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Body Politics is a workshop series that offers artists of all disciplines an opportunity to engage in experimentation, delving into the intricacies of performance dynamics. Guided by experienced artist mentors, participants have the chance to learn and collaborate as they deep dive into what it means to be an artist who works with performance.
This is Season Three of Body Politics, and the exploration is Uncanny Embodiments and Queer Alterities.
Curator Zoë Bastin says, "Let's navigate the uncharted waters of digital multiplicities, stretching understandings of corporeality beyond comprehension, blur the boundaries between somatic fact and fiction and revel in awe-inspiring bodies that defy convention. Facilitated by artist mentors Hamish McIntosh, Brooke Stamp, Sarah Aiken and Alexander Powers, Jonathan Homsey and Luke George.
In this season, we're leaning into intriguing questions: What happens when bodies go beyond conventional limits? How can bodies transform into digital entities, pushing the boundaries of comprehension? How can we transcend our physical constraints, or harness boundless material forces? What are the powers at play that choreograph us in social environments, that create a body politic?
Join us on this thought-provoking journey as we challenge norms and explore the extraordinary. Discover new dimensions of the body and its capabilities to surprise and inspire you."
ABOUT BODY POLITICS
Established in 2018, Body Politics is an initiative designed to facilitate meaningful conversations about the methods, future directions, and techniques employed by performance practitioners. Devised and convened by artist, researcher and curator Zoë Bastin, this program aims to foster emerging performance-based practitioners across disciplines. We warmly invite creatives of any background with an interest in performance to participate in an enriching exploration of the practices of their peers. Join us for a deep dive into the inner workings of established artists as we collectively delve into the world of performance.
WHO CAN COME
We welcome individual practitioners in performing and visual arts at all career stages. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander practitioners are particularly encouraged to attend and mob tix are available at checkout. This series is delivered at a low cost to participants. We would like everyone to be able to attend, so if finances are a barrier please get in touch for a free ticket. For more info or access inquiries email: hello@zoebastin.com
SCHEDULE
Sat, Nov 4: Hamish McIntosh, Main Hall, 1 – 4pm
Sat, Nov 11: Brooke Stamp, Upstairs Studio, 1 – 4pm
Sat, Nov 18: Sarah Aiken, Upstairs Studio, 1 – 4pm
Sat, Nov 25: Alexander Powers, Main Hall, 11am – 2pm
Sat, Dec 16: Jonathan Homsey, Upstairs Studio, 11am – 2pm, Luke George, 2pm – 5pm
TICKETS
6 Session Cost: Mob/Queer Fam/POC $100, Conc/Unwaged $130, Full $160
Per Session Cost: Mob/Queer Fam/POC $20, Conc/Unwaged $25, Full $30
The Dancer as Masochist, Hamish McIntosh
Nov 3, 1 – 4pm
Named after Jock Abra’s 1987 paper, The Dancer as Masochist workshop will explore how self-destruction can subvert our definitions of dance. Drawing on examples from within and without theatrical dance, this session will look at ways we can test the limits of the body and aesthetic norms in pursuit of a political practice.
About Hamish
Hamish McIntosh, PhD, is a Pākehā artist and writer living on Wurundjeri Country. Born in Aotearoa New Zealand, Hamish trained in contemporary dance before pursuing research in queer theory. He has exhibited his work at the Gus Fisher Gallery (Auckland), play_station (Wellington), Temperance Hall, and the National Gallery of Victoria.
Psychic Waste, Brooke Stamp
Nov 11, 1 – 4pm
Brooke Stamp will lead a somatic and speculative session that creates space for participants to reconstitute the excesses of labour and production into a practice for the whole-body sensorium. Psychic Waste will explore subterranean, subconscious impetuses, trespassing into worlds of vocalisation, action, and spoken language, to dislocate our bodies from obligation to bodily form. Remixing somatic realities with somatic fiction, we will prioritise materials seeded in the psyche to rouse a bodily matrix significantly more elastic, agile, and resilient – practicing alternate speeds and scales for artistry over artistic production.
About Brooke
Brooke Stamp is a dance-artist practicing within a global matrix of peers to create performance bridging fields of visual art, sound, and conceptual performance. Prioritising aesthetics of the experiential, Stamp’s practice draws on the body’s capacity to augment language, lineage, and energy, and operates characteristically in improvisation to generate live situations that shift fluidly between contexts of studio, gallery, theatre, and natural site.
