ABOUT
CREATION
CREATION is a new religion, manifesting in spectacle and intimacy. A faith, a gathering of intention and purpose with which to face an era when paid opinion trumps environmental evidence.
CREATION proposes a crowd-sourced belief system teeming with pleasures and possibilities.
CREATION seeks to engage with the dream life of humanity to build ambiguous and beautiful practices of collectivity. It aspires to counter assaults on the biosphere with lateral, joyous, grieving, enraged action. Our era demands preposterous thinking, bold experimentation, leaps and loops and flights of faith.
CREATION is at stake.
Built in collaboration with metropolitan and regional communities and institutions, CREATION encompasses mysteries, performance, visual arts, design, dance, food, music and literature. At each gathering site, artform-specific workshops will be held with local publics. Each workshop series will yield an element of CREATION: a liturgy, parables, a cosmological imaginary, ritual garments, choreography, song, sustenance and ceremony.
CREATION is multi-dimensional and cross-disciplinary, moving across and between contemporary art, politics and ritual. The work will entail moving and static imagery, a transcendent soundscape, intimate encounters for learning and exchange, culminating in collaboratively devised participatory performance events.
PEOPLE
Deborah Kelly, Instigator
Deborah is a Melbourne-born, Sydney-based artist of mixed settler ancestry. Her works have been shown around Australia and elsewhere. For a decade she has been working with groups of strangers in cities around the world to make experiential collaborations emphasising process, community and aesthetic intensity. Kelly’s works are concerned with lineages of representation, politics and history in public exchange, and practices of collectivity both epic and intimate.
SJ Norman, Liturgy
SJ is a cross-disciplinary artist and writer. His artistic trajectory is informed by a diverse range of practices, disciplines and methodologies, and incorporates solo and ensemble performance, installation, sculpture, text, video and sound. He is a non-binary transmasculine person and a diasporic Koori of Wiradjuri descent, born on Gadigal land. Since 2006 he has lived and worked between Australia, Germany, the UK and the United States.
Lex Lindsay, Composer
Lex is a writer, composer and performance artist with a 20-year career as a creative producer, curator and strategy advisor to arts organisations. He has composed music for theatre, dance and film productions including the Australian Premiere of Howard Barker’s Ego in Arcadia, films Tempting Fate and Birthday and Deborah Kelly’s The Gods of Tiny Things. His plays include Swallowing Geography, Safety, Prime.Real.Estate, and Armour/Amor.
Angela Goh, Dance
Angela is a dancer and choreographer. She lives and works in Sydney, and her work has toured across Australia and internationally to Europe, the UK, the USA and Asia. Her work poses possibilities for disruption and transformation inside the aesthetics and conditions of technocapitalism, planetarity, and the post-anthropocene. She received the Keir Choreographic Award 2020, the inaugural Sydney Dance Company x Create NSW Fellowship 2020/21.
Melody Pei Li, Animator
Melody is an award-winning artist with over 15 years experience in animation and has extensive knowledge of design and film production. She has worked with artists and musicians for exhibitions, festivals, stage design and public art for Vivid Sydney and many other festivals. Melody is an accomplished visual storyteller who believes in the power of art and storytelling to solve problems and make positive change to the world.
Alia Ardon, Filmmaker
Alia is an emerging French-Australian-Moroccan cinematographer, director, editor and animator. Intrigued by the moving body and its imagery she is subsequently drawn to dance films. A student of Sydney-based contemporary school Seet Dance for 10 years, Alia has developed a sensitivity to creativity through her own body. It is with these experiences that she applies herself to her dance films.
Erica McCalman, Oracle
Erica is a Ballardong Noongar woman with Irish Convict, Scottish and Cornish ancestry. A creative producer, curator, facilitator and writer, she received the 2019 Green Room award for Innovation in Curatorial Contribution for her Next Wave Festival program Ritual. Through her project Art Oracle, Erica investigates a collaborative producing practice. Art Oracle directs celestial observation, and creative precepts, for the CREATION project.
James Lionel King, Costumier
James has a degree in Design, majoring in textiles and ceramics from UNSW Art and Design, and was awarded the university medal in textiles. James has an exuberant desire to inspire people to new cultural ideas and movements. He feels design should be sensual and exciting. ‘As designers we must be attentive, alert, aware and sensitive. Creating new orders, structures, totality, accord and hence beauty.’
Justine Shih Pearson, Digital Priestess
Justine has an interdisciplinary practice as a designer, creative producer, facilitator, writer, arts researcher and advocate. Trained at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, she has collaborated on projects for live performance, digital media, film/tv, online publishing, public spaces, hospitals, and museums in Australia, Europe, the UK, North America, and SE Asia.
Su Goldfish, Producer
Su is a freelance arts worker and filmmaker, who has worked in varying capacities as a performer, writer, set maker, carpenter, builder, arts manager and producer. Her recent film project, feature documentary The Last Goldfish, premiered at the 2017 Sydney Film Festival and is currently on STAN and 7Plus. Su led the UNSW Creative Practice Lab for twenty years, to 2021, producing a range of cross-disciplinary performance experiences.
