Making Art with Neil Pigot

13 Joanne Murray Smith

[https://makingart.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/making-art-episode-joanne-murray-smith.jpg] MAKING ART – EPISODE 13 JOANNE MURRAY SMITH Episode Released 22nd September 2020 Joanna Murray Smith is an elegant and fiercely intelligent woman so it came as no surprise that from the moment she resplendently appeared on the zoom link for our chat she launched headlong into a philosophical discussion about the effects of the current Covid lockdown on the creative soul. It’s unsurprising too that she became a writer. Born in to a literary, bohemian household the written word has been a significant presence in her life since she first opened her eyes. Her father was the writer, educator and radical public intellectual Stephen Murray-Smith perhaps best remembered as the founding editor of the left wing literary journal Overland. Her mother Nita was a music loving teacher with “a mind like a steel trap”. Both were voracious readers, so much so that on her mother’s death their library was bequeathed to Joanna and her two siblings and each received in excess of 10,000 titles. That childhood was one in which she was surrounded by the cream of the Australian intellectual and creative crop in a home where parties on weekends would be full of volatile tempers and good humour, weekends where her elder siblings would creep from their bedrooms early on a Sunday morning to see which titan of the Australian creative world had decided to sleep on the lounge-room floor. Over her thirty year career Joanna’s plays have graced the stages of more than 30 countries making her Australia’s most internationally successful female playwright and for me her work continues to tap that childhood experience, an ongoing fascination with wit and the troubling conflict between our public and private selves. It’s almost as if she can still hear those weekend conversations, fiery discussions fuelled by heavy drinking that went long in to the night between people immensely articulate in the public sphere, so sure of their views about the big issues and yet so troubled by their inner worlds, vulnerable in their unstable relationships, constantly grappling with their fractured views of themselves. And so it was, framed by the sun streaming almost ecclesiastically through the upstairs window of the inner Melbourne home to one side and a stacked column of books on the other that I chatted to the playwright Joanna Murray Smith.

12 Frank Woodley

[https://makingart.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/making-art-episodes-frank-woodley.jpg] MAKING ART – EPISODE 12 FRANK WOODLEY Episode Released 4th September 2020 Get Smart featuring Don Adams as the secret Maxwell Smart is without doubt one of the greatest comedy series of all-time. A product of the scatological minds of Mel Brooks and Buck Henry it was a favourite of mine growing up and while I loved the comedy I think I was more enamoured with the fantasy. Secret agents were my thing and while Maxwell Smart was fine for that half hour after school, The Men from Uncle and Sean Connery’s James Bond were my boyhood idols. My guest this week was also a fan of Agent 86 but it was not the espionage that caught his eye. It was the hilarity of cones of silence, men in letter boxes, lines like “not the grass, the grass” and particularly Adams’ relentlessly inventive physical comedy that took his fancy. And so it was that at the age of 18 Frank Woodley, nee Wood, set off for the Adelaide Fringe Festival with a comedy sketch show Gad. The year was 1986, the show flopped but Frank, thankfully, kept at it. Not long after he met Colin Lane and the two, along with friend Scott Casely began performing together, enjoying reasonable success as the trio Found Objects. When Casely bowed out in 1992 Lano and Woodley was born and within 2 years the duo had conquered the Edinburgh Festival winning the coveted Perrier Award. And just two years after Edinburgh they were starring in their own, self-devised and self-written television show “The Adventures of Lano and Woodley”. It was a hit and two Australian comedy legends were born. [https://makingart.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Lano-and-Woodley-return.jpg] Together with Col, Frank had created perhaps one of the greatest modern expressions of that most recognisable of comedic forms, the double act, following in the footsteps of Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello and Martin and Lewis. And when the duo decided to amicably split in 2006, thousands turned out across the country to catch one last glimpse of the much loved duo in their farewell show Goodbye. In the years that have followed Frank has enjoyed a prolific and highly successful solo career which has included sell out shows at our major festivals and a television series Woodley and in doing so he has cemented his place in the Australian comedy pantheon, delighting audiences with his own blend of innocence, wit and physical comedy in the tradition of his heroes Keaton and Chaplin. I hope you enjoy my conversation with the always thoughtful, always playful and always delightfully warm Frank Woodley.

11 Jo Lloyd

[https://makingart.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/making-art-episodes-jo-lloyd.jpg]Photo: Peter Rosetzky MAKING ART – EPISODE 11 JO LLOYD Episode Released 21st August 2020 The art of choreography, the skill of communicating complex ideas through movement alone, is not an easy one. Enter Melbourne’s Jo Lloyd. Creatively restless and wary of comfort zones, over the past 2 decades Jo has created a body of work that continues to challenge both hers and her audiences expectations, work that is brimming with ideas and creative risk, dance she herself calls “choreography as social encounter”. And watching a Jo Lloyd piece you begin to understand what she mean by that description. Dancers writhe, run, jump and roll, their bodies seemingly possessed by play but with a deeper intent. It is work that is brimming with the richness of life’s experience, so much so that rather magically all of life’s joys and traumas can appear to slowly enter the room as a performance unfolds. And when the dancers throw their limbs or shake their bodies it begins to feel like they are reliving those life experiences, your experiences or alternatively being slapped and then cajoled by new ideas that can then seem to slowly slide out through the ends of their fingers and toes as they move on. [https://makingart.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/making-art-jo-lloyd-live.jpg]Photo: Peter Rosetzky It’s compelling work that is trying to tell us something and not just something glib. Work that feels urgent and connects through movements that whilst highly technical seem incredibly loose, physically precise but at the same time utterly human. And this in many ways mirrors Jo’s thinking about making art. For her it is the human process of making a work that is fundamental, it is what the work is about, so much so that Jo herself says “the process is the piece”. When we met virtually Jo’s initial worry was that because her thinking is so connected to the physicality she experiences in her studio space she wouldn’t be able to come up with anything to say. That could not have been further from the truth. I hope you enjoy my chat with Jo Lloyd. website – www.jolloyd.com [https://www.jolloyd.com]

