Sadly, it was while doom scrolling on Facebook that I was informed of Keith Gallasch’s passing. I had received a few of these announcements of late so had to check its veracity. Like the others I had a mixture of hope and dread wanting, but not wanting, to know if it was as it said.
It’s hard to imagine the Australian Arts landscape without Keith Gallasch in it. I remember the day Keith and Virginia Baxter announced they were closing down RealTime magazine. I, like many other independent artists making work that either hadn’t quite found a readymade audience and/or, hadn’t quite mastered creating work that fit neatly into a clearly defined pre-packaged marketing friendly genre, were simply gutted. Who was going to get the word out there? Who was going to help attract the audiences able to appreciate those queer works? And by queer I mean, in all the ways that both include and exceed the obvious LGBTQIA reference.
This blog is not going to list all of the achievements Keith and partner Virginia made or their past lives as writers and performers. No, I can aptly redirect you to the TROVE website and the Wikipedia entry dedicated to RealTime for that. Instead I am going to tell you how they both unequivocally and almost single handedly changed the trajectory of my career, my life really.
It was the late noughties and I had been struggling to make a name for myself. Well not exactly a name, but a more solid or dependable living at least. I had a couple of full length works under my belt and was making pieces on other fledgling companies in an endeavour to maintain whatever momentum I had garnered. Upon seeing one of these modest works titled Pack, created on and for DirtyFeet’s program titled Tipping Point at the old performance Space venue on Cleveland Street, Keith had singled my work out as “fascinating”. It appeared as one paragraph wedged between a review of Bangarra’ Dance Theatre’s 20th Anniversary and Hiroaki Umeda’s inclusion in the 2009 Spring Dance program at the Opera House. I think I wore the grainy paper out tracing the words with my finger as I read and reread that passage.
Then in 2011 when I made Briwyant with a fantastic group of performer collaborators, which premiered at Carriageworks, as part of a Performance Space’ residency and presentation, Keith did a wonderful thing. Knowing his review wouldn’t be published in time to make a difference he wrote a viral email and sent it through his networks, which was picked up by producer Harley Stumm, who sent it through his networks and the rest of the season went gangbusters AND we managed to secure a national tour!
During this time Martin del Amo had interviewed me for RealTime, inviting me to unpack the meaning and creative processes underpinning Briwyant. I was so impressed by his ability to write creatively for his solo performances and in a journalistic capacity that an ambition to do the same was sparked within me.- And waddaya know? Again it was Keith who afforded me the opportunity to write as part of a First Nations contingent as part of a special editorial feature titled realblak. This represented a soft landing and from then on I was invited to review Indigenous dance works as part of their large stable. I mean, if it wasn’t for that RealTime experience and my wanting Martin del Amo’s position I wouldn’t be here writing today, I certainly wouldn’t have gone on to do a Masters in Dance and currently still be struggling with a PhD. (No I haven’t finished. But that’s another story.)
Don’t get me wrong Keith was very exacting. I remember hearing sound designer Gail Priest, who began in the advertising section and later taking on roles as assistant editor and online producer, jokingly recall agonising rewrites at the RealTime 20th anniversary celebrations. As Priest started reciting a few of his commiqués, which featured an enquiry into the specificity of choosing one word over another possibly more applicable one and whether or not a particular sentence was redundant, I began to get flashbacks over my emails, also complete with lists of correctives. Who’d have thought there was much difference between a cliff side and a cliff face? In hindsight of course I realise that one pertains to the overall nature of the thing, its size, while the other could lead us to meditate upon the facets of the cliff, its appearance. I, in turn, began to examine my word choice and turn of phrase, which del Amo is quick to point out has common appeal. The appeal of the commoner. I can’t and won’t deny it.
Yet again I was honoured to be chosen along with Martin del Amo and physical theatre company Branch Nebula to celebrate RealTime Magazine’s digital launch as part of an exhibition at UNSW titled In Response: Dialogues with RealTime, curated by Erin Brannigan. Walking through the three rooms that were made for each of us I realised that if it wasn’t for RealTime giving us a platform, we may never have realised all that we had. We just had the right people in our corner, of which Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter were very prominent.
So, in closing this, the first of two blogs this year, I would like to invite people to share their stories of Keith Gallasch, a keener advocate of the weird and wonderful you’d be hard pressed to find. He once wrote of dancers as these beautiful creatures that lived in the dark. I couldn’t find it to share with you but it was so wonderful I couldn’t help but feel that I was part of something precious. If you find it please post a link of it to me. Now go on, share in the comments your experiences of Keith.
Vicki Van Hout
FORM Dance Projects
Blogger in Residence
https://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue94/9661
https://www.realtimearts.net/article/103/10337
https://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue111/10802
https://digitalcollections.library.unsw.edu.au/nodes/view/3124