Arts House Listening Program

The two podcasts in this series follow the collaborative work of artists Lorna Hannon and Jen Rae, and their ongoing interest in visionary activist, Ruth Crow. Ruth Crow provided the artists a way to explore ideas surrounding community gathering and change in North Melbourne. Commissioned by Arts House 2016 Amy McMurtrie – Artist & Deviser Michael Vescio – Consultant Sound Artist and Technician

The two podcasts in this series follow the collaborative work of artists Lorna Hannon and Jen Rae, and their ongoing interest in visionary activist, Ruth Crow. Ruth Crow provided the artists a way to explore ideas surrounding community gathering and change in North Melbourne. Commissioned by Arts House 2016 Amy McMurtrie – Artist & Deviser Michael Vescio – Consultant Sound Artist and Technician

Silent Supper Club will look at expressive forms of non-spoken communication – Auslan, tactile experiences and live captioning. Hosted by artist and director Jo Dunbar, guests include writer and poet Quinn Eades, co-founder of The Delta Project, Anna Seymour and photographer Kate Disher Quill. Surrounded by delicious food, Silent Supper Club explores the types of silences saturating spaces of performances, and look at the role of audiological silence and how silencing translates in creative practice

Silent Supper Club will look at expressive forms of non-spoken communication – Auslan, tactile experiences and live captioning. Hosted by artist and director Jo Dunbar, guests include writer and poet Quinn Eades, co-founder of The Delta Project, Anna Seymour and photographer Kate Disher Quill. Surrounded by delicious food, Silent Supper Club explores the types of silences saturating spaces of performances, and look at the role of audiological silence and how silencing translates in creative practice.

This forum was recorded on 30th July 2016 “The question is, am I a monster, or am I myself a victim? And what if I am a victim?” One hundred and fifty years since Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, Crime and Punishment, we’ll be talking about our enduring obsessions with transgression, retribution and justice. What purpose does punishment play in society? Is punishment good for you? And what is the connection between punishment, justice, catharsis and redemption? The answers to these questions depend on who you ask. Facilitator Madeleine Morris will be joined by former Pentridge Prison chaplain Peter Norden, female inmate advocate Debbie Kilroy, actor Uncle Jack Charles and theatre maker J R Brennan. Brennan’s work, The Chat, is co-devised by artists and ex-offenders and was shown at Arts House in July 2016. For this Insight-style forum, we’ll also hear from a range of other guests who are invested in these issues, from ex-offenders to criminologists to prison officers to dominatrixes to risk managers. Themes of cr

This post show Q&A was recorded on 28th July 2016 Devised by both artists and former prisoners, The Chat takes a dark and humorous look at the criminal justice system. Led by theatre maker and former parole officer,
J R Brennan, with writer-performer David Woods (Ridiculusmus), The Chat is an administrative nightmare of comic proportions where offenders become parole officers, actors become criminals, and the parole board is played by you, the audience. How and when should crimes be forgiven? Who gets to decide? What happens
if they get it wrong? Against the steely beauty of a heavily surveilled interview room, former prisoners share the stage with performers J R Brennan, David Woods and Ashley Dyer to build a new world order for ‘justice arts’ – a world of crime stories, interpretive dance and bleak, possibly horrific comedy.Radically disruptive, The Chat transforms the theatre into a tense and liminal space where offenders stand on the brink of freedom, taboos unravel, and all of us are put on trial. Con

This postshow Q&A was recorded on 7/7/2016 Dance, video, poetry and song are breathtakingly combined in a major new work from intercultural and interdisciplinary company, Marrugeku. In a burnt landscape a group of climate change refugees faces yet another extreme weather event. Propelled back and forward in time, they revisit conflict with mining companies, the destruction of fauna and the relegation of the marginalised, while contemplating the gift of life and the life-giving force of the sun. Butterflies swarm searching for water; dancers disintegrate into the light. A song is sung, calling for rain. Like climate change itself, Cut the Sky is both local and international – bringing together artists from Europe, Asia, Africa and remote and urban Australia. An ambitious and poignant meditation on humanity’s frailty in the face of our own actions, Cut the Sky showcases Marrugeku’s unique contemporary vision – restless, taut and unwavering.

and the earth sighed is a large scale immersive video and sound environment that focuses on desert, fire, flood and coral reefs. The audience is encouraged to ascend stairs to a platform where they view large-scale floor projections from above, and then descend into the floor projections where their bodies are immersed in the moving sea and landscapes. The ambient surround soundscape designed by Alex Davies fosters engagement and contemplation about the impact of climate change on natural ecologies. This Work was presented by Arts House as part of Performed Climates Season, July, 2016. This project has been supported by a Creative Australia development grant from the Australia Council’s Emerging and Experimental Arts program and the City of Melbourne through Arts House.

