Ahead of their upcoming dual-project residency The Paranormal is Personal, we caught up with artists Jason Sweeney and Fiona Sprott to talk ghosts, haunting, and paranormal audio investigation tools.
The Paranormal is Personal comprises two distinct, separate, but deeply interconnected projects. Where did the two concepts come from?
Jason: The project Corporeal has been with me for almost a decade now. It was meant to be a follow up to my first feature film, The Dead Speak Back, which deals with a character using paranormal methods to try and access her personal ghosts. Before that Fiona and I had also worked on a podcast project called Download the Dead which was about a number of characters ‘speaking back’ from the grave. So, you know, that interest has been there for a very long time. But Corporeal eventually transformed into what it is now – a deeper and very personal exploration into my own queer personal hauntings. As both Fiona and I had an interest in paranormal investigation – as well as our own 30 year artistic collaboration being marked in 2023 – it made sense to celebrate that with a joint residency project.
Fiona: I suppose my own interest in the paranormal and strangeness began back in childhood. My book collection was dedicated to amateur sleuths, ghost stories and unsolved mysteries. It was a local unsolved mystery of a girl abducted from her bedroom in the 1980s that formed the basis of about a decade in total studying predatory crimes and homicide – both the factual and fictional representations in popular culture. I became fascinated with the notion that traumatic events create a lingering energy in spaces and people’s lives – often in the guise of an absence that is so present it is palpable. What is the nature of a haunting, and what is a ghost? This question led me to explore paranormal investigation, initially to understand how people were attempting to communicate with the dead.
Over time I have become convinced that ghosts are far more complex. As someone deeply motivated by research as the entry point to my creative work, I had a question to ponder and wrangle with. I also had a poltergeist living with me and I wanted to try and communicate with it – which is to say that a personally traumatic event unfolding in my house was creating a sensation of feeling an unseen presence that was moving things, turning electrical items on and off. I was curious to see if I could communicate with, essentially, the energy of my own trauma, my own personal ‘ghost’ haunting me. It was this point of connection between us – a desire to connect with and explore the personal ghosts using the technology, that made for a natural compatibility between us creatively. It’s like entering a world of its own, and having two people in it, was helpful for navigating and seeking feedback on the specifics of that world impacting on each of us artistically.
Jason, you’re using ‘paranormal audio investigation tools’ to generate music and text-based materials that are used in Corporeal – what spurred this interest in the intersection of the paranormal and contemporary technology?
Jason: I’ve always loved the idea of tapping into the ‘unknown’ through sound and audio technology. As a child I used to obsess over number stations using shortwave radio and recorded hours of this to cassette to listen back to. When I listened to that I felt like I was hearing ghosts of the past, reaching out over the airwaves – even though apparently there is a more covert intention to them! And so now, with devices such as a Spirit Box (which scans at various speeds over radio frequencies as a way to potentially detect intelligent responses through words that might appear), I feel as if the world of paranormal research is made for sound artists!
The incredible SA-based team of Amy’s Crypt designed a series of apps called GhostTube that generate spoken words from a vast dictionary triggered by a magnetometer, it can scan internet radio like a Spirit Box and can now also create AI imaging responses integrating white noise. Again, such great creative fodder for a composer like me. It’s almost like the cut-up technique used by the Dadaists and later by William S Burroughs using actual recorded tapes whereby random word associations could be made.
I’ve been particularly interested in the complexity of multiple channels of input of materials (text, audio, tech, film etc) and how to piece it all together in separate compositions. There is, of course, also Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) – a term popularised by the Latvian parapsychologist Konstantīns Raudive in the 70s – which has been used to detect voices on audio recordings. This technique takes patience and doesn’t necessarily produce much for my own research. I also used my own recordings pressed to vinyl to remix using filters and mixers to produce much of the soundscapes for the compositions as I really liked how ghostly these processed sounds became. So, audio technology is a perfect tool for paranormal enthusiasts such as I!
Fiona, you’re using a combination of writing and audio storytelling for Ghost? How do you utilise what’s written in your Journal of Hauntings to inform the audio component?
Fiona: The background to my dedicating myself to the pursuit of an audio based storytelling is rooted in the early days and years of the pandemic. I was granted funding by Arts SA to explore how to create in isolation – how could I reinvent my practice, which had largely been from the tradition of theatre and live performance. I was technologically challenged, to say the least, but I had a microphone, a computer, and Audacity software. I also had Jason as my mentor. The text in my Journal of Hauntings (which are stories inspired by the findings/specific words and results of the paranormal investigations), is the baseline for a layering process I enter into.
I focus on creating what I refer to as ‘theatre for the ears’. Instead of lights or props and costumes, I am using the delicacy of sounds filtering in and out, the moments of music, the quality of, in this case, a ‘dirty audio’ reflecting a kind of raw documentary of my experiences, as layers to be fed in. I am constantly in headphones and fine detailing edits, re-recording, and using this listening process as my authoring process to ascertain how I can make the experience for the listener as interesting as possible. As affecting as possible. I didn’t want to just do a recorded reading from the Journal because audio is, and certainly can be, its own performance artform and I love the challenge as a storyteller of having to figure it out as I go – and I’m hoping our audiences will be able to offer valuable feedback and engage in a dialogue about the methodology itself.
What led to you choosing to develop these separate projects together?
Jason: I think there really was more power in developing both projects alongside each other as we share the 30 year artistic collaboration and also the passion for the paranormal. Each of our projects has helped inform the other – plus we were able to initially create a series of Youtube paranormal investigations that can be found here: Abnormal Paranormal – this video series specifically allowed both Fiona and I to visit sites where we had trained or made performances together, as well as places in the southern suburbs where we both grew up. I think it’s interesting also that our approaches take very different lenses to them, which has always been a fascinating aspect to the collaborations Fiona and I have done. For me one of my central questions was: is there something inherently queer about an interest in spirits? So my view on the research was through this queer lens and how, as an ageing gay cis man, I can mess with what I perceive to be a very ‘straight’ approach in the paranormal investigative world.
Fiona: I agree. For an audience too, there is such a richness in the methodologies used by each of us, and the array of creative offerings coming out of the direct and indirect collaborations. At the heart is a shared interest in, and use of the paranormal technologies and mythologies and lore for that matter. Early on we determined that the paranormal is very personal. On an emotional level, our long standing friendship was very helpful for mutual support – as fun as the paranormal can be, the ghosts of the past do turn up… To be honest, at times I think we entered an eight month long exorcism together to confront and send off some of the more troubling memories arising for both, or either of us. But too, I absolutely trusted that we would create a fantastic synergy between us whereby ideas could find full flight and not be restrained by the need to find a singular outcome representing us both.
What will the process of making this sort of work look like? Anything you are hoping to achieve throughout your residency?
Jason: I’m making a live music performance based on the 18 compositions that I’ve created. The residency will allow me to inhabit Waterside and revisit my own haunted past as a performer, curator and maker in the hall. I want to draw upon past performances I’ve presented there (Hall Monitor, Emission, Masc Confessional, Sentients) and ‘remix’ specific aesthetics and approaches I used in these works – to basically re-inhabit the ghosts of my performance past at Vitals! At the end of the residency I’m going to present a 60 minute performance-in-progress on the grand old hall stage, red curtains drawn and footlights on!
