Tongues of Stone Workshop in Perth

Workshop in Perth

Design: Dorita Hannah
Choreography: Carol Brown
Musical Score: Russell Scoones
Assistant Design: Lauren Skogstad
With Strut Dance http://www.strutdance.org.au/
Special thanks to:
Agnes Michelet - Director of Strut Dance
Curtain University

Carol Brown and Dorita Hannah: Movement-Architecture Projects 2003 - 2006: Show reel

How Water Began to Play

I found this poem by Ted Hughes from 'Crow':- 

How Water Began to Play

'Water wanted to live

It went to the sun it came weeping back

Water wanted to live

It went to the trees they burned it came weeping back

They rotted they came weeping back

Water wanted to live

It went to the flowers they crumpled it came weeping back

It wanted to live

It went to the womb it met blood

It came weeping back

It went to the womb it met maggot and rottenness

It came weeping back it wanted to die

It went to time it came through the stone door

It came weeping back

It went searching through all time and space for nothingness

It came weeping back it wanted to die

Till it had no weeping left

It lay at the bottom of things

Utterly worn out   utterly clear' 

Site Research: Perth

Kings Park


Kings Park


Kings Park - War Memorial


Kings Park


Central Park


Convention Center


Empty Space near Convention Center


Space near Forrest Place


Forrest Place - 7.45 pm


Forrest Place - 12pm


Forrest Place - 12pm


Forrest Place - 12pm


Perth Concert Hall

Site Research: Kings Park: Pathway of sucess - Women Leading the Way

Location of Kings Park in Perth

Site Research: Kings Park

Location of Kings Park in Perth

Site Research: Forrest Place

Location of Forrest Place in Perth

Site Research: Convention Centre

Location of Convention Centre in Perth

Site Research: Central Park

Location of Central Park in Perth

snow figure

So we have just had a major snow event here in London with 30cm settling on the ground yesterday.  Today the sun has been out and I am looking out on a fluorescent whitescape and enjoying the subdued muffled sounds of traffic (very little and going slow).  When I went out on the common last night and this morning the fields of snow are dotted with snowmen and women.  Russell took this image of a rather imposing towering  snow woman (that's Rafe and neighbour Anna standing below). This is one but there are many as there has been a frenzy of party-like building of ephemeral figurines of snow going on since yesterday morning.  I'm fascinated by this hunger to build melting figures of fun.  They also reminded me of the Pinnacles I posted earlier, only these ones are built with human hands rather than with wind, sand and water.

Bodies and City

 

Here are some further images of the dancers responses to place in Nov 07.

Bodies and City

This is an image from my workshop in Perth in 06. The Strut dancers improvised on the grass patterns of rolling, resting and containing.  Its a large stretch of grass fringed by a busy road and the cityscape backdrop, on the other side is the sea and the Bell Tower.  Looking at them from this distance without the motional quality of the live they appear fallen.

Living Stones

At Lake Clifton in Western Australia these stromatolites are found.  Known as 'living stones' they are millions of years old and some of the oldest organisms on our planet.  They are primitive cellular organisms which 'grow' 1mm a year in these spiralling circles.  At the lake you can see them, some submerged some beached like this one, a sequence of circular forms which form a visual rhythm around the lake like a piece of serial music.

Geology

During my visit to Western Australia in 2005, I was intrigued by these standing sentinel sculptures of limestone - the Pinnacles - found near Cervantes about 200km north of Perth.  Apparently limestone deposits run all the way along the coast of Western Australia.  The pinnacles, as they are known, take on various anthropomorphic forms, this one - a tall woman - appeared at sunset standing sentinel on a plain of wind blown sand.

Ishtar

I need to research this further but am drawn to the story of Ishtar as a trigger for Tongues.

