Arts, Culture & Research
The sky was painted in a deep amber for the exhibition & the night began with a crescent moon. The fire drums sent soft clouds of smoke across the stage. It was a memorable & magical night for everyone who attended and exceeded any expectations we had for a preview performance of a new work. We look forward to seeing the narrative seeds of this story continue to blossom.
Here is a photo set from the night of the show.
This is the first part of a film about building bush cubbies.
filmed & edited by Brian Cohen
music by Staffan Svahn
featuring Abby, Alana & Bindi’s old TV
Stu Liddell arrived in town, put on his headphones & NTG2 mic & wandered around town with a mob of young people capturing the booming empty water silos & squeals of the towns people.
Here are some of the music tracks that eventuated and became the soundtrack for a spectacular live show under a crescent moon.
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A preview performance of Under Me Skin by award-winning writer Gayle Kennedy, conceived & developed by Brian Cohen & Tara Prowse in partnership with the remote outback town of Ivanhoe, NSW.
Under Me Skin is a working title to the play we are producing & directing with Gayle Kennedy. She’s incorporated the story line as developed by the young people in our workshops & has used it as a push off point for an exciting narrative. We’re lovin’ this collaboration. Just got a draft and here’s an excerpt we’d like to share:
“I don’t even remember wantin to come home. Just seemed to drift back here one day. Now I’m one a those people just standin still. Best thing bout standin still is I git to see and hear everything that goes on here. It aint ever dull. No way is it ever dull. See people from cities and big towns reckon nothin goes on little places like this. But that aint true. Everything that happens in those places happens right here. We got all the lyin and cheatin, and stealin and broken hearts. We also got the good times, the new born babies, the music and the laughter. We got the livin and the dyin too. Time don’t stand still out here. Things is always movin and changin. It’s just ya can’t always see it happenin. But I do. I do all the time!”
Developmental showing of this play will take place in Ivanhoe on 22 August 2009. Come by for a cuppa round the fire drum. 
There’s so much to say on this topic and bedtime is calling. We’ll get this post started as there’s bound to be a lot more to add as these weeks go on. Most of the kids here have built bush cubbies. They are scattered around the edges of town & beyond, made from thrown aways like old car seats, beads, toys, chicken wire, doors, beds, kitchen appliances, etc. We’ve been lucky enough to get toured around to some of them.
The week before last we made a test film of exploring bush cubbies with Candice and the McKenzie kids. The footage & stills came back so incredible that we took a step back and started to think about what we could do. Most of the elders and adults in town also used to build bush cubbies. So we decided to gather a trailer load of bits & take a whole mob of grown ups & young people out bush to build one together.
There were no shortage of people willing to come, and if they couldn’t they wanted a johnny cake to be brought back to them later. At 11am we had mums, grannies, one grandpa & a heap of kids ready to get stuck into it. I even saw a couple of young people who I’d barely met before cos they’re usually on the PS3.
We hiked out with the car towing the trailer full of goodies, found the cluster of trees we’d scoped out earlier & got to work. All day everyone chatted & sang songs, played & worked together. We read stories from Gayle’s book & took heaps of pictures. The footage we got of the day was golden and will be cut together for the exhibition at the end of August. The day couldn’t have happened without the help of Kiaya who was the only young person to be found the day before. She helped organise the whole thing.
Here are some still from the day. Unfortunately, I could only include photos from young people we have releases from. But there are some truly stunning pictures to follow.
About a week ago Mack, Daniel & I were scroungin’ round the tip looking for stuff to throw in the trailer to make a bush-cubby-to-end-all-bush-cubbies. After scoring much of what you’d expect they suggested we go to the other tip. What other tip? The one at the end of the dirt track across the road where people go who don’t want to pay to dump stuff. So we went round this spaghetti trail seeing much of the same, only it had a few special items.