Fiona: I am returning to Waterside after a very long absence but it’s a fitting finale to the project, to be based there and explore the memories and “ghosts” that linger there. I’m focused on presenting a listening experience which encapsulates all the textures of the eight months of investigation and writing I/we have been immersed in. I’d like to create the sensation of entering a haunted house, where the disembodied voice lingers there, trying to speak to those who might be willing to hear. My goal with the residency is to explore how audio storytelling, a body-less performance experience, non-visual at heart, might translate into a live event. Is anything gained by listening ‘together’ in a shared space? I’d especially value understanding more about how to make this a comfortable, and enjoyable live experience for people who are vision impaired or without any vision at all.
What are you hoping that audiences will take away from The Paranormal is Personal?
Jason: Hopefully to be inspired by the use of paranormal tools as a way to create art. I’m a healthy skeptic when it comes to the investigation of the ‘spirit world’ but I’m also absolutely invested in the creative potentials of the technology that is available as a way to experiment and ‘dialogue’ with entities or energies that may, or may not, exist. Some of the results that can be found using GhostTube, for example, are incredibly uncanny and spookily accurate at times as to make me wonder if, indeed, I have made contact with the ghosts of my life.
Fiona: First of all, I really hope to introduce audiences to the work of Amy’s Crypt! Amy and Jarrad are Adelaide creators, and have been a source of great inspiration for the project. They developed all the app technology themselves so, I’m very proud of them, and that they’re local to South Australia. Overall, I really hope the audience enjoy an evening of thought provoking material, find the methodologies employed by us both to be interesting, and to enjoy the material presented. We both experienced some genuinely intriguing responses and results using the paranormal tools.These are in-progress projects. I’m really keen to have the focus on the process I’ve undertaken for crafting audio storytelling and to generate some interest in further dialogue about alternative ways to create performance ‘texts’.
Any final words or thoughts to add?
Jason: In presenting the in-progress performance I’m hoping that I can have conversations with (living) humans about the future of the work: Where might it be performed? What kinds of spaces would be good for such a work to be presented? How could it tour? I’d also be interested in conducting workshops for performance/sound using paranormal audio tools! Hit me up!
Fiona: I’m keen to have my audio work/s listened to via being hosted by anybody who feels that ‘theatre for the ears’ might be an interesting addition to a program, especially as it can be situated online. I’m an occasional academic so anybody in the university or education sector that would like to learn more about the making process, to talk about workshops on creating work using a basic program like Audacity, any writer-focused folks that want to hear more about the creative approach… I’d love to talk!
Photo by Pier Carthew
Vitalstatistix Artist in Residence, writer Jennifer Mills, has written a response to YES, the new performance work by acclaimed feminist theatre makers THE RABBLE. Rather than attempt to describe or translate the experience of this extraordinary production, Mills has chosen to assemble a collage poem, a formal response to the work’s invitation to participate in, and widen, its inquiry.
YES is on at Waterside until June 26. Book tickets HERE.
After YES: a collage
1. Why search? What is there to search for?
2. It is a gray zone, poorly defined, where the two camps of masters and servants both diverge and converge. This gray zone possesses an incredibly complicated internal structure and contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge.
3. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.
4. There are temporal and collective dimensions to these actions, and their public nature is not inconsequential; indeed, the performance is effected with the strategic aim of maintaining gender within its binary frame. Understood in pedagogical terms, the performance renders social laws explicit.
5. What’s love got to do with it?
6. Despite the fact that controllers use many of the techniques deployed in other capture crimes and with similar effect, the main elements of coercive control set it apart from all other forms of oppression. Its particularity lies in its aim – to usurp and master a partner’s subjectivity – in its scope of its deployment, its individualised and personal dimensions, and its focus on imposing sex stereotypes in everyday life. The result is a condition of unfreedom (what is experienced as entrapment) that is “gendered” in its construction, delivery, and consequence.
7. Responses, responses, responses. Reviews, reports, inquiries.
8. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.
9. Another inquiry is not going to do it, just get a shovel and start digging.
10. I think the politicisation of natural disasters is very unfortunate.
11. Tasmania is the only jurisdiction in Australia to have made coercive controlling behaviours an offence.
12. Do you really want to hurt me?
13. The Prime Minister of Australia publicly apologised to me through the media, while privately his team actively discredited and undermined my loved ones. I tuned into Question Time to see my former bosses, people that I had dedicated my life to, deny and downplay my lived experience.
14. He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind. As if I couldn’t see through him!
15. Performativity has to do with repetition, very often the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms . . . This is not freedom, but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in.
16. Coercion entails the use of force or threats to compel or dispel a particular response… coercion can have long-term physical, behavioural or psychological consequences… Control may be implemented through specific acts of prohibition or coercion… but its link to dependence and/or obedience is usually more distal than coercion and so harder to detect.
17. Feeling unsafe? If you, or another adult or child, are in immediate danger call 000.
18. Literature is the question minus the answer.
19. My loved one died in the fires FAQ
20. The rainfall, the extreme weather. We are going to have more flooding and it’s going to be unpredictable and it’s going to be more severe and so as someone who loves Lismore deeply and wants to live here into the future I’m asking for leadership, I’m asking for real and sincere commitment to withdraw support from fossil fuel projects which are driving climate change and making it uninhabitable for us to live here.
21. We were denied funerals by pandemic conditions themselves created by the extension of capital to all corners and all habitats of the world, and without the brief socially-sanctioned ritual, we were expected simply not to grieve at all. The expectation once again that grief is just another form of work we do, and, without the performance, we must continue, unaffected.
22. Where the bloody hell are you?
23. No, I don’t really want to shake your hand.
24. If we had no appetite, we would be free from coercion, but because we are from the start given over to what is outside us, submitting to the terms which give form to our existence, we are in this respect – and irreversibly – vulnerable.
25. Do you want to try my milkshake?
26. I don’t hold a hose, mate, and I don’t sit in a control room.
27. And what can one do?
28. As many trauma survivors will tell you, it’s often the lack of an adequate response in the aftermath of a traumatic event, rather than the experience itself, that causes the most psychological damage.
29. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
30. To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
31. You don’t have to participate in this trivial, superficial continuation of mindless abuse culture just for the sake of civility.
32. We will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this.
—
Sources
1. Paula (Ingrid Bergman), Gaslight, 1944
2. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, Summit Books 1988
3. Audre Lorde, ‘The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,’ Sister Outsider, Crossing Press 1984
4. Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology
and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal 1988
5. Tina Turner, 1984
6. Evan Stark, Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life, Oxford University Press, 2007
7. Grace Tame, speaking at Adelaide Writers’ Week, 2022
8. Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill, Hogarth Press 1930
9. Speaker at a Lismore flood inquiry community meeting, 2022
10. PM Scott Morrison, March 2022
11. Tasmanian government website
12. Culture Club, 1982
13. Brittany Higgins, address to the Women’s March, May 2021
14. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ Small & Maynard 1899
15. Judith Butler, interview with Liz Kotz in Artforum, 1992
16. Evan Stark, Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life, Oxford University Press, 2007
17. Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety website
18. Attributed to Roland Barthes
19. Title of a page from the NSW coronial inquest into the 2019-20 fires, in which 26 lives were lost
20. Speaker at a Lismore flood inquiry community meeting, 2022
21. Sarah Jaffe, ‘Nothing and Everything: Mourning Against Work,’ Salvage, 2022
22. Australian tourism slogan; Australian climate strike placard
23. RFS volunteer in Cobargo when approached by the Prime Minister
24. Judith Butler, ‘Bodies and Power Revisited,’ Radical Philosophy, 2002
25. Australian government consent education video, withdrawn in 2021
26. PM Scott Morrison, December 2019
27. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ Small & Maynard, 1899
28. Joelle Gergis, ‘The Great Unravelling,’ Fire Flood Plague, ed. Sophie Cunningham, Vintage 2020
29. Audre Lorde, ‘The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,’ Sister Outsider, Crossing Press 1984
30. Ursula K LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ace Books 1969
31. Grace Tame, speaking at Adelaide Writers’ Week, 2022
32. Greta Thunberg, address to the United Nations, September 2019
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 artist Rebecca Conroy about her interests in economics, labour and artist-led study of these topics, along with her new work Iron Lady, in development with Vitalstatistix and Performance & Art Development Agency.
