Concrete and Bone Sessions was a festival highlight, a very special work, exhilaratingly focused on the beauty of collective movement and daredevilry.
–Keith Gallasch, Real Time 112
Concrete and Bone Sessions is the product of an intense collaboration between culturally diverse professional performers; skaters, bmxers, parkourists, breakers and contemporary dancers brought together within the architecture and natural elements of a skate park. The 60 minute show, an exhilarating seamless choreographic experience set to a haunting contemporary soundtrack, is filled with surprising duets and outstanding ensemble work.
Concrete and Bone Sessions is about impact, on a space and a culture, and the body within the skate park, and of the role of the spectator in this space. With its shifting forms and uncertain terrain, this concrete monument to risk and danger is a place where its inhabitants push their bodies to the extreme.
The work draws out a diverse audience; teenagers, seasoned arts audiences, twenty somethings, families; and local first time arts audiences. The show premiered to sell out audiences for the Sydney Festival, January 2013 in a skate park in inner city Sydney. It is fully adaptable to other skate parks.
Concrete and Bone Sessions is an evocative transformation of public space and a unique opportunity for a festival to engage with the local community and skate park users. As part of its premier season Branch Nebula engaged local skate park users in the show by opening the show with their involvement.
Circus for the fearless, the urban. A beautiful portrait of human defiance, of connection, of adrenalin, of focus exquisitely landed.
– Australian Stage 29 Jan 2013
Performers/Collaborating Artists
Jared Graham (Leerock)
Antek Marciniec
Kat Williams
Marnie Palomares
Danny Campbell
Kathryn Puie
Michael Steingräber
Roland Chlouk
Cloé Fournier
Gabrielle Nankivell (Chile season)
co-creators
Lee Wilson
Mirabelle Wouters
composer
Bob Scott
community Liaison
Nick Power
produced by
Pippa Bailey for Performing Lines
This is site-specificity of the most immediate kind, a visceral connection to a place of play, not its social role or its history, in a display of what is often regarded as fun but here as art without losing the integrity of its popular foundations. The outcome is a visual spectacle, impeccably choreographed so that star turns are embedded in and shoot out of the mesmeric poetry of the grand sweeping collective rides and runs that transform the concrete into a magic, enabling vessel.
– Keith Gallasch, Real Time, Feb 2013
Trailer
Tour Dates
Jack Shanahan Reserve, Sydney Festival 2013
9-19/01/2013
Parque De Los Reyes, XXI Santiago a Mil International Festival, Chile
11-16/01/2014
Concrete and Bone Sessions was originally commissioned by Sydney festival and was developed with the support of the Australia Council, the Australian Government’s arts funding and advisory body; Arts NSW and Marrickville Council.
