One of Australia's most fascinating performance artists is plugging into a robotic exoskeleton at the Opera House. Here's the run-down.
Stelarc brings Antipodean Apparatus to the Sydney Opera House on 9 July, swapping his body for wearable, sound-triggering machines.
For more than four decades, the Cyprus-born Australian artist has used his own body as the medium, working through robotic third arms, flesh-hook suspensions and an ear surgically grafted onto his forearm. His practice sits on the outer edge of what a human body can be made to do, and Antipodean Apparatus keeps that experiment running with a fresh set of wearable devices. Chief among them is an exoskeleton built alongside Ben Merrylees and JOLT Arts director James Hullick, engineered to trigger sound as it moves.
Stelarc: Antipodean Apparatus
- Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House
- 9 July, doors 7.30pm
- Stelarc 8pm, The Amplified Elephants 9pm, James Hullick 9.30pm
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Hullick shares the bill with a suite of robotic sound machines and reworked violins that feel like they rolled off a parallel industrial revolution’s line. As artistic director of JOLT Arts and the BOLT Ensemble, and an Australia Council Creative Fellow, he has spent years pulling new sonic territory out of inventive instruments, found objects and the human voice. Both his solo set and his work with the ensemble turn these creation-augmenting tools into full sound worlds.
The Amplified Elephants round out the program. The neurodiverse sound ensemble has been produced by JOLT Arts since 2006, incubated for years through Footscray Community Arts, and took out Best Avant-Garde Work at the 2022 Music Victoria Awards. Their immersive surround-sound pieces, among them Select Naturalis and the album Deep Creatures, have travelled to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Macau and the UK, and a recent collaboration paired them with Japanese Noh vocalist Ryoko Aoki. The ensemble builds its sound from voice, electronics and custom sonic systems.
All three acts perform in the Utzon Room across a single evening that leans into performance art and avant-garde sound in equal measure. Doors open at 7.30pm, with Stelarc on first, followed by The Amplified Elephants and Hullick closing out the night.
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