Apart from all the other places where stories like this have taken place. And keep taking place. In all, there have been at least 11 councils sacked in NSW from 1997-2008, and 32 corruption inquiries since 1989. So Wollongong is very far from alone in this area. Does it all matter? Compared to the scope of the political scandals that version 1.0 has worked with in the past, are these dodgy developments a bit too small-scale? Is this just a funny, sometimes silly show about a sex scandal with some loopy twists, such as the con men posing as ICAC officers? What are the stakes in local government corruption scandals? Don’t things like this happen all the time?

As a group of artists and citizens we had to wrestle with these questions. But through the process of making this work we have realised that in the end, all politics is local, and the primary tier of government that most citizens relate to on an everyday basis is their local council. The events, actions and inactions scrutinised in this ICAC inquiry have allowed us to consider what kind of relationship we want to have with the places in which we live, and with the governments that run the places in which we live. As citizens, we don’t think about that often enough. Hopefully, this show might provide such an opportunity.

David Williams, version 1.0, August 2011

“Going missing presented those left behind with a void. While other losses may be uncertain, missingness was not only uncertain but also intangible. What had happened was unknown and what might happen was entirely outside the control of those left behind. [They] found it difficult to grieve because of the uncertainty about what exactly it was they were grieving.” Julie Clark, Adult Siblings of long-term missing persons: Loss and “unending not knowing” (2007), p17

When a missing persons case is discussed in the media, the focus seems primarily concerned with the mystery and drama associated with the disappearance, and on the logistics of the investigative process marshalled in hope of finding this person. Perhaps captured by the dramatic conventions of television crime shows, the stories about missing persons that circulate throughout the media sphere almost always propose disappearances as cases that will eventually be solved, with the victim rescued or located and the villain punished. In its simplest formulation, public discussions around missing persons cases work under the assumption that in such cases the case will be closed, and answer will be found. In many cases this is correct, with 86% of the 30,000 persons reported missing each year found within seven days. But those statistics leave a great many people unfound.

What is almost always lost in this focus on the mystery of the missing person is the plight of those left behind. Recent research estimates that each missing persons case directly affects the lives of twelve other people, and be they family, friends or community members, the journeys of the left behind are far from straightforward. As Julie Clark observes in the second epigraph, the left-behind must exist in a state of not-knowing, left ‘stuck’ or ‘frozen’ in a state of grief in which they cannot ever be sure what it is that they are grieving for, leaving everyday existence as “a void”. version 1.0’s The Disappearances Project quietly traces the edges of this void, hoping to shed light on the emotional journeys and trajectories of hope of those left behind, with the great hope that we as a society might begin better helping those faced with experiences.

David Williams, Bathurst, April 2011

Kym Vercoe and Jane Phegan in rehearsal for A Distressing Scenario. Image by James Brown

For me the worst thing about the global financial crisis is the movie Wall Street II. My god!

At the beginning of the second week of rehearsals we thought it would be a fun thing to do. An afternoon excursion. We wanted to learn some of the stock market floor moves. My god. It was the worst movie ever!

The writing – appalling. The acting – atrocious – those Federal Reserve board meetings!!! I mean, Michael Douglas – what are you doing?

And that overused thematic of the ‘bad father coming good.’ I mean, how many movies? Why do we always need some old misguided white guy to save the day? Didn’t they make this mess in the first place?

And the young couple that get engaged and find out seven seconds later she’s pregnant. They move from one fancy New York address to another fancy New York address. She’s got a secret $100 million (courtesy of the estranged ‘bad’ father) but really they just want to save the world by investing squillions in some unproven ‘green’ technology.

They break up (‘bad’ father meddling), they get back together (‘bad’ turned ‘good’ father meddling).

Sean Bacon in rehearsal for A Distressing Scenario. Image by James Brown

[I’m not ruining it. I’m saving you $15.]

A stupid motorcycle-alpha-male-off. And the conspicuous overuse of children’s bubbles as the dominant metaphor.

And hilariously, it’s about greed! Are you kidding me? How much did this Oliver Stone travesty cost? And we had to go on cheap day and sneak in our snacks from ALDI because Jane never even got the $900 stimulus from Kevin!

Kym Vercoe, November 2010

“How could they describe that swirling current among men which passed from dumb animal fear to suicidal enthusiasm, from the lowest impulses of bloodlust and pillage to the greatest and most noble of sacrifices? Never can that be told, for those who saw and lived through it have lost the gift of words and those who are dead can tell no tales. Those were things which are not told, but forgotten. For were they not forgotten, how could they ever be repeated?” Ivo Andric, Bridge on the Drina p. 265

The idea of place is a funny thing. How is it possible that I feel more comfortable, more ‘at home’ in a country 15,830 kilometres away from my backyard in Sydney? Tonight’s story comes from my love of travel, more particularly, my love of travelling in the Balkans, and more particularly still, in Bosnia. It always takes a few days to settle in over there, to slow down and get back into copious coffee drinking. I also have to get used to the directness and openness of people, which I love, even when they tell me they can’t stand my big black boots. And then later, it’s always so difficult to leave.