Sarah Aiken
Nov 18, 1 – 4pm
Occupied with collaging, making cuts & rough joins that expose the mechanisms & temporary relationships between parts, Sarah's current research acknowledges material yearnings for connection, longing & belonging & a constant state of being together yet apart, transforming & reforming, creating monstrous or mythical wholes & superhuman or more than human forms.In this workshop we will work between the corporeal, material and digital to look for illusions, distortions and choreographies that cross those boundaries.
About Sarah
Sarah Aiken is a dancer and artist whose work investigates assemblage, authorship, scale and the self, looking at the roles of audience, performer, subject and object employing repurposed materials, sound, light and video to distort perspectives, considering performance as a site for empathy & exchange. Sarah is co-director of Deep Soulful Sweats, working with Rebecca Jensen to invite audiences into cathartic and thoughtful performative experiences.
Alexander Powers
Nov 25, 11am – 2pm
Powers' workshop will introduce the philosophical groundwork of her practice in an accessible way, as well as the foundational pre-expressive exercises from her choreographic practice. Together, we will try to understand what a Queer Methodology towards art can mean.
About Alexander
Alexander Powers is a Narrm-based artist experimenting across electronic music, dance and choreography. As a DJ, known as Female Wizard, she has played across a wide variety of clubnights and festivals across Australia for the last 10 years, and has produced three solo albums including her most recent entitled What A Body Can Do released on her own label Powertrip. Powers has been producing work as a choreographer since 2019, works that instrumentalise physical exhaustion and noise music. In 2021 she won Best Electronic Act at the Music Victoria Awards.
Let go...and be camp, Jonathan Homsey
Dec 16, 11am – 2pm
Jonathans want you to let go. To discover what is camp and how to queer our practice, we must know where we are queering from. This workshops starts with letting go of expectations and body images through practicing music visualisation, a social tea with a possible debate into improvisation ideation. This workshop is for the maker who yearns to make something satricial in their practice.
About Jonathan
Jonathan Homsey is a choreographer and curator working from the positionality of a Queer Person of Colour based on Wurundjeri country.Originally an award-winning dancer for crews during the naughties in Southern California, he is humbled to be a community leader in so-called Australia for the past decade galvanising people together to dance. From Footscray Community Arts to Melbourne Museum, Jonathan specialises in platforming Street and Queer dance forms to cultivate empowerment for sexually and ethnically diverse young people. He is the 2021 Green Room award winner for I Am Maggie in Best Dance Production.
The Choreography of Cruising, Luke George
Dec 16, 2 – 5pm
In this workshop, we will examine and loiter in the elusive histories of Cruising (the covert seeking of sex in public/private spaces) as a social choreographic practice. Through tracing and embodying the fragility and temporality of these queer intimacies, we will consider their potential for a ‘re-architecting’ of civic space and social dynamics. Luke seeks a transdisciplinary and multi-faceted exchange of ideas between bodies, and invites individuals of diverse backgrounds, experiences, knowledges and practices to join this workshop.
About Luke
Based in Naarm, Luke George is a multidisciplinary artist working across performance, installation, craft and curation. Luke sees dance and performance less as spectacle than as reflexive practice, in which people examine themselves and their values through movement and interaction. Luke’s artistic practice is informed by queer politics and spaces, whereby people are neither singular nor isolated; bodies of difference can intersect, practice mutual listening, take responsibility for themselves and one another. Luke’s work examines the dynamics of intimacy and collectivity to create ‘safe spaces’ that allow for care as well as risk.
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ACCESS AND SAFETY
This event will take place inside. Bathrooms are for all-genders and wheelchair accessible, Temperance Hall's Upstairs Studio is only accessible via a stairwell.
If you have any specific accessibility needs or any queries regarding the workshop series, please contact: hello@zoebastin.com
LOCATION
Temperance Hall
199 Napier Street, South Melbourne
Image Design by Hamish McIntosh
Artist Photo credits:
Hamish McIntosh by Jeff Busby
Brooke Stamp by Jeff Busby
Sarah Aiken courtesy of the artist
Alexander Powers by Aneta Urbonaite
Luke George by Pippa Samaya
Jonathan Homsey by Bonita Carzino and Xaiver Messe
Temperance Hall is supported by the Australian Government RISE Fund, The City of Port Phillip, Working Heritage.
Temperance Hall acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the land in which we dance and create, the Bunurong Boon Wurrung peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation, and pay our respect to Elders both past and present and, through them, to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.