THE PHOTOGRAPHY ROOM in Queanbeyan is a newly established commercial gallery space, studio and point of call for artists and students. It has a loft-like appeal, boasting natural light and a new paint job. As the brainchild of Sean Davey, artist, TPR’s Director and co-curator, it was originally intended to be a room of his own, a slice of tranquility within a larger studio space of ceramicists, musicians and painters who together inhabit The Artists’ Shed.
Sean saw he could have it both ways. “I will spend time working away in my studio, which is within the gallery so I want to be moved and stimulated every time I look at the walls and am in the space.” The Artists’ Shed “has a really honest atmosphere and all the people there have a strong integrity about what they are doing, which I find really motivating.”
We spoke on the opening night of their current show, Pictures of Life. I asked how the gallery came to be, and what it aspires to be. Sean’s first impression was the scale of the task ahead: “On the first day I saw the space I stayed in it for over an hour, just thinking, umming and erring about whether I would have a crack at giving it a go.” He concedes that setting up anybusiness has its perils, mainly financial, but that the ephemeral knowledge you pick up while working in “the arts”, like in a gallery, a shop or taking freelance work, is invaluable.
The gallery encourages a documentary style but stress that this is no limit on what we can expect to see there. In lieu of promoting a ‘house style’ they will respond to artists who are willing to investigate their own time and place. “I like video work, audio work, all sorts of work that examines the world as it is.” In late February 2012 there will be a group show called Multiples, followed by the work of Woulter Van de Voorde which promises to throw light on a sinister side of Canberra, and later a suite of large format colour photographs (over) exposing friends and lovers by Sydney-based artist and curator Spiro Miralis.
TPR aspires to act as a bit of a satellite state, Sean explains. “It’s hard for photographers to get exhibitions in galleries, everyone knows that and I wanted to create a space that can host work that I believe to be of value, not only to the photographer, but also to photography and the arts community.”
Pictures of Life runs from Monday January 23 to Sunday February 19 in The Photography Room at The Artists’ Shed, located at 14 Foster Street, Queanbeyan. Opening hours are Wednesday-Sunday from 12pm – 6pm.
Please Resist Me Tour:
We're Slamming
Call me a gutter-mind, but I wanted to know. Do poetry groupies exist? The query incites laughter from Australian Poetry Slam Champion Luka Lesson, who is part of the Please Resist Me tour happening at New Acton later this month, but his response is affirmative. “One of my friends and I joke about being rock star poets. We get put up in hotels, flown places, and yes... there are fans. It’s a viable lifestyle.”
Luka is a self-confessed addict to poetry performance, or ‘slams’ – organised competitions where live poetry is rated by the crowd and a winner is named. “It’s exciting because it’s scary. Every single movement, every single whisper, every single blink of the eye is watched and heard and seen. It’s just so raw.”
Though his first experience of poetry reeked of archaic English scribes, “like Pride and Prejudice, but far worse”, once Luka discovered Tupac and delved into Greek classics, Homer and The Iliad, he was hooked. “In Australian schools they tell you that poetry has to be like Shakespeare. They don’t click that every culture has had a history of poetry, and hip-hop is poetry as well,” he says.
Being a good Greek boy, Luka grew up singing with his guitar-strumming brother at weddings, Easter and Christmas celebrations. “Now, listening to Greek music or reading poetry makes me feel at home, although I’ve never been there for more than a couple of months,” he says. “It’s my version of ‘the new country’, the place I want to go back and discover for myself.”
After first performing in 2009, Luka quit his day job teaching Indigenous Studies at Monash University and took to the stage. “On the face of it, it was a risk, I could have been getting paid regularly, but going against my soul and my heart was much more of a risk. I knew that none of the perks could have compared.”
Luka holds strong and innate beliefs about Australia’s history, and at the start of the interview, he wishes me a happy invasion day. “Australia was invaded and it wasn’t legal, it was done by force, it was violent and it was painful,” he says with conviction. Even in high-school his was the lone voice advocating an apology to the Stolen Generations in his legal studies class. Even his teacher vehemently disagreed with his stance.
He is astounded that there are still groups of people who don’t understand the importance of healing. “Possession is what’s given us everything that we enjoy, and what we call a great country. But some people don’t see how the loss of culture and language and the reliance on government handouts has affected Indigenous people. Even people who have not been born yet are going to be affected by a colonial imperial regime.”
Not long after starting his Indigenous Studies course at Monash University, Luka found himself in the Northern Territory unrolling a swag and camping down in a remote community called Boorroloola. Surrounded by a circle of Yanyuwa people who spoke not one word of English, he succumbed to a massive culture shock. “I was sitting there and really feeling everything sinking in about what exactly has been lost, and what’s not there when you walk around the city.”
