Inner West Creative Trails Event
[dis]connection / A day of performance art
Saturday 3 August 2019
Schedule
11am – 5pm / Omer Backley-Astrachan with Allie Graham
12.30 – 3pm / Sharon Backley-Astracha
11am – 5pm / Emma Harrison & Emalyn Knight
11am – 5pm / Cath McNamara
11am – 5pm / Gideon Payten-Griffiths & Melissa Hume
11 – 5pm / Adam Warburton, with collaborators Laura White & Jessica Leung
11am – 5pm / Wendy Yu
11am – 5pm / Alan Schacher
11am – 12pm; 1 – 2pm; 3 – 4pm / Keila Terencio
12 – 12.30pm; 1 – 1.30pm; 2 – 2.30pm; 3 – 3.30pm / Rowan Yeomans
Curator: Bonnie Cowan
Bonnie Cowan is a concept-centric, process-driven performance artist and curator. Since graduating from the University of Wollongong’s theatre course in 2015, Bonnie has created various solo performances and performative installations such as Lacquer Chatter (PACT 2019) affect me (Bearded Tit, Crack Theatre Festival, Shopfront, PACT, 2017-18), Do Something That Feels Good In Your Body (Scratch Art Space and PACT, 2017) unspoken (107 Projects, 2016) and unravelling (You Are Here, 2016). Last year Bonnie co-curated PACT’s artifice x interface Salon with Alex Stevenson. Some of her earlier collaborative performance credits include Aeon (Liveworks 2017) iDNA with the PACT Collective (2016), and Marina Abramović: In Residence, (Kaldor Public Art Projects, 2015).
Artists
Omer Backley-Astrachan is a NSW based dancer and choreographer. Originally from Israel, Omer has worked extensively overseas with an array of choreographers and dance companies such as Kamea Dance Company, Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company 2, Idan Cohen Dance Company, Jerusalem Dance Theatre, Jerusalem Ballet, Maya Levi, and Rotem Tashach.
In 2014 Omer relocated to Australia where he based himself as an independent artist. He has worked and collaborated with Australian and international artists such as Kay Armstrong, Dean Walsh, Marina Abramovic and Nick Cave. In 2018 Omer was appointed Course Coordinator for Sydney Dance Company’s Pre-Professional Year where he mentors and guides the next generation of dance creatives in Australia.
As an artist in residence Omer’s choreographic works have materialised though the support of various arts organisations such as Bundanon Trust, BrandX, FORM Dance Projects and Catapult Dance. His works have performed in venues and festivals both in Australia and overseas such as Carriageworks, PACT, Sydney Fringe Festival, Fringe World Festival, Suzanne Dellal Centre, Tel Aviv Summer Dance Festival, Seymour Centre, The Lock-Up Gallery and Bondi Pavilion.
Sharon Backley-Astrachan
Sharon Backley-Astrachan is a NSW based dancer and choreographer. Sharon graduated from the Western Australian Academy of Performing arts in 2007. In 2008 Sharon Backley Moved to Israel where she worked with numerous companies and Choreographers; including Kamea Dance Company, The Israeli Ballet, Eytan Sivak, Uri Ivgi, Rotem Tashach and more.
In late 2014 Sharon returned home to Australia where she began to focus on her own practice. Sharon was the recipient of a number of residencies such as BrandX Creative Development (Sydney), Bundanon Trust Residency, Propel Residency (Newcastle) and more. Sharon’s works have been presented in many events, theatres and galleries such as Sydney Fringe Festival, The Lock Up Gallery (Newcastle), Catapult Dance (Newcastle), The State Theatre Centre (WA) and more. Sharon’s work TOHU made in Collaboration with Omer Backley- Astrachan was recently a finalist in the Fringe World awards at the 2018 Fringe world festival Perth.
Emma Harrison
Emma Harrison is a performer and maker across a multitude of art forms. Primarily a contemporary dancer and maker with focus in performance improvisation, Emma’s practice has moved into multidisciplinary works merging dance, film and theatre. She is a graduate of WAAPA/LINK Dance Company and UTS Media Arts and Production. Emma has presented developments through First Run, March Dance Festival 2019, Crack X Festival, Strut Dance WA, Annandale Creative Arts, Sydney Fringe Festival (film), Fremantle Arts Centre and as a 2017 DirtyFeet Choreographic Lab recipient. 2019 sees her work Milk Machines remounted for Bondi Feast, traveling to Perth as dance cinematographer for a Strut SEED residency and creating a new work MADONNA in Out of the Studio DirtyFeet.
Emalyn Knight
Emalyn Knight is an independent artist, dancer and performance maker from Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. Graduating from Sydney Dance Company’s Pre-Professional Year, 2016, she has gone on to develop, create and work with established artists and organisations, expanding and exploring on her creative process and interests. Her credits include Opera Australia, PACT, SXAE, Sydney Fringe Festival, SDC, EDC and CNY Festivals alongside film works and choreographic residencies and developments with artists; Renata Commisso, Cloe Fournier, Jasmin Lancaster, Alexandra Knox, Elle Evangelista, Eliza Cooper, Kristina Chan, Gideon Obarzanek, Zachary Lopez, Ayman Harper, Gabrielle Nankivell, Thomas Bradley, Melissa Toogood, and Matt Cornell.
Cath McNamara
Cath McNamara is an independent theatre performer and maker, and is a queer woman who grew up on unceded Wiradjuri land in regional NSW. She aims to make work that is interactive, site-specific and exposes the wondrous contradictions/challenges of the performer/audience contract.
