For decades Jude Anderson has produced performance art that has tested traditional conventions of live performance and audience engagement.
After having worked overseas for many years in Chile, America, Italy and France, Anderson founded Punctum in Castlemaine in 2004 to work with more than 400 artists to support their practice and new works.
Anderson will be presenting on two occasions at the Conflux festival of creative ideas in Bendigo next month.
In the first, she will facilitate a conversation with Stephen Page, the artistic director of Indigenous Australian contemporary dance company Bangarra Dance Theatre.
“Stephen’s contribution to Australian culture and the performing arts is inestimable,” Anderson said.
“He has an approach to storytelling and creating work that draws on a culture that goes back 60-70,000 years, and we have a lot to learn from that.
“The process and practice that he and the members of his company bring through their culture and kinship and systems of connection to Country through their performance, he will be able to speak to that, and that is really exciting and rare.”
The second of Anderson’s presentations is a session titled ‘Making Meaning – Building Cultural Bridges, Crossings, Collisions and Connections’, in which she will use recent works as case studies and share practices and principles underpinning Punctum’s contemporary performances.
“This session comes from one of the two branches of Punctum’s long-term cultural investigations that we seem to return to a lot through our works,” she said.
“One of those is creating works that are speculative futures in the context of migration and the flow of people, and that brings about cultural shift.
“We’re really interested, in a regional context, of how we might speak to that through a future lens.
“The other branch of our practice for a long time has been speculative futures around how we connect with the impact of climate change.
“When you look at Punctum’s works over the years, you’ll see that our works constantly are an expression of one of those two branches of investigation.”
Anderson said Punctum brought audiences into the works and gave the audience a strong part in how the works worked.
“We offer new ways of considering what live performance might be and how that might engage with audiences,” she said.
Anderson is among a host of fascinating presenters in the lineup for Conflux Bendigo. Tickets available now at emporiumcreativehub.com.au/confluxtickets