I conducted an interview with Andrew Garton at his place in Fitzroy on Thursday, 24 October 1996 after I’d seen him and a friend of mine, Joe Stojsic (together with Justina Curtis) do a performance of Fierce Throat at Southbank, Melbourne. I began by asking Andrew when he had last seen and heard of Joe (which I’ve removed from this interview) and how the choir began.
I wasn’t looking for singers, I was looking for people who were interested in the project and who were interested in committing to it and had the energy to put into the pieces. The first manifestation of the choir was made up of ten people and I think there was only one actual singer in amongst them and that was a powerful sort of troop, but we only ever did one piece and well, those performances were in Brisbane for an installation, a mini festival if you like, called Transplant in a deserted powerhouse in Brisbane and there were all sorts of performances going on all over the place and they just had this one space and we did this one piece - which we still do, called God Tears Europa, which I wrote in Prague after basically my first experience of Europe where my parents come from and I think it’s sort of a cathartic experience of this place that I’d always heard about.
Why was it cathartic?
It was cathartic, because I grew up in a family that spoke German and Russian. I didn’t know there was a language such as English until I went to school and had English force-fed and we’re also a little bit of reclusive, and as I was growing up I sensed that there was a lot more to what family was about, than what was occurring in the western suburbs of Sydney. And, I started this kind of quest, if you like, not to research the family, but to identify some kind of cultural significance in this country and to attain some sort of relationship with what I thought or perceived as a European heritage, which was very strong. Though curiously I spent quite a number of years travelling around Asia, so I never got to Europe until a couple of years ago, so all my experiences of the outside world were in Asia, which really appealed to me in its own way. I was working with people and living with and associating with people who were all engaged with form some kind of cultural dislocation, if you like, all standing in the middle, between what their families have given them in terms of culture and what the contemporary world has provided them, as, something that - I can’t quite put into words, that doesn’t necessarily recognize their culture of origin, that they have to struggle to maintain some sense of what they’ve grown up with or what they feel.
Is that like a sense of place and sense of identify?
In the Philippines, it’s difficult, if you’re are a Filipino growing up in Manila in your early twenties now, many young Filipino’s I'd met don’t know much beyond their current present lives, they don’t know little of their heritage which seemed to me to be basically more about survival. Of course they'll know about the Spanish, the Japanese, the Americans, but once you get beyond that – from my experience, there’s little other than stories about getting to cities and trying to make a life there.
Do you think that your interest in language – the relationship you have…
Well, definitely because I’ve seen that through language culture is maintained in some way, that the heart of the culture is communicated through the nuances of the language, even slang. I was talking to my mother the other night, and I was saying ‘I did this great performance and I’m doing this piece now in German’, and I read the text out to her and she said ‘oh, no – no, you pronounce it like this’, I said ‘I was under the impression that you say it like this’ – ‘no, no that’s the slang’. But that has meaning to me because that’s how the language is communicated – that’s how these words are communicated to me and how they changed over time - how they have mutated and people attempting to define their own sense of place through using the language that they’ve grown up with, and adapting it to their environment.
Are you saying language situates us?
I don’t have any theories about any of this, but I do have a sense, or feeling that it can situate you or attempt to give you a sense of place, but that that sense of place changes constantly.
But it also alienates?
Oh yeah, very much so. When I was in Prague I thought great, a lot of people were (German is a second language in Prague), great, I can speak German, I can go there and I can practice my rough German, and perhaps get some of this back. But everyone wanted to speak English and a lot of the young people that I met knew German, but they wanted to speak English, they didn’t even want to speak Czech. They just wanted to practice their English, which is really boring - interesting for them, but their need to learn English is almost similar to the desire to learn English amongst young people in Asia, they are driven by this sense that the English language contains wealth, contains dreams, contains themes that the world that they live in cannot provide them.
When I was listening to you there seems to be a power in the language, I don’t know if you intended that in your performance, a certain power that allowed you to bring out power and emotion, or anxiety and aggression even, and I wonder if you are using that language that as a vehicle for certain power, for certain emotions, whereas English…
It’s a personal discovery, in that…
How do you feel about saying that?
