Performance Space is so proud to be a part of the Experimental Commissioning Consortium (ECC) – a new multi-year, multi-organisation initiative that scaffolds independent artists to make ambitious work. The ECC is a newly convened group of organisations around Australia devoted to the development and presentation of independent and experimental art and performance. It seeks to foster cross-sector collaboration to generate increased mobility and opportunity for artists. The program includes three pillars: an experimental laboratory to incubate work, a commissioning circle to bring work into development, and a national touring network.
The ECC is supported by Creative Australia.
The pilot program of the ECC is being administered by Performance Space. The first artist lab took place at Utp in Western Sydney during the inaugural Another World Festival 14 - 16 November 2025, hosted by Utp and Performance Space. The second artist lab took place in Lutruwita/Tasmania from 18 - 25 March 2026, hosted by The Unconformity and Assembly 197.
Let me introduce you to the incredible artists of the ECC...
MORGAN HOGG
Morgan Hogg is a multidisciplinary artist and creative producer of Cook Island Māori (Ngāti Tāne), Tahitian, and English descent, currently based on unceded Wangal and Dharug lands. Working across installation and performance, her practice explores cultural identity, displacement, and intergenerational knowledge through the lens of her Kūki Airani heritage.
Central to Hogg’s practice is oral exchange. Drawing on dialogue with family and community as method and material, her work transmits ancestral narratives and embodied knowledge, weaving traditional cultural practices into contemporary forms that honour, reinterpret, and extend her cultural inheritance. Through this process, she creates spaces for cultural storytelling and relationality, contributing to conversations on Indigenous identity and decolonial futures while emphasising continuity, care, and collective memory within diasporic Pacific communities.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
Pe’e (working title) is a performative moving-image installation documenting the artist’s process of reconnecting to ancient Mangaian and Rapa Nuian chants under the guidance of Ta’unga Tuatara (Traditional Knowledge Holders). Continuing the lineage of Pacific storytelling, Pe’e (working title) explores cultural sustainability through the revitalisation and contemporary recontextualisation of ancestral Pacific performance practices. The project centres intergenerational knowledge transmission, community-led dialogue and digital archiving as acts of cultural continuity. Approaches that are increasingly vital in the context of climate change, mobility and cultural displacement across the Pacific.
RAINA PETERSON
Raina Peterson is a multi-award winning dancer-choreographer of Fiji-Indian and English heritage who was born and raised on the lands of the Gunaikurnai people of regional Victoria. Their work draws on the deep cultural practice of their classical Indian dance (Mohiniyattam and Kathakali) training and the experimental, subversive, queering which emerged from their performances in the queer party scene.
Raina has performed in the work of Jacob Boehme, Nithya Nagarajan, Naina Sen, Paul Rae and Kaylene Tan, Lucy Guerin and Alisdair Macindoe. Raina’s recent, award winning works include ‘Drishti’ (2020), ‘Narasimha’ (2022) and 'MOHINI' (2023). Raina runs ‘TGD Yoga’, a program of free yoga classes for the trans and gender diverse community, and is an audio-describer for Vitae Veritas.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
'The Death Of Sita' is an experimental dance work which uses a moment from the Hindu epic 'Ramayana' to explore climate grief, connection to the earth and resistance. The impetus for this work comes from environmental activist and deep ecology scholar Joanna Macy's assertion that in order for meaningful change to take place, society needs to undergo a spiritual and perceptual shift where we see the earth not as separate to ourselves, but as a part of ourselves. In the development of 'Sita', I am exploring different techniques which can influence audiences’ experiences and perceptions.
SHIRIN SHAKHESI
Shirin Shakhesi is an Iranian–Australian experimental media artist working across animation, moving image, projection, and immersive installation. Based on Djaara Country in regional Victoria, her practice explores memory, migration, identity, ecology, and lived experience through poetic visual storytelling and immersive spatial experiences.
