Andrew Carter can be a hard man to catch as he flits between Malaysia, London and Australia exhibiting his paintings and putting his talents to work creating the ambience to bring ballets, plays, opera and modern dance to life. The young Western Australian has become a sought-after theatre designer. Since graduating in industrial design from the Western Australian Institute of Technology-WAIT (now Curtin University) in 1979 and following this with a master's in theatre design at Yale in America, Carter has worked in New York, Denver, Bermuda, Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and the Hague. The creator of interesting and innovative sets, he has been commissioned to bring to life new works by a number of Australia's foremost choreographers, amongst them Barry Moreland, Graeme Murphy and Chrissie Parrot. He has worked with the Australian Ballet, Nederlands Dans Company, Australian Bicentennial Authority, Bermuda Arts Festival, Denver Centre Theatre Company, State Theatre Company of WA, WA Opera, WA Academy of Performing Arts and the ABC. Other projects include illustrations for Access Press, staging for television presentations, a 'light painting' for the Sci-Tech Centre in Perth and street lighting for the suburb of Joondalup. A trained singer, he plays flute and guitar and writes plays. Carter was a student at WAIT at a time when art and design were part of the same department, with students having the ability to move between the two, drawing from both disciplines. This has had advantages for him and a number of the other talented graduates whose practices now include both design and fine art. Carter does not remember his time there with great affection, but it was one of excitement and expansion, with frequent international travel for visitors and lecturers alike and increasing international interest in the arts of Australia. Contacts were made, particularly in the crafts, which made Australians international players. Carter's education, which spanned fine arts and industrial design, was particularly suitable for the path he was eventually to take. Indeed, Graeme Murphy has said of him: Set for Catalyst, 1991, showing dancers negotiating the rope sculpture. This set won awards for design.
'He has the craft and knowledge of the theatre, the vocabulary of the backstage world, the draughtsmanship and knowledge of perspective-of how to draw and then of how to make that perspective real in a theatre situation. How ideal can you get!' Carter was born in the Western Australian wheatbelt town of Goomalling into a gypsy lifestype as he moved with his parents, opera singer Elizabeth Hatfield Carter and scientist-chemist and concert pianist Keith Carter (who had by this time become a Methodist minister) to various rural centres and later to the United States whilst his father completed higher degrees at Yale. Early contact with the earth stimulated by creative and gifted parents has produced an innovative multi-talented artist bonded to his land who, although he works internationally, prefers to remain based in Western Australia. Carter's path to success has been a winding one. His father died when he was ten. He became a troublesome student, was expelled from high school and went into the printing trade before winning entrance into fine arts at WAIT. After clashes with lecturers, he transferred to industrial design and on graduation set up as an industrial designer. His main practice was designing furniture for upmarket office suites and it was while researching a commission that he became lost in the library stacks, strayed into the wrong aisle and came upon a volume which was to alter his life. The book fell open at a page of watercolour sketches of sets by acclaimed American designer Ming Cho Lee. Entranced, Carter spent the rest of the day engrossed. He knew at last what he really wanted to do. Noting that the designs were lent by Yale University, he wrote off to find out if Lee was teaching there and, if so, how to enrol. Papers were soon forthcoming for entrance to the highly competitive postgraduate course. Before he left, he designed The Magic Flute for the WA Opera Company. To his intense disappointment, it was mortally altered by the visiting director once he had departed. His delightful watercolour sketches for the sets of Lear, undertaken whilst at Yale, give an indication of the spare modern style which he developed-a style which leaves the imagination of the audience free to fill in the detail. Critic Jill Sykes has described them as having 'a power of suggestion all too rarely seen on stage... Without taking up valuable performing space or dwarfing the dancers, they make a bold yet abstract statement that leaves room for individual interpretation.' When designing for dance Carter has certain conventions to consider. The centre stage must be left empty-dedicated to the dancers-with room for the diagonal movements as well as lifts. He considers the peripheral areas and anything above three metres 'my space'. The rest is 'their space' and if his proposed design cuts into 'their space', he has to make a model and barter with the choreographer to provide alternative areas. Modern dance is easier in this respect. Chrissie Parrot, for whom he designed Mirror Coda-staged for the 1989 Festival of Perth-and Terra Nova, rises to his challenges. Her dancers gallantly clambered over the sets of Terra Nova and undertook aerial episodes. Before designing, he had long talks with Parrot, took her ideas and made them concrete. He described the set as domineering and powerful-the Brothers Grimm crossed with a World War II bunker meeting Jung. Two huge concrete pyramids (a brooding tower and rickety castle) were used to ground the powerful dance movements, a difficult concept which fortunately worked as a space as well as looking good. For Mirror Coda, he created a timeless place where light made sound and shadows glowed. 'The two worlds of reality and unreality come together for a brief moment to dance and touch', he said. 'The space I have designed is like a special portal in which this dimensional transformation takes place.' As with all his designs, they were influenced by music and words, the words of Chrissie Parrot and the music of WA composer Peter Hadley.
