Chamber Made

Listening Acts: Ten New Work Commissions

Listening Acts: Ten New Work Commissions

We invite you to be a catalyst for new Australian artworks. Listening Acts will be a unique exhibition and performance event in Melbourne. This ambitious project bringing together an exciting and diverse cohort of lead artists working across multiple artforms to create bold new works that deconstruct, reframe, and challenge conventional notions around the act ...

GOAL

$50,000

Australia > VIC > Metro
09/08/2024 > 31/08/2025

Field of Interest

  • Arts and culture

Target Population

  • General population
  • Young people (6-25)
Chamber Made Chamber Made

Based on Wurundjeri Country in Naarm/Melbourne, Chamber Made cultivates adventurous multi-artform practice to disrupt and rewrite conventions of live performance. A commitment to collaboration, an appetite for innovation, and an ongoing fascination in the intersecting spaces between artforms drives the company through its fourth decade with renewed energy. Our works speak directly to a 21st century Australia enriched by the meeting of cultures

The company is led by acclaimed performance-maker and director, Tamara Saulwick, whose works are defined by a deep, abiding engagement with sound and music. Saulwick’s distinctive style has developed over many years of dedicated collaborations with some of Australia’s leading music practitioners, positioning her perfectly to lead and shape Chamber Made’s complex and nuanced cross-artform work and creative processes.

Chamber Made is renowned for cultivating adventurous collaborations between composers, sound artists, directors, performance-makers and media artists, disrupting and rewriting conventions to discover new forms of expression. Bringing contemporary composition and performance dramaturgy together in ever-shifting forms, our works have been presented in theatres, recital halls, lounge-rooms, galleries, on iPads and online. Chamber Made has presented over 100 performance seasons in Australia, NZ, Asia, Europe, USA and South America. The company has commissioned over 55 new Australian works and engaged countless artists since it was founded in 1988.
Please see vimeo.com/912432153 for examples of our recent works.

Project Summary

We invite you to be a catalyst for new Australian artworks. Listening Acts will be a unique exhibition and performance event in Melbourne. This ambitious project bringing together an exciting and diverse cohort of lead artists working across multiple artforms to create bold new works that deconstruct, reframe, and challenge conventional notions around the act of listening.

What is it to listen? What is it to listen imperfectly? Or indeed, to listen perfectly? And how can technology facilitate, interrupt, complicate or confound acts of listening to draw attention to what may remain in its wake? Ten exciting Australian sound artists have been asked to consider these questions in a groundbreaking series of works exploring the profound and multi-faceted nature of listening.

The works will explore the innumerable ways that listening (or not) shapes our existence, from the relationship between sound, memory and place, to bodies and power as experienced by the Stolen Generations, the sounds of medical treatment, the intimacy of binaural listening, unexpected conversations (with AI) and the reverberations of intergenerational trauma. Whether sound or screen based, live performance or installation, the constant thread will be this attention to the notion of listening.

By providing support, you will directly and meaningfully impact the career of an Australian artist and allow audiences to experience listening anew.
Lead artists are: Aviva Endean, Biddy Connor, Monica Lim, Rebecca Bracewell, Anna Liebzeit, Alexandra Spence, Thembi Soddell, Tamara Saulwick, Hannah de Feyter, Marlene Radice (please see attached bios).

Project Outcomes

The exciting outcomes of Listening Acts include:
- A curated series of immersive, genre-defying performance works and installations that challenge audiences to radically rethink what it means to listen
- 10 bold new works led by 10 women - Australian artists who collectively work across sound, film, installation, composition and contemporary performance
- Premiere season across three days in 2025 as part of a major arts and technology festival in Melbourne
- Employment and audience-building for Australian artists
- Works with an inbuilt consideration of access for deaf and hard of hearing audiences, First Nations audiences and those from different cultures, and people with different physical and mental disabilities
- Orientation towards attracting younger audiences to the live and visual arts through partnering with a major festival
- An opportunity to spark dialogue and drive cultural change around the social and societal role of listening

Budget Breakdown

TOTAL BUDGET: $135,610
FUNDING
Funding source Amount
Creative Australia (confirmed) $63,610
City of Melbourne (unconfirmed) $20,000
Ainslie and Gorman Arts Centres (confirmed) $2,000
Funding gap (unconfirmed) $50,000
EXPENSES
Expense item Amount
Artist New Work Commission Fees | $6,000 per new work (NB. each artists received $2000 concept development fee in 2023) $60,000
Collaborating Artist Fees (performers, lighting & costume designer) $8,600
Production & Technical Fees $9,960
Producing Fees $4,900
Oncosts (superannuation, workcover & holiday loading @21%) $13,982
Access Costs (First Nations & access consultants; child care contribution, as required $3,650
Production & Travel Costs (installation fabrication, equipment hires, performance materials) $21,635
Marketing Costs $3,500
Documentation of the works (stills & video) $5,400
Contingency at 5% artistic & production costs $3,983

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Contact Us
Level 6, 126 Wellington Parade, East Melbourne VIC 3002

We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first inhabitants and Traditional Custodians of the lands on which we live, learn and work. We pay our respects to Elders past and present.

Australian Communities Foundation is a proudly inclusive organisation and an ally of LGBTQIA+ communities and the movement toward equality.