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The Living Room Theatre, I love Todd Sampson, 2016, performance
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Michelle sees her practice as sitting in the framework of ‘Composed Theatre’ – a philosophical lens which creates fragments of images, sounds, text that organises and reorganises, to evoke a circuitous environment where the viewer enters a constructed reality. "... I manipulate time spaces at the junction of dream logic. I look to destabilise the real and the unreal worlds by bringing together contradictory artforms, media and seemingly disparate collaborators (and a couple of my beloved horses). My early investigation into the compositional structures of orchestral music led me to ‘Composed Theatre’ – the result is a coded world of theatrical scores rather than scripts. I ask the performers to play with the relationship with themselves in topography of space in time in rhythm. Obsessed with the state of suffering, I am drawn to work in spaces that feel hurt, bruised, violated. My themes of female desire, the universal desire for something better and the suffering of everyday life. Within these states we find beauty. The private celebrations distilled yet unsettled. There is always something that isn’t quite right. My work is not about the straight narrative, nor about the theatrical arc but rather what is heart driven, illogical with the narrative meted out through image, light, sound and language."
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| The Living Room Theatre, I just wanted to be alone with her, 2018, performance |
My time at Gunyah will involve the weaving stage of a new work 'The foul of the air'. Using the landscape as my canvas I look to work through the several components of sound, object and image to find how they resonate in the expanse of the outdoors. Drawing on the several threads born from previous developments I will work towards a completed map of the new work that weaves together the composed sounds, images and objects from 20 artists.