Kasi Albert, Textiles & Banner Workshop Leader
Kasi is the conservator at the Museum of Contemporary Art and has worked at numerous national and state collecting institutions. With over ten years of professional experience, she specialises in objects conservation with a particular interest in contemporary art. She lectures in conservation and registration at UNSW. She is also an avid amateur sewer, crocheter, crafter and painter.
Seet Dance
Charemaine Seet founded Seet Dance in 2009. A contemporary dance school that, in the words of Ausdance NSW, has become the ‘foremost place in Sydney where dance is taught as a contemporary art form.’ Charemaine says, ‘As a choreographer and former principal dancer in London and NYC, I had a vision to offer children the same artistic stimulus I encountered working with pioneering dance makers.’
The CREATION Chorale
Kit Spencer, Performer & Choir Captain
Kit is a musician, artist and teacher, whose work focuses on music making as experimentation, performance-oriented practice, and accessibility.
Karen Cummings, Composer & Performer
Karen is a singer interested in new works for the voice. She has performed works by Australian composers Andree Greenwell, Sally Whitwell, Richard Vella, Martin Wesley Smith, Rosalind Page, Stephen Adams and has performed with Deborah Cheetham’s Company, Short Black Opera, Opera Australia and the Victorian State Opera.
Zaya Barroso, Performer
Zaya is a captivating Sydney singer-songwriter and performer with a rich and diverse background. After launching her solo career in 2015, Zaya has been beguiling, entrancing and seducing audiences to think and feel ever since.
Eugene Choi, Performer
Eugene is a performance-based artist whose practice has evolved around the physicality of constructing internal and external structures working across sculpture, performance, installation and video.
Harriet Gillies, Performer
Harriet Gillies is an award-winning performance artist working across a range of performance modes. She has presented across Australia, New Zealand and North America.
Liza-Mare Syron, Performer
Dr Liza-Mare Syron’s family clan is Biripi from the Mid North Coast of NSW. She is a director, actor, teacher, dramaturge, and academic. Liza-Mare is an Indigenous Scientia Senior Lecturer in the School of the Arts and Media at UNSW.
James Tawadros, Musician
James Tawadros is a world-class percussionist and soloist, his main instrument is the req. He has performed internationally with many celebrated artists and regularly accompanies his brother Joseph in concert.
Andrew Bukenya, Performer
Andrew Bukenya is a multi-talented singer, vocal arranger and composer who most recently performed as a soloist in Paul Mac & Lachlan Philpott’s acclaimed The Rise & Fall of St George, Sydney Festival 2021. He currently hosts Sydney Symphony Hour on 2MBS, Thirsty Thursdays at Darlinghurst Theatre & the online artists interview series, Andrew Bukenya Presents Chat & Dash!
Malaika Mfalme, Performer
Malaika Mfalme {Angel King} is a singer, songwriter and guitarist producing on Gadigal Land. Malaika is here to create a safe space focused on healing with a powerful message of kindness, acceptance and reflection vibrating through every one of their sonic outputs.
Liveworks 2020 Dancers
Scarlett Fitzpatrick-Lubowitz, Brian Fuata, Melissa Gilbert, Lily Golightly, Zachary Lopez, Inez Murray, Scarlet Perry, Nivedita Rajendra, Isabella Sanasi, Lilli Seebacher, Celeste Stein, Aiya Ting, Anthony Toohey, Floria Tosca, Ella Watson-Heath, Jessica Weatherall, Alison Williams, Patricia Wood, Wendy Yu, Tessa Zettel.
MCA 2021 Dancers
Peggy Jean Atcliffe, Amelie Banyard, Anna Barry, Evie Rose Bennett, Lauren Bennett, Vanessa Billy, Willow, Billy-Rowland, Jensen Blum, Maisie Bodey, Milla Butko, Finn Carroll, Lottie Coulthard, Ana Cuellar, Ema De Aboitiz, Lucy Delescefs, Aiya Elise Ting, Sidney Evans, Robyn Evans, Katie Fitchett, Scarlett Fitzpatrick-Lobowitz, Lotte Flood, Christina Gaertner, Alice Giuffre, Sofia Harling, Anu Hewett-Spurr, Corisande Ho, Kei Ikeda , Aleah Kadir, Claudia Kisch, Stella Kita, Krisandra Knight, Eadie Lalotoa, Tilly Lambert Knight, Charlotte Le Moing, Sophie Leaney, Inez Murrary, Rozsa Pandolfini Kirkwood, Sabine Pandolfini Kirkwood, Sophie Pentecost, Scarlet Perry, Matilda Perry Gomez, Anouska Rose, Clara Sandaradura, Olive Sanders, Lilli Seebacher, Marina Qing Seet, Antonina Simmonds , Samantha Spurr, Anya Sreesha, Penelope Stickells , Lyuba Tarnopolsky, Tilda Tordoff , Mariia Ursulenko, Greta Von Arnim, Delphi Watson Wood, Alison Williams, Elena Wintz, Frankie Zilber.