Tiger Two Times

Performance collective Tiger Two Times from Sydney was born out of the collaboration Team Mess which was a ten person group coming out of Wollongong Uni.

Team Mess made a work for Underbelly and then received a Performance Space residency to make Killing Don.

Four of the members have branched out to create Tiger Two Times, lala interviewed (via Skype) them as they were packing their bags in Sydney getting ready to come to Melbourne for their new work Nature League in North Melbourne. (Have a look at at the difference in clothing between Melbourne and Sydney)

Nature League in North Melbourne is on at
7.30pm and 8.30pm 25 Sep,
5.30pm, 7.30pm and 8.30pm 26 Sep,
5.30pm and 6.30pm 27 Sep
7.30pm and 8.30pm 29 Sep-2 Oct,

Fringe Hub – The Warehouse
521 Queensberry Street North Melbourne

Tiger Two Times have a process blog for the project too.

If you are in Melbourne, get along and support these lovely Sydneysiders and have a wee chat to them after their show and tell them what you thought!

Let’s Paint Tv – in australia!

The incredible Jon Kilduff is coming to Australia. It is impossible to talk about exactly what it is he does – but his cable show in LA has become something of a cult phenomenon. He is at Electrofringe and a bunch of dates along the east coast on his “Embrace Failare” tour.

LET’S PAINT TV – AUS DATES
SEP 25 SYDNEY – THE RED RATTLER
OCT 1-5 NEWCASTLE – ELECTROFRINGE
OCT 7 CANBERRA – CANBERRA CONTEMPORARY ART SPACE
OCT 9 MELBOURNE – TAPE SPACE
OCT 10 MELBOURNE – HORSE BAZAAR

Check out Emile Zile’s interview with him here and here for his website.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQUUriLDVZU&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvbL_5rH1QQ&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

Tim Etchells on performance

(12AM Awake and Looking Down – Forced Entertainment)

Tim Etchells’ text commissioned for Programme Notes: 2007 LADA and Arts Council England, Editors Daniel Brine & Lois Keidan p 22.

After naturalism, after Brecht, after the absurd, after the Kitchen Sink and musicals, after collaborative this and experimental that, after the multi-disciplinary high-and-low budget, high-and-low-brow extravaganzas, after empty spaces and physical theatres and all that very visual theatre and all that theatre that is also installation and all the performance theatre and the dance drama and the dance theatre and the loud music and the strange slow images and the even-stranger jump-cut images, the re-definition of mime to include talking and the reinvention of dance to more-or-less exclude dancing as such, after all of it, after the fragmentation and the swearing, after the violence and the microphones and the yelling and after the reading and the formal shock horror, after the content scandale and the buggery, the no-star reviews and the cacophony of tipping seats, after all that ‘is-it-really-acting’ and ‘is-it-really-theatre’ and ‘is-it-really-art’ etc etc etc perhaps we can say now, finally, that theatre can be what we want and need it to be in order to meet audiences and look them straight in the eyes with a question and an attempt to talk about what its like to live in this world now. After all that perhaps we can just say that the door is open. That the space is one of possibility – that anything can happen in the next one hour and 45 minutes, that no one needs permission from a parent or guardian or the approval of a responsible adult, the Mayor, the Lord Chamberlain or the Ghosts of Shakespeare, Osbourne or any living dead critics from any national newspapers, I mention no names. The door is open. Anything is possible. All of the above, and anything more (or less) or anything totally different that anyone feels inspired, inclined to compelled to bring to the table, to the stage. That’s all anyone ever wanted after all; that the door be open and left that way so that more people can get their foot through it, artists and audiences.

(with thanks to Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy)

Live Art and Performance

(Predictive Text – Clair Korobacz/Gameshow)

On Live Art
In addressing and critiquing notions of time, live art performance is also able structurally to undermine some of the most enduring cultural forces and narratives of our time:
the progress of ‘civilisation’, the accumulation of culture.  The scrutiny that performance brings to temporality thus has a vital significance in the accelerated cultures of late capitalism.  Here, time has become a commodity that is highly regulated: speed is the primary value and time wasted is money lost.  Frequently deploying a contemplative and ‘wasteful’ expenditure of time, performance continues its long wrangle with the forces of capitalism.

