Brink Performance Group | Jessica Wilson

BRINK

Brink Performance Group was a collaborative team creating ground breaking and ambitious site based visual theatre in Brisbane. Led by myself and Ainsley Burdell with artists Rodolf Blois (composition) and Randall Wood (projected image), we.created 4 major works between 1996 and 1999.

All works were funded by Australia Council and Arts Queensland and supported by QUT's Centre for Innovation in the Arts at QUT, where Brink were resident company.

The works were HENRY'S SHADOW, set on a dis-used wharf, PAPER CROWN, UNDER THE BIG SKY, and BRITTLE.

“As explorers of the theatrical imagination and poetic ironists of our obsession with identity and lifestyle, this company treads a distinctive path.”

Veronica Kelly THE AUSTRALIAN 1998

“stunningly beautiful and imagistic.. Australian conceptualisations of the land are evoked with witty economy and surreal visual poetry”

Veronica Kelly THE AUSTRALIAN 1998 of UNDER THE BIG SKY

UNDER THG BIG SKY was the most acclaimed of Brink's works presented by QPAT's STAGE X festival.

The ambitious performance work was set on a 20 metre high vertical cliff face, on the banks of the Brisbane River. Contrasting the sublime and the banal, it explored Australia's relationship to landscape and its effect on cultural behaviour. Drawing on many distinctly Australian visual arts and literary references it was structured as a journey from the romantic view of the landscape (the surface) into the depths of the gothic view (the depths) and back again.

A colonial woman, a water diviner and an explorer were the key characters drawn from both historic and contemporary images. Large scale moving and still projections worked with performers on a complex belaying system, puppetry and live spacialised sound composition.

Under the Big Sky was a ground breaking work in its time, with its use of large-scale projected image on glass slides for an enormous parni projector - the most contemporary equipment available - and some of Australia's first innovation in belaying performers at height.

ACADEMIC PAPER: Fear and Desire 'Under The Big Sky': Brink Visual Theatre and the Post-Colonial Australian Landscape. Paul B Makeham.

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