|
2010
June (23 May 1 July)
> In the Arts Island Tour – Indonesia - Collaborative work with local artists and workshops
23 June – Institute of Arts (STSI), Bandung, West Java
26 June – Moseum Wayang dan Topeng, Ubud, Bali
29 June – Galeri Batu. Malang East Java
1 July – Galeri Batu. Malang East Java
May (28 May)
> Winged Creatures – experiment 1 – Full Moon Show,. Group work/Improvisation at
5.30-7.30pm
Fleming Park Hall
100 Victoria Street
E Brunswick
April (22-25 April)
> Rasa Sayang – A Major solo work more...
March (2 7 March)
> Spent – Collaboration between Tony Yap and Anthony Pelchen, Art Is Restival, Horsham
Anthony Pelchen
Anthony Pelchen gathers memories and images of location together, weaving them into visual structures that reflect the beauty and austerity of the Wimmera. The floor installation, Spent, contains some 35,000 used shotgun cartridges that form a colour-coded carpet, an aesthetic totality of many parts. It is large, compelling and mesmeric like a woven tribal rug and takes its source from the country north of Horsham where Pelchen lives and works. It is loaded with physical associations and issues of belonging and isolation, of the dual anatomies of life and death, drought and abundance. As a boy living on the family’s farming property that borders the Wimmera River, Pelchen would accompany his father through paddocks and along the river at dusk. He would watch the shooter discard cartridges as the sound of the shotgun fractured the night. It taught him the importance of stillness and the agony of disruption, the moment between life and death. This carpet is, however, much more than a patterned aftermath; it also holds a dark ontology, a metaphor for Pelchen’s own drained body, a casualty of a prolonged illness. Out of this painful episode he realised ‘the potency of order [that] relies on the potential for disorder’, a contradiction that activates his search for spiritual and bodily regeneration. Each episodic realisation acts as a testimony of endurance that is transformed into powerful, ordered, visual installations awaiting the inevitable act of disruption.
An artist’s personal history naturally inhabits their work, but with installation and collaborative performances there are many physical and psychological experiences that motivate both the artists and their audience. Pelchen’s work embodies several geographies and lives, and involves a repertoire of emotive journeys. He has established a working relationship with the choreographer, dancer and performer Tony Yap for over a decade, with each artist building an understanding of one another’s creative practices and developing a reciprocal use of the ‘body’ as a vehicle through which each filters memories, ideas and emotions.
The spatial austerity and the natural beauty of the Wimmera is Pelchen’s canvas and aesthetic laboratory, and for Tony Yap, who also has links with this region, the land and the river lends itself to explorative meditations on absence, loss, death and the regenerative and mystical forces of nature. Both artists revere the spatial and visual poetics of this particular landscape. It provides a transformative setting for shared values, in which beauty, order and equilibrium starkly counter the disruptive passions of pain and sorrow, all central to their personal and collaborative productivity. A carpet of empty gun cartridges is physically disrupted by the performer and may be seen as life ruptured and spent and reorganised by chance. It is an exquisite, empathetic drama, a contemplative penetration of still life into life. Tony Yap feels the parameters of Pelchen’s memories, the edges of the carpet are psychological walls he must engage with before bodily and emotionally intruding and splintering the visual order. The sense of violation, of having committed an insane crime against such harmony is replaced by the body’s final surrender to majestic exhaustion. Physically and emotionally spent, and emptied of his frenzied delirium, Yap is able to return to the original source of memory; the imprint of the black swallow is a metaphor for the fluttering heart of life.
In Well, Anthony Pelchen sets Yap’s videoed performance into a box so that we may look down into a darkened shaft, the visual distancing it creates giving a sense of entering another world. We are confronted by and drawn into a strangely beautiful melancholy, the gentle motion of eastern dance and meditation. As early morning mists lift and are carried along the river, the viewer is transported past reflective skies and large river gums, while the solitary figure divines the awakening world. Light plays with the earth, sky and water and, as Yap has said, the dance becomes ‘a mirror that thaws fear. The dancer should dance in this spirit … it is the unveiling of the inner life’. I would add that the dance is a salutation and an invitation to enter outside the self and into the darkness of the river, into its vaporising mists and the sentinels of old red-gums, to roam beyond the body and among the shadows and reflections of land and sky.
Anthony Pelchen’s art is grounded by the land. He recognises the flatness, emptiness, the rich austerity of space, the pinnacles of the Grampians and the serpentine Wimmera River as signal points to guide his eye. But contained in his art practice is an embodiment of both western and eastern concepts of energy, appearance, spiritual phenomena and the desire for order and disorder. Without one the other cannot exist.
Sheridan Palmer, March 2010.
2009
August (20-23 August)
> The Buddha My Body – A Palimpsest – an international collaboration more...
June (19 June)
> Difficult Majesty – a collaborative mix-medium installation with visual artist Anthony Pelchen and film maker, Sean O'Brien. Difficult Majesty will be performed in Ballarat at the Gold Exchange Gallery.
June (6-7 June)
> Project 2222 – A collaborative dance theatre in collaboration woth Lequyduong company, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. This was presented at the Shanghai International Experimental Festisval.
May (9 May)
> Buddha Body 1 - Melangkori – As part of Tony’s fellowship with the Dance Board of the Australia Council, one of his primary goals is to enrich his professional skills in the tradition of Javanese dance and vocal work. In September last year, Tony studied under the master, R.Ay Sri Kadarjati Ywandjana (Ibu Kadar) and make further investigation into trance dance practices as a major preperation for the first creative development of Buddha Body Series. This series will draw upon issues of migration and identity as well as the language of ‘emptiness’ and ‘fulfilment’ in spirituality.
