Biennale of Sydney

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Call and Response is a performance series reflecting the core philosophies of rīvus. Taking place on closing weekend across exhibition venues including The Cutaway at Barangaroo and Pier 2/3 Walsh Bay Arts Precinct. 

Poets, artists, singers and writers will hold a dialogue with exhibition projects, curatorial frames and contributing participants through live site responsive performance. Call and Response foregrounds collective practice, water relations and radical thought and action.  

The spatial qualities of exhibition sites, The Cutaway and Pier 2/3, will be pushed – each environment serving as an echo chamber holding stories, sounds and vibrations. Call and Response draws lines of connection between people, place and things and initiates pathways between lines of thought and action. 

Program:

Ecopella – choral piece 
Ecopella is an environmental choir that sings about the beauty of our world and the struggle to protect it from exploitation and degradation. You might expect a choir that sings about the environment to be a gloomy ensemble, but Ecopella’s sense of fun fills each performance with positive and satirical messages. Even when the mood becomes serious the beauty and solemnity of the music is uplifting. For the Biennale of Sydney, Ecopella will contribute to the echo chamber of stories, sounds and vibrations that reverberate through rīvus. 

Maria Lindsay – Song of the Ocean
The ocean has a breath and rhythm that draws us to it, and into ourselves and our very beginnings. It is home to countless species of life, some still quite unimaginable to us, but it also seems to have a life and heartbeat of its own, interacting with the moon, wind and seasons in a vast and timeless dance. Its depths are immense, but it allows us to stand on its edge and breathe in a tiny fraction of its greatness. The piece is played on solo violin and uses the natural qualities of the instrument to convey the soundscape of the ocean, the life within it and the soaring lyricism of the “Song”. The bottom string is lowered to create a bass for the heartbeat of the ocean. 

Studio Artes collective, Creative Sound, presents: Autumn Rain 
Studio ARTES collective Creative Sound presents Autumn Rain, a night of live sound and sampling reflecting the natural flow of life from the perspective of adults with disability. The collective has experimented with a variety of different techniques and equipment to manipulate found sounds, live instruments and MIDI, to explore ideas about, and mimic the sounds of various waterways.   

Uncle John Kelly and Rena Shein: A River proclamation from Memory
Fifty people created a poem  

One by one 

Together 

Fifty people remembered  

And wrote 

One by one 

Together   

What River means to them 

Join us for a live reading from rīvus participants’ Uncle John Kelly and Rena Shein’s exquisite corpse provocation co-created across time and space by our Biennale of Sydney community. 

Victoria Hunt: Weathering Beings 
Weather Beings is a 2Spirit performance collaborative founded by Indigenous artists Moe Clark and Victoria Hunt. Created as a site to examine the intersections of our whakapapa and wahkohtowin (kinship systems), Weather Beings asserts our position to reclaim, restore and rematriate feminine and queer knowledge into our cultural and creative practices. As we navigate thresholds between what is ‘known’, what is withheld or ‘unknown,’ and what is being dreamt into being, Weather Beings upholds a framework of ethical co-existence and restorative co-resistance.