CREATION
Deborah Kelly, Lex Lindsay, Kit Spencer & Saria Green - CREATION: Curated Commission
6:00pm Sunday 14 April – Official Performance
Main Hall, Petersham Town Hall

CREATION is an artwork in the form of a queer insurrectionary science fiction climate change religion. It is interdisciplinary, evolving, multigenerational and iterative. CREATION is expressed across visual arts, music, literature, choreography, performance, and, most especially, through sustained collaboration.

The world premiere performance, in English and Bandjalang, of Lex Lindsay’s newly composed song Urgently and Gently will form the centrepiece of CREATION’s full concert presentation at Petersham Town Hall.

Over two days, CREATION will fill the Town Hall with chanting, dancing, costumed CREATION congregants, gathering their collective energies to sing a new world into being.

Urgently and Gently, devised from a prayer written by Juundaal Strang Yettica (Bandjalang/Kannakan) for the CREATION project, will be performed by the expanded CREATION choir accompanied by spoken word elements by

Juundaal, and large-scale projected collage animations. The animated imagery will be developed in workshops open to project participants, conducted in February-early March and animated in time for 13-14 April.

CREATION’s foremost collaborator is musical director Lex Lindsay, who will be the second lead artist in this presentation. We will be joined by choir captain Kit Spencer, choir soloists Andrew Bukenya, Zaya Barroso, Malaika Mfalme, Tash Rusterholz and Liza-Mare Syron, producer Su Goldfish, choreographer Saria Green, and a host of local participants across visual art, choir and movement.

About the artists

Deborah Kelly, Instigator - Deborah is a Melbourne-born, Sydney-based artist of mixed settler ancestry. Her works have been shown around Australia and elsewhere. For a decade she has been working with groups of strangers in cities around the world to make experiential collaborations emphasising process, community and aesthetic intensity. Kelly’s works are concerned with lineages of representation, politics and history in public exchange, and practices of collectivity both epic and intimate.

Lex Lindsay, Composer - Lex is a writer, composer and performance artist with a 20-year career as a creative producer, curator and strategy advisor to arts organisations. He has composed music for theatre, dance and film productions including the Australian Premiere of Howard Barker’s Ego in Arcadia, films Tempting Fate and Birthday and Deborah Kelly’s The Gods of Tiny Things. His plays include Swallowing Geography, Safety, Prime.Real.Estate, and Armour/Amor.

Kit Spencer, Performer & Choir Captain - Kit is a musician, artist and teacher, whose work focuses on music making as experimentation, performance-oriented practice, and accessibility.

Saria Green - Saria is a queer Tanzanian multidisciplinary performer, living and creating on Gadigal land. Saria started singing and dancing from two years old, and found her way to the stage in choirs, musical theatre, and spoken word poetry. Saria believes strongly in the power of performance for protest, healing and storytelling. Outside of her creative endeavours, Saria is a Clinical Psychologies and psychology teacher.