THIS IS INCOMPLETE WITHOUT YOU

ORIGINAL SEASON
Caloundra Regional Gallery | May 11 - June 25 2023 | Sold Out Season

Development supported by Sunshine Coast Creative Alliance and Sub Tropic Studios. Artist Studio Residential is a Sunshine Coast Creative Alliance initiative supported by Arts Queensland.

SPECIAL THANKS
To Cat Jones for all her brilliant mentorship and support through development.

Videography x Photography Timothy Birch Studios

Repetition is culture and here we are
I practice you
You practice me

THIS IS INCOMPLETE WITHOUT YOU is an irreverent and tender ode to ‘close enough is good enough’. This one-on-one participatory performance questions the mechanics of relationships. A playful, quietly subversive stumble in the potential utopia that could be approximate proximity. Parallel happening.

Part audio-journey and part learning-a-new-body-language-alphabet, participants are given a series of poetic invitations and practical physical instructions. As they traverse and navigate the work together with artist Ruby Donohoe, a silent embodied dialogue emerges between the two.

THIS IS INCOMPLETE WITHOUT YOU offers an imperfect, cinematic, felt experience to explore subjectivity as a communal, negotiatory act. And how we might extend this gaze to the world around us.

LUNG WATER Audio Journey

Performer, Text, Edit | Ruby Donohoe
Videographer | Jorge Serra

Videos developed as part of the 2021 Supercell Dance Festival -SCAPE Program

In an embodied ode to temporary forms, LUNG WATER is a hybrid journey of both solo experience and collective encounter. 

Throughout this four-part digital-immersive audio journey, participants are given a series of poetic invitations and practical, physical instructions that ponder the nature of holding and being held, and the complexities of how we are shaped by our surroundings. 

LUNG WATER is a surrender to the absurd and tender companionship of our own reflection in the world we perceive and our desire to both be one with our environment and extricate ourselves from it. A celebration of the beauty, devastation, and joyousness of entanglement.

CREATIVE TEAM
Writer x Lead Artist | Ruby Donohoe
Sound Design | Isha Simpson

PRESENTATIONS
2022 APAM | Pause, Play, Perform
2022 Horizon Festival | Homegrown Program

SUPPORT
This work was developed with the support of Horizon Festival Homegrown Program and the Sunshine Coast Arts Foundation.

HERO IMAGE
Photographer | Jorge Serra

LUNG WATER Performance

WRITTEN X DIRECTED BY RUBY DONOHOE

A woman who devotes her life to swimming around the world wakes up in a tiny hotel room with a melting glacier and discovers that her lungs are filling up with the sea. Held in quarantine in a room overlooking the ocean, her journey is told through a series of video calls with a doctor, her mother, and her girlfriend. The central character’s reckoning with the complexities of survival, the self in love, motherhood, and the climate crisis unfolds alongside the audience’s own journey.

LUNG WATER is a surrender to the absurd and tender companionship of our own reflection in the world we perceive and our desire to both be one with our environment and extricate ourselves from it. In a torrential prayer to the beauty and rage of entanglement, the work skids through the spine of Western medicine, an elderly Buddhist Punk manifesto rally, a war declared against the sea, bodily invasions, avenged pilgrimages, and the perils of trying to sell something on Craigslist.

This brutal, dark comedy and hopeful tragedy is about a disappearing sea, a disappearing self, and where I end and you begin.

CREATIVES

DIRECTOR + WRITER Ruby Donohoe
PERFORMER Jenni Large
PERFORMER Giema Contini
PERFORMER Eleonora Ginardi
SOUND DESIGN Isha Simpson
LIGHTING. Jorge Serra


DEVELOPED WITH THANKS TO
Horizon Festival 2021 Homegrown Program

Sunshine Coast Arts Foundation (2021)

Sunshine Coast Council + Creative Spaces’ Crows Nest Residency (2020)

DOPPELGANGSTER (UK/AUS) Deep Water Program (2017)

BACKBONE ARTS OPEN SOURCE RESIDENCY (2018)

PLAYLAB THEATRE (2018)

LUNG WATER Installation

Photo by Nick Bleeker

Backbone Arts 2018 How Soon Is Now? Festival
Featured in Emergency Index Vol. 8 (Ugly Duckling Presse, NYC, 2019)

LUNG WATER was a performance installation comprised of a time-based ice sculpture, short films of bodily estrangement performed for camera, and light installation.

LUNG WATER was a torrential prayer to slow atrophy, an ode to temporary forms, and an exploration of containers as porous structures for holding exquisite moments of rapid change. Inspired by Anne Carson’s “Kinds of water drown us. Kinds of water do not.” (Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, 1995), LUNG WATER explores the in-breath as a case study for the simultaneous beauty and rage of entanglement, and our competing desires to both be one with our environment and extricate ourselves from it.

LUNG WATER was installed/performed in Meanjin (Brisbane), Australia - whose traditional owners, the Turrbal People, I’d like to pay my respects. The performance space was under a Queenslander-style, old bowls club – an architectural design characterised by vertical stilts beneath the building which creates a cavernous space beneath the main structure allowing it to “float” above the terrain and built to cope with Queensland’s iconic subtropical flooding. LUNG WATER incorporated two abandoned industrial-sized water tanks installed at the site in the early 1980’s that were connected via pipework and were reminiscent of lungs. Another site-specific feature included 80+ stones collected from East Brisbane river area which defend against moving water along the riverbank and give natural protection against erosion. These stones were used to mount the ice sculpture and were replaced back into the landscape at the conclusion of the performance. 

