Gallery

Bland Project

The Bland Project was a performance installation initiated by Alan Schacher in collaboration with Sean Bacon, and four performers Ari Ehrlich, Ryuichi Fujimura, Phillip Mills and Teik-Kim Pok. The first stage of development at the Drill Hall Sydney consisted of four moveable screens attached to four separate wire strands. The performers were able to move the screen left to right, horizontally across the space. There were also screens and screen material that hung against the back wall and around the space. The moving screens, back wall and assorted screens created a fragmented projection surface for four projectors.

The Vehicle Failed to Stop

A multimedia firestorm of live video, live music, ululation and machismo, this combination of verbatim and physical theatre is exhilarating and smart. Version 1.0 have luxuriated in the vastness of the Carriageworks cavern, even opening up a backstage area, which elevates the space to an industrial scale, fitting for a story about unaccountable mercenaries. Video artist Sean Bacon has set three screens in the space: one behind the car, which shows scenes from a moving vehicle through Fallujah streets; a small thin screen on high displaying the source of the various texts and a whopper of a screen on the opposite side. December 12, 2012 by Jessica Keath

seven kilometres north-east

This is a stunningly powerful piece. Vercoe's personal anecdotes, accompanied by Bacon's images and broken into sections by songs from Sladjana Hodzic, take the audience on a journey from beauty into the bowels of humanity. The energy Vercoe brings to this performance is phenomenal and deeply moving. Bacon adds to his impressive resume with a well-chosen series of videos, projected onto the beautifully designed backdrop of the set

Short promo of selected works

Reflections on Gallipoli

Richard Tognetti, director Neil Armfield and deviser Nigel Jamieson have captured the essence of what soldier-poet Wilfred Owen described as “the pity of war, the pity war distilled”. Music, spoken word and images have been woven together in this thoughtfully conceived commemoration. Key to its success is its cosmopolitan outlook, which considers the Turkish experience of Gallipoli as well as the Anglo-Australian one, backed by Sean Bacon’s evocative video designs of contemporary World War I photographs.

This Kind of Ruckus

This Kind Of Ruckus playfully foregrounds recent NRL scandals as the company (Danielle Antaki, Arky Michael, Jane Phegan, Kym Vercoe and David Williams) take up cheerleading poses in front of the curtain. A quick spin and we’re in – not to a footy game, but to a shaggy dog story (very entertainingly related by Vercoe) of late-night aggro on the streets of Newtown, a tale suffused with sexual menace. In another, the bubble-wrap becomes a nightclub where the men perform unruly, simian dance moves while the women strut and grind. Moves are made, not all of them are welcome. Gail Priest’s nagging electronic dance beats combine with video artist Sean Bacon’s split screen mix of live, delayed, and pre-recorded video to powerful effect. 5th September 2009 by Jason Blake

Beautiful One Day

Palm Island, Queensland, 2004. An Aboriginal man dies in police custody. Members of the community make a direct challenge to police power and the police station is torched. Eleven years later, the people of Palm Island continue to demand real justice. “Personal stories from the performer-devisers are married with verbatim interviews with locals, court transcripts and re-enactments. Fluid sound and visuals seamlessly integrate historical photographs and footage with images of Palm Island today – a tropical ”paradise” that appears at odds with the painful events that have occurred there” – Rebecca Harkins-Cross, The Age, 2013 “Beautiful One Day is a work that demonstrates how effective that link between the artistic and the political can be. It’s theatre that matters. It’s a work where the politics are enriched by the art and the art is enriched by the politics Sean Bacon’s audio-visual design brings images, audio and footage from Palm Island, relayed via four large screens at the back of the stage. When accompanied by the rich and descriptive dialogue, the audience gets a strong sense of both the beauty and the pain co-existing on the island.” – Ben Neutze, Crikey, 2013

" Sean Bacon is an artist at the vanguard of using video and camera technology on the theatre stage."

