Whispering limbs: cross-cultural collaboration in a hybrid of contemporary dance, media, sound and improvisation

Whispering Limbs was a performance collaboration between Cairns-based duo Bonemap, Brisbane-based dance trio Polytoxic, Indigenous Cairns-based dancer Earl Rosas and Townsville-based sound artist Steven Campbell. The collaboration was facilitated by Bonemap's principal artists, Rebecca Youdell and Russell Milledge. Through the lens of cross-cultural collaboration, the work places the dancers in a sweep of surreal landscapes, exploring a range of contemporary cultural and cross-cultural themes within a highly integrated, immersive and improvised performance arena. Devised within two weeks and presented over three nights during the 2009 Cairns On Edge Contemporary Media and Performance Festival, Whispering Limbs presents a cultural mix of Indigenous, Polynesian and Caucasian performance. This paper details the development process, the performance environment, the main themes of the work and the manner in which these themes were realised through a focus on the choreography, video projections and sound design in four of the work's twelve scenes

Bonemap's fluid hybridisation

Can an ecological perspective provide cues for hybrid arts practice? Over the last fifteen years, Bonemap's novel collaborative method has produced hybrid and genre independent works within the broad field of contemporary arts. Their specific creative methodology relates to a practice and process imbued with an ecological perspective. The approach incorporates a multimodal and intermedial praxis that expands static representations of human creative environments and genres. Using flux, improvisation, participatory and responsive strategies to harness generative form it is argued that Bonemap work articulate a metaphor of fluid hybridisation. The authors cite the creative works of Bonemap and other influencers to approach contemporary arts practice with an ecological perspective producing evidence of a fluid hybridisation of artistic genre. Bonemap's key methodological operations are responsive through the embodiment of ecological perceptions, improvisatory through the virtual and the visceral, and participatory through the experience of the implied and explicit. Practiced as spatial concepts, that inform methodological approaches to practice, Bonemap's ecological and artistic concerns consider hybridity and intermediality as linking materiality and immateriality. The evidence considers the hybrid materiality of 'unknowing' and 'ephemerality' within creative research that further challenges conventions of knowledge creation and the categorization of form. Bonemap's methods are shown as moving towards a proposal for fluid hybridity that is set adrift in the sublime aim to articulate an ecological understanding of interconnected meaning and associations as a unique poetic vessel that bridges the interstices of genre

Collective Future: a consultation with the the Creative and Cultural Sector in Cairns 2011

This paper provides an overview of the Cultural and Creative industries sector consultation initiated by James Cook University, School of Creative Arts (JCU SoCA). The study's context the JCU 2011 Curriculum Refresh project is curriculum refresh and the continued development of the Bachelor of Creative Industries program in Cairns. Over twenty key stakeholders participated in substantial conversations during September - October 2011, this dialogue underpins the ideas of the paper and subsequent recommendations. Key stakeholders varied in scale and scope with the unifying traits of appropriate core sector business, and the geographic reach of Cairns and its surrounds. Those sampled include small to medium enterprises, leading tropical institutions, large events, and major commercial and government institutions. Three tiers of government were also sampled, and provide a context of the strata of local, state and federal perspectives.\ud \ud The study uses the 'Tropics' as a central notion and frames the relationship of those approached. Within the Far Northern Queensland framework many industry individuals sympathised with a local, national and international context, the region as a gateway to the Asia-Pacific and globalised outlook. A majority of those sampled are long-term residents or have a long investment in the region, the rest are newer residents with three being new to their role this year. The Australia Council representative had previously worked on the JCU Vincent Campus, but did not indulge in the second and third questions in relation to the tropics, and spoke from a national context

Spectropica

Spectropica is a contemporary art event, an urban intervention incorporating thermal spectrum imaging data projection, and live performer/participant interaction. Operating as an intermedial performance presentation in exterior urban sites such as an exposed parking station surrounded by high-rise buildings or structures. The event experience can be conceptualised for what might be considered found spaces and places as site-specific interventions. \ud \ud Iteration one: On Edge Media and Performance Festival, Cairns\ud \ud Projected video sequences of non-sequitur tropical narratives shot with iPhones along with live interactive thermal spectrum imaging displayed on the huge wall surfaces provided by architectural firewalls and external walls of lift shafts as seen from alleyways and parking lots. One projection illuminated a multi-story elevator column with live interactive thermographic images over 20 metres high. The second overlaid the entire firewall of an adjacent multi-story property with high definition video sequences shot using iPhones.\ud \ud Iteration two: Dance Science program CSIRO Discovery Centre, Canberra\ud \ud Combining the orientation of audiences in relation to built structures invoked the design comprising of multiple supersized projections and a sonic zone for live dance / sound performance. Set in a public thoroughfare between neighboring buildings provided spatial relationships and conversations between projection and performance. Thermal imaging and depth sensors were channeled through the digital imaging software and programming to be projected live in relationship to the pre-eminent presence of the dancer.\u

