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hsl 2022 | Speculative beginnings
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Explore this year's artists |
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+ & THEIR BOLD NEW WORKS
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durational ｡･ﾟ installation ART
TRIANGULATE ｡･ﾟAMNION
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TRIANGULATE is a live three-point collusion of Sound Design, Sound Art, and Sound Generation reflecting the aesthetic explorations and deviations that have informed a 15+year audio practice. Audiences can expect a mixture of compositional and orchestrated sound design works, live manipulation of raw materials and field recordings, and live performing of electronic machines and noise generators in an immersive sonic experience.
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The guise of AMNION was originally a means for Roderick to contain his work and push it out into the world. The name was derived from the word amniotic referring to the ‘fluid that encases the embryo’ and this was reflected in his music as it was ‘amniotic’ and concerned mostly with applications in surround sound and audio specialization. AMNION quickly evolved into an identity that became a vehicle for Roderick’s work in ambient, industrial, noise and other curious sub genres of electronic music.
At its core, Roderick’s practice explores composition and sounds that directly reflect his own interests and the world around him. This focus expanded his practice into areas of field recording, instrumentation, live performance, machine building and electronics. This presented him with new ways to explore different mediums and formats that more directly relate to his work as a sound designer. |
The Holding ｡･ﾟEmiko Artemis
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The Holding is an interactive performance that explores the creation of a space embodied with sacredity, ritualism and mystical energy. The Holding asks the audience to consider what a space of healing looks like today, what shapes it, who holds it, what informs it?
The Holding responds to the nihilism present in much of contemporary life. The nuclear clock has moved forwards, the seas are rising and cannot be held back, food is running out, wars are erupting, and world leaders are imploding. Where does that leave you and me? Entering the space of The Holding is to enter a moment of quiet, enveloped in compassion, covered in gentle words, free floating in a place of love, here you can, for a moment, place worries aside and be present in a single moment of grace, guided by your Holding creator and host, Emiko Artemis. |
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Emiko Artemis is a South Australian visual artist who works across media with a focus on screen-based formats, performance and the creation of immersive, interactive environments. Emiko’s practice explores today’s world through a feminist lens, and she is interested in investigating how the contemporary body moves through both urban and wilderness spaces. Much of Emiko’s work presents contemporary enactments of ritual and mysticism, using costuming, props and set scenes to explore these ideas.
Emiko has been a practicing artist for a number of years, winning the University medal whilst studying her BA of Fine Arts and later completing a PhD. Emiko has exhibited nationally and has won a number of awards for her work as well as being interviewed in both print and radio media about her practice. Emiko lives and works from South Australia and is an active member of both the disability arts and LGBTQIA communities. |
Choir ｡･ﾟ Jordan Sibley
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A response to ruminating thought and states of worry, Choir proposes a solo expression of a group experience through the imitation of choral performance.
Improvised in collaboration with a loop pedal, the experience provides one woman the capacity of ten singers. Held in rythym by the strike of mechanical metronome, whose form exists as a piano string struck by a motorised plucker. Here, a lonely performer ignites herself with herself, with aide of technology. (An improvised and durational performance akin to a church choir, featuring one singer and a loop pedal.) |
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Jordan Sibley....
I'll spend hours watching the same episodes of the U.S. 'The Office' with a hollow feeling remaining in my gut. Draining my phone battery with social media scrolling whilst eating Mi Goreng-plastic-noodles. And at the end of the day I get into bed and dream about my pot plants being overwatered. It is only within the process of making Art that I find that my eyes align with the Life-Goal-Target. My artistic career is oriented toward process and not outcome. The meaning of my artworks often lend themselves to the process of their creation. It is possible that, after so many months of endless watching of 'The Office', all my artworks will secretly be about Michael Scott. |
iterative performances ｡･ﾟ
Chrysalis ~ serendipity of the mush. ｡･ﾟ Dani-Ela Kayler
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Chrysalis – the serendipity of the mush.
