Gabrielle Nankivell’s Sightings explores personal and collective mythologies of place through crowd-sourced mapping and storytelling, choreographed site interventions, video works, documentation, and public performance.
A choreographic and sculptural ritual about remembering, forgetting, and mourning. Performed on the stripped chassis of a Holden Commodore VF, the work reimagines the car as a uniquely evolved Australian species of feral lion, now facing extinction.
YES is an investigation into the dynamics of power, consent, knowledge, truth and the complexities of one seemingly simple word.
An exploratory dive into online performative spaces, adult camming sites, chat windows, and cyber encounter. Using text, performance and endurance, the artists’ subjectivities and gaze are placed within the wider aesthetics and politics of online sex work.
Bodies of Work, is exploring the broad territory of labour, labour organising, artists as workers, and the future of work.
Drawing on Amrita’s interests in participatory research, intimate conversations and resilience, The Read will explore the similarities and differences in body-centred professions, and the broader observation that their labour is not contained to a singular act, event or performance.
Emma Beech’s art is both simple and hard to define. Labels like direct address performance, docu-drama, verbatim real-life portraiture, all seem to rob her storytelling of its straightforward warmth and worth.
Writer Jennifer Mills joins the Vitals team in 2022 as Artist-in-Residence.
The work explores the complexity of women’s experiences and survival strategies; intergenerational stories that span loss, love, sorrow, solidarity, resistance and refusal.
Sightings explores personal and collective mythologies of place through crowd-sourced mapping and storytelling, choreographed site interventions, video works, documentation and public performance.
An immersive sound performance. Penetrating ferocity. Near silence. Deep cuts.
The work puts everyday decisions under the microscope to reveal seemingly contradictory, at times hilarious and often unbearable truths. A hortative manifesto that boldly proclaims wasting waste is a waste, Progress Report exemplifies the imperative need to transform the value of garbage.
Bedroom explores the space of internalising the pervasive domination that women experience on a regular basis, and then the embodied expulsion of anger and grief, delivered through a visceral and charged performance – one full of humour and grace.
A ‘think and do’ tank for epic issues, tiny revolutions responds to the overwhelming scale and anxieties of key global issues through quick and dirty creative resistance that is impactful and fun.
From the creators of global cult hit The Second Woman (presented by Adelaide Festival with Vitalstatistix in its final Australian presentation in 2019) comes Anna Breckon and Nat Randall’s much anticipated new work Set Piece.
An investigation into the dynamics of power, consent, knowledge, truth and the complexities of saying yes, YES is a new performance work-in-development by acclaimed feminist theatre makers THE RABBLE.
In 2020 our artist-in-residence is writer, critic and Walkley award winning journalist Jane Howard.
The Read will explore the body in service with a performance by a dancer, a sex worker and an athlete.
We the Sick [of It] generates a series of participatory micro manifestos about the health of the social body, engaging with poetics, play and radical care practices. Cat Jones is
Capital and Darkness is an improvised sonic writing process, a song cycle and a deep listening, responding to labour, exiting the labour body, machines of production, automation and essentialism. Virginia
AI vs Baby is an exploration of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, racial bias and memory, using pedagogy and movement to unpack responsive differences between a child and a virtual digital assistant.
Cliffhanger is a multidisciplinary work across performance, installation and text, investigating the cliffhanger and the state of suspension as an omnipresent facet of contemporary anxiety. Holly Childs is an Adelaide-based
Energy Fields is an experimental, practice-based exploration of body-oriented, dialogical and decolonised ways of working towards future cultural ecologies. This process brings together four artists whose interests and lived experiences
Epoch Wars is an artist-run alternative symposium to the 36th International Geological Congress, where artists, thinkers and audiences debate and negotiate the name of the era we will die in.
Every Woman is a research process towards a large-scale public performance installation where women will collectively embody diverse and intersectional feminist movements. Liesel Zink is an award-winning Australian choreographer interested
Game of I-Lands is an intercultural science-art performance project about the impact of the South China Sea conflict on the sentient creatures who inhabit the South China sea marine ecosystem.
