Art and the arthropod

We swat them, trample them underfoot and spray them with poisons, but the bugs that surround us have a story to tell. As a multi-legged circus troupe crawls into town, here are some inspirational insects.

I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air -
Between the Heaves of Storm -
- Emily Dickinson, 1862

WHEN she lyricised about a fly's starring role at her imagined death, poet Emily Dickinson offset the trivial - a vexatious insect - against life's most shattering event. That the metaphysics of death could be so earthed by the noise of a maggotty fly seems a cruel irony. Why, we wonder, didn't Dickinson deploy her swatter while she still had some strength?

She wanted, of course, to use the fly's buzz to get us thinking about the paradoxes of existence. Any trace of the transcendent divine at her deathbed is sideswiped by that irritating buzz; there is no ''Power'' witnessed in the room and it is futile, her poem suggests, to search for meaning beyond earthly existence. Our bodies inevitably give out and become fly-attracting corpses.

Poor flies. Rarely do we give thanks for them, or for mosquitoes or spiders, much less celebrate their existence, especially in summer. Annoyance and revulsion tend to triumph over admiration. Indeed, bad publicity seems to be the fate of arthropods, a group that includes insects and arachnids. As entomologist Patrick Honan reveals when we tour Museum Victoria's storerooms of living exhibits, most people are familiar with a mere 0.5 per cent of all insects - and these tend to be the notorious, criminal types: irritating, disease-bearing, venomous.

Insects make up more than half the living organisms on Earth. While humans would probably perish without them, they'd get on fine without us (except, perhaps, for head lice). Yet we fumigate them, squish them underfoot, knock them out of existence with a satisfying swat and think of them - excepting ladybirds and butterflies - purely as pests. And in our gardens we spray the ''baddies'' with pesticides, ignorant of all the helpful, gorgeous insects that die with them. So little wonder that pandas, tigers or elephants get the sympathy and funding on near-extinction lists, while few tears are shed for endangered species of stick insect, spider or ant.

Yet, in our art and culture, insects are used as a metaphor not only for anxieties and terrors, but to explore more elevating, beautiful ideas. At places such as Museum Victoria, much is done with the live exhibits to help us understand and admire the huge diversity and splendour of insects, arachnids and other arthropods in the invertebrate world - and, in the case of bees and other pollinators, their crucial role in our own survival.


Many composers, filmmakers, poets, writers and visual artists draw great inspiration from these incredible creatures. When Brazil-based director Deborah Colker started working on the latest Cirque du Soleil production, OVO, she thought it would be interesting to explore the beautiful dynamics and physical similarities between insects and the Cirque acrobats, who ''seem to have more legs and arms than the insects themselves''.

''Like insects, acrobats can fly, climb, jump, run and spin in amazing ways,'' says Colker, who has spent much time researching in the rainforests near Rio de Janeiro, where she lives. ''Insects are the smallest creatures that man can see and they can both irritate us or beautify our lives. They are so small and so important in the cycle of nature. I wanted to give personality, emotions and stories to each of the families of insects."

She does that through the movements her performers have learnt to do, even 14 metres high on the trapeze, up against an abseiling wall or in the air above a trampoline. Watch the crowd at a performance of OVO and you can see their prejudices about insects dissolve. Take the ants: somehow, the six Cirque women who play these insects with zeal and skill manage to make us adore a creature we usually notice (and exterminate) only when they make a summer invasion of the kitchen.

In Colker's hands, and those of her costume designer, Liz Vandal, the six performers dressed as ants seem to elicit more applause and affection than any other OVO act, simply because they mix incredible gymnastics with an impossible serenity, tossing each other into the air like so many inflatable beach balls. Under the Cirque big top in Sydney, before OVO's Melbourne season, they attack oversized kiwi fruit and pieces of baby corn, the red antennae on their cute little heads twitching from side to side. And as they tumble their food, and each other, about on astonishingly strong legs and arms, the crowd gasps with uncontained delight.

