Arts NSW and the National Association for the Visual Arts have awarded Dr Eve Klein and creative collaborator AnA Wojak a NSW Artists’ Grant to present a new transmedia work at the Melaka Art and Performance Festival in Malaysia during November.
Dr Klein is Convenor of Music at the University of New England and Wojak is an award winning visual and performance artist based in Lismore. Together they will present a new performance work entitled LOOP as well as featuring in collaborative performance works with other International artists presenting at the festival. Armidale based videographer-engineer Ravi Glasser-Vora will also contribute to LOOP’s visual and technical design.
LOOP is a performance and installation work exploring the intersections and feedback of the senses. From the most concrete, the genetic template encoded in double-stranded molecules of nucleic acids, to the most esoteric, the contradictions that slip between the body, mind, and the unknowable, LOOP addresses the fundamental experiences of being human.
The Melaka Art and Performance Festival encompasses an intensive two-week collaboration period called Co-Lab where Dr Klein, Wojak and Glasser-Vora will collaborate on the creation of LOOP before presenting the work at a three day festival located in a ruined church on St Paul’s Hill, Melaka. The annual performance event attracts thousands of Asian and international visitors and is an important part of the local cultural life of Melaka’s historic tourist district. This year seventy international artists including dancers, actors, musicians and composers will collaborate and perform as part of the festival.
Earlier this year Dr Klein’s opera The Pomegranate Cycle was a finalist for Vocal Work of the Year in the 2014 Art Music Awards, and she has also been awarded an Australia Council for the Arts New Work Grant to compose music for the 2015 VIVID festival. The VIVID project will be performed by the Australian Recorder Project, a recorder duo featuring University of New England Music lecturer Alana Blackburn and Joanne Arnott.