Vitalstatistix presents
ADHOCRACY 2011
THE ARTIST IS DEAD
LONG LIVE THE ARTIST
Queen's Birthday Long Weekend
June 11 – 13
Waterside Workers Hall
11 Nile St, Port Adelaide
Download the Adhocracy 2011 poster
Twitter hashtag #Adhocracy2011
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Adhocracy is South Australia’s new annual make ‘n’ show hothouse, inviting interdisciplinary artists to create, converse and critique, in one space, over the June Queen’s Birthday long weekend.
Following an amazing pilot event held in 2010, this year’s Adhocracy is the full deal. We have selected five extraordinary creative teams to participate. Over the three days they will undertake creative development of interdisciplinary and live art works that will challenge and delight you. Alongside these projects, Adhocracy 2011 includes a three week lead-up residency with WA-based, acclaimed tactical media group pvi collective. pvi is collaborating with ten SA artists to remake their work transumer: deviate from the norm, for presentation at Adhocracy. All in all, it makes for a long weekend of great art and intense conversation.
Whether you’re a general punter, a fellow artist, a theatre-goer and art-lover, an activist, a conversationalist or just plain curious about what’s going on at the workers hall in the Port, there is something for you to experience. Over the weekend there will be open studios, artist’s talks, work-in-progress showings, audience experiments and site-based interventions.
Rug up and get down to the Port for the June long weekend. The bar will be open; you can even buy some nosh from Burger Theory (5-8pm each evening). And most importantly, you can contribute to the creative processes of an amazing assembly of artists.
THE ADHOCRACY TEAM
Creative Producer: Emma Webb
Adhocracy Curatorial Team: Brigid Noone, Edwin Kemp Attrill, Emma Webb, Jason Sweeney, Steve Mayhew
Coordinator: Emma Bedford
Production Manager: Justin Pennington
Graphic Design and Marketing: Olivia Power
Documentation: Jennifer Greer Holmes and Heath Britton
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Anna McLean, Carlie Angel, Che Biggs, Daisy Brown, Daniel Jaber, Elena Carapetis, Elizabeth Hay, Ella James, Ellen Steele, Emma Beech, Gabrielle Nankivell, Geoff Cobham, Indigo Eli, Ingrid Weisfelt, James Umpherston, Jason Sweeney, Kelli McCluskey, Kyra Kimpton, Lachlan Tetlow-Stuart, Lara Thoms, Liz Dunn, Lori Farmer, Luke Smiles, Michele Fairbairn, Ninian Donald, Ross Ganf, Ryan Sims, Sarah Brokensha, Steve Bull, Steve Noonan, Steven Glass, Tamara Lee, Teri Hoskin, Tessa Leong, Vincent Crowley.
little black box & The Misery Children
Waterside Stage
A work under construction by little black box and The Misery Children, Aurevoir Abattoir explores notions of fear and visceral reactions to the unknown. Over Adhocracy, artists Daisy Brown, Ellen Steele, Sarah Brokensha and Lori Farmer, will undertake a creative development of this new work by undertaking a series of intimate experiments in fear.
Psychological studies show that particular stimulus can supersede rationality and common decency amongst everyday people given the right circumstances. Fear, and its good friend adrenalin, is a physiological experience; you cannot control it. It invades your nervous system and takes up residence in your very being.
There are so many genres of ‘fear’ that make us react in very different ways, from the illicit pleasure of shlock horror films to the ‘eyes closed, hands over your ears, hiding under the covers’ kind of fear. There is the fear that your decisions will ultimately cause discomfort or pain to another person. There is the fear of the unknown; the fear of the dark. There is the fear of what lurks behind the door; the fear of the stranger on the train; the fear of being watched. There is fear of being separated from the group; of making the wrong decision; of revealing something you shouldn’t.
Aurevoir Abattoir is about taking fear into a live performance space where every sense can be challenged, pushed and manipulated. The work is conceived as three different, immersive and thrilling performance experiences that are shared by audience and performer; its current development is heading towards a festival-ready work to be toured 2012-2013.
Aurevoir Abattoir is influenced by the work of film makers Michael Haneke and David Lynch; contemporary artists Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Erwin Olaf, Guy Bourdin and Vanessa Beecroft; the incredible work of performance artist Marina Abramovic, and theatre companies Ontroerend Goed and Cuocolo/Bosetti’s IRAA.
