LIVE DREAMS: MARRIAGES

On Demand Tickets

In its 6th season, with a cult following and a beloved intimacy with artists practice and process, Performance Space and Carriageworks are thrilled to present LIVE DREAMS May 2023. Taking place both in physical space and online, come and get a glimpse at the future of experimental art from across the Asia Pacific.

As Performance Space gears up to celebrate its 40th anniversary, LIVE DREAMS reflects on the rituals of time as a way of thinking through the development of exciting, new performance work.

Bringing artists and audiences together in dynamic and responsive ways, LIVE DREAMS is a series of curated performance events across three nights: BIRTHS, DEATHS and MARRIAGES. Taking its theme from the government registry that records significant life events, curators Rosie Dennis and Daniel Mudie Cunningham have selected works that speak to the rituals and markers of time as they shape a diverse spectrum of lived experience and the human condition.

Each theme is a prompt for artists to consider the correlation of art to life. From starts and origins, beginnings and conception, LIVE DREAMS artists will literally birth new ideas for audiences, while others will consider how the natural cycles of existence give way to departures and endings, and loss and cessation as metaphoric notions of death are offered up for consideration. Though lifespans are inevitably measured from where they start and end, they are coloured in by collaboration and togetherness, companionship and commitment, marriages of self to other, artist to audience, idea to action.

This innovative platform allows the artists to present ideas- and works-in-progress, so you can see first hand into the creative process, getting a glimpse into current developments in experimental art, and engage in a conversation about their next steps.

CONTENT WARNINGS: Use of haze and smoke, partial nudity, use of essential oils (Sweet Orange, Lavender, Ylang ylang, Patchouli), audience invited on stage, use of contained liquid, and performance will be filmed.

ARTISTS

Jodie Whalen, giving and receiving - a negotiation.

Marriage is the collaboration and togetherness of artist, artwork and audience - there is a commitment from each party to enact, engage and submit to transformation. Honouring the rituals of audience and artwork as performer, this commitment, this union of voluntary and involuntary togetherness, the work reaches its final form - the birth of emotional transformative experience.

This time based multi sensory work honours the ritual markers of time in its materiality, its process and the needs and wants it asks of the audience- This marriage lays bare ritual transformation, collaboration and togetherness that art births and parents long after the union has ended.

CONTENT WARNINGS: Use of haze and smoke, partial nudity, contained liquid, use of essential oils (Sweet Orange, Lavender, Ylang ylang, Patchouli), flickering light, audience invited on stage.

Sabrina Lee Muszynski, 2nd Skin

Movement. Dance. A memoir. An art installation.  A work about feminism. A work not about feminism. A work about identity – cultural identity, gender identity. A work about us. A work about me.

2nd Skin is a work-in-development, investigating the intersection between movement and Scottish highland dancing. Examined via kinaesthetic and technological processes, the project plays between a dual human identity – representing one’s individuality and their cultural dancing roots. Through disrupting and shifting the strict traditional dance steps, the work considers the binaries, both pulling and opposing, between highland dance and visceral movement forms. Explored within a hybrid space – videography and live performance – an amalgamation of two bodies is analysed, one remaining in tradition, while the other departing into new movement pathways.

Elsie Yager, THE KNOT

How can I describe to you the Real? The Real is the thing you can't describe. The thing you can't think. The thing you can't perceive... And also not quite that. Because if I try to describe it to you, even like this, I kill it. Because by definition I can't encase it in language, I can't touch it with words. You know it exists, but if you try to look at it, it disappears. It is the thing that is always already there, and always retreating. That's how I feel about me. THE KNOT begins as a lecture on Lacanian psychoanalysis and quickly breaks down and explodes... into an autobiography, a ritual and a queer dance party. Performed by a body 17,000 kilometres away, THE KNOT explores queer rebirth, transformation and transcendence through and beyond bodies. Real bodies, shared bodies, imagined bodies and bodies yet to become.

Michelle St Anne & Linda Dement featuring Kathy Cogill, The Seeping Woman

On one chair sits a woman staring into a glass with something black inside. The glass seeps water. Her body looks restful at first glance but her fingers, lips and legs are agitated. She wants to leave but can’t.

Intimacy, proximity, and the lens are taken here as metaphor and reality. How can live, recorded, online and warm flesh worlds co-exist under and via scrutiny of the lens? How can a choreographic approach form a marriage in-between?

We experiment with rituals and markers of non-linear simultaneous time. 

Chenoeh Miller, Francesca Giselle

"When I was young, she taught me to dance. Now, through life’s pummelling, I am dancing still".

She is God, the Universe, the sisterhood, the everywoman; she is the speaker of truth, the gift of sight, the light in the darkness. Actually, it doesn’t really matter who she is. What matters is that she took your hand and guided you out of those deep, murky waters that had threatened to drown you. 

Little Dove dedicates this work to all those who have suffered physical, emotional, mental and/or financial abuse at the hands of others, and give thanks to those individuals and organisations that are working to end the insidious epidemic of intimate partner violence. 

Nick Delatovic, Must Go On

Must Go On is a Queer Sci-fi Narrative Gig. A lurid, sweaty, glam and genderfucked concert that is a theatre show that is a party.

It’s the last ever show by a pop diva who has dominated 60 years of future history, from 2020 thru 2080. A career retrospective hosted by the VIP Fan Club who have both acted as patrons for the star, and exercised tyrannical control over their career and life. The audience will attend in character as this Fan Club, and be complicit in all events.

At the end of the gig, the Diva’s X factor/talent/je ne sais quoi will be downloaded into a whole new form of pop music life, and their lifetime of memories will be divvied up among a handful of VIP superfans. But the Diva has another, stranger plan: to upstage even their own annihilation and re-define the “immortality” of star performers. A queer future built from the history of queer showbiz, which is all of showbiz. 

CONTENT WARNINGS: Use of contained liquid.

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