From 2010-2013 Performance Practicum was a space of creative development and practice. With mentors Margaret Cameron, Helen Sharp and John Howard participants could explore perceptual practice and devise new work. Here’s some pics and sound from that time.
I went through a phase of recording covers as a way of trying new things with music and software. This is song came out of that phase. You can hear the rain on the roof of the shed that was my studio at the time. Keeping it real. x
A Margaret moment, Footscray Performance Practicum Workshops, 2012. Pic Liebzeit
This song is an old re working of Ya the Volim first recorded when I was 26 as part of the work Svila. It tells the story of when my dad looked after his mum until she died, he was 15. Her name was Anna Liebzeit. He was committed to the act of love. Anna’s death was freedom for both of them. Years later I was the caretaker of Rudy’s death. This picture is one of the last I took of him in 2012, a few days before he died in my arms. I’d said to him,
He knew I loved him. But he had to leave.
Often my relationship with the world is understood through my relationship with sound. Active listening sometimes allows my body to surrender expectations, allowing the experience of art as a verb. Vibrational practices exploring difficult felt spaces became material when limitations are resisted. Margaret Cameron (2016) writes;
Critical engagement with auto biography levers the personal into a radical reconnection of our relationships with one another.
Singing Water, Gadigal Country. Incubator Residency, Queen Street Studio, Sydney, 2011
Cuckoo, Footscray Community Arts Residency, FCAC Melbourne. Paper and cardboard room made by Anna Liebzeit. Audience viewed the performance as they stood or walked around the perimeter of the room. The performance took place inside.
Membrane, a paper and cardboard site specific performance installation, Footscray Arts Centre. Slits cut into the paper walls were where the interior of the room could be viewed from. By Anna Liebzeit, 2005.
Many moons ago I went to Germany for a month. After time spent in the north I went to the south to breathe in the Alps. It was there I recorded this song using my phone and the microphone input of my headphones (hence the phasing). Guitar and vocal is in the one take, with a wee bit of post-production. I had bought the electric guitar in Berlin a few weeks before. Such a beautiful tone even unplugged.
Apparently in love “only fools rush in”… x
Today marks dimly the consciousness of Australia and it’s political parties. The death of a man on Manus who needed urgent medical help exemplifies how barbaric indefinite detention is, and how it needs to end. Men, women and children need freedom so they can rebuild and begin to heal. Australia and it’s colonial discourse must be accountable for this mess. (language warning)
I discovered this video I made a few years back. The audio was recorded on my Iphone 4 in the liminal space of being awake and being asleep. A deep dream, visited by a dying woman. She slips between the cracks of matter and begins to howl, and I fall too. Her message to me is to sing, an object, knowledge? She is shot. I grieve, she will never sing again, it is her grief. ‘She’ is my ancestral link and she came to teach me something. Keep moving forward creatively, don’t be shot and killed by a colonial discourse. Never forget love deep, hard and howling.
