City Search Editorial Review
Alison Currie blends, shoves and tears down walls to bring her audience an involving experiment in art and choreography.

30 May - 5 July, 2008?Experimental Art Foundation / EAF?North Terrace, Adelaide

While the name itself is not particularly descriptive, what you have here is a glorious push at the boundaries of modern dance, choreography, performance art and installation all at the same time. Through the combination of a variety of media, Alison Currie - director, choreographer and performer of 42a - has created an interactive space where the audience itself affects the display and presentation, purely by where they stand, where they move to and what they do within the art space.

After stepping inside the edgy confines of Adelaide's Experimental Art Foundation gallery, an array of sculpture, new media, video and a plethora of cardboard creations and dance are ready to entrance the prospective viewer. The installation is almost a performance for all opening hours, as dancers and performers move throughout the area adjusting their choreographed steps in reaction to the number of viewers present, with the viewers' placement, their reactions to and interactions with the installation dictating the performers' response.

With a wide collection of different sounds, objects, movements and experiences to behold in this exhibit, there should be something for everyone to enjoy. Should you be someone who likes to sit back and observe - or actively try to affect - or if you're just interested in seeing what that crazy experimental art scene is up to now then 42a should stimulate your creative mind.
Paul Cotton


III Performances (in white cube)
Russell Kelty, Artlink review
III PERFORMANCES [in white cube]?Linda Lou Murphy?Ana Wojak & Fiona McGregor?Alison Currie?Curator: Melentie Pandilovski?Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide?30 May – 5 July 2008

In a recent forum, curator Melentie Pandilovski, questioned the viability and relevance of performance art while the artists of III PERFORMANCES [in white cube] lamented the fact that an art form so well suited for the gallery was not presented more often in it. So why is it so rarely seen in lieu of various permutations of painting and sculpture? The answer is simple; you can`t sell a moment. But you sure can enjoy it while it lasts. ??

SA-based artist Linda Lou Murphy has been creating performance work as the founder and creative facilitator of the performance group shimmeeshok and on her own as a Master of Visual Art student at UniSA since the late nineties. Murphy`s previous work has drawn out new relations between contemporary craft conventions, sound, video and design. Un/gather placed the audience in the role of voyeur as the interplay between body and object was enacted. This was accompanied by haunting sounds, capes and the dramatic effect of black objects manipulated by white hands. Murphy, dressed in black, wrapped Facepiece (2008), a long pleated paper construction around her face. She then pulled a needle and seemingly endless white ribbon from her mouth and nailed it to the wall. The performance concluded when Murphy wrapped a large roll of paper pleats and pins, Pleatwork (2008), around her arms and torso. The three video projections played throughout the performance which allowed the objects and her hands to take precedence. In the projections Murphy gathered and dropped pins, pushed a needle through the folded ribbon dispelled from her mouth and gathered and unrolled Pleatwork in large waves. ??

SenVoodoo is a performance collective founded in Sydney in 1999 by artist Ana Wojak and writer/artist Fiona McGregor which has performed across Australia and Europe. Arterial was initiated as a video installation in 2005 and has been viewed in Australia and Beijing, and toured Poland for two months as a live performance. For the first time at the EAF both versions appeared together. Arterial, according to the catalogue, drew on 'Butoh traditions as well as the emballage of Tadeusz Kantor`s Theatre of Death, which deals with transcendence and history inscribed in memory, wherein the individual becomes anonymous'. Accompanied by an ominous atmospheric soundscape, two figures shrouded in white garments walked slowly towards each other on a path of emulsified photographic paper, while blood dripped from an artery in each of their wrists. After the figures met, fell to the floor and exited the gallery a painterly blood trail was all that remained. Blood has played a central role in some of the world's most trenchant rituals and is associated with cleansing, pain, birth and death. Arterial was a ritual in its own right. The solemn mood of the audience and the aura around the performance was indicative of the pervasive sense of peril and intimacy created by SenVoodoo.??

