On November 8, 2011, Sydney experienced a torrential downpour. With the sound of rain on the corrugated roof of Fraserstudios, an audience gathered and I premiered a new work by Russell Phillips. I had commissioned him to write a piece for solo voice which looked at cravings for religiosity.

For this he built a drum shaped score with a combination of colours, textures, notations, including neumes, which he left me to interpret.

this work was performed alongside duo sets with jeremy tatar and marcus whale respectively

The following is an excerpt from that first outing.

on second appearance, at loquastrium, we shifted the equation by giving an extra amp of feedback.

I was contacted by Connecticut based sound artist Derek Piotr in october 2011 after he came across the ronnu panda project from our inclusion in Gail Priest’s New Weird Australia compilation, Vox. Over the next week we exchanged a flood of emails, engaged in skype-showing-off of my snacking skills and assorted tchotkes, and through file sharing put together a short release called ‘gobs’ as a project called ‘gobs’. It was all vocally based. The future holds plans to put together more material, which can be found through updates here.

Two actors played Gesualdo, a redux of sorts and the linear ideas of the centre form were echoed in their costume. Constructed from linen, elastic and pvc, the silhouette and idea of shrouding was key, mild evocations of period costume and rustle of the shreds clouding movement. Maria’s costume was intended to weigh her, trap her, limiting her speed. Constructed from lace, calico and silk, it was 4 metres in diameter when extended. The musicians wore shifts made from two shades of blue, with pvc belt. With an empire waist, the way the male musicians moved was different.

I was in residence at Queen Street Studio (specifically FraserStudios) during august and september 2011 under the mentorship of Julie-Anne Long. I developed a solo work which dealt with ideas of combination – what fascinated me was the idea of breaking something down and mixing it together, squeezing it into a skin.

The idea was originally born from an idea of a multi day performance in which a circle of plinths were the sites at which different sausages would be prepared each night (the process filmed and played back during the next performance) until there was essentially a multi-screen installation in which a live movement based performance would occur.

During my residency, I worked on refining a very restricted body language – the idea mutated into movements within and under skin. I had bought a sausage making machine with the intention of filming footage, but decided it wasn’t the right feel. However, the whirring drone and the handling of sausage casings, pushing the meat into the mincer were what really informed what I presented in my performance.

I essentially wanted to create all these layers which were, in a way relentless and eventually develop a desensitisation to overall structure after the non-patterned repetition. I created a 3 channel video which had sausages grilling, sausages boiling, calf and forearm palpitation, hand and finger manouvring of face, and eating a sausage – levels of movement under, over, within skin. In the long gallery space, I installed 5 channels of audio which were composed of clarinet burblings. I had two lit pots of boiling water, and a glass oven, the light of which comes on and off in periods.

Below is an excerpt from performance

Program notes as follows:

This piece is about combination. The idea is of sausages, breaking things down and pushing them into skins, of just-barely-variation. The process of making sausages, the slipping of casings, that groan of the mincer, and the sickening meat that you continually plug in informs the content which is then multiplied. The multiples aren’t supposed to be entirely impersonal, as they feed off each other and I feed off them. I chose to work with this one state rather than represent the literal process (cleaning, filling, tying etc) because I was fascinated more by the internal line – say, the immensity of travelling through an intestine and bowel rather than laying the intestine and bowel in space.

stills from video

process video

our program notes are as follows

russell: When something is new, glowing and new, momentarily it is weightless. Gravity does not exist for a some time because of incomprehension, reality is suspended (the glowing acts as a shield). This moment is only fleeting. Parture is musical and performative and explodes this moment into a fifteen-minute offering/meditation/exegesis. Like an ultramagnified drop of water (or eggwhite), detail emerges from stasis, plainness and seamless surface. The artifacts of sustained chords or single notes are transposed down to an audible level and are amplified, occuring as peculiar inflections: scratches and squeaks. Phrases come in slow waves framed by silence.

It was my intention that the space within the piece would provide a musical canvas for the collaborating artist to ornament. The slow pulses of sound might engender particular types of movement and silences a time for focus on the visual aspect of the performance. Armed with concepts of newness and the strangeness of birth, I spoke to Ivan about representing slow transformations, incorporating the symbol of the egg. The transparent eggwhite suspends the yoke, weightless in its protection.

mine: Collaboration, by nature, implies that the whole is greater than the sum. When Russell approached me to be involved with the project, he spoke about being interested in the idea of eggs, rippling, transformation, metamorphosis. In my own work, there has been a thread of olfactoric stimulation, food as process and sensory assault, and I saw the eggs as more stillborn than new, in this limbo purgatory between incubation or processing, so we removed the shell and instead we work with this cold, luminous fluid.

