Saturday, March 26, 2022

First Responders: Director and Co-Writer > Back to Back Theatre. 2022.


Currently screening on: ABC iView > ABC ME 

Co-written and directed by AHMARNYA PRICE animation RHIAN HINKLEY music KELLY RYALL animation assistant ZIA GUL SADEQI text illustration VICTORIA MARSHALL illustrations ARTGUSTO.

producers ALICE FLEMING, NIKKI WATSON executive producers BRUCE GLADWIN, TIM STITZ

Co-written and starring BREANNA DELEO, BEN LECOUTEUR, CAM LECOUTEUR, JAI STOREY, HARRY SCHALLER, PARSA SHABESTANIMONFARED, PRISCILLA RAGESH, SARAH GRAY, KERRY COOK, GRACE FUNSTON, VIVIAN SALTER, CHLOE WEILER, AYDEN HORROCKS, SARAH ALWOOD, JONATHAN SLATER, NATHAN MEAD, LUCAS KENYON, RUPERT STONE, CHARLOTTE FITZGERALD

backtobacktheatre.com/project/first-responders

Ride On Time: Solo Performance > Life Changing Show > La Mama Theatre > War-Rak Festival. 2021

A resurrection of the best theatre we have ever seen. Life Changing Show is a tribute to live performance. Over the course of one evening, a group of Melbourne’s best theatremakers recalled shows they have witnessed that moved them deeply. Life Changing Show was a rebirth of theatre past. A one night only event with: Lou Wall, Beng Oh, Emilie Collyer, Kate Hood, Jamie Lewis, Ahmarnya Price, Zak Pidd, Alice Will Caroline, Ibrahim Halacoglu, and Liz Jones.






Friday, March 25, 2022

The Splendid Anomaly: Solo Performance > ARTS HOUSE Culture Lab Creative Development. 2021.


“Luckily for me I was born to a mother who - when on the day I arrived into the world with a 'congenital abnormality', when told by doctors that they had no idea what had caused the ‘anomaly’, when they gave her an extensive list of all the things I would never be able to do - very clearly and succinctly told them all to "get stuffed". My mother was determined that SHE would never become MY disability. Perhaps it is for this reason that this project won't exclusively be about disability. Or me. Or my Mum. (Though I can't entirely promise that it won't be).  But what it will be is a 'performance essay' investigating the ways we both limit and undermine ourselves and others through our assumptions of what is and isn't possible. To counter this tendency and in conversation with a select group of experts, I will be examining and celebrating the brilliant and innovative ways that humans, animals and plant species have and do adapt to change and 'perceived' limitation. I aim to disprove that it has been a case of 'the survival of the fittest' but rather 'the survival of the most creative and adaptable'. It might just be that at the heart of our evolution, if not our very survival, lies a most powerful and imperfect muse - the splendid anomaly”. 

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To date, The Splendid Anomaly has been developed and researched as part of Arts House's Culture Lab (Melbourne) in 2018; Battersea Arts Centre Residency (United Kingdom) in 2019; the University of Sussex's Visiting Artist Program (United Kingdom) in 2019 and Culture Lab in early 2021. The first season of the work will be presented as part of Arts House's 2023 program. 


(note: click on images to enlarge)


















Tuesday, November 3, 2020

Friday, October 28, 2016

RUMPUS: Solo Performance. 2012 - 2016 .

Photo: Justin Batchelor

It’s 1989. George Bush is President of the U.S.A. Hundreds are killed in Tiananmen Square. The Cold War is ending. The Berlin wall is falling. At the bottom of the world a child is sent to detention. The child begins a series of messages, an SOS, to its future self. 

Twenty seven years later the child's messages are found. RUMPUS is the long awaited reply.

RUMPUS is a contemporary performance by Ahmarnya Price. Through a combination of installation, animation, live storytelling, soundscape, lip syncing and bad dance moves audiences are taken on a wild but charismatic tour through the wormholes of time and space. Together, using the structure of the book 'Where The Wild Things Are' by Maurice Sendak and gathering content from extracts of Ahmarnya's 1989/1990 teenage diary, we examine parallels between the local school yard and the global political arena in order to begin asking how the experience of play turned violent can so easily be created and ultimately 'WHO is going to say STOP!'?  


In March 2016 RUMPUS debuted it's first season to sold out audiences at Footscray Community Arts Centre as part of The Festival Of Live Art (FOLA).

