Hot Body is a poetic performance text exploring touch, intimacy, desire and embodied power in fictional and virtual spaces.
Grace Marlow is an early career, multidisciplinary artist working in text-based performances and poetry to inform a practice of quiet interruption. Their writing is informed by confessional poetry, memoir and autobiography as modes of queer self-becoming. They question value systems through quiet gestures that subvert artistic labour and patriarchal structures. They are interested in how poetry can disrupt how we see, hear and feel.
Working with mentors, artists Madison Bycroft and Monte Masi, Grace is developing their original poetic text into a solo performance that actualises the text’s themes of touch and intimacy.
Creative Team: Creator and performer – Grace Marlow; Artistic advisors – Monte Masi and Madison Bycroft
Helpline is a participatory live artwork that utilises the ubiquitous helpline and product assistance service to explore isolation, therapeutic outreach and community care.
Working across theatre and live art, comedy and drama, Bron Batten and Gary Abrahams are multi-award-winning and prolific performance makers. Drawing on practices of participation, improvisation, direct address and collaborative exchange with non-artists and audience members, their recent works include Onstage Dating and Waterloo.
From Melbourne in lockdown, this new project sees the artists investigate the culture of call-in services, the liveness and intimacy of the socially-distanced telephone conversation, and the modes this new and pertinent performance could take.
Creative Team: Co-creators – Bron Batten and Gary Abrahams
Game of I-Lands is an intercultural science-art performance project about the impact of the South China Sea conflict on the sentient creatures who inhabit the South China sea marine ecosystem.
Australian Performance Exchange (APE) creates new intercultural performance work, which responds to current and historic concerns of social justice, cultural identity, diversity, diplomacy and the climate emergency. Led by Artistic Director Sally Sussman and Artistic Associate, Annemaree Dalziel, APE aims to develop collaborations with Australian and international artists to co-create new performances that engage with the pressing issues of our times.
This new collaboration brings together APE artists, who have worked together for nearly three decades, with others artists and a scientist, as well as the Taiwanese performance company Performosa, to make a new work which speaks to the geopolitical crisis in the South China Sea and gives marine creatures a voice in this conflict.
Creative Team: Director – Sally Sussman; Designer – Annemaree Dalziel; Performer – Katia Molino; Performer – Valerie Berry; Videographer – Ali Mousawi; Scientist – Cat Dorey
Every Woman is a research process towards a large-scale public performance installation where women will collectively embody diverse and intersectional feminist movements.
Liesel Zink is an award-winning Australian choreographer interested in the body within shifting environmental and political landscapes. Seeking to engage new and diverse audiences in meaningful arts experiences, she creates dance works in public space and uses her process as a platform for artistic, cultural and intergenerational exchange.
In research for this project, Liesel is having conversations with a diverse range of women to collectively re-imagine our future with female voices at the core. She is working in consultation with creative producer Kate McDonald Baggerson who specialises in socially engaged and participatory arts practices, and dramaturg Sanja Simic.
Creative Team: Director and facilitator – Liesel Zink; Collaborating artist – Kate McDonald Baggerson; Dramaturg – Sanja Simic
Epoch Wars is an artist-run alternative symposium to the 36th International Geological Congress, where artists, thinkers and audiences debate and negotiate the name of the era we will die in.
Through their pandrogynous collaborative process, experimental live art duo Pony Express work across media art, performance, video and transdisciplinary research. They create immersive alternate realities that reflect themes of adaptation, global weirding, queer ecologies, nonhuman politics, environmental futures and the slow apocalypse.
This new large-scale, live artwork disguised as a conference, had its plans turned upside down by COVID-19 and is now moving to the digital realm through a completely new iteration in development that reflects how the online space and the screen has become a primary site for formal communication, negotiation and participation.
Creative Team: Show runners – Ian Sinclair and Loren Kronemyer; Sound designer – Alex Last; Creative producer – Annette Vieusseux
Energy Fields is an experimental, practice-based exploration of body-oriented, dialogical and decolonised ways of working towards future cultural ecologies.
This process brings together four artists whose interests and lived experiences include embodiment, queerness, Indigeneity, radical imagination and activism. Lz Dunn, Amrita Hepi, Victoria Hunt and Zoe Scoglio’s individual practices incorporate many artistic modes including choreographic processes, site-responsive art, participatory experiences, performance, video, sound and installation.
Working together and apart from Melbourne, regional Victoria and Sydney, the artists are exploring what it means to bring their separate practices into direct relationship and to tend to the human and planetary body in these precarious times.
Creative Team: Co-creators – Lz Dunn, Amrita Hepi, Victoria Hunt and Zoe Scoglio
Cliffhanger is a multidisciplinary work across performance, installation and text, investigating the cliffhanger and the state of suspension as an omnipresent facet of contemporary anxiety.
Holly Childs is an Adelaide-based multidisciplinary artist and writer, recently based in Moscow and Amsterdam. Her research involves filtering stories of planetary computation through frames of ecology, earth, memory, poetry and light. Angela Goh is a Sydney-based dancer and choreographer working in theatres, galleries and telepathic spaces. Her work considers the body in relationship to commodity, materiality, technology and feeling.
The artists have previously collaborated, including on Angela’s acclaimed performance work Uncanny Valley Girl which undertook a development with Adhocracy in 2016; this new process brings them back together to co-author a timely new work.
AI vs Baby is an exploration of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, racial bias and memory, using pedagogy and movement to unpack responsive differences between a child and a virtual digital assistant.
Emele Ugavule is a Tokelauan Fijian multidisciplinary storyteller. Her work centres the development of ethical trans-Indigenous collaborative creative processes and outcomes informed by Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies and cosmologies. In this work she explores how the myth of unconscious bias reinforces whiteness as a default lens.
Working with collaborators Amy Zhang and Jackson Garcia – choreographers and dancers who draw from street styles, hip hop and contemporary – this team is combining their interests in intercultural explorations to begin this new experimental work, while currently residing at opposite ends of the country due to COVID-19.
Creative Team: Co-creators – Emele Ugavule and Emosi Ugavule with Amy Zhang and Jackson Garcia
Capital and Darkness is an improvised sonic writing process, a song cycle and a deep listening, responding to labour, exiting the labour body, machines of production, automation and essentialism.
Virginia Barratt is an Australian researcher, artist, writer and performer, whose work has been instrumental in developing critiques around gender and technology over the last three decades. Lauren Abineri is an early-career multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes music and sound-based interventions, solo and collaborative.
This project emerged from an unplanned co-performance encounter online between the artists during the first weeks of the initial COVID-19 shutdown. A foundational feature of this project is making with and staying with the trouble whereby crisis creates the conditions for the emergence of difference, novelty and diversity.
Creative Team: Sonic fermenter and astral automater – Lauren Abineri aka jemisahologram; Twitch channeler, performer and automatic writer – Virginia Barratt aka mouthhouse
ADHOCRACY OPENING > 5pm, Friday 6 September
Celebrate our tenth birthday in style, with Jane Howard and Jessica Alice’s project
Let Me Tell You plus other special guests, cake, bubbles, and a host of performances and talks for you to enjoy throughout our first evening.
EXPERIMENTAL ART EXCHANGE > 3-4 September
A gathering of this year’s participating Adhocracy artists joined by other local and national guest artists and sector leaders; two days of conversation in the leadup to
our tenth edition of Adhocracy.
JOIN THE EXCHANGE – What’s urgent for experimental artists in Australia? >
7pm, Wednesday 4 September
Hart’s Mill Flour Shed, Mundy Street, Port Adelaide
Convivial discussion and provocation on what’s keeping us up at night and getting
us out of bed in the morning.
