Throat Pleats (AUS) descends upon Berlin to present their new performance work Elasticene at the Heizhaus Uferstudios presented with PSR Collective

Performance: 8pm June 6th 2025

Open rehearsal: 3pm June 5th 2025

Free

About the work

Elasticene is a 55-minute hybrid performance work at the intersection of experimental music, sound installation, movement & speculative fiction, by performance duo Throat Pleats. Twenty-first-century humans have a “habit of parsing the world into dull matter (it, things) and vibrant life (us, beings)” (Jane Bennett 2010). As binaries between living and non-living materials and human and non-human lives are blurred, Throat Pleats, in their first long form work, embark on a material exploration of latex, plastic and rubber as lively agents in imagined lives. The man-made materials of the Anthropocene have fled their makers to form new weird ecologies; Elasticene embraces and finds whimsy in strange, imagined futures where materials and beings biologically entangle.

Throat Pleats dismantles the boundaries between instrument and performer, using plastic reeds, balloons, tubes, and wind instruments as sculptural & sonic objects. Amidst environmental collapse, the work positions synthetic materials as both collaborators and antagonists in a choreographed negotiation of breath, resistance, and play. The balloon—a delicate expanding petrochemical membrane containing human breath—becomes a metaphor for the body’s entanglement with industrial ecologies and a collective rising anxiety about impending climate disaster. Throat Pleats musically repurposes detritus of the Anthropocene to find joy, strangeness and beauty amidst a world choked by our material creations, presenting a posthuman, anti-virtuosic reimagining of contemporary musical performance in the twenty-first century.

About Throat Pleats

Throat Pleats (Sydney Australia) is an experimental, interdisciplinary musical project by percussionist Niki Johnson and composer-clarinettist Solomon Frank. Their practice dismantles conventional performance structures, engaging with sound as a visceral, theatrical, and material experience. Since 2017, they have worked across contemporary classical, experimental, live art, and queer nightlife spaces, shaping a sonic aesthetic that is guttural, gestural, and unpredictable: an embodiment of omnipresent climate anxiety. Their work activates the physical and material extremes of their instruments—drums, reeds, balloons, air—blurring distinctions between sound, movement, and object. As two queer performers (with backgrounds as classical musicians) they use expanded forms of clarinet and percussion technique in an attempt to ‘queer’ classical instrumental practices, where the expressive capacity of instruments is abstracted, extended and desanctified.

Credits

Lead Artist and Performer: Niki Johnson

Lead Artist and Performer: Solomon Frank

Creative Producer: Malcolm Whittaker

Choreographic Consultant: Cassidy McDermott Smith

Costumes: Rachael Guinness and Milo Michell

Photos by Chloe Abdel Nour

Developed with the assistance of Vitalstatistix and Brand X