The Splendid Anomaly: Solo Performance > debuts at ARTS HOUSE in Melbourne, August 2024.

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TEASER: 

https://vimeo.com/907136106?share=copy

Another global crisis looms. Ahmarnya is leaking. Again. Using live drawing, animation and sound she examines the various ways that astronomical and cellular life has responded to disruption and change.

 

As both her own and the Earth’s systems rapidly collapse, Ahmarnya checks herself into the emergency department of a local hospital. Quarantined inside a specimen display box and in consultation with her brother, her mother and an overwhelmed medical team, she begins to write and draw herself into and out of a world that was never made with her in mind. Along the way, she discovers parallels between her own complex medical history and the universe’s vast cosmological records. Ahmarnya starts to suspect that it might never have been a case of ‘the survival of the fittest’. Or the most contained. That perhaps at the unknowable heart of evolution's creation story, and our own survival, lies a messier and more imperfect possibility - the splendid anomaly

 
Ahmarnya, in collaboration with Arts House, Susie Dee, Kelly Ryall, Rhian Hinkley, Romanie Harper and Richard Vabre have been developing this multidisciplinary solo performance since 2018. The Splendid Anomaly will debut its first season at Arts House in Melbourne from 26^th – 31^st August 2024. 

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.

- thepeoplemaketheatre.com

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

For information on the project see above. 

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The Splendid Anomaly: Solo Performance > ARTS HOUSE Culture Lab Creative Development. 2018.

For information on the project see above. 

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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: 

https://vimeo.com/146519956

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

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

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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 112cmMarch. 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 112cmJuly. 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 112cmDecember. 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.