Sometimes we stumble across something haunting and we can’t let it go. seven kilometres north-east is about one of those moments. It’s a story about remembering. Thank you for joining me.

Kym Vercoe, version 1.0, September 2010

The most recent large-scale work from Sydney performance group version 1.0 is THIS KIND OF RUCKUS, an alcohol-fuelled and techno-beat driven reflection upon sexual violence in contemporary Australia. A key feature within THIS KIND OF RUCKUS is the frequent violent deployment of the gaze by both genders. Frequently in the performance, the gaze becomes rendered as an exercise in dominance. Within RUCKUS the gaze is uncomfortable, uncalled for, unwelcome, and often highly inappropriate. A man sits and stares a women’s crotch repeatedly, and is closely watched in turn by a video camera. A policeman looks at two women sitting in a car for too long, trying to decide whether or not to exercise his authority. A man looks across a dance floor and finds a target for seduction. Two women look at individual audience members and decide which ones they might most like to have sex with. If, as philosopher Cathryn Vasseleu suggests, that “to regard someone is to have regard for them” (Vasseleu 1998:88), then what might be some of the implications of the violent vision within version 1.0’s THIS KIND OF RUCKUS?

Context

In a program note, I described THIS KIND OF RUCKUS as:

“a performance about power, control and violence in intimate relationships. The work explores sexual violence in a range of spheres – from the realm of the domestic, to the judicial system, to the media and popular cultural attitudes, to the recent spate of sexual assault scandals in the sporting arena.”

The performance premiered at Performance Space in Sydney in September 2009, and has had subsequently been performed in Adelaide and Lismore, with an upcoming season at the Arts Centre in Melbourne in August 2010.

THIS KIND OF RUCKUS is in many ways a departure from past work by version 1.0. As a performance group, version 1.0 has built its reputation on a series of deconstructive documentary performance projects, projects that draw upon a wide range of public documents to make performances about significant public scandals. These documents have included Senate Committee proceedings, Royal Commission transcripts, and media reportage and commentary upon, the actions of public figures, most often politicians, public servants, and senior figures within major corporations. The topics of these works have ranged from the so-called ‘children overboard’ affair, to the selling of the war on Iraq, to the ‘wheat-for-weapons’ scandal that engulfed monopoly wheat exporter AWB Ltd.

It would be fair to say that version 1.0 has always been interested in making performance works about the operations of power, especially in those moments in which power has been distorted, misapplied, and/or abused. However the targets of these investigations have always been directly the political system and its players. Whilst this work was also highly concerned with power and its operation, in THIS KIND OF RUCKUS version 1.0 grappled with very different subject matter and source materials than on our previous body of work – a shift from overtly political documents oriented around parliamentary figures, to a range of media snapshots around issues of sexual violence in a variety of contexts, blended with material generated by the members of the devising company. Marking this shift in approach to gathering performance materials, co-dramaturg Yana Taylor observed in her program note for the show:

“We started to generate material from our own connections that took the place of others’ accounts verbatim or reportage. Memories of ambiguous situations we were involved with and occurrences witnessed, often glimpsed fleetingly between neighbours and friends that left their mark reminded how close any of us might be. The inside-show media lens swung back on us at the same time. To use an analogy, its like we were water sampling the present state of this gender ecology. It feels some days like a tipping point in this ecology might have been reached as the public airing continues.”

So, in THIS KIND OF RUCKUS, the investigation is not of a single political scandal. Instead, the performance is concerned with the cultural scandal of the continued presence of sexual violence within a wide range of domains in contemporary Australia. Rather than one inciting incident for performance, there are instead a series of different encounters and micro-narratives that aimed to open a public conversation around the subject area.

Witnessing and recounting

As well as the nature of the subject matter and blend of textual materials being substantially different to past work by version 1.0, the aesthetics of the work and the performance strategies employed are also radically different. The performance is structured in a highly formal way, with space and time being clearly organised and divided. The performance is staged in two acts without interval, with a prologue, an interlude and an epilogue. These acts are delineated by the opening and closing of a tab curtain, a curtain which completely closes off the audiences’ vision of the playing space. In front of the curtain is a very shallow space, only about 1.5 meters in depth, in which the performers work very close to the audience. Behind the curtain, in Act 1 there is a 8m wide and 6m deep floor made from woven bubble wrap, with a wall of bubble wrap placed behind this. The height of this wall in productions to date has ranged from 2m to 3.5m. Atop the bubble wrap wall are two large projection screens. Either side of the wall are tables covered with orange sports drinks, and the outside edge of the floor is marked out with hazard tape. When the curtain reopens for Act 2, all of the bubble wrap has been removed, revealing a vast black playing space upstage of the screens. A mirror image of the downstage hazard tape marking is also placed upstage, making a central ‘playing area’ that is 8m wide and 12m deep. In Act 2, the drinks on the tables are replaced with cans of beer.

