Straight from a sold out world premiere season at Arts Centre Melbourne, Speak Percussion return to Perth to perform their new work, Polar Force. Presented by PICA with Tura New Music, Polar Force is a hyper-realistic sound adventure to the Antarctic hidden in an inflatable performance installation. Encounter a multi-sensorial world through sound, wind and light, with pristine Antarctic field recordings and bespoke ice instruments, which melt and fracture to render the ice and ‘weather’ into audible phenomena.

Unsure whether you’re witnessing cutting edge scientific research, a dangerous polar expedition or unknown sinister activity, Polar Force explores notions of human fragility and isolation to question our relationship to the natural world.

Internationally recognised as a leader in the fields of experimental and contemporary classical music, Speak Percussion are constantly redefining the potential of percussion. Their works have been described as “virtuosic, adventurous” (New York Times) and
“breathtakingly impressive” (The West Australian) and Polar Force is set to be Perth’s ‘coolest’ art experience this summer.

The Talk by Mish Grigor
18 – 19 & 21 – 25 January | PICA Performance Space

The Talk is a terribly undomesticated evening and hilarious live twist on the family dinner. Melbourne-based artist Mish Grigor, whose work explores the space between pop culture and experimental performance, created the show based on a family event and following period of research with her very own family members about their sex lives.

“My brother came out after an episode of ‘The L Word’. As the credits closed on Carmen going down on a leggy blonde in a nightclub, he said, ‘I’m like that. I do that.’ My mother and I looked at each other, confused. ‘Cunnilingus?’ I offered, and laughed. ‘No!’ He said, standing up and rolling up his blanket. ‘Gay. I do gay. I’m gay. I do gay sex.’”

Audiences are invited to step in as Mish’s family and re-enact real conversations about the taboos of sex, sexuality and love. Described by The Guardian (UK) as “Funny, toe-curlingly frank, and immensely insightful”, The Talk is participatory theatre at its most explicit, unapologetic and best.

Mish Grigor is one third of the theatre company POST, formed in 2003 in collaboration with Natalie Rose and Zoe Coombs Marr; and in 2018 began a new co-directorship of interdisciplinary collective Aphids with Lara Thoms and Eugenia Lim.

PICA’s flair for the adventurous

Embracing PICA’s unique performance brand for the contemporary and experimental, this year Fringe audiences are offered adventurous experiences they won’t find elsewhere.

PICA’s Producer, Tim Carter shares some of the thinking behind curating these works within FRINGE WORLD: “Our program this year considers and reframes the role of the audience, taking the expectation of audience interaction, now very familiar across FRINGE WORLD, and turning it on its head through participation and sensory immersion.”

“Polar Force is a deeply immersive installation ready to transform PICA’s Central Gallery as we’ve never seen. I’m excited for audiences to experience this transporting and affecting work based on the Antarctic in the midst of our own extreme climate conditions, Perth’s summer. This environmental tension will offer a directly physical and sensory experience exploring the barriers between human and habitat in this current age of climate turbulence.”

“I like to think about The Talk as an intervention into the ‘taboo’ of sex that some fringe shows fetishize. The work is full of candid, explicit accounts of sexual behaviour but in inviting the audience to recount these stories the ownership of the material shifts and prompts us to question why we consider certain activity taboo, and what individual and social value we place on moral freedom.”

PERFORMANCE DETAILS

The Talk 

Creative team
Created and Performed by Mish Grigor
Collaborating Artists Jess Olivieri and Anne Thompson