Makeshift Gathering: Why Care About/For The Audience? Participation in Contemporary Performance
by Bron Batten (host and curator), Amrita Hepi, Malcolm Whittaker

Participatory performance challenges the boundaries of an audience, along with the artists who create it.

What part does care and consent play? And in what ways does participation transgress the audience/artist divide? Is it necessary at all? Is it exciting and daring – or merely cringe worthy?

From intimate and personal interactions to larger community spectacles, this Makeshift gathering will grapple with the care, ethics and strategies of participatory performance.

This event includes a free light dinner courtesy of Sorghum Sisters.

About the Artists

Bron Batten’s performance-making and curatorial practice involves the creation of live works featuring non-artists as collaborators. She creates performance situations which establish risk and tangible stakes within a theatrical environment, exploring vulnerability, improvisation, audience participation and the tension between the real and the performed. She has toured her work all over Australia, New Zealand, Europe and the UK and completed residencies in Paris, Berlin, Glasgow, New York, Chicago and Lithuania.

Amrita Hepi is an award-winning Choreographer and Dancer from Bundjulung (AUS) and Ngapuhi (NZ) territories. Her work is characterised by hybridity and engages in extending choreographic practices by combining dance and movement with other domains such as visual art, language and participatory research. An artist with a broad scope she has toured work in the form of performance and video nationally and internationally through theatres and galleries in Australia, Europe and the USA. Amrita trained at NAISDA and Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre New York. In 2019 she was a commissioned artist for The National: New Australian Art 2019 and the recipient of the dance web scholarship to be mentored by Anne Juren, Mette Ingvarsten and Annie Dorsen. In 2018 she was the recipient of the people’s choice award for the Keir Choreographic award and was also named one of Forbes Asia 30 under 30. An artist with a broad reach, Amrita combines her interest in materials/objects and choreography in the search for allegory & advocacy for first nations sovereignty with a compelling and diverse physical practice.

Malcolm Whittaker is a cis male who works as an artist, writer, researcher and performer. He does this in solo pursuits, as a founding member of performance collective Team MESS and in collaborations with other artists and non-artists. His work is mostly made and executed through the engagement of participants and collaborators in the framing of play spaces that adopt social forms and rituals of popular culture and the everyday.