News and Events

A portrait of me by photographer Michael Shirley is exhibited in the Blue Mountains Portraits Exhibition at Blue Mountains Cultural Centre Gallery, Katoomba, NSW, Australia.

As part of the series of ‘PUNK STUDIO’ Performances, for “What is Post Formalism - La Vie Ensemble” by Billy Gruner and Sarah Keighery : Sun Oct 9 1.30pm, Alan Schacher (performance) 2.30pm, Ben Denham (sound - Alvin Lucier homage). Articulate Project Space, Leichhardt, Sydney

I will be performing my work Sweet Separation on Saturday 1st October as part of Newcastle’s The Little Festival. It’s going to be a big weekend in Newcastle with the New Annual Festival as the hub for many activities. If you are going to be in Newcastle this weekend swing by and say hello ! This will be the third time I have performed this work. Sweet Separation is a durational work in which I use my own body weight in Turkish sugar cubes to construct a tiny separation wall between myself and the public. Thinking of the bitter walls that divide lives such as between Israel and Palestine and the USA and Mexico, I am constructing a sweet folly over which we can discuss migration experiences. You are welcome to help build the walls too.

Location: Kuwumi Place, 666 Hunter Street, Newcastle NSW.

Hours : 10am to 4pm / Date: Saturday 1 October 2022

Following undertaking walks with a series of volunteers, Alan Schacher and WeiZen Ho will lead a short series of 2 x 2-day workshops at Springwood Theatre in The Blue Mountains. To be held on Monday and Tuesday 5th + 6th and 12th + 13th September 2022 (10am to 4pm each day). These workshops will assist walker-participants to transform the walking experience and the memories that have surfaced into movement and object based motifs. This process will be assisted remotely by renowned artist Mella Jaarsma, based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The workshops will culminate in a public talk and participatory procession outdoors from 1pm at the Springwood Theatre Hub on Saturday 17th September 2022.

We are also asking previous walkers to lead a group on a walk on Saturdays 3rd and 10th September.

For the 2022 Keir Choreographic Award Alan Schacher and WeiZen Ho are performing a new work Evaporative Body, Multiplying Body in an exploration of tremulous bodily states, liminal thresholds and shimmering auras which asks : What will happen if the things we are pretending to do actually manifest? They are collaborating with video artist/lighting designer Fausto Brusamolino and noise/sound artist Hirofumi Unchino. To be performed 23-25 June at Dancehouse, Melbourne and 30 June - 2 July at Carriageworks, Sydney. https://carriageworks.com.au/events/keir-choreographic-award-2022/

Alan Schacher and WeiZen Ho have been awarded a 2022 Research Residency by Critical Path, a Choreographic Research Centre based in Rushcutters Bay, Sydney. Together with researcher Dr Phillip Mar they have initiated a community engagement and artistic project that is very much grounded in the Blue Mountains, where they live. As part their research project titled What Persists, they are inviting local residents to share a favourite walking route in nature or town.  It could be around a few local streets, a bushwalk, or perhaps a walk further away where they grew up or used to live. Somewhere that has meaning for them and has significance in their lives.   Talking with people about the significance of their walk will be the beginning of investigations into place and public space, and how place can be engendered through community. Further discussions and working groups will focus on ways of devising a social choreography based on symbols that persist in the individual’s memory. Memory Walks will explore walking in the different ways that it activates body memories. In parallel they are working in an exchange process with collaborators in Indonesia : Artist Mella Jaarsma and curator and researcher Mira Asriningtyas.

Decade Show | per.doc Opening Event Date: Saturday Feb 5th 2-5pm Performances 3pm : Alan Schacher, Kit Bylett, Katya Petetskaya

Exhibition from Feb 4th until Feb 20th Open 11am - 5pm | Fri-Sun

Venue: Articulate Project Space 497 Parramatta Rd, Leichhardt. Sydney

I am exhibiting an installation titled Disrupted Histories and will present a performance at the opening of Articulate’s fourth Decade Show, which features some of the performances and associated projects artists have undertaken at APS over the past 10 years.