I feel fine about that. The more we do that piece (God's Tears Europa) the stronger it becomes for me. That piece came to me very, very, quickly, and the first time we rehearsed it, it’s a very simple piece, it’s not very complicated at all, as you recognized, it has a power in it, but, I grew up speaking this language and there was also Russian spoken in the family, but as kids we never really picked it up, but we spoke German and then between six and ten I very quickly stopped speaking German and I went to school and no one prepared me for this very stressful situation, of not being able to communicate and not understanding.
You were quite old…
I was six when I started…
Grade one?
…I was four when I started kindergarten, but I was six when I started to get into English and so all that formative stuff that was going on I lost contact with; which is why I was hoping that in Prague, when I got there, it was such an extraordinary experience, of not being in Asia, not being in Australia, stepping out into the Metro off into the middle of the main square in the centre of the city and feeling this sense of something that was so overwhelming. I knew I was part of, not necessarily that city, but everything that that continent had to offer was there for me to absorb. Whereas the people I was meeting there for work, people who didn’t want any of the stuff I craved, they wanted to leave it as fast as they could, returning to America. Australia or England.
Interesting, because children start to internalize language at around two years old, so you must have been speaking some language between the age of two and six?
Well, apparently, it was German. According to my mother I spoke German fluently and I was always talking, I was always very articulate.
I think that the power in what I’ve tried to do with that piece called Ausländer und Staatenlose, translates, as ‘foreign and stateless person’ I’m actually saying in that piece that I am not the foreign and stateless person, even though that’s what was my father had stamped on travel documents, this big Austlander und Staatenlose brand from the UNHCR.
Was that in Australia?
That was in Europe.
So what were they?
Well my father was stateless. He was born in Yugoslavia in 1921 to a white Russian refugee who fled at the start of the the Russian Revolution…
So sad - because we always have a country, we have a sense of history, it’s very sad…
Well, I think it’s not necessarily sad for me because I have tools available to me to explore, I can question things, I had the opportunity occasionally to travel and meet people and talk about these things, but someone like my father who spoke seven different languages, who travelled a lot purely just to survive, ended up in Australia and literally died inside, and as far as I know left this world not having any one to talk to about it, not having anyone to really communicate the deep seated anguish that he may have felt and I feel very close to him in a lot of ways because of the travelling meme and in some ways I feel like I’m fulfilling a kind of life that he’d hoped to have lived himself, but was unable to.
So do you think some of this has been about grieving for your father?
I use to think in the mid eighties. I was doing a lot of writing, grieving for my father, he passed away on my twenty-first birthday…there’s a whole series of things associated with that.
Are you still sad?
Not anymore, I kind of went through the worst part of it during that period when I was working on a set of compositions and during that period I realized that a lot of the stories he told me were coming through and the music became parodies about the stories that I’d remembered and some of them colored and some had changed and distorted in my mind and once I got through that, I decided I wanted to know a little bit more about those stories, but I did not want to live for my father, and I don’t want to dig up the past in a lot of ways, but there’s such a fascinating cultural history or history of dislocation, but it is not unique, its everywhere, I meet people all the time that have very similar stories and they don’t have to be European or Asian, they could be of Irish decent…
I’m a sixth generation Australian. I don’t have that Europeaness…
It doesn’t have to be European, there’s a friend of mine who now lives in Melbourne as well, he’s traced his family back to the Blasket in Ireland - this island off the coast of Ireland, a very bleak harsh environment. His descendants ended up here as convicts in Tasmania. He grew up there. But he’s got no interest in Europe. He finds the stories and culture of what he’s learnt through reading and talking to people more than enough to fulfill him, but he isn’t completely fulfilled because he wants to go there, he wants to walk on the soil of his ancestors. It’s not a driving force though.
I stopped interviewing Andrew briefly and I noticed an image on a piece of paper he gave me:
Beelzebub? (I laugh)
It’s a kind of critique on Christianity, in that it looks at how Christianity has taken symbols of early forms of religion, mythological images and so forth and transformed them into creatures and myths of their own.
Yes, they incorporated them. Have you incorporated German mythology into your writing?
No probably the Russian aspect, so we speak German because my mother is Austrian, so we speak Austrian German, a kind of lighter form of German. When I was living in Byron bay I lived with Germans and picked up on their harder dialect and slang in some way and that was quite interesting.