From the outset, it is clear that the performance is highly interested in what the audience sees, how they are able to see it, what falls within their field of vision, what they may have overlooked, and what may be hidden from them. Or what they can be convinced that they did in fact see, but which never actually occurred. And driving this concern with seeing is the desire to force audiences to question how they make sense of what they see, and actively engage with the complexities surrounding issues of gender violence. The action behind the curtain over the two acts plays out in a series of repeated cycles, and the stage action does not necessarily occur in a linear fashion. The opening image as the curtain opens is repeated four times over the course of the performance, and in each reoccurrence, some detail has changed, or the action may be able to be explained in a different way. Certain elements that recur across the two acts are visible in new ways; what was only half-glimpsed behind the bubble wrap in Act 2 occurs in full view, for instance.

In each section of the performance, looking is a key concern. The piece opens in front of the curtain, with a line of performers holding red pom pons waiting as if awaiting the start of a cheerleading routine. On a count of three, the performers turn and sit down, and performer Kym Vercoe begins to tell a story. Her story recounts a journey home late one Sydney summer night, with Vercoe and her friend driving home after a night of dancing. On the relatively short drive home, the two women encounter two roadside scenes of violence in women appear as victims, scenes that the two women in the car feel compelled to intervene into. And yet in each of these scenes, all is not exactly as it appears. The first incident revolves around a clump of men around a woman slumped on the footpath, and two car loads of women stop and come to her assistance. Whilst the heightened aggression of the men made it appear that the woman had been assaulted or was in imminent danger of further attack, the subsequent unfolding of the story after the police arrived was that one of the men, the woman’s boyfriend, had been trying to prevent the very drunken woman from driving home, and this drunken altercation had led to her being thrown to the ground. The role of the other men was unclear. Upon continuing their homeward drive, Vercoe and her companion see another agitated woman attempting to flee whilst two men were approaching her. Upon attempting the assist the woman, our narrators are almost immediately stopped by police, who violently arrest the woman, who is revealed to be an ice addict who has been breaking into cars. The police chastise Vercoe and her friend for misreading the situation, and in their view, acting stupidly because they failed to see the true circumstances, despite the evidence of their eyes.

Vercoe reaches the end of her narrated encounter with police with another look, in this case that of the police officer who whilst claiming to be making sure that the two woman arrive home safely, feels it necessary to demonstrate his potential power to detain. “Its just that I can smell alcohol on your breath,” he says. As the two woman in the car defend themselves – “I’ve had a couple of beers, but they were hours ago now, so I’m OK to drive I reckon” – another performer, Jane Phegan, interrupts her. Looking directly at the audience, Phegan states: “Imagine fucking 12 of these guys in a row.”

In this sequence, Phegan is referring indirectly to a real incident involving an Australian rugby league on tour in New Zealand, in which a local woman who thought that she was having sex with one member of the team, but was brought to a room to which the entire team were present. Phegan’s thought experiment involving the actual members of the present audience, speaking apparently as herself shifts the focus from this potentially part-remembered past event to the live transaction of looking and looking back. Here too, gender issues recur, with performer Arky Michael’s rhetorical dismissal of Phegan’s capacity to act on her proposition on the basis that she “hasn’t got the balls.”

Perspectives: Incomplete views/ Inconsistent visions

Vercoe’s opening story raises a key concern of the political aesthetics at play within RUCKUS. In past works such as 2007’s Deeply offensive and utterly untrue, it was of upmost importance that the audience be highly aware at all times of the identity of each of the speakers, and be able to reflect upon the nature of this speaking position, in order to fully comprehend the appropriateness or otherwise of particular statements. Broadly speaking, in these works in was very important that the company ‘name and shame’ politicians and other political actors, as a primary concern of these works was accountability. Whilst RUCKUS is still deeply interested in accountability, there was an early political decision that the despite about a third of the material in the show being found texts, a number of which from a range of sexual assault scandals that occurred as the piece was being made, the only people named within the work would be the performers themselves. Kym Vercoe is clearly telling a personal story about her own experience, and there is some expectation that this is indeed a true story, an effect of course emphasised by the direct address mode of the performance. Later texts the appear in the performance are not necessarily from personal experiences of performers, but are rather found texts from a range of sources, including edited media interviews and court transcripts. But in each of these texts, the speaking position is not clearly identified, leaving open the question of who is speaking at any given moment, and therefore how much of what is said should be believed. Who should the audience trust? Which speaker might be reliable? What of the previous statements by this performer should be read in parallel with the current utterances? Is this really Kym Vercoe speaking to David Williams in the couple’s mediation at the centre of Act 1? During Arky Michael’s story of a group sex experience in a Cairns pub room in which the consent of the woman involved is very much unclear, is the ‘I’ that Michael uses to describe himself part of a group of footballers or a group of actors? And should audiences be expected to read these behaviours differently depending on the perceived identity of the speaker? In the repeated series of aggressive dancing, who are the performers playing? Character identification has always been highly unstable in version 1.0’s performance works, with performers donning and shedding roles with great alacrity, though in this work these unstable identities do raise the personal political stakes. Is it more a problem to think about myself, David Williams, as a potential abuser, as a consciously or unconsciously violent man, or to be comforted by the notion that I am only playing someone else?

