the stare
If we don't look we can't see, and if we can't see we can't know, so how can we understand?
Challenging the way we view people living with disability, The STARE addresses uncomfortable and too often unspoken ‘norms’. Through a series of portraits, audio/video recordings and live workshops/performances the project creates conversation to reconstruct what is normal. Dedicated to reflecting the diverse world we live in, The STARE celebrates difference and brings thought-provoking portraits of disability to shop fronts, galleries, billboards, personal and public screens.
In 2021, The STARE has been presented on the City of Hobart Loop screen, Metro buses, poster poles, Win TV and the City of Hobart Soap Boxes in Mathers Place.
Additional episodes will be released through 2022 with the target of a saturation campaign across Tasmania’s major billboards, airways, TV screens and personal devices in 2023.
Lead Creatives: Kelly Drummond Cawthon, Dan Cripps, Angus Ashton, Willoh S. Weiland, JR Brennan, Keith Deverell, Julia Drouhin
Partners: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Win TV, GO Transit, City of Hobart, Preset Gallery
Funding: Arts Tasmania: New Work New Markets, City of Hobart
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In the works
Bending the WIND
Bending the WIND
Bending the WIND
We create a place where fans cease to turn and autumn leaves forget to fall.
Where weather warning sounds are heard and a lost kite surfer flies.
The wind grasps sentences and picks out words to string together and pass along, in whatever language needs to be heard.
-Charlie Smith-
Bending the WIND is a contemporary performance work that features live musicians, projections and theatre. Audiences will feel the wind, hear it and be moved by it. The finished work will feature a commissioned score by Dean Stevenson, including live performance by Warren Mason, Emily Sanzaro and the SEE ensemble.
Organically this work has evolved through residencies in significantly different places. This is now integral to its form and vision. The work is site specifically aware, with a respect for land and acknowledgement of ownership. We have committed to continue to create the work through additional residencies across the state. Feeling the wind in each place, finding the windiest places on the island to move in, listen to and create.
Lead Creatives: Charlie Smith, Dean Stevenson, Cary Littleford, Warren Mason
Partners: Tasmania Performs, Tasdance, Moonah Arts Centre, Nayri Niara, Arts House Melbourne
Funding: Arts Tasmania , RANT Regional Arts
[IN]SECURITY
Bending the WIND
Bending the WIND
A raucous cabaret.
When maths and the performing arts industry says you don’t have much time, what do you do? Kill yourself, or make a show? Paul and Kelly have chosen the latter.
In a place where life meets death, where success confronts failure, pop meets classical, philosophy meets trash talk and man meets woman, worlds collide in this uncompromising developing work of gender bending cabaret, performance art, and sport.
Sex on stage is risque, Death on stage is hard to pull off even for Shakespearian actors - will it come too late, too soon or just in time for these artists and their acts?
Lead Creatives: Kelly Drummond Cawthon, Paul Hedley Roberts, Amanda Hodder
Partners: MONA FOMA, Footscray Arts Centre
Funding: Myer Foundation
The BEAUTY Project
The BEAUTY Project
The BEAUTY Project
Birds can eat and fly anywhere they want to go
-Elise Romaszko-
Elise Romaszko is researching fashion, design and beauty to create a podcast meets pop-up runway performance that reminds us that we are all human and that we all wear clothes and have a desire to feel fashion-able.
Common social perceptions about disabled people mean that non-disabled people are perennially surprised by the fact that, gosh, we really are just like them. One area where that plays out in really frustrating ways is when it comes to fashion disabled people. Or, should we say, the lack thereof, because there are almost no designers focusing specifically on designing clothes for people using wheelchairs and other mobility devices, or people with disabilities that may affect limb length and body structure.
The BEAUTY Project addresses this problem head on and brings the conversation into our public spaces. Through research with designers, field interviews, podcasts and public pop-up runways, the BEAUTY Project forces our eyes and minds to perceive beauty not as a static artifact of conventional perfection but as a dynamic construct of effort and intentionality.
Lead Creatives: Elise Romaszko, Michelle Boyd, Michelle Maynard, Julia Drouhin
Partners: Ten Days on the Island, City of Hobart
Funding: City of Hobart, Arts Tasmania
The BRIDGE
The BEAUTY Project
The BEAUTY Project
The bridge is the space between two mirrors
You come in and go out of the mirrors
It is dark .It is loud. It is cold
It smells of metal and glass
Space
The multiverse of the world we are in
It is our virtual reality
We will surrender. To the void in us
To the static living somewhere
We will see and feel . Something. Someone
-Luke John Campbell-
The BRIDGE is the second work in a trilogy of cross art form investigations. Inside an avatar, surrounded by drums and witnessed only as a reflection, Luke is exploring the conceptual space between who we think we see and our expectations of them.
Viewers will question what and who they are seeing and consider whether they judge a book by its cover.
