What happens when collaborating artists share no common language but sound?
We’ll ask choreographer Gideon Obarzanek and musical director Genevieve Lacey, two of the artists involved in the incredible Chinese-Australian project One Infinity. This dance and music collaboration saw Australian artists work with musicians from the Jun Tian Fang guqin cultural centre in Beijing.
Lacey spent a month at the centre in October 2015, developing the project and learning from local artists. The One Infinity performances, taking place as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival, sprang from that original collaboration and feature artists from both countries.
Hosted by curator and dancer Nithya Nagarajan, join Obarzanek and Lacey – plus Jun Tian Fang founder Wang Peng, and British composer and One Infinity collaborator Max de Wardener – for a conversation about artistic exchange and language beyond words.
Presented in partnership with Melbourne International Arts Festival.
Featuring
Genevieve Lacey is a recorder virtuoso, serial collaborator and artistic director, with a significant recording catalogue and a career as an international soloist. She creates large-scale collaborative works across radio, film, dance, theatre and public art, and has premiered scores of works, writte... Read more
Gideon Obarzanek is a director, choreographer and performing arts curator. He was recently Artistic Associate with the Melbourne Festival and co-curator for XO State at the inaugural Asia Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts (Asia TOPA). Gideon founded dance company Chunky Move in 1995 and was C... Read more
Nithya Nagarajan is a curator, dancer and interdisciplinary performance-maker. As Manager – Community and Participation for the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), Nithya leads the artist residencies, creative exchanges and public programs at NIDA’s first physical outpost in Victoria. She... Read more
Wang Peng is the founder of JunTianFang; a contemporary guqin master of both craftsmanship and performance; a designer of aesthetic space; and the Intangible Cultural Heritage Inheritor of the ‘traditional guqin craftsmanship’ programme in China. He is also the Deputy Secretary General o... Read more
Max de Wardener was born in London, and studied music at York University and Guildhall School of Music and Drama. His classical commissions include a percussion concerto for Colin Currie and Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine, and three works for the London Symphony Orchestra. Max has also writ... Read more
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