2024 Melbourne Fringe Festival

Pictures & Ghosts
Arabella Frahn-Starkie
Wednesday 9th October, 2024
Guild Theatre
University of Melbourne, Parkville

Cosmos
Callum Mooney
Thursday 10th October, 2024
Sylvia Staehli Theatre
Dancehouse, North Carlton

Grim Grinning Ghosts
Alix Kuijpers
Thursday 10th October, 2024
Skylab
Dancehouse, North Carlton

Ghostly Figures, my response to three independent performances presented as part of the 2024 Melbourne Fringe Festival, drawn up especially for Fjord Review.

Seated on the floor before an overhead projector, Arabella Frahn-Starkie could be in her studio, working, sifting, collaging, thinking. In a darkened theatre, as befits the lumens of the projector, Frahn-Starkie slides image after image across the flatbed, and in doing so, she animates them and ensures they remain unfixed to any one moment or meaning. With her back to the audience, Pictures and Ghosts begins with an overriding sense of having crept into the artist’s studio to unassumingly watch her process. Music playing softly, to her right, so as not to obscure the hum of the projector, enhances this sensation of Frahn-Starkie being alone in the studio, ruminating. A lidded, expanding document holder to her left.

Memories of another time tap at my shoulder as I watch her work. The projector was one of the tools I especially loved to use at art school in the mid to late nineties, creating collages by overlaying different transparencies[i] run through the colour photocopier. My mind wonders, are these the ‘pictures’ and ‘ghosts’ of the title? Projected pictures made by equipment that is now largely relegated to the past, save for a niche fanbase[ii] that will always love the unique parameters of a condenser. Seated in the Guild Theatre, University of Melbourne, for a restaging of Frahn-Starkie’s work, which was first presented at Dancehouse, Melbourne and Platform Arts, Geelong in 2022, the pictures and ghosts are many and varied. In the second week of the 2024 Melbourne Fringe Festival, ghost technology and memory traces, from the personal to the universal, link this work with two the following night, Callum Mooney’s Cosmos, and Alix Kuijpers’s Grim Grinning Ghosts, presented at Dancehouse’s Sylvia Staehli Theatre, and Skylab, respectively.

Frahn-Starkie, using multiple photographs of herself taken by Trudi Treble, wearing the same distinctive bright green top and black pants as she is now, compresses and extends pockets of time, much like the accordion of the document holder. As befits the idea of retracing one’s steps, literally, in the process of archiving the ephemeral nature of performance, in the photographs on transparencies Frahn-Starkie has shorter hair. Past Frahn-Starkie extends her left arm towards the floor, as her right rests in the small of her back as she leans forward, her face turned to follow her extended arm, with her back to the camera. Present Frahn-Starkie shuffles the various poses to create a new choreographic memory from the images. Pose after pose, the reliability of the archived image is questioned as new sequences are drawn and new memories mapped.

Pictures and Ghosts, which sprung from Frahn-Starkie’s residency at Platform Arts, and the “introspective time”[iii] the train journey to and from the studio afforded, looks at the changeable nature of what remains of a performance, for both the performer and those in the audience, when the house lights come on. We can document dance through notation, analogue and digital records, but how accurate and reliable is this picture in looking at what was? Frahn-Starkie erases and redraws, printed text is included and layered, and the name Ginger Rogers appears without (to my eyes) Fred Astaire. Melding “film and photography as a way to fuel [her] nostalgic tendencies and to frame and capture moments in time”[iv], the ‘remains’ of a performance, those material traces, are as slippery as the transparencies Frahn-Starkie slides over the flatbed, and throws, in clipped cornered retro-glory, up on the wall. Just as each introspective staging draws up what was and laces it with new memories of what is, sewing further memories into the seabed, Frahn-Starkie plays with perspective. Through placement on the flatbed, and smaller images, a projected version of Frahn-Starkie performing alongside multiples of herself recedes in the picture plane, as if in “contemplation on the possibilities and pitfalls of archiving dance”[v]. Later, as Frahn-Starkie draws a loose outline in a green marker around her projected image, upon removing her body, the shape that remains is both nothing and everything like the body it once held. A curved bean and an energy forcefield. When this green outline is digitally animated and pulses and zings with every knee bend and arm crook, the ghosts of the past are fully activated.

