FLY-TOWER: A LIVE ARCHIVE

var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-23470655-1']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); FLY-TOWER is New Zealand's National submission for the Prague Quadrennial 2011. As an exhibition it is a ‘live archive’, which transforms hourly through the ‘live’ and ‘material’ efforts of the selected performance designers and artist. Designed and Curated by Tracey Collins & Sue Gallagher Digital Archive Stuart Foster

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BLUNT PRACTICE// Sue Gallagher / Nooroa Tapuni

BLUNT PRACTICE is a collaborative team of Sue Gallagher and Nooroa Tapuni. The work 'YOU FOR ME' engages the FLY-TOWER structure as a performative environment, that seeks to fuse 'home' with body.

The work serves as a contemplative engagement with both creative practices and explores an irrational terrain, a series of intersections and boundaries, where we might encounter our unstable selves procuring an environment therefore where bodies are always unstable, always in relay, and always with the potential to fail and to transform. 'YOU FOR ME' offers the audience a chance to contemplate the entanglement of weakened bodies and their unstable environments, as that which define everyday lived experience.

Biographies

Sue Gallagher is Head of the Postgraduate Department, Senior Lecturer in the Spatial Design Department, School of Art & Design, AUT University; Co-ordinator of CoLab: MAP Media Arts & Performance research group; New Zealand Commissioner for 2011 Prague Quadrennial: Performance Design and Space (National, Theatre Architecture and Student Sections): Co-Curator of NZ National Exhibition with Tracey Collins. Sue’s research and teaching investigates performative environments, including installation, exhibition design, moving image and spatial design. Sue’s research practice explores performance as a platform that transgresses many art forms. It is her understanding from training as an architect and performance designer that spaces are not static and fixed creations, but subtle, communicative and transformative. Performance, installation, video and other scenographic works have been exhibited in the Netherlands, Germany, Greece, Japan, Czech Republic, Canada and New Zealand.

Nooroa Tapuni is a multi-disciplinary artist with conceptual interests in cultural stereotype, parody and mimicry.  Nooroa graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts in 1999 where she majored in painting and engaged in sculpture and installation art has Completed a Graduate Diploma in Digital Media in 2006 where in digital skills where acquired and has recently completed a Masters in Art and Design at AUT in 2010 in which experiments where made in rendering moving image sculptural. She has been in a number of Group and Solo shows over the last decade in New Zealand and the Pacific. The most recent include: “Glitch” curated by Sue Gallagher at St Paul St Gallery 2009 , “don’t pacify me” curated by Charmaine Iliau at St Paul St Gallery 2009, “Strengthening Sennit” curated by Leanne Clayton at St Paul St gallery 3, Auckland in 2008, “Language People” curated by Janet Lilo at Artstation Gallery, Auckland 2008, “Longitude”, Curated by Giles Peterson at The Art Studio, Cook Islands 2007 and “Subliminal shots” at Artstation , Auckland, 2005

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M.A.P (Movement, Architecture, Performance)// Dorita Hannah / Carol Brown / Russell Scoones

 MNEMOSYNE : a re-membering of 3 dance-architecture events Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed Into different bodies. Descend again, be pleased to reanimate This revival of those marvels. Reveal, now, exactly How they were performed From the beginning Up to this moment…

