TIME MACHINE Performance Lectures
Time Machine features performance lectures across both festival weekends by Melita Rowston, Nathan Harrison, Noëlle Janaczewska, Helen Grogan, Nancy Mauro-Flude & Megan Garrett-Jones.
Melita Rowston
Six degrees of Ned Kelly
Date: 21.07.12
Time: 1-2pm
Location: Serial 002
Everyone’s family has Kelly Numbers, right? That’s the number of degrees of separation between them and Ned Kelly. Ned Kelly is the most famous Australian bushranger of all time, and he travelled a fair bit, so it makes sense we’ve all been touched by his larrikin ways. Or does it?
Melita Rowston journeys to some of Australia’s most shoddy tourist destinations in search of the truth about her family folklore. Were her ancestors simply great storytellers, or are we all linked to Ned Kelly within six simple steps? Rowston is a playwright, her Crushed premiered at The New Theatre’s Spare Room Season early this year. She has written and directed for many theatre productions, is a graduate of VCA, NIDA and UTS and has also forged a career in corporate marketing, in which her keynote presentation skills continue to be in high demand.
Nathan Harrison
Is Jacob Luciano a Bot? Man, What if Jacob Luciano is a Bot?
Date: 21.07.12
Time: 2-3pm
Location: Serial 002
Nathan is friends with Jacob Luciano on facebook, even though he has not seen him since high school. But, despite six years of co-education, Nathan can no longer be sure that Jacob Luciano is not a chat bot. Every time Jacob Luciano‘s activity pops up in Nathan’s facebook news feed, Nathan wonders if in year 9 science he was actually sitting next to a bot. But was Jacob Luciano always a bot? Or is this just what Jacob Luciano has become? Or is it just what he has become to Nathan on facebook? The problem this performance lecture aims to solve is whether or not Jacob is a bot. We have stumbled across a new stage in the Turing test and it is the hardest level yet.
Nathan is a performer and musician among other things. A founding member of Applespiel, he has performed at Underbelly Arts Festival, Crack Theatre Festival, You Are Here, Tiny Stadiums, Performance Space and Festival of Unpopular Culture. In 2011 he devised and performed a stage adaption of a Georges Perec novella at PACT Centre for Emerging Artists. He did 4 Unit maths in high school and has been trying to reconcile that with his practice ever since.
Noëlle Janaczewska
Loose Gravel—a poetics
Date: 22.07.12
Time: 1-2pm
Location: Serial 002
Loose Gravel—a poeticsis about gravel and its kin. About ripping stuff out of the ground, and the language that moves in to fill up the hole. It’s a funny and philosophical performance essay about uncertainty as a defining feature of contemporary life. About the pitfalls and rich disorder of being an associative thinker. It’s about crap places, and growing up in a crap place whose best-known exports are Cliff Richard, Victoria Beckham—and yes, gravel.
Noëlle Janaczewska is a multi-award winning writer of plays, performance texts, monologues, poetry, essays, gallery and on-line explorations, and radio scripts across drama and non-fiction. Her work has been performed, broadcast and published throughout Australia and overseas.
Helen Grogan
Untitled
Date: 22.07.12
Time: 2-3pm
Location: Serial 002
Based in Amsterdam from 2001-2005, Grogan worked amidst the new wave of ‘conceptual dance’ in Europe. Entangled in crisis and emancipation, dance practice/theory interrogated itself, struggling for relevance as contemporary art. The ‘performance lecture’ developed as a common form for live ‘discourse’. Grogan assiduously monitored the form, yet resisted adopting it. Simple questions began re-occurring – what performativity is this? Why wear jeans and trainers? Around that time, Grogan quit dance. All contracts cancelled. This new work for Time Machine is the first time since then that she will perform.
Helen Grogan is an artist/curator working with temporal and research-based practices in Melbourne and Europe. She studied Philosophy and Contemporary Dance at Deakin University and City University of New York, before continuing research at The School for New Dance Development (NL). Projects have been presented at Gertrude Contemporary, Amsterdam Biennale (NL), and Rijksakademie (NL), amongst others. Grogan’s practice is often collaborative, and relates to ideas of extended choreography and practical philosophy.
Nancy Mauro-Flude
The Intimacy of the Commandline
Date: 28.07.12
Time: 3-4pm
Location: Serial 002
Our computers know us more intimately than most lovers — but this is a lopsided relationship. Behind their user-friendly facades, what do we know of the operating systems that drive our daily fix? This isn’t a performance lecture about identity; it’s about identity theft, what news might a female hacker bring back for the rest of us? Nancy Mauro-Flude gives us a compelling insight.
Nancy Mauro-Flude’s performance practice bends in from our mortal world into the virtual dark and back again. In a playful and speculative manner she points to renaissance of computer culture and the automaton in contemporary art. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania.
Karen Therese is an artist and creative producer, her work is grounded in contemporary performance, political activism and social diversity. She is an MA-Research Candidate in Performance at The University of Wollongong. Currently Karen is working as a dramaturg for Nancy Mauro-Flaude.
Megan Garrett-Jones
Park Lecture: Everyday Creative Acts, a Guide
Date: 29.07.12
Time: 12.30-2pm
Location: Prince Alfred Park (meet at Serial 002 at 12.30pm)
The ubiquitous city park – home of activities from dog walking to Tai Chi. In an audio-lecture-tour, the park is considered as a resource for creative and non-commercial use of time. Follow the hyperbolic quest for civic betterment implied by these places to playful and personal conclusions. The lecture tour is site-specific to Prince Alfred Park, while theorising a universality of parks. Follow your desire path through the material and site. You may want/need gumboots or bare-feet.
From 18 April 2011 Megan Garrett-Jones undertook to walk in a park every day for a year and recorded this act. She now posts performances, slogans and stories from this process as weekly ‘advice to park users’ on her blog. Megan studied performance at Wollongong University and the University of Sydney. Her critical and creative writing credits include Realtime, Das Platforms, Text Camp Reader, the Sydney Guild, New Planes and Runway Magazine.
Image Credit: Nancy Mauro-Flude