The last time I went to Manila to work with the Sipat Lawin Ensemble I had one of the best weeks of my life, both creatively and personally. When JK and Sarah from Sipat asked me to be part of a festival they were running, Karnabale, I said yes immediately, despite not knowing what Karnabale was or what I would be expected to do.

It eventuated that I was being invited to take part in a international exchange platform. I would be partnered with a Filipino artist from the first day of the festival and we’d have two weeks to devise something and then present it on the last day.

Partnering with a stranger was already a daunting challenge (although one I was way up for) but as a card-carrying Glutton For Punishment/Opportunist I was quick to ask if I could also do a performance of Bomb Collar as part of the festival. My fellow over-commiter Dave Finnigan was co-ordinating the exchange platform and generously said yes.

My performance of Bomb Collar was on the first weekend of the festival so I didn’t have too much time to worry over it. I’d had just enough time before I left to relearn and re-tweak the script and have Adam make some improvements to the lighting effects. I had a very nice reception from the crowd but not a lot of in-depth feedback. I have strong suspicions that it might be the sort of show that’s acceptable to most but loved by few, which might just be the inevitable pitfall of making something that’s such a specific synthesis of my personal interests. It’s certainly developing me as a performer and I’ll certainly keep touring it; now that I finally have space to bring Adam and Paul in as creative voices (rather than just prop designers) it might well find another level with crowds.

Anyway, the bulk of my time was spent on the exchange platform. I was partnered with Ariel Diccion, whose intimidating CV was sent to me ahead of time. Ariel is a lit academic with an extensive and varied theater background and is a member of Spit, the premier improv group in Manila. He comes from a conceptually rigorous space and I knew I needed to be on my game.

Luckily for me Ariel is the most generous, welcoming and open person alive and within ten minutes of meeting him I was determined to forge a long-term long-distance collaboration with him. We have a ridiculous amount of overlap in our interests, both artistic and existential, and in our first week we developed entirely too many ideas to fit into our Karnabale show. Which was no sweat, because we’d both resolved that this piece would be just the first salvo in a multi-year (maybe even multi-decade) collaboration.

So what did we present at the end of the fortnight? Long story short, the one idea that remained central to our devising is a Tagalog word that Ariel introduced me to, Tanda. This word can mean injury or the broader idea of being marked, it can also mean the state of maturity (sorry if I’m butchering the nuance Ariel!). I was immediately taken with the way that the concept was so physically inculcated. In my mind it instantly related to performance, and Ariel contributed some extremely fresh thoughts on the nature of social performance within individuals. Like I said, there’s a lot of places that Tanda will take us in the future, some of them quite heavy.

Our Karnabale piece was quite silly and fun, with some confronting flecks here and there. It was a heavily participatory work, which is still a newer thing for me but second nature to Ariel (I was leaning on some script whereas he improvised his entire performance, running rings around me). Our show was a mock marketing presentation, where we treated the audience as potential frachisees for a ten-minute workout system. The ‘workout’ was a mix of intense exercise and character creation challenges. We challenged people to create their own superhuman identities in 5 minutes, in a way that satirized rugged individualism, self-help courses and cultural appropriation. We used a very goofy structure to get people to confront their own experience of Tanda in a frantic environment where there was no time to ponder deeply. We then ordered the crowd to present their new identities to each other and assert their superiority, a thing that got surprisingly emotional reactions from some of the participants.

Like a lot of pieces I work on it threatened to be over-stuffed, but thanks to Ariel’s performance chops (and a very up-for-it audience) it played coherently with a good amount of artistic meat. As always, there were elements of it we could push that you could never get away with in Australia, and that alone will keep me coming back to work with Sipat Lawin for as long as they’ll have me.

All Photos by Jordan ‘Lucky Lens’ Prosser

EP IN A DAY 2 VIDEOS 3 & 4!

May 4, 2015

FILM, LUKE, MUSIC, NICK

RIVER - Luke McGrath

NICK- The River That’ll Carry Me Home is a song I used to play with my old band Big Score. Big Score essentially had four lead singers and I learnt that trading off lead vocals is a great way to add a breathless energy to a track , as well as get away with murder in terms of song structure. This track would probably be repetitive as hell if it was just me singing it, but with the whole gang weighing in it feels like it goes for about a minute.

RIVER - Nick McCorriston

Once I put a band together with so many incredible singers it was a no-brainer to do this one, but the fact is the multi-voice thing wasn’t on my mind when wrote it. It’s the same character singing every verse, a weird sort of half gormless Pollyanna/half jester cynic guy, a song character I associate closely with my mid-twenties.

The character singing My Own Little Girl is even more obnoxious again, at least by my reckoning. Writing in an unlikable voice in one of those tricky balances and I’d been waiting for just the right band to play this one with. Of all the numbers I’ve done for this project so far this is the one that I’m a bit nervous about.