Lead Creatives: Luke John Campbell, Matthew Fargher, Jason James, Julia Drouhin
Partners: Performance Space NSW, the Unconformity, Tasdance, Constance ARI, Rosny College
Funding: Australia Council for the Arts, RANT Regional Arts
the archive
Let Me Dry Your Eyes
Let Me Dry Your Eyes
Let Me Dry Your Eyes
the ocean is filled with tears
And the sea turns into a mirror There's a whale in the moon when it's clear And a bird on the tide
- Tom Waits
Let Me Dry Your Eyes is a love story of sorts where two beings - a bird and a whale - are connected only where they can meet at the water’s surface. Audience will be invited to experience the work at the water’s edge, listen and view underwater through telescopes and hydrophones and possibly even join us in the pool.
Presented by Second Echo Ensemble and MONA FOMA 2021
Supported by Arts Tasmania, the Alcorso Foundation, Regional Arts Fund , City of Hobart and SEE supporters.
The CHAIN
Let Me Dry Your Eyes
Let Me Dry Your Eyes
The eternal chain and the chain of who we are. The constant on and on.
We are never really gone.
Nothing is ever lost. The chain reaction. The rise and fall. The perpetual cycle.
The internal and the eternal.
The water teaches us the wisdom to Surrender to life and death. In my mind I surrender to the Breath. Without acceptance there will be a violent storm. Go with the flow.
Go with the chain.
Breathing it is life and it gives us birth. Listen to the water. The volume. The sound flowing and falling. Listen. To the water. Flowing. Falling. Falling flowing. Surrender.
Accepting death and life and death
THE CHAIN is an installation based performance created at Wilkinson's point.
Presented by Second Echo Ensemble and Constance ARI.
Supported by Arts Tasmania, Regional Arts Fund Glenorchy City Council, Tasmania Performs, Moonah Arts Centre, Constance ARI, Rosny College and SEE supporters.
Rite of Spring
Let Me Dry Your Eyes
Rite of Spring
Through dance, physical theatre and immersive design, we journey deep into the promise of spring. Interiors are revealed; the wishful linings of pockets, secrets stained on petticoats, histories and landscapes tattooed on the heart. Our hopes, expectations, and choices. Our rights and dreams. Rite of Spring is a grand procession: audience and performers traveling together. On a journey with friends, strangers and neighbors, we move at the same pace and in the same rhythm. We feel geography and celebrate moving and being moved.
Development Showing:
Ten Days on the Island RAWspace 2015, Undercover Artists Festival, Brisbane
Premiere: Salamanca MOVES 2016
Produced by Second Echo Ensemble in association with Tasmanian Theatre Company and Salamanca MOVES
Director: Kelly Drummond Cawthon
Design Team: Nick Higgins, Hanna Parsinnen, Roz Wren
Musical Director: Michael Fortescue
Performance: Luke Campbell, Aidan Chick, Alma Faludi, Rodrigo Diaz-Icasuriaga, Zeb Direen, Rob Flehr, Bryony Geeves, David Montgomery, Alexandra Morris-Baguley, Bridget Nicklason-King, Elise Romaszko, Charlie Smith, William Webster.
Contested Land
Contested Land
Rite of Spring
Contested Land is conceived and directed by Charlie Smith. A founding member of SEE, Charlie is working with ideas that are both quietly political and socially evocative. Investigating the history of nations, conflicts both embodied and landscaped, and lines drawn in the sand, Contested Land explores our sense of connection and what it means to us to take, give, share and fight over our contested lands.
Development Showings: Dancehouse Room to Move 2016 , Melbourne, Ten Days on the Island RAWspace 2017, You Are Here Festival, Canberra 2017
Presenting partners: Moonah MOVES and Tasmanian Theatre Company.
Director: Charlie Smith
Creative Producer: Kelly Drummond Cawthon
Performance: Second Echo Ensemble with Joshua Langford
Musical Directors: Matthew Fargher and Michael Fortescue
Original Recorded Music Works by: Rhys Gray and Thomas Misson, commissioned and recorded for Contested Land by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Gregory Stephens.
Design: Roz Wren
By My Hand
Contested Land
By My Hand
By My Hand is an immersive physical theatre work set within a rigorously defined structural lattice of rope and rock. It is a kinesthetic and sensory exploration of how we are caught up and held in place by our perceptions, our beliefs, and our rigidly held constructs of authority.
That which constrains us, defines us. That which contains us, releases us.
Premiere: DARK MOFO 2018
Tour to Lonely in the Rain Festival 2018, Finland
Choreographer: Luke Campbell Creative Producer: Kelly Drummond Cawthon
Music Direction: Matthew Fargher Performance: Luke Campbell, Kelly Drummond Cawthon, Alma Faludi, Matthew Fargher, Michael Fortescue, Jusso Pakarinen, William Webster, Anna Maria Vaisanen, Bella Young
Visual Installation: Garth Knight
Costume Design: Roz Wren
Production Manager/Lighting Design: Sam Cole
Produced by Dark MOFO and SEE
Producing Partner: Tasmanian Theatre Company
Supported by City of Hobart, Creative Hobart, kdcWORKS, Dark MOFO, Match Creative Partnerships Australia, Arts Tasmania and SEE supporters.