realtime 101: what next—2011?
over 90 artists tell what's in store in 101 words
Lisa O’Neill and Christine Johnston, 1998
photo Jodie Ranger
Lisa O’Neill and Christine Johnston, 1998
I am starting a band with my long time creative partner Christine Johnston, I’m not a musician…But that’s okay. Christine has for many years said “You would look great in a band; I want to start a band and put you in it!” The response from my fellow practitioners was “What the f…k do you play?” I replied, “I’ll create my own position in the band!” So I’m now a proud member of what we call RRAMP. I thought it worth mentioning this project as a work that has pushed my performance practice into yet another and sometimes challenging direction. Lisa O’Neill, performer, choreographer, director
EXPLORATIVE BOUNDARY-CROSSING EXPEDITIONS AND COLLABORATIONS DELVING INTO THE AQUATIC, THE FORESTED AND THE INTER-GALACTIC. Aphids 2011 program launches with a BIG BANG, as heart-throb Kamahl serenades and croons mysteries of the universe in VOID LOVE, a concert and soap opera about deep space and astrophysics. Coral spawning, sex and death on the reef are placed under a voyeuristic lens, as Aphids develop CORAL WORK in flotation tanks and on the Great Barrier Reef. Mixed reality gaming infiltrates the coastlines and parklands of Southern Victoria with ATELIER EDENS, an R+D lab developing transmedia experiences and live performances in site-specific and natural environments. Willoh S Wieland & Thea Beaumann, Aphids
Cordelia Beresford, Superhero, My Favourite Doll
Two ideas I am working on in 2011: My Favourite Doll—video & still photography portraits of young children, boys and girls, with a human-form toy they project personal attributes onto, in some way examining the ‘wish-animism’ that is a normal part of infantile self-object development. I am fascinated by how we gain our sense of personal identity, along with all the cultural and gender-specific role-playing that forms it. Splitting—a multi-image video work, with psychic division as a starting point, portrays two female characters from two different eras inhabiting the same physical space and subconsciously reacting to each other. Cordelia Beresford, cinematographer, video artist
Every night, as we fall asleep, we leave the earth for just a while. In Sweet Dreams the singers of Song Company take flight into a different realm, a world of dreams, just by singing, and whilst singing, by creating images with their shadows and some of the wonderfully simple and self-made creatures of our collaborator, ecological systems designer Stephen Mushin. Think of it as ‘back to the cave.’ Or back to nature. Or back to our childhood. Sweet Dreams. The program will premiere in October before going to South America, then returning to Australia for the company’s final season in December. Roland Peelman, Artistic Director, Song Company
Currently I’m making a work with the Royal Flanders Ballet in Antwerp. In April-May I’ll be with the Ballet Du Rhin in France creating a new version of The Rite of Spring, experimenting with a sound engineer on the compartmentalisation and placement of sound throughout the theatre, including the wings, the back of the auditorium and from the stage itself amongst the dancers. For ADT I’ll make a work incorporating a live illustrator mark-making in charcoal throughout the performance in direct conjunction with the dancers. I’ll also be developing a new work that experiments with the dancing body and live processed video and photographic imagery. Garry Stewart, Artistic Director, Australian Dance Theatre
Skye Gellmann
This year I’m moving to a far away island to pursue love. I thought that Melbourne and its relationship with depression was on the cards but I was stolen. I effortlessly think about somebody all day and every moment boils down to seeing them again. For example, I write grants and they all read like dodgy schemes to go overseas! Still, I do have a couple of new art projects (both computer-game/performance hybrids) but the real challenges in my life are: selling all my belongings, re-starting my life and shedding hang-ups. In 2011 I encourage readers to feel 18 again. Skye Gellmann, physical theatre artist
Our year got off to a great start with Gob Squad’s Super Night Shot at the Sydney Opera House as part of Sydney Festival. Jeff Khan joins our team and I’m looking forward to working with him and Bec Dean on a truly interdisciplinary approach to our program. I’m really pleased we’re shaking up our programming model a little. We have two seasons at CarriageWorks—Uneasy Futures and Exchange—but heaps more on throughout the year. Watch out for WALK—it’s off-site and on-the-streets—and a whole range of projects ranging from Applespiel’s residency to the premiere of My Darling Patricia’s new work. Daniel Brine, Artistic Director, Performance Space
Field Theory: the second year of an experiment in sustainability and exchange. We’ll send out 800 handmade gifts. You can put $100 towards art projects that otherwise wouldn’t have seen the light of day. The last year of field theory has allowed for a colour audit of a megamall, an online soap opera about astrophysics starring Khamal and IVF family portraits. Jason Maling, Deborah Kelly and Willoh S Weiland thank you from the bottom of their hearts and pockets. Those in the know have seen glimpses of prismatic auditor socks and flammable magnets in the crevices of homes, streets and legs. 2011 will see four new projects and several gift sweatshops come to life. Lara Thoms, field theory
Di Smith, Frances Barrett, Kate Blackmore, (Kelly Doley not pictured), Brown Council, work-in-progress
courtesy the artists
Di Smith, Frances Barrett, Kate Blackmore, (Kelly Doley not pictured), Brown Council, work-in-progress
“This footage is really dark and shaky, but you can just make out the water surrounding the base of the ladder. The water is electrified, so if I fell, I would have been electrocuted…you just had to be there…” Chris Burden. We are excited to be developing A Random Selection of Video Tapes, an exhibition for Artspace in November. Inspired by Burden’s lo-fi documentary about his practice, we will explore documentary filmmaking and performance art documentation to see how they shape our cultural memory. We are especially interested in investigating the notion of ‘truth’ within such documentation and the role of the artist as its harbinger. Brown Council, video and performance artists
We’re excited about:
Only communicating in lists
4 shows we think will be irresponsible
4 Rough Draft creative developments
Not pursuing ‘the truth’
Not worrying about rationality
Sometimes being unreasonable
Not navel gazing
Having nothing constructive to say
Having a beer
No small talk
Theatre that’s:
Not sweet
Not edifying
Illogical
Confused about morality
Might not have big narratives
Not out to make Australia seem normal
Not about making the audience feel educated and intelligent
Contrary. Elusive. Sceptical. Delirious. Bitter. Bothersome. Arousing. False. Tawdry. Light. Archaeological. Foolish. Lewd. Innocent. Debauched. Volatile. Noxious. Spectral. Wanton. Illustrative. Pretty-Ugly. Profane-Sacred. Poor. Sad. Filthy. Tom Wright, Associate Director and Polly Rowe, Literary Manager, Sydney Theatre Company, for Next Stage
My year will start at Peter Brook’s Bouffes du Nord in Paris performing My Dearest, My Fairest, a love story told through music and played only on toy instruments. Celebrating its 10th year, this piece originated at Berlin’s Schaubühne and has since played in opera houses throughout Europe, the bars of Buenos Aires and Tel Aviv and, most memorably, Peter Lehmann’s wine warehouse in the Barossa. From the near ruin of the beautiful Bouffes du Nord, an Asialink scholarship takes me to its very antithesis—the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre where I will be their artist in residence. Joanna Dudley, director, performer, singer
My Vinyl Arcade, Lucas Abela,
photo Alex Davies
My Vinyl Arcade, Lucas Abela,