Rebecca Conroy is an interdisciplinary director, curator, producer, researcher and writer, working across community, PFsite-based events, discursive practices, and intercultural collaborations. She has worked with key arts organisations in Australia including Performance Space, Campbelltown Art Centre, Pact Theatre, ArtSpace, Urban Theatre Projects, Watch this Space, Lismore Regional Art Gallery, as well as collaborating with artists in Sydney and internationally, in the USA, South East Asia and Europe.
Iron Lady is in residence at The Mill, presented by Vitalstatistix and PADA, during the Feast Festival in November
Rebecca, can you tell us a little about your practice and your artistic communities?
Rebecca Conroy: I grew up in the performing arts, but have been straddling disciplines ever since I graduated from theatre school in the 90s. Moving into artist run spaces introduced me to the visual arts world, and now I use my art-swipe-card to gain access to economics, housing, urban planning, and the like. I feel like my practice has always been morphing and lurching in these kind of passionate increments, some conscious and some less so—more like a blurred connection of messy evolving lines of enquiry.
I am interested in work that is cheeky, oppositional, and sort of ruptures things; I prefer straddling, mimicry and Trojan strategies—to survive and maybe avoid capture. Work that is self-aware of its power as art operating within the institution—a self-conscious art.
I also use it therapeutically or as a solution to a problem. Yurt Empire was certainly this, as a response to the housing crisis in 2011 which evolved into a large-scale collaborative experiment; making installations as dwellings we attempted to smuggle them onto a series of development sites south of Sydney. In some ways, I like to make pragmatic works that appear on the outside to be ridiculous propositions, but are actual tools or weapons, instruments that can be wielded, mostly as disguises. I think that’s one of the distinct advantages of the art field—it can use its licence to say what it is and is not, and to alter the frame in which it is interpreted.
When I returned to Sydney in 2004 from a decade living and working in Indonesia, I needed to seek out the ‘kampung’ and ended up in the inner-city neighbourhood of Chippendale setting up a warehouse. With a bunch of others, we co-founded ‘The Wedding Circle’ which ran studios, a gallery and experimental event space. Maybe from a deep longing for Java, the local laneways (or ‘gang’ as they are called in Indonesian) became little capillaries connecting all of our warehouse spaces. Every era feels definitive, but this really felt like the last hurrah for lots of artist run warehouses in that part of Sydney, whilst also being the time when Sydney artists were starting to connect with their nearest neighbours. We used this as a springboard to create an exchange and festival event over four years with artist run spaces and communities from Java. Naturally called it Gang Festival, and published a book called “Gang re:publik”. I like occupying terrain, or wearing its DNA and seeing what happens if you just replace or delete or alter the gene sequence.
You have a body of work and collaborations that explore economics, and do so through artist-led research models. Can you tell us a bit about some of these projects such as Dating an Economist and the Marrickville School of Economics?
RC: Yeah for the past 3 years I have been interested in the superficial distinctions drawn between art and economy and creating works that respond to the nexus of these seemingly disparate fields—I really think they are both involved in the business of making stuff up and speculating, and determining what is of ‘value’. I also enjoy the opposition and friction between them. This is essentially where the ‘Dating an Economist’ project came from. I wanted to reclaim the authority that economists assume in determining and knowing ‘value’, and contest this in a less formal, more intimate setting, which introduced factors of the unknown and unpredictable. By placing them in a date situation, it also put into play feelings, emotions, and the irrational – or rather the way the human behaves in relation to gendered power.
The MSE (Marrickville School of Economics) is another example where I tried to talk back to the authority of the London School of Economics and question the general hegemony of economy as a field of discourse and ideological blunt instrument shaping everything, leading us to “knowing the price of all things and the value of nothing”. The MSE by-line was ‘Let’s unfuck the Economy’ and its challenge was to expose the inadequacy of economic thinking to our worlds. It also questioned the increasing influence that bankers and business people have in the arts world. For example, Ian Narev the CEO of the Commonwealth Bank is also the chairperson of the Sydney Theatre Company. Imagine if artists were on the board of banks? Why is there this implicit and presumptuousness when it comes to knowledge, expertise and value? So MSE was a curriculum that I designed to offer artists access points and pathways into interrogating the assumptions of these disciplines. It was also an opportunity to offer up all the research I had been doing as a series of curated reading lists and literature that was responding specifically to the issues that affect artists, in particular how the rise of flexible casualised labour and a precariat workforce was approaching the condition of the artist-labourer. There is a bunch of art-labour stuff happening in Europe and North America but not so much in Australia. With MSE, which also had an iteration this year as part of the Folkestone Fringe in the UK, the intention was to generate some interest and collectivise knowledge and contacts in this field. The sessions were curated around a thematic and readings, and culminated in a presentation with a non-artist or collaborative project that had some pedagogical use-value.
Much discussion of new economies is basically about promoting entrepreneurship and capitalist ‘innovation’. Yet there are ideas and models that challenge neoliberalism too. What are some of the key ideas around new economies that you are most interested in?
It’s a really interesting time when the distinction around words and concepts like community and sharing have been so thoroughly co-opted and integrated into experiential capital. So part of the ‘fun’ at the moment is finding yourself at events that bring together these segments in misplaced and confusing ways.
Recently in Paris I was fortunate to attend ‘Ouishare’, an international gathering of share economy, alternative economy, and community led enterprise activists, entrepreneurs, and advocates. Elsewhere I have described it like TedX meets Vivid Sydney with the catering done by Hillsong. In other ways, the existence of something like Ouishare is testimony to the tenacity of capitalism.
Instead of addressing the systemic flaws—poverty, climate change, housing crises—as driven by the current configurations of power, well-meaning, mostly white activists, add yet more innovative “solutions” to the mix (as if a lack of ideas was the problem) and in the process, elide existing struggles and erase the histories experiences and lessons learnt.
I tend to find these spaces fascinating to the extent that I am puzzled as to why someone could so much time creating a solution to a ‘problem’ but seemingly zero time understanding how the problem emerges and continues to persist, in the first place. I am conscious particularly that white folk, and particularly men, need to put more energy into listening to those who are at the coal face of those problems.
To this extent I don’t push for artist led solutions, because I think artists have some kind of magic solution, but simply because as a field of practice and body of ideas and approach this is the industry or sector that I relate to, and have experience with.
