- For Artists
- Creative Developments
- In the Dark
In the Dark
Come. Take night-time hours as your own. Uncover stories about women and the spaces we inhabit. Explore the projections, imaginings and fantasies by which we are limited and defined.
Dates
18 - 30 Mar 2019Come. Take night-time hours as your own.
Uncover stories about women and the spaces we inhabit. Explore the projections, imaginings and fantasies by which we are limited and defined.
IN THE DARK is a series of live performance installations presented in public spaces, created by performance maker Leah Shelton in collaboration with writer Mandy Beaumont and digital artist Alinta Krauth.
Beaumont’s complex, brutal text collides with Shelton’s stylised choreography to explore the female experience in public spaces after nightfall. IN THE DARK will agitate around the issues of female agency and voice, around holding space, around the imaginings of others as to where we belong.
The artists
Leah Shelton
Leah Shelton is an Australian performance artist whose work sits in the sweet spot between alt-cabaret, physical theatre and live art. She is also Co-Director of artist collective Polytoxic, one of the most prominent contemporary Pacific theatre companies in Australia. Originally dance-trained, Leah has a diverse performance background which has seen her tour to the US, Canada, Europe, UK, Japan and South Pacific. As a solo artist, she creates stylized, guttural, unashamedly feminist work soaked in cult references and dark humour. She spent over a decade working in the intense Suzuki Actor Training Method in Brisbane and Japan, and has graced the cabaret stages of La Clique (Edinburgh, Brighton) and Vegas Nocturne (Las Vegas). She is currently touring her award-winning solo work, Terror Australis, which received the Adelaide Fringe Innovation Award, Matilda Award for Best Set Design, and Green Room Nomination for Best Contemporary and Experimental Performer.
Mandy Beaumont
Mandy’s writing has been called powerful, brutal, magnificent and complex. Her writing has won the MOTH International Short Story Award, and been a finalist in the Victorian University Short Story Award, the Overland Fair Australia Prize (twice), the Newcastle Short Story Award, the Rachel Funari Award, the ACU Poetry Prize, and the SmokeLong Quarterly Award. Mandy was also the Poet in Residence at the State Library of Queensland and a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Writing Fellow. She has been published in Griffith Review, Cordite, Black Inc. Best Poems, The MOTH and The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library Journal, and in 2017 was co-editor of The Idea of Women edition of Overland. Mandy has also undertaken large-scale text work for Brisbane Festival, Queensland Poetry Festival, the State Library of Queensland and the Brisbane Writers Festival. She teaches creative writing at Griffith University and is currently shortlisted for the Richell Award.