Working with a composer means that the burden of the aural world is removed, but how do you navigate being necessary to the work? There was real naivete in the image, so its transformation – by lightly jostling with another fluid, overflowing was arrived at through discussion. We figured that harsh extremes, a grotesque tension was not what we wanted. The slow play in density, a path, unlocked ritualistic process, but a real lightness hopefully compounds with what I understand of the music, and a deftness in focus and response will draw the work together.

Strindberg’s ‘Creditors’ had appealed to me since my first reading in a set of pre-inferno translations by Walter Johnson. It came to my attention that the David Grieg translation, as staged by Alan Rickman had received acclaim internationally, but I was still drawn to Johnson, which I felt was a more balanced, ambiguous, and language-rich.

Going through early diaries, I think I noted the play as feeling like particularly brutal Ibsen, and though Strindberg’s ‘misogyny’ was famous, I liked that took gender and marriage as the obvious, a departure point and depicted these intense creatures just verbally sparring.

With three characters, and only two onstage at once, there was a real obvious slant to a sporting climate. I didn’t think that I would be contributing to the play by staging it in a theatre – why risk it verging on trying to be universal sentiment through the proscenium microcosm? I wanted the language to carry harsh echo, making the text a little masked and almost emerging at times with quasi-epigrams, so I first wanted to stage it in a changeroom of a swimming pool, a modern-day temple of sorts with layers of immersion and the audience seated on the bench perimeter with chlorine and concrete seeping.

Insurance and availability wise, this was not viable, and instead I worked with this cavernous ideal of high ceiling and post-sweat white box clinicism. It had the reverberation i craved and space for audience.

The way I initially conceived the set was using preserved loaves as bricks of sorts, dowelling and reinforcing as furniture and then in a ring around the space a chain of toasters that’d be continually toasting sliced bread. With support from Bourke Street Bakery and Sonoma, I had really beautiful loaves which were handshaped and varied – to assemble platforms and furniture would prove non-aesthetic and impractical, so the shellaced bread became a larger encompassing installation of sorts -quite a brittle, pebble-like presence in the space which gave a necessary lightness (but possibly unnecessary discomfort) to actors.

We tried working with toasters in the space, but actor controlled appliances became almost like a cheating, easy discipline to immediately heighten tension, what with billowing smoke and jagged knife strokes in the loaves. I didn’t want to chain up action in the space by ritualising the toasters, as it was always supposed to just be a motion that wove in and out of the action rather than the action itself, so it became a device that I controlled from the rear of the space, letting a cloud of burnt toast smell fall over the whole space.

I was astounded by the completeness text and was keen to respect it and not butcher sections – the more ‘laboured’ repetitive sections were to act as intensifiers, a kind of audience bludgeoning, a little subversive etc. I was interested in different modes of communication though – the subtext, I guess, and wanted to experiment with physically depicting a different arc to the explicit text.

I am indebted to the fine actors I worked with – Harriet Gordon-Anderson, Eleni Schumacher, and Stephen Sharpe.

More on the choice of bread and rehearsal process in program notes below.

IVAN CHENG
Director
I first read this play in a San Francisco residence in a house filled with echoes of French forty-somethings dancing to Prince and Talking Heads, balloons, bowls of custard pastry scattered. What struck me about this play as the sun rose was the correct, majestic completeness of it.

Autobiographical in content, the misogynist Strindberg has crafted this work where the whole text is necessary but sickeningly excessive –  to watch this text lift itself to the stage swung me between the ecstasy of stunning, honest work from the actors, and agony of harrowing words, endless plays to strip the others of belief and strength.

When the process began, I was driven to the idea that the text was about something more important than gender, than discussing marriage and relationship. I thought it was about the ache, the impossibility of withdrawing intellectual and physical gifts you had given, using a shiv to wedge doors shut, a jack-hammer to enamel windows, but now, as our season is about the commence, I feel it is about the tyranny of communication.

What are they saying, what do they mean to say, what are they trying to say, why are they saying that in that way, and then their bodies, physicalising that ambiguity of twisting dialogue, petty at surface and then proud. The actors are dressed in unitards, all organs and haphazard muscle slather, breathing and exposed but not revealing anything. Surrounded by hand shaped loaves, protected and coloured by shellac, it is an impassive, foreign staple in this competitive arena, a product of artisan moulding; baking and firing something that was plastic, punched down, rising, gashes.

