Skin hunger

Performed dusk till dawn, Friday 26 October 2007
"Skin Hunger is an improvised movement performance that invites the audience to engage directly with the performer. The performer is accompanied by a sign that invites the audience to 'touch me and see what happens'. He then uses the tactile information as a stimulus to generate movement and motivation for what he does. Small moments of relationship emerge from the initiations offered by the audience and the performer's ability to be responsive to the moment of touch.

The sign reads:

Touch me.
Touch me and see what happens.

Perhaps I will dance
Or I may do something else.

If you hit me I will bruise I do not enjoy physical pain.

Tenderness is rare.

Brush, scratch, rub, pat, prod, punch, bump, jiggle, stroke, push, nudge, tickle, hug, squeeze, caress, feel, grope, fondle, graze, tap, fiddle with, handle, slap, knead, cuff, spank, thump, shake, jerk, clout, graze, chafe, tap, poke, jab, dig, skim, shove, pet, cuddle, embrace, finger, maul, paw, manipulate, pump, support. "
cf. Melbourne International Arts Festival. Musicircus artists
(http://www.melbournefestival.com.au/musicircus_artists)

Audience experience : measuring quality in the performing arts

Traditional measures of quality in the performing arts include critical reviews, awards, attendance data, the reputation of the director, company or lead performers, and attributions of success such as festival participation or sponsorship and grants. However, the recent literature on audience values, quest for authenticity and the personal experience suggests the need for empirical research into the capacity of the audience experience as an appropriate and important measure of quality in the performing arts. The authors use primary research with performing arts audiences to explore notions of quality, audience risk and audience experience to redefine the quality-measurement paradigm.

Aussie bia om

A community theatre project, aimed at exploring the issues prevalent in the lives of young people in today's society. It encouraged an understanding of the arts and cultural activity in young Vietnamese people. It supported collaborations between professional artists and community members, to ensure that artistic and social value of community cultural development is widely accepted.

The story of Aussie Bia Om is set in the future Australia of 2010 in Australia's first Bia Om, an entertainment superstore for adults. The play follows the journey of Aussie Bia Om's owner, Bob Williams, his workers and customers. It is a tale of intrigue and betrayal which explores greed, exploitation and sexuality. It looks at a society driven by money, power and corruption.

Cracking it open

Cracking it Open puts the spotlight on improvisation with live performances by some of Melbourne's leading improvisation artists. Each artist presents a short performance, and then opens the floor for discussion with audience members.

Retrospective screening program

A peek into the past of an Australian experimental cinema legend. Glorious 16mm film program with sympathetic vibrations by Jon Dale, Joel Stern, Lloyd Barrett & Joe Musgrove.

Inside the outside

Inside the Outside is a three screen, gesture and sound poetry performance. It extends the concerns of Traum A Dream (Australia 2003) into the immediacy of the performance situation. Traum A Dream has been described as "A representation of traumatised space, depicting a person who is consumed by a body of pain" and enlists the strategies of Direct Cinema, punk and Artaud's 'cruel' performance.

RemmbrMe

Dirk De Bruyn’s eleven-minute RemmbrME (2007) is a visually engaging film that documents in a painterly fashion the numerous gaps and intersections between analogue and digital moving image manipulation. RemmbrME is a work that critically focuses on the re-shaping of the lost material that is germane to a basic cameraless direct-on-film practice and resonates important ideas concerning the increasing fusion between analogue and digital image-making in our everyday culture.

Diary V3-2

Interactive multimedia diary.

Lanternfanten

In his work, filmmaker and media artist Dirk de Bruyn deals with the disorientating and traumatic experience of media saturated environments. His perfomance of LanterNfanten for three projectors created an absorbing space where time was disturbed and compressed as a kind of personal research on bodily trauma and cultural qisplacement, employing hand drawn, afterimage, single frame and flicker work. It was accompanied by a live soundtrack from Brisbane based composer Joel Stern, merging music concrete, art brut and noise.

'Rushing behind the wheel' : investigating the prevalence of 'drug driving' among club and rave patrons in Melbourne, Australia

The paper reports the findings of survey research recently completed in Melbourne, Australia, among a sample of 455 club and rave festival patrons. This research aims to provide a clearer account of the prevalence of drug driving within such settings in Melbourne, as well as identifying relevant ‘predictors’ of this drug driving. Just under half of the sample (48%) indicated that they had driven a motor vehicle within four hours of consuming an illicit substance at least once in the past year; 22% of respondents reported driving while ‘knowingly intoxicated’ in the previous year. Fifteen percent reported such behaviour ‘several times’ or more in this time. Relatively permissive attitudes towards drug driving, coupled with higher than average prevalence of drug driving in one's peer group, were found to be significant predictors of drug driving. So too was the reported frequency of the use of cannabis and ecstasy, and the propensity to use these substances in ‘rave’ and ‘party’ settings. Given the levels of drug driving revealed in this study, the paper closes with a series of recommendations regarding the design and delivery of more effective anti-drug-driving strategies within rave and club settings.

The gift of perseverance

The Exhibition was held as a part of  Melbourne Writers Festival, 2008

First time tragedy: second time farce

The re-enactment of the First Fleet from the United Kingdom to Australia and the arbitrary celebration of the two hundred years of British settlement becomes a catalyst to consider the issues of colonialism, cultural and national identity. This film looks at the construction of national identity and dissent around the Australian Bicentennial.

An ambiguous national iconography : Humphrey Jennings' Family Portrait

Family Portrait, made by Humphrey Jennings for the 1951 Festival of Britain, negotiates the complexity of national identity within and through a productively ambiguous iconography. Simultaneously, future political directions for the nation and speculation on the coming social condition of the ‘national family’ are offered in the film. Family Portrait, often overlooked in critical assessments of Jennings' film-making career which typically focus on his wartime films, emerges as a central work within the Jennings' canon, one which frames national identity within a particular moment within modernity in Britain.

Hedge-mony

Hedge-mony was a site-specific visual performance involving the creation of a human maze involving 400+ performers including a large number of Deakin University students and alumni. The Red Cabbage Collective developed the work with the support of Next Wave for Festival 2006, the cultural festival of the Commonwealth Games. The Red Cabbage 'Hedges' were featured internationally in the Games advertising campaign 'See The Games We Play'.