2011 is going to be busy indeed: I’m currently touring Indonesia. My Vinyl Arcade project is going gangbusters, starting the year in the Australia Council window, then as an installation at Imperial Panda festival in March before being shipped off to Austria for the Donau festival in Krems in April. dualpLOVER is touring ravesploitation act Captain Ahab from LA in Feb. Justice Yeldham has a European tour, and I’m building him new instruments at Cydonia glass studios. I’ll be debuting Mix Tape at Tinsheds in June, a curated exhibition of exposed audio tape/interactive installation. And finally my fingers are firmly crossed that my proposed tap dogs meets merzbow ice-capades project gets off the ground. Lucas Abela, sound performer
2011 is shaping up really well. I’m excited to be working with architects Peta Heffernan and Elvio Brianese on the production design of a hybrid large-scale work for MOFO 2012 in Hobart—a wonderful commission for our 21st anniversary year. A 12-month design development period is tremendous. The work is based on the writing of Constantine Cavafy and will have a fusion of Greek and Egyptian music. Kimisis—Falling Asleep, from our 2010 program, is touring to Darwin, and an American producer is developing USA presentations for later in 2011 and 2012. Constantine Koukias, Artistic Director, IHOS Music Theatre and Opera
2011 starts fast for Insite Arts as producers of MONA FOMA in Hobart in January. 2 Dimensional Life of Her by Fleur Elise Noble will tour internationally with trips to New Zealand, Denmark, USA and the UK. Saltbush, a co-production between Insite and Compagnia TPO [creator of immersive, interactive theatre for children] from Italy, will tour to Adelaide Festival Centre, ArtPlay, Castlemaine Festival and then Korea. Mirazozo by Architects of Air will return to Australia after a successful season on the forecourt of Sydney Opera House. In between we’ll be showing a new work—The Drawing Project by Fleur Elise Noble. Lee Cumberlidge, Insite Arts
In 2011 some things fascinating me are: Depression-era folk furniture, Neolithic jewellery and objects, greenwood carving, gleaning urban timber, Modernist abstract sculpture and remnant vegetation on battlegrounds. In February I have two exhibitions: Polygon Wood at Greenaway Art Gallery opening on the 16th; and a group show at Artroom 5 opening on the 20th. I will then get packed up, ready to travel overseas to take up my Anne and Gordon Samstag Scholarship. With my destination in the laps of the application gods it seems I will spend the latter part of 2011 in either the USA or Portugal. Bridget Currie, visual artist
I am absorbed by futures and fictions with Lizzie Muller and a host of Australian artists: time travel, walking on Mars, shrinking things with ray guns, civil wars fought along the gender divide, cloud seeding, interspecies relationships, survival kits, fembots and more. Awfully Wonderful: Science Fiction in Contemporary Art opens in April. Throughout the year Performance Space is walking with artists around various Sydney locations. Later, we are exploring the body, its viscidities and exchanges. Now I’m sitting in the office with Jeff Khan talking more about the future—2012: a decade after we made first contact (really!). Bec Dean, Associate Director, Performance Space
Hurtling out of a commission for the gala opening of the Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre—a new work using layers of animation mapped onto multiple screens with dancers navigating their way into and around a forest of light. Floating into a month preparing images of new digital art works for an exhibition in May. Flying to Melbourne to work on Winterreisse directed by Matt Lutton with Paul Capsis, Alistair Spence George Shvetsov and dancer James O’Hara. Approaching the third phase of creative development of Kings and Queens, a physical theatre production with painter Patrick Doherty, writer Reg Cribb, composer Jonathan Mustard, actors vocalists and dancers. Chrissie Parrott, choreographer, producer
Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, Limona Studios, Mumbai
Back to Back Theatre’s new work Ganesh versus the Third Reich premieres this year. Constructed as a play within a play, the first narrative is the epic hero’s journey of Ganesh travelling from India to Nazi Germany to reclaim the Swastika (the ancient Hindu symbol) from Hitler. The second narrative is the moral and ethical journey that the makers of the play undertake in presenting the first narrative. The further Ganesh travels, the more enmeshed its protagonists become in the politics of appropriation. If you are a small theatre company from Geelong, Australia is it okay to rewrite Asiatic and European history? Should authors be allowed to craft fairytales, satires and comedies about anything? Back to Back Theatre Company
I’m most looking forward to a show that kicks off PICA’s exhibition program this year. John Gerrard is an extraordinarily accomplished Irish artist who has been using real time 3D, a technology mainly used in video gaming, to create eerily realistic animated video works that depict bleak but compelling agri-industrial scenes in America’s Great Plains. For this show, John’s first in Australia, we’ll see chilling imagery of infamous dust storms in Texas and Kansas during the 1930s, daily circumnavigations of a fully automated pig farm in Oklahoma and the relentless movement of a lone oil derrick in Colorado. It’s strangely powerful stuff! Amy Barrett-Lennard, Director, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art
What is ahead for Stalker? The best indicator is a snapshot of today—several of us researching a new work called Encoded. We are discussing developing photogrammetry techniques to enable real time virtual cameras to interact with live performance. It all comes from the use of photos to generate point clouds that we can then animate. The BIG question from today was how to embody such heavy use of technology in a physically meaningful way. After all Stalker has been a physical theatre company for well over 20 years! But we did start the day with yoga, and catapult training! David Clarkson, Co-artistic Director, Stalker Theatre Company
Chunky Move, Connected
photo courtesy Chunky Move
Chunky Move, Connected
After 15 exciting years of Chunky Move I am leaving at the end of 2011 with a bang! Turning on some sweet middle-aged moves in my solo show, Faker, at Dance Massive in Melbourne and am most excited about premiering two large-scale works: Connected—kinetic sculptor Reuben Margolin, lots of mathematics, composers Robin Fox and Oren Ambarchi, five extraordinary dancers, lighting Ben Cistern, costumes Anna Cordingly; Assembly—Richard Gill, Nick Schlieper, Victorian Opera, 50 singers, 8 dancers, chants, Gesualdo, Ligeti, a cappella, mass, crowds and power.…Oh, and if you are in Melbourne, a huge party in December!” Gideon Obarzanek, Artistic Director, Chunky Move
In 2010 we explained the GFC from what we reckoned. In 2011 we’re working out “Who’s The Best,” out of us…from what we reckon. And what the audience reckons. The show/competition will be at STC, then touring Oz. We’re all excited to hear the scores. After that we might have a crack at figuring out Death. Probably from what we reckon, and maybe some other sources too. For us this year’s all about drag, imposters, impressions, bad acting, The Biggest Loser, birth, auditions, shamans, epitaphs, avatars, and those nightmares where you have to give a speech but haven’t got any pants on… Mish, Zoe, Nat, Post performance collective
Tracing lines beyond the map. Deleuze and Guttari’s rhizome engenders an operational velocity that is ever apparent, though sometimes perhaps only to myself. There are lines and tracings that flow through Revelation and other aspects of theoretical, literary, curatorial and programming work with which I continually engage, both above and below the maps of culture. Presently deep in exploring trauma and film academically, this may well contribute to interesting decisions subsequently. As ever, I feel the need to be fighting the powers of boredom and stasis, searching for new films and expressions that challenge and stimulate, striving to present the limitless potentialities that can be reached. Jack Sargeant, Program Director, Revelation Perth International Film Festival, author, nihilistic bon vivant
King Lear, director Benedict Andrews, Icelandic National Theatre
photo Eddi ljosmyndari
King Lear, director Benedict Andrews, Icelandic National Theatre