World meet Phyllis. She was feeling a little sorry for herself after loosing a foot in a canine-related accident and needed a pick me up. I’m not sure Mack & Daniel were convinced when I placed her on my dash. But I was in love. Given that we’re on stage 12 water restrictions in the middle of the desert it kinda makes sense why someone would’ve tossed her. Who can afford a fancy checkered bikini, slip slap slop, water feature Granny? (Note the hose-in, hose-out)
The next day we packed the family into the Pajero (which means wanker by the way, in fact out here there’s lots of us!) and head out into the dirt. Phyllis wanted to take in a picture show. Pyper suggested Hannah Montana and so we head off towards Wilcannia, Broken Hill, Silverton, Menindee and many back bush roads in between. Much fun was had by all and Phyliss was a laugh a minute. As of tonight she sits in our shop window on the Ivanhoe main street, holding court.
Good news! we are very excited to announce we will be working with Gayle Kennedy as the writer on the show! Gayle is a talented writer who was born in Ivanhoe and moved to Sydney when she was a teenager. She recently won the prestigious David Uniapon award for Indigenous writers and has written short stories, poetry and prose. She is a member of the Wongaiibon clan of the Ngiyaampaa speaking Nation of South West NSW. She has stories published in newspapers, magazines and broadcast on radio, and was the Indigenous issues writer for Streetwise Comics. She is in demand at literary events and workshops and has spoken in Australia and internationally on the issues of culture and disability.
Her book Me, Antman & Fleabag is full of wonderful characters and deliciously black humour and contains many characters from her family and small town life in Ivanhoe. We are very excited to be working with her on the Ivanhoe project and hope to travel to Sydney sometime before August to meet with her. We think her style will meld really well with the storyline that the young people have been working on and definitely add some great funny moments!
Watch this space for excerpts/updates as the work progresses.
The Storybooth has also had its own set of questions, with the purpose-built software coming up against issues in terms of the codecs used to compress the footage and also the ability to directly upload the video. Both were working fine, but messed with the USB audio. So, back to our software geek in Portugal to help fix some problems. I find it exciting that we are collaborating with a PhD student in Portugal, a wordpress guru-ista in India and some wonderful local young people in Ivanhoe. A couple of the boys have really taken it on themselves how to run the Storybooth software which will be a great asset, and B is doing a Wordpres blog class at the school this week with some of the older kids, so that we can facilitate a blog they can keep updating themselves.
The workshops have been continuing in the afternoons after school and there has been a steady stream, sometimes a river, of kids coming through the door. A few have singled themselves out and are keen and motivated to spend extra time both behind the camera and in the edit suite, they have been coming back after hours to work as well as borrowing the cameras, both DSLR and HD, to shoot some of their own pieces and photos.
There have been some really inspiring story-building workshops with the older group and the elements of the show are coming alive. We now have a story outline up on the wall in the hall and are getting all sorts of creative inputs from other community members too. Two of the younger girls, Abbey and Brooke, also devised an excellent story board for a short film which we filmed on Saturday and which we’ll post up here when its edited, watch for how we made Mack fly off into the sky!
This week we will also begin working on the Moving Portraits. We will be producing around 6 x 20sec moving portraits of women of Ivanhoe. They will be shot with the DSLR multi-shot function and a fast 85mm lens. In the edit it will be accompanied by around 15 seconds of an audio quote, a response to some of the great questions the young people have been developing with the Storybooth project. They have multiple outcomes. Each piece will be a small web video, a snap shot of the women and their lives. As well as this, individual Jpgs can be selected to become quality printed photographs in hard copy, perhaps as postcards or blown up exhibition pieces for next years outcome. The 20sec moving images will also form part of the performance as projected portraits, the women of the town whose gaze follows the little boy on his journey.
This week is NAIDOC week and Aunty Joanie Slade, a Paakantji elder who lives here in Ivanhoe, is heading out to nearby Lake Mungo to run some cultural tours. We are hoping to head out there as well on Thursday, hopefully with a couple of the local young people, to listen and meet some of the local mob.
