and hoping that presenters like Vitals or one of the major festivals tour contemporary works into Adelaide.

The other disadvantages are that I often feel the sector in Adelaide is stifled by a lack of politicisation, a lack of forward thinking (but present-acting) leadership, too many gatekeepers, and a vast misunderstanding by some decision makers about what it actually takes to be an innovative maker of live art. And then, perhaps it’s the flip side of what I was saying before… It’s a small town. Everyone knows everyone, so it can be hard to find freshness – both personally and professionally.

V: Tell us about Between Light and why ZQ wanted to present the work with Vitalstatistix at Waterside.

JGH: I have a really strong connection to Waterside and Vitals, stemming from my family’s history with the building, growing up in the area, and my work with Vitals – as a former staff member, a documenter of events, and as an independent artist. Vitals is the state’s only presenter supporting innovative, experimental, cross-disciplinary collaboration in a way that is affordable for independent artists and small organisations. When Emma Webb responded to the premiere of Between Light at Queen’s Theatre so positively, I immediately thought that it would be a good work to see in that spectacular old hall, Waterside.

HK: Between Light was always conceived as an adaptable touring show and, in essence, a conversation between three elements – music, light and space. What is special about the music created for Between Light is each score comprised an improvisation component, which means we will never perform – and audiences will never hear – any piece quite the same way twice. Likewise, the lighting is stimulated, manipulated and generated live manually and through technology that turns sound waves to light. To be able to explore the possibilities of a different space adds yet another dimension to the life of this project, and we are very excited about this!

I also deeply admire Vitalstatistix’s role in our artistic community – Vitals are game changers, leaders and fearless producers of work that has national and international impact. I personally admire the way the organisation delves deeply into the local community, history and a broader social commentary to support artists and create work – I feel humbled and proud to be able to be a small part of this.

V: Jennifer, you work across a range of art forms as a creative producer, arts manager, curator, documenter, DJ and other roles. How do you approach your relationship with artists and your career as an independent cultural worker?

JGH: In short, from the heart. I have been evolving my ‘rules’ for how and who I work with over the past five or so years. When I first decided to give this whole independent caper a crack, my only motive was to not work with dickheads or Boards. Now, I have refined that somewhat!

When I work as a creative producer, I mostly work with friends (or artists who have been recommended by friends) who are trusted, both personally and as artists. I’m not interested in working with people or on projects that I wouldn’t want to see or artists I can’t advocate for the type of work they do. That’s not to say I haven’t done that – I’m just not very good at it.

In terms of artist management, again, I only do that for friends. At the moment, I work with Zephyr, Jason Sweeney and Heath Britton. I want to work with people I can be brutally honest with, for better or for worse (and it’s no coincidence that I use that marriage vow – I see it as a bond and an honour like no other).

I’ve been with Zephyr for more than four years, which is the longest job I have ever had. I love it and I love them. I think they’re completely shit-hot and I have had the privilege of talking about them overseas for the last month and a half – and people are so impressed.

They’re really leading the way. I already knew that, but having spent this time away and seeing what else is out there, it became even more obvious.

As a documenter, I see myself as a tiny cog in the process of telling a story. That’s a weird one to me, the documentation. It kind of just happened, without any deliberate choice. I think it’s vitally important to have records of things, and I’ve always been obsessive about hoarding memories, so it totally fits with my history and personality that I would do this for work. It is quite technical (which isn’t me at all) – I work with Heath Britton in this role, who I have known for over 20 years, so we have a shared language and defined roles that we’ve slipped into with making videos for artists.

Being a DJ is my favourite job I’ve done. It’s purely indulgent, hedonistic, joyful and outrageous. I work with a dear friend, Jo Kerlogue, and we get paid to drink bubbles, play our favourite records, dance and watch other people dance. If I could do that every day for the rest of my life I would be a very happy lady. Also, being a ‘post-modern feminist vinyl only DJ duo’ means that we kind of have a particular niche! It’s still work, and sometimes it feels like “going to work” but there is no comparison to a bad day at the Bad Jelly office – it’s still pretty darn good. In terms of collaboration, and the way Jo and I work together, pretty much we are just old mates who love records and tell each other how it is.

Back to the short answer though: I don’t do work that I don’t believe in. I can’t. When I stop enjoying something I don’t feel like I am being true to myself if I keep doing it. Work is very personal to me. Sometimes that’s problematic; most of the time it’s fucking fantastic.

V: You have worked with Vitalstatistix in many different capacities over the years. What do you see as the current value and role of Vitalstatistix?

JGH: As I mentioned before, Vitals is pretty much a standalone in Adelaide and South Australia in terms of the opportunities it offers artists. I have been fortunate enough to benefit from being an Incubator artist, which supports the development of new work; I’ve documented every Adhocracy since it started and am just astounded at the way that it continues to evolve the way it supports and engages artists and audiences. It’s completely unique in Adelaide, there is simply nothing like it. I love it. It’s my favourite part of Vitals’ programme.

Vitals is there for independent artists. It has helped develop audiences’ understanding of and taste for live contemporary art. It has facilitated so many creative relationships and sparked multiple collaborations that I have directly benefited from – both as an artist and an audience member.

