Hungry Ghosts
Daryl BUCKLEY
This performance ritual creates a border that is formed and re-opened every year. Society for a moment addresses its own fears, the marginalised, the chaotic anima of its darkside in a ritual before that border is closed, the spirits returned to hell and `normality´ re-embraced. It is the dynamic in this ritual which has most galvanised my thinking for this brief essay. As somebody in the fortunate position of directing an ensemble now engaged in a incredibly diverse array of performance activities (rituals if you like) issues of coherence, artistic development and a critical self-reflexive practice are ongoing. In contemplating the Hungry Ghost ritual a set of questions could be elaborated as follows -- What challenges to systems of knowledge and practices can be posed, how are spaces defined or elaborated in performance, and how does an audience engage in these practices as a co-creator of significance and meaning? For a large part of ELISION's artistic direction throughout the 1990's a belief resided in the value of nurturing relationships between composers and performers in a way that was analogous to that between a choreographer and dancer. Musicians spend a long time, in fact decades, in developing and refining a physical relationship with an instrument. The relationship is one of posture, of establishing a ergonomic habit that enables efficient, generally flawless and effortless movement. There seemed to be in the writing of composers such as Richard BARRETT or more recently in John RODGERS deployment of a sound vocabulary utilising `degraded instruments´, a creative intervention into that ergonomic relationship, into those very systems of knowledge and practice galvanised around the creation of a classical music performer. Barrett's concept of radical instrumental writing proceeds from the apprehension of the instrument/player combination, of trying to sculpt musical material away to discover a existent but unexplored compositional possibility [1]. Historical practice is borne in mind as a special case of possible instrumentalisms, and because `practice material' provides a kind of scale of familiarity versus awkwardness. Rodgers however, at least in the Inferno, a large scale work for fourteen musicians and electronics, seems to be currently preoccupied with re-imagining the instrument itself. His score confronts the performer with the disturbing situation of fundamentally altering familiar territory to such an extent that it becomes a new, deviant and tortuous reality -- perhaps a Clive Barker-like imagination is at play here, conceiving bizarre combinations of flesh, wood and metal? The ice-oboe, played by Stephen ROBINSON, encapsulates this ethos most fully. The only predictable aspect of this instrument is its demise and the presentation to the performer of varying uncontrollable options as the ice-oboe melts, decays and then collapses.
All of these performance techniques emerge out of Rodgers' own personal experimentation. In his improvisations John has displayed no reticence in using his violin to bow a classical guitar or in unwinding his violin bow and twisting the hair in a spiral around the wood, the resulting combination of both wood and hair then being employed to produce strange articulations on his violin. Such interrogation of the performer/instrument relationship applied wholesale to an ensemble willing to commit itself to such investigation, inevitably creates its own dramaturgy. The concentration and effort that each moment of performance requires are monumental and not without a resultant visual vocabulary. Certainly it seems to me that one of Rodgers' intentions in the Inferno is to throw musicians back upon their own core resources, simultaneously acknowledging the depth of established skill while using unfamiliar challenges to directly tap into the energies and acumen that generated that depth. The constant flux in that work between notated and improvisational modes makes those challenges even more acute. I have found that these composers, amongst others, who work with introducing disturbances into considered practice, provide an interesting fault line in locating ELISION's practice. One intention is the transformation of the concert hall format from a `one-off event´ into a process driven outcome emerging from a very complex set of longterm artistic relationships. Herein can lie one of the most earth shattering requests that can be made of an audience in current contemporary art practice -- that is, the requirement of `listening´ without distraction! And here the European concert-hall format, often considered to be the boring platform of a unthinking non-reflective high arts practice, can transform itself into something quite subversive. It is this aspect of ELISION activities in rethinking concert-hall practice that brings coherence with the ensemble's engagement in music-theatre, visual arts and site-specific installation. In those collaborations utilising found spaces to generate a performance practice a criteria I always use is `what does it feel like to be in that space at that moment hearing that sound, having that visual experience´? The most profound theatre, the only one in fact, is the human mind. One of the lessons of the first Bar-do'i-thos-grol installation project (premiered by ELISION in 1994) [2] for me was the simplicity of technical means that visual artist Domenico De CLARIO employed to create perceptual doorways into the existent but unnoticed -- seven coloured floodlights, a suspended chandelier and the choice of their placement amongst the ruins of cars and household materials. In this project De Clario's work relentlessly positions itself as a subtle intervention into established borders, a breaking of the framed act that constitutes a barrier between art and non-art with importance being re-centred on the audience's perceptual abilities in the creation of the work and the subsequent potential for the re-evaluation of their own experience, history and knowledge. Another analogue: the qin, the Chinese zither, is an extremely quiet instrument whose performance was traditionally heard only in intimate circumstances. The listener is embraced as a co-creator of musical meaning and their inner space is as important to the performance as the actions of the performer. The qin is an instrument to be played to a listener, here defined as the perfect and true friend (not defined as that ubiquitous funding statistic -- the bum on a seat). A more recent ELISION project realised presented at the Queensland Art Gallery's Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Visual Art was Sonorous Bodies (1999). This installation-performance project takes its framework from the aesthetics of qin performance. Here the `true friend´ entered the performance space (the Old Library of Brisbane Town Hall) through a eight metre blacked-out tunnel. To enter you had to allow time for your eyes to adjust to the limited ambient light, to allow time to attend to the necessarily slow and quiet navigation of that tunnel into a wider series of spaces which contained eight different video projections (artist Judith WRIGHT) and a performance by the Koto player Satsuki ODAMURA of music by composer Liza LIM. Both Judith and Liza embrace similar sensibilities for perception of the deflected, the action and moment of touch, the sensing of vibrations set in motion through projected light. 