Working across multimedia platforms Shirin creates works that examine the intersections of personal and collective experience, drawing on social, political, environmental, and philosophical themes. Blending moving image with emerging technologies, she creates immersive environments that invite reflection on people, place, and memory.
Shirin holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours in Animation from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. She was awarded the Australian Government’s New Colombo Plan Mobility Grant for the Cook Islands (2023) and the VCA50 Creative Development Grant (2025). Her work has been presented at Science Gallery Melbourne (Dark Matters), Now or Never Festival, Entangled Worlds at Collingwood Yards as part of Melbourne Fringe, the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), and Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF Play). Her films have also been screened internationally across Spain, Italy, the United States, Turkey, Cambodia, Indonesia, and beyond.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
Echoes Between is an immersive spatial media installation exploring belonging, displacement, and the spaces that exist between people, places, and environments. Composed of suspended translucent fabric, layered projection, spatial sound, and responsive media, the work creates a shifting landscape where forests and cityscapes dissolve into one another, inviting audiences to physically inhabit a space of transition.
Drawing from experiences of migration and living between urban and regional landscapes, Echoes Between reflects on how memory, movement, and identity shape our sense of belonging. Through light, projection, sound, and audience presence, the installation creates a shared sensory experience that evokes the feeling of being in-between, a third space where boundaries between nature and the built environment, past and present, and self and place become fluid.
The work will be activated through live audiovisual performance, where improvised music unfolds in dialogue with the projected environment, deepening the relationship between movement, image, sound, and space. Rather than offering fixed answers, Echoes Between invites audiences to slow down, embrace uncertainty, and reflect on the interconnectedness of people, place, and ecology.
GRACE CONNORS
Grace Connors is an artist and curator with varied experience working within the visual arts sector. She has exhibited across Australia since 2016, with her practice predominantly performance based and oriented towards storytelling, kinship and collaboration. She has performed at Hobiennale in 2017 and underwent creative development for new work with APHIDS in 2025. Additionally, she has presented performance lectures at UWA Gender Diversity in Music and Art Conference 2019 and Revelation Film Festival Academic Conference in 2018 with her performance work featured in Frieze Magazine in 2017. Connors has undertaken studio residencies at Midland Junction Arts Centre in 2020, has been artist in residence at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art in 2019 and 2025, and is a part of aphids supermassive artists program.
Her work as a facilitator and community engaged collaborator has been driven by a strong advocacy for supporting rigorous creative work and diverse arts programming. She has facilitated Young Boy Dancing Group as part of their Australian debut Spiraling Tour in 2025, produced and curated exhibitions including Bedforms in 2025 and co-curated the hands should have no peace both as part of Perth Festival in 2021, It has been a long time since this moment for Symbiotica’s Unhallowed Arts Festival in 2018, and Light As A Feather at Hobart’s inaugural Hobiennale in 2017.
Based in Boorloo/Perth Grace is presently co-founder and chairperson of the artist run initiative Cool Change, and previously cco-director at Moana Project Space and volunteer at Success Arts.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
Bluebird23 is concerned with your wellbeing. How many steps did you take in the office today, did you call your Mother, did you drink enough water, you look tired, did you get enough sleep last night, and the night before that ? R U OK ? Fill out this anonymous survey to get your wellness score. Did you hear what they were saying about you in the lunchroom ? They see you taking notes, they know you’re recording everything, why are you writing this down ? They know that you spend 1 hour each shift to record voice notes in the accessible bathrooms. They know you’re planning to turn this into performance art. How much are you going to tell them ?
During her time at ECC, Grace Connors will develop Bluebird23 a performance part of an ongoing series Running on the smell of an oily rag. This iteration of the series pulls apart job ready welfare systems by providing unsolicited financial advice based on her years working as a debt collector. Bluebird23 pays it forward with humour and hard truths.
