In the lead up to our final presentation for 2022 – Sightings, a new performance and portrait of place – creator, director, and choreographer Gabrielle Nankivell dropped past to talk about heat on the road, points in time, and Grandma’s shortbread…
Firstly, tell us about Sightings. I know that much is unknown right now, but what should audiences expect?
Sightings is a strange and lovely project. It’s an evolving map that charts the travel of getting to know a place – on foot, through debris, in conversation and across all the messiness of witnessing and composing reality-based fiction. As a performance it’s something like a cabinet of curiosities, a backyard cinema, and a collective ritual rolled into one. Audiences should expect an invitation to explore – to wander, look, touch, read, sit, try, make, watch…
Weirdly, it contains all the things I use to make dance performances, but which don’t usually end up in the performance. I guess I’m usually more associated with epically physical contemporary dance outcomes – I’ve performed in plenty of work like this and most of the commissions I receive are with intensely virtuosic contemporary dance companies – Sightings sits a long way outside of this world.
You’ve been developing this piece for several years now – what has changed along the way? What’s been surprising about the process?
Figuring out how to work on this project has been quite a process, we’ve tried lots of approaches that have totally failed! Finding the right medium/s-language/s with which to manifest it has also been a story of trial and error. One of the things I realised changed along the way was that we were creating the blueprint for a site-specific performance making model rather than making a standalone performance – i.e.: the performance can’t exist without the residency. This was a huge surprise for me as prior to that I had mostly used the opportunity of residencies as seeding grounds for future works and as a time to take stock of where my practice was at.
Learning a lot more about time has been a surprising side-effect of the Sightings process, especially since I come from the very labour/time intensive world of choreography. In a residency situation it’s tricky to balance the lead-time required to implement an encounter or adventure with the time required to actually fulfil it. Some ideas require a lot of comms, and therefore time, to secure access to a site and/or people. Because we are working with people, individual personalities, ways, routines, and relationship with time need to be respected – this can be a bit of an intangible thing until you are in it. Some mediums are more labour intensive – working with analogue film for example, processing and conversion time has to be considered and then there’s time for editing… It’s been an invigorating experience to work in a paradox – intensely planned and organised but also meandering and offering time to the abyss.
What does it mean to be bringing this piece specifically to Yerta Bulti-Port Adelaide? What do you hope to discover about the Port?
Yerta Bulti-Port Adelaide holds a lot of mystery for me. It’s absorbing and reflective at the same time, like heat on the road or fog on the river, mirage-like perhaps. The yarns, myths, and tales – held and told by earth, walls, people – make it dusty and shifty and full of life. I feel like it’s a natural environment for tuning and receiving. If we do that well, hopefully the performance will reflect a very real-feeling fiction or imprint of place.
We hope to discover the Port exactly as it reveals itself in this particular point of time.
The work utilises both mixed-media and crowd-sourced stories/locations – how do you and your team wind that all together into a performance piece? What should people do if they want to get involved?
Collectively our occupation is some kind of imagination fabrication, we’re all quite into getting our hands dirty, figuring out how things work and general tinkering. Any chance to try something we’re not particularly familiar with is exciting, therefore it’s pretty easy for us to get on board with the eclectic range of enthusiasts we meet along the way. These encounters tend to generate a variety of material – found or made objects, photos, videos, written material, physical skills.
Sightings is a process of following – guided by what we’re offered and what we find, rather than just something we impose. The ‘enthusiast’ spirit really seems to suit the project, it allows for a different kind of finesse in the content we are producing – one where warmth, care and effort are perhaps privileged over glossy, high-end noise. Think the difference between a handmade photo album and a ‘For You’ memory compilation made by your phone, or Grandma’s shortbread versus Arnott’s Shortbread Creams… I think it’s a project where you really feel the alchemy of the people and the place involved.
If people want to get involved they can provide us with some breadcrumbs via the ‘Participate’ link on the Sightings website, https://sightings.cargo.site
Anything else audiences should know?
The Sightings team are artists who work across dance, sound, writing and visual design. We spend a lot of time making live performances but are equally invested in developing research projects where we can learn more about the places and people we meet through the itinerant nature of our work. We welcome reflections on the performance so if any audience members feel inclined to leave us a handwritten note, have a chat or drop us an email following the season – we would love to hear from them.
With residencies at Vitalstatistix in April and May, two projects now in development address questions of labour and pleasure, embodiment, sex work, and online/IRL interactions.
The Read is a collaboration between dancer and choreographer Amrita Hepi and writer, sex worker and activist Tilly Lawless, investigating labour, desire, and bodies and their mechanics, drawing on Amrita’s interests in participatory research, intimate conversations and resilience.
