CREATION is an artwork in the form of a queer insurrectionary science fiction climate change religion.
The Dock proudly presents CREATION instigated by artist Deborah Kelly with artistic leaders SJ Norman (Liturgy), Angela Goh (dance), Lex Lindsay (composer), James L. King (costumier), Stereogamous (dance anthem) and Alia Ardon (film).
CREATION seeks to engage with the dream life of humanity to build ambiguous and beautiful practices of collectivity. It aspires to counter assaults on the biosphere with lateral, joyous, grieving, enraged action. Our era demands preposterous thinking, bold experimentation, leaps and loops and flights of faith.
CREATION works with marginalised communities to develop a vivid new belief system. Ways to gather, to commune; a framework for imagining a place in a more than human world. CREATION unfurls through years of collaborations across generations, identities, artforms and places, and changes with each iteration, acquiring songs, congregants, iconography, poems, recipes, rules. In each site, it is made anew.
Liturgy of the Saprophyte
The heart of CREATION is Liturgy of the Saprophyte, brought forth by artist SJ Norman. The eight chapters of the liturgy exist as sacred literature, foundational to the entire work of CREATION. The liturgy grounds the CREATION project in a gothic First Nations sensibility, repudiating settler colonial rapacity and exhorting restoration of Right Relationship. The liturgy guides the iterations of CREATION throughout artforms, across time and space. The Liturgy also forms the spine of a banging new disco anthem by dancefloor godfathers Stereogamous, featuring emerging popstar Lupa J.
For Creation
For Creation is an elaborate contemplation of the great weight, the myriad complexity, the glittering webs enveloping matter and sentience. Combining playful proposition, ardent queerness, elegy and homage, this new moving image artwork forms a call to congregants of CREATION.
Made over three years, around entwined global crises of health, climate and justice, For Creation is animated paper collage constructed from the ruins of obsolete books. In Sydney, Kandos and Darwin, collage workshop participants collectively studied SJ Norman’s glorious Liturgy of the Saprophyte, the new sacred literature at the heart of the CREATION project, and their resulting artworks form figure and field.
Learn the Songs
Brian Fuata made a dynamic chant in response to SJ Norman’s text, and brought it to life in a riveting performance accompanied by Zaya Barroso and Kit Spencer with percussionist James Tawadros. This subtitled performance forms an instructional video sharing Brian's ecstatic, urgent ululations — The Call Upon The Bright Ones.
Composer Lex Lindsay has written music for the poems to render them singable. Two karaoke videos (to date) are ready to teach the first CREATION songs. The CREATION project was blessed by the voices of Eugene Choi, Kit Spencer, Harriet Gillies, Alison Williams, Liza-Mare Syron and Zaya Barroso, featured in the instructional karaoke videos.
Learn the Dance
Led by Sydney-based award-winning dance artist Angela Goh, twenty children and adults worked together to devise the movements of this open-source speculative religion. Through a workshop structure embedded in Performance Space’s 2020 LiveWorks Festival, they embraced an ecstatic week of collective embodiment.
In a lucid instructional video by young auteur Alia Ardon, they take you through the movements gently and firmly. Here you can learn the steps and gestures, and in practicing them you become part of the heart of CREATION.