Join us at PACT on Friday 22nd of November for In The Works.

In The Works is an opportunity for our 8 PACT Lab: Process, Play, Experiment (PPE) artists to share the works they have developed during their residency.

What is PPE ?
PPE is PACT’s full-time, two-week lab intensive that will support eight emerging artists in building their skills, experimenting with form and evolving their craft to its next stage.

This year, PPE has been led by Malcolm Whittaker, Nat Randall, Tammi Gissell, Janie Gibson, Raghav Handa, Fausto Brusamolino, Clare Britton, James Peter Brown and Justine Shih Pearson.

RSVP

The Artists

Arie Rain Glorie

He/They

I am a queer neurodivergent multi-disciplinary artist practising on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people. I make projects about the human experience ie. our interactions with the world, emotional regulation, perceptions of self and how thoughts work. Interested in the absurdity of life and the struggles that come with trying to be “normal”, my work often operates like a comforting wry smile. I've opened a retail store, made audio works in a quarry, made street poster campagnes, made decks of cards and exhibited artworks on a stage. I’m always interested in finding unique ways to share creativity with audiences.

Project:
‘Anxious Creatures’ are visually arresting, sticky, humorous manifestations of my internalised ruminations, inner dialogues and compulsive behaviours. In this performance, I will wear costumes of strange creatures and find ways to communicate a struggle with anxious thinking through performance.

Ashleigh Veitch

She/Her

Ashleigh Veitch is an independent dance maker and artist based in Eora/Sydney. She is a member of “The Young Folk,” an emerging artist group supported by ReadyMade Works and Dance Makers Collective’s “Future Makers”. Ashleigh has had choreographic residencies with ‘March Dance Festival’ and ReadyMade Works ‘Constant Relay” program to further develop her own works. In 2023, she presented her own work ‘ReRun (Working Title)’ in Dance Makers Collective’s “Big Dance 2.0” season. In 2024, her solo work “Longing” was performed at Sydney Dance Company’s Neilson Studio as part of the Sydney Fringe Festival, featured in DMC’s Future Makers show “MOVE FM.”

Project:
My work "ReRun Xtended" is movement research on the repetitive loops we find ourselves in. An exploration of how we fall into loops and patterns from the perception of many angles.

Bella Whitcher

They/Them

Bella Whitcher is a performance practitioner and mixed media artist residing on Gadigal Country. They studied a Bachelor of Performance (2018-2020) and a Bachelor of Creative Arts (Honours) (2022) at the University of Wollongong. In 2021, they co-founded Crush Collective with Leah Herbert and Ellen Houghton, creating an arts collective that supports emerging performers to produce contemporary queer and feminist work in a collaborative space. The shows they have produced and performed for Crush Collective includes ‘Queer Apocalypse’ (Factory Theatre, 2024), ‘girlblogging’ (Qtopia, 2023), ‘Mouse Mag Launch Party’ (PACT, 2023) and ‘Crush Nights’ (Society City, KXT, Merrigong, ITS, 2021-2024).

Project:
‘The Landlord Special’ invites you to meet a neighbourhood of tiny critters who are currently renting in decaying dollhouses. The project explores the current Sydney rental crisis from true stories submitted or shared online.

Ben Nosworthy

He/him

Ben Nosworthy is a theatre maker/performer from Wagga Wagga, and is currently based in Wollongong/Sydney. He currently holds a Bachelors in Performance and Theatre and is studying his Honours degree at the University of Wollongong. His previous theatre credits include Scorched (Dir. Emily Ayoub), George in Martyr (Dir. Mark Rodgers), One man show Every Brilliant Thing (Dir. Luke Denvir), Bingo Host on Blind Naive Faith (Dir. Dr Malcolm Whittaker), Sandy in The Antipodes (Dir. Matt Prest) Richard in DNA (Directed by Matilda Ellicott), and recently performed an expurpt at Sydney Improv Theatre with his new show, Working Class Clowns (2024). Ben seeks to create a live and charged theatrical experience for audiences which explore, question and make fun of the realities of contemporary life, by embodying the chaos of life itself in their process.

Project:
The project I will bring to this program is reminiscent of the classic cooking show ‘Ready Steady cook’. For this project, I want to create a live cooking show that plays with the ‘liveness’ of reality tv cooking, and explores the interpersonal connections between producer, host, janitor, dish pigs and the broader team of often unacknowledged labourers in the kitchen.