What is Russian mythology like?
Kind of hard to explain because…
It is obviously as rich as everywhere else?
Full of magic and I can’t remember actual stories, but I remember these moods and images, sitting with my grandmother who was Russian and she would tell us these stories in German. She was multilingual as was my father, and so she’d tell us these stories, but I’ve yet to find her stories in books, Pushkin I think, but there were these colors and sombre moods that she painted and her paintings were all over her house, and that mood runs through a lot of my work, it’s a more broody feeling.
I noticed that.
Do you have any of the texts with you? The other thing I thought of when listening to you I keep thinking about Philip Glass (Einstein on the Beach), that woman’s voice, have you listened to a lot of Philip Glass?
Not a lot, but I was fortunate to attend a performance he put on in Rio a few years ago, it was absolutely stunning
Did he use that kind of overlaying voice?
Yes, he used that a far bit, but the thing that blew me away than anything was that all his music was actually played, and he had this ensemble of keyboard players sitting and doing it all and he was there playing as well and had someone else conduct and they were doing pieces from Koyaanisqatsi and Naqoyqatsi and also running scenes from those films simultaneously…
That would have been great!
…and it was great and it was also performed at an old Spanish built opera house, very beautiful building, so I really appreciated what he was doing.
Have you used those overlaying texts before, because there are a few people who do that - Warren Burt and Chris Mann do that?
I started doing stuff like that, I had a project in the early 80s called spiel das music or play that music, and it was placed around a whole bunch of songs that I’d written, which were just sort of dramatic, almost burlesque kind of pieces, but there was just nowhere to actually play it, because people were used to rock and roll singers getting up with acoustic guitar and singing ballads and I’d sing these weird kind of things (my laughter) and, so that it was sort of short lived, but I got to do a performance at a festival in Adelaide of that stuff, it was a children’s art festival of all things…
Well, they probably would have appreciated it more…
It was fantastic. Fierce Throat did a performance at Glitch a few weeks ago and the only person that came up to talk to us about it was this young guy about nineteen or twenty, he said – ‘you from Germany, Berlin, you look really sort of Teutonic’ - can’t remember what he said, ‘Arian’ and I said, ‘no, no we are all Australian’, I said, ‘well, actually Joe is Slavic, Tim’s family is Swedish and he speaks Swedish and Justina’s family’s tenth generation Welsh, English’ and so yeah – all those sort of influences were there, the coloring, we’d all bleached our hair blond…
That was interesting because I hate the word fascism, because it’s just thrown around so often, but if you do that all black thing with blond hair, with the control you are exhibiting, then you get that tag of fascism - but it worked!
But it’s also a parody; I find those pieces really, really, funny. I find it hilarious that four people, probably the other three people including Justina, coming along to rehearsals, and being these strange controlled people in these performances, but I want to create performances that are engaging, that create a kind of temporary island where we grab people’s attention for a short period of time and then let them go again, we establish trust, so, OK, we’ve got your attention, and now have to trust we can bring you back, and generally that works. Up until I started developing the idea of the choir I was doing all this stuff myself, so all these shows we were doing were one man shows but the Pan show which was called Triumph over Triumph, and Pan and Beelzebub’s and whatever, the pieces of the choir I started doing, essentially grew out of a one man opera that I wrote called Black Harlequin. When I was in Byron bay I contracted an odd strain of viral meningitis and spent three months in bed, and this friend of mine from Sydney sent me the videotape, which are the images you saw at Southgate performance, this video art that was running in the background…
I didn’t even notice it…
…he sent me three hours of the stuff and I was lying in bed and watching it and started getting ideas for Black Harlequin and was able to draw in all these parts of my personality that I’d lived through the whole sort of punk period and up to that present point in time, I realized in all of these performances I’m kind of like a clown, so the Black Harlequin became this post-industrial harlequin, that was just pissed off. I’m not going to tell you the stories, but they are funny, but at the same time, I’m not going to let go, once I’ve got you on this little raft out in the middle of the ocean, you’re here with me and I’m not going to let you go until this is over….