The ice sculpture weighed 130kg, took five days to produce, melted in 38 hours, and was interwoven between two found metal supports from pool-side chaise lounges. These structures had a history of holding bodies, and during the performance water moved through them. 

That weekend it rained. 

The ice fell over due to tropical early summer wind. It began to melt unevenly as winds and humidity began to re-mould and imprint the disappearing sculpture. 

Audiences came and went. 

Let Us Sell You (Your Burial)

Photographer | Jorge Serra

Let Us Sell You (Your Burial) is an experiential, immersive performance interrogating the cultural phenomenon of burials. Participants are invited to experience the work as a custom-designed collective burial. A once in a lifetime experience.

This intergenerational + interdisciplinary collaboration between Ruby Donohoe, Nadia Milford, and Sharmila Nezovic will collide ‘plastic fantastic’ against earthy materiality in an intersection of visual arts, dance, and immersive performance practice. At the heart of the work is the potentiality of pleasure and estrangement as performance dramaturgies.

The work invites audiences to explore a spectrum of embodied understandings and perspectives on why embedding ourselves within the earth is such a significant cultural tradition. This research is an attempt to excavate new potentialities for how this desire might be reimagined in an era where we are increasingly disconnected from the earth beneath our feet. The work pursues pleasure as a vehicle for reconsidering the relationship between body and environment; temporality and sensation; experience and product. How do we get in touch with our own materiality and the materiality of the planet without it being anchored in death or grief? And how do we sell it?

The work unpacks the containment and commodification of natural landscapes as a by-product of commercialism and convenience. Given the prospect of looming gentrification and expansive urban development within the region, considerations of the environment and our relationship to it are becoming increasingly important to the community and the changing identity of the coast.

The work mines references from consumerist culture, pop culture, advertising, and ritual to explore the shared driving force behind both paradigms - pleasure.

CREATIVE TEAM
Ruby Donohoe
Nadia Milford
Sharmila Nezovic

UPCOMING
IN | artist run initiative x The Old Lock Up
21 - 27 November

PREVIOUS DEVELOPMENTS
2021 Supercell Contemporary Dance Festival
2022 4 Walls and a Floor Dancenorth Residency

JERK

Photographer | Warwick Gow

JERK 
DƷƏːK/

1. A quick, sharp sudden movement. A physical twitch, a jolt.
2. Discontinuous. Deviation.
3. Someone needlessly rude.

JERK is a new contemporary performance by Ruby Donohoe about her experience of living with epilepsy and what the notion of an ‘out-of-body experience’ means for a species so tethered to the idea of body as self.

ABOUT THE SHOW
JERK is an irreverent free-fall based on my experience of living with epilepsy. Shapeshifting between the autobiographical body and the abstracted body, JERK inhabits a performative space between the experiential and the named, the chasm between the body and the body explained, and all that happens between cornflakes for breakfast and when the lights go out (and nobody is home). JERK explores what it means to have an out-of-body experience for a species tethered to the notion of body as self. 

The title is drawn from the small, involuntary movements experienced before and during a seizure. The etymology of the word informs both content and form as the work dives into what it means to deviate/disrupt/interrupt, the uncontrollable, the not-suitable-for-public, the hypersensitive, the dissonance between the intentional and the involuntary, defiant misremembering, and what it means to be a jerk as a woman. 

CREATIVE TEAM
Ruby Donohoe Director, Writer, + Performer
Jenni Large Collaborator + Performer
Chucho Bruno Sound Design
Ash Musk Dramaturge

This project has been supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, Sunshine Coast Council RADF, Access Arts Queensland, and Epilepsy Queensland.

An Act Of Intimacy

An Act of Intimacy is a one-on-one participatory performance exploring the politics of encounter. In a time where we are so practiced in our solitude and so practiced at our distance, what does it mean to be intimate?

Headphones are placed over your ears. You are zipped into a clear head-to-toe bodysuit. And so begins a pursuit of intimacy- in all its elusiveness and all its forms. 

From within this insular universe, an audio journey leads participants to an installation space where they meet artist Ruby Donohoe.

In this simultaneous state of proximity and separation from within the suits, participants are invited to propose an act of connection to undertake together. Participants are free to suggest any act in whatever form it might take - anything from holding one another to cutting one another’s hair to taking a nap to changing the bandage on a wound.

PHOTOS BY JORGE SERRA fEATURING Ruby Donohoe, Younghee Park and ASH DJOKIC

DEVELOPED WITH THANKS TO
MKA:THEATRE OF NEW WRITING SUBTXT FESTIVAL (LA MAMA, 2015)

Backbone 2high festival (metro arts, 2016)

PLACEMAKERS* Behind the golden doors (The Farm, 2020)

EYE RESOLUTION

Images by Ruby Newport

By Ruby Donohoe, Kristian Santic, and Kyle Berry
Metro Arts 2015
Backbone 2high festival 2016

Two people step into a pixelated canvas. Weaving interactive live projection design and performance, performers Ruby Donohoe and Kristian Santic immerse themselves into an ecology of transmedia light technology orchestrated by live projection designer Kyle Berry. In a dance between the live, beating, atrophying reality of the body and the ephemerality of light, this work excavates the space between the tangible and the intangible. Eye Resolution makes visible our invisible connections.

CREATIVE TEAM
Collaborator x Performer | Kristian Santic
Projection Artist | Kyle Berry