Acknowledgement of Country

Overview

Sydney Opera House and The British Council present a season of new digital performance works by artists and organisations from across the UK, exploring the question ‘Who Are We Now?’. Tackling themes of identity and community, the UK/AU Digital Season provides a unique insight into the ways in which artists are responding to unprecedented global challenges. The season will feature new works from diverse voices across a range of artforms and formats, with a mix of free programming and pay-per-view access on Stream, the Sydney Opera House’s dedicated arts streaming platform.

New works each months on the first Tuesday.

March:

Theatre Complicité: Can I Live? – A vital performance where Fehinti Balogun identifies the intimate relationship between the environmental crisis & the global struggle for social justice.

Prime Cut Productions: East Belfast Boy – Pumping techno, pulverising movement & street sharp poetry, this award-winning production turned digital performance is a cliché free zone.

Breach Theatre: It’s True, It’s True, It’s True – Based on transcripts taken from the 1612 trial of Agostino Tassi who was accused of raping fellow Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi.

The Scottish Ballet: The Shimmering Extraordinary – A mini-series of six short dance films, created by Emmy-Award nominated director Fx Goby and Scottish Ballet celebrating diversity.

Corey Baker: BLOWN – A dance film capturing movement inspired by renewable energy & the power of the wind, featuring dancers performing inland and off-shore Scotland.

Candoco Dance Company: Feeling Thing – Retrain your sensitivity to the liveliness of everyday objects in this short-film by multi-disciplinary artist Jo Bannon.

Candoco Dance Company: Cuckoo – This short-film is a reflection on our changing experience of time passing, inspired by a bespoke prosthetic leg and set to a poetic score by Jules Maxwell.

Candoco Dance Company: Unspoken Spoken – Fin Walker exposes the potential that exists when we challenge the rules. We encounter five characters, each with their own rules to question, surrender to, fight against.

February:

BAC Beatbox Academy: Frankenstein – How To Make A Monster: In BAC Beatbox Academy’s hit show, six talented performers interpret Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein from their own perspective as young people growing up in 21st-century Britain.  200 years after the 18-year-old Mary Shelley wrote the text, these young artists explore how modern monsters are created in today’s society. This musical film is part performance, part documentary, with the cast’s voices as the only instruments. Bringing their own interpretation of the Frankenstein story to life with a dazzling array of vocal talents including rap, beatboxing and song; the cast create a breath-taking musical soundscape filled with memorable original tracks.
Originally devised for the stage, the unanimous 5* live show Frankenstein: How to Make a Monster was a huge hit at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and sold out its international debut run at the Adelaide Fringe.

Jonzi D & Bim Ajadi: Here/Not Here: Sign language, dance, public space and private communication. Here/Not Here, combines elements of dance, Krump and hip hop, with football, BSL and Visual Vernacular, looking at how movement is language.  The setting is a run-down space that three different gangs, footballers, Krumpers and VV-ers all think of as their own. Funky, funny and thought-provoking, Here/Not Here explores how we all try to find our place. It is set in an urban ‘meantime’ space where different groups competing for use. As well as for broadcast the project is designed for theatrical stages and site-specific outdoor spaces. It showcases a new visual language for story-telling combining sign, dance, music and Visual Vernacular.
Botis Seva & Billy Boyd Cape: Reach: Director Billy Boyd Cape collaborates with dance artist, choreographer and director Botis Seva and his hip hop theatre collective, Far From The Norm, to explore the themes of love, abandonment and fatherhood. On a journey of independence, we discover a man’s inner struggle of his mind versus his soul in this emotional and award-winning short film Reach.
Laila Diallo: 1:1: This is a dance made to the scale of our kitchen. It knows the room well. It carries the repetition of its days. None really ever the same. It remembers moments. It holds some of the light, some of the weight, some of the landscape. This is a dance made to the scale of our kitchen, tipping from the everyday into something else, carrying traces of dances danced before and inviting new ones.
Jo Bannon: Kitchen Alba: Made in 2021 amidst a world ‘working from home’, this film places the miraculous in the most mundane of spaces: a domestic kitchen. We watch as one woman’s faith binds two arrivals inextricably together: a pale child with a shock of white hair and a visit from the Catholic Pope to the child’s home town, and transforms a coincidence into a miracle. Riffing on religious iconography, white goods, family and faith, Kitchen Alba prompts us to find meaning, miracle and mystery wedged between the cookery books and the dirty dishes.