Her first training was in dance, and is invested in movement, physical theatre and devising. She considers PLAY and experimentation as her grounding discipline. She’s recently returned from 6 months touring ERTH’s Prehistoric Aquarium (an interactive children’s show that she co-wrote) around the USA (Redtail Entertainment, 2018-19) and around regional Australia (Arts on Tour, 2017). Before that, she premiered DEB, an equal-parts daggy/earnest attempt to investigate Australian entitlement and prejudice, but also the real connection and support that comes from being part of a rural community (Crack X Theatre Fest, 2018).
Gideon Payten-Griffiths
Gideon Payten-Griffiths is a chameleonic artist, performer, curator and facilitator spanning theatre, dance, music, live-art, film, installation and bodywork and finding a centre in the body as a material emotional landscape and in searching for the compassionate, liminal or queer space between people and all things. He wants to reclaim the profound intelligence in the radical, unashamed embrace of pleasure, the sensory, the sexual and eco-sexual, pure abstraction, our lost embodiment and connection to country, deep listening and kindness. He chases ways to save the world with joy, existentialism, absurdity, whimsy, the uncomfortable, the horrific, the real and the dramatic, the quotidian and the dance in all things. Often experimental, hybrid, site-specific, interventionist, immersive, participatory, abstracted or sensory, his work manifests in a range of forms, contexts and collaborations including with Sydney Festival, Sydney Biennale, Peats Ridge Festival, Next Wave, Sydney Opera House, Performance Space, MCA Australia, KW Institute Berlin, PACT, The History Council of NSW, Sydney Living Museums, Strings Attached, DeQuincey Co. and Ninefold. In the fractal truth of this existence Gideon believes that lists can never be long enough.
Melissa Hume
Melissa Hume is an actor, performer and interdisciplinary artist spanning theatre, film, immersive and performance art. She is interested in the subversion of the ordinary to find the theatrical and extraordinary, viewing performance based art as a form of democracy; an opportunity for the collective experience to examine context, culture and ourselves and to provoke social and political change. Melissa’s work leans into the satirical, the surprising, thrilling, horrifying, playful and unexpected. She is interested in all forms of performance especially site-specific and unconventional. Melissa has worked locally and toured nationally with a number of companies and collaborators including Ninefold, Lies, Lies & Propaganda, Revolving Days, Leftovers Collective and Hurrah Hurrah.
Alan Schacher
Alan Schacher is a performance artist and creator whose works present a ritualised action to evoke a relationship between the body and the materials employed. He provokes through juxtapositions, contradictions, miss-fits and historical implications. His work expresses notions of ghosting and unbelonging, incorporating cultural inheritances and differences, which can lead both to encounters and misunderstandings. The primacy of body, identity and place are fluid, yet in time their collision can be catastrophic. In recent solos he has employed shoes, sugar cubes, eggs, spices, coloured water, simple domestic props, paper, bedding, to echo and emphasize the position of the body in culture. He is always interested in how an audience may at once be witness, complicit and implicated by the structure of the work.
Keila Terencio
Keila Terencio is a Sydney-based performing artist. She graduated in Performing Arts in Brazil, where she worked in a number of productions as an actress and theatre producer, as well as voiceover for radio dramas. Recently, Keila has been researching and working on physical theatre, aerial performances, stilt walking and puppetry, exploring the relationship between air and movement, and subjects related to culture, languages, faith and identity that unite people and societies.
Theatre and Performance credits: ELIXIR LAB performances as part of Janet Laurence’s 2019 exhibition at the MCA, Chil the Kite in the Nautanki Theatre production of the “Jungle Book” for Riverside Theatre. Matilde for the New Theatre production of “The Clean House” by Sarah Ruhl. Collaborator on “iDNA” as part of the Collective 2016 for PACT Centre for Emerging Artists and Moogahlin Performing Arts. Movement ensemble for the opera “Orfeo ed Euridice” directed by Shannon Murphy and Sam Chester as part of Spectrum Festival.
In June 2016 Keila obtained a place in the International Theatre Experience Residency in Tuscany, Italy. And since July 2015, she has been part of Annandale Creative Art Centre Collective, where she devised the works: “Anh’s Story”, “Miscommunication”, and “She Carries”. Keila has also collaborated in performances with emerging and renowned artists presenting works at MCA ArtBar, Art Gallery of NSW, Melbourne Festival, Art & About Sydney, Integral Aerial Arts, Sydney Fringe Festival, and Canberra Beyond Festival.
Adam Warburton
Adam Warburton is an artist with a background in different street dance styles. His work involves integrating these dance styles in different contexts and working with concepts that underpin these dances, such as accessibility, inclusiveness, connection and intuition.
Rowan Yeomans
Rowan Yeomans is a non-binary artist, musician and filmmaker based in Sydney Australia. In their practice, they seek to deconstruct the pressure of living as a neurodivergent transgender person in a world shaped by strict binaries on what we consider normal and abnormal by using art making as a process of catharsis, note taking, and journaling. They graduated from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in 2018 and have had work exhibited across the mediums of film, theatre, live experience, VR and installation.
Wendy Yu
Having recently graduated the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, 2018, Wendy is currently navigating the Sydney post-modern performance art scene with an interest in constructing post-structuralist work, her latest work was presented as part of Pact Salon: Dark and Lite with further works to be presented in both the Sydney and Melbourne Fringe Festivals. Within the past years she has worked with artists such as Gideon Obarzanek, Lee Serle, Sandra Parker whilst also volunteering for programs such Chunky Move’s volunteer based project for NGV’s Triennial, as well as for Sarah Aiken’s Melbourne Fringe Festival work Light, Colour and Quiet Conversations. Currently, Wendy is undergoing an internship with Critical Path and volunteering for Carriageworks 107 Redfern street.
