‘Audio Logical’ is an interdisciplinary improvisation practice that brings together dancer Olivia Millard and theatre-maker Kate Hunter.
Drawing on their separate and interwoven practices, Kate and Olivia respond, react, move, and travel together through the crossovers and meeting points in the genealogies of their combined fifty-year performance history. This immersive practice examines questions of sustainability and convergence. What does it mean to build a body of work - and a body?
‘Audio Logical’ engages with the imperative of the present while contemplating past experiences and embodied histories, which, as suggested by John Cage, is expressed in each person, act, interaction as an “interest in continuity whether in terms of discourse or organization" (1973, p.75). Built from weekly improvisation sessions grounded in a travelling score, ‘Audio Logical’ uses recordings of the artists’ bodies in motion – breathy gasps, arthritic knees, crackly elbows – to create a personal, comic and moving performance of gathered and shared embodied histories to arrive together, momentarily, in the present.
‘A DARKLY PLEASURABLE DELIGHT … OFTEN HILARIOUS, ALWAYS SHEERLY ENJOYABLE’
ALISON CROGGON, WITNESS PERFORMANCE
'A BRILLIANTLY CONSTRUCTED AND EFFORTLESSLY PERFORMED EXPLORATION OF THE BLURRED LINES BETWEEN PRIVATE DETAILS AND PUBLICLY AVAILABLE INFORMATION IN THE MODERN AGE'
5 ★ ★ ★ ★ ★, THEATRE PEOPLE
Part live performance, part undercover surveillance operation, 'Earshot' is driven by Kate Hunter's lifetime obsession of eavesdropping on the private conversations of complete strangers.
At once a symphony of the authentic voice and a celebration of the Australian vernacular, poetic, musical, horrific and hilarious, 'Earshot' asks us to draw a line in the sand of the public domain. Where is that line? The park? The cafe? The street? Your back garden? Who should be permitted to listen?
‘Earshot’ was acclaimed in The Saturday Paper’s list of top stage performances for 2019.
'FUNNY, HIDEOUS AND THOUGHT-PROVOKING ... HUNTER'S TEXT IS A REVELATION'
4 ★ ★ ★ ★, THE AGE
Concept, creation, performance: Kate Hunter
Performance, composition: Josephine Lange
Electroacoustic design: Jem Savage
Dramaturgy: Glynis Angell
Lighting design: Gina Gascoigne
Producer: Kath Papas
Presented at -
fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne, Australia, December 2017
The Performance Space, Due West Festival, Melbourne, Australia, December 2019
This project has been supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. Creative development was supported by the Besen Family Foundation, Theatre Works and the City of Yarra.
Photos by Leo Dale.
'HUNTER'S WORDS HAVE THAT TRAINED LIVENESS TO ALLOW EACH RECOLLECTION A MOMENT'S RETURN'
Real Time
'KATE HUNTER CONJURES STRIKING IMAGES ... THE FINAL IMAGE IS HAUNTING'
The Age
'HUNTER'S PERFORMANCE IS OUTSTANDING ... A COMPELLING SELF-EXAMINATION OF ONE'S OWN MIND AND MEMORY'
Toorak Times
Memorandum is a hybrid theatre performance: part memoir, part poem, part kaddish. Using a radical audio structure in which live and pre-recorded narratives simultaneously intersect, converge and diverge, Memorandum examines the ways our memories deform and become misshapen over time, how truths and fictions unknowingly intertwine.
Solo performer Kate Hunter creates an intimate, immersive and disturbing piece, driven by a compelling soundscape and a striking visual design, in which one woman lays bare the gothic, peculiar, and slightly neurotic world of remembering and forgetting.
Concept, creation, performance: Kate Hunter
Lighting design: Richard Vabre
Presented at Theatre Works Selected Works season, Melbourne, Australia, 2014; and the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, Sydney, Australia, 2015
This project was supported by Besen Family Foundation and the City of Maribyrnong.
Photos by Leo Dale.
'The Procrastination Project' is a hybrid performance/installation/durational event in which two women caught in a bizarre holding pattern, and hamstrung by incessant and repeated physical rituals, are poised on the threshold of action or inaction - of going or staying, speaking or being silent, acting or not acting.
‘The Procrastination Project’ is a rich, playful and profound investigation into what it is to be stuck, and the role that habit plays in keeping us swamped in inertia. Inspired by the metaphysical landscape of Hamlet’s indecision as he grapples with his desire for revenge, this new collaboration interrogates some of the complex manifestations of procrastination in contemporary life.
The Procrastination Project draws on a vast array of interconnected source material, including cognitive neuroscience, to-do lists, personal stories of dead fathers, physical repetitions and rituals, and digital and analogue sounds, urban field recordings, vocal tics, and metronomes.
Concept, design, performance:
Kate Hunter and Deborah Leiser-Moore
Presented by Tashmadada at La Mama Theatre Explorations Season 2015 and Performance Studies International, University of Melbourne, 2016
'THE WAITING ROOM IS CUTTING EDGE EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE ...
WHAT MAKES THIS PIECE RADICALLY BEAUTIFUL IS THAT IT INTERROGATES AND EMBODIES THE RANDOM PROCESSES INTRINSIC TO HUMAN BEHAVIOUR.'
4 STARS, CAMERON WOODHEAD, THE AGE
*WINNER*: BRISBANE POWERHOUSE AWARD AT MELBOURNE FRINGE 2012
Collective human behaviour under the microscope, from the comical to the disturbingly surreal.
Melbourne's most experienced performers and improvisers, Born in a Taxi bring you a unique, unrepeatable live art experience in which the audience are co-creators.
Devised and performed by: Penny Baron, Debra Batton, Andrew Gray, Carolyn Hanna, Kate Hunter, Nick Papas, Tamara Saulwick
Directed by: Penny Baron
Presented at Dancing Dog Theatre Melbourne 2011, Brisbane Powerhouse World Theatre Festival 2012, The Substation for Big West Festival 2013
Photos by Leo Dale
'It's about us and it's about everyone. But really, it's about us. And everyone.'
We're born, we live, we die. In between there's a lot of talk about love and other similar things. Kate and Emilie have been in conversation for a long time. In this strange and funny work, stories are re-written, re-told and re-collected. It's an intimate look at friendship, the things we do together and the ways in which we're always alone.
Concept, performance, sound design: Kate Hunter and Emilie Collyer
Sound consultant: Ben Grant
Dramaturg: Glynis Angell
Lighting design: Katie Svetkidis
Presented at Big West Festival, 2011, with the assistance of the City of Maribyrnong and the Besen Family Foundation.
Kate was a founding member of bouffon/LeCoq-inspired theatre Company 13, directed by James Pratt. Company 13 features a rich and varied list of past and existing members, all highly skilled in improvisation and physical theatre, including Glynis Angell, Penny Baron, Kristian Bagin, Clare Bartholomew, Vanessa Chapple, Joanna Davidson, John Forman, Andrew Gray, Aurora Kurth, Josephine Lange, Fiona Roake, Tamara Saulwick and Richard Vette.
Company 13 devised a number of works that interweaved the actors' personal stories with bouffon characters and live music, including 'Spit' (2007) and 'D.E.A.D' (2008) at La Mama theatre, and 'Grimm' (2009) at Arts Centre Melbourne.