10 Paul Kelly

[https://makingart.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/making-art-episodes-paul-kelly.jpg] MAKING ART – EPISODE 10 PAUL KELLY Episode Released 8th August 2020 It’s easy, particularly it would seem in this country, to underestimate the impact certain individuals have on our cultural life. We don’t hold our culture in our consciousness and so we can miss the fact that a person has been quietly creating a body of work that spans several generations, and that that body of work has seeded itself into our subconscious surreptitiously becoming a part of who we are. Paul Kelly is such an individual. Over four decades he has chronicled our social and cultural landscape with dozens of songs that feel as familiar as an old pair of slippers. To Her Door, Dumb Things, Leaps and Bounds, Sydney from a 747, Darling it Hurts and that magical Australian Christmas song, How to Make Gravy, are the products of a man who for four decades has provided us with a reassuring, ever evolving, always surprising musical presence. A window to ourselves that he has offered quietly and unassumingly. And that’s Paul. Gentle, generous, graceful, thoughtful. I met with Paul at his house just before lockdown. I hope you enjoy our chat. THE REMORSE OF THE DEAD O shadowy Beauty mine, when thou shalt sleep In the deep heart of a black marble tomb; When thou for mansion and for bower shalt keep Only one rainy cave of hollow gloom;And when the stone upon thy trembling breast, And on thy straight sweet body’s supple grace, Crushes thy will and keeps thy heart at rest, And holds those feet from their adventurous race;Then the deep grave, who shares my reverie, (For the deep grave is aye the poet’s friend) During long nights when sleep is far from thee,Shall whisper: “Ah, thou didst not comprehend The dead wept thus, thou woman frail and weak”— And like remorse the worm shall gnaw thy cheek.

09 Robyn Butler & Wayne Hope

[https://makingart.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/making-art-episodes-robyn-butler-wayne-hope.jpg] MAKING ART – EPISODE 09 ROBYN BUTLER & WAYNE HOPE Episode Released 17th July 2020 What qualities are desirable if you want to succeed in the arts? It’s an interesting question that for some reason has a habit of throwing up some rather abstract responses. Whenever the question gets posed it seems to encourage people to go off on the most extraordinary tangents for reasons known only to themselves. A colleague of mine remembers that when she was considering the visual arts she asked someone what they thought and was simply told “you’re going to be poor until you’re dead and then you’ll be famous.” Which is not exactly advice per se despite the fact that in some cases it’s actually true. I’m pleased to say she did become a visual artist and quite a successful one at that. Budding musicians on the other hand are regularly given warnings about the dangers of imbibing illicit substances. “Stay away from the drugs” they say. Sound advice for anyone really but as another friend of mine pointed out, the cocaine tends to come after you’ve achieved success, not as you’re searching for it. Luck is always high on the list of attributes one gets told they should aspire to but frankly, telling someone that they need to be lucky is, well, let’s just say it’s not really practical guidance. You can learn to sing but can you learn to be lucky? [https://makingart.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/making-art-episodes-robyn-butler-wayne-hope-work.jpg]The couple at work I was told that if I wanted to be a successful actor there were 10 books that I must read and that I should always dress like someone’s watching. I won’t bore you with the entire catalogue but I will say one was War and Peace and the others were in a similar vein. I will also happily confess that I am still to read Tolstoy’s weighty tome although I did have a copy of it on my bookshelf for many years until guilt forced me to give it away. Dress? I dress like a 58 year old and have since I was 20. Over the years I’ve come to understand that the most valuable qualities one can have as an artist are those human qualities at the giving end of the spectrum. Openness, generosity, compassion and patience. If you throw in commitment, courage and drive you might just get somewhere. And when you sit down with Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope that’s exactly what you see. The couple met as actors on a TV show in the late 90’s. Robyn, at the time a single mother, was initially wary of a relationship but Wayne gently persisted, they fell in love, married and in 2004 with a digital camera purchased from Tandy Electronics and a boom pole made from the leg of a camp stretcher they produced, wrote, directed and acted in their very first, very much hand-made TV series Stories from the Golf. A fine example of courage and commitment that brought them a little luck. Thirteen 5 minute episodes were produced which took them 5 minutes over the one hour of produced television drama required to apply to Film Victoria for development funding. An opportunity they seized with all four hands. [https://makingart.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/making-art-episodes-robyn-butler-wayne-hope-sftg.jpg]It all began with Stories from the Golf Since then they have produced two daughters and their drive and commitment has seen them create a string of hit television series including The Librarians, Upper Middle Bogan, Very Small Business and Little Lunch. Their latest effort is a children’s detective series set in a Melbourne primary school and as luck would have it, straight out of the box, The Inbestigators has received overwhelming critical acclaim and become a bona fide international hit, seen in over 150 countries. But is it simply luck? [https://makingart.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/making-art-episodes-robyn-butler-wayne-hope-inbestigators.jpg]At work on The Inbestigators We met in offices behind a nondescript door devoid of signage that is home to their prolific production company Gristmill. And in a room dominated by a whiteboard we sat around the table and had a lengthy, generously honest chat. I hope you enjoy listening to my conversation with Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope.