It was important to me that visitors to my envisioned lagerphone extravaganza understand that the totemic forms also served a musical purpose. I needed a live performance by The Lost Clog to showcase the various motifs and percussion workshops to capitalise on their sonic potential. I needed videos that demonstrated the lagerphones in action for the times outside the live performance. I needed a respected venue.
The humble lagerphone had been reimagined as an immersive, multi-media installation offering an autoethnographic exploration of hybrid Australian-Lithuanian cultural identity. Together, the lagerphones and the videos would take audiences on a visual, auditory, and poetic reimagining of Lithuanian folk traditions through a unique, antipodean lens, while also showcasing environmentally sustainable art practices. As global conflicts continued to generate waves of displaced persons and exact tolls on natural resources, Sparrow would showcase the leading role that culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) practitioners and communities play in championing both diversity and environmental sustainability. Furthermore, through reimagining traditionally sidelined musical artefacts and marginalised cultures for a contemporary art audience, I would re-assert their currency in – and capacity for – opening up broader narratives of migration, cultural fluidity and tolerance.
I teed up a percussion expert, a filmmaker, filming location, recording studio and respected exhibition venue. I devised a song cycle around the seasons. My largely solitary practice was transformed into collaborative extravaganza, with a large cast of personnel and an intense schedule of workshops, rehearsals, recording sessions and film shoots in place. Thanks to generous funding by Creative Victoria and the Australian Lithuanian Foundation, I had the funding and the talent pool to do my vision for The Sparrow Made Some Beer justice. It was all systems go.
Cue COVID.
Suffice to say that the uncertainty of snap lockdowns and the demands of rescheduling, relocating, reworking, rethinking – not to mention the challenges of rehearsals on Zoom – were brutal on morale and momentum. Even so, we actually pulled it off. In some cases, the outcomes were even better than expected.
The final exhibition featured a glittering forest of fifty lagerphones grouped according to habitat and seasons. The long, housebound evenings gave me time to embroider shirts for the Lost Clog men and sew new capes for the Lost Clog women from my stockpile of left-over fake fur from my Masters as well as excess Lithuanian tablecloths and my stash of cancelled Lithuanian coins. The video works by Mark Bakaitis in the new bushland settings were sublime and the percussion arrangements by Ben Smart were truly inspired. Our replacement sound engineer, Misha Herman, worked miracles on the audio recordings, setting the stage for a full CD with launch at the Melbourne Lithuanian Club, funded by the City of Melbourne. The Sparrow Made Some Beer went on to win the Australian Folk Music Association Award for Best Cultural Project, earning The Lost Clog a slot at the National Folk Festival in Canberra. It also scored me an artist residency and solo exhibition of lagerphones at the Kaunas Picture Gallery in Lithuania. By a miraculous alignment of stars, The Lost Clog happened to be in Kaunas in time for a special closing performance in the gallery.
It pays to be adaptable.
