Performance art is a little hot, a little heavy
Gliding washing machines, swinging hills hoists and ironing board instruments merge with dancers, singers and musicians in a new immersive interactive show from the Ironing Maidens.
Cairns based musician and projection artist Melania Jack and CQUniversity’s Patty Preece, a musician and music academic, have produced their most ambitious interactive live show yet – Hot and Heavy.
Hot and Heavy is an aural, visual and sensory experience that invites you to ‘lose your friends, go deep and shake free’.
Audiences are given the opportunity to explore a queer new world where domesticity has been made strange, appliances are defamiliarised, and the casual horrors of human production lines and capitalist consumption are vividly transformed.
Transcript
My latest project is called hot and heavy it is a fully immersive interactive exploration I guess of capitalism and a search for new futures amidst the broken down beat of a washing machine so I guess this the new work is an expansion of my my work in the band The Ironing Maidens this work we collaborated with a whole bunch of people but primarily a choreographer um and a rigger from down south and the Ironing Maidens band which I usually play in in this work we really wanted to I guess you know kind of explore new worlds but to kind of get there we had to take people through a journey so we sort of had this structure where in the outside world you taken through I guess the demise of capitalism so you're in the factory you're a factory worker you have to do stuff you know in order to kind of get what this you know place is trying to tell you you know I guess in order to have empathy for you know factory workers we need to feel what it's like to be have no control to be told what to do to you know experience that physical pain from you know doing the same one repetitive action the whole time so it is a little bit fun but it is also you know a little bit serious as well we use projection and we use sound we have performance artists and dancers that will kind of I guess facilitate an experience for the audience in this space so when you walk into hot and heavy the first world that you kind of experience is the factory world and it's sort of absurd you know there's washing lines hanging from the ceiling with you know oversized clothing on it on those washing lines we project kind of I guess the other side of the story so using glitch feminism as a lens here it's like kind of looking at the error or the matrix or seeing another way or another possibility there's a lot of people working on this show my partner who's my primary you know collaborator Melania Jack is a projection artist and a you know musician as well we work with a choreographer Leanne Vizer her last work was the opening of the FIFA Women's World Cup so she does like kind of large scale choreography one of the main focuses of the work was to take a look at climate change so previously my works focused mostly on gender so we really wanted to shift the focus and look at how we can you know I guess mobilize audiences make them think about climate change and make them want to do something
“The new work is an expansion of my work with the band Ironing Maidens, but here we collaborated with a whole bunch of people including an amazing choreographer, Leigh-Anne Vizer, renowned for her work at the opening of the FIFA Women’s World Cup,” explained Preece.
“In this work we really wanted to explore new worlds, but to get there we had to take people on a journey, exploring the demise of capitalism and the underlying themes of climate change.
“We wanted to immobilise audiences, get them thinking about real societal issues and make them want to do something about it.”
Preece explained that the project aims to make visible issues of transnational labour, heteronormative individualism, and the ecological impacts of consumerism.
The performance uses projection, sound, performance artists and dancers to facilitate the experience for the audience.
Breaking down the traditional fourth wall of theatre, Hot and Heavy blurs and breaks the lines between performer and audience to enable participants to feel the shift from individualism to collectivism.
Preece has explored Hot and Heavy’s performance techniques and theories in a new paper presented at the recent International Symposium on Electronic Art in Brisbane.
“The paper looks at Theory U, a framework we used in the project, and how it can be applied in a performance context,” Preece explained.
As a sidenote, Preece has also just competed a new installation piece, a video and sound artwork, at the Vacant Assembly at West End in Brisbane.
“It’s a little bit silly, and a little bit fun, but you can basically use an iron to control the images and the sounds.”