Helpline is a participatory live artwork that utilises the ubiquitous helpline and product assistance service to explore isolation, therapeutic outreach and community care. Working across theatre and live art, comedy
Hot Body is a poetic performance text exploring touch, intimacy, desire and embodied power in fictional and virtual spaces. Grace Marlow is an early career, multidisciplinary artist working in text-based
Hundreds + Thousands is a choreographic work that enlists plants as artistic collaborators, audience members and social mediators to explore the transformative powers of communality, fluidity and stillness. Both Luke
Identify: What boxes do you tick? is a multi-platform performative work that seeks to unpack the fixed and fluid notions between identity of the self and identity by interpolation. Amala
In How Long Can This last? a performer with chronic illness pursues a pain-free space provided by live performance in a durational work interrogating the visibility of disability, medical gaslighting,
Immaculate is an intimate, durational artwork about transforming and reframing the conception of a child, through the lens of queer experience. Casey Jenkins is a Melbourne-based installation and performance artist.
Mother’s Blood is a contemporary urban drama played out online and IRL about three generations of an Aboriginal family, exploring political change across decades, online identities and technology in dramatic
Nature is Healing is a performance work about the relationships between human and non-human animals sharing urban environments, based on the story of the gweela/Australian bush turkey. Too Rude is
Of Stubborn Songs and Unequal Wars* is an intercultural theatre work and living repository of research about domestic violence, the micro-personal and macro-political landscapes of female bodies, and women’s cultural
Plant Notes is an ephemeral art tour investigating the remnant flora on Kaurna Yerta/ the Adelaide Plains, and in this iteration the mangroves (Avicennia marina) which inhabit the Yerta Bulti/Port
Scomodo is a durational performance work where two dance artists obsessively deconstruct and reconstruct a wheelchair, exploring the boundaries between humans and their machines. Cinzia Schincariol is an independent artist
Screen Me is a performance project exploring representation on screen, inspired by the lead artist’s experience as the only visible person of colour on an Australian police procedural in the
Broth Bitch is a podcast performance work about the wellness industrial complex and white women, set against conversations about women, labour and capitalism. Michele Lee is an Asian-Australian playwright and
Das Wasser im Bade is an experimental exploration of commodified use of water in our daily lives, through sound, video and performance works made from the mundane to the sublime
In Nevermore, a group of cross punks take aim at rapists through an exploration of how to incorporate comedy, fantasy and punk politics into an artistic response to sexual violence. Jennifer Greer
Sincere Apologies is a performance work constructed entirely from apologies – the famous, the obscure, the imagined, the speculative or forth-coming and those that begin every second email in our
Takatāpui is an expansive performance work unearthing the transgenerational and collective trauma of colonisation, and the relentless journey to reclaiming sovereignty of body, mind and soul. Daley Rangi (Te Āti
The Lost and Found Office is a performance installation about loss, memory and the everyday experience of slippage, woven together from real-life interviews with South Australian communities. Early career playwright
You Are Jeff is a composed theatre piece for pianist and orchestra, inspired by Siken’s Crush, evoking a portrait of queer discovery, self-reflection, rage and sensuality. Dan Thorpe is a
Set within an everchanging and unpredictable physical space, an audience witness the joys and horrors of women saying yes. Part endurance feat, part public debate.
Bedroom explores the space of internalising the pervasive domination and violence that women experience on a regular basis.
Through this project she is tracing a history of Aboriginal women’s domestic labour and servitude, via oral history and the State’s official record.
A no-holds barred performance at the intersection of parade, protest and procession, Howl is a glorious celebration of controversy in the art world.
This stunning performance blends Bharatanatyam, contemporary dance and theatre in a provocative, politically pertinent and dark fairy tale about colonialism.
Waterborne is the story of micro-inhabitations, decay and the flow of matter. Forensically researched, stunningly lyrical and deeply life affirming, this audio artwork brings science and imagination together in a surprising, beautiful meditation on our watery bodies and the cycle of life and death.
Semaphore is a compelling and intriguing exploration of signalling, communication and miscommunication. Using physical, visual and aural encoding systems – Semaphore, Morse code, pennants, lights and binary code – dancers and musicians synchronise in a complex choreography of bodies, music and illumination.
