Ron Seeto is an independent Brisbane based contemporary performance maker and performer. Ron will present ‘Breach’ as part of Brisbane Emerging Art Festival 2013.

You are trained to kill. Passionately at times but also dispassionately. Aggression is now a switch to flicked. Conflict is the job you signed up for and now you are one of the very few individuals gifted with the legal responsibility of killing. You are an arbiter of death. You may fight and you may kill. Until your time is up that is and then you are back in society proper. You are no longer an arbiter but death does not leave you. How can it?

Breach is a hybridised (theatre+dance+stage combat) performance work investigating contemporary military training techniques and the field of killology - the study of the psychological and physiological effects of killing and combat on the human psyche. How does the military turn well adjusted violence-fearing civilians into soldiers ready to fight and possibly die or kill for their country? Inspired by the director’s (Ron Seeto) own personal experience in the Australian Infantry and verbatim accounts from soldiers around the world, Breach asks the age old question: Could you kill someone?

Breach is a first development showing and may contain disturbing imagery.

Image: Inter/nality (2011)

Jamie is a Brisbane based Physical Theatre Performer who has performed Nationally and Internationally since graduating from High School in 2006. His career has been strongly associated with Zen Zen Zo Physical Theatre Company, with whom he has performed in Europe, New Zealand, and Asia. Credits include; Zeitgeist – a Butoh show that received over 20 five star reviews worldwide (2008/09/10), The Tempest – performing alongside Grin and Tonic’s Brian Nason (2009). The Golden Show – Performed in Japan, directed by Takuya Marumatsu (2009), Cabaret – Performed at QPAC and received several Matilda Awards (2011), performances in Queensland Ballet’s Swan Lake (2009/10/11) and The Bolshoi Ballet’s Le Corsaire (2013) and much more. Jamie has also performed alongside professional solo artists such as Emma Dean and Amanda Palmer. Jamie is currently performing in a Queensland Schools Touring show with Wilde Applause.

Tobias Heart will be Jamie’s debut show as a Director, after working as co-director for many school shows over the past 5 years in association with Zen Zen Zo Physical Theatre.

Tobias Heart is the story of a boy who was born with a heart too big. Literally.

Side-effects include; loving unconditionally, not being able to say no and a light that shines through his chest from his heart.
Tobias is looking for someone he can spend the rest of his life with, which can be difficult when the people he meets can feel things like doubt, fear and resentment.
The moon tells him that he “must find someone in the world who is capable of a love that is bigger than their heart.”
Simple enough, right?

Cast: Jamie Kendall, Melissa Budd and Merlynn Tong

Jamie will present ‘Tobias Heart’ in the theatre rehearsal space at Brisbane Emerging Art Festival

Stephen Quinn works within the form of contemporary hybrid performance. His primary training is in contemporary performance, traditional theatre, physical theatre and visual art. Over the past five years, hr has been involved in theatre in many different roles: performer, designer, director, writer and producer.

Stephen will be presenting a development work for Brisbane Emerging Art Festival called ‘Yellow’. Yellow, draws on Charlotte Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1982), to pursue the question, What causes us to break? Yellow exists in a space of flux; its world is in constant transformation. It flows between mind and body, dream and reality, sanity and insanity. This world forces us, the audience, to sit in the discordant relationship between mind and body and deal with the historical treatment of the mentally insane and the continued lack of knowledge in contemporary sciences understanding of psychological disorders.

Yellow promises a contemporary theatre experience beyond linear narrative psychology with a visual and kinetic through line that is tailored for a modern audience.