Ted Hughes: Tales from Ovid This exhibition re-presents fragments of 3 productions created by MAP (2005-2011) through a performance installation that engages with the mythical figure of Mnemosyne and her pool of remembrance. It utilizes the fly-tower as an archival repository of objects, choreographic gestures and sounds, which reanimate moments from three productions, Her Topia (Athens 2005), Aarero Stone (Wellington 2006) and Tongues of Stone (Perth 2011). Folding elements of these works into a site-specific landscape a live performer catalogues, maps and reconstructs phrases and artifacts, enfleshing these fleeting appearances with melancholic desire. Biographies MAP’s performance design involves designing performance and performing design as an integration of body, environment and sonic landscape. Scenographer, Dorita Hannah, choreographer, Carol Brown, and composer, Russell Scoones, have been collaborating on a number of site-responsive works that fold audiences into live performance whilst attending to the fractured narratives of place, memory and mythology. MAP has created a body of work that is profoundly informed by catastrophic events on the world stage, linking the lived-present to long-buried traumatic pasts. Their aim is to restore the corporeal to the chaos of the universe through a deterritorialisation of the performance frame. Architecture and performance form the principle threads that weave through Professor Dorita Hannah’s creative work, teaching and research. Her practice includes scenographic, interior, exhibition and installation design with a specialized architectural consultancy in buildings for the performing arts. Dr Hannah has practiced as a designer in New Zealand, Australia, London, Czech Republic, Greece and New York, gaining awards and citations for her creative work, including a UNESCO Laureate in 1999, NZ Institute of Architects Awards in 2004, the selection of her work for the International Archive of Women in Architecture and Gold/Silver awards at World Stage Design in 2009. Carol Brown is an award-winning choreographer of contemporary dance, a writer, and a teacher. Her work is research-led and collaborative; it evolves through intense dialogue and experimentation, in particular with artists and scholars from architecture, music, visual arts and literature. A New Zealander, In 1997 Dr Brown was made Associate Artist and in 1999 the first woman Choreographer in Residence at the Place Theatre in London. Since this time, she has received numerous awards including, a Jerwood Award for Choreography, an AHRB Research Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts as well as a NESTA Dream Time and the Ludwig Forum International Prize for Innovation.  A sound artist and composer, Russell Scoones began playing bass, singing and writing songs for rock bands in the mid 1970's and, by the 1980's, while touring Australasia. He has composed, performed and toured with dancers and in 1996 co-founded Carol Brown Dances, collaborating on many performances that have toured throughout Europe, Scandinavia, USA and New Zealand. Russell was artistic director of Planet People, a collection of musicians and composers with learning disabilities based in Surrey, UK, which has created films and compositions for performance. He is a practicing music therapist and has recently formed a band called The Verandahs.

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Tracy Grant Lord / David Eversfield / Colin McColl / John Gibson

The originating creative team of Auckland Theatre Company’s production of Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’, have produced The Hanging to exhibit its archive of design process and performance through the re-arrangement and re-engagement of the work using its inherent scenic elements; a composed sound landscape and the projection of video mapping. Using the associations within the text, that of execution, entrapment, seduction, closed community, gothic isolation, colonisation, uniformity and modification in suggests a form of universal communal relationships.

Creative Team: Colin McColl - Director David Eversfield – Lighting Designer John Gibson - Composer Tracy Grant Lord – Set and Costume Designer 

Biography

Tracy Grant Lord is a leading stage designer of theatre, opera and ballet. Her career began serving a 10 year design apprenticeship at the Mercury Theatre (Auckland) and since then she has worked as a freelance designer with the major performance companies throughout Australasia. She is a Winston Churchill Fellow, has a Bachelor of Spatial Design from Auckland University of Technology and her work has been chosen to represent performance design in New Zealand, at the Prague Quadrennial (Czech Republic) in 1991, 1995, 1999, 2003, 2007 and 2011. She was selected to exhibit at the World Stage Design exhibition in Toronto (Canada) in 2005.

Highlights of her work include the acclaimed Royal New Zealand Ballet’s 50th Anniversary production of

ROMEO AND JULIET, which premiered at Sadlers Wells in London in 2004. This production then went on to receive an Olivier Award nomination for Best New Dance Production in the UK in 2005.

Recent projects include the set and costume design for Sydney Theatre Company’s IN THE NEXT ROOM (2011), a new production of SLEEPING BEAUTY for Singapore Dance Theatre (2010) and the Matt Cameron/ Tim Finn musical 

 POOR BOY for Auckland Theatre Company (March 2011).

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DIGITAL ARCHIVE

The DIGITAL Archive Component of the FLY-TOWER exhibition structure is a digital interactive record and playback system. This will allow the audience to interact with the selected performance projects and to access their various stages of development. The smaller interface on ground level will comprise of a slide mechanism that accesses the time-line of the entire project.

