RealTime E-dition 10 September 2018

RealTime E-dition

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Spring brings promise in the shape of highly focused, inspirational arts festivals of the ilk of Performance Space's Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art (image above), Adelaide's OzAsia Festival and the recent Extended Play Festival of Experimental Music in Sydney. South Australia's artists and audiences, however, are set to endure a wintry slashing of art funding and unified portfolio support. The restructure, as reported by AICSA (Arts Industry Council of South Australia), includes the reduction of Arts SA staffing by nearly half (the director had already been removed before the budget announcement), a $1m grants funding boost (as promised) rendered a nonsense by $4.9m 'savings' cuts 2018-19 across the board, Arts SA responsibilities (SA Film Corp, Adelaide Film Festival, Jam Factory) delegated to the Department of Skills & Development and, astonishingly, the renowned Windmill Theatre, among others, to the Department of Education.

At the federal level, we learned from the Brandis-Fifield Excellence/Catalyst assault that no amount of self-justification (employment and income generation, educational and community benefits) by the arts community could save the arts ecology from ideological intervention. That depredation is now echoed in the South Australian Government's utterly functional, neoliberal dispersal of responsibility for the arts, amazingly in a state with a significant reputation in the field. Meanwhile the Commonwealth simply has no arts policy. Bring on the next election. Keith & Virginia

LIVEWORKS 2018: IT’S ALIVE! IT’S ALIVE! Spring for ravenous culture vultures means Liveworks, the annual, two-week feast of seductively challenging live art presented by Sydney’s Performance Space with Asian and Australian artists working side by side.

OZASIA 2018: MUTUALISM & DISPLACEMENT Joseph Mitchell's enticing program features striking works by female Asian visual artists, a Chinese performance about young women living in a social media bubble, theatre from Iran, Syria and Malaysia, dance from Japan and Indonesia, and South Australian-Asian collaborations.

ON HAVING NO STYLE While reflecting on writing for RealTime, Linda Marie Walker had been commissioned by a magazine to write about a visual art exhibition. The magazine’s rejection of her piece threw up for the writer questions around house style, poetic language, the general reader and writing as a way of being in the world.

DANCING ON A CULTURAL KNIFE-EDGE Vicki Van Hout's new dance theatre work for FORM Dance Projects, plenty serious TALK TALK, is wickedly funny, existentially intimate, culturally complex, bitingly political and superbly danced beneath an exquisite grass sculpture woven by the artist.

BACK TO BACK, IN BETWEEN TIME & REALTIME Osunwunmi visits the making of the latest account of Back to Back Theatre's The Democratic Set for the We are Bristol Project, and, with In Between Time Festival Artistic Director Helen Cole reflects on IBT's relationship since 2006 with RealTime.

LIVEWORKS: NICOLA GUNN
As a prelude to Nicola Gunn's appearance in Performance Space's Liveworks in Working with Children, we're linking you to a revealing 2015 interview-based article by Susan Becker on the performer's vision and creative habits and also to Gail Priest's fascinating 2014 RealTime TV interview with Gunn.

GREAT EXTENDED PLAY:
NOW FOR THE LONG PLAY
A new midday to midnight festival of experimental music filled every space of City Recital Hall, rewarding the curious and the committed with superb performances from ELISION, Ensemble Offspring, Lisa Moore, Bang on a Can All-Stars and many more artists. Exactly the kind of event new music needs more of in the long-term in Sydney.

AUTHENTICITY: HERITAGE AND AVANT-GARDE
As a companion piece to our review of Vicki Van Hout's plenty serious TALK TALK, we're re-publishing the artist's insightful 2012 essay on the challenges faced by an artist of Wiradjuri heritage when making use of dance steps from other Australian Indigenous peoples in experimental hybrid dance works.

LIVEWORKS: RETURN TO ESCAPE FROM WOOMERA
In 2003 Migration Minister Phillip Ruddock was furious with the Australia Council for funding the video game Escape from Woomera. In anticipation of Applespiel's revival of the work as a live gaming and performance experience, we're linking you to Melanie Swalwell's fine account of the saga in our archive.

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RealTime E-ditions are published by Open City an Incorporated Association in New South Wales. Open City Inc is supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding body, and by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy [VACS], an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.

Opinions published in RealTime are not necessarily those of the Editorial Team or the Publisher.

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