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Dark Mofo 2016

Hobart, Tasmania

Australia

June 2016

Dark Mofo is the winter equivalent to MONA FOMA Festival – an outdoor extension of David Walsh’s subversive Disneyland, the home of sex and death, the Museum of Old and New Art, meant to celebrate the winter solstice and wash away the dust of daily life off our souls.

MONA and its art-led non-festivals have grown in scale and, while the city of Hobart has served as a stage over the last four years, the 2016 incarnation pervaded every fiber of the city.

Backed by Tasmanian government funding, Dark Mofo 2016 captivated, excited, and confused its audience on an unprecedented scale from the second you touch down at Hobart Airport, where its sign greets you on the tarmac: More than 400 artists across seven festival precincts and 245 venues ranging from Funeral Parlours, cathedrals, museum, music venues, theatres and a mental asylum.

Dark Mofo and MONA are not only changing the face of what lies in the lap of the snow-capped Mount Wellington – they are changing the face of arts internationally and pushing the limited of what is commonly thought to be possible.

If you like the arts and you have grown tired of festivals catering to the lowest common denominator of what is palatable to mainstream taste, it does not get much better than MONA’s engaging, envelope pushing celebrations of human creativity. If you visit Australia and leave out Tasmania because lazing around beaches is the pinnacle of your Down Under experience, you are missing out.

The concept and dictum behind Dark Mofo is the exploration of contemporary and ancient mythologies, meandering along des Weges alles Vergänglichen and Auferstehung.

Curated by Leigh Carmichael who has been involved in the creation of MONA brand since MONA’s brewed emissions needed labels for its bottles, his fabulous team has created a risk-taking program of art, music, food, film and theatre that stretches over 12 days.

Let’s take a walk in the park:

Dark Park is Dark Mofo’s large-scale, dimly lit outdoor interactive art playground located at Macquarie Point behind the city’s docks in a largely fallow, unused industrial area.

A ”dark” park in the truest sense - illuminated only by log fires and towers spitting gas flames in intervals.

Red illuminated cables lead the way through the dark.

Boutique-y mobile eateries and MONA’s excellently themed pop-up bars sustain the ones daring to immerse themselves in the Dark Mofo ethos, roaming through the eclectic mix of installations which are placed throughout the playground.

The opening of the Dark Park was serenaded by the 36-part choral performance of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra Chorus dressed in silver druidy thermo cloaks. Their faces eerily illuminated, following Michaela Greave’s microtonal cues to sonify stellar data to create sound and visual composition unique to their exact location in space and time: Spatially mapped across the forum with each pitch, rhythm, volume and panning corresponding with individual stars, they sang the galaxy into life.         A beautifully haunting exercise aesthetically accentuated by a cathedral of searchlights that would have made Albert Speer proud.

Gleave’s homage to Werner Fassbinder’s iconoclastic 1974 film Angst essen Seele auf, a masterpiece of what was to be labeled “New German Cinema,” her Fear Eats The Soul LED ark display looms over the audience.

Reminiscent of an abandoned theme park ride, it questions the degree to which we let fear dictate our behaviours. Rest in power, Brigitte Mira!

All the while Grupo EmreZa’s Dada-esque Bodystorm rummages through one of the warehouse spaces: With its suited protagonists writhing around in dust created from smashing bricks with sledgehammers and mortars, they blow pathways and explore the relationship between natural phenomena and their dying shells.

At the other end of the Dark Park, the barren soccer pitch sized Sea Road Shed houses London-based United Visual Artists’ contemplative yet dramatic installation Our Time: A computer controlled mesmerizing display of duality, play of light and shadow, inquiring the tension between real and synthesized experiences with a bank of 21 saucer like downlights swinging in various computer programmed patterns to the sound of deep bass and meditation bells.

As an artful take of the Sideshow attractions, Keith Courtney and Christian Wagstaff’s kaleidoscope had people stumble around the House of Mirrors, trying to discern themselves from their reflections. What appears easy to navigate upon first entering, turns out to be challenging, disorienting and maze-like puzzle.