Below the Line is an immersive, interdisciplinary performance project built around the comments submitted to an online article about David Finnigan’s play Kill Climate Deniers.
how do you feel now? is a process-driven exploration and response by Wiradyuri conceptual artist Amala Groom and Wajarri Yamatji/Dutch/English trans-disciplinary creative Nicole Monks.
A girl meets a half-man-half-kangaroo in her dreams, and falls in love. Obsessed by his reality, and the idea of becoming a part of it, she takes desperate measures to spend more time with him. This obsession leads her into the darkest depths of the human psyche.
Adhocracy is a festival of ideas meets intense art camp meets magic house party. Get amongst some of Australia’s most exciting established and emerging makers of Australian contemporary culture, art, performance and commentary.
A Mountain, a Karanga is a diasporic duet, and an experiment with dialogues and cultural definitions, by Māori women dance makers Forest Vicky Kapo and Paea Leach.
CREATION proposes lateral, experimental ways to creatively engage with climate denialism.
Inspired by curtain shows that take place in private homes and tea-houses all through Central Asia.
How do we create and participate in meaningful rituals that permit some temporary alleviation from the obligations of the everyday?
A live performance installation and political activation for public spaces after nightfall. It is an agitation and reclamation around agency, voice, and holding space.
Let Me Tell You is an almanac of the first decade of Adhocracy and its impact, cultural and personal.
Queer performance and music duo GIRL explore masculinity, patriarchal power and androcentrism.
From antidotes to ire, diuretics for disillusionment and cures for capitalism, Medicament For Your Predicament gently applies a drawing ointment to modern maladies.
Motus Collective are exploring ideas of regeneration, identity and change, based on the philosophical problem of the Ship of Theseus.
What are the conditions for the time to come? How can listening be a critical form of political agency for the urgent project of building sustainable and ethical futures?
Witness Stand is about enacting a public hearing of places that demand witnessing and reflection.
Extra events!
Set Piece explores homosexual coupledom through the lens of power dynamics and erotic power play.
Join The Second Woman co-creators Nat Randall and Anna Breckon, in conversation with Rachel Healy, Joint Artistic Director Adelaide Festival, and Emma Webb, Director Vitalstatisix.
With one eye on the future and the other on the past, mi:wi sees three First Nations women intertwine their connection to country, ancestry, each other and their future, in a powerful performance.
“After a nuclear holocaust, all that will be left are cockroaches and Cher.” Jimmy James
Contemporary dance takes on camp and cabaret in this solo tour de force inspired by ultimate pop chameleon, Cher.
Rejecting the idea of the ‘everyman’, the modernist canon, and the large amount of space Ulysses takes up in it. Instead THE RABBLE will invent a series of experiments that investigate the intersections between intellectualism and femininity, to be performed over 10 hours.
Progress Report is a new solo dance performance about consumerism and waste. The work puts real world, every day decisions under the microscope to reveal seemingly contradictory, at times hilarious and often unbearable truths.
In an astonishing feat of endurance performance and live cinema, a performer repeats a single scene inspired by the 1977 John Cassavetes film Opening Night, 100 times over a 24-hour period.
Welcome to a tropical island full of palm trees, phosphate mines, coconut water and kids.
Natalie is undertaking a three-year Australian Research Council-funded project entitled Resistance Poetics and Decolonising the Archive: Aboriginal Domestic Labour Stories from South Australia. Through this project she is tracing a history of Aboriginal women’s domestic labour and servitude.
A very special evening event, offered in two parts, that brings together research, performance, ceremony and conversation.
A subversive river cruise and participatory performance about creating a new water-world order.
A provocative and innovative audio performance about beliefs systems and survival tactics for the end of the world.
A mesmerising dance performance about remoteness and proximity, connectedness and isolation, and our curiosity for the unknown.
A sculpture, a watercraft, and an experiment in community engagement with adaptation, everyday creativity and the future of our rivers.
A large-scale durational installation offering a visceral encounter with the sky of a wild, geoengineered future.
A video installation in which a collective body powerfully conjures a resistance to an underwater threat to Oceania.
An immersive concert of beautiful and hopeful odes to individual animals who suffer for our desires.