We have also been in touch with Gayle Kennedy, an awesome writer, and Aunty Joanie’s niece, who was born in Ivanhoe, but moved to Sydney. In 2007 she won the David Uniapon Award for her book Me, Antman & Fleabag and we are hoping she will accept our invitation to be the script writer for the show which is shaping up.
I’ll leave you here with some wonderful pictures that Adrian & Mack have taken over the last few days. They were experimenting with long-exposure at night time as well as close ups and have taken some excellent shots. During the school holidays we are setting up TV’s in 3 empty shop fronts, with DVD’s of the young people’s work on loop. Adrian and Mack will be the first featured artists in a series of works in the old shop front windows on the high street. After their work has run for about a week, then will then take on curatorial roles and select the next piece by one of the other young people.
Here is a photo set by a local photographer by the name of Adrian Forbes.
Adrian was one of the first adults to approach us with an open & warm smile, wanting to connect & make friends.
Adrian will be working on the show control elements of the production alongside Stu Liddell, who arrives mid-August.
Check out his photos, they’re amazing. If you’d like to know more, or want prints contact him via info@trax.org
A lot of people have been writing wondering where exactly is Ivanhoe? Here is a map you can search live.
Well, 21 kids turned up today. Aged from 6 to 16. Phew. I took the younger bunch and B took charge of the older ones, having been to speak with them in their class earlier in the day. Pyper is being a great project kid and hung out all afternoon with us at the community hall. After some awesome loud and chaotic games with the whole group we split in two and I started a storytelling game with the younger ones. Using some of Kay’s old photos as prompts, we started by creating a character, and they came up with a young boy aged 6, then we imagined this scenario: One day in Ivanhoe, a small boy appeared. No one knew how he had arrived or how he had ended up here. Some said he must have been on the plane that crashed in the back paddock. But he had not a scratch on him. Others were certain that he blew in with the dust storm, yet he wasn’t dusty. Still others held that he was with the Evans’s, but they weren’t missing anyone. This is his story. He was wandering down the main street. People came out of their houses to look at him, for he had flaming orange hair and freckles and was singing a song that no one had ever heard before. It went on from here to kind of peter out at the end, and of course there were the obligatory moments of alien abductions, bloody fight scenes and he grew from 6 to 16 years old in a matter of seconds, but all in it was a sweet beginning to what could become something later. We will keep it in the the tea chest of ideas for future use, perhaps a short film or an element to the play.
B:
I setup the Hall office in a couple of hours which didn’t leave me much time to mop the floor from the previous dust storm. I had to stop halfway through or it would’ve been too slippery to work on so I mopped the word Welcome instead. My crew of Secondary students were introduced to the concept of how we will use digital media tools to research narrative threads for the play. It’s a mouthful I know, so we spent some time breaking it down. After showing them the edit suites & tech gear we moseyed over to the Outhouse Storycatcher. It wasn’t until they opened the door did they realise it used to be a portaloo. This cued open season on the loo, poo, & other toilet activity jokes! I showed the group what our production designer Maya had done in a photoshop mock up to help inspire them. From that, they suggested various motifs which they reckon might work in the local context: a Telstra phone booth, a horse trailer, an ATM. Finally the group decided to paint it in the gradient colours of an outback sunset through brown, orange, pink & yellow. We will mix sand from the desert into the paint & add a few characters walking through the bush. The interior design team of four was talking about black velvet with pink trim. We also discussed tactics for getting local people to get into the booth. One young woman suggested we put velcro dots around the inside of the booth & then get different coloured strips of paper which had various phrases which would act as prompts for the user. The idea stretched to perhaps theming the colours e.g. red is love. This way we can swap & mix the prompts and responses. To wind down the session we huddled around the edit suite & watched a collection of short films we’d made on other projects.