I think in this way also that artists need to see themselves as part of these same dialogues that are happening around different ways of doing economy—and by extension the practice-led seems to be a great way to be shifting politics. Whether your hands are stuck in soil, or energy systems, or food, or other materials, the doing and the practice I think are great vehicles to rethink political economy and ways of being-in-the-world.
You recently spent three months in Europe for a range of residencies and conferences exploring some of these ideas. Can you tell us about this?
I spent time at PAF (Performing Arts Forum) just outside of Paris. This is an old convent, one-time-cult, and now thriving artist community which hosts “meetings” and themed residencies for large and small groups. It’s quite unique and quite my cup of tea, mixing as they do philosophy and critical enquiry form an artist led practice. I also spent 2 weeks in Tuscany (just awful) with a bunch of great thinkers and community workers learning about P2P economy and alternative models for community housing, food, energy, and governance shaped by municipalities. My contribution was thinking through the artist led-laundromat that is currently in development (see below). It was so incredible to listen learn and just bear witness to the sheer volume of things happening in this field. Artists should be really excited about this. It’s good news for us!
Like women and artists generally, Iron Lady is a service provider and she is also in the business of emotional labour. Can you tell us about her and what you will be doing when you are in Adelaide in November?
Iron Lady emerged from my interest in libidinal economies, the role of intimacy, and my predilection for female assassins and the deceptively harmless, in particular how the subversive can be folded into the ordinary and the everyday.
I was also fascinated with how many clichés I could pile into the one-dimensional character as device, and still generate ambiguity. So obviously Margaret Thatcher is one dimension of the Iron Lady, marked as she is by her lack of empathy and shrewd economic rationalism.
Underlining this is the humble domestic ironing service which underscores all other forms of gendered laboured performed by women in the household, which is why the Iron Lady includes these value-added services on her artisanal menu. Woman as soft generous sounding board, Woman as honest appraisal, Woman as bleeding heart, Iron Lady can perform all these. Illicit affair? Iron Lady can also do that.
Secretly she’s also spraying your collars with Oxytocin—an enzyme that makes you emotionally vulnerable.
During my two weeks, I will be operating a boutique artisanal ironing service, which only caters to cis-white men working in the corporate sector. Essentially, it’s a data mining exercise, a bit like military drills you carry out with friendly combatants. Whilst servicing this ‘market segment’ I will be gathering useful knowledge about how they operate. I will solicit my clientele using a combination of stealth marketing and door to door sales work. And a very good-looking outfit. I will be offering a basic wash and steam press with a free consultation to determine which of the nine value added services from the menu they would like. The work is a made-in-residency work and will expand and move in as yet unknown direction as necessary. For example, recently Iron Lady was given the opportunity to make a cheeky foray into Sydney Contemporary art fair. Moving through the ‘art-kelp’ as my designer Emma Price likes to say with affection, with my business card and my Assassins swag, I discovered that I am going to have to have a firm grip on the narrative otherwise I risk a participant feeling like the jokes on them. OH NO!
Artworks like Iron Lady, and another project you are developing called A Very Beautiful Laundromat, can act as businesses and art simultaneously. They could be seen as a type of public art, or as a type of social enterprise. Are they or are they not? Can you tell us more about the artistic framework of your work?
This is a great question which I always have fun trying to answer as a way of pushing the thinking about art outside of all the tired binaries—art/politics etc.
Essentially I like making work that does both at the same time, or that can shift from one to another constantly. Life is perhaps too short for things to only exist as ‘art’ and not also be threaded into the lived experiences as a response to making life happen, just as social enterprises seem like missed opportunities to also express art or have ridiculous moments, rough up the edges a bit, or carve out some space for deep beautiful thinking.
The artist run laundromat is a response to the feast and famine economy and will provide occasional paid shifts for artists in between gigs, whilst also being a gathering space for the social and the discursive. I am working with three other top ladybirds in the arts and finance worlds to make this come alive. Our business outfit is called Money Laundering.
What could people read to know more about these ideas?
The websites for the projects have some great resources, in particular:
Other artists whose work I dig in the art/economy field are:
At the beginning of September, Vitalstatistix presented Adhocracy, our national arts hothouse. Adhocracy featured nine project and around forty artists, all developing new experimental and multidisciplinary artworks. You can read about why Adhocracy (and the artists it supports) are important here.
This year’s commissioned residency project for Adhocracy was Second Hand Emotions, led by Mish Grigor, Sarah Rodigari and SJ Norman with South Australian artists Celeste Martin, Grace Marlow, Jennifer Greer Holmes, Rebecca Meston, Sarah-Jayde Tracey and Suzannah Kennett Lister.
Second Hand Emotions was a queer, unashamedly process-driven and discursive project responding to the provocation of ‘love and feminism’. The Second Hand Emotions zine, produced during the residency, can be seen at Fontanelle’s Love & Feminism exhibition on until 8 October as part of FRAN.
For our (slightly belated!) September blog we are publishing a speech delivered by the Second Hand Emotions lead artists at the opening event on Friday 1 September.
Our next Vital Conversations blog in October will feature a solo interview with artist Rebecca Conroy, also discussion feminist themes of affective and emotional labour, and her work Iron Lady in development with Vitalstatistix and Performance & Art Development Agency during November as part of the Feast Festival.
WE TALKED
WE STARTED BY TALKING
WE’VE BEEN TALKING FOR TWELVE DAYS
WE’RE STILL TALKING NOW (AND …..NOW)
WE MADE LISTS
WE INTERROGATED EACH OTHER
WE ASKED NICELY
WE CATEGORISED IT AS A COLLOQUIAL DISCURSIVE MODE
WOMEN SITTING IN A CIRCLE TALKING
(NO, PEOPLE SITTING IN A CIRCLE TALKING)
WE COVERED LOTS OF GROUND
WE DEFINED AFFECTIVE LABOUR
SOME OF US GOOGLED PHILOSOPHICAL TERMS
WE TALKED ABOUT WAVES OF FEMINISM
WE TALKED ABOUT WAVES OF EMOTION
WE WERE LOST IN A SEA OF CONTRADICTIONS.
WE WORKED 10-5
BUT REALLY WE STARTED AT 11, THE REAL WORK STARTED AT 11. BEFORE THAT WAS COFFEE, AND WRITING, AND CHECK INS.
WE MADE ANOTHER POT OF COFFEE, WE MIGHT JUST MAKE ANOTHER POT OF COFFEE?.
WE DECIDED NOT TO GIVE ANY HOMEWORK
BUT THEN WE GAVE A BIT, BUT WE IT WASNT REALLY HOMEWORK, IT WAS ALMOST HOMEWORK, SO IT WAS STOOP WORK.
WE TALKED ABOUT EMOTIONS
WE TALKED ABOUT ART
WE TALKED ABOUT POLITICS
WE TALKED ABOUT LIFE
TENDERNESS. RAGE. GRIEF. LOVE
WE TALKED ABOUT FUCKING.
THEN WE WOULD GO HOME AND THE REAL WORK WOULD START
THEN WE WOULD DO THE OTHER WORK THAT WE HAVE TO DO FOR OUR OTHER JOB, OUR MONEY JOB. THEN WE WERE TIRED BECAUSE WE REALISED WE WERE WORKING ALL DAY AND WORKING ALL NIGHT.
