FREERANGE2012

FreeRange provided a rare chance for artists to experiment and play with new ideas in an incubator model designed to enable risk-taking. FreeRange let audiences in on the ground floor of a creative work and see performance work in the making. This is the place where everything is raw and everything is new. 

There are no wrong answers: only more possibilities.

Tonight is the final presentation of works in development as part of FreeRange 2012! Dialogue has been flowing thick and fast around the works-in-progress presentation so far. Our provocateurs have been in to a number of the works, taking notes and gathering their thoughts for fruitful discussion with the artists - catch up with them tonight, to hear their feedback in post-show discussion.

So we're at the tail end of what has been an amazing four weeks of process and development!

It seems like ages ago that Sarah Winter's CROSS-STITCH: Night of the Dead Trees kicked off FreeRange 2012 with an immersive two night experience of experimental work, curated around subtlety and storytelling - but here we are, beginning the final showings tonight of five developing projects.

Over the next two days, the following works will open their doors to share what they've been growing so far:

I Don't Think This is Happiness - a collection of works curated by Lauren Clelland, in the Galleries.

Trade Winds - a new dance and new media work developed by members of Polytoxic, in our Studio.

Aurelian - a contemporary performance work developed by Genevieve Trace mixing memory, biography, and verbatim stories of grief, in The Basement.

Violatus - a confronting and visceral new work, exploring the audience-performer relationship and underworld environments, by Ron Seeto - in the Warehouse

and finally, Seed, from which the above pictures come - a developing dance work; a collaborative piece initiated by Brian Lucas, and members of Singapore's Odyssey Dance Theatre, Lo pui Sze and Linnea Ong - presenting in The Whitlam space.

Lauren Clelland, lead artist of the FreeRange 2012 project, I Don't Think This is Happiness, kindly shares some of the stimulus material that she and her team of artists worked from as this suite of works started to take form. 

They've been working together in a fluid way - Lauren working as a centre point from which the ensemble of artists touch in and out, consulting and developing new works as Lauren frames dialogues, connects different artists, facilitates and teases out emergent ideas. It's been an extremely collaborative and discursive model of curatorship or facilitation, and we're eager to see the end results.

Take a look at the following pieces of writing to see the drivers behind this team's process.

Goat Island performance Group - Letter to a Young Practitioner

A sneak peek of...

A sneak peek of...

A sneak peek of...

A sneak peek of...

Motherland, our third and final Takeover project for FreeRange 2012 is on it's way!

Presenting this Friday and Saturday, 22 & 23 June, this new work, directed by Caroline Dunphy from a script by Katherine Lyall-Watson, has been steadily growing with a team of highly respected Brisbane performers. Katherine assembled the highly lauded group for FreeRange 2012, coupling the space and developmental support the program offers with the wealth of experience of these established artists. 

Join them this weekend to see this ambitious new work - mixing the Fitzgerald inquiry, World War II, the Russian Revolution; linking three strong Brisbane women across history. 

Members of Odyssey Dance Theatre (Singapore), Linnea Ong and Lo Pui Sze have joined dance-theatre maker Brian Lucas in the rehearsal room today, as they start developing Seed. 

A sewing day for Lisa and Leah from Polytoxic - these expansive white costumes encompass both form and function. In addition to being beautiful creations in their own right, the team have been exploring the costumed body as a projection surface, for animations by artist Samuel Tupou. This approach will be the context in which the narrative of their work unfolds.

Our second Takeover project, Tracksuit Girl, takes to the stage tonight, with the promise that she'll make you feel good...

FreeRange 2012 has been the framework for the final stage development of this interactive new theatre work - reimagining possibilities for engagement between artist and audience, performer and spectator - Tracksuit Girl and you.

Tonight, our FreeRange 2012 Artist Dinner provided the perfect context for great food and great conversation. Our Provocateurs - Bec Dean (Co-AD, Performance Space), Britt Guy (Producer, Brisbane Festival), Vanessa Mafe-Keane (independent dancemaker), Anne Louise Sarks (Director, the Hayloft Project), and Kieran Swann (independent hybrid artist) - hosted conversations probing right into the depths of topics we're normally a little too self-conscious to explore - our individual processes. 

With a series of opening provocations, artists moved freely between Provocateur's tables between courses, positing arguments, mulling over details, ruminating, debating, and celebrating process.