RIVER - Sam King

LUKE – I’d thought The River That’ll Carry Me Home would be the first salvo of EP #2, and so envisaged the shot of Nick walking into the studio as being our take on the opening of Stop Making Sense, where the camera tracks along David Byrne’s feet.

I’d imagined Nick arriving in the room just in time to sing the first line, but the way it played out lets the arrangement breathe, and we get to know/see each of the musicians before the song takes off. The handheld shots feel intimate – complemented with a few post-production light leaks, it gives the clip a warm and funky vibe.

From a director’s point of view, My Own Little Girl is my favourite of this batch. It’s certainly the boldest, conceptually – a live music clip where we don’t actually see anyone playing their instruments(!). The clip is composed entirely of close-ups of the performers’ faces.

little girl - Matt Nightingale

Ben Lane warned me it might be too intense, and just after we finished filming it, I had a small panic attack – if it didn’t work, we had no back-up footage. Thankfully, it does work – mostly down to the relaxed and natural presence of the performers. It’s the visual equivalent of someone whispering a secret into your ear.

EP-IN-A-DAY 2! THE FIRST 2 VIDEOS!

April 28, 2015

FILM, LUKE, MUSIC, NICK

Wishing - Nick Delatovic

NICK- So last year I failed to get Arts ACT funding for a live-in-studio solo album. As a cheap alternative I organised a one-day session with some of my closest friends and collaborators from the Canberra music scene, and we arranged and recorded four tracks. As an indulgent twist I got Luke to shoot us as we cut the songs live and then make a music video for each. Nick's Dead - Nick Delatovic

A year later and the #EPINADAY format has become a key part of my musical output and I’m acting like I planned it all from the start. It’s turned out to scratch at least 5 different itches:

-Instant gratification (here’s my song-bam!-here’s the studio version)

-Another stream of skills development for Luke and I as film-makers

-A chance to put together a different fantasy band line-up every time

-A chance to work in a completely different style every time

-A format to work in which, it turns out, is really fun for all involved Nick's Dead - Nick Delatovic

So my plan is to build each #EPINADAY band around a single artist that I’ve always wanted to record with, but in this case there was a slight exception. Matt Nightingale and Jacqueline Bradley can tell you that I nagged them for ages, putting this session off until a date that they had free. Constantly busy, they’ve played a gagillion gigs between them and they specialize in the country/trad style that I wanted to bring to this session, but above all they are the Accompanist’s Accompanists. I’ve rarely seen any musicians so completely adept at serving a song and supporting a lead performer, and between them they seem to play every musical instrument. it was downright luxurious having them take my songs in hand, the arranging of all four songs seemed to take ten minutes. Wishing - Sam King

As always Sam King made producing the session while also playing guitar look effortless. It’s at the point now where if I get stumped on an arrangement (which is often) I just throw it to Sam, to the point where he describes his role as ‘producing, guitaring, intros and outros’. Sam McNair was our drummer and while I’d seen his band The Burley Griffin play a bunch of times I actually hadn’t met him before the day. I knew he had the specific genre moves I needed but his skill and versatility went way past my expectations, plus he’s a fun guy. I’ll be hitting him up again in future for sure.

Wishing - Nick Delatovic Sam McNair

Audio-Hunk Nick McCorriston (my collaborator on a bunch of projects as well Tech-Maven for You Are Here Festival) moved back to Canberra just in time to record the session, and the returning film crew of Luke, Shane ‘Crazy-Legs’ Parsons and Adam Thomas were augmented by your-pal-and-mine Ben Lane. I’ll let Luke talk more about their end of it.

As usual we did four tracks, the first two are already online. Song To Be Played In The Event Of My Death is the newest song, and therefore my current favorite (songwriters will understand). It was a classic title-first job, the lyrics and vibe are my best attempt to create something that I would actually be happy to have serve as my epitaph. That is to say, it’s very meaningful song to me, which makes the off-the-cuff breezy breathlessness of the take feel all the more appropriate.

Wishing is a song I wrote in fifteen minutes and have no facility to critically assess. I always intended to rewrite the lyrics (I suppose to give it a more clearly delineated central metaphor or something) but when it came down to it I realized that I like it just as it is, for better or for worse. Obviously it’s the most ‘country’ track in the session so it was a total thrill to play it with a band that could lean right into the genre trappings. Nick's Dead - Nick Delatovic

LUKE – For each song of the last EP, we filmed four angles at all times – a wide shot, a close-up on Nick, and two roving cameras picking up shots of everything else. In other words, we played it safe, ensuring we had ‘coverage’. It was our first time attempting such a shoot and I didn’t want to leave anything to chance. It was a blessing and a curse – we had plenty of footage for each song, but it all looked the same. The challenge became editing each video to make it distinct, while still matching the tone and emotions of the song.

