Arts Centre Melbourne & Australian Art Orchestra Present Meeting Points Series 2018-2019

After the success of its premiere season, Meeting Points Series returns with a line-up of never-before-seen works, electrifying improvisations and cross-cultural collaborations for its latest program.

This intimate concert series has been curated by renowned trumpeter, composer and Artistic Director of the Australian Art Orchestra, Peter Knight. It features cutting-edge artists from Australia and Asia accompanied by Australia's leading contemporary music ensemble, the Australian Art Orchestra.

Exclusively for this series, hidden spaces throughout Arts Centre Melbourne will be transformed into intimate pop-up venues. From secluded rehearsal rooms to historic foyers and the famed Fairfax Studio - no two concerts are alike.

The Meeting Points Series is a creative collaboration between the Australian Art Orchestra and Arts Centre Melbourne.

Hand to Earth is a world premiere and begins the series on Sunday 23 September 2018. It showcases a number of new international partnerships initiated by the Australian Art Orchestra through its Creative Music Intensive residency held each year in the Southern Highlands of Tasmania. These collaborations approach music making through an organic process that uses improvisation as its connective tissue.

The International Artists featured in Hand to Earth include one of Korea's leading jazz vocalists, Sunny Kim who lived in New York for many years and has worked with leading artists from around the world. In this intimate concert, her soaring vocals will be paired with those of song men Daniel and David Wilfred, who are bringing their manikay traditions from the Yolngu homelands of North-Eastern Arnhem Land.

Sunny is known for drawing together musicians from Korean shamanic traditions, contemporary jazz and electronica to create new music that reflects the vibrancy of contemporary Australia - a vision that is truly borderless and post-genre.

Originally developed as a multi-speaker installation during a residency in Kerala in Southern India, im/modesty with Mapping Melbourne (Multicultural Arts Victoria) will premiere on Sunday 9 December 2018, as a live performance work featuring Shoeb Ahmad. The three-part text narrative inspired by the cultural barriers people from the Indian sub-continent face when exploring their sexuality is the premise.

This ground-breaking work features text spoken by three voices in different stages of life, interspersed with electronic music and atmospheric recordings from the streets of India.

Shoeb is many things to the Australian artistic landscape - songwriter, guitarist, artist, improviser, curator, and facilitator. Proudly identifying as a person of Bangladeshi heritage and a transgender woman, Shoeb's artistic practice has her known for exploring deeply personal experiences and vulnerabilities, in an evocative mix of acoustic and electronic indie-pop.

Integrating hip-hop and traditional Japanese court music within a contemporary jazz sensibility is Umi no uzu, meaning 'stirring the oceans' - a mythical, irreverent, innovative and deeply groovy piece taking to the stage on Sunday 3 February 2019.

This work consists of six-movements that tell the creation story of Japan. The diverse influences it brings together are focused through the creative lens of the composer/pianist/beat maker, Aaron Choulai. Aaron has been commissioned to create a new 50-minute musical work that will be set to a video collage of Japan created by renowned Fukuoka-based artist, designer and label head Popy Oil (Oilworks). It also features Tokyo-based hip-hop icon Kojo, famous for his work in both the Japan and New York hip-hop scenes.

Now in its 24th year, the Australian Art Orchestra (AAO) is one of Australia's leading contemporary music ensembles. Formed in 1994 by Paul Grabowsky, it has been led since 2013 by renowned trumpeter/composer, Peter Knight. With an emphasis on improvisation AAO explores the meeting points between disciplines and cultures, and imagines new musical forms to reflect the energy and diversity of 21st century Australia. The group draws on a pool of players trained in jazz and classical approaches, and uses improvisation as an 'interlingua' to create musical connections with artists from other cultures, in particular with the Yolgnu people from Ngukurr in north east Arnhem Land and various Asian countries including Korea and Japan.

Find out more about Australian Art Orchestra at aao.com.au

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