It begins, in and out of the incidental, a single word, random thought, fleeting moments and friction. The beginnings are insignificant. The beginnings are messy. Pay attention. It has already begun. |
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Dani-Ela Kayler is a Melbourne-based performing artist and educator. She has been creating, collaborating and performing self-devised, process–based performance works with colleagues and independently for the past 16 years, both locally in the hills, across Melbourne, interstate and overseas.
Dani-Ela has performed an array of choreographed, improvised, and site specific dance works presented at the Melbourne Fringe Festivals, Malthouse, Artshouse, Dancehouse, Crack Theatre Festival, as well as found spaces both urban and in nature. She has also been actively involved as a performer and volunteer with local community supported events such as hillsceneLIVE, Belgrave Lantern Parade, The Patch Festival and Burrinja Cultural Centre. She has presented site-specific work for hillsceneLIVE, PAVEfestival, and worked for Ausdance delivering the Big Danceflashmob in Lilydale. Most recently, Dani-Ela delivered a youth arts project HERE ME, activating public spaces in Belgrave, funded by the Yarra Ranges Council. Dani-Ela creating work that is visceral, playful and intimate. She seeks to create memorable live performance experiences, usually with some element of audience involvement, provoking reflective thought and emotional memory. She embraces opportunities that bring new audiences to experience contemporary dance practice and strengthen artistic community. |
Enter the Space ｡･ﾟThandi Bethune
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We enter the space and who we are is informed by its physical and social boundaries.
We enter the space and it is informed by us. This collaboration is constant; a dance of relation and behaviour that underscores how we move through the world. We enter the space and act in accordance with its function and our role and power in relation to it. As we move, our bodies wear the complex layers of these relations for others to interpret. Both as a reflection of how we see ourselves and how we think they see us. Becoming aware of all that informs our movement creates an opportunity to reform our patterns of behaviour, revealing what they say about us and what we are saying about each other through them. What happens if we move differently? |
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Thandiwe Bethune is a multidisciplinary artist and activist. She holds a BVA Honours from the Victorian College of the Arts and Sydney College of the Arts, where she was also active in the campaign to save the art school. Her practice explores the boundaries between art and activism seeking to draw people into both. Thandiwe has recently begun exploring the use of creative arts in community and health settings, teaching dance and art to adults and children of a wide range of abilities. Having recently studied creative arts and health at the University of Tasmania, her research explores movement as a means of communication and personal transformation.
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A photo album of the mundane ｡･ﾟ The Contingent
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The Contingent’s “A photo album of the mundane” is an homage to the small memories and hopes that make us who we are. Yes, we are individuals, staring down mortality with an open gaze. But we are also three Ansos losing time on a sleepless night. Two Meiki’s driving up a mountain. One five-year-old Kitt getting lost at the supermarket… or was that Toni? Through a collage of semi-autobiographical snapshots, a deeply-connected troupe improvise a collective true story that challenges the boundaries of identity. The Contingent are a Physical Theatre Improvisation Ensemble that perform live, intimate performances combining text and movement.
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The Contingent perform nuanced, bittersweet, improvised ensemble physical theatre.
Our artistic practice is based on a model of shared leadership. We train monthly and organise residential intensives each year. This shared time has fostered a deep respect, love, and understanding within the group. We have learned to work with each other as artists and as people, and we value both equally. Our members have been training and performing together in various combinations since the early 2000s, before debuting as The Contingent in 2018. We are eleven different people from a variety of disciplines, united by our lively curious minds, and our deep and enduring love of play. For hsL~Speculative Beginnings Toni Main, Meiki Apted and Kit Forbes are the Contingent at the Festival. |
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Synthcronicity-First Transmission ｡･ﾟWizardom
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Synthcronicity-First Transmission is a work exploring the patterns that are revealed through the synchronicity, those seemingly mundane but beautiful moments, that point to an underlying purpose in our individual experience.
