Newcastle’s annual This is Not Art festival is back in 2010 for its 11th year, taking place from 30th September – 4th October 2010. The festival presents Australia’s most exciting and emergent exhibitions, screenings, performances, panels, workshops, talks, gigs, interventions, live art, and special events in five days of creativity and absolute madness. The festival features over 400 local, national and international artists in a combination of writers, performers, thinkers, independent and industry musicians, creative researchers, electronic artists, dilettantes, and much, much more.
Festival program highlights include:
The Crack Theatre Festival
The premiere performance of queer DIY Theatre troupe Sisters Grimm’s The Rimming Club. Four estranged friends re-unite on a Greek island, hoping to reclaim the summer of that forever changed their lives. But has too much changed? Can you really ever escape the past? What does poo taste like?
An instalment of celebrated Melbourne variety night The Last Tuesday Society. Come watch the creme de la creme of Melbourne’s underground performance scene present their patented brand of lo-fi, am-dram, theatrical mash up, rock n’ roll vaudeville. Your eyes won’t believe themselves.
Shh’s Blind, As You See It, an extraordinary fusion of physical theatre, opera and puppetry that traces the story of a young woman as she loses her vision. Shh is a company specialising in object/puppet works, hybrid and interactive theatre and has toured nationally as well as internationally, including presenting their self-titled show Shh at the Sydney Opera House in 2005.
Bitter black comedy Up to your Arse in Alligators by The Masters of Space and Time, a razor-sharp depiction of Australia’s inspired attempt to engineer a utopian ecosystem through the introduction of the cane toad. This is the law of unintended consequences, handily summed up in the colloquialism – “when you’re up to your arse in alligators it’s difficult to remember that your initial objective was to drain the swamp”.
Our very own Year 12 Formal, a free-for-all participatory performance in which audience becomes performer, performer becomes audience and the hormones flow as freely as spiked punch. Curated by famed deviant Hadley and featuring light, sound, music and chaos by the Spill Collective, Svelt, Dead DJ Joke and YOU. Don’t hold back: turn a nightmare into a night out!
Critical Animals
Panel discussion: Critiquing Criticism – I Can’t Believe it’s not Better
Join a cross-TINA panel of critics and artists to pillory those arbiters of cultural production who’ve done you wrong. Or, alternatively, laud those brave men and women capping the well-head of bad taste and worse art. This is a conversation about the role of the critic — nurturer or discerner; impartial judge or cosy coteriean; good cop, bad cop — and the state of criticism. With cultural and creative critics Lisa Dempster, Fenella Kernebone, Andrew Ramadge, Naomi Milthorpe and Shaun Prescott. Co-presented with Macquarie University Faculty of Arts.
Panel discussion: Coterie in the Arts: We’re All in it Together
How do coteries, cliques, collectives and scenes occur? Why do they form? How are they variously productive and exclusive? Beyond the idea that they’re simply bad but that we’re all part of them, we want to look at why. The discussion will be launched by a paper extract from Keri Glastonbury, and go on to consider the effects of coteries in the literary, experimental, chiptune, performance and theatre scenes. With Keri Glastonbury, Mike Rosenthal and Ben Byrne. Co-presented with The Writing Cultures Research Group, University of Newcastle.
Panel discussion: Thought in Motion: Ekphrasis, Creative Citation and Embodied Theory
What language do you use to perform a lecture about the body? Where do acts of looking and writing interact in painterly language, and what lies between the materiality of the object and the transparency of the vocal? This innovative presentation traces and performs the generative connections between theory and creative practice. With Hayley Singer (performance/cultural theory), Miranda Wheen (dance) and Nick Keys (poetry/performance). Co-presented with University of Newcastle.
Workshop: Air City, and Inflatable Art Workshop
Join Tully Arnot as he shares his skills in inflatable art-making. Workshop creations will be displayed in the Air City exhibit over the weekend. All supplies provided. BYO awesomeness.
Plus an extensive collection of visual installations all weekend long in the Newcastle City Hall Banquet Room, The Lockup and PodSpace Gallery.
Electrofringe
Splinter Orchestra
The Splinter Orchestra’s music is like quicksand: it can suck you in, just as each of the 27 musicians relinquished his or her sense of self within this monumental improvising ensemble. Listening to it is like looking down on a jungle from above, with infinite layers of foilage making for an image without surface. Behind every sound lurks another sound, and then another. The result is eerie and weirdly beautiful; more diaphanous then dense, which is a tribute to both the subtlety of the interaction and the sophistication of the recording. Remarkable.” John Shand
The Human Theremin
Luke makes art with strangers. His mother told him not to, but he does it anyway. Now he needs your bodies. Luke has constructed a machine that tranforms him into a Human Theremin, and he needs you to play him!
National Young Writer’s Festival
American Gothic Ball
Weird tales of deepest darkest America. Elvis fighting soul-sucking mummies. Old bluesmen meeting the devil at the crossroads. Cthulhu in Deadwood. Swamp Thing meets Sheriff Buck. Brush up on your Joe R. Lansdale and Cherie Priest, put on your cowboy hat and neckerchief and have yourself a rollicking occult time.
