Review: Adhocracy 2016

Vitalstatistix, Waterside Workers Hall, 2–4 September 2016. Curated by Emma Webb, Jason Sweeney and Paul Gazzola.

Raft of the Medusa. Photo: the author.

It’s with a strange mixture of pleasure and pain that I find myself writing, once again, about Adhocracy, the national artist hothouse presented annually by Vitalstatistix at the Waterside Workers Hall in Port Adelaide. Pleasure because this festival-in-all-but-name remains a highlight of South Australia’s performing arts calendar, bringing together multidisciplinary artists from across the country to develop new works in the presence of fascinated audiences; pain because it’s impossible to forget the precariousness of it all, Vitals, along with Slingsby and Brink, having born the brunt of the Coalition’s funding cuts to the small-to-medium sector in this state (the company waits on tenterhooks while its application to Mitch Fifield’s Catalyst, the successor to George Brandis’ short-lived NPEA, is considered).

Adhocracy seems emblematic in this regard: scrappy and investigational, infused with feminist, queer, and environmental politics, it is an aesthetic light year from Brandis’ beige, unthreatening prescription for the arts: canonical, formally conservative, bound to received ideas around artistic merit. The loss of Vitals itself would leave a distinctively large hole in the state’s performance ecology: no company outside of the State Theatre Company of SA maintains such a busy and varied annual program—developments, presentations of touring work, performances, residencies, events, long-term projects, and exhibitions. While there’s no telling what the future holds, a paring back of that program seems the more likely outcome—a testament to the hard work and resilience of creative producer Emma Webb and her small staff.

This year’s Adhocracy, the sixth since its day-long format was abandoned in 2011, was held for the first time in September, having followed the sun from its traditional Queen’s Birthday long weekend berth. No doubt the move was a question of logistics rather than audience comfort—despite the welcome sunshine, the evenings were familiarly bitter—but the novelty of a sunny Port for much of the event was strangely thrilling. Perhaps Adhocracy’s rescheduling was thrown into relief by something else too—the fact that this year’s event felt to me, more so than in previous years, like a consolidation rather than an advancement; not exactly a greatest hits compilation, but something like one of those late-career albums by a veteran artist content, for once, to restate rather than innovate, to finesse an established groove instead of push at its edges.

There was, for example, Aeon, this year’s two-week residency project, which strongly echoed last year’s large-scale participatory sound work Crawl Me Blood. Both works provided audience members with personal audio devices while they navigated the area around Hart’s Mill Flour Shed, finally ending up in the Mill itself where what had been an individualised experience turned into a collective one. Whereas Crawl Me Blood used Jean Rhys’ 1966 postcolonial novel Wide Sargasso Sea as its launching off point, Aeon (led by artists Lz Dunn, Lawrence English, Lara Thoms, and Shian Law) drew on the principles of bird flocking, in particular the three behavior types that have been identified by computer modeling since the 1980s: separation, alignment, and cohesion.

Separated into groups of about ten or so, each assigned a different starting location—mine was the Wells Street laneway beside the Waterside Workers Hall—audience members were given a small portable speaker and a business card-sized piece of paper on which was written a relevant factoid or, in my case, epigram: Everything is natural. Nothing is normal.

Thus equipped, we were left to drift as we may, informed only by the instruction that, as with birds, we were to think of ourselves as leaders as well as followers. While our speakers piped out birdsong, snatches of human voices, and drones of varying volumes, my group fanned out organically towards the river, eventually melding with the other groups where the presence of several provocateurs became more obvious, some attempting to seduce us into running or flapping our arms or, more challengingly, remove items of clothing.

Our collective destination, it becomes clear, is the cavernous Mill, where we exchange our speakers for blankets at the entrance and find a space in the semi-darkness among a floor strewn with bodies. The low lighting fades away, and a drone begins. I fight down rising panic—there’s something about the combination of near-pitch darkness and the vast, empty space that evokes the kind of existential anxiety that makes anechoic chambers so famously unendurable—as the drone builds to a chest-rattling crescendo, then dies away.

As with the rest of this work-in-development, it’s a moment that, while experienced individually, carves out a communal space at the same time. In the darkness, unlike outside the Mill when we were answerable to our smaller, more clearly defined groups, our sense of responsibly to the rest of the human beings around us—of being a part of something larger than ourselves without having our agency stripped away—diminishes, leaving us feeling adrift and cut off but not alone; a richly metaphorical provocation in the neoliberal era.

