Dance & Performance 
Nicola Gunn (AU)

Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster

Nicola Gunn

is a Melbourne-based performer, writer, director and dramaturg. Since 2001, she has been making works that blend performance, art and anthropology to explore the fragility of the human condition with subversive humour. Her artistic practice is committed to institutional critique, social engagement and generating works that activate the public sphere by questioning old ways of being or proposing new ones.

She uses performance to reflect critically on its place in theatres, to examine power relations in existing organisations, and to consider the relevance and social function of art itself. The starting process is often a written text or idea imagined responding to a self-generated impulse to tell a story or explore a form. She draws mainly from her experience to create autobiographical fiction.

nicolagunn.com

Credits

Concept, text, direction and performance 
Nicola Gunn
 
Choreography 
Jo Lloyd 
Sound composition and design 
Kelly Ryall 
Lighting design 
Niklas Pajanti 
AV design und outside eye 
Martyn Coutts  
Costume design 
Shio Otani 
Script dramaturg 
Jon Haynes 
Production management 
Emily O’Brien 


Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster has been developed with the support of Australia Council for the Arts, Creative Victoria, Punctum Inc. Seedpod, Arts House Culture Lab, Maximised by Chunky Move and Mobile States Performing Lines.  

Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster

„Comic genius … Gunn’s text is intricate and often brilliant, full of unpredictable digressions and curious factoids. It’s the verbal equivalent of skimming stones over water.“ Cameron Woodhead/The Age

Piece For Person and Ghetto Blaster is the story of a man, a woman and a duck. It dissects the excruciating realms of human behaviour by calling into question our capacity to make moral judgments and relate to others in an ethical way.

The work is disarmingly simple – exploring in great depth the moral conundrum of what should one do if one comes across a person throwing stones at a duck – but gradually becomes mind-bogglingly complex. Threaded between observations and memories of this brief encounter with a stranger are philosophical musings about peace and conflict, moral relativism, the ethics of intervention and the very function of art. Each new complication is layered into the mix until the ability to maintain different ethical and conceptual paradigms within one’s mind at the same time exhausts itself.

Accompanying the text is a rhythmic sound composition and an unpredictable choreography that shifts from the unnecessary and incongruous to the strangely affecting. The effect is of a mental rhythm playing onto and against a highly impulsive conflation of physical rhythms. Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster slips across tempos, ideas and performance modes – from movement to dance to performance art and back again – to create something inescapably unique. The culmination of these multiple layers is a work in perpetual motion, full of wit, provocation and reflection.

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Nicola Gunn

is a Melbourne-based performer, writer, director and dramaturg. Since 2001, she has been making works that blend performance, art and anthropology to explore the fragility of the human condition with subversive humour. Her artistic practice is committed to institutional critique, social engagement and generating works that activate the public sphere by questioning old ways of being or proposing new ones.

She uses performance to reflect critically on its place in theatres, to examine power relations in existing organisations, and to consider the relevance and social function of art itself. The starting process is often a written text or idea imagined responding to a self-generated impulse to tell a story or explore a form. She draws mainly from her experience to create autobiographical fiction.

nicolagunn.com

Credits

Concept, text, direction and performance 
Nicola Gunn
 
Choreography 
Jo Lloyd 
Sound composition and design 
Kelly Ryall 
Lighting design 
Niklas Pajanti 
AV design und outside eye 
Martyn Coutts  
Costume design 
Shio Otani 
Script dramaturg 
Jon Haynes 
Production management 
Emily O’Brien 


Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster has been developed with the support of Australia Council for the Arts, Creative Victoria, Punctum Inc. Seedpod, Arts House Culture Lab, Maximised by Chunky Move and Mobile States Performing Lines.  
16.03./
17.03.
Fri/​Sat
19.30
16.03./
17.03.
Fri/​Sat
19.30
TQW Halle G
€ 20/15/10
 
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