I’m in Reykjavik sitting at the kitchen table. Outside are the silver waters of the bay. One moment, the low sun shines, next a blizzard blows in from the mountains, or a thick fog from the sea. It’s a sublime, cosmic theatre—ideal to watch while preparing my version of The Seagull (Belvoir, June-July). The idiom and milieu will be distinctly Australian—my bones longing for Australian summer—but the turbulent Icelandic weather seeps in. I’m thrilled to be returning to Chekhov in 2011—to the dramatist of what Giorgio Agamben calls “the time that is left.” Benedict Andrews, theatre director
I am looking forward to building a rich practice outside of my project-based work and hope to find myself in a room with other performers as much as possible this year. There are a few things on the boil that I’m most excited about: Whelping Box with Branch Nebula and Clare Britton—a two-hander that takes on dogs, men and gods; regrouping with the raw joyous energy of Whale Chorus (Janie Gibson, James Brown); and finding ways to tour Hole in the Wall (with Clare Britton), something we want to see mature after a successful premiere in 2010. Matt Prest, performance maker
2011 promises big things for Stompin! We are exploring our inner rev-head with the premiere of I ♥ Cars at Ten Days on the Island. Set in a car mechanic’s workshop, this show is a site-specific, multi-art mash-up that explores our love affair with cars and the way they literally connect and separate us. Stompin’s incredibly talented team of artists, including Adam Wheeler, Emma Porteus, Philip Peck from Bluebottle and Dan Speed, will collaborate with 15 young, non-professional performers from around Launceston to create a performance event that shifts between abstraction, representation and documentation. Stompin says art/youth/community 4ever. Sarah McCormack, Executive Producer, Stompin
Polytoxic, l-r Fez Fa’anana, Leah Shelton, Natano Fa’anana, Lisa Fa’alafi, Mark Winmill, Amanda-Lyn Pearson
photo Sean Young
Polytoxic, l-r Fez Fa’anana, Leah Shelton, Natano Fa’anana, Lisa Fa’alafi, Mark Winmill, Amanda-Lyn Pearson
2011 will bring us a whole lot closer to realising two new works, kicking it off with a scratch showing of The Rat Trap at the Brisbane Powerhouse’s World Theatre Festival. Based around a twisted tale of blood ties, revenge and rodents, it’s a chance for all six Polytoxics to meld our gutsy physicality with aerials, theatricality and even some WWE wrestling moves. Also on the cards is further development of a smaller work, Lost Dances, which arose from research into lost, suppressed and archived dances of Samoa; a partnership with Queensland Theatre Company; a residency at the Brisbane Powerhouse; and our usual antics. Polytoxic, dance ensemble
2011 will be a year for regaining my physical and mental faculties after two years of art making and dissipation in the fine but exhausting city of Berlin. I’ve sublet my Neukölln flat, god bless it, to establish a new nest in Katoomba. A collaborative project, between myself, my partner and the Goddess of the Hearth. This Rabbit year will be one of quietude and completion. The focus: finishing a large scale writing project (a book of ghost stories) too often neglected in favour of the more obnoxious demands of performing. The body will get out there too: the epic cycle Songs of Rapture and Torture will be performed in its pent-amorous entirety; new works, developed and performed overseas, most recently at InBetweenTime, will see Australian premieres. Until then, I’ll be writing, bottling preserves and learning new skills domestic and esoteric. Sarah-Jane Norman, artist, writer
Looking forward to adventures…turning a most impossible ear toward the lost opera Minotaur—the Island (Chamber Made Opera, Ten Days on the Island)…to salt winds on the Bruny Island ferry…to living with ‘the company’ and ‘lunching’ with the audience. I am squinting toward horizons where wild paths of works flicker far into a year. And, after Falling Like a Bird (Ladyfinger) soft landing in Italy on an escapade, if the little puppet sisters of A Quarrelling Pair (Aphids) fly off to fight again about their rooms, their milk and whether hearts are big or small. Margaret Cameron, poet, performer, director
Precarious, Merilyn Fairskye 2011
Precarious (digital video, 65 minutes) evokes the aftermath of the explosion at Chernobyl 25 years on. This road movie takes the spectator on a journey from the shores of the Black Sea to the frozen heart of Chernobyl, passing through desolate, snowy landscapes littered with abandoned villages. Squatting in this icy wasteland, the ghostly sarcophagus of Reactor #4 is a constant reminder of the threat still lurking. Winter exerts its hold, ice keeps the hidden radiation at bay, but the spring thaw will once again release the surrounding rivers’ toxic flow. Accompanied by testimony from a group of veterans of the disaster, Precarious bears witness to the folly and resilience of humans and to nature’s fragility. Merilyn Fairskye, artist: photomedia, video, installation
The nexus between contemporary art and environmental sustainability will underpin Arts House in 2011 in two programs—Six Degrees and nude works. Six Degrees brings together the notion of six degrees of separation (sometimes known as Human Web) and the idea that if global temperature increases by six degrees Celsius the world will be uninhabitable. These two ideas underpin the Arts House Six Degrees project, inviting sound artists to collaborate and respond to climate change. In August, nude works is a mini festival of contemporary performance and live art that is elemental, stripped back and essential. Nude works may not all be performed entirely naked! Steven Richardson, Artistic Director, Arts House
Lee Wilson, Branch Nebula, The Whelping Box
photo Mirabelle Wouters
Lee Wilson, Branch Nebula, The Whelping Box
We are excited about birthing our new performance, Whelping Box: from fighting dogs to mythological beings, in collaboration with Matthew Prest and Clare Britton. The project also extends to a stand-alone video, with Denis Beaubois and Steve Couri. We head to Melbourne in March to find new audiences for our recent work, Sweat, at Dance Massive. Next we brave new territory with a site-specific creative development when Concrete and Bone Sessions infiltrates the local skate park at night with nine artists utilizing BMX, skating, parkour, martial arts, dance and gore. Later in the year we explore artistic and familial connections when we head to Europe. Lee Wilson & Mirabelle Wouters, Artistic Directors, Branch Nebula
I spent day one, 2011, in Jakarta, a city of 15 million people that runs on subsidised petrol and hums with the sound of as many motorbikes. Jakarta sprawls as far as you can imagine, with massive shopping malls and countless kampungs crammed with warungs selling food, cigarettes and pulsar. I hope 2011 remains true to its first day. I am looking forward to working at Tin Sheds and hope to find ways of linking artists here with those from around our region. We need to turn the world upside down or we are all stuck in a Jakarta traffic jam. Zanny Begg, Director, Tin Sheds Gallery
“I do understand the anxiety and indeed fears that Australians have when they see boats…” Is Prime Minister Julia Gillard imagining herself to be an Eora woman witnessing the arrival of the First Fleet? If so, what an astonishing piece of theatre! Heiner Muller said, “As long as freedom is based on force, and the creation of art is based on privilege, works of art will tend to be prisons…” At the VCA Grant St. Theatre, Feb 17-20, Doomstruck Oedipus, Why Are You Here? Parts 1-2-3 will be asking, among other things, What is the role of performance in Australian society today? Ben Speth, theatre director
The sharp trill of an alarm clock launches Clocked Out into 2011. After 10 years of the same dream, forays into the wide alley searching for foreign objects, cleaning up the messy spills of Dada, we finally say enough is enough. It’s time to Wake Up! to the everyday sounds around us. [Wake Up! debuts March 23, 6:30 pm @ Queensland Conservatorium.] Also in 2011: watch out for our Ensemble in Residence series at Queensland Conservatorium, The Trilling Wire Series at Judith Wright Centre, the Radio Plays project at Queensland Music Festival, and a new collaboration with Continuum Sax! Erik Griswold & Vanessa Tomlinson, Clocked Out