That did work and I thought what was happening with your control was that you were actually creating a space, and that space was not only to get people attention, you almost created this aura around you, and I thought that was interesting and I didn’t notice the visuals, which meant that you were quite compelling.
To achieve that, you need that level of control in that sense, that’s why I wanted everyone to try and sustain their focus and try and stay still, as soon as you start sort of shuffling around, moving, whatever, you lose the drama and the theatricality of what’s actually happened. I’m not trying to create a narrative; I’m trying - as you say, to create a space, like this island.
Do you have a literary background? Have you studied literature?
No, no, I left school when I was fifteen and only went back when John Bird asked me to do this Masters and he fought tooth and nail to get me in.
That’s amazing! But you’ve paid your dues in the same way as someone who has gone through an institution and presented their work – you did the work?
I’ve produced a large body of work. I’ve written stacks of stuff. From research to fiction, poems to plays. At the moment it’s becoming more and more focused. In the mid-1980s I wrote this experimental musical called, Triangle over Triumph about how Pan in transformed, over centuries, into Beelzebub, the Devil, and another before that called Thick with Muscle, which was more of a more fantasy orientated performance, that had, one, two, five different characters, all very different characters, including a young boy, and this was focused around an imaginary place - could be anywhere in the world, where an entire community grew up developing this culture isolated from the rest of the world but influenced by half a dozen characters who appeared very different to everyone else, and these characters evolved attributes of their physicality with this community, so over centuries the people in this community developed physical symptoms of their association with these strange people. Basically they evolved with a brain that grew outside their bodies – and this brain had to be – when they were born their brain was kept in this little pouch and had an umbilical cord that connected the brain to their body. So it was an external brain…
Like an external baby? (laughter)
…sort of, but they were totally emotionless and the only way they could create emotion or respond emotionally to situations was to manipulate the brain, the pouch was opened at either end and designed so that they could put their hands in and manipulate the brain - thick with muscle. So, these people didn’t know how to respond to love, to laughter, without actually manipulating the brain, until a stranger appeared and taught them how to dance, taught them how to dance without having to manipulate their brain …
That’s really beautiful…
…and it caused a revolution and he was banned or ostracized from the community. And had to leave, but while he was there he fell in love and after he left, the woman he’d fallen in love with gave birth to a young boy who was born without a brain outside his body, and they were considered totally abnormal and they were banished from the city as well. But as the kid was growing up in the forest his mother was teaching him the dances that the father taught her and the kids in the community got to hear about this strange boy, and after a period of time the kids would go into the forest and they’d meet the boy and get to know him, and we don’t have to touch this friggin little thing anymore (my laughter) this is amazing lets go back and tell the elders, and so they go back into this city called Busel and they danced for everyone without touching their brains, and the elders, which were called the Ogles, they had these sort of long single eyed heads, were completely horrified by this situation and they go out and capture the boy in the forest and bring him back to the city and basically perform a kind exorcism around him and the exorcism they perform, they basically trying to kill him and by dancing their dance around him they keep him awake for days and days to deplete him of energy and the kids realized this is really fucked, we can’t say anything or do anything about it, our parents are really freaked, let’s go out, let’s all leave the city on mass, let’s go and find his father. So all the kids leave the city, which freaks out the Ogels; because the kids are needed to replace the parents because, the parents are running all of these machines. The parents get sick and they get tired; the kids are just back up for the parents. So all the kids are gone, so the systems that they’ve develop in the community start to break apart, so there is there is this mad quest to find all these kids and bring them back, in the meanwhile there are all these kids running through the forest and the mountains, whatever, not only on the quest to find the boy’s father, but being liberated themselves more and more, discovering this world, discovering these emotions…. discovering…
So, it’s actually through the child then that change will occur?
Yeah, which kind of goes back to that whole thing about language, in those, my formative years, there’s a lot in the language I grew up in - stuff that I can’t identify with now. Up until I stopped speaking German, I was a very, very happy boy – and then up until fourteen, according to my mother, I cried at the drop of a hat. I guess, if anything, my own personal quest is to try the child within, which we all do in some way, but for me It’s through language, and I might never actually attain that space completely, but I might be able to create spaces that assist that process by bringing other people into that quest in some sense, so that we can all begin to start asking questions about place and belonging…
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