Alison Currie received her BA in Dance Performance at the Adelaide Centre for the Arts in 2003. She has performed extensively in Adelaide and also Shanghai, China. 42a has been in development since 2006 and includes eight collaborative artists and performers. In 42a Currie, director/choreographer, sought to create an immersive installation performance experience' which dissolved the physical and psychological boundaries between spectator and performer. In the installation the concept of 'home' was dissected and reassembled into separate environments delineated by architectural lines, projection screens, headphones and one's own personal space. Some were familiar, like people lounging in a living room; others unexpected like a giant pink Arnott's biscuit. The audience's movements or `triggers` prompted the performers to enact choreographed acts of domesticity, such as opening a door, mimicking a spectator or feigning shyness. This took place for nine days straight, five to six hours per day. 42a was an ambitious project which succeeded in immersing the spectator in the fluctuating chaos of the home. ??

When performance art is good it hums and vibrates with energy. It reaches out to the audience and brings them in like 42a. Or it places all their senses in a visceral moment of expectancy like Arterial. Performance art is still out there and still relevant; exploiting the richness of the gaps between various media and disciplines and defying an ideological framework which would strangle its power.

Artlink Volume 28 No 3
http://artlink.com.au/articles.cfm?id=3160


RADIO ADELAIDE ARTS BREAKFAST 9.05am 28 June 2008

Alan Brissenden

42a Alison Currie Director/Choreographer/Performer
Experimental Art Foundation, Lion Art Centre
26 June-5 July Tuesday-Friday 11-5, Saturday 2-5 Free

Last year independent artist Alison Currie successfully applied for a grant to develop 42a, an installation work based on the idea of a shared house work which she presented at the Downtown Artspace in Waymouth Street. In my review at the time I remarked that it was an intriguing piece that truly involved the audience willy nilly. The comments still hold, though the feeling is very different. Instead of the two small rooms of the Waymouth Street premises, 42a now has the large airy space of the Experimental Art Foundation gallery to expand into. What it has lost in intimacy is compensated for by generosity and variety.

Currie is interested in the idea of hose and home, of the voyeuristic act of entering someone else’s domestic space and the experience of interaction between that space, the performers and the audience. The space is occupied by various objects: a kitchen corner with a refrigerator full of food including packets of biscuits with pink icing and hundreds and thousands to supply the plate of them on top of the fridge, available for eating; elsewhere there is a large replica biscuit on the floor, with roving coloured lights on it, hundreds and thousands on the move. Kids in the audience were particularly enchanted by this imaginative enlargement of a small reality. Elsewhere a claustrophobic metre-wide hallway projects from one wall, in which from time to time Currie dances, forcefully expressing confinement and anxiety. In a corner of the gallery a glass-sided room is filled with empty cartons, a couple of chairs and table. Curious people open the door and go in, reading the print on the cartons, discussing what it can be about; as I passed it at one stage three people were inside talking, gesticulating, one sitting crossed-legged on the table. I asked them when they came out if they were performers in the piece. They weren’t, but they may well have been, as everybody in the room is in some way a performer, observable by those around them. The five listed performers moved among the audience, sometimes aggressive towards one another in pairs, or as soloists, against a wall, or gymnastically on the floor, gaining reaction from those around them, or being ignored, silently questioning the meaning of personal space in a domestic situation which is also public.

Opening night meant there was a party going on, and you could pick up a pair of earphones to hear the noise, from a microphone hidden in a fruit bowl. That was our noise. Further along there was a door in the wall, and if you trod on the doormat, you could hear the music that was being incessantly played – other people’s noise. A kitchen sink was attached high up on another wall, with a huge ball off hair and gunk protruding out of the severed drainpipe, an expression of who knows what domestic disasters. But around the corner, a hologram of a huge table lamp glowed and pulsated with cheerful light. And back in the main hall, a a freestanding wall papered in blue and white flowers flickered now and then as the petals on some of the flowers changed colour, triggered, I think, by the dancers or the passing audience.

A video cameraman wanders around, not to make a record, but to transmit what’s happening to video screens in the room, because this presentation is about the here and now, about the present, and the way perceptions of events and objects can change as you participate in or interact with them. How do you feel when a couple of dancers start moving together only inches away from you? Should you or should you not take one of those enticing pink-iced biscuits on top of the fridge? Do you mind that two people are talking at the top of their voices about the latest foreign film when you are trying to concentrate on what the dancers are doing? Of course you can just move away, find another dance going on, or contemplate on the variety of humanity and the myriad ways of interpreting it.

