‘Tense, funny, strange’: Greek tragedy and seductive technology collide at Supersonic
Ovid’s Metamorphoses and media ‘hyper-saturation’ have inspired a new work by performance artists Marcus Whale and Andrea Illé, premiering as part of Illuminate Adelaide.
Marcus Whale has a long history with Adelaide; from sweaty basements to iconic local venues, the singer/songwriter has been tapping into the city’s uncanny and euphoric potential since his teens.
“My relationship to Adelaide has a lot to do with my old friend Travis Cook, who I met on the internet when we were 16 and played in a band together for 15 years called Collarbones,” Whale says.
The electronic duo released their fifth and final album in 2023, but Whale’s artistic output has continued to expand and evolve across four solo albums — two of which were nominated for the Australian Music Prize — and experimental live performances at festivals including Rising and Vivid.
Whale returns to Adelaide this month to a present a new show as part of Illuminate Adelaide’s closing weekend mini-festival, Supersonic. Working across different mediums, Tiny Hole Inside Me seeks to unravel, disarm and deconstruct the human experience while drawing influence from classical mythology and 21st century attention economies.
It’s the result of another collaboration, this time with Melbourne-based performance artist Andrea Illés. The pair began working together after performing in a mutual friends’ work for Soft Centre festival in Melbourne last year, which soon led to their own “effortless” partnership.
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“I find Andrea’s approach to performance completely mesmerising and magical,” Whale says. “Her ability to arrest the attention of a room, her commitment to extremity and also just her incredible movement style have been a huge inspiration to me.”
The show, which will run for three hours and incorporate solo, collaborative and audience-interactive passages, will use each corner of The Lab at Immersive Light and Art — an immersive and multi-functional event space that encourages experimentation — to consider societal issues including surveillance, bodily failure and the impossible nature of perfection.
“Andrea and I both work across hybridised performance styles and this work is no exception,” Whale explains. “Andrea often works with live video and movement and I often work with live and improvised sound, so the interaction of these elements has been an exciting way to fill the duration of the work.”
Whale and Illés’ were also drawn together by their shared appreciation of Greek tragedy, that inspired them to create a modern, technicolour interpretation of an ancient odyssey. Drawing inspiration from Medusa, and the seductive nature of online imagery, allowed both artists to experiment with the macabre experience of living in a digital reality.
“Both Andrea and I have been drawn to the figures of Echo and Narcissus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses for various reasons over the years, and the opportunity to make a performance in The Lab, with its ridiculous wealth of LED screens seemed to make a lot of sense with the themes of this story.
“There was also the figure of Medusa in our thinking, these ideas of the deception of the image, the seductive danger of imagery in an era of media hyper-saturation seems to speak to the themes of Ovid’s story, although the way these manifest in the work are pretty obscured or transformed.”
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Whale and Illés’ hope to convey these mythic narratives and contemporary tensions through primal sensations and gestures — echoing the often disorienting and endlessly interpretative nature of navigating digital realities.
“I’m not sure if we’re exactly successfully telling a story, but there is some story behind the different gestures or movements we’re making,” Whale reflects. “Sometimes story is the thing that fails, leaving us with the sensation of sound and video that’s harder to grasp or put in a narrative sequence.
“I’m interested in things that can’t be perfected, and perhaps the failure of the task of achieving perfection.”
The pair created the work specifically for The Lab, where Whale performed his latest solo album, Ecstasy, last year.
“The Lab is an amazing space that has been so much fun to work with,” Whale says. “We had a week in there spending time playing with the screens and live video, and especially with live video feedback which has been quite a strange and amazing experience.
“This work feels very specifically made for The Lab space, which is unlike any other. Perhaps if there’s another iteration, it’ll be quite different, or an entirely new work.”
It’s a fitting playground for an artist with a deep appreciation for the city’s liminal spaces and overlapping sub-cultures.
“I’ve always appreciated that Adelaide has a self-sufficient, local-centred scene that doesn’t always have much regard for out of towners who don’t understand the specific vibe of Adelaide.
“I like how people congregate in really particular places — last time I was there Travis took me to the Crown & Anchor on a Wednesday and I was so happy it was totally packed with kids watching math rock, that doesn’t happen in Sydney!”
Tiny Hole Inside Me will be performed on July 19 at The Lab as part of Supersonic and Illuminate Adelaide