Taking place inside the legendary Witches in Britches theatre restaurant (home to Melbourne’s only full-sized polystyrene dragon), Comfort Zones features the curdled cream of Australia’s performance underground.
It’s a game of artistic musical chairs, with fake cobwebs and haunted zombies, where we ask our artists to make the ultimate sacrifice. Theatre-makers, musicians and god-knows-who-else will all relinquish the safety of their personal practices, devising short performance works that are as far from their speciality as possible. Comfort Zones culminates in a rockin’ all-night after-party with a CTJ (Cassette Tape Jockey) in the Dungeon Disco. It’s got a bed of nails – on the ceiling.
Two Tuesdays only. Wildly different line-up each night!
Bron Batten, The Black Lung’s Thomas Henning, Ed Gould, Forty Forty Home, Richard Higgins, Telia Nevile, Max Milne, Simonce Page Jones, Claudia O’Doherty, The List Operators, Safari Team (Lillian O’Neil, Blaine Cooper and Jon Oldmeadow), Karina Smith, The Suitcase Royale, Sisters Grimm, Elbow Room
About the artist/s:
Bron Batten is a Melbourne based theatre-maker, producer, choreographer and performer. She has trained at tertiary institutions such as Deakin University and most recently at The Victorian College of the Arts, graduating with a Post Graduate Diploma in Theatre Making (Animateuring).She has performed in and made work for festivals such as The Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Melbourne and Adelaide Fringe Festivals, Next Wave, The Village Festival, The Big Day Out, The Streets of Melbourne Festival and The Falls Music Festival. She co-devised and performed We Could Live Here for the 2008 Adelaide and Melbourne Fringe Festivals and devised and performed the work I want to dance with somebody for the 2008 Next Wave festival’s Nightclub Project. Bron was a collaborator and performer in Interior Theatre’s Last Drinks for the 2008 Short and Sweet Independent Companies season, which won the Best Comedy Writing award. She is the Co-curator and Producer of the monthly performance event The Last Tuesday Society, which has presented events at The Melbourne Fringe Festival, The Melbourne International Comedy Festival and The Streets of Melbourne at Federation Square, as well as monthly at Yah Yah’s, Old Bar and The Order of Melbourne. Bron premiered her long awaited solo work Welcome to the Jungle at the 2009 Melbourne Fringe Festival and is a theatre reviewer for Australian Stage and Artshub.
Award-winning theatre-maker Telia Nevile
graduated VCA in 1999 and since then has been constantly experimenting with form and content to the delight of her audiences. Her recent works include the deconstructivist social study Last Drinks (2008 Short + Sweet Best Comedy Writing); the whirlwind 1920s dance piece Zoetrope (2008 Falls Festival; 2008 The Village; 2008 Melbourne Fringe; 2007 La Mama Explorations); and the private-viewing Festival favourite Penny Machinations, which she ran with List Operator Matt Kelly (2009 Melbourne Food & Wine Festival; 2008 Chookahs Childrens Festival; 2006 & 2007 Falls Festivals; 2006 & 2007 The Village at Edinburgh Gardens; 2005 & 2006 Melbourne Fringe – Outstanding Special Event 2005).
Telia premiered her beloved Poet Laureate character at the cult Last Tuesday Society in 2008, and has appeared regularly at the monthly event and its Festival spin-offs, converting audiences to the power of comic poetry at the 2009 Melbourne International Comedy Festival, the 2009 Streets of Melbourne Festival and the 2008 and 2009 Melbourne Fringes. Her 2009 Melbourne Fringe show While I’m Away enjoyed an extended season and critical acclaim (“Four stars” The Age), and had a successful season at the 2010 Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Telia also appeared in Poet Laureate guise as part of the 2009 Melbourne International Arts Festival’s Becks Rumpus Room Notes from the Underground.
Safari Team
Lillian O’Neil, Blaine Cooper and Jon Oldmeadow collaborate as doppelgangers and nom de plumes who practice, exhibit and travel together.
Formed in 2005 as a knee jerk vomit reaction to turgid self-conscious art nightmares, Safari Team work with a whiskey fuelled fluidity that results in shambolic projects far surpassing the reach of individual artists, in an interchange of humour and ideas.
Safari Team invent doppelgangers and ‘nom de plume’ identities using them in film, installation, performance, sculpture and painting. Pursuing an aesthetic of self-resourcing, high-energy, second-hand materials and lo-fi technology.
