Das Wasser im Bade is an experimental exploration of commodified use of water in our daily lives, through sound, video and performance works made from the mundane to the sublime in suburban waterways.

Jesse Budel is a composer, performer and sound artist with a research focus on arts-science explorations of environmental soundscapes, including aquatic environments. Ray Harris is an artist working in performance, video, sculpture and installation exploring the self and everyday fantasy states. Austrian-born artist Cynthia Schwertsik has an art practice that includes visual art and contemporary performance with a focus on participatory inclusion.

This project has developed from the collaborating South Australian artists’ responses to each other’s work and their mutual interest in water – psychologically, scientifically and politically. This is the first time the artists have all worked together.

Creative Team: Co-creators – Ray Harris, Cynthia Schwertsik and Jesse Budel

Broth Bitch is a podcast performance work about the wellness industrial complex and white women, set against conversations about women, labour and capitalism.

Michele Lee is an Asian-Australian playwright and theatre maker working across stage, live art, audio and screen. Her work is largely narrative-focused, in comedy and drama, and explores stories of women, work, otherness and found families.

Collaborating with an acclaimed team of Melbourne-based theatre makers, while all are in Melbourne’s lockdown, Michele and her co-creators are using the format of a multi-episodic podcast to make this new satirical work for presentation in late 2020 at Melbourne Fringe.

Creative Team: Writer and lead artist – Michele Lee; Director – Ming-Zhu Hii; Dramaturg – Jessica Bellamy; Performer – Maia Thomas; Composer and sound designer – Russell Goldsmith

You Are Jeff is a composed theatre piece for pianist and orchestra, inspired by Siken’s Crush, evoking a portrait of queer discovery, self-reflection, rage and sensuality.

Dan Thorpe is a classically trained composer, pianist and performer, with an interest in theatrical work, queer work and genre-decimating work. He has performed and has been performed around the world. His latest work is a concerto for acting pianist and chamber orchestra, with text from the eponymous Siken poem, commissioned by Forest Collective as part of a portrait concert in development for premiere in late 2021.

With Forest Collective’s director and conductor Evan Lawson and theatre maker Britt Plummer, Dan is drawing from a text that spurred his art practice out of the closet to make a collaborative, transcendent and very personal concert debut.

Creative Team: Composer and pianist – Dan Thorpe; Director and dramaturg – Britt Plummer; Artistic Director, Forest Collective – Evan Lawson; the musicians of Forest Collective

What’s Eating Tristan Meecham? is a podcast about identity, sexuality, faith and how people with divergent beliefs can find common ground, inspired by an unbelievable coincidence and an internationally journey to connect left and right ideology together. 

Tristan Meecham is a performance artist and Artistic Director of All the Queens Men. Through a relational engagement practice, he co-designs creative projects that improves access not only to arts experiences but to broader community health and social services. He has become a leading creative voice within the LGBTI+ community nationally and internationally.

Creative Team: Writer and performer – Tristan Meecham; Sound editor – Jess Fairfax; Sound designer – Luke Smiles

We the Sick [of It] generates a series of participatory micro manifestos about the health of the social body, engaging with poetics, play and radical care practices.

Cat Jones is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and researcher thinking across social, biological and metaphysical realms. She experiments with transformation through the subversion of science, history, language and the senses. She works across text, performance, media, immersive, site-specific, tactile, olfactory and edible art.

Working with pvi collective’s Kelli McCluskey as a provocateur, Cat’s latest project continues her interest in medicine and feminist futures, the social body, and community care. The project experiments with crowd-sourced content through the form of collective manifestos, and their pertinence at this critical time for global health policy and ongoing isolation.

Creative Team: Artist – Cat Jones; Provocateur – Kelli McCluskey

The Lost and Found Office is a performance installation about loss, memory and the everyday experience of slippage, woven together from real-life interviews with South Australian communities.

Early career playwright Georgi Paech and emerging director Elizabeth Hay are collaborating on an ambitious project, bringing together a stellar team of South Australian theatre-makers to realise their vision and the magic of Georgi’s interviews with diverse local people.

Conceived as an immersive installation and whimsical promenade performance experience, the work explores the many types of loss we can encounter – the profound and the heartbreaking, the comical and the careless, and the liberating – and how loss shapes our lives.

Creative Team: Co-creator, interviews and script, producer – Georgi Paech; Co-creator and director – Elizabeth Hay; Designer – Bianka Kennedy; Lighting designer – Chris Petridis; Performers – Ashton Malcolm, James Smith and Jacqy Phillips

Takatāpui is an expansive performance work unearthing the transgenerational and collective trauma of colonisation, and the relentless journey to reclaiming sovereignty of body, mind and soul.

Daley Rangi (Te Āti Awa) is an eclectic, award-winning multidisciplinary artist. Raised on Whadjuk Noongar boodja, Daley was born in Aotearoa, with Māori whakapapa. They are neurodiverse and genderqueer, and use these lenses to explore the outer limits of humanity, generating unpredictable and uncomfortable works in a celebration of chaos, queerness and decolonisation.

Working from a deeply personal text, Daley is exploring what it means to be a Takatāpui, a queer Māori human, and what it takes to move through the world in their body, in a grounded, revealing work.

Creative Team: Creator and Performer – Daley Rangi; Video Art Director and Editor – Elham Haakansson-Eshraghian; Video Art Cinematographer – Elliott Nieves

Sincere Apologies is a performance work constructed entirely from apologies – the famous, the obscure, the imagined, the speculative or forth-coming and those that begin every second email in our inboxes.

Working from lockdown in Melbourne, two artists well known for their separate documentary and verbatim theatre practices join two other artists well known for their solo and collaborative participatory works for unexpected places. Together they are making an automatic performance, an apology for their absence.

This fascinating collaboration is exploring the many types of apologies experienced in public and private life, every day. The work will test the limits of the act of apology, and perhaps move through the core of our collective regret into a place where healing and repair might become possible.

Creative Team: Co-creators – Dan Koop, Jamie Lewis, Roslyn Oades and David Williams

Screen Me is a performance project exploring representation on screen, inspired by the lead artist’s experience as the only visible person of colour on an Australian police procedural in the late 90s.

Sapidah Kian is a director, actor, theatre maker and dramaturg, working across theatre, film, television and radio. She is joined by a powerhouse team of collaborators, artists who all work in screen media and live performance but whose bodies and narratives we are still not used to seeing.

The project explores how television, the most ubiquitous of contemporary cultural artefacts, has represented what it means to be Australian and asks where we are now. This participatory performance will be a vengeful autopsy of a dying medium, a citizens’ action to seize the means of pop-cultural production; part sinister-panto, part grim-reality programming.

Creative Team: Director, collaborative writer and performer – Sapidah Kian; Dramaturg, collaborative writer and performer – Georgina Naidu; AV dramaturg and consultant – Amos Gebhardt; Visual/editing collaborator and consultant – Kelli Jean Drinkwater; Producer – Toby Sullivan