Amrita Amrita

Hello Beautiful Fronds+Family+Mob+Community,

Prue, Honey and Amrita have been selected to be a part of the amazing Underbelly Arts festival 2017.

Underbelly arts is a super important festival and organisation that helps emerging artist realise incredibly bold projects. 

We are super honoured to be a part of it, and this is going to be one of our biggest (in size) projects to date! 

Their new work is called: 

This _ _ _ _ _ _ _ may not protect you but at times it’s enough to know it’s there.

And heres the a little bit about it !

We are making a huge inflatable sculpture that will house performance & intimate storytelling ~ its a little bit like one of Prue & Honeys photographs being bought to life with perfomance/choreography by Amrita+Guests. 

and in a bit more detail..

Gentle 

Protective 

Expansive 

The idea of Utopia is a Contradiction. 

The Idea of a soft structure protecting you is absurd.

Distilling fragments of each artists known, imagined and seen utopias and bringing them to life through mapping and making tangible the energy that comes with re-occupying space. This work is a provocation to ask how it is we can renegotiate boundaries visible and invisible.

Utopic notions are explored through dance, performance and photography. Creating a mass soft structure with body, breath and language in  an intersectional physical landscape. 

Using softness and fluidity as a force to permeate through the walls of rigid colonialist structures.

Our utopic visions are not rooted in a desire to achieve perfection; rather to individually and collectively explore what is thinkable, permissible and doable.

Heres a little bit about us! 

Creative duo Honey Long and Prue Stent are multidisciplinary artists whose work is a co-mingling between photography, performance, installation and sculpture. Their practice centres around their conflicted relationship to femininity and its passive associations. Often their process is spontaneous and playful with the result being unexpected and accidental. Along with many shared interests and fascinations they have a perverse curiosity to interact with alluring materials and objects, incorporating them into costumes or disguises which distort and fragment the bodily form. As a result cultural debris becomes reconfigured within fluid and dreamy contexts, triggering subconscious associations while also evading classification.

Amrita Hepi is a dancer and choreographer working in performance, video and installation. A Bundjulung and Ngapuhi woman her practice sits in the nexus between contemporary dance and pop culture Her work has taken many forms (film, performance, sculpture, text, lecture, paticipatory installation) but always begins from working with the body as a point of archive, memory and resistance.  She trained at NAISDA and then headed to Alvin Ailey to further develop her tertiary education. Her work has been shown internationally and nationally at the Sydney Opera House, Museum of Contemporary Arts, TEDX sydney, Dark Mofo Tasmania, ACCA, Art Central Hong Kong and Banff Centre Canada. She has also recently joined the Western Australian Dance company Ochres and also is working with Marrugeku.

What we will be using the funds for! 

- The primary use of these funds will be to cover the fees of collaborating performers from within sydney/greater western sydney.

 3 x rehearsals for 4 Dancers

Wage for 4 Dancers 

The commissioning of two writers, creating two original stories that will also act as a score. 

Wage for writers to read/perform at the underbelly arts presentation weekend.  

- Materials (2 x fans and the sewing of a giant inflatable) 

- Flights  (prue is based in Melbourne) 

- Welcome to country/Smoking of space. 

With our collective and also with the support of Underbelly we feel really honoured to have recieved this oppurtunity - however as independent artists ourselves we want act with integrity -The greatest challenge of this project is being able to pay our collaborators what they deserve - while delivering an ambitious and huge project (and not sending ourselves into negative broke) 

Working interstate with conflicting schedules has also been one of the biggest challenges - so the time we do get to spend toegther is integral/incredibly important.