After completing a Bachelor of Contemporary Art (majoring in Drama) at Deakin University, Simone Page Jones has devised and performed in several solo artistic ventures, as well as collaborating on numerous projects with various Melbourne Artists and Theatre Companies. Including award winning television series Fashion Police directed by Leila Koren (2003-2005 Channel 31), Total Theatre Australia in Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (2004), Paola Bilborough The Venting Tent (2005, The Village, Big West Arts Festival, Footscray), The Suitcase Royale (2007, 2008 Wesley Anne Residency, 2008 Chooka Kids Festival), The Suitcase Royale The Ballad of Backbone Joe (2009, the voice of ‘Denise’) Blacklung Theatre Avast (2006), Rubeville (2006 Melbourne Fringe Festival) and Pranking (T.I.N.A 2007, New Castle), Pete Reid and The Tar Gang Four Rogues (2008 Next Wave Festival), Hitlerhoff (2008 Melbourne Fringe Festival), and self-devised and written cabaret show Sveta Dobranoch and the Brown Bears (2008, The Village Festival, Melbourne International Comedy Festival, 2010). For her work in Sveta Dobranoch and the Brown Bears, Simone was presented with the ‘Spinning Wheel Award -for Best New Cabaret Artist’. Since receiving this award, Simone’s character ‘Sveta’ has performed within A Company of Strangers (2009, The Spiegeltent, Adelaide Fringe Festival – Winner of The Advertiser Award), The Last Tuesday Society and the Life on Mars? benefit event with Tri Pod and Ali McGregor (2009 Melbourne International Comedy Festival). Additional projects include A Company of Strangers (2009, The Spiegeltent, Brisbane Festival), Clairy Baby Browne and The Bangin Rackettes (2009, Melbourne International Arts Festival), Bittersweet (2009, Melbourne Fringe Festival) and Glassoon a collaboration with Thomas Henning and The Blacklung Theatre, November, 2009.
Simone has also collaborated with Australian visual artists Sophia Hewson on Goodnight Atala (2009, http://www.lindbergcontemporary.com.au/artists-sophiahewson_03.php ) and David Bromley (2008, 2009), and has appeared in several short films including Cherrybomb directed by Lester Francois (2007), Little Pieces directed by Belinda Fitzpatrick (2007) and Carrot directed by Tom Salisbury (2008).
The List Operators
. Two guys, two pens, some blank paper and lots and lots of lists. At the Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2009 the The List Operators were awarded the coveted “Golden Gibbo” for Best Independent Production and the Auspicious Arts Award at Melbourne Fringe 2008. Lists are generated live with input from the audience or they are a pre-prepared framework for sketches. Props bought from charity shops, handmade t-shirts, a sampler and sounds stolen from 1990s Casio keyboards combine to create a show that is “kinetic, mad and unerringly clever.” The Age Online 2009
Matt Kelly won the 06 Fringe Special Event Award for his show Penny Machinations (with Telia Nevile) which has since toured Victoria and Tasmania, playing the 07/08 Falls and 07 Midsumma festivals. He had a critically acclaimed run of the solo show ‘The Outsider’ at the Stork.
Rich Higgins had a successful one man show in the 08 Comedy Festival ‘Richard Richards: Expert Tour-guide in Training’ and is the host of the monthly performance night ‘Last Tuesday Society’. He is also a Clown Doctor.
The Suitcase Royale
is a Rag n Bone band of three from Melbourne, Australia that has been creating and performing their unique style of ‘Junkyard Theatre’ since mid 2004. Their style utilizes a large variety of performance styles and employs multiple art forms including; performance, dance, puppetry, text, set design and stop animation. The Suitcase Royale also compose & perform original music for their shows as well as creating digital sound scapes. It is a unique ensemble based style of theatre making that approaches the work as a whole, with the aim of making highly developed, multi faceted, narrative driven theatre.
The Suitcase Royale’s repertoire of works, Felix Listens to the World (2004), Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon (2006), The Ghosts of Ricketts Hill (2007), The Ballad of Backbone Joe (2008) and The Suitcase Royale SPACE SHOW (2009) have toured to the Pittsburgh Arts Festival, Edinburgh fringe, Ruhrfestspiele festival, Germany, Dublin fringe and the Soho theatre in London. The company has also collaborated with U.K. performance duo, Lone Twin, in a piece entitled The Newsboys, commissioned by 2008 Melbourne International arts Festival.They have recently recorded their debut self titled album and will perform a season of The Ballad of Backbone Joe at The Sydney Theatre Company in late 2010.