2011, despite being an odd number, seems to have a lot of symmetry to it. It’s been 10 years since we created Same, same But Different and with it Force Majeure. 2011 sees us complete our collaboration with Sydney Theatre Company—Never Did Me Any Harm—a work about contemporary attitudes to raising children, something of a minefield we’ve discovered! Also looking forward to participating in the Adelaide Film Festival’s The Hive lab; presenting Not In A Million Years at Dance Massive; conducting our own lab, CULTIVATE; directing a play, FOOD (hopefully for Belvoir); and welcoming new CEO Lisa Havilah to CarriageWorks with open arms! Kate Champion, Artistic Director, Force Majeure
Lily Shearer leading a smoking ceremony at the posts
photo Michelle Blakeney
Lily Shearer leading a smoking ceremony at the posts
This year My Darling Patricia will premiere Posts in the Paddock. In 1900 relatives of mine were murdered by Jimmy Governor. The film and novel, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, are based on his life. Actor LeRoy Parsons (Jimmy’s great-great grandson) and musician Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor will join My Darling Patricia on stage. Australian history is full of silences. We want Posts in the Paddock to allow Indigenous and non-indigenous artists to speak into that silence together. For us, it’s the culmination of three years of research and consultation. Also really exciting: our Malthouse commission, Africa, on tour with Mobile States and to STC’s Next Stage. Clare Britton for My Darling Patricia
2011 sees me in the middle of my three-part solo series, Trilogy. It explores the potential of durational and intensely physical choreographic forms to encounter the body as both a site and agent of continual becoming. In each piece the figure is restrained by an extremely minimal choreographic structure that the internal forces of the body rebel against, producing visceral micro-choreographies of rhythm and vibration. The first piece, Thousands, will return to Melbourne for Dance Massive and Cannibal, the second work, will have Sydney and Melbourne seasons. In October I’ll begin working on the final piece in the series. Matthew Day, dancer, choreographer
“Minotaur is a place—the island of Minotaur. The music is tense—just out of reach—fracturing and breaking into bits—travelling through corridors. The objects are the island, and are moved around the space like flotsam from a shipwreck. The characters are: Ariadne with a sound puzzle box, Venus in a man’s suit, Pasiphæ in a white hand-knitted dress, Theseus dressed as a matador, Dædelus, Monteverdi in a medieval dress, the small Minotaur with fur boots, Icarus with a gull’s head and a harpsichord. ‘She could have music depending on the wind.’” From text by Margaret Cameron & David Young. Chamber Made Opera, Minotaur, Bruny Island, 2011 Ten Days on the Island
2011 marks a clear shift in my practice. After mainly working as a solo artist for many years, my focal point will now be collaboration with other dancers, both on group works and on solos. I’m especially excited about the premiere of my new work, Mountains Never Meet, at Riverside Parramatta in August. It’s a collaboration with young footballer and performance maker Ahilan Ratnamohan and eight untrained male performers from Western Sydney. Exploring the connection between sport and art, the work aims to playfully challenge our notion of what dance is and who can be considered a dancer. Martin del Amo, dancer, choreographer
2011 starts with Embedded (trombone Rishin Singh, accordion Monika Brooks, double bass Sam Pettigrew) opening the Now now Festival and till death us do part. February: Bogong AIR Festival, playing in the high country of Victoria. West Head Project: releasing our first CD, a closely woven fabrik, on Splitrec. Blip (with bassist Mike Majkowski) release calibrated and tour the East coast. March-April: collaboration with Tess de Quincey. August: MURAL launches a CD at the Rothko Chapel, Houston, recorded there in 2010. November: first trip to Chile. I hope lotsa bush music in between. Jim Denley, improvising musician
Not travelling, or tooling ninja-style on productions, I’m bunkering down into the literal moon crater of COFA this year. These next two years I am trying to establish an understanding of digital animism, a haunted and blooming soul of video. I need to explore this state where the multiplication of video transcends itself and hidden meaning appears. VIVARIA will tour in Mobile States and I’ll be in Campbelltown making a fictional documentary on the imaginarium of shopkeepers. Every few weeks I can emerge to add life to the gestures of puppets and the enigma of performance art, still the wildest state of living. Sam James, video artist/projection designer
2011 will see my next feature film, Falling for Sahara, starring an entire cast of African refugees, premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival in July…all very exciting. At the moment I’m writing a play about Vietnamese weddings for Belvoir and creating a four-hour dramatic mini-series for FremantleMedia about capital punishment, which we hope will go into production in late 2011. Khoa Do, filmmaker
2011 is a year of recovery. In the aftermath of the floods I’m provoking questions about the role of theatre in our society. How do we respond to the social trends, demography, geography and the uniqueness this brings to our storytelling? It’s not enough to just devise a program and expect people to come to it anymore. Engagement, Diversity and Excellence have become my mantra. I’m looking at creating an Indigenous Program, developing a Studio Program to give artists space and resources to create work, take the next step and explore their craft, and also trying to unashamedly increase the audiences for theatre in Queensland. Wesley Enoch, Artistic Director, Queensland Theatre Company
Dean Walsh
photo Heidrun Löhr
Dean Walsh
Granted an Australia Council two-year dance fellowship, my independent practice is presented with a renewed oxygen supply for more in-depth experimentation and an expansion of my interest in planned future works. Research, apart from many weeks investing in solo and group work and more frequent scuba diving, will also involve attending conferences and interviewing experts on environmental and species un/sustainability interfaced with exploration of our everyday perceptions of these realities. I’m taking my dance reflections out of the sub/urban and into the ocean and back again. Performance Space has invited me to undertake a stage one performance ‘research touchdown’ this coming May as part of their Uneasy Futures season. This new work is called Fathom. Dean Walsh, choreographer, dancer, Sydney
Dwelling Structure: a new music work that premieres in May. For this operatic project without singers, the sound of the house is the main protagonist in a collection of time-use episodes. Greatly inspired by textual development with writer Cynthia Troup and visual assemblage by Neil Thomas and very happy to be part of the Chamber Made Opera house. As David Foster Wallace, our new fave author, writes in Infinite Jest: “almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trench-coated out of an alley with some sort of ‘psst’ that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.” Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, musicians, composers
2011 looks bright, with some great projects coming to fruition early in the year. My ANAT Synapse residency with the Bionic Ear Institute culminates in a concert of newly commissioned works for the bionic ear on Feb 13 and two exciting new dance works. Connected, with Chunky Move and Drift by Antony Hamilton feature my sound designs in the Dance Massive festival in March. A new album with double bassist Clayton Thomas is ready; I’m still editing the 3D shoot of the laser show, reading a lot about holograms and giant Theremins, planning tours…the rest is highly classified. Robin Fox, sound and visual artist
Halcyon has always been about championing composers, so we’re thrilled to be launching our inaugural young composers project, First Stones, where participants will develop a new song for voice and chamber ensemble; the new works will be on show in Halcyon’s final concert for 2011. As well, we’ve commissioned a major chamber work from Sydney composer Andrew Schultz, to be premiered later this year in a program with George Crumb and Joseph Schwanter, and in March, Jenny, Andrew and Alison are Artists in Residence at Bundanon to share and develop ideas for the new work in relaxed and inspirational surrounds. Alison Morgan & Jenny Duck-Chong, Halcyon, new music ensemble