Melangkori (melancholy) as a poetic beginning, arises from the sense of loss of someone or memory of a past. Melangkori's relationship to emptiness is the sense of the overall theme of Buddha Body Series. This work continues the long term collaborative project of Tony, Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey and Naomi Ota as the core members of TYC. Bambang Nurcahyadi and Ben Rogan joins the artistic team in this process of development. more...
April (5-11 April)
> Edge – an installation/performance with visual artist, Anthony Pelchen, Palimpsest Festival, Mildura Victoria more... www.pulserooftop.com
April (17 April)
> Difficult Majesty – a collaborative mix-medium installation with visual artist Anthony Pelchen and film maker, Sean O'Brien. Difficult Majesty will be performed in Mildura as part of the Palimpsest Biennale Festival.
February-March (25 Feb-8 March)
> Past Caring – a collaboration between TYC and TNS (The Necessary Stage, Singapore) will season at The Necessary Stage, Singapore more...
Inspired by the title of a poem by Australian writer Henry Lawson, Past Caring is an inter-disciplinary theatrical collaboration involving artists from Singapore and Australia.
Urgent issues of adoption, displacement, family, land and journey will be weaved together into a complex and contemporary presentation of text, music, multimedia and movement.
In a year-long process, the project involved artists making field trips, conducting interviews and creating and presenting nascent works in Singapore and Melbourne.
2008
December (12-14 Dec)
> The Buddha My Body -Palimpsest will be performed at ARKO Theatre, Seoul, South Korea more...
November (14-16 Nov)
> The Buddha My Body -Palimpsest International collaborative development with Nottle Theatre Co. Sth Korea, Paguyuban Seni Surya Kencana Indonesia and Tony Yap Company will be performed at performed at Taman Sari (Water Palace), Jogjakarta, Indonesia
September
> Sen Siao (Fellowship Program) Dance Film development with Sean O'Brien and masterclass/choreographic development with Ibu Kadar, Jogjakarta, Indonesia
2007
December
> Palimpsest International collaborative development with Nottle Theatre Co. Sth Korea, Paguyuban Seni Surya Kencana Indonesia and Tony Yap Company (see repertoires/projects)
November
> E1 Presentation at BIWAKO BIENNALE, Japan
http://www.arts.australia.or.jp/english/events/0711/tonyyap/
Tony Yap Company (tyc) will be participating in a cultural exchange residency for two weeks at the 3rd Biwako Biennale (Oumi-hachiman city, Shiga, Japan) - [the performance is scheduled as the biennale's closing event on 18th November 2007.] Biwako Biennale 2007 is themed Spirit of Place: Genius Loci where the uniqueness of (a) place in an increasingly mass produced and globalised world may be addressed. Biwako Biennale will bring together in this unique place artists from all over the world and provides a great opportunity for artistic creations, collaborations and intercultural exchange. The genius loci theme of The Biwako Biennale fitted closely with E1.
> BB07 - Beyond Butoh Festival. Co-curators Tony Yap & Yumi Umiumare in partbership with Multicultural Arts Victoria and Ausdance Victoria. 8 & 9 November 2007 at Reading Room, Fitzroy Town Hall @ 8pm
BB0# series has been directed, curated and facilitated by Tony Yap and Yumi Umiumare since 2001 to provide the local Butoh communities an opportunity to investigate, explore and stretch the limits of what we understand as the intrinsic meaning of Butoh. The long-term vision for this series is a grander scale festival encompassing all idiosyncratic interpretation of Butoh in performance from local and International artists.
In BB07, Tony and Yumi will curate ten selected short works of 7minutes in length. This event will be performed in the very intimated space at Reading Room in Fitzroy Town Hall.
This year’s BB07 will focus on the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’.
August/September
> E1 (solo version) Presentation at The Centre for Professional Training and International Exchange in Performing Arts, Ho Chi Min City, Vietnam. Seven-day workshop.
> Interactive workshops with dancers from Amrita Performing Arts in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
June
> E1 Presentation at Asian Arts Market, Singapore, 3 june Esplanade, Singapore Website: www.esplanade.com or www.asianartsmart.com
March
> IMPROV LAB
FortyFive Downstairs Fri-Sat 9-10 March @ 8pm and Sun 11 March at 5.00pm
Web: http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/sections/whats_on/boxoffice/event_details.asp?EventID=1897&sm=1&ss=1
> The Crossing Presentation at Loch Island, Murray River, Mildura, 16, 17, 18 March
THE PROJECT SUMMARY:
The Crossing is a performance event on Loch Island, Murray River, Mildura inspired by local stories about the island, the river and untold histories. This is a collaborative work which is a poetic and ritual performance about spirit expressed through dance and evocative cameos of new and untold stories gathered, translated and performed by the local Koorie dances and musicians and invited Victorian Butoh dancers. The work seeks to articulate shared histories in a marriage of both local and international performance art forms by re-presenting a history of the under represented past and present. It is a contemporary expression of the spirit of place that will symbolically weave and acknowledge overlapping histories.
The artistic objectives are to make a new performance artwork in creative collaboration with The NSW Tafe; Koorie Unit, The Victorian College of Koorie Education and the performance artist, Jill Orr. The work seeks to communicate to audiences and participants alike, through the earthed energy of dance and music in both Aboriginal and Butoh dance forms. Both forms focus on highly centred and emotionally charged energy, which is different and complementary enabling the creation of potentially powerful image making. The distinct dance forms will create the physical language used to articulate a culturally different historical and contemporary experience.
January-February
> RIAU Cross-cultural, cross-medium collaboration in Gwangju, Sth Korea (Little Asia Creators Meeting) 21 Jan-11 Feb
|
