Scomodo is a durational performance work where two dance artists obsessively deconstruct and reconstruct a wheelchair, exploring the boundaries between humans and their machines.

Cinzia Schincariol is an independent artist based in South Australia and currently Berlin, working across performance, community and health through mediums such as dance, voice, drawing, photography and film. Her practice is grounded in embodiment, instant composition, accessibility, compassion and a relationship with the natural environment. Matt Shilcock is a South Australian choreographer, dancer, actor and creative producer. He has developed a choreographic methodology and movement language, Osteogenuine, that combines his interests in dance, alchemy, and holistic healing.

Both artists are interested in the body as a political landscape, cyborg theory, and discomposure, all themes for exploration in this performance work named after the Italian word for ‘uncomfortable’.

Creative Team: Co-creators and performers – Cinzia Schincariol and Matt Shilcock

Plant Notes is an ephemeral art tour investigating the remnant flora on Kaurna Yerta/ the Adelaide Plains, and in this iteration the mangroves (Avicennia marina) which inhabit the Yerta Bulti/Port Adelaide region. 

Louise Flaherty and Laura Wills are collaborating South Australian visual artists, both with drawing and installation backgrounds alongside strong interests in creating site responsive and participatory works. Their practices reflect and generate curiosity with the natural environment. They have invited two acclaimed South Australian composers and musicians, Belinda Gehlert (violinist) and Naomi Keyte (singer songwriter) to collaborate on engaging social-distancing publics through creating an audible experience of their work.

The project riffs from the history of botanical illustrations as a way to record science and knowledge, to a contemporary and explorative process conveying feelings, loss, the unsaid and the underrepresented.

Creative Team: Co-creators – Louise Flaherty and Laura Wills with Belinda Gehlert and Naomi Keyte

Of Stubborn Songs and Unequal Wars* is an intercultural theatre work and living repository of research about domestic violence, the micro-personal and macro-political landscapes of female bodies, and women’s cultural resistance practices.

Nithya Nagarajan is an artist and curator whose practice adopts movement as a system of inquiry into the sacred, the sensual and the decolonial, underpinned by a strong feminist sensibility. Liv Satchell is a theatre maker, writer and dramaturg. She is interested in how loss and grief are embodied, and in feminine dramaturgies that seek value outside of traditional narrative paradigms.

Inspired by written accounts and lived experience of intimate partner violence, the artists and their collaborating team are forging this project at an intersection of their practices, exploring how language and the body can both submit to and resist control.

*Working title borrowed from ‘When I hit you’ by Meena Kandasamy

Creative Team: Co-creator – Nithya Nagarajan; Co-creator – Liv Satchell; Sound designer – Marco Cher-Gibard; Producer – Zainab Syed; Digital archive – H Mur

In Nevermore, a group of cross punks take aim at rapists through an exploration of how to incorporate comedy, fantasy and punk politics into an artistic response to sexual violence.

Jennifer Greer Holmes is a creative producer, a creative documenter and a curator of contemporary performance, music and live art. Teddy Dunn is a theatre director who works with playwrights, screen writers, devisors and directors with particular focus on queer and feminist dramaturgies.

In this collaboration they begin a process of interrogating in what way artists, and artists who are rape victims, can depict and explore not only the experience of sexual violation itself, but also revenge, rape jokes, and complex trauma.

Creative Team: Writer, performer and creative producer – Jennifer Greer Holmes; Dramaturg – Teddy Dunn; Video artist – Heath Britton; Outside eye – Lee Wilson

Nature is Healing is a performance work about the relationships between human and non-human animals sharing urban environments, based on the story of the gweela/Australian bush turkey.

Too Rude is a collaboration born from artists Emma McManus and Maria White’s participation in the infamous Earlwood Farm Christmas Climate Change Variety Hour and named after the Daily Telegraph’s response to this event. They make hilarious, researched and political performances about themes such as living in cities, cultural policy, and ecologies.

In their latest work-in-development, the hero is the gweela and its fight against gentrification in urban areas, particularly North Sydney. The work also unpacks the eponymous meme that has emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, based on a misguided idea of the environment returning to a more ‘natural’ state as humans self-isolate.

