Bring Your Own Grog is a well-worn, peculiarly Australian tradition – but Bring Your Own Plant? That’s what audience members are being invited to do as part of experimental arts festival Liveworks.
All types and sizes of vegetation will be welcome at a performance installation titled Hundreds and Thousands.
Luke George (left) and Daniel Kok (right) among plants in their Hundreds and Thousands work.Credit:Kate Geraghty
Created by longtime collaborators Luke George and Daniel Kok, the work, which merges choreography, installation, experimental music … and potted plants over three nights is a “performance for people and plants, by people and plants”.
“It’s very important to us that people know it’s also for the plants,” Kok says. “They’re not just there for decoration.”
First created in 2018, and part of Performance Space’s 10-day annual festival within Carriageworks, Hundreds and Thousands underlines our co-existence with nature, evolving as our connection with houseplants deepened during lockdown.
“We want people to pay attention to what plants ‘see’,” Kok says. “There will be a strong sense of everything breathing together as you sit amongst a makeshift garden.”
Raghav Handa performing ‘Follies of God’ that is part of the Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art 2022 at the Carriageworks, Eveleigh. 17th October, 2022. Photo: Kate GeraghtyCredit:Kate Geraghty
Artistic director of Performance Space, Jeff Kahn, is equally aware of everyone breathing together as Liveworks, featuring more than 60 Australian, Asia-Pacific and First Nations artists in 27 shows and digital events, returns to an in-person event after lockdown.
“It’s a huge relief,” he says. “We’re all feeling a bit elated and dizzy.”
Kahn says experimental work, sometimes considered challenging, or a leap into the unknown, for audiences, benefits greatly from being part of a festival.
“Experimental arts is where all the fun stuff happens, where you’re trying something new,” he says. “At heart, it’s about artists innovating at the cutting edge of their art forms, experimenting with their medium, pushing it in ways they haven’t before.”
“Add the buzz of a busy foyer, friends and the arts community returning, it’s an incredible environment.”
Sophie Penkethman-Young looks towards an image of her installation.Credit:Kate Geraghty
Dance artist Amrita Hepi, whose 60-minute solo work Rinse explores the romance of beginnings “and what happens next”, is keen for audiences to lose themselves in the piece.
“Rinse looks at personal beginnings and also tries to touch on more universal ones,” she says. “When did this country, as we know it, really begin ? What happens after the start of a relationship or falling in love? What are the elements or atoms that form and begin Earth as we know it?
“Those questions may seem quite big to explore in a dance work, but I think dance has a way of making something clear or explicit without over-explanation.”
“Dance has a way of making something clear or explicit without over-explanation.”
Hepi considered several recent life shifts including the death of her father, moving interstate and the end of a long-term relationship.
“Assessing or dealing with the reality of my “ends” I was trying to establish or remember how it had begun, what remained and how do I begin again?” she says. “I don’t think there is ever a clean break.”
Another dance work, Follies of God, by Australian-Indian artist Raghav Handa, uses Sanskrit verses from the Bhagavad Gita, a 700-verse Hindu scripture that influenced both Mahatma Gandhi and SS Chief Heinrich Himmler.
“We look at how language can be used as a form of weapon,” Handa says. “And how this has historically been used by individuals and groups to inspire or to subjugate.”
Amrita Hepi will be performing her piece ‘Rinse’. Credit:Kate Geraghty
Follies of God, created with sound artist James Brown, features Handa performing with a crane tyre weighing more than 250kg.
“I stand on top of it,” he says. “I am under it, I dance with it. So the stakes are high, risk is real, consequences are real. And that’s what makes this piece compelling.
“It’s an embodied exploration of the seduction of violence, where we confront our own struggle for self-mastery amidst the seduction of violence and the lure of power over others.”
A third of the Liveworks program, which also includes artist collectives BoneDirt and Field Theory, musician and composer Jon Rose, three nights of experimental works-in-progress and a 12-hour queer immersive dance party, is presented digitally.
“After presenting work online during lockdown, we got feedback that audiences with disability often found it safer or more welcoming to engage with work digitally,” Kahn says. “And, for digital artists like Sophie Penkethman-Young, it recognises the uniqueness of their practice.”
Penkethman-Young’s work, In Progress: The Wait of Expectation, which is live-streamed for audiences on a computer at home, was inspired by the prevalence of loading bars and digital icons in apps or online to show action.
″They’re everywhere,” she says. “The Apple Watch rings, period trackers, sleep apps, meditation apps. I don’t think I know my own body without a loading bar.”
The idea for In Progress: The Wait of Expectation, which runs until Saturday, originated two years ago when Penkethman-Young was watching a food delivery app’s animated graphics.
“Experimental work is where the art of the future gets made, where the artists of the future … push the culture forward.”
“I was taken by how mesmerising they were for something that is sort of evil,” she says. “I felt like it was trying to connect me with a fake means of production. Instead of seeing the cook in the back cooking my food I had these graphics letting me know that it was getting done.”
Penkethman-Young says icons and loading bars, originally invented to placate frustrated computer users, now commodify labour.
“We’ve now turned it back on ourselves,” she says. “Does our labour exist without the loading bar?”
Liveworks program, which began with a three-hour concert featuring experimental pop artists Rainbow Chan and Sui Zhen, will end with another free music event, Closing Sounds, led by atmospheric music artists Haco and Lisa Lerkenfeldt.
Kahn says the festival, now in its eighth year, is the place to catch performers, choreographers, artists and thinkers creating without constriction, or before they move to bigger, more mainstage, venues and festivals.
“Experimental work is where the art of the future gets made, where the artists of the future establish their practices and push the culture forward,” he says.
“This is a laboratory, a space to try something new, both for the artists and for the audiences. It’s for the bold and the adventurous.”
Liveworks runs until October 30 at Performance Space, Carriageworks
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