Changing The Way Live Performance Is Experienced

We are listening to live music all wrong.

At least, that's what Sophia Brous reckons.

The Supersense Festival curator will open the doors to Australia's underground arts scene this week, challenging our expectations of how music should be seen and heard.

"I feel like 70% of the time, a lot of the performances we see are in the wrong kinds of environment," Sophia says. "All you have to do is quietly disrupt one of the elements - be it the way you enter the venue, the way it's lit, the way it smells, how close you are to the performance - and you can totally heighten the experience of it."

This is the concept behind Overground - a manifestation of experimental culture featuring about 60 musicians, artists, and multidisciplinary creatives. "It's about bringing together these artists with different sensibilities to collaborate and create performance contexts."

The New York- and Melbourne-based singer says we often step into a gig with our own expectations, confining us within our comfort zones and "passively sitting in the audience and receiving entertainment". That's why she's disrupting the Arts Centre Melbourne, enticing us to liberate the venue's foyers and underground rehearsal spaces.

Sophia founded Overground as part of the 2009 Melbourne International Jazz Festival, and it's since featured more than 200 performers working across genres from jazz to classical and everything in between.

"Nothing can replace the experience of being in a room and witnessing live performance," Sophia says. "That's the thing I have an addiction to."

Artists will occupy several stages popping up in the lesser-known centre spaces; in a similar fashion to its launch in the Melbourne Town Hall. "We relate to these large, civic venues in such a limited way," Sophia says. "While we may frequent these spaces, it's the addition of experimental art that unleashes their true spirits."

As well as curating the festival (working collaboratively with Australian arts organisations Liquid Architecture and NOW now), Sophia is set to take part in the action when she performs live herself. What should you expect when you see her? Well, even she can't tell you that.

The singer will draw on her improvisatory background as she teams up with cellist Oliver Coates, harpist Zeena Parkins, and double bassist Clayton Thomas to present exploratory soundscapes.

She'll also feature in the Supersense program with her Lullaby Movement: A Song Cycle and The Dream Machine, and says the crossover from performer to curator is simply a matter of mastering her materials.

"When you're engaging with your own work, you are the person building the blocks of all elements," she says of her creative output. "But when you're curating a festival, those blocks are spaces and contexts and environments and people. And it's about creating a conversation between those things."

Some of Overground's building blocks come together for the first time - artists who are lauded in their own careers but have never met each other; performers who will take their first steps into the venue. And the effect is "exciting and brilliant - as it should be".

"It creates the breathing ecosystem of Melbourne and Australia, and that's what I really want to highlight."

See Overground: A Festival Within A Festival in the Arts Centre Melbourne from 2-6pm on August 20. Find out more on the Supersense: Festival Of The Ecstatic (August 18-20) website, supersense.artscentremelbourne.com.au