Tales of the unexpected
TheAge.com.au
by Liza Power
September 8, 2009
The element of surprise plays a big role in this year’s Fringe Festival. Liza Power reports… Melbourne Fringe Festival runs September 23 to October 11.
On the first Friday of October, the streets and laneways of Melbourne will be overrun by 100 bespectacled women in identical blue dresses, boots and black wigs. Arranged into ”pods” of 10, they will roam, dance, wildly gesticulate, pause and congregate. Each action adheres to a set of rules prescribed by Japanese artist Yasuko Kurono. Called TOYS (an acronym for Take Off Your Skin), the event, part of this year’s Melbourne Fringe Festival, was first staged in Japan in 1999.
Conceived as a meditation on the vapid nature of fashion and the perils of group psychology, it has since been re-enacted in Scotland, Hong Kong, Paris, Beijing, and the US. Images from each event – identical ”girls” riding escalators, skipping across zebra crossings, sprawled theatrically beside footpaths, dancing in shopping malls – appear on Kurono’s blog, soon to be joined by photographs of its Melbourne incarnation.
The idea to bring the Kurono project to the Fringe Festival came to Melbourne-based artist Dario Vacirca two years ago. Told of Kurono’s work by an effusive colleague who discovered it at Tokyo’s Performing Arts Market, Vacirca began following the artist’s ”remote operation” online. ”It seemed such an easy way for people to connect around the world through putting on a costume and working on a few simple rules,” he says.
”I thought, ‘Let’s see if we can get as many people to become another person for a moment in time’.”
With about 18 months of planning behind him – not to mention a cupboard brimming with kooky blue dresses in four sizes including for ”large boys and smaller girls”, black wigs, glasses and red lipstick – Vacirca then sketched a score. A map of geographical and physical movements, he describes it as an ”extremely detailed yet simple” set of instructions that will form the backbone of the event. He says the idea of recruiting volunteer clones online was to give people without performing experience the chance to be part of art.
For Fringe Festival creative producer Emily Sexton, what renders the TOYS project immediately intriguing is its playful approach to what constitutes a show.
She describes the act as ”live art”, an umbrella term for works that use dance, performance, music and visual art in unexpected spaces – street corners, tramways, cafes, parks, even lifts.
Sexton is drawn by the form’s immediacy and spontaneity. ”I see a lot of theatre and performing arts and what I’m looking for constantly is why it’s so important that we’re in this room with you now, and what is vital about what you have to say,” she says. ”A lot of live art captures these ideas in whimsical, confronting and exciting ways.”
While sharing numerous qualities with its innovative performance cousins, the flash-mob and the urban prank, live art is for Sexton distinguished by its duration (flash-mobs appear then vanish, live art projects progress through phases), and its aims (urban pranks tend to focus on collective tomfoolery rather than art as such).
Still, she says, they’re linked by a desire to dissolve traditional performance boundaries, engage broader audiences and, often, touch on political themes.
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