Created by Shakthi Sivanathan and Aimée Falzon in partnership with CuriousWorks.

I just spent three weeks at [international arts festival] being bombarded by art from around the world. This was a breath of fresh air.

The Other Journey is a unique art work: a multi-sensory, immersive storytelling experience.

The work is centred around honest, intimate stories from three people who fled a war in the villages of Sri Lanka to settle into the largest city in Australia. Set to a luscious score mixing South Asian and Western influences, the music and stories are played through portable audio players and headphones. During the work, the deep listening experience takes place in varied, beautiful settings: on a boat ride; under bird sculptures; amidst fire and oil lamps on a river bank; amongst whiffs of cinnamon and jasmine; surrounded by elegant, large-scale, outdoor video art. We like to think of it as an arts adventure.

The movement of refugees and immigrants across the world is usually 
relayed through statistics, news bites, policy and campaign. Through
 these channels, public responses generally alternate between scorn and
 pity. The Other Journey instead relays the intimacy, dignity and compromise that surrounds the decision to flee: and the courage, risk and transformation it takes to belong again to a new community.

The show is always adapted to its local environment and is most suited to quiet, reflective places (ideally by a river) just next to highly-visible, public meeting points. In special circumstances, the content itself can also be adapted to different cities and towns, with stories from the local Sri Lankan or a local migrant/refugee community in that place incorporated into the work.

Contact the director Shakthi Sivanathan to discuss further: shakthi@curiousworks.com.au.

Video footage from the Parramasala preview night with the community and collaborators (courtesy of Guido Gonzalez and Matta Media )

News story from SBS (an Australian TV channel) of the Parramasala preview night with the community and collaborators

Image from Parramasala closing night (courtesy of the festival)

Images from the Parramasala preview night with the community and collaborators (courtesy of Guido Gonzalez and Matta Media )

The Other Journey is created and presented by artists Shakthi Sivanathan and Aimée Falzon.

This is an excerpt from the Parramasala website. Book tickets and learn about the rest of the Festival Programme here.

Sydney’s remarkable CuriousWorks is renowned for its innovative approach to creating art across many forms. The Other Journey is a theatre work presenting intimate stories by three very different people who fled from Sri Lanka to Australia.

Commissioned by Parramasala and presented outdoors on a stretch of the Parramatta River, this exciting project combines large scale outdoor video art, moving storytelling, guided tours and luscious music which mixes Eastern and Western influences.

The flowing water and banks around the Lennox Bridge will provide the canvas for a stunning art installation which maps the many individual journeys from Sri Lanka to Australia. Animated light projections, lanterns and short films will bring the river to life.

Against this ever-changing backdrop, The Other Journey will be presented at scheduled times each evening to small pre-booked groups. Audience members will take part in two different experiences. Leaving Lanka is presented to the audience while sitting on the riverbank. Through headphones and mp3 players, intimate stories will be told by people who decided to flee from Sri Lanka to Australia. Becoming A Battler revisits the same people, this time telling the story of how they settled into Sydney and became Australians. For this experience, the audience is seated in a boat which gently travels up and down the river.

Every audience member will take something special away with them, and leave something personal behind.

Passers-by can simply view the unfolding visual story each night from the Lennox Bridge.

CuriousWorks’ The Other Journey will be one of the unmissable events of the festival and sessions are expected to sell out quickly.

Book your tickets here.

(See the documentary film produced by CuriousWorks , The Migrant Project at 1pm Friday 4 November as part of the free Lunch Hour Documentaries series).

Asi’s debut album, The Waiting, is a diverse embrace of styles and atmospheres.

On “Burn Them All”, acoustic folk grows into a beat box romp. “The Waiting Turned” is 22-beat indie rock, followed by classic singer/songwriter folk with the carnatic-infused “Kurinji”. The down-tempo, lush sounds and harmonies of “Older” and “Worlds Were Here” lead into the epic, final track of the album: “The Crooked Path”. “The Crooked Path” takes you on a 13 minute ride, moseying through found-sounds, ambient, trance and rock’n’roll before building into a thundering wall of trans-global percussion.

Listen to full tracks and download from Bandcamp Stream the full album and download at your chosen price

Preview excerpts and download
iTunes
Amazon

Buy the CD
Online from CD Baby
In person at CuriousWorks

released 22 November 2009

Schmick and moving. Very moving. Very powerful, without trying too hard. The soundscape was delightful.

I just spent three weeks at [international arts festival] being bombarded by art from around the world. This was a breath of fresh air.

Gut wrenching. The music just takes you in there.