I was really pleased with how our first formal session went despite nervousness on both sides. The group of young people were astoundingly attentive for the whole two hour session. I am looking forward to the time when they are slightly less well-behaved, by that I mean I want them to feel safe enough to say the things their eyes were thinking. I want to see individuals within this small creative team taking up space, voicing, deciding & arguing for the best ideas. The initial engagement phase is a kind of honeymoon where curiosity charms the impending back-down-to-earth reality of building a large scale public artwork.
We are still settling in & finding out feet as well, and when this blog shifts from being a Melbourne family’s cute insights into a small outback town to a voice which represents an authentic partnership between critical thinkers, then we will have arrived. There will be challenges ahead which will probably cross sticky terrains which we cannot know. The story we are most interested in facilitating the telling of, is one which discovers new elements to the current body of narrative work done in this genre. Ivanhoe shouldn’t be reduced to a series of historical labels; drought, colonial settlement, aboriginal diaspora, resilience & depression. It is the stories beneath & within these crucial aspects of Australia’s inland culture we are searching for. There is a unwritten oral record in the hearts & minds of the people we meet which betrays the history-written-by-consensus impression that the reference books have left behind. There are people missing in the photographs. But today, through an increasingly transparent & accessible media, more and more people from around the world are comparing & contrasting themselves to each other, whether it be a spark towards Iranian democracy signaling through Twitter, or the Indian students of Melbourne collectively knocking Swine-flu out of the headlines despite a dominant sense of denial. Suzanne, our Creative Producer, reminded us that the hard stories to tell are to be cherished & not buried as they often are best placed to celebrate the richness & diversity of a community. She also reminded us of Buffy the Vampire slayer which people watched because it was about a girl who had no choice but to kill the man she loved in order to save the world, the vampire part was secondary. Good stories defy genre & labels. Each day we learn more.
Smiley, the roo shooter who used to live in this here house, came past this evening. He’d left his swag in the back room, stashed alongside some bottles of homemade port. I’m not a drinker he says, but you’d be mad to miss this stuff. Been in the bottle 5 years now. Just like a couple a glasses with my dinner ya know. He was off spotlighting in the four-by, gonna bring us back some legs too. Best bit is the thigh, take a knife, insert it about one inch away from the bone on the knuckle of the leg and twist round in a circular motion, the meat just falls off the bone and you got yourself some prime steak cuts. Considering the store here doesn’t stock roo, we’re keen to get some fresh, Still be warm he says.
Why does this country insist on farming meats and animals that don’t belong here and whose hooves destroy the topsoil layer, when Kangaroo is an amazing, lean, naturally organic meat readily available just over yer back fence. Heck even the government are telling us to eat more of it. The crusaders of the cute and fluffy badge have been attacking the roo meat industry of late. Cruelty. Probably true, but if you have ever visited an industrial abattoir then you will know that ‘industry standards’ don’t make for happy cows. So, Smiley was wary when we asked could we tag along one night and film the chase. Happy to have us, just not necessarily the camera. Fair enough. Looking forward to my tasty roo stew though.
Stop press… next morning now, and there it was two warm, hairy legs sitting on the table out the back of the house. B skinned and carved it up, the stew is now bubbling and sending tantalizing smells around the house. Thanks Smiley.
16 June 2009
Out in the west away from city smoke
Sits our little town with its good old country folk
If you haven’t heard of us, and that could be the case
Listen to our song about it- Ivanhoe’s the place!
Ivanhoe Central, that’s our school
Just do your best that’s the rule
We’ll work and play together and learn as we go
That’s the way we do it here, at Ivanhoe
Roads you may travel from many miles away
Hillston, Menindee, Wilcannia and Hay
Broken Hill or Cobar, singing as you go
Where do all those dirt roads finish?
Ivanhoe.
