Uncanny Bodies

In this experimental site-responsive performance, dancer/choreographer Carol Brown and musicians Russell Scoones and David Cross engage in an improvised dialogue with traces of movements and music of Viennese Jewish Composer Marcel Lorber (b. unknown, d.1986) and Choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser (b.Vienna 1890, d.Sydney 1959). Their collaborations in Vienna included eccentric, ecstatic and sensuous dances banned within Nazi Germany and Austria but reimagined on Australian soil as expressive modern dance dramas.  Through a process of recovery and release, they offer a series of countermoves, retrospective loops that resist the disciplining effects of the architecture of the Grainger Museum, to attempt to recapture the dynamic relation between exiled composer and choreographer. Unleashing repressed choreomusical memories, their gestures relay between the forgotten, the fantasised, the imagined and remembered, marking the Museum as a place for composing with the uncanny fragments of the past through the corporeal archive.

Header images features Carol Brown in Shelf Life. Photographer:  Mattias Ek.

Tickets are free.

In 2021 Museums and Collections invited artist and curator Dr David Sequeira to be the University’s inaugural Creative Researcher in Residence at the Grainger. The building was emptied of its contents and David was given access to Grainger’s collection of manuscripts, musical instruments and personal effects.

#brownmaninawhitemuseum is a suite of new installations, curatorial interventions, talks and performance resulting from this residency.

Due to issues associated with the sexually explicit nature of some of this material, viewing is by Public Programs and restricted to ages 18+