Bec Dean's Presentation 'Performance Space (Sydney)' at Shin Minatomura 'From the World Arts Initiative (4)'
Bec Dean, Associate Director, Performance Space
14 October 2011
Before I start talking about Performance Space, I'd like to say thanks and pay my respects to our hosts BankART: Ikeda san, Toshio Mizohata and Makato Kawaguchi and all of the staff. This is the second time that I have participated in a BankART Life program, and the last time I was here in 2009, I was also taken around the Echigo Tsumari Triennale by BankART staff, so I'd like to use this opportunity to thank them for their generosity. For the last few weeks I have been living in Totsuka, which is just over an hour's travel from here, and so I am having a different experience of Yokohama and the daily commute to its suburbs which all workers have to make in one way or another. This is a very different experience for me, of living in Japan.
I am here assisting Sarah Goffman, who is an artist that I worked with in 2010 at Performance Space on a project called Trashcan Dreams" where she was also collaborating with Yokohama-based dancer Lina Ritchie (who is here today) and Morita Yasuaki. BankART's Shin-Minatomura project seemed like the perfect opportunity to engage in a program where artists and architects are re-imaging the city and the place of artists within it, and to work with Sarah again, who through various processes transforms the discarded objects and trash of a city's inhabitants.
Sarah Goffman, Trashcan Dreams 2010
Photo: Garth Knight
Sarah Goffman, Trashcan Dreams 2010 with Lina Ritchie and Morita Yasuaki
Photo: Garth Knight
Sarah Goffman, Trashcan Dreams 2010
Photo: Garth Knight
Sarah has an open studio here for a month. She has been visiting Japan for the last two years with residencies through Asialink at Tokyo Wonder Site and the Australia Council in a residency space at Takanadobaba, and the work that she has been doing engages entirely with found materials from the area, and the things that she uses in daily life. I'd like to thank Izumi Murata, a Tokyo-based performance artist who has just performed a tea ceremony in Sarah's space. This has been a wonderful opportunity to meet with artists like Izumi and the artists that are working both in the Shin-Minatomura project and the Koganecho Bazaar, to see the relationship of Yokohama city with its artist community continue to grow.
This is my fifth visit to Japan for the purpose of contemporary art exchange. In 2008, I co-curated an exhibition Trace Elements: Spirit and Memory in Japanese and Australian Photomedia, which was held at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery and toured to Performance Space. I'd like to acknowledge Hitomi Toku, from the Australian Embassy who is here with us today, for her work on the Australia/Japan relations around that project.
Since 2007, I have been working for Performance Space, Australia's leading organization for interdisciplinary arts, which has been running for twenty-eight years in Sydney. I am an Associate Director and the co-curator of its exhibition and performance programs. For 23 years, Performance Space ran a venue in Redfern on the outskirts of the centre of Sydney which included a 100 seat theatre space, a gallery space, a bar and a studio residency and it organized an annual program located in that venue. Since 2007, we have worked from a shared contemporary arts venue called CarriageWorks which comprises a nine hundred seat theatre, a three hundred seat theatre a black box gallery, a giant foyer space and two large rehearsal spaces. The original building – a red brick warehouse not unlike Yokohama's pier - was erected in 1896 and employed about 3000 rail workers up until the early 1980s and was squatted by artists and used as storage for several arts organizations until it was redeveloped. We do not run this venue – it has an administrative and programming organization called CarriageWorks Inc – but we are founding tenants, and we were very actively involved in the redevelopment of the site for contemporary art. In this situation, we rent the theatre, gallery and foyer spaces as required, and we have to make bookings to use the spaces about a year in advance.