Forty Forty Home
is a new Melbourne based company set to produce high quality theatre productions made by an all female creative team. They aim to produce original performances that facilitate creative collaboration between emerging and established female theatre practitioners.
Responding to the current creative climate and increasing culture of apathy, the company has resolved to make work that, rather than maintaining a safe, ironic distance from potentially political content, engages audiences and practitioners in critical dialogue.
Forty Forty Home is sturdy theatre.
Erin Kelly, Amy Turton and Ella McDonald are the Artistic Directors.
Sisters Grimm
are Ashleigh and Declan Grimm (nee Flanders and Greene). Since 2006 we’ve been creating endless reams of gross-out high-camp trash-theatre, performed in our hometown of Melbourne, Australia, as well as interstate and in the UK. We exist to foster the development of innovative, entertaining, subversive queer creative practice
Declan Greene is a writer and theatre-maker based in Melbourne. His plays include RAGEBOY, A BLACK JOY and MOTH, and have been produced at The Storeroom, the Malthouse, and the Sydney Opera House among others. He has won the Monash University National Playwright’s Competition (2006), the Malcolm Robertson Prize (2010), and the R.E. Ross Playwright’s Development Awards (2007 and 2009). Commissions include Union House Theatre, Melbourne Theatre Company and Arena Theatre/Malthouse.
Ash Flanders graduated from the Ballarat Arts Academy (formerly BAPA) in 2002. For the next two years he toured Australia with theatre-in-education company Brainstorm Productions (2003-4). In 2007 he performed Adam Cass’ one-man play I LOVE YOU, BRO, which then toured to the Malthouse, the Spiegeltent, London’s Pleasance Theatre, Edinburgh Fringe and the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival where Ash was nominated for Best Male Actor. Ash most recently worked on Georgia Fields latest film clip and starred in FUGUE, which has been selected for the 2010 Melbourne Queer Film Festival
Elbow Room’s
2010 production of a tiny chorus for the 2010 Adelaide Fringe Festival was nominated for the Best Theatre Production award.
Emily Tomlins and Eryn Jean Norvill were both nominated for the Best Performance award for their performances in that production. Elbow Room’s 2009 production of a tiny chorus for the 2009 Melbourne Fringe Festival received the Fringe Dweller’s People’s Choice Award. Elbow Room’s 2009 production of There for the Adelaide Fringe Festival was shortlisted for the Bank SA Supprt Act Award. Elbow Room’s production of There for the 2008 Melbourne Finge Festival received the The Adelaide Fringe Festival Award for Best Performance. Elbow Room’s 2008 production of Venus in Furs was nominated by The Age as “one of the best independent productions of the year.”
Elbow Room are actors Emily Tomlins and Angus Grant
Writer/Director Marcel Dorney and
Prodcer Neal Harvey
Karina Smith is a Melbourne based dancer, burlesque and circus performer. Having graduated from Deakin University with a Batchelor of Arts in dance and drama in 2005, she has performed in a variety of festivals, including the Dae-Jeon International Choreographers Festival in South Korea, The International Comedy Festivals, Melbourne Fringe Festivals, Next Wave Festivals, as well as many one-off nights at various venues all over Melbourne, including The Last Tuesday Society, Blonde On The Rocks, The Famous Spiegeltent, The Toff in Town, The Big Day Out, The Order of Melbourne and Rockstrip. Karina is also an aerialist with the Footscray Womens Circus, playing the role of Cassandra in the 2008 production of “Here”.
Ed Gould has completed a a Bachelor of Music Performance (Honours) at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University in 2009 and a Bachelor of Music Performance, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University in 2007. Gould has performed as a solo saxophonist in the performance of ‘Nexus’, composed by Don Banks, with the Monash University Symphony Orchestra at Robert Blackwood Hall, Clayton, Melbourne in 2005. Gould has been involved with a variety of visual arts and performance projects such as compiling the soundscape for performance artist, Bron Batten as part of the 2008 Next Wave Festival, Festival Club Closing Party, Melbourne and has performed with a Wandering Mind at the Degraves Subway in association with the City of Melbourne and Platform Artist Group Inc in 2009. Gould has performed in a variety of Melbourne venues from diverse as the old Dizzy’s Jazz Club, Richmond and The Barley Corn, Collingwood, Bar 303, Northcote, The Tote, Collingwood and Ding Dong Lounge, Melbourne.
