NOW SHOWING:

THE CURIOSITIES, Sue Healey, (dance film, dance performance/installation) Sydney, August 14th-16th, 2008

Date: 13/8/2008 - 16/8/2008 Time: Wed-Sat @7:30pm & Sat Matinee @ 5pm Location: Io Myers Studio

Io Myers Studio August 13-16 @ 7.30pm Sat 16 Aug matinee at 5pm

Images of the body amplified by digital technology combined with live dance. The Curiosities is a work about the body - the curious complexities of form - in particular the intricate structures of the heart and the brain.

The heart historically, has been regarded as an organ of emotion - a physical and symbolic space where experiences and feelings are localised. In contemporary thinking it is superceded by the brain - the site for cognition, memories and emotions - the organ that determines death or life. The Curiosities explores these anatomical and symbolic territories of the body.

The Curiosities features three of Sydney’s finest dance artists; Lisa Griffiths, Rachelle Hickson and Nalina Wait with collaborators; composer Darrin Verhagen, digital animator Adnan Lalani ( a recent graduate of EMPA’s Media Program) and film artist Louise Curham.

“I've also drawn stimulation from people who wouldn't normally be involved in creating dance. Professor Kate Stevens, a cognition expert and Professor Richard Harvey, a heart developmental biologist, have been involved in several stages of the choreographic process, inspiring a new approach to generating images and movement.” Sue Healey

Intimate in its presentation, this is an evening of drama and emotional subtlety, beauty and complexity - creating an indelible connection with the kinaesthetic.

“An intricate, engrossing multimedia dance experience.” Realtime-“Immensely playful and surreal, (Healey’s work) offers moments of great intensity and sensitivity….” Dance Australia

UNSW. Bookings: Phone: cpru@unsw.edu.au / 9385 5684 More info: www.suehealey.com.au

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SCORES IN DEVELOPMENT:

THE ZOMBIE STATE, Melbourne Workers' Theatre, 17th-27th September 2008

Union Theatre, ground floor, Union House (bldg 130), Parkville

www.union.unimelb.edu.au/tickets

By Ben Ellis

Directed by Daniel Schlusser

Design by Kate Davis

Lighting by Niklas Pajanti

Sound by Darrin Verhagen

Your taxi-driver is distracted, your surgeon keeps getting your name wrong, the girl selling you shoes is maniacal... The Living Wage? More like the working dead in a world-class city.

The nightmare begins with a deranged Southbank seagull and converges in a secret government project in the bowels of the city... As Melbourne finds itself in the grip of the vengeful dead, who will stand and fight?? 

The Zombie State is an exquisite grotesque, a wickedly twisted monster production, a horror-schlock mash-up, a large-cast theatrical feast with a darkly comic edge.

Please, (don't) leave your brains at the door.

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KITTEN, Malthouse, 8th-25th October 2008

written and directed by JENNY KEMP

set and costume designer ANNA TREGLOAN

composer and sound designer DARRIN VERHAGEN

choreographer HELEN HERBERTSON

“KEMP’S EXTRAORDINARY TALENTS AS A CREATOR OF HAUNTING PAINTERLY BEAUTY… STRIVING TO CONNECT WITH THINGS THAT EXIST WITHOUT A VERBAL LANGUAGE TO EXPRESS THEM.” THE AGE

Kitten looms on the edge of a cliff, her lover perhaps lost to the sea, his best friend at her side. She is a song in three movements, a fragmented, untameable self. She surrounds herself with the relics of a love lost, but memory alone won’t fill the void. This yearning becomes a vacuum so powerful it threatens to devour her world.

The landscape of a mind in disorder has no horizon. Kitten’s rollercoaster journey from the depths of despair to soaring hope makes for theatre at its most powerful, freeing us from the illusion that everyday life is a realm removed from our hidden interiors.

Bewitching and unsettling, Kitten dares to conjure a magical realism which stands apart from most modern drama. It is a three act tale that is at once psychiatric fable, lyrical puzzle and metaphysical love song performed by an outstanding cast including Natasha Herbert (The Pillowman, The Wall), Kate Kendall (The Lover), Margaret Mills (The Odyssey, Still Angela) and Chris Connelly (The Club).

One of Australia’s most revered auteurs, Jenny Kemp’s Kitten is her first Black Sequin Production since the mesmeric modern fairytale Still Angela. To unlock the chambers of Kitten’s heart, Kemp reduces, sharpens and refines the numerous truths inside her narrative to the most delicate and nuanced of gestures - and then amplifies them; sound and image, movement and word, style and substance, are a single vision inextricably entwined.

Commissioned for and presented with the 2008 Melbourne International Arts Festival, Kitten is a landmark collaboration between Jenny Kemp, Malthouse Theatre’s Resident Artist, Anna Tregloan who has imagined a rich and remarkable physical world saturated with the sumptuous vocal and sound score of Darrin Verhagen and choreography of Helen Herbertson.

NOW SHOWING:

THE BURLESQUE HOUR, Finucane & Smith, Melbourne, 45 Downstairs,

The Burlesque Hour locks loads and liberates Burlesque for the 21st Century, bringing together Australia's hottest and most intelligent exponents of gender in performance and contemporary burlesque. Salubrious salon meets cutting edge culture; The Burlesque Hour invites its audience into a world of pure old-fashioned burlesque/variety/music hall, layered with the work of astonishing artists who have twisted this artform until it screams for more, and have exploded the boundaries of gender in performance for over a decade.

Created by artistic collaborators Moira Finucane & Jackie Smith, renowned for their creation of intimate theatrical spectacles where variety, cabaret, burlesque, the gothic and fairy tale are melded into indelible visions of gender, power, violence and desire; The Burlesque Hour is an explosive mix of circus, vaudeville, carnival, showgirl, magic realism, text, burlesque, music hall, dance, butoh and performance art; colliding in extraordinary images of liberation and oppression. A crash curve carnival of Bearded Ladies, Japanese Serpent Warriors, Italian Stallions, spike covered Showgirls with sharp teeth, trembling Victorian spinsters, mad Hello Kitty devotees, Ecstatic Ice Queens, Bodice Ripping Adventuresses, Apocalyptic Beasts in shredded fishnets and towering stilts.

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SCORES IN DEVELOPMENT:

TWO FACED BASTARD,

Chunky Move, The North Melbourne Meat Market, 8th-12thOctober 2008

On either side of a dividing curtain a group of performers juggle two simultaneous shows played to two opposing audiences. Each exit through the curtain becomes an entrance on the other side. There is no backstage, nowhere to get off, nowhere to hide. As one world bleeds into another a unique performance emerges, cut loose from the rules that determine a performer’s onstage/offstage life.

A cleverly staged work, Two Faced Bastard reveals our constant state of duality and capacity for treachery in the desire for individual gain. A tantilising look at two duplicitous worlds of fiction and reality, this production exposes its cast with often hilarious consequences.

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OBSERVATORY, Chris Henschke, 2009

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CARNIVAL OF MYSTERIES, 2009

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META/LLURGY, I+T=R, 2009

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RELEASES:

V:28 (Norwegian Black Metal remix), September 2008

Shinjuku Thief - NEW, late 2009

EPA - The White Cut (late 2009)