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Wizardom is multidimensional artist Giuliano Avedikian
Wizardom’s music has uplifting, vulnerable, esoteric and thought-provoking lyrics. His music has a synth base and blends pop/rock/electronic with folk, world music sensibilities that connects with you on different levels. Many of his songs have an upbeat and entertaining feel no matter what the lyrics, which is influenced by his 80’s musical upbringing. Wizardom is a brand, a character, a way of being. His performances are transmissions sharing his life journey through multimedia including music and storytelling using elements of fantasy, magic, folklore and the esoteric. Whichever platform he can share his message of “follow your magic” he uses. |
/in-‘sitju⧗/ ｡･ﾟ Rachel Hunt
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IN SITU : in the natural or original position or place. Presented by Aerial Canvas, In Situ is an exploration of the life and breath of a space inhabited by diverse human movement. Contrasting machinations of the mundane with the performative movement genres of dance and aerial art, In Situ celebrates the unique energy created in a space by human movement. In her directorial debut, Rachel Hunt uses movement as the medium to contrast the mundane with the performative and showcases the individual effort within the collaborative. Director & choreographer Rachel Hunt will be showcasing the development of the work in a dynamic presentation at hsL: speculative beginnings. |
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Rachel Hunt - former Cirque du Soleil aerialist as director, wanting to increase accessibility of a new hybrid art form and format for presenting “circus” art.
Rachel Hunt is the founder of Aerial canvas and creator of Aerial Canvas Online – a world-class resource for Intermediate aerialists based on years of experience in aerial education and performance, including 5 years with Cirque du Soleil. |
Uncertainty ｡･ﾟIcastica Choreography/ Elena Osalde
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Nothing prepares you to experience being a baby again and learn how to fit into society. Finding yourself in a reinvention process seems to be a never-ending journey when you migrate. A group of immigrants with nothing and everything in common explore the uncertainty and ongoing experimentation required to thrive in Australia.
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Elena Osalde is a Mexican–Australian choreographer whose performative background includes poetry, a capella singing, ballet, jazz, tap, contemporary and creative dance. Elena further developed her dance teaching and choreographic skills with Andy Howitt, Katrina Rank, Karen Malek and Paul Malek. She deepened her understanding of Creative Dance with Claudia Mangiamele at Mangala Studios.
Elena has danced, choreographed and facilitated dance workshops since 2012 including site-specific choreography involving performances at Pride, Grief and Forging Ahead at The Art Gallery of Ballarat (2017), The Archivists with Katrina Rank for the Bold festival in Canberra (2019), and Quarantine Music Embodiment for the Hillscene Festival (2020). |
Singing the Ranges ｡･ﾟ Jenny Hickinbotham
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A multimedia performance in 4 chapters, telling the story of Jenny’s early childhood, where the seed of mental distress was sown and watered; a first
psychosis resulting from an assault; and the onset of Jenny’s second sychosis while at high school. Not even Alice can answer the question: How could this world, her family, be so demeaning, punitive, and unkind? In the final chapter, Jenny shares her leap from the blackness of that rabbit hole, the chaotic psychotic thinking, the demeaning disabling family, through her hand-written songs and performance. Further Jenny and her band will be joined on stage by two local talents, people from Yarra Ranges community, who also journey through trauma, mental health and/or neurodiverse challenges. Performers will include: Jenny Hickinbotham, vocals/song-writing, Mish Szekelyhidi percussion and their friend Mishka on flute. James Rushford, organ; Troy Rainbow guitar. |
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Jenny makes art because thoughts can be troublesome when living with schizophrenia.