A temporary artists’ collective based around WeiZen Ho’s thematic including:

Chris Caines, sound

Damian Castaldi, audiovisual percussive installation 

WeiZen Ho, concept initiator and performance deviser

Naomi Oliver, digital video, animation, sound and performance

Michael Petchkovsky, electronic media

Alan Schacher, installation and performance/activation

PLUS Laura Altman (clarinet) with guest artists

In 2019 Critical Path invited me to join the 2nd year of the Dancing Sydney Archiving Project. I called for “unspoken” contributions and am still assembling them into an audio/video work for online presentation. This research project seeks to address ephemerality – its potentials and its problems – by finding, creating and reinvigorating old and new, public and private dance archives: not only the kind that exist in ephemera, text and objects, but also those that are produced and maintained within/through the body dancing. I attempted to find a common thread in the unspoken spaces that connect and differentiate us.

This video project celebrates the picnic heydays of Blue Mountains tourism. The scenes are staged inside some of the historical faux rock shelters of Katoomba and Leura, built around 1935 by Tom Adam.

In this performance I perform with reams of white A4 paper in a set where everything is lost and nothing is retrievable. A 360VR video work made for and with Theatre Kantanka for the New Realities series. Invited to make a work during the Covid lockdown I thought of a vertical tunnel of swirling paper. A new series will be posted online soon ! Best viewed with occulus headset.

In this exhibition artists show documentation of past single-installations made at Articulate over the past decade. For Dividing/Line I introduced steel site fencing to dissect and disrupt the venue’s function as gallery and workspace. Channeling all walls that separate, I patrolled the site as a security guard. Articulate Project Space, 497 Parramatta Rd, Leichhardt, Sydney. 28 Nov - 13 Dec 2020 , Fri-Sun 11am - 5pm

In this performance I will hand shred A4 sheets of black paper into a mound at my feet, reducing the black square. Conjointly, WeiZen Ho will perform “A Kind of Divination”, performing throughout the venue with lengths of red string. Performance for the opening event of WEST Projects Parramatta, and as part of the opening exhibition: 1st Biennale of International Reductive and Non-Objective Art, Sydney. Venue: The Stores Building, adjacent to Old Parramatta Gaol entrance, via corner of New & Dunlop Strees, then down left side lane top Darling Mill Creek.

NEWS UPDATE: I was the winner of the 2019 edition ! I am performing DELTA as an entry in Stonevilla Studios’ annual wearable art prize. This is a windy outdoor event held in a popular party-like atmosphere on a catwalk in the backyard of an old two storey villa. Venue: rear entrance, 19 Railway Parade, Sydenham, Sydney.

A performance for The Moon Bar, part of the Willoughby Visual Arts Biennal 2019 - The Tenacious Realm.

We weave and collide between shifting realities, employing subtle tools to navigate between realms. Cleaving to dreams, hopes, fears and diverse realities, our method of divination seeks to make visible the images that persist. The glass walls of the Concourse serve as veiled passages through to other worlds.

I am performing You Don’t Know Me From a Bar of Soap a durational 6 hour work for [dis]connection Performance Art Event at Scratch Art Space, Sydney. I’m working with a new topic around soap and what it means to us. As always there is a deeper thematic. Its essentially a one-on-one work, though I’ll also be carving soap. So if you wish, I will soap you, literally, wash any part of your body you choose to offer. But here’s the rub: I only deal in used soap. So what is it that we shall attempt to wash away today?

16 artists over 6 hours : 11am to 5pm

A live performance for Art Month as part of the Waterloo-Green Square precinct night.

Venue: Green Square Library, 355 Botany Road, Zetland Thursday 14th March 2019
6pm-8pm

Featuring: Jim Denley : wind instruments Luiz Gabriel Gubeissi : double bass WeiZen Ho : performer Linda Luke : performer/ dancer Phillippa Murphy-Haste : clarinets and viola Alan Schacher : performer Hirofumi Uchino (Defektro) : handmade instruments and electronics

I have participated in several of deQuincey Co’s Impro-Exchange Laboratories. I am joining again on the weekend of 8th-10th March 2019. If you are free, come along to the improvised performance showing on Sunday 10th March at 2pm with drinks and casual discussion after.