The author, during Aeon. Photo: Jennifer Greer Holmes.

                

Also responsive to place was Pony Express’ Raft of the Medusa, another participatory work featuring an intersection of natural and anthropogenic worlds. Intended by its creative team of Ian Sinclair and Loren Kronemyer to finally be performed on a life raft, the blackly humorous work is a commentary on rising sea levels, the titular watercraft—inspired by Théodore Géricault’s infamous depiction of the wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse—pitted against a dilapidated yacht in a “mid-apocalyptic” contest. Not much of this, admittedly, was in evidence during the artist talk I attended on the Saturday evening, but its on-water potential is beyond doubt: the kayak we lugged from the Workers Hall shop front to portside proved eminently seaworthy, Sinclair delivering his artist talk through a loudhailer while an alarmingly multiplying group of seagulls swooped at the hot chips covering his body, and Kronemyer successfully rowed in a loop around the Port River. According to Sinclair, Port Adelaide is second only to Bangladesh in terms of its vulnerability to climate change-induced sea level rise. True or not, Raft of the Medusa was a welcome complement to Vitals’ ongoing Climate Century project—a five-year series of commissioned artworks, projects, and events speculating on how we might commemorate this dangerous historical moment—making us complicit in its response to potentially catastrophic environmental change without sacrificing the playfulness that Pony Express have come to be known for (see, for example, reports of their recent Next Wave work, Ecosexual Bathhouse).

It’s difficult in a single piece of reasonable length to do justice to Adhocracy’s richness—eight works in various stages of development led by a total of 33 artists—but I do want to briefly mention three more projects (unfortunately, due to time constraints, I wasn’t able to engage with Angela Goh’s Uncanny Valley, Girl or the equally intriguing Lady Example by Alice Dixon, Caroline Meaden and William McBride). The Lost Art of Listening, a collaboration between two South Australian artists, Zephyr Quartet’s Hilary Kleinig and “conversationalist” Emma Beech, is shaping up to be a fascinating meditation on an essay by pianist and memoirist Anna Goldsworthy on whether classical music has lost its relevance as technologised distractions multiply, and our relationship to music becomes increasingly passive.

In an intimate, leveling exchange of a kind typical of Adhocracy, Kleinig engaged us with a series of questions that functioned as an exchange between audience and performer, rather than a one-sided presentation of her discoveries so far. We were invited to share our recollections of times music had made us cry, and to attach our answers written on tags to small trees steeped, so we were told, in the tears of those who had come before us. (My recollection? Hearing Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs for the first time, in a state of total unpreparedness, while splayed on the couch one slow-burning Sunday afternoon. The wrong piece of music can move you to tears if you happen to hear it at the right time—while grieving, or in the middle of a breakup say—but some require no special circumstances to open up a world of feeling.) It looks as though the final work will build on Kleinig’s previous explorations of incorporating electronic elements into democratised sound works, including mobile phones operated by the audience.

Two final works rounded out my experience of this year’s Adhocracy: The Tension of Opposites, by newly-formed multidisciplinary collective Capture the Flag (Hew Parham, Meg Wilson, Nick Bennett, Paulo Castro, and Sascha Budimski), and Dirty Pieces, a highly embryonic attempt by dancer/choreographer Rebecca Jensen and Adhocracy regular Malcolm Whittaker to unpack the difficulties associated with understanding contemporary dance. I saw two showings of The Tension of Opposites, though not much changed. It’s an unusually developed work for Adhocracy, the two performers, Parham and Bennett, using an established text—Austrian writer Peter Handke’s Self-Accusation—to explore notions of dictatorship and conflict within Wilson’s highly detailed apartment room set. The audience were divided from the performers by a wall, some panels cut out, others covered with obscuring gauze. By removing the two rows of seating that had been in place during the first showing, the audience were able in the second to move from panel to panel, in a sense editing their own film by “framing” different parts of the action from moment to moment. Such filmic gestures, as well as a distinctly political-European sensibility, are typical of Castro’s body of work, with which The Tension of Opposites feels strongly of a piece.

As for Dirty Pieces, a work that recalls the quip, attributed to Elvis Costello and others, that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, it’s difficult to know what to say. “This work is about…” Whittaker repeated over and over again, before exhausting his own struggle for interpretation, for meaning-making, and handing the microphone over to various members of the audience. “This work is about everything,” one of them said. “This work is about nothing,” responded another.