Another installation in the vein of funfairs, Melbourne based calligrafitti artist Richmond Maze had people wandering around a grungy pop-up industrial maze:  The aptly titled Labyrinth harboured hidden art and live performances by Melbourne street artist Mayonaize. The installation and its performances were ever-morphing as the festival progressed.

Anemographs positioned out in the open at Dark Park did their own form of painting by visualizing the speed, direction and duration of the wind.

A ferry ride away, Cameron Robbins’ anemographs and other weather powered instruments worked and drew away at MONA, each controlled by different power sources: His solo retrospective Field Lines visualizes immaterial flows and invisible forces such as magnetic anomalies, the flow of the wind or the tide of the river Derwent by having his instruments propelling pens around paper to represent time and bringing nature’s shape into the world by giving form to the unseen yet omnipresent.

Ryoji Ikeda’s remarkably enjoyable frequency study supercodex performance at the custom-made music venue Blackbox was the sonically completed his spectacular, digital-based work supersymmetry, which is exhibited in a customized section of the MONA mothership:

Conceived during his residency at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva, a long row of projections and screens display data collected from three square lightbox structures consisting of glowing white screens with metal balls forming patterns as they are magnetically manipulated. Deafening digital noise and epileptic attacks inducing strobe lights enhance the visual and aural immersive overload of information.

Ikeda’s supercodex live performance explored the data of sound with raw material coming from re/de/meta-constructed excerpts from his first two albums.

Hyperprecise and abstract in nature, a huge screen provides complex visual patterns and, once you get absorbed, serve as a Rorschach test like canvas for your projections, hypnotically challenging your concept of perception.

Brian Williams, aka Lustmord, filled the Blackbox venue with dark, primordial droning ambience the following night: An array of low end buzzing sub-bass frequencies producing tectonic, hypnotic textural, lingering sounds, which invite you to space out and have the abyss gaze back into you.  Smoke, clouds, flames and morphing three-dimensional shapes projected on the big screen behind him, complete the experience for which the minimalist, industrial “Blackbox” proves to be the perfect venue.

The Songs of the Black Arm Band was a nice change of pace: The Black Arm Band is an Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander music theatre organization. Founded in 2005, it has produced seven large-scale productions since its debut performance at the Melbourne Festival of the Arts in 2006 in addition to ongoing educational and development work in remote Aboriginal communities.

With a revolving cast of performers, the soulful show at the Odeon Theatre, another venue that is now also owned by the fine folks of MONA, provided complex harmonies that served as a soundtrack to the immersive journey across rural Australia displayed in the background on a cinematic screen.

Willow Court, located at New Norfolk 30 minutes out of Hobart, was Australia longest running mental asylum, which ran continuously from 1827-2000.

The festival long installation Asylum at the derelict former ward for female inmates confronts the recipient with the darker terrains of human experience and institutional policies of the past. Admitted on presentation of a mirror, which is meant to be left behind at the premises, the public was allowed to enter Willow Court and wander through the decrepit, decaying buildings without supervision or barricades 24-hours a day.

Scattered with veteran performance artist Mike Parr’s past work, i.e. confronting endurance performances and mutilation exercises, crowds were invited to navigate their own way through the damp premises. Buckets of the artists’ excrements are placed throughout the building, mixing with the odor of animal waste providing a John Waters-esque odorama experience without sniff’n scratch cards.

While Asylum was a festival long installation, Entry by Mirror only was a 72-hour endurance piece, during which the 70-year old Mike Parr became an inmate of Willow Court: Performing for three full days in a mind altered state, drawing disturbing self-portraits and paying tribute to his schizophrenic brother Tim, who himself was a patient of a mental institution and died of alcohol poisoning in 2009.

Appetite still not sated?

The Blacklist parties, the winter equivalent to the MONA summer festival’s Faux Mo extravaganza, provided wicked after hour entertainment with a myriad of performers literally lurking in every nook and cranny, running the gamut from the weird to the wonderful.

