Liveworks 2020 is a transformation of Performance Space’s Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art. Over 5 days, gather for performances, installations, workshops and conversations at Carriageworks and LIVE ON-THE-LINE. Responding to the turbulence and instability of our current moment through artistic leadership, creative thinking and supported gathering. Liveworks brings you provocative, ambitious and unpredictable new work.
Wed 21 Oct
Thu 22 Oct
Fri 23 Oct
Sat 24 Oct
Sun 25 Oct
Carriageworks is a registered COVID-Safe business. To ensure the wellbeing of our visitors, we are following strict guidelines set by NSW State Government and Live Performance Australia. Help us keep everyone safe by reading our COVID-Safe Plan before your next visit.
Presented by Performance Space and Carriageworks.
Day for Night
This year Day For Night undergoes an extraordinary transformation and will happen across 12 sessions, for intimate groups of 20 people at a time. Come with us on a wild and revitalising journey through queer space and time. Lay back and experience a guided meditation created by and for queer communities, devour performances, manifestos and music sets from our most luminous queer artists…and finally, move your body through a joyous and liberating dance workshop.
Medicament For Your Predicament
Medicament For Your Predicament is an experimental pharmacy offering new approaches to collective and mutual care for our complicated times. Join artist Cat Jones to create homespun solutions to your personal and political ailments, however big or small they might be. Get hands-on in the OPEN LAB! workshops from the comfort of your own home or visit the OPEN PHARMACY! installation at Carriageworks.
Leading is Following is Leading
Leading is Following is Leading draws on archival footage of political leaders through the decades - from Robert Menzies to Julia Gillard - to which performers Valerie Berry and Moreblessing Maturure sync their own choreographies of gesture, stance and intonation, putting questions of political power under the microscope. Created by Sydney director Yana Taylor, Leading is Following is Leading is a playful and intimate performance installation event.
CREATION: THE DANCE
Build a new faith for our fractious era. Deborah Kelly’s CREATION project sees the construction of a new belief system with which to confront the rise of the irrational and its threat to civil society: one that emulates the emotive and sensual allure of religious faith. Over five days, join choreographer Angela Goh and Deborah in building a liturgical dance from the ground up, culminating in a public display of devotion. CREATION is being developed around Australia, his is your chance to be part of this landmark project.
tiny revolution
In tiny revolutions pvi collective explore the potential for the small to make a big impact and shift our collective anxieties about the future. Members of the public are encouraged to submit an epic problem, connect it to one of 15 global challenges and then select an intervention tactic. On the receiving end of the submissions is the tiny revolutions taskforce, made up of artists, industry experts, activists and members of the public. With each submission the taskforce will debate and devise a bespoke tiny revolution to be carried out in the public domain.
nganggurnmanha : sound dust
nganggurnmanha : sound dust is an immersive audio installation that challenges us to listen deeply to the natural world and find ways to inhabit time differently. A collaboration between Yamaji Wajarri, Dutch and English artist Nicole Monks and Sydney-based collective Make or Break (Connie Anthes and Rebecca Gallo), the work responds to First Nations and Western concepts of time and how time intertwines with nature, the body and seasonal shifts. The work is a responsive installation where the viewer’s movement and presence influences how the work unfolds.
AEON†: EPISODE I
Fusing Filipinx myth, puppetry and queer pageantry as ceremony, AEON†: EPISODE I is the premiere of a new body of work imagined by acclaimed Sydney artist Justin Shoulder. AEON† speculates a realm between the infinite and the definite. The performance space becomes a petri dish incubating distinct and recombinant organisms. With a team of collaborators including Corin (music) Matthew Stegh (co-designer) and Victoria Hunt (mentor and collaborator), AEON† invites us to cross time, from the origins of life to glimpses beyond its end.
(XXX)
Broadcast online at sunset each day, this performance ritual centres a daily exchange of love letters between Koori artist and writer SJ Norman and Cherokee writer and scholar Joseph M Pierce. Writing from their respective quarantines in Sydney and New York, each artist will read the other’s letter direct-to-camera as the sun sets over their city, every day of Liveworks. Invoking the violence of separation and the erotic poiesis of distance, Norman and Pierce consider what it means to express Indigenous love in the colonisers’ language.
Live Action Relay
A drone, 4 dancers, a director, a musician and a spectacular space. Live Action Relay sees acclaimed Sydney choreographer and filmmaker Sue Healey break new ground, creating a digitally-broadcast dance performance streamed from a drone. Drawing from our current moment of social isolation, Live Action Relay reimagines the role of technology in bringing us together across distance: a portrait of individuals in isolated spaces, connected by the orbiting eye of the drone camera and instantly shared in real time.
Live Futures: Why Risk Gathering?
Gatherings have become the contested agent of the COVID pandemic, a site of uncertainty and panic around safety and agency. The pandemic crisis, and the BLM protests, have emphasised how gatherings of people have a key function in shaping our sense of social, political, cultural and health norms. Experimental artists lead the way in creating different kinds of gatherings that help us to imagine alternative futures. What risks are we taking by gathering? What risks are we taking by not gathering? Curator/Moderator: Wesley Enoch
Live Futures: The Future of Work
Curators Bek Conroy (Marrickville School of Economic) and Emma Webb (Vitalstatistix) converse with artists, social commentators and activists from Australia and the Asia-Pacific, about the transforming nature, organisation and payment of work. Precarity, labour rights and the future of work have enormous relevance to arts workers, and side-by-side artists have much to offer in speculative, creative and strategic thinking around these critical questions for now and the future.
Live Futures: Caring for Always
Colonial power structures give way like sandy country. The end of your art world isn’t the end of ours. There was/is no normal to return to. We were always on the brink of no change. Things will always be always. Life after always. Things are going to be always now. In this moment of involuntary slowing, always was always will be Aboriginal land. First Nations curator Hannah Donnelly speaks to Indigenous practitioners from a future they care for.
Live Futures: Future Care // Future Intimacy
PSpace has always championed feminism, queer cultures and fluid and diverse approaches to sex and gender. This year, ideas of intimacy, sexuality, friendship, family and care have been radically disrupted. Curator Bec Dean asks how is our sense of responsibility to each other changing, and what will acts of care and intimacy look like in the future?
Live Futures: Brian Fuata
Curator/moderator: Brian Fuata
Imagined Theatres: Publication Launch
Curated / co-presented by Fusebox Festival. Curator / Moderator: Fusebox Festival
Live Dreams: Utopia
Works that imagine the best and worst versions of our future world, and the possibilities and pitfalls of reinventing our social, cultural and political structures. Curated by Performance Space
Live Dreams: Impossible
Anna Tregloan’s Impossible Project surveys artists whose works have been deemed impossible, creating an archive of impossible works and an exploration into the possibilities of impossibility. Curated by Anna Tregloan
Live Dreams: Catastrophe
Works that seek to grapple with, refuse, resolve or revel in the multiple layers of catastrophe we are experiencing. Curated by Performance Space
Live Dreams: Always
The end of your art world isn’t the end of ours. Things are going to be always now. First Nations artists share from a future they care for. Curated by Hannah Donnelly
Live Dreams: Wonder
Works that seek to imagine the world anew, seek beauty in the everyday, or find hope in unlikely places. Curated by Performance Space