Watch The Soft.

The Soft interfaces Martin Hansen’s ongoing research into the ‘Hauntological Body’ with soft rendering of the genre of Horror. This work, extricates the positionality of white Australian subjecthood from the ‘natural’ to the ‘monstrous’ as the seemingly undead figure fails to capture, in both movement and language, its fading grip on a colonised nature.

Martin Hansen Choreography and performance
Aviva Endean Sound
Cobie Orger Video
Amelia Lever-Davidson Lighting
Romanie Harper Costume

Commissioned by Christoph Winkler Company.

Image, sound, and time untether in a dance work that considers our entanglement in acts of delay, deferral and doubt. 

Foley is a sound-effect technique used in film to construct a sense of reality within a scene. Sounds on screen are recreated in post-production using unlikely objects and body movements, amplifying the image in a way that’s so convincing we can forget to doubt. “Slip” connects the illusion of Foley to the complexity of our present reality, where almost everything around us is processed, and we find ourselves entangled in acts of delay and deferral.

Originally created as a short piece for the Keir Choreographic Award in 2022, “Slip” has been developed into a new, full-length work. Dancer Rebecca Jensen (Deep Soulful Sweats) and award-winning musician Aviva Endean (Token Armies) perform together, de-coupling sound and image in a dance work that is both witty and mesmerising.

Image credit: “Slip” (2023), Rebecca Jensen. Photo by Gregory Lorenzutti.

Performer and Choreographer: Rebecca Jensen
Performer and Composer: Aviva Endean
Visual Design: Romanie Harper
LX Design: Jennifer Hector
Outside eye: Lana Šprajcer

Presented by Darebin Arts Speakeasy, as part of FRAME: A biennial of dance

Date & Time

1 March, 7:30pm (preview)
2 March, 7:30pm
3 March, 7:30pm
4 March, 2:00pm (post show talk)
4 March, 7:30pm
5 March, 5:00pm

$15 – $38

Bookings

For wheelchair and accessible bookings please contact: ticketing@darebin.vic.gov.au.

Approximate running time: 60 mins, no interval

Show warnings: This production uses theatrical haze, bright lights, partial nudity, and loud sounds.

Whale Fall is a cross-disciplinary composition for sound, cars, video and dance, asking us to consider aspects of deep time, history, and discontinued lines of production. Developed by dancer and choreographer Rebecca Jensen and set at the site of the Dromana Drive In, Whale Fall connects ideas of fossil fuels and future fossils, confronting ideas of extraction and remains.

Accompanied by composer and sound artist Aviva Endean, and with videography by James Brennan from NON Studio, Whale Fall works with choreography as an expanded form, extending the body through machines and sound. Equating scrap metal on rope with soothing wind chimes and corrugated agricultural pipes and cars with majestic aeolian harps crossed with dystopian whale sounds.

Dance: Rebecca Jensen

Sound: Aviva Endean

Video: James Brennan

Curator: Ilana Russell

Presented by: Front Beach Back Beach

11 Nov – 27 Nov 2022

Dromana Drive In

Tickets and info

www.dromanadrivein.com.au

Please Stand​  is an attempt to capture every anthem currently being sung and to examine the complex, contentious and bizarre histories that sit beneath each catchy (or not so catchy) tune.

Working with young performers, musicians and child activists, the project examines what national anthems profess to represent versus our global political realities. Which anthems were originally drinking songs? Which were initially written in blood on prison walls? How many contain glowing love hearts? And why do so many anthems mention freedom yet continue to exclude?

Please Stand​ questions the practice of myth making around national identity and of nation building and the potential of what it means to stand up and sing together – or to sit down and be silent.

Co created by Samara Hersch and Lara Thoms

Sound Design: Aviva Endean

Lighting Design: Jenny Hector

Production: Emily O’Brien

Producer: Freya Waterson

Photo Credit: Bryony Jackson

Premiere seasons:
Theater Spektakel 2022- Zurich
more info and bookings
Norderzon 2022- Groningen
more info and bookings

In Rewards for the Tribe , two of the country’s most influential and innovative dance companies, Chunky Move and Restless Dance Theatre, wrestle with the archetypes of divine geometry. Their search for idealism in art is upended by a dance of exquisite chaos.

Five dancers, with and without disability, wrestle with the archetypes of divine geometry laid out by the Old Masters. Together they bend, crumple and reorganise a Mondrian-inspired whimsical set and costumes designed by Jonathan Oxlade, that both reference and topple idealistic modernist forms. Rewards for the Tribe celebrates the imaginations of artists while embracing life’s exquisite chaos.

Choreographer: Antony Hamilton
Sound and Composition: Aviva Endean
Set and Costume design: Jonathon Oxlade
Lighting Design: Jenny Hector
Images: Jeff Busby
Video: NON Studio

Commissioned by Warwick Arts Centre and Coventry UK City of Culture
Presented by RISING.