Performance Space runs two major seasons of performance and contemporary art at the CarriageWorks venue per year, which are conceptually and thematically curated. We commission new work by visual artists and curate group exhibitions. We present, produce and co-produce contemporary dance and performance during these seasons. The seasons run for 6 weeks, twice a year. For about forty weeks of the year, we also run residency programs from the rehearsal spaces, where artists that are working towards the development of new projects for forthcoming programs have the opportunity to research and test ideas, and also show the works in progress to limited audiences. Scattered throughout the year, we also run a project called ClubHouse which enables us to deliver an artist-led program of short performance, talks, lectures, experimental music and film screenings. This is a responsive program that allows us to take up opportunities that arise with visiting artists and for projects that have a much shorter lead-time than work we show in the theatre or the gallery space. As we no longer have access to a venue year-round we are finding ways to still be flexible for the artists we want to work with.
Helen Pynor and Peta Clancy, The Body Is A Big Place production still 2011
Photo:Chris Hamilton
Michele Barker & Anna Munster, HokusPokus production still 2011
Photo: Michele Barker
We have relationships with The University of Sydney's department of Performance Studies and also with The University of NSW's Creative Research and Practice Unit which enables us to offer eight offsite residencies to performance and dance practitioners, and gives those artists potential access to other research areas within the universities. We have also recently started a relationship with the National Art School to run a film screening and discussion program in their Cell Block theatre, which take place five or six times a year.
As we are no longer bound by having to work out of a specific venue, we have also been giving more attention to artists working site-specifically or in socially engaged practice. This year we commissioned nine new works as part of an offsite program called WALK which ranged in scope from artists working on a social history project that looked at trade union activity and sites of protest against property development in Sydney in the 1970s, to a project that involves mapping gps-located dog walks. We co-presented one of the WALK projects with the Sydney Opera House and the Sydney Festival, this was not a commission but a site specific project by British/German Group Gob Squad.
Big Fag Press and Cross Arts Projects, Green Bans Art Walk 2011
Photo: Alex Wisser
Sarah Waterson, Laika's Derive 2011
Pascal Daantos Berry and The Anino Shadowplay Collective, Within and Without 2011
Photo: Blacktown Arts Centre
We also co-presented a transcultural project for the WALK program with the Blacktown Arts Centre, which is in Western Sydney with artist from the Filipino collective Anino Shadowplay. Blacktown is an area with a high proportion of Filipino-Australian residents and the artists actively involved that community in the making of their WALK project.
Performance Space also runs a number of strategic initiatives including an offsite, intensive laboratory called Indigelab for Indigenous Australian artists working in interdisciplinary and collaborative ways. We've been doing this for four years in an international residency space called the Bundanon Trust, which is on a rural property three hours south of Sydney. We have recently begun a funded residency program called Indigespace which gives specific residency opportunities at the CarriageWorks venue for Indigenous interdisciplinary artists.
Biennially we run a festival of Live Art called LiveWorks which involves around thirty artists projects across a single week, but next year, we are instead working on a program that will be housed in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney as part of its reopening celebrations. The program that we are curating is called Local Positioning Systems and will involve seven new works by Australian and international artists that engage with the Museum's new education facility and social spaces, that intervene in its gallery spaces and also work outside the Museum in the area of Circular Quay.
Victoria Hunt, Copper Promises 2010 with Fiona Winning. Part of LiveWorks
Photo: Heidrun Löhr
Jive Parthipan, 2010. Part of LiveWorks
Photo: Heidrun Löhr
Twice a year, we also invite artists to curate a one-night-only event called Nighttimes, which comprises short works from video to dance of no more than ten minutes. This is one of the opportunities at Performance Space that is open to all artists to submit a proposal to. Last year, the Nighttime program toured to four Australian regional gallery venues, that did not actively curate performance or live art into its visual art programs.
