Art History

“My history at Performance Space actually predates Performance Space,” laughs Nigel Kellaway, who has enjoyed a 32-year relationship with the artistic hub. “I arrived in Sydney – I'd previously been living for a few years in Adelaide – and I arrived in 1981 and I joined a dance company called The One Extra Company and the very first show I did with them we performed at this old dance hall at 199 Cleveland Street, Redfern and I think I did about three shows there, it didn't have a name. And then Mike Mullins took over the lease of the place and it became, formally, the Performance Space.”

In the three decades since, Kellaway has worked at Performance Space in a number of guises – as director of companies, as part of organisations such as the Sydney Front, as a producer and performer.

“The Performance Space was home, basically,” Kellaway elaborates. “You didn't work in isolation, you worked in a community of artists with differing but often similar concerns so it created an environment for contemporary performance. It's a pretty central part of my life; I guess now I would be considered one of the grandfathers of the place.”

In many ways Kellaway is the ideal candidate to present work as part of Performance Space's You're History! festival, which celebrates the organisation's 30-year anniversary. He will be premiering his new avant-garde theatrical masterpiece, Brief Synopsis: A Beautiful Naked Young Woman 'Of A Certain Age' Brutally Stabs A Young Man To Death.

“The title, it says it all, really. Evidently in the work, before the audience walks into the space, they know that somewhere on stage will be a beautiful naked woman of a certain age, but they also know that there is going to be a young man on stage, they know that there is going to be a murder, that is all they need to know, and indeed, that is the entire story, that is what happens over the space.

“This is evidently not a whodunit, because we know who kills the young man before we enter theatre; it's not like a Mousetrap where you don't know who did the deed. That was the idea I wanted to play with, that the audience get all the information so they're not going into the theatre to see a story unfold, because they already know what happens. This goes back to the idea of abstract painting; this work is encouraging the audience to actually look at the work, rather than through the work,” explains Kellaway.

Appropriately, the work is a melting pot of artistic practices. Kellaway is joined by fellow performer Katia Molino, a live band of three cellos, double bass and piano, and has collaborated with photographer Heidrun Löhr and lighting designer Neil Simpson to make this contemporary baroque anti-opera, which will be performed in Carriageworks' cavernous Bay 17.

“I've worked in all the other spaces in Carriageworks, but I haven't worked in Bay 17 before. I don't do sets, I never have, I've never been interested in set design, and I think this is part of the heritage of working back at the old Cleveland Street venue. I'm interested in rooms, and interesting rooms, so there will never be a Brief Synopsis like this version,” Kellaway says.

Spaces interest another artist recruited for You're History!, Tess de Quincey, who found in Performance Space upon her arrival to Sydney in 1989 the perfect environment to further develop Body Weather, a performative exploration of the body which she had begun while training with butoh dancer Min Tanaka and his Mai-Juku Performance Company in Japan. “Body Weather is a way of thinking about body and being part of a space. I found it to be absolutely amazing. It's a synthesis of both Eastern and Western work in many ways; it has ancient techniques but is hypermodern as well.

“Performance Space was the first place I performed in Sydney in 1989 and I felt immediately embraced and felt that I had the possibility of having a home there. People were very warm and very engaged in the work that I was presenting, so I felt that the nature of performance – as in, being an interdisciplinary, collaborative venture – was extremely vivid at Performance Space. As opposed to carving it out into theatre and dance and installation, the fusion of all this into performance as it could be in interdisciplinary practice, was for me very, very clear in Performance Space.”

Box Of Birds, the work de Quincy will present for You're History! will occupy the nooks and crannies of Carriageworks' architecture, filling them with an immersive concoction large-scale photography, improvised dance and live music. The work stemmed form Anne Ferran's investigation into photographs from Gladesville Mental Hospital during the 1940s. They worked together towards an exhibition earlier this year, and de Quincey suggested the next step of their collaboration should be performance. “The idea of putting it into Carriageworks seemed very relevant because on one level there is this big grand institution, but it's got this resonance of people being held in confinements, in confined spaces, even though there are huge spaces of confinement. I found it very interesting that the enormity of Carriageworks, and the small niches in it, have this oppositional quality that are a bit like the minds that fly free while the body is confined.”