14 minute read
Vicki Van Hout Interview with Erin Brannigan
For the full interview recording visit, digitalcollections.library.unsw.edu.au/nodes/ view/13
- Vicki Van Hout (Interview Part 1 - 45:06)
TRAINING & DEVELOPING VOICE – HISTORY AS ARCHIVE (Interview Part 1 - 1:28)
ERIN: I thought we’d start with where you fit into the dance ecology in Sydney, but maybe also Australia. I really liked a comment you made on your blog about a research period with Anandavalli and your interest in thinking more about relationships rather than products and outcomes. You are so embedded in the community and have so many different working relationships. How do you see yourself in that big picture?
VICKI: That’s quite complicated. So I’ll preface with: I found Performance Space in the 1990s, or in the 2000s, or Performance Space found me. But that goes back to the fact that when I was in high school, I was a squatter at the Gunnery [what is now Artspace gallery] and there were a lot of interdisciplinary performances there. There’d be a lot of impromptu performances because there’s lots of little nooks and crannies in that space. There was the dome, there was this projection room where they’d have all these punk bands that had come down from either Brisbane or up from Melbourne. People were always making things, there were always installations in the rooms. So you would go into one room, and I remember seeing a big mosquito, what do you call it, proboscis. The proboscis was a needle. People would be living quite risky and there were a lot of things going down, but it was very vibrant and I think I kind of found my niche.
Then I went to NAISDA on Glebe Point Rd which again had its own little microcosm and you get quite enveloped. Back then the majority of people that came to NAISDA, the Aboriginal and Islander Dance Theatre, came from remote areas and only one or two of us were local. So I joined NAISDA but I had this other life that existed while I was in Sydney. I grew up in Dapto, but I was busting to get out and so was my friend and that’s how I found out about the Gunnery. The underpinning of modern technique at NAISDA was Martha Graham back then. So, I’d be doing yoga in the morning, I’d be swimming, I’d be doing NAISDA. I’d be going to Paul Saliba’s classes at night at Sydney Dance Company and he took an interest in me and he saw that I wanted to become a dancer. NAISDA used to turn into the Dance Now Centre at night, and Ronnie Arnold, Aku Kadogo and others would be teaching. No things in moderation, that’s my motto, so I had a full dance card. My day was filled. And people said I had no talent at all, I was quite awkward. But they could see that I had a drive. And I think it was also a little bit difficult because I had another life ... the dance life is very straight laced.
When I went to New York I immersed myself in Martha Graham. I was taking about four classes a day because I was an international student on scholarship, but I also had an ATSIC grant. So I could indulge, but then I really felt that this other part of my life was missing. And somehow, when I was moving, by chance I found Jeani Fillipini who was looking for a roommate. It was a tiny little studio, very small and so I had to sleep under the heating duct and she had a bed. She worked at night and I worked in the daytime, but she knew these women, Tish and Snooky, who were in a punk band called the Sick Fucks, and they were also Blondie’s first backup singers. And I said to Jeani, ‘oh, I’d really like a job,’ so she introduced me to Tish and Snooky and I started working for them. So I found my punk people.
And then when I came back to Australia, I was working for Bangarra because I think Kate Dunn had left and so they wanted somebody to replace Kate Dunn - that’s hilarious I know. Me and Kate Dunn, because we’re identical and have the same skills. Not at all. Anyway, so I was dancing with Bangarra. But, it is that kind of repertory model that is a very traditional Eurocentric model. And I think I missed Club Bent and a lot of things but I somehow gravitated towards Performance Space. There was one day I think they had a series of performances, Accidents and Alchemies, when they were in the old Performance Space [on Cleveland St Redfern], and I remember Branch Nebula’s Lee Wilson was on the same one as myself and so was Georgie Orr, Brian Fuata did a piece.
ERIN: A bit later, after you made Wirad’journi, Amanda Card was very supportive of you when she was the Executive Producer of One Extra, when it was working out of Performance Space.