Artists amira.h. and Monte Masi are collaborating on Goddess Ball’s Fun House, using text, performance and endurance to explore the online world of adult camming sites, the nature of work and play, and the true meaning of fun.
Jennifer Mills spoke with both these creative duos over Zoom about their works in progress, collaborative practices, friendship and trust, labour and time, adaptation, pleasure, and making meaningful work.
JM Starting with amira and Monte. Where did the idea spring from to work together?
Monte Masi amira’s and my relationship goes back a fair while, we both studied at the South Australian School of Art at around the same time, but this project is our first time directly collaborating. The first development was part of last year’s Adhocracy at Vitalstatistix and because of “the situation” (laughs), amira and I spent the Adhocracy weekend in 2021 working at a distance over Zoom.
This project really begins with you, amira, sharing an artist’s book – a piece of collected text that you had been amassing, which was text from camming sites’ chat rooms. amira eventually sent me a 2,000 page pdf of that which went by the same name, ‘Goddess Ball’s Fun House.’ And amira had mentioned sharing that text amongst a few people and inviting a response, so whoever had the honour of receiving the text might become obligated to create a response.
amira.h. The text was collected from October 2018 to 2020 sometime, but then I went back and got more, which I haven’t actually added to the ibook file I sent you… it’s not a pdf, it is specific because the pdf has lots of emojis and they don’t move but I wanted people to see what I was seeing on the sites, which is a lot of emojis, emoticons I call them, and they’re very different from other social media, very specific to these sites. So yep, it was a 2,000 or so page ibook.
JM That’s a weighty tome! Why did you start collecting this document?
a.h. Well, that’s what I do – I collect stuff, even at uni I would give people postcards and tell them to text me a response and then I created a book – I called it a book – of pages stuck on the wall, of people’s responses to me. That was in the hundreds, just text responses. I like collecting things.
JM It sounds like a very zine-influenced practice to me.
a.h. I do love zines, definitely.
MM You were going to curate an exhibition based on these responses.
a.h. That was Dominic Guerrera’s idea, he works at Country Arts, and he suggested we could show it at Nexus, but that just didn’t feel right. So then Monte asked me to be an assistant to a whole other project, and I was living on Kaurna land, in Adelaide, but now I’m not, so I had moved and Monte asked if I could still assist and I said I didn’t know, and then he said Vitals have this Adhocracy thing due tomorrow, let’s just quickly write up a proposal (laughs).
MM I saw us putting together the Adhocracy application as a continuation of your invitation to think of a response to that text. I thought we could create that response together.
JM I love that Adhocracy is a space that you can jump on at those moments. It sounds like this project has been through a few versions of itself, are you still taking a digital/online approach?
a.h. It is definitely morphing. Recently Monte said ‘I don’t want to have Zooms or livestreams in our work!’ We want it to be in real life, IRL.
JM There was a lot of excitement around the potential of online spaces but now there’s so much fatigue as well, people are really happy to be able to be physically with each other again.
a.h. It’s true. In my head I kind of see a live chat, you know, I definitely wouldn’t want to show any of the people on the websites, so I want to be able to zone in on the chat and have that accessible in the space, and that might be the only online component.
MM I am certainly cognisant of that snap-back to the way things were. It was great to have a lot of stuff over Zoom and suddenly people being quite invested in livestream, even for me as someone who thinks of themselves as able-bodied or reasonably mobile, it was a treat to be able to for example catch something in New York that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise, let alone how it might have felt for someone who actually finds it incredibly difficult to get into a theatre or a performance space. But I think maybe it’s because the first time we really had a development for this work we had to do it over the screen, I just think a lot of the ideas and a lot of the forms that we’re imagining and dreaming of for this work are things that you do in front of other people.
JM Are you going to retain a participatory element of that, with people whose conversation you’re using as source material?
a.h. I have got some ideas, but Monte and I haven’t decided on anything concrete yet.
JM In terms of working out those kind of mechanisms or ideas, what’s your process as a collaboration?
a.h. We try to have Zoom meetings every 2-3 weeks. I text Monte all the time, probably annoyingly, if I get an idea I just send it to him, it’s very spontaneous for me and that’s what I like about it.
MM In some ways it has been fairly spontaneous but it’s also been quite discursive, in that sometimes we will have what is ostensibly a meeting which will end up with you, amira, telling me particular details of a particular period in your life or a particular kind of online web of intrigue, and going down a sort of rabbithole of different things, and trusting to do that while not knowing whether it really lives in the world of the work.
