Speakeasy #1 Critical Animals

Critical animals at This is not art festival newcastle, nsw
3–5 October, 2014

Hosted at the Williams, Newcastle, a curated conversation and participatory performance with discussions around art, possible futures, wellness and sustainability. Centred around the sharing of food and the intimacy of the social space, led by sociocreative trust, participants consider “Possible Futures”.

This project was made possible through the generous support of our friends via Indigogo and Creative Partnerships Australia.

Paperdolls

D11 Docklands, MelbournE, VIC
12–26 April, 2014

A group show expanding on the theme of 'paper dolls' and leading from nostalgia | memory | dreams | the making of stories into a public space from places of secrets and whimsy.

Curated by Melissa DeLaney featuring the work of Susie Anderson, Jessica Knight, Jeremy Pryles, Lilly Rhiengold, Zoe Steers, Yasmin Keeney, Beck Pope, Gemma Robertson, Laura Smith, Relational Cosmetics and performances by hum noir by Hum Hum Hurrumph, Callum & the Big Order, Jessica Knight and Velcro. 

[images by Alan Weedon]

Speakeasy #2 Festival of Live Art,

AT footscray community arts centre, melbourne, victoria
2016

A future making and breaking, curated conversation, feast and participatory performance centred around gentrification, futures, wellness and sustainability. Along with food supporters Feast of Merit, Speakeasy welcomes everyone to the table via beautiful sharing of usually discarded, ugly food and the intimacy of the social space, led by sociocreative trust, participants consider “Possible Futures”.

Reflections – Speak Easy at FOLA by Melissa DeLaney

In March, 2016 as part of the Festival of Live Art (FOLA) sociocreative trust presented Speakeasy, a participatory art performance. 

We trialed our first Speakeasy in 2014 as part of Critical Animals (creative research symposium) at the This Is Not Art Festival (TINA) in Newcastle, NSW and wanted to rework the project. With fine tuning we were part of FOLA (Festival of Live Art) in Melbourne supported by the Footscray Community Arts Centre, an alliance with partners we considered to share some of our own investigations and philosophies. 

Speakeasy is so much more than ‘a dinner’. It is an experiment.

We invite the audience to leave their expectations and to enter the performance space with an open mind and a willingness to contribute. The food is such an important part of Speakeasy, and in this iteration we were excited to work with the support from Feast of Merit and YGAP who provided the food for the event (and Cake wines and Two Birds brewery) for the drinks. Seating people together at a table with shared food and drinks is an integral part of the concept of Speakeasy. To create moments of intimacy and comfort and connection around food, the breaking of bread. We are also influenced and inspired by the slow movement across all areas of social and cultural impact. Slow food, slow relationship building – having the privilege and space to make our own rhythms. Feast of Merit designed a vegetarian menu also incorporating ‘ugly food’, supporting Melbourne’s ugly food movement. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jul/27/farmers-pick-fruit-subscription-boxes-imperfect

Being a performance piece and within a live art context, we wanted to push the audience out of their comfort zones for them to connect with each other beyond who they are in their daily routines, ie. their jobs. Through the actions and interventions we directed the audience to connect as we were more interested in their ideas and contributions around the provocations. 

We had a set of questions prepared around broad themes of futures, gentrification, place and environments. These themes held a lot of significance for the people who came along, and for us to host the work in Footscray stemming from many conversations between us as the artists and Footscray Community Arts Centre and friends and others – teasing out narratives and peoples’ first hand experiences locally around these themes. We were highly sensitive to the diversity and complex nature of Footscray’s communities and how the area is ever-evolving and wanted to explore the impact of this more closely. 

It’s important also during any Speakeasy that participants come prepared to engage and to break away from their normal social selves. As the MC, I was leading the conversations via curated provocations we’d prepared earlier. This was timed and formed the structure of the performance. I had a bell and from observations if people were getting too comfortable we changed direction by introducing a new provocation, or the sociocreative trust artists who were working the floor would select people to be interviewed and then return them to a different seat at the table. Participants were also invited to write their own questions for discussion. 

The whole while food and drinks flowed to bring a certain level of bonhomie to the process. 

Generally people were gracious and open to our direction. It’s confronting to be taken out of your comfort zone but within a Live Art performance, we create the environment and open it up to the outcomes quite intuitively. We’d created an environment with each detail considered. It was important for us to maintain our ethical and philosophical ground. There were projections and sound/music and we set up a social media activation space where other audiences enacted with Speakeasy through live social media activation and an analogue wall. They were later invited to ‘take a place at the table’ an action we used as a statement about ‘there is room for everyone at the table’. 

This performance was different to the first one at TINA and each time we do something like Speakeasy, although the framework remains, it would be completely different depending upon the setting, the food, the people and the provocations.

To some people the performance could reek of privilege in an ironic way feeding back into itself, but we question this and each of our own points of entry into the dialogue. Supporting local makers and each of us coming from marginal areas and understanding our place within this with respectf and with acknowledgement. Also from that idea that anyone should have a voice.

Like corporate think tanks, overall we aim to bring people together (individuals rather than groups) and to listen to thoughts and ideas on futures. Ideas are valuable and sociocreative trust provide a platform for them to be heard. The next challenge is for us to document this process with more impact for wider audiences to hear about what we think and how that can influence further conversations and actions.

Each project is bespoke, and contains a unique approach and really has to be experienced to be understood.

In future projects the recording, broadcasting and documentation of the performance will add value. My dream is to do other Speak Easy’s around the world, in the corporate environment bringing together disparate groups and create more networks of partners and friends.

We invite different ways of looking at the same situations. We are also influenced by so many other artists before us who step outside a traditional gallery format and use energy and space into plasticity and it becomes form. A sculptural process of making something from nothing.