BY MARK BOSCH
Singles Club + Alice Chance
BackStage Music
Woodburn Creatives, 22 November
I count myself very lucky that the first ever live performance review I wrote was for a BackStage gig.
I was given a lot to work with, there — sight, sound, touch, even smell. Multisensory engagement has always excited me as an audience member. Same goes for any sort of genre mixing, bending or busting; really any subversion of the categories to which we cling so hard as human beings.
BackStage is very good at this sort of thing. And of the three out of five events in the 2018 series I had the fortune of seeing, Thursday’s was probably the most irreverent with an interactive installation involving the audience’s phones and voices in the first half, and a bunch of implacably percussive works in the second; the clamour of each separated by the amusing if ever-so-slightly stilted emceeing of Bree van Reyk and the rest of the so-called Singles Club.
Alice Chance’s Wishpond (2018) opened the night. This was an interactive installation guided by Chance, who explained how everyone’s smartphones would be used: turn your brightness up to 100 per cent, sound volume to about 75 per cent, and, ideally, turn off intrusive notifications. We were then directed to a short online quiz of sorts, where we were asked to choose a member of the pond’s ecosystem — tadpoles, fish, reeds — and submit an anonymous wish, after which an animated video player appeared.
These instructions, let alone the need for a smartphone, provided a certain barrier for entry. Nevertheless, BackStage seems to invite a tech-savvy crowd with no shortage of smartphones.
We were shepherded into a line and led to stand around the titular pond, represented by a very nice arrangement of gauze fabrics in three colours: green for the embankment, red for the water lilies, and blue, of course, for the water. Standing close together around the pond, we were at last instructed to press play on the video from the quiz and place our phones face up in the pond.
At this point, I realised each quiz had returned a unique video — mine was titled Wishpond 8 — as air bubbles fizzed spasmodically and tadpoles swam around on some screens and not others. The effect was brilliantly evocative: we had built a fragmentary window into a real, living ecosystem.
The audio of each video coalesced into a soundscape, which for all its dulcet sounds of water splashing and cascading would have put me to sleep standing up, if not for the attention required by the group vocalisations in which we were then instructed to take part. Chance guided us through gentle humming and cooing as we held out our hands and dusted our invisible wishes into the pond. I’m not counting on mine coming true, but I’ve never been the type to chase serendipity. Nevertheless, I really grew to appreciate this ritual as an open and empathic experience, which, either in spite of its interactive component or because of it, was enormously tranquillising.
Some sense of ritual carried over into the evening’s second half, although that’s really where the similarities stopped. The five members of the Singles Club — Bree van Reyk, Marcus Whale, Rhiannon Newton, Cor Fuhler, and Lauren Brincat, all in varying capacities as both composers and performers — each made expressive and evocative entries, mostly as solos or duos. All the pieces were engaging, although the longer and more insistent – even, at times, seemingly interminable works – were the most effective, namely Caldera by Marcus Whale, who was joined by van Reyk on suspended metal bars; and Double Pressures, featuring Newton dancing slowly, rigidly, as if in a stop-motion metamorphosis, and van Reyk on suspended wooden bars. These two pieces seemed like siblings, both quite repetitive (though never overtly predictable) and both very loud. I really, really got swept up in their flow.
Most of all, I loved Whale and van Reyk’s commitment to staring down a bell left to swing freely after having been struck the last of four or five times in the coda of Caldera. After a minute and a half or so of complete silence, all of us watching this intransigent bell like the instrument of a hypnotist, Whale caved and interrupted its oscillation with a laugh that instantly became audience applause. Call me masochistic, but I really wish we had been forced to watch that bell until its movement had become all but imperceptible; yes, even if it had taken five minutes(!!).
Fuhler’s first piece Cinnamon Breeze employed a vibraphone prepared with a spring stretched across the bars. It was a mostly quiet, rhythmically unfocused affair; I would have loved to see a more comprehensive exploration of the possibilities afforded by this preparation. Brincat’s pieces were also quite short — it would have been great to sit with her notions of listening and responding to the other player’s heartbeat, or conveying vocal resonances through a gong, for a little while longer than we were able to.
Conceptually, none of these pieces worked as throwaway side-acts, which seemed to be more or less how they were intended; rather I thought they all needed a bit more time to breathe. They were all worth it — even if it meant we’d get home a few minutes later than intended.
Images supplied. Credit: Ollie Miller.