JM While we’re talking about these blurring boundaries I’m going to let Amrita and Tilly into the meeting. We’ve just been talking about collaboration and the way that art and life blend a little in the process. Amrita and Tilly were you friends before you started this project together?
Tilly Lawless We knew each other vaguely but we have definitely become closer through doing it.
Amrita Hepi Tilly made a really good point today, that because this has been so delayed it’s been a nice way to get to know each other. If we had started 2.5 years ago when we were originally supposed to start, maybe it would have been harder. I feel like there was material generated in speaking to each other and getting to know each other.
We had this conversation about the kind of economy that the arts runs on, the economy of friendship, that obviously there is a camaraderie, and it’s one of the most beautiful things, but that it can also be really abusive in some ways.
JM Totally. It can manifest as exploitative labour practices very quickly.
TL There is a level of trust that has come with knowing each other for the last few years that makes me feel like I can trust what Amrita says in the room.
I think that if we’d started not knowing each other well that I would have been quite tentative, and I don’t feel that. I feel quite confident in voicing my opinion. I only see the friendship as positive. I understand that people can exploit friendships in order to get certain artistic things from people or to not pay people for their labour but I haven’t felt like that one bit.
AH I said to Tilly at the start that sometimes there can be a tyranny of structurelessness: we’re improvising, we’re trying things, the hierarchies are different, and in the room I am performing in it too, I’m in it with you. But I am the director. I will be making the work. And I think there is a nice trust that comes from knowing that is your responsibility.
JM It builds trust when there’s a bit of clarity around roles.
TL A director is the same role you would get when, as a writer, you have an editor editing your work. You have someone that has more power than you, you’ve agreed to them having a say over what you’re doing, and you trust them in the critiques that they’re going to give… I wouldn’t say yes to being directed by someone unless I respected that they could direct me well.
JM I wanted to ask all four of you a bit more about process as labour but also process as play, and where that sits for you as a collaboration and how you manage that balance?
MM Before, I used that word discursive, but in some ways what I mean is also playful, as playful as you can be in a chat over Zoom, where yes, you are in theory trying to advance a project but you are also trying to work out what are the possible boundaries for the project so that you are creating some sense of what is inside the world of the work before we get started with our residency at Vitalstatistix. For us it has up to this point been about play. And we’ve been talking a lot about fun anyway within the work – we have this title of Goddess Ball’s Fun House so there’s been fun stuff and fool stuff. We’re getting a piece of neon fabricated that says ‘FUN.’
AH The way that I like to work is fast and relaxed, but I spent a good part of my early dance career working in companies that didn’t feel that way – where everything felt serious and sombre and we needed to get it right. I think I thought for a long time that it really needed to be that way. I use this analogy of when I stopped using birth control, when I switched to another kind of birth control and because it didn’t hurt I wasn’t sure it was working, I wasn’t sure it was real. There’s an idea that if I’m not having some kind of epiphany or I’m not having a struggle… I mean it really doesn’t need to be that way.
JM There’s this ‘if you’re not suffering, you’re not making work’ mentality. I think a lot of us have absorbed this hyper-employment model as sole traders or practitioners where we do push ourselves and work really long hours.
MM And that’s the logic of the project in some ways anyway. It always wants to see a peak at the moment of presentation, it always wants you to go a bit beyond yourself to get something done.
TL My relationship to it is a bit different because I have my job that I do for money and I work really hard at it and then everything I do that is creative is fun.
AH But also I wouldn’t have asked you to come and do it just for fun and I won’t pay you!
TL Obviously the pay matters, but I don’t have the sense of, ‘is art only real if there’s suffering involved?’ because I have always enjoyed the things that I do creatively, whereas I often don’t enjoy my daily work.
AH The other thing is not just if there’s suffering involved, but is the labour real if there isn’t a moment of transformation? If it’s hard and if it looks like it’s easy, is it still labour? Or if it has a feeling of effortlessness is it really labour?
JM And there’s a crossover there with sex work as well, if it’s pleasurable is it still labour?
TL My relationship to fun has changed since the pandemic. Before the pandemic I would have thought what a drag to go leave my house for two weeks and do this thing and be in a studio all day and now it’s so much fun to be in another state, and to be in a big room with someone. I have turned from being a glass half empty person before the pandemic to glass half full. I am getting scraps of fun out of everything.
JM There’s a real element of joy in returning to working physically close to each other … is that infecting the work, that craving for physicality and being in space?
AH Yeah, absolutely. Over Zoom, we haven’t figured out how to manufacture improvisation in quite the same way. Real time allows for an ease of working. Number one, this is how I have always known how to make. Number two, I think it is really much more enjoyable. Even if it is hard to be away from home, doing this in another way or not together would just not be possible.
