On VIEW: LIVE PORTRAITS SUE HEALeY
PERFORMANCE SPACE PRESENTS 17 - 25 july 2015
: w e i v on live portraits sue healey
ON VIEW: Live Portraits evokes the reverential spaces of a portrait gallery. The work dissects the body with an analytical intimacy as it explores the dimensions of portraiture and how we view each other. Sue Healey’s work reveals the drama that exists at the boundaries between the choreographic and the filmic – a provocative dialogue between performers and their cinematic selves, articulating how we see and are seen.
PRODUCTIOn credits Choreographer & Film Maker Sue Healey Dancers Martin del Amo Shona Erskine Benjamin Hancock Raghav Handa
Part One is a 5 channel performance installation where performers enliven, confront and are in dialogue with their cinematic selves.
Nalina Wait Director of Photography Judd Overton
Part Two is a separate video installation featuring Dame Lucette Aldous and Professor Shirley McKechnie, icons of Australian Dance and will be open to the public from 18 – 25 July as per the times listed at performancespace.com.au
Composers Darrin Verhagen & Justin Ashworth Additional Music Canto Ostinato, Lemniscaat
ON VIEW is an ongoing series; film portraits of innovative dance artists interspersed with live performance. The first iteration of this work was presented at the Manly Gallery and won the 2014 Australian Dance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance on Film/New Media. The second iteration; ON VIEW: QUINTET wowed Melbourne audiences at Dancehouse, presented as part of Dance Massive 2015.
by Simeon Ten Holt
Various iterations of ON VIEW are touring galleries around Australia including; Brenda May GallerySydney, Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery, Glaashouse Gallery - Port Macquarie, KickArts Contemporary Gallery Cairns and Gertrude St Projection Festival.
Senior Technician
Karen Norris Producer (MAPS NSW, Performing Lines) Pippa Bailey
Sophie Pekbilimli Screens Serge Konovalov (Amberfox Blinds)
Image: Nalina Wait, On View (Film Still).
Lighting Designer
e danc space Dr Christopher Chapman is Senior Curator at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
[Spoken while dancing] Although I don’t clearly understand what I’m doing, nor perhaps do you fully grasp what you’re seeing, yet it still comes to life like this, unexpectedly. I want to keep dancing in such a way that deeply touches you for some inexplicable reason. Kazuo Ohno A diagram of thoughts in space moves along these vectors: the idea of physical presence moving towards a sense of transcending physicality; the experience of being in a space translated into a reflection upon what that experience feels like. Choreographer and dance film-maker Sue Healey’s environmental screen-and-performance installation On View layers sensation on to time. In her video portraits of dancers, they exist as ephemeral beings, captured and re-played; fluid and atomised in the projected digital image. The language of the screen-based digital portrait (or video portrait) is evolving. Like any portrait, the genre should succeed when it communicates a compelling sense of person-hood, or identity, or individual being. Other kinds of filmic forms can tell us about someone too: documentary might construct a ‘real’ world around a character to reveal how it moves within this space; narrative can evoke metaphors for personal events to ‘paint a picture’ of someone. Performance-art documentation can allude to the experience of actions and energies, a distillation of expression-through-the-body. A video portrait can be hermetic, contained and quiet. A few floors up in an undistinguished-looking building in New York City, just below mid-town, is a big open work space. On the wall is a large high-definition flat-screen with an image of a magnificent snowy owl crouched on a silver branch against a geometric background of blue-on-blue spots. The owl’s black and amber eyes look out at me. After a period of quiet
it calls out – a high-pitched cry. This video portrait by US theatre artist Robert Wilson presents a surreal interaction, like a dream in extreme clarity. In another of Wilson’s video portraits the bony hand of Japanese dancer and choreographer Suzushi Hanayagi turns and opens like a flower seeking the sun, the wind-instrument score by David Byrne equally plaintive and optimistic. Here is movement through space, familiar but made different through a shift in perception. In 2011 London-born US-based artist James Nares drove through New York City in a van enclosing a high-speed highdefinition camera, recording the everyday motion of the city he moved within. Finished with a layered and looping twelve-string guitar score by Thurston Moore, Street creates a world where all actions are languid and fluid, pedestrians and cyclists moving as softly as a pigeon taking slow-motion flight.