Clara Solly-Slade and Max Brading of The Kinetik Collective

Clara Solly-Slade
She/Her

Clara was awarded the Helpmann Academy’s Neil Curnow Award (2018) where she interned in the USA with The H.E.A.T Collective (Healing. Education. Activism. Theatre), Working Classroom and continued her work with La Mama Experimental Theatre Company. Clara worked for two years fulltime as an Emerging Director Fellow with the State Theatre Company of South Australia and State Opera of South Australia (2019-2020). Co-Founder of Independent Company The Kinetik Collective she directed ‘Kill Climate Deniers’ in 2022 as part of The State Theatre Company of South Australia’s ‘Stateside Program’. Clara Co-Directed ‘The River that Ran up Hill’ with Andy Packer (Slingsby Theatre Company, 2023 Adelaide Festival and 2024 at The Sydney Opera House) in, ‘Hypercolour Miscellaneous Bistro Buffet’ with Dave Court (Slow Mango and The Bait Fridge, 2023 Illuminate Festival) and The Sight with Victoria Falconer (2023 Dark Mofo Night Mass Programme). She is a proud Creative Director of the multi-disciplinary arts collective The Bait Fridge.

Max Brading
They/Them

Max is an multidisciplinary artist and musician. From a lifelong interest in the exchanges and relations we form with technology, Max has developed a creative practice that blends technical knowledge with performance and software programming, grounded in collaborative process through experimental use of technology. With a diverse range of skills including photography, music and sonic arts, interactive programming, performance art, and lighting design, Max's experience allows them to connect and create using technology across disciplines. Through their collaborations Max seeks to create space for artists to experiment, innovate and interrogate what is possible with technology and art.

Project:
Ek-ko is a new theatrical work exploring the way we engage with emerging Machine learning or Artificial Intelligence technologies. This work will see us create a multiple choice voting system where the audience will be in control of a digital avatar as we pass through several different stages of understanding of an "ultimate truth" within the work.

Juundaal Strang-Yettica

She/Her

I am a Yugambeh-Bundjalung & Kannakan woman, living on Wodi Wodi Country of the Dharawal nation. As an emerging artist with a disability, learning and determination underpin my approaches and my mentors are integral to the foundation of my practice. Performance, video storytelling, community and social engagement projects ground my cross-disciplinary practice and my performative characters Sister GlitterNullius & Sister Everywhen. I hope to create work that advocates and prioritises Nature, interrogates complex relationships, challenging issues, strengthens community capacity and contributes to social change. I hope to lead with vulnerability and build bridges, not mirrors.

Project:

I aim to develop the range of characters, nuns, stemming from my existing characters, Sister GlitterNullius X and Sister Everywhen. I hope to find ways to adapt and integrate these new characters into my long-term, social engagements project, The Wrapped Trees Project: The Wrapped Trees Project: https://thewrappedtreesproject.wordpress.com/. Registration to follow!

Natalie Quan Yau Tso

She/Her

Natalie Quan Yau Tso’s practice seeks to urgently place, archive and remember Hong Kong to survive their erasure. She investigates bodily boundaries as political boundaries through sculptures, installations and performances. She is guided by the layers of her body as a meeting of place and histories, performing acts to activate bodily dispersions. She then collects these materials, including saliva, sweat, hair and skin to form sculptures. She is invested in transparent, almost invisible, materials as a mask that both protects and erases her in the post-colonial contexts of Australia and Hong Kong.

Project:
Sea-Ghosts refuses and overwrites Hong Kong’s colonial narrative by excavating the buried sea spirits and their histories of salt-farming. I honour the colonised sea ghosts in their geological, spiritual and political forms, hoping to strengthen a connection to Hong Kong country that roots our identity deeper in mutual geological care to outlive the current violence of colonisation, state control and capitalism.

FACILITATORS

Malcolm Whittaker

Malcolm Whittaker (b. xxxx) works as an artist, writer, researcher, performer, producer and teacher. He does this in solo pursuits, as a member of re:group performance collective and Shammgods, and in collaboration with other artists and non-artists on a project by project basis. His work as an artist is mostly made and executed through the engagement of participants and collaborators in the framing of play spaces that adopt social forms and rituals from popular culture and the everyday. His projects have taken the form of theatre and gallery situations, site-specific and public interventions, performance lectures, film shoots, phone calls, support groups, radio programs, elevator rides, teeth-brushing services, walks in the park, games of chess, gift shops, handshakes, newspapers, fashion labels, letters in the mail, digging holes in the dirt and the borrowing of books from the library.

