Australian Art News - Presentation at Tokyo Performing Arts Market 2005

Daryl Buckley, the artistic director of ELISION Ensemble

15th September 2005

Presentation at Tokyo Performing Arts Market 2005

Contemporary music practice in Australia is extremely diverse. It is informed by and shares in many of the current international influences. Activities range from concert-giving to performance in many different kinds of venues, from experimentation with the creation of new techniques and sounds upon older and more traditional instruments to the use of emergent technologies to create entirely new practices.

Cross-disciplinary practice has been an important trend as has been the emergence of a younger body of composer/performers who can shuttle with fluidity between improvisational experiences and more formally notated works in order to use both as creative laboratories impacting upon their own creations.

The European population within Australia has become increasingly engaged in the Asian region and potentially more alert to dialogue with Indigenous people, communities and artists. The Australian Art Orchestra, composers Iain Graindage, Liza Lim, Timothy O'Dwyer and others are spending time with Indigenous people in their outback communities and upon their country and lands.

ELISION Ensemble major projects

HAFT PEIKAR

HAFT PEIKAR is based upon a meditative poem of a Sufi Mystic. It is a collaboration between ELISION musicians and the visual artist Domenico deClario and it takes place in a disused factory within installations made of light and found objects. The performance went for fourteen hours. The musicians were blindfolded for this time and oboes made of ice were used. Audience members could come and go at any time.

TULP

TULP-the body public is a work at the intersection of medicine and art that places the audience centre stage. Taking an artistic reference from the Rembrandt painting 'The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp' this piece is created from interviews with members of the general public. Their stories of birth, death, cancer, gender change, amateur medical operations, flirtation with nurses, missing organs and desires to be stuffed after death.

Experience "TULP"

Sight and Sound of a Storm in Sky Country

This is a collaboration with projections and live electronics. The artists are Indigenous visual artist Lilla Watson and composer/performer Timothy O'Dwyer. An important part of this project is the dialogue and partnership between both artists.

Experience "Sight and Sound of a Storm in Sky Country"

Moon Spirit Feasting Opera

Composer Liza Lim and librettist Beth Yahp created a culturally hybrid work, a ritual street opera based upon their childhood experiences in Malaysia and later European influenced practices. The hero Hou Yi is impotent and recites instructions from a Daoist sex manual. His wife to be, Chang-O, is trapped in a red box- a symbol of his immortality and a source of male authority which she will eventually steal prior to her exile on the moon).

Experience "Moon Spirit Feasting Opera"

Daryl Buckley

Daryl Buckley is the artistic director of ELISION Ensemble, Australia's leading new music group. The ELISION ensemble has developed innovative international projects in contemporary opera, site-specific installation, improvisation and electronic music. Daryl has organised 16 international tours for the 21 member ensemble with highlights including performances at Saitama Arts Theatre, Hebbel Theater Berlin and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, UK.

ELISION is influenced by many of these trends and is heavily engaged in experimenting with different modes of performances. These 'experiments' include installation-performance works, cross-disciplinary projects with a range of new media and visual artists, and the use of improvisational experiences as a creative tool to inform more structured and formally notated musics.

ELISION Ensemble
www.elision.org.au