Think fancy dresses, multi-genre DJ sets, stages with performers popping up in different areas of the venue and engaging, challenging performances eventuating where you would least expect it and MONA’s excellent bars. Sensory overload ‘til dawn.

Festivals end as festivals must, in my case after only three days which is why this feature merely scratches the surface of Dark Mofo 2016 and covers only a fragment of what was offered over the full 12 days - but fret not; the gears are already in motion for MONA FOMA in January 2017.

Judging by the scale, program and extent of the Dark Mofo 2016 festival, it is hard to imagine that it can be topped.

While it might not be an easy feat, it is exactly what MONA does – taking risks, pushing the envelope and creating fantastic, interactive and immersive experiences.

All you have to do is undergo them.

Dates and locations for MONA FOMA w2017 will be announced soon.

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Photos by KAVV

Steel Panther

Luna Park

Sydney, Australia

June 17, 2016

They are the biggest glam rock band that never was from 1985, in 2016. 

Steel Panther has become bigger than any act that served as their source material.

Histrionic comedy rock? Metal cabaret?                                                          

Subversion of the entertainment industry?                                                             

Performance art?                                                                                                   

Expert banter without cynism, stereotypes of self-aggrandizing machismo rock conventions lead ad absurdum.                                                                                

Self-deprecation.                                                                                             

Virtuosic musicianship.                                                                                   

Seasoned jokers. 

Charismatic.

Costumes.

Image.

Wigs and hair sprayed coiffures.

Prowess.

Precision.

Aware of their roots and signifying them.

Itch for publicity.

Poses.

Intelligence.

Stupidity.

Pushing boundaries.

Ever feeding on the lowest common denominators.

Oversexed.

Un-subtle.

Impressive.

Inclusive.

Likeable personas.

Vanity.

All out sexism and misogyny, which gets uncomfortable with the audience taking it for face value.

Stupid.

Memorable hooks.

Persiflage.

Authentic.

Satirical.

Scatological.

Hyperbolic.

Meta-faux.

Cartoonish.

Suggestively taunting.

Attentive to detail.

Painting with broad brushes.

See more than a few contradictions there? 

Steel Panther embodies it all. 

Jokes do get old but Steel Panther's one is well crafted and perfectly executed.  

Do you need more than one trick if it is executed well? 

Does the fact that perfectly tasteless jokes are made on a meta-level justify them?  

Would I even ask the same questions if I reviewed a Will Ferrell / Ben Stiller movie with exactly the same comedic content? 

Steel Panther is a fun act. 

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it: 

Their staple opener “Eye of the Panther” kicked off the proceedings and opened a tour de force through the highlights of their 3 studio albums. 

Expertly taking the local context into consideration, the scandalously high prices that Australians have to dish out for Peruvian marching powder were denounced and tribute was paid to Satchel’s crystal meth cooking clan in Adelaide, which may or may not have inspired his trademark mid-show solo performance to culminate doing the locals proud with his Hendrix-ian take on the national anthem of Australia.

As time goes by it seems to take less and less prompting to have loose females jump on stage to frame SP’s performance of the song “17 Girls in a Row” in various states of undress and dry humping the band in the most outrageous manners.

“Party All Day” and the sing-a-long crowd pleaser “Community Property” ended the show on a high note.

Even after having seen them various times with largely the same show, an intelligent band with great songs and likeable characters never gets old.

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Photos by KAVV

Björk Digital

Carriageworks

Sydney, Australia

June 4, 2016

The term “third place” was coined by Ray Oldenburg, an American urban sociologist, most prominently known for his elaborations on the importance of informal gathering places for a functioning civil society, democracy, and civic engagement.

In short, where we meet our social needs through creative interaction with others.

The “first place” is home where we place to role of son, daughter, mum, dad, etc. The “second place” is work where the role is whatever position one represents.

The “third place,” according to Oldenburg, denotes territory that is inexpensive, easy to get to, welcoming, offers food and drink and people to chance to meet new people and feel companionship.

Carriageworks is a “third place.”

A general industrial precinct converted into multi-venue arts centre in its heart that has evolved to become an epicenter of Sydney’s art scene.