This Artist Talk was recorded Saturday 25th June 2016 In this adventurous and celebratory performance event, Glasgow based artist Nic Green exuberantly examines feminism, inviting women of all ages and backgrounds to share the stage in an energetic tribute. Presented across the UK to wide acclaim, Trilogy now greets Melbourne with its bold and joyous proclamation. Trilogy begins by celebratingwomen in today’s world – with all their complexities, in their skins and as they are. Footage from the landmark 1971 discussion Town Bloody Hall – in which Norman Mailer took on passionate feminists including Germaine Greer – kicks off the responses and reflections of five young performers; before an exuberant paean for womankind concludes an evening of eclectic style and rousing energy. Honest and adventurous, Trilogy deftly weaves performance, participation, discussion, music and archival material; carving out new space for feminism and rallying the power and strength in women together.

This postshow Q&A was recorded on 9/6/16 Mira Fuchs is an expert. An expert private dancer. She’s also the public face of artist Melanie Jame Wolf’s eight-year private life as a stripper in a gentleman’s club. Mira wants to dance you through the myriad questions and contradictions of her work, that time and her world. In an intimate, in-the-round work, Wolf speaks, prances and twists her way through an abstracted memoir that trips between lap-danceand body politics. With humour, high heels and deep insight, she fashions a looking glass for our own reflections on the work of stripping. Leave your preconceptions with the coat-check and step into an oft-hidden economy of desire and exchange. Both entertaining and unflinchingly personal, MIRA FUCHS explores sexuality, gender, performance, intimacy, dance-as-labour, looking and being looked at, and pleasure, in a world where money is timeand timing is everything.

This postshow Q&A was Recorded on 2 June 2016. We hold memeories in our blood. It connects us. It defines us. Blood on the Dance Floor explores the legacies and memories of our bloodlines, our need for community, and what blood means to each of us questioning how this most precious fluid unites and divides us. A choreographer , dancer and writer from the Narangaa and Kaurna Nations of South Australia, Jacob Boehme was diagnosed with HIV in 1998. In search of answers, he reached out to his ancestors. Through the powerful blend of theatre,image,text and choreography, Boehme pays homage to their ceromonies whilst dissecting the politics of gay, Blak and poz identities.Blood on the Dance Floor is an unapologetic, passionate and visceral narrative that traverseas time, space and characters. A story of our need to love and be loved, Boehme's stricking monologue reveals our secret identities and our deepest fears, seeking to invoke ancestral lineage in a contemporary quest for courage and hope. Writer & Performer:

From Luke George and Collaborators 'Erotic Dance' this sound score is one half of a duet between dancer (Luke George) and sound artist (Nick Roux). Exploring the sensuality of form, it summons an experience of art that is primitive and seductive, intimate and visceral. This Work was presented by Arts House as part of The Festival of Live Art, March 2-5 2016 Created and performed live using an assortment of guitar effects pedals, a Gibson ES135 guitar resonated by an Ebow, two hand built sine wave oscillators, a microphone, a snare drum and all fed through two guitar amplifiers.

This postshow Q&A was recorded on 20/11/15 EDMUND. THE BEGINNING is both an exercise in distorted biography and a confessional torrent. Brian Lipson summons a disordered array of characters from the impatient past and the murky present: some are familiar, some are famous, some are known only to Lipson. None is comfortable. Fifteen years ago Lipson’s acclaimed solo show, A Large Attendance in the Antechamber, won two Green Room Awards before touring the world for the next seven years. Brian is now considerably older and considerably less wise, but he can still talk very fast. EDMUND. THE BEGINNING is even more complex than its predecessor, and each of its many characters is both a real person and an imaginary figure. But who imagines whom? Who is Whom? Who is Alive? Who is Dead? And Why? In EDMUND. THE BEGINNING, literary giants, sirens, reprobates and infants cavort in existential quadrille. A few you will recognise, others you won’t. All will ring bells.

This postshow Q&A was recorded Thursday 19th November 2015. In a kitchen, somewhere in West Wales, a war veteran called Zach has withdrawn into a box. A friend called Ieuan arrives, o ering recovery in the form of dialogue and a capsule containing 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine. He’s participated in trials for treating chronic PTSD with psychedelic drugs, and says he’s cured. What follows soars into a psychoactive dream of delirium, trauma and supermarket shopping as the two men are parachuted into their own fractured pasts – their symptoms expressing the pathologies of a disturbed world. Give Me Your Love is the second instalment of Ridiculusmus’s three-pronged investigation into innovative approaches to mental health. Informed by the latest scienti c research, it explores the healing potential in altered states of consciousness. Written, Directed & Performed by David Woods and Jon Haynes

