Now Pieces – For Now
Kevin Jeynes and Paea Leach
Now Pieces – For Now streams eight improvisers experimenting and connecting despite the conditions! It names the here and now: responds to the immediate and the personal and meets the more social, political, and atmospheric moment we share. This platform embraces performance, exchange, dialogue and movement: it builds and rebuilds community one body at a time. Curated by Kevin Jeynes and Paea Leach, Now Pieces – For Now responds to the world in which we find ourselves and remind us of the necessity and vitality of moving.
Organisers: Kevin Jeynes and Paea Leach
Improvisers: Bronwen Kamasz, Tony Yap, Peter Trotman, Lynne Santos, Deanne Butterworth, Phoebe Robinson and Alex Harrison
Biographies
Kevin Jeynes is an improvisational performance artist, educator, and therapeutic arts practitioner. His performing has, over the past 20 years, traversed the pleasing plains of cohesion and the slippery slopes of disintegration in movement, sound, song and text. Kevin trained extensively with Andrew Morrish, Tony Osborne and Al Wunder, each iconic practitioners and teachers of improvised performance in Australia. He has performed extensively throughout Australia at venues in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra and was a member of ‘Making Space’, an improvisational research group in Brisbane, from 2003 to 2007, and co-founder of the ‘Froth’ Performance Venue in Brisbane in 2008. After moving to Melbourne in 2012, Kevin curated and regularly performed in the series ‘un-attache d’, and ‘Up the Ante’ at the Cecil Street Studio and in Now Pieces at Dancehouse. He has appeared in the shows, Squinting, 241 Years, Hare and Dog, Straw-men, Words Flail, Tooth and Claww, Margins, Finely Tuned-Roughly Grated, Tall Storeys, Flight and Tryptych. He has created solo pieces informed by the literary works of James Joyce – ‘Thwack Jack’ at Cecil Street Studio, and of Gertrude Stein at the Little Con-ference, Deakin Uni and an extended Solo show ‘Into the Half Light’ at the Cecil Street Studio. He is a Lecturer and Supervisor in the Master of Therapeutic Arts Practice at The MIECAT Institute.
Paea Leach has worked as a dancer/performer in Australia and Europe. She has developed a choreographic rigour and questioning, a career as a dancer and gathered education as a yogi along the trajectory. As a performer she has worked for companies Chunky Move Melbourne, Australian Dance Theatre Adelaide, PVC Germany, Perth Theatre Company and most recently with EASTMAN Belgium. With them she has toured nationally and internationally. She has worked with independent dance and theatre makers. She has performed in Bagryana Popov’s adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, Equus as staged by Perth Theatre Company and in numerous small improvisation evenings. She was one of nine who re-performed Marina Abramovic’s Luminosity in Sydney 2013. She has been making work since completing university.Paea graduated from Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) at Edith Cowan University in Perth W.A in 1999. In 2001 she completed an Honours degree in choreography, and an Anatomy and Physiology course through Open Universities Australia in 2010. In 2017 she completed Zenthai Shiatsu training in Yandina, Mt Ninderry, QLD. Most recently she created The Difficult Comedown with Alexandra Harrison for Dance Massive (2019) and Karanga, a solo show presented with Vicky Kapo in Aotearoa (2019). She made one and one and one for the Keir Choreographic Award (2016) with performance poet Candy Royalle, and a site specific work the lines of birds (2014) with sound artists Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, presented by Chunky Move for Next Move. Paea has taught professional classes for Chunky Move, ADT, Bangarra, in Antwerp, Berlin and Finland. She has taught at a tertiary level for more than ten years, runs workshops for community groups, as well as choreographic series, and is engaged as a mentor at times. She was the curator for First Run at Lucy Guerin inc 2016.
Bronwen Kamasz is a Melbourne based artist, a movement improviser with a background in the visual arts. Bronwen is a member of Environmental Performance Authority (EPA) a site specific ecological performance group, creating participatory experiences. The practice of Bodyweather underpins their work.
In 2020 Bronwen has rummaged around in modern dance history to excavate layers of embodied knowledge passed through generations of dancers and movers; whilst dancing in a small bedroom and local parks all year as we all shuttled through a range of ‘new normals’, never settling on anything.
Lynne Santos has been a member of various companies including One Extra Dance Company, Theatre of the Ordinary, Born in a Taxi, Actors Furniture Group and Teatro del IRAA. Her ongoing practice is now largely concerned with improvised performance.
