Vitalstatistix acknowledges that we, and our home Waterside, are on Kaurna Country, its sovereignty never ceded. We acknowledge Kaurna people as the continuing custodians of the Adelaide Plains who have a spiritual relationship with this land. We respect their cultural authority. We pay our respect to Kaurna Elders, past, present and emerging, and through them to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Of Stubborn Songs and Unequal Wars*
Nithya Nagarajan, Liv Satchell, Marco Cher-Gibard and Zainab Syed (NSW, VIC and WA)
Of Stubborn Songs and Unequal Wars* is an intercultural theatre work and living repository of research about domestic violence, the micro-personal and macro-political landscapes of female bodies, and women’s cultural resistance practices.
Nithya Nagarajan is an artist and curator whose practice adopts movement as a system of inquiry into the sacred, the sensual and the decolonial, underpinned by a strong feminist sensibility. Liv Satchell is a theatre maker, writer and dramaturg. She is interested in how loss and grief are embodied, and in feminine dramaturgies that seek value outside of traditional narrative paradigms.
Inspired by written accounts and lived experience of intimate partner violence, the artists and their collaborating team are forging this project at an intersection of their practices, exploring how language and the body can both submit to and resist control.
*Working title borrowed from ‘When I hit you’ by Meena Kandasamy
Creative Team: Co-creator – Nithya Nagarajan; Co-creator – Liv Satchell; Sound designer – Marco Cher-Gibard; Producer – Zainab Syed; Digital archive – H Mur
Image: Gianna Rizzo
Published on
25 September
Live+Local
Artists-in-conversation (with Game of I-Lands)
Friday September 11 at 7pm
Adhocracy In Conversation panel: Racism, whiteness and transforming representation in the arts
Friday September 18 at 8pm
Residency Outcome
We came together to mine Dalit feminist author Meena Kandasamy’s text as source material and starting point – with the view to allow for a creative fertilisation of disciplines in our imagined dual strands to the eventual outcome of what will be a sensitive and considered process: a live performance work and an accompanying repository in the form of a digital archive.
We chanced upon an intimate process as most of the team are in hard lockdown in Naarm. We re-read the text to each other over zoom – excavating the key themes, the subtext, the cultural nuances, the literary devices, the material worlds culminating in a full day of devising.
We reached a kind of crossroads at the end of this seed development with the option to go down one of two paths:
– a faithful adaptation to an excellent work of fiction told through a one woman live performance work with text and movement (after appropriate permissions) OR
– an audio theatre work where the audiences enter a sensorial world and encounter a series of images and objects in an installation space. The audio has adaptations of text, workshopped testimony from the lead artist and DV survivors in the diaspora, sound scores, silence and prompts to action in a formally ambitious installation that blurs the line between subject and object. In essence, we will create an interdisciplinary labyrinth tapping into the consciousness and agency of the audience that forces them out of a certain complicity and radically activates the narrative through affect.
For our Adhocracy outcome, we have chosen to unpack the latter idea. Please work through the material in order:
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