Audience is vital in the making and development of this work allowing every person’s journey to be unique as individuals are forced to face their own fascination with the macabre. As an audience what will you learn about yourself, or about the person sitting next to you? Will you laugh at real fear despite yourself? Will you question what you are capable of, the fantasies you may have and the role you play in the creation and perpetuation of all that is dark, cruel or perverted? Will you give over to a series of experiments, despite the nagging fear and the hairs standing up on the back of your necks? Over Adhocracy, the Aurevoir Abattoir team will ask these questions and more.
Aurevoir Abattoir will be an intensely personal journey that ventures somewhere between the tensions of the familiar and the strange, leading you right to where the darkness lurks. Each day of Adhocracy, the artists will themselves set a fear-creation task. Day one will explore the horror cliché; day two, the intimate exchange; and day three, the closed door. They will also explore location-based fear, inspired by Waterside itself. Each night audiences are invited to have a peek at what’s been made and embrace the fear!
CREATIVE TEAM: Daisy Brown, Ellen Steele, Sarah Brokensha and Lori Farmer.
YOUR CHANCE TO SEE:
- Aurevoir Abattoir, Horror Cliché experiment, 9pm Sat June 11.
- Aurevoir Abattoir, Intimate Exchange experiment, 9pm Sun June 12.
- Aurevoir Abattoir, Closed Door experiment, 8:30pm Mon June 13.
The Australian Bureau of Worthiness
Waterside Supper Room
The Australian Bureau of Worthiness is a residency model for creating live performance in a dynamic seminar style. It asks the question of the community it is made in: what makes your day worth it? Developed by Emma Beech with Tessa Leong, I met (Port Road) the Other Day will become the first incarnation of this residency based performance-making process.
Coming up for air from the daily grind, a street is interrogated and re-evaluated by the Australian Bureau of Worthiness Census. Armed with only a voice recorder and stills camera, the artists will randomly survey members of the everyday population. Was your day worth it? Was your neighbors’? These samplings of the chaotically acquired information are collected and reconfigured into a live performance of quietly inspired stories, anecdotes and images of the every-ness of every day.
The work will be a gentle revelation about a place, and a place in time. It will be about listening and seeing what might otherwise not be noticed, through comparison of how the place we choose to live and work impacts upon our days and our personal sense of worthiness.
Coming shortly after a regional residency (UpRiver), the Australian Bureau of Worthiness will spend Adhocracy responding through a series of tasks to the material generated from four days in Renmark, South Australia. New material, generated from conversation with people on the streets of Port Adelaide, and Adhocracy artists and audiences, will also come into the mix. Working as an open studio, the artists will invite audiences to grab a chair, sit in for while, look and listen. Then, at the end of each day, new material will be presented, in an environment where the audience can play an active role in developing the work. Each of the showcases will invite the audience to respond to the material- what worked, why did it worked, why didn’t it work, what was challenging, what was funny, what was dull?
The Bureau’s residency model has been selected by the Port Festival to create I met (Port Road) the Other Day, for presentation October 2011.
CREATIVE TEAM: Emma Beech and Tessa Leong.
YOUR CHANCE TO SEE:
- Watch out for Emma and Tessa on the streets of Port Adelaide, June 11 – 13.
- Visit the open studio each day, 1-4pm, June 11-13.
- I met (Port Road) the Other Day showcase and conversation, 7pm each night, June 11-13.
Lara Thoms and Liz Dunn
Waterside Mezzanine
A spiralling fall. A faceless companion. A mountain ahead. A faint breeze. A distant beep. A rabbit on your foot.
Enter the world behind your eyelids.
LAST NIGHT NOW is a live performative experience where two artists fish out the contents of your dreams and deliver them up to the collective unconscious via video goggles and sensory manipulation. Using touch, smell, sound and a stream of live and pre-recorded video, LAST NIGHT NOW is an immersive and intimate live artwork.
“Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream - the butcher’s, the poet’s equal there.” (Emil M. Cioran, 1911)
Dreams don’t occur in daytime language but some are so lucid that they create memories as real as any waking experience. This work explores the private world of dreams and how they can be recreated, re-experienced and shared. The subconscious is one of the great unknowns. This work is for those curious about the imagery that exploded on the pillowcase last night.