Ishtar is a multifacted goddess.  She is the goddess of love and sexuality, and thus, fertility; she is responsible for all life, but she is never a Mother goddess.  As the goddess of war, she is often shown winged and bearing arms. Her third aspect is celestial; she is the planet Venus, the morning and evening star.  In Babylonian mythology she is the 'divine personification of the planet Venus'.  It is claimed, her cult involved sacred prostitution, or at least the requirement that women once in their lifetimes made love to a stranger in the temple of Ishtar.  One of the most famous myths about Ishtar describes her descent to the underworld.  In this myth, Ishtar approaches the gates of the underworld and demands that the gatekeeper open them. The gatekeeper lets Ishtar into the underworld, opening one gate at a time.  At each gate, Ishtar has to shed one article of clothing.  When she finally passes the seventh gate, she is naked.  In rage she throws herself at Ereshkigal (queen of the underworld).  Ereshkigal orders her servant Namtar to imprison Ishtar and unleash sixty diseases against her.  After Ishtar descends to the underworld, all sexual activity ceases on earth.  The god Papsukal reports the situation to Ea, the king of the gods. Ea creates an intersex creature called Asu-shu-namir and sends him-her to Ereshkigal, telling him-her to invoke 'the name of the great gods' against her and to ask for the bag containing the waters of life.  Ereshkigal is enraged when she hears Asu-shu-namir's demand, but she has to give him-her the water of life.  Asu-shu-namir sprinkles Ishtar with this water, reviving her.  Then Ishtar passes back through the seven gates, getting one article of clothing back at each gate, and is fully clothes as she exits the last gate. (Source: Wikipedia)

Because of her multiple aspects and powers, Ishtar remains a complex and confusing goddess figure in modern study. Scholars suggest she incorporates contradictory forces to the point of embodying paradox:  sex and violence, fecundity and death, beauty and terror, centrality and marginality, order and chaos.  Rivka Harris views her as a "liminal" figure (Harris, "inanna-Ishtar as Paradox," 265).  In 'Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopatamia', Zainab Bahrani calls her the embodiment of "alterity" (Bahrani, 'Women of Babylon, 158) (Source: www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/place_settings/ishtar/php)

Gates of Ishtar

The Gate was one of eight gates into the city of Babylon and a main entrance  dedicated to the goddess Ishtar.  It was decorated with glazed brick reliefs, in tiers of animals - a mythical dragon, and young bulls and lions. It was built during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II (604-562 BC) and has been reconstructed in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin. 

Batavia Gate

The Dutch East India company sent many boats around the coast of West Australia towards Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia) one of their major colonies (1619-1942).  After the slow passage through the doledrums, the waters off the coast of West Australia were fierce so, many were shipwrecked, including the Batavia which wrecked off the coral island of Abrolhos.  Having just been to an exhibition about Babylon - Myth and Reality at the British Museum - I have been thinking about possible connections between Batavia - Babylon - Perth.  The shipwreck of the Batavia contained the 32 tonne sandstone arch (in pre-fabricated pieces) for the Batavia Castle (Jakarta), a fragment of a perhaps babylonian dream to build an architecture which symbolised human ambition, an aspiration and a folly. 

AARERO STONE: TWO SOLOS IN A PERFORMANCE LANDSCAPE

Commissioned by the New Zealand International Festival of Arts, 2006
Choreographers/Dancers: Carol Brown and Charles Koroneho
Performance Designer: Dorita Hannah





Aarero Stone was an interdisciplinary collaboration between choreographer-dancers and performance designer, commissioned and premiered by the 2006 New Zealand International Arts Festival. Aareo means Tongue and the tongue of stone was a speaking landscape upon which journeys of transformation were woven from the strands of Mâori ancestral stories and European mythologies. Sited on the stage of Te Papa’s Soundings Theatre, this architectural installation was comprised of a cartographer’s grid of reflective crosses, a shadowy tomb embedded in a slab wall, a vessel of white stones, an obsidian promontory jutting into the auditorium and a black mirror hovering over a dark pool of water. Open, abstract and elemental it formed an atmospheric space that shifted subtly through movement, light and reflection to evoke a multitude of places.

Aarero Stone in 2006 New Zealand Arts Festival

Her Topia: Athens 2005

Chapter from Performance Design

edited by Dorita Hannah & Olav Harslof

(Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2008)

Her Topia Presentation Boards:

Duncan Dance Centre

Interview with Carol for Aarero Stone

A fragment of the Batavia wreck recovered off the coast of Western Australia.  It was a Dutch ship en route to Jakarta (Batavia) with passengers, coins and a sandstone portico for the palace in Jakarta.  Much of this has been recovered and can be seen in the Maritime Museum in Freemantle.  The story of the Batavia is one of 'angry ghosts' as the shipwreck led to the abandoning of the passengers on a waterless island as the officers returned to the netherlands.  A mutiny amongst them led to a massacre of many and the subsequent punishment in the Netherlands of the rescued murderers. The waters of Western Australia were used for the spice trade.  There's something bablyonian in the whole enterprise and the idea of bringing a major architectural element on boat all the way from Europe to Jakarta.

