Alan Schacher and WeiZen Ho kick start their current research project ‘Evaporative Body, Multiplying Body’ with collaborating artists Mike Leggett (experimental video & film) and Fausto Brusamolino (lighting design).
For this residency they are interested to research ways in which the body can evaporate and multiply, change its very substance, transmute, relocate. Concepts like possession, ghosting, vibrational energy, reality and projection will be examined physically and by means of augmentation in light, projection and media. Mediums employed will include screen or other surfaces, reflections and fog or haze. The work refers to transitional boundaries between life and death. Between spirit and sci-fi, scepticism, faith and superstition.
Alan Schacher is a performance-maker and interdisciplinary artist. His practice traverses live art, dance and installation and focuses on spatial experience and the different meanings the body takes on in diverse contexts. An undercurrent of cultural landscapes and diasporic references, both imagined and inherited, form significant motifs in his work.
WeiZen Ho is a performing artist and deviser who brings together phonic-vocals and movement. Her performances transform and extend mundane postures, sounds and everyday objects or speech into poetic prayer. She is fascinated by ritual, in particular the animistic rituals still practised by Chinese clans in her hometown and throughout South-East Asia. For her, ritual, imagery-work and accoutrements are distilled in performance through the visceral vocal-body.
Mike Leggett is a practising artist across the institutions of art, education, cinema, media arts and television for over 50 years. He has a PhD from the Creativity & Cognition Studios in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, UTS, having received an Australian Postgraduate Award to investigate the precept of visual mnemonics in the development of tools for creative viewer interaction with digital motion pictures.
Fausto Brusamolino is a lighting designer and creative coder based in Sydney. He designs lighting for live performances and filming, creates his own lighting installations, and provides lighting designs and consultation for other artists’ artworks and exhibitions. He received the 2018 Green Room Award for Best Visual Design for Tangiwai, directed by Victoria Hunt, which he designed the lighting and implemented the water effects.