I recommend 42a to you – it could make a difference, even for a short while, to the way you think about life. It’s free, and it’s on until 5 July during the Experimental Arts foundation’s opening hours – Tuesday - Friday: 11am-5pm, Saturday: 2pm-5pm.


Ausdance Magazine August 2008
42a by alison currie Venue: Experimental Art Foundation - Lion Arts Centre
Dates: 26 June 6-8pm, 27, 28 June, 30 June- 5 July 11am-5pm

http://www.ausdance.org.au/outside/sa/publications/adm_magazine/aDm_May08.pdf
Further information: www.eaf.asn.au
email Alison Currie: algenoncurrie@yahoo.com.au

Since graduating from AC Arts in 2003, Alison has worked solidly towards creating her own work. Through a variety of projects she's been mentored by Solon Ulbrich and Amanda Phillips through the roles of performer, rehearsal director, choreographer and tutor.

2007 marked an exciting time in Adelaide's arts scene with Arts SA offering the first
triennial project grant to an independent arts maker. Alison was awarded this honour for the development of 42a - an interactive installation-based dance work. Over a three year period, the grant will assist Alison to continue collaborating with a pool of talented artists and take 42a to local, national and international audiences.

Ideas around 42a began to infiltrate Alison's thinking around 2005 and prior to undertaking an attachment to the Builder's Association in New York. After filling a stack of note books with sketches, instructions and ideas and completing 2 stages of creative development (readers may recall 42a at its second stage in Downtown Art Space), 42a in recent weeks, has been in development at the Ausdance SA studios.

The project brings together a swarm of Adelaide-based artists across multiple genres. Collaborators include Annemarie Kohn (video artist), Adam Synnott (media artist), Kel Mocilnik (visual artist) and Alisdair Macindoe (sound artist.) Kel, Adam and Alison will perform alongside Carlie Angel, Rachel Fenwick and Veronica Shum.

Solon Ulbrich has continued to mentor Alison through all stages of this development.
Based on themes relating to house and home, 42a is a place where you can stay as long as you like. The Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide's West End will be the home of 42a for an 8-day season. At any point during gallery hours, audiences are invited to visit 42a and its 8 artists. Explore the act of entering another's personal space and become part of 42a through your very presence - you'll be partly responsible for the performers' response to predetermined stimuli and in turn witness a seemingly improvised yet highly structured choreographed environment.
42a is funded by Arts SA, and the Australia Council and supported by Ausdance SA.


Reviews from 2nd Development Downtown Art Space 2007

Alan Brissenden, The Adelaide Review 2007
“And, talking of innovation, independent choreographer Alison Currie recently produced an intriguing piece, 42a, at the Downtown Art Space, 233 Waymouth Street. The movement of this interactive installation work involving performers, videos, sound sculpture, light and other media, was triggered by people, especially the audience. The first of the two rooms of the performance space was almost empty except for a small model house in one corner, with a pair of earphones attached; pick them up and you heard a party going on. Those with sharp eyes also discovered a minute pair of bicycles perched on a small ledge. A dancer sitting on a cushion got up occasionally and moved, turning, flexing, bending. ??In the kitchen next door a loaded table had an artist drawing, two people playing Go, and a tray of Chinese buns for the taking. A jar for coins sat on top of a fridge full of grog and softer stuff, postcards were stuck on the wall, and a pile of cardboard cartons was stacked against another wall. Now and then one or more of the five performers rose from the table, moved, maybe lay down on the floor (you had to watch where you stepped). There might be two solos going on, or a trio, or duet. It looked casual, but it was in fact cunningly choreographed. ??You could stay as long as you liked during the three-hour sessions, and opening night (July 11) was quite a party, with plenty of people coming and going. Based on the idea of shared house, 42a truly involved the audience, willy nilly. Watch out for a further development next year.”