MM For me and amira, the first stage development for this work was at Adhocracy in 2021 but we had to do that over Zoom. So I was in the basement at the Waterside hall chatting to amira on screen. There were a couple of Adelaide-based projects that did have their creative teams with them and I was eyeing them off with a slight jealousy: ‘They’re all talking to each other without a delay!’ I think in a way the thought of being in a room together has driven some of the ideas about what we’re going to do in our upcoming couple of weeks.
JM That desire has to infect the work, especially as the work is already about desire. The desire for physical closeness is already in it.
a.h. It’s really exciting to be performing IRL. I’ve been doing online stuff from about 2016, I was just doing that ‘for fun’ because it was so novel, like Periscope – but being in a physical space, I am imagining how we can utilise smell and taste and touch…
JM Can I ask you about the idea of failure and mistakes in your work? Monte, you have spoken about misperformance as a strategy, and that really resonates with my experience of being genderqueer.
MM We have these scripts that we follow – you could think about it as a dramatic script but you might also think about it as a cultural script – and by not performing well or by failing to appear in the proper way, it might be generative. So by misperforming that script you might be able to generate something new. Which is connected to ideas in The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam, and to writing by José Esteban Muñoz and other theorists.
JM There is also great potential for comedy in that.
MM Performing things in a totally committed but very wrong way is connected to what clowns do, and playing the fool.
a.h. I have always embraced failure. I mean, growing up as a queer Muslim woman, I thought I was going to kill myself by the time I was fifteen…
JM Society tells you that you don’t deserve to live.
a.h. Yes. I’m the eldest child out of four, I’m the one who is the fuckup – I don’t own my house, I am unmarried, I don’t have kids, to society I am a failure, so I have embraced that in lots of my work. I fuck up and you have to accept it. I have accepted that I don’t adhere to rules, even rules I set myself.
JM: When you’re discovering your creativity as a queer artist, it’s a huge lesson to know that that’s where the sparks are, in the fuckups and the failures and the not fitting right.
AH Definitely in that stuff. But also in the mundanity of the existence of the failure. We’ve been asking about assumptions. What do people assume about what it is that you’re doing at work? And what’s the reality? So one of the exercises we have is I ask Tilly, what do you think people assume about sex work, or about writing? And vice versa, around the labour of being a dancer. What a day of work is like, what the architecture looks like in the space, where you are, what you’re doing with your body, what happens? The things we think are mundane actually reveal something about the unconscious, about what the other is assuming about us.
JM And it absolutely reveals the structures under that work as well, physical structures and temporal structures and the embodiment of the labour that you’re doing – a lot of creative labour is quite invisible to the general public.
AH There are three zones, in the way I’ve been thinking. There’s the desire to do – the desire to act in both our labours. Then there’s the labour itself and what it’s worth or what its value is perceived to be. And then there are examples of other people in labour, or other objects that are desirable, that feed into this.
TL There is some assumed knowledge with the audience in that we assume they know that both dance and sex work are labour.
AH But then there’s what it’s worth, and what it looks like, and what happens before the event. What leads you into a performance, and what makes it good? How do you make something good? That is actually kind of nebulous.
JM With literature and dance, there’s a perception that they spring almost spontaneously from the body, that you don’t require external resources to make them.
AH Yes, ‘you can do it anywhere.’ I was talking to a friend who wrote a beautiful article and they said it really poured out of them, and I love that word pour. There is so much stored that is maybe conscious or unconscious or that maybe we just heard yesterday that makes its way into the room, the rehearsal room. You realise how much you know about something that you didn’t know you knew.
JM That deep archival knowledge that you have to draw on from longer practice is one of the great pleasures of getting older in a creative career. And also your networks grow and so your ability to draw on others’ knowledge grows.
AH You have a reference point and maybe you have watched work that you can then take into your own methodology, because there’s a tone of understanding, rather than just going: I need it to be good, and how the fuck do I get there.
As an emerging artist, what I didn’t know… maybe there was also nothing to lose.
MM In some ways I would agree. When I was an emerging artist you did feel like you were running on energy. I couldn’t even imagine what the possible consequences would be of failing, I was just doing stuff.
AH As you get better, you have a better understanding of your own aesthetic.
Now I am thinking about things more sustainably, like if I’m making this work maybe I want to be able to show it in a different context, not be [hammers hands] bang-bang-bang. The Read feels like it’s been ruminating for a while and I’d like for it to be able to take the time it needs to take and also have the chance to be in different formats and different contexts. I know a bit more about what I’m interested in in terms of subject and material.
