The sixth edition of Liveworks’ beloved queer performance and party extravaganza Day for Night is set to take audiences on an epic journey through queer space and time.
This year’s anticipated event takes place on Saturday 26 October and brings together a host of phenomenal queer artists, performers, DJs, musicians and lovers. In a collision of club culture, contemporary art and new performance, Australia’s brightest and best queer artists create new works, then reinvent and re-figure them for the glittering unfurling of Sydney’s spectacular day to night party.
“Day for Night offers an expansive view into what queer practice can be. It is a unique offering within the wider arts landscape that provides a platform for diverse voices and practices to be celebrated. This year’s edition presents a range of performances that create alternative forms of community and expand our ideas about what queer spaces can look and sound like. Taking shape as quiet, playful or ritualistic interactions between performers and audience members, some of Australia’s most exciting queer artists generously offer up new visions of community and togetherness, before taking a deep breath and diving into the party by night.” said Jeff Khan, Performance Space’s CEO and Artistic Director.
One of Sydney’s most extraordinary queer dance parties
With a fierce and fabulous line-up of newly commissioned performances, installations, visual art, sound and movement spanning 12 hours, this impressive artist-driven event has wowed festival goers year on year. Kicking off at 12pm with an unfolding program of performance art and building up to one of Sydney’s most extraordinary queer dance parties, audiences are invited on an epic art experience like no other.
“We’re excited to welcome Maori and Pacific perspectives through the work of Jermaine Dean and Th3 Order. The brilliant Melbourne-based musician Nina Buchanan offers a surround-sound electronic wonderland that opens up new spaces for queer music and queer listening beyond the dance floor. GIRL’s performance MASC invites audience members to offer their views on masculinity throughout the day, then mixes these recordings into a storming set at the Day for Night party. Elsewhere, Zaya Barroso brings trans experience to the fore with her extraordinary fusion of movement, performance and live music, and Stereogamous’ new queer sounds and musical treats will take us across the length and breadth of it all.”continued Khan.
Day For Night 2019 highlights include:
Multidisciplinary artist and member of Auckland’s LGBTQI+ Pacific Arts CollectiveFAFSWAG Jermaine Dean invites festival-goers to step inside an immersive live photo shoot and witness his participatory process unfold in real time, as he creates dreamy imagery in a makeshift set. Gain insight into his collaborative photographic process using artists, audiences, props and the party itself, through a fantastical lens of pixellation, distortion and manipulation.
Celebrated club music producer and composer Nina Buchanan creates an immersive sound environment for community gathering with her exquisite new music performance Higher. Created through a Performance Space & Mardi Gras Stephen Cummins Residency earlier this year, this surround-sound composition invites audiences to lie down and surrender to an intuitive, contemplative and deeply grounded experience of queerness, celebrating the power of vulnerability and care. Using arpeggiated synths, ambient textures and melodic composition with the dynamics of quadraphonic sound, Higher is complex and layered. It carves out space for quiet queer existence, resistance, healing, and collective celebration.
Adelaide’s artist collective and electronic music group GIRL present MASConfessional – a performance in two parts. MASConfessional begins with the artists inviting audience members to contribute their thoughts, fears and fantasies about masculinity through a series of recorded conversations. These voiced responses will be collected throughout the day before being whipped and spun into sonic interludes that will be played between songs from their debut album ‘Masc’ in a special live music performance at the party. Expect gimp apparition realness, a human mirror ball, killer heels, killer pins, cutting edge sound-responsive projection, on-stage costume changes, throbbing beats, celebration, sadness and a banshee scream in a pear tree.
Sydney singer-songwriter and artist Zaya Barroso presents Transit; a range of dramatic, supernatural and cathartic performance vignettes. Zaya’s looped musical compositions and autobiographical performance accompany her epic vocals, inviting the audience in to an intimate portrayal of Zaya’s experiences of resilience against trans haters, and those who exploit power. Transit celebrates life as it is whilst creating and staging art in the moment, within the everyday.
Jermaine Dean, Julian Chote and Jaimie Waititi’s Th3 Order—traveling from Aotearoa-New Zealand to present in Australia for the first time—bring us The Lion, The Lady pouring Water and The Lady with Wheat looking West, an unfolding series of performance episodes. Th3 Order is a gathering of three individuals resonating on the edges and in-betweens of spaces; never converging to unite as one but uniting in differences. Bringing Maori and Pacific perspectives into the queer cosmology, Th3 Order is a trio of collected mess resulting in a chaos of personality, colour and body.
Sydney-based poet and performance artist Samia Sayed offers a durational performance inviting Day for Night’s audience to engage with an offering of tea and food, accompanied with poetry and story-telling.
Soft Core Bondage Faeries—an artist collective including Harrison Pickering, Vishmi Helarante and Miranda Macpherson—seeks to create disruption and recombination, enveloping Day for Night audiences in a cumulative web of, well, soft-core bondage. Through this playful and social performance, the artists flirt with unspoken social dynamics that play out in public gathering spaces. Through soft-core bondage and breakage, a chorus of connective-plasma-faeries and gift giving creates new social scenarios by physically tying people together, or initiating shared activities of platonic intimacy.
Iconic Sydney legends Stereogamous once again bring the music and epic party for the duration of Day For Night. The musical equivalent of Mardis Gras that runs all year, Paul Mac and Jonny Seymour create maximum dance floor joy. Working with and around artists to turn out sonic scores by day and colourful tracks by night, our favourite music duo guarantee the ultimate Day For Night experience.