Live: Art and Performance

2004, Routledge, New York

Editor: Adrian Heathfield, p 10

Panther interview – Playground, a new world order

lala was extremely excited to talk to Maddy Hodge and Sarah Rodigari (Panther) after their successful Arts House season of Playground, a new world order. They answered the questions as both a single entity (I) and also as a group (we).

lala: tell me a bit about Playground the work and where it came from?

Panther: Playground, a new world order was originally developed in 2007 for Anti Contemporary Arts Festival, a small and truly amazing contemporary arts festival in a little town in Kuopio, Finland. Anti Festival presents site-specific work for public spaces and the Uppo Nalle children’s park was one of them. When they first asked us to present something we had this idea of creating something like a massive fair day but as we started spending lot of time in playgrounds and watching children play, our idea really shifted. As adults, we kept trying to understand the playground, how the space is negotiated and how children play and interact with each other. We also kept talking about what we used to do in playgrounds but now that we are older, we felt removed and it seemed harder to run up a slide, to cross the monkey bars, to imagine worlds other than the reality of this one. We began to think of the playground as a world of shifting narrative spaces, we liked the way it could be any space depending on the stories you are telling, the playground is a structure that can contain many structures. We then looked to the structure of the journey of a hero as a story that can contain may stories. We liked to try and understand how these spatial and imaginal worlds could be slotted into each other through the structure of the heroic narrative.

lala: …and the subsequent seasons?

We then presented the show as part of Live Works at the performance Space, Sydney in 2008. The audiences were much larger and we had set performance times, where as in Finland we were there for three days from 10am – 6pm and tours happened whenever enough people had gathered to make it interesting, sometimes we waited a long time in the cold for enough people, so in Sydney we had a much more specific structure.

lala: how did the Finnish participants in the original work differ to the Australian ones?

Panther: The groups in Finland were smaller and the playground was much bigger. I guess in Kuopio it was a slightly more intimate experience and our performances happened amongst other children playing, there was a sense in kuppio that the adults where sharing the world with the children. Sydney was quite rowdy, it was a smaller playground and we had a lot more people so the performances would at times interrupt other games, which really raised lots of questions about how we could/should negotiate and share the space with the children, at times, in Sydney it felt like we were an invading force interrupting their play.

lala: How did you find the Melbourne season at Arts House?

The season Arts House was an incredible challenge and an amazing opportunity. By putting playground inside a theatre space it really became a whole new performance. It raised a lot of questions about how imagination and interactivity needed to be re-addressed in a theatre space. An audience enters the theatre with a very different expectation to an outdoor playground and of course the relationship to the playground shifted when it was brought inside. The performance felt less about adults negotiating a children’s playground and themselves as children and more about how to take on and negotiate the role of the audience/performer to create their own heroic narrative in such a short period of time in a space that is reminiscent of a playground (but certainly not) in a space constructed specifically for them to play in.

lala: you were placed in a season of quite varied works, i know you probably didn’t get to see them all but can you give me an idea of how you think your work fitted with the rest?

Panther: It was a real privilege to be part of such a skilfully curated season, it seemed that a lot of the works had really interesting intersections between them. I really liked the relationship between our work and the work of forced entertainment, post and ontroend goet. They were the three works we saw and it really felt as though these works complimented each other, with ideas of limits, lies, death and our expectations of performance spanning each of the works. To have our work situated as part of that dialogue gave us an opportunity for reflection on the work we wouldn’t otherwise have had.

lala: I found the experience of being in the work really exciting, like some sort of reversion experience, and it wasn’t til later i realised i had reverted to the person i am – but also the person i was as a child. This isn’t a question, more a statement…

Panther: Its funny you say that I am not sure where a work like this sits as an art work some people commented that it was like therapy, a sort of community service or like a deliberate attempt to illicit a reversion to childhood, in a way that is a lovely byproduct of something that to me seems a lot darker and more melancholy.

lala: It is called ‘new world order’ – is this an attempt to challenge peoples imaginative worlds more? – for people to create their own imaginal world in the reality they have?

