Queer Workshop Intensive
We’ve had a riot of a time at the Queer Workshop Intensive. A gaggle of emerging Queer artists across Australia have been workshopping and developing performance magic, with five incredible facilitators - Al Joel, Samia Sayed, Betty Grumble, Fetu Taku, and EO Gill.
Read on for insight into the program, and what you can expect from QDP if you apply next year 😎
We started our week with costume, set and production design powerhouse, Al Joel. Soaking up her savvy and innovative advice and experience, our workshop participants flurried in creative craft making, focusing on reuse and recycling and the power of reciprocity in our creative emergence and longevity.
Leaping from strength to strength, we rolled into the creative realm of Samia Sayed; contemporary artist, writer, embodier, interrogator and reviser of religious notions, culture and gender. We nourished ourselves in her methodology of self-care, unlearning burn-out culture, rounding off the day with skill-sharing, and Samia’s exercises in writing and improvised movement with her three pillars of work realisation; challenge, play and memory.
Wednesday’s workshop landed in a rockin’ rumble with Sydney/Warrane based performance artist, Emma Maye Gibson (AKA Betty Grumble). With a focus on presence, grief, spirit and pleasure, our artists were invited to come into their senses and creativity. Gibson’s enriched practice inherited and gifted by local and international mentors, peers and guides encouraged radical tenderness and consent work, making space for expansive meaning making and performance rigour for our artists.
The week continued to unfurl its creative givings with movement coach/choreographer, teacher and womxn, Fetu Taku. The artists got to experience Fetu’s commitment to cultivating dance / movement spaces within community, specifically working on their intention to influence their movement and choice, as well as working on freestyle and picking up and executing choreography.
As a bonus for the day, we experienced Stephen Cummin’s resident, Adam Jones share his work in development, mentored by multi-disciplinary artist, creative workshop facilitator and socially engaged community program manager, Liam Benson.
We wrapped up our week in magnificent moving-image practice and performance techniques with performance and video artist, EO Gill. Experimenting both in front of and behind the camera with different mediums of film and video, our workshop artists questioned perspective and positionality, framing performance as a tool for play, experimentation and intervention in image and identity-focused practice.
Each day ended with our artists gathering together for Peer-to-Peer informal sharing and free time to work on their individual projects. Fuelled by the thrilling mix of facilitators, you can be assured our Workshop and Residency Artists will have some titillating works-in-progress to show at Queer Nu Werk. Don’t miss it - Book now!