Review: Adhocracy 2015

Vitalstatistix, Waterside Workers Hall, 6–8 June 2015. Curated by Emma Webb, Jason Sweeney and Paul Gazzola.

The curators of Adhocracy – headed, during the past three years in which I’ve been writing about it, by Emma Webb, Jason Sweeney and Paul Gazzola – know a thing or two about lassoing the zeitgeist. In 2013, as the murky palaver of Labor’s leadership unrest was approaching its nadir, the national artist hothouse hummed with questions of personal and, especially, political authenticity and illusion. Artists like David Williams and Malcolm Whittaker pulled back assorted veils to reveal harsh truths (and untruths) about liberal democracy’s terminal condition in a time of radical capitalism, fiercely partisan politics and the irresistible ascension of the tycoon and spin-doctor alike.

Adhocracy 2014, meanwhile, landed as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was finalising its Fifth Assessment Report. The report’s findings? That atmospheric and ocean warming is unequivocal, that it has been occurring since the middle of last century at unprecedented rates, and that it is virtually beyond question that human beings are responsible. By the time the Queen’s Birthday long weekend, Adhocracy’s traditional timeslot, came round, a government led by one-time climate change denialist Tony Abbott had been in power for ten months and was just weeks away from repealing Australia’s eminently sensible carbon pricing scheme. A piquant admixture of hope and despair infused the numerous works-in-progress – chief among them Future Present, led by Rosie Dennis of Urban Theatre Projects – that assayed an irrevocably climate-changed future.

This year, if we are to accept the enduring adage that the personal is political, Adhocracy’s gaze turned inwards but nevertheless retained the interrogative charge of previous years. As the commentariat sparred over the merits and meanings of Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal, companies All the Queens Men and Applespiel investigated the fluidity of truth and identity in still-developing works rich in ambiguity and sly humour.

Crawl Me Blood. Photo: Bryony Jackson

Perhaps contradictorily, however, I was most taken this year with a project somewhat removed from this ambit, and otherwise discrete from the rest of Adhocracy’s program on account of its scale and literary lineage. I’m talking about Crawl Me Blood, a work-in-development by Halcyon Macleod, Willoh S. Weiland (of large-scale arts project specialists Aphids), and a posse of collaborators drawn from a variety of disciplines including sound (Tristan Louth-Robins, Felix Cross, James Brennan), text (Alan Grace, Phillip Kavanagh), and performance (Ellen Steele, Josie Were).  

Crawl Me Blood’s source material is Jean Rhys’ 1966 postcolonial novel Wide Sargasso Sea, and it’s intended that the development will ultimately blossom into a radio docu-drama and a live installation experience. I attended the final showing, having been warned that it would be substantially different to the previous two, and can report that the work, whatever form or forms it eventually takes, contains an embarrassment of potential.

Its setting was not the Waterside Workers Hall that has served as Adhocracy’s base since its inception, but the newly renovated Hart’s Mill Flour Shed, a cavernous space a few hundred metres from the Hall and which we, the audience, entered with portable radios pressed against our ears, the easy lilt of reggaeton beats filling the decidedly un-Caribbean-like Port Adelaide air.

Once inside, we were gently shepherded between a series of performance sites, each one a response by one or a small group of artists to either an aspect of the novel or one of the many interviews that had earlier been conducted by Macleod and Weiland with Caribbean women and expats. These responses – loosely allied by Brennan’s woozy, swathing sound design, and light installations (including an outsize Christian cross, symbol of suffering and defeat, triumph and salvation) that seemed to flicker into life at our presence – were invariably intriguing. Almost all of the human senses were played upon in vignettes, redolent of the novel’s setting, that had us gently assailed by the Flour Shed’s massive industrial fans (the Caribbean’s famous trade winds?), handed cups of rum punch as we entered a room imbued with a tropical atmosphere, and situated us as witnesses to monologue-as-autobiography, the construction of a pineapple sculpture, and the loud, unnerving intrusion of a ute into the space. All the while, the distinctive chiming of steel drums teased the edges of our hearing, not to mention our wintered faculties with evocations of warmer climes. What a joy and a privilege to see a work of such scale and lightly worn ambition so early in its life, and at a time when economic, and, concomitantly, aesthetic austerity is the name of the game.

