Salamanca Arts Centre (which played a key role in my development as an artist) commissioned myself, Ian PIdd and Sam Routledge to dream up a celebration for their 35 year anniversary as an organisation.

After a series of developments we came up with a weekend of events that engaged the history, worked almost exclusively with Tasmanian artists and also proposed possible futures for the building and the Salamanca precinct.

Each of these events dealt with audiences in different ways – from very clear and open engagement in the Kelly’s Steps Landing Party or the Pageant to the more subversive market stalls that we took over.

I felt really humbled to be asked to make this work, both by the Arts Centre but also by how much artists, producers and members of the public put in to the weekend to make it happen.

My hope for the community in and around SAC is that there is an understanding of what these amazing people did when they set up the arts centre 35 years ago, an appreciation of what it is today and how it nurtures and supports the arts and finally that this sort of work can be possible in Hobart and that there are many possible futures open to it.

In the Queensland election which will be decided in March there are many distractions – not least of which is the turmoil of the Rudd/Gillard schism which is turning into some wort of War of the Roses melodrama with every hour.

Just a few days ago an LNP (Liberal/National Party) candidate for the marginal seat of Broadwater was disendorsed because he visited a swingers club.

LNP state director Michael O’Dwyer said the decision to sack Mr Caldwell “arose following a complaint made by a member of the public”.

“The LNP believes that its candidates should uphold high standards of behaviour in line with community expectations and on this occasion those standards have not been met.” Courier Mail

This is the point of this post where I say that Queensland is conservative and christian…and indeed this plays some part in these events, but I think where this incident is most troubling is the way in which our representative members are held to public account.

Now don’t get me wrong, of course there should be propriety in MP’s dealings, after all it is public money they are using if they are elected. We should also remember that the spectre of the Joh Bjeke-Peterson era and the Fitzgerald inquiry into police corruption did not happen that long ago and should never forgotten.

But at what point does someones sex life play a part in how people do their job?

How would Cameron Caldwell’s job be impacted by him going to a swingers club?

Similarly US President Bill Clinton’s affairs had little to do with his ability to do his job, the only reason it came up was a political campaign to smear him by Newt Gingrich and other high ranking republicans. In both the Caldwell and the Clinton case it was the perception of a conservative electorate that is the worrying situation for the parties concerned.

Cameron Caldwell’s response;

“Suffice to say, there was little in the story that could be made factually, but the party had reservations to the headline-grabbing distractions that would be caused regardless. I am disappointed with the outcome and I wish the party every success in the upcoming election.”

As sex columnist Dan Savage noted on a recent podcast, if everyone is to be held up to these ‘societal standards’ that are being laid down then in 15 or 20 years when this current generation who reguarly sext (sending sexy images of themselves in a text message) grows up then NOONE will be allowed onto Capitol Hill or the White House.

And then there is my final thought, which is that Australia need to do everything we can to get better talent into politics. If we are to dispense with the factional politics that have dogged the past 4 years of parliament, then we need smart people with vision who want to be in parliament dealing with policy issues not inconsequential personality quirks.

Why would a lawyer or public personality want to be in politics in Australia, with the invasive 24 hour media scrutiny, the time-consuming factional disputes, the low pay and the pointless tit-for-tat set up of parliamentary debate?

Who knows what kind of a politician Cameron Caldwell would have been – but he is young, a successful lawyer who may have had a long career ahead of him. Suffice to say his talent will now go elsewhere for better pay and a better lifestyle.

If we have learnt anything from the GLBTQ rights movement it is that who you have sex with has nothing to do with how you do your job.

But i guess for the LNP, (even in ‘new world city’ Brisbane where the Broadwater electorate is) who you have sex with IS their business and they will tell you who you can and can’t do it with.

I find these sorts of workshops really illuminating for my practice as I have to take stock of what it is I do and what my eye sees and what my brain is interested in. Working with Deborah, I think I also became aware of the lineage of making that I belong to. Whilst there are some things I can pinpoint directly (like Deb’s interest in non-hierarchical collaborative structures and task based, non character based performance) there are other things that are a grab bag of my own obsessions and influences from others around me (interventionist performance, social practice).