With much of the décor of the Railways of New South Wales workshops intact--think concrete, exposed brick, industrial light fixtures, steel appliances, weathered wood--the repurposed iron and brick charm radiates distinct nineteenth century flair.

Committed to the reflection of social and cultural diversity and artist-led in nature, its resident organisations produce diverse multidisciplinary programs and collaborations in its capacious halls, corridors and spaces with local and international artists.

An ideal location for Björk’s new project and exhibition:

Björk Digital, an installment of Sydney’s annual Vivid Festival, which celebrates “light, music, and ideas.”

Björk’s collaboration with digital luminaries, programmers, and visual artists has spawned seven 360 degree videos for her recent album Vulnicura, a personal emission of public grieving inspired by the feelings before and after the breakdown of her marriage with artist Matthew Barney.

The multi-media experience for the recipient and attendant of its Sydney premier is less in the form of an exhibition and more of a festival; Carriageworks’ vast industrial area is divided into designated spaces to celebrate all facets of Björk:

The “Björk Digital” 8x12m antechamber features a visceral 12-minute cinematic experience of her song “Black Lake,” which was filmed in the lava fields of Iceland – a canvas of natural beauty with the main protagonist crawling through its crevasses.

The custom built room has the audience encased in a chasm in between two big screens, surrounded by 54 speakers spinning their immersive sonic webs.

Emerging from the black lake and as a natural continuity of the audiovisual poetry of the medium music video, the audience now meets Björk up and close and gets to know her literally inside out: “Mouth Mantra,” as the titles suggests, lets one meander through her mouth as she sings the song and “Stonemilker” offers panoramic 360 degree views of her on a desolate beach in Reykjavik.

Entering the next room, which is partitioned off into small squares, one gets up close for a dance with the slowly growing, glowing outlines of the Icelandic shape shifter with the help of virtual reality devices.

The headphones and headsets create a focused, intimate all-encompassing experience that enhances every aspect of Björk’s songs as it allows you to enter her world.

Björk’s Biophilia was billed as an “app album.”

A multimedia project that was released alongside a series of apps linking the album's themes to musicology concepts. It was followed by a series of educational workshops in four continents.

The last part of the digital extravaganza allows the audience to explore and experience the custom made instruments and the Biophilia app, which is comprised of a series of 10 separate apps, one for each song, all included in a "mother app" which contains a menu made up by a 3-D constellation which the user can shift, zoom and orbit by swiping their fingers to open the apps.

In another section of Carriageworks, the “cinema room” offered a curated loop of Björk’s video oeuvre spanning her 24-year career.

The songs have been remastered for the occasion and feature her collaborations with the likes of Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Nick Knight, and Chris Cunningham,

Sandwiched in between the futuristic, virtual reality component of the Björk Digital experience and the cinema documenting her past, Björk performed an eclectic 5-hour marathon DJ set in the flesh the here and now for the two opening nights.

Björk has always been a pioneer and maverick.

Using interactive technology to her advantage, Björk Digital creates an experience that mimics the way we use our senses and enables the perception of information that is outside of our sensory spectrum:

The vision of experiencing music as digital synesthesia reflecting the way she has come up with her songs.

While Björk Digital is per definitonem inextricably linked to her art and persona, it does not merely serve as a forum to put on her on a pedestal and idolize her. It is all about content.

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Photo courtesy of Carriageworks

Les Butcherettes

Summit Music Hall

Denver, CO

July 17, 2015

When Melvins rolled into town in July of 2015, they of course put on a great show. It seemed after that night, however, all anyone could talk about was the opening band and Ipecac labelmates Le Butcherettes.  So we find ourselves less than a year later at the Lost Lake Lounge eagerly awaiting the first headlining set by Le Butcherettes in Denver.

Opening act Sugar Candy Mountain from Oakland, CA was experiencing mechanical difficulties getting to the show, but they managed to make it in time for an admirable, albeit abbreviated set before Le Butcherettes hit the stage. Frontwoman Teri Gender-Bender (née Suárez) stomped onto the stage, with an almost primal chant before launching into Burn The Scab.