This postshow Q&A was recorded on the 12th November 2015. Piece For Person and Ghetto Blaster is the story of a man, a woman and a duck. It is about the excruciating realms of human behaviour. It is an attempt to navigate the complexities of an ordinary person struggling to become a better human. Preoccupied by how social conventions obstruct the possibility of personal liberation, Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster is a duet between physical action and spoken language, setting up a space for dialogue. Offering little comfortable optimism for the future unless we confront our own responsibility to make it better, it calls into question our very capacity to continue to make moral judgments and relate to others in an ethical way. So what if, in the auditorium, all together, we created conflict? And what if we created conflict just so we could practice transformation? This new work from riveting, subversive creator/performer Nicola Gunn tries to understand how we can all get along. Creator & Performer: Nico

At the intersection of theatre, dance and visual art installation, Bronx Gothic gives palatable force to the charged relationship between two girls on the verge of adolescence in 1980s outer-borough New York City. Their world emerges through the clandestine and sometimes sex-saturated notes that are passed between them. Orchard Beach, Nathan’s hot dogs and Whitney Houston’s hair are all part of the landscape of Bronx Gothic. Created by New-York-based writer, performer and choreographer, Okwui Okpokwasili, in collaboration with director and designer, Peter Born. Bronx Gothic is a partially-true chronicle of one woman’s past, and draws inspiration from both Victorian-era novels and West African griot storytelling. Okpokwasili’s intensely physical solo performance pushes against extremes, reverberating with a potency that threatens to break the body. Bronx Gothic unfolds as a dark and powerful tale of sexual self-discovery and the (brown) body in transformation – and the humour, love, strangeness, and even te

This post show Q&A was recorded on the 12th September 2015. The signs are there: over the past few decades, humanity’s 5000-year collaboration with the honey bee has been building toward a grim conclusion. If we fail to heed their warning, could we be casually swept into the fossil record alongside them? Dance of the Bee is a remarkable interspecies musical collaboration: a work performed by three pianists, the vocalists of the Astra Choir and a live swarm of bees, housed inside a sculpted, transparent hive. Woven through the mysterious song of the bees, the pieces range from soundscapes to intense virtuosic arrangements, punctuated by semi- improvised sonic excursions. As the bees sing, live video allows us to observe the marvel of the hive at work – and to ponder on the fragile connection between our world and theirs. Composed by Martin Friedel Piano/Prepared Piano Michael Kieran Harvey, Peter Dumsday, Joy Lee The Astra Improvising Choir Directed by Joan Pollock The Astra Choir Directed by John McCaughey

New Zealand-born, Brussels-based artist, Kate McIntosh, creates an improvised laboratory for unusual recordings and acoustic experiments, using everyday objects and materials. Chairs are dragged, paper is torn, glasses are toppled; sounds are recorded and played back along the way. As curious scientist, mischievous questioner and eclectic storyteller, McIntosh creates a distinctive journey made of parables, fragments and jokes: of human and animal behaviour, of crowd control and linguistics, politics and group dynamics, birds and traffic jams, societies and social interactions. In the silences in between, questions arise about who we are alone and how we are together; about what it might take to change a culture, and what we might miss in the push for self-sufficiency. McIntosh is fascinated with destruction and creation, sense and nonsense, the whole and the fractured. With both lucidity and off-beat humour, All Ears beautifully balances on the thin line between experiment and entertainment. This postsh

In this new work by Melbourne choreographer Jo Lloyd (Future Perfect, 2013), hypnotic tension is generated by three dancers as they negotiate a dysfunctional system of choreography. Navigating their physical histories, both recent and distant – from traces of folk dance to idiosyncratic body rhythms – the performers reveal a series of desperate encounters, in a destabilising flood of movement. Confusion for Three uses complex choreographic parameters and a set of highly physical and mentally demanding tasks, exploring order/disorder in a progressively unravelling structure. The questions remain: can this confusion be sustained, and where does it lead us? Lloyd has brought together some of Melbourne’s finest creatives for this fascinating work – including dancers Rebecca Jensen (OVERWORLD, Dance Massive 2015) and Shian Law (Personal Mythologies, Next Wave 2014). This Postshow Q&A was recorded 27th August 2015 Choreographer: Jo Lloyd Performers: Rebecca Jensen, Shian Law, Jo Lloyd Composer: Duane Morrison

Wesley Enoch, Playwright and Director Tue 18 August, RECLAIM AUSTRALIA - with guest and co-host Deborah Cheetham. What are we trying to do as a nation - to legislate-out racism, or to remove racism from our central document - the Constitution? What does it look like and is it even possible? Join Wesley and Deborah and guests for this pertinent discussion.