Panther: It does ask an audience to really engage with their imagination, which seems like treat as we get older. I think it is about shifting perspectives, considering personal histories and the narratives that we create in our lives be they fact or fiction. As you say its also about the potential to create a new world order in our own lives, telling ourselves new stories and engendering the feeling that anything is possible,

lala: the work was originally in a playground but for the Meat Market season, it was in a constructed playground inside the building. i was concerned about this – thinking that it would bring down the level of play of participants, but it didn’t, how did you feel about this theatrical space?

I guess we felt like the meat market space works as a sort of outside inside space. It’s a fake theatre, a reappropriated space which is definitely part of its charm. The shift into this space makes the work feel a lot more stylised, focussed and artificial. We felt like this would make it possible to create more tension around eliciting the performance from the audience. I liked the lights, the flatness of the sound, the awkwardness.

Thankyou Panther!

www.pantherpanther.com

Live Art @ Melbourne Fringe Festival 2009

It is interesting to see that the Melbourne Fringe Festival, a Festival that Creative Producer Emily Sexton is calling an ‘Open Access’ Festival has delivered a new live art category. I was intrigued that a large and uncurated festival had such a thing.

As the Festival launched this morning I was interested to hear what were the reasons behind this – here is an interview with Emily taken before the launch;

lala: Hi there, I know you are about to launch the Melbourne Fringe Festival program and you are beyond busy so its nice that you could do this for lala. I am interested in this years program and the live art feel that has permeated the Fringe, can you tell us a bit about the Fringe events that you have partnered with or have championed for 2009?

ES: It’s an interesting question from a number of perspectives.  Introducing a live art category into the Festival this year has raised a number of questions in my head about the process of categorisation itself; at what point it occurs, what value it has for artists and what value it has for our artforms.  Obviously it’s partly a marketing decision (“where will my audience look for my work in the Festival Guide?”); but it is also a decision that affects future professional development opportunities, because artists are selected for awards based on the category they choose to be part of.  I recently attended a talk by China Mielville, who falls within a genre of fiction called “New Weird” (it’s a great term).  He’s a Marxist who writes part science fiction – part fantasy – part dystopia – etc.  He noted that the human brain is a machine, and it’s in its nature to loosely categorise.  He suggested that as literature evolves and borrows from many different traditions, there have been a number of people who have sought to categorise literature not according to genre, but rather as “good” or “bad” – likewise we could think of live art (because it is here that some of the most interesting cross-artform discoveries are made) as just “good live art” – “or bad live art.”  He disagreed with this statement; that to categorise hierarchically is a mistake, and the expectation of audiences to wade through the thousands of works deemed ‘good’ is also unreasonable.  I really like this approach.

So – for the benefit of audiences, for the benefit of the shape of the Festival, for the benefit of the artists in our Live Art category – I called it, and our Live Art category was born.  What is challenging is that of course, the ideas and concepts that drive live art as a practice have circulated and existed for many years in Australia, driven by a number of vital institutions – particularly Performance Space, but also PVI Collective and the Judith Wright Centre as well.  Real Time as a publication has been very important too.  So whilst this is a new category of art within my 2009 Festival – and we are one of the first major Festivals to showcase work in this way – the artform itself is by no means new.

It’s important to note however that for the majority of people encountering my Festival, it is new.  And perhaps the live art practice in Australia has emerged to point where in 2009, we can confidently categorise works as such.

There’s six works in this year’s Festival that I would classify as live art.  Not surprisingly, they differ widely, coming from dance, visual art, theatre and sound backgrounds.

