Past Events › Performance

Discover the unexpected stories of #WesternSydney in this intimate multi-lingual and multi-generational storytelling show. Through personal narratives and photographs, Who Speaks For Me? explores the vagaries of language – the powerlessness of those who do not have it, the nuances lost in translation, and the sometimes hilarious consequences of misunderstanding it. These irresistible stories will be accompanied by rare photographs from private collections and will take the audience to the heart of the migrant’s journey. This new co-production by National Theatre of Parramatta and Performance 4a is co-directed by William Yang and Annette Shun Wah. Coming to Riverside Theatres 12-15th October 2016 #NTofP #RiversideParra #TellingTales Written and performed by: Chandra Acharya Puspa Lal Acharya Bà Quôc Viêt Sophie To William Le Ly Heang Seang Vanna Seang Directed by: William Yang Annette Shun Wah At Riverside Theatres, cnr Church & Market Streets Parramatta 12 – 15 October Wed – Fri at…

Bunny is part of Asia TOPA. With a background in socially engaged arts practice, Luke George is Melbourne-based choreographer and performer. Daniel Kok (Singapore) is currently developing artistic research on critical spectatorship and audiences and exploring the notion of Trans-Individuality at the Kinosaki International Arts Center (Japan), where he will work with visual artist, Miho Shimizu (Japan).   Desires are unleashed, tensions suspended and lines of connection macraméd in Bunny – an interactive performance using rope. Dance provocateurs Luke George (Erotic Dance, Festival of Live Art 2016) and Daniel Kok (Singapore) exploit the physical properties of rope and knots to unpick the boundaries of desire, trust, consent and communion between artist and audience, ‘Bunny’ and ‘Rigger’. Staged in the round, the web of technicoloured ropes draws performer and audience into an increasingly enveloping bind.   Date&Time: 2/3/4 Feb 7pm-, 5 Feb 3pm- Duration: 120 mins. Warning: Adult concepts.

This show is part of Asia TOPA at Arts House. Founded in 1997, chelfitsch is led by theatrical visionary Toshiki Okada, widely regarded as one of Japan’s most significant contemporary theatre makers and innovators.   Confined to a room, the ghost of a woman, her surviving husband and his new partner are attempting to cope with the devastating effects of the 2011 earthquake in Japan. Suspended in the days immediately following the disaster, the ghost embodies the fleeting feeling of euphoria post-Fukushima as dreams of a better future take hold. Facing the reality of life six years on, the ghost’s husband and his lover are haunted by grief and the excruciating loss of hope and unrealised transformation. Seamlessly layered with text, movement and images that all melt into each other, Time’s Journey Through a Room is performed in Japanese with English surtitles.   Date&Time: 9/10/11 Feb 7:30pm-, 12 Feb 5pm-…

As part of Asia TOPA 2017, Arts House welcomes Japanese docu-performance mavericks Hamanaka Company.   On 11 March 2011, a woman living in Hisanohama, a port town in Fukushima Japan, lost her husband when he was swept away by a tsunami. Kagerou – Study of Translating Performance is an intimate, documentary-style performance that tells a women’s story through her own words and voice. Or so it seems. Interweaving sound recordings and video footage from Hisanohama, Kagerou – Study of Translating Performance also features simultaneous Japanese/English interpretations to create an immersive and uniquely powerful meditation on translation in the aftermath of Fukushima.   Duration: 50 mins.

Smoke rises. Song welcomes. Bodies are adorned. Enter a space carrying culture, ceremony and regalia of our longest living cultures.   Next Wave brings together acclaimed Samoan/Aotearoa (New Zealand) artist Rosanna Raymond with Maori, Pasifika and Aboriginal collaborators in Lukautim Solwara (look out for the ocean), a one-night-only event of performance, art and adornment. Immerse yourself in the mana (power and honour) of visual artists, performers and choreographers as they intensively articulate, fabricate and actiVAte an explosive new cross-disciplinary experience, especially for Asia TOPA.

China’s most successful and globally sought-after avant-garde performance company returns to transfix Melbourne with its explorations of the human form.   Acclaimed choreographer Tao Ye's TAO Dance Theater was a sellout hit at last year's Supersense festival at Arts Centre Melbourne. Now this fascinating maverick is back with a double-bill: the fast-paced 6, which featured in last year’s Paris Men's Fashion Week, and the sensuous and lyrical 8. The two works bookend Tao Ye’s ‘Straight Line Trilogy’, in which dancers maintain precisely the same distance from one another, and which deploy repetition and variation to explore the invisible forces that bind us all. Through his work’s persistent focus on pure movement, Tao Ye has come to reveal the body in motion as the most meaningful expression of what it means to be human today. The incessant motion of both works is choreographed to an intimate score from Chinese indie-folk-rock composer…

Takao Kawaguchi, reconsiders authorship and artistic freedom by recreating the movements of legendary Butoh dancer, Kazuo Ohno.   Takao Kawaguchi’s performance, About Kazuo Ohno, caused a great deal of controversy when it premiered in Tokyo in 2013. Using video recordings of the premiere performances of butoh master Kazuo Ohnoʼs early masterpieces including Admiring La Argentina (1977), My Mother (1981), and Dead Sea, Ghost, Wienerwaltz (1985), Kawaguchi attempts to replicate Ohno’s movements. Ohnoʼs dance is often characterised as being largely improvisational and unique in his distinctive bodily features and movements, which were essential to his ‘dance of soul.’ In an attempt to copy his dance, Kawaguchi’s inevitable divergences come to reveal the distinction between the original and the copy, which in turn reveal the unavoidable interpretive agency of the copier. The copy becomes original. In copying recordings that are themselves copies—or perhaps even copies of copies, Kawaguchi works in direct violation of Ohno’s methodology, which stated that, “if there is the…

The line between life and death is joyously erased in a physical work of rare intensity.   Award-winning Thai choreographer Pichet Klunchun leads you into a space between life and death, where the material and immaterial meet, and where body and spirit exist in a state of kinetic freedom.   When Klunchun first visited the Phi Ta Khon ghost festival, he found a place where the living and the dead mingled and death was not to be feared but celebrated. Through vibrant and colourful costumes and masks – and dance that is free, fluid and organic – fertility and mortality were woven together to joyfully honour both.   Inspired, Klunchun went on to invent a new physical language marrying the improvisational and intuitive nature of folk expression with his contemporary choreographic system based on classical Thai dance.   Step onto the State Theatre stage for an up-close experience that's out of this…

Arts House will blow the lid off contemporary dance with ten extraordinary works presented by over 50 artists as part of Dance Massive 2017. During March, these ten dance works will have audiences drifting, flocking, skating, bending and lying down in awe of contemporary dance. 14 – 18 Mar 2017 Nick Power – Between Tiny Cities (Arts House) 14 – 18 Mar 2017 Victoria Hunt – Tangi Wai … the cry of water (Meat Market) 14 – 18 Mar 2017  Shian Law – Vanishing Point (Meat Market) 16 – 26 Mar 2017 Lucy Guerin Inc – Split (Arts House) 17 – 19 Mar 2017 Lz Dunne – Aeon (Royal Park) 20 Mar 2017 James Batchelor – Deepspace (Meat Market) 21 – 25 Mar 2017 Nat Curiso – Tiny Slopes (Meat Market) 22 – 26 Mar 2017 Mariaa Randall – Divercity (Arts House) 22 – 26 Mar 2017 Rebecca Jensen – Deep Sea Dances (Meat Market) 24 – 26 Mar 2017 The Farm – Cockfight (Meat Market)