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House on Fire.The Griffyn Ensemble with The Cashews. National Gallery of Australia, Saturday September 13 and Sunday September 14 at 2pm. Ticketing: griffyn.iwannaticket.com.au and information: griffynensemble.com.au
What a collaboration: the Griffyn Ensemble with Canberra pop-up duo, The Cashews, and at the National Gallery of Australia!
These performers aim to lead people to think outside the square, to twist their minds into new configurations, to challenge conventional thinking in the most original, innovative way. They are indeed in touch with the character of the painter Arthur Boyd.
The group's new offering, House on Fire, at the National Gallery of Australia on Saturday and Sunday, September 13 and 14 invites people to discover their place and identity in their homeland, provoked by the surreal Australian wilderness of Boyd's paintings displayed in the gallery's new exhibition, Arthur Boyd: agony and ecstasy, which opened last Friday.
The program is all new music and features songs about bogong moths, mountain tops, metamorphosis and the landscape around us.
Michael Sollis, composer and director of Griffyn, says that the whole program has been a collaboration with Alison Oakleigh and Pete Lyons of the duo The Cashews. "The eight of us will be sharing our own personal experiences because the concert is really about individuals and their places. We're really hoping to speak to the audience."
The Cashews play a number of intriguing instruments, sometimes even children's toys, as well as piano accordion, and are very much embedded in the Canberra environment.
Tuggeranong Parkway or Sullivan's Creek might be celebrated in their songs and they like to play at unusual gigs, maybe an underpass or a hillside on a summer evening.
"We're known for our guerilla gigs," Oakleigh says, "We just appear. We send out information an hour before a gig. We try to encourage people to think about Canberra in a different way. It's a way of community building. We love to perform on our own terms and tweak the corners, and we're often very tongue-in-cheek, maybe even a bit subversive."
"When we first started talking about this concert one of the things that came up was the cockatoo," Sollis says. "It figures a lot in Arthur Boyd's work – a sort of divine cockatoo – so the concert is going to be hosted by Clancy the Cockatoo."
Birds and animals appear in so much of Boyd's work. Even in the fragment of his painting, The Prodigal Son, which will be shown for the first time in this exhibition, they are present in the background to the biblical figures.
Boyd was enchanted by the brilliant light of the Canberra summer when he spent almost six months in a residency at the ANU during the early 1970s after more than a decade living in London.
"These days of Canberra summer when not quite washed out by rainstorms are for Arthur the purpose, justification and to a degree the consummation of the wish to be in Australia again," his wife, Yvonne, wrote to Alan McCulloch in 1972.
Boyd wanted to belong in the Australian environment and this concept of belonging is a central pivot of this concert.
"The exhibition will be open before and after the concert," Sollis says. "All the pieces have been written and inspired by Boyd's life and works."
The performance will take place inside Gandel Hall at the gallery, "But at a critical moment we'll move to Skyspace," Sollis says. This change from the elegant man-made interior of the hall across the courtyard to the magical Skyspace mound will alter perspectives and set in motion new trains of thought about the area around us. And, after all, isn't Canberra a place of constantly changing vistas and ideas?
"Ever since we met Griffyn at Canberra's Centenary we knew we were going to click," Oakleigh says, "and we started to collaborate."
"And it's been really exciting for us," Sollis says, "to be able to work outside the boundaries of pop music. Every concert is a bit of a surprise."