In political terms, the devising artists of the company believed that in RUCKUS, to name and shame absent others would be to let the audience and the performers off the hook, to safely exclude all of the people present in the theatre building from complicity in cultures that enable and perpetuate sexual violence. To open up a space of public conversation, as RUCKUS hoped to do, means reflecting seriously not only on examples of clearly unacceptable behaviour by people ‘out there’ but also on those experiences each of us within the shared space of the theatre have had, moments in which we have crossed lines of proper behaviour, either unconsciously or consciously, as well as times when our trust has been broken or abused by others. It’s too easy to say that the problem is only ‘out there’. This lets everyone in the auditorium off the hook, and as we are all aware, problems of sexual violence are never that simple. As I’ve remarked in other discussions around this project, while we were making the show there were a range of sexual assault and domestic violence claims made against footballers. While we were performing the show, there were a series of domestic violence claims made against actors.

The curtain opens, revealing a man (David Williams) sitting looking closely at a woman (Kym Vercoe) lying prone on the floor in front of him. Or more particularly, the man is staring at the woman’s crotch as she lies on the floor in her underwear. This focused stare is captured by a live camera side-stage, with the image displayed on the large screens hung above the middle of the stage. The staging clearly makes a spectacle of what Laura Mulvey has famously described as “the male gaze” in her seminal article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. outlined the basic tenets of feminist theory of the gaze: that men look, and women are looked at, and that those who get to do the looking find two main pleasures in it: voyeurism and fetishism. According to Mulvey, there are three “looks” which comprise the male gaze: men within the narrative looking at women, the spectator who identifies with the male gaze in the narrative, and the omnipotent gaze of the camera itself. The body of theory around the male gaze obviously needs much more attention than I have time for in this current paper, but in the opening image of Act 1 of RUCKUS both stages and exposes each element of Mulvey’s patriarchal male gaze, whilst at the same time suggesting that the presence of the audience gazing toward these voyeuristic and potentially violent male gazes complicates matters somewhat. Yes, there is a man looking at a woman, shortly thereafter joined by another man looking at another woman. Yes, these acts of looking are captured and reframed by multiple onstage cameras, the presence of which I need to explore in more detail. But the notion that the spectator identifies in an uncomplex way with the male gaze in this narrative seems far from certain.

These power dynamics and potentially abusive looks may or may not be what they seem. Effectively, THIS KIND OF RUCKUS stages the gazes of real people upon other real people, who are in turn gazed upon by other real people in the audience. But no one viewer is able the see everything, and every act of seeing is manipulated, undermined, overturned, disrupted, or plainly inadequate. If nothing else, the cascades of violent vision within RUCKUS demand that when looking at the bodies of others, each of us must look extremely carefully.

Paper delivered at the 2010 Australasian Drama Studies Association Annual Conference, ANU, July 2010

Introduction

In the women’s rowing eight final at the Athens Olympic Games in 2004, Australian rower Sally Robbins stopped rowing before the finish line. Immediately following the race, the team very publicly busted up, held a press conference in which they declared that they had reconciled, and then very publicly busted up again. Concurrently a highly emotive debate began in Australia about how this rowing failure might reflect upon and illuminate the national character, triggering a lengthy debate about national identity and values. In late 2005, Sydney-based performance group version 1.0, a company of which I am a member, began work on a performance about this debate, taking the so-called ‘no-row’ incident as a starting point. Very soon after commencing work on the project, version 1.0 began receiving threats of legal action and hate mail that memorably declared that the project was “a disgusting and opportunistic farce”. This paper will begin by briefly outlining the incident and the deeply emotive responses that this incident provoked, then begin to unpack the values at the core of this notion of the un-national, and then finally begin to consider what might animate version 1.0’s theatrical representation of these deeply intertwined personal and national traumas.

Part 1.

For those of you who managed to miss the incident when it occurred, here’s a brief summary of what happened. For reasons still hotly debated, rower Sally Robbins stopped rowing 600 metres before the finish line, slumping back in her seat. Upon finishing the race, the other crewmembers verbally abused Robbins, with one of her team-mates declaring that: “I just want to stress there was not a technical problem. No seat broke. There was nothing wrong with the boat. We had nine in the boat but only eight operating. That’s all I’m going to say.” Other crew members were recorded by media yelling out: “Tell the truth Sally! Don’t lie!” Robbins herself commented to Channel 7 that: “I had some pretty hard words thrown at me. I had some pretty tough things to take,” and also claimed that her teammates had threatened to throw her overboard.

The mood back home in Australia was similarly hostile. Cathy Freeman, herself no stranger to nationalistic controversy, stated that: “From a distance, to give up is almost very Un-Australian.” Ron Barassi was less subtle, stating: “You don’t quit until you’re unconscious. She wasn’t thinking about her team, and she wasn’t thinking about her country.”