http://www.adelaidereview.com.au/archives.php?subaction=showfull&id=1184893676&archive=1186103663&start_from=&ucat=3&

http://www.supernaut.info/2007/07/42a.html

How to write about someone I have spent much of the last couple of months hanging out with, eating too much, drinking, laughing till pain sets in? Or more pertinently if I say this is one of the best pieces of art I've seen this year, how much of that is derived from knowing Alison Currie and the pleasure I get from seeing their personal weirdness as an artist unfurled? I thought perhaps I tend to favour art by my friends because I have this intimacy with them, an unscrupulous duplicity born of dance world nepotism, but perhaps I like my friends because I am entranced by their intellect and passion and ideas and personal fascination and so the art they make is only this attraction made real. Of course then I'd like it.

42a is something of an installation, performance art, and post-show party without the attenuating distraction of the show, something of a second-stage development and mostly a visit into the odd minds and home of some of Adelaide's most sublime artists.
Downtown, located appropriately opposite the warm fire of the Grace Emily Hotel is two smallish concrete rooms, the front possessing a large, wall-opening chrome-fringed sheet glass window. The past three weeks, Alison along with programmer (and dancer and choreographer and maker of Blood Rain) Adam Synnott, video artist Annemarie Kohn, artist and performer, chainsaw collector and cardboard box enthusiast Kel Mocilnik, dancers Veronica Shum and Rachel Fenwick, and with mentor Sol Ulbrich have been inhabiting the two rooms and growing a peculiar collection of objects, movement, things that do things when you do things, food, games, an accumulation of adventures to be found during its opening hours.

This is not a dance performance. It is dance, or rather there is dance there, movement, small phrases that evolve and adapt depending on who is watching, where they are standing or sitting or lying, fragments that come and go that become something different over time. It is like a raindrop. If rain on a window holds no attraction neither will this, though if the difference and repetition of each tiny explosion profoundly stills your attention, the continual ebb and flow here can become transfixing. As a performance it is one to attend or ignore to arrive and leave and arrive again; the opposite of a narrative chained to steps and counts impelled into existence over time that demands unfaltering focus.
Then there is the minutia, for those with microscopic attention who look for dirt in the cracks and seams of tiles, or how one wall folds into another, a certain kind of attention that privileges detail and minor architecture as much as the broad scale inhabited by people, one for getting on your belly and peering. After and hour or so delighting in all these things to be found and discovered, I interrupted Adam in a game of Go with Tanja to coax maybe some more things I'd missed from him. A fake powerpoint, more fingernail sized bicycles, and yes, a chainsaw. Another hour on and still without the chainsaw, I'd increased my collection of oddities again, and when we all departed still thought about what I'd missed.

As with Adam's in the bones of children in which Alison danced, I'm caught between a mechanical listing and describing of objects and events and an evasive, subtle and entrancing experience, like floating, eyes out of focus. A favourite pastime for me is letting my thoughts bleed to a background haze, eyes barely registering the blankness or complexity of whatever room I'm inhabiting, a comfortable abandonment as much asleep in absence of response to the world yet nowhere near drifting into oblivion. All of 42a allowed my most enjoyed diversion complete indulgence.
Things and objects. Adam has again been programming and soldering, building and coding, giving movement to Annemarie's luminous pixel flowers sliding across Alison's turquoise wallpaper, and Kel's coin-operated ice cave fridge and miniature sink-side tundra. I'm really in awe of his phenomenally rapid grasp and application of the technology he's working with, and also where his aesthetic is coming from. For me, him and Alison are by far the most interesting and accomplished independent choreographers and artists in Adelaide.

Carboard boxes growing like lichen on moist and shaded concrete, spilling out onto the streets around Downtown, a pop-up New York Story, the coin-operated freezer ice-fountain, a fridge-top plate of hundreds-and-thousands cookies and a television with dancing technicolour cookie dots. The fake powerpoint. A medicine cabinet with ginger candy and Berocca, Alison's breakfast snacks, The lift to the crystal room, more diminutive bycycles, cars and a condom. The worktable, games, food, chairs to sit with the residents of 42a. The wallpaper growing under linoleum floor tiles, between broken and perished gaps, into the walls where tiles and skirting aren't quite flush. How much more have I missed?
People dancing. Veronica Shum, Kel Mocilnik and Rachel Fenwick are the trio who deal with the dancing part of this installation, though all the artists by being there somehow emerge as performers or actors. Kel is the only non-dancer in the midst, though for me often he pulled my attention more than the others. Besides having a really elegant natural movement, he was playful and spontaneous in how he could respond to the people closest to him, and more than once had someone following his gaze as he repeatedly glanced at something only he saw, or straining to hear conversations with himself, Veronica, Rachel or someone near.