Carter has a consuming passion for his work. He sets high standards for himself, engaging in considerable research for each project. In 1986, as resident designer with the Royal Queensland Theatre Company, he designed Love's Labours Lost-a modern setting for a traditional play. As this was set on an island, he went off and lived on one for a while, setting up his camera to take photographs at regular intervals-sunrise, midday and sunset. He later incorporated these into the design, projecting them onto three screens behind a jetty and beach where most of the action took place. Scene changes were arranged by a change of lighting. For instance, the posts on the jetty could be lit to become a runway of an airstrip. He rarely uses walls in his sets, preferring to use an object to describe a wall and letting the audience use their imagination. Watercolour concept sketch of King Lear painted whilst at Yale. Model showing the curtains for The Lady of the Camellias. Much of Carter's work has been for the WA Ballet Company's Barry Moreland. Moreland commissioned designs for Pu/chine/la soon after Carter returned from America (without his American records, design folio etc. which were stolen from a container en route to Perth). This was not only the first ballet he had designed, it was in fact the first he had ever seen. He was obviously entranced not only with the dance but also by the dancers. The talented ballerina Natasha Middleton became his leading lady for some years. For the WA Ballet, Carter has designed Pavilions, The Owl and the Pussycat,
Vast set design of Act l segment : the Coast line, mangroves by a sunny shore. Vast: Concept painting used to develop the backdrop and reproduced in the programme. A Bicentennial event choreographed by Graeme Murphy. Cinderella, Seven Deadly Sins, Orpheus, Invisible Choirs, Strange Territory, The Lady of the Camellias, Billie and Hamlet. Carter found the freedom of working with ballet refreshing after the constraints of theatre. 'Working with Barry Moreland, I found a way of using first words on paper, then drawings and paintings, to articulate my understanding of what we are doing.' Moreland has said of him: 'He is a true collaborator. He doesn't just give you what you think you want. He collaborates until ultimately he designs what you both want.' Seven Deadly Sins, based on Bertolt Brecht's play, featured Jill Perryman with Natasha Middleton as her alter ego. Carter designed a somewhat surreal, richly polychrome set evoking a semi-conscious dream world. He described it as a skeletal design avoiding walls, with lots of levels appearing to float in space set in a black void. He reads prodigiously, visits sites, soaks up the atmosphere, immerses himself in the project and expects the same commitment from the other professionals for and with whom he is working. Graeme Murphy has said of him: 'You get more input from him sometimes than you can handle. This is in part because he takes total responsibility for his own design. The best thing for me to do is to give him the music and let him get on with it. Andrew has the rare ability to hear the secrets that the music is speaking.'
