Next Wave Festival is Australia’s biennial festival of the new generation in art, with the 2016 event featuring some of the most intelligent, powerful and thought provoking emerging artists from around Australia.
Expect intelligent, powerful and thought provoking works as highly talented emerging artists from across Australia amplify their quiet voices through performance, dance, visual art, video, sound art and more. With so much on offer, we take a look at 10 performances worth checking out:
Under My Skin
Arts House – North Melbourne Town Hall until 8 May
Presented through the lens of deaf culture, The Delta Project explores what we choose to hide and what can be revealed in this new dance-theatre work, This ground-breaking company, comprised of deaf and hearing dancers, creates cross-cultural work using Auslan and English with dance as a universal communicator. With choreography blending with images and sound, building access into aesthetics, Under My Skin challenges what it is to listen and be heard.
Ecosexual Bathhouse
Domain House, Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria: continues to 14 May
Plunging you into an immersive labyrinth of intimate encounters and sensory interaction, Ecosexual Bathhouse imagines a world where this identity is on the brink of becoming mainstream, where those of green persuasion have a place to express their deepest ecological desires.
Ground Control
Northcote Town Hall: continues to 14 May
Part science experiment, part love story, Ground Control takes our world and fast forwards it 100 years into the future, spitting it back with a grimace. A furious, experimental comedy about violence, technological singularity and long distance relationships, this is a confronting and passionate new performance created by the award-winning team behind Angry Sexx. What is it that we are moving toward? Have we already reached the point of no return?
MIS]CONCEIVE
Northcote Town Hall: 17 – 22 May
In his debut full-length dance-theatre work, rising performer and choreographer Thomas E.S. Kelly explodes the misconceptions and prescriptions of what it is to be a young urban Aboriginal person in Australia. Combining Indigenous knowledge with contemporary gestural motifs,[MIS]CONCEIVE‘s fusion of hip hop, physical percussion and rhythmic cultural pattern is expressive and immediate.
Mummy Dearest
Arts House – North Melbourne Town Hall: continues to 21 May
Writer, performer and queer-rights activist Annaliese Constable’s whip-sharp mind and deadpan delivery clash in a brutally honest take on parenting, childhood and what it’s like to have a mum who once tried to take a swig from a breathalyser. Mummy Dearest is for anyone who was ever unparented, underparented, overparented or parentified. It’s for anyone who misses a parent—or wishes they missed a parent more.
Algorithmic Misfits
RMIT Design Hub: 12 – 21 May
Spending time on the internet is rewarding because it delivers what we want. However this is no accident. Increasingly, algorithms bias what we see and hear, according to what ‘they’ want us to buy, believe, or actually be. Algorithmic Misfits introduces audience members to professionals on both sides of the internet privacy war – algorithm nerds, freedom fighters and obsessed academics, who will help untangle what’s real and what’s fiction.
The Horse
Arts House – North Melbourne Town Hall: 12 – 22 May
A dark and dreamlike concerto for saxophone, accompanied by violin, cello, electronics and automated instruments, The Horse begins with equine apparitions found in an MRI scan of composer Dylan Sheridan’s own brain, and voyages through space to the Horsehead Nebula, 1500 light years from Earth. Traversing scales, spectrums, land, Earth and the universe, Sheridan makes the impossible possible: playing the galaxy; hearing the stars.
The Second Woman
ACMI – Federationa Square: 20 & 21 May
Throwing herself into a strange loop of framing and spectacle in this 24-hour performance and cinema experiment, Nat Randall repeatedly performs a single scene inspired by John Cassavetes’ cult film Opening Night. Starring opposite Randall are 100 different men ranging in age, background and acting ability. Through this repeated performative exchange, Randall aims to explore the trade of emotion, intimacy, chemistry and authenticity.
Still I Rise
Blak Dot Gallery: continues to 22 May
Employing the language and aesthetics of hip hop and popular culture, Still I Rise is a music video environment harnessing female and Indigenous power. Exploring forms of resistance practiced by women and First Nations people around the world, artist Hannah Brontë presents a formidable future Australia in which an Indigenous woman is Prime Minister, and parliament is entirely female. Through a politically charged, fiercely feminist rap entwined with oestrogen and camouflage, the parliament of Australia shall address the people. It’s time to rise.
Ua numi le fau
Gertrude Contemporary: continues to 18 June
Six leading local and international artists draw on resurgent First Nations and diasporic knowledges in Ua numi le fau – an exhibition project asserting sovereign futures through performance video, photography and textiles. Bodies and kinships are explored through sexuality, spirituality and ecology, which will be uniquely articulated in multiple languages and mediums.
The 2016 Next Wave Festival continues to 22 May. For more information, visit: www.nextwave.org.au for details.
Image: Ground Control – photo by Sarah Walker