Part Of The Show

Live art is a difficult thing to define. In many ways it's artwork that doesn't fit into the more traditional categories of the performing arts or visual arts. However, it borrows heavily from all these forms. It's about the encounter between the initial creator of the work and the people who interact with that work. In many ways the simple performer/audience binary doesn't exist. Rather, the consumers of the work often become makers and participants in the work, which are often created in the moment, before the audience. Although this sort of work has been around for a long time – ever since the happenings of the '60s and '70s – it seems there's a growing interest in this sort of work as people look for ways of engaging with art outside of the traditional forums. The inaugural Festival of Live Art (FOLA) is testament to this growing audience.

One of the more ambitious projects in the FOLA program is Game Show, a collaboration between Tristan Meecham, Bec Reid and the team at the cross-artform group Aphids. In Game Show 50 contestants a night compete to win every possession Meecham owns. While he says his life has never been particularly geared towards amassing material wealth, there's still the possibility that people may walk away with everything from fridges to televisions and even his eczema cream. It's the items that hold sentimental attachment, such as childhood artworks or awards, that could be difficult to lose. In the manner of much of Meecham's work, Game Show is a large-scale spectacle work that looks at the grand, the ridiculous and the impossible. It will feature choirs, dancers, glitter cannons and similar sorts of bombastic gestures. As well as the 50 participants there's also an audience, like the studio audience of a game show, each night, that gets to observe the moral dilemmas that exist within game shows and competitions. Meecham is interested in how, within a competitive atmosphere, people become disconnected from the prize they're actually competing for and become instead focused on the idea of winning itself.

Game Show is the second work in Tristan's The Coming Out Trilogy, the first being Fun Run, in which Meecham ran a marathon on a treadmill in a public space surrounded by groups of dancers, cheerleaders and all manner of celebratory pyrotechnics. During the Melbourne event at City Square in the 2010 Next Wave festival he even had a newly married couple come onstage for their bridal waltz. It's these sorts of surprising interactions and moments of unplanned magic Tristan attempts to bring out with his work. He wants to create exciting interactions between the creators of the work and the general public. The next work in the trilogy will be Miss Universe, in which Meecham will go head to head with the celebrity singer Grace Jones in an all-out battle, the loser promising to never perform again.

Profits from the performances will be donated to The School of Hard Knocks Foundation. Jonathan Welch, the founder of the Choir of Hard Knocks, is collaborating on Game Show.