Welcome to Season One March – May 2013

Dance. SONG. And a great big artistic laboratory. This season looks like a ‘holy trinity’ of creating, presenting and collaborating across art forms, venues and several eventful months.

Dance Massive is back! This extraordinary biennial event created by Arts House, Dance House and the Malthouse returns for round three, again confirming our city as Australia’s undisputed dance capital. As a model for saturation programming Dance Massive is both disarmingly simple and magnificently successful.

Arts House’s Massive shows draw from Melbourne’s rich dance ecology, with an added charge of energy provided by our commissioning of a new work by Broome-based Dalisa Pigram. The stunning Gudirr Gudirr is conceived, cochoreographed and performed by Pigram, directed/co-choreographed by Koen Augustijnen of Belgium’s les ballets C de la B, and with video by Vernon Ah Kee. Pigram takes her place amid a stellar line-up of Melbourne makers – flip through the pages and you’ll find names like Guerin, Lake, Lloyd, Hamilton, Abbott, Darbyshire and more… You’ll see some of the most distinctive, fearless work in Australia right now at Dance Massive.

And then there is SONG. Who could stand tall beside the sublime mountains of the Massive? – Ranters Theatre. You’ll have a couple of weeks to draw breath while the sprung floors are dismantled, before this bold premiere from one of Melbourne’s sharpest, edgiest and smartest theatre companies. Departing from Ranters’ text-based work, SONG is a multi-artform, multi-sensory collaboration with rising international visual-arts star Laura Lima (Brazil) and mellifluous UK musician James Tyson.

This season we’re thrilled to have no less than ten CultureLAB projects in development at Arts House, so to top off an already-huge output we present UNDONE – a day of ideas, feedback and samplings (and possibly some artistic torment) from our incredible array of CultureLAB artists. Come up to the LAB on Saturday 11 May to see where they’ve got to, or where they’re going, and contribute your opinion on how to make it better. Top it off with a carousing night of great sounds, fermenting ideas and fermented beverages at the Arts House bar.

Thanks in advance to you, our audience, for your energy and enthusiasm, commitment and curiosity!

Angharad Wynne-Jones
Creative Producer, Arts House