If you haven’t familiarised yourself with what ‘live art’ is, now is the time. The Festival of Live Art (FOLA) is yet again showcasing a body of bold, ambitious and provocative work and Let’s Go Up Here is the embodiment of what they stand for. This beautifully outlandish show sees their participants going through several phases and having a roller-coaster of an experience.
As it reads on the show’s ticketing page, Let’s Go Up Here promises to begin with a fun and accessible painting workshop, where each workshop attendee has the chance to manifest a new landscape for their remaining days on a canvas.
The rest of the description is quite obscure – which is the way the show plays out. The first 1.5 hours is a sweatshop where we pursued to create an environment with a dreamy sunset, otherworldly trees, and intricate details. You’re not criticized, nor assessed with the quality of your artwork – the only thing that matters is your imagination and how much you can grow out what has been said.
When you finalise your magnum opus, you can see how others interpret what you’ve seen. A short break and you got fed with nibbles while chatting with the artist. The last phase of the show comes unexpectedly, it’s a beautiful piece of contemporary/experimental dance performance, performed in full nudity right in front of your eyes. The overall aim of the entire show is to “open up your senses, abandon your defenses and listen to the music of the night”.
Let’s Go Up Here is produced by Alice Dixon, Caroline Meaden and William McBride, the artistes of Slown, Smallened & Son – a non-hierarchical collaboration as devisers and performers of new, unusual contemporary performance. In their own words, their practice is ‘an inquiry at the intersection of contemporary dance and theatre that foregrounds rigorous and unusual physicality, inventive writing and spoken delivery, and choreographic performance structures and dramaturgical logic’.
– Busra
Busra crossed the oceans and made a comeback to her beloved city to let herself loose in Melbourne’s refined arts scene.
Let’s Go Up Here has no more shows as part of The Festival of Live Art but you can follow them on social media. The Festival of Live Arts runs until 25 March 2018.
