BLEED

For Bleed - the biennial live event in the everyday digital - the North Melbourne Arts House and Campbelltown Arts Centre have together curated a select group of artists from varied disciplines to combine, collaborate and explore their art brand, style and creative diegesis.

The digital festival, ironically devised before the pandemic, reflects the new age. It embraces our new ‘restrictive’ lives where we are to “stay at home”, limit contact with people, ‘social-distance’ and when we do venture out ‘wear masks’ and to keep one point five metres away from our fellow humans. We are living in a new era ushered in by the global crisis.

The point of this festival is to address the surge of digital technology and present work by challenged artists. In the main arena, Beyonce has embraced the digital world by reaching out to her audiences during the pandemic with a new visual album. Podcasts, Instagram accounts and immersive theatre experiences including Content developed by the ABC using vertical TV space (phones) to capture relevant visual information are gaining popularity.

Becoming the Icon, my choice was arbitrary, the last of a series of six online shows, celebrates the collaboration of two very different Melbourne artists who have come together for the very first time - Liliane Steiner, a dancer and choreographer, and Emile Zile, artist/filmmaker and performer. It is a subtle yet confronting choreographed filmic performance that uses body language, hand gesture, and words that reflect on political jargon and coercion. It is an engaging piece of work.

The other work l viewed was Hannah Bronte’s audio-visual exploration of ancestry, story and country. It is a sensitive poetic journey into nature and family lore.

The Bleed festival also includes performances tackling themes of climate change and virtual landscapes. All you need to do is Google the Bleed festival and follow the prompts.

Flora Georgiou

Mages: Becoming the Icon (photo by James Wright) and Hannah Brontë’s mi$$-Eupnea.

bleedonline.net