Cosmos, in three level of consciousness parts —Waking, Dream, and Higher —transitions, in the blink of an eye, from “existential emotions… recurring dreams and nightmares... and the connectivity between energy and soul”[vi]. Mooney’s choreography takes this hand-drawn energy field and colours every limb and leaf in rapidly evolving, twitching, falling, full and saturated colour. Mooney, joined by Hugo Poulet, Erin O’Rourke, Hoyori Maruo, and Angelica Menta, alternate between angular anguish and fluid tenderness, in both solos and as a super-charged quintet in hypnotic unison, combing over every uneven, unknown surface the afterlife presents. With sound by Dave Thomson (Lost Few) and cellist Conrad Hamill, as Mooney, Poulet, O’Rourke, Maruo, and Menta lie supine at the foot of the stage, in the act of returning to the soil. As a current of sound appears to ripple through them by turn, the shadows their limbs cast are thrown up, far larger than their human forms could ever dream, against the night sky, and the cosmos that lies beyond, sloughing off earlier vocalised doubts and anxieties.

Doubts and anxieties take on a different form and meld into a theme park in Kuijpers’s Grim Grinning Ghosts, afterwards in the smaller, upstairs space made smaller by the swathes of fabric, open cases, and cardboard boxes strewn about the room. Into a domestic space in flux, suggestive of a deceased person’s estate, with haunted house vibes, Grim Grinning Ghosts, too, tips its top hat to the ghost of technologies past, with a few whacks of the black box TV to set the reception to interference from the beyond realm. ‘No screen signal’ nostalgia in overdrive kicks in, spliced with a mysterious changing of the channels and middle of the night, static noise, glitch aesthetic. A fragment of a news story about animals not being in possession of a soul and therefore not able to ascend to heaven flickers before morphing with the believed-to-be first horror film Georges Méliès classic, Le Manior du diable[vii] (1896), replete with a bat metamorphosing into the figure of Mephistopheles. Underscoring the familiar theatrical spookiness, however, a laid bare look at grief, as Kuijpers communes with the dearly departed.

The on stage, on screen conjuring tricks of all three works, Pictures and Ghosts, Cosmos, and Grim Grinning Ghosts, summonsed a sequined top not out of thin air, but rather through the shrinking capabilities of a microwave, and gnawed at my nostalgia for “objects of personal memorial as the magnificent radiance of life.”[viii]

[i] Overhead transparencies/dry acetate films

[ii] Replacement components and bulbs are becoming more expensive and harder to source.

[iii] Arabella Frahn-Starkie in interview, Forte https://fortemag.com.au/starkie-family-reach-for-the-sky-with-their-geelong-performances, accessed 9th October, 2024.

[iv] Frahn-Starkie, ‘What remains of a performance when the curtain goes down?’, Pursuit, The University of Melbourne, https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/what-remains-of-a-performance-when-the-curtain-goes-down, accessed 8th October, 2024.

[v] Frahn-Starkie, “Pictures and Ghosts” printed Program Note, 2024.

[vi] Callum Mooney, “Cosmos” synopsis, Dancehouse, https://www.dancehouse.com.au/whats-on/cosmos, accessed 11th October, 2024

[vii] Sam Wigley, ‘Ten Great Bat Films’, British Film Institute, https://www.bfi.org.uk/lists/10-great-bat-films, accessed 11th October, 2024.

[viii] Xiao Yen, from ‘The Right to Nostalgia’, quoted by Dai Jinhua, trans. Judy T. H. Chen, ‘Imagined Nostalgia’, boundary 2, Vol. 24, No. 3, Postmodernism and China (Autumn, 1997), p. 144, https://www.jstor.org/stable/303710, accessed 11th October, 2024.

Pictures & Ghosts
Choreographer and Performance: Arabella Frahn-Starkie
Photographer: Trudi Treble
Cinematography: Meg Duncan and Bonita Carzino
Composition: Robert Downie
Lighting: Giovanna Yate González and Lara Gabor
Video Documentation by Takeshi Kondo

Cosmos
Choreographer: Callum Mooney
Sound Design: Dave Thomson (Lost Few)
Performers: Callum Mooney, Hugo Poulet, Erin O’Rourke, Hoyori Maruo, and Angelica Menta
Cellist: Conrad Hamill

Grim Grinning Ghosts
Choreographer: Alix Kuijpers
Performer: Alix Kuijpers
Sound Design: Alix Kuijpers
Lighting Design: Fern Mines
Costume and Set Design: Caroline De Wan and Alix Kuijpers
Digital Scenography, Animation and Visual Effects: Alex Waite Mitchell
Rehearsal Directors: Hanna Instrell-Walker and Caroline De Wan
Mentors: Annamari Keskinen and Ryan Mason
Producer: The Mill Adelaide (Katrina Lazaroff, Tim Watts, Chloe Metcalfe)
Photography: Daniel Marks

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Image credit: Arabella Frahn-Starkie in Pictures & Ghosts, by Bonita Carzino