Individual audience members enter a specially constructed, full-scale child’s bedroom to immerse themselves in the world of a little girl in a 21st century fairy tale via an iPad. The film, shot to a cinematic quality, moves through the space requiring the audience to move with it.

Alma Mater uses the concept of a ‘blank site’ to celebrate the power of the imagination to rise above the humdrum and envisage a more colourful existence. With an original score by John De Simone performed by experimental octet Ensemble Thing and cinematography from award-winner Anna Chaney, Alma Mater is a haunting meditation on family, familiarity and growing-up.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Fish & Game is a creative partnership between Eilidh MacAskill and Robert Walton. Fish & Game create entertaining experimental art works that straddle theatre and Live Art. Eilidh MacAskill is based in Glasgow, Scotland and Robert Walton is based in Melbourne, Australia.

“A spine-tingling encounter” **** The Guardian, UK

“It’s not everyday that you are offered a brand new way of looking at the world. But Eilidh MacAskill and Robert Walton’s piece gives you just that.” The Stage, UK

“Alma Mater created a new, and entirely mesmerising world that transcends theatre, film and storytelling to become a whole new genre.” The Skinny, UK

Image by Rebecca Rutter

Each edition is digitally and physically archived within the book structure, and then added to or replaced by the next edition. In conjunction with local artists, Well Theatre serves the book structure as performers and facilitators of contemporary people’s imagination and sharing.

The book has been seen in 6 editions across 4 countries: Australia, Macau, Mexico and Korea.

The most recent edition: Book of Risings at the Hi Seoul Festival May 2011,  saw responses to the possibility and problems of new cultural forms, new communities coming together, and the need for a rise in dialogue and sharing toward peoples across borders. Book of Risings paid homage to the forgotten stories of Korean peoples who have risen and fallen in the tumult of war and occupation and those who will rise (again).

The result was a 10-day program for Hi Seoul Festival featuring new performance works and collaborations, public mural, video art and animation, live music and cross art collisions.

“There is something irresistible in a book made out of books, a book, moreover, that you can walk into and climb inside, a book you can write in, a book that is a receptacle for your own discarded books, that is at once an art object and a literal and metaphorical theatre.” Alison Croggon, Theatre Notes

Well Theatre’s website

A unique art work: a multi-sensory, immersive, storytelling experience.

The Other Journey is a unique art work: a multi-sensory, immersive, storytelling experience.

The work is centred around honest, intimate stories from three people who fled a war in the villages of Sri Lanka to settle into the largest city in Australia.

Set to a luscious score mixing South Asian and Western influences, the music and stories are played through portable audio players and headphones. During the work, the deep listening experience takes place in varied, beautiful settings: on a boat ride; under bird sculptures; amidst fire and oil lamps on a river bank; amongst whiffs of cinnamon and jasmine; surrounded by elegant, large-scale, outdoor video art.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Two workmen enter a space, empty except for an old piano neglected in the corner, and begin to transform it in a functional choreography of ladders, drop sheets and paint. A frame takes shape, almost by accident. They step through it, the colour drains away, their movements speed up and take on a jerky rhythm, as they are transported into the world of silent film.

Cut Away evokes this world, and explores our uneasy relationship to the past, through the physical language of silent film, and through the curious distancing effect this creates.

But everything will be done physically within the space, without resorting to the expedient use of multi-media. It’s just the two extraordinary dancers on a stripped stage, along with composer Iain Grandage, controlling the world behind the screen as he bangs away at the old piano.

This highly portable work again showcases the gutsy choreography, surreal imagery and wicked sense of humour seen in previous Webber/Millwood collaborations lawn and roadkill

Click here to view the embedded video.

From the seeds of this grim spectacle, multi‑award winning Australian composer David Chisholm has created an ambitious memorial to the personal and symbolic tragedy that was the sinking of the Kursk. Chisholm has set renowned Russian poet Anzhelina Polonskaya’s melancholic verse within an original composition for an eight‑voice male consort and 26‑piece chamber orchestra.

Sweeping in scope, devastating in tone and unwavering in its artistic vision, KURSK received an overwhelming response from critics and audiences alike at its Melbourne Festival world premiere performance.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“You have to resist the temptation to over-praise the final, serious music element in this year’s festival but, in its own right, the oratorio requiem Kursk shone”  The Age

“A masterpiece…Kursk’s emotional range, orchestral colour and technical inventiveness bring to mind Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony. It’s a great legacy of 2011’s Melbourne Festival.” Herald Sun

“Complex and ambitious…the poetry evokes moods and sets up imagery striking for its luminous pathos against the music” Arts Hub

“About as ambitious as a festival commission gets… This 90-minute oratorio is virtually cliche-free, in words and music. And while its effects include a cymbal in a box of water and a “holographic singing bowl”, all are achieved with unamplified, untreated instruments and mostly male voices…gobsmacking”
The Australian

 
Image by Jon Green

One of Jack Davis’ most celebrated theatrical works, Honeyspot is given new life by the highly acclaimed Yirra Yaakin Theatre.

A young girl makes friends with the new boy at school. Peggy is a budding dancer and daughter of the local forest ranger, Tim lives in the forest and dances to the rhythm of his cousin’s didgeridoo.

As their friendship grows, Tim agrees to help Peggy create a dance piece for the ballet scholarship competition – and together, they blend the earthy feel of traditional Noongar dance and the fluid grace of classical ballet into one.

First staged in Western Australia in 1985 during the emerging reconciliation movement, Honeyspot is an optimistic, funny and moving story about the power of friendship to overcome racial differences and prejudices. With a striking original score performed live on cello and didgeridoo, Honeyspot is an iconic piece of Indigenous theatre for adults and children alike.

“Yirra Yaakin artistic director Kyle Morrison is to be applauded. The play… has some fine things to tell us and…Yirra Yaakin have found a new way to say them.” The West Australian

“Alan Surgener has created a set and lighting atmosphere in which the play’s multiple locations are instantly understood, and recreates the multifarious spectrum of colour and shadow of the forest wonderfully.” X-Press Magazine

Yirra Yaakin

Photo by Otilee Lamb

If you could tell your deepest darkest secret without being identified, would you? Should you?

Tawdry Heartburn’s Manic Cures is a free interactive performance, installation and web-work offering you the chance to “get it off your chest”.

The performance unfolds in an intimate 20 minute conversation between Tawdry Heartburn, a six-foot-five nail technician, palmist and Manic-Curist of Secrets, and a single audience member or ‘client’. Surrounded by varnish, typewriters and things unsaid, Tawdry will professionally paint and polish your nails, or read your palm, while inviting you to consider divulging a secret via his collection of mechanical ‘gossip machines’.

Photo by Ashley de Prazer

Life often unfolds in unexpected directions.
Four strangers find themselves trapped in an unknown place with no exit.
Together they dance tango, search for answers and recall moments when life ran out of control.
From the exuberance of young love to the grief of loss, their only hope of moving on is to reconcile the past.

Featuring Danielle Micich’s emotive dance theatre and Kingsley Reeve’s filmic soundscape, Shiver explores the vulnerability of being human and the stories that connect us.

Photo by Christophe Canato

REFLECT plunges us into shadowy psychological terrain, a half- remembered a story that turns around on itself so many times that the distinction between what’s real and what’s imagined starts to disappear. Memory, imagination and visceral response are at the heart of the work. Vibrant images unsettle the otherwise monochrome environment, much in the same way an unexpected memory upsets the status quo. The images are brief; a rich and colourful hyper- reality that dissolves into bright white nothingness; an empty wall in a black space.