Amelia McQueen

ELEVATE by Natalie Abbott, Janine Proost and Amelia McQueen for You Are Here festival 2014, Image by Lorna Sim

This Town is Loud Now is a multifaceted performance project rooted in the possibilities of the present moment. The project will have three vastly different stages - research lab, conference and live art event - which will work together to form and reform unpredictable artistic expression. A brutally fast timeline will force creative urgency upon the artists and produce a raw, intimate space between performer and audience. At the culmination, the performers will be unleashed amongst an audience of pioneers, abandoning conventional theatre structures - and YOU'RE INVITED!!

This project will create art the way artists want to make it, from a non-commercial platform of individual expression. This project is setting the conditions to achieve breakthrough work by bringing people with commen interests but different ways of thinking into a process of intense collaboration. The work they create is guaranteed to reflect the peak of our civilisation as it is now. The live event will be a unique, once-in-a-lifetime explosive gathering of human minds, bodies and spirits. Attendees will engage with their physical creativity and use it to celebrate the intrinsic connection we all share.

This kind of extreme vision is not cheap! This Town Is Loud Now will employ a large and diverse team of performers, designers and technicians, and will need a big and well appointed theatre space to operate within - so luckily, this crowd funding campaign has extra muscle behind it!

Every dollar you give will be matched up to $3000 through Creative Partnerships Australia's initiative Match: Crowdfunding for the Independent Arts Sector.



This means that if you pledge $1, we get $2... if you pledge $20, we get $40... and if you pledge $100, we get $200!

With the all-or-nothing nature of this campaign, only if the $4000 target is reached will the funds be matched, so please read on, share this page, and if you're inspired to do so, pick your reward and help make this project a reality!

if you need a bit more persuading, here is some extra juicy details on the creative components that form This Town Is Loud Now:

1) Performance lab: An elite team of dancers, musicians and performance artists come together for the first time. They give over their extensive individual experience as an open source for exchange and learning. Simultaneous to evolving themselves, they share their work with others through a program of classes and online publishing. They ask themselves ‘What is being present?’ ‘What is exciting about being present and why do we want it as a performance tool?’ ‘How can we use the performer/audience relationship to learn something new about presence?’

2) Conference: the lab artists will bring their work into a broader context by hosting a day of panel discussions and Q&A sessions with other artists and the general public.

3) Night-time Spectacle: An event of sentient, sensory living - food, drink, sound, bodies, vision, observation, touch, dialogue, new and dynamic assemblages of dance-performance-music bodies affecting and being affected. The lab artists will perform emerging work from the lab, plus special guest performances from other extraordinary artists. The event will be designed as a total experience including food, drinks and interactive installations.

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The MATCH Initiative is thanks to the partnership between QL2 Dance and Creative Partnerships Australia. 
For more information about QL2's involvement with Creative Partnerships Australia head to: http://blog.ql2.org.au




PROJECT ARTISTS
Concept: Amelia McQueen
Mentor Producer: Kara Ward

Amelia McQueen, Image by Lorna Sim

Lab Collaborators:
Dance: Gabrielle Nankivell, Josh Thompson, Amelia McQueen %20 TBC
Music: TBC
Lead Archivist: Cobie Orger


Gabrielle Nankivell, image Chris Herzfeld

Conference speakers: Lab collaborators %20 TBC

Night-time Spectacle:
Performers: Lab collaborators %20 TBC
Lighting Design: Ben Shaw
Edibles and Libations: Simon Hall

Promo Video Credits:
Camera and Edit: Cobie Orger
Sketch Artist: Michelle Baginski
Sound: William Bilwa Costa
Total legend: Simon Hall
Featuring live excerpts from:
'ELEVATE' made and performed by Natalie Abbott, Janine Proost and Amelia McQueen at the You Are Here festival, Canberra 2014
ROCK PIGS - work in progress
Created by Cobie Orger
with Martin Hansen, Natalie Abbott, Seth Rees, Noah Symons

Whoo hoo, punch the air, prance the feet, now onwards!

-The lab artists and Night-time Spectacle performers will be remunerated in order to support artists in a sustainable practice. Often performers are asked to donate their work because it is an opportunity, or provides them experience. While this may be true, you can't eat or sleep under opportunity and experience. This project values the work of performers in dollars terms.

-An online portal to house creative documentation and make the work of the lab artists broadly available until the end of time will be designed and implemented.

-The extensive production costs of the Night-time Spectacle will be recouped through this crowdfunding campaign and other fundraising efforts, as well as personal investment.

- securing enough support to keep production costs in line with artist fees, so that as many artists as possible can benefit from the project

- keeping the curatorial focus of the Night-time Spectacle succinct, as there are so many fantastic performance artists in Melbourne who have new work ready to be seen by audiences