LAST NIGHT NOW aims to recreate dreams for the public. With a fan in your hair, an altered view of a familiar city, and a furry weight brushing your foot, we invite you to re/live your dreams.
Lara and Liz will work though different stages over the Adhocracy weekend to develop and test this new work:
- Research: Talking to people about their recent or recurring dreams
- Select: Choosing dreams to re-enact
- Source: Finding simple props and collecting imagery
- Develop: Devising short videos and sensory manipulations
- Invite: Facilitating dreamers to re-experience their dream
- Involve: Inviting audiences to help create sensory manipulations (if necessary, i.e. hold this fan)
- Encourage: Inviting audiences and artists to experience other people’s dreams.
Through a technological structure, where audience members are literally blindfolded by video screens, the artists seek to make an accessible, experiential and transformative experience.
This style of work is drawn from the artists successful past projects using video goggles, including spat+loogies Holiday (2008, Victorian Arts Centre, Tiny Stadiums Festival, Sydney, and Awesome Festival Perth) The Dark Side (2008, Rauma Festival, Finland) and collaborative project Thrashing without Looking, 2010 (2010, Performance Space, Sydney, Arts House, 2011). Lara and Liz’s individual practices are concerned with elements of exchange, social engagement and using technology in a playful way.
CREATIVE TEAM: Lara Thoms and Liz Dunn
YOUR CHANCE TO SEE:
- Watch out for Lara and Liz on the streets of Port Adelaide, June 11 – 13.
- Visit their open studio each day, June 11 -13, from 2-4pm.
- Experience LAST NIGHT NOW, June 11-13, anytime from 5-7pm.
TORQUE SHOW
Waterside Hall
RIOT has been commissioned by Malthouse Theatre and Tipping Point through the Dara Foundation Climate Change Commission. TORQUE SHOW co-founders (Ross Ganf, Vincent Crowley and Ingrid Weisfelt), with collaborators (Carlie Angel, Daniel Jaber, Ninian Donald, Gabrielle Nankivell, Luke Smiles, Che Biggs and Geoff Cobham) will undertake a creative development of RIOT over three days as part of Adhocracy.
One of the challenges to widespread public engagement with climate change is that it’s largely been a science-led issue. We may accept the lessons of science as truth, but as a truth without meaning. RIOT asks: how can the climate become a protagonist in our life story? How do we reconnect with climate as a template for relating to our world? How do we bring a sense of urgency to a problem that is happening at a rate difficult to perceive in our day-to-day lives? Drawing on ideas that include Alvin Toffler’s prosumer and Augusto Boal’s spect-actor, RIOT explores the immediacy between our actual selves and the chaotic events we are setting into play through climate change.
Exercising the right to protest may be our single most dynamic engagement with democracy and social change in contemporary society. It is a transgression of space from a place of meeting to a point of authority. Using the form of a protest march, to create a work where climate triggers a peaceful protest into a chaotic ‘riot’, RIOT aims for a cyclical feedback loop with an audience, and in doing so, to theatrically create a tipping point in real time.
RIOT carries two very important purposes: to re-ignite protest as a form of political expression for a contemporary society and to arm its participants with a contemporary language through which to protest climate change. The work is conceived as a series of events that occur during a festival. It will have three components to a season: A ticketed physical theatre show; a free large scale climate change protest; and a series of prosumer/user generated interactions with RIOT.
Over Adhocracy, the collaborating artists will explore the choreography and other content of RIOT through investigating motifs and gestures of protest and riots, non-violent protest techniques (the physicality of passive resistance), stylization of how crowds and crowd controllers move when order is lost, flash mob techniques, and how to achieve an expanded contract between audience and performer. The artists will commence with a conversation on climate change amongst the creative team, led by Che Biggs Research Fellow – Distributed Systems and Climate Change Adaptation at the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab and director Ross Ganf, which audiences are welcome to observe and participate in.
CREATIVE TEAM: Ross Ganf, Vincent Crowley, Ingrid Weisfelt, Carlie Angel, Daniel Jaber, Ninian Donald, Gabrielle Nankivell, Luke Smiles, Che Biggs and Geoff Cobham
YOUR CHANCE TO SEE:
- Climate change conversation (public welcome) at 1pm, Sat June 11 (60mins)
- RIOT showcase and audience experimentation, 3pm, Sun June 12 (80mins)
- RIOT showcase and audience experimentation, 3pm, Mon June 13 (80mins)
*If you plan to participate in the showcases, please where comfortable clothing (no heels!)