"Jennifer’s work is honest, experimental, has a political and personal subjectivity that makes you want to stop and pay attention. The use of sound - voice, songs, assemblage is totally compelling." RMIT Liquid Architecture Graduate Prize for Sound Art PhD candidate at RMIT Fine Art: project title: Voices to Sing and Hands to Create: Creating Radical Political Defiance, seeking participants from the trauma, mental health and neurodiverse communities of Melbourne and regional Victoria to collaborate in writing their story into a song for performance, recording to an EP, visual art for an exhibition and a Song/StoryBook Decentring Australian Art, my own feature chapter and contribution to methodology with partners: Grace McQuilten RMIT, Anthony White Melbourne University and Tristan Harwood of The Monthly. Sticks and Stones will Break my Bones, but Words Can Totally Destroy my Mind!, Blindside Gallery Sound Series, Melbourne 6-23 April 2022, curated by Joel Stern, Liquid Architecture. Sam Pankhurst, internationally acclaimed musician, wrote: ‘I so loved playing together .... Best music I’ve played for a long time. A real honour to meet you and play your music.’ Melbourne Fringe 2021, Digital event and two Living Live shows at Woodend. |
The Hungry Poet ｡･ﾟKatie Lohner
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The Hungry Poet
Lonesome cowgirl seeks adventurous audience for a steamy night of erotic and comical spoken word. Must love chicken, poetry and country twang. Come indulge your senses in this ceremonial dance of words. She’ll make you wanna lick the plate clean. |
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Katie Lohner is a spoken word and multi-disciplinary artist from Naarm (Melbourne). Her quirky and dynamic performance style has touched audiences including Mother Tongue, Poetryspective, HillsceneLive and Melbourne Spoken Word Poetry Festival. Her poetry has been described as being unencumbered with a sense of freedom and joy. She was a 2018 finalist at The Melbourne Spoken Word Prize. Her practice also extends from poetry to a range of performance art and visual art.
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Magnetic Dialogues ｡･ﾟ X4NDR4
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X4NDR4 will present Magnetic Dialogues a sonic-poetic performance. The performance will celebrate X4NDR4's latest release Magnetism and include unreleased material.
Ethereal and mystical, X4NDR4's dreamy spoken-word, sonic soundscapes and performance poetry is crafted from the magic of language with assistance from digital technology and digital audio workstations. Magnetic Dialogues is the most recent quest in Josie Alexandra’s multidimensional speculative world-building, philosophical-artistic project {P01~L94CG}. |
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The project emerged from an ambition to re-contextualise Josie’s late grandma's politic - “the importance of knowing one's mind”. Striving to honour this worldview informed the development of the project’s key concepts; politic of interiority and life, you’re a computer game.
Central to the project are two alter egos Carto and X4NDR4. Their artistic processes celebrate and express non-binary and neurodiverse ways of being as avenues to know one's mind // personhood. Creative processes assist in building and reclaiming a strong personal interiority. An inward relationship developed via processes and practices investigating the Virtual, Physical and Digital. |
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Josie Alexander loves crafting neologisms and constantly has a concept they are turning over as they contemplate and experience the magic of life. From this playful and experimental realm, poetic lines dance across frames, whilst sensitive and powerful self-knowings look inward, before venturing out again.
Josie’s trans-disciplinary practice responds to the need for plausible futurisms for trans & neurodiverse folk. Currently, they’re working on {P01~L94CG} — a longform philosophical-artistic project, working with artistic persona’s X4NDR4 & Carto, the project re-narrativises understandings of personhood to celebrate non-binary & neurodiverse ways of being, reclaiming a sense of interiority through relationships to the virtual, physical and digital. |
i look good in short shorts XL ｡･ﾟ
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i look good in short shorts XL is an improv extravaganza to rival all previous short shorts events.
We have invited 10 years of hsL Alumni (the performers, artists and creatives that have made hsL the amazing experience it is today) to join us as we celebrate 10 iterations of hillsceneLIVE by getting their improv shorts out and collaborating in spontaneous making. |
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What is “I LOOK GOOD IN SHORT SHORTS XL”?
Glad you asked! I look good in short shorts started at the Mount Evelyn hsL and has grown into a must at every festival since. Short shorts sees two (or more) artists of different mediums, that have never made art together before, perform a 10 minute improvisation performance for the loving audience. Highlights have been noise artist Rod with contemporary dancer Sara, drummer Aiden with writer/performer Meiki Apted, saw player Nikki and festival director Toni.... and sooooo many more combinations. Anyone can participate as long as you can do it live! Put your name in the hat to perform and create an amazing new relationship live on stage. |
