'Lines of Flight : a Sonic Community', inaugural NZ transmission to the Radia network, broadcast live at Enjoy gallery, Wellington

To celebrate the transmission of the initial NZ contribution to the international Radia radio art network, Enjoy Gallery kindly agreed to host a live Radio Cegeste MiniFM simulcast of the programme, to its gallery space in central Wellington.

This transmission, a documentary on the Lines of Flight festival, was narrowcast as it went to air at 9:30pm on Radio One 91FM in Dunedin, on the Radia programme on the station, which has already been playing the shows of other stations in the network, and is regularly hosted by my co-producer of this documentary, Gilbert May. This was followed by live performances by artists in and around the Enjoy Gallery space : Sam Hamilton and L A Lakers working together as ".,", Campbell Walker's Haulout Seal Orchestra, and Wellington based duo Discomedusae.

Radia Season 20 :: Episode #231 :: from Radio One Dunedin, New Zealand

Lines of Flight - A Sonic Community

This, the inaugural contribution to the Radia Network from Radio One (Dunedin, New Zealand), offers an impressionistic account of the biannual, and somewhat secretive, experimental music and film festival "Lines of Flight". Running in Dunedin since 2000, "Lines of Flight" has provided New Zealand improvisational and experimental musicians with an intensive platform for performance and interaction and has organically evolved a space for a much stronger formation of a sound practioners' community. Although the improv./experimental scene from which the festival grew - recall the musicians associated with the labels Metonymic and Corpus Hermeticum in the 1990s - has changed considerably since the festival's beginnings, Lines of Flight has become a kind of default constant, a fluid forum, a relatively regular 'symposium' for many in that evolving scene.

Radio producers Sally-Ann McIntyre (a.k.a. 'Radio Cegeste') and Gilbert May took the opportunity which the 2009 Lines of Flight festival offered to interview a number of the organisers and performers (particularly those who have had a long standing relation to the festival) to obtain their reflections on the history and significance of the biannual event. Combined with an equally partial selection of music, a limited and impressionistic editing process provides a far from comprehensive, yet nevertheless enlightening, introduction not just to the "Lines of Flight" festival, but to a part of a wider New Zealand scene.

[Featuring: Peter Stapleton, Kim Pieters, Peter Porteus, , Bruce Russell, Matt Middleton, Dean Roberts, Rachel Shearer as well as samples from Sleep, Flies Inside the Sun, Birchville Cat Motel, Handful of Dust, Crude, Eye, Rotor Plus, Tillakaratne and Adrian Hall's Red Carpet. Many thanks to all involved....]

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the event is archived on Enjoy's weblog here, and on the radia.fm site here.

the Forbidden Room

discussions with devised / media theatre group The Clinic (who were, at the time, much esteemed theatre critics on the Arts radio show Mag:net, which I was hosting on RDU98:3FM) about a project involving their workshopping my writing eventually led to the three act piece The Forbidden Room.

This piece was performed at Enjoy Gallery, Wellington, as part of the Wellington Fringe Festival (where it picked up the prize in Multimedia) and in Christchurch for a short run at the Physics Room Contemporary Art Space.

The first act involved interaction between screen based and live characters with a plot based loosely around incidents in the domestic life of Louis Althusser, the second act's puppet-like physical momentum was largely driven by a typewriter score, and the third act included references to the writing of Marguerite Duras as well as a live radio show, complete with performative foley effects.

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"The Forbidden Room is a collaboration with a writer, focused on the relationship between writing and acting, the text and the body. Taking the myth of Bluebeard as a narrative structure, we examine three different male-female and writer-written relationships. Performed in art galleries, the show also took a critical look at the 'forbidden room' of the world of contemporary art."

Director - Anastasis Dailianis
Scriptwriter - Sally McIntyre
Film design - Julieanne Eason
Performers - Lucette Hindin, Anastasia Dailianis
Additional direction – Haydn Kerr