2024 RAWspace artists
Jane Longhurst
Residency dates: May 2024
Project: Homescape (working title)
Homescape will be an original performance/installation created by performer Jane Longhurst, visual designer Jill Munro, sound designer Jacky Collyer and dramaturg Deborah Pollard.
Homescape will be the final performance in a trilogy of performances devised by Jane Longhurst titled The Black Bag Trilogy. The work is inspired by themes of social isolation, precarity and threat inherent in the first two plays of the Trilogy (Happy Days by Samuel Beckett and Request Programme by Franz Xaver Kroetz) and the life's work of 1970's Tasmanian housewife superstar and recycling pioneer Marjorie Bligh.
Recycling themes of social isolation, recycling set pieces from the first two productions and literally cycling the energy source for the lighting states, this design frugality will contrast sharply with Hometime's venue: the Ian Potter Recital Hall of the Hedberg with its state-of-the-art acoustic system. The venue serves as an unexplored location where the team aim to construct a site-and sound-responsive performance.
HK Vermeulen
Residency dates: TBC
Project: Hello and Good-Bipolar
Hello and Good-Bipolar is a new, cross-art form performance art piece that will integrate music, movement, and dialogue, with each performer encouraged to push the boundaries of their artform. This multiform approach aims to shed light on various aspects of Bipolar disorder, mental health and community within the context of Lutruwita/Tasmania, extending beyond HK's personal experience to incorporate insights gained through interviews with individuals with this condition. A pivotal objective of the project overall is to challenge misrepresentations of Bipolar disorder, which is often oversimplified as mere states of 'happiness' or 'sadness.' HK will be working with Dewayne Everett-Smith, The Harry Edwards Trio, Sarah Hamilton and other superstars of the Lutruwita art scene.
Nic Ingram
Residency dates: September 2024
Project: Walking the Line
Walking the Line is a new play written by Palawa and Wiradjuri theatre maker Nic Ingram. Exploring community relationships, responsibility to Country and living within the colony - after the passing of their father, Tahlia and Sammi are forced to move back to Country with their Uncle Bobby. They’ve grown up flash in the big city and it’s time for them to face the realities of their hometown and the people within it.
Gabe Adkins
Residency dates: October 2024
Project: Enough
Enough, a new play in development, unravels the journey of Kate, a woman trapped in the suffocating grip of a marriage concealing a sinister truth. It explores the haunting reality of domestic violence and the arduous path to reclaim agency over one’s life.
Enough offers a keyhole glimpse into the untenable situation Kate is enduring. Her husband, the epitome of charm, conceals the manipulation that binds Kate to him: investigating the complexities of a violent narcissism versus societal pressure. Kate’s ability to break down the door allows an understanding that it’s not just a secret behind four walls but one that’s played out in many and varied walks of life. Disorienting and non-linear, the play mirrors Kate's unraveling psyche. The stage transforms into a tapestry of visuals and immersive soundscapes becoming an unsteady witness to her struggle.
Matt Warren
Residency dates: TBC
Project: Ghost Applause
Existing somewhere between Hauntology and Electronic Voice Phenomenon, Ghost Applause is a spatial and sonic exploration of a theatre and its’ audience through time and space.
Marconi, the inventor of radio, mused on the possibility that sound, once emitted, never dies but instead forever reverberates in increasingly quiet decay. Ghost Applause takes this esoteric notion and allows the theatre to play the role of a recording and sound-storage device, amplifying the applause contained as an echo in its stalls and balconies.
Was the cheering and applause you hear from a week ago? 100 years ago? Or could it be an audiences’ appreciation of something onsite from before the theatre was even built?
Inspired by ghost hunting, but also the idea of listeners’ expectations and of artistic deceit, artist Matt Warren will inhabit the Theatre Royal, capturing and presenting a multilayered ‘ghost audience’ responding to long forgotten or invisible performances.
RAWspace 2024 is supported by founding patron of the RAWspace Giving Circle, Belinda Kendall-White, the City of Hobart, the University of Tasmania, Performing Lines TAS and Mona Foma.