In relation to the current funding situation, I always felt Vitals should be safe due to the unique offering they make to local and national artists. No-one else is doing what Vitals does, and no-one else has the kind of impact Vitals does in terms of public outcomes on the kind of money that’s available. Post-funding announcements, I am completely devastated by the news that Vitals missed out on funding. I have no words… Ok, maybe some: Shocked. Gutted. Appalled.

V: How are you feeling about the future of the arts locally and nationally?

JGH: Every time I think about this question I try not to be bleak. Yet, here I am again, attempting to answer it and feeling bleak. Not in terms of the art that is being made (there are truly exceptional artists here) , but the opportunity for artists to make it with adequate support for their work – not just funding, but infrastructure: both physical, such as venues; and in education, such as audience development and training.

That aside (and I don’t cast it aside lightly, I’d just prefer to focus on something that gives me hope), the emergence of a strong and diverse live art scene in Adelaide over the last few years is largely what’s kept me there. And it’s no coincidence that I am writing this for Vitals, as it is Vitals who has been at the forefront for supporting this type of work locally.

When I think about making work in Adelaide and Australia at the moment, I feel a bit limited. We are insular, we must reach out to be part of conversations, for it is rare that we are invited into them. For the most part, I don’t feel this is especially problematic: it definitely informs the experimental nature of our work, as I feel we are somewhat uninfluenced by trends. However, it does have limitations for audience growth – not just in numbers (which is an obvious one) but for the growth of an audiences’ understanding of what else is out there, what they can demand from their engagement with artists and the type of work they can see.

I’ve been writing this blog from various parts of the world – all away from home (I’ve been to 15 cities in just under 7 weeks!). I’ve been incredibly fortunate through my work in this sector to be supported to attend markets and festivals in order to find presentation and collaboration opportunities for SA artists. I am in love with Europe, and absolutely see the increased potential for artists to work there. I imagine it’s for a range of reasons, but one of the things I noticed in my conversations with Europeans from a variety of backgrounds (cultural, social, economic, language) – is the acceptance of the arts. It made me sad for Australian artists: I feel that we are apologetic or defensive of our choice to do creative work.

Again, short answer: it feels bad and sad. The devastation of the Australia Council news is fresh and I am tired of being told we need to find new ways to survive –  as if we aren’t already doing that! Three companies I’ve worked with a fair bit in the past two years haven’t been funded. And I guess the other thing that has me down – particularly now, as I arrive back in Oz – is the potential of Adelaide to be this great city for arts and artists.  There are amazing cities all over the place which have half ­- or less than half – the population of Adelaide which are all absolutely thriving with stuff to do and people who are out there hungry for it, publications who pay writers to write about it, and businesses who rely on the arts to bring people through their doors. It has nothing to do with our size. It’s an excuse we’ve been hearing for ages. I don’t know how to address it, I feel like I’ve been trying for half my life and am a tad battle weary. When the fight outweighs the joy – that’s a sign for me.

HK: There are no doubts that these are fairly dark times for the arts and I see the more recent Australia Council funding cuts as just yet another nail in the coffin. A myriad of things have contributed to making a hard job even harder over the last 5-10 years – ABC funding cuts, changes and cuts to arts courses at university and TAFE, etc.

I too, at times feel incredibly sad about this and echo Jennifer’s laments about the place and importance of culture within Australia, and I am not sure what to do to make changes to this. What we are talking about here are fundamental changes to our national identity! In a real practical sense I do feel that vast changes at a fundamental levels need to be addressed in education, access to arts, and media.

On a positive note over the last month or so I have felt a sense of purpose, of coming together, of unity and strength from the vast majority of the arts sector on many different levels. People are realising that they do have a voice, that they can speak for change, and that this is better done from a united front. Whilst none of us know what the future will hold there is a sense, for the most part, that we are all in this together, and that we are a community that – despite our differences – want similar results and outcomes.

I can’t speak for others, but these are my feelings today, right now, in this time and place:

I, too, feel that sometimes the fight is too much, that I am tired and have nothing left to give.  On the other hand, at times, and most recently this last week, I am reminded by the power of art, the power of community and the power that a sense of shared experience in time and place is a strong and important reminder of our common, shared humanity.

On Monday I had the honour of playing music for a friend’s funeral – it was sad and it was happy, it was funny and it was joyful. Trying to read the music and play the right notes through the tears, trying to make a beautiful, moving sound that would honour a life well-lived, and looking at the vast crowd of people who were there sharing in this most primal human experience, I was reminded that music says things that words can’t say, that art has a power that no one can undermine and that it is our shared humanity and a strong sense of being part of and being valued by a community which makes life worth living.

I don’t know that will happen in the future with governments, with funding, with arts bodies, with politics, and what this means for the future of the arts locally and nationally. I know that changes in these areas can make our jobs as artists easier or harder but it can’t and won’t ever take away the power of and our human need for art.

Zephyr Quartet presents Between Light in association with Vitalstatistix, 30 June – 3 July.

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