This time around, rather than necessarily leaving all that to the edit, I wanted to come up with a different filming set-up for each song. That way, no two videos would be alike. It was a bold move – filming without a safety net essentially – but I think it paid dividends. A couple of days beforehand, I ran my ideas for how to film each song past Nick and he was immediately on board – it was another step closer to his conception of making each clip feel like its own autonomous music video.

Wishing - Jacqui

We had a studied looseness to our approach this time which comes out strongest in Wishing. It’s the closest we get to Dogme – all handheld, on location, in colour, diegetic music (of course!), and with just one small LED light hung above Nick (it’s not truly a Dogme film unless you break one rule). In fact, in contrast to last time, we didn’t use any static shots in any of the videos – everything was shot from off the tripod. Shane – that’s Shane Parsons, camera ninja extraordinaire – arrived earlier than me, and filmed all the beautiful rehearsal footage out in the atrium in front of the studio. I love the behind-the-scenes footage in the video, it gives a sense of the warmth, humour and fun of the day. Having this clip kick off the series provides a nice through-line from the first EP, where the last video also showcased behind the scenes.

When I talk about filming without a safety net, Song To Be Played In The Event Of My Death is what I mean. Either we got the shot or we didn’t (full credit to Nick for letting us try). I have long had an idea of filming a ‘oner’ of a band’s performance, rotating out from the centre of the room. I tested the concept at a PROM rehearsal a couple of years ago and loved the results – your eye urges the camera on to the next thing, while at the same time, you hold your breath waiting for the shot to cut away (or at least I do when watching lengthy single takes). Shane’s had some experience with single takes, so I ‘volunteered’ him to shoot this one (I was filming b-roll from behind a corner, but thankfully we didn’t need to use it). Nick's Dead - Sam King

The camera is moving so fast, it can be dizzying concentrating solely on the footage. To leaven the effect, I thought it might be neat to throw up the lyrics as subtitles (in stately SBS yellow). That way, your eye bounces between the two things intermittently and the dervish movement is less likely to leave you woozy. A one-take like this also reinforces that the band is really playing the song live, without studio tricks or cheats – it serves as a testament to the skill and polish of the musicians themselves.

WWMW2S4M

April 16, 2015

FILM, LUKE, MUSIC

Whole World Moves Way Too Slow For Me is the last song I wrote for X, and it neatly sums up my views on the creative process. I like to work fast, which sometimes means waiting for collaborators to catch-up; I also value brevity and concision, hence an album of one minute songs or a series of uber-simple cooking videos. The accompanying film clip required a sense of speed and urgency – running and singing the song in a single take seemed a perfect way to convey this. Lou, Matt Borneman and I shot some test footage last year, and discovered our excellent location next to Lake Burley Griffin – a stretch of track just wide enough to use a car as a dolly.

Visually, I thought it could be compelling to dress as the iconic Jean-Paul Belmondo in the final scenes of Pierrot Le Fou (it also nods to the band’s Francophile proclivities). I could claim other subtextual conversations are at play (like how Belmondo blows himself up at the end of the film and I collapse at the end of the song), but, really, I just wanted to dress up as Ferdinand! With my hair out and my skin tinted blue, I excitedly found I also resembled Rogan Josh.

Next, I needed to fill the clip with colourful characters – along with the band, I secured the talents of warrior-poets Nathan Gubler , Nick McCorriston and Cameron Thomas.

The opening titles are another homage to Pierrot Le Fou – I was even able to find a ‘Godard’ font, created to celebrate his 80^th birthday.

There’s evident irony in a song about life being too slow… accompanied by a video festooned with references to health and mortality. A personal trainer and his client, a pair of surgeons, and even Death himself all make cameos. I’ll leave interpretations to others, though I will point out I love the cosmic justice whereby I literally avoid and outrun Death (who gets pummeled by Mel and Cath!) only to collapse a few steps later.

My collapse happens as two surgeons begin running alongside me. Even funnier is that they don’t actually assist – Darren and Kev came up with their own slapstick routine, which is so good I want to make another clip just based around their antics.

The take we use is the fourth – we could have kept shooting and added more elements (or refined existing ones) but this take felt like the right amount of energy and spontaneity. Besides, more takes wouldn’t have been in the spirit of the song! A big shout-out to the unseen heroes of the shoot – Louise McGrath and Kate Hodges, manning the camera and the car respectively.

ICONOCLAST

April 9, 2015

MUSIC, NICK

Cracked Actor is the band I play bass in. It’s the only band that I don’t write for, and so it’s my only creative project that I feel comfortable talking about as if I wasn’t in it. As such, I’m comfortable saying that our new album, which is called Iconoclast, is totally excellent and you should get a copy right now. You can do so here- https://hellosquare.bandcamp.com/album/iconoclast

It’s certainly me that you can hear playing the bass parts on the record, but in reality I can’t take much credit for the finished product. Primary credit goes to the production crew of Sam King and Graham Thompson (who is also our drummer) and above all the alarmingly consistent creative vision of Seb, the singer/songwriter/prime mover behind everything that the band is.

