Artistic Team
Dara Gill, Travis Hodgson, Luke Holmes, Sime Kenezevic, Frank Mainoo, Georgie Meagher, Natalie Randall, Malcolm Whittaker
 
Artistic Policy
Team MESS is an outfit of artists who revel in post-industrial excesses and everyday life. We are dedicated to the making of new and experiential Australian theatre/performance work. Our work is in a constant state of process, product and reception as the three should not be mutually exclusive vacuums. We struggle and toy with histories, conventions and crafts and play with the mess that spills out to make live work that is personal, playful, abject, abstract, grandiose, fun, fancy, shit and shimmering. Our work is fused with a sense of wonder for all things past and present, ritual and routine. We like to start with a series of open questions and explore there possibilities with our bodies, words, images, found  objects, designs, drugs, architecture, music and new (and old) media. We are a collaborative collective, critical and self-reflexive, allowing the array of individual desires to flourish and shape the work. We like to see how it all interacts and talks with our audience. We disagree with lying, cheating and stealing but do agree with trespassing, plagerising and borrowing (often without returning). We don't mind falling off balance between the seriousness and silliness of the performance situation. We always leave a mess behind.

Review Extracts
Killing Don
"...brimming with strong imagery, playful audience/performer relationships and spatial possibilities.  Whilst formally nostalgic in its own way, it was laced with an irony that suggested a criticality needed for creating this work."
Fiona Winning, former Artistic Director of Performance Space

"The conceptual considerations of Killing Don are sophisticated and engaging. In an age of cultural amnesia what is the place of memory?"
Deborah Pollard, independent artist

"The work is surprisingly joyous, witty and ironic considering the material focuses on the sites and rippling effects of contemporary cultural trauma."
Chris Ryan, independent artist

Current Work
Killing Don: Evolution of a Memory
Killing Don is somewhere between a celebration and lamentation of memory. Memory as fact and fiction. Its legacy and the feelings it conjures. How it torments and pleases our imaginations. How it informs who we are. And then we forget, intentionally or not. Through a collection of intimate performative encounters Team MESS endeavors to explore personal crises in remembering moments (sometimes even if they weren’t there). It’s New Wave drama under the pressure cooker. It’s a party. Killing Don is the first major work from Team MESS. It was presented at Performance Space, CarriageWorks in February, 2009.

60 - 70mins. 4 - 6 on road and stage.

All areas of the works presentation are 'hosted' from within the show. Performing, ushering, operating etc. Whilst not being site-specific Killing Don does take in the specifics of its site and is designed with spatial possibilities in mind: theatre space, studio, gallery, warehouse or living room.

Future Work
Our next project is pursuing durational site specific performance, exploring the liminality between performative aesthetics and domestic environments. We ask how many witnesses make a private scene public? What happens to performance when you don’t want people to watch you? Through a process of distillation and abstraction of cultural experience and personal histories, we wish to deconstruct the anatomy of the familiar, engaging with the strange and surreal within ritualistic behaviours and relationships and the routine of our culture and history.Current preoccupations centre around the use and cultivation of a garden and the occupation of a house. The liminality of the garden, a poetic meeting of private and public space, is unique. Within the space of the garden lies a exciting potential in exploring the significance of being inside (or outside) four walls. The domestic environment is a place of safety and protection. Within four walls, inside, in private space, who is protected from whom? What do we keep in, and what out? What lies in the space between inside and out? Within the space of theatrical performance a silent contract is made between audience and performer. When the performance, and therefore the audience, is re-situated in a domestic environment a tension arises within the relationship between the performers, as inhabitants, and the audience, as outsiders. We will investigate the ubiquitous phobia of the other. Every other.
Engaged in the voyeuristic situation of performance, strangers are invited to share in a unique intimacy, leaving performers and audiences vulnerable and holding a particular power over each others situation and performative experience.

Wrap Around
Keen on artists talks, forums, symposiums, panels and lectures, breaking down the vacuums. Also open studios and workshops, it's where/how the magic happens.
 
Work available for performance, presentation, exhibition or touring
Killing Don: Evolution of a Memory.