It also is interesting to me to continue to return to Tasmania and see what has changed and also what stays the same over a long period of time. It seems somehow that there is still no energy for performance in Hobart. Even though Salamanca Arts Centre is pushing very very hard and doing everything that they can to support independent makers, there is not enough support coming from Arts Tasmania to see a thriving independent scene.

Of course you can’t just blame a funding body for the ills of an arts scene, many places around the world exist without funding and are renowned for the culture they create. And the visual arts have always thrived in Hobart, as dance has in Launceston.

So what is the impasse? Hobart would seem to be a place where artists could come and make work in great surrounds without impediment. Sure there is the perennial ‘there isn’t the audience for it’, but I don’t buy that excuse any more – Brisbane didn’t have an experimental music scene until Laurence English and friends began it about ten years ago and now there is one. If you build it – they will come.

What SAC is doing is a step int he right direction, workshops, funding for developments, space for artists – this is the way to build community and is what both Deb and Ryk did when they came to Hobart.

But I suggest that Arts Tasmania needs a plan for performance in Hobart, and that plan does not involve funding more institutions and companies it involves giving money to artists to make work.

Independent artists are resourceful – give ten of them $5000 each and they will make 10 shows, and in the process they will employ friends to work on those shows – automatically you have created experiences for all these artists to work.

But then follow this up by offering larger grants for them for the presentation of the work. And you only need to offer 1 or 2 of these. LInk these in with the venues and festivals (including Falls and MONA FOMA) that are already functioning, but also encourage artists to make work outside, in non-traditional venues, in their loungerooms for 4 people at a time etc

And finally ensure that this is an ongoing program, show artists that Arts Tas is serious about supporting independent performance work and not just propping up 20 or 30 year old companies. Reward resourcefulness, Create culture, be brave in giving out funding and don’t be frightened.

But back tot he workshop – I was excited to see some people there from many different arts backgrounds willing to open their minds and go with us on our little journey.

As Kelly an myself both work in theatrical contexts we were interested in developing a theatrical work that didn’t involve performers, but the mechanics of the theatre.

For World Theatre Festival we began to look at a submission process where we asked Brisbane locals what they thought of their city and to send in work that was in response to this idea.

After 10 days of gathering material from submissions and also our own footage and audio recordings we showed a 30 minute work to an audience.

We were very gratified to receive excellent constructive feedback from a number of people that came to see the work.

There was also a number of incredibly unhelpful blog posts written about the work from the World Theatre Festival ‘ambassadors’, who seemed to be under the mistaken impression that this work was a finished product.

I am all for critique, but I have never seen a review of a work that is in development – especially at the early stage we are at, so I found that pretty disappointing and ill-informed.

But beyond this, both WTF and Brisbane Powerhouse were excellent and a very nurturing environment in which to develop experimental theatre work – what a privilege!

I am writing to you ask you to take part in a project that looks at your home city. The work is called Disappearing Acts and is a collaboration between sound artist Kelly Ryall and myself.

We are asking for local Brisbane folks to send in a response that answers /disputes the question ‘Is sunshine enough?’.

The material should be preferably in time based digital format (audio or video) and will be used/re-used/mashed/remixed as a multimedia work that will be created for audiences at the World Theatre Festival in Brisbane in February 2012.

The response can be of any length, but would be preferably be of 2 minutes or longer. We will both be down at the Brisbane Powerhouse from Wednesday 8th February – Wednesday 15th February, where you can deliver your response directly. Or you can upload it to the WTF site here – http://www.worldtheatrefestival.com/program/scratchworks/disappearing-acts

Rather than be presumptive about Brisbane we are hoping to the get the insiders perspective on what is a city in flux…thankyou so much for your interest.

Martyn Coutts.

With the Taiwanese 2012 presidential elections only a few days away and the polls so close that it is unclear whether the Chinese leaning KMT party or the Independence seeking DPP party will end up in charge – it seems pertinent to look to China.