This is the year of time and practice, particularly primary research and its application. This means first hand interviews with informers for our work, engaging directly in the struggles that we reference, spending open ended time in pivotal locations, sending probes into our own bodies and cutting things out…I’ll be labouring on Hydra’s theatre work Prompter Live Studio and a new project based around a SymbioticA residency exploring empathy, abstraction and broken narratives. I’ll be curating performance for a peer exchange project called WASTE with an accompanying zine from Mother [has words], looking, sans sentiment, at what discarded conceptual efforts suggest. Sam Fox, director, Hydra Poesis
Fiona McGregor, Vertigo, 2009, still from performance video / multi-channel video installation
photo Julia Charles
Fiona McGregor, Vertigo, 2009, still from performance video / multi-channel video installation
Water—fundamental to our existence; the functioning of our bodies, the life cycles of our environment. Its scarcity across much of Australia has become one of the most urgent issues facing our society; its rare, violent overabundance causes chaos and destruction. It nourishes and yet can be used to torture both body and psyche. Through November Fiona McGregor will produce Water, a suite of installations and durational body-centred performances across all the Artspace galleries, both evoking the magical, poetic qualities of water and exploring states of relationship with it—saturation, absorption, deprivation. Blair French, Executive Director, Artspace
An ‘environmental’ triumvirate in 2011. Firstly, Site Listening, a term I coined to encourage the activation of the ears and reduce the dominance of our visual perception, will be a focus with a Queensland version to be unveiled as part of the Queensland Music Festival. Secondly, my project with Werner Dafeldecker, The Cold Monolith (based on our work in Antarctica under invitation from Argentina’s Dirección Nacional del Antártico), will be presented on Germany’s SWR radio and also as an installation at festivals. And finally I’ll be working all year on a series of audio/media works based on problematising contemporary understandings of [the Japanese aesthetic philosophy] Wabi-Sabi.
Lawrence English, room40
Ever wondered what a genre film director like Enzo G Castellari would have created if he were a choreographer? My debauched lifelong obsession with the avant-garde works of genre celluloid trailblazers found its way into my latest dance work, DRIFT. DRIFT fell from its loftier concerns of “architecture, the body and their intangible relationship” to “devising dystopian pagan rituals of the future!” The project began as a quest to discover Melbourne’s atmospheric derelict urban haunts. Like a location for film instead of theatre for dance, the location is a vessel for a nostalgic romance with B-grade sci-fi post-apocalyptic fantasy.
Antony Hamilton, choreographer, dancer
Close Encounters (3D render/composite), Jordana Maisie
In 2011, Close Encounters takes off. A large-scale interactive sculpture raised 2.9 metres: at a distance it appears as if a luminous UFO is hovering above the undulating festival audience, transmitting messages to the crowd as they move through the site. When walking underneath it, Close Encounters acts as a portal connecting you to the sky. The work provokes participation through text messaging and LED technology, inviting punters to ‘text’ the number displayed. By responding to the text provocations, a collective conversation begins—the audience co-creating a real time narrative as the festival unfolds. Jordana Maisie, new media & electronic artist
We’ll be creating a new stop-motion world in 2011. Interactivity and performance will get a look-in as we gear up to create a new multi-viewer experience to premiere towards the end of the year. We can’t wait to visit MONA [Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania] where our 2010 work You Were In My Dream will be showing August–September, and the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery in May. We’ll be running stop-motion workshops, dreaming up new film ideas, sculpting miniature scenes and making faces. Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine, media artists
so what might be ephemeral practices? / launch of hard soft john barbour survey publication main gallery vernon ah kee tall man bonita ely murray river punch elizabeth newman + nicki wynnychuck installation nasim nasir women in shadow kit wise projections james + luna cheryl l’hirondelle mind the gap osw (bianca hester + terri bird) / noel sheridan project space ray harris videos ane damcho drolma one moon christine collins drawing installation nien schwarz residency + installation / odradekaeaf window box february through august curated by ray harris + matthew huppatz / wura-natasha ogunji videos / launch of new performance/installation/project space. Domenico de Clario, Director, Australian Experimental Art Foundation
Prediction for Luke George: You will reignite collaboration with your spiritual-art-brother Miguel Gutierrez (NYC). Late February is a powerful time for you both. You will meet and dance every day through a CultureLab Residency in a Melbourne House of Arts. Joining the power of your minds/bodies, you will develop supernatural perception and the ability to slip between multiple performance modalities at the speed of light. Through a completely illegitimate process, you will research what is the biology and neurology of performing. You will invoke a space that resists opinion and evaluation and invite an audience to exist within the live-ness of this dance. Luke George, dancer, choreographer
In November Marrugeku will partner with Atamira Dance Collective to present the third International Indigenous Choreographic Laboratory in Auckland. The labs (Sydney 2009, Broome 2010), explore resonances and differences in contemporary Indigenous dance-theatre from Africa, New Zealand and Australia. New influences, processes and cultural pathways are explored and their relationships to traditional practices. Each laboratory is steeped in the local cultural context and artists work from their own experience of being Indigenous artists or working in Indigenous contexts. IICL3 will be lead by New York based Zimbabwean choreographer Nora Chipaumire and Maori choreographers Louise Potiki Bryant and Charles Royal. Rachael Swain, Dalisa Pigram, Co-artistic Directors, Marrugeku
Critical Path 2011, Choreographic Research
■ ■→ IDEAS of bodies orientated CHAOS, falling, finding seeing; critical characters turning spaces; ■ musicality, hand movements past improvisations → artist’s language lucid notices watching them watch images. ■
■ Constructed lit surfaces connecting ■ ↔ ■ obscured frames; movement, blurred by motivation choreographies, embodied learning shared documented. Participation transitions, contact forgotten speed passing danced behind >>>> backs >> diagonally making circles weighting intention>>>>>> reviewing dramaturgically absurd interventions ■
↓↑With content of arms pelvis head ears eyes facing pointing fingers mapping directions thrown front toward distant tangents of irritation; slowly, swaged ■ Of imagined time future training permissible beyond >>>>> counting >>>>>> audience’s inspirations ║ reaction fast ↔ finding forgiven feet, shins, knees, thighs, torso ║ surface ↓↑ fading expectation blacked out. •∞
Margie Medlin, director Critical Path
•∞↔→↓↑║
Whilst my passion for natural systems, morphology and cultural histories has grown apace, my desire to work with galleries and museums has gradually diminished—displaced by my enthusiasm for environmental projects that directly engage public space and community. 2011 will see me on the high seas again, working from my boat Sisu in the Abrolhos Islands (WA) to develop CrayVox, a work for the Space(d) Biennale; then mounting VoxAura, the River Sings for European Capital of Culture in Turku, Finland; and onto Istanbul for ISEA with a sound installation entitled Weeping Willow. Add in a couple of large scale public sculpture commissions and that’s my year! Nigel Helyer, sculptor and sound artist
