The People’s Republic is thrilled to welcome a superb new interdisciplinary performance group featuring a quintet of celebrated Australian experimental artists as they bring their distinctive brand of embodied sonic and performative practice to The Red House...

CHRONOLOGY ARTS COLLECTIVE

SUNDAY August 10th at 7 p.m. [doors at 6.30]

The walls have ears.
There are voices in the piano, and the floor is a resonating drum.
 
Interdisciplinary performance group Chronology Arts Collective bring their distinctive brand of embodied sonic and performative practice to The Red House this winter. Enfolding the audience in a layered and spatially distributed web of voices, expressive bodies, instruments, microphones, amps and cables, they play each other and the materials and resonances of the building, its contents and possible (hi)stories.
 
For the "Spirits in the House" performance, Chronology Arts Collective are Elizabeth Jigalin, Gideon Payten-Griffiths, Mitch Riley, Nikki Heywood and Stephen Adams. Performance facilitated by Stephen Adams.

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Chronology Arts Collective is an emergent experimental multi-disciplinary collective coming together for creative development and performance with an ethos of liberation, creativity, deep sensitivity and awareness. The collective was founded in 2024 under the umbrella of Andrew Batt-Rawden’s Chronology Arts organisation. Working through an improvisatory practice and dialogue, the intergenerational collective includes artists grounded in sound art, music composition, theatre-making, dance and other forms of contemporary performance.
In 2025 the collective has given monthly performances at the Harold Park Hall in Glebe, variously facilitated by collective members Andrew Batt-Rawden, Ryuichi Fujimura, Stephen Adams, Josh Freedman, Carolyn Eccles and Mitch Riley, with the support of City of Sydney.
 
Mitch Riley is a versatile artist, interpreting and devising works in opera, theatre, music, movement and clowning. Recent work includes the role of Enkidu in the world premiere at Carriageworks of Jack Symonds’ opera Gilgamesh, directed by Kip Williams, as well as a collaboration with the renowned French string quartet Le Quatuor Béla to create L’Homme est une fleur, a theatrical adaptation of music by György Kurtág combining physical theatre, pantomime burlesque and clowning. Mitch’s interest in the way music opens a particularly rich space for storytelling and expression through movement and gesture led him to study at the Jacques Lecoq International Theatre School in France, renowned for its work around the body of the actor and the mask. He is an associate artist with Sydney Chamber Opera. 
 
Nikki Heywood is an interdisciplinary artist working across dance, performance, writing and live art. A performance creator with a deep focus on embodiment, her long professional practice has centred upon devising and directing original movement-based performance work. She has been creatively informed by Jerzy Grotowski, Body Weather (via Min Tanaka, Tess de Quincey & Frank van de Ven), her work with Deborah Hay, and somatic practice Body-Mind Centering, studying for over 20 years with Alice Cummins. Her long-standing improvisational practice, often working with musicians, has produced a body of work spanning solo and collaborative performance, with work touring to festivals inter/nationally.
 
Elizabeth Jigalin is a composer, performer and artist who traverses experimental, improvised and chamber music contexts and her work has been featured at festivals worldwide. She regularly performs in series across the city of Sydney, sharing her experimental, playful and embodied approach to prepared piano and object performance. Additionally, Elizabeth is the founder of the music box project, an award-winning collective known for their interdisciplinary and exploratory music-making. The group has premiered over 50 new works and remains central to Elizabeth’s practice.  Read more about Elizabeth here.
 
Stephen Adams is a composer, improviser, voice and sound artist with a developing movement practice and two decades as ABC Classic’s Australian Music Curator/Producer (2004-23). Stephen studied composition with Peter Sculthorpe (1983-86) and Richard Vella (2003-4). Over the past four decades he has created music for choirs, rock bands, chamber ensembles, orchestras, and theatre (including an electro-acoustic score for The Opera Project’s ‘The Audience and Other Psychopaths’ (2004) with librettist Amanda Stewart), as well as studio works for radio and other media. His ‘Piano in a Field of Recordings’ was selected for the ISCM World Music Days 2022 in Auckland. His work ‘Breathing Rotations’ recently premiered on air across Australasia, Europe and North America. Stephen improvises with voice, body, flute, field recordings, microphones, radios and other acoustic and lo-fi electronic objects. His music is available on ABC Classics, Hyperion, Tall Poppies, Wirripang, and Harrigans Lane Collective labels, and on Bandcamp.   
Breathing Rotations
Close to your ears
Sunset inside the listening room
 
Gideon Payten Griffiths (Sydney/London) is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, curator and facilitator spanning theatre, dance, music, live-art, film, installation and bodywork. They find centre in the body as a material and emotional landscape and searches for the radically compassionate, liminal or queer space between people and all forms. Their work is often experimental, site-specific, immersive, participatory, abstracted or sensory and has assumed a range of forms, contexts and collaborations including with the Sydney Festival, Biennale of Sydney, Sydney Opera House, Performance Space, AGNSW, MCA Australia, Willoughby Visual Arts Biennial, PACT, Sydney Living Museums, Kaldor Public Art Projects, Peats Ridge Festival, Erotic Living, DeQuincey Co., Shh Productions, Bakehouse/KXT and Tooth & Sinew.

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THERE IS NO ADMISSION CHARGE FOR PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC EVENTS - PLEASE DONATE GENEROUSLY ON THE NIGHT KNOWING THAT EVERY CENT GOES TO THE ARTISTS

PLEASE NOTE, THIS IS A CASH-ONLY EVENT SO PLEASE BRING ALONG PLENTY OF THOSE QUAINT COLOURED RECTANGLES

OUR EVENTS ARE B.Y.O. please bring along any beverages you wish but no food is allowed