Performance
Storytelling / performing / directing and project design are part of my extended art practise. Together with Jennifer Kornberger I founded Theatre of the Sea which produces a range of works including installations and immersive events, combining elements of site activation, experimental theatre, secular ritual, soundscape, film, and spoken-word performances. I also team up with artist and curator Tom Muller as Zweitgeist to realise projects.
The Rehearsal
was conceived as 'social sculpture' based on the change-making ideas of Rudolf Steiner and artist Joseph Beuys. Our aim was to form a learning hub, build capacity in community and harness the potential of the group for making transformative theatre. As the title of the work suggests, audience members did not spectate, but joined us to rehearse the future we wish to inhabit.
Somnus
was a work commissioned by the Fremantle biennale 2019 and written by Jennifer Kornberger. It was a radical enquiry into the nature of sleep, immersing audiences in the experiences of four sleepers as they cycled through the fear and ecstasy of REM and non-REM states. By day the pillared warehouse of PS Art Space was a sleep sanctuary, which transformed at night into an otherworld of kinetic still lives, nocturnal languages, poetry, and haunting music-scapes where audiences roamed between stages of sleep.
22 Pillars
was a spoken word performance event that took as its theme a poetic divination of place and its possibilities. It was a site-responsive work created for the Fremantle Biennale 2017. The project engaged twenty-two poets, comprising a mixed cohort of emerging and established writers. Each poet explored and revealed an archetype of Fremantle giving voice to the human and non-human world, seeking to draw the audience into a profound imagination of place and its innate possibilities.
Silence Speaks
(2017) was a creative dissent project staged with members of Re-think the Link. We were asked to create a public ritual in the centre of Perth where people could gather to experience the power of collective imagination in silent protest at the imminent destruction of wetlands. More than a thousand participants stood for one hour in Forrest Place, the largest silent protest to date in Perth.
The Delphi Project
was an experiment in collective imagination. We invited writers and cultural creatives to join us to develop exact, pictorial thinking and apply it to personal and world questions. The project began with an online development phase followed by an intensive week at the Athens School of Fine Art in Delphi, Greece. The results of this enquiry were published in The Delphi Project (2017 Horst Kornberger)
Seaborne
was a contemporary performance/ritual by Zweitgeist (a collaborative Duo between writer and artist and curator Tom Muller)to and myself to mark the commencement of the first Fremantle Biennale. The event was conceived as a meta-artwork that involves individual artists working with site-specific responses in a collective, equally site-specific performance piece. The emergence out of the sea of fully dressed artists at the iconic Bathers Beach, Fremantle, served as a metaphor for the artistic ‘High Tide’ that the Fremantle Biennale aimed to bring about.
Dark Light
was site-specific works for PS Art Space which extend the perception of place. It was a collaboration between Stanton, Geoffrey Wake and Zweitgeist (a collaborative duo consisting of Tom Mùller and myself). I augmented the event with a performance-talk on the alchemy of coloured light.
Oraculum
was was a spoken word event conceived as a ritual to renew time. It evolved out of a research process into deep time and engaged audiences in a poetic experience of time past, present and future. Composer Paul Lawrence created a soundscape of pure tones for the work.
The Beemaster
was a festival drama written by Jennifer Kornberger in collaboration with composer Paul Lawrence and directed by Horst Kornberger. The play,created for the national conference of the Anthroposophical Society in Australia was performed over four nights at the Point Walter Conference Centre in 2009. It contained in metaphoric form themes that form the paradigmatic and social background to the current bee crisis.