Their usual sabre rattling has been very subdued this election – they appear to have learned from past mistakes – in 1996 their firing some of their 1000 missiles aimed at Taiwan (they shot them into the sea around the island not actually at any towns) created a backlash of voters who re-elected the first Taiwan born President Lee Teng-hui.

But it seems very clear that their preferred President is the current incumbent Ma Ying-jeou as he has indicated closer ties with China (and possible reunification in the future).

On thing that I was very aware of the two times I spent in Taiwan was the engagement in politics that occurs there – rallies are well attended (apparently there were 100,000 at a rally in Tainan for DPP candidate Tsai Ying-wen yesterday) and people are aware of what is happening.

I know I have no part in this election – I have no particular stake, but I feel like it would be a very sad day if this young and thriving democracy were to come under the jursidiction of a non-democractic PROC.

Luke Devine’s exhibition opened last night at Off The Kerb Gallery in Melbourne. He is a very old friend of mine from my previous life in Hobart, Tasmania. He decided to reconstitute the loungeroom of our sharehouse (29 Sandy Bay Road) from the year 1997 in the gallery space, the main feature of which are ALL the photos from that house that were up in a photo wall.

I have felt churned up by the delving into a past life and I don’t really have any reason why this is. As I look at these photographs I am reminded of feelings and moments but not of any great insight or vastly important experiences. Who are you if you don’t have a memory?

We are an unbroken line from the time of our birth until the moment we are currently in, but i feel more and more that all you can do is to be present – be here.

That time in 1997 was so much about the building of self – who you are, who you want to be, what the past has brought you to. We had set about (we didn’t know it at the time) the pathway of identity construction. We had done this by dropping out and not following a path. This was very important, crucial in fact. But now the idea of maintaining the construction of self is a tiring burden.

When I enter this cavalcade of the past, this room, this set of ideas (that Luke has resurrected), whilst it triggers in me nostalgia and further questions it is absolutely a construction. The idea of placing a couple of couches and tv set and a photo wall in a room, is as much an artificial construct, a simulacrum as the construction of self.

The way Luke has encouraged the addition of other time periods, other personas and other materials means there is a multilayered experience of the past and of nostalgia. As the actors who are playing the parts begin to bring some of themselves into the work, then the fabrication becomes more ‘real’ than the reality.

As we put up the photographs the night before the opening, Luke had said to me about a particular person in a photograph ‘oh you hated her’, which i couldn’t remember and didn’t feel anything remorseful about the situation. The past is long gone, if I were to meet this woman now I would be open and honest with her. If you can’t recall the misdeeds of the past should you atone for them? (Isn’t that what John Howard said about not saying sorry?)

What if your relationship with your past is one of indifference?

Standing in the gallery during the opening, not in period costume (we were instructed to come in 1997 garb), i realised that I needed to be be me now – I cannot play the 1997 Martyn, someone else is already playing that person.

This scene is reminiscent of the classic moments from Seinfeld when in the 4th season Jerry and George write a ‘sitcom about nothing’, the joke being that this was exactly what Jerry and Larry David had done in the creation of the series. They then go through the process of casting for themselves. In many ways this was the height of popularist postmodernism, as the tv sitcom creators begin referencing themselves inside the show (it had been happening in the Simpsons for a few years, and had also happened once in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air when Will Smith said “Oh you know that guy, he’s the guy that spins me above his head in the title sequence of the show”). This was then taken another step further when Larry David in his own show Curb Your Enthusiasm, in order to win back his wife contracted the Seinfeld actors to rewrite the ending of the show. Thus the show within a show within a show.

Another popular reference point for this sort of business is in the L-Word where main character Jenny writes a novel which is turned into a film about the lives of her friends in LA. The novel follows exactly the plotline of the tv series with the character names on slightly changed – Shane/Sean, Dana/Donna, Bett/Beth The amusing moment where Jenny ends up having a sexual relationship with her screen alter ego Jesse, in a way ‘fucking herself’ brings a narcissistic crescendo to that particular season of the show.

