Artistic Statement
by Jenny Kemp
Black Sequin Productions creates performance works that investigate the human psyche and its ability to function creatively in a contemporary world.
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
Call of the Wild | Remember | The Black Sequin Dress | Still Angela | Kitten | Madeleine
About Black Sequin Productions
We inhabit the ‘everyday’ world but carry within ourselves an extensive ‘inner world’.
See Jenny Kemp speaking at The Wheeler Centre in 2011.
Statement by Jenny Kemp Artistic Director of Black Sequin Productions.
Black Sequin Productions include both the world and Australian premiere productions of new plays written and directed by Jenny Kemp - Artistic Director of Black Sequin Productions. Productions presented by BSP have spanned the disciplines of drama, dance/movement, music/sound, visual art and film, with a highly creative, core group of award winning artists. Black Sequin Productions seek to investigate the psyche and its ability to function creatively in a contemporary world. Memory, dream, fantasy, myth, and desire are presented as integral and catalytic elements within that functioning. It is the potential for the development of a more creative and productive dynamic with these elements within the psyche that is the specific focus of these works
Innovation
In seeking to develop a new (and female) dramaturgy that may provide a viable alternative to theatrical forms based on patriarchal worldviews, Black Sequin Productions have suggested new relationships between inner and outer reality. The intention in these works is to liberate the audience from the usual dramatic constraints - particularly those of time – in order to provoke an associative engagement with image, action, text and sound. The discontinuous narrative in each work serves to capture the progress of plotlines that simultaneously more forward through time and downwards into the extraordinary psychic resonances of any one moment. The perception of reality, the use of language and the unfolding of time are all destabilized, as memory, imagination, myth and fantasy are given equal status to any concept of social reality. The works employ cyclical time frames and repetition to provoke a meditative response – enabling the audience the time and space to establish more creative connections. These shifts in ‘ways of engaging’ with the performance offer the audience a foundation for a shift in ways of perceiving the world, and hopefully suggest the terms for a re-engagement of the self with that world.
Critical Acclaim
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.
Artists
BSP artists include - Green Room Award winners Jacqueline Everitt, David Murray, Helen Herbertson and Jenny Kemp. A.F.I. and A.G.S.C. Award winner Elizabeth Drake. Kemp and Herbertson have also both been recipients of two year Australia Council Fellowships, and Kemp, the Kenneth Myer Medallion for Performing Arts.
From – The Doll’s Revolution by Rachel Fensham and Denise Varney.
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)
Acts of Resistance in Late-Modernist Theatre by Richard Murphet.
Jenny Kemp’s theatre, demonstrates her own deep dissatisfaction with the narrow frame that society places upon the untapped reservoir of human individuality, and in particular the ways in which a patriarchal social order has restricted the potentiality of female subjectivity. And, in that sense, individual beings and their theatrical representation as ‘characters’ are of prime importance for her. However, her endeavour has entailed a thoroughgoing critique of the primarily social dimension of realist characters, engaged as they are in struggles within the social domain. She seeks to substitute instead a constantly opening revelation of a woman-in-process …. She seeks to track constant slippage between the subjective and the objective: that is, to track both the ways in which the outside world collides with an individual’s internal state of being, and the effect that an individual’s internal journey has upon her ways of perceiving that world.
See Jenny Kemp speaking at The Wheeler Centre in 2011.
Statement by Jenny Kemp Artistic Director of Black Sequin Productions.
Black Sequin Productions include both the world and Australian premiere productions of new plays written and directed by Jenny Kemp - Artistic Director of Black Sequin Productions. Productions presented by BSP have spanned the disciplines of drama, dance/movement, music/sound, visual art and film, with a highly creative, core group of award winning artists. Black Sequin Productions seek to investigate the psyche and its ability to function creatively in a contemporary world. Memory, dream, fantasy, myth, and desire are presented as integral and catalytic elements within that functioning. It is the potential for the development of a more creative and productive dynamic with these elements within the psyche that is the specific focus of these works
Innovation
In seeking to develop a new (and female) dramaturgy that may provide a viable alternative to theatrical forms based on patriarchal worldviews, Black Sequin Productions have suggested new relationships between inner and outer reality. The intention in these works is to liberate the audience from the usual dramatic constraints - particularly those of time – in order to provoke an associative engagement with image, action, text and sound. The discontinuous narrative in each work serves to capture the progress of plotlines that simultaneously more forward through time and downwards into the extraordinary psychic resonances of any one moment. The perception of reality, the use of language and the unfolding of time are all destabilized, as memory, imagination, myth and fantasy are given equal status to any concept of social reality. The works employ cyclical time frames and repetition to provoke a meditative response – enabling the audience the time and space to establish more creative connections. These shifts in ‘ways of engaging’ with the performance offer the audience a foundation for a shift in ways of perceiving the world, and hopefully suggest the terms for a re-engagement of the self with that world.
Critical Acclaim
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.
Artists
BSP artists include - Green Room Award winners Jacqueline Everitt, David Murray, Helen Herbertson and Jenny Kemp. A.F.I. and A.G.S.C. Award winner Elizabeth Drake. Kemp and Herbertson have also both been recipients of two year Australia Council Fellowships, and Kemp, the Kenneth Myer Medallion for Performing Arts.
From – The Doll’s Revolution by Rachel Fensham and Denise Varney.
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)
Acts of Resistance in Late-Modernist Theatre by Richard Murphet.
Jenny Kemp’s theatre, demonstrates her own deep dissatisfaction with the narrow frame that society places upon the untapped reservoir of human individuality, and in particular the ways in which a patriarchal social order has restricted the potentiality of female subjectivity. And, in that sense, individual beings and their theatrical representation as ‘characters’ are of prime importance for her. However, her endeavour has entailed a thoroughgoing critique of the primarily social dimension of realist characters, engaged as they are in struggles within the social domain. She seeks to substitute instead a constantly opening revelation of a woman-in-process …. She seeks to track constant slippage between the subjective and the objective: that is, to track both the ways in which the outside world collides with an individual’s internal state of being, and the effect that an individual’s internal journey has upon her ways of perceiving that world.
Publications
For texts and online streaming please go to the Online Access page.
Black Sequin Productions have generously been supported by:
Australia Council
Arts Victoria
City of Melbourne
Malthouse Theatre
Playbox
Melbourne International Festival for the Arts.
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.
Black Sequin Productions have generously been supported by:
Australia Council
Arts Victoria
City of Melbourne
Malthouse Theatre
Playbox
Melbourne International Festival for the Arts.
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.