Charlotte Haywood: Same time/Same place (COEXISTENCE)

Next date: Saturday, 21 December 2024 | 09:00 PM to Sunday, 02 February 2025 | 04:00 PM

2024 Open Cut Commission
Sponsored by Broken Hill City Art Gallery

Charlotte Haywood

Same time/Same place (COEXISTENCE);a MULTISPECIES (KARAOKE) OPERA?

Same time/Same place playfully explores the idea of a multispecies ephemeral opera set on Wilkalyia and Barkandji Country in the arid zone of far west NSW; a resilient and adaptive ecology that experiences dramatic changes from dormancy to abundance. Triggered by the phenomenon of rain, the seemingly sparse landscape can burst into life with shimmering crescendos of colour and movement - of wildflowers and flocking birds. Creeks spontaneously flow, synchronising frogs to wake from æstivation (dormancy). In this multispecies chorus, duets and intertwining arias emerge, signifying the cycles and interconnection of life.

Looking to unravel and expand the definition of opera as a multisensory provocation, Same time/Same place is part ecological doco, part sonic tapestry, part visual symphony, part experimental community flash mob; made up of many parts, reading the landscape like a musical score, and invoked through democratic means of workshops, participation, sampling, making, shape notes…. karaoke?!

Delving into multispecies song and Broken Hill’s aesthetics and choreography; its history as the cradle of the Australian union movement, collective behaviour, the social cohesion created by zebra finches’ song, swarm intelligence, and further the way living beings respond to and navigate each other and their environments.

Like a spontaneous dance where no one knows the steps, but everyone moves in harmony.

The project has been developed through a series of observations, recordings, sensory collaborations, workshops, and sometimes brief - on-going - and long distance relationships between interdisciplinary artist/everyway weaver Charlotte Haywood and composer/multi-instrumentalist Sue Simpson and the multispecies participants, communities, ecologies, voices and expanse of Wilkalyia and Barkandji Country, Broken Hill, Fowlers Gap Research station, Silverton, Imperial Lakes, zebra finches, willie wagtails, butcher birds, magpies, crows, wedgetail eagles, billy goats, kangaroos, water holding frogs, Peron’s laughing tree frog, saltbush, blue bush, velvet potato bush, mulga, river red gum, dead finish, the chorus of grasses, AACES Group, arts/COOL, Aimee Volkofsky, CW Stoneking, Leroy Johnson, Claudia Vidal Aguilar, Edward Horne, Hamish McCormick, the Broken Hill Civic Orchestra, Barrier Industrial Unions Brass Band, the Broken Hill Philharmonic Choir …

The project was created using experimental processes, from drones to phone footage, sonic field recordings, to collective body percussion, making in ensemble, live instrumentation and vocals to electronic sampling; seeding relationships, fruiting ideas of collaboration and symbiosis, as vulnerable spaces that rely on thresholds of curiosity, trust, generosity, exploration, intuition, adaptability and embodied knowledge; allowing emergent phenomena to awaken and ferment.
Asking: what are the fertile conditions that allow for creation/life to flourish?

Listening to Earthwise practices of respect, self-assembly, and reciprocity; weaving multi-sensory content, materials and ephemera that have been locally collected/ held/ assembled/ reconfigured and then will be finally returned, as cyclical processes.

Looking to narratives that illustrate a (re)framing of our relationship to the living planet and each other, born from the ruin and decay of meta crisis, hospicing modernity’s old systems and making fertile spaces for community to flourish through the creation of a participatory (karaoke) multispecies opera of the senses. An offering of a DIY psychological tool kit for the future.

THANK YOUS: Uncle Badger Bates, Simon Griffith (evolutionary ecologist), Dave Elston.
This project has been thankfully made possible through the Open Cut Commission and the Joyce Spencer Textile Fellowship. Respectfully made on and in collaboration with the unceded lands of the Wilkalyia, Barkandji and Bundjalung peoples and all the living beings that are at the same time/same place…

Image: Charlotte Haywood, Same Time/Same Place, digital collage, 2024.