….a makeshift shower on a city rooftop, an endurance 42km run on a treadmill, a live film clip, a long walk home, four continuous hours of slapstick…

In Australia | live art can be

sarah.rodigari@gmail.com • martyncoutts@gmail.com • larathoms@hotmail.com • jasonmaling@gmail.com • willohsweiland@gmail.com • jackson@pvicollective.com • rebeccaburdon@gmail.com • janemssmith@gmail.com

fieldtheory.com.au • fieldtheorycollective@gmail.com

Soap City offers an alternative format to a common act by re-imagining the processes surrounding cleanliness. The exhibition, located at two separate locations, makes use of the gallery as a factory for producing soap with maps impressed upon them. These maps direct you to the second location, a nearby rooftop that supports a showering facility.

www.bababainternational.com

….A makeshift shower on a city rooftop and a soap engraved with a map on how to find it.

Bababa International | Soap City

Brown Council | A Comedy

In A Comedy, Brown Council lift the curtain on comedy to reveal the darker and more malicious side of humour and laughter. Beginning like a late night variety show and escalating into the realm of violence, humiliation and impossible conquests, A Comedy engages with concepts of spectacle and endurance. For four hours, the four members of Brown Council place themselves at the mercy of the audience, as spectators select which comedy trick or trope they’d like to see next.

www.browncouncil.com

Brown Council

…Four continuous hours of slapstick, pie throwing and stand up questioning the role of comedy.

Brown Council| A Comedy

Sunset stories performed online for 1001 nights…

Barbara Campbell | 1001 nights.

1001 nights cast is a project generated by the forces of The 1001 Nights: the theatrics of the voiced story, the need for framing devices, the strategies for survival, the allure of the Middle East and its contrasting realities. In 1001 nights cast, Barbara Campbell performed a story live each night at sunset for 1001 consecutive nights from 21 June 2005 to 17 March 2008. The stories were generated each day from newspaper reports on the Middle East from which other stories emerged through online collaborations between Barbara and a team of writers. The stories remain on the website as ghosts of their one-time voicing.

www.1001.net.au

A political dance performed by hundreds of people across the world to commemorate Tiananmen Square massacre….

Deborah Kelly |

Tank Man Tango

Tank Man Tango is a momentary monument to the Tiananmen Square protests of June 1989, a memorial made of dancing bodies in cities around the world. Deborah Kelly commissioned choreographer Jane McKernan to devise a dance based on the movements of the man who defied the tanks after the massacre of the Tiananmen Square protesters on 4 June 1989. The videos invite people to dance the Tank Man Tango together, to create a distributed social movement. Much of the memorial returned to YouTube as documentation by the far-flung participants. The memorial took place on 4 June 2009 in Bristol, Perth, Brisbane, Sydney, Warnambool, Tucson, Daylesford, Hobart, Leipzig, Weimar, Bielefeld, Erfurt, Singapore, Mexico City, Melbourne, St Catharine's in Ontario, Philadelphia, Auckland, Dunkerque, Belgrade, Athens, Richmond in Virginia, and in three parts of Brussels.

Watching 40 choreographed non-performers blend into a busy intersection from three stories above...

Jess Olivieri, Hayley Forward and The parachutes for Ladies |I thought a musical was being Made.

An audio performance that takes place in public space. 38 audience-members watch from windowsills above the crowds, as on-street movements from 38 performers are encapsulated within a sometimes musical, sometimes live sound scape, played through headphones.This project is site responsive and involves collaboration with the volunteer performers, the ‘Parachutes for Ladies’; those who answer the call and become part of the work.

www.parachutesforladies.com

….An artist walking home through Winter

Sarah Rodigari| Strategies For Leaving and Arriving Home

Strategies for Leaving and Arriving Home, was a two - month participatory performance in which Sarah Rodigari relocated from Melbourne to Sydney on foot, in the middle of winter. d she relied on blind faith, dogged determination the kindness of strangers .People were invited to walk with her, give advice, share stories and track her progress via a blog. www.strategiesforleavingandarrivinghome.com

Diego Bonnetto |Weedy Connection The Weedy connection project is an artistic investigation on Australian flora, providing information and insight into a number of non-indigenous plants commonly known as weeds.

The aim of this project is to rediscover the traditional knowledge, celebrate the multiplicity of cultures in botanical terms, and learn the legal status of such plants.The framing of “illegal” and unwanted flora within a cultural context will draw attention to the concept of “permissible species” as a social construct. Weeds are defined by a nation's law, and plants that are declared a weed in one place may be a precious resource in another.

www.weedyconnection.com

An investigation into weeds…

…A wordless exchange over telephone

Amy Spiers | A Wordless Exchange

A wordless exchange requires a little trust as there is an exchange of phone numbers. Consenting participants are emailed instructions that contain another’s number, and no other identifying personal information. Participants are asked to call the number and say nothing to the person who answers. This is the cue for both receiver and caller to exchange no words, as instructed, and instead spend a little time on the line together. Either participant can decide when to hang up. The aim is to create a one-on-one encounter that frustrates a person’s desire to connect with another.

www.amyspiers.tumblr.com

…Finding unofficial expertise in a community

Lara Thoms| The Experts Project

Lara speaks with strangers in public libraries to find out their unofficial expertise. If the conversation goes well, she ends up back at the experts house, dressed as them. The series of photos, taken by each expert, are accompanied by text based on what she learnt. The project is showcased through a three hour durational performance lecture of all fifty lessons.

www.aphids.net/about/Lara_Thoms

HIGH VIS DANDY is “Beau Brummell meets Bon Scott”, boldly challenging the Australian definition of manliness by reappropriating that reigning symbol of rugged, anti-fashion masculinity: high visibility work wear.

