Campbelltown Art Centre Announces Program of Dance and Art as Part of Sydney Festival 2021

Campbelltown Arts Centre will present a program of contemporary dance and art as part of Sydney Festival 2021.

Performances will include Explicit Contents, The Complication of Lyrebirds, and Space YZ.

Campbelltown Arts Centre is a cultural facility of Campbelltown City Council and located on Dharawal land. C-A-C is assisted by the NSW Government through Create NSW and by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Art, its funding and advisory body, and receives support from the Crown Resorts Foundation and the Packer Family Foundation.

Learn more at https://c-a-c.com.au/.

Check out the full lineup below!

Explicit Contents

Campbelltown Arts Centre, 1 Art Gallery Road, Campbelltown
Season: 6 - 9 January 2021

The edge of the body has disappeared; the environment has seeped inside and come to live amongst body parts; the nervous system feels its way far beyond the skin.

Commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre, Explicit Contents is a new dance work from acclaimed Sydney-based choreographer, Rhiannon Newton. Describing visceral transactions between humans and their worlds, the work tells hyper-real stories about the contents of two bodies as they are made and remade by the forces of their surroundings. Burning and cooling, hungering and satiating, incorporating and expelling, the body becomes an explicit site of action and exchange.

Featuring Sydney-based dancers, Ivey Wawn and David Huggins, and sound design by Peter Lenaerts (Brussels/Sydney), Explicit Contents presents an evocative journey through the body's entanglement with the environment. Reimagining bodies as watery vessels, techno-chemical conglomerates and thermo-dynamic machines, this new work asks not just what impacts are humans having on their environment, but what do these impacts feel like?

Information and Bookings: www.sydneyfestival.org.au

The Complication of Lyrebirds

Campbelltown Arts Centre, 1 Art Gallery Road, Campbelltown
Season: 20 - 23 January 2021

The Complication of Lyrebirdsa??is a contemporary dance work designed to break away from the social expectations of what it means to look or sound Aboriginal. Lead artista?? Jasmina?? Shepparda?? draws on her own experience and her family roots to look at questions surrounding Aboriginal identity through the story of the lyrebird.

The lyrebird adopts the calls of other birds in order to appear attractive and find a mate however, there is an authentic identity to the bird that is no mimic. In the same way, Indigenous people are faced with external pressures to prove their 'blackness' and adopt different ways of talking and appearing. Considering this, Sheppard proposes that if your family was denied their culture by the impact of colonisation, then what really makes you Aboriginal?a??

Re-contextualizing historical documents, such as 'The White Australia Policy' and 'The Exemption Form', as choreographic tools,a?? The Complication of Lyrebirds a??investigates societal and cultural sources of expectations and pressures, as well as drawing on the artist's own lived experience, to create a unique and powerful choreographic narrative.a??

Information and Bookings: www.sydneyfestival.org.au

Space YZ

Campbelltown Arts Centre, 1 Art Gallery Road, Campbelltown
Exhibition: 7 January - 14 March 2021

In times of alarmingly diminishing art school options in the tertiary and higher education systems, Space YZ, curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham, draws inspiration from the visual arts legacy of Western Sydney University (formerly known as University of Western Sydney).

From the first graduating class in 1986 to the final cohort as the curtain closed in 2009, the art school was a pioneering hub for experimentation and risk-taking across a broad variety of media.

Staged twelve years since the closure of the art school, Space YZ presents significant early works created by 88 Visual Arts and Electronic Arts alumni during their undergraduate studies or within two years of graduation.

'Space YZ' references the university gallery established on campus in 1992. A transitional space, the gallery was literally an oversized corridor connecting the Z Block art studios to the rest of the university on the Kingswood side of the Penrith campus. Less a destination than an idling walkway, Space YZ speaks to the metaphors of transition and connection that abound at art school; where ideologies are challenged and unique artistic identities forged.

Including early work by Brook Andrew, Liam Benson, Raquel Ormella, Savanhdary Vongpoothorn and Justene Williams among many others, Space YZ celebrates the vibrant artistic practices that have flourished from this important institution, while advocating for better access to art school education in Western Sydney and across Australia.

Free entry - Information: www.c-a-c.com.au

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