coming up at the natimuk frinj festival.

In Gaol with David and Jacob

You’ve heard of In Bed with Maddona, right? Come and get involved with David and Jacob in the old natimuk gaol where they will be interred for the entire festival. A durational performance event, the work is centered around personal history, relationship, intimacy and the paradox of freedom.

Often the tightest imposed boundaries generate the greatest creative freedom.

http://natimuk.com

All video shot by Cobie Orger

also, Ruth Zaporah will be in Melbourne at the same time so we’ve organised (in conjunction with Al Wunder) for a combined solo evening followed by a forum on improvisation practices.
Full details here

Andrew Harwood will now be teaching an intensive weekend workshop in Byron instead of a full week. Also, Paula Zacharias will be accompanying Harwood and contributing to the teaching in Byron - sharing her own work as an addition to Harwood’s teaching. This menas there is more teaching time than the other locations for the same price. Byron’s looking good! We will post some more info about Paula up here soon. An outline of the Byron workshop is as follows:

Thursday Feb 12th - 6 - 9.30pm
Friday Feb 13th 6pm - 9.30pm
Saturday 14th & Sunday 15th 11am - 5pm

By chance I stumbled across an interview with Andrew on YouTube - it’s in French.

We’ve stayed in touch since our residency and performances with him in 2006 and have finally managed to co-ordinate dates. Andrew will be teaching a workshop in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Byron Bay. At the same time we will be rehearsing and performing with him in each location (except Byron Bay - at the moment).

If you’re interested in attending the workshop download the flyer. More details here soon.

ACIC is part of the CI36 celebrations happening around the world. it’s a Satellite Event and maybe there will be some media hook up while we’re there. martin hughes will be teaching at and attending CI36, which is great to see him being recognised by the global CI community. he has been so influential in the development of CI in Australia.

not sure if there are any tickets left, but it’s going to be a great time at ACIC… get in if you can.

a little snippet from the little con monster show from dc on Vimeo.

it was a crazy night - but very enjoyable.

that’s where we’re performing next. it’s in melbourne at Dancehouse from 7 - 9pm on Feb 29th, 2008.

from the blurb:

What happens when you bring together some of Australia’s finest contemporary dancers with some of Australia’s leading improvisers, contact and butoh practitioners: 5 spaces, 30 dancers - a lot of boxes and 2 hours to find out. Don’t miss the february little con. It’s a monster.

Friday 29th Feb, 7pm @ Dancehouse.
In February, The Little Con will be a special two-hour long curated and
scored improvisational dance event bringing together dancers working across
different contemporary forms. Audience members will be able to come and go
at their leisure, roaming freely about the upstairs space and are invited to become part of the performance by using cardboard boxes to divide and
redivide the space into three sections, creating separate and intimate
viewing environments.
Cost: $7 @ the door.

there’s a crazy excel spreadsheet detailing when and where everyone is performing that has had a few revisions and makes my eye water when i try to read it. here’s hoping that it all makes sense on the night.

video documentation to follow.

More info about the event.

Here is a version of Ready:

Also, an earlier work of David’s, called Always There, is screening on Nov 7 in LA as part of The Int’l Fest of Cinema and Technology. More details about this event

I don’t know if it got added to the official Melbourne Festival Musicircus website, but here is the blurb we wrote for our performance:

Whilst performing in Canberra last year David and Jacob overheard, in the foyer before the show, a lady and gentleman discussing the program notes. The gentleman suggested that the notes were pretentious intellectual dribble.

Our dribble for this installation project is as follows:
David and Jacob have been working for many years in the area of contemporary improvised performance. Our base physicality is a dance form called Contact Improvisation. We are interested in how meaning is created whether it is intentional or not. We enjoy performing with no explicit meaning intended and observing the feedback loop that is created through us, each other and the observers.

For this installation we have chosen the The Mobius strip as a metaphor for something simple, yet profound. If we were pushed to contextualise this installation we would probably point at current political, social and environment concerns and draw some analogy between them and a sense of oneness. We would do this to create a contemporary sense of meaning and connection.

To be honest we like the mobius strip because for us it has a sense of change, strangeness, continuity and inspires curiousity.

We hope you enjoy mobius as part of Musicircus.

It was quite an event. For us, it was a bit of a marathon. It took us 6 hours to complete the giant Mobius strip, which wound up and down and around the framework of the Fracture Gallery at BMW Edge. Then we slung some hammocks and made an attempt at having a snooze - which, with the amount of noise going on, and being suspended some distance from the ground, was not so straightforward. In fact, it was a little bit like having a very psychedelic dream.

We climbed into out hammocks at about 2.30am and climbed out at about 3.30am just as Die Roten Punkte were finishing a performance below us. Then we got ready to dismantle the whole thing, which started at 4.30am. By 4.36am we’d pulled all of the paper down and we then proceeded to de-rig and clean up and ended perfectly on time to watch the final moment at 5.20am.

A few pictures of the event from inside the glass.