This was my first day at the golf club… and my first ever game of golf. It’s not something I’ve ever been tempted to do outside of a few baskets at a driving range & miniature golf as a kid. Thankfully, it’s not too much different than that. Whack the bloody ball as hard as you can in the straightest line you can manage, then putt towards the hole. As you can see it looks like we’re playing golf on Mars, which is why I couldn’t resist. The other fellas in the photos were top blokes and generously shared their clubs with the newbie.
Golf began nearly 1000 years ago with sheep herders knocking stones into rabbit holes with their staffs. It was a way to pass the time which somehow became a sport but to it’s credit it still feels very much like that. Maybe it’s because of this I genuinely enjoyed playing this game in the desert with farmers who run stock on their land.
I certainly would not have crossed paths with golf at the TPC at Sawgrass with a remote controlled golf bag. Ivanhoe’s 9 hole course will never suffer the criticism of environmental degradation brought about by poor water usage, chemical pesticides & fertilisers. Worldwide golf courses use a staggering 9.5 billion liters of potable drinking water each day. But no such worries here, since 1956 this course has been molded by the arid landscape.
My score was surely terrible. It does seems to me the most illogical way of hitting a ball imaginable. Put a heavy weight at the end of a stick the strength of bamboo & girth of a pencil & swing away. No other sport has as awkward a relationship between the ball & player.
I will dabble, perchance master, this game of shepherds & there is nowhere else in the world I’d rather have a crack. Games are on Sundays at 9am… see you there from now till September 09.
Kay, the policeman’s wife, has been living here in Ivanhoe for 2 years, after re-locating from Sydney. She has recently put her efforts into collecting and collating a visual history of Ivanhoe by gathering old photographs from many people round the town. She mentioned the resilience of the people here and how over the years, no matter how hard things have been, there’s always been a sense of considering that others might be worse off. Here are a few of the pictures.
Friday afternoon was the first workshop with some of the kids at the school, in preparation for making a small film at the campdraft the next day. Three of them wrote and prepared a shot list for a small film about a boy and a horse – the kids filmed and worked all morning, as well as taking some great still photos. The school is a really special place in this town and seems to be a real nexus for the community and life that goes on in it and the whole atmosphere is nurturing and familiar. We were chatting to one young girl who used to live in Melbourne who said she much preferred going to school in Ivanhoe, because “here I can be myself”.
That night B ventured over to make his debut at the RSL club, conveniently located exactly opposite our house. Friday night is the go, as there is the chance to win some huge meat trays at the raffle, which i guess can be a good deal if you don’t spend more on the tickets than the meat is worth. So, armed with some change he bought the obligatory tickets and sat down for a beer with Vish, the Science and upper-years teacher, and Aunty Velma, one of the local elders from the area. Later that night he came through the door with a huge leg of lamb & a pile of snags.
Awaking before dawn and the coals are a foot-deep in the grate, kept us warm all night. We spent Saturday at the Campdraft. Took a walk out to the show grounds on the edge of town to have a look and meet some people. Fifty-odd trucks with people, horses, camp dogs and riding gear all set up around a large ring of red red earth, surrounded by a hundred tyres on their rims, pilled three high, like a checkered window through which you can see the dust that flies as the steers are released and the riders hunt them across the arena. It feels gladiator-like and there are kids as young as eight who chase and weave the cows through the pylons, as mums cheer and fathers shout advice. Pyper is a dusty camp gal already and was all ‘look mum there’s a cowgirl’ and in wonder at the fact that her whole school was present. I think she is so used to not bumping into the same person twice in the city, that the familiarity of small town life has made her feel easily at home.
Welcome to the Ivanhoe Chronicles blog. We will think up a better name for this project in due course, but for now we are just listening & learning.