CHERYN FROST AND EMMA KEW
Cheryn and Emma are a creative partnership driven by conceptually bold, hyper queer site-specific work. Their practice is rooted in experimental performance and shaped by responsiveness to unconventional spaces. As a duo they have credits across performance, drag, directing, writing, lighting design, curating and producing and have presented work for Performance Space (Queer Development Program), Dark Mofo (Night Mass), Biennale of Sydney (Here Here), Bundanon (Not So: Blue Light Disco), Bondi Festival (Heavy Lifting), MCA (Artist Ball) and The Bearded Tit.
Cheryn and Emma are part of the 2026 Experimental Commissioning Consortium; a new multi-year, multi-organisation initiative that scaffolds independent artists to make ambitious work. In 2025 they were the recipients of the Steven Cummins Residency for Performance Space. As individuals they are also accomplished artists - Cheryn was the recipient of the Moogahlin Performing Arts First Nations Scholarship for the Queer Development Program 2020/2021. Other credits include Queer Woodchop (Liveworks), Brolga: A Queer Koori Wonderland (Performance Space), Volcanoes & Vulvas: The Exploration of My Two Greatest Loves (Redline Productions/The Old Fitz) and Hydraulic Fucking (PACT).
Emma recently presented her sold-out return season of Notes On A Scandal: Folie A Deux (Qtopia Pride Festival) and consistently collaborates with award-winning production companies including ATYP (Straight Panic), film collective, Studio Antics (Venus Baby, Buff, Dykes on Bikes - An Origin Story, Single & Winona) and Stage Mum (Dough!, Truly Madly Britney & I Still Haven't Found What I'm Cooking For).
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
Ride or Die is a queer interdisciplinary performance that explores the death of the heterosexual norm as a gateway to awakening a truer, liberated queerness. Centred around a car, the work turns this symbol of transportation into a space of transformation - a metaphor for the end of heteronormativity and the birth of something new. The vehicle becomes a portal through which we explore life’s rites of passage - first loves, road trips, breakups, coming out and death.
Part interactive installation, part performance, audiences are invited to reimagine the car as a confessional booth, a dance floor, a shrine or a grave, transforming it into a site of intimacy, transition, and revelation.
KATY B PLUMMER
Katy B Plummer is a multimedia artist and educator living and working on unceded Gadigal Land. She makes video installations about ghosts and revolution, using the history of western theatre as a formal and conceptual container for ideas about lineage and empire. Her work announces that history is a haunted stage, and that storytelling and witchcraft are useful strategies to interrupt opressive systems.
Katy has a BFA from UNSW and an MFA from the School of Visual Art, New York.
Katy was the 2024 recipient of the Fishers Ghost Open Art Award for MARGARET AND THE GREY MARE. She also won the 2021 Blake Established Artist Residency Prize. She was a finalist in the 2019 VAFE award at Artspace, and was awarded a 2020 public art commission (WE ARE ALL ASTONISHINGLY WISE) from the City of Sydney. She was the UTS Library’s Creative In Residence for 2022, and in 2024 she was commissioned by MAMAlbury to make IT’S LATE UNDER THE TABLE OF THE WOMEN, an accessible space for families. In 2025 she made THE UBIQUITOUS MYTH OF THE EERIE WIFE for Maitland Regional Gallery, and she is currently engaged in a national tour of MARGARET AND THE GREY MARE.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
Even a Colossus is a multimedia experimental opera incorporating video, installation and live performance. It is both a standalone work and the second in a trilogy of experimental video operas, following Margaret and the Grey Mare.
This trilogy conceives of the stage as a witch’s circle, acknowledging the numinous roots of theatrical storytelling. Theatre aesthetics and theatre-craft are reimagined as tools for magical repair.
Even a Colossus circles art and resistance, asking: How do we build meaning against a backdrop of The System’s ruthlessness? How do we love each other, raise children, make art, conceive of tomorrow as we watch the apocalypse rolling across the world? The work is a witness to the violence The System exports to maintain itself, and to the unstable, conditional safety it promises to those at its core.
