Jerome lead a vocal exercise on the morning of November 23, the last lab day at Bundanon, which began with a vocal warm up and then contrapuntal exercises that reminded me a lot of improv exercises but using the voice instead of the body. At a certain point, they were asked to choose one sound and were arranged in a circle. Jerome proceeded to conduct the choreographers: when he pointed at each one, they had to make that sound they chose, stopping only when Jerome pointed at someone else.

Cat decided she wanted to do the conducting also, integrating dynamics and piling on the textures. This is a video of her orchestral experiment:

Jerome then asked everyone to try out movement with their sound of choice, or whatever sound they fancied, just to get a feel for how the sound they make shares their physical impetus. That is captured here. And no that sound is not an angry wombat, it’s just Vicki.

Soon, Jerome started to play electronic dance music, urging everyone to keep experimenting with movement and sound, and adding other sounds if they wished. As the others took their time warming up to the idea, you could see Simon and Rhiannon start to really get into it. What I found interesting was how they didn’t easily take to the “dance music.” They would also regularly forget to use sound with their movements as you might notice:

Disco time. With some violent animal possession care of Vicki Van Hout.

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And, that’s all she wrote. Thanks, kids, I had a marvelous time. xoxo – Joelle

Inserted a few more photos from the Traffic experiment in the previous post, and uploading the rest to a separate blog entry just so we’re not clogging bandwidth. Enjoy

Ly Ly set up her Traffic experiment in the studio adjacent to the main living quarters in Bundanon Artists Center (for those familiar with the place, it’s the studio with the drawing of the wombat on the wall. This space is the kind of studio that’s long enough to be divided into two, a trait that turned into a qualifier over the course of the exercise. Doris spent most of Monday assembling obstacles in the room, laying out a tiny avenue within the four walls.

On the morning of Tuesday, Ly Ly laid down the ground rules: they are to go through the paths any which way they liked but if Doris put in front of them the Stop sign (a red dust shovel tied to what I think was a microphone stand), they need to go another way.

For a very long time, the choreographers stayed in only one side of the room, and followed the rules accordingly. They all walked single file around the various structures that Doris put up. Ly Ly pretty much dictated a lot of what else could be done – other movements, like sudden turns and touching the others, slapping the obstacles – were mostly initiated by her, as if signaling what was and was not acceptable.

It was Cat who eventually rebelled against the single file and dropped to the ground to lie stretched out on the floor. They would fall into that single file now and then, but very seldomly and each did their own thing, moving around, and in Vicki’s case usually, through the obstacles.

All throughout this exercise, Vicki was holding her camera, documenting the experiment on video from start to end.

Rhiannon interacted with the furniture-as-highway more than she did with other people: the choreographers often addressed  whoever they pass while walking, from simple physical acknowledgements to joining in what the other was doing. In contrast to Rhiannon, Cat would try to violently move the objects out of their original assigned places, as if trying to really disrupt the space. Simon interacted with the others also, but often broke away from everyone to stand still – in the corner, on top of a chair, by the window.

At some point, Jerome ended his ambient music and seemed to signal for everyone to wrap up the exercise. But Ly Ly went to the other half of the room, prompting the others to spill out after her. And the traffic continued.

The interesting thing about the other half of the room was here, the rules were seemingly abandoned. Instead of a flow of traffic, the choreographers started to pick things up, move them around, turn them on and off, create sculpture with them, wrap themselves in them, use them to attack other inanimate objects with, and so on. I used to have a more complete list but I lost my iPad before Christmas and, relying only on my memory, must acknowledge that there was just too many things going on to remember who did what exactly.

Many of us opined that it’s possible more things happened in the other room because there were more objects to manipulate there, as opposed to the seemingly immovable structures in the first room. There was only so much you could do with couches and chairs, and they were indeed done. But in Room # 2 you had rolls of tarpaulin, a vacuum cleaner you could plug into a socket, a plastic bag hanging from the ceiling, a wastebasket, a sink full of sand, just to name a few. There was so much possibility. The movements that were then created looked more like prop improvisation than the structured walking done previously and the concept of traffic had now liquefied into something else entirely.

Later on, after the exercise and the discussion, Vicki commented that it was great that they were able to do some physical movement as the whole lab was primarily visually-motivated. It was a good reminder to dance as well.

Click to view slideshow.

Click to view slideshow.

Cheers,

Joelle

In the kitchen, Margie is supervising the emptying of the kitchen and Rhiannon is scrounging around the cupboards. “Too late for tea?” she asks, smiling.

Fu Kuen is moving around, asking people to “Finish the wines. Finish the nuts.” It is now a nice polite exchange between him and Margie to finish the wine: “Can lah.” “No can.” “Can not must can, lah.”

The day started out with music exercises headed by Jerome and attempting to use those exercises to create movement. I took a bunch of videos and will post them soon. It was also a day of file swapping, and sharing and just trying to get out of the cold. I’m pretty sure I will miss Bundanon. I don’t feel it yet, but hey look at the urgency to finish this blog entry.

See you all again when I get internet access.

The Lady of the Manor first manifested on Sunday, while Cat, Latai and Vicki were playing around in the Bundanon homestead. Cat had come from getting her portrait taken by Doris for her portraiture project, with her face painted in white, and it became fun to shoot against the fireplace in the Bundanon museum. Helen asked if the people from the Bundanon Trust know that they were were there, taking photos, and Cat said they did and were very amused.

Aside from there being photos of Cat in front of thr fireplace in the homestead, there were also photos of Cat in the studio, in front of the Arthur Boyd painting that was on display. Helen points out that the painted face makes it appear to be part of the painting, “but also it looks like there’s an ownership role.”