In 2011 I’m embarking on a feature documentary/on-line project with Melbourne colleague John Hughes to tell the story of the Filmmakers’ Cooperatives which operated in most state capitals in the 70s and early 80s, until in the mid 80s a centralised government bureaucracy effectively closed them down. The project will examine the history of the Co-ops and their aesthetic concerns in a period where filmmakers were deeply engaged with social/political issues. This is an important and overlooked moment of Australian film history which will not only entertain but also be useful to new generations of filmmakers, and essential in any comprehensive appreciation of Australian cultural history. Tom Zubrycki, filmmaker
Concerts with eRikm, Valerio Tricoli, Thomas Lehn and Stephen O’Malley in Europe. PIVIXKI in Canada and NZ, solo in Chicago, tour with Fusinato, Thymolphthalein LP on Editions Mego. New work for percussion quartet and flute that HAS to be better than the music for Kwaidan. Making the solo piano record that I’ve always wanted to make and re-issuing the last one the label shafted me on. Practising Doepfer every day, writing elaborate songs that WON’T be better than Scott Walker, doing my first film in six years, listening harder, reading wider, seeing deeper, remembering to live. Antony Pateras, composer, performer
Brooke Leeder, Gabrielle van der Elst, wok, Tongues of Stone
photo Sarah Burrell
Brooke Leeder, Gabrielle van der Elst, wok, Tongues of Stone
After Prague (2003), Athens (2005) and Wellington (2006), Perth hosts the site-specific work of New Zealand’s Carol Brown (choreography), Dorita Hannah (design) and Russell Scoones (sound). Three years in development, Tongues of Stone features 15 dancers carving their way through the city, from the underground central station to the open foreshore. Reminding us of the disappearance of Perth wetlands, Tongues of Stone brings to the surface silenced memories. In a quest to make visible the lightest of art forms, STRUT joins the Barcelona-based Dancing Cities Network and brings its voice to worldwide conversations between dance, architecture, public space and social change. Agnes Michelet, Director, STRUT dance
To be excited about one dance project over another at Campbelltown Arts Centre is too hard. Kathy Cogill and Latai Taumoepeau trying to define what Intercultural work is? Beautiful. There’s a Bright Golden Haze on the Meadow. There sure is. Lizzie Thomson with local amateur actors reworking old musicals. Beautiful. Not to mention Antony Hamilton out on his own with us in cars listening to the radio. Who’s Donna Miranda? You just WAIT! In the meantime, Nat Cursio comes to town to curate a motza. Emma Saunders, curator, dance program, Campbelltown Arts Centre
Decibel are still going strong, in 2011 making a book, releasing recordings and running a subscription concert series. These PICA concerts will take place in the main gallery space so we really get a chance to explore ways of combining sound art and more traditional composition. There is so much great new music being made in Australia right now, and we are excited about playing, recording and writing about it both here and overseas! Cat Hope, director, Decibel, new music ensemble
Performance is the key to my creative thinking at this moment and it has dominated my thinking for the past 10 years. It never ceases to amaze me, that in 2011 Indigenous artists are still constructed as the ‘other’; performing in a space that is only allocated to the ‘Performative of Aboriginality,’ rather than just being artists who are Aboriginal. Why…? I will continue to make work that questions the reasoning behind why there is a lack of visionary thinking and courage to do it differently!
r e a, media artist
It’s about the emotional nerve. Working with artists from across the arts who inspire through their passion and individuality, and with the need to realise their respective visions. 2011 promises a rich palette—a performance of the complete Berio Sequenzas; collaborating with Jon Rose on his Pursuit project; an overseas visit to observe other new music festivals and organisations thanks to a Churchill Fellowship. Also exploring the music of Hannah Kulenty through movement with choreographer Amanda Phillips as well as celebrating the 50th anniversary of Grainger’s death with cellist John Adderson and Vincent Plush. Underpinning all of these activities, I continue to delve into the visceral, intellectual depth of pianism. Gabriella Smart, musician, Artistic Director, Soundstream Festival
2011: the year of collaboration! I’ll be digging alongside Ian Milliss as we embark on our Yeomans Project—about the cultural (and agricultural) phenomenon of Percy Yeomans (an Aussie visionary who invented a special ploughing system in the 1950s). I’ll also be digging through the archives with SquatSpace, as we work towards a 10-year retrospective project at Campbelltown Arts Centre in 2012. Apart from that, my gardening collaboration with Diego Bonetto will continue decomposing itself, at the Sydney College of the Arts. And through all of this, I’ll keep on getting inky at Big Fag Press. Lucas Ihlein, artist
Started the year working with Hitlab NZ to deliver an augmented reality work for the next Adelaide Film Festival…excited because it uses technology just on the edge of deliverability so we have to keep trying to solve the maze of what we can imagine and what is actually possible. Using coral specimens from a trip I made to Lord Howe Island last year to the southernmost coral reef and drawing data feeds of bleaching alerts from NOAA. The health of reefs is urgent so I thought about the sugar bowls of the Abolitionist movement and decided to do my first work for mobile phones. Lynette Wallworth, media artist
Alan Flower, Kym Vercoe, Yana Taylor, The Table of Knowledge, version 1.0
photo Heidrun Löhr
Alan Flower, Kym Vercoe, Yana Taylor, The Table of Knowledge, version 1.0
In 2011 version 1.0 are presenting new work all over the place—including Bathurst, Launceston, Sarajevo and our hometown of Sydney. What I’m most looking forward to is The Table of Knowledge at the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre in Wollongong, exploring an infamous corruption scandal involving developers and former staff of a major local government. It’s got sex, kebabs, massive overdevelopment and conmen played by balloons. The show opens in late August and will be visually spectacular and outrageously hilarious, with a cast of dodgy characters and stories too crazy to have been made up. No one said political performance couldn’t also be deeply fun! David Williams, Chief Executive Officer, version 1.0
In 2011 Urban Theatre Projects moves to a new Arts Centre in Bankstown; develops The Quarry in collaboration with Belvoir, directed by Alicia Talbot and written by Raimondo Cortese; and Effie Nkrumah and Alan Lao premiere the funny and politically incorrect show Ama and Chan. Roslyn Oades’ Stories of Love and Hate reappears as part of STC’s Education Program and a workshop program travels to Adelaide care of Vitalstatistix. Rosie Dennis runs a masterclass; Alicia and Michelle Kotevski return to London to develop a new commission from LIFT [London International Festival of Theatre]; Ahil Ratnamohan and linguist Daisy Wouters develop Michael Essien I Want to Play as You, in Brussels and Paris. Alicia Talbot, Artistic Director, Urban Theatre Projects
Dedicated to innovative new music, Ensemble Offspring will present a program of unique events in 2011 beginning with a fresh angle on the Minimalist tradition in our Why Patterns tour, featuring the vast canvases of Morton Feldman. In May we’ll join the NOW now crew in Sydney for a rendition of the Cardew epic, Treatise. In June, Professor Bad Trip will introduce Sydney audiences to the exhilarating drug-induced sounds of Italian composer Romitelli. And not satisfied with merely performing new works, our ongoing Partch’s Bastards project will premiere newly devised musical instruments capable of wondrous tones in September. Damien Ricketson & Claire Edwardes, Artistic Directors, Ensemble Offspring
Jess White & Isadora Drummond Sweeney, Next of Kin, November 2010
photo Chris Herzfeld
Jess White & Isadora Drummond Sweeney, Next of Kin, November 2010