This is our second day here. People say we brought the rain, but it was definitely here when I tried to unload the car & trailer of all our stuff the other night. Pyper, my daughter, claimed & began decorating her room within seconds of finding our way into this old tin-topped house. We’ve situated ourselves as close to the open fireplace as possible, open plan is our thing anyway. Though the fengshui was helped along by the sometimes rail workers who also too cold in their swags have used one of the walls as a source of firewood. We scavenged bits & pieces of furniture from disused & uninhabitable parts of the estate. Once dusted off, everything is working, except the oven. In trying to rejig the stove top knobs to their rightful valves I stared down a fire ball which took out my eyebrows. It’s the warmest I’ve been since arriving.
At 8.35am Pyper rode her bike the length of two houses to reach her first day at school. Armed with my DSLR I photographed her first day of formal education in the outback. She pretended not to know me which by all indications means she’s ready to go to school, or just better at blending in. Tara & I watched her line up in her green fleece school jumper with the other 29 kids that make up the whole school & watched proudly. Sniffle. After scouring the northern suburbs of Melbourne comparing alternative education methods for her to attend next year we can honestly say that Ivanhoe Central School is a fair competitor. So if you’re reading this in Melbourne it may not be in your child’s “catchment” area, but I’m sure you’re welcome.
A man named Doc took me & my camera to go get some firewood. Along the way I met Jared, his 19yo son & Pops. Three generations helped fill a trailer load. The Stihl chainsaw was the centrepiece of the job, constantly being cleaned, sharpened, oiled & juiced up. Only Pops was allowed to do the maintenance on it, but Doc did all the cutting. Jared has agreed to help edit the footage I shot today as soon as we set up shop. It will be his first film.
I tried to hold back asking too many questions but wanted to know so much. In a nutshell, the trash is picked up Mondays, the small farms of the area were mostly bought up by bigger farming conglomerates, there’s a meat raffle at the Club on Fridays, the drought hasn’t really affected the firewood business, the best city to restock is Griffith, school pick up is at precisely 3.08pm, the shop stocks all kinds of meats except kangaroo & eyebrows take 2-3 weeks to grow back.
I’m joining the golf club tomorrow (see pix on this blog) & Tara the CWA (Country Womens Association). Hopefully we will get keys to a swank shopfront in town we’ve got our hearts set on. We want to run the project like we did in out recent Preston Market project not only because it’s easy for the community to engage with us, but also because it shows the arts as a trader alongside other essential (& non-essential) services. One of the comments that kept coming back from the market traders was that they couldn’t believe how long & hard we worked. An arts project is not neatly compartmentalized, it is immersive. And we are here to surrender & share our family with this community in the hope that we will find stories worth telling from a town that few have ever heard of.
Until next post,
B. & Tara
w. Pyper & Savy
“A dash of red dust, a dam full of dreams & the whole town in one room- we will be baking this delight across generations with the rich & resilient citizens of Ivanhoe.” – B. Cohen
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Under Me Skin is a theatre project in partnership with Outback Theatre for Young People, West Darling Arts & local community organisations. We are working with playwright Gayle Kennedy & families in Ivanhoe, NSW.
For our 2009 residency we will be introducing ourselves & the project, making friends & listening to stories. The Outhouse, a spin on the olde style photo booth, will be piloted here as a way for people to share stories & ideas. In September there will be a developmental showing in the form of a live performance.
In 2010 we will continue our work developing a large scale public performance at a site in the community. We will be connecting to wider audiences through Digi-Bridge internet broadcasting technology developed by TRAX. Young people will celebrate their town by sharing their work and voice with the world.
There is also a sister-project occuring in Balranald centred around circus arts, so if you live in the area & are curious please contact us.
“Culture is the accumulation of all the artistic expression of a time and place. It may present an unattractive picture, or a brilliant one, but it is an essential record unless we take the nihilist view that human existence itself is irrelevant.
The nihilist would see no point in having children. If any one of us matters, then art matters and culture matters. A Society without art leaves no children; with no past it can have no future.”
- Julian Burnside, QC
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This project is currently seeking funding &/or in-kind support to develop & grow.
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