The team held a press conference the following day, facilitated by AOC President John Coates, where they repeatedly insisted that they had reconciled, yet the following day team members were again venting to the media. At a welcome home function in Sydney, Robbins was slapped by one of her team-mates, and then it was reported that the rift continued when Robbins was a no-show to the wedding of Julia Wilson, the team captain. The media loved the story, and it became a strange sort of grubby soap opera. Recently, Robbins tried and failed to seek selection for the Beijing Olympics, which provided an excuse to run through the story all over again on newspaper front pages. According to one recent report, she is now considering a career in cycling.

Part 2.

Freeman’s use of the term ‘unAustralian’ to describe this incident was far from isolated, with ‘un Australian’ appearing regularly in the commentary on all aspects of the ‘no row’ incident. Robbins was un-Australian for quitting. The rest of the team was un-Australian for turning on her. Athletes had become un-Australian for overturning apparently long-held values of sporting conduct. The commentators were un-Australian for getting stuck into someone in such a moment of weakness.

In their paper Popular understandings of ‘UnAustralian’: an investigation of the un-national (2001), sociologists Phillip Smith and Tim Phillips observe that unlike the long standing usage of the term ‘UnAmerican’, there appears to be no clear definition of notions of un-nation in an Australian context. Unlike the use of the term UnAmerican to indicate an apparent betrayal of national values and ideologies, those historical references that do appear to UnAustralian-ness have distinct racial characteristics. UnAustralian seems to equate historically with non-white, though more contemporary usages seem to cluster around concepts of values. Noting the exclusionary function of the term, in the conclusion of their paper they begin to explore the possible motivations animating this exclusionary impulse. Drawing on the work of Zygmunt Bauman they note that this naming process forms part of a response to anxieties and feelings of insecurity about rapid social change:

“Labelling an object or event ‘UnAustralian’ is a core aspect of the boundary- maintaining process: blaming ‘out-groups’ for change and the decline of ‘the old ways’ (Bauman, 1990: 48). We might expect this more aggrieved usage of the ‘UnAustralian’ to be part of a larger vocabulary of motives found mainly to be concentrated in the life-world of a ‘middle Australia’ (Brett, 1997) reacting to the perceived threat to their symbolic-moral universe.” (Smith and Phillips 2001: 337)

It is this use of the term un-Australian to control a perceived threat to a symbolic moral universe that animated the performance project From a distance....

Part 3.

In late November 2005, Victoria Laurie, a journalist with the Perth desk of The Australian newspaper, discovered whilst browsing the internet that version 1.0 was planning on making a performance about the so-called ‘no row’ incident. Due to the fact that the rower at the centre of the scandal was based in Perth, Laurie thought that this was a good basis for a story. No doubt some of her interest was piqued by the unintentionally sensationalist proposed title of the work: Sally Robbins: An UnAustralian Story.

Whilst perhaps not as insensitive as the title of Dan Illic’s recent Beaconsfield: A Musical in A Flat Miner, planned as part of the 2008 Melbourne Comedy Festival, the placement of Robbins’ name next to term un-Australian proved extremely problematic, despite the originally intended title never being publicised. As part of her news story, Laurie contacted Robbins for comment. While declining to comment for the story, Robbins was reportedly unamused in the extreme, and immediately contacted her lawyers, who in turn contacted version 1.0.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, those who spend so much of their lives striving to achieve the authorization to represent Australia in domains such as sport are quite sensitive to the means by which their representation is subjected to further representation in other domains. Robbins was extremely unhappy with what she and her legal team believed was the show’s primary assertion that Robbins was Un-Australian, despite the fact that the show never intended on making such an assertion or implication, being more interested in the fact that others made such assertions, and further interested in exploring what this might mean for our national identity. Neither Robbins nor her legal team recognised the distinction. This is a marked contrast to the response of elected representatives in the domain of politics, the subjects of other performance work by version 1.0, who appear far less concerned about their potential representations in domains other than their own. It has been suggested by my less charitable colleagues that this is because politicians are essentially vain, though such an assertion is of course impossible to quantify.

Lawyers representing Sally Robbins began issuing threats of legal action, initially framing their concerns around the proposed title of the project. After largely amicable negotiation with Steve Lawrence, Executive Director of the Western Australian Institute of Sport, representing Robbins’ lawyers, the official title for the production stage of the project was altered to From a distance…, an acceptable compromise title. However, Robbins’ lawyers remained interested in pursuing defamation actions against the company, continually asking for a copy of the script so they could approve it. Legal advice obtained by version 1.0 indicated that Robbins’ lawyers had no rights to gain a copy of the script, which at any rate did not yet exist, and strongly advised against providing one to her legal team on the grounds that it could be used as the basis for a defamation action. These later negotiations were often extremely tense.