Booking

https://chunkymove.com/works/rewards-for-the-tribe/

Angelica Mesiti’s ASSEMBLY is a three-channel video installed within an architectural setting inspired by the historical shape of the community circle and amphitheatre. ASSEMBLY establishes as an evolving set of translations from the written word to stenographic codes then music, and performance. Filmed in the Senate chambers of Italy and Australia, the three screens of ASSEMBLY travel through the corridors, meeting rooms and parliaments of government while performers, representing the multitude of ancestries that constitute cosmopolitan Australia, gather, disassemble and re-unite, demonstrating the strength and creativity of a plural community. 

Initially invited into the project by composer Max Lyandvert, I was further able to contribute to the work with several original compositions.

Artist Angelica Mesiti

Producer Bridget Ikin

Cinematographer Bonnie Elliott, ACS 

Composer Max Lyandvert

Michela Stenographic Advisor Paolo Michela-Zucco

Poet David Malouf

Michela Stenographer Michele Pigliapoco

Pianist Sonya Lifschitz

Viola James Wannan

Clarinet Aviva Endean

Sanṭūr Jamal Farokhsereshti

Dancer Deborah Brown 

Drummers, C’DARZ John Afram, Christopher, Dandan, Ricky Hadchiti, Albert Khouri, Rizik Khouri, Bakhos Samrani, Nadim Sleiman, Anthony Younes 

Vocalists The House that Dan Built: Elektra Blinder, Grace Campbell, Sofia Goulding, Brianna Harris, Kittu Hoyne, Kiri Jenssen, Emily Pincock, Harper Pollard, Jayden Selvakumaraswamy, Iris Simpson, Thu Tran, Sylvie Woodhouse

Vocalists’ Manager Danielle O’Keefe

When you enter an environment populated by varied lifeforms, animated machines and a set that itself seems to pulse and breathe, you know you’re not in traditional dance territory. This visionary creation throws every rule to the wind, and is the first work created by Antony Hamilton since taking up the helm of Chunky Move.

Token Armies is a symphony of action, image and sound, and a collective experience through which audiences will make their own journey. Featuring a leviathan sculpture by Creature Technology Co. – the renowned creators of works such as King Kong and Walking with Dinosaurs ­– this immersive spectacle explores the way labour becomes ritual and opens up opportunities for a future humanity. Bio-mechanical forms alongside an ensemble of 23 performers query the boundary between the living and the inanimate.

Token Armies is a bold statement of the kind of work Antony Hamilton champions: dance that goes beyond the frontier of the individual body, making porous the barriers that divide humans from each other and the natural and artificial worlds in which we move.

Epic in scale, ambitious in conceit and utterly unforgettable in execution, this world premiere event is an evolutionary leap into an unknown tomorrow.

Concept, Direction and Choreography: Antony Hamilton
Sculpture and Wearable Sculpture Design and Fabrication: Creature Technology Co.
Assistant Choreographer and Rehearsal Director: Melanie Lane
Costume Design: Paula Levis
Costume Consultant: Andrew Treloar
Lighting Design: Bosco Shaw
Sound Design: Aviva Endean
Sound Consultant: Madeleine Flynn
Concept Art: Peter Gregory
Performers: Jade Dickinson, Alice Dixon, Joshua Faleatua, Christina Guieb, Antony Hamilton, Samuel Hammat, Mitchell Harvey, Melanie Lane, Cody Lavery, Phillip Leitch, Gregory Lorenzutti, Kathleen Lott, Tiana Lung, Talitha Maslin, Amber McCartney, Damian Meredith, Callum Mooney, Josh Mu, Jessie Oshodi, Jack Riley, Harrison Ritchie-Jones, Kyall Shanks and Michaela Tancheff
Supported by – Chunky Move, Melbourne Festival, Creature Technology Co. and the City of Melbourne through Arts House
Presented by Arts House and Chunky Move  in association with Creature Technology Co. Commissioned by Melbourne International Arts Festival

Rewards for the Tribe is an ambitious collaborative dance work between Chunky Move and Restless Dance Theatre. The work weighs in on idealism as a principle of the humanist project, and its presence in some of the major art epiphanies of recent centuries. It asks, is there such a thing as utopia by design?

Rewards For The Tribe will present a world in which divine geometry is subverted by wonkiness, questioning civic planning’s promise of an idyllic life for all. Collaboration, resilience and acceptance bind the inhabitants of the work as they wrestle with an environment defined by ambiguity, to show that we can all find a way to thrive if we work together through adversity.

Concept, Direction & Choreography: Antony Hamilton
Sound Designer/ Composer:Aviva Endean
Set/Costume Designer: Johnathon Oxlade
Lighting Designer:Jenny Hector
Performers: Jianna Georgiou, Benjamin Hancock, Michael Hodyl, Cody Lavery,Charlie Wilkins
Understudy Zoe Gay
Creative contributor Chris Dyke

In development April 2021, Melbourne
October/November 2021, Adelaide