Let’s Go Up Here

Part painting class, part intimate performance

Let’s Go Up Here is an experimental, participatory performance created by Alice Will Caroline, the collaborative trio of Alice Dixon, Caroline Meaden and William McBride. Premiering at Arts House's Festival of Live Art in March 2018, the work brought together painting, choreography, sound, theatrical spectacle and audience participation.

Exploring shifting power dynamics and varying degrees of audience agency, it unfolds as a durational painting workshop, participatory picnic, and performance spectacle. Audiences are guided, sometimes gently, sometimes forcibly, through a mysterious, evolving landscape, where amateurism is embraced. The studio process and resulting work drew on Bob Ross painting tutorials and other modes of naïve artistic experiments of the 1980s and 1990s. Kevin Lo’s sound design layered in radio-like recordings of our retired parents recounting their hobbies—lists of paint colours, flower species, knitting stitches, and caravan pantry supplies. The work also dealt with themes of mass production and the commodification of the Australian landscape.

Let’s Go Up Here could be understood as a form of expanded choreography in which instructions, social interactions, gestures, visual composition and the manipulation of spectatorship become choreographic material.

Let’s Go Up Here

CREATIVE TEAM
Creators and Performers: Alice Dixon, Caroline Meaden, William McBride
Sound Designer: Kevin Lo
Lighting Designer: Amelia Lever-Davidson
Set and Costume Construction: Ross Dixon, Margaret O’Donohue

Producer: Erin Milne, Bureau of Works

DOCUMENTATION
Video Direction and Production: Mischa Baka
Photography: Bryony Jackson

PERFORMANCE HISTORY
Festival of Live Art, Arts House, Melbourne, 2018