The images of the show were always instinctive and clear from the beginning of the process – the challenge was its realisation. We began with quick script acclimatization before I tried to prescribe an abstract choreography line by line. Pleads of ‘I’m not a dancer!!!’ resounded, so we started to dissect text, as actors love to do. I’m very interested in the impenetrable, in instinctive understanding without justification and no clear bridges, so tried to discipline the actors so that the physical aspects worked as a separate arc to the spoken,  naturalistic presentation of text.

Leading them through mental and physical frames of being was one of the most thrilling aspects of directing, trying to empower them to be aware of action and impulse. Having found this ephemeral ‘vocab’, I was then very keen to empower them to have play throughout the whole show, freedom and release from tyranny of text (lines down by July 22!).  What you see now begins with frameworks and devised safety nets of impulse so that ‘default’ is no longer grandstanding and chatting, rather more charged and image-slamming, the energy of contemporary dance theatre.

I hope that you’ll find this show beautiful, and identify a form of expression that should have no bounds but perhaps does.

Thankyou to my brave and fantastic cast for their trust and their gorgeous, generous work in rehearsals. Cheers to Bourke St Bakery and Sonoma for their contributions, Denise Clark at the University of Washington Press, Russell Fitzgibbon and Deb Hartstein for their work on posters, anatomy whiz James Wilson for his work on costumes, our kind-faced producer Camilo Lascano, Tom Walker and Harriet Gillies at Verge, Liz Toriola and SUDS for their support, Pierce Wilcox, Dom Mercer, Laura Bannister, and Paul Reynolds.

STEPHEN SHARPE
Gustav

Here lies a sea of doubting duplicitous love and stormy revenge, navigated with unease by crippled characters that remain ever weary of the play’s periphery, where snags of repressed violence and spectres of lost children are littered. For us, this hesitant and withholding text has been more than a challenge to map, contradiction, confusion and mystery still abound, and I’m not entirely convinced that it isn’t just a nightmare. And even then I can’t be sure whose nightmare it is.

Additional layers of exposed organs, breadcrumbs and physical impulse, installed in such an energetic echo chamber, have complicated the conventional styles of performance my body wants to cling to. Here, a new language is required, and I’ve been feverishly trying to step up to the plate, or whatever you approach to play an all-star game of squash.

The resulting performance feels a lot like being tied up in a black bag with the other actors and occasionally kicking or being kicked. I have the lacquered-hard bread bruises to prove it. This has been an exciting course of learning to embrace frustration, anxiety and uncertainty.

HARRIET GORDON-ANDERSON
Adolf

“This is part of modern acting. It is not solvable. It’s not just an orange. It has a little to do with an orange but also something to do with sex.”
- Stella Adler on August Strindberg.

So much of what I have to say about this play and the experience of performing it begins with ‘I don’t know’. There is comfort in certitude and habits of knowing, but this is not a comfortable play. The circles these lovers carve for themselves are duplicitous and impassioned but they only double back on themselves, and tracing them has been an exercise in sensory, rather than cerebral navigation. If anything, this production that is so visually stunning has pushed me to rely less and less on my eyes for direction. With any luck each performance this week will be different, as the cast force ourselves out of habit and muscle-memory and into instinct, struggle-snuggling without direction or resolve.

ELENI SCHUMACHER
Tekla

This process has occasionally made me laugh, sometimes made me cry, and often made me nauseous. I think that nausea comes with the realisation, through explor-ation of such meandering, embittered altercations, that we are all relentlessly confused and changeable beings.

For me, nausea comes from anxiety, and for Tekla, this anxiety sprouts from the constant struggle to love and be loved. She battles with it, she misdiagnoses and mistreats herself, makes her own sickness worse, contracts it to others, then performs unhygienic surgery on them with blunt and rusty instruments. She then sits in a waiting room and hopes they need someone to feed them soup during recovery, all the while wondering why she feels nauseous about all this.
This process has been at once frustrating and liberating. In being given absolute agency to move whenever and however I want, I have found myself rooted to the spot by the actor’s inhibition that tells me the audience must understand precisely what’s going on beneath my skin. It took me a long time to realise that this play is riddled with uncertainty, dishonesty and misguided affection/disgust.

