Perormance Space: Recent Episodes
Performance Space
Performance Space is the crucible for risk-taking artists. Emerging over 30 years ago in response to artists’ articulated desire to explore and investigate new forms of art, Performance Space has consistently identified, nurtured and presented new directions in contemporary practice. We champion risk, experimentation, and new modes of creative expression. Performance Space continues to evolve and renew to meet the needs of the independent sector and explore new models for developing and presenting the most critical and important new work.
The breadth of our organisational and artistic activity is informed and underpinned by a commitment to diversity. Performance Space embraces a diversity of artistic and cultural perspectives as being fundamental to a vibrant and engaging experimental arts culture. We therefore privilege the work of Aboriginal artists, practitioners from diverse cultural backgrounds, artists exploring new takes on sex and gender, disability and artists pushing the boundaries of the human through experiments with new technology.
Over the past 30 years, we have continually refreshed and revised our development and presentation models. Our constant renewal has ensured that the bravest new works and most innovative artists have been supported through enabling structures to realise their most ambitious ideas and connect with audiences.
Nisha Madhan (Basement Theatre, NZ) sits down with Jeff Khan to discuss the role of the curator, re-Indigenisation and a whole lot more.
Nisha is one of four guest curators for LIVE DREAMS, a new platform for artists to share works-in-progress and ideas in development in a dynamic and responsive environment. LIVE DREAMS will be a part of Liveworks 2021. Find out more here: https://performancespace.com.au/program/live-dreams-ancestry-live-on-the-line/
Leading experimental artists Gail Priest, Lauren Brincat and Alex Murray-Leslie all create work that sits at the forefront of sound, technology, experimental music and contemporary art. In a lively conversation facilitated by Clare Cooper (co-founder of the NOW now festival, Splinter Orchestra, Splitter Orchestra and Frontyard Projects), these Liveworks artists discuss their research interests and artistic practices, as well what it means to create collaborative work that spans sound, installation and performance.
Podcast music: Other Tempo by Lauren Brincat, recorded live for Liveworks 2019. Image: Lauren Brincat. Photograph by Jessica Maurer/Artspace.
Liveworks artists Joel Bray (Daddy) and Samara Hersch (Body of Knowledge) in conversation with theatre maker Roslyn Oades as they explore the boundaries of audience participation, consent and dangerous social dynamics in contemporary performance. Joel and Samara’s works both create complex audience-performer relationships to ask important questions about sexuality, the body, and social taboos and intimacy.
Podcast music: Other Tempo by Lauren Brincat, recorded live for Liveworks 2019. Image: Credit: Samara Hersch, Dybbuks (2018). Photograph by Pia Johnson.
Writer and scholar Theron Schmidt leads an artist-centred conversation celebrating the launch of his new book Agency: A Partial History of Live Art (2019). A collection of dialogues and provocations from radical artists and thinkers around the world, Agency explores how and when we make possibility for action in the face of what oppresses us.
Agency was commissioned for the 20th anniversary of the Live Art Development Agency in London. For this conversation, Theron is joined by Sydney-based artists Brian Fuata and Sarah Rodigari.
Podcast music: Other Tempo by Lauren Brincat, recorded live for Liveworks 2019. Image: Cassils, Inextinguishable Fire, SPILL Festival of Performance, London (2015), produced by Pacitti Company. Image Guido Mencari. © Cassils 2015. Image courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts
Performance Space has long been a hub for queer artists from diverse artistic practices and cultural backgrounds. The Queer Together conversation features Jeff Khan (Performance Space Artistic Director), Joy Ng, Frances Barrett and Bhenji Ra discussing new horizons in queer performance, the intersection between queer club and art communities and the diversity and vitality of Sydney's LGBTQIA+ artistic culture.
Podcast music: Other Tempo by Lauren Brincat, recorded live for Liveworks 2019. Image: FAFSWAG performing in Day for Night, 2018. Photograph by Alex Davies.
United by an interest in breaking physical limits, Lee Wilson, Mirabelle Wouters and Mickie Quick join artist and curator Frances Barrett to discuss endurance performance and bodily extremes. This conversation explores the precarious processes behind Branch Nebula’s work High Performance Packing Tape.
New York-based Australian curator and producer Vallejo Gantner joined artist Nicola Gunn for a conversation about Working With Children, exploring Gunn’s unique research and creation process and the moral and ethical ambiguities tackled by this new experimental performance.