We’re excited about our new show for Come Out 2011. Take me there directed by Dan Koerner uses startling video technology and a pumping, original score by Ian Moorhead. At once poignant and hilarious, it not only transports the performers but the audience as well into a strange world where there is freedom to be wherever you want, whenever you want. Restless continues to be fiercely committed to combating discrimination within Australia’s artistic scene. The company has embraced a deeply inclusive rationale, working predominantly with people with disability across dance, tutoring, directing and choreography. Nick Hughes, Company Manager, Restless Dance Theatre
The art of play. I will continue my collaboration with Chiara Guidi from Italian theatre company Societas Raffaello Sanzio at Campelltown Arts Centre, working towards the creation of a work for and by children. Looking for opportunities to present: Impasse an installation collaboration with Denis Beaubois and William McClure. Over-lay: a performance collaboration with Paul Gazzola. The Raven Project with Frank Mainoo will become a “film club” presentation exploring the interplay between performance and film. Currently working with Shfa on Hoopla Festival and later in the year on Viva la Gong Festival in Wollongong. Jeffrey Stein, performer, creative producer
In our 12th year, Bonemap continues to develop new work within the influences of the ‘north’ and an ongoing questioning of the processes and overheads required to practice against the backdrop of a groaning natural environment. Although our practice, processes and methodology are continually rediscovered afresh, we are increasingly regarded as senior artists by the community and asked to recount seminal events in the manufacture of a culture that is becoming less transient. The creative sector continues to inspire development in the deep north as a new wave of exciting projects takes shape in the Cairns region including a $240 million performing arts centre, Indigenous museum and cultural precinct (see www.movedancetnq.com). Russell Milledge & Rebecca Youdell, Directors, Bonemap
Dreams Rising, a new hybrid work about transformative aspects of dreaming and memory, will be developed as part of The Opium Confessions series at The University of Sydney with showings for invited audiences in April. Concerned with the nature of visionary experience, it will draw on poetic and scientific approaches and, in collaboration with Radio National, weave together personal accounts of people from diverse cultural backgrounds in Sydney for whom such experiences have been life changing. Science offers an understanding of dreams and visions in terms of technical brain function, yet our culture has other dimensions, deep histories that honour the reality of visionary experience and find powerful forms of meaning in it. Tess de Quincey, Artistic Director, De Quincey Co
Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art, LCD screen. Vienna, 2010
photo Michael Yuen, courtesy of DICA
Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art, LCD screen. Vienna, 2010
Across Australia, Asia and Europe, my lecture tour series, Testing the City, addresses ideas drawn from the new mega cities in emerging countries. The tour follows last year’s lectures on dismantling old, prevailing city planning ideas. In the northern summer, the Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art [DICA] hits the road again, our non-profit space on the back of a donkey travelling the streets of Beijing. The institute lives by the charm and rhythm unique to the donkey’s soul. In this sense, DICA is the most inhuman and radical fulfillment of the avant-garde. Plans are brewing for an exhibition of young noise artists and a second travelling library. Michael Yuen, artist
ELISION is collaborating with SIAL-RMIT on a large-scale project, CONSTRUCTION, the follow-up to composer Richard Barrett’s Dark Matter. The project explores ideas of spatialisation in acoustic and electronic form examining relationships between “utopian” and real architectures—a long tradition stretching from Plato’s ‘Republic’ to Bacon, Campanella and onwards which is juxtaposed with real cities layered by violent disruptions of war, conquest and rebuilding. Also in the wings is a creative development with David Pledger’s NYID and American composer Aaron Cassidy. I’m enthused about this exploration of composition as a ‘choreography of gesture’ placed within Pledger’s concept of the body itself as a listening mechanism. Daryl Buckley, ELISION
2011 is going to be a great year for the company, touring our latest works and making new ones—taking us right across the country, deep into regional Australia and overseas. Human Interest Story opens the new Heath Ledger Theatre at the Perth Festival and plays at Belvoir in September while Untrained’s three-month Road Work regional tour will feature courageous locals. I’ll be developing a work commissioned by Belvoir in April with actors, dancers and the 2011 Tanja Leidtke fellowship recipient. We’ll take Structure and Sadness to the US in October and, back home in November, I’ll begin work on a brand new piece as yet unknown! Lucy Guerin, Artistic Director, Lucy Guerin Inc
2011: a year of multi-focus challenge. A film project, Virtuosi, will take me around the world filming extraordinary dancers, and a major performance project ,Variant, will be premiered in Sydney. There is real magic in the mix—Variant realises a dream cast of performers who push the boundaries in everything they do and are, quite simply, astonishing. The physical and emotional palette within Variant is the most diverse and exciting of my career. It will challenge the perception that dance is merely a ‘cult of a body-type’ and will turn the idea of what is normal on its head. Sue Healey, choreographer, filmmaker
CHRONOLOGY ARTS (new music collective) presents TACTILITY. Sound is an awesome medium, one of the most ephemeral, but this year we’re taking a leap away from the immaterial as we team emerging composers with emerging fine art practitioners, conceptualising in true symbiosis between members of six teams consisting of composers with a painter, two photographers, a sculptor, video artist and another artist—each creating right now to be ready to present ephemeral temporal art with solidified components upstairs at the TAP gallery, Sydney, at the end of March 2011…Huge Creative Risk. That’s the way we like it. Chronology Arts, new music
Tony Yap, Yumi Umiumare
photo Sean O’Brien
Tony Yap, Yumi Umiumare
Last year Yumi Umiumare and I launched a new and timely work inspired by the sites of our spiritual heritages in Japan and Malaysia. This contemporary performance work will be uncompromising, innovating deep rituals from our cultural background. ZeroZero is a development springing from the long-term partnership embodied in our renowned series, How could you even begin to understand? of which Jonathan Marshall wrote: “butoh and its multifarious manifestations of a body…draws on traditions of the ecstatic body—[How could you…] is the closest to a shamanistic trance most of us are likely to see…another masterful work.” Tony Yap, dancer, choreographer
Between channel surfing half a dozen crime dramas and simultaneously playing news clips on YouTube, narratives collide, genuine articles mix with the artificial, all confused into one. We want to see beyond surface representations. We want to see the car crashes and smouldering bullet holes on the streets. We want the police and the press to arrive, figure out what happened and present their verdicts to us. We will do this in public spaces, experimenting with the space between audience and event, between abjection and seduction, between producing popular narratives and exploring how they determine social relations and the dynamics of public spaces. Malcolm Whittaker for Team Mess
When I’m not wearing my RealTime blazer, I’ll be involved in an eclectic range of projects. Stuart Buchanan from New Weird Australia has invited me co-curate Volume 10 which focuses on the voice in experimental and ‘interesting’ musics. For version 1.0 I will contribute some sexy sounds to their tales of corruption in Table of Knowledge. Then I’ll sonify our corporeal fluids for Peta Clancy and Helen Pynor’s installation about organ transplantation, The Body is a Big Place at Performance Space. In between I’ll be delving further into vocal improvisation, learning to make a kaiseki banquet and writing a haiku or two. Gail Priest, sound artist
