by Jenny Kemp
Black Sequin Productions creates performance works that investigate the human psyche and its ability to function creatively in a contemporary world.
To visit a production page click one of the links below.
Call of the Wild | Remember | The Black Sequin Dress | Still Angela | Kitten | Madeleine
About Black Sequin Productions
‘…as you walk down the street you see the real world but feel aware of an inner world..’
See Jenny Kemp speaking at The Wheeler Centre in 2011
Black Sequin Productions attempt a dialogue with this disjunction. Based on the premise that any ordinary action has extraordinary resonances, our intention is to liberate the audience from the usual constraints of linear time and provoke an imaginative and associative engagement with image, action, text and sound.
Black Sequin Productions seek to challenge conventional theatre forms. We span the disciplines of drama, dance/movement, music/sound and film with a highly creative, core group of award winning artists including:
A.F.I. and A.G.S.C. Award winner Elizabeth Drake and Green Room Award winners Jacqueline Everitt, David Murray, Helen Herbertson and Jenny Kemp. Kemp and Herbertson have also both been recipients of two year Australia Council Fellowships, and Kemp, the Kenneth Myer Medallion for Performing Arts.
Black Sequin Productions have been creating highly acclaimed, ground-breaking performance works for almost two decades, including works for The Melbourne International Arts Festival, Kitten, Adelaide International Festival for the Arts, The Black Sequin Dress, and The Spoleto Festival (now Melbourne International Festival for the Arts) The Call of the Wild. And Still Angela toured nationally with Performing Lines and MOBILE STATES.
From – The Doll’s Revolution by Rachel Fensham
Jenny Kemp’s theatre is less about a political revolution in which the writer takes up arms against gender inequality and political injustice and more about a poetic revolution in which expanded conditions of possibility for the psyche, particularly for women, are the key to cultural transformation. This poetic revolution takes place first of all in the imagination where the association of images to words, in bodies and space, resonate. Through figures such as a woman dancing with a skeleton, or a train guard singing a serenade, Kemp’s theatre sets out to navigate between two worlds, the material everyday and the symbolic universe.
Surprise shifts in setting, mood, and tempo connect figures in familiar places, such as a kitchen, yet unfamiliar settings, such as a rocky plain and time is no longer sequential, but appears to be caught between the past, present and future. The mis en scene admits fragments, contradictions and ambiguities and each character belongs to story, dream or myth more than any given reality. (Fensham 2005: 64)
Publications:
All the performance texts have all been published and the videos and a documentary of Black Sequin Productions have been released through Contemporary Arts Media.
Black Sequin Productions have generously been supported by:
Australia Council
Arts Victoria
City of Melbourne
Malthouse Theatre
Playbox
Melbourne International Festival for the Arts. (no logo but put in wording)
Note: The Lady in the Water image featured in the header was taken in 1947 by fashion photographer Toni Frissell. For more context click here.