Here- https://vimeo.com/116835140 – is the promo video to Start As You Mean To Go On (the album’s closing track), which features Seb in an isolated context which for me works as a neat metaphor for the album making process. I’ve been right in that same spot, pushing an artistic vision uphill, assisted by wonderful people but always at the mercy of elusive thing that you can hear in your head, not knowing if you’ll succeed in getting it all the way through to something that exists in the world. The run on nature of that last sentence gives you an impression of the mindset I often end up in, and Seb is far more exacting with his creative vision then I’ve ever been.

This has been over two years of Seb’s life, all our lives, but the proof of the pudding is here for all to listen to. This is very likely the most successful artistic endeavor I’ve ever been a part of, and it’s been a wonderful thing to tour these songs around Australia in the last few weeks.

If you want to keep apprised of our live shows you can do so here- https://www.facebook.com/CrackedActorAus. If you want a hard copy of the record get in touch with us through our page or just come to a gig!

YOU ARE HERE 2015 TOUR DIARY!

March 31, 2015

NICK

All photos by Adam Thomas, except some of the Neon Night Rider ones are by Martin Ollman

Wednesday March 18, 5.43pm- I’m at Canberra Museum and Gallery facilitating an artist named Aviva Endean. We’ve built her a booth (out of curtains and PVC pipe) inside CMAG’s glass-walled Gallery 4, in which she will be creating 15-minute immersive soundscapes for one blind-folded audience member at a time.

I watch Aviva test run her piece and it’s fantastic, but I’m nervous and pre-occupied. Two blocks away the shopfront that we’ve taken over will be acting as a first point of contact for our opening night audience, to be directed to a host of events around the city centre. If they show up. I’m one of two managing producers for the festival and it feels weird to be so far from the center.

5.52pm- I check Facebook on my phone and see that Smiths, one of Canberra most beloved and shoddily managed live venues, have announced that they are closing forever on Saturday. We’ve got several events booked in there for the Sunday, all a part of Noted, a new experimental writers festival launching in partnership with You Are Here. I call Kaye from Smiths and then Lucy from Noted, we sort out the first venue change of the festival.

7.05pm- I get a text from Samantha, our production manager. An audience member has fainted during Zak and Reefa’s Hollywood Funeral, a theatre show happening inside Landspeed Records, a record store. The show is part of Dangerous Territory, a suite of theatre shows designed to be performed in unusual locations in the city. It was my idea but I’ve delegated much of the curation and supervison to Morgan Little, one of YAH’s three new staff members for 2015. This is his first event of his first festival. By all accounts the person is fine and Morgan handled it no sweat, it was just very hot with 70 people crammed in there. I should have thought to give Morgan a hard limit on crowd.

8.32- I check in with Vanessa (the other managing producer and one of my best friends) at the Hub. Good numbers to everything so far. Alison Plevey’s piece in Garema Place (a dance work called Work It) has gone really well despite our conviction among the producers that Garema Place sucks as a venue. Lots of people have been through the Hub and checked out the East Row Museum, curated by another new staff member, Yasmin Masri. It’s a museum that subverts and satirises the nature of museums and I was frankly shocked by the high-end nature of the signage and fit-out, it stands out dramatically in the long-vacant record store shopfront that is our hub.

9.03pm- I’m not usually on Twitter but I am logged in to the YAH feed and my phone is losing it’s shit. This is the first time we’ve had a dedicated media and marketing person (Zoya Patel, who happened to be named ACT Young Woman of the Year about a week ago) and seeing all the social media updates just HAPPEN is a load off. I am personally pretty half-arsed at social media.

I really want to watch the whole of Reuben Ingall’s lecture on the history of slowed and time-stretched music but I have to head across to the merry-go-round. Working with such a small festival team means that for the next five days I will at whatever event is most practical for me to be at.

9.28pm- Chris Endrey and his team sent me the script and run-sheet for their event exactly one day ago. It’s a rumination on death and mortality that takes place in and around the merry-go-round and incorporates a sing-along to Bohemian Rapshody,

I notice that many in the crowd are hardcore fans of Endrey’s sex-pop band Fun Machine, and seem primed to expect something fun and raucous. The artists get me to hold up a sign announcing the sternly-worded rules of the event.

10.02pm- As the 50 people inside the merry-go-round are put through their conceptual paces, I see a line has formed outside. People think that there are going to be ‘turns’, they don’t get that it’s a one-off theatre show. The crowd inside are gamely engaging with tasks involving writing and contemplation, while spinning on horses. Some of them are clearly keying in to the intended headspace. The crowd outside realizes they are spectators only, most of them stay. At the very end the artists relent and do one more go-round for the outsiders.