WE WORKED IT OUT
WE INVITED GUESTS
WE BROUGHT IN EXPERTS
WE HAD A SKYPE
WE HARDLY EVER AGREED BUT WE WERE USUALLY PRETTY POLITE ABOUT IT
WE TALKED ABOUT FEMINIST HISTORIES
WE TALKED ABOUT ART HEROES
WE TALKED ABOUT PROJECTS THAT WE MIGHT MAKE
WE TALKED THROUGH OUR HISTORIES
WE DEFINED OUR EXTENDED ANCESTRY
WE TALKED ABOUT INSTAGRAM EYEBROWS
WE TALKED ABOUT THE SOMATISATION OF EMOTIONAL
WE ASKED QUESTIONS
WE WERE LATE
WE ARRIVED EARLY
WE SPLIT INTO GROUPS
WE DIDNT HAVE A BOSS
WE DIDNT HAVE A LEADER
WE WERE ALL LEADERS
SOME LEADERS SPEAK MORE THAN OTHER LEADERS
WE LAUGHED
WE WONDERED IF SOMEONE WOULD CRY
WE MADE FUN OF EACH OTHER
WE TRIED TO LISTEN
WE TALKED ABUOT THE BODY
WE TALKED ABOUT THE MIND
WE TALKED ABOUT THE CARTESIAN SPLIT
WE TRIED TO EXORCISE THE DEMONS OF THE CARTESIAN SPLIT
WE TRIED TO DISPEL THE MYTH OF THE CARTESIAN SPLIT
WE FELL BACK, EVEN US, ON THE CARTESIAN SPLIT
WE WERENT SURE HOW TO SHARE ALL THIS WITH YOU
WE WERE TIRED AT THE END OF EACH DAY
WE WERE TALKING AS A POLITICAL ACT. WE WERE TALKING AS A SPACE OF ACTION. WE TALKED ABOUT TALKING AS A RIGHT AND PRIVILEGE AND WE TALKED IN DEFIANCE OF ALL THE TIMES WE HAVE BEEN SILENCED. WE TALKED TOGETHER IN DEFIANCE OF ALL THE TIMES WE HAVE BEEN ALONE. WE TALKED ABOUT TALKING AS A WAY THAT AFFECTIVE LABOUR MANIFESTS.
WE HAD A WINE
WE HAD A WINE
WE HAD A WINE
WE USED THE WORD CUNT AND RECLAIMED THE WORD PUSSY
WE HAD ANOTHER WINE
WE WENT PERSONAL WE WENT POLITICAL WE WENT INTERSECTIONAL
WE ASKED QUESTIONS – ARE YOU A WOMAN? HOW DO YOU KNOW?
WHAT SHAPE DOES RAGE TAKE? WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU WERE VIOLENT?
WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU CARED FOR SOMEONE?
WE ASKED VIRGINIA WOOLF, WE ASKED AUDRE LORDE. LESLEY FEINEBERG. MAGGIE NELSON. NINA SIMONE. TWIN PEAKS.
MY BACK CATALOGUE YOUR BACK CATALOGUE
WE WONDERED IF YOU CAN COMMUNICATE TWELVE DAYS OF CONVERSATION IN FIVE MINUTES
WE WONDERED IF WE COULD ENCAPSULATE IN THAT OUTCOME ON WHAT IS INHERENTLY AN OPEN ENDED NON DIDACTIC MULTIFACETED DIALOGICAL SPACE OF SELF REFLECTION AND SHARED FRUSTRATION
WE FIGURED OUT THAT YOU CANT ENCAPSULATE IT
WE FIGURED THAT YOU CANT EXPRESS IT
THERE’S NOTHING IN HERE ABOUT COLONIALISM
BUT WE KEPT IT IN THE ROOM, ALWAYS
WE TRIED TO KEEP IT IN THE ROOM, ALWAYS
WE STARTED OUR FORTNIGHT WITH A DECOLONISING GESTURE, AND WE CARRY THAT WITH US NOW, AT THE END.
WE WONDERED WHAT ELSE WE MIGHT TAKE AWAY FROM IT ALL
WE PROPOSED MOVING SILENCE INTO ACTION
WE WONDERED WHAT WE MIGHT IMPART TO YOU
WE WANT TO SAY THANKS FOR HAVING US
WE THINK WE’LL BE THINKING ABOUT THIS FOR A WHILE
Image: The entire Second Hand Emotions artists on the final night of Adhocracy.
Vitalstatistix spoke with artists SJ Norman and Meg Wilson about their multidisciplinary practices, the queering of feminism, and their upcoming projects for Adhocracy 2017.
SJ Norman is a multidisciplinary artist and writer. Their work traverses performance, installation, sculpture, text, video and sound. Norman’s primary medium is the body and live performance remains the core of their practice: working with extended duration, task-based, and endurance practices, as well as intimate/one-to-one frameworks. They are a proud Indigenous Australian of both Wiradjuri and European heritage. They are co-leading this year’s Adhocracy residency project Second Hand Emotions.
Meg Wilson is a multidisciplinary artist who works predominantly with large-scale and site-specific installation and performance. Her visual art and theatre design practices are mutually influential and frequently overlap. Meg aims to provoke imposed perplexity, uneasiness and a sense of drama in the everyday, through explorations of the performativity of space and the audience encounter with the ordinary, set within the context of the out-of-the-ordinary. She is developing live art event SQUASH! at Adhocracy 2017.
Meg and SJ, tell us a bit more about your practices and your artistic communities.
SJ Norman: I make a lot of different things but I’m mainly known for my performance and installation work, and my writing. Many people would call me a live artist, which is fine.
My artistic community is a very dense rhizome which stretches across the globe. It includes quite a lot of people who would not call themselves artists.
Meg Wilson: I’m very fortunate to have an artistic practice that spans several disciplines, from visual and live art to performance and design for theatre. This has come out of fairly unconscious desire not to be defined by or associated with any one genre or form. I started out as a painter and became known as a textile artist, then an installation artist. After art school, I studied interior design and eventually found my way into design for theatre, allowing me to satisfy a constant eagerness for making and resistance to monotony between personal projects.
As I have largely gained experience by volunteering and interning with various companies and designers that I admire, I have managed to form meaningful and supportive relationships with a diverse and extremely generous group of makers and collaborators that I can now call upon for guidance – locally, nationally and somewhat internationally.
It is the overwhelming generosity, sharp intelligence and sheer bloody persistent guts of my community that excites me and allows me to see a future for what we do.
SJ, you are co-leading this year’s Adhocracy residency project Second Hand Emotions with Mish Grigor and Sarah Rodigari. You will be joined by a team of local artists to explore the theme of ‘love and feminism’. What does this theme conjure for you?
SJN: The very first thing that springs to mind is the question of affective labour. I want to know what a “Labour Of Love” really looks like under late-capitalism. Certainly one of the most enduring questions of Feminist discourse is that of the feminization and devaluation of specific kinds of work: un-waged reproductive labour, certainly, but also the care and service professions. I think about how we do or do not value this kind of labour, how it is distributed, how some bodies are burdened with a greater expectation to provide it than others.
I think, also, about how individual potential to convert this labour into capital- be it monetary or otherwise- is determined by numerous governing factors; if we use very broad brushstrokes, we would say: principally race and class. There are infinite levels of nuance to unpack underneath that, though.
