Review: the ArtsLab: Body of Work festival is an encouraging glimpse of our artistic future
Featuring work by Flynn Mapplebeck, Amelia Gilday and Ana Fenner, Mina and Lu Bradshaw, Spacefloss, and Jenna Lewis; presented by Shopfront Arts Co-Op
Review by Charlotte Smee
A repurposed car garage on Redfern St, Redfern 107 has a huge, open entryway that welcomes you to some mismatched couches, outdoor tables, and $4 pastizzis snuggled up in their pie warmer. For two weeks, it is home to Shopfront Arts Co-Op’s ArtsLab: Body of Work. A celebration of eight young artists presenting gallery and performance works created with the help of Shopfront and their respective mentors, in a few words ArtsLab is community-based, feel-good (in the “I-feel-good-for-supporting-new-work” way) and essential.
This iteration features three performance works and two visual/gallery works. If you’re brave enough, you can take on the lovingly nicknamed “marathon” and see all five in one night. On Saturdays, you can even see a sixth reading of a film in the works. I went on a Wednesday, so below is a quick run-down of the weekday marathon.
Spacefloss’s When I think of us it sounds like is an immersive sound work, with an accompanying large red wooden box that greets you as you find your way through the garage door. Sets of the chunky kind of over-ear headphones line the wall, waiting for you to pick them up. Inside the world of the red box and the headphones is a conversation between two friends (recorded separately, without one person able to hear the other), reminiscing on a trip to Japan and a decision to start making art together. Between words are the sounds of train station announcements, synthesised tunes and other sound snapshots of the world around them. The sounds build, decay, and warp as the recording goes on.
Tiny, pinpoint peepholes in the giant red wooden box give glimpses of Japanese coins, flowers, and other miniature suggestions of what the people in your ears might be talking about, and iPads play video footage of Kaylee Rankin and Rachel Seeto (the duo who make up Spacefloss) taking turns speaking into their microphones. It’s gentle, and has moments of quiet, like a conversation you might have on a road trip with a friend you’ve known for a million years. A beautiful little snapshot of what it’s like to be in platonic, creative love, and to recreate memories together.
A second gallery work, Do androids dream of silicone binders?, features a mound of pillows dressed in collared polo shirts, round-necked t-shirts and other tops in the centre of a makeshift room to the left of Spacefloss’s giant red box. Playing from speakers in either corner of the room is a “radiophonic” work: part podcast, part music, that features the artist Jenna Lewis speaking about their trans body. It’s a meditation on what it means to have a body that’s different – and needs time to be digested. With the hubbub of opening night and not a lot of time on my hands, I didn’t get the privacy I needed to experience this work properly. If you’re interested in this exploration of embodied queerness, leave a good 20 minutes before everyone else is around to delve deeper (like I, unfortunately, wasn’t able to do).
First up in the theatre program, Flynn Mapplebeck’s Quadrants is anything but gentle. A solo performance work created with the help of mentoring by Tom Walker, Flynn takes you through a slideshow on what it means to be alone. He’s an only child, and an introvert, so he likes being alone. So much so, that he challenged himself to stay completely isolated in his apartment for the duration of Sydney’s lockdown period (aside from two hilarious outings involving a fire evacuation and a following infection with COVID).
Quadrants uses stand-up comedy and mime to tell stories of and demonstrate the things Flynn does when he’s alone: learning to bounce mime balls, open doors, and analyse himself. He is a charming performer, with an endearing earnestness that allows for a hilarious explanation of an inordinate amount of graphs explaining, in detail, the perfect social conditions to maximise his social battery. Flynn’s earnestness allows for some vulnerable moments too, and a particularly intimate confession on his most lonely moments being with a crowd of people he knows. The ending was a little overwhelming and without a completely clear reason other than weirdness, featuring Flynn completing three different puzzles mixed with two different songs layered over each other and some Snapchat memories of Flynn from lockdown. Walker’s influence is very clear in this show, so if you like your clowning with a touch of vulnerability, Quadrants has all that and more.
Amelia Gilday and Ana Fenner’s performance work Under the Influence operates along similar lines to Quadrants, asking how we perform for others when we’re performing our gender. Ana Fenner is the sole performer with three screens behind her playing video footage of herself, a voice teacher robot, a 1950s instructional video and other found footage.
Under the Influence features movement sequences that are a kind of endurance performance, like being a woman in the world, and they’re heavy with a meaning that words alone struggle to convey. We open on a sequence where Ana attempts to follow along with a make-up tutorial, to the blasting sounds of Hoku’s ‘Perfect Day’ (of Legally Blonde fame). The making-up becomes increasingly messy and, by the end of the song, eventually becomes a frustrated attempt to complete something that just won’t turn out perfectly. Another movement sequence features a tutorial on how to “stand like a woman”, which devolves into an extended dance routine that brings Ana to the point of exhaustion.
In between movement sequences, Ana speaks about her experiences of being a trans woman. The monologues border on cliche, and struggle to match the brilliance of the theatrical imagery that intercuts them. Perhaps the arguments made symbolically start to lose their embodied, frustrated, repetitive, pointless feeling we’ve just been shown when given words that we might hear somewhere else. Worth watching for the exciting ideas, and the meaningfully integrated use of technology and video elements, Under the Influence is Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble made physical in the TikTok era.
For the final hour of performance work, Zest, a play by Mina and Lu Bradshaw, mentored by Amrita Hepi, is a dark interpretation of a reality show that takes place at a wellness retreat. Like Nine Perfect Strangers but without Nicole Kidman, Zest is a softly menacing voice (by Benjamin Stonnill), a multimillion-dollar business, and a place to find yourself.
Zest has a clear vision of who it is making fun of – wellness influencers, but also the rest of us who might fall prey to the business of wellness (my TikTok algorithm loves to spit out weight loss suggestions at me no matter how hard I try to tell them I’m not interested). It features a fantastic ensemble made up of Michael Ho, Jesicca Melchert, Bailey Tanks and Sophie Florence Ward, who each give detailed performances of regular people slowly descending into competitive madness. Their costumes, props and choreographed movements to sound design by Greg Fosyth scream corporate wellness: with perfectly matching tights, weird face masks with glowing green tubes to sleep under and electronic water dripping sounding music. Special mention goes to Jessica Melchert for bringing a sickly sweet influencer mum to vivid life — who knew laughter therapy could be so delightfully insane?
Unfortunately, Zest doesn’t have as clear a vision of the exact argument it is making against wellness culture. It’s clearly against it, with satirical scenes featuring increasingly ridiculous yoga poses and arguments about what is “healthiest” or “most beneficial”, but it doesn’t quite reach much further than that. I was waiting for the voice of Zest to finally crack, or something a little less predictable than the “crazy” character turning to violence. Some further thinking on what exactly Zest stands for, in comparison to other critiques of wellness culture, would fully round out an already entertaining piece from a talented ensemble.
The product of hours of collaboration, hard work, encouragement and fun, ArtsLab: Body of Work features some promising ideas from some promising and enthusiastic emerging artists. Go for the very warm introductions to each piece by Creative Director Natalie Rose, and stay for the fuzzy feeling of knowing you’re contributing to the development of Sydney’s future creatives.
ArtsLab: Body of Work plays at Redfern 107 until 2 April. Find tickets and information here.
Images by Clare Hawley
Charlotte is the editor of Kaleidoscope Arts Journal, a little enby and a big mess. Their friends regularly worry that they might overdose on theatre.
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