The Fondue Set Evening Magic (2007)
Photo: Heidrun Löhr
The Fondue Set Evening Magic II (2007)
Photo: Heidrun Löhr
Kate Murphy, Yia Yia's Song 2010 part of Nightshifters
Photo: Garth Knight
Alexis Destoop, Unheim 2010 part of Nightshifters
Photo: Garth Knight
Performance Space prints two annual publications called POINT which includes details of our program as well as commissioned essays by artists and writers, a series of artist pages, and we also commission an artist to illustrate the cover. We work on all of our printed collateral with Blood & Thunder Publishing Concern, which is comprised of an artist, an illustrator and a graphic designer who work on a Riso printing machine. We also make exhibition catalogues with Blood & Thunder – this is one of them for the exhibition I co-curated this year called Awfully Wonderful: Science Fiction in Contemporary Art. Annually, we also collaborate with PS122 in New York and the Live Art Development Agency in London on the Live Art Almanac, which is this publication which collates international essays around live art and performance.
2011 installation of Awfully Wonderful: Science Fiction in Contemporary Art.
Photo: Garth Knight
Ms&Mr, 2011 part of Awfully Wonderful: Science Fiction in Contemporary Art.
Photo: Garth Knight
Adam Norton, Mars Gravity Simulator 2011 part of Awfully Wonderful: Science Fiction in Contemporary Art.
Photo: Garth Knight
Haines/Hinterding, Cloudbusters and Hayden Fowler, Anthropocene 2011 part of Awfully Wonderful: Science Fiction in Contemporary Art.
Photo: Garth Knight
All in all, we work with about 300 artists per year in one way or another. We are funded by the Australian Government and the New South Wales government and we also fundraise and seek philanthropic support for particular projects.
We have a team of 8 full time staff including myself, our Director Daniel Brine http://www.performancespace.com.au/us/staff/, my co-associate director Jeff Khan our Indigenous Producer Alison Murphy-Oates and a project officer on the curatorial side of the office. Our approach to programming has shifted in the last twelve months in response to the changes that the organization has faced over the last four years. Daniel, Jeff, Alison and I – with the input of our support staff who are also artists and producers –shape our program collaboratively across all artforms rather than individuals assuming responsibility for a specific artform area.
The transition that we have made over the last few years in the new venue has helped us to redefine the organisation so that it is – in terms of organisational resiliency – able to always deal with change and yet remain intrinsically connected to its artistic policy and its values. The move to CarriageWorks, to a venue that is not our own to autonomously work in, has been instrumental in driving Performance Space back to the vital, energetic impetus for its establishment in the first place back in the early 80s – which was to support new forms, to find new contexts for work, to take risks with artists and engage dynamically with audiences. We may have dematerialized in terms of our visibility at a fixed place and in our role as a venue, but it also means that our program is not tied a single building. This is an exciting situation for us as curators and producers.
I've been showing you images from a selection of Performance Space projects since 2007, after we moved in to the CarriageWorks. As a venue, the CarriageWorks is historically and culturally a very rich space, and many of our artists have made research and site-based work, engaging with its threads of history, as you may be able to see from some of the slides.
David Cross, Hold 2011.
Photo: Alex Davies
Patrick Ronald & Shannon McDonell Habits and Habitat (2010)
Photo: Patrick Ronald
Wade Marynowsky The Hosts: A Masquerade of Improvising Automatons (2009)
Photo: Garth Knight
pvi collective Reform (2008)
Photo: Heidrun Löhr
Jonathan Jones & Ruark Lewis Homeland Illuminations (2007)
Photo: Heidrun Löhr
To give you an idea of some projects we are working on for next year, Jeff Khan and I are co-curating with Sydney artist Deborah Kelly, a major Australian survey exhibition called SEXES, which looks at contemporary Australian art and Australian culture through the frame of Sex and Gender – and extends upon feminist discourses. Our offsite program next year is called Halls for Hire, and it extends the kind of work that we have been doing across Sydney with our WALK program, but in this case the program utilises community venues such as town halls, ice skating rinks, sports clubs, disused cinemas and theatre spaces. So again, I would like to thank BankART for inviting us, because it also gives me the opportunity to see how projects such as Shin-Minatomura and the Koganecho Bazaar operate and work with artists in alternative spaces outside of the gallery or theatre.