Hugo Weaving and The Presets on the challenge of making art without an audience
Making art without the presence of an audience is a challenge for some performers and unimaginable for others.
If everything had gone to plan, the world never would have heard of the Necks. When the trio formed in 1987, they were just three guys — Lloyd Swanton (bass), Tony Buck (drums) and Chris Abrahams (piano) — making music. Audiences were not invited.
These were musical experiments that extended to experiments in controlled isolation. For Swanton, it was like working in a greenhouse, where environmental variables could be monitored. In the Necks’ borrowed rehearsal rooms at the University of Sydney, audiences were a variable too far.
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“The concept was pure music with no outside influences, only the three of us and the space we were playing in,” Swanton says. “It’s wasn’t that we disliked audiences. We just didn’t want any other influence on the performance.”
READ MORE: Necks greater than the sum of its parts | Hugo Weaving prepares for Macbeth | Our review of Hearts and Bones | Keith Jarrett’s room for improv | Presets find spark for power revival | Expressions Dance Company’s change of name an ‘evolution’
This creative quarantine didn’t last. A university administrator arranged a small concert, one thing led to another and soon the world had caught up.
The Necks are said to inspire a cult following — and it’s true that their concerts, improvised from start to finish, can feel like offerings to the gods. Their audiences, meanwhile, are like a family of co-conspirators: mesmerised strangers bearing witness to an act of creation, everything contained in the moment, never to be repeated. For Swanton, nothing compares with the live experience. “We take some satisfaction personally,” he says, “but we’re also feeling happy on behalf of our baby, the music.”
But that was then, before the virus changed everything. Concert halls and theatres have fallen silent. Artists continue to share their work, mostly online, but the lockdown has dismantled that elusive bond that makes live performance so unique.
Amid the silence, certain questions are coming into sharp focus. What role does the audience play in the creation of art? To what extent does its presence mould the work on stage? Perhaps now, in the absence of live audiences, there has never been a better time to take stock of this creative exchange.
It probably felt more immediate for Shakespeare, who had to fight for the attention of those rowdy Elizabethan crowds, and it probably feels more immediate for rappers, whose crowd-baiting battles were popularised by Eminem in the 2002 film 8 Mile, but it’s real and it matters and it’s a key ingredient in the alchemy that has been missing from the world. “When we go to see works of art,” wrote Robert Hughes, “we want to be alone with them.” Hughes was referring to paintings, which reach us, like film and literature, in a completed state. They remain static, indifferent to their reception, unlike live performance, which transforms endlessly before our eyes and ears.
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Amy Hollingsworth
Amy Hollingsworth stood at the top of a huge, sweeping staircase, breathing in the anticipation of opening night.
The Royal New Zealand Ballet was reviving a production of Romeo and Juliet, her favourite ballet, by Christopher Hampson. It was 12 years ago, but Hollingsworth, playing Juliet, can still remember the hairs on her arms standing to attention as Prokofiev’s score filled Auckland’s Aotea Centre.
“I could feel the hush in the audience, it was quite extraordinary,” she says. “That descent down the staircase launched me into probably one of the best performances I’ve ever experienced of the balcony pas de deux.”
Hollingsworth is choosing her words carefully. She felt both immersed and outside herself that night, performer and audience at once. “It felt like something really special had happened.”
These days, Hollingsworth is artistic director of the Australasian Dance Collective, the Brisbane company formerly known as Expressions. Her career spans ballet to contemporary dance and beyond, and she has staged work in intimate and large spaces — the latter including a stadium tour for Kylie Minogue, with Rafael Bonachela.
Hollingsworth has given a lot of thought to the “incredible emotional charge” on stage. She talks to her team about the importance of knowing why they do what they do. “The better you can articulate that, the stronger the connection,” she says.
There is, she says, a “sacredness” in the performance space, an awe that comes from sharing intensely personal emotions with others. “It’s something that gives the theatre a heightened sense of importance and ceremony,” she says.
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Hugo Weaving
Like Hollingsworth, Hugo Weaving draws on the language of religion to describe live performance. Australians no longer attend church in the numbers they once did, and he suspects the collective consumption of art has been a part of that.
“To me, there are certain art forms that are really wonderfully communal,” he says. “We are all communing with each other, all focused on the same ideas or the same images or the same story. That’s a really important part of who we are.”
As an actor, Weaving has worked on a variety of productions, giving him a broad perspective on his craft. His films range from Hollywood hits (The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, Captain America) to Australian classics (Proof, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert). His television performances include Seven Types of Ambiguity and Patrick Melrose, while his voice can be heard in features including Babe and Happy Feet. Then there are his many memorable moments on stage, particularly with the Sydney Theatre Company. When the lockdown came into force, Weaving was in London, working on a National Theatre production of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s The Visit.
Whether working on stage or screen, his ambition remains the same: to invite people “into your head and your heart”.
Theatre has an obvious immediacy, but Weaving is enthusiastic about film and TV too. “There’s a different demand but it’s no less thrilling,” he says. “There is a sense that the eye of a camera is the unseen audience. But it’s a different audience. An intimate audience. A place where you don’t need to push, you just need to breath and be.” He pauses: “Stage is a little different. Your expression of being is different. It’s louder, bigger. I don’t mean literally, but it has to travel in a different way.”