Crawl Me Blood. Photo: Bryony Jackson

As to the theme alluded to earlier – namely, the unfixedness of identity – Applespiel’s Jarrod Duffy Is Not Dead and All the Queens Men’s Versions of Truth staked out the territory. In the first, the titular Jarrod is revealed to be the ninth member of the company who supposedly vanished without trace in 2010, a mere fortnight before he was due to appear in an Honours show (the company is made up of graduates from the University of Wollongong’s Creative Arts program). In this second stage creative development, the story of Jarrod’s disappearance and the subsequent attempts by the rest of the company to find him takes the form of a sort of live podcast, Appelspiel’s members gathered behind assorted laptops and microphones at a desk.

Laced with irony, Jarrod Duffy amusingly deploys tropes that will be familiar to anyone who has listened to podcasts such as This American Life (part of the joke, I suppose, is that Serial, This American Life’s popular spinoff, is about a real-life murder case whereas the mystery around Jarrod Duffy turns out to be, shall we say, rather more prosaic). The work, as I saw it, finds itself on less sure ground with an excessive conclusion during which, among other things, a wheelchair-bound Jarrod in a wig is pushed onstage to the tune of Rodgers and Hammersteins’ ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’. It may be that this is the company’s preemptive response to the question the work in its present form will inevitably face from audiences – why not simply make an actual podcast? – but the effect is jarring, and serves to detract attention from the other, more important questions the work opens up – about the nature of truth, the ethics of appropriating other people’s stories for public consumption, and about how possible it is to know someone, even a cherished friend and colleague, truly.    

More puzzling again is Versions of Truth by All the Queens Men, a company better known for large-scale participatory projects than the intimate, audition room-set work presented here. Beginning with the premise that ‘our lives are built on made-up versions of ourselves’, performer Tristan Meecham guides two participants (one, I think, was a plant) through an acting audition that includes a screen test. The auditionees are variously challenged and humiliated by Meecham, who also weaves throughout the work stories (presumably, though not explicitly, drawn from his own experiences) about life in the acting business. These stories, which include Meecham’s successful audition for the role of the Young Collector in a Melbourne Theatre Company production of A Streetcar Named Desire, are sinisterly undercut by allusions to some terrible event that is never revealed.

Versions of Truth situates itself within the current wave of ‘confessional’ performance art but Meecham’s performance is far too slippery for the fit to be a snug one. The work gets stranger as it goes – ‘down a rabbit hole of deceit’, as the program, not inaccurately, puts it – and winds up, confusingly, with an almost wholesale recreation of the Fiery Hawk Comic Relief skit that went viral a few years ago. I was not alone in being unable to discern the purpose of the skit’s inclusion/imitation; was it an homage, a parody of a parody, some wily comment on artistic pilfering or something else? I couldn’t believe for a moment that it was a guileless rip-off – and, who knows, maybe that in itself was the point.

Future Turf. Photo: Heath Britton and Jennifer Greer-Holmes

Finally, it is worth mentioning, if only briefly, two works that enjoyed first stage creative developments during Adhocracy 2015, Awkward Sex Scenes and Future Turf. Both are embryonic but, growing out of clear, fertile ideas – the often uncomfortable relationship between artistic representations of sex and audiences in the case of the former, and the intersections between the built environment and the human form in the latter – show great promise. Awkward Sex Scenes, concerned with a seemingly universal but often unspoken experience, will find ready audiences wherever it goes, and it would do well to retain the interactive element whereby audience members are invited onto the stage to recount their own awkward experiences with sex scenes as the creative team of Ahmarnya Price, Dan Koerner and Ingrid Voorendt shuffle elements of the set around them to evoke those sites, mostly lounge rooms, of occasional but supreme discomfort.

I gather that Future Turf underwent radical transformations between its three showings, but the work’s underlying hybridity – a meeting of text by poet Emily Stewart, sculpture by Henry Wood, performance art by Emma Hall, and choreography by Rachel Heller-Wagner – looks as though it will be carried through to subsequent developments. This will be no bad thing; Future Turf is cross-disciplinary practice with the brakes on, a meditation on the politics of both home and land ownership that may find one of its great strengths is its open-hearted and open-minded search, if not for any kind of truth, then at least for poetic, meaningful resonance.