It examines how the mobile performance can reference the asylum-seeker state of forced mobility, of perpetual motion, of shape-shifting, of transit after transit, of crossing borders: geographical, cultural and psychological. Similarly, how the audience’s relationship to the artists and the work moves throughout the performance: from witness and confidante, to fellow-traveller, participant and activist.

O-T-D responds to the rapidly deteriorating public discourse that renders the asylum-seeker invisible, untouchable and in stasis. O-T-D counters the immobility of this discourse with a flexible, mobile structure which is a key medium for the transmission of stories of forced mobility and a possible fulcrum for identification with religious, cultural and political others. The asylum seeker artists telling their stories are always in control of their representation.

This mobile structure marked a critical point in the ever-evolving conceptual framework of the work, from its beginning in Indonesia as a commentary on the third-person depiction of the asylum seeker, through the prism of the Indo-Australian relationship, to its present form privileging ‘real people’ as agents of their own representation.  This was accompanied by a deliberate focus on young adult students in Western Sydney as audience/community/voters/co-travellers.

The paper concludes with an examination of how O-T-D #2, the installation created in the gallery for Performing Mobilities, distils the simplest and most visceral images and stories from the mobile live performance into a video installation that can only be fully experienced while in motion.

Things that move… comprises two events to be staged during Assembly. These will be located across and between two sites: the level 10 rooftop of the Design Hub, and the courtyard behind the VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery.

> EVENT 1: sun viewing (telescope) > site: VCA campus, Lionel’s courtyard > time: Sat 10 Oct 1-2pm
> EVENT 2: measuring arc of the earth between the Design Hub and Margaret Lawrence Gallery VCA, and walking the arc (gnomon, callipers) > site: measuring at both sites followed by a walk from RMIT Gallery to Margaret Lawrence Gallery VCA > time: departing RMIT Gallery, Sun 11 Oct 9.30am > Duration: 1.5hrs

With this broad definition that stresses connections more than differences, I will look at the project and highlight the issue of mobility. As the project is a guided tour of guided tours, it necessarily deals with mobility and does so in two obvious way: it considers both the mobility of tourists and the mobility of tour formats, that is to say what and how visitors project onto locations, and how in turn the location makes itself know to visitors.

I will then consider the mobility of the project itself. I will compare and contrast the creation and reception of The Tour of All Tours in different locations, including Melbourne. I will attempt to show how, in choosing to spotlight the interaction of host and visitor as a site of performance, these works invariably become political. I will describe how each tour I have made so far has uncovered a set of themes specific to its location, which I was unable to fully predict prior to making the work. Indeed, it is usually the unintended meta-narratives that emerge as a result of taking tours that I am most interested in and which, I will argue, finally give the most revealing portrait of a place.

Walking Interconnections is a research project that recognises and responds to the fact that disabled people’s voices have been largely absent from the sustainability debate. Representing one-fifth of the world’s population, disabled people have unique contributions, often overlooked, to help build resilient societies and communities. Setting as its foundational tenet the fact that disability does not mean inability, Walking Interconnections uses ‘walking with’ as a way to identify and make visible the everyday, embodied knowledges of disabled people – their habitual experiences of their environments and their persistent enactments of resilience within these.

In this short paper, Dee Heddon shares some of the findings from the project, revealing frequent performances of preparation, creativity, persistence and, especially significant to the context of environmental sustainability, interdependency.

The scene, comprising the completed prow of a large boat projecting through the doors of a Joiners shed at Cockatoo Island, included daily performances by volunteers wearing makeshift animal masks who queued by the boat with their luggage in this rehearsal of an escape…

This is the second version from an ongoing series of the same ‘scene’ continually adapted for and by different contexts. Each proposes rehearsal as play as a challenge to the rigidity and immobility of fear in response to catastrophe while also being responsive to the ways different contexts might affect the focus of the project.

This paper will discuss these shifting contexts for four versions of the Rehearsing Catastrophe work shown to date, including:

1. …The Ark in Avoca 2010 at Watford House, the site of The Avoca Project, a 10-year environmental work specifically addressing climate change,

2. …The Ark in Sydney, as described above,

3. …An Ark for Somerset for Illuminate Bath in January 2015, as influenced by the ‘Charlie Hebdo’ demonstrations in Paris,

4. …An Ark for Mons, (Belgium) in June 2015, in a Europe now under constant terrorism alert.

