Token Armies

Repertoire

Token Armies

Token Armies is a modular performance installation that explores the complicated connection between humans and the worlds we make, underscoring the cooperation and negotiation required to make these worlds function. Employing an ambitious design system composed of bodies, machine-like sculptures, instruments and garments, Token Armies examines the conditions we place on living things in a world largely defined by a troubled association between humans and technology. It looks at what is gained and lost in the pursuit of the body’s material augmentation and questions the potentiality of our species’ use of tools and technology.

Through a perpetual and turbulent negotiation of thought and action, sentience and automata, Token Armies gestures to the fundamental shifts in the passing of time, the carriage of culture, and the labour of continuing the work of living.

Premiere Season

16 – 20 October 2019
Meat Market
3 Blackwood Street
North Melbourne

Creative Team

Concept, Direction & Choreography: Antony Hamilton
Sculpture and Wearable Sculpture Design & Fabrication: Creature Technology Co.
Assistant Choreographer & Rehearsal Director: Melanie Lane
Costume Design: Paula Levis
Lighting Design: Bosco Shaw (ADDITIVE)
Sound Design: Aviva Endean
Sound Consultant: Madeline Flynn
Additional Object Design & Fabrication: Blair Hart, Antony Hamilton
Concept Art: Peter Gregory, Paula Levis, Antony Hamilton
Stage Manager: Lyndie Li Wan Po
Mechanist: Michael Burnel

Performers

Jade Dickinson, Alice Dixon, Johsua Faleatua, Christina Guieb, Antony Hamilton, Ren, Mitchell Harvey, Melanie Lane, Cody Lavery, Phillip Leitch, Gregory Lorenzutti, Kathleen Lott, Tiana Lung,Talitha Maslin, Amber McCartney, Damian Meredith, Callum Mooney, Josh Mu, Jessie Oshodi, Jack Riley, Harrison Ritchie-Jones, Kyall Shanks and Michaela Tancheff

Presented by Chunky Move and Arts House in association with Creature Technology Co. Commissioned by Melbourne International Arts Festival

Read the Artistic Director’s note on the Chunky Move archive here

Awards

2020 Green Room Award For Visual Design For Creature Technology Company, Antony Hamilton, Blair Hart, Paula Levis, Andrew Treloar and Bosco Shaw (Objects/Costume/Light)

2020 Green Room Award Music Composition and Sound Design For Aviva Endean with Madeleine Flynn

Video still by James Wright

Media

“A courageous choice for an artist of great integrity” The Age. Read more

“Even when his movement language is at its most mechanistic, Hamilton has a gift for evoking what makes us living, breathing, thinking animals and our need of one another for survival” The Australian

“The world it presents seems scarred by conflict or cataclysm but is also defined by collaboration and co-operation. The work explains nothing on a literal level; at the same time it all makes perfect sense.” The Age. Read more