Welcome to Arts House Season Two, 2016

In the making of art we grapple with our failings and passions, our shared and often abominable histories, and celebrate the new ways of being and looking that emerge –a source of hope and possibility.

J R Brennan’s The Chat invites us to scrutinise our dubious morality and ethics as we make judgements on the crimes and punishments of others, while SQUIDSILO’s RIMA re-frames the abject facts behind the effects of solitary confinement and isolation. Gideon Obarzanek and Brian Lipson, in Two Jews walk into a theatre…, become their fathers and plunge us into the trauma of post-Holocaust politics and the intricacies and complexities of father-son relationships. And in September, Jodee Mundy’s extraordinary Imagined Touch: the deafblind  live art experience, immerses us in a world of altered sight, sound and senses.

And in the midst of it all I guarantee you will laugh.

Spring is festival time, when we all come out
to play… this year, as we invite Melbourne Fringe to take over every nook and cranny of Arts House, we’re partnering with Field Theory in Kids vs Art, a radio program in which kids tell us what they really think about contemporary art. In partnership with Melbourne Festival we present two wild childs of experimental performance: Sydney’s Ensemble Offspring

excavate hidden and forbidden music in The Secret Noise; while New York choreographer Faye Driscoll exuberantly invites us to remake ourselves, and the work, in Thank You For Coming: Attendance.

And as the summer begins we focus on our capacity to listen with three transdisciplinary works – Matthias Schack-Arnott’s Anicca; Ashley Dyer’s Tremor; and Chamber Made Opera’s Permission to Speak – that enrich and re-texture our aural and physical landscapes. We launch The Listening Room – a newly curated space and archive at Arts House designed for immersive listening of audio-driven works made by Arts House artists past and present. We welcome the inaugural Listening Room Artists in Residence, Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, as they consider imagined futures and what they might sound like.

Before we head off to Natimuk with 20 artists for the Time_Place_Space: Nomad travelling laboratory, we open our doors to young
and old with Summertime Party – a major artistic celebration for, and of, the Arts House community.

Turn up, turn on, or tune in. We invite you to join us in imagining the future.

Angharad Wynne-Jones
Artistic Director