An extremely full two days of forums and performances last weekend has left me quite tired but full of new questions and with some new colleagues and friends.
This great brown land of ours is a beautiful place to be, but for the tiny community of artists living in the cities that grip the coast it can be an isolating experience. So it was to Perth
that some of us came to take part in pvi collective’s symposium this is the time…this is the record of the time (amusingly, and with almost irreverential glee acronymed to titt…titrott by pvi) The artists attending were;
Madeleine Hodge and Sarah Rodigari (Panther)
David Williams (Version 1.0)
Julie Vulcan and Jason Sweeney (Unreasonable Adults)
Cat Jones (CatgURL)
Molly Tipping and Jen Jamieson (sic)
Sam Fox (Hydrapoesis)
Michelle Outram
Kat Barron and Lara Thoms (Spat and Loogie)
WIlloh S.Weiland and me (Deadpan)
Rebecca Conroy and Bec Dean (Performance Space)
Jeff Khan (Next Wave Festival)
It was pvi’s 10th birthday and this celebration was a marker point where we came together to discuss what hybrid performance artwork or ‘live art’ is today in Australia. The panels discussed what it was to make work in public contexts and with challenging form or content. There are very few times when I feel like I am part of a community, one of those times was at Time_Place_Space in 2004, where I felt a strong sense of lineage and peership
. This gathering had this sort of feeling too. There were a lot of things discussed, too many for me to record here, but i think there were some general overarching things that i noticed;
* That this community is resourceful and mobile, their reach extends a long way due to use of online delivery methods and clever use of opportunities like residencies and personal connections
* The work is light, tourable and is based around ideas, concepts and an ability to be adaptable
* There are a lot of duos (Spat and Loogie, (sic), Panther, Deadpan)
* Everyone is multiskilled – sound, video, graphics, performance, writing, producing, curating etc…
* There is a kindness and heart in the work, that somehow the artists want to make a personal connection with their audiences, whether that is General Public or theatre/dance goers.
* That these people are funny and have a healthy sense of the ridiculous
And a few things that stuck with me over the past week;
* Rebecca Conroy saying that this type of work was small and feels like things are not really happening here, which i think is a great comment and really made me rethink the context I am making work in, and although this was a celebration, it was still a reminder that we are all making work in a very specific and small context.
* Kelli from pvi recounted a quote by Tim Etchells that went something like : “You work in the places that are the most difficult for you”, this resonated for me after a week of soul searching whilst being ‘missing’ for the Deadpan project “I Lost You In The Suburbs”
* Bec Dean acknowledged the traditional owners of the land, the Noongar people. And she said “this is the place…” I felt really strongly that this should have been done at the beginning of the symposium, as here we were marking time. And I was glad that one of the last words was indeed to recognise place as all of the work being discussed has such a strong connection to people and place.