11.10pm- Quick production meeting, we had good numbers to everything and the crowds seemed to take to the ‘start at the Hub then fan out’ premise.

Thursday March 19th, 1.05pm- We finally have time to take a team photo of the staff. It’s our smallest team ever, 9 of us returning from previous years.

7pm- Far Flung is a dance piece that happens at 3 different venues simultaneously- CMAG, Gorman Arts Centre and the Hub. The young dancers collaborate using streaming video, it’s risky in it’s tech-heaviness. The tech works mostly fine and the performers do a great job, but the turn-out is very disappointing. The low numbers seem even lower since they’re stretched across three locations. I wonder if the ‘dinner time’ slot is the problem.

7.55pm- Jillian Curruthers: Girl Reporter is a fictional 30s radio play that involves a watermelon getting smashed with a hammer live on stage. I lay down big sheets of black builder’s film and hope that will be enough to keep the sound gear safe.

8.50pm- I clean up as much melon as I can and clean the stage for World Of Payne, a contemporary dance duet by a Canberra ex-pat called Paul Jackson. Paul’s partner in the dance is a 6-inch doll of One Direction’s Liam Payne. The piece could not be more up my alley.

10pm- Finger You Friends starts. It’s a band/theatre show by my good friend Emma McManus. It’s sexy, high-energy, funny and smart, and no one dances. The previous acts just didn’t set the feel for a party. The original plan was to pair this band with Luke’s Faux Faux Amis murder mystery gig, but they’d had to pull out.

The crowd treat it as theatre and love it. At one point a naked woman joins the band on stage and mimes the song by making a mouth out of her belly. The woman in question is You Are Here’s 2014 production manager.

Friday March 20th

4pm- Exactly 4 artists show up to our artist-to-artist discussion session. Finding a good timeslot for it in a five-day festival was probably impossible. Still, we have a pretty nice chat about the motives behind durational performance, among other things.

7.36pm- My girlfriend Adelaide is also a YAH producer, the Neon Night Rider is one of her events. It’s basically a bike ride around the lake with mini-dance party stops, where participants are encouraged to cover their bikes in glowsticks and other illumination. It is COLD and I haven’t dressed appropriately. I worry the weather will hurt numbers. Bo, a musician who owns a military radio truck and runs full DJ and band rigs out of it, starts his set at the staging area.

8.26pm- I’m leading the ride, which is about 150 people strong, and feeling barely in control of the situation. We stop at Reconciliation Place and everyone jams themselves into the tunnel. The Rat Patrol have brought a double wide bike that incorporates a sound system. It’s very suddenly a huge dorky dance party and it’s amazing. Adelaide and I exchange big grins. Samantha radios to say that someone has come of their bike near the bridge, they took off on their own and now can’t be found.

9.27- After losing control of the ride at least 3 times, we get everyone back to the marshaling point safe. I lead a good chunk of the crowd back to the Hub for the No Light No Lycra dance party. As a non-drinker and a compulsive dancer I have a particular affinity for the NLNL events, and things are going smoothly enough for the staff to wade in and enjoy ourselves.

We take another staff photo on the stairs of the Hub, our production designer George isn’t there, she’s gone home early feeling sick. I’m constantly angst-y about how overworked George is compared to the rest of us and the photo feels like an uneasy metaphor of that for me. George works absolute miracles on an absolute shoestring and my fondest dream is that one day I can pay her properly to do a job that is smooth and easy with great working conditions.

Dancing in the Dark comes on as the final song, I’m off the steps and in the crowd before I even register what’s happening.

Saturday March 21st, 12pm- I rise late, under strict orders from Samantha. The day is going to go late.

I drop in to CMAG to bring Adelaide some lunch, she’s running an indie game developer showcase. After that she’ll be off to the parliamentary triangle to run an audio walking tour that exhorts it’s participants to roll down a hill in defiance of architecture as social control. Adelaide has some of our most logistically challenging events on her docket for the day and she’s juggling about 30 tasks at once, a typical state for a YAH producer.

Personally I’m much more comfortable delegating. I’ve charged Morgan with running a double bill of theatre shows out at the new Westside container village at the lake. It’s a risky location for a lot of reasons and it does make me nervous to not be there, plus it sucks to miss the shows after being so involved in the development process. But Morgs and I have been backwards and forwards through the site plan, he’ll be fine.

The Westside shows are called Eucapocalypts Now and A Chill Day In Hell. They came to us as fully formed shows, I was the one who convinced the artists to try them as site specific. I think the bleak futurism that the shows share will be enhanced by the weird environmental intersections of the space. Unless no-one comes, or the space is unworkable, then they’ll be no-one to blame but me.