Rachel often slouched to the floor drunk or insensate, pulling herself inwards mid-phrase to an unconscious stop before getting up, wandering off for a drink of water a sitdown and chat then off somewhere again, maybe to terrify the patrons of the Grace Emily. Veronica was by far the most introverted of the three, barely registering another's presence, adding a voyeuristic confusion in watching her, like peering through someone's uncurtained window.

The complete closeness of the dancers to audience, sometimes on top, around, constricting, or just brushing past is mostly absent in dance performance where the body is seen at a distance and the choreography relies on the broadest of gestures. Like Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker in her solo Once, the audience in the first few rows have an entirely different experience to those in the rear. And here, to be able to see and feel the warmth of a dancer's skin and breath or if you so choose to touch, to see a performance so close it loses focus.

What did I want more of? I came along to the preview or I suppose dress run, and after thought a few things that remained after seeing it at vernissage. Of course I want more things to discover, a continual growth like the forest reclaiming Chernobyl, and for this also to occur across the duration of the season, so the evolution occurs not just across the hours of one day. Yes they only had three quick weeks, and really did not have an unclaimed minute.

The ceiling and area above eye's horizon was sadly neglected, and I would have loved to find as much fascination in lying on my back gazing skywards as I did looking at the floor. Also, as this was a play with homes to have smells and odours, potted aromas of fish soup and compost, far from the smells of a house under the hammer of an auction. And more sound.

My immediate and enduring favourite place was beside the shoebox cardboard house listening to a drugged chainsaw or farm town pissup on insulating headphones watching Rachel Kel and Veronica arrive and depart. To have more of these also or to hear the different rooms and corners of the gallery amplified like this, the spaces continuously folding in on themselves would have been magical.
The choreography also which evolved depending on who and how many were in what proximity at times had that sleepy attraction for me I am so partial to. Again though I'd have liked to seen a more complex and subtle evolution. Stealing unconscious movement from the audience, growing into something absolutely unrecognisable from what was at the beginning of the night, really to play and be set free from itself. This I think is one of the contemporary concerns in dance, how to get beyond imprisoning movement to steps and counts, to understand movement as a series of initial conditions that can change over multiple iterations the way software models of organisms, cells, life can do the same.

To grasp how this could be achieved in movement I think is what Alison is striving for. Simultaneously how to engender a conceptual involvement with the scale of individuals one step magnified, like standing too close, and where identity resides at this level. Along with her ensemble, Alison is more than capable of bringing these off.

Supernaut…I whore for art

ANOTHER WONDERFUL YEAR
2007 Was A Great Year For The Arts, So Our Critics Recall Some Of The High Points.??
Dance by Alan Brissenden?

…. “In July young Alison Currie’s 42a, an interactive installation piece based on a shared house, was the year’s most intriguing dance theatre work.” ..

http://www.adelaidereview.com.au/archives.php?subaction=showfull&id=1198106718&archive=1200530902&start_from=&ucat=18&

 

42a is dance, video, sound, media, sculpture and painting. It is an experience, an experience of home and homes and houses and our imaginations within those spaces. In a gallery setting you can come and go as you like, or stay for hours at a time.
42a is an interactive installation based dance work at the nexus of visual art, media and performance. The work utilises elements of dance, sculpture, video and new media to explore concepts relating to house and home. Themes include memories attached to objects, personal relationships within this space, instructions found in the home, how individuals relate to the physical constructs of a house, as well as notions of home, where that is, and the possibility of creating this space with in one’s imagination.

