Mary Brennan
Dance and Performance critic of The Herald.
A longer version of this piece originally appeared in The Herald newspaper in December 2002.
Last September, the Midland Reporter filled its front page with the banner headline: Live arts coup for City of Swan. The National Review of Live Arts visit to Australia was big news, and the paper was making much of the fact that the NRLA touring package was only going to two venues - the Powerhouse in Brisbane and the Midland Railway Workshops, located on the outskirts of Perth.
Another front cover that of the Australia-wide arts and media magazine, Real Time carried an image from Michael Mayhews performance piece, plus a full-page feature about the NRLA dappled with enthusiastic comments from Zane Trow, Artistic Director of the Powerhouse and the man responsible for bringing a sample slice of NRLA action to Oz. Trows determination to stage an NRLA event harks back to when he first met Nikki Milican. This was at the Adelaide Festival of the Arts in 2000 where she was scouting for interesting Australian dancemakers to bring into her New Moves season. Suitably intrigued, Trow made it to Glasgow in 2001 where he witnessed the NRLA in all its variegated glory. He came away convinced that the NRLA has been invaluable in nurturing performance, creating a safe house for the development of risky work and the commissioning of new work. Its a model we should be giving serious thought to in Australia.
Back in Brisbane, musing on the way in which Australian performance/live art has lost ground since an effective high in the 70s and 80s, Trow reckoned that a glimpse of NRLA practice could re-boot local confidence and interest, and perhaps initiate future collaborations and artist exchange schemes. As a result, Nikki Milican walked into the Brisbane Powerhouse in mid-October last year with a group of four performance artists and a clutch of videos to begin a four day intensive residency that would, as Trow avers, tell you a lot more about Britain than the RSC and Oasis.
So who did Milican take to Australia? Two established artists, Robert Ayers and Richard Layzell, and two younger practitioners at different stages of their career, Michael Mayhew and Kira OReilly. Ayers, a respected academic as well as a performer, intended showing two sides of the performing coin: short, sudden interventions such as him, hanging naked wrapped in fairy-lights and a durational piece about notions of fantasy that begins with him breaking out of a locked wardrobe. In Brisbane, deep in the graffiti-ed bowels of a 1920s powerstation now re-energised by the arts, Ayers performance was stymied by a mal-functioning glue-gun. But in the long, dark alley-ways of the disused Midland Railway Workshops in Perth, where project co-ordinater Sharon Flindell is resolutely carving out a gritty, magical environment for the arts, Ayers found himself abruptly put out of commission. The opening slam of wardrobe onto concrete left him with a broken collarbone. His departure in an Aussie ambulance was video-ed and then filtered into Mayhews performance the following night, a wry reminder of how live art is quintessentially of, and for, the moment...
At both venues local artists were invited to make contact either by showing their own work and/or joining in the discussions. Unlike many of their British and European counterparts, these practitioners currently lack the networks that would allow them to sustain their art as a career. Moreover, theres no NRLA equivalent to provide a focus and a platform for artists be they emerging or experienced. The hope now is that this first encounter with Milican and her methods will, like grit in an oyster, kickstart new initiatives within those artistic communities. The plan is also to continue this supportive dialogue through regular exchanges that will see Australian performers reciprocally showcased in seasons here in the UK. A measure of future success will be when the arrival of an NRLA event in town is just a matter of course and not headline news.