VICKI: Yes. She was also at the University of Sydney. So there’s this whole thing with One Extra. Then I couldn’t tell the difference between One Extra and Performance Space. I didn’t know that One Extra was just housed in Performance Space, but I saw them as the one entity. The lady I was boarding a room from (I call her ‘my other mother,’ Barbara Kernick), she was doing the books for One Extra and she’s the person who introduced me to Amanda. And Amanda looked at my video and she says, ‘Oh, yes, yes. Oh, God, no, I did this. I’ve done this in the 1970s. This and this? No, definitely not, I’m cringing and we will never put that in a showreel,’ and she systematically just pulled apart bits of Wirad’journi. And she said, ‘you are just putting the steps together, a fusion. These are the things that are interesting, where you’ve developed a vocabulary, a physical virtuosity from the indigenous language.’ So she was really telling me which bits of the choreography were more interesting. So this was the first time I got really rigorous feedback… this was what was really interesting, that Amanda actually gave me something tangible to strive for.
EXHIBITION AS ARCHIVE (Interview Part 2 - 36:45)
ERIN: Can you talk specifically about the sculptural part of your creative practice and where that work comes from? Why is it so important in each of your works? And what is the role of the durational process of installation building in the work?
VICKI: Yeah, so it’s about making the environment for the dancers to inhabit. It all comes from preparing yourself for the dance. It’s about framing the dance; the dance is not just the dance, the dance has a lead up, and the dance will go somewhere else. The lead up into the dance is really important because, whenever I’ve been invited to do any kind of indigenous dance, there’s been hours of preparation beforehand.
Two moments really resonated with me. One was in Christmas Creek where we were all taken out to some spinifex in the heat of the day. Our upper bodies were all covered with crisco cooking oil. Then our breasts were painted, so we had to pull our bras down. Then we put our bras back up and we sat in the sun a bit more. Then we went back and the men danced all night, it got really late and it was cold. We were like, ‘We’re going to bed. It’s 10 o’clock.’ And then it was like, ‘yeah, the women are getting up and we’re gonna dance.’ We did one dance, that was it. Then we went back and we sat down and we drank more tea and we didn’t even take our tops off, they didn’t even see our breast painting. It’s just the fact that we did it, underneath the bra. It was just how that day was framed. Hours and hours. We waited hours, dying to dance, the boys were dancing with their woolly backboards, dancing for hours. Now you know why I always wanted to be the man.
Also, when I was in the Torres Strait, I remember I was staying on Saibai Island. We’re getting ready to dance. What happened first was my hair got plastered with coconut oil because they all have curly hair, so they get the hair parted in the middle and they have the coconut oil so that they have beautiful curls. I have one ear bigger than the other, and this ear was sticking out like a wing nut. They put a headband on me, my hair which was lathered in coconut oil was parted in the middle. ‘Oh, you look beautiful,’ they said because they all wanted the straight hair. And then they proceeded to put Christmas decorations around my neck and around my arms. I think it was blue and silver metallic tinsel. Then they put on my zaazi (the skirt) and it was done so tight I could hardly breathe. He goes ‘No I gotta make you look like a good Island woman.’ But you know, it was all about getting ready. And also we had woven our head dresses. It was purple and cane-looking and it was woven. But to make the purple, we got purple copy paper, tracing paper, to scribble it onto the strands so that you can weave them. And they also went on the inside, so when I had the coconut oil and the head dress on - purple! It just unfolded. There was a big procession in the dark from our place to where we were going to go and dance. So, it was all about getting ready. And then straight after we danced it was all about feasting and the order of the people who were going to eat. It was the elders, the guests, the children, and then the hosts, so that’s how they fed people.
So the dance took up a little part. It was also sweeping the ground to make sure there were no stones or putting sand down so that you could see the impact. Then the theatre just became for me an opportunity to make the environment, the other world, that the dancers will inhabit. That’s how my interest in sculptural sets started.
