Tanks Art Centre, Cairns
19 - 20 July 1996
REVIEW by Ingrid Hoffman
Cairns is a place of mixed reputations. That a surge of contemporary art development has occurred here in the last four or five years bespeaks a convergence of talented practitioners interacting in a context of powerful environment and visible reminders of a deeply conservative political era - or did that never really disappear?
The Tanks Art Centre is a remarkable site by any standards of imaginative recycling. Constructed by American troops for fuel storage during the Coral Sea phase of World War Two, three massive round concrete structures remain camouflaged by rainforest gardens. Their destined demolition was scotched by the Local Authority purely due to the expense of it; opening the Tanks as a cultural precinct was the reluctant second choice. Performers, musicians - the whole arts community - were for a moment, at one with Cairns City Council.
At home 'in space, tank and time', performance artist Leah Grycewicz and Double Bass virtuoso Rigel Best collaborated with contemporary German dancer Heike Muller to create a potent evening of movement, form and sound - a theatre of imagery that traversed the sensory realm.
They took the dark, extensive interior of Tank Five and had light fall on the circular progression of their journey. Which unfolds thus: a slow-motion unravelling of gigantic shipping rope, its weight borne by bodies matching its strength and soon scaling a rig of scaffolding in motion through water, a black shallow mass restrained by massive rope also. Music is an abstraction, both a shadow and shape. Vertical light poles become wefts as rigid and twitching bodies propel their weaving through them. Then a bench, a bus-stop zone, sitting, lying, falling.
I recall a disabled catwalk, lab-coats, plastic raincoats and the appearance of only one high-heeled shoe worn by the dissident clotheshorse Muller. Fractured gestures are maintained, then heads float up and disappear behind a solemn black-draped barrier (the previous cat-walk). Shadows arise as blow-up figures on crude oil-encrusted cement walls. The double bass, bowed and plucked, is an orchestra of singularity.
Further crossing and traversing ensues, always with sustained detachment, as if by expressing the complexity of sense it becomes neutralised. Herein lies my fascination: the movement of Grycewicz and Muller is baroque superimposed by minimal dissolved by dada. Together with Best's sound, exquisitely responsive, what I know and feel is described but in a way that's quite weird and non-referenced.
Rhythms come with rapid high-heeled stamping. Long poles poised vertically fall and thump. Archetypal dresses stand for evolving sensuality expressed as a vulnerable girl or the sovereign princess. Then of course, the white froth of skirts must crawl through and roll through water - a catharsis of adult play. Whiteness must be threaded, extended and woven into a mad and beautiful web. Best's voice arises to accompany this action, haunting and delicate.
The gathering of diaphanous layers of white dresses by jerking, gesturing hands and a final tableau of benediction: Muller and Grycewicz with outstretched arms are raised against a screen, projections of slow melting fire or the advancing drain of rust-coloured blood engulf them. Slowly the screen glides backwards and the circle of the tank breaks up into darkness.
Some viewers might have needed more literal explanations about origins and meanings. As a work in progress however, the artists could well have eschewed responsibility for providing these. My own preference is that heightened visual/sonic moments remain undeciphered. After all, we are asked to enter an intuitive world. I gained richly from the immersion.
Ingrid Hoffmann.