Luka has since been visiting the community and running workshops and language preservation programs with the elders and young people. “They hold all this information about our world and our cosmos – the loss of Indigenous languages worldwide is such a huge tragedy for humanity,” he says. “But the kids in the community love learning poetry.”
Luka acknowledges that the ‘P’ word is not as acceptable to a lot of young people as hip-hop, which is how he introduces the concept and gets his workshoppers writing. Rather than bringing back the ye olde English forms of prose, he encourages each person to write about what’s important to them. “All I’m doing is letting a new way of expression come through so they feel that it’s comfortable. The poetry has already been there forever.
“They get confidence, they start to feel at home with a teacher. Best of all, we use local words which are in danger of dying out,” he says. After a workshop, the participants usually perform in front of the elders, giving them a voice in their own community and kudos with their peers.
Luka’s own performances are infused with his experiences working with remote Indigenous communities. “Making enjoyable poems is important, but performing is an opportunity to disseminate information that’s not available through usual modes of media. Being a poet is a great opportunity to delve deeper into issues, find the nuances and the subtle differences between arguments and discover a closer truth,” he says.
A poetry slam does not have a genre, nor a word limit or a designated style. A slam performer can say anything they want. While Luka leans toward rhyming and rhythm because of his hip-hop background, the style is fluid. Luka says, “while hip-hop has developed this hyper-sexualised and sexist vernacular that’s come through, women can get up at a poetry slam and be anybody. There’s no hierarchy and it’s respectful.
“If you go to a performance of poetry written by the performer, that brings a power and understanding and empathy that you can’t get just from reading words in a book.” The promise is so seductive I may be in danger of becoming a poetry groupie.
Australia’s young slam poetry performers Joel McKerrow, Alia Gabres and the Australian Poetry Slam Champion Luka Lesson will conduct a workshop at the Kendall Lane Theatre on Feb 21 and perform in the New Acton Courtyard in New Acton South on Feb 22. The poets are co-directors of The Centre for Poetics and Justice, facilitating writing and performance workshops and presenting quality acts around Australia. Visit www.cpj.org.au for more details.
You may recall that during last year’s autumn, coffee shops, pubs and empty shopfronts began to sprout art and theatre and music at an amazing rate. That was 2011’s YOU ARE HERE festival, the first of its kind, lauded by the city’s friends and frenemies alike as the perfect product of the ACT underground’s creative resources. Highlights included spoken word performers at Lonsdale Street Roasters that ended up naked and shouting on the dining table; a choreographed mash-up dance party Skyfire alternative; a wiki-model of our ideal city in fluorescent colours; and the Judgement Day Prom that squeezed the last of the delicious juice out of the Zombie craze. This year, the festival is really pulling up its sleeves, eager to prove that 2011’s show consisted of the baby steps of a beautiful ballet dancer who in 2012 will fall in love with a kid from the streets, master jazz/hip-hop/krunk overnight, and dazzle her stuffy instructors.
“Last year was really a test,” explains David Finnigan. He ran the festival last year, convincing property-owners that they had nothing to fear by turning empty spaces into venues. “It went really, surprisingly well… it felt as if there was a need for something like this.” This year he has – Shiva-like – sprouted extra arms, in the form of theatrical impresario Adam Hadley and curatorial art-writer wunderkind Yolande Norris. With this much power behind it, the festival has increased its scope enormously: for every event that worked perfectly last year (like Pub Theatre at PJs), the team has conjured up a magician’s hat-full of new material. So You Think You Can Hipster will be a nod to RiotAct’s ‘You Are Hipster’ criticism, with DJs and a fashion show, “a general stupid-fun event”, says Hadley. Norris is curating a walking tour of tiny artworks hidden around the city, spanning the panoply of Canberran artistic talent. The traditional South Coast beach trip will be brought to us with a back alley car park dance party in the centre of the city. A brief interview with the team behind You Are Here produced so many fantastic events that a whole magazine would be needed to relate them. Says Hadley, “there will be a festival program.” How about dance-art where the resonance of a musical floor will be sampled live and incorporated into the soundtrack, you ask? It’s obvious why the organisers can’t keep the excitement out of their voices.
“You live in Canberra, you work in Canberra, and there’s free art happening in the doors that you’re going to walk past from March 8th to 18th.” It’s just like a team of excellently talented artists and curators are going to throw a festival that will yell ‘clear!’ and give the city’s artistic heart a jump-start – without the cost of health insurance.
You Are Here is free and will take place in various locations throughout the city between Thursday-Sunday March 8-18. For more information check out www.youareherecanberra.com.au .
