Appointed in 2020, our INAUGURAL ARTISTIC ASSOCIATE is performance and visual artist, LUKE GEORGE.
The Artistic Associate role represents a recent addition to Temperance Hall’s artistic team, an established independent artist to become engaged on a deep level with the organisation. The position supports the independent artist as a cultural agent and is intended to create new pathways for artistic creation, production and exchange. Temperance Hall’s current Artistic Associate is performance and visual artist, Luke George.
Statement from Luke George:
In these totally weird and destabilizing times for art, I want to rethink how we’re doing all of this... how we’re making and doing art - how it nourishes and sustains us - how our art reaches people - how it is happening before, between and past the moment of “the show”. Through my work with Temperance Hall, I wish to choreograph and curate an interconnected map of encounters and intersections between people of different experiences, backgrounds and places. With a focus on the act of gathering and social connectivity here at the Hall, on Bunurong Boon Wurrung Country. CARE TACTICS is an artist-led, artist-centred program of gatherings, talks, workshops, screenings, developments, performances and celebrations. Providing opportunities for artistic development, artistic challenge and exchange - prioritising the voice of the artist and people who need to be heard and seen. In all of this, I am focused on care as a radical strategy (yes, radical), to build social capital, to survive, sustain and transform.
CARE TACTICS
2021 – 2023 program
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Screening and Conversation Series
Focusing on significant dance works from both the recent or distant past by some of our community's most celebrated artists. Caring for the ephemeral artefacts of our dance histories and herstories, to revisit a moment in time and ask what was happening for the artist and the world at that time - perhaps as a way to look at where we are now. Curated and facilitated by Luke, each public screening includes a conversation and Q&A with the featured artists.
Descansos...resting places by Helen Herbertson
Thursday 9 September, 7:30pm – 8:30pm
Online event
Find out more information here
Grey Area by Phillip Adams
Friday 5 March, 7:00pm – 9:00pm
Temperance Hall
Find out more information here
EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST
Public Talk Series
Critical and urgent dialogues between artists and guest speakers from the broader community. Talking about art, performance, the body, dancing and what it means to gather. Experimenting with form, the series will dance with the way we talk and listen to each other, centering the knowledges and wisdoms of those often unheard.
Queer Gestures - where is the queer body in dance, now?
Thursday 3 February, 7:00pm – 9:00pm
Temperance Hall
2022 Midsumma Festival
EXQUISITE CORPS
Artist Cohort-in-Residence
Supported with space and time as well as individual stipends, each cohort-in-residence is self-organising and determines their own activity, process and outcomes – collectively and individually, to re-envision and reposition how sustained artistic practice for an individual artist may take place through co-supportive frameworks where they can create alongside, with and for each other. Curator, Luke George supports and cares for the Corps as a kind of ecologist and calibrator, encouraging, facilitating and mentoring the artists to consider new modes and ways of thinking for their artistic practice.
Exquisite Corps 2020 artists (October 2020 – March 2021):
Amrita Hepi, Andrew Treloar, Benjamin Hurley, Harrison Hall, Luke Fryer, Emma Riches, Rachael Wisby and Luke George.
Exquisite Corps 2022 artists:
To be announced soon.
See more information on Exquisite Corps here.
ALIENS OF EXTRAORDINARY ABILITY
Performance Party
More details to be announced soon.
WORKSHOPS
A workshop series led by Luke or guest artists who will each consider the act of care and what it means for them. Caring for the body, caring for practice, for the art form, for self and others, caring for the spaces and places we live and dance in.
En Route: The Care Edition by Joel Bray
Saturday 13 March, 10:00am – 6:00pm
Temperance Hall
Find out more information here
about the artist
Artistic Associate, Curator, Artist: Luke George (lutruwita -Tasmania, 1978) creates new choreographic and visual work that takes daring and at times, unorthodox methods, to explore new intimacies and connections between artist and audience. Luke’s artistic practice is informed by queer politics, whereby people are neither singular nor isolated; bodies of difference can intersect, practice mutual listening, take responsibility for themselves and one another. Based in Narrm (Melbourne), Luke creates, performs and collaborates with artists and the public across Australia, Asia, Europe and North America. In 2019 Luke was recipient of an Australia Council for the Arts Fellowship and premiered new works in Dance Massive and the Venice Biennale. In 2020 Luke was appointed Artistic Associate of Temperance Hall and to the Co-Design Consultation Group for a dedicated Melbourne dance festival. In 2021, Luke is presenting performance commissions for the National Galleries of both Victoria and Singapore, the Liveworks Festival of Experimental Arts (Sydney), and a permanent design installation commissioned for Melbourne’s newly built Victorian Pride Centre.
Find out more: lukegeorge.net/
Feature image courtesy of Luke George.
Images above: (left) Bunny by Luke George and Daniel Kok, premiered Campbelltown Arts Centre 2016. Photo by Bernie Ng; (right) Public Actions by Luke George and Collaborators, premiered Arts House for Dance Massive 2019. Photo: Pippa Samaya.
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.