Experimental Micro-Fellowships
PRESENTED BY PERFORMANCE SPACE
2021 Experimental Micro-Fellowship artists announced!
Performance Space’s Experimental Micro Fellowships support artists to undertake new research and artistic experimentation that will strengthen the future of their practice. Performance Space is committed to the development of experimental practice and sees the extension of this program through 2021 as essential in supporting innovative new work and ideas in a changed world.
We are delighted to announce our six Mirco-Fellowship artists for 2021:
BoneDirt (NSW, VIC, SA)
A transdisciplinary collective, Jessie Boylan, Linda Dement and Virginia Barratt have been working together since 2018. BoneDirt: makes perceptible, through a practise of deep listening, the undifferentiated relationship between geological and human. Read More.
They will engage in technological and speculative processes to open our perception to the non-human agency of the geological, in order to create a sense of human care for the geological. By listening to geological formations and seeking resonant frequencies, Bonedirt seeks to shift the bio to geo, attempting to engage with deep geological time, speculating as to geo-consciousness and our simultaneity with it. BoneDirt wish to create immersive environments that have an affective resonance. In their projects, they explore the power of infrasonic sound, poetics, and temporality in durational performance environments
Ferry & Ang Xiao Ting (Singapore)
Ferry is an installation artist, designer, musician, educator, and collaborator. Honed through a practice that spans design, music, art, education and theatre FERRY’s edge is in the ability to synthesise ideas and practices from diverse fields, utilising different methodologies to create audience experiences that engage through multiple means. Driven by ideas regardless of form, she continues to challenge and change perspectives on social issues. Read More.
Ang Xiao Ting is a freelance Singapore-based hyphenated practitioner – a performance-maker, movement-based performer, actor, educator, dramaturg and interdisciplinary collaborator. Her creative practice is informed by the intersection of the arts with non-aesthetic aspects of society to advocate for social innovation and change. Read More.
Ferry and Xiao Ting’s Micro Fellowship project Land of Loss: WISDOMS is an interdisciplinary investigation into concepts of loss in the context of Singapore’s frenzied mixing of cultures and rapid social transformation. Focusing on intergenerational knowledge and combining social research with formal experimentation, their Micro Fellowship will uncover new artistic possibilities for this developing work.
Riana Head-Toussaint (NSW)
An interdisciplinary disabled artist, she employs choreography, performance, video, sound design, immersive/participatory installation and audience activation to create works that interrogate entrenched systems, structures and ways of thinking; and advocate for social change. Read More.
Through this fellowship she will develop two works 'Conductive Site' which puts forward the concept that no space is neutral; the architecture, culture and history of every site will affect those who interact with it – how, and to what extent, they can access it. This has direct implications for the ‘liveness’ of an event. The work will draw focus to create movement, conversation and change.
The other project is Animate Loading. The work involves a group of people with different movement languages and bodies (politicised in various ways due to race, disability, sex, gender and movement mode) entering a location; traversing and interacting with it. It’s a performance, but also a socio-political intervention; as their movement foregrounds the complex negotiations that often go unnoticed in scenarios involving bodies and the built environment.
Sarah Aiken (VIC)
A Melbourne-based teacher and choreographer from Bellingen NSW. Sarah’s work investigates assemblage, authorship, scale and the self, looking at the roles of audience, performer, subject and object and connecting tangibly with audiences, to consider performance as a site for empathy & exchange. Read More.
Sarah’s experimental Micro Fellowship sees her breaking new ground at the intersection of her performance and video practice—expanding her technical and conceptual use of video and wedding technology with corporality: considering the body as an assemblage, as a landscape for microscopic life, as singular, as one of many, as a multitude, as a tool for change, both destructive and generative, and as temporary. This investigation of the body traces imagined histories of our matter before and after our ownership of it.
Seini ‘SistaNative’ Taumoepeau (NSW)
An Orator & Songwoman with an Intersectional Oceanic-Pacific lens & First Nations focus with a career spanning more than 30+ years. With a strong aesthetic in harmony & rhythm, Sēini works in the invisible & the intangible first & foremost exploring ideas of connectivity, hōhoko (geneology), ritual, ceremony, communication, relational inter-sectionality & displacement across Tā Vā (Time-Space). Read More.
An eternal scholar & emerging Elder, Through this fellowship Sēini will continue to grow her study & practices in every direction with the desire to bring Oceanic wisdom & indigenous science to the forefront, through sharing empathic intuitive intelligent Heart centered creative practice to continue to create harmony & community praxis, as an extension of the Indigenous cultures of her people of the Mōana.
Victoria Hunt (NSW)
Born on Yugambeh Country, Surfers Paradise SE QLD, residing on unceded Bidjigal Country, Eora Nation, Sydney, Australia. Victoria descends from Te Arawa, Rongowhakaata, Kahungunu Maori, Celtic, Scandinavian and English heritages. They work across diverse forms as a dancer, choreographer, director, photographer and film maker. Their work is philosophically liminal, inter-cultural and reinstates the power of Indigenous creativity within the politics of Rematriation - inserting the body into frameworks of power, for future ancestors. Read more.
Victoria’s Micro Fellowship sees the artist probe into creative research stemming from indigenous epistemologies within diasporic concepts of identity formation and belonging. This research turns towards Polynesian forebears and Maori celestial realms/cosmology, calling backwards into the future in a reciprocal imagining. Victoria will draw in a range of collaborators – including Moe Clark and their collective Weather Beings, as well as James Brown and Boris Bagattini to explore the artistic possibilities from this creative immersion.
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Performance Space’s Experimental Micro-Fellowships are a new initiative in response to the unprecedented worldwide disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic to the experimental and interdisciplinary arts sector. During this strange and difficult time, we are committed to keeping experimental work thriving, supporting artists to embark on new creative developments and undertake new research that will strengthen the future of their practice.
The Experimental Micro-Fellowships are a series of small $5000 grants awarded to 8 Australian and Asia Pacific artists to undertake research, new experiments, or creative developments in the current environment of remote work and social distancing.
Aiming to foster a culture of curiosity, experimentation and creative response, the Experimental Micro-Fellowships could support artists to work on the transformation of an existing project, the creative development of a new work, a new piece of research, or an experiment to try something new. This might be an opportunity to find a new way of working on a project, a chance to change direction and experiment with new ideas, or to bunker down and focus on a piece of research that hasn't otherwise had time and space. These fellowships are focused on artists with interdisciplinary or experimental practices: we are seeking to support artists who are expanding the edges of art forms and exploring new ways for art to meet its audience.
Past Artists:
2020
Samia Sayed
Natasha Tontey
Giselle Stanborough
SJ Norman
Val Lee
Janet Carter
Del Lumanta
Luke John Campbell
Information surrounding the next fellowships round will be updated here. To stay up to date with all our Artist Development opportunities subscribe to our e-news and our social channels. Instagram | Facebook | Twitter