For Pack (2009) I made these ant mounds out of wooden pegs, oh 1000s of them, glued in my apartment. And I remember asking Anthea Doropoulos, ‘do you think you could come over to my place and chuck the set in your car?’ And she says ‘no, it’s too late, I’m going to the theatre.’ So, with one of those red, white and blue shopper bags I had to make quite a few trips. I had to dismantle some of them and go back and forth to Performance Space with those bags on my back and ride them from my place in Stanmore to Performance Space in Redfern back and forth with these sculptures. It was about how people act like ants and was the first time I conceived of a sculptural set. I had watched a documentary about baboons, when they all get together and preen and it releases, not endorphins, but something that calms them down. They kind of get a little bit drugged. So the dancers took some of the pegs from the ant mounds and they put them on themselves. And when they plucked the pegs off and put them back on their bodies, they would act like they were getting drugged out. So they were nodding off as they did the partnering. And I think there were 22 rolls of tape and they had to make ant trails to the different things on stage. So it was just how animals behave in packs and how humans behave in packs.
Vicki Van Hout working on the installation for Briwyant
Photo courtesy of the artist
ERIN: Can you talk about the works that will be in the exhibition In Response: Dialogues with RealTime?
VICKI: I am taking two elements from other works – I’m making a weaving like the one from Plenty Serious Talk Talk. I just think that the back space is a bit empty, so I am kind of dressing the space. It could become a lighting thing. I quite like it for the lighting thing, just the repetitive nature of it, that it’s this digit that might act as some kind of projected thing, because of the light/dark space, negative and positive space. I’m definitely doing something with the cards, because the river of cards in Briwyant spoke about movement as the flow of water. It’s a static thing [the stage], and then the people activate the space. I’m going to have to think about people engaging with the space because I think as it gets messy, that’s also interesting. And when we have an opportunity, we can also replenish it. To invite people to come and mess this space up and engage with it, to make sound, to activate it. There’s a piece of text from Briwyant and it’s called ‘Just a Dot’ and it goes:
Just a dot. Straight line, crooked more like. Self-made chewed twig brush. I’ll swipe that piece dot from your self-made chewed twig brush. What you think I am? Your dot, dot, dot fill-in! You provide the outline, but I provide the spirit, the time to talk to the ancestors. My hand, my constant, my steady beat. They communicate their story through me.
This quote relates to a documentary I saw about a male indigenous artist. I think it was this man’s second wife and she was doing the dots. So it was about the time you engage with the things. They would make this big painting, the man did the outline and the second wife was painting the dots, filling it in. And they would have it on the kitchen table. They would have breakfast on that painting! And I remember once, I think he accidentally spilled a cup of tea on the painting and he berated his wife. He was like, ‘see what you made me do.’ It was black primed canvas, so then they had to go and get this special black paint to go over the fact that they’d ruined it with a cup of tea. And then she had to dot over it. But the dots were really small, and they were selling them at Circular Quay because he’s a very well-known artist. He’s a very well-known artist, not her. So, I like this whole thing, that it’s the woman’s job. That was the whole premise behind Briwyant as well; the time it takes for each dot is what makes the work shiny, the repetition makes the work shiny and invites a longer dialogue with the ancestral spirits.
It makes it more powerful, it’s a powerful conduit. So that’s why I wanted to make that as an offering because it moves in itself and because it will be shiny and it represents how much time I’ve sat and contemplated the work, that it’s imbuing that space with a lot of myself. And it is making it a receptive space as well.
ERIN: And the sort of mundala work from Talk Talk. Can you talk a bit about the context of that in Talk Talk?
VICKI: Actually, I didn’t envisage it the way it happened in the show. At first, it was up on the back wall, and it was just going to be an Aboriginal flag, but it just didn’t work at all. It was still a work in progress and I’m getting somebody to rework some of the filming of the first film, because when I was sitting backstage, and I saw the sculpture, it was like a portal. So I saw a backlit version because I was backstage and the projection was at the front. It was so good because everything else was black, and you could just see whatever you could see. And I realised that’s how I have to see it, that you’re looking at it from a different time or it just kind of takes you out of the place that we’re in. It alludes to a different space. It makes it a multiple space … instead of it being something that occurs here, it’s bringing those other things that happen outside of the theatre, because I’m the thing that’s in there. So that was it.
