BackStage Music | Hand Unmade
August 30, 2024, Woodburn Creatives, Redfern, NSW
The Woodburn Creatives offered an intimate setting for ‘Hand Unmade’, a multi-arts event curated by Damian Barbeler, with Lamorna Nightingale as Artistic Director. This marked yet another bold and exciting program as part of BackStage Music’s 2024 series. Far from a traditional concert setting, this evening of music, light, sound, movement, and even food, was continually surprising and always thought-provoking.
The artists and performers involved in this concert come from diverse backgrounds and professions. Personalities shone throughout the evening as the compositions and installations often stemmed from the artists’ personal experiences. There was a wonderful sense of anticipation before each new ‘chapter’ of this ‘multi-art’ essay; the sense that quite literally anything could happen.
Wearing only a sheet of pig skin embedded with synthetic horsehair that was stuck to her chest, WeiZen Ho reinterpreted a Rungus dance ritual from Kampung Minyak, Sabah. Titled The Subtle Beings – Emergence, this powerful work melded the voice, the body, and the performance space itself. At times quite confronting, there was an immediacy to WeiZen’s movements which organically unfolded along with Dahyo Lloyd’s live sampling and WeiZen’s vocalisations. WeiZen’s eventual removal of the pig skin across the front of her body seemed a symbolic reference to the -un- of unmade; the reimagining and resurfacing of the body and the spirit, enabling a process of transformation and change. This installation set up an important theme that pervaded throughout the evening, namely the challenging of the parameters of a performance. It was fitting that the pig skin, hung up on wires from the ceiling, remained for the duration of the concert.
Next up was Niki Johnson’s Bread Touch. At a table with a lamp light shining on a loaf of bread, Johnson began by puncturing the loaf with a corkscrew, before abandoning this tool for an electric drill. A hydrophone was moved around inside the loaf, allowing the sound of the fluffy interior to waft through the space. One of the highlights of this work came when Johnson picked up a torn piece of bread spread with butter and proceeded to eat it, going so far as to place the hydrophone (for an uncomfortably long time) in her mouth, so the audience was offered the full auditory experience of chewing and swallowing sounds. The simple, everyday loaf of bread became something other, or more, than bread – this handmade entity of flour and water was refashioned and heard for what felt like the first time. Johnson’s work presented a synaesthetic experience that was mesmerising and incredibly enjoyable.
‘I’m not very good with my hands’, said Leta Keens during her work A Writer Tells a Story. It took me a moment to realise that the ‘performance’ had begun as Keens was simply chatting away to the audience. Explaining that she normally listens to music when she sews, Keens proceeded to pick a CD (The National album called ‘Boxer’) and pop it into a CD player. Keens then sat down in front of the sewing machine on a wooden table in the centre of the space and simply started to sew! Her natural and unaffected communication with the audience, as she performed this unexpected task for a concert setting, brought into question the traditional division between audience and performer.
Following this was Chris Cooper’s Clarinet Boxing. The work consisted of a boxing training session between a student and coach, but alternated with Cooper ‘training’ with the clarinet instead of making punches using boxing gloves. The clarinet’s sounds, in the form of trills, short bursts of repeated pitches, and rapid undulating passages, took on a new, unfamiliar form, as the tones veered away from sounding musical into something symbolic of physical exertion and struggle. Cooper’s work alluded to the power of music and made one question how music might affect an individual in both a physical and emotional sense.
During the interval, a tape was played while four multi-arts ‘scientists’ in white lab coats wandered around with trays of bite-sized bread appetizers to pass to the audience. Each tray had a different question written in the centre of it on a piece of cardboard: ‘Will it match?’ ‘Should it match?’ ‘Can it match?’ And ‘Does it Match?’ Liam Mulligan’s work Refreshed challenged how we experience music through sensory collaborations between taste and sound. I enjoyed how the intrigue of this evening’s event was not lost during the interval.
After the interval, Amy Fenton, a registered nurse, and Damian Barbeler, shared stories about their respective fathers. Between each ‘round’ of this storytelling competition, James Crabb played the accordion, creating a nostalgic atmosphere while Fenton and Barbeler bent pieces of metal using a mechanical device made by Fenton’s father. This segment of the evening had a humorous and personal touch that, again, defied any one genre of performance.
Accordionist James Crabb performed his Squeeze Box Folk Song while weaving through the audience, demonstrating an ease and unique presence as a performer. But the high point of Crabb’s playing was Sophia Gubaidulina’s De Profundis. Crabb’s poise, intensity and incredible command of the instrument was captivating. De Profundis references the Penitential Psalm ‘Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord’. The religious associations of darkness and light, despair and hope, that are reflected in this work, aligned with the expanding and enriched sensory awareness that pervaded this concert as a whole.
The Casimir Fairy experiment by Damian Barbeler, with Dahyo Lloyd and Jonathon Watson, marked the final section of this multi-art essay. Introduced playfully as a Popular Science Event nicknamed the ‘Harmonic Series’, this experiment presented a striking visual projection of colour, light, and moving shapes, combined with experimental sounds, creating an immersive experience for the audience.
I look forward to the next BackStage Music event in September, Cool Becoming Warm. I have no doubt it will be just as adventurous as this concert was.
Photo credit: Ollie Miller
