2024 | BackStage Music's 2024 Season featured a diverse array of performances that celebrated innovation, inclusivity, and cultural richness. "Human's Got Talent", curated by Solomon Frank, explored the intersections of queerness, pop culture, commercialization, and music. "IMPOSTO" took audiences on a sonorous journey delving into the sympathetic generation of historical and cultural song lines. "TRACE", curated by Ria Andriani, was an immersive, multi-sensory performance reflecting on diverse ways of making and experiencing music from the perspectives of people with disabilities. "Hand Unmade", curated by Damian Barbeler, was a genre-defying 'multi-art essay' combining musical performance with movement, storytelling, cooking, striking imagery, and more. It celebrated the human hand as a mechanism for creativity, featuring guests from various backgrounds sharing their unique expressions of art. "Cool Becoming Warm", presented by Big Noters NSW First Nations Musicians, celebrated the Dharawal season of Ngoonungi. "Stories of Water and Earth", a collaboration between Darwin-based Arafura Music Collective and Sydney's Ensemble Offspring, combined interactive storytelling with traditional songs alongside new compositions. It featured special guests Nardi Simpson and Melanie Mununggurr, weaving together diverse cultural narratives and musical expressions.
Past Events
Image description for Human’s Got Talent : Clarinet player, focus on jewelled fingers on keys.
Event 1: 7.30pm, Saturday 9 March 2024, Woodburn Creatives Redfern
Solomon Frank curates a music and performance program exploring uncanny convergences of queerness, pop culture, commercialisation and music. Including Solomon's major work, Human's Got Talent (naughty girlies unite XD), a new commission by local composer, Liz Yung Cheung and performance by Shahmen Suku. The program is simultaneously silly and sacred. Laugh, cry, dance, pound your fists against the wall, we don't care, we just want you there to witness this eclectic mix of art music and queer performance.
Image description for IMPOSTO : Curved sandstone rock with violin overlay.
Event 2: 7.30pm, Friday 14 June 2024, Woodburn Creatives Redfern
Take a wild and sonorous journey delving into the sympathetic generation of historical and cultural song lines. IMPOSTO explores the vaporous phenomena of the intangible, ever shifting, reverberant vibrations that surround us. Giant jellyfish globe, alien aurora veil and articulated albatross traverse tidal waves of lyricism in a wondrously provocative program of existing contemporary and especially curated works. Jane Sheldon and Anna Fraser (voice), Satsuki Odamura (koto), and Laura Vaughan (viola da gamba and baryton) will take you on turbulent and effervescent wanderings - exciting discoveries into new and evocative sonic atmospheres.
Image description for Trace : Finger tips reading braille manuscript.
Event 3: 7.30pm, Saturday 13 July 2024, 107 Projects Redfern
Trace is an immersive, multi-sensory performance that reflects on the different ways of making and experiencing music from the perspectives of people with disabilities. Through touch, listening and reflections we trace new meanings and connections from the sounds around us. Curated by Ria Andriani and featuring music written by and for people with disability the program includes composers and performers, Georgia Scott, Jennifer Hankin, Tessa Gutierrez, Lamorna Nightingale and a very special performance from the Monday Club led by Tony Gorman.
Image description for Hand Made : Hand on violin bow. Eyes drawn on hand with violin hold creating a concentrated facial expression.
Event 4: 7.30pm, Friday 30 August 2024, Woodburn Creatives Redfern
The human hand makes artists of us all. It's the mechanism for the soul. Pianist or welder, cook or painter, hands hold our beauty, our suffering and our creativity. Curated by Damian Barbeler, this genre-defying ‘multi-art essay’ combines musical performance with movement, stories, cooking, images, sound and more, in a meeting of hands (and other limbs) of guests from all sorts of backgrounds.
Image description for Big Noters, Cool Becoming Warm : Flying fruit bats imposed on Waratah flowers.
Event 5: 7.30pm, Wednesday 18 September 2024, Woodburn Creatives Redfern
Cool Becoming Warm is the characteristic of the Dharawal season Ngoonungi. During Ngoonungi the Dharawal people of coastal Sydney begin preparations for ceremony. The blooming of the red Waratah heralds this important time. So too does the coming of the flying foxes. During Ngoonungi colonies of bats fill the Dharawal sky, flying from the north and west to their feeding grounds in the south. Big Noters NSW First Nations Musicians will celebrate Ngoonungi with a night of ceremony: a gathering of soaring music, storytelling and cultural knowledges designed to herald the coming of bats and the opening of Waratahs. Join Big Noters for Cool Becoming Warm, a celebration of the Dharawal season of Ngoonungi.
Image description for Stories of Water and Earth: Melanie Mununggurr singing hands in the air and composer Netanela Mizrahi.
Event 6: 7.30pm, Thursday 5 December 2024, Woodburn Creatives Redfern
North meets south and freshwater meets saltwater when Darwin based Arafura Music Collective and Sydney’s much loved musical mavericks Ensemble Offspring join forces on the back of their recent Darwin Festival debut with Stories of Water and Earth. The collaboration features special guests Yuwaalaraay woman Nardi Simpson and Djapa woman Melanie Mununggurr, in a weaving of cultures, instrumental chamber music, beat poetry and dreaming stories.
Stories of Water and Earth combines an interactive performance composed by and featuring Nardi Simpson, evoking dreaming stories, traditional songs, sharing the practises of Yuwaalaraay women’s creative and cultural practice, with a new long form commission from Netanela Mizrahi and Melanie Mununggur delving into Melanie's Yolngu identity, the triumphs and struggles of motherhood, neurodiversity and connections to land and culture.
Image description for Limitless : Female image walking into the unknown cloud like land.
Event 6: 7.30pm, Saturday 14 Decemeber, The Lock Up, Newcastle
Limitless is an electro acoustic exploration of The Lock Up in Newcastle by Newcastle creatives Ekstasis Ensemble. The Lock Up having once confined individuals in cells, the walls still echo with their anger and despair. Drawing inspiration from texts written by those who have lived in confinement, this collaboration between electronic artists and instrumentalists will explore not only the limits of these walls but the limitations created by beliefs and definitions within our own internal worlds.
“Barely two years old, Backstage Music is one of the most exciting recent developments in Sydney’s musical life, and judging by the audience (a veritable who’s who of Sydney’s new music scene) there’s definitely an appetite for this kind of event – especially with a headliner the calibre of Claire Chase.” - Angus McPherson, Limelight Magazine
“BackStage Music on Friday night was exactly what my brother and I needed. The week had been fairly crazy and we needed to mentally close the door, allowing the weekend door to open... The friendly and social crowd arrived. You could feel the excited energy for what they were about to experience. It was a full house. It was great to see. It was also great to see people looking around the space they were in, a new venue for living music, Woodburn Creatives.” -Kate Tribe, ClassikON
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