This year I will travel to Europe as the recipient of the 2010 Robert Helpmann Scholarship. I will spend four weeks researching ideas for a new dance work with UK choreographer Wendy Houstoun, continuing the relationship we began with the Fondue Set in No Success Like Failure; four weeks with German choreographer Antje Pfundtner, initiating a collaboration to make a new duet; and four weeks with Belgian-based NZ choreographer Kate McIntosh, sitting in as she creates a new group commission. Three months with three strong women. Then one month in Berlin attending workshops and dance performances. Viel spass! Jane McKernan, dance artist
2011. Meow Meow delves into the lush land of French New Wave cinema, works with Oscar winner Michel Legrand, Pulitzer Prize winner Sheldon Harnick and UK director extraordinaire Emma Rice in Kneehigh Theatre’s adaptation of Jacques Demy’s Classic 1960s French jazz romance “that just happens to be sung”—The Umbrellas of Cherbourg opens on the West End in March. Meow performs Cocteau at opera festivals in the US, continues punk-art-love globally with Amanda Palmer, Lance Horne, La Soiree and exotica with Thomas M Lauderdale; converts Floridian Republicans to the Meow Meow Risque Revolution; dreams of Malthouse Melbourne, Schubert, Schoenberg and presents a surprise announcement at the Edinburgh International Festival. She continues to carry her own luggage and experience crowd surfing as the closest she can get to “a good lie down.” Meow Meow, artiste
Mike Majkowski
photo Corrie Ancone
Mike Majkowski
Double bassist/improviser/composer Mike Majkowski’s list of things to do (so far) in 2011 (and the list is growing): continue SOLO double bass work (mix & edit recent recordings, record some more—aiming towards a new release); BLIP (duo w Jim Denley) tour to promote the release of a new record, Calibrated; complete the 2nd album, Frost Frost, by ROIL (trio w Chris Abrahams & James Waples) & get it released; more recording with ROIL; complete STRIKE’s debut album (trio w Jon Rose & Clayton Thomas) & get it released; get some gigs with the neo-marrickville-mega-babes (new group w Monica Brooks [drums] & Jon Watts [electric bass])…with Mike singing & playing electric guitar. Mike Majkowski, improvising musician
At the CD launch for Topology’s album Difference Engine, the band welcomes the charming Emma Baker-Spink to perform its Brisbane Songs. Then a few large productions with The Australian Voices exploring the Australian landscape in Sky Songs through new works by Rob Davidson and Gordon Hamilton; a show of new cross-cultural works featuring William Barton composing and performing alongside the band, with Dheeraj Shrestha’s sublime tabla; and a new work for John Babbage in collaboration with Natalie Weir and Expressions Dance Company. The quintet will then create another new engrossing one-hour piece followed by revisiting and redeveloping its hilarious Kransky Sisters collaboration. Topology, new music ensemble
The NOW now is alive and well, thank you very much. And for now, The NOW now will continue to present borderless music twice a month, in Sydney, throughout 2011. Pushing musical binaries so hard they snap. Making a space for the music of the present and the in-between. Always listening. The NOW now is here, now, with you, where it will always be and The NOW now would like to leave you with a Derek Bailey quote: “Of course there’ll be another NOW along shortly, but it won’t be the same NOW. It won’t be this NOW, the NOW now.” The NOW now
2011. January: in cia studios developing Accidental Monsters of Meaning (about surviving consumerist society). February: helping Albany put on a new community dance production. March: Accidental Monsters lands in the WA Museum—11 days straight, four hours a day, five dancers perform in perspex boxes. April: off to Taipei Artist Village for a two-month residency. May: creating in Taipei. June: catching up on uni—studying a Master of Arts in Sustainability. July: seek grants for next year’s artistic endeavours. August: more study. September: more study. October: more grant writing. November: off to Kyoto Arts Centre for a 3-month artist residency. December: cold, icy and inspired in Japan. Aimee Smith, dancer-choreographer
Arlo Mountford & Nick Selenitsch, Movement work #1, Wood, turntables, magnets, metal tacks, motion sensors, 2011
courtesy of the artists and GRANTPIRRIE, Sydney and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
Arlo Mountford & Nick Selenitsch, Movement work #1, Wood, turntables, magnets, metal tacks, motion sensors, 2011
One of the most exciting projects for me in 2011 opened recently. Fellow Melbourne artist Nick Selenitsch and myself have been collaborating on works for a show in the RMIT Project Space—Movements—in which two kinetic sculptural works play with the human instinct to anthropomorphise basic phenomena—like thumb tacks propelled across a surface by magnets or steel balls collecting on a gallery floor. Also on the horizon are two major animated works that include reworking YouTube videos. And there will be a whole lotta saving the cashola for a studio residency in Japan at the beginning of 2012! Arlo Mountford, artist
Current project is Tongue of the Invisible, commissioned by the Holland Festival for jazz musician Uri Caine, singer Omar Ebrahim and musikFabrik which premieres this June in Amsterdam and Cologne. There’s a text by Jonathan Holmes after the Sufi poet Hafez and the work explores an ecstatic world of Improvisation as unpredictable play, Song as longing for the Divine, Musicians as listeners, drunk with desire, and The Concert as a tavern, a meeting-place between world and ’other.’ “This door is the mouth of love,/ Whether it leads to the mosque or the wine-shop/ Souls inhabit the dust of its threshold.” (Holmes). Liza Lim, composer
pvi collective t2 r&d
We are most looking forward to playing hard and getting our hands dirty in 2011 with: transumer inspired street intervention workshops at Adhocracy, Adelaide; a new series of quick and dirty public actions titled Do we need a permit for this?; developing national “go fcuk it up day” to launch in time for CHOGM when Perth becomes the centre of world political debate; showcasing t2 at pica, where audiences will be invited to undertake tiny acts of resistance against their built environment. 2011 is looking a little bit brutal & full of love, but we will have killer smiles and sly mischief on our side! PVI Collective
In 2011 an art gang I’m part of, which emerged out of the DLux TILT festival and Newcastle’s Electrofringe, will be ten years old. We’re boat-people.org, we’ve been making work around the ideas of race, nation, history and borders since John Howard conjured us into being with his 2001 border panic election. A decade on, we’ve made all kinds of public spectacles of ourselves and others, maybe including you, in (the hope of) the public sphere. As we reach double digits there’s much more mischief to be made around the troubled themes of our interesting times. Sign up, join us! boat-people.org. Deborah Kelly, artist
We are developing a project for the inaugural San Francisco/Sydney Biennial curated by Justine Topfer (SFAC Gallery) and Meg Shiffler (Director, San Francisco Art Commission Gallery). The exhibition is titled Envisioning Urban Change: Proposals for an Integrated Urban Life and will include three projects about each city created by local artists. The first stage of the project opens in San Francisco in April, the second stage will be exhibited at CarriageWorks, Sydney in August. Our project focuses on Sydney Harbour, exploring people’s relationship to it, the state of the water and how we imagine the harbour’s future. Josephine Starrs & Leon Cmielewski, artists
It’s hard to pick a highlight (how lucky am I?) but none of us in the FULL TILT office have quite come down off the ceiling yet after the extraordinary success of the new music theatre series Carnegie 18 which we showcased in January at the Arts Centre. But from this vantage point we can see the 2012 Carnegie 18 program rapidly approaching! If 2011 gave us an opera about netball, vaudevillian grotesques and rock musicals, then bring on the next round of little gems for 2012. I’m really looking forward to the next new batch! Applications close in May. Vanessa Pigrum, Program Manager, Creative Development, The Arts Centre, Melbourne
RealTime issue #101 Feb-March 2011 pg. 2-13
