March 1-31, 2023
A major new biennial dance festival for Australia, FRAME is an evolving and transformative assembly for audiences, makers, and presenters to celebrate and experience dance. FRAME presents the following exhibitions and screenings, featuring works by Centre for Projection Art and The Substation.
Exhibitions
Cthuluscene by Megan Beckwith – Centre for Projection Art
What will your body be, and how will it behave in a virtual future? Chtulucene explores the transformative nature of the digital to discover different notions of gender, physicality, and the post-human.
Through animation, motion capture, and dance, new physical forms expand the idea of the human body and dance performance. This work draws on the ideas of diverse bodies, and the post-human through the image of the Chtulucene.
1 – 31 March. Brunswick Mechanics Institute, 270 Sydney Rd, Brunswick
Longing + Forgetting by Matt Gingold and Philippe Pasquier – Centre for Projection Art
Longing + Forgetting explores the ways in which machines are ascribed intelligence, while humans are increasingly treated like machines. Combining physical and algorithmic choreography with architectural projection, the work questions the relationship between the inanimate and the animate: how are our bodies measured and controlled by the structures of technology? And what traces do our bodies leave on the structures around us?
Longing + Forgetting is a collaboration between media artist Matt Gingold, Philippe Pasquier, a world leading expert in machine learning and director of the Metacreation Lab, and Thecla Schiphort, a pioneer of digital choreography who co-created Lifeforms, the choreographic software used by Merce Cunningham.
1 – 12 March. South Laundry, Abbotsford Convent, 1 St Heliers St, Abbotsford.
REALREEL Curated by Jo Lloyd and Melanie Lane – The Substation
REALREEL is an exhibition curated by Jo Lloyd and Melanie Lane bringing together a nation-wide selection of artists that centre the body [dance] on screen with a focus on experimental, contemporary performance making and varied, Australian choreographic voices. Spanning from cultural storytelling to speculative fiction, the exhibition reflects on the language of dance on film as an archive of memory, ephemerality and imagination. Traditionally a live art form, these films shift dance beyond the limits of the body and into a space that captures time, movement and human experience in extraordinary ways.
1 March – 1 April. The Substation, 1 Market St Newport.
Strokes by Annika Koops – Centre for Projection Art
Strokes is a moving image work by Annika Koops that explores how the corporeal and personal are distilled into data through the capture and codification of human motion.
The work utilises Computer Generated Imagery (CGI), digital video, motion capture and AI to draw links between animation and automation. The work revolves around a central femme figure dressed in chromakey blue. She performs gestures driven by a grab-bag of expressive actions: dancing, painting, rhythmic gymnastics, movement taken from TikTok videos, and vintage footage from live-action animation studios at Disney.
1– 12 March. Industrial School, Abbotsford Convent, 1 St Heliers St, Abbotsford.
Film Screenings
Body-Cites: Conversation Series – Centre for Projection Art
Centre for Projection Art will be in conversation with exhibiting artists to delve deeper into their intersectional and choreographic modes of thinking within their practices.
“Body-Cites provides a window into the wealth of creative work being generated right now at the nexus of dance, technology and moving image practice. As one of CPA’s venue partners who specialises in supporting Australian film and video art, Composite is thrilled to play host to a program that represents the dynamism of contemporary practice at the intersection of the moving body and the moving image,” says Channon Goodwin, Composite Moving Image and Media Bank.
Body-Cites: Conversation Series #1
Join Dr Sean Lowry in conversation with presenting artists Annika Koops, Matt Gingold and Philippe Pasquier as they unpack ideas in their practice working with gestures, new media and technology through corporeality and how our bodies converse with technology specifically through the works “Strokes” and “Longing and Forgetting”.
March 4. Abbotsford Convent, 1 St Heliers Street, Abbotsford.
Body-Cites: Conversation Series #2
In collaboration with NextWave, join Professor Carol Brown in conversation with artists, Megan Beckwith and Wendy Yu who will discuss the transformative nature of the digital and the position of a body in the future and how this informs the making of their works. March 25. Brunswick Mechanics Institute, 270 Sydney Rd, Brunswick
Body-Cites: Conversation Series #3
Join Mx. Anna Helme in conversation with artists Luna Mrozik Gawler, and collaborators Harrison Hall and Sam Mcgilp. In this discussion the artists will discuss the conceptual interests in their work ranging from biomimicry and post-normal narratives, and how their practices morph to articulate these complex concepts through these iterations on screen. March 30. Composite Moving Image Agency & Media Bank, 4/35 Johnston St, Collingwood.
Choreographic Experiments on Screen – Centre for Projection Art
The below experiments in film will be shown at Composite Moving Image Agency & Media Bank, 4/35 Johnston St, Collingwood as well as a satellite showcase at Bunjil Place and Metro Arts in Meajin (Brisbane).