Even a Colossus is a spell, a dark ritual with a sliver of light in it: people rise, empires fall, and even a colossus will hang from the rafters of history’s smokehouse.
Katy's Collaborators; Katy B Plummer - lead artist, Sally Whitwell - composer, Kuba Dorabialski - video, Tamara Elkins - choreography, THE PROTAGONIST - Margaret Plummer.
RIANA HEAD-TOUSSAINT
Riana Head-Toussaint is an interdisciplinary crip artist, DJ and curator/community organiser of Afro-Caribbean heritage. Her practice sits at the intersection of creative expression, activism, cultural exchange and disability justice.
Riana creates across choreography, performance, music, film, writing, and installation. Her work is aimed at challenging deep-rooted systems and ways of thinking, driving social change, and creating spaces that invite deeper embodiment and expansive ways of experiencing the world.
Her work has taken place in carparks, post-industrial ruins, raves, galleries, and online/digital spaces. It has been commissioned and presented by a range of institutions and organisations including Human Rights Watch, the Art Gallery of NSW, the Opera House, Buxton Contemporary, Carriageworks, Arts House, the British Council, Soft Centre, Perth Festival, Pari Ari and more.
Riana is also the founder and curator of CRIP RAVE THEORY, a project that draws on crip/disabled knowledge to expand sound and club culture. She is currently living on unceded Wurundjeri Country.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
I am interested in developing a new experimental choreographic project, called DEADSTOCK, which explores and subverts the norms and conventions of the high fashion show, and the fashion industry more broadly. The fashion industry holds immense power to dictate and reinforce cultural narratives and norms around belonging, agency, bodily autonomy, aesthetics, sex appeal, visibility and social capital. Disabled people like myself continue to be almost exclusively locked out of these spaces, and significant barriers are also faced by those who are fat, trans, bla(c)k, etc. I am interested in what could happen if we were to rip some old ways of operating in these spaces to shreds, and sew things back together quite differently...
CHUNG NGUYEN
Chung Nguyen (he/they) is a Vietnamese dance artist, somatic movement facilitator and registered Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapist based in Naarm/Melbourne, with 15 years of international performing experience. His work is situated at the intersection of choreography, live art, and healing through interdisciplinary, embodied, and participatory approaches. His current interests are in the examination of his personal political stories and Queer identity in relation to Vietnamese culture and history - exploring the dialogue between embodied cultural knowledge and new lived experiences within the context of his Australian migrant experience.
Chung’s work explores the liminal relationship between stillness and intensity — where subtle internal shifts generate profound external expression. By blurring boundaries between dance and visual art, he cultivates artistic expressions that resist conventional categorisation. This approach emerged in response to limitations within Vietnam’s contemporary dance landscape, where cultural censorship shapes definitions of what contemporary dance and the moving body can be.
His performances and cross-cultural and interdisciplinary collaborations have been presented at international venues and platforms across Southeast Asia, Australia, the United States and South Korea, including Temperance Hall and Dancehouse (Melbourne), Cont-act Contemporary Dance Festival (Singapore), No Cai Bum Art Week and Performance Plus (Vietnam), American Dance Festival; The International Choreographers Residency (USA), to name just a few.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
Led by Chung Nguyen in collaboration with visual artists James Nguyen, Breathing is Remembering (BiR) is a multiphase, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary project combining multi-channel video installation, live performance, and community engagement.
BiR builds upon Chung's performance project Fluid Memories — which examines his personal Australian migrant journey — extending his artistic research to investigate the shared history of Agent Orange (AO) through local environmental history and multicultural communities.
Through a specifically Vietnamese perspective, the project traces the shifting relationships between bodily memory, displacement, shared trauma, and resilience across refugee and migrant communities in Australia and Vietnam. In doing so, it reframes the legacy of AO not as distant history, but as a living and collective ecological experience — damaging Aboriginal land and absorbed into new migrant bodies, across generations and cultural borders.