Venue: Glebe Town Hall, 160 St John’s Road, Glebe, Sydney.

[http://dequinceyco.net/research-overview/impro-exchange/]

A new pilot site-specific performance event in Bangkok, Thailand. Curated by Dr Mike Hornblow and Ploy Yamtree. The event is situated in the historic Nang Loeng area of Bangkok, facilitated and produced through a collaboration of local community leaders, artist group E-lerng, and Bangkok-based community architecture office, Openspace.

I am again returning to petrform at Melaka Festival in the old town on St Paul’s Hill.

Performances for this new festival 25-27 October 2018. The festival is held at the historic limestone park near Doupeng Mountain. Curator Dong Jie.

My Lecture at 14:00h Sun 14 October ; venue: Luxehill Art Musem, Chengdu My Performance Colour Bleed at 14:00h, Fri 20 Oct; venue: Southwest Jiaotong University Campus, Chengdu

This 10 day performance art festival is curated by Zhou Bin. The Sixth UP-ON art festival will be held in Chengdu from 12th to 22nd of October, 2018. A total of 25 artists (10 from abroad and 15 from China) will participate. Organized by UP-ON Live Art Space, it is coorganized by College of Architecture and Design of Southwest Jiaotong University,the Art Museum of Sichuan University, Gao Xiaohua Art Museum of Soutwest University for Nationalities, Sculpture Department of Fine Art Institute of Sichuan Music University. Sponsors include the LUXELAKES · A4 Art Museum.

A durational performance building miniature walls with sugar cubes for Bundanon’s Siteworks 2018 themed MICRO. Venue: Bundanon Trust, 533 Bundanon Rd, Illaroo NSW 2540 Saturday 29th September , performance 12noon-6pm (event continues into evening with overnight camping available)

https://bundanon.com.au/whats-on/siteworks-2018

A repeat performance of Delta for Mortality Performance Night, Sydney Festival of Death and Dying

• Venue: The Drill Hall (Critical Path) 1C New Beach Road, Rushcutters Bay, Sydney.

A 3-week whole space residency at Articulate Project Space, Sydney. During this residency I will divide the space in many ways to create divisions between the viewing public. In this I am considering the ways that we divide, separate and segregate people, thinking of The Israel-Palestine Wall and The USA-Mexico Barrier and even The Great Wall of China. This project is supported by funding from the Inner West Council. Dates 31st July - 20 August 2018.

Articulate Project Space

This 6-day residency (4-9 June 2018) is supported by Critical Path and will be undertaken in partnership at The Creative Practice Lab, School of Media & Arts, UNSW, Sydney

Alan Schacher and WeiZen Ho collaborate with media artist Mike Leggett & lighting designer Fausto Brusamolino. We will be researching ways in which the body can evaporate and multiply, change its very substance, transmute, relocate with the augmentation of lighting, projection and media. This new work questions transitional boundaries between life & death, spirit & sci-fi, scepticism, faith & superstition.

http://criticalpath.org.au/program/residency-6/

A 5-hour collaboration/ improvisation for base-metal’s In Between Program. Alan Schacher will collaborate with a sequence of artists, each of whom will bring a provocation in the form of materials, objects, sounds, images.

• Artists : Gary Warner, Kraig Grady, Hirofumi Uchino, Ryuichi Fujimura, Sue Callanan, Rebecca Cunningham.
• Venue: AIRspace Projects, Marrickville, Sydney. (12noon to 5pm)
• Image: Alan Schacher & Kraig Grady . Photo : Gary Warner.

opening performance for the exhibition Push the Medium

• 2pm Sunday 4th February 2018
• Narrandera Arts Centre, 141 East Street Narrandera, NSW, Australia
• Photo: Liana Magrath