I think, also, about how Feminism as a discourse has had, and retains, a more difficult relationship to certain types of affective labour than others: I’m referring, specifically, to sex work. When you say the words “Feminism and Love” to me I am going to think about the monetization of love and the burden of societal stigma that exclusion which is the reality for so many people who find economic agency by trading emotional and sexual labour. I think, specifically, about the systematic exclusion of sex workers and advocates from the broader terrain of feminist politics and discourse, the way that mainstream White Feminism continues not just to fail sex workers, but to actively work against them. This, along with Transgender rights, have come to the fore (once again) as the battle lines along which one type of Feminist is distinguished from another.
A lot of people are calling this a generational divide, but as far as I can see, this is demonstrably untrue: I know plenty of SWERF’s in their 20’s, and plenty of radical sex work advocates in their 70’s.
Generally, I think about all the sex workers in my life who expend their life energy fighting abolitionists, people who would no doubt identify themselves as Feminists, who are intent on pushing back on their rights, denying their agency and dehumanising them generally. I think about how little this community sees by way of solidarity. I think about how endlessly exhausting this is for a great many people I love and it enrages me, frankly.
I think about what love can look like as a radical act: I think about Audre Lorde’s oft-misquoted doctrine of self-care. I think about what love as resistance looks like, what radical vulnerability and generosity look like. I think, especially, about what that looks like in the context of a de-colonial politic. I think about the love that exists between people who share struggle. I think about de-colonising desire, and what that looks like. I think about the love that is held in abundance by Elders of all kinds.
I think about how words like “No” and “Fuck You” can also be said with love. I think about the loving rage that sometimes seizes me and forces action.
I think also, about the twisted and damaged love I’ve received, as a survivor of both familial and intimate partner violence. In all cases the perpetrators were women, who called themselves Feminists. People are complicated. So is love. The myth of Feminine nurturance is a pervasive and deeply oppressive one.
I think about my marriage, which is not recognised legally in this country. I think about the love I have for my wife, and the love they have for me. I think about our ironic use of the word “wifey” for each other even though neither of us identify with womanhood, much less wife-hood. I think about what this word marriage means when we apply it to the daily lives of two non-binary, feminine presenting trans people, who are spurious of any state sanctioning of our relationship, but very happily chose to engage it anyway, on our own terms.
I think of the ferocity of love that comes from my Tiddas. I think about how the word Sister, when it comes from an Aboriginal person and especially, a feminine person, holds an entirely different bond of kinship and solidarity and love than when it comes from a white woman. I have a white sister- my immediate blood sister to a different mother- and she is the only non-Aboriginal person I would ever suffer to address me in this way.
As a non-binary transperson I don’t permit the use of feminized forms of endearment or address in relationship to me by anyone, at any time, with the exception of Blak kin. I think about how both love and feminism mean profoundly different things in different contexts.
Given all of that, it’s not surprising then, that Feminist is a term that I struggle with. But then, I don’t know any Revisionist Feminists (and I guess that’s my species) who don’t struggle with the term Feminist and the weight of complex expectation and ambivalence that comes with it. I struggle with it in the same way I struggle with Queer, with trans, with non-binary, and, in a different but intersecting way, with Aboriginal. I struggle in the sense that all of these words denote both an identity, an embodied and encultured experience, a struggle, and a political and theoretical terrain which extends far beyond the boundaries a singular terminology could mark out. They contain multitudes and they contain deep conflict, and in all cases it’s a conflict that pervades my life and my body. They are absolutely structural to my existence in the word. And yet, their failure is also inherent. They can only function as placeholder text for something far more immense and slippery. That is not to diminish any of them, or to diminish the richness and the functional political value of language. But it becomes problematic when we assume a commonality of meaning.
What does it mean for me to claim the title of Feminist, when Julie Bindle or Shiela Jeffries call themselves by the same name, and our politics bear absolutely zero resemblance to each other?
I’m generally more at home calling myself a militant Blak non-binary Queer than I am with calling myself a Feminist. Which is not to say I reject the term of the discourse, either. Not at all. I’m just more personally invested resisting gender-based oppression than I am in upholding what seems like a fairly nebulous, flawed and highly selective agenda called “Women’s Rights”. I don’t even know what that is, beyond a fairly narrow set of parameters that excludes me and almost everyone I care about.
Meg, SQUASH! is the third in a trilogy of works about sport, women, aggression and competition. What draws you to these themes?
MW: I feel like there was a point in my life where I made the decision to become an artist over an athlete. Somehow I thought that as a woman becoming an artist was more feasible than making a living as an athlete. I find sport fascinating as a kind of microcosm or intensified version of everyday life. It allows for behaviour and attitudes that are rarely accepted outside of sport, and yet these are attitudes and behaviours that can still be frowned upon for female athletes.
Women, aggression and competitive nature are very interesting areas of investigation. I have experienced high levels of violence and aggression. I would also say that I am a fiercely competitive individual, however, I think that most would describe me as a relatively calm, fair and softly spoken individual. I find this somewhat hidden or unspoken behaviour and the rules surrounding it intriguing. There are platforms in which aggressive behaviour is permissible for women…but only to a certain extent. Then there’s the realm of female aggression and damaging competitive attitudes against other women and ourselves.
You both, at times, work with duration, pain and the body. Can you speak to us about why this is and who/what has influenced you artistically?
SJN: People have been asking me this question for 13 years, and honestly I’m still not sure how to answer it! I have worked with duration and endurance differently in every work I have ever made, so there is not a single answer.
There is an assumption that performance makers who work with pain or physical mortifications of any kind are in it for ultimately exhibitionistic reasons. That might be true for some artists, and you might be able to apply that reading to the work of others if your engagement is superficial.
I am actually profoundly disinterested, and actually quite annoyed, by the Spectacle of Pain. I am annoyed by the fetishism of endurance, too. The fact that I do something for 12 hours is not interesting in and of itself. I’ve worked longer and more grueling shifts in hospitality. Women have longer labours than that.
Likewise, sticking a few pins in myself is not challenging or interesting unto itself- I do much more physically hardcore things for fun, on my own time, and I don’t call it art. What is interesting is the artistic application of those practices. I think there is an assumption that if you are making body based work you are out for the shock value. This is such a boring, persistent and reductive reading. It’s a distinctly elitist, western discourse and a masculinist one at that; this voyeuristic display of physical dominance. It’s also deeply false, in my case at least. I couldn’t care less about shocking people – I am actually much more concerned with ushering an audience past the shock threshold so we can get on with the more interesting and intimate business of transmutation, dreaming, and magic.
Ultimately that’s what draws me to these practices. Repetition, duration, trance states- all of these things are tried and true pathways to the Ecstatic and that is what fascinates and drives me the most.
They are capable of opening doors into the numinous through which both performer and audience can enter. They are ways of dialoguing with the unseen, and a way that the bodies of strangers can speak deeply to each other, there are sublime openings and exchanges enabled in that space if you pilot it right. There is big healing to be found there. I made my first solo work in 2006, after several years of ensemble performance. I set out on solo practice with one objective in mind: I wanted the body of the audience, be that an individual body or a collective body, to be as strongly engaged and implicated in the work as the body of the performer. I wanted to create frameworks for co-manifestation of complex and volatile states. That remains the case today.
A lot of diverse interests have fed into this path: early in my practice I studied Butoh intensively, in Australia and Japan. I had been a self-harming teenager and a BDSM-practicing adult. I have been a practicing witch for as long as I can remember- I was steeped in both western occultism, mysticism as well as the deeply inscribed ancestral cultural patterning throughout my upbringing. I possess more than a passing fancy for techno and entheogens, and have been going to dance parties and raves since my late teens, and these spaces have and continue to teach me a great deal about collective transcendental ritual.