“There were no preconceived ideas, it was just my face was painted,” Cat shares during the regroup. “(The painted face) deconstructs the body, it’s a reference to Western theater and this character kind of emerged. The river experience today is the next step and hopefully something will come of that.”

The “river experience” involved some shots taken of Cat with her face paint on, but in a bikini and sarong, with a bowl of fruit in the river, and Latai as her manservant. You can refer to this page for pictures.

Helen comments that Cat is “Sort of bringing an artifice to the natural landscape,” and at some point, she transforms from the Lady of the Manor to the Island girl serving the man. Cat agrees, laughing “Yeah, the gender roles keep shifting.”

Other comments from the group were how into the character Latai was and how it helped transform the character of the Lady of the manor (and how dedicated: even when the chair in the river was falling backwards, Latai stayed true to her character and didn’t let go of the sweet potatoes she was holding. Doris also pointed out that the presence of the fruit bowl is like a classic still life, still tying the idea of the Lady of the Manor to painting. In some some of the shots, though it also looks like she’s also wearing too much sunscreen.

Cat says she’s still playing with the idea of the exoticized image and the flatness of it. She’ll see where it goes.

Aside from the Bower Bird discovery, another incident that impressed the Bundanon dance lab participants during the Tuesday afternoon walk was the herd of cattle that didn’t seem keen on allowing us to cross the paddock and when the bull, in all its majesty, looked straight at us suspiciously, and some of us started to panic quite audibly, Leigh Warren put his arms up in front of his head and said, “Quick, make like a rhinoceros!!” This obviously did not deter the cows and bull, nor did it make them want to charge, but it did disperse the nature nerves as we cracked up in laughter.

In honor of Leigh, Vicki rounded up the Bundanon educational exchange program schoolkids and got them to do some site specific movement with her. She brought them to a nice wooded area beside the bower bird nests (both real and Latai’s) and asked them to stand behind a tree, like hiding. At her signal, the kids should start jumping up and down (like some of our favorite animals in the paddock – not the cows) but from behind the tree. Then, when they got tired, or just felt like it, to “Make like a rhinoceros.” She asked one boy to wear the yellow gloves from her kitchen.

The kids, all visual arts students, were all quite game, but most likely not aware that they just did a “Leigh Warren choreography right there,” as Cat put it. And despite herself, Vicki finally got to orchestrate a collaboration of her initiative.

Make Like A Rhinoceros from Critical Path on Vimeo.

This is a song I wrote about Bundanon and it was inspired by the activities and experiments we explored here in the past week or so. Some of the things we got up were extremely of their moment (LOL) and to explain them too much I think would b unkind to the bubble-like magic that buoyed us along. This was recorded in one of the artist’s studio spaces. Enjoy!

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Bundanon Song (Connection)

Footsteps whisper along the trail
Fingers pulling on threads of red
Dance across the green
To the river to fall
Like trees

Tiny symbols on the ground
Turn to face the lens
Of so many eyes
Visiting, wandering
Looking for a sign

When we are gone from Bundanon
With some kind of phenomenon
Tracing our practices
In intersecting lines
Connection, connection

Bodies melting into the ice
Build a bower from the colour of
Blue summer skies
Crystalising in a memory
Of clouds

Brace yourself against the architecture
Of the land
Put a white face on
And stare down your history
Connection, connection

Here come the traffic
Here come the bull
Here come the plastic
Sense of what’s true

Here come the questions
Written in sand
Here come the drumming
Fingers of a man

Here come the wombat
Here come the poo
And light from a projector
Turning into you

And here come a song

Walking with torches to the sound
Of a language we don’t understand
Now that we’re bound
Across space and time
And spirit lines

Someday we’ll dream of Bundanon
Of Arthur and Yvonne
Painting the landscape
With energy
Connection, connection

On the first Tuesday that we were here, after much discussion in the studio, everyone was excited to take a walk around Bundanon and make our way to the river. We went up the amphitheatre and down again, and crossed a few paddocks before deciding to leave the river to be found another day.

(See photos of the walk here
See photos of the river here and here)

A few meters down from amphitheatre, we found a bower bird’s bower, and most of us were quite flabbergasted to see it because we had never actually seen a bower bird’s bower before. It was just as I read in those nature books in our grade school library – the circular reshaping of the grass, the soft bed in the center, the scattering of blue objects in the center. In this bower, there were a couple of blue feathers, some blue paper and a bottle top.

Latai had been bringing around a blue tarpaulin, basically playing around with it, creating images with the imposed object in the space. When she saw the bower bird, she decided to create her own bower with her tarp, hoping to make the bower bird envious.

On Sunday morning, Latai set up her bower beside the bower bird’s nest and included a lot of “found objects” around the house – including a chair Simon found by the river, a couple of mugs, a tea towel and a canister from the kitchen, Doris’ bathing suit and Alfira’s bikini top, which, when reported missing, Vicki responded with a straight face, “Your swimmers are missing? Since when?” Leigh also sacrificed his Prostate Cancer Awareness bangle to the bower bird, and the next day, they found that the bower bird had taken that and placed it in his own bower, as well as a washing peg and bits of paper, in effect fulfilling Latai’s intention to make the bower bird jealous. That Sunday before he left for Adelaide, they recorded Leigh doing a David Attenborough commentary on this special breed of bower bird.

Latai took the bower down on Monday, after showing it to the students engaged in the Bundanon education program, who were scheduled to visit on Monday at 1pm. They kept bits of blue paper and disposable objects in case the bower bird would like them. When Helen checked on the bower bird the next day, she was happy to report that the bower bird had indeed taken all the othe objects from the bower and placed into his own.

Latai talking about her bower to the Bundanon educational exchange students