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Splinters - Winter of the Rutting Moon
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In Tristia Hilaris In Hilaritate Tristis poster
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Program for the season Thirst... is a Place, Water to Burn Digitised copy of printed booklet
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Clock Sculpture by Stuart Vaskess used as a prop in Splinters productions
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Cannon Sculpture by Stuart Vaskess used as a prop in Splinters productions
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Trike #1 (with eagle) Sculpture by Stuart Vaskess used as a prop in Splinters productions
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Splinters Exhibition panorama Panorama of the exhibition Splinters Theatre: Massive Love of Risk installed in Gallery 5, Canberra Museum and Gallery.
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A look at: Massive Love of Risk, The Art of Splinters Review of the exhibition
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‘Massive love of risk’ – looking back at Splinters Review of the exhibition by Helen Musa
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Stuart Vaskess Gumboot Full of Blood notebook Production notebook
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Pauline Cady In Tristitia Notebook Seldom did a Splinters production begin with a complete script. For the most part shows were devised collaboratively, often with artists bringing finished work to be inserted into a greater whole, which was bound together by an overarching “journey” narrative. In the earliest days, Splinters toured extensively as a small collective with anarchistic intent, to Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne. Shows were written and rewritten on the road in this hothouse environment and were very deliberately intended to provoke: one reviewer describing 1988’s Gumboot Full of Blood as “Too shocking… too extreme, too violent.”
Within this maelstrom, however, was much sublime and beautiful. The core early members of Splinters knew well the power they were playing with and created a profound collective aesthetic. These notebooks from the early days (1986-92) contain drawings and writings that are works of art in their own right as well as documents of that remarkable era. The pages are being digitised and will in time be made available online, where they can receive their due as some of the most important manuscripts in the arc of Australian experimental theatre.
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Blood Dress The Blood Dress was worn by key early Splinters member Pauline Cady for her mesmerising soliloquy in the production Winter of the Rutting Moon (The Performance Space, Sydney 1991, variously titled Whirled on a Fatal Floor and Roading Home to Aunty – Splinters productions were regularly reworked and retitled for different locations). The speech draws from the image of the Siren in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but was inverted to become a powerful feminist examination of the desiring body. As Pauline spoke, the dress flowed out across the floor like a pool of blood.
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Snuff Puppets These giant puppets made by Andy Freer first made their appearance at the Splinters performance Mutter Courage for the 1990 National Playwrights Conference, at the Union Forecourt of the Australian National University. Basing their production on a loose reading of Bertolt Brecht’s classic, in trademark Splinters style, the group parodied the conventions of realist theatre and the expectations of Australian middle class theatre-going audiences by contrasting these concerns with the fearsome intensity of pre-war Europe. The huge, menacing puppets with human operators within were at once figures of ridicule as well as symbols for archetypal aspects of humanity, putting the audience off guard before dragging them into a chaotic, fiery bacchanal, which became a Splinters trademark.
These original puppets went on the play a major part in Splinters shows in 1991 and 1992, before Freer and fellow puppeteers Pauline Cady and Simon Terrill decided to pursue their ambitions as an independent company in Melbourne. Snuff Puppets has gone on to be one of the most successful companies that derived from the Splinters milieu, winning multiple awards and touring regularly around Australia and internationally.
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Guardians of the Concourse
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Splinters - Gumboot Full of Blood - Leaving Empires Behind
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Splinters - The Massive Love Of Risk - Newspaper Poster
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Splinters - Utopia Distopia - Square Poster
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Splinters - Appearing Now Near You - In Your Own Language A4 Poster for Winter of the Rutting Moon
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Splinters - A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Graveyard
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Splinters - Thirst... is a place Water to Burn - Poster
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Splinters - Fuck Jesus Coke (colour) Fuck Jesus Coke
(colour)
Poster 1988
730 x 510
Acrylic paint on paper
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Splinters - Oracle Journey Of The Avatar - Original
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Machine War Artist statement:
This documentation was redirected into a video work as an abstract element from a larger set of performances. The video becomes emblematic, in a form of catharsis that builds through the show’s journey, culminating in a grand finale of participants.
The editing references the twin influences of contemporary, international spectacle performance art and traditional Indonesian folk trance performances. The radical Spanish collective, La Fura Dels Baus, incorporated an awareness of European practices in their show Suz/O/Suz, Sydney, 1989, that would later go on to influence the group’s work for the opening of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Similar influences are seen in work of Dutch collective, Dog Troep, with their outdoor spectacle show on Potsadammer Platz, Berlin, 1990. This shared influence displays a performance style which moves beyond the confines of the traditional proscenium arch and engages directly with the audience, influencing the beginnings of relational aesthetics in the arts.
The video piece is edited to a music track combining ambient sounds from the main performance at the Old Adelaide Gaol during the 1992 Adelaide Fringe Festival, a live improvised drumming ensemble piece from a performance at the Canberra School of Art and a soundtrack of Turkish folk jazz by Okay Temiz. As promotional material, Machine War became a signature of the Splinters large scale shows, despite its reference to the outdoors spectacles, the video as a teaser suggested an unpredictable and evolving energy that was manifested through the group’s incorporation of creative contributions from practitioners of visual, performance and installation art.
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Gumboot Full of Blood
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Fuck Jesus Coke Item