Liveworks

Liveworks Festival is Performance Space’s flagship festival of live art and performance, spanning dance, music, theatre, installation, experimentation and celebration.

This year’s program will again take over Carriageworks from 23 – 27 October 2024, with a festival of art from across Australia and the Asia Pacific.

This year’s artists explore how we practise care and intimacy, hold each other in collapse, find release and joy in unexpected places, and the power of small actions to make big changes.

They offer us spaces to reflect, come together in surprising ways, and imagine new and alternative worlds. Performance Space invites you to join them on a journey of imagination, joy, rage, and contemplation of our most fundamental human experiences – love, life, death, and dancing.

Far from the formulaic, our digital commissions and programs explore new possibilities for liveness and expand our sense of what live performance can mean in the digital realm.

This festival brings contemporary art alive. Whether the performing or the visual arts take your fancy, you’ll find plenty to enjoy. Liveworks allows you to discuss featured exhibits with the artists who created them.

There are many events during the festival where we can’t fit all the information on one page. Please check out the official website for full event details, dates, times, and ticket options.

Liveworks Opening Night

Join the Performance Space team from 5pm—6pm as we welcome another year of Liveworks in style. Food and drink will be abundant courtesy of our supporters Archie Rose Distilling Co and Scotchmans Hill. Registration is free, and we hope to see you there!
Wednesday, 23 October 2024, 5pm

Leftover Market

Leftover Market is inspired by a term defined by the All-China Women’s Federation, “Sheng Nu”, meaning “Leftover Women”, used to classify females* over twenty-seven still single, a notion that pervades Mandarin-speaking cultures worldwide. Following their trilogy Girl’s Notes (2018-2020), which revolved around gender identity, nudity and embodiment, the award-winning feminist artist PinWen Su has questioned gender performance.

In their new piece, Leftover Market, Su parallels the notion of leftovers in our fast food and fast fashion cultures with how females* are evaluated and notions of desire and consumption. Inviting audiences into an immersive and participatory space populated with so-called waste and a figure that refuses to conform, Leftover Market interrogates how we judge things as favourable or useless and who gets to decide. Ideas of gender, sexuality, family, materiality, food, sustenance, and the very landscape of our daily lives under late-stage capitalism are thrown together and exploded in this provocative and playful work.
Wednesday, 23 October 2024, 6pm
Thursday, 24 October 2024, 6pm
Friday, 25 October 2024, 6pm

THUNDERBLOOM-LIVE

Experience the magic of THUNDERBLOOM-LIVE, a full-length theatrical extravaganza originally commissioned as a visual album by West Space (Victoria) and now brought to life at the 2024 Liveworks Festival by Performance Space at Carriageworks.

This captivating show features HOSSEI, his mother NAHID, supporting singers, dancers, a local seniors choir, and live music. Infused with themes of healing, care, and humour, THUNDERBLOOM-LIVE showcases vibrant and colourful costumes, heartfelt music, and dynamic performances.

Exploring health, migrant family dynamics, and the bond between mother and son, this performance promises to captivate audiences, spark meaningful conversations, and leave a lasting impact.

Don’t miss this special event that celebrates life, love, and the power of connection.
Wednesday, 23 October 2024, 6pm
Friday, 25 October 2024, 6pm
Sunday, 27 October 2024, 2pm

The Crying Room: Exhumed

A crying room is a small, soundproof chamber at the back of a theatre auditorium where you can experience an event via one-way glass and live audio feed. As the name suggests, it’s a place you can go if you are crying so as not to disturb the audience. But what if a crying room was a site dedicated to emotional extraction? A place not to conceal tears but to invoke them?

The Crying Room: Exhumed conjures a world of hyper-spiritualists, clairvoyeurs, psychobabble, and cyber grief. Prophecies will be written, and spectres will be divined—all for a nominal fee. But some fortunes should remain untold; even the dead are buried with their mobile phones.

In this deeply personal and form-bending adaptation of his award-winning online work The Crying Room, Marcus Ian McKenzie scours infinite planes in search of his lost brother.
Wednesday, 23 October 2024, 6:30pm
Thursday, 24 October 2024, 6:30pm
Friday, 25 October 2024, 6:30pm
Saturday, 26 October 2024, 2pm
Saturday, 26 October 2024, 6:30pm
Sunday, 27 October 2024, 6:30pm

Ecstasy

How do the reckless abandon of the rave and 16th Century Saint Teresa of Avila’s violent raptures with angels intersect? And what might it look, feel and sound like for the mystical pageantries of Christian liturgy and queer performance to enmesh? These encounters, and others, take place in the solo stage show Ecstasy, an adaptation of the album of the same name by vocalist, producer and performer Marcus Whale.

Building on a palette of sounds from the thunderous sub-bass frequencies of high-BPM rave music to the ecclesiastical tones of choral drone, Ecstasy unfolds as a choreographic investigation into ekstasis, the state of being “outside oneself”, a name for experiences in which the boundaries of the self, of inside and outside, become troubled or broken down. Live, loud, visceral and taking place in the round, Ecstasy stages a reach into the seductive void that exceeds the limits of the knowable.
Wednesday, 23 October 2024, 7pm
Thursday, 24 October 2024, 7pm
Friday, 25 October 2024, 7pm
Saturday, 26 October 2024, 7pm
Sunday, 27 October 2024, 7pm

dissent

“Is this just a game to you?”

