Thursday 21 - Sunday 24 May 2009

Back to Back Theatre, Melbourne, presents Small Metal Objects and collaborates with Bristol's Art and Power

"A unique and remarkable group of performers and designers" The Age

"One of the most startling and seductive shows of the year" Beat/Arts

An ingenious theatrical gem, Small Metal Objects unfolds amid the pedestrian traffic against the backdrop of the city. On a raised seating bank with individual sets of headphones, the audience is wired in to an intensely personal drama being played out somewhere in the crowd.

Gary and Steve are the kind of men who normally escape notice. But here they play an inadvertent but pivotal role in the night of two ambitious executives they've arranged to meet for a transaction. As the intimacy of their situation develops, small metal objects becomes a sly and luminous depiction of everyday issues most take for granted.

Here, the company explores how respect is withheld from outsiders - the disabled or unemployed - who society deems 'unproductive'. Set against the shifting backdrop of the city, the notion that everything has its price couldn't be called into starker relief.

'The real-life setting emphasises the play's message, its making visible (through the technical wizardry of radio microphones) the precious worth of the most insignificant members of a city crowd' The Age

Small Metal Objects is an Inbetween Time project for Bristol Old Vic and Arnolfini bringing Bristol together ith the world's most unusual artists and their ideas.

Supported by the Australian Government, Australian Council for the Arts, Arts Victoria and the Victorian Government.

During their time in the UK, Back to Back also worked with Bristol-based Art + Power in workshops around performance. 

April to December 2010

 During April and May 2010, Arnolfini will continue their Antibodies research project working with a group of Deaf teenagers from Elmfield school in Bristol to explore access for the Deaf community. The approach will take the form of an intensive work experience programme, exploring Arnolfini as an arts organisation and exposure to inspirational Deaf arts professionals, David Ellington & James Banks and hearing artist Nisha Duggal whose work investigates gesture and non verbal communication.

The project will result in an artist’s commission that will be shown during Arnolfini’s ‘In Between Time Festival’ in December - January 2010.

This work is part of the Arnolfini series of projects throughout 2010 related to the idea of lingua franca: looking at intermediary language, linguistic translation and the construction of new languages.

Nisha Duggal  Didn’t We Do Well.

Anti-Bodies Live Art Weekender as part of Inbetween Time Festival of Live Art and Intrigue 2010

Arnolfini, Bristol

Anti-Bodies Live Art Weekender is conceived as part of a major international, interdisciplinary show of national co-productions and site-specific premieres within Arnolfini's Inbetween Time Festival of Live Art and Intrigue 2010.

What Next for the body? explores how we experience our bodies and what happens at the point where 'I' ends and something else begins. It will delve into the composition and decomposition of the body. The works presented question one's sense of ownership over one's body. At what point does our matter cease to be ourselves? Is a body a thing that we have, or a thing that we are? Perhaps one can only look at oneself clearly through that which has ceased to be a part of oneself. The body's coherent unity fragments as bits fall off, or out, ceasing to be part of ourselves. We leave imprints, testifying to bodies no longer there. Our senses take us beyond our bodies extending ourselves into the world around.