The sort of celebration that comes through in OVO and other insect-focused work such as the much-loved films A Bug's Life (1998) and Antz (1998) was far from the brooding mind of Franz Kafka when he wrote his short story The Metamorphosis in 1915. In the tale, he wanted to use a creature that would evoke scorn and disgust - and so the character Gregor mysteriously transforms into a verminous cockroach-like bug.

Along with all those other creepy-crawlies we try to expunge, the cockroach is a locus for much human anxiety and disgust; we like to think of ourselves above all other creatures, especially the scavengers. Yet, as Museum Victoria's Honan points out, in Australia there are only three or four species of cockroach (all of them introduced) that will come into the home to fossick. No one ever mentions the 400 or so native cockroach species that go about their business under bark and leaf litter, because, simply, we don't know about them.

Nor do we spend time contemplating the 40 or so species of funnel web spider, one of which inhabits the Dandenong Ranges (''People are horrified when they learn that,'' Honan says). Or the big trapdoor spiders that might be found in every Melbourne suburban backyard if we cared to look. In the museum's storage rooms (one is tropically humid) are many different arthropods. There is the huge native tarantula (which can be found as far south as Mildura), enormous katydids the size of an infant's hand, hard-to-see stick insects and gloriously symmetrical orb spiders hanging from the ceiling in their magnificent webs. Not to forget the plastic bag of wriggling scorpions, just collected in the Grampians, that Honan still has on his desk.

Honan runs arachnophobia courses and plays several other educative roles to dispel myths (such as the ones about white-tail spider bites causing arachnogenic necrosis, or a daddy-long-legs being highly venomous), and it seems all the anxiety he sees is caused by our fear of difference.

That is why, in the cinema in particular, insects are frequently used as the aesthetic jumping-off point for hideous monsters, such as in Starship Troopers (1997), Alien (1979) or The Fly (1986), in which director David Cronenberg educed great disgust by splicing a scientist with a fly. And for those who can bring themselves to watch Tom Six's Human Centipede films, insect horror reaches unprecedented bounds.

Far more celebratory is Isabella Rossellini's wacky Green Porno video series, in the first season of which the actor - in glorious outfits - enacts the sexual behaviour of insects including the dragonfly, spider, bee, praying mantis and fly. Watching her thoroughly enjoy herself as a spider creeping up on big mama to quickly impregnate her, or as drone bee humping away until its penis is severed, or as a fly vomiting digestive juices onto its dinner … well, it is fabulous.

This sort of fun is far from the minds of the scientists at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research's shiny new $1.5 million insectary, where, next month, containers of Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes will be arriving from India under strict quarantine. Insectary staff hope to unravel a way of beating malaria, whose complex life cycle is enabled by this mosquito vector.

As entomologist Sara Erickson leads a tour of the facility - with five doors and two airlocks, one of them refrigerated, to prevent escapee mozzies - it becomes increasingly clear her intimate knowledge of mosquitoes combines scientific skills with a dollop of admiration for these malaria-bearing creatures. She is careful, though, not to attribute the apparent intelligence and wily behaviour of mosquitoes to anything other than evolution - characteristics artists' imaginations might get carried away with.

Like these scientists, though, Melbourne artist Catherine Clover has gone to great lengths in the name of insects: her art installations are sound-based, some stimulated by a three-month research trip to China several years ago. There, she was astonished by a thriving cricket culture - not the sport but the insects, kept in cages as pets and displayed for admiration and trade in local parks.

''They were insect markets,'' Clover says. ''Everyone I met had a high consciousness of insects, which you wouldn't have in a Western country. Everyone had an opinion, experience or memory about them - it was quite astounding.''

Clover's romance with insects started with listening: in the summer months, her consciousness of the sounds made by crickets and cicadas in particular, the rhythms and qualities of their sounds, started to intensify. She gathered the sounds, and listening is now her main research method.

