5footway
“Last spotted in the rice fields of Indonesia, an extra-terrestrial flotilla is about to crash-land near you…”
5FootWay is a journey into DIY science fiction, with participatory food performance, dance, video art, and live links between Australia and Indonesia. Developed through my 2014 Asialink Performing Arts Residency (hosted by Wayang Ukur in Yogyakarta), the project is a collaboration with Javanese dancer/choreographer Agung Gunawan. 5footway draws its influences from Javanese animism and the primordial abstractions of contemporary street art in Jogja (Yogyakarta). Using the figure of an alien as a playful approach to cross-cultural collaboration, the project invited local people to take part in a story of discovery:
“A rumour is going around Jogja that an alien has crash-landed somewhere in a padi field. Its spaceship was seen breaking up in free-fall. Some say it looked like an old Vespa attached to the back of a Satay Chicken food cart from Madura…”
A series of encounters with local people in the streets and rice fields of Jogja follows a search for the alien as it assumes different personas, and as the debris from his crash-landing – a spare tire, his shoe, a petrol bottle – shows a magical capacity to change form and replicate. This resulted in a multi-channel video and performance work, presented in Perth (WA) at PUBLIC Festival 2016 (commissioned by FORM), and at Junction Arts Festival 2016 in Launceston (Tasmania). Both presentations had live video links to performance communities in Indonesia, beaming in through two DIY sci-fi vehicles – ‘Europa Moon Lander’, a roving food cart half boat and half bicycle; and its bamboo mothership – ‘Satellite Maroon’, with video projected onto a weather balloon above.
Gallery samples (click through below)
Top line: video installation channels, PUBLIC/JAF 2016 (screenshots)
Lines 2-3: social practice, AsiaLink 2014, Yogyakarta (screenshots)
Bottom: live link performances for video projection; and one-on-one audience interaction with iPads
Agung Gunawan performed at PUBLIC Festival accompanied by a group of local workshop participants, alongside his youth dance troupe on live-video link from the Sampang Agung Centre for Performing Arts (SACPA) in Pelem, Java. At Junction Arts Festival, we worked with Architecture and Design students from the University of Tasmania, who produced a range of speculative design responses that reconceived the original narrative. This was presented at Launceston Harvest Market, with a full Gamelan Orchestra played by local members of the Indonesian Student Association Tasmania, in collaboration with dancer and mask artist Carmencita Palermo. In the evening, the Moon Lander food cart moved to the Festival Hub at Princes Park, where live links played through iPads and video projection onto a 5m-span weather balloon attached to the Satellite Maroon installation.
The JAF2016 live link performances were in partnership with Pelem Festival, including a village festival café installation that I designed with Thai architect Ploy Yamtree from Openspace, alongside Agung Gunawan, local builders, and the kids from SACPA. Another live-linked collaboration involved Javanese Jatilan trance performances on a beach in Wonosari with the Merapi Purba community, hosted by Iwan Wijono from Performance Klub.