The Substation/​ Artist/​Chamber Made/

A live performance work for distributed voice and body.

My Self in That Moment is a new hybrid performance work for an ensemble of 49 tablets and a solo vocalist, exploring the fragmented and distributed self in the digital age.

The swiftly evolving ability to replicate, deconstruct and distribute a person’s image and voice presents a swathe of possibilities and conundrums. The edges of self are increasingly frayed as our relationship with devices and systems becomes ever more entangled, fragmenting notions of ‘me’ and ‘mine’.

Interrogating questions around identity, agency, ownership and the myriad systems that lay beneath the distribution of data, My Self in That Moment is a reflection on the voice and body and what it means to be digitally captured and archived.

“How much agency do I have of a past self that’s been funnelled through machines? How much of that is me? Well, I don’t know. I don’t know that.” — Tina Stefanou (performer).

Led by Chamber Made Artistic Director, Tamara Saulwick, with composition by Peter Knight, My Self in That Moment continues the company’s record of engaging with new forms and technologies in live performance and music. For My Self in That Moment Steve Berrick has developed a system where personal devices in the form of tablets are networked to function as a visual and sonic ensemble, opening up exciting possibilities for the spatialization of image and sound.

Featuring the recorded voices and images of three astonishing vocalist/collaborators, Jessica Aszodi, Alice Hui-Sheng Chang and Tina Stefanou, My Self in That Moment also incorporates a rich visual language developed for the piece by photographer Sarah Walker and designers Amelia Lever-Davidson and Geoffrey Watson.

This premiere season at The Substation will be performed solo by Jessica Aszodi and Tina Stefanou in alternate performances.

DATES & TIMES

27–30 July 2022
Wed–Sat, 7pm and 9pm each night

Duration: 50 minutes for each performance

Due to unforeseen circumstances, Tina Stefanou will not be performing on Wednesday 27 July and Thursday 28 July. Performances will still go ahead and Jessica Aszodi will be performing both the 7pm and 9pm My Self in That Moment shows.

MORE ABOUT CHAMBER MADE

Interrogating the intersections of music, sound and contemporary performance, Chamber Made creates works that speak directly to a 21st century Australia enriched by the meeting and intersection of cultures.

The company is led by Artistic Director Tamara Saulwick who, with a career spanning more than 20 years, brings to her role a deep knowledge of cross-artform collaborative practice. Saulwick specialises in creating sound-based works and collaborating with composers and musicians in cross-artform contexts.

Chamber Made is renowned for cultivating adventurous collaborations between composers, sound artists, directors, performance-makers and media artists, disrupting and rewriting conventions to discover new forms of expression. Bringing contemporary composition and performance dramaturgy together in ever-shifting forms, Chamber Made has presented over 100 performance seasons in Australia, NZ, Asia, Europe, USA and South America since it was founded in 1988.

CONTENT WARNING

This performance contains low light levels, high noise levels, screen-based flashing imagery, partial nudity and content which some viewers may find unsettling.

Please note there will be no readmission once the performance has started.

Food, drink and personal photography/videography are not permitted.

DOCUMENTATION

Filming and photography will take place during both performances for My Self in That Moment on Friday 29 July at 7pm and 9pm.

CREDITS

Concept & Direction: Tamara Saulwick
Performer & Collaborator: Jessica Aszodi
Performer & Collaborator: Alice Hui-Sheng Chang
Performer & Collaborator: Tina Stefanou
Composer & Sound Artist: Peter Knight
Photographer: Sarah Walker
Dramaturg: Martyn Coutts
Creative Coder & Programmer: Steve Berrick
Lighting Designer: Amelia Lever-Davidson
Costume: Geoffrey Watson
Technical Operation: Giovanna Yate Gonzalez
Production Manager: Matt Gingold
Producer: Kylie McRae

Hi-Viz Practice Exchange returns in 2021 with an online program of artist talks, listening sessions and interactive activities.

Presented by Chamber Made and The Substation, Hi-Viz Practice Exchange aims to deepen dialogue around cross-artform practice, placing a particular emphasis on minoritised genders, including people living beyond the binary and cis women, whose work resides at the intersection of performance, sound, and music. The online program provides an opportunity to foster dialogue, build networks, and nurture new understandings between performance makers, theatre directors, composers, and sound artists.