In 2007, NASA astronaut and devoted mother and wife Lisa Nowak got into her car and drove for 14 hours from Houston to Orlando, to confront her lover’s much younger lover, Colleen Shipman, in a parking lot at Orlando International Airport.
A performance project about white Australia’s obsession with monuments to settler colonialism. Hear artist talks and see showings.
Contemporary dance about liminal spaces – such as airports – that operates like a palindrome, a reversible performance. See it develop over three days.
A solo theatre show about mobility, privilege and ways to disappear. See it develop over three days.
A playful, immersive artwork about the post-work future. Participate in the artists’ studio, research and showings. Robots.
A multimedia walking tour about urban visibility and dispossession. Help build the stories for this new work-in-development.
A contemporary opera built from the high drama of Google reviews of McDonalds. See it develop over three days.
A speculative talk show set ten years in the future. Help map the next decade, participate in workshops and see a first outing of the performance model.
An improvised three-sided game between two content producers (the artists) and the audience. Each showing will be different in this social experiment.
A series of outcomes from a two-week residency about decolonialised artistic activation.
Adhocracy is Vitalstatistix’s national hothouse, supporting the creative development of new experimental and multidisciplinary arts projects. Artists from around Australia join us to create and converse over the first weekend of Spring.
Feminist theatre makers THE RABBLE are developing an epic, multi-part durational performance event inspired and repulsed by James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Joan is a teenage girl. A virgin soldier who will convince an army of men that she hears the voice of the divine. She will burn.
Left Right Forward March is a collaborative performance project between the artist Bron Batten and a member of the Australian Defence Forces, exploring the intersections between conservative and progressive politics in Australian society.
Slow Awakening is a performance work spanning the lives and struggles of a unique Aboriginal family from Raukkan Mission, Point McLeay, South Australia, and Dimboola, Victoria.
Alexis has worked as a dancer, choreographer, performer, writer, theatre-maker and filmmaker over the past 20 years. As a Birri Gubba, Wakka Wakka and Kanak woman, Alexis is passionate about First Nation people’s voices as well as the stories of people with disability and people from diverse backgrounds.
Fever is an immersive dance-based work that asks us to consider personal, political and cultural change: what starts it and what has stopped it, in the face of human-induced climate change.
Iron Lady is a performative research project and comedic intervention into the finance district by an artist armed with an ironing board. The work starts from the premise that finance is an experimental playground that peddles in speculation, fiction, and value creation.
The Exaltation of Enheduanna is a live sound and video work by Daniel Von Jenatsch. It combines ancient history with speculative fiction.
Presented by Vitalstatistix in association with TARNANTHI: Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art.
In this creative development, contemporary dance practitioner Ben-Hur Winter joins Berry; together they will create ‘rebel political warriors’, hybrid forms of the artists’ complex selves.
Multidisciplinary artist Martyn Coutts will work with choreographer Caitlin Comerford in a subversive exploration of machismo. Dirty Harry, in its first development, is an experimental process that positions the male body as a site of power and violence, and seeks to find out what happens to it under pressure.
DON’T READ THE COMMENTS questions climate change denial, online disinhibition and the impact of creative responses to political issues.
Maybe You, Maybe You, Maybe Even You is a participatory performance that investigates the nuances of queer visibility in public space.
At its most frivolous Solo for (Hu)man and Foam is a playful dance experiment; at its deepest it reflects the possibilities and limits to individual change in the face of environmental disaster.
Artist Meg Wilson, continues her fascination with sports-based durational art events, in her new work SQUASH!, a live art work exploring grandiosity, narcissism and deceit.
At its heart The Silent Key will produce a relay of broadcasts featuring artists, communities and individuals, forming an ‘exquisite corpse’-style narrative arc. These playful global broadcasts will be accompanied by a series of terrestrial and online clues, performances, publications, and other interventions.
The Witness is a performance installation and video work exploring death awareness and acceptance, and the internet as a site for private inquiry. This creative development draws on a video work commissioned by RealTime in 2017; video and sound artist Tiyan Baker will begin a major research and performative extension to its first iteration.