Approximately 75 minutes later, everyone in attendance would be on the same plane of understanding that what was just witnessed was something very special. Suárez, who is a true force of nature, grabs the audience by their collective throats and refuses to loosen her grip for a second. It's rare to see a live act with this much passion for their art.

Le Butcherettes are an exhilatating live act and one that should be seen by as many, as soon, and as often as possible.

An evening with Edward Snowden

Big Top, Luna Park

Sydney, Australia

May 28, 2016

Moral ambiguity.

Conflicting values.

The need to keep people safe versus concerns about privacy.

The boundaries of law.

The transparent citizen.

What constitutes a “good citizen”?

Edward Snowden.

Did his act of civil disobedience do his nation a service or is he a traitor?

Does a good justification for what is considered a crime make it just?

What constitutes a crime?

Herbert Hoover, the 31st President of the United States said that there are only two occasions when Americans respect privacy: prayer and fishing.

Snowden’s act of whistleblowing revealed that ordinary citizens, not just Americans, are being snooped on through the collection of metadata from telecommunication companies in an Orwellian fashion.

Are you aware of how much information you willingly share by simply using your mobile phone and the internet?

Does it surprise you that the information you divulge by using these service is being collected and retained?

Privacy, individualism, and national security.

We are being watched.

After serving as a high-level technology and cyber security specialist across US government agencies, rising through the ranks and gaining clearance levels and AAA access, Snowden became a hero to all who value governmental transparency and a traitor in the eyes of others as he revealed to the world that the National Security Agency (NSA) was seizing private records from billions of everyday civilians.

He was made a public enemy, his passport was revoked and he was forced to seek political asylum. Edward Snowden has been living in exile for the last three years. From his exile in Russia, Snowden appeared live via a video link to be interviewed by Julian Morrow, best known for being a member of the Australia satirical comedy group The Chaser, and given opportunity to explain why and how he did what he did.

Advocating intellectual discussion and striving to challenge the status quo, the organizer of “An evening with Edward Snowden” Think Inc. is a young, Australia-based initiative dedicated to “reinvigorating the excitement of rational discourse in daily conversation.” Think Inc sees their mission in amplifying the dialogue between inquisitive members of the public and those making significant strides in their academic and professional scientific fields through a series of lectures and Q&A sessions.

Snowden is first and foremost a gifted techie.

A personable techie with the ability to communicate complex ideas with ease to a broad audience. In conversation he proves to be an eloquent individual with a composed and self-assured manner who uses rational, factual arguments that are well thought out.

He has become a seasoned professional when it comes to dealing with media, answering curveball questions with poise and not unlike during previous public appearances, he was well prepared and used the evidence of his accusers to diffuse their bullets and make his points.

Snowden is fairly skeptical of the argument used by governments around the world that mass surveillance programs are necessary to prevent terrorist attacks, which is used by the NSA as a justification of their practices. While that might be considered a noble cause, Snowden makes the case that the information gathered on individuals and groups by spying on journalists, governments, etc., is mostly used for political and diplomatic advantages and that there is no hard evidence that mass surveillance has lead to the prevention of terrorist attacks.

Snowden put emphasis on the fact that privacy is essentially the right to self and how surveillance programs affect the individual. He has a problem with a quote that is often attributed to Joseph Goebbels (“You have nothing to hide if you have nothing to fear”) because of the underlying assumption that privacy is about hiding bad things.

By accepting this assumption, privacy is myopically viewed as a form of secrecy and following this logic, Snowden finds that it would equate someone not caring about free speech because one has nothing to say.

Over the last three years Snowden has accomplished half his mission:

His deeds and event sparked debate and discussions on a global scale and with attendants of the event carrying on long after Snowden had signed off – specifically regarding the point that Snowden made regarding Australia: In his view intelligence services down under are much more unrestrained than the ones in the new world.

If Snowden’s action will eventually lead to reforms remains to be seen.

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Photo by KAVV