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

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 36^th 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