Second Hand Emotions is a process-driven, queer and discursive project responding to the provocation of ‘love and feminism’, the theme of Fontanelle’s keynote exhibition during FRAN.
Speechless is developing as an experimental opera homage to persons rendered speechless through political means. The work draws its primary score and thematic material from Gillian Triggs’ 2014 Human Rights Commission report entitled ‘The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention’.
Super Imposition is a new work and first collaboration by contemporary performance-makers Tamara Saulwick and Nicola Gunn. Fusing performance dramaturgy, music composition and video art, the work interrogates notions of change – our desire for it, our resistance to it and the inevitability of it.
Cher breaks convention, challenges the system and somehow remains a constant. Choreographer, dancer and fan, Larissa McGowan, will use Cher’s iconic figure as a totem in order to flesh out the real possibilities of personal-political transformation.
Speech Pattern is an investigation into contemporary subjectivity utilising performance, video and installation. The work draws from the fields of dance and the moving image, alongside queer, feminist and psychoanalytic theory.
In 2007, NASA astronaut Lisa Nowak got into her car and drove for fourteen hours from Houston to Orlando, to confront her lover’s much younger lover, Colleen Shipman, in a parking lot at Orlando International Airport. Disguised in a dark wig, glasses and trench coat, she allegedly wore an adult nappy used in space so that she didn’t have to stop.
In 1903 dance pioneer Isadora Duncan gave her speech ‘The Dance of the Future’, which became a manifesto of free dance. “The dancer [of the future] will not belong to a nation but to all humanity.” Chris Scherer will investigate the nature of liberty, as such ‘dancer of the future.’
In 2017 celebrate living and longing, loss and lust, at Temple of Love. Throw yourself headlong into heartfelt declarations, sweet goodbyes, hauntings and ritual, all set within a dance party.
Performance-maker and conversationalist Emma Beech joins Vitalstatistix as our artist-in-residence in 2017, working in our Shopfront Studio throughout the year.
Points in the Plane is a mentoring project with South Australian artists Josephine Were, Ashton Malcolm and Meg Wilson.
I CON is a new work-in-development by artist, dancer and choreographer Atlanta Eke. Atlanta joins us again after her acclaimed Body of Work at this year’s Adelaide Festival, this time at Waterside.
Life Is Short and Long is a performance installation created from three years of travel yarns and investigation of how people respond to crisis and change.
As we walk multiple paths toward a future in flux, Aeon envisions the space between civic responsibility and personal consent; between soaring clouds of wings and piles of pigeon poo to offer a paradoxical, complex and ever emerging horizon.
A collaborative exploration of the question “but what is it about?” conducted through improvisation, generative writing, and image making.
Lady Example begins as forensic examination of the women who surround us – in our lives, in our cities, in our histories, in our mythologies, in our popular culture.
Never Trust A Creative City is a performance about the uncomfortable topic of artists and gentrification.
Set in a speculative future, sea levels have risen, the ocean has overtaken the land, and only two boats remain: a large raft-like boat modeled on the raft of the Méduse, and a more habitable, yet decrepit yacht.
Composer and musician Hilary Kleinig is collaborating with conversationalist Emma Beech to investigate how people experience and value music in an age of 24-hour connectedness and distraction.
Sparked by a comedic idea based around two dictators attempting to share a small apartment, The Tension of Opposites expands this idea to explore conflict and pigheadedness, from petty differences to global politics.
Uncanny Valley, Girl explores a feminist cyber/socio-political imagination to produce a new narrative for the ‘fembot’ trope.
Adhocracy is Vitalstatistix’s national hothouse, supporting the creative development of new experimental and multidisciplinary arts projects.
LOSS. GAIN. REVERB. DELAY is an ambitious sound and sculptural work-in-development, which explores knowledge transmission through time and across land, referencing specific landmarks and correlations between Aboriginal knowledge and scientific discovery.
A long term artwork that uses tree rings to record the human activity.
Join us for a mid-winter, Sunday afternoon conversation about how artists are responding to the global condition of climate change.
Zephyr Quartet presents their critically acclaimed 2014 project Between Light in the beautiful Waterside Workers Hall.