This paper hopes to extend the artworks by first challenging assumptions of fixity of place as enacted by Watford House then, by focusing on play through the filter of Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch’s use of the term ‘enaction’ (1992), exploring the adaptabilities of people under threat from environmental and social catastrophe; and finally, through the added filter of Brian Massumi’s recent study of animal play (2014), which challenges the fixed assumption of the superiority of humans over animals, by focusing on what the wearing of animal masks might contribute to these works at a deeper level.

In order to investigate this archaeology of memory and the effects of a political system, I travelled not only across oceans to Europe, but through the silence around that which had been hidden and erased, to speak to people who had known my grandfather, a political prisoner under the totalitarian regime.

In this paper, I will look at mobility as something which is tethered to history, to memory of generations before us.  Through text, film, and still images, I will look at how the return to discover a traumatic political past is not only a geographic return, not only in time, but in a sense a return into a site of deeply personal and family memory.

Drawing on Secret Police dossiers, the work of Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks in Theatre and Archaeology, the idea of trace in Walter Benjamin, and of the ‘difficult return’ in the work of James Thompson, I will discuss the threads and traces which weave through generations, and which are present in this work.

The site-specific project Traces involved walking to unnamed sites in Sofia. In one of those sites my daughter – born in Australia – sat deciphering the diary of her grandmother in a small apartment, laden with a troubled and semi-hushed history, and with absences.

This is a paper looking at the unbearable heaviness of mobility, and the after-shocks across time, place and generations.

The roundtable reflects on the ethical dimensions of the travelling artist. Among questions that participants will discuss are: what are the responsibilities of theatre-makers and performance artists as travellers, and how have they negotiated these? How is the mobility of artists understood in relation to that of others? Do artists seem to occupy a privileged position as ‘travelling correspondents’? And, more broadly, how have theatre-makers and performance artists developed artistic strategies by which to respond to their movement through the world?

The session aims to stimulate debate and open out the conversation beyond the invited participants and, as such, will attempt to take its steer from the experiences and interests of those attending.

Creative activity can be seen as a condensing of mind and matter into expression – drawing dispersed ideas and elements into a coherent event, mobilising and directing forces into the becoming of something new. Within Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, this is represented by the dynamics of the five elemental phases: from the openness of space (which allows even the idea of mobility), the free movement of air stirring introduces communication and momentum; fire generates a magnetising force, becoming more tangible, drawing in and digesting fuel as it moves along a certain path; developing then into water, coherent and strong yet still adaptable and transformative. When ideas take form, this is an expression of earth, which, like bone, is seemingly stable yet always ready to disperse again into mobility.

This paper is based in my creative research into the fluctuating density of the body’s physiological systems through movement and dance, and the development of the dance/film cast (2014), set along the Yarra River in Melbourne’s CBD – exploring internal and external flows of movement in this urban, pedestrian environment – and Postcards for John Cage (2015), filmed near the Hopkins River in Warrnambool. My presentation will feature clips from both films, along with a discussion of mobility as described by a continuum of density, marked by continuous dispersal and regrouping into coherence.

I will consider this work in relation to the global ‘Slow Movement’ that attempts to counter-act the fast pace of capitalist consumption and its deleterious effects on the environment. Using the theorisation of ‘slow dramaturgy’ (Eckersall and Paterson, 2011), I will consider how the rhythms of the female body were represented in the work, and how these were altered in its mediated version created by SBS and spread globally through YouTube.

Further to this, I will draw on philosopher Jane Bennett’s work on material agency in Vibrant Matter (2010) to consider the ‘thing-power’ of the menstrual blood in relation to Jenkins’ political ecology and feminist activism.

In this paper, I argue that it is neither the mode nor manner of expression that is at fault, but rather the design of the audience experience that perpetuates the barrier to meaningful and dignified engagement in our ubiquitous visual culture.

I will explore how a new project underway in Melbourne and Brisbane aims to resolve the shortcomings of first generation visual literacy initiatives like audio and verbal description by melding ekphrastic expression, phenomenological and formalist analysis with a dynamic digital platform delivery for a rich, mobile and autonomous audience experience of the visual.

In effect, the blind as people who are ‘visually remote’ teach the sighted to see by guiding a sighted audience to explore visual experiences thoughtfully and systematically. This requires any typical shorthand to be expunged in favour of intimacy, revealing the essential form of experiences that might otherwise have been passed over at a glance for reasons of brevity or taste.

While the collaborative methodology affords social and cultural dividends, this is not a disability project. Rather, it is a much broader communication project informed by the experience of disability. I will also be demonstrating the pilot project during the Assembly as an iC2 Walk down nearby Swanston Street.

The iC2 Walk is supported by the City of Melbourne Arts Projects 2015.