For Weaving, theatre work follows a familiar pattern. He reads the script and images form in his mind’s eye. Rehearsals begin. He explores his character, steadily absorbing the rhythms into himself. “You move from it being outside you to it being inside you,” he says.
The director and crew are there, guiding the production. But the story has further to go. “You really need an audience to inform you where you are, how it’s sitting, how the whole story is being told,” Weaving says. “You’ve got a director there, giving you feedback on that very thing, but that director may have particular blind spots. What an audience brings is affirmation to all the ideas incorporated in the script and affirmation to all the work you have done. They will steer you into what’s working and what’s not. They will illuminate passages or rhythms which are working and which are not.”
Weaving has seen plenty of fine performances during rehearsals. But something is always missing until that auditorium around them is full. “Sometimes you can hear a pin drop and you know that particular build-up of tension is absolutely right. Or you’re getting waves of laughter and you know you’re on the right path,” he says. “Theatre is like a stream flowing. A movement from one place to another. It looks the same on the map but it’s incrementally changing, and for me there’s a similar sort of thing with live performance.”
In 1996, Weaving shared the stage at Belvoir with Geoffrey Rush in The Alchemist, Ben Jonson’s physical comedy that lent itself to reciprocity. “Geoffrey was very much interacting with the audience. We all were. We would try different things each night depending on what we felt like doing at the time.” It comes back to the purpose of art, how it serves to “illuminate” who we are as people. “There are plays that demand that close interaction with your audiences,” he says. “If you’re playing Richard III — I haven’t but I’d love to — he’s asking with his first soliloquy, right at the beginning: come with me on this journey, I’m a rascal and you’re complicit.”
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The Presets
During the lockdown, musicians around the world have posted scaled-down, acoustic versions of their work online. Not the Presets. Julian Hamilton and Kim Moyes, the two halves of the electronic dance duo from Sydney, have spent the best part of two decades playing to sweaty, energetic crowds around the world. Zoom doesn’t cut it.
“Obviously we enjoy making it,” Hamilton says, “but the real equation happens when the music is hitting a listener’s ears and they’re interpreting it for themselves, moving to it and dancing to it. That’s the important part.”
Hamilton and Moyes generally know what to expect at their shows. So do their fans. Most of their concerts, according to Hamilton, bop along at an energy level of 80 per cent. But occasionally the level drops to the 60s. He’s reminded of one winery show in South Australia, where the crowd felt oddly absent. Hamilton and Moyes still gave it their best, but something was off.
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Then there are the nights when the crowd lifts to 90 per cent. One took place earlier this year, shortly before the lockdown, when the Presets shared a bill with Golden Features at a warehouse in Hobart. “That was one of those magical, unexpected nights where it just went berserk,” Hamilton says. “You walk on stage and play one song and you just know the audience is up for it. You give a bit more and the crowd gives a bit more, and by the middle it’s just fire. You really remember those ones. You feed off them and they’re really fun to play. They’re the kind of things that sustain you as a performer.
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The Necks
Every performance by the Necks contains an infinite number of possibilities. Musically speaking, this goes without saying, since every note is improvised. But there are other variables. The instruments are rarely the same, since most are lent for each show. The acoustics shift from room to room as well. Then there’s the audience, and if they’re restless or riveted the musicians will know it.
“Everything is done at an almost subliminal level,” Swanton says. “We’re aware of the audience, but we’re trying very hard to not let it affect us in a negative sense. We’re trying to let the music speak at the pace it wants to speak.”
The Necks have released 21 recordings through the years, but only four recorded before a live audience. Part of the reason is technical: it’s hard to capture the sound accurately. “The microphone just isn’t as discerning as the human ear,” Swanton says.
But the studio has its limits. Every aspect of recording — mastering, mixing, promotion — is a joy for Swanton, apart from the actual recording itself. “Sitting in that airtight booth, playing music, I hate it.”
All of which results in a deep affection for audiences, despite that initial seclusion at the start of their career. “We’re all breathing and digesting and thinking and perspiring and alive,” says Swanton. “It’s just wonderfully affirming.”
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Keith Jarrett
More enthusiastic about live recordings is American pianist Keith Jarrett. His most famous is The Koln Concert, from 1975, when he overcame a substandard instrument and queasy stomach to make one of the most sublime spontaneous compositions recorded.
Jarrett, whose concerts are improvised, has a huge, passionate fan base. His relationship with those fans is tense: intimate, dependent, but fractious. More than one concert has gone off the rails because of coughing or other interruptions.
One solution would be to retreat to the studio, where Jarrett can remove the unpredictabilities of the concert hall and apply the greenhouse approach of the Necks. But no. He once reflected on “a conversation between the audience and myself over the entire span of my career”. That interplay is crucial, regardless or even because of the risks involved.
Sometimes, too, as with Hollingsworth, Jarrett feels as if he’s among them too, listening on, an observer as much as a participant in the creative process. Even if only one side is being paid.