4’33” Into the Past is the debut collaboration between dancer Julie-Anne Long and musician Glenn Thompson.
Glenn Thompson is a musician who has toured worldwide and recorded albums with Custard and the Go-Betweens. He has released a self-recorded solo album to international acclaoim and his 90’s hit Muisc is Crap, made it into the Courier Mail’s List of the 50 best songs from thr state of Queensland. Glenn was named in the top ten greatest alternative drummers in Australia on the prominent music website FasterLouder. Recently Glenn has focused his attention on building Horse Of Australia Studio in Marrickville where he recorded and mixed Custard’s first album in 15 years.
4’33” Into the Past was developed as part of Campbelltown Art Centre’s ‘I Can Hear Dancing’ program (2012) initially curated by Emma Saunders and curatorially developed by Kiri Morcombe and performed 25 & 26 September, 2015
What you see is the workings of the collaboration between Glenn and Julie-Anne – from sussing each other out, to doing what they know best and what they don’t know at all yet. Also in collaboration with Campbelltown Performing Arts High School students Georgia Briggs and Braxton Hegh.
“Despite a reluctance to do so, one can’t ignore saying something they do participate playfully and parodically with the provocations and propositions of Cage and others of this period historically labeled “happenings”….
The work feels less a happening that that things happened, offering us scenes or better yet events of not really knowing what or why, other than that we were ‘entertained’ by ‘art’ and fulfilled by the offering to “pay attention to what it is just as it is” (Cage 1957). Cage’s 4’33” is a paradoxical score about silence. Into the silence all we can hear is the noise. For Long and Thompson, the past-all we can find, and indeed applaud-is the present since the artists here are from where they were: Thompson, the little drummer from Queensland and Long “the prima batlet ballerina” (as she recorded in a childhood book of 1972 charting her then career) from suburban Auckland.” (Jodie McNeilly RT130 )