Brand X has launched Season 5 of its contemporary performance program, The Flying Nun premiering at East Sydney Community Arts Centre from October – December 2020. Originally slated for February – May, but delayed due to COVID-19, Brand X is thrilled to finally present this suite of experimental new works in its intimate COVID-safe* Darlinghurst venue.
Established in 2018, The Flying Nun is a biannual showcase of contemporary performance work developed through performing arts residencies offered by Brand X at East Sydney Community Arts Centre. To date, the program has supported 56 emerging and independent ensembles to realise new ideas that push creative boundaries. A celebration of fringe counter-culture, The Flying Nun was created to incubate experimental projects that more conventional performance spaces hesitate to take a risk on and provides a platform for artists to test out new ideas and take them to the next level.
Highlights from The Flying Nun Season 5.2 ‘Back to Live’ include:
- Harriet Gillies’ experimental solo performance The Power of the Holy Spirit, returning after a sell-out season in 2019 that was also awarded ‘Best Experimental Performance’ at Melbourne Fringe 2019. Audiences can expect something akin to a Ted Talk on acid and a performative lecture on mushrooms. It’s an existential joie de vivre to celebrate the void year that has been 2020.
- Love Burns, The Other Theatre’s world premiere production of Graeme Koehne and Louis Nowra’s new opera directed by Eugene Lynch. Angela loves Jack. Jack cons Angela. After being swindled out of her life’s savings, Angela blackmails Jack into being with her. Together they hatch a scheme to get rich by killing lonely widows and stealing off with their fortunes.
- Ghost Salon, a new cabaret written and performed by Drew Fairley, partly inspired by his experience of being marooned on a cruise ship during the onset of COVID-19. Ghost Salon is a hilarious and haunting cabaret; part séance, part confessional, part spectral hooley.
- Layer, a ‘mixed reality’, transglobal performance by Box of Birds, the digital production wing of Stalker, one of Australia’s leading physical theatre companies. A real-time collaboration between three dancers, two in Australia and one in the Netherlands, who will dance together in an interactive filmic 3D space that is simultaneously live, projected, virtual and screened. Each woman is alone and isolated with multiple cultural identities, exploring the pleasures and fears we encounter within our socially distanced COVID selves.
- The Life Cycle of Blanco, a solo work written and performed by multi-disciplinary theatre and filmmaker Vonne Patiag that fuses AV, call-and-response dynamics and a riotous monologue about the culminating impact of casual racism. Blanco – a struggling Asian actor – reviews the short ‘life cycle’ of his career with documentarian flair, unpacking the emotional labour and exhaustion of being a POC artist in Australia.
- Landed, provocative grotesque slapstick presented by Frumpus, the all-girl clowning ensemble emanating from the rich and anarchic Sydney performance scene of the early 1990s. Wrapped in First Class pyjamas and inflated ankles, Frumpus navigate white knuckle turbulence to touch down in luxury goods. Damaged, swollen from neck to foot, and desperate to clear customs, they negotiate a land of extravagance, opulence and anarchic self-satisfaction.
- Dictionary by a Bitch: The Journals of Bee Mills, written and performed by Vashti Hughes and directed by Liesel Badorrek, takes its title from of one of Sydney’s iconic eccentrics, Bee Miles’ unpublished journals. Bee was a transgressive and a bohemian rebel who challenged social injustice. It continues Hughes’ series of one-woman shows spotlighting some Sydney’s most renown female identities including Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh.
- Whitney and Me, co-created by Harriet Gillies, Lucas Jervies, Hugh O’Connor and Solomon Thomas, is a feedback loop of Whitney Houston fandom and YouTube hysteria. Lucas mimics, morphs and manipulates a 4-minute Whitney Houston video into an hour-long, low-budget spectacular. Like a Whitney Houston Addicts Anonymous meeting, audiences are invited to be complicit in the bad behaviour. Everything disintegrates. All that remains is, Whitney.
Courtesy of a grant from Create NSW, select performances will be recorded and made available to view online on demand for a small fee from late October.
Brand X Director James Winter, said: “After months of Sydney’s night-time venues being dormant, we are excited to inject some creative life back into the inner city and present this exciting collection of experimental independent artists in a COVID-safe environment. Brand X is pleased to offer Sydney and virtual audiences an affordable program of live contemporary performance to reconnect with each other again under the new realities of COVID-19. If isolation has taught us anything, we need places for commune. Cultural connections remind us of our simultaneous fragility and resilience.”
‘The Flying Nun is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW and local government partner, The City of Sydney.
Featured image ; hapless frumpus