The title was intended to be highly ironic, and to draw attention to the rhetorical over-reaction of commentators and members of the public to the incident. It was not intended to be a comment on the Australian-ness or other wise of any individual, though this made little sense to anyone beyond the members of version 1.0 at that stage. Laurie, and other journalists after her seemed convinced that the performance must include a reenactment of the race, and must also make some contention about who might be to blame. Of course, the intended project was designed to do neither of these. As I attempted to explain in an email to Steve Lawrence:

“There’s a couple of mis-conceptions that may have arisen as a result of the recent media reportage of the proposed performance that I should address at this point. Media, as you know, does tend to mis-represent. In the performance, we do not ‘re-enact’ any part of the incident, not any part of the race, and not the incident at the welcome home event. The only ‘re-enacting’ in the performance is of the press conference, and that’s simply in terms of repeating the words that were said there. There are references to these incidents, but not re-enactments. We assume that the audience already knows what happened, and what we explore is the reaction to the incident, and what that (over)reaction might tell us about our national identity. I know that sounds abstract, but my point is that none of this is personal.” (email 16 December 2005)

As I’ve noted elsewhere in regards to re-enactment, version 1.0 has tended to focus on re-presenting the aftermath and reactions to events rather than re-enacting the events themselves – staging questionable second order reproductions rather than faithful copies. This is especially true in attempts at re-presenting events for which there was in fact no original, such as the so-called ‘children overboard’ affair of 2001, the subject of version 1.0’s 2004 work CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident).

Laurie’s article, ‘Lay Down Sally, the stage play’ (published 8 December 2005), provoked demands for interviews from media outlets nationwide. This media interest in the project also provoked hate mail directed at the project artists, an edited version of which was included in the show. The hate mail challenges the right of artistic practice to represent real events, and posits arts attempt to represent such events as an act of violence.

“I felt I should write and let you know of my disgust upon hearing of plans for the play; truly a concept that is shit-to-the-core with bad taste, bad timing, and has an overwhelming stench of useless arty-farty endeavour. These are not fictional stereotyped characters, nor is this a generalised sporting situation of triumph and tragedy that needs to be performed as an interpretive bloody dance. It is a real story that occurred in the not-so-distant past, and involved real thinking, feeling, emotional people, who are still around today, and in many cases are trying to continue with their careers. […] Would you acting-types like it if I wrote an analytical book about the time you were dining with the Premier and your beret fell off your head into your skinny latte? […] In closing, a general fictional play on the subject would be fine. Perhaps even a very similar situation, but in a different sporting field? But a specific performance of a very recent and, for many people, very tragic situation, involving people that are still trying to go about their lives, is indeed a disgusting and opportunistic farce. Shame on you.”

The email is not a response to the performance itself, but rather a response to the idea that such a work might be made at all, a response to “hearing of plans for the play.” Nonetheless, the letter effectively marshals a range of Australian cultural anxieties around artistic practice, and adds to this a fascinating illustration of the deeply personal stakes of this incident, even to uninvolved spectators. Of course, one email is undoubtedly a scant evidentiary basis for such an assertion. It was however my experience when talking about the ideas for the show in a range of social contexts, that it was extremely rare for the person that with whom I was talking to not have strong opinions about the incident.

One possible reason for this personal and visceral reaction is the incident is seen as a crisis of values – a fracture in the symbolic moral universe that Smith and Phillips discuss that requires urgent repair. As if anticipating this need for repair, around the same time as the ‘no row’ incident, former Prime Minister John Howard proposed a list of seven core national values shared by ‘ordinary Australians’. Howard stated at the time that:

“A sense of shared values is our social cement. Without it, we risk becoming a society governed by coercion, rather than consent. That is not an Australia that any of us would want to live in.”

His list of shared values were:

1. We live in a very successful nation.
2. We do not have much to be ashamed of.
3. Australia is well-regarded around the world.
4. Individuals should be given a fair go if down on their luck but, once helped, should not expect continued community support.
5. Traditional institutions like the family are central but people with alternative views should not be persecuted.
6. Society should be classless where a person’s worth is determined by personal character and hard work, and not religion, race or social background.
7. People should be very tolerant, but also believe in unity when facing a common threat.

It is the symbolic moral universe articulated in this list of values that in some way begins to make sense of the excessive reaction to the ‘no row’ incident that led to a 23-year old athlete being widely branded ‘un Australian’ for stopping in a rowing race. The performance From a distance… attempted to make sense of this national identity crisis by tracing what the nation says it isn’t. We live in a very successful nation. We do not have much to be ashamed of. There’s clearly a much more detailed discussion that needs to be undertaken around the largely negative orientation of many of these values, not to mention the significant caveats that this list contains, but unfortunately that is beyond the scope of this paper.

The hate mail contained some further useful warnings about the care required when investigating this territory:

“Sure, the event was controversial, and raised questions about what was acceptable conduct in the sporting arena. Maybe it was a reflection of some deep-rooted aspect of being Australian? Who flamin’ knows?! Perhaps these issues should be explored, but this incident should not be used as some sort of “type-example” or snapshot of the Australian psyche, because you have no understanding of the inner workings of the team, the personalities at play, the prior history, the pressure of the situation etc. To put it forward as a study of “un-Australian” behaviour (or whatever), without having full knowledge of the situation is ludicrous and, as stated above, in very bad taste…shit taste in fact.”

The impertinence of this performance project is that it uses this incident as a trigger to investigate the territory of the un-national, despite the warning contained in the hate mail. Obviously to fully articulate the ways in which any performance might achieve such an undertaking requires far greater space than is available in this paper, and indeed I would suggest that From a distance… was far from successful in its performative investigation. Despite its flaws however, this work was intended as an act of critical patriotism, and perhaps such a motive can at least partially excuse such “a disgusting an opportunistic farce”.