He has made and presented work extensively across Australia, as well as in the UK, Finland and Europe. He has done so through a range of initiatives and organisations, including Performance Space (Sydney), Arts House (Melbourne), Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), State Library of NSW, Art Gallery of NSW, The Wheeler Centre (Melbourne), Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney Biennale, Vitalstatistix (Adelaide), Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney Opera House, Mona Foma (Hobart), ANTI Festival (Kuopio), Next Wave Festival (Melbourne), Proximity Festival (Perth), World Theatre Festival (Brisbane), Junction Arts Festival (Launceston), Field Theory (Melbourne), Griffin Theatre Company, Belvoir St. Theatre, Merrigong Theatre Company (Wollongong), Belvoir St. Theatre, Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Urban Theatre Projects (Western Sydney), University of Technology Sydney, Berlin Performing Arts Festival, Prague Quadrennial, Punctum (Castlemaine), Country Arts SA, Salamanca Arts Centre (Hobart), Mona Foma (Tasmania), Bleach Festival (Gold Coast), Big Anxiety Festival (Sydney), Brand X (Sydney) and Cementa (Kandos). Malcolm holds a PhD from The University of Wollongong, where he has also worked as a sessional teacher of art theory and practice since 2014. He has been a member of the Artistic Directorate of PACT Centre for Emerging Arts since 2020.

Nat Randall

Nat Randall is an artist working at the intersection of performance, video and film. Randall has presented work at major institutions, galleries and festivals nationally and internationally; at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Performance Space, Dark Mofo, Rising Festival, Perth Festival, Adelaide Festival, Weiwuying: National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Taiwan), Harbourfront Centre (Toronto), BAM (New York) and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.

In 2019 Randall and collaborator Anna Breckon and Performing Lines were nominated for a Helpmann Award for ‘Best Production of a Play’ for their critically acclaimed The Second Woman. Randall is also a founding member of art collective Hissy Fit and performance collective Team MESS.

Randall studied at the University of Wollongong where she developed a breadth of performance practice including devised work, site specific practice and participatory work. Randall is currently on the Artistic Directorate at PACT Centre for Emerging Artists.

Tammi Gissell

Tammi Gissell is the Collections Access Coordinator, First Nations at The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, NSW. She is a Muruwarri-Wiradjuri woman born in North-West NSW. Tammi is also a performer, poet, performance theorist, choreographer, researcher and writer; having performed, lectured and consulted regionally, nationally and internationally across the spectrum of contemporary & contemporary-Indigenous performance since 1996. Prior to her current role, Tammi led the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Assessment Team for the Collection, Relocation and Digitisation Project for the new Powerhouse Parramatta. She holds a Bachelor of Performance: Theory and Practice (Honours) from the University of Western Sydney (UWS); was inducted into the Golden Key International Honour Society for achievements in performance theory in 2004 and later graduated Deans’ Medallist and Reconciliation Scholar in 2005. From 2007-2011 Tammi was Course Coordinator at NAISDA Dance College while also presenting her body of solo works and appearing with leading Australian dance-theatre makers including Mirramu Dance Co., The Physical TV Company, Branch Nebula, Kinetic Energy Theatre Co., Lina Limosani, Jason Pitt, Darren Green, Bernadette Walong and Liz lea & Co. Since 2014 Tammi has been an independent assessor for EttingshausensPro full time dance program, Sydney.

Janie Gibson

Janie Gibson is an actor, theatre-maker, director and teaching artist based in Newcastle, Australia. She uses the ritual of theatre as a forum for human connection; a site to hold radical ideas, witness multivalent perspectives and offer counter-narratives to the confinements of the dominant culture. She tells stories in the quest to redefine personal, cultural and political identity through the radical act of being seen and heard. The stories we tell and are told forge our sense of self. They influence how we act and are acted upon. The narratives we live in can limit us, or expand our sense of possibility. Stories are road maps. Stories can be medicine. Her theatre practice is born out of research and training in leading European ensemble theatre, contemporary performance and an ongoing exploration into the human voice. This search has taken her work around the globe in collaborations with Anu Almagro (Song of the Goat), Odra Ensemble (Song of the Goat, Poland), Ultimavez (BE), Shakespeare and Company (USA), Kristin Linklater (Orkney, Scotland) and nationally with NEXT WAVE, Tantrum Youth Arts, PACT Theatre, Roslyn Oades, BYDS and UTP. Most recently she designated as a Linklater Voice teacher in the Freeing the Natural Voice method; a vocal training designed to awaken the innate expressive and creative potential of the human voice.

Raghav Handa

I am an Australian choreographer & performer of Indian heritage with training in modern & Indigenous contemporary dance. I am inspired by my birthright – my works combine traditional Kathak principles & contemporary movement with speed & precision to create multifaceted, engaging explorations of modern Australian cultural identity.

My works are highly physical and theatrical, incorporating stylistically diverse languages, an array of artistic media (from film and spoken word to 3D motion capture technology and sculptural set design) and, occasionally, some humour to help deliver my message. Over the last 8 years my works – TUKRE’ (“Pieces” in Hindi 2014-15), MENS REA (2016) and FOLLY & TIME (2018-19), DAWN (2020 Sydney Opera house digital) – have been performed in festivals and theatres across Australia and overseas.

