COLLABORATOR BIOS

Freya Schack-Arnott

Freya Schack-Arnott is a Danish/Australian contemporary cellist who enjoys a multi-faceted career as a performer, improviser, composer and curator; ranging from contemporary classical repertoire to experimental, electronics, popular and cross-disciplinary art forms. Freya regularly performs with Australia’s leading new music ensembles, including ELISION Ensemble and Ensemble Offspring. Her curatorial roles include co-founder and curator of the regular ‘Opus Now’ music series, an ongoing project exploring relationships between the music of today and classical string quartets; and co-curator of the Rosenberg Museum, together with violinist and improviser Jon Rose. In recent years, Schack-Arnott has performed in a number of festivals and major venues across Australia, Asia and Europe: National Concert Hall, Taipei; JazzSpot Candy, Tokyo; Copenhagen Jazz festival; Sydney Festival; Melbourne International Arts Festival; Vivid Sydney; Dark Mofo Hobart; Supersense; No New Noise; Now Now Festival; Baiame’s Ngunnhu Festival; Day for Night, Liveworks; Melbourne Fringe and SIMA Jazz Festival.

Brian Fuata

Brian Fuata is a Postwar & Contemporary artist who was born in 1978. Their work was featured in several exhibitions at key galleries and museums, including the ACCA, Australian Center for Contemporary Art and the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery (MPRG). Brian Fuata has been featured in articles for the Observer, the Ocula and the ArtDaily. The most recent article is Connected Online: New Art for New Times written by Julianne Pierce for the Artlink in August 2020.

Marcus Whale

Marcus Whale is a Sydney composer, musician and artist. In addition to his musical output as Collarbones, Black Vanilla and Scissor Lock, his broader practice spans live performance, sound installation and recordings, scored musical works, video and composition for screen, theatre and dance. He has curated shows for Firstdraft and Serial Space, with sound and video works also exhibited by Underbelly Arts, Art Proper and Penguin Plays Rough. Frequent collaborators include Austin Buckett, Tom Smith, Michael Salerno, Ivan Cheng, Jess Olivieri, Pip Smith and Caterina Mocciola.

He performs music solo as Scissor Lock, as part of pop groups Collarbones and Black Vanilla and with improvising groups Pollen Trio and The Splinter Orchestra, while recording for labels Two Bright Lakes, New Weird Australia, The Finer Things, Room40, Feral Media, HellosQuare and 3BS. As a producer, he has worked with Moon Holiday and Guerre. His compositions have been performed by The Song Company, Synergy Percussion, Ensemble Offspring, Chronology Arts and his own Volta Collective.

Under these guises, he has performed or presented work at Sydney Festival (2012-2013), Vivid Sydney (2013-2014), Brisbane Festival (2012), Underbelly Arts Festival (2013), the Now Now Festival (2011, 2013, 2014), Time Machine: Festival of Time-Based Art (2012), Sydney Fringe Festival (2012), Sound Summit (2010-2011) and Electrofringe (2010, 2013).

Elia Bosshard

Elia Bosshard is a Sydney-based installation and visual artist, scenographer, flutist, founder and editor of ADSR Zine, and director of the project platform Parliament House. Her work centres around the construction of material and mental spaces, encompassing site-specific installation, sculptural scale models, drawing and writing. Elia studied Design for Performance at the National Institute for Dramatic Arts and holds a BMus (University of New South Wales) with Honours (Australian National University). She has exhibited at Articulate Project Space, 107 Projects, in ‘Fieldwork’ with Parliament House, CICA gallery (KR), NAS Inner West Council, and Siteworks Festival; and has worked across theatre, dance, music and opera with credits including Deutsche Oper Berlin, Open Frame X Vivid Live, Resonant Bodies Festival, Now Now Festival, Ensemble Offspring, Backstage Music, Belvoir St Theatre, Griffin Theatre, Hayes Theatre, Old Fitz Theatre, Kings Cross Theatre, NIDA, Musical Alaska at Alaska Projects, Periscope Productions, Axis Circus, Triple J, ‘Circle Cut By Sound’ at the High Court of Australia, Sydney/Melbourne Fringe Festivals, and with artist Ken Unsworth and the Australian Dance Artists. Elia is the recipient of The Rockend Berlin Opera Award from The Opera Foundation for young Australians (2019), UNSW Alumni Artist In Residence (2017), and both Spirit of The Fringe Award and Critics Pick at Sydney Fringe Festival 2017.

Harley Stumm - Intimate Spectacle

Harley is the founder and director of independent performing arts producer Intimate Spectacle. Established in 2012, the company works across genres, from contemporary theatre & dance theatre to live art and interactive performance.  He engages with artists to produce their work from early research stages through creative development, premiere production and touring (at all or any of these stages). He has highly developed networks and reputation among artists, presenters and the sector at large – nationally and internationally.

He has produced and toured works by recent collaborators Branch Nebula, post and Nick Power, as well as indigenous choreographer Vicki Van Hout, Cambodian-Australian rocknroll band Cambodian Space Project, visual theatre makers Sam Routledge & Erth, and Lenine Bourke, to major festivals & venues nationally, regionally and internationally.

Highlights include the recent French/Australian collaboration commissioned by Sydney, Adelaide & Brisbane Festivals, Nick Power’s Two Crews; three years of touring of Nick’s Between Tiny Cities to Hong Kong, Malaysia, Vienna, Budapest, Berlin, as well as throughout remote Northern Territory communities; post’s Oedipus Schmoedipus bilingual presentation in Santiago (2017), and adaptation into Cantonese with Hong Kong Repertory & West Kowloon (2018); 14 seasons including a national tour of Branch Nebula’s Helpmann Award-winning Snake Sessions to skateparks throughout Australia; presentations of Lenine Bourke’s The Walking Neighbourhood in Finland, and developing and touring Cambodian Space Project’s rock opera Cosmic Cambodia between Kampot Cambodia and Sydney.

Benjamin Freeman

Benjamin is a sound designer and musician based in Sydney. He has worked extensively across the Sydney theatre community for companies such as Griffin Theatre, Darlinghurst Theatre Company, KXT. He was awarded the 2018 Sydney Theatre Award’s Best Independent Sound Design for his composition of 4.48 Psychosis (Old Fitz Theatre). As a musician he has toured internationally with Stones Throw Records and supported  acts Floating Points, Giles Peterson, Shigeto and Knowledge over the last few years. In 2020 his collaborative work was released on the vinyl album Seven Wonders (Wondercore Island) as a part of new Australian movements in soul and jazz.