Exhibiting truth here would be a lie. In a universe that constantly seeks truth, accepting the loving embrace of confusion is a breath of fresh air. I hope you enjoy being confused with us.

starting on april 5 2010, i worked with jon watts on a project which we called ‘ronnu panda’ after a friend who was dear to us. it consisted of my improvisation of vocals with live processing by jon using ableton live.

the project began on easter monday, with the original intention of just having a play to formulate a kind of religious music – ecstatic spirituals and the like – but was more of a fun, humourous lark. we played gigs until november 2010, and with recordings from this project i was a shortlisted finalist in the jazz  category of the 2011 APRA Professional Development Awards.

ronnu panda blog

ronnu panda bandcamp

images from various performances

(above and below) first performance @ sound series, hardware gallery. photo – lucy parakhina

(above)  nowNow at serial space. photo – daniel butler

(three above) at megaphon studios photo – lucy parakhina

(above) at SCA open day. photo – james brown

(2010 revue. photo by brendan champion)

The 2011 con revue has just finished its season, directed this year by Sam Pender-Bayne to enthusiastic reviews. When I began studying at the Conservatorium in 2009 I was frustrated by having to traverse campuses to engage in other types of performance, and when I enquired into its absence, the faculty was enthusiastic about its capacity to enhance student life. Until 2009, the Student Association had also been defunct, so there was an absence of student social presence. As well as this, according to the then resident institute historian Diane Collins, there hadn’t been a revue in over 20 years. With such an insular institute, there were many things to parody without victimisation.

Securing support from the foundation, the show took formation, with my talented peers coming along for what is always an enjoyable ride. Audience members commended our ensemble cast and band for creating ‘the best revue I’ve ever seen’, and in 2010 we apparently exceeded expectation by playing on the relationship between our cast, exasperation at my continuous gracing of the stage.

2009 video

2010 video

2009 images

2010 “the con-stables’ revue” photos by brendan champion

I began working with Travis Ash from the end of 2009 to develop new works. We had a showing at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music on the 14th of April, following a workshop period in Brisbane earlier in the month. We each conceptualised a work to be realised between the two of us, and we chose to develop works from existing sources.

While Travis chose to deal with notions of intimacy and breach through two Shakespeare monologues, I drew my work from the Medea myth, with an awareness that this legend is one so striking to the collective unconscious that it has been presented and represented over the centuries. From what I remember, my first exposure to the explicit myth (rather than simply the Argonauts) was through a teacher who chose the role as her dream, for the intensity and range of the character.

The whole piece was conceptualised completely from the beginning of the process, and what really developed was probably the role that Travis took. Deliberately ambiguous in his actions, there was still the idea that he held control of the space, moving elements in and out of the space and physically forcing some things to happen. Rhythmically, I prescribed breathing patterns to reflect the inaudible pulse that the performers had as an internalised thought.

Medea is pulled out into the space duct taped into a blue tarp, chosen for the harsh texture and colour, like a brutal, false sea. Medea is unwrapped and is still, gazing at the audience, wrapped in a toga-like large sheet. She is brought to sitting. Lighting comes from two floods on the floor, building shadow across the space.

Medea is forced to stand, limbs manouvred by Other. Other sets out a hot plate and pan. Other wraps Medea’s finger around the instrument and forces it in mouth. Medea calls into instrument in sound based on vocal production within the clarinet noise. Pitch basis on manipulated fundamentals.

Other demands that Medea give two packages filled with corn which are taped to Medea’s front. He turns on the heat and pops the corn, these seeds that Medea carried, dried, infertile now, exploded into larger, but still small popcorn pieces. The instrument is taken away and there is silence but for the popping corn and sizzle of oil and there is stillness too.

Eventually Other grapples with Medea and forces Medea to reach to her back and remove two bloody steaks taped there. These are her two children, and they have seeped into the toga. Other cooks them over the burnt remains of the corn, and they burn, with smoke billowing. Medea is still.

Other forces Medea to the ground and pours a flask of gold over Medea’s head. He arranges her body and rolls it into the tarp and exits the space.

Images staged by Lucy Parakhina (body assistance Lucien Alperstein)

Program Notes:

II/ MEDEA Medea has been spurned by Jason, for whom she left her kingdom, stole the golden fleece, and murdered her brother. She has borne two children by Jason, and to extract revenge, she commits filicide. Medea is the self who retreats from love to pride. Balance – the conflict of thought and memory in the scales of fairness,  Process – directives to the stream of resolute thought, and Action – and the finite execution which counterpoints the progression of rationality, are present in an amalgam of natural and unnatural. Phrase, breath, sound and self and the factors that affect it, essentially an individual’s sense of expression drive this piece.

This final image taken following performance at the Conservatorium