Between Light commissioned five Australian artists to create new work for Zephyr Quartet, exploring notions of light and dark in their work, taking the Italian art term ‘chiaroscuro’ as a genesis.
Crawl Me Blood is inspired by the work of Jean Rhys whose book ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ expounds the landscape and complex race relations of the post-colonial Caribbean.
In the absence of known eulogies and memorials for individual animals slaughtered in environmentally impacting commercial industries in Australia and globally.
A personal account of Bryan Dawe’s journey into political satire. From the grim educational pickings of working class Port Adelaide in the 1950s and 60s, Bryan escaped from high school at 15 and went on to become one of Australia’s finest satirists.
Atlanta Eke’s acclaimed Body of Work (Keir Choreographic Award, 2014) sees the visceral and mechanical collide. Described as dance meets performance art, this work is both strangely familiar and radical, with its nods to science fiction and cyborg feminism.
In 2016, get your festival mojo back at House and Garden, a lush neon lounge of tunes and live art, dance lessons and icy poles, under the high ceilings of Waterside.
This is the story of a man, a woman and a duck. It is about the excruciating realms of human behaviour. It is about trying to become a better person.
Climate Century is an exhibition of multidisciplinary art works that imagine climate futures in the coastal and river environs of Port Adelaide and the LeFevre Peninsula.
Victorian-based theatre makers THE RABBLE are developing a new epic, 18-part, ten-hour contemporary performance inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Life is Short and Long is a new work in development by South Australian theatre maker and conversationalist, Emma Beech. Drawing on local and global travel experiences, Emma is undertaking a humanist investigation of how people and communities respond to crises.
Vitals is excited to be hosting the world-first screening of Rolf de Heer’s 1993 classic Bad Boy Bubby.
Handmade, heritage & vintage at the Port Festival. We throw open the doors at the heritage-listed Waterside Worker Hall. Expect vintage and craft stalls, food and drink, music, special tours of Waterside, participatory experiences and more!
This is football as theatre – stripped back, extracted, frozen, repeated, abstracted. Beautiful and ugly all at once.
Join us for the public launch of the South Australian Branch of the National Trouble Makers Union (NTMU), with National Secretary of the NTMU, Bryan Dawe as Sir Murray Rivers QC.
Angelique is young and full of dark mystery. The future is hers. But her existence teeters on the edge. The future threatens to close in on her. Now she’s disappeared. What happened to her? What does she know? And what are these clues she’s left behind?
Crawl Me Blood is inspired by the work of Jean Rhys, whose book ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’, expounds the landscape and complex race relations of post-colonial Dominica.
Adhocracy is Vitalstatistix’s national artist hothouse, supporting the creative development of new experimental and interdisciplinary projects.
Alternative Futures Working Group is a research project exploring perceptions of the future and conversations as artworks.
A new performance work in its first stage of creative development that explores discomfort with representations of sex when in the presence of others.
Future Turf is a performance installation exploring the relationship between the built environment, home and the human form.
In October 2010, Jarod Duffy disappeared, leaving behind the furniture at his house and no explanation. This is the story of that disappearance and Applespiel’s hunt to find their missing friend.
A feminist research project working towards a large visual arts exhibition in 2017, commemorating the 30th anniversary of The Women’s Show (Adelaide, 1977), the first contemporary Australia-wide, all-women exhibition.
Versions of Truth draws on verbatim theatre and live art practices to explore identity, performance, authenticity and representation.
Dance theatre meets documentary biopic in the extraordinary and highly entertaining personal story.
Australia’s premier indie music event returns to the Port.
The project explores how memories and narratives of histories are interpreted across generations and geographies.
Part game, part social experiment, black market explores modes of value exchange in an uncertain world.
Broadcasts is a project about listening to edges and mapping the faltering periphery of a territory by using sound and signals.
A beautifully chaotic, joyous and uplifting event that reminds us how to engage with and celebrate the act of living (and conga lines).
An ephemeral public art project responding to the small, the large, the public and the hidden, in central Port Adelaide.
Adhocracy: A form of organisation that cuts across normal bureaucratic lines to capture opportunities, adapt to change & solve problems. A process of decision making where groups of individuals reach consensus by responding in an ad hoc fashion to frequently changing priorities.
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