News

latest: May to October 2023

Hi there.

I hope everyone is staying as safe and connected as you can, in whatever way you think best. As for us, we’ve just returned from a four month excursion making and presenting work, firstly in Sydney and then in the UK and Europe.

Nocturne In April and May we headed to Sydney to create a new work around Sydney Harbour, commissioned by Vivid Ideas as part of Vivid Festival 2023. Nocturne was conceived as a counterpoint to the immense light shows and large audiences of Vivid – an intimate journey to (re)discover the dark, the hidden nature, and the night sky. A journey into the dark and the light within & without. We felt incredibly honoured to spend slow time with indigenous custodians of this place and for them to share their stories and knowledge of land, sea and sky country with us and our audiences.

All The Ways Without You Immediately after Sydney we headed overseas to Jersey Arts Centre on the Isle of Jersey, to undertake a 4-week development. This development consolidated the explorations we undertook in 2022 with our young Irish collaborators, Aoife and Riain, exploring the possibilities of a site-specific work in which the site was a black-box theatre. This generosity with both time and space allowed a new conception and theatrical language to emerge, with the help of our Irish collaborators, creative producer Richard Jordan and lighting designer John Ford. A season is planned for 2024.

en route From Jersey we headed to Edinburgh to re-mount our en route – edinburgh show with The Traverse Theatre as part of the Edinburgh Fringe in August. It’s been a few years since we first took en route to Edinburgh (in 2010!), but the show seemed to hold up well and still resonate with the city, and provide fresh revelations for both us and the audience.

While we were overseas we took advantage to visit presenters and colleagues in Edinburgh and also in Dublin, where we started dreaming on an eco-work for Dublin, scouting for sites for a possible adaptation of Nocturne. We stopped for a weekend in Berlin to experience Shared Landscapes, a 7-hour experience of multiple live art experiences within a forest. And finally on to Riga, Latvia, to attend and give a talk at the international festival Homo Novus, and to immerse ourselves in the local and international artist community there. An incredibly rich time.

Noir Trail Later in the year we will return to an on-going new work, Noir Trail. Last year we undertook a couple of short developments at The Substation in Newport. This largely involved developing the indoor part of the show, with singer/performer Susan Bamford, and with lighting designer John Ford. All is coming together nicely, with a planned season in late 2024.

64 Ways of Being Part 1 (Melbourne CBD) and Part 2 (Footscray) have been launched as part of our major commission, a collaboration with games researcher Dr. Troy Innocent and app development company Millipede.
Part 3 (Fitzroy) will be launched in October and Part 4 (St. Kilda) is nearing completion and will be launched early 2024.

As always, thank you for your interest in our work, and do take care of yourself and others, stay safe, stay connected. We really do hope that some day there’ll be an opportunity to bring one of our works to wherever you may be.

one step (Suzanne, Clair, Julian)