PERFORMANCE SPACE WINTER PROGRAM

With cornea, blood, skin, sperm and uncannily life-like robots joining the cast list, six tons of moving iron and half-remembered dreams playing backdrop, this winter at Performance Space promises to be an interesting experience … especially for our bodies. Daniel Brine, the Artistic Director, had this to say about the season, “questions of manipulation of the body and its positioning in space are particularly prevalent.  [There’s] Sunstruck with its focus on people and place, The Hosts, which in its own way (re)interprets the body in space, and Run which really looks at the physicality of the body and the built environment.” With that in mind we’ve snuck backstage to prepare ourselves for some of the coming oddities …

GRIND HOUSE ALLEY      

Frankenstein would be spinning in his grave with glee at this – Perth-based duo Bio-Kino are bringing out their Bio-Projector for an experience that we’re told is somewhere between a backyard laboratory, freak sideshow and early cinema parlour. Microscopic cells, mega spectacle.

Aug 13-15, free

THE HOSTS: A MASQUERADE OF IMPROVISING AUTOMATONS 

This installation by sensor-triggered choreographer Wade Marynowsky rattles the proverbial ghost out of its shell, in a robotic masquerade of manners that could out-weird (and out-wire) the most awkward dinner party.

Aug 14-Sep 12, free

RUN: A PERFORMANCE ENGINE

RUN is a performance installation of extreme energy and motion in a mobile structure. What does that mean, exactly? The director, Tess de Quincey, puts it this way, “We’re moving a number of suspended construction elements from the buildings like a mobile. Six tons of iron has an impact on the body and the space. The performers are linked into and at times suspended from the mobile. So the entire ‘engine’ is a mobile exploring organism which unfolds in different ways. The piece explores energy and locomotion – control and the uncontrollable.” Basically, expect the unexpected, as de Quincey prefers to, “generate a tactile and sensorial world, states of being which trigger and unroll your imagination as an audience, as a participant in the exchange.”

Aug 20-29, $20-30

SUNSTRUCK: A PREMONITION OF EVENTS & MORPHIA SERIES

Concerned with the distraction your body is dished up at night – dreams – these performances are the result of a long-standing collaboration between Helen Herbertson and Ben Cobham. And just like with dreams, the focus is on sensation, memory slippage, and the dense, sometimes impenetrable interrelationship between peoples and places.

Sunstruck: Aug 11-15, $20-30

Morphia: Aug 11-14, $20 

Aug 1-mid Sep, Performance Space, 245 Wilson St, Eveleigh, 8571 9111 or performancespace.com.au