Elissa Blake

The Maids

Sydney Theatre Company's Maids is a radiant production. TO bring together two actors of such greatness is wonderful but to bring them together in such a play as this is brilliant. Genet's unsettling 1947 existentialist drama about two maids, Claire (Cate Blanchett) and Solange (Isabelle Huppert), who play out their fantasies of abjection and domination, is full of layers. In their little acted-out "ceremony", Claire plays Madame and Solange plays Claire (at least this time) but the theatrical levels are always shifting, flickering back and forth between different realities that are, in the end, all performances, like the theatre and like our lives. And there is the fact that we are watching Blanchett and Huppert in magnificent, tour-de-force performances. They are celebrities as well as great actors and this layer - just watching them strut their stuff - becomes part of the fabric of the production. Add Elizabeth Debicki (who played Jordan Baker in the recent film The Great Gatsby) as an almost offensively young, beautiful, stupid and cruel Madame and we see Genet's squalid drama of dreams and play-acting lifted into a different realm. Sean Bacon has designed and operates a live video feed, screened hugely above the stage, that peers into the actors' faces and movements from outside the walls, like paparazzi snaps but more luminous and revealing. The music by Oren Ambarchi is like the score of a movie, by turns heightening and lowering the mood in a frankly manipulative way. • JOHN MCCALLUM • THE AUSTRALIAN JUNE 09, 2013 3:37PM

The Return of Ulysses

Monteverdi's psychologically accurate vision of war-torn lives is a masterpiece

There was great depth of talent - young and old - in the many supporting roles, whose beautifully and richly observed quotidien activity, spread all over the stage, was videoed and relayed on two large screens (video design: Sean Bacon). There was Ruby Hughes as the mesmerising puppet-master Minerva (who unnervingly shadows Penelope throughout the opera), Samuel Boden as a fantastically lyrical and knuckle-headed suitor Anfinomo and Thomas Hobbs in a touching turn as Ulysses's son, Telemaco. Outstanding among the older cast members were Diana Montague's phlegmatic old nurse, Ericlea, and Nigel Robson's sympathetic, but never ingratiating, everyman, Eumete. Hobbs deserves particular praise for his part in the second most moving moment of the night: the stunningly quiet reunion with his father Ulysses (Tom Randle). What Andrews seems to have realised is that, 400 years before the rise of the contemporary docu-opera, at the dawn of this fragile new art form, here in Monteverdi's The Return of Ulysses is a fully formed psychologically accurate testament to the real world in all its detailed glory. Andrews figures of myth live and breath. They talk to the nature of personal relations in a state at war better than anything else I have seen. The emotions ring true, the activity quickens the pulse, the words strike the heart. And the result is a masterpiece. By Igor Toronyi-LalicFriday, 25 March 2011

Truckstop

TRUCK STOP is a very interesting and signifying work. It is a powerful searchlight into some 'lane ways' of our society. Rarely engaged in so 'full on', especially with the transgressors, being, of the female gender - (THE BOYS?) - and so even more immensely challenging. The Q Theatre ought to be congratulated for taking it on and bringing it into a limelight. The Seymour Theatre Production arm for bringing it into Sydney for more 'airing'. The depth of preparation by this artistic team is extremely evident. The three young actors give frighteningly believable performances: Eryn Jean Norvill as Sam, the 'really angry' girl; Jessica Tovey as Kelly, the 'disaffected girl' and Sam's best friend; and Kristy Best as Aisha, a newcomer, not only to bonding with these girls, but also as a recent immigrant from Bangladesh, to this 'Austrayian' cultural milieu - a voyager on a journey as strange to her as it is to some of us, perhaps - a whole new territory, world of behaviour. Elena Carapetis, deftly and with great subtlety captures, iconically, all of the other characters, both female and male, across a wide generation age gap, convincingly and apparently, effortlessly. The Set Design by Michael Hankin, is both wonderfully practical and metaphoric, a concrete, and a detailed weed infested, play area, fenced in, protected, by metallic school outdoor seating. Lit well by Chris Page and backed by an active background of Video images by Sean Bacon, the locations of the story shift easily and unobtrusively. The Direction by Katrina Douglas, impassioned and controlled. All elements become an impressive whole. Kevin Jackson, Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Goldner String Quartet