3pm- I rock into The Street Theatre. We’re doing three events here and due to the notoriously high production standards of the venue and staff I’ve been assigned to oversee all of them. One of the events is a ten year anniversary celebration of HellosQuare Records, probably Canberra’s most creatively successful indie label. One of the bands on the bill is Cracked Actor, the band I play bass in. The gig will act as the Canberra launch of our new record Iconoclast. The decision was made without my input and while I’m excited about it it’s a tricky juggle to be in the band headspace on today of all days. I try and stay focused for soundcheck but I’m anxious to check in with the other events.

4.35pm- Street 3 at The Street is one of the most beautiful performance spaces in town and we’re using it to host Inflorescence, a experimental music/visual installation piece by a mother and son team called Dianne Fogwell and Reuben Lewis. Dianne is the visual artist and she’s clearly run many a project before. I’m strictly a spare pair of hands, helping to switch on tiny portable lights and making small talk with Reuben (a top-notch musician who I’ve known for years) and the other two guys in his trio. Reuben and Dianne have been particularly patient with the restrictions of working with YAH (our artist fees and events budgets are comically tiny). Their set-up looks amazing and I really really hope they get a crowd.

5.30pm- Fuck Decaf begins, another site specific theatre show. It’s set in a cafe shop and we are in fact staging it in The Street’s cafe area. That said, they built a stage and set up row seating. I would have rather see them go a little more in situ with it, but the play is excellent and the crowd love it.

6.30- A capacity crowd show up for Inflorescence. I want to go in for the performance but don’t feel I can turn my phone off for the hour.

7.03pm- I’m standing out the front of The Street when a woman and her two sons approach me and ask where they can find Excavate, one of our festival events which consists of a dancer named Gareth Hart and a cubic meter of dirt. I look up and I can the top half of Gareth’s body, he’s on the roof of the City West car park. I explain that the performance has begun and the woman says that she had no indication from the program that punctuality was a deal-breaker for the event. I apologize, it’s another oversight on our part.

8.15- Backstage with Cracked Actor, running the songs one more time with Seb (the bandleader). I want to play a note-perfect set, we’ve done plenty of rehearsal but am I prepared? I find myself wandering out into the foyer to check on the gig as a whole. I’ve roped two of my friends in as volunteer ushers, on less than a days notice. I watch them watching Lawrence English, a noise artist who is playing deafeningly loud, and wonder what they think of it.

10pm- Cracked Actor plays. We’re in Street One, the large sit-down theatre, it’s a first for us to be playing in a space like this. The crowd is warm and appreciative, there’s about 90 people which looks a bit thin in a 200-seat theatre. By my count I make 3 mistakes, otherwise I play pretty solidly. It’s a pretty exhausting hour and the rest of the band head off for a drink, but my work-day is only half done.

12.12am- I rock in to CMAG where our third annual overnight gig is already 40 minutes in. I’m not actually on shift again until 3am but there’s no point in trying for a nap now.

There’s a crowd of a few dozen in the foyer, the student ensemble from the ANU experimental music school is performing in a circle on the floor. Before I’m anywhere near them I can see and hear the problem- the Wah Wah Room, the miniature cabaret nightclub that we’ve set-up at the mouth of the second floor elevator, is sound checking their guitarist. You can hear it all through the building. It’s virtually wiping out the ANU guys, whose set is unplugged and quiet. This is my fault, I had assumed there would be no noise bleed between floors which is moronic considering the atrium style architecture. I watch Vanessa walk from artist to artist trying to smooth over my colossal mistake.

1.10am- The greatest event in the histroy of You Are Here is happening in the CMAG theaterette. Paul Heslin, a sound artist whom I’ve worked with a ton of times, is running Endurance Karaoke using only a laptop, a mic and karaoke videos from the internet.

The audience members request famous songs and then begin to perform them in classic karaoke style, then Paul starts to strategically loop sections of the song, effectively creating an infinite version. The audience member sings the song for as long as they can stand to.

The audience engagement is instantaneous and wholehearted. A 20 minute version of Blank Space gives way gives way to a 24 minute version of Hallelujah, and then it becomes all about breaking the record. I was sure this would be a small off-to-the-side event but more and more people come in until the ‘main stage’ foyer area is all but empty. I know that Ness is out there still dealing with disgruntled artists and I feel guilty.

2.05pm- The record peaks with a transcendental 30 minute version of What Is Love (Baby Don’t Hurt Me), the crowd cheer every moment. After that the durations settle down to a sensible average of 20 minutes.

I take the elevator up to the Wah Wah Room, the audience and I are presented with four performances and a big red button which selects which one we see. We draw 5 minutes of scathing stand-up on the subject of detention centers and refugees. It involves a properly hilarious and unsettling impression of Scott Morrison. The stand-up is provided by Struthers Murray, the Wah Wah Room is his baby and I’m glad to see it going smoothly. In the foyer, two artists who’ve come down from Brisbane settle into the second hour of their set.