Watching, however, was the primary tool for Colker while designing OVO, and insects have become her ''passion, art, nature, consciousness''. She even spent time with renowned Canadian entomologist Georges Brossard.

''I have always observed the insects and I have always been fascinated by their colours and shapes,'' Colker says. ''Very often nature seems to me - or, more specifically, the insects - to be made of plastic or specially manufactured because of how precise and perfect they really are.''

Backstage in the Cirque tent,

head of wardrobe Deborah Linden and assistant artistic director Jen Bender explain how Colker's OVO vision has been created and maintained. Linden, for example, takes care of the 18 types of outfits (cricket, ladybird, ant and so on) worn by the 54 performers, who each use up to four to six copies of their outfits a day. Because of the various stresses on knees and elbows as the artists mimic the body language of insects, that means a lot of upkeep.

French Olympic gymnast Yahia Icheboudene plays one of the crickets in OVO and says he attended many Cirque workshops on acting, dance and movement to learn how to adopt the distinct moves of a cricket (he is good at leaping).

He also watched documentaries. ''At first it was hard to move with [the costume] and to jump and run,'' he says, giving a quick and convincing demonstration of an insect's head movements. ''You have to make a different face in three seconds.''

As Colker explains it, this is part of the ''vocabulary of movement'' she has set down for each of the insects: gestures, postures, ways of dancing that mean the spiders are erotic, the butterflies romantic, the ants small, precise and synchronised, and the crickets joyful, bouncy and humorous.

For Michelle Matlock, who stars as the Ladybug, research revealed the most important aspect of her character would be its sound. ''She is constantly making bug noises,'' she says.

''I discovered a language for her. It's not English but I hope people understand what I am saying.'' They do.

They also love the moment when her Ladybug gets stuck on her back, trilling in alarm, limbs frantically flapping. Our impulse, after all, is to help this gorgeous, colourful insect and put her back on her feet.

Andrew Stephens travelled to Sydney as a guest of Cirque du Soleil.

OVO is at the Big Top at Docklands from January 17. cirquedusoleil.com

Itsy-bitsy stars

NIKOLAI Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee made a musical delight of that strange creature's sounds and aerodynamics but in the cinema, most references to bugs and insects tend to be heavy with horror. In films such as The Fly, The Swarm, Mimic and Cronos there is no end of revulsion, but bugs get cute in children's films such as A Bug's Life, Bee Movie and Antz, with their kooky portrayal of the insects' behaviour and lives, while Eight Legged Freaks challenges stereotypes with its tagline of ''Do you hate spiders? Do you REALLY hate spiders? Well they don't like you either''. And who could forget Mothra, Godzilla's fuzzy-winged enemy?

In literature, children's books have mined the arthropod field deeply, from E.B. White's Charlotte's Web and William Joyce's The Leaf Men to a string of works by Eric Carle, including The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Grouchy Ladybug, The Very Busy Spider, The Very Quiet Cricket and The Very Clumsy Click Beetle.

There must be something about insects, too, that appeals to musicians, not only in naming their bands - the Beatles, Adam and the Ants, and more obscure artists such as the Maggots from Mars, Grasshopper and the Golden Crickets, and Butterfly Messiah - but in their songs. For every band with an insect-related name, there must be 100 songs titled after the enormous range of critters: Beetles by Aphex Twin; Fleetwood Mac's Fireflies; Spanish Fly and The Full Bug by Van Halen; Pink Floyd's King Bee (and I'm a King Bee by the Doors); Love Is Like a Butterfly by Dolly Parton; or the Who's Boris the Spider. Not to mention La Cucaracha, Bug-a-Boo by Destiny's Child, Cab Calloway's Jitterbug, Puccini's Madame Butterfly and Herb Alpert's Spanish Flea. And, as well as all those children's rhymes (Itsy Bitsy Spider - or Eency Weency Spider, depending on your locale), there is the world of video games, where creepy crawlies such as centipedes, ladybugs and wrigglers feature in nearly all the Super Mario Brothers games.

Charlie Cameron