Art and About Launches
This Friday, Martin Place becomes a suburban Aussie back yard for the launch party of one of Sydney’s most anticipated festivals. Complete with freshly mowed lawn and a Hills Hoist, the least ‘backyardy’ place in the city is transformed in honour of Sydney’s creative and unique art festival Art and About. Transformation is the order of things as every street corner, dark alley and major business centre are game for redecoration. Installations and works will be popping up all over the city, in places you would least expect. Art in unusual places, that’s what Art and About is.
Now in its 13th year, Art and About has a theme this time exploring the endangered. There is a fair chunk of Australian nostalgia, starting with the ‘quarter acre block’ party on Friday, as well as the Milk Bar banners scattered through the city, harking back to the glory days of the humble milk bar. Us, an outdoor photography studio, uniting strangers in group photographs, forms a popular highlight. Perhaps the most unusual exhibits and installations will be those which are performance based. Part dance performance, part ballet, part outdoor spectacle, Trolleys is a 20 minute outdoor high-energy theatre work where street dancers and acrobats come together with the humble shopping trolley to spin, glide and slide across city spaces. In the festival’s finale, Bodies in Urban Spaces, 20 brightly clothed people will be finding ways to squeeze themselves into doorways, alcoves and any gap they can find in the CBD.
Armchair Apocalypse, a miniature, itinerant theatre season running for the length of the festival, demands particular attention in its unusual setting. Performances will not be held in traditional performance spaces, but rather people’s homes – anyone’s home. Regular city dwellers open their doors to an ‘intimate night of theatrical antics, music and storytelling’. The season, programmed by theatre company Tamarama Rock Surfers and written by Lydia Nicholson, Cait Harris and TRS Acting Artistic Director Phil Spencer, thrives on the intimacy of its settings and promises memorable performances. Spencer, no stranger to the lounge-room theatre phenomenon, traces the origin of the concept back to his slapdash dramatic days at the University of Glasgow: ‘we rented out mate’s houses for shows, theatre spaces were just too expensive’. When discussing domestic performance spaces in Sydney, he stated a ‘need for this city to reclaim these multi-faceted spaces as much as possible’ which bears great relevance to the central theme of Art and About. For more information on Armchair Apocalypse, visit rocksurfers.org.
From this Friday 19th September until Sunday 12th October, the city will be alive, with art and artists crammed into every nook and cranny, in some cases quite literally. Don’t let this one slip by you, get Art and About.