For Murphy's Sydney Dance Company, he designed Shining, following this with Song of the Night for the Nederlands Dans Theatre and Vast for the Bicentennial Authority. In the latter two, the costumes were by Jennifer Irwin. Carter and Irwin established a rapport so that costumes complemented not only the choreographer's concept, but also the set designer's themes and colours. Shining was applauded at home and on its international tour. For this he devised a space divider-a compounding, convex curve which diminished to one side-to separate reality from unreality. This ramp form was made of tiny sections which bolted together and came apart for packing neatly for touring. His industrial design training has proved useful. A neon sign of two figures embracing completed the minimal background. Vast was a huge Bicentennial undertaking, utilizing the talents of the WA Ballet Company, Queensland Ballet Company, Sydney Dance Company and the Australian Dance Theatre of Adelaide. Sixty-five dancers, a new score and new choreography for which sets had to be devised. He was told his job would be to produce artwork representing the scale and extremes of the continent. Underwater and cities were no problem, but the centre? To prepare himself for this, Carter undertook a solo drive in a landrover through Central Australia to discover for himself the essence of outback Australia. This he disthled as: distance, isolation, vibrant colour and the slow curve of a distant horizon. Most unexpected was the intensity of the colours. He devised a series of abstract mood sequences to suggest a profile of Australia. These impressed John Cargher who wrote in the Bulletin: 'The set designs by Andrew Carter are... beautiful, artistically flawless and, most importantly, effective as a stage picture, if abstract'. For acts one and two, he painted scenes of the inland and the coast which were transferred to huge cloth backdrops by scene painters of the Perth Performing Arts Workshop. A number of these images were also shown in the catalogue. For act three-the cities-he created a contrasting set of shimmering steel and glass, extraordinarily evocative of a teeming city. At a later stage, a backdrop of two large mismatched planets about to collide was used as a metaphor for unrequited love-or two people who never quite got together. The dancers appeared as whirling atoms in the universe. Song of the Night which toured France and other parts of Europe, was based on a concept of dealing with forces of good and evil and of making a choicean abstract narrative which needed an abstract design. After 'bashing his brains' for many hours, he commenced playing with forms in front of a lamp, eventually coming up with two guillotine shapes which could be manipulated to give satisfying effects. These hanging panels were suspended in front of a heavily textured backcloth to which he had applied rubber to create projections which could be side lit, an experimental technique which he continues to use in his paintings. In 1990, he designed Catalyst for the Australian Ballet. Stephen Bayne's sleek disciplined choreography to Poulenc's Concerto for Two Pianos was complemented by elegant abstract sets which suggested chandeliers, modern art and computer creativity. Catalyst is about a journey through time and he incorporated navigational symbols and other older mystical marks on backdrops which utilised fibre optics. The three-dimensional constructions were a rope sculpture and tunnel which the dancers negotiated. The design and choreography won awards in Australia and Europe. Exploring light, he built a 'sun painting' composed of refractory light for the Sci Tech Centre in Perth. Sunlight reflected from a roof-mounted parabolic mirror is concentrated through a hole in the roof onto about 50 prisms which split it into the spectrum before bouncing it off hundreds of small plant-like mirrors which further disperse the rainbow-coloured light all over the walls and onto birds cut from hologram film. Quite remarkable to experience. One of his greatest joys is the success of the designs for light poles for the Joondalup Development Corporation-a satellite city north of Perth. Although commissioned as an artist, it was his industrial design skills which allowed the
Right: Set for Catalyst for the Australian Ballet which toured the USA and Europe-dancers in front of the tunnel. Below Left: View from the Jungle, 1 993, 1750xl 000mm (commissioned by a Malaysian client) Below Right: The Lady of the Camellias was in neoclassic style, the nearest to a classic set Carter has designed. Described by critic Lynn Fisher: 'The set is genius, with an exquisite plum-coloured curtain scrim and valence and clever use of photographic blowups in the background.' project to proceed. He had the knowledge and expertise to argue with the engineers that the concept was realizable. Further projects are in the offing and he is quite excited about this. Carter has also turned his talents to other graphic arts. He has illustrated two books, The Veil and Smugglers' Cave for Access Press. He has held four solo exhibitions in Perth and Sydney and is currently completing a series of commissions for clients in Asia. Many, like his sets, are abstract impressions rather than detailed exposes of the subject. He has many projects on the go and is negotiating others, so watch for this name in any of his fields of endeavour. Dorothy Erickson Photography: Andrew Carter