David Williams

Paper delivered at the ADSA Annual Conference, Edith Cowan University, Perth, July 2009

“Your editorial suggesting the Australian Government went to war in Iraq to protect its wheat market is deeply offensive and utterly untrue”

In January, the version 1.0 team began work on a performance inquiry into the so-called ‘wheat for weapons’ scandal in which monopoly wheat exporter AWB Ltd paid bribes or ‘kickbacks’ to the government of Saddam Hussein right up until Australia declared war on Iraq in March 2003. The basic facts of the scandal are pretty simple, and highly disturbing. Whilst operating under a sanctions regime whose purpose was to prevent Saddam access to hard currency to continue his weapons programs, AWB was asked in 1999 to pay a new fee for ‘trucking’, payable not only in cash but also in US dollars. Rather than risk missing out on a big sale, AWB agreed to pay a ‘trucking fee’ of US$7.2 million in cash to Iraq, knowing that this was against the spirit of the sanctions. After convincing AWB to cheat once, Iraq continued to increase the ‘trucking fee’ over the next four years, and AWB, sliding rapidly down the slippery slope, continued to pay. In all it seems $290 million was paid by AWB to the government of Saddam Hussein. Worse, AWB actively tried to conceal these payments through a string of front companies. Worse still, the Australian government had very close ties to AWB and its management, and despite 35 documented warnings that the company was engaged in corrupt behaviour, chose not to investigate, and instead aggressively defended AWB against all concerned parties. Even worse, the Australian government aggressively pushed the case for war against Iraq, and one of the justifications used was that Iraq was rorting the sanctions program. AWB was the biggest single rorter, and the Australian government their biggest defender. In 2005 the United Nations held an inquiry, and the resultant report from Paul Volker recommended further inquiry into companies such as AWB. In December 2005, the Cole Commission began hearing evidence in Sydney. Enter performance group version 1.0.

version 1.0 has made theatre from inquiries before, most notably our 2004 project CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident). This time however, we weren’t fully prepared for the magnitude of the task. The transcript of the Cole Inquiry’s 76 days of public hearings totals almost 8500 pages. Add to this the 2000 or so pages of Cole’s report, and thousands upon thousands of pages of journalism and other commentary, and you have a veritable mountain of paper. Scaling this mountain, and transforming it into theatre was never going to be simple. However, the precise degree of difficulty of this task caught everyone by surprise. Making performance from documents that are defiantly non-theatrical is something that version 1.0 has become quite skilled at in recent years, but to say that this process has been challenging is a severe understatement. As I described this process in an interview in February: “sometimes I think it would easier to knock over a brick wall with my head.” I was only half joking.

The usual line from government spokespeople like Foreign Minister Alexander Downer has been variations of “it’s all very complicated”. Like the best political spin, this is true and misleading at the same time. Yes, the Cole Inquiry and associated documents are mind-bogglingly complex in the mass of details they continually disgorge. But as I described at the start of this article, the issue itself is pretty straightforward. Downer’s insistence that everything about this scandal is too complicated encourages citizens not to waste their time thinking closely about this. Such strategic avoidance of thinking, and dismissal on the grounds that ordinary citizens won’t ever understand and therefore should not try, obviously serves very particular political interests, especially in this election year. Part of the urgency that drives version 1.0’s attempt to render this inquiry theatrical is to actively resist these exhortations to stop thinking, and instead to encourage citizens to closely interrogate the processes by which our democracy operates, and the ways in which our representatives, both governmental and commercial, act in our name. That is not to say however that this theatre is either didactic or reductive. To encourage people to think more closely about an issue is not to tell people how they must think. No preaching to the converted for us, thanks very much.

But despite the ideological imperative that drives Downer’s statement, it is true that the Cole Inquiry is concerned with fine details. The inquiry transcript shows a forensic investigation of shades of gray in the legally and ethically murky world of the international wheat trade. The lawyers assisting the Inquiry ask probing questions of minute and often-impenetrable detail, in no particular narrative or chronological order. These include the date of a meeting, the distribution list of an email, the exact significance of a scribble on a document. Much of it is hardly riveting stuff. Additionally, the regular response to such questioning – “I don’t recall” – advances neither dramatic nor investigative coherence. One of the key witnesses in our performative remix of the Inquiry, the CEO of AWB Andrew Lindberg, used variations of “I don’t recall” 158 times in a single day’s testimony. I know, I counted them. When Commissioner Cole handed down his report in November 2006, Lindberg was deemed to be a “witness of truth”. This is somewhat baffling to us after reading hundreds of pages of denials, evasions, and refusals to admit that anything was even wrong.

Against the Australian government’s line “it’s very complicated” and AWB’s line “I can’t recall”, version 1.0 attempt in Deeply offensive and utterly untrue to put the pieces of the kickback jigsaw together, and in the process entertain, provoke, disturb, and inform. Together with our audiences we seek to produce accountability for both corrupt behaviour and negligence. The task might be impossible, but since when has that ever been a reason not to try?