2005 Real Madrid vs Villareal football match (coincidentally Zidane is playing alongside David Beckham for Real Madrid). Here’s a capturing of the body’s movement over time, within the arena of football. Zidane’s movements are dramatized by the grandeur of film within a set of vectors, within the rules defined by the game. The video portrait is a depiction of an athlete and of the working of Zidane’s mind. Energised arcs of physical possibility and interactions with externalised physics are generated by the neurological mapping of Zidane’s athleticised body and his intuitive perception of the arena, the ball, and the other players. This energy is reflected by multiple camera angles, closeups and wide-angle shots – an interplay of interior and exterior. The soundtrack by Scottish band Mogwai hums and vibrates like electricity – the brain’s quantum wet chemical firing, the rippling stadium crowd comprising thousands of bodies and minds.
Here’s a strange kind of intimacy because David Beckham might be so well-known. He’s sleeping, slowly moving his bare torso, his arms gently wrapped around his chest. He’s sleeping on white linen, his bare skin close. This is British artist Sam TaylorJohnson’s video portrait of British footballer David Beckham, commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery in London. Here he is, sleeping after a Madrid training session, just over a decade ago now. Happily exhausted, is he dreaming of football? A couple of years later, another filmic portrait of an iconic footballer makes a connection to the inner world of the mind. Scottish artist Douglas Gordon and Algerian-born French artist Philippe Parreno’s 2006 film Zidane – A 21st Century Portrait is a ninety-one-minute visual composition. The temporal and spatial dynamic is powerful, constructed with footage from seventeen cameras following French footballer Zinedine Zidane during a
Image: Martin del Amo, On View (Film Still).
Image: Shona Erskine, On View (Film Still).
Sue Healey’s filmic portraits of dancers seek to communicate aspects of self-hood expressed through the body, choreographed as a distillation of inner-being. Here is a form of expression that is unencumbered, modelled by energy that is changeable, reflective of modulations in mood and feeling. Healey has her dancers interact with their projected images. More than dancing in the mirror, her performers create a constantly evolving sense of being that is multi-dimensional. They unfold time.
artist s e i h ap r g bio
Beckham sleeping, Zidane running – both naturally-actualised states of physical expression performed without selfconsciousness. In a video portrait of Cate Blanchett her choreographed movements are symbolic. Australian artist David Rosetzky collaborated with choreographer Lucy Guerin and composer J David Franzke to create the video portrait commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. The opening close-up depicts the actor’s hands moving delicately and carefully through a sequence of gestures that could be abstract forms of communication. As a reflection on the craft of acting, the portrait ponders Blanchett’s relationship to the roles she plays. Her voice floats across the sequence of scenes in the video. ‘Very early on,’ Blanchett softly states, ‘I realised that exactly what I thought I was communicating, would be, or could be received by someone in a completely different way and you can’t control it, you have to give that over. Interpretation you have to give over.’
Image: Raghav Handa, On View (Film Still).
The soul is the prime mover in dance. Are we conscious of our feet when walking? No, how could you figure out your steps and walk at the same time? Don’t we walk by placing one leg in front of the other? We’d never be able to walk were we to think of which leg to put down first. When a mother beckons her child to come to her, it runs toward her, instinctively. Like life itself, we can never stay still. Kazuo Ohno
SUE HEALEY is the recipient of the prestigious 2013 Creative Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts. Based in Sydney, her work encompasses live performance, dance film, gallery installations and international collaborations. Sue’s award-winning works have been presented by Sydney Opera House and have toured to Melbourne, Canberra, New Zealand and Japan. Originally from New Zealand, Sue graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts, and was a founding member of Nanette Hassall’s Dance Works in Melbourne. Experimenting with form and perception, Healey creates dance for diverse spaces: theatres, galleries and the camera. Healey is an acknowledged pioneer of dance on screen. Her films are widely acclaimed and have won many awards, screening in over 30 countries. Virtuosi (Healey’s feature length documentary) has screened in New York, Montreal, Prague, Portugal, Berlin, Hobart, Auckland Arts Festival, DocEdge festival Wellington, American Dance Festival and many other international festivals in 2013/14.
