Festival of Experimental Art brings pioneering performances to Carriageworks at Eveleigh
IT’S all very well for the Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art to say that Lee Wilson’s performance “deprioritises safety and wellbeing in new and liberating ways”.
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IT’S all very well for the Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art to say that Lee Wilson’s performance “deprioritises safety and wellbeing in new and liberating ways”.
Death-defying would be another way to describe Wilson’s habit of hanging by his feet from a strip of packing tape.
Whether it’s liberating would be entirely up to the performer to know.
But festival director Jeff Khan reassures that Wilson is an elite specimen who trains rigorously for his chosen art form.
Wilson’s one-man show is called High Performance, Packing Tape. Wilson will enact it as part of the Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art that opens throughout Carriageworks today.
Along with packing tape, Wilson works with other common items such as cardboard boxes and balloons.
From these simple things, Wilson creates “dangerous situations that he has to navigate as a performer”, Khan says.
Khan admits his heart is in his mouth whenever he watches Wilson rehearse.
“He’s so brave and fearless,” Khan says. “But he’s such a skilled and powerful performer that he carries the whole show.”
Wilson is a 20-year veteran of Branch Nebula, which he co-founded and works at the nexus of performance, dance, sport and street styles such as parkour.
The group is a perfect fit for Liveworks, an annual event created by Performance Space. Based in Sydney, Performance Space describes itself as “a crucible for risk-taking artists”.
Khan is CEO.
“The festival is about artists who are breaking the boundaries of traditional art forms,” Khan says.
So what to expect?
Apart from Wilson’s risky interactions with stationery items, visitors will encounter numerous performances throughout Carriageworks.
One of these is Return To Escape From Woomera, by the arts collective Applespiel. The work examines the 2004 controversy surrounding federal funding for the development of the asylum-seeker adventure video game, Escape From Woomera.
The game was made by a group of artists and activists. It was set inside Woomera immigration detention centre in South Australia, and the object of the game was to escape.
Because the game cast negative aspersions on the then federal government, the Australia Council for the Arts was directed to withdraw its funding from the game, Khan says. The Australia Council refused.
Return To Escape From Woomera allows audience members to play the video game, which will be projected on to a large screen. Invited guests including human rights advocate Julian Burnside QC, as well as former refugees who were detained in Woomera, will offer their perspectives on what is happening in the game.
Japanese sound artist Asuna will create 100 Keyboards, a site-specific listening experience created with 100 cheap plastic keyboards.
“Sound waves on the same frequency multiply and bounce off in myriad directions, creating a complex sonic field of interference and reverberation that swells and changes over time,” the program notes say.
Other acts will include New Zealand vogueing collective FAFSWAG, and multi-instrumentalist Bree van Reyk with her new work, Invisible.
Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, Carriageworks, 245 Wilson St, Eveleigh; from today until October 28,$20-$40, carriageworks.com.au