Working with the Strut dancers in the theatre at PICA (Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts) in November 07. We worked on a painted white floor and with a white screen backdrop for projection.

Events in Perth

Event index in Perth

Sculptures in Perth

Sculptures by the Sea

Sculptured Aboriginal Art Perth
Reference: Art in Perth

unidentified installation/object

Perth by night - "The City that Sleeps"

"The City that Sleeps"

Comments on Perth:

"Having been here for a few months, people tend to post the same question over and over again - ‘How do you find Perth?’

I bet I’ll be getting tons of these questions when I get back home end of the year, and my answer is still relatively the same, ‘The city that sleeps.’ The West Australian paper has an interesting article on Perth as a city and its lifestyle, and it says:

Demographer Bernard Salt said Perth was easily the most suburban of Australia’s capital cities, largely because much of Perth had been developed post-World War II in the era of the motor vehicle.

He said Perth lacked the inner-city “funk factor” of Melbourne and Sydney and therefore there had not been a lure for people to live closer to the city, though that had started to be addressed in suburbs such as Subiaco and Northbridge.

I’m not quite convince with the motor vehicle part but he was right about the “funk factor”, my first few weeks in Australia was a horrible experience, I couldn’t imagine myself living in a ‘City’ that literally shuts itself up before 5, according to one of my lecturers, it used to be some kind of Union law requiring every shops in Western Australia to have their door shut before 5, but it appears that they are trying very hard to reverse this trend currently.

The other thing about Perth is the architecture, unlike Sydney and Melbourne, Perth lacked an architecture identity and ironically they’re the richest state in Australia, according to my lecturer, Perthlings prefer to spend their money on health care, education… anything but architecture, and when they do, they do it with a big bang – the iconic Perth Convention Center."

Sleepy Perth as bad as Adelaide, says architect

Cafe's

Cafe Locations

Perth Cafe Location Guide

Perth Mining

Gold Mine Hill

Gold Mine Hill gives sweeping views over the Coastal Plain to Mandurah in the north and Bunbury in the south. Mine shafts and diggings can still be found with chunks of quartz scattered through the area. No gold was ever found.

Mining in the Media

Frontier to sue over banned Kokoda mine

Historic Buildings

Round House

The Round House is the earliest extant colonial building in Western Australia. The Round House is one of two remaining public buildings designed by H.W.Reveley in Western Australia. The Round House comprises a twelve sided building of local limestone, containing eight cells and gaoler's quarters above a tunnel built to connect the old whaling jetty with High Street. Contains twelve equal compartments: one entrance or wardroom, one sleeping room for gaoler and wife, one kitchen, two conveniences and eight cells, all surrounding a central courtyard with well. Designed by Henry Willey Reveley.

Reference: Heritage Council of Western Australia

The Perth Mint

The Perth Mint is Australia's oldest operating Mint, established in 1899 to mint gold sovereigns for the British Empire. The Mint is owned by the Western Australian Government and is Australia's specialist precious metals mint, producing collector and investment coins for world markets. The Perth Mint has played a central role in the development of Western Australia's gold industry During the 19th Century, three branches of the Royal Mint of London were established in the Australian colonies to refine gold from the gold rushes and to mint gold sovereigns and half-sovereigns for the British Empire.





310 Hay St
Perth

The Perth Observatory

The original Perth Observatory was constructed in 1896 and was officially opened in 1900 by John Forrest, the first premier of Western Australia.

Fremantle Prison

Fremantle Prison is a former Australian prison located in The Terrace, Fremantle, in Western Australia. The 60,000 m² (15 acres) site includes the prison, gatehouse, perimeter walls, cottages, tunnels, and prisoner art.

The prison was built by convict labour in the 1850s, and transferred to the colonial government in 1886 for use as a gaol for locally-sentenced prisoners. It closed as a prison in 1991 and reopened as a historic site. It is now a public museum, managed by the Government of Western Australia with daily and nightly tours being operated. Some tours include information about the existence of ghosts within the prison.