It took me on an existential journey. I almost cried, I can’t really talk about it now. It was outside of everyday life.

It was almost Yogic. First time I relaxed and thought deeply all day. Still taking it in.

Very impresssed. I really enjoyed the music; it was excellently produced. Very slick.
The animation was also interesting, and even though it repeated often through the “journey” it still felt fresh. Well done!

If you haven’t been through it, you don’t realise. I never realised what they’d been through.

I heard my own voice, my own story and it took me a while to recognise it. Then I heard my own words, but with new meaning.

Nice work mate. Until they realise we’re all one, it’s not going to work, is it?

The movement of refugees and immigrants across the world is usually 
relayed through statistics, news bites, policy and campaign.
Through
 these channels, public responses generally alternate between scorn and
 pity.

Leaving Lanka instead relays the intimacy, dignity and compromise that surrounds the decision to flee.

The work is an interdisciplinary experience and takes the form of a gentle, guided audio journey, embedded with site-specific, animated projections and paintings. During the journey, the audience member is invited to listen in to 3 conversations – with an Australian dancer, teacher and minister – each 
intimately sharing their stories of leaving Sri Lanka. Their quiet,
 honest reflections are set to a luscious, expansive soundtrack that
 carries the listener from dusk into the early evening.

Blending audio documentary, contemporary Western music with classical Indian overtones, traditional oral storytelling and immersive installation,
 Leaving Lanka is a special, reflective experience that takes one on
 a journey across the face of the globe and back home again.

This show is always adapted to its local environment and is most suited to quiet, reflective places just next to highly-visible, public meeting points. The content itself can also be adapted to different cities and towns, with stories from the local Sri Lankan community in that place incorporated into the work.

Leaving Lanka debuted at Parramasala Festival, November 2010. It was held in a bunker underneath a cafe (whilst raining) and in a boat along Parramatta River, by the side of Riverside Theatres (whilst not raining). Parramasala is an annual Australian Festival of South Asian Arts, hosting a vibrant celebration of today’s professional contemporary artists from around the 
world who are embracing the traditions and innovations in South Asian
 arts.

Contact asi@curiousworks.com.au for a more detailed conversation, including access to audio and visuals from the work and pricing details.

By all accounts, the Chinese love interactive performance.

In November 2010 Shakthi joined ten other Australian artists to devise a rockin’ new media show for the people of China. Called On the Edge, the whole thing was pulled together by the wonderful Kate Croll and supported by the AICC. Here it is in pictorial form.

Check out the On the Edge website to learn more about the show and the totally amazing artists I worked with.

In Beijing, our screen was a massive LED screen. Our show was in a public place, so I made an opening piece that slowly drew a crowd in. It was a mashup featuring images from remote Western Australia, iron ore trains, ships coming to China, the people of China, all to Monkey Marc’s beats. MC Mantra did spoken word over the top. He weaved in and out of the show with words, raps and some of his own music thereafter, the voice of the work. The show was placed in a piazza within a big shopping mall. After an intro sequence, a calligrapher began painting in water on the ground. His calligraphy stick was tied via a wiimote to a synth patch, so he painted in sound as well as water as he moved. Richie Allen set this up. The AV crew consisted of DJ Wasabi and Monkey Marc (pictured) and Robin Fox and I (seated). It was cold. They both rocked it throughout the performance. Really cold. My role after the beginning was VJ. I used Isadora and was really impressed with how sophisticated it was. It was very fun, throwing up content on such a massive screen. Some fantastic portraits were shot by Poppy van Oorde-Grainger, that went up as a database controlled by movement of the mouse. In the final show, in Chengdu, I jumped on the wiimote bandwagon and made with Richie an app that let people VJ as they danced, controlling the colour and size of a live camera feed of themselves based on their movements. We did night time shows in Beijing too. At one point Davros (stunning graphics/design/post-production man who also contributed heaps of fantastic visual content to the show) threw up work, again with Richie’s wiimote tool doubling their visual movement for sound. In Beijing, calligrapher man joined in, an amazing moment as it was his first non-calligraphy moment and he rocked it. In other shows, Tanya El-Gamal also joined in.

Towards the end of each show Rhys Turner rocked it with his iPhone audience VJ app – people could use an iPhone screen as a canvas to draw processing-style shapes and flows of images drawn by young Chinese people, and have it show up on the big screen. This is some raw footage of it in action as MC Mantra and DJ Wasabi freestyle to words that pop up on the screen.

Robin Fox blew everyone’s brains at the end of each show with his audio-controlled laser work. This is in Chongqing, a small warehouse performance. I’m a fan of his emergency stop button.