THE EXPERIMENT - SYDNEY FESTIVAL 2015
THE EXPERIMENT, Bay 20, Carriageworks, 15-17 January 2015. Photography by Jamie Williams; above and right: Mauricio Barrasco.
Ideally, arts festivals should be about extremes – there’s plenty of time and space the rest of the year for moderation – but it stands to reason that if you want ecstasy there may also be occasional agony. Nevertheless, The Experiment is oddly neither extreme nor moderate, agony nor ecstasy, but somewhere in between.
Caught in an elastic time-warp, the piece is built around English playwright Mark Ravenhill’s 2009 monologue with visual and sound technology used to make what composer David Chisholm describes as a musical monodrama. It’s a form, Chisholm reminds, that’s been around since the 1760s and Rousseau’s Pygmalion but this is probably not why the music-soundscape seems peculiarly old fashioned and familiar.
In its component parts it’s reminiscent of the late 70s and 80s when people were getting really excited about electronics and such goodies as Moog and Fairlight CMI. To counter this, perhaps and also in the spirit of experimentation, it was also when traditional musical instruments and the human voice were being used in every possible way but the one for which they were intended: think theatro-vocalist Phil Minton; bassoonist Lindsay Cooper’s deconstruction performances and Henry Cow’s mischief with voice, instruments and improvisation, for instance. Or closer to home: Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter and, among other performance pieces, Open City.
So, in The Experiment (a misnomer, really) a Spanish guitar takes on a sculptural role from its position on a tripod from where it is briefly played by Mauricio Barrasco. Another – conventional – electric guitar lies in a what could be a smallgoods display unit fitted with cameras so when he “plays” it with a plastic ruler and what might be a scouring pad, we can see his beautiful hands in giant close-up on the screens at the back of the stage. The visuals are a welcome distraction from the daft torture being done to the guitar by a musician who, in true impro tradition, is actually a classical guitarist of distinction.
Maintaining the torture theme, Ravenhill’s text is solemnly delivered by Barrasco in that quasi-liturgical sing-song where every line swoops reverently upwards, no matter what. For decades, really lousy poets in really crummy pub poetry nights have used the same technique. The effect is to render senseless much of what is said and heard as the listener tends to hear style over substance.
The time-warp sensation is further intensified by video backdrops of scratchy-twitchy repeats of an Australian bush house and slowly building and morphing abstract-organic images (Emmanuel Bernardoux). As well as the overarching soundtrack and Barrasco’s live work there is a robotic steampunk electric guitar (actually two that have been Siamese-twinned, fitted with auto-playing gadgetry and credited to Benjamin Kolaitis).
And something like Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis is briefly conjured when the ever-patient Barrasco methodically wires himself with heart monitor pads and momentarily dons an archaic-futuristic helmet (Anna Conrick) that lights up but nevertheless fails to illuminate much. Barrasco then methodically removes the heart monitor pads, one by one; the helmet too.
The Experiment is brief (about an hour) but still some in the audience at the first performance left before the end. That’s par for the festival course – viz agony and ecstasy above – and so there may be revelations and inspiration to be had for those for whom every day is Year Zero when it comes to experimental art.