We are co-producing a major public performance intervention in TAKE OFF YOUR SKIN (TOYS), with WELL and Full Tilt at the Arts Centre.  Inspired by Yasuko Kurono, the work will see 100 clones of Yasuko quietly and beautifully infiltrate the streets of Melbourne, culminating in a mass clone explosion on St Kilda Rd.  It’s a very interesting work.  Then there’s Willoh S Weiland’s The Mapping Room; eight different artists and arts collectives will be mapping the Festival and its participants from intriguing perspectives, producing an evolving installation throughout the Festival.  The Betty Booke are back again (is that a song? It should be.) – which makes me very happy.  Their work en route promises to be yet another sophisticated iteration from this collective of very intelligent practitioners; it’s a series of audio tours throughout Melbourne’s cafes and laneways that act as an aural soundscape and intervention into any casual city scene you may encounter.  24003 is a mobile performance venue produced by Dan Koop, Thomas Henning of the Black Lung, and two designers/landscape architects.  They’ve created a durational performance that includes the evolution of a built space – it’s happening alongside our opening and closing night events, and should be quite extraordinary.  Then there’s Letters to Isaac, a poly-platformed text-based work in which audience members sign up to receive a short letter each day of the Festival, via a range of technological mediums, culminating in a secret live performance event on the Festival’s last weekend.  Lastly, I’m really looking forward to hosting the Sydney-based quartet Tiger Two Times at our Fringe Hub, and their work Nature League in North Melbourne, an installative green-house that you’ll have to see to believe!

lala: Do you think it is difficult to pin down what live art is? and are you aware of the context it sits in or is it more aligned to work you are interested in?

ES: Personally, the writings of Joshua Sofaer have been very useful for me in pinning down this area of art-making.  I guess it is difficult to pin down to a degree because ultimately it’s a mistake to consider it an artform; as I’ve said above, live art works are made by dancers, by theatre-makers, by animateurs, by visual artists, by sound artists… for this reason it’s more useful to think of the works collectively as those that are interested in ‘liveness.’

I am acutely aware of the context of this work; and it’s aligned to what I personally am interested in!  Increasingly so.  I have been hugely stimulated this year in collaborating with the live arts collective GAMESHOW (with Clair Korobacz, Olivia Crang, Tristan Meecham and your fine self, Marty Coutts).  I am very keen to create work with people that is thoroughly researched and rigorously informed, but also is more interested in structures, constraints and conceptual drivers than in achieving a specific outcome.   I am also very bored by Acting, particularly my own Acting.  So it’s nice to perform but with only arguments, rules and structures in mind – rather than “character.” I find the process liberating and very intellectually engaging.  It also flows nicely from training I did with the SITI Company in late 2007.

lala: I know you made a work called Lulu vs Jack the Ripper which was a durational performance installation that asked different things of the audience/performer transaction – is this the type of work you would be making now if you didn’t have a massive festival to run?

ES: Possibly, yes. Lulu vs Jack the Ripper was a dance, text, sculptural and video installation staged by Kumquat Theatre as part of the 2007 Melbourne Fringe Festival.  We had over 20 performers, male and female, each dressed as modern iterations of Louise Brooks, or Lulu.  It was fascinating to stage what was very experimental work in the context of the Fringe Festival, as we drew over 700 audience members over six shows – exposing many of them to a type of art they had not known before.

Massive Festival is correct; 314 shows in 2009.  Yikes!

lala: How do you see live art developing in Melbourne and what is the future for programming/curating it for a Festival like Fringe?

ES: We are currently developing a major live arts project as part of our 2010 Festival, that will focus on the future of the artform in Australia, and quite deliberately expose discussions about the artform’s evolution into the wider public sphere.  It should be a lot of fun, and as is ideal for a Festival context, gather a number of key practitioners into Melbourne to look across and witness each other’s work.

And that’s all I will say about that at this point!