The Digital Archive has been generously supported by CoLab, a creative technology centre at AUT University, focused on innovation through new technologies. Digital Archive Designer Stuart Foster Biography

Foster is a spatial designer specialising in digital interactive performance environments, digital fabrication and spatial representation practices. His specialist skills focus on interactive technologies that operate across the digital and physical realms through the use of Tangible User Interface. Recent projects include interactive technologies integrated into performance environments. Foster is currently lecturing into the Spatial Design programme within the College of Creative Arts, Massey University, Wellington.

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David Cross

Pause is a an artwork that seeks to faintly recast our experience of space, intimacy and pleasure. Drawing on the visual language and experiential qualities of children's bouncy castles as well as overtly phobic forms of architecture, the work is an inflatable sculpture that asks the audience to viscerally engage through active participation. While prefacing a haptic engagement between audience and object, the work also formulates a dialogue between audience and a performer whose presence in the work markedly yet subtly shifts the terms of engagement. Biography

Working across performance, installation, video and photography, David Cross has focused on the  relationship between pleasure, the grotesque and the phobic. His small to large- scale performance/installation work has sought to incorporate and extend contemporary thinking in relation to participation, linking performance art with object-based environments. Often using his own body as a starting point, he employs a range of objects-many of which are inflatable- to draw audiences into potentially unexpected situations and dialogues. He has exhibited extensively in New Zealand, Australia and Eastern Europe and is Associate Professor in Fine Arts at Massey University, Wellington. Project credits: Massey University Research Fund, Canvasland International

Image credit: Hold, Performance Space, Sydney, 2010. photo: Alex Davies

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Tracey Collins

“Risk Everything” is an installation consisting of 3 sculptural interactive installation works that have been created as ‘translation’ works, developed and designed from 3 Television Features designed during the last 2 years. The “Risk Everything” works are devised for the audience to participate in, and through this live experience, gain insight and understanding into the ‘worlds’ created, it’s philosophies and logic, the conceptual approach, and the developed design process and strategies. A key objective is to bring to these to these ‘designed worlds’ ‘a new life’ one that parallels and contrasts with the Screened Productions to give the audience a ‘one off’ unique experience.

Biography

Tracey Collins graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, Bachelor of Fine Arts. Tracey is an Artist and Designer for Performance Live Events, and for the Screen. Tracey is more recently a Production and Costume Designer for Television Features, favourites include- ‘Bliss’, ‘Piece of My Heart’, ‘What Really Happened Waitangi’, ‘This is Not My Life’, and Maddigan’s Quest. She has worked as a Set and Costume with Auckland’s leading Theatre Companies over the last 21 years. Some favourite productions include- The Holy Sinner for Inside Out Productions, Viva Verdi for NBR NZ Opera, Midsummer Night’s Dream for NZ Actors Company, Horseplay for Auckland Theatre Company. This will be Tracey’s 4th participation at PQ. Tracey has Co-Commissioned with Sue Gallagher at PQNZ 2007 with the NZ Exhibit with ‘BLOW’ and with Helen Todd in 2003 with the exhibit ‘Part’. 

http://www.traceycollins.net.nz/index.html

Credits for Original TV Productions “This is NOT My Life” Written by Gavin Strawhan and Rachel lang. Directed by Robert Sarkies and Peter Salmon. Produced by Tim Sanders. Exec Producers- Gavin Strawhan, Rachel Lang, Steven O-Meagher, Tim White.

“Bliss” Written and Directed by Fiona Samuel. Produced by Michele Fantl.

“What Really Happened Waitangi” Written by Gavin Strawhan. Directed by Peter Burger. Produced by Robin Scholes.

Credits for ‘Risk Everything’- Graphic Design: Lisa Rushworth (for ‘This is Not My Life’ board game)  

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Structure

The FLY-TOWER exhibition structure is a hybrid environment, an active space between a designer’s studio, a stage, an archive, and an installation space. The exhibition structure is a 9 metre high ‘fly-tower’ that houses 8 performance works created by NZ performance designers and artists. The performance works developed for the exhibition are ‘archived’ in the upper region of the fly tower. The works are shown individually in the 4 by 5 metre stage space in the lower region of the fly tower – the stage space. Each work is ‘performed’ for approximately an hour and then ‘fly’ back into the upper region of the fly-tower structure. The next work is then be lowered and takes centre stage.

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Christopher Braddock.

