8/20/20 8/20/20

Infinite Item

Title: Infinite Item
Project Director: Dean Walsh
Phase: Ready to Tour
Format: Staged performance and community engagement strategies
Performance Length: 75mins

Infinite Item

Short Trailer link: https://vimeo.com/447112042

Full show video available, please contact us for access details.

Full presenter pack available, please contact us for a copy.

About the Work

Infinite Item is a 75-minute performance work (dance-based), devised, directed and performed by renowned artist, Dean Walsh. Dean is also an educator, movement researcher (embodied marine environmental awareness), avid scuba diver, disability arts access practitioner and Warm Data Host.

Infinite Item reveals the plastic waste and lesser known noise pollution urgency that our most vitally important environment is struggling with. This work encourages us to look at the very worst, whilst never losing sight of the very best we can be, and what is possible if we engage our community-based efforts to learn more and do better, individually and together. Whilst there are most definitely “big business” responsibilities to the solution of these problems, we each must play our part in rethinking and changing the complex systems that threaten the health and wellbeing of us all.

These issues aren’t only complicated, they are deeply complex. They are not only intersectional but transcontextual in nature. The lines between cause and effect are not straight, they are enormously detailed and complex and, as such, require adding complexity rather than a continued reductionism within which much of the modern Western world has (dys)functioned.

Infinite Item seeks to convey this fact by utilising found plastic items, all of them (1.2 tonnes), found around Sydney harbour, beaches and local open water, as metaphor for all that this moment in history asks of us - “How much are we going to bear and blame before it’s ‘too late to leave’ from a chaos we can’t equitably return from? Isn’t this the time to “clean up our act” - all of them - and listen into the realms and infinite frequencies we’ve been numbed to for too long now?” As with these synthetic ‘items’ of noise and plastic, the possibilities of reconnection through repurposing, resourcefulness, reconfiguration, inter-environmental regenerative cultures, are infinite.

All photos by Heidrun Löhr

Artists

Maker/Performer: Dean Walsh

Composer/Tech: Andrew Batt-Rawden

Costume: Kate Shanahan

Lighting: Fausto Brusumolino

Broadcast: Martin Fox

Development Supporters

Development 1 (2018): PACT, Hunters Hill Council

Development 2 (2019): FORM Dance Projects, Sydney Opera House, AusDance NSW, City of Parramatta

Final Stage Development (2020): Crticial Path, Woollahra Municipal Council

Contacts

Presentation and parntership enquiries;

Andrew Batt-Rawden
andrew (at) weird nest (dot) com
0430 120 327

8/19/20 8/19/20

The Instruments (of crisis)

Title: The Instruments
Project Directors: Dean Walsh & Andrew Batt-Rawden
Phase: Development
Format: Online in-studio hybrid
Performance Length: 60mins

About the Work

The Instruments (of crisis) - our methods, our language, our movement, our masks, our costumes, our herd, our indivuality, our alarm, our calm, our desire, our reptilian, our data, our (dis) connectivity, our lies, our belief, our stoicism, our exhaustion, our anger, our muscles, our voices, our fear, our discernment, our education, our senses, our screams, our silence. Our choice.

In 2018 Floek (Andrew Batt-Rawden and Ben Hinchley) were invited to make and present a work for “The Experiment” produced by BrandX. In its first rendition, the work was primarily concerned with the social connection / disconnection afforded by mobile technology. Proxima (it’s original name) used audience’s and performers’ mobile phones as instruments. After further development during a residency at Legs On the Wall in 2019, the work transformed into The Instruments and was programmed by the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music for October 2020. The festival has been postponed due to COVID, but we’re going ahead with development plans nevertheless.

A further development late 2019 / early 2020, Dean Walsh was brought on board as a co-Director / choreographer, S1T2 as software development partners and Mark Oliveiro as modular synth performer. Dean facilitated the group to develop the concepts further into “The Instruments of crisis” and we commissioned S1T2 to develop a system on Unreal Engine that uses live data feeds to detect distance between audience and performers (so we could use it as a sound-trigger device).

With the base-line tech ready to go, we’re now seeking funds for a further development to prepare the work for a Covid-friendly hybrid online / on-stage presentation. Although we don’t know when BIFEM will be up and running again, we’re preparing for April 2021. Future plans for the work include bringing on board other performers and finalise its development.

There are a number of audience participation moments (for audiences at home as well as in studio) in collective choices made through a software interface.