David Williams, August 2007

Article first published on Arts Hub, Friday 24 August 2007.

Now, I like to think that I’m a sensitive, caring, considerate kind of guy, a so-called SNAG (presuming that the reader will permit me the excision of some of the more hippy connotations of ‘new-age’). I like to think that I have a healthy belief in both gender equity and personal excellence, and as such, that I oppose discrimination without reducing solutions to such discrimination to mere quotas. I like to think that ‘reverse discrimination’ initiatives should remain temporary measures. Most of my bosses in a wide range of jobs have been women, and its fair to say that almost all of my significant mentors have been female artists and artsworkers. I like to think that I’ve absorbed many of the primary lessons of feminism – biology is not destiny, the personal is political, etc, etc.

I begin with this awkwardly affirmative-action paragraph in order to indicate the scale of my self-deception. As we were making THIS KIND OF RUCKUS, the closer attention we paid to gender politics and power struggles within relationships, the more I realised that despite my belief to the contrary, I benefit from patriarchy. Not only that, but I use these benefits for my own advancement. Subtly, of course. And most importantly, I like it. I enjoy these benefits. This pleasure in (relative) power is unavoidable, even though it becomes, upon reflection, somewhat abhorrent to me. When I think too closely about it, I begin to despise the sight of myself in the mirror. Despite this reflective abhorrence, the simple fact remains that my power as a man is largely invisible to me. And by invisible, I mean that I am not required to think about it very much at all. I can walk through the world and think very little about my power – my power to inflict physical and psychological harm, my power to remain safe from various forms of assault whilst walking on the street, my power to only be required to be afraid of particular kinds of physical harm NONE OF WHICH attack my status as a subject. I have within my power the ability to effortlessly retain the status of a subject, and am never forced to risk reduction to an object. I benefit from patriarchy* and I like it. How could it be otherwise?

If this project was to succeed in anything, it should be to have made visible, however fleetingly, those powers that men wield that remain, in everyday life, invisible to us.

*Of course, it doesn’t hurt that in addition to being male, I’m white, physically unimpaired, and middle-class (in upbringing if not in income – I do work in the arts after all!)

David Williams, November 2009

In the show that results from this meeting of aesthetics, we ask our audiences and ourselves direct but often impossible questions. We present complex images and scenarios that are impossible to easily resolve. We embrace the gray areas that cling around such a significant issue of public concern and dig into the spaces that require us to argue about in order to make sense of it all.

To open up a space of public conversation means reflecting seriously not only on examples of clearly unacceptable behaviour by people ‘out there’ but also on those experiences each of us within the shared space of the theatre have had, moments in which we have crossed lines of proper behaviour, either unconsciously or consciously, as well as times when our trust has been broken or abused by others. It’s too easy to say that the problem is only ‘out there’. This lets everyone in the auditorium off the hook, and as we are all aware, problems of sexual violence are never that simple.

There’s a poem by Brecht in which he discusses a car crash. All of the witnesses to the car crash are transformed by what they see, to the point that they cannot stop talking about it. Whilst each of them have differing accounts, and each version of the story is partial and incomplete, they seem unable to stop reflecting upon events, feeling in some way responsible to make sure that these events are never forgotten. If we were able to achieve something like this in THIS KIND OF RUCKUS, then we will have fulfilled our mission.

David Williams, Sydney, March 2010

The creative compost has involved a mountain of research, public reports, media documents, articles, consults, field visits, films, photos over the rounds of development. And in getting amongst all this we are, as before, not experts. There is not a single catalytic scandal but a continuous one. To enact verbatim fashion, cases and words of those caught up in violence between intimates risked doing all manner of further violence in performance. Our working motto became – no trauma-porn. It provoked a reframe and by necessity called ʻthe usʼ, our relationship with these dynamics into question. When we re-speak the words of those who chose to become public media figures – parliamentarians, generals, journalists and judges etc, as performer–makers we do so from a distance that allows room for critique of those who would speak and act in our name.
As we early on traced the track to being captured in repeated cycles of domestic violence, an insistent question became, “Why did she stay?” As we wrestled with the current media spectacle focussing on abusive group sex, the questions shifted and became “Why did she put herself in such risky situations?” This of course implicated us, put us into the frame. The work turned another corner (Thanks to the process provocation of ʻoutside eyesʼ, Chris and Deborah, we set aside the mountain of research and let it work on us). We started to generate material from our own connections that took the place of othersʼ accounts verbatim or reportage. Memories of ambiguous situations we were involved with and occurrences witnessed, often glimpsed fleetingly between neighbours and friends that left their mark reminded how close any of us might be. The insideshow media lens swung back on us at the same time. To use an analogy, its like we were water sampling the present state of this gender ecology. It feels some days like a tipping point in this ecology might have been reached as the public airing continues. Then another media story breaks and someone walks into a rehearsal saying, “ Did you hear about that member of parliament bashed by her partner?”

Yana Taylor, version 1.0, September 2009