Vitalstatistix is a South Australian contemporary arts organisation based in Port Adelaide. We focus on art and artist development, fostering experimentation, risk, research and new collaborations. We connect artists with audiences who are interested in a live experience of progressive ideas, creative process and expanded artistic practices.
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Incubator is our annual residency program that supports the creative development and premiere of new art and performance works.
VITALSTATISTIX.COM.AU 2017 DATES DRIVE
MAY, WATERSIDE
CHER/SPEECH PATTERN (DOUBLE BILL) SUPER IMPOSITION
MAY, NEXUS ARTS JUNE & JULY, WATERSIDE
SPEECHLESS
JULY, WATERSIDE
ADHOCRACY
SEPTEMBER, WATERSIDE
SECOND HAND EMOTIONS
SEPTEMBER, WATERSIDE & FONTANELLE
LOSS.GAIN.REVERB.DELAY.
OCTOBER & NOVEMBER, WATERSIDE
ENHEDUANNA
OCTOBER, NEXUS ARTS
IRON LADY
NOVEMBER, ADELAIDE
CLIMATE CENTURY
R I O C T N A E B D U I C S E N I R
NOVEMBER & DECEMBER, WATERSIDE
ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE ARTIST TALKS (EMMA BEECH & POINTS IN THE PLANE)
DECEMBER, WATERSIDE
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REBECCA MESTON
DRIVE
WORK-IN-PROGRESS SHOWINGS
12 AND 13 MAY, 2017 WATERSIDE 11 NILE STREET, PORT ADELAIDE CREATIVE TEAM
REBECCA MESTON SARAH DUNN ASHTON MALCOLM JOSEPHINE WERE ROZ HERVEY
NICOLA GUNN AND TAMARA SAULWICK
SUPER IMPOSITION
WORK-IN-PROGRESS SHOWINGS
30 JUNE AND 1 JULY, 2017 WATERSIDE 11 NILE STREET, PORT ADELAIDE CREATIVE TEAM
NICOLA GUNN TAMARA SAULWICK WITH CHAMBER MADE OPERA
AN OPERA BY CAT HOPE PRODUCED BY TURA NEW MUSIC
SPEECHLESS
WORK-IN-PROGRESS SHOWINGS
28 AND 29 JULY WATERSIDE 11 NILE ST, PORT ADELAIDE CREATIVE TEAM
CAT HOPE ANNALISA OXENBURGH TURA NEW MUSIC
AARON WYATT THE AUSTRALIANBASS ORCHESTRA
In 2007, NASA astronaut Lisa Nowak got into her car and drove for fourteen hours from Houston to Orlando, to confront her lover’s much younger lover, Colleen Shipman, in a parking lot at Orlando International Airport. Disguised in a dark wig, glasses and trench coat, she allegedly wore an adult nappy used in space so that she didn’t have to stop. A few years earlier, a forty-something woman beams out at the camera, holding her helmet in her orange, medaled space suit. All of her dreams as a girl, looking up at the sky, watching the Apollo moon landings, fixated on female astronauts, had paid off. High school valedictorian, Master of Science in Aeronautical Engineering, test pilot, NASA mission specialist in robotics, Nowak is killing it. At home she is devoted to her husband and her three children, who cheer her on from earth.
Super Imposition is a new work and first collaboration by contemporary performance-makers Tamara Saulwick and Nicola Gunn. Fusing performance dramaturgy, music composition and video art, Super Imposition interrogates notions of change – our desire for it, our resistance to it and the inevitability of it.
In the aftermath of the 2007 car park attack, Nowak is painted as a dark, grim, menacing, messedup, psychopath. Shipman comes across as perky, compassionate, sweet. She’s untainted: the girl-nextdoor, the girl-you-take-home-to-meet-Mum. Nowak has an extensive Wikipedia page. Colleen Shipman does not. Inspired by these events, Drive is a contemporary exploration of lost, deviant women and carefully constructed avatars, set against long stretches of road and suffocating sky. Drawing on satire, choreography and contemporary modes of story telling, you are invited out into the open road of freeways, highways, northern expressways, and the outer space between safety and success, and loneliness, unfettered desire and unwavering drive.
In development with Vitalstatistix and Chamber Made Opera, the work will draw upon Tamara’s practice of using sound and recorded transcripts to make a kind of documentary fiction and Nicola’s work that blurs the distinction between performer and persona to create an autobiographical fiction.
Ideas of change have different resonances and implications when viewed through the lens of our personal lives as distinct from a wider socio-political context. Through exploring and performing these differences, the artists will illuminate the inconsistencies, hypocrisies and complexities of our life and times. Times in which views once considered outdated are gaining renewed currency.
“I am tired of life. I cannot wait much longer. What will happen to us? What are we guilty of? What have we done to be imprisoned? I’m just a kid, I haven’t done anything wrong. They are putting me in jail. We can’t talk with Australian people.” 13 year old child, Blaydin Detention Centre, Darwin, 12 April 2014, as quoted in ‘The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention, 2014. Speechless is developing as an experimental opera homage to persons rendered speechless through political means. Speechless draws its primary score and thematic material from Gillian Triggs’ 2014 Human Rights Commission report entitled ‘The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention’. Using her techniques of digital graphic notation, new score reading technologies and experimental vocal
and orchestral approaches, Cat Hope is composing an abstract examination of how wordless music – vocal and instrumental – can empower text that is hidden or suppressed. Speechless will engage a thirty-piece shouting/screaming choir and an Orchestra formed from bass guitars, bass brass, bass drums and electronics, to channel a new and personal Australian gothic representation of the silencing of children, the silencing of dissent and the seemingly ubiquitous compassion fatigue of many Australians.
OPPORTUNITY
VITALSTATISIX WILL BE CALLING FOR CHOIR PARTICIPANTS LATER IN THE YEAR. STAY TUNED FOR DETAILS.