January:

Corey Baker: Swan Lake Ballet – created remotely during the pandemic, award-winning choreographer Corey Baker reimagines Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake Ballet in this dazzling short film featuring 27 elite ballet dancers filmed in bathtubs from across the world. A visually mesmerising and playful film, Swan Lake Ballet was commissioned by the BBC as part of their Filmed in Lockdown series in 2020, aimed at bringing joy to audiences through art via the screen.

mandla rae, as british as a watermelon – Queer Zimbabwean writer, performer and curator, mandla rae, asks questions about belonging, trauma and forgiveness in this unflinching auto-fiction digital performance. Weaving in poetry and storytelling, the work is told through the exploration of mandla’s fragmented asylum and migration memories within a chaotically colourful, sensory performance space.

Mind The Gap: A Little Space – two leading UK theatre companies have produced the film version of Mind the Gap’s physical theatre A Little Space, with returning cast Paul Bates, Lorraine Brown, Alison Colborne, JoAnne Haines and Charlotte Jones. A co-production with Gecko, A Little Space observes the lives of five people living in an apartment block and explores interweaving themes of isolation, agency, community and personal space drawn from the performers’ own experiences.

Boy Blue: R.E.B.E.L – created by UK hip-hop dance company Boy Blue and commissioned by Sky Arts, Art 50 and co-funded by the Barbican, R.E.B.E.L is a rallying call for solidarity in action. It was created by, and features, young dancers from London who weren’t able to vote in the EU referendum. The work responds to challenging questions around cultural identity, what it means to belong to a community, how young people deal with feelings of powerlessness and how they move forward within a fractured and polarized country.

Rachel Bagshaw & China Plate: Where I Go (When I Can’t Be Where I Am) – with a gripping performance by Hannah McPake, the Australian premiere of Rachel Bagshaw and China Plate’s new work was adapted from and created by the team behind the multi-award winning theatre show, The Shape of the Pain. Filmed in isolation with sound design and editing that evokes the synesthetic experience, this is an insightful exploration of love, solitude and living with a rare, chronic pain condition.

December:

• The National Theatre of Scotland and Hopscotch Films’ riveting on-screen drama Adam – the remarkable true story of a young trans man seeking asylum inspired by the life of, and starring, Adam Kashmiry.
• Stopgap Dance: Artificial Things.
• Jonny Cotsen: Louder Is Not Always Clearer.
• Fevered Sleep’s 8 Tender Solitudes is a series of choreographies conceived and made during lockdown that explore isolation, yearning and sensuality as a reflection on what it means to touch and be touched.
• Impermanence Dance’s Lady Blackshirt, is an abstract dance-based film collage that interrogates the confluence of radical early 20th century fascist and suffragette ideologies, scouring through the political ambiguity that existed then and is mirrored today, where a fraternisation of opposites emerges when the status quo or centre ground becomes eroded.

About Sydney Opera House Digital Program

Since its inception nearly a decade ago, the Sydney Opera House Digital Program has engaged tens of millions of people around the world through livestreams, performance films, podcast series, short films and original digital commissions

Delivering the unmissable work of Sydney Opera House to the laptops, living rooms and mobile phones of audiences everywhere, the digital program delivers high-quality streams and recordings direct from the stage, along with new digital presentations that extend and complement the Opera House’s Artistic Strategy.

Core to Digital Programming is the delivery of Digital Creative Learning to schools and educators around the country, offering free programs of livestreams, interactive workshops, author talks and original content.