Regarding live art’s future within this Festival: I’d say that the beauty of an open-access Festival is the immediate representation and response to current artistic trends.  My approach to this Festival’s shape and direction is underpinned by the philosophy that a healthy independent arts ecology requires a combination of freedom and provocation.  Independent artists, operating and creating freely without the constraint of a theme or the wait to be curated, should determine, lead and shape contemporary culture.  It should not be bureaucrats, administrators, venue managers nor any other kind of gatekeeper that collectively decide what’s vital for audiences to hear or see.  At the same time, artists also need provocation: to be introduced to new concepts, exposed to artists and practices they may not have encountered previously.  The arts sector more broadly requires a similar approach; although that provocation can come in the form of celebrations or highlights of certain artforms  – which is what we will do with our live arts initiative in 2010.  I think that open-access Festivals like Fringe are absolutely essential to the ongoing vitality of our arts community and artistic output – I think they go hand-in-hand with what makes Melbourne a great artistic city.   So open-access Festivals are one of the best opportunities then to see what shapes, trends and forms our contemporary practice currently takes; as is the case in 2009 with our live art category.

lala: Thanks so much and good luck with the launch on September 1.

ES: No worries Martyn, thanks for facilitating this discussion, it’s very important!  If anyone on the lala list has thoughts on any of the above, I’d love to hear from you.  I can be contacted via emily@melbournefringe.com.au.

Melbourne Fringe Festival launched today and runs from 23rd September – 11th October 2009.

live art – what is it good for?

In the continual search for definition of live art I have come across these great articles – the first by the Live Art Development Agency in the UK.

The term Live Art is not a description of an artform or discipline, but a cultural strategy to include experimental processes and experiential practices that might otherwise be excluded from established curatorial, cultural and critical frameworks. Live Art is a framing device for a catalogue of approaches to the possibilities of liveness by artists who chose to work across, in between, and at the edges of more traditional artistic forms.

The full article is here; in what appear to be a positioning statement for LADA.
Also of interest is Joshua Sofaer’s writing;

While live art practices still battle for acceptance even within art institutions themselves, the increasing globalisation of live communication through internet and digital television widens the possibility for performance based art practices. Not only does this plethora of home access media mean artists can go directly to the people, rather than relying on them to make a trip to a gallery, nightclub or warehouse, it also means that there is an increasing premium on live interaction. The renaissance of cinema, after decades of decline caused by television, is tribute to the public’s need for interaction at an event they can collectively witness in space and time. Either way, virtually or in the flesh, the future looks bright for live art.

His website, including the full version of this article ‘Seven Reasons why live art gives good value‘ can be found here.
(with thanks to Rinske Ginsberg)

Panther @ Arts House mini-festival

The hard working Panther girls are days away from opening their work Playground, a new world order.

They have been included in a fantastic season of curated works at Arts House which brought together Forced Entertainment (UK), Ontroerend Goed (Belgium), NYID (Melbourne), Post (Sydney), Suitcase Royale (Melbourne) and Panther (Melbourne).

Panther developed this work in Finland 2007 for the ANTI Festival and now sees it inside a new context in the Meat Market complex at Arts House in North Melbourne.

Panther are super keen for feedback about the work, so either talk to them at their website or drop a comment here with your thoughts.

lala post zero

Hello, this is the start of an idea, as most live art is.

After a gathering in Perth with pvi collective at their symposium “this is the time… this is the record of the time…” discussions between artists seemed to be leading towards a way to connect artists living in separate states who shared a simlar practice or language.

With a regular blog and a monthly mailing list, lala aims to generate discussion, keep artists informed with goings on and raise the profile of the live arts in Australia.

lala is maintained by me, Martyn Coutts, but will rely on artists in other centres writing, calling or sending me smoke signals to tell me about whats happening. (I am super keen to meet some Brisbane live artists as things seem to be really cooking up there!)

Also, if there are burning questions, or discussion points that you have for an audience then send them to me and I will post them on your behalf.

lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalala!