Encompassing everything from body art to sound, video to installation; definitions of what performance means and what it can be are constantly shifting.

Encompassing everything from body art to sound, video to installation; definitions of what performance means and what it can be are constantly shifting.

The Blue Oyster Performance Series, a part of the 2010 Dunedin Fringe Festival, aims to showcase this diversity, profiling the work of a number of emerging Australasian practitioners alongside filmic documentation, historic works and discussions. From post-punk to postmodernism, this series is sure to intrigue and provoke.

Red River | Core

Performance: 9pm, Thurs 18, TBC - check www.bluoyster.org.nz
Exhibition Opening: 5:30pm, Tues 23, Blue Oyster Art Project Space
Exhibition Times: 11-5pm Tues - Friday, 12-3pm Saturday until 17 April, Blue Oyster Art Project Space

Conceived as a one-night performance to be followed by a month-long exhibition at the Blue Oyster Art Project Space, Core appeals to our humanity with the use of tableaux. Moments in this artwork in two parts, tap into the primal; explore the essence of the human; dwell on the liberation of inner nature... If the viewer sees both the performance and the exhibition, the more will be revealed.

The term tableaux in this context may not be self-explanatory, so artist Katrina Thomson clarifies, "the idea is to present a performance work that blurs the boundaries of theatre and performance art. I see this style of work as an installation, which has moving parts. The uses of tableaux or vignettes are like choreographed stand-alone samples of scenes, imagery or action. Seemingly disparate, it is the rhythm of how they are presented that informs the over-all feeling of the work. In a way it can be both cinematic and sculptural.” Following on from past Fringe Festival performances; Ghost Train, Mothhearts in the Nighthouse, and 3rd Horse, Core showcases local talent and works across the spectrum of potentials in performance and visual art.

Aerolineas | In Mono

Performance: 6pm Sun 28, Blue Oyster Art Project Space
Exhibition Opening: 5:30pm, Tues 23, Blue Oyster Art Project Space
Exhibition Times: 11-5pm Tues - Friday, 12-3pm Saturday until 17 April, Blue Oyster Art Project Space

Aerolineas is a multi-media sound and installation based collective, the nucleus of which are the Melbourne based artists Storm Gold and Julian Holcroft. Storm Gold works within the disciplines of sound, painting, sculpture and drawing, while Julian Holcroft produces multi media installations that combine old and new formats, materials and technology. Their collaboration has developed out of a mutual interest in 16mm experimental film projections, improvisational performance and the proto-milieu of the ‘happening’.

As a part of the Blue Oyster Performance Series, Aerolineas are presenting a new segment of their project that explores the abstract possibilities of the monolithic. In Mono is a further distillation of the collectives performative, immersive environments which are both a sonic and physical exploration of the volume and presence of projected light and film and a metaphorical synthesis of natural phenomena with industrialised environments such as fog, smog, smoke and steam.

Josh Rutter, Motoko Kikkawa and Kimberly What | Unacceptable Archaeologies

Performance: 12:30pm, Fri 19, Dowling Street Steps

Striving to summon intensities of body and sound, Unacceptable Archaeologies is sited at a well known yet cryptic part of Dunedin's inner cityscape - the Dowling St Steps.

Rutter, Kikawa and What will dig a tunnel in the everyday to unearth its alternative histories.

Alex Bennett | Stagpipes and Wheeze Box

Performance: 6pm, Sat 27, Blue Oyster Art Project Space

Bennett’s musical performances with handmade instruments, Wheeze Box and Stagpipes are morbid attempts to preserve acoustic instruments and the nuance of human gesture that is ever truncated by today’s digital technology.

The work Wheeze Box portrays a performer with a toy button accordion-come-respiratory device strapped vertically to his chest. Large bodily convulsions are performed to make the box ‘breath’, keeping him alive whilst producing music.

The irony being that the top of the device is fastened to his neck, making every breath increasingly harder. Stagpipes involves a fully functional set of bagpipes constructed entirely from taxidermic deer parts, this performance is a macabre look at modern thought/culture and its diminishing effect on mythology, the artisan and acoustic music.

Blue Oyster Performance Series

Performances
THU 18, 9pm Red River: 169 High Street
FRI 19, 12:30pm Joshua Rutter, Motoko Kikkawa and Kimberly What, Dowling St Steps
SAT 20, 1pm Full Fucking Moon: 362 Moray Pl and live on Radio One 91FM and Toroa Radio 1575AM
SUN 28, 6pm Aerolineas: Blue Oyster
SAT 27, 6pm Alex Bennett: Blue Oyster

Talks at Blue Oyster Gallery 24 Moray Pl
SUN 21, 12pm Catherine Dale on Antonin Artaud
Wed 24, 5:30pm Suzanne Little on Performance and Representation

Film Screenings at Havana Club and Cinema, Cnr Filleul St & Moray Pl
MON 22, 7pm Featuring: Rubbings from a Live Man
THU 25, 7pm Featuring: Mystic Eyes Performed by Lisa MacKinney
FRI 26, 7pm Featuring: Lucy Guerin's Structure and Sadness