Nancy Mauro-Flude (NSW)

sister O/s.g.ballerina/translocal media merger/embodiment theorist/dancer/sound artist/performance installation

Born in 1975, an Australian Citizen, situated global. Nancy is a dance artist who works in the field of rock, digital media, installation and performance. Recently she has began to integrate the software KeyWorx with her writing, dance and sound work in the form of ‘electrik-theatrik operations’. In 2003, she conducted a two-month empirical research in the South Columbian jungle, exploring ancient media of sound, dance, plants and divination.

She is particularly interested by the combination of the high-class act of a medical Professor and the sleight-of-hand magician, vaudeville-mesmerising routines and the experiential anatomy and physiology these modes of embodiment call for. She investigates augmented realms of place, time and space in durational performance zones. Because of her eclectic ancestral history she skims through belief systems and finds the connections between them. This habitus is not unlike the native Australian bower bird who collects specific bold colours, tendrils and hues it likes for its nest. Her artistic practice focuses on the body as a transmitter, an interface in its extended form for information to flow. Nancy is especially concerned with what transpires when there are interferences, glitches in the flow of communication when transmitting, receiving, mapping and entwining apparently incongruent sensory codes, signs and knowledge together.
Nancy’s performance work has taken place in traditional theatre settings and nontraditional spaces: online, galleries, transformed glass houses, anatomy theatres, the street, festivals and clubs (from Cabaret to punk rock venues). Apart from sister O, she is also s.g.ballerina in electric-theatric band toydeath.

Helen Omand (SA)

Helen Omand has worked in Australia, Europe and the U.S. Artistic Director of Helen Omand and Co, she produces dance/video/object/new media investigations. Her work is influenced by contemporary performance with an emphasis on improvisation both as a method for creating work and as a performance mode.

Helen has lectured in The Netherlands, Turkey and Australia. Currently freelancing as a director, lecturer, performer and writer, Helen views each role as an interweaving web linking her passion for creating and thinking about performance.

Michelle Outram (NSW)
www.michelleoutram.com/shaggingjulie

Michelle Outram has a performance/music background, and in 2001 co-founded Shagging Julie, a performance collective that emerged from the imPACT ensemble in 2000. Since forming, the group has created 14 performance works, ranging from 4-60 minutes. The group places strong emphasis on training, aiming to provide a grounding in coordination, physical/spatial awareness, integration of media and other practices, collaboration, and making micro and macro structural choices both improvised and through reflection. Processes developed by the group are driven by a combination of practices including physical performance, dance, music and architecture and design.

Her practice outside Shagging Julie includes working collaboratively as a freelance performance maker, sound artist, technician, composer and musician. She has also worked as a guest tutor for the imPACT ensemble at PACT Youth Theatre. Her solo practice is drawn from an intensive interrogation of the same principles used in Shagging Julie, and often involves working across music/sound, performance, improvisation and installation to produce a personal vision of the world.

Michelle has an honours degree (first class) in Performance Studies from the University of Sydney. She currently manages Omeo Dance Studio and operates Pyrmont Bridge on weekends – the oldest electrically operating swing-span bridge in the world.

Deborah Pollard (NSW)

Deborah Pollard is an artist and director whose work focuses on hybrid collaborations with arts and non-arts practitioners. She has created a number of multi-disciplined performance and installation works in collaboration with emerging and professional artists. She has performed and written a number of solo works including Mother Tongue Interference, To Eat Cake and Fish Out of Water, which premiered at the Performance Space in 1996.

Deborah was the Artistic Director of Salamanca Theatre Company in Hobart from 1997 to 2000. Projects for Salamanca include Still Life, Reality Check, Ecstasy of Communication, Color My World, and Panopticon. She has also worked with a number of companies as a director and performer; most notable are Urban Theatre Projects, Performance Space, Jigsaw Theatre Company and Two Turns.
She studied with Tadashi Suzuki in 1990 and 1991 and is a teacher of the Suzuki Actor Training Method.

Since 1993, Deborah has been working in collaboration with Indonesian performance and installation artists. Together they have created a number of large-scale performance works, most notable are Postcard (1995), Badai Pasir (1996), To Eat Flowers and Walk on Glass (1999), and Girt By Sea (2002).
In 2000, Deborah received a Winston Churchill Memorial Fellowship and has recently been awarded the Rex Cramphorn Scholarship and an Australia Council Fellowship from the New Media Arts Board.

Hellen Skye (VIC)
www.companyinspace.com

Hellen is a director, choreographer, performer, and image maker. She is a founding member of Circus Oz and the Australian Performing Group, and Founder /Artistic Director of Dancehouse. Since 1993, she has been Co-Artistic Director of company in space (cis), co-devising new work that has been performed nationally and internationally in a range of festival contexts.

In 1998, Hellen won a Green Room Award for outstanding creativity in performance for the cis production Escape Velocity. In 2001, she developed for cis INCARNATE, a dual site performance with the Hong Kong Arts Centre for the Digital Now Festival, and directed Architecture of Biography, a multi-art form project seen virtually in the Behind the Scenes program of the Melbourne Festival and realized as The Light Room in Melbourne Festival 2002. The Light Room, a cis collaboration, was nominated for three Green Room Awards: Ensemble Performance; Concept & Direction; and Video, Image and Interactive Screen.

