SOME NOTES ON LIVE AUDIOVISUAL PERFORMANCE IN BRISBANE
In the inky surrounds of a completely black theatre, audience eyes are struggling. All they can hear is their own breathing, and the air is thick with anticipation. Suddenly, a loud noise—the frizzing pop of a strobe, and the room is strafed with light. The strobe sets up a slow but coruscating beat, periodically revealing the empty stage floor and softly shirring black curtain behind. Audience eyes strain as the entire space shudders, flooded in sudden illumination, then darkness, then light again. The pulsing beat of the strobe explosions develops into more sophisticated sonic textures: crackling, bubbling, metallic noises whizzing throughout the venue and across the empty plain of the stage. Then, from behind the curtain a white hand appears, followed shortly after by its owner. Clad in a white, knee-length shift, her russet hair swathed in bandages, performer Sally Golding materialises. Her motions frozen by the strobe, spectators glimpse her capering advance and mischievous sidelong glances as a series of abrupt still frames. Golding presents her white-sponged face to the 16mm film projectors set up at the front of the stage, and as the flickering projection—a decaying skeleton—appears and maps itself over Golding’s pale flesh, we realise that she is not to be an actor in front of the screen, but the screen itself. Joel Stern’s layered soundscape accompanies and accentuates this dark apparition, creating a delicate tissue of manipulated science fiction sounds which chime with the regular electronic pulse of the strobe, and are grounded in the grinding drone of the amplified projector.
Something fascinating has been happening in the nethermost reaches of Brisbane art, something exemplified by the Abject Leader performance by Stern and Golding described... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline