Rural Utopias Residency: Bennett Miller in Mount Barker #3

Bennett Miller is currently working with the community of Mount Barker. This residency forms part of one of Spaced’s current programs, Rural Utopias.

Bennett Miller works across sculpture, installation, video and performance. In more recent years Miller's work has moved out of the gallery and into the public realm, through a series of live art performances for festivals and outdoor contexts.

Here, Bennett shares an update from Mount Barker.

Weeks 5 and 6 followed on directly from Week 4- so there weren’t many opportunities to break down or get Covid. This period was a bit more productive and I was very lucky to be able to stay at the excellent Karribank in the Porongorups throughout.  

I mentioned the Mount Barker ‘Sing for Joy’ choir in the first of these troubling reports- but at that time I had only seen them perform and hoped to work with them. Extremely fortuitously and with great thanks to them I have now attended a few of their weekly rehearsals. They are all very welcoming and kind, and willing to ignore completely the fact that I can’t sing. People say things like ‘Everybody can sing, just go for it’ but those people are either polite liars or people that have not yet heard my tuneless warbling.

Thankfully- everyone else in the choir can sing, and very well at that. They meet at the RSL on Booth St every Wednesday at 7. Sonia- the choir director- travels up from Denmark each week and guides everyone through the complicated harmonising involved. They are essentially a Gospel choir- with many of the songs either addressed directly to, or about, God. I like those ones, but I absolutely love the ones that could (also) be interpreted as being about the environment. They have been working on versions of Sylvie by Leadbelly (‘bring me a little water, Sylvie’), So Much Magnificence (‘near the Ocean’) by Miten and Come and Go to That Land by Bernice Reagon that I started to think of in that way. 

I’m not going to even try explaining why- but sitting in on these choir rehearsals has been one of the most enjoyable things I have ever done. I was always genuinely uplifted after it, and because it was also recorded- I would listen to it again and again in the intervening week.

Towards the end of this trip down there I also had a really great day on the King River, taking a paddleboard for hours down stream toward the ocean. I have since learned about the Kalgan River- which runs all the way from the Stirling Ranges to Albany- slightly to the north and/or east of all the areas that I have been staying in. Apparently it is one of the oldest rivers in the world and was for a brief time claimed by the French. When I go back I am going to attempt paddling down that one too, and hopefully I will be able to get through to some of its more remote sections.