Wages of shock is change

Performance Space will not be going soft, however. It's just getting comfortable after 25 years making do at its ramshackle premises.

Director Fiona Winning says there are no plans to change the experimental company's confronting style.

"I see it as the beginning of a new era," she says, sitting in the bustling open-plan office. "Performance Space as an entity will continue to create new works and work in the intersections between art forms as people experiment and play, and develop audiences that are curiouser and curiouser about the possibilities on offer.

"We have loved this building dearly, but it is time to expand, grow and change."

CarriageWorks will open in January next year, in time for the Sydney Festival. With a budget of $42 million from the NSW Government, CarriageWorks will provide Performance Space and other companies with two theatres (one of which seats 300) and rehearsal, workshop and office spaces.

Since it opened in 1980, Performance Space has maintained a consistent vision: to encourage and promote experimental and cross-discipline art forms. The Space branched out from purely local productions and fringe theatre with forums, workshops and residencies, including the five-year Time Place Space project, which allowed artists to experiment and play.

"That seeded a lot of national projects," says Winning. "We've moved into Australia Council initiative Mobile States (for dancers) and British-Australian co-operative Breathing Space (hybrid and live art), which are about getting work out to larger audiences beyond Sydney and participating in national networks to develop practices and audiences."

This year the Space has hosted interactive installations and videos in Videos from the Zones, as part of the Sydney Biennale. It also hosted Liquid Architecture, the seventh sound-arts festival, and a range of live performances including Indonesian artist Melati Suryodarmo's high-cholesterol Exergie - Butter Dance, in which the dancer, dressed for a disco, slips and slides on slabs of butter.

The first show at Performance Space in 1980 was a political one: Mike Mullins's New Blood. Mullins was the Space's instigator and first director, and was well known for his street art performances, dressed in bloody bandages as the Lone Anzac. The final show at the Cleveland St premises is a return season of the blackly comic theatre piece The Wages of Spin, about the sexing-up of evidence for war on Iraq. The production company behind the show, Version 1.0, emerged through a series of training programs and collaborations at Performance Space.

The Wages of Spin, she says, challenges audience expectations, albeit with irony and humour: "I would say that that's one of the really important things about this space, that kind of porous relationship between audience and performer or between spectator and artist. The relationship has really been challenged and experimented with consistently. I think that is one of the really key points of difference this space has offered to audiences."

The Cleveland St building began life as a grand terrace, then was made over into a railway union social hall; it was also a brothel and an illegal gambling den. Over 25 years the place has been massaged into something approximating a specially designed, multi-purpose theatrical space. But with tight budgets and market rents, Performance Space funds were directed towards performances rather than infrastructure.

"The fact is that there's not a real loading dock and the dressing rooms are just tiny dank rooms off the space that were never really meant for masses of artists putting on big costumes. Everyone's always adapted to the physical space and there's been a great deal of invention to make great work."

With cutting-edge work the potential for failure is magnified. Some shows succeeded, others drove audiences screaming from the room. What all the performers had in common was passion: they believed fiercely in what they were doing. Audiences were just as enthusiastic. One group stood for two hours during an early Mullins show, Long, Long Time Ago.

In 1988, French-Canadian theatre troupe Carbone 14 filled the space with tonnes of earth, railway tracks and sleepers for their show Le Rail. The next year, during The Pornography of Performance by the Sydney Front, audiences blindly groped naked performers, who went on to spit, eat dog food and do unspeakable things with cake.

In 2001, Mexican-American artist Guillermo Gomez Pena created The Museum of Fetish-ized Images with 10 Australian artists who formed themselves in what looked like historical tableaus. "The audience walked into what felt like a party space with dioramas, but the images were quite extreme, highly sexualised and ethno-mutated," says Winning. "Throughout the night, the boundary between performers and audience broke down as the audience members participated much more fully than they might have intended to when they walked in."

The Wages of Spin and Videos From the Zones are at the Performance Space, Sydney, until August 19.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20085234-16947,00.html