If you’re not as frequent a library dweller as myself, you might not have ventured into The National Library of Australia to peruse its most excellent new HANDWRITTEN exhibition. Handwritten contains 100 manuscript treasures spanning ten centuries, sourced from Germany’s largest library, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. There’s a manuscript book of Virgil’s Aeneid, letters from Charles Dickens and Darwin, scores composed by Mozart and Bach, and many more inscribed pieces of history. But one might wonder at the significance and disparity of such objects to a time of Twitter, tablet computers and txtspk. While you could view these pieces of precious ephemera as artifacts from a fast-fading age, maybe they point to a resurgence of interest in the handwritten, its co-existence with the digital; an enduring, evolving relationship still being negotiated. This is where Handwritten Live: Scissors Paper Pen comes in. After filling a pub and a café with people and words, Scissors Paper Pen is joining forces with The NLA, Women of Letters, Women of Notes and a stellar line-up of guests to explore the past, present and potential of the handwritten, all in one very enlivening evening.
Some of BMA Magazine’s own Women of Notes will step outside their usual home at Transit Bar to fill some more studious surrounds with their siren songs and ethereal tunes. Julia Johnson and Cathy Petocz will bring their own contemporary counterpoints to Handwritten’s classical compositions.
Marieke Hardy and Michaela McGuire will also be bringing Women of Letters to Canberra, along with an exceptional line-up including Julie Posetti, Eva Cox, Latika Bourke and Melanie Tait, all of whom will present their response to the theme ‘A Letter to the History I’d Like to Rewrite’. They may even bring some postcards for you to scribble your own missive during interval.
Finally, a panel discussion will interrogate the role of the handwritten today. NLA Curator Susannah Helman will reflect on the exhibition, Marieke Hardy will speak of her various textual forays, Vice-President of Amnesty International Kathy Richards will compare the effectiveness of letter writing and online activism, and Canberra Times political cartoonist David Pope will divulge his reasons for moving from pen and ink to tablet.
If all that isn’t enough, get there before the music and crowds begin to view the Handwritten exhibition itself. But before you switch your iPhone to silent, don’t forget to ready some paper, a pen and, more importantly, your most primed senses. All in all, it should be a wonderful evening – an exploration and celebration of all things handwritten.
Handwritten Live: Scissors Paper Pen begins at 6pm Thursday February 16 at The National Library of Australia. You can book tickets at profile.eventarc.com/profile/nla or by calling (02) 6262 1271. For further SPP deets, head to scissorspaperpen.com .
Duncan Felton is an SPP co-coordinator, a Readers Assistant at the NLA and a freelance writer.
The Stolen Generation is a part of Australian history that continues to strike sorrow and disbelief in the hearts of many. The Hidden Sorrows by the Dance Beyond Barriers Company presents a contemporary perspective on this shameful period that also draws upon the more recent past. With its debut at The Street Theatre on Monday February 13 set to coincide with the anniversary of then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s national apology to the Stolen Generations in 2008, the dynamic dance performance choreographed by Casey Keed and Amy Minchin offers an inspiring message for the future of Indigenous culture.
An Indigenous Australian whose family has been touched by the Stolen Generation, Keed’s involvement in The Hidden Sorrows is highly personal. The performance is the culmination of three years work for the dancer and choreographer, supported by The Street Theatre. The local Canberran and founding artistic director of Dance Beyond Barriers describes her style as “upfront”. Commenting on her choice of subject matter, Keed explains that when forming her company she “did not want a dance company that doesn’t have meaning behind its performances”. For her, this meaning is one that acknowledges the past, yet is not enveloped by it, and instead highlights the unique culture of Indigenous Australians.
The progressive “dance triptych” combines contemporary Indigenous and non-Indigenous dance styles with a bit of ballet thrown in for good measure. Believing that “dance can speak so powerfully”, Keed considers that this fusion of styles offers a “raw” quality to the performance that pays respect to the real issues it explores. The selection of both trained and untrained, Indigenous and non-Indigenous dancers, which form the ten-strong company (including Keed and Minchin), contributes to this dynamism.
The performance’s three pieces – The Predator, When the Lights Go Out and Sorry – take the audience on a journey that culminates in an inspiring celebration of Indigenous culture. The opening piece highlights the trauma experienced by helpless children removed from their families “when nobody was looking” in the dead of night. The second piece is a poignant exploration of the relationship between a mother and daughter (played by Minchin and Keed respectively), both before and after their forced separation. The aptly titled finale is shaped around Rudd’s apology and offers a positive vision of the future of Indigenous culture. Keed describes this event as the catalyst for “a great change” for Indigenous Australians that signalled the potential to finally “move forward”. This message is something she hopes to encourage through the dance performance, and dreams of seeing it “travel all over Australia” after its debut.
The Hidden Sorrows promises to be an inspiring and emotional journey that offers insight into how Indigenous Australians are coming to terms with the horrors of the past, while celebrating their individuality as never before.
The Hidden Sorrows is showing for one night only at The Street Theatre, 7pm Monday February 13. All tickets are $15 and can be purchased through www.thestreet.org.au .
