Rituals of Memory at Tonsley

 

This week, Flinders University extends an invitation to staff, students, and alumni to attend a double showing of Garry Stewart’s latest work-in-development, Rituals of Memory.

The piece marks the initial stage of a new performance that features five dancers, robot machines and designed objects.

Through this work, Stewart aims to address concerns about the future of our planet by presenting a world in which technology, nature, and humans are enmeshed in each other. In Rituals of Memory there is an enfolding of bodies, machines and other design elements within representations of nature, exemplifying the porosity between these agents.

The central idea conveyed in this work is that while we are instilled with technologies, it is perhaps only through technology that we can find our way out of our current environmental predicament.

Over the past two decades, Garry Stewart’s work has been informed by multiple areas of thought including biology, physics, architecture, phenomenology, selfhood and identity, and ecology.

Rituals of Memory furthers Stewart’s creative research into nature and technology after introducing works using robotics, 3D graphics, interactive video technology, virtual reality and other digital media.

His work Devolution (2006) for Australian Dance Theatre was an outstanding, large scale foray into dance and robotic machinery. More recently in his short film Ghosts in the Machines, he worked with dance in confluence with robotics, created with the assistance of the Australian Industrial Transformation Institute (AITI) and the Tonsley Innovation District in 2021/22. For this new work, he will continue this relationship with AITI.

Charles Renfro and his team from the New York-based architecture firm Diller, Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) have been engaged as design consultants, working with Stewart and designer Jonathon Oxlade on concepts that will inform the next phase of the work.

Event details

Date: Wednesday, 8 March and Thursday, 9 March 2023
Time: 8:30pm on both nights
Where: Main Assembly Building, Tonsley Innovation District, 6 MAB Eastern Prom, Tonsley SA 5042

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