Hellen’s diverse experience in the performing and visual arts informs her approach to direction and conceptual development of new media performance. She explores the extension of the performing body’s relationship to space and movement sited in both physical and virtually projected theatrical prosceniums. Her work as co-artistic director of company in space has been supported by a range of state and federal arts agencies and has gained international recognition for innovative approaches to live digital arts performance.

David Williams (NSW)

David Williams is a performer, technician, and director. His training includes a number of physical performance practices including the Tadashi Suzuki method with Meme Thorne, and Body Weather with Martin del Amo. He holds a B.A. (Honours) in Theatre from the University of Western Sydney, Nepean, and in 1998 was awarded the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship for Acting.

He is a founding member of the performance collective version 1.0, playing a key role in the collective's five major devised performances including The second last Supper (2001). He has also worked with Sidetrack Performance Group, Sydney Theatre Company New Stages, Two Turns Dance Project, PACT Youth Theatre and Platform 27. Additionally, he has worked as a staging technician and flyman at the Sydney Opera House since 1997.

Over the last two years David has been investigating practices of movement improvisation, performing in Omeo Dance Studio’s ongoing Rushing For the Sloth. In 2002, he commenced a PhD at the University of NSW researching awkwardness, stupidity and failure in devised performance. He was one of the participating artists in Time_Place_Space 1 and worked on British multimedia collective Blast Theory’s Desert Rain at Artspace. Most recently he devised version 1.0's latest work questions to ask yourself in the face of others with Beck Wilson at Performance Space in June 2003.

Fei Wong (NSW)

Koon Fei Wong was born in Hong Kong of Chinese and Taiwanese parents. In 1997, she finished her school education in Hong Kong. At the age of seventeen she traveled to Australia to study Aerospace Engineering, but later shifted to theatre studies. She recently completed her Bachelor of Arts (Honours in Theatre Studies and major in Philosophy) in the University of NSW (UNSW). She is currently undertaking the Master of Arts by Research (research area: performance, memory, trauma /abreaction) at UNSW.

In 1999, she went to Cambridge University, London to study an intensive course on Shakespeare. After she returned to Australia, she performed and worked in various productions with the School of Theatre Studies including Slowianska Street (directed by Clare Grant), and a video project Writing with artist Denis Beaubois. She is particularly interested in body movement and visual arts, and created her first self-devised work See? based on body, objects and space.

In 2000, she joined De Quincey Company as a performer/dancer, training in the Bodyweather methodology. She left the company in 2002, due to her Honours thesis, but continues to maintain the Bodyweather training.

Koon Fei is a Buddhist and has been active in Sokka Gakkai International (worldwide Buddhist organization) since she was a teenager. Through the cultural activities and the studying of the philosophy of Buddhism, her involvement in SGI has inspired her in her studies and interest. She is committed as a performer to create innovative and relevant work with something to say to a contemporary audience.

Rebecca Youdell (QLD)

Rebecca Youdell is a choreographer and performer and is one half of Bonemap,
a creative intermedia arts partnership with creative producer Russell
Milledge. Bonemap often works in collaboration with other artists through a
mesh of live art, dance, installation and new media linked within a hybrid
ecological philosophy.

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Rebecca studied movement in Australia, US and
UK. She attended Jordan College of Fine Arts (US), the Royal Ballet School
(UK) and worked with the Royal Swedish Ballet Company in Stockholm before
receiving a BFA (Dance) - cum laude high honours from Butler University
(US) in 1992. Rebecca has an MA (Visual/Performing Arts) from Charles Sturt
University (Aus) 1998, has toured and performed work in the US, Asia and
Europe as well as receiving awards both in Australia and overseas.

Rebecca has diversified her practice to integrate media through
collaborations with the Bureau of Meteorology and the use of medical
diagnostic imaging technology. Specific investigations include performance
and movement language with/for the camera through video and photography.
Rebecca has participated in the development of multimedia, web and sound
based works linked with an understanding of media manipulation. Recent
highlights include: A fellowship at The Australian Choreographic Centre;
Asia Pacific Next Wave, Choreography Today - Japan; the first Asialink
interdisciplinary residency hosted by The Substation in Singapore;
participation in Experimentica 02 Wales, UK. Bonemap Projects are archived
at www.bonemap.com

Yiorgos Zafiriou (NSW)

Yiorgos Zafiriou is a multi-disciplinary artist, using whatever medium is most useful in communicating a message. Over recent years, his interest has swayed towards performance and the objects or items that can be generated in response to performance, including photography, drawing, etching, objects, sculpture and video.

Yiorgos was born in Australia, however English is not his first language. Both his parents migrated from Greece in the 1960s, and he strongly defends cultural difference and celebrates its existence.

He has a degree in Fine Arts (major in Photo Media) and Design (major in Industrial and Interior Design), and subsequently worked as freelance graphic designer, leaning towards typography. He currently teaches Graphic Design at TAFE, and plans to undertake post-graduate research in art in 2004.

His main areas of interest are ethnicity, identity, shock and the abject.

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