Peter Trotman has been described as the black prince of improvisational performers because the tales he weaves are often darkly gothic and embedded in powerful imaginative landscapes. He is known for his unique physicality, heightened by graphic verbal abilities and a wry wit. Based in Melbourne, Australia, he was one of Al Wunder’s first students in Australia and was also a member of Theatre of the Ordinary. 1982 saw the beginning of a very fruitful collaboration with Andrew Morrish as ‘Trotman and Morrish’ which continued for around 13 years. Together they performed in Australia and the US to considerable acclaim and this period strongly shaped a lot of his ideas about improvisation, dance, language, and performance. He has an ongoing interest in the potential for both movement and text to emerge and richly take form in the present moment of performance.
Tony Yap. Born in Malaysia, Tony was one of the principle performers with IRRA Theatre (1989-1996). He has made a committed to the exploration and creation of an individual dance theatre language that is informed by psycho-physical research, Asian shamanistic trance dance, Butoh, Vocal extensions. He received numerous nominations and awards including The Decay of the Angel which won him a Green Room Award for Male Dancer; and Rasa Sayang, nominated in The Australian Dance Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Independant Dance. He is a figure if international discourse and received Asialink residential grants to work and a Dance Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts. Tony is the founding Creative Director of Melaka Arts and Performance Festival. Tony’s trance praxis is the heart of his PhD research in physical theatre and multidisciplinary practice.
Phoebe Robinson has an established practice of over 20 years, as a dancer, teacher, choreographer and more recently within digital filmmaking. Having presented live performance works in Australia and internationally since 2000, her current interest is in applying choreographic strategies within digital filmmaking. Her work is driven by a deep interest in everyday movement. By detaching gesture from notions of individual expression, she is interested in how gestures circulate and alter within specific places and over time.
As a dancer Phoebe has performed in works by Sandra Parker, Rosalind Crisp, Lucy Guerin, Judith Walton, Joanna Pollitt, Frances D’Ath, Neil Adams and Kota Yamazaki. As the inaugural Housemate Resident at Dancehouse in 2008, Phoebe’s solo performance Only Leone received critical acclaim and a nomination for an Australian Dance Award. In 2014 she was commissioned to present in Melbourne Now, at the National Gallery of Victoria. Currently she is completing a PhD in Choreography at the VCA, where she is also a sessional lecturer. Her current creative research is informed by her experience as a guest student at the Universität der Kunst Berlin in 2011, within the MA Solo/Dance/Authorship (SODA) course, a practice-led Master degree. This exchange was funded by Critical Path and the Ian Potter Cultural Trust.
Deanne Butterworth. Born in Perth, Deanne is a Melbourne-based dancer and choreographer. Her practice is informed by the dynamics of how people work together while accessing different energies and memories often in relation to the space they occupy. Over 25 years she has worked with many choreographers including Phillip Adams, Shelley Lasica, Shian Law, Jo Lloyd, Sandra Parker, and Brooke Stamp performing nationally and internationally. In 2017-2019 she was a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary and in late 2019 she was Resident Artist at Temperance Hall where she premiered Group Furniture. In June 2019 she co-created Double Double with Jo Lloyd, Evelyn Ida Morris, and Tina Havelock Stevens which was performed at the Potter Museum, Liveworks Sydney, and MONA FOMA 2020. Deanne is currently working on Top Ten Actions in This Scene to premiere in 2021.
Alexandra Harrison has been a creator and performer of dance and theatre for twenty years, devising over fifty new works for Australian and international audiences. Since her formative years as an ensemble member of Legs on the Wall she has worked with Branch Nebula, Brown Cab, Nigel Jamieson, Mark Murphy, fLiNG, Dislocate and many more. She has been supported in her choreographic work by Critical Path, Dance 4 (UK), Dancehouse, Australia Council, NSW Ministry and Melbourne City Council, Queen St Studios, Yarra City Council, Campbelltown Art Centre and the Fling Rural Residency program. She lives in Goldie, regional Victoria.
Alex forecast movement futures in her new solo dance-work-as-festival, What’s Coming at Dancehouse and Nottdance Festival, UK. She also created, with Fling Physical Theatre, the Australian Dance Award nominated group work Idea of South. Previous works include Concrete and Bones Sessions with Branch Nebula, creation and choreography of The Project in the Field with Link Dance Company, WA with Dislocate on Unit 4 and creating The Audience Watching the Audience from 8:00 pm to 8:40 pm with Donna Miranda and Angelo V. Suarez (Philippines). In 2010, she premiered her first solo work Dark, Not Too Dark with soumd composition by Sydney based Bob Scott, and with the support of the of the Australia Council, Performance Space and Queen St Studios.
She performed in and devised Nigel Jamieson’s award-winning Honour Bound (Sydney Opera House and Malthouse Theatre) and Branch Nebula’s Paradise City (Sydney Opera House) both of which toured nationally and internationally. Alexandra developed and performed Half Life and Aisling’s Children with Mark Murphy/NVA/National Theatre of Scotland and Bubble for the Sydney Opera House.
http://alexandraharrison.com.au/