ETS’ and Ecosystems: Environmental Writing in an Election Year
It’s the vanguard of journalism for this generation, but writing climate change is tricky business. Grassroots activists, writers and mainstream journos discuss the challenges of navigating the politics, economics and science of contemporary environmental journalism.
Sketch the Rhyme
An interactive hip hop gameshow where speed drawing meets rapping meets live hip hop beats. Artists sketch on paper that is filmed and projected live. Rappers freestyle about what the artists are drawing. The audience is invited to participate as the improvisation is structured into games.
And don’t forget the classics: Zine Fair, Creative Health Check and the Spelling Bee.
Sound Summit
Jason Forrest (USA/Berlin)
Jason Forrest is an electronic musician working in a variety of styles. His sample-based music has been a pioneering force in the experimental music community and he has been credited as being a leader in the emergence of the Breakcore genre. He began the Cock Rock Disco label in the summer of 2001 and also was host of the Advanced D&D radio program on WFMUfm, in NYC. In 2005 he co-founded the Wasted festival with Pure and in conjunction with Club Transmediale in Berlin. He is a founding member of the Birthday Party Berlin collective and began the club music label Nightshifters in Dec, 2008. In August, 2009, he released the iPhone application Star6. Co-developed with Agile Partners, the app is currently available worldwide on iTunes.
LINKS: http://www.myspace.com/jason_forrest + http://www.cockrockdisco.com + www.NightshiftersLabel.com + http://www.agilepartners.com/apps/star6/
Grouper (USA)
The songs of Grouper aka Liz Harris are densely compelling micro-universes. Each piece is layered with glowing washes of reverb and softly howling echoes of delay, in which Harris positions herself. Soft focus, and at times lost amid the clouds of audio, her voice emerges with a haunting fragility. Grouper’s work epitomises the potentials of textural songwriting – a practise of ukiyo-e like quality, where audio colours are squeezed through a gauzy treatment, ultimately imprinting new and unexpected sound-shapes. Over the past 5 years, Grouper’s records including Way Their Crept, Cover The Windows And The Walls, Dragging A Dead Deer have defined her as one of the most evocative and unique voices to emerge from the USA. She travels to Australia on the back of several new releases including yet soon to be issued new solo LP.
LINKS: http://www.myspace.com/grouperrepuorg
Songs (Sydney)
Songs are walking the hard path back to modernism with a shrug. The Sydney based band make echo heavy drone pop that gives modern music the cold shoulder. Songs have released recordings on labels including Popfrenzy and The Spring Press. Songs’ performance at Sound Summit/This Is Not Art on October 2 will be their last show with band members Jeff Burch and Steve Uren.
LINKS: http://www.songssongs.net/ + http://www.myspace.com/ssongsssongs
The Grand Debate
Featuring: Kirsty Brown (Sound Summit), Adam Gauci (Curse Ov Dialect), Andrew Ramadge (mess+noise, news.com.au), Elmo Keep (The Internet Is Punk), Everett True (Plan B), Fenella Kernebone (ABC Art Nation, Triple J Sound Lab).
The Grand Debate examines the unique relationship musicians have with critics – whether professional or armchair and discuss: who are the guardians of ‘taste’, why do they matter and what happens when they love or dislike an artist. Topics will include; AMP/AIR/ARIAs – do any of them really matter and why? What to do if JJJ won’t play your music and Rolling Stone won’t give you a cover and why do we see artists like Curse ov Dialect, Naked on the Vague, Gray Daturas, Oren Ambarchi, Ben Frost and The Necks bring reviewed in The Wire, yet they cannot get local coverage and exploring how media channels can make or break bands.
Instant Expert: Build A Noise-Making Fuzz Pedal From Scratch
Featuring: Christian Moraga ([cubisteffects]) and YOU!
Mods whiz Christian Moraga will teach you how to build, solder and wire your very own fuzz pedal from scratch, which after learning soldering technique and basic electronics you will test, play and keep your very own creation! NOTE: Limited capacity for this event! E-mail info@soundsummit.com.au to register. $20 registration cost covers all supplies, and your take-home fuzz pedal.
Check out www.thisisnotart.org for further details and don’t forget to like us on Facebook!
For images, interviews and further information please contact Hannah Cooper on media@thisisnotart.org / +61(0) 431 985 018.
Festival Directors:
Crack Theatre Festival – http://cracktheatrefestival.com/
David Finnigan and Gillian Schwab.
Critical Animals – www.criticalanimals.wordpress.com
Aden Rolfe and Sarah Caulfield.
Electrofringe – www.electrofringe.net
Daniel Green and Estee Wah.
The National Writers’ Festival – http://www.youngwritersfestival.org/
Sarah Howell, Talina McKenzie and Bhakthi Puvanenthiran.
Sound Summit - www.soundsummit.com.au
Andrew Tuttle, Kirsty Brown and Chris Hearn.
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