A figure sits alone at a table with only a battered handbook, a set of dice, and a cup of tea. Players are randomly selected to join them and given an arbitrary list of rules. As the rest of us watch on and perhaps join in, an unnerving, familiar journey emerges through imagination and play. Even within the confines of this murky backroom, possibilities abound.

From shapeshifting Māori storyteller Daley Rangi, Dissent is an irreverent and provocative exploration of everyday resistance. Each roll of the dice and each change of heart shapes an unfolding, hyperlocal story. Faced with escalating choices, the lines of responsibility between ‘individual’ and ‘community’ begin to blur.

Facilitated by a mischievous but supportive host, this is a disquieting role-playing encounter of ethical and social dilemmas. No one is forced to play, but as the game unfolds, you won’t be able to turn away.
Wednesday, 23 October 2024, 7:30pm
Thursday, 24 October 2024, 7:30pm
Friday, 25 October 2024, 7:30pm
Saturday, 26 October 2024, 4pm
Sunday, 27 October 2024, 4pm

Fell

In Fell, Luke George retraces his roots in Tasmania / lutruwita, recalling in particular the impacts of the logging industry. In seeking a state of balance between himself and a log equal in weight to his body, George attempts to suspend the narrative of a human will to power so that other memories, including those of nature, might also become sensible.
Wednesday, 23 October 2024, 8pm
Thursday, 24 October 2024, 8pm
Friday, 25 October 2024, 8pm
Sunday, 27 October 2024, 6pm

The Bloom

Imagine being a fig wasp – born pregnant. Imagine the sex of mould. Imagine mothering as a botanical project that broke its banks.

A new dance work by Jessie McCall is leaning into the generative glitches of queer propagation and motherhood.

Made in collaboration with creative production studio RDYSTDY and performers Sofia McIntyre, Raven Afoa-Purcell, and Sasha Matsumoto, The Bloom is darkly funny and deeply human, an invitation to imagine intimacies outside of the gaze of the nation-state.

As imperialist violence operates with devastating impunity in Gaza and many other parts of the world, including their own motu, the artists of The Bloom acknowledge their intricate accountability in the systems and histories that bring us to this global moment and what it means to present work at this time.

The Bloom seeks to queer the hold of colonial patriarchy over caretaking practices, an intention which, for its artists, goes hand in hand with calling for a Free Palestine.
Wednesday, 23 October 2024, 8pm
Thursday, 24 October 2024, 8pm
Friday, 25 October 2024, 8pm
Saturday, 26 October 2024, 5pm
Sunday, 27 October 2024, 5pm

The Butterfly Who Flew Into The Rave

From Aotearoa, New Zealand, Oli Mathiesen, with Lucy Lynch and Sharon Mortimer, presents the award-winning The Butterfly Who Flew Into The Rave, an endurance-based dance work set to the booming techno album Nocturbulous Behaviour by Suburban Knight.

Exploring the movement vocabulary used in techno and rave culture, a contemporary nightclub between three bodies emerges. Relentless movement, seamless without pause, detailed down to every beat. The atmosphere and culture of a three-day rave are condensed into a high-art, streamlined performance where you watch the destruction of three human beings commence in front of you. Indulge in the pain, the sweat, the cathartic mess; a display of pure endurance to achieve a goal.

It is a spectacle of the human body as a victim to music, as a victim to passion, as a victim to our endless desire to achieve more. To win and win again.
Wednesday, 23 October 2024, 9pm
Thursday, 24 October 2024, 9pm
Friday, 25 October 2024, 9pm
Saturday, 26 October 2024, 8pm
Sunday, 27 October 2024, 8pm

Brolga: A Queer Koori Wonderland

Immerse yourself in Brolga: A Queer Koori Wonderland – an interactive art party curated by renowned Wiradjuri man and multidisciplinary artist Joel Bray. You’re invited to join us at a reimagined contemporary gathering of light, colour, projected image and ecstatic dancing bodies inspired by First Nations stories of the dancing Brolga.

Debuting for Melbourne Fringe 2023, this 5-star rated event has made a name around Australia. Now, Eora, it’s your turn! For one night only, Brolga has returned for the 2024 Liveworks Festival to transform every nook and cranny of Carriageworks into a psychedelic Queer Koori Wonderland.

Start planning your Brolga-inspired look for this explosion of queer performance, music and video art, and spread your wings on the dance floor to a rotating roster of the hottest local and national club DJs.
Saturday, 26 October 2024, 8pm

Archie Rose Liveworks Bar

Add some spirit to your Liveworks experience by choosing an award-winning beverage from the Archie Rose Distilling Co. pop-up bar! From cocktails to straight spirits featuring native Australian botanicals, Archie Rose spirits are the perfect way to cap off your Liveworks experience.

The bar will be open all week, so you can eat and drink before and between performances. Food and Non-alcoholic drink options will also be available.

Getting There

Eveleigh is an inner-city suburb located about 3 kilometres south of the CBD. You can also get there via public transport (bus or train services). If you catch a train, it’s a short walk from Macdonaldtown Station on the Main Suburban Line.