RUMPUS TRAILER: 

RUMPUS ANIMATION (FUNDRAISER) : https://vimeo.com/153184298


(note: click on images to enlarge)




















Thursday, October 13, 2011

The Waiting Place: Director, Designer and Co-writer > The Chaotic Order. 2011.



C0-written, directed and designed in collaboration with interdisciplinary ensemble The Chaotic Order THE WAITING PLACE was an intimate performance work that combined animation and live performance. 

The Waiting Place is at once somewhere and nowhere, a place we all find ourselves. It’s where we confront life’s paradoxes and the absurdities that variously define, embrace and confound us. Each of The Chaotic Order’s performers is regarded as neurodiverse. It’s something that informs the work but isn’t the driving influence. For that, we look to insight, humanity and shared experience. The resulting performance is darkly humorous, transcending social, ethical and cultural definitions. It’s a rethinking of our perceived differences and a call to what is common between us”.
- Aden Rolfe. 2011.
 
The Waiting Place premiered as part of the 2011 Melbourne Fringe Festival at Footscray Community Arts Centre and was the winner of the Melbourne Fringe Festival Award for 'Most Original Australian Work'. 




Saturday, October 30, 2010

The World At Large: Solo Exhibition > Gilligan Grant Gallery. 2010




(note: click on images to enlarge)


January. The World At Large
mixed media on canvas
H 87cm x W 112cm



February. The Fear
mixed media on canvas
H 87cm x W 112cm
March. Beautiful Way
mixed media on canvas
H 87cm x W 112cm


April. Headache
mixed media on canvas
H 87cm x W 112cm


May. Trouble In Mind
mixed media on canvas
H 87cm x W 112cm

June. The Lady Don't Mind
mixed media on canvas
H 87cm x W 112cm
July. Grace Kelly Blues
mixed media on canvas
H 87cm x W 112cm


August. Bang On
mixed media on canvas
H 87cm x W 112cm



September. Save Me
mixed media on canvas
H 87cm x W 112cm



October. Asleep And Dreaming
mixed media on canvas
H 87cm x W 112cm


November. Come Into My Sleep
mixed media on canvas
H 87cm x W 112cm
December. Beginning To See The Light
mixed media on canvas
H 87cm x W 112cm



Essay By Aden Rolfe.Any two objects placed in an appropriate space develop a connection. They influence each other, talk amongst themselves, tell a story. ‘The World At Large’ explores the relationship between image and narrative, between the personal and the general, the real and the fictional. The twelve diptychs – corresponding to the twelve months of a year – depict a variety of characters and creatures alongside everyday objects and abstract elements. Taking their cues from world events, song lyrics and the artist’s life, the works are fragmentary and suggestive, leaving the viewer to unravel the oblique meanings that might be found there.

For ‘The World At Large’ Price has created a series of strange and humorous scenes that place the representational alongside the conceptual. Faces, animals and shapes are made strong and dark against flat beige backgrounds. Figures are out-of-proportion and in distorted perspectives. Each panel is rendered by pencil, oilstick, paint and collage, and is essentially a drawing on a canvas. The result is a fragmented world that seems to extend beyond the frame: a realm of select objects, a textured limbo. In the negative space the elements breathe. They develop relationships both tacit and overt, provoking questions and advancing the plot.

The energy in Price’s work is created by juxtaposition: from individual elements interacting within the frame; from each panel speaking to its pair; and from the works talking across the sequence. The eye is drawn around the canvas to follow the entangled hair of its subjects, the moth emerging from a character’s stomach, the apocalyptic gaze of a magpie. By the lines connecting various parts of a work a story starts to unfold, but it’s a story that’s neither fixed nor explained. Instead it expands as the images recur elsewhere, popping up in different works where they relate to different characters and different objects. The narrative is open-ended and conversational, part of an incomplete whole.

‘The World At Large’ playfully interprets the human condition, measuring the months while rendering chaos into tight images - making sense and non-sense from the flow of daily information. It reconfigures the public and the personal into a world at once meaningful and absurd, unreal and yet strikingly familiar. It’s a world that asks you to follow the lines and join the dots, to read your own story into the sequence. A world where meaning is made in collaboration with the viewer, and the interplay of narrative and image invites your interpretation to round out the tale.