Off the rails in a creative move

WITHIN a vast brick shell at Sydney's former Eveleigh Rail Yards are Victorian-era steel columns, girders and decommissioned gantry cranes. Embedded in the floor are parallel lines of track where carriages were built and maintained for more than 100 years.

The rolling stock has gone but hints of Australia's rail heritage remain at CarriageWorks, Sydney's newest cultural centre. The multi-venue arts precinct is due to open next month after a $49 million transformation.

Situated between Redfern and Newtown stations, CarriageWorks is part of the regeneration of an inner-city area troubled by heroin, poverty, racial friction and crime.

Sue Hunt, appointed director of CarriageWorks less than six months ago, will oversee its opening in time for the Sydney Festival. She says she wants the centre to be a stimulating neighbour for local people andothers.

"One of the things I want it to be is part of the local community; not as a community drop-in place, but as a place that the community owns and sees," she says.

The centre is expected eventually to be self-sufficient; an adjacent commercial site with shops and cafes will help pay for the culture. It has ambitions, Hunt says, to be Australia's leading venue for contemporary performance.

Last week CarriageWorks was still a construction site, noisy with earth excavators and power tools.

Wearing a bright orange reflector vest and hard hat, Hunt led her visitor around the cathedral-sized foyer, the three performances spaces and rehearsal rooms.

The largest venue, Bay 17 -- the rail yard references have been preserved -- is a concrete box within the original facade. It's a flat-floor space of 1150sqm that will have retractable seating for 800. Soundproofing promises to eliminate the rumble of passing trains from the busy railway network nearby.

Bay 20, which seats 300, also has a sprung floor, but retains more of the site's industrial features than the larger venue. The architectural firm Tonkin Zulaikha Greer designed the CarriageWorks refurbishment, working with heritage consultants Otto Cserhalmi andPartners.

Other prominent examples of industrial-turned-cultural edifices come to mind: the Musee d'Orsay in Paris was a railway station; London's Tate Modern a power plant. In Australia we have Sydney's Wharf and Melbourne's Malthouse theatres and the Brisbane Powerhouse performing arts centre, all of which have maintained the patina of their former industrial uses.

It could be said that such venues physically manifest the transformation from the industrial age to the conceptual.

"That's why being in this environment, this place, is exciting to artists," Hunt says. "They can see that you can overlay the contemporary with the history and not lose either."

CarriageWorks will be different from other venues, she says, because of its mix of culture and retail, and because of the way it will develop in partnership with its resident companies, rather than be merely a hall forhire.

Sydney's Performance Space, formerly of nearby Cleveland Street, will move into CarriageWorks as a presenter of experimental art. Other tenants will include the physical theatre company, Stalker, and Erth, which creates puppets and giant inflatable characters. The performance group Legs on the Wall won't move in permanently but will use the spaces for shows.

Significantly, there is not a proscenium arch to be had at CarriageWorks. The style of performance to be presented here does away with conventional notions of dramatic and lyric arts and ushers in the avant-garde, athletic and acrobatic.

Hunt says there has been a growing interest in such physical performance since the spectacular work seen in the 2000 Olympic Games opening ceremony.

"That's when government started to think: we've got these amazing contemporary artists here. Let's not just think of it as aerial work and circus; there's a whole range of other practice, including contemporary dance andmusic.

"There was an interesting evolution between government and the artists about creating this place."

The venue won't exclude other users. Indeed, the first performances will be Sydney Festival seasons of contemporary dance, from Britain's Akram Khan Company, the Adelaide-based Australian Dance Theatre and Israel's Batsheva Dance Company.

Hunt says she has yet to discuss the possibility of the big performing arts companies -- Opera Australia or Sydney Theatre Company, for example -- also presenting at CarriageWorks, particularly performances of a more experimental bent. A potential drawback, however, is the suitability of the venues for unamplified music and singing, given the dryness of the acoustic within them: this has yet to be tested.

Hunt intends that CarriageWorks will also produce work itself. The not-for-profit company has a $2 million budget in its first year, a small amount of which will be invested in programming, Hunt says.

"One of the objectives of the centre, and of the Government, is development of contemporary arts," she says. "As managers of it, we have a role in doing that as well, in providing the venue service, housing the resident companies, and we've got the overall brief of filling it.

"I hope to be able to develop work and produce work. A lot depends on the commercial side of the operation. The idea is that we develop and populate the commercial site, so the revenues from that flow directly into the operating costs of the art space."

Hunt, who was formerly director of performing arts at the Sydney Opera House, says CarriageWorks has the potential to attract and generate new artistic activity.

When the idea of building the Opera House was conceived, she points out, there was no national opera company, no national ballet, and the Sydney Symphony was in its infancy.

"That's not to say the Opera House created them," she says. "But creating a place that draws people to it provides an impetus and a catalyst for cultural development. I think this (CarriageWorks) has the potential to do the same thing."

CarriageWorks opens with Akram Khan's Zero Degrees on January 5.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20904353-16947,00.html