I saw a note that I had written 14 years ago at the opening – my handwriting looks EXACTLY as it does today – for a moment I thought it was something I had written to Luke recently. To look at the handwriting, even the tone of the note – dripping with sarcasm and self referential awareness it would appear as if nothing has changed, not a thing.

Some of the people on the photo wall materialise at the opening, invoking a school reunion type feeling of ‘what do they look like?’, ‘who are they?’, ‘what do they do now?’, feeling. Again the fatness, the loss of hair, the extra lines on their faces somehow to me was not connected to the people who existed in the photographs. In some ways it was like a bizarre and morbid raking over of coals, a necrotic gesture.

But I digress…at the end of the opening of Luke’s show, in some ironic twist of fate Jethro (one of the other original flatmates), Luke and myself end up sitting on the couches by ourselves watching Larry CLarke’s Kids saying the inevitable “well its just us three again”.

The looping layers of existence and lived existence and re-lived existence, of actual media, of remembered moments, of forgotten relations and of revisionist histories is startling, mind boggling and intensely unsettling. The night after putting up the photo wall I couldn’t sleep – haunted by obsolete media, shadowed by remembered conversations and revelations of unknown secrets. Perhaps I care more than I want to believe about my past – or is it not the actuality of the past but the mode of remembering (or not remembering) of it that is troubling…

I am taking a short trip to Brisbane to take part in Exist-ence in Brisbane. Looking forward to seeing how the event is put together and also to do some writing and maybe some talking…

A work I am dramaturging for the Next Wave Festival, by Liesel Zink.

Within a minute of Future Perfect I found myself again in a mesmeric trance of Jo lloyd’s making.
From here, with only a slight reprieve to take in a video piece, we are held by bouncing hypnotic states that all five performers would work out of. Slightly altering, fracturing and shifting order,
A rippling evolutionary mass of shattering and ever reforming fractals.
At the end of it I realised I was still in the state that it left me in – I was worked into this vibration that changed me and I felt fundamentally altered.

The sound in this work was so sublime, Duane Morrison pushed the intensity through waves of synth and driving electro. There were times I felt like I was in the movie Dune or some other classic sci-fi film, at another point he delivered one of the best rave like peaks to a track that was so exciting that someone behind me gasped and said ‘fuck’. If Duane doesn’t win an award for his sound in this there is something wrong with the world.

There were a couple of moments for me that let down what was an otherwise incredibly moving experience, I felt like the ordering of material created a couple of situations that felt out of place – the final piece ended so abruptly that I was thinking ‘no, no, no! give me some time to come out of this gently…’. And where to place the video piece without disturbing the flow and momentum of the show was always going to be tricky.

But these were minor quibbles…

It is interesting I had been having a conversation about Dance Theatre or Physical Theatre in relation to Look Right Through Me which I saw the previous night at the Malthouse. I was positing that dance is not literal, it is abstract at its best.

Dance for me is more akin to music than theatre. When I think about the dance work that I love the best it is visceral, emotive and physical it is never gestural, character or narrative.

I don’t want a story, if I had wanted that I would have gone to the cinema or watched the DVD box set of the Wire.

I can’t tell you what Future Perfect is about because words are useless for something so experiential. And that is how it should be – great performance has to be experienced to be believed and if you weren’t there you didn’t get it.

I am one of the lucky ones, because I got to see the perfect future, and it was happening in the perfect present.

It is such an odd show to tour as it is so strange and the experience of viewing it is so disconcerting. There are times when even I feel affected by the subject matter. Torturing baby monkeys for psychological experiments really makes me glad I am vegetarian…

The first project I was involved in was to witness the last few days of Liesel Zink’s process for Fifteen her Kickstart developed show for the Next Wave Festival. I have spoken a little about this here but I can’t really underline more strongly the value that I have found in this process, it is interesting when the younger artist can teach the older artist something – because that is what I felt happened. It may have been an incidental learning, but I feel like I had an epiphany about my work and culture in general in Australia through watching this unfold.