Ryan Sims
Waterside Foyer and Staircase
A blue pin-stripe suited Ryan will travel by train to Port Adelaide from his city abode, carrying suitcase and boxes containing the tools of his trade. Upon arrival at Waterside he will unload sewing machine, pins, needles, scissors, threads, glue, inks, brushes, ironing board, iron…creating an onsite artist studio.
Setting out on a Saturday morning wander with an empty suitcase and pockets containing scissors, glue-stick, needle and thread, Ryan will traverse the Port sourcing ingredients and inspiration for his creation. Objects found street-side or on abandoned lots, fabrics that are found or op-shopped, second-hand books, leaves, grasses, sticks, bark, will all be collected and prepped street-side. A footpath or park bench will become a mini-art-studio for a short period of time, as Ryan commences the process of cutting and trimming, layering, writing upon, and stitching together. Photos and film snippets of his travels will also be collected into the mix as Ryan directs his cameras out at the Port, paying particular attention to the saw-tooth roofs of the factory buildings.
Returning to Waterside, Ryan will commence making Stitch Factory, a city portrait in installation and sculpture. Akin to the output of a box-factory, but with a hand-made aesthetic, Ryan will stitch the various elements into a series of sculptures, featuring loose threads, raw edges and varied textural combinations.
At points during the weekend Ryan will be joined by writer Teri Hoskin, who will collaborate as writer-at-large. Her writing will respond to the ambiance of the site, the actions of the artist and exchanges with those who engage with his making. In the same way that the stitch punctuates fabric some of the marks made will form words or pictographs. The stitch-stitch-stitch of repetition is rich ground for thinking about the passing of time and scales of production. Teri’s contribution maybe stitched into the work, maybe written upon scraps of paper and glued…or may become a separate ‘spoken word’ component.
Ryan will also be joined by emerging artists Ella James and James Umpherston. On the third day of Adhocracy, taking the units, and possibly making more, Ryan, Ella and James will commence stitching them side-by-side into small-scale saw-tooth-roofed factories that will extend snake-like out from the artists’ workspace. Once electrified, rays of light will escape from stitches, doors and windows and the mechanical sounds of industry will be heard.
The development of Stitch Factory at Adhocracy will lead to an exhibition of the work as part of the 2011 South Australian Living Artists (SALA) Festival in August.
CREATIVE TEAM: Ryan Sims, with Teri Hoskin, Ella James and James Umpherston
YOUR CHANCE TO SEE:
- Watch out for Ryan on the streets of Port Adelaide on Sat June 11.
- Visit the open studio each day from 1-6pm; artist talks each day at 5pm.
- See the final Stitch Factory installation 6pm Mon June 13.
pvi collective
Get ready to fcuk things up and reimagine Port Adelaide, as you take to the streets clutching self assembled deviation kits, absurd weaponry, a slippery identity and armed with a customised i-torch.
transumer: deviate from the norm is a darkly playful site-based intervention, inviting audiences to undertake tiny acts of resistance against their built environment. A joyful, deviant, profound experience, intent on unhinging our beliefs about what cities bring to our daily lives and how we can subvert the official narratives of place.
This is a new manifestation of a body of work by pvi collective, first commissioned for the 17th Biennale of Sydney in 2010, and has been made in the ‘awaiting development’ landscape of Port Adelaide with a team of local artists.
WA-based pvi collective produce interdisciplinary artworks that are intent on the creative disruption of everyday life. Every artwork aims to affect audiences on a personal and political level and is geared towards instigating tiny revolutions.
Fri June 10, Sat June 11 and Sun June 12
6pm, 8pm & 10pm (50mins)
Waterside, 11 Nile St, Port Adelaide
$14, book at BASS, www.bass.net.au or 131 246
Limited numbers, bookings recommended.
Outdoor experience – please dress warmly!
Twitter hashtag #transumer_portadelaide
CREATIVE TEAM
pvi collective: Kelli McCluskey, Jason Sweeney and Steve Bull.
Collaborating artists: Anna McLean, Elena Carapetis, Kyra Kimpton, Michele Fairbairn, Steven Glass, Elizabeth Hay, Indigo Eli, Lachlan Tetlow-Stuart, Steve Noonan and Tamara Lee.
