LIVE DREAMS: PORTAL - LIVE ON-THE-LINE

LIVE DREAMS: PORTAL - LIVE ON-THE-LINE

Curator
Emma Webb (Vitalstatistix) 

STREAM HERE

Works that invite us to leave the current world behind, celebrating the liminal drift or the radical leap, the shapeshifter, the departure and liberation, an unbound break away from this time, politic or place.

Duration: 2 hours 

This event will be available on-demand until Midnight Sunday 31st Oct 2021. Purchase a ticket to access the password for this event.
Artists 

Mrs Tan (Philippines)
Tandemonium
Tandemonium is a virtual world that shows how chaotic the world can get, how power is purchased, and how oppression and killings, especially of those in the minority, continue while people are silent. A virtual world where its own creator is not the ruler. A chaotic world where the power to decide is given to those who you share it with. One has no voice, no choice, no control. One is there only for entertainment.

Jay Gardener, George Wohlfiel and Jeff McCann (Sydney)
Us, the Most, The Many (UMM)
Collaborators Jay Gardener, George Wohlfiel, and Jeff McCann will envision a utopia for the Live Dreams portal stream that radically reimagines our present. UMM asks, what would our world be beyond gender, beyond binaries, beyond our bodies and beyond human? Can this alternative present be captured in a ‘live’ experience?

Jenny Brown (Sydney)
Pick-up-needle-bottom-of-sea
Pick-up-needle-bottom-of-sea performs an apology to Iraq as a participant imagining of a water-energy postal system in the creek that cuts across my backyard down through rivers to the sea. The work responds to French-Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s description of how America wanted to take control of the Chaldean writing system, the birth of writing, as its motivation for targeting Iraq, which led to the US-Australian-British-led invasion. The theft of the Gilgamesh tablets during the war and their relocation to Washington’s Museum of Bible entangles this drive further. In our ice-book form’s floating creekline release, the Christian bible melts away.

Too Close to the Sun (Perth)
At the End of the Land
At the End of the Land is a contemporary solo performance work about the liminal space between life and death. It draws inspiration from spirit photography, 18 dead school girls from the Victorian era, a red monkey who listens to death metal and David Lynch on the unified field. The work is essentially an experiment in seeing beyond our material existence and grappling with what cannot be comprehended. In making this work we intend to invest deeply in the mysterious and the uncanny and to reveal a glimpse of what is hidden underneath the living and the known.

Talya Rubin - performer/writer/co-devisor
Nick James - co-devisor/director
Sam James - hologram and projections designer
Hayley Forward - sound designer
Richard Vabre - lighting designer

Sally Craven (Adelaide)
Orchadia
Inspired by lost worlds and the unexpected utopias of golf, Sally Craven’s performance lecture and video will bend histories and anecdotes into Orchadian fictions, speaking to the last remaining island of a critically endangered orchid surviving inside a private golf club on Kaurna land. Sally will consider the site’s inherent contradictions and tensions, pasts and possible futures, and the complexities of capitalist public/private thresholds, underpinned by colonial ideologies. The work draws from art historian Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll whose research examines plants as both witnesses to, and dynamic agents in, history. She says that ‘even in “nature” we are not outside the world of neoliberal exploitation, but rather in a postlapsarian collapse of Eden into a colony. Plants are also in service of the global economic apparatus of extraction, accumulation, and acceleration—the quiet resistance that we sense from them as we become vegetalized by incarceration is also at least partly an illusion’ (Orlow 2018, 242). 

Pat Toh (Singapore)
Air Ways
Air Ways examines the breath as entangled territories of policies, ecologies and corporealities. Taking crises of respiration as the point of activism, this work is a chorus performance voicing on the affects of greenhouse gases and the precarious relationship of our lungs with the atmosphere. 

Angus McGrath (Sydney)
The Tomb of Illusions, or, A Seance As A Play
A seance performed with a TV summons the spirits of artist Andy Warhol and novelist Yukio Mishima, blurring the lines of performance, play, lecture, and occult magic. The infamously performative men lecture about the meanings of beauty, fantasy, the body, sex, and death. Maybe the characters whose bodies they inhabit learn something too.

In 2020, global events created enormous instability and uncertainty for experimental practice. In response, Performance Space created Live Dreams, a new platform for artists to share works-in-progress and ideas in development in a dynamic and responsive environment. Taking place both in physical space and online, Live Dreams enables artists and audiences to continue connecting with each other across borders and geographic space. Live Dreams has offered us an exciting glimpse into current developments in experimental art, and has been a crucible for experimentation and conversation.

Performance Space has expanded this program as part of Liveworks 20211, inviting four Guest Curators from across the Asia-Pacific to theme each stream with powerful provocations as we navigate the turbulence of our current moment.  

All LIVE DREAMS events will be live streamed on Vimeo, and embedded on our website. All the events in the LIVE DREAMS Series will be available on demand for 7 days after they air, through our digital experimental art channel LIVE ON-THE-LINE.

Access: 50% visual content