THE PROJECT

In Autumn 2019 EPA used a 3-week Testing Grounds residency to explore ecologies of the city, develop skills and share our work. Individual members of EPA used the site and the surrounding streets and parkland of Southbank and the CBD to question their own practice and document their process and discoveries:
What are my interests and strategies for site-based ecological performance?
Can I find new ways?
What are new ways to involve audiences?
What might we learn by sharing our processes with members of the public?
We invited the public to share in close-range sensory observation of features of Melbourne CBD spaces, to join walking activities, to create their own performance responses to sites that drew their attention.
Our investigations included a late night visit to CBD locations where, only over time, if at all, was it apparent that what was proceeding was performance or research. 
At the end of the residency we made a public exhibition of our work and documentation accompanied by impromptu performances around the Testing Grounds site, and ran a free public forum discussing ecological, site-based performance.
Photos by Gretel Taylor and Bronwen Kamasz

NIGHT VISIT - Melbourne CBD

Photos by Laki Sideris

OUTCOMES

Walk, Wait, Lean, Ride - how to find rest and ease in a busy metropolis. 
"We acknowledge that we live, work and create on the lands and waters of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people. We recognise that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people are the Traditional Custodians of the lands and their continuing connection to the land and waters surrounding us. We pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
 We acknowledge that generations of First Nations people have danced, performed and told story here for over sixty thousand years and these rich customs and traditions continue in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island culture today."