42a is created for a gallery space. It is a durational installation that inhabits the space for the entirety of the opening hours. The work becomes the space, changes it, reveals things about this place and our relation to it. The relationship to the space as a viewer, to the gallery and objects, fixed or moveable, within it and the relationship to the performers who inhabit the space in a similar way to that of the viewer.

42a simultaneously explores the voyeuristic and experiential act of entering another’s private space and resulting subconscious judgements. Audience members are invited in and/or ignored by performers at different points of the installation. This concept requires the creation of choreographic options, available for selection by dancers in response to predetermined stimuli. All of the movement is choreographed but the timeline is not. There is not a loop of an hour that repeats itself; rather triggers appear randomly due to the interactive (audience/performer) nature of the installation. This randomisation causes a completely different experience and outcome for each viewer, and the impression of improvisation within a highly structured choreographic environment. The environment in which the performance occurs always remains fresh and responsive to the space and the people in it.

42a draws attention to how perception of objects can change in relation to space and context, and how the mind can shift its bearings into that new space, creating an imagined environment in which the physical space comes alive. This is evident in how we inhabit our homes with both mind and body. These concepts infiltrate all aspects of the installation. Abstract and pedestrian movement meld creating a surreal imagined space within the dancers’ bodies, their physical relationships to one and other, their environment, and the audience members. This theme is echoed in the skewed scale of ‘normal’ objects within the installation. This exploration of scale is most evident in the sculptural and film components of the work.

The work crosses the mediums of performance art, dance, sound, video, interactive media, painting and sculpture. All the collaborators work across their fields of expertise assisting and collaborating in ideas and solutions for objects and performance, performing and making the work. It is a piece that is physically and conceptually complete; ready for touring, and yet still growing, regenerating and changing in small ways to truly inhabit each new space.

42a is a living breathing installation. A performance that will quite literally talk to you... The Adelaide season was enjoyed by people of all ages and levels of experience with the arts. The work will be publicised online through a wide variety of media, including artists’ blogs, websites and social networks, as well as local street and media press before arrival in each city, in efforts to attract a broader non-arts focus audience.

Triennial funding from Arts SA has assisted in the final development of 42a for presentation at the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide, South Australia in June 2008, and will assist in touring the work in 2010. This is the first time triennial funding has been offered to an independent artist in South Australia. The project has also been supported by the Australia Council for the Arts Dance Board during the development of the work.

42a has undergone three funded developmental stages:

2006 - Concept and material development 3 weeks
2007 - Development and performance experiment 3 weeks Downtown Art Space, SA
2007 - Excerpts from the second development presented at Electrofringe, NSW
2008 - Development 4wks and presentation 2wks at Experimental Art Foundation, SA
2008 - World Dance Alliance presentation (topic: changing the way we make and view dance), QLD

CREATIVE TEAM
• Alison Currie - Director/Choreographer/Dancer
• Adam Synnott - New Media Artist
• Kel Mocilnik - Visual Artist / Dancer
• Carlie Angel and Lewis Rankin - Dancers
• Annemarie Kohn - Video Artist
• Alisdair Macindoe - Sound Designer
• Solon Ulbrich - Mentor

• Damon Jones - Production Manager

Photographer: Edwin Comey

join 42a on facebook http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=202355708116&ref=search

42a is a living breathing installation. A performance that will quite literally talk to you...

The Adelaide season was enjoyed by people of all ages and levels of experience with the arts. The work will be publicised online through a wide variety of media, including artists’ blogs, websites and social networks, as well as local street and media press before arrival in each city, in efforts to attract a broader non-arts focus audience.

You can support the national tour of 42a by using AbaF's Australia Cultural Fund (ACF)- a free arts donation service.

Artists and arts organisations can register to use the service which enables their donors to make tax deductible donations to the fund*.
* Family members of recipients cannot donate through AbaF and receive a tax deduction.

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How to donate

Search the list of registered arts projects and complete the secure online donations form. There is one at the end of every profile.

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Sisters, dance artist Alison Currie and visual artist Bridget Currie. Come together for the first time to create Three ways to hold a performance and sculpture work. Three ways to hold explores the fundamental similarities between dance and sculpture.