At first glance, the installation looked like an everyday roadside construction site. But up close – watch out! – industrial sewing machines roared and haute-couture workers performed choreographed cock-rock routines.

Inspired by the artists’ own experiences in a culture where bullying and stigmatisation discourage men from taking an interest in fashion, HIGH VIS DANDY urged us to reconsider our assumptions about what it means to ‘be a man’.

www.matthew.collabo.net

….An outdoor sewing workshop creating tailored high fashion industrial work wear.Matthew Kneale | Hi VisDandy

Intimate encounters with dance. Audiences eat, drink, talk, work their way through a formidable selection of live dance and dance-on-screen within tents. A cross section of super-fine work by a new generation of top-notch dancers choreographers and dance-film makers. 30 tiny private 'rooms’ for one audience member at a time, creating immersive and celebratory alternative kind of dance-viewing..

www.natcursio.com/

…30 tents containing individual diverse dance experiences

Nat Cursio | Private Dances

…An audio tour of your city filled with tiny interventions.

Once Step At a Time Like This| En Route

en route is a mobile work for pedestrians in which the private and the public, imaginal and concrete, intertwine. en route poses questions about where and how the creative act may be sited and what form it may take. It invites participants to be co-creators of the piece, writers and re-writers of the cityscape.

www.onestepatatimelikethis.com/

…A live film clip screened through video goggles

Aphids| Thrashing Without Looking

A performance ride through loneliness, frenzy, banality and cliché. A show you can watch, create, perform and control. Thrashing Without Looking is an experiential work that combines performance with live cinema. It is a textured and disorienting journey that considers the agency of the audience through all of the senses.

www.aphids.net

….satirical citizens concern group helping to reform behaviour in public spaces

pvi collective | Reform

reform is a unique interactive performance combined with radio narrowcast for a small audience to take on-foot in the city. tuning in via portable FM radios and headsets, audiences are invited to follow pvi’s elite anti-social behaviour taskforce, ‘the loyal citizens underground’ as they attempt to become model citizens.

www.pvicollective.com

A body art performance protesting war.

Rebecca Cunningham| 1litre of blood 1000 kg of Bullets

A deeply intimate moment with an artist in the back of a truck….

Sarah Jane Norman | Rest Area Rest area is an invitation, a confession, an invocation of a familiar desire, a repetition of a familiar gesture. A one-to-one experience, it is meditation on longing, comfort, and the melancholy eroticism of loneliness.In the back of a stationary truck, the audience discover an unlikely bedchamber, where they are invited to relinquish into a stranger's embrace.

www.sarahjanenorman.com

…A one on one performance matching massage to the rhythms of karaoke classics

Teik Kim Pok | Karaoke Massage

Karaoke Massage is a participatory work that 'combines the powers of lullaby and touch'. Usually taking place in market-style contexts and outdoor events, this performative exchange is essentially a massage choreographed to pop standards chosen by audience members whose experience is visible and audible to passers-by.

…A health spa in a shopping mall run by artists.

Triage | It’s All About You

You are invited to enter the world of the luxury day spa in triage live art collective's durational participatory installation. triage investigates a poetics of kindness; the meaning of sanctuary and commodified care within an exclusive day-spa offering free individual micro-treatment ‘escapes.’ Treatments take 20 minutes and are available daily. Let the good sisters of triage take care of your every need.

www.triageliveartcollective.com

…A live video game

Martyn Coutts & Kate Richards| Wayfarer

Wayfarer was an iterative performance and media project which dealt with place, agency, interactivity and the mediated experience. Three versions of Wayfarer were presented in Sydney and Melbourne over a 7 year period from 2004-2011 by Kate Richards and Martyn Coutts.

www.martyncoutts.com

An endurance 42 km run on a treadmill supported by performances from local cheerleaders, gymnasts, and DJs

Tristan Meecham | Fun RunThe star of FUN RUN and our fearless hero is Humphrey. Clad in tight packed lycra shorts and nipple pasties, Humps runs a grueling 42.2 kilometers on a treadmill, supported by massive visual effects, a booming soundtrack, a silky-voiced MC and hundreds of performers and athletes from the wider local community. Humps’ journey has the audience cheering, gasping and asking; will he succeed or will he hit the wall and collapse in a humiliating failure?

www.aphids.net/répertoire/Fun_Run

Creating performance and video works based on gifts from the public.

Unreasonable Adults | Gift/back Gift/Back is a participatory live art and multimedia project that provides the opportunity for general public to provoke the artists by giving them the raw materials to create art. Unreasonable Adults initiate an open call for submissions and generous offers in the form of ‘gifts’. These gifts can include; text, sound, video, objects, wigs, clothes, food, websites, tasks, provocations and are submitted online or in person.

www.unreasonablefilms.com