Another thing that has become clear to me is that clarity of thought comes from both daily practice and giving time to thought processes. These epiphanous moments came from me removing myself from the activity and giving myself time to think deeply about the ideas. I feel like I had an inherent trust in myself that I would eventually crack whatever it was that was troubling me about the piece and the approach that we were taking. This is a very good space to be in.

I believe the reason I am in this space is that i have had 3 months away from Australia which has given me time to reflect on process and the importance of the things in my life.

After Liesel’s project I went to Hobart to work with Ian Pidd and Sam Routledge on a massive project that will celebrate the 35th Anniversary of Salamanca Arts Centre. I love this process and working with these guys has been a real gift. We are building is a series of playful events which will engage both artists involved in SAC and also general public to rethink the way they see culture in Hobart. All of us have lived in Tasmania at some stage and we are all invested in creating a place that can support art and artists which SAC has been doing for 3 decades. With the advent of MONA and MONA FOMA the landscape of art and art making is changing enormously in Hobart, as Ian suggested one day “even the taxi drivers have an opinion about the art there”.

For a weekend I travelled to Townsville to work with Perc Tucker Regional Gallery to give and artist talk and discussion around Visible City, Live Art and my own work. I also led a workshop trying to generate ideas for a performance element that would sit alongside their ‘Strand Ephemera’ sculpture series which happens biennially.
What we discovered were a bunch of ideas which could easily fold around the infrastructure of the event rather than massive stand alone or difficult to achieve projects. So misinformation booths, guided tours, awards ceremonies and the like seemed to make a lot of sense. Stuff that was playful but not alienating and stuff that added to the Strand Ephemera works.

Finally I began to work on the final rehearsal stage of Thrashing Without Looking which was developed at Performance Space in Sydney last year and Arts House in Melbourne the year before. I am always amazed that in any collaborative process how anything gets done, it is especially the case when you have 5 artists who are also producers in their own right working together, (Willoh S. Weiland, Tristan Meecham, Lara Thoms and Elizabeth Dunn and myself).

Somehow we managed to pull it all together and create a work for two separate audiences at the same time. This is no mean feat considering the complexity of the experiences for all involved. This sort of experiential work is very hard to develop and to know if you are getting right because of the variation in audience experience. Some people who I thought would be fine in the video goggles were actually really freaked out while others were sarcastic and bored. Most people enjoyed the experience in some way and the non-goggled audience had a surprisingly good time which we marked as a major goal for this final development.

We are incredibly lucky to have been selected to be on next year’s Mobile States tour of Australia with the work, so we will get to continue to hone the experience for more audiences.

What I have come to realise is that there are two sides to this debate.

Those that believe in climate change and those that don’t.

I believe that climate change is real.

I will never convince those that don’t that it exists, so I won’t try.

What I can do is to ensure that those people that do believe, (and there is a majority of them in this country), will do everything they can to support policies which will help to stop climate change. Because if the majority of people believe that it is real, then that is a mandate to do something about it.

This debate shares large parallels with the republican referendum in 1999. Back then it was not the monarchists that sunk the debate it was those people who wanted a republic but didn’t like the model. That faction led by Phil Cleary decided to vote NO and the whole thing died.

And now we have no republic and no hope of a republic probably for another generation.

So people squabbled over the model and then ended up with nothing.

Climate Change (and I am speaking to those that believe now) won’t wait for another generation, so I would urge you to support this model – the carbon price. It isn’t perfect, nothing will be, but it is a start and we have to start somewhere.

And like the Republic it is a choice between something and nothing.

I prefer something.

Now, Labor is doing a terrible job of selling this thing, awful in fact. So it is up to the people that believe that climate change is real to quietly get out there and tell their friends that pricing pollution makes sense, that we as one of the 25 richest countries in the world CAN afford to do it and that it is a small price to pay. Tell them to not be afraid.

To those that don’t believe in climate change then good luck to you – this is a country of free speech and it is great that you can have your opinion, but this blog post is not for you.