TL I’ve found it really useful not to tie my identity to what I create. If it’s not good, it doesn’t matter too much. I’m still a person beyond what I created, my friends are still going to like me, I’m still going to have a great life. Not everything you do ends up being as you’ve imagined it before you do it. So I just try to not tie myself to those things too much. Which doesn’t mean that you don’t put in all your energy or all your hopes. But your life is full beyond what you created as an artist.
AH I worked with a dance theatre company called Marrugeku for a long time and it taught me to make from this reactionary place. In some ways I still do, something will niggle at me. Sometimes the politic of something overwhelms the poetic; it can suck out the fun. You think you have to perform the politic by which it is perceived.
This is not what Marrugeku does, they do it with a poetics that then infects the politics. With making now, it doesn’t feel as fraught with having to express the politics, because it is already there. And it can be fun.
TL I realised quite quickly that I don’t want it to be a professional career, I love writing and I will always write but I don’t want to pursue it as a career, it ruins my enjoyment of it. I like it too much to ruin that.
MM I have seen people do really weird things in order to try and find or keep that sense of pleasure or openness alive. With all sorts of artists, anyone who is able to derive some income from what they make, there is a recognition that once you start to have people really interested in what you’re doing or you’re creating opportunities that are being recognised by others, that there is a danger that what makes a thing fun and possible can be extinguished or leave you.
JM I think it’s also a really exciting thing that art does, finding these cracks where things that are work don’t feel like work. It’s possible to do that in every job – every job can and should have those moments of ‘I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this, it’s so fun.’
AH I have a query around that because I don’t just make art for the good feeling. I am not necessarily interested in making people feel good or entertained. I guess it’s like the panic and stretch zones, still trying to find the way into being enjoyable but there is also the fiscal financial stuff that comes into it. Then there’s this other thing: a part of my revenue stream, if I’m honest, is using dance as a commercial tool. So there’s movement direction for advertisements, or myself as the subject modelling for things and talking about the fact that I’m a dancer. People ask ‘how could you do that?’
But are we only ever doing it for a good feeling or for our community? That’s part of it, but I do not believe for a second that that is the only reason we’re doing it.
JM Maybe the pleasure is not the end point. The pleasure is like a window into meaningful work. It’s a clue that the universe has left us that we can follow.
AH To purpose. We’ve been talking about that in our work, about identity and class, and the big example we’ve been talking about is the allegory of the turnspit dog. The turnspit dog would run on this wheel like a hamster wheel that would turn the meat and cook it. Then at the turn of the industrial revolution, with electricity, all of a sudden it didn’t have a purpose anymore, and it was then bred out.
Being in the Port, I think about work and art and labour, and striking. When workers talk about striking, they withdraw their labour, but for artists that doesn’t make sense – they’ll just find somebody else. And then that leads into thinking about the gig economy, and it’s all so soupy – personally finding the pleasure and purpose fits into something that’s a much bigger machination.
JM I feel like I’m haunted now by the ghost of my future redundancy.
AH There is that nebulous fear: a GPT-3 AI wrote this…
JM Oh absolutely. There are already AIs that could substitute for some of my freelance work quite easily.
AH I am so curious and suspicious about that dream that we’ll be overwhelmed by machines. The fear that we wouldn’t be able to work anymore if the machines take over. I think it’s almost a desire: ‘Oh no, don’t take the work away!’
a.h. Talking about labour, the start of Goddess Ball’s Fun House came about through my body being so injured that I couldn’t work. So I was a personal shopper for one of the huge supermarkets for nine months, and then ended up with carpal tunnel, hip bursitis, tendonitis… I couldn’t walk anymore. And a friend suggested to get into the camming world. I was living on my own, didn’t have a fridge for about six months, and I was on the dole.
I didn’t start this for pleasure. It was out of pain. Survival sex work.
Andy Kaufman is a big influence on this work. Andy only does something if it’s fun, if it’s not fun he stops doing it. But if you delve into his online world at the moment, it’s not fun at all.
The root word of fun is actually fool. Monte and I have done a lot of research about the Fool card in tarot, which is the zero. Not the start and not the end, but a liminal card. I feel like I have been on a Fool’s journey with these online lives that I have lived. I’ve played the fool and I’ve been made fun of. Fun isn’t always pleasurable.
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The Read showings: 5 & 6 MAY at 7pm – BOOK HERE
Goddess Ball’s Fun House showings: 19 & 20 MAY at 7pm – BOOK HERE
Photo credit: Emma Luker for Replay Creative (@replaycreative on Instagram)
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…
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 8th 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…
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 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!