2.36am- I cave in and ask Morgan how the Dangerous Territory Shows went. Solid turn-out and smooth running at Westside, that’s a relief. Morgan is more anxious to tell me about A KREWD Chorale, the show that happened in Bible Lane, Canberra’s scumiest alleyway, around the same time Cracked Actor played. The show is an agit-feminist gallery of the grotesque and was always gonna be fraught with safety concerns.

Morgan asks me to guess how many people were at it. I notice that he’s still buzzing with energy despite his long day. My guess of 150 is wrong by the same amount. Apparently the turn-out included the staff of the surrounding bars and restaurants and the police, all of whom seemed to dig it.

7.20am- After facilitating curated video playlists from 3-6am and overseeing a fairly abortive breakfast event (only 6 people stayed the whole night) we bump out CMAG and drop the stuff back to the hub. I’m stressed that Shane and Mick from CMAG will be disappointed in the event, they’ve been some of our most important supporters over the years, and they stayed up with us the whole night as usual.

Sunday the 22nd, 12pm- After a bit of sleep I rock back into the Hub for our last staff briefing. First issue of the day- we realize that the NCA application for use of Black Mountain Peninsula didn’t include opening the power box. The event that’s happening there in 7 hours, Dishes, needs power. It’s unclear where the comms broke down but I’m pretty sure it was me.

1.43pm- Sir Co, a theatre show about imprisonment, is happening in the back of Bo’s comabt truck in the alley behind the Phoenix Bar. NickMc (our tech co-ordinator) and I stand nearby asking Bo to use his truck to supply power for Dishes. Danny Wild, the principal artist behind Dishes, shows up to meet us. He’s already dressed in his costume, rubber washing-up gloves affixed to his clothes.

3pm- With some trepidation I switch my phone off and head into Street 3 for Inflorescence. I’m not missing this one.

5.32pm- I’m helping with the Inflorescence packdown, Dianne is making me feel like I’m a member of her family and they seem very happy with how it went. I bask indulgently in the moment, packing up lights and carrying stuff to their car.

7.02pm- Dishes has timed perfectly with the sunset. Two dancers start as white dots against the island and slowly move toward us. The low rumble of the combat truck isn’t a planned part of Danny’s soundtrack but it’s working for me. There’s a crowd of about 20 people, I feel like we all feel the same. The ambient electro segues into Enya’s Orinoco Flow. Thanks to another misprint in the program our videographer hasn’t made it in time to film this. You probably had to be there for this one anyway.

9.32pm- The last event, Primal Screen, has just happened in a packed Phoenix Pub. A live social media debate crossed with a game show, it was an event I got to do a lot of close development of and it’s just soared in front of the crowd. Techno-Skeptic Aaron Kirby is the principal artist and he singles me out for a thank you. I love praise.

I get up and do my last of many bits of MCing, I think I remember to thank everyone important.

I’m getting warm words from everyone around, I make a conscious decison to soak them up. Tomorrow will be bump-out and debrief, every fuck-up and thing to fix for next year will be raked over. Right now I’m with my team, my wonderful friends, and some Ideas became Things, and sometimes you’re allowed to call something a win, at least in the privacy of your own mind.

MY YAH

March 24, 2015

LUKE

Nick will have a lot more to discuss, but I thought I’d write up my involvement in You Are Here this year.

Firstly, we had to cancel the debut of L’Assassiner de Faux Faux Amis – as I wrote before, we found ourselves a cast member short with three weeks to go. It became apparent that even if we found someone on short notice, we weren’t in a position to commit to the extra rehearsal time it would take to get us ready. It’s a bummer, but we’ll survive. At this point, the show is in a state of flux – You Are Here has offered to put it on later in the year, but wrangling everyone for rehearsal as the year progresses is already proving hard. I’m torn between seeing it through, or harvesting it for songs/ideas and moving on (I might also post the script online – rule no. 12).

I was delighted to be involved in Gillian Carruthers: Girl Reporter, written by and starring stand-up comics Nick Smith and Chris Ryan (Chris was one of the leads in my sitcom The Real). Gillian Carruthers is a re-enactment of a fictitious 1930s radio play, performed in front of a live audience. I bumped into Nick and Chris having one of their early production meetings – they mentioned the show involved interviewing You Are Here artists. I offered to be interviewed and then didn’t think about it again. It wasn’t until the week before the festival they got in touch – not only was I being interviewed, but I now had one of three main parts! Clearly written with my talents in mind, the role required a ridiculous accent (which you can hear in the snippet below – also look out for Sam King who stole the show as the ‘sound engineer’).