I am also an Aboriginal person who has been divested of a direct connection to my ancestral customs and rituals, or at the very least, the set ritual vocabularies which might have been passed to me by my mob had my family managed to maintain that continuity.
I am deeply driven by the need to give form to the conversation that is taking place continually in my body by other, more improvisational means. This kind of performance has been a way of giving voice to haunted flesh, to a roaring in the blood. I am interested, also, in taking a de-colonial stake in a field of practice which has historically been overwhelmingly white and which has relied heavily on dubious pseudo-Shamanic posturing, unreconstructed primitivism. In some respects, it is an act of very deliberate de-colonial reclamation.
MW: At the moment I know that my body can handle endurance and pain and this is a strength within my practice. I know that there will be a time when endurance is no longer my strength and that the pain will be all too overpowering and damaging. This too may become an area of interest for my practice. I don’t know. I know it hurts more with every project, as I acquire a new injury related to age and relative disuse of certain muscles and joints in recent years. I think of it as a really honest language for an artist. There is no way of hiding emotion in an endurance event and there is no certain way of influencing, determining or predicting an outcome. In this way I find it both exciting and intimidating.
I am mostly influenced by local artists, whom I have come to meet and know through their practice. Artists I have recently been influenced by include: Mira Oosterweghel, who uses both her own body in performance, but also delegates performance to other artists; and theatremakers, THE RABBLE, whom I was very fortunate to spend 2016 with as Lead Artist Intern. Theatre for THE RABBLE is a conversation that sits somewhere between extreme pursuits of the body and mind, exquisite beauty, pain and comedic and political intelligence. Emma Valente of THE RABBLE has continued to act as mentor for my artistic practice into 2017, and is dramaturg for SQUASH!
Meg, you have participated in Adhocracy numerous times over the years, in different ways. Tell us about the Adhocracy experience from an artist’s point of view (participating artist and artist in the audience).
MW: In 2014 I took part in my first Adhocracy residency, Future Present, alongside 9 other SA artists under the guidance of Rosie Dennis of Urban Theatre Projects. At this point in time I was at a major crossroads in my career as a purely visual artist. I had become interested in interdisciplinary and collaborative art making, having only ever worked in solitude in a largely isolating manner. Exposure over a two-week period to the methods of artists largely unknown to me, allowed me to explore process and take risks in an environment where no idea was precious. I learnt how to make in a space where it was okay to be vulnerable, experimental and chuck things out when they’re just not working. It was during this residency that I first met and collaborated with performers and theatremakers, Ashton Malcolm and Josephine Were. Together, we continue to decipher and define a language of making that sits somewhere between live art, theatre and performative installation and have been prolifically generating works across all disciplines.
In 2016, I was able to take part in Adhocracy as part of a newly formed collective of artists: Hew Parham, Nick Bennett, Paulo Castro and Sascha Budimski, on Tension of Opposites. This was the first time all of the artists had worked together and the work was in its very initial stages of development. The platform of Adhocracy allowed us to test the viability of the team’s working relationship within a collaborative framework, and to devise material in a compressed (and somewhat intense) fashion. With access to multiple audiences and the ability to talk to the work and respond to critical feedback and discussion over the three days of presentation of the work in progress, was extremely beneficial to the team and the direction for the work leading into its next stage of development.
Adhocracy is also just a very excellent opportunity to observe and to chat. To see artists come from all over Australia to share their process, listen to early creative thoughts and engage in a national conversation, Waterside in Port Adelaide, is actually just a giant treat every year.
SJ, last time you were in Adelaide, you presented a new work Stone Tape Theory, as part of PADA’s Near & Far exhibition and the first Tarnanthi Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art. The work then went straight to SPILL in the UK. What is the experience of presenting your work in Australian and European contexts as a queer, Aboriginal artist?
SJ: The short answer goes like this: I am a bi-cultural, globalised, neo-colonial, late capitalist, Indigenous Diaporic, queer subject, and unpacking what that means is a big part of my practice and life. Just to widen the context: I come from a background of geographical and cultural dispossession: I was raised by a single Aboriginal mother and we moved around a lot. Just as she had done, as the offspring of itinerant workers, and as they had done as people who were dispossessed of their land. So, spatial liminality is second nature to me. I’ve never called a singular place home and I doubt I ever will. I’ve been on the move pretty constantly between Australia and Europe for the duration of my adult life and practice. My practice has grown in the in-between space in geographical, discursive, formal and cultural terms. Thresholds and crossroads are my place in the world, everything I make is generated from within these spaces.
A work like Stone Tape Theory (STT) travels more easily between contexts because it is speaking quite broadly. First and foremost, it’s a work about mental health and my specific struggle with complex trauma. It’s not a work which has what audiences might see as recognisably Indigenous or queer themes, despite the fact that it is made by a Queer Indigenous artist and my subjectivity has entirely shaped its realisation.
Whether or not a work, made by an Aboriginal artist, which is not explicitly relating to their Aborginality, is still an “Aboriginal Artwork” is like enquiring after the sound of one hand clapping…it’s a question I hope we are all bored of, by now.
One of the tricky things, of course is, once an artist is identified as Aboriginal, they are not allowed to be or make anything else. Queer artists often fall prey to the same pigeonholing, but to a different, and I would argue, significantly lesser extent. Aboriginal artists who choose to (*gasp*) occasionally make work about other things are often treated by the art public and occasionally by their peers as somewhat treacherous or suspicious- it’s just further evidence of our failure to fulfil the criteria of a white-centric standard of Indigenous “authenticity”. This just a part of a bigger, and much more complex, structure of systemic exclusion which seeks to sequester Aboriginal practice away from the main body of contemporary art. It’s just another manifestation of a colonial imperative to keep Aboriginal people and artists firmly in our place. It was a bold choice for TARNANTHI and PADA to jointly present Stone Tape Theory in the context of a major review of Indigenous practice, because the dominant perceptions of what that can be remain quite narrow in Australia. Next Wave made a similarly bold choice by programming Concerto No. 3 in BlakWave.
I’m thankful to the presenters I have worked with in this country who have shown this kind of guts, and it does take guts.
I presented STT at SPILL London within weeks of the Adelaide presentation. It was the second time I had been commissioned by SPILL, the first was Bone Library in 2015. Bone Library had received a thunderous reception at the previous SPILL so the pressure felt very high. I made the work, as I make all my work, entirely on my own.
I had been without a fixed address for about 9 months prior to the presentation, I didn’t have a studio, and I was managing what can only be described as a fully blown nervous breakdown, I was really held together by frayed sticky tape at that point. So to say the work was pretty raw is an understatement.
It went down well in London, though I am sure it confused and polarised some people. It was not an easy work. It required some investment of risk and discomfort from the audience. Some people literally left screaming: even I was terrified to be in there sometimes, the force of energy summoned by the work was immense and occasionally tipped into actual horror.
I have a long history of presenting and working in the UK, in particular. It was really in England that I first established my practice, after I moved there in 2006. The live art community, and specifically the community in Bristol where I was based, had a big part to play in growing me up artistically. Much of my practice, especially with regards to the works which focus on the broader terrain of colonial history, have been born out of my own cultural and political bi-location between England and Australia. England still feels wildly foreign to me at times but then, so does Australia.