An Experiment in Intervals III – Violet Desert by The Third Thing (Nithya Iyer and Vlad Mizikov) – Centre for Projection Art
An Experiment in Intervals III – Violet Desert is a video work made in response to a decommissioned industrial plant in Barreiro, Portugal operated by the Companhia União Fabril from the early 20th Century. Ushering in what was intended to be the economic boom of industrialisation, it is now a toxic, barren site, standing as a reminder of both the promises and failures of this vision. The work characterises the quality of this site as one of ‘monstrous architectures’ – a term used by Georges Bataille to refer not only to what is against the sacred but that quality which materialises in the machinations of state violence and industrial exploitation.
1 – 11 March.
TOXX by Luna Mrozik Gawler – Centre for Projection Art
TOXX meditates on the planetary inheritance of industrial residue, traversing territories of toxicity, queer(y)ing the eco-monstrous figure to reckon with the grotesque figurations of ecological presents and the radically ulterior futures that might lie beyond. The porous progeny of the Toxicocene find themselves compromised, united in their corporeal contamination across every cell, site, and species. TOXX lingers in the disquiet of these post-normal narratives, refusing the convenience of utopic/dystopic binaries in favour of the morphic muck of transition without expectation of arrival. 15 – 18 March. Images here
JNK in 6 panels by Wendy Yu – Centre for Projection Art
JNK in 6 panels takes inspiration from the academic writings of Anne McDonald and Andre Lepecki who wrote that dance embodies the experience of mourning through its ephemeral nature. In this sense, the design of this work represents a capture of the dance that has passed. This work features a local Melbourne dancer who was filmed in and designed for the specific dimensions of Collingwood Yards. Other iterations of this work follow similar intentions hyperlocality by emphasising the importance of using local dancers. These have included collaborations with local street dancers of Boston, Cincinnati, New York, Brooklyn, Warclaw, Beijing, Shanghai, Sydney, Tasmania and Hong Kong.
22 – 25 March.
Body Crysis/身體災變 by Harrison Hall and Sam Mcglip – Centre for Projection Art
Body Crysis/身體災變 is a choreographic work with (re)animated bodies, stretching the bounds of our newfound digital corporeality. It transmutes dance, motion capture and CG animation into a simultaneous, shared performance between Newport and Taipei, in the flesh and online. Long-time collaborators Harrison Hall and Sam Mcgilp have teamed up with NAXS FUTURE, a Taipei-based media art collective to present a hybrid live/digital dance work of impossible choreography, biomimicry and techno-morphology. Performed simultaneously at The Substation and online, Body Crysis/身體災變 is the culmination of two years of experiments in motion capture and digital choreography by two artists who are fast gaining a reputation for their visionary approach to genre-fluid performance.
29 March – 1 April.
FRAME represents dance artists across all forms, practices, cultures, histories, disciplines, aesthetics, and experimentations. FRAME responds to the need in Australia’s dance practice of a flagship festival to concentrate, connect and celebrate the work of dance and movement artists across the continent. FRAME will be delivered through an unprecedented alignment of diverse arts organisations working collectively with a shared purpose and with an artist curatorium comprising 20 dance artists FRAME will be adaptive and will respond to current conditions in its scale with ambitions to be sustained over a 10-year cycle. It has been created by an arts community recovering from the ongoing effects of interconnected crises and utilising artist-led, intergenerational, cross-sectoral and locally focused models of collaboration and collective organising.
For a complete list of all FRAME events head to https://framebiennial.com.au/
FRAME: A biennial of dance
Presenting Partners
Arts House, City of Melbourne
Bunjil Place
Centre for Projection Art
Chunky Move
Dancehouse
Darebin Arts Speakeasy
Lucy Guerin Inc
Punctum Inc.
Temperance Hall
The Australian Ballet
The Substation
Associate Partners
Arts Centre Melbourne
Ausdance
Abbotsford Convent
APAMNext Wave
Venues
ACCA
Arts House
Australian Ballet Centre Studios
Basement Theatre (NZ)
Brunswick Mechanics Institute
Bendigo Venues & Events
Darebin Arts Centre
Dancehouse
Goods Shed Arts, Castlemaine
Northcote Town Hall Arts Centre
The Substation
Temperance Hall
WXYZ Studios
Image credits:
Top: REALREEL. Video still from ‘Make Your Life Count’ by Sarah Aiken
Middle: Strokes (2022), Annika Koops. Photo courtesy of the artists
Bottom: “Body Crysis_身體災變 (2022), Harrison Hall and Sam Mcgilp. Photo courtesy of the artists