The work will consist of 4 performances over 4 weeks each differing and each generating sculptural form(s). The gallery will be open for viewing both during performance times and the paused performance for the viewing of the sculptural forms.

The work consists performance, sculpture and video documentation. At any point within the viewing there will always be movement. Movement generated by action; past present and future.

Three ways to hold is a exciting connection between two of Adelaide’s young yet established artists, a connection between artists, artforms and sisters.

Their work has always shared a similar asthetic and or ideology, though due to the forms they work in outcomes of their work have been very different. This will be the first time they have come together to create a work.

http://www.unisa.edu.au/artarchitecturedesign/sasagallery/calendar.asp

Review:

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue99/10050

Photographer: Bridget Currie Three ways to hold

The Main Event deals with experiences. The build up to, the fall out from, the sudden points and the spaces in between the significant events we create in our lives.

The Main Event is a dance work directed by Alison Currie and Solon Ulbrich and created collaboratively with the 2nd year AC Arts dance students 2009.

The Main Event deals with experiences. The build up to, the fall out from, the sudden points and the spaces in between the significant events we create in our lives.

take the field
catch fall almost
sub in
break open
i know
my story.

Photographer Kel Mocilnik

Restless Dance Company Youth Ensemble
Steve Mayhew Director
Alison Currie Choreographer
Performers Restless Youth Ensemble

Contact Restless Dance Theatre

Bedroom Dancing recieved the OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN YOUTH OR COMMUNITY DANCE award at the 2010 Australian Dance Awards

http://www.australiandanceawards.net.au/categories.html

Bedroom Dancing review for Adelaide's Come Out '09 festival

PETER BURDON  The Advertiser May 18, 2009 11:30pm

RESTLESS Dance has presented consistently impressive works by young people, especially those with a disability, for a wide audience.

Bedroom Dancing is perhaps the best to date.

Designed as an installation it's a promenade past 15 "bedrooms" decorated in collaboration with the performers. The audience is treated to personal, and sometimes private, glimpses at the lives of the occupants.

Choreographer Alison Currie, ever imaginative, has done wonders in developing each scene. Some are asleep, others awake and others still are waking up and stretching.

Dana Nance is sorting through pictures of faraway places, and we are privileged to read letters to her "dear friends". Lorcan Hopper revels in the victory of his beloved Hawks.

The performers include experienced dancers such as Bonnie Williams (in a playful duet with Alice Kearvell), James Bull (responding to the commands of a computerised voice), Ana Retallick (interleaving meditative strumming on a ukulele with diverse, diverting movement) and especially Dan Dawe, whose through-danced solo is captivating.

The last five minutes come together in a brilliant climax of sound, light and movement.

http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/entertainment/festivals/promenade-with-brilliant-climax/story-fn2pxwpd-1225713405074

Call me your experiment is a dance choreographed to a phone ring. An experiment in public performance to unsuspecting audiences. A choreographed solo is performed to a ringtone composed by Alisdair Macindoe the solo is performed whenever the dancer’s phone rings over the selected time frame.
An aim of this experiment is to find ways of connecting with and holding the engagement of an audience that hasn’t decided to see a performance.

Call me your experiment 0.1 also works well to engage the general public in performance. At This Is Not Art (TINA) festival Newcastle 2009, the choreography was taught to a workshop of festival goers and locals, who were then given the ring tone for their personal phones. The participants committed themselves to performing the solo whenever their phone rang over the course of the festival. This allowed the work to be viewed by a larger audience in a broader range of situations as well as engage the public in the performance of the work.

Call me your experiment 0.1 was performed by Alison as a singular solo at the South Australian Living Artists Festival.

This work is perfect for a festival or arts party as people love to join in and know that they can have control over the dancers.

Depending on the situation Alison has handed out fliers with her phone number on it, or had the number posted in a public area of the performance space.

Alison is hoping to develop the work futher to choreograph more solos to different phone rings engage more dancers in order to cover a larger space and to allow for more points of cross over. She also hopes to develop a duet that would be performed if one of the dancers phones rings and they are in close proximity from one and other.

The work has been successful in engaging audiences, who have commented that they love to know how they can control the performance.