"Goldner String Quartet review: Homage paid, over and over, with devotion and skill"

Goldner String Quartet City Recital Hall Angel Place, May 3 Spirits of honoured ancestors hovered benignly behind this concert: Richard Goldner, violist and zip inventor who founded Music Viva in a blacked-out concert in 1945 and whose name the Goldner Quartet honours; Ken Tribe, lawyer, Musica Viva founding father and tireless worker for music in Sydney for whose contribution the concert was a celebration; and composer Peter Sculthorpe, whose posthumous birthday last week was marked with a brief encore. Performed before projected images designed by Sean Bacon, the program was vintage Musica Viva: a strong modernist work, Ligeti's Metamorphoses nocturnes paying homage to Bartok; a fine new Australian quartet by Paul Stanhope, and a late Beethoven quartet underscoring the foundational Viennese heritage that has shaped Musica Viva over the past 70 years. Peter McCallum May 5, 2015

Measure for Measure

DENSE with ideas, spiked with technology, claustrophobically staged and blackly funny, Benedict Andrews's production has Shakespeare's ever-perplexing play speaking of, and to, the present. Cameras wielded by actors, secreted behind mirrors or housed in a casino-style surveillance bubble nose into intimate scenes. People are caught with their pants down, literally and metaphorically. When the disguised Duke Vincentio speaks the lines "millions of false eyes are stuck upon thee", he's not exaggerating. It's a powerful tool and well used, in the main. We're treated to close-ups, reverse angles, reaction shots. The scene between Isabella and Claudio in his death-row cell is probed mercilessly - almost pornographically. Indeed, the very act of filming it seems to cue the desperate sexual lunge from the traumatised Claudio. Operating simultaneously as stage and screen actors, the cast is uniformly excellent. Jason Blake , June 11, 2010

The Glass Menagerie

Tennessee Williams’ semi-autobiographical memory play The Glass Menagerie is undoubtedly one of the greatest theatrical works of the 20th century, and is performed time and again. Flack’s largely faithful staging uses video cameras surrounding the apartment, which relay black and white video footage of the performances to two large screens on either side of the stage. It’s a theatrical device that’s been used in Sydney a fair bit lately (Benedict Andrews used live broadcast in both The Maids for Sydney Theatre Company and Measure for Measure at Belvoir), but it’s executed perfectly here (Sean Bacon serves as video design consultant), creating a dual emotional experience — somehow what we see on stage is more romantic on film. Which is closer to the truth? The film is enhanced by title cards and Stefan Gregory’s atmospheric, mournful compositions. BY BEN NEUTZE

The Table of Knowledge

At the centre of the story is the young Wollongong Council town planner, Beth Morgan, who slept with local developer Frank Vellar, received gifts and fast-tracked his development approvals. The ''Table of Knowledge'' was located at a local kebab shop which would be the site of many unofficial meetings between developers and high-ranking council staff. With Version 1.0's signature style of blending video, multimedia and re-enactments, they not only revisit the systemic corruption but also capture the extreme personal toll it had on all those caught up in the scandal. It's a tragic story told with sensitivity, humour and a healthy scepticism that's infectious. For a company that has already presented works on sexual violence in sport, the Australian Wheat Board inquiry and Australia's involvement in Iraq, this is yet another production that proves that good political theatre can activate and anger audiences. Nicholas Pickard, SMH, September 4, 2011

Deeply Offensive & Utterly Untrue

As we enter, the video screens present both a truth and a disclaimer: "Every word in this performance is true." In Version 1.0's artfully abridged version of the Cole Inquiry's 8500 pages of transcript, the spoken words are faithfully reanimated. It's the non-verbal performance, the stuff enacted and screened and represented while the lawyerly exchanges are accurately intoned, which provide the commentary that is the content. Version 1.0 has recently specialised in a sub-genre of the verbatim - inquiry theatre - and this is its most assured work yet. The skills and environment here (more concise condensation of material into digestible nuggets, superb video from Sean Bacon, a more defined and coherent physical language) result in the tightest and most pointed work the company has mounted. Stephen Dunne, reviewer SMH, August 24, 2007