In support of this year’s theme 'Sound as Knowledge Exchange', guest curators Aviva Endean, Amos Gebhardt and Stéphanie Kabanyana Kanyandekwe have crafted the curatorial theme, program and guest speakers.

To view the full program please visit chambermade.org

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

‘Sound as Knowledge Exchange’ invites contemplation of sound as a relational medium operating across many registers and knowledge systems. Sound has a unique ontological ability to signal both presences and absences, in the large and small, of the past and present. It reflects the very contours of our world by shaping and being shaped by all phenomena from language, extinction, cultural meaning, storytelling, birth and ecologies.

Sound however is not heard equally. Our ability to know, connect and balance is impacted by dominant registers and perceptual hierarchies that habituate our sense of listening. This sensorial distortion can work at the intimate scale of the body, and echo out to a national, cultural and species level.

We are interested in individual and collective practices which disrupt the habitual, to ask how expanding an attunement to sound can generate cultures of change? Care and connectivity? Protest and survival?

Three key sessions addressing these ideas are Storytelling & Sensory Archive, Amplification & Entanglement and Collectivity & Attunement. Within these sessions, we invite a range of artists working at the nexus of sound, performance and music to reflect on how the sounds we choose to amplify impact who we are and how we share existence.

REGISTRATION

Participants will require a free Zoom account in order to register for this event.

Chamber Made’s Hi-Viz Practice Exchange is back for 2020 and we’re taking it online.

To see the full program visit our new dedicated Hi-Viz Website

With artist talks, listening sessions, participatory workshops, provocations, break out sessions, and performance, Hi-Viz is a day dedicated to artistic practice designed to stimulate, connect, and recharge.

We are all sharing one of the most unusual years in our lifetimes where time has become slippery, bodies dangerous, and the real and virtual increasingly entangled. What happens to artistic practice at a time like this? How does collaboration and creating new work shift? What do you let go of and what are you determined to hold onto?

Please join us online to tease out some of these questions.

A work that sweeps across the senses, Dragon Ladies Don’t Weep is new music icon Margaret Leng Tan’s exploration of memory, time, control and loss.

A native of Singapore, Tan forged a path as a major force within the American avant-garde, collaborating with such giants as John Cage and George Crumb. Her stellar career is a touchstone for the past 50 years of experimental music lineage.

Dragon Ladies Don’t Weep combines spoken and recorded text, projected images, and original composition for prepared piano, toy piano, percussion and toys by Tan’s long-term collaborator Erik Grisworld.

Created by a team of Singaporean and Australian artists led by Chamber Made director Tamara Saulwick and performed by Tan, this cross-cultural collaboration is an evocative collage of the forces that have shaped Tan’s life and how music has been both her passion and her refuge.

Opening the evening is the world premiere of an international collaboration between Japanese filmmaker Makino Takashi and Australian composer Lawrence English.

Inspired by the concepts found in the first chapter of Australian author Greg Egan’s legendary science fiction masterpiece of the same name, Diasphora presents a uniquely utopian reading of what life might be like if we surrender to the fact that software can be, and in fact is already, superhumanly organic. As we theorise and catastrophize about the perils of handing over control to an AI we often overlook the possibility that software could not only save our species but that it could also be a beautiful step in evolution towards an ethereal, non-body, consciousness. Using projection, illusions and lasers, a truly futuristic visual design houses an ensemble of extraordinary musicians who are charged with sonifying the complex and multi-layered build of a digital life-form.

The creative team is led by composer and audio-visual artist Robin Fox working in close collaboration with Chamber Made Artistic Director dramaturg and co-director Tamara Saulwick, co-composer and violinist Erkki Veltheim, video artist and system designer Nick Roux, and musician / performers Madeleine Flynn (ondes musicales and Moog synth) and Georgina Darvidis (vocals and theremin), with lighting design by Amelia Lever-Davidson.

Presented by The Substation, Melbourne International Arts Festival and Chamber Made. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council.

Hi-Viz Practice Exchange is a new Chamber Made initiative for women working across performance, sound and music. It’s is a day of discussions, exchanges, and interactions aimed at deepening dialogue around cross-artform practice. Hi-Viz is for everyone in this space, from emerging to established artists. Hi-Viz is designed to bring women performance-makers, directors, composers, and sound artists into conversation with one another. The practice exchange is intended to deepen dialogue, build networks, and nurture new understandings between women performance makers, theatre directors, composers, and sound artists.