MARTIN DEL AMO, originally from Germany, is a Sydney-based dancer and choreographer. He started out as solo artist, acclaimed for his full-length solos fusing idiosyncratic movement and intimate storytelling. In recent years, Martin has primarily created group works and solos for others including Songs Not To Dance To (2015), Slow Dances For Fast Times (2013) and Anatomy of an Afternoon (2012). His work has toured nationally and internationally (UK, Japan, Brazil). SHONA ERSKINE has worked with many leading Australian choreographers, including Lucy Guerin Inc., Kage Physical Theatre, Natalie Cursio and Healey. She was a founding member of Phillip Adams’ Balletlab. She received her PhD (Psychology) in 2007 and now works as a Performance Psychologist at WAAPA. RAGHAV HANDA is a Sydney based performer and has worked with Marilyn Miller, Raymond Blanco, Vicki van Hout, Martin del Amo and Sue Healey. Recently Raghav was awarded a Jump mentorship, and the Kickstart 2013 grant by Next Wave in Melbourne to create Tukre, presented at Parramatta Riverside by FORM Dance Projects in April 2015.
BENJAMIN HANCOCK is a Melbourne based dancer who graduated from the VCA in 2008 with a Bachelor of Dance. He has worked with a wide range of artists including Antony Hamilton, Kirsha Kaechele (MONA), Lucy Guerin Inc., Martin del Amo, Narelle Benjamin, Opera Australia, Prue Lang, Richard Nylon, Sue Healey, Supple Fox, and 2ndToe Dance Collective. NALINA WAIT is a Sydney-based dance artist and junior academic currently completing a PhD on improvised dance at UNSW. She has performed in Australia and Internationally with Sue Healey, Rosalind Crisp, Nikki Heywood, Danceworks (Sandra Parker), Devastation Menu, Hans Van Den Broeck (SOIT, Brussels), Joan Jonas and Marina Abramovic.
Image by Jeff Busby.
JUDD OVERTON was awarded the Prestigious Cliff Ellis Award from the Australia Cinematographers Society (ACS) in 2007 and has been applauded at Toronto (TIFF), Rome, Camerimage (Poland) Edinburgh Film Festivals and the Berlinale where his short film Franswa Sharl, dir. Hannah Hilliard won the Crystal Bear for Best Short Film in 2010. Judd has worked with Healey on multiple projects; including Virtuosi (Silver ACS Award 2013), The Golds (2015 documentary), Reading the Body (2010), Red Shoes (2014) for Expressions Dance Company and The Door, the Chair, the Bed and the Stair (Gold ACS for experimental cinematography).
Image: Banjamin Hancock, On View (Film Still).
KAREN NORRIS has extensive experience as a lighting designer for Theatre, Dance and Music and Film throughout Australia and Europe. Sydney Theatre Company, State Theatre Company, Melbourne Theatre Company,
Belvoir Street, Sydney Opera House, One Extra Dance Company, Dance Exchange, Bangarra Dance Theatre - to name a few. DARRIN VERHAGEN is an award winning sound designer for dance, theatre, screen and installation. He has written scores for Sue Healey, ADT, Chunky Move, Lucy Guerin, Stompin Youth, Melbourne Theatre Company, Sydney Theatre Company, Daniel Schlusser Ensemble, Malthouse, and Chamber Made Opera, Gina Czarnecki and Patricia Piccinini, and SBS, Foxtel and Nicholas Verso. His recent installations, have been presented at Experimenta: Recharge, Globelight Festival, White Night and the National Gallery of Victoria. Darrin is a researcher and senior lecturer in Sound Design and multisensory experience and runs the Audiokinetic Experiments (AkE) Lab at RMIT University, Melbourne. Justin Ashworth is a composer, and multi-instrumentalist working in dance and film, and is the front person for the band Glasfrosch. He has a Degree in Fine Art, and has worked with Damo Suzuki, Arcko Symphonic Ensemble, TAM Projects, and Sue Healey. He has a cat named Sashimi and a record player named Scratch.
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The Artist would like to thank... All of the amazing collaborators for their passion and committment. CPU UNSW: Paul Matthews, Mark Mitchell, Su Goldfish, Serge Konovalov, Secondments: Kaitlyn McConnell, Chad McLachlan, Jacob Edmonds, Emma Joubert (WAAPA), Dancehouse, Geoff Webster, Dr Christopher Chapman, Paul Greedy, and Richard and Ben Harvey for everything! Quotes by Kazuo Ohno (1906-2010) from Workshop Words / Keiko no Kotoba, Film Art Sha Tokyo 1997, translated by John Barrett in Kazuo Ohno’s world: from without & within, Wesleyan University Press, Connecticut, 2004
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