RealTime E-dition 1 June 2017

RealTime E-dition

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National Indigenous Reconciliation Week in 2017 brings with it heightened anticipation of constitutional change and a push for a long overdue treaty. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have often led the way in Australian art, creating hybrid and experimental works deeply rooted in tradition, and now have taken the lead politically. This week, Tyson Yunkaporta responds to the documentary Zach's Ceremony in terms of his own cultural knowledge and Jonathan W Marshall ponders Yirra Yaakin's production of Conversations With The Dead by Richard Frankland, a former Indigenous Deaths in Custody Commission investigator. We review works in Yirramboi First Nations Arts Festival by Emily Johnson and Mariaa Randall and, from The Deep Archive, Wesley Enoch delineates the barriers to Indigenous self-representation in 1994. In a climate of conservative resistance to meaningful engagement between Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, it behoves us all to commit to more than symbolic change. Keith & Virginia

SORRY THEATRE The return to the stage of Richard Frankland’s Conversations With The Dead (2002), haunted as it is by Aboriginal deaths in custody, compels Jonathan W Marshall to question the power of art to intervene in Australian politics.

DIVERCITY MAKES COMMUNITY Though impressed by the dancers' conversational ease and their interaction with the audience, Elyssia Bugg wants more from emerging artist Mariaa Randall's choreography in Divercity.

SHORE, A LINE TO CROSS For Andrew Furhmann, an illuminated tree, the moon and a walk through cobbled laneways open up a sense of congregation and otherness in Emily Johnson's SHORE in NARRM for Melbourne's Yirramboi Festival, though what follows is less certain.

AUDIOVISION 26: TRAUMA & SILENCE Opposing sound design overkill in contemporary theatre, Philip Brophy brilliantly delineates the strategies with which Japan's chelfitsch sensitively addresses voices silenced by trauma in Time’s Journey Through A Room.

PERFORMANCE NURTURERS 1: INSPACE In the first of his two reports on support for emerging and early career artists, Ben Brooker talks to the director and participants engaged in the Adelaide Festival Centre's inSPACE program.

REALTIME ON INSTAGRAM Follow RealTime as we see shows featuring works by inspiring Indigenous artists: Michael Cook, Brenda Croft and the late Robert Campbell jnr.

ZACH'S CEREMONY: COMPLEX MANHOOD
Western and Aboriginal notions of masculinity clash in Aaron Petersen's documentary tracing an urban boy's initiation into Law, writes Tyson Yunkaporta, who is himself preparing for participation in ceremony.

THE DEEP ARCHIVE 1994: WESLEY ENOCH
Premiering his production of the 1971 classic, The Cherry Pickers, in 1994, Enoch ponders the meaning of "contemporary Indigenous art" in terms of loss and continuity of heritage and poor access to the means of Indigenous self-representation.

CRITICAL VIDEO:
GABRIELLE DE VIETRI
See an art project that prototypes the world’s first three-sided footy game while doubling as an affectionate quasi-documentary video portrait of a community and then read writer and performer Teik Kim Pok’s response.

GALLERY: TIYAN BAKER
In The Witness — Portrait of r/WatchPeopleDie (2017), one of four RealTime commissioned video works, Tiyan Baker presents a side-glancing portrait of an internet community: people who post and watch videos of other people dying—on Reddit.

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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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