A 30 minute performance piece on sexual abuse with Dean Walsh and Andrew Batt-Rawden.
With an unrelenting and pioneering vision DEAN WALSHhas been at the creative forefront of many significant shifts within the Australian cultural landscape. This has positioned him among Australia’s most accomplished independent performing arts practitioners with a primary focus on dance, choreography and more recently embodied environmental research. Since 2007 he has built a highly respected interdisciplinary and disability-inclusive practice.
His approach to bringing marine environmental technologies (scuba diving and marine science) into his inclusive arts practice, through embodied application, is having profound affects on individuals' in the arts and wider public. He has developed a methodology called PrimeOrderly, so named for its synergistic potential in new collaborative beginnings – research exchange between the performing arts and marine environmental science communities. Utilising this, he directs disability-inclusive performance works, delivers workshops that have focus on human and environmental wellbeing and presents lecture-type demonstrations at arts and environmental science conferences and festivals. He has worked with many leading Australian and international dance companies including: DV8 Physical Theatre, Australian Dance Theatre and Stalker Theatre among others.
Between 1990 and 2006 Dean was focused on dance, choreography and contemporary queer performance. Throughout this period his solo and group works wrestled themes considered taboo within conventional Australian contemporary dance orthodoxy. He carved out his career with over thirty acclaimed works exploring: masculinity and the Aussie ‘ocker’ identity, the cycles of violence from war to trickle-down-effects within domestic realms, chronic familial homophobia and sexual abuse, through to LGBTIQ themes.His works have appeared in festivals in Australia, Japan, UK, Europe and in NYC.
Through his work, Andrew Batt-Rawden revisits layers of self, drawing you in and allowing you to reflect. His expressions connect to audience by showing vulnerabilities and contradictions, whilst eliciting a sense of freedom. He is expressive and full of emotion, and creates the space for others to express themselves as well.
Andrew's work has been mostly centered in contemporary classical composition. He co-founded Chronology Arts in 2007 which lead to him commissioning, performing/conducting over 150 new works by emerging Australian composers, as well as facilitating cross-artform collaborations. He's also curated or directed for Vivid at Seymour, Bellingen Music Festival and Aurora Festival. In 2013 he bought Limelight Magazine to prevent its closure and has been its publisher since.
In 2016, Andrew collaborated with visual artist Wendy Sharpe and the Australian Art Quartet (Sydney), pianist Jocelyn Ho (USA), the acclaimed Plexus trio (Melbourne) for Metropolis Festival, Synergy Percussion (Sydney), pianist Roger Woodward (USA), and Strut Dance (Perth). The collaboration with Wendy resulted in a performance of the creative process between life model and artist while the Australian Art Quartet performed his work "27". Andrew’s "Relentless City" for Plexus used the live heartbeats of the musicians as tempo of the work (3 tempi at once), and live weather data from Sydney determined the electronic soundscape and responsive poetry accompanying the live musicians. "Love Spiral" for Jocelyn Ho used a jacket made of light to emulate Jocelyn's live heart-beat, as well as a visual narrative emulating the emotional journey of the work.
He is now working on performance art projects and music commissions in Australia and overseas with a variety of collaborators in visual arts, dance and technology.