  Braddock’s video series Trying from Above (for Jim Allen) is located somewhere between live art performance, CCTV visual surveillance technology, making sculpture and teaching a class. It is none of these activities but relies on all of their histories and associated structures. Participants interpret instructions for each EXPERIMENT. I imagine the hot house ‘clinics’ of Lygia Clark and her insistence on ritual as a means to avoid commodification, enabling participants to discover and remake their own physical and psychic reality. The series Trying from Above pays homage to Jim Allen’s works such as Contact, 1974, acknowledging Allen’s significant contribution to discourses on participatory art actions and performances of the 1970s. Biography

Christopher Braddock is Associate Professor of visual arts in the School of Art & Design, AUT University, and Chair of the AUT St Paul St Gallery. His art practice and writing is particularly focused on installation practices that include performance interventions and the objects of art that bear traces of performed actions. Braddock’s first book Performing Contagious Bodies: Ritual Exchange in Contemporary Art will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2012. In 2010 Braddock published “Alicia Frankovich and the Force of Failure” for Sydney Artspace’s Column. In 2009 he curated Random Entrant for PSi#15 (Performance Studies International), Zagreb, including artists David Cross and Alicia Frankovich. In association with this project he published "Random Entrant and the Force of Failure," Frakcija Performing Arts Journal, 50 (Spring), 26-33. http://www.imageandtext.org.nz/chris.html

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Daniel Belton

Belton and Good Company brings together a group of acclaimed artists and designers in performance, visual, sound, textile and film genres. Soma Song fuses digital dance, choreographic screen processes with architectural cinema and sound, the project develops an electro-shamanic ethos.

There is embedded rhythm behind all the work for Soma Songs. The Soma Songs blocks in their flat two dimensional form are sound glyphs. They represent a musical notation system - tone links with alphabetical characteristic in code. Cubit sound. The digital glyphs have elements we associate with musical structures. The Soma Sound Glyphs take on the characteristics of music when they follow a linear trajectory, and a pattern is present. This can be circular or helix also. Inherent in this is the connection to the human body as glyph - human glyph. This is holographic and hieroglyphic in the context of motion.

The human element is constantly distorted in movement against the fixed, solid still objects. The fabric of existence is malleable. We jump from flat space to the idea that there is time inside the space as well. You go into the still image and suddenly you are in 3D space. There is pulse in the line - the line is active - and the dance geometric. Why do we build? What do we want to broadcast? ‘The wisdom is physiological'.

We trace our stories of architecture from the first attempts to capture and hold space with stone. The skeletons of stone structures have sat with us for millennia. In Soma Songs our work focuses on the relationship between movement and moving image, both when it is produced as a result of a choreography for the camera, and when it is produced by the filmmaker's look on movement. The dance is moving geometry - movement is the basic datum.

Architectural rhythm is read by scanning the surfaces of planes, as in scanning a musical score, reading the patterns the notes make in time. When you set up a curve, you set up a rhythm, and again, this is about movement. The curve signals rotation. There is more length on the curved surface than a flat surface which therefore implies acceleration - accelerated movement. Curves also signify returned movement. Light is both wave and particle. In Soma Songs we conduct this energy and its resulting memory. Light has a consciousness. Geometric forms affect us because there is consciousness in the form.

The concept of numbers and the development of mathematics has enabled description of our world, and our understanding of the Universe. We recognise pattern in repetitions, alterations, inversions and in reflected or returned moments so that; ‘ordered movement lies at the heart of our universe, as it lies at the heart of the atom. It is this permanent and all-pervasive state of motion, from the pulse of our blood to the circling of the planets, which places us as dancing figures in a dancing Universe' (Clark and Crisp. The History of Dance 1981)

In Soma Songs the soundscape and performed projected movement is architectural - it follows along a slant in time, sharing a common logic which determines how the physical elements relate. As the choreography and space changes develop, a large interlocking version of the miniature structure built in the opening sequence takes form. Is this structure a shelter or a wall? Is it a device or a library - a means to navigate and travel – or a massive instrument to play sound? As the figures complete their building process the light changes suddenly. A code or key has been deciphered, and an opening or access revealed.

  Daniel Belton. (Excerpts from Director's Notes © 2005-11) www.goodcompanyarts.com