I am a performance creator and performance artist working across the terrain of dance, installation, theatre and architecture. My projects have been realised in large-scale ensemble performance, solo dance, video, installations and actions, where the body and its inherited and accumulated history remain primary. I live in the World Heritage region of the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, Australia with my partner, performer WeiZen Ho, and our two children.

Alan Schacher An artist whose themes include global human movement, architectural experience and the performativity of public space, his oeuvre is visceral, non-narrative and non-didactic. Offering viewers multiple readings of undercurrents drawn from cultural and diasporic landscapes (both imagined and inherited) the performances can take the form of fictitious ritualised ceremony. They attempt to eke out the essence of site, materials and objects in relation to and with the performer’s body, the situation, and memory of place. He is driven to provoke, employing juxtapositions, contradictions and misfits. Exploiting the roles architecture and the built environment take in framing and containing human activity, he structures it to be be witnessed as performative. His works address a post-holocaust legacy, placing the performer in the role of outsider, impacted by unseen pressures, tasks and rules, creating rituals of and for place and time. He conceives of diaspora as a web, a contemporary and historical global condition calling to question any possibility of home-land. Recent solo performances are pared down, employing everyday materials such as sheets and rolls of paper, shoes, sugar cubes, eggs, spices, coloured water, simple found acoustic props, a bed-sheet or blanket. Using these he provokes relational images that establish the position of the body in culture. This visceral approach to the human condition sets both performer and spectator adrift. Founder of seminal Sydney-based Performance Ensemble Gravity Feed (1992 to 2004) and of Gravity Research Institute (2000-2019). Since 2010 he collaborates with WeiZen Ho in performances that enter the domains of ritual and spirit, investigating processes of transformation and intercultural archetypal transference.

Acknowledgements

The Blue Mountains in which I live are the traditional lands of the Dharug and Gundungurra peoples.

Thanks to the many friends, family, collaborators, performers, composers, video and photographic artists, technicians, administrators, venue and festival directors, mentors and teachers, who have given me support and sustenance over the years. Notably the photographers and videographers. Without their documentation, enthusiasm and support this archive would not exist. In Australia photographers Heidrun Löhr, Mayu Kanamori, David Brazil, Vsevolod Vlaskine and others….. and videographers: Peter Oldham, Michelle Mahrer, Sean Bacon, Samuel James, and many others. In Malaysia photographers include Steve Chong, Rizduan Rasheed and Chia Soo-Chin.

Website design: Ian Hobbs / Image editing and digital archiving : David Brazil