You Are Here also kindly asked me to curate thirty minutes of video content to be played as part of the overnight event Ill Advised Night Out. There were no other stipulations – all I knew was that it would play around 3am. Thinking of a theme to hang some clips on after midnight, vampires came to mind. Like Batman, they can be anything you want – serious, campy, funny, romantic, kid’s TV or arthouse cinema. I decided to create a mélange of vampire content including short scenes from favourite movies like Near Dark and What We Do In The Shadows and video clips like Gnarls Barkley’s brilliant Who Cares?. However, the project took on its own life when I started creating mash-ups, re-scoring movie scenes and trailers. It’s a simple enough idea, but there is something beautiful and subversive about scoring a Twilight fight scene with The Birthday Party’s Release The Bats. I did about six of these – another deserving of mention is the intro to Count Duckula scored with Wesley Willis’ Vampire Bat; a perfect mix of style and content. When I tried I to put the whole thing online, I got seven copyright infringements from Youtube – you’ll just have to take my word that it was awesome. Fangs to You Are Here for the opportunity.

YAH OPENING NIGHT

March 17, 2015

NICK

Okay. The signs are clear.

Milk crates have been quietly collected from all around the city. The old vacant record store has been filled with makeshift curtains and second-hand couches and surprisingly high-end museum signage. The road closure permissions have been granted, though it was a no on the controlled fire. Theatre groups dot the city, sneaking in rehearsals in locations that were never intended to host theatre. 2 cubic meters of dirt are being moved to the top of a carpark, the better to be danced atop. NickMc is playing 90s rap and pop as George, working with nothing, makes and does everything that anyone could ever need ever. I just got sent a runsheet informing me that the audience participation event on the merry-go-round is now a ritualized rumination on Death. Rooms are being built within rooms that have been built within rooms.

The weather is clearing up.

Five days with my favorite people doing the most ill-advised, most worthwhile things.

Google ‘You Are Here Canberra’ if you want facts. This post is about love.

STRUCTURALISM

March 14, 2015

LUKE, MUSIC, WORDS

Most readers know Joyce modelled Ulysses on The Odyssey – lesser known is that he based each section on an organ in the body. It’s irrelevant to your enjoyment of the novel, but it helped him structure his work. I’m a structuralist – I can’t work without parameters. It’s why formats like screenplays appeal to me, and why I self-impose restrictions like an album of one minute songs.

L’Assassiner de Faux Faux Amis is similar – an opportunity to work within (and against) the tropes of the murder mystery genre. Still, it didn’t gel until I overlaid another level of structure. In this case, the perfect through-line for a show about death was the five stages of grief. Each stage became an act heading, and gave me a framework (and confidence) I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Many of them only influence the narrative laterally (‘Part 4 – Depression’ incorporates a blues song), but I found them handy to guide the progression and choose the right place for each reveal in the story. The audience never see this scaffolding, or at least that was my intention – Faux Faux Amis think it might be neat to screen them like silent movie title cards behind the performance.

I’m working on my first (non-musical) play right now, and I’m this close to nutting out the structure, to finding the right model with which to box myself in. Once I have that, I can take my piles of notes and start seeing what fits and what doesn’t.

ARTISTS ARE NOT INTELLIGENT PEOPLE

February 21, 2015

LUKE, MUSIC

When the idea arrived for L’Assassiner de Faux Faux Amis, one of the bonuses was already having a killer band in place to perform the show. Almost instantly, that fell apart. Our drummer Darren bowed out with health problems, and Catherine elected not to take part. Finding replacements has taken time – I finally locked in the line-up a couple of weeks ago but just had another member unavoidably pull out. It’s been two steps backward for every step forward, and the performance date is a train hurtling towards me.

In my brief moments of despair, the stress makes me wonder where this pressure to create even comes from. I have a good job, a great wife, plenty of friends – why do I quixotically persist with these ever-more ambitious projects?

Intelligent people live their lives as nearly on a level as possible—try to be good, don’t worry if they aren’t, hold to such opinions as are comforting and reassuring and throw out those which are not. And in the fullness of their days they die with none of the tearing pain of failure because having tried nothing they have not failed. These people are much more intelligent than the fools who rip themselves to pieces on nonsense. – John Steinbeck

The ‘nonsense’ he refers to is writing, but could be any form of art (and it’s not just the pain of trying that artists experience, it’s also that feeling of wasting your time when you are not pursuing a creative endeavour). I feel his point deeply – I don’t know where this drive comes from or why I have got it, but I know I will be slave to it the rest of my life.

I’m scrambling to find a replacement now, and hoping we still have sufficient time to rehearse. Personally, I reckon Steinbeck had it easy – he only had to organise himself!

On a lighter note, here’s the image I sent our costume designer to indicate the colour I wanted.

—Lick Nuke

KARNABALE 2015!