That said, adapting Bone Library for an overseas audience was a nerve wracking experience. First of all, there are protocols and relationships that I have to carefully observe and manage in order to take the work off-country. There were a lot of ethical questions which I had to very rigourously engage before the work was ready to tour. That took about 6 months of extra work.
I did not expect the work to receive the rapturous reception that it did at SPILL, or subsequently at Venice International Performance Art Week. It was a really humbling experience, because I saw how deeply audiences from literally all over the world (there were delegations from every continent at Venice) were able to connect with it.
The English really surprised me, to be honest. UK audiences are known for their coolness, and I also did not expect them to so readily connect with the work, and to do so with such depth and sincerity. People were bawling their eyes out, like really really crying, when I read the Elder’s welcome handed the bones into their care. Bone custodians from everywhere regularly write to me to express their gratitude for the work, for the insight that it gave them and the chance they had to connect with some sense of intimacy and agency to a history which has been denied. It’s not just Aboriginal people who are denied our truth when history is suppressed. Settlers are also denied the opportunity to reckon with their own part in that history and to heal their own relationship to it as the descendants of perpetrators. Similarly, the work has yielded incredible, heartful dialogues between me and others whose cultures have been marked by similar traumas. This is part of the cultural labour that I aim to achieve with Bone Library, and many of my other works.
I dearly wish I could say I had had the same experience performing the work in Australia. But sadly the work has only been performed to scale in this country once in its 7 year life span, for five days in Melbourne in 2010. Likewise, Unsettling Suite, the body of works that Bone Library comes from, has also only been seen once in this country, at Performance Space in 2013. Elders and Aboriginal community have expressed their appreciation of the work, as have quite a few emerging Aboriginal artists who have personally expressed to me how influential Bone Library and the other works of the Unsettling Suite have been on their own practices. This is hugely rewarding and sustaining for me to know. I had wonderful audiences for the 2010 performance and I know that and, that said, I’ll repeat that the work has been produced to scale once, in its 7 year life span.
In the 7 years I’ve been performing it, Bone Library has received a total of about 600 words in coverage from the Australian arts press, and a good 200 of those were expended by a critic fixating on my fashion choices, hairstyle and “air of contemporary urban sophistication” which apparently undermined her own expectations of what an Aboriginal person looks like…this is not me having sour grapes, by the way!
I also have a lot of really, deeply wonderful and nourishing support here, and owe a tremendous amount to the people who have backed my practice fiercely. I’m just alluding, perhaps not so subtly, to some structural disadvantages that have affected me as an Indigenous queer experimental artist working in this country.
We also have a problem, in Australia, with devaluing our own artistic legacies. This is a very colonial problem. Institutionally, whole local performance histories have gone criminally under-recorded in favour of a focus on the European and American cannon. This shows up, for me and other artists, in peculiar ways. For instance, recently, I was made aware of a graduate show at a well-known art college in which a student had made a piece that directly plagiarised a work of mine. I’m not talking about an obscure piece, either, but a work which I have performed all over the world, at least once a year, for the last 12 years. If a student had made a piece that was, say, directly plagiarising the work of any of my European or American peers, I can’t imagine they would have gotten away with it. But “local” artists are fair game because we are fundamentally valued less. Art students know everything there is to know about Marina Abramovic but they’ve never heard of Jill Orr. And our cultural memory here is so alarmingly contracted.
People who are students now, even in cities with such rich local performance histories as Sydney, know everything about the 70’s in New York but nothing about the radical work that was being produced in the 90’s in their own town, by living artists who probably live around the corner from them. I find this confounding and deeply saddening.
All of these things have been very good reasons for me to put a lot of distance between myself and Australia, at times. Distance is also essential for me to gain perspective on the things that I want to talk about here, especially with regards to de-colonial discourse. It helps me to generate and clarify ideas. It’s hard to do that here, because the problems you want to address are inches from your face at all times.
Tell us about something you are currently obsessed with?
SJ: I’ve been too concerned with survival recently to have the time for many obsessions, sadly. Hopefully that will change. Other than that, I guess my thoughts are quite occupied by environmental calamity and existential collapse, and the looming specter of theocratic fascism.
Planting a medicinal herb garden while the world burns, basically.
I’m also trying to finish writing a couple of books. I’m heavily pre-occupied with re-grounding back in Australia after 9 years predominantly based in Europe – that is a shock to the system. I am obsessed by all the things that are fucked about Australia politically and continually strengthening my own agency and that of those around me to resist, agitate and transform this neo-liberal colonial white supremacist political cesspit we’re all trying to survive in. I’ve also been pretty obsessed with body-building and weightlifting for about a year now, lifting heavy shit keeps me sane.
MW: To be honest, I’m not great with obsessions. I don’t really have interesting ones. I do become engrossed with current projects and then ways of switching off from projects.
The problem is that my projects often require a huge change to my lifestyle in order to realise a project outcome. Right now, I would say that I’m obsessed with the game of squash and becoming quite good at it (I hope).
The counter obsession is watching mindless documentaries on Netflix such as Locked Up – a documentary that follows prisoners in penitentiaries in the U.S., but I always find a link between these mindless obsessions and the things I’m currently working on.
As independent artists what are the kinds of initiatives and programs that you want to see further support for in the future? What excites you in Australian arts?
SJN: Top of the wishlist? I would like to see independent artists become unionised, the same as any other industry. I would like to see an end, once and for all, to the cult of genius and the speculation economy. I would like to see more initiatives that increase the industrial organising power of artists and arts workers, because we are an extremely exploited workforce.
I would like to see more opportunities for artists to become politicised and organised around labour and class, because right now the arts is dominated by, and upholding, overwhelmingly bourgeois cultural values to our great collective detriment.
I would like to see more opportunities for rigorous training and development for younger artists, in particular, outside of institutional frameworks. I owe my own practice to the training and mentorship I received at PACT Centre for Emerging Artists in Sydney. The Impact Ensemble was an incredible and totally accessible program. I would love to see it returned to its former glory. I would love to see more initiatives like it. I would like to see them abundantly funded.
I would like to see more de-colonial pedagogy. I would like to see a decentralisation of power outside of major institutions. I would like to see more and more and more Indigenous led organisations and more Indigenous people in positions of power within the arts. I would like to see how this would change the landscape for the better. I would like to imagine a future where Indigenous artists and people are running our own show, and the real depth, complexity, diversity and strength of our contributions as innovators, artists and leaders was give then value it deserves.
MW: I have obviously greatly benefitted from my relationship with Vitalstatistix and programs such as Adhocracy that champion experimentation, interdisciplinary practice and the importance of diverse audiences for works in various stages of development. As a former co-director of an Artist Run Initiative (ARI), I also champion artists who create opportunities that bridge gaps for other artists.
I highly support initiatives that nurture artists in their early stages of practice and those that interrogate artistic processes. It’s okay to have a good cry or two during this process!
I defer to an earlier question about artistic community with regard to what excites me about Australian arts. I just think that within the independent scene there is an overwhelming amount of support between peers and it is these relationships that allow us to keep kicking goals (shameless sports reference) as artists struggling in a pretty grim environment right now, all the while managing to sustain important, relevant and exciting conversations surrounding topics of substance that continue to matter.
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!
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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