If you’re cute and you’ve got good sneakers that’s all you need really.
For those who take time to coordinate their outfits and who believe that sneakers are a dress shoe.

Connotations of substance abuse, party culture and opportunistic behaviour are present in this work. The work is performed in the public toilets of a bar. Upstairs a solo is performed by a female dancer (Kate Skully) in the women’s toilet. Audience view the work by chance as they enter this shared space. Downstairs in a communal toilet is a solo dancer (Daniel Jaber) he is joined by Kate to preform a duet between male and female dancers; insinuating messy behaviour and decisions that we tend to regret in the morning.

Created as a site specific performance for the toilets of FAD bar and adapted for a performance at The Cornel Light Hotel Adelaide; both performances during South Australian Living Artists (SALA) Festival 2007

Choreography - Alison Currie
Dancers - Daniel Jaber, Kate Skully

Photographer Kel Mocilnik

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW-cNMSX4h0

You don’t need a name you don’t even need a face all you need is a heart that’s broken to know that you’re alive… And if its alright can I dream about you tonight?

Mr Potatohead highlights the singular elements of public space. What we choose to share who we are hiding from and scared of. Ultimately it is about loneliness, being surrounded and still alone. Despite the sadness in this film there is also humour to be found in the reactions of the general public.

Filmed in Adelaide CBD and surrounds. This self devised solo was initially made as a video component of Hans Kreiner’s work for Inspace 02, and edited later that year into short film Public Liability. Public Liability it won the judges special mention award at the ZOOM Awards Adelaide Short Film Awards 04 and was screened at various events. In 2007 Alison re-edited the work to become Mr Potatohead for Adelaide band No Through Road as a film clip for their song of the same name.

Video, Choreography, Performance, Edit: Alison Currie
Sound: No Through Road
Thanks: Matt Banham, Emily Currie, Hans Kriener, Peter Sheedy, Sol Ulbrich

Video Filmed 2002 edit 2007
Video clip No Through Road

Photographer Emily Currie Mr Potatohead

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4RJV10VtGk

With the greatest of ease.
Me in a glass lift; the physicality of irrational fear.

With the greatest of ease explores unjustifiable fear and the physical responses of the body when coping with this fear. These natural movement responses have provided impetus for the generation of choreographed movement. This movement is abstracted further by actual live response to fear when performed in a glass lift.

The work is can be viewed from within the lift and from outside through the glass.

With the greatest of ease has been performed live in glass lifts around Australia and in the UK. It has also been performed within a projected video of a lift filmed in the Adelaide Myer centre. Formal performances at This Is Not Art (TINA) NSW, and the Baltic Gateshead UK.

Performer/s: Alison Currie
Choreography: Alison Currie
video: Kel Mocilnik / Alison Currie

Thanks to Kel Mocilnik, Nathan George, Ade Suharto, Emily Currie, Alisdair Macindoe, Alex White, Electrofringe and Ausdance SA

Photographer Nuritza Daghlian: With the greatest of ease

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1RbSm4I-7U

The morning after the night before. Seemed like fun, was fun, isn’t now. Was it really necessary to re-open that particular wound?

This work was a collaboration with musician Gavin Clarke to create a performance to the song Bourne. The lyrics drove the creation of the work which tells a story of a past relationship revisited and not necessarily for the best.

The work was viewed in the round with the dance performance taking space in a two meter by two meter set out as a condensed apartment. With a fridge, books, shoes a table forming the perimeter of the space.

Gavin performed the song live sitting on the table at the edge of the space as though he was living in an apartment next door and providing a commentary to the action taking place.

This work was part of Live at the Soup Kitchen a collection of short works made in response to music. All of the music was performed live and with artists creating work in various mediums inspired by the music and presented along side it.

Calling out around the world a self devised solo inspired by and choreographed to Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Pt 1 by the Flaming lips. A futuristic fighter. This work was performed in Avalon gallery as part of an artists’ walk during South Australian Living Artists (SALA) Festival 2005.

Directed and Performed by Alison Currie
Sound by The Flaming Lips

Thanks: Kel Mocilnik, Aaron Reese.

Photographer Kel Mocilnik