Body Blow

Creature\ud A group exhibition by artists from the Cairns region which explores the nature of the creature, whether destructive force of nature or gentle loving spirit, through a range of different media.\ud \ud Body Blow\ud The seasons are a creature whose moods emphasise the\ud ephemeral nature of human mortality. Through our place\ud on this land, through the imagination of place and\ud identity, we are embodying histories in motion. The\ud weather reaches the smallest things; and as a creature\ud its presence, at times, is beyond care of inhabitation or\ud emotion issuing a body blow to humanity.\u

The Exquisite Resonance of Memory

The Exquisite Resonance of Memory is a work about how\ud memories are encountered through provenance and circumstance. The manifestation of collective or cultural\ud memory through reframing the visual representation\ud of the Baroque (to pin-point a time of early European\ud awareness of the Australian continent) reflects on the role\ud memory plays in lending form and consequence to our\ud idea of self.\ud \ud The work dramatises the way memory functions through\ud association, leaps, or dislocates to become the shadows of\ud ideas and how the more profound of these occurrences\ud can give us a new understanding of our relationship with\ud the world

Terrestrial Nerve

Terrestrial Nerve is a thirtyfive minute immersive performance installation suitable for theatre or gallery setting. Created as a dynamic and sublime media arts performance influenced by encounters with frontier zones, border crossings and psychological inhabitation.\ud \ud The set is charged with the representation of meteorological events imaginatively indicating an enchanted world. Inanimate material suddenly becomes a compelling character in a non sequitur surrealist narrative. Dance performers respond to the elaboration of a fantastical place, where ephemeral forces are sculpted into enigmatic identities in overt and subtle ways. At the heart of the work, anatomical, spiritual, environmental and topographical themes, imbue a liminal terrain, evocative of cosmological events induced by wind and water

Terrestrial nerve

Terrestrial Nerve is a thirty-five minute immersive performance installation suitable for theatre or gallery setting. Created as a dynamic and sublime media arts performance influenced by encounters with frontier zones, border crossings and psychological inhabitation. The set is charged with the representation of meteorological events imaginatively indicating an enchanted world. Inanimate material suddenly becomes a compelling character in a non sequitur surrealist narrative. Dance performers respond to the elaboration of a fantastical place, where ephemeral forces are sculpted into enigmatic identities in overt and subtle ways. At the heart of the work, anatomical, spiritual, environmental and topographical themes, imbue a liminal terrain, evocative of cosmological events induced by wind and water

Lodestar

Lodestar is a performance installation concerned with interpretations of intercultural dialogue in northern Australia. The audience explored the theatrical space, much like they might explore a gallery of visual objects. The audience situate themselves to experience the work from different view-points within the auditorium, traversing the installations, while the performance episodes unfolded.\ud \ud The audience expectations met with the experience of a theatrical world constructed scenographically and sensuously with representations and enactments of a world created by the artists based on ideas of the fantastical and wondrous.\ud \ud What is Lodestar? A 'lodestar' or guiding star is used in celestial navigation and metaphorically represents a guiding principle. You use a lodestar to help you find your way.\ud \ud Critical thinker Walter Benjamin (1940) proposed the organizing principle of a constellation to describe place and history. By drawing on Benjamin and other theories, the concept of the constellation becomes a multi-faceted metaphor that suggests negotiating the politics and time of place without fixing or limiting it to a linear concept.\ud \ud Lodestar explores imagined terrains with a lens on the contested psychologies and motivational implications of the Australian landscape. A process of mutual tolerance, vernacular and physical dramaturgy was a key to coalesce artistic disciplines and to describing imagined or magic geographies. Lodestar revealed the liminal terrain of shared environments in the microcosm of Australia’s far north