Troop Drill at Fort Lytton
Brisbane, Australia, 2009
Troop Drill provides a very satisfactory, safe and quick method of moving large groups of people from one point to another. Furthermore it is a satisfactory method of warming up before more concentrated work is commenced.
This project draws from two hunches: (1) that audience participation is a valuable aspect of experiencing contemporary art, and (2) that traces of history survive in the everyday like spectres; there whether you can seen them or not.
By the mid nineteenth century the Pacific was crawling with colonisers – Russians in the north Pacific, French in New Caledonia, Portuguese in Timor, Dutch in Indonesia, Germans in New Guinea. All along the Australian coastline from Torres Strait to Fremantle the ruins of typical nineteenth century garrisons are proof that the British colonies in Australia felt very exposed.
Fort Lytton, a pentagonal structure surrounded by grassy embankments and a moat, was built in 1881 on reclaimed land near the mouth of the Brisbane River. It survives as evidence of the kind of colonial nervousness that imagined such structures might repel invaders. As the birthplace of Queensland’s military history, Fort Lytton provided the main training grounds for the volunteer Queensland army, many of whom rode from as far north as Gladstone to be part of the annual encampment, an event marked by “tales of camp revelry, daring and fellowship”.
Troop Drill will call on volunteer audience members to enlist prior to the set date. Along with the site and the event, each of these volunteers will become part of the material of the night-time project. Historically, various kinds of troop drill have been used as methods of mobilising groups of people. This project will draw from the history of Fort Lytton to raise questions about possible parallels in the way audiences for contemporary art are controlled and mobilised, and aims to foster a means through which to call up past spectres of camp revelry, daring and fellowship. Audience volunteers will be required to self-document for the period of the project, and to volunteer their participation in the conditions and requirements undertaken as part of the project. Live animals may be involved.
“Hoffie’s performance titled Troop Drill, was staged at dusk on the mouth of the Brisbane River at Fort Lytton. Built in 1881 and used for the defence of Brisbane until the end of World War II, the fort occupies a site with a complicated history. Once a traditional crossing for Aboriginal inhabitants, then the mustering ground for Queensland’s far-flung Light Horse Brigade, it is now a national park. The concrete structure’s pentagonal plan creates a natural, grass-floored amphitheatre in which Hoffie choreographed the thundering entrance of 16 horses to music produced on didgeridoos, bagpipes, and electric guitars. As hundreds of spectators watched the horses and riders move through their paces, archival footage of the Australian Light Horse Brigade was projected into the crumbling walls of the Fort, creating a visceral, eerie meeting of past and present. Nostalgia was not the goal: Hoffie sought to use the power and bulk of the animals, the anachronism of a leisure-time re-enactment of defence training, and the site’s potent aura to produce a powerful connection to place: “So many aspects of the site are powerful—the Indigenous heritage, the irony of a ‘ruin’ in a place like Queensland, the reminder of the sheer futility of ‘keeping out’ anything from elsewhere …the fact that things are still capable of re-surfacing many years later can be a potent force in realising connections.”
More info at: https://sculpturemagazine.art/pat-hoffie-and-the-sublime-impossible/
