Proximity Festival

Curated by Kelli McCluskey and Sarah Rowbottam

Cathedral Square until November 5

Tyrone Robinson (pic: PAVLOVA)

I’m something of a Proximity veteran, having tramped around the Blue Room, PICA, the Fremantle Arts Centre, AGWA and, now, Cathedral Square since 2012 in search of the amusement and however big a slice of enlightenment you can get from a quarter hour or so in the hands, or at least the company, of a single performer.

That’s the idea of Proximity; an encounter of one performer with an audience of one, multiplied anything up to twelve (this year a more manageable nine) times, in one precinct.

It’s a challenge for performers, their curators, Kelli McCluskey and Sarah Rowbottam, the producer Megan Roberts and stage management, led by Donelle Gardiner. There’s no disputing it’s also a challenge for the audience.

That challenge for us isn’t logistical – the Proximity team know exactly what they’re doing and how to do it, and you’re shepherded from site to site with practiced skill and a small army of vollies.

It’s more about what you do when you get there. There are some pieces that require your proactive interaction with the artist, some where the artist leads and guides that interaction and some where you need only observe proceedings.

The trick is knowing what you need to do, if you need to do something, and the success of a piece often depends on how clearly that is communicated.

So, for example, Rachel Dease’s THIS LITTLE LIFE OF MINE, a sensory meditation on how much you’ve spent of life, and how much you have left to spend, is as clearly signposted as it is beautiful and thought-provoking.

So too Tyrone Robinson’s multifaceted and powerful CONSENT. Are we engaged in ritual or slaughter? Are we confronted with fear or captive rage? One day you eat the bear…

LET’S MAKE LOVE Jen Jamieson’s gentle, chatty perambulation through the laneways and landings of affection is, in part, entertaining pseudoscience, but, even more enjoyably, a great advertisement for touching and feeling.

These, for me at least, were the highlights of Proximity, as much for how clearly they placed me within the experience as for the experience itself.

Other pieces of note, for the same reasons, were Cigdem Aydemir’s THE RIDE, a gruff but enjoyable piece of film studio trickery on the back of a motorbike, Martin Coutts’s SHELL GAME, a little game of cards with the South China Sea and the Spratley Islands as the pack, and Mike Bianco’s THE TREES OF ST GEORGES SQUARE, a pointed, political induction into the use and misuse of official gardening.

Less successful were Hannah Brontë’s  TRESSE//PASSING – DON’T TOUCH MY HAIR, Liam Colgan’s REFLUX OF A BLUSH and Nat Randall’s EXCLUSIVE. It’s unfortunate, because each of them had points to make and were conceived and staged well, but ambiguities or gaps in advise and instructions left me adrift in the piece and my part in it. It’s not a comfortable place to be, and not for the reasons the artists intended. Other audience members will no doubt have made a better fist of it than I did, and consequently reap greater rewards from them.

It will be interesting to see where Proximity goes from here. It’s an unusual, perhaps unique, artistic endeavour, and that creates particular challenges, particularly because there is no established “circuit” for these pieces and their artists.

After four outings, it’s probably time for an evolutionary leap in Proximity’s presentation and audience experience to keep what is a remarkable and stimulating event the “leap into the unknown” its curators seek to give us.