Visions, nightmares and sinking worlds; a one-off showing by some of Aotearoa’s and Naarm’s most exciting contemporary artists.

For Activators 10, Chunky Move is excited to work with Aotearoa (New Zealand)-based Jahra Wasasala, Fijian world-builder, movement psychopomp and writer. Jahra will be working in collaboration and presenting with Naarm-based artist Henry Lai-Pyne and Aotearoa-based artist Oliva Luki (Spewer).

Jahra, along with their collaborators will undertake a residency at Chunky Move studios, culminating in a one-off public showing as part of FRAME: a biennial of dance.

Dance is potent. It circulates within us like blood, and seeps out of us like sweat. Enigmatic in character, Dance nests within many bodies in order to define its shape. Although volatile and untouchable, Dance is always poised at the ready, waiting to be observed.

To immortality and out the other side is a sculptural work that celebrates Dance as an essential material for the creation of its own archive. With the aid of motion capture technology, the dancing body and its logic has passed into the digital realm in order to birth a new, physicalised skeletal body – its own archival relic, a fossilised dance…

However, housed within Gallium (a natural metal with a melting point at 29.76°C), this Dance remains volatile and untouchable, just like its creator.

“The world set an empty stage, but there was no occasion for it.”

During months of lockdown, Shian Law recorded himself dancing all over the city. He found empty stages everywhere he looked—under the Flemington bridge, in carparks on the rooftops of high-rise buildings, at the entrance of a five-star hotel, in the compound of an abandoned factory—and shared his recordings on social media.

Created by digital choreographer Harrison Hall and motion graphics artist Luca Dante, Maelstrom is a sombre meditation on the unseen, hidden and destabilising forces that transform us.  A mutable site for trauma and catharsis, the body exists in this work as a liminal site between the real and imagined.

Combining the motion capture of dancing bodies, 3D animation and physics engines with sound by experimental techno/ambient sound artist Pavel Milyakov (Russia), the work is experienced as an immersive multi-channel projection and soundscape.

In Maelstrom, the vastness of time and space sets the scene for an unsettling dance of nameless skins. The uncanny movements of these digital embodiments forewarn us of the fragility of reality, as bodies fly and swirl in an absurd dance that warps earthly limits.  Neither here nor there, this dance exists in the volume between worlds, through pressures and forces to no particular place.  Maelstrom drags us like rag dolls from the present, flinging our flailing limbs onto the threshold of tomorrow. Into the vortex, we go down, further and deeper, we go down…

SOFTTRAP is a single-channel screen work by dancer and choreographer Amber McCartney that uses body horror tropes to redefine the flesh as a site for harbouring instability.  The work questions the potential of the body as it is extended and expanded through physical and artificial manipulation.

Using replicas of her own arms, created by McCartney and special effects makeup artist, Kiana Jones, the artist inhabits a transformed body that fluctuates between eerily familiar and disturbingly foreign.  Over the course of the film, McCartney attempts complete embodiment in an experimental purging of the internal in an attempt to experience human form as both the subject and object of terror.

An accompanying sound design by Morgan Hickinbotham intensifies the viewer’s discomfort and unease made manifest in the work, where the body exists as a mutable site for trauma and catharsis, between the real and imagined.

Imagine seeing images frozen in time of your ancestors in museums, taken by people documenting an ‘exotic’ sighting. Who has the power over their image?

Co-commissioned by Chunky Move and Next Wave, Ngioka Bunda-Heath’s (Wakka Wakka, Ngugi, Birrpai) new dance work and photographic exhibition explores the idea of shifting the gaze and refocusing the colonial lens that has publicly framed her ancestors.

Extending on her 2019 YIRRAMBOI Festival work, Blood Quantum, about her mother’s story, Birrpai turns to Ngioka’s father’s heritage; to her great-grandmother captured by the camera of a ‘culturalist’. She puts a First Nation perspective on colonial photography alongside contemporary dance that has taken her to stages around the world.

“Ngioka Bunda-Heath’s solo Blood Quantum, beginning with the dancer’s strongly weighted plunging to the earth over and over, was poignant and challenging. Video and voice told the tragedy of children being taken from their mother as Bunda-Heath’s movement gradually intensified to thrashing despair. ” – Kim Dunphy

Curated by independent dancer and choreographer, Leah Landau for Chunky Move, Activators 4 comprises Conversation Series and First Chapter of a Novel. The project existed through a website for one year, and now is archived as a digital publication.

Conversation Series invites six Australian-based artists to discuss absence, text and performance, with a conversation partner of their choosing. The artists (Amaara Raheem, Amrita Hepi, Daniel Jenatsch, Megan Payne, Tim Darbyshire and Rhiannon Newton) can speak to someone who is relatively unknown to them; someone they may have met in passing, at a residency or a festival; perhaps someone they have never met but are curious about; someone that may not come from the quote unquote art background. Leah has collated the many texts and other references referred to in (or evoked by) the conversations into a Reading List, for those who’d like to dive deeper.

As kind of sister project, artist Brian Fuata created AN EMAIL PERFORMANCE OF A FIRST CHAPTER OF A FICTIONAL NOVEL AS PROPOSITION (or a minor text in six parts), using the six artist conversations as material to create ‘the first chapter of a novel’. Brian’s Email Performance is a lesson in performative velocity, the ‘when-hits-what-hits-how-hits-who’.

BONANZA! is a playful blend of dance/ film/ digital animation/ artist dialogue, filmed in Alpha60’s Chapter House.  Created by Harrison Hall, Sam Mcgilp and Justin Kane, BONANZA! is ArtxDialogue with guests NAXS Corp (Taiwan) and Lu Yang (China).  An uneasy meeting of nostalgic-futurism, BONANZA! is a lament for our physical bodies and an exaltation of digital reincarnation.

Watch trailer here

Movement experiments – human, insect and mechanical bodies. This video artwork is a movement experiment between Prue Lang’s choreography, artist Mathieu Briand’s androids and a Phasmid (stick insect). The work explores the body/androids/artificial movement/intelligence on the one side and the body/human instinct/natural movement/nature on the other. Through the creative process, Lang and Briand have observed, responded to and manipulated the complex relationships between these concepts, approaching the distinctions between physical presence vs. artificial presence with curiosity.

Activators 1 unfolds as an offering of art discourse in the format of art event. Developed as a dialogue and presented in three parts, Friedlander and Grogan craft pragmatic tasks that attend to a sharing of curiosity and potentiality, rather than the staging or display of a ‘complete outcome’. Each of the three parts acknowledges and reveals how the artists’ actions/thoughts are imbued with embodied knowledge – choreography, material fabrication, spatial comprehension – as are all actions/thoughts already happening within the site.