Lament of Desire (first performed by ELISION for the 1999 Perth Festival) was another video-installation project, involving collaboration between the Thai visual artist Araya RASDJARMREARNSOOK, composer Timothy O'DWYER and musicians of the ELISION ensemble. In the colonial sandstone Fremantle prison, films of a morgue in Chiang Mai with images of the artist reading to dead bodies, and of corpses floating in water were projected into six ponds of water. The musicians were visually anonymous, hidden to the audience, situated high on top of internal mechanical and wooden structures. The audience placed themselves on seats along the wall or wandered around the ponds, reflections of their own peering faces mixed in with those of the gently floating Thai dead.
The Inaow was a text read at school everyday during Araya's education. Like many traditional writings it encodes a set of behaviour between genders, friends, and family with respect to the ideal of love. The discrepancy between these social strictures and the reality of contemporary urban life in Bangkok introduces a powerful unresolved dissonance in counterpoint to the above. Timothy O'Dwyer's Sige for solo bass saxophone and prerecorded materials (1999), commissioned by the Queensland Art Gallery to celebrate their acquisition of the sculpture Void (13#) by Anish Kapoor, draws heavily upon Kapoor's strategies for suggesting the void. The artist's use of pigments, organic materials, and sculptured forms are tactically duplicitous; the eye is defeated as it gazes upon this particular work and the longer the duration of the focus, the more intense this failed subjectivity becomes. Like an automated projector unable to establish itself in relation to an image, the viewer cannot easily take a position with respect to the Kapoor.
The issues of a critical self-reflexive practice, the location of the performance space as a site for interarts practice, inter and intracultural collaboration, and the perceptual relationship of audience to work, all elaborate, inform and construct ELISION's investigation of existing and new modes of performance practice. Referenced as they are to historicised practice, Euro-American models (examples such as the London Sinfonietta, Ensemble InterContemporain or even Het trio) that have struggled to survive in their derivative forms are no longer adequate within an Australian environment, if indeed they ever were, and are fundamentally disabling for the contextualisation of work within the set of broader concerns, the multiplicity of narratives that articulate the Asia-Pacific region. These include issues of identity, globalism, migration, post-colonialism, and intercultural conflict. Like-wise attention to these issues can assist in providing an artistic response to engagement within Europe. A fundamental question here is what is being added to, suggested, or what contribution is being made to international ensemble practice and discourse. The ghosts are hungry and demand attention if not a feast!!!
Further reading:
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The recent opera of composer 
Also in the Inferno there are the gestural constellations of a cellist,
In performance Araya read from a Thai text called the
Inaow. The sound of her readings also emanated from the
video-projections (as did the sounds of the fans in that Chiang Mai
morgue), and were sampled and processed electronically from one night
of performance to the next. The core of this work, in its confluence
of multiple spaces, visual and sonic presences, is Araya's chanting to
the dead as a invitation back into life. Here the ghosts are
acknowledged as permanent co-existences, invited back into life without
ritual closure.
Likewise O'Dwyer's use of trilled multiphonics, harmonics, circular
breathing, and vocalisations both disturb and create unusual patterns
of difference tones within a heavily polyphonic performance style. He
consciously creates within the listener a sense of multiplicity that in
its very ceaselessness elicits a sonic uniformity of texture as
enveloping as is Kapoor's Void (13#).
Last updated Monday 02 February 2004
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