Creative Team: Co-creators and performers – Emma McManus and Maria White; Protest Patch designer – Romanie Harper; Sound composer and designer – Angus McGrath

Mother’s Blood is a contemporary urban drama played out online and IRL about three generations of an Aboriginal family, exploring political change across decades, online identities and technology in dramatic storytelling.

Jacob Boehme is a Melbourne born and raised artist of the Narungga and Kaurna Nations, South Australia. He is a multidisciplinary theatre maker and choreographer for stage, screen, large-scale events and festivals.

This project is the second in a series of works around the theme of blood. Mother’s Blood highlights the experiences of Aboriginal women living with HIV, alongside themes of contemporary Aboriginal identities, sexuality, family loyalty and community. The process brings Jacob back together with artists Isaac Drandic and Keith Deverell, extending their artistic collaboration seeded during the making of acclaimed performance work, Blood on the Dance Floor.

Creative Team: Writer and creator – Jacob Boehme; Dramaturg and director – Isaac Dandric; Video artist – Keith Deverell; Performers – Kamarra Bell-Wykes, Chenoa Deemal, Kiah Cruse (image)

Immaculate is an intimate, durational artwork about transforming and reframing the conception of a child, through the lens of queer experience.

Casey Jenkins is a Melbourne-based installation and performance artist. Their work explores social and institutional power dynamics and notions of intimacy, temporality and identity with a focus on feminism and gender. Casey combines tactility with technology, craft with performance, and makes work that ranges from the meditative to the disruptive, from minimalist solo durational performance to street art and experimental group performances.

In this new, personal work Casey is creating a sanctuary for witnessing and reflecting on non-hetero and solo reproduction, the controls put on a queer body which resists being controlled, and the hope, fear and strength inherent in the process of conceiving alone.

Creative Team: Creator – Casey Jenkins

Identify: What boxes do you tick? is a multi-platform performative work that seeks to unpack the fixed and fluid notions between identity of the self and identity by interpolation.

Amala Groom is a Wiradyuri conceptual artist whose practice, as the performance of her cultural sovereignty, is informed and driven by First Nations epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies. Articulated across diverse media and informed by extensive archival, legislative and first-person research, Groom’s work is a form of passionate activism, presenting acute and incisive commentary on contemporary socio-political issues.

In this autobiographical work, the artist performs herself as well as a plethora of other characters as a historiography of her lived relationships and experiences. It extends a performative lecture delivered for Talk Contemporary at Sydney Contemporary in 2019 into a fully realised artistic work with artist, writer and curator Willoh S.Weiland, in their first collaboration.

Creative Team: Writer, director and performer – Amala Groom; Dramaturg – Willoh S.Weiland

Hundreds + Thousands is a choreographic work that enlists plants as artistic collaborators, audience members and social mediators to explore the transformative powers of communality, fluidity and stillness.

Both Luke George and Daniel Kok’s choreographic and visual artworks explore intimacy, spectatorship, relational politics, closeness and coexistence. These interests and practices, of course, are transformed by the experience of a pandemic.

With a team of six collaborating artists living across the cities of Naarm-Melbourne, Singapore, Tainan and Manila, the creative development process for Luke and Daniel’s latest ambitious and beautiful new work has changed in 2020 due to COVID-19 travel restrictions. So, this development time now represents a segue to inviting other artists, thinkers and the public into an interaction with the work’s key ideas in the context of the new world we all find ourselves in.

Creative Team: Creative Team: Lead artist – Luke George; Lead artist – Daniel Kok; Voice artist – Alice Hui-Sheng Chang; Light artist – Matthew Adey; Sound artist – Nigel Brown; Visual artist – Leeroy New; Producer – Alison Halit

In How Long Can This last? a performer with chronic illness pursues a pain-free space provided by live performance in a durational work interrogating the visibility of disability, medical gaslighting, and what it means to be sick.

Jamila Main is an actor, award-winning playwright and emerging arts leader whose work explores themes of autonomy, trust, and joy within queer, feminist and disability dramaturgies. They are a fierce advocate for people with Endometriosis.

Jamila is exploring the key ideas and artistic modes – both digital and physical – of this deeply personal new work through a mentoring process with director, lighting designer, and dramaturg Emma Valente, co-director of feminist performance company THE RABBLE.

Creative Team: Performer and concept – Jamila Main; Dramaturg – Emma Valente; Video and sound production – Jamila Main and Kobe Donaldson