Somewhere between conversations with strangers at the bus-stop, storytelling, stand-up comedy, improvisational theatre, performance lecture, conversations with your bestie, and traditional theatre is Emma Beech’s honed, well-loved practice. Embracing simplicity in form, a low carbon footprint, and a focus on the here and now.
No rehearsals, no prompts, no set design, just Emma, the craft she has so finely tuned, her stories from the wonderful, storied life she’s lived and sought, and the relationship she builds with the audience during their time together.
Waterside Workers Hall, Annexe Stage
Image: Heath Britton
Reflections on 8/8/8:REST at Rising Festival 2024, and how debriefing and grappling with the paradoxes of that show will allow us to dream of better futures.
WORK. REST. PLAY. TIME. LABOUR. CAPITALISM.
Hart’s Mill Packing Shed
Image: Amelia Dowd
An investigative laboratory for a new work. An assembly, transmission, and encounter lounge. An ongoing astro-geo-bio-mattering attunement to the dark. Julie Vulcan, alongside composer Ashley Scott, continues an ongoing inquiry into relational ecologies of the dark. Outcomes contribute to an assembly of speculative, performative, and site-responsive works accumulating since 2012 under the banner project Wishing DARK.
Waterside Workers Hall, Supper Room, enter from the back of the building
Access information: Entry to this room is by staircase only. We apologise for any exclusion and endeavor to work with our landlords to increase access and safety for all patrons.
Image: Ashley Scott
A creative development of sights and sounds in the imagined world of DEADLY, a game inside the new theatre work House Arrest by Alexis West, where the real world and the game world warp into a Dreamtime reality of nightmarish proportions.
Post Office Projects Gallery + Studios
Image: Lance Wilson
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
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
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
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
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
