Three days of dance, discussions, dirty feet, sandy bottoms and deep investigation into what it is to be an artist in the world today.
Bare Bones is back, after taking a break from Bare Bones in 2019, Bare Bones 2020 will next be staged February 21st - 23rd at The Farm’s Gold Coast studio as an entree to February’s Supercell Festival of Contemporary Dance Brisbane.
This year the facilitating team include:
Kyle Page - Artistic director of Dancenorth, Kyle has performed in more than 20 countries around the world. He has co-directed four full-length works for Dancenorth alongside his wife and long-time collaborator Amber Haines, including Dust, Syncing Feeling, Spectra and Rainbow Vomit.
Byström Källblad - Swedish duo Helena Byström a visual artist, working mainly with film and sculpture and Anna Källblad a choreographer, with ten years in Los Angeles. They have shown work in Shibuya Crossing Tokyo, Sakakini Art Centre Ramallah, Stockholm City Hall, Uppsala Cathedral, Kulturhuset, The Royal Dramatic Theatre and the Modern Museum in Stockholm.
Liesel Zink - award-winning Australian choreographer interested in the body in shifting environmental and political landscapes. Her work has been shown all over the place including Ukraine, Hong Kong, Hungary, South Korea and Australia.
Joerg Hassmann - a Berlin based dancer who has been exploring and teaching Contact Improvisation for more than 25 years.
Aleks Borys - a Polish based artist making work in the fields of choreography, video, installation, astronomy, cosmology and ecology.
The Farm - Collection of artists including, Gavin Webber, Grayson Millwood, Kate Harman, Mindy Davies and Michael Smith who will be facilitating workshops and conversations over the weekend.
Plus more to be announced over the next few weeks...
The Farm’s co-artistic director Gavin Webber says Bare Bones brings together high-profile teachers and international artists with professional and emerging Australian dancers in a uniquely non-hierarchical structure.
“At Bare Bones everyone is a student,” says Webber, winner of the 2017 Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award.
“The classes are built on free exchange of practice and ideas – where what you know and what you don’t know become equally important to learning.”
At Bare Bones 2017, dancers from around Australia worked with facilitators including Hungarian Mate Meszaros, Berlin-based Canadian Laurie Young, Swiss choreographer Simone Truong and Legs on the Wall co-artistic director Joshua Thomson.
Bare Bones 2020 will also feature several star dancers and choreographers in town for Supercell.
“Bare Bones is the perfect accompaniment to Supercell, it’s on the Gold Coast over summer and an opportunity to work with amazing people before hitting the festival,” he says.
Within the hit Bare Bones format, teachers and students explore all aspects of dance, theatre and performance, with facilitators moving from class to class, sometimes guiding and sometimes following.
Each night of the workshop, members of the group stage excerpts of works in progress without lighting, set or wardrobe in order to expose the conceptual “bare bones” of their choreography for discussion and analysis.
“Each time a performance was stripped of theatrical artifice and made accessible, it became this incredible starting point for dialogue between emerging artists and established practitioners,” says Webber.
The Farm’s Berlin-based co-director Grayson Millwood says the 2020 Bare Bones will be structured similarly to the 2017 and 2018 models but will be particularly looking at what it means to be an artist in the world today.
“We have been looking forward to another Bare Bones since the day the last one ended,” he says.
“There will be lots of new faces with new ideas, but one thing we want to keep is the intimacy... a small group that work, teach and learn together.”
The 2020 staging will be open to about 20 dancers, with guest teachers and facilitators to be announced closer to the date.
The full list of Bare Bones facilitators will be announced with the full Supercell Festival of Contemporary Dance Brisbane program in late January.
Supercell Brisbane curator Kate Usher says Bare Bones builds a “critical mass” of dance activities around the festival.
“Bare Bones is the professional development offering for artists,” she says.
“The opportunity to put dedicated time and space into creative play, process and peer-to-peer learning is vital to the ongoing development of a rich and diverse cultural practice.
"And linking in Supercell’s signature artists from Australia and abroad is a wonderful way to feed new ideas and aesthetics into a space where everyone is equal, present and open to exploration.”