In my practice, I challenge cultural norms by navigating the “preciousness” and complexities that surround traditional hierarchies and principles. Notwithstanding these influences, my Indian heritage is at the core of my work – often in the themes I explore (as in TUKRE’ and MENS REA) and always through my movement language. In my process, I draw on Kathak’s principles and movement patterns – including dynamic shift and complex rhythm cycles – to create a unique movement language which is intricate, precise, extremely physical and unique in the Australian dance landscape.

Fausto Brusamolino

Fausto Brusamolino is a lighting and visual artist currently living on Darug land, Australia.

Fausto devises lighting and generative visuals for live performances, filming, and creates lighting art installations.

Fausto has created works and lit productions in traditional venues like theatres, concert halls and art galleries, alongside less conventional locations like multi level car parks, roof tops, large scale outdoor installations and abandoned locations.

In his work, lighting and video are dynamically manipulated in real time, following, supporting, gauging, enhancing the performance and the entire space as they happen, shift and unravel during each unique show.

Fausto's approach to lighting design organically embraces a wide range of visual and video techniques and uses Creative Coding to build custom made software, allowing a creative, engaging and unique control over the aesthetic of the work.

Clare Britton

Living on Bidjigal Land in Sydney, Australia, Clare Britton is an artist interested in how artworks, people and landscapes hold stories. Informed by her work in live performance, Clare’s visual art practice includes installation, site-specific art and writing and considers the way water does and doesn’t move through Australian Landscapes.

Clare’s work has attracted awards for sculpture, performance, design and research and toured in Australia and Internationally.

Clare’s work is animated by research and interdisciplinary collaboration.

Clare facilitates Magnetic Topographies with artists Therese Keogh and Kenzee Patterson and is an active member of the Mullets. Her time as part of the performance collective My Darling Patricia (2004-14) informs her process. A Sidney Myer Creative Fellow (2014), Clare holds a Masters of Studio Art (2016) and a Doctor of Philosophy (2020) from Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney. Her PhD, A Week on the Cooks River, was completed under the supervision of Julie Rrap, Ann Elias and Mikala Dwyer.

Clare is a lecturer and researcher in the School of the Arts and Media, Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, UNSW.

Clare’s work respects the fact that working in Australia means working on Aboriginal Land.

James Peter Brown

James Peter Brown is a composer and sound designer known for his evocative and diverse music scores. His practice investigates emotive experiences that explore character and aid storytelling. He has worked across a range of forms, from film to theatre and contemporary dance to documentary, animation, video games and virtual reality. His processes often involve creating music and sound simultaneously with the development of a project, building connections between performance material and sound.

He holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts, in which his focus was on composition and sound design for animation.

He also holds a Masters of Acoustic Physics from The University of Sydney, for which his thesis was on the impacts of low frequency sound on the body and mind.

Justine Shih Pearson

Justine has an interdisciplinary practice as a designer, creative producer, facilitator, writer, arts researcher and advocate. Trained originally at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, over 20 years she has collaborated on projects for live performance, digital media, film/tv, online publishing, public spaces, hospitals, and museums in Australia, Europe, the UK, North America, and SE Asia.

Based in Sydney/Warrang since 2007, Justine combines an ongoing creative practice with scholarship and advocacy in the areas of artist and art form development. With a reputation for championing the work of the independent artist, she has been Executive Director/CEO of PACT Centre for Emerging Artists since 2021; is on the board of artist-run space ReadyMade Works, which she chaired from 2017-2022; and was previously director of choreographic research centre Critical Path, producer of screendance festival ReelDance, and a programming fellow with Dance Theatre Workshop/NY Live Arts. She holds a MA (NYU) and PhD (USyd) in performance studies and writes and consults on intercultural and interdisciplinary practices, and placemaking. Mixed-race and multinational, growing up between the unceded lands of the Ohlone, Lenape, Kaurna, and Gadigal as part of the Chinese diaspora, Justine is a child of the Asia Pacific, and this geo-cultural context pervades her approach.

PACT is an accessible venue, with level access throughout the public areas of the building and non-gendered, ambulant and wheelchair-accessible toilets. There is accessible (non-dedicated) street parking on Railway Parade. The nearest accessible train stations are Erskineville (5 minutes) and Newtown (15 minutes).

For additional accessibility support, please contact us – info@pact.net.au

We encourage you to contact us with any access questions and to discuss your requirements with us.
Where: PACT Centre For Emerging Artists, 107 Railway Parade, Erskineville NSW 2043.

Getting to PACT:
By train: Erskineville Station (250m), Newtown Station (900m), and Macdonaldtown Station (1km)
By bus: 355 Bus Stop (250m); Newtown (900m)
By taxi: Erskineville Road Taxi Stand (300m)
By car: Railway Parade has unlimited free street parking

In The Works | PACT Lab: Process, Play, Experiment.