Weird, wacky and wonderful: Expect the unexpected at this festival

Standing in the foyer of Carriageworks in Redfern, Kate Britton, artistic director of Performance Space, points excitedly at a mammoth boulder occupying one end of the space.

“You’ve got to go around the back,” she says, smiling. “It is not what you expect.”

The secret qualities of the rock, part of Liveworks, the Performance Space’s annual experimental art festival give the lie to its apparently solid, fallen-meteorite appearance. Instead, the innards of the evolving three-day installation called It’s Already Happened, We’re Just in the Past, are revealed – a hollow polystyrene cavern fixed with glued and screwed timber framing.

Performance Space artistic director Kate Britton (second from right) with Liveworks performers (from left) Marcus Whale, Daley Rangi, Hossei and Marcus McKenzie.Credit: Janie Barrett

Conventional perceptions are flipped, a philosophy encapsulating the nine-year-old festival’s five-day program. Featuring 10 acts performing until Sunday, Liveworks 2024 subverts expectations via performance, dance, interactive installations and full-blown musical ensemble works.

Britton, a self-confessed “Liveworks tragic”, is keen to recapture the spirit and history of Performance Space, while championing the importance of experimental work.

“I don’t want to sound too dramatic, but I feel like we’re in an era of poly crisis,” she says. “The last couple of years have been extremely challenging in a number of ways and I am seeing a creeping conservatism start to seep into our culture.

“I worry that artists are starting to self-censor in some ways because they have to make a living and they need to attract an audience.”

In Fell, Luke George balances on a roped-up tree trunk for an hour.Credit:

Britton views Liveworks as a place for artists to feel supported and uninhibited while also attracting audiences to unconventional work.

“Having a space where true experimentation and artist-led practices are still programmed and presented is important because I think there’s also a conservatism in our institutions,” she says.

Some shows, including choreographer, performer and rope-worker Luke George’s solo work Fell, begin outside the theatre space and invite audience members to be involved. Others, such as It’s Already Happened, We’re Just in the Past, which include live performances and a live sound score, encourage exploration at your own pace.

Fell, which begins with a log swinging above passersby in the Carriageworks foyer, features George suspended and balancing with the roped-up tree trunk for an hour.

“To perform the work requires my intense concentration,” he says. “I have to listen very deeply to my body, the log, the rope connecting and protecting us.”

“Pop star moment”: Artist Hossei’s mother, Nahid, stars in his work Thunderbloom-Live. Credit:

Balletic, tense and symbiotic, Fell, which re-uses a 75kg log (also George’s weight) from the recent opera Gilgamesh, is partly inspired by growing up in Tasmania.

“Most of my childhood and teens were spent in or around the bush,” he says. “I also grew up amidst the state’s logging, mining and energy industries that would clear-fell vast stretches of old-growth forests. We lived in communities where neighbours quite literally were on either side of the fence of environmental politics and practices.

“Tensions were high. So much was at stake. Yet somehow, people had to live and find a way to co-exist in this tough terrain and climate.”

Sydney artist Hossei is presenting Thunderbloom-Live, an ensemble work that features his mother, Nahid, as the star of the show.

Originally an album of songs with music videos, the work has evolved into a live emotion and beat-filled show propelled by wind machines, percussion, celestial projections, group choreography and bright flowing costumes.

“I’ve been thinking about Thunderbloom for 10 years,” Hossei says. “It came to me when I took on the title of being my mother’s carer.

“I was already sort of spending almost every day with her but, since having that title, it felt a bit different. It made me think about the idea of care and healing and my mum’s experiences of health, care and ageing.

Featuring Hossei’s “serious ear-worm” original songs, Thunderbloom-Live evokes warmth, happiness and a sense of togetherness between the performers and audience. It is also Hossei’s ode to Nahid.

“For the past 10 years, I’ve secretly written down quotes my mum would say which later became lyrics to songs I made,” he says. “One was, ‘I get my glow from the stars’.

“My mum is very whimsical. She’s 72, her health has been up and down. But she’s part of the show. She’s nervous, but this is her having her pop star moment.”

New Zealand artist Oli Mathiesen is presenting The Butterfly Who Flew Into The Rave, a three-day rave condensed into a 70-minute show.

The Butterfly Who Flew Into The Rave is a three-day rave condensed into a 70-minute show.Credit:

Featuring Mathiesen, Lucy Lynch and Sharvon Mortimer, the work, which explores techno and rave culture and movement, is a feat of human endurance, presented amid sweat, precise choreography and, eventually, exhaustion.

“It’s non-stop, it’s relentless,” Mathiesen says. “You watch us chasing after something rave-goers try to escape to but in a contemporary dance theatrical format.

“There’s this play between three dancers sharing one entity. But because it is so tiring, so difficult and extremely physical, you watch the three of us slowly dismantle into our individual selves as we try to stay in time, match each other’s bodies and match each other’s energies.”

The work, which features costume nods to different kinds of dance partygoers, from bush-doofer to corporate, athletic and kink-wear, is also an ode to Mathiesen’s late father, who was an ultra-marathon runner.

“I’ve definitely got his endurance gene,” Mathiesen says.

Other works include Brolga: A Queer Koori Wonderland, a six-hour interactive art party inspired by First Nations stories, Taiwanese artist Su Pin-Wen’s feminist piece Leftover Market, Jessie McCall’s dance work The Bloom and Māori artist Daley Rangi’s roll-the-dice interactive work dissent.

There is also merchandise, including stainless-steel garden forks, nine-track vinyl albums, raving singlets and “cement” cushions.

“I invite everyone to come,” Britton says. “The work that you’ll see in the festival is not here to hit you over the head with any sort of ideological stick. It’s very far from that.”

Liveworks is at the Performance Space, Carriageworks, Redfern, October 23-27.