Unravel Skye

Left my clothes infront of the heater

2010-09-30T02:21:00.001+10:00

I want to write about all the great tour times, all the faces we met and everything great that ever happened, but somehow a perpetual stress and anxiety has really taken the wind out of my writing wings.

I feel more like running. Like I have all this excess energy and I'll run until I hit a wall, smash through it. Then run till I meet the next wall. I'll smash a hole through that one too, and then with the next and the next. Until I have smashed many holes. A straight tunnel down the centre of the city and I can look from one end to the other. And then as I look down the tunnel, peoples heads will pop out and look around and back in confusion. I will run. And others will join, and our shoulders will hit the edges and our tunnel will become bigger until.... Like a wave. I think you get the picture. We'll go swimming.

Still haven't seen the ocean on the east coast.

Stress is making me emotionless. Can't deal with other peoples crap at the moment. Washed my sheets today. Left the heater on and almost burnt the house down. Somehow I really like these photos. Need saving.

Scary Week Ahead

2010-09-03T16:34:00.000+10:00

So I've been feeling lately like all my friends are isolated from each other. It'd be great to have a party soon. Some deboarchorous mixing pot of distorted faces. Actually, it would be scary.

Next Wednesday I'm going away to Sydney Fringe Festival for Retinal Damage. Really looking forward to performing it again. It's looking really good. VERY excited to see what people think of it's second re-incarnation. This time around, I'm performing with Miss Maya Ruin, who is lovely, and very talented creative girl. She's behind the reins of the slide projector!

From there Maya and myself part, and I go to Brisbane to performing in Under the Radar Program for Brisbane Festival. I've been developing a new work, Mothlight with my friend Naomi. The new shows got some really nice parts. Exciting. But anyway.. Much travelling soon.. But now, I must work! Thinking of having a slide night tonight but everybody's out of town. Feeling a little isolated........ kinda like my life is Retinal Damage. Maybe my life is Retinal Damage... let me just check.. Ok.. Yes.. It is.

PS. Mothlight is also playing in the Melbourne Fringe Festival in October. This is the most exciting season out of all of them. Melbourne Fringe Rocks and we have the best space for the show EVER!

Photos of late:

Marmalade Toast

2010-08-14T00:13:00.014+10:00

Hot marmalade on toast.
Attracts the attention of the birds.
Cut into triangles, sweet and burnt.
...
All the letters I never sent.
Will get-to-you, in there own time.
With unsent letters you don't regret,
You don't even need to write-back.
In the morning broken-down house.
House-mates sleep till well past twelve.
I get up early to burn the toast.
Sorry I can't help with the noise.
I'm walking home, late at night.
Blue spotted stockings keep riding past.
I'm sick of stepping on the snails
so I walk down the centre of the road.
...
A place I'd rather be. Marmalade sweet.
Suck-down cups of tea. Anxiety.

Place I'd rather be.

Almost Today

2010-08-11T23:22:00.000+10:00

So Close or So

2010-08-11T00:36:00.002+10:00

We kept our phones on the whole flight just to see what would happen.

Animal Ears Help

2010-08-05T00:38:00.001+10:00

Cures EVERYTHING...

Birthday Girl; Brighter Things

2010-08-02T01:47:00.002+10:00

Galvanised Iron

2010-07-29T19:56:00.004+10:00

Sound echo's around his head like the inside of a rainwater tank. His spine displaces from his body. He feels vacant. A ghost. Only dripping water and galvanised iron exists. His skeleton sits on a stool across from him; staring. Bashfully it plays sad slide guitar. Its wobbly jaw falls off. No voice. Only blues and cold welling echoes. The inside of a rainwater tank. At the least of time. There is music!

Places I'd rather travel

2010-07-27T01:24:00.003+10:00

Words are garbling around in my head cavity, but there are too many. Hard to make out what they're saying. Something about being born in Mexico, some place more exotic then here.. And another voice about learning. Learning, when I stop I'll pack my bags. Can't make out.......

Making out. I saw some people kiss on tv.

Rosie keeps telling me boys are bugging her.

I feel like I cannot let anybody know all the delicate old things my innards know. Like if these things were to escape they would rampage unknown. Treasures in black cloaks and buttons. Reeling.

At least I can write letters to you about it.

If you would like me to write you letters just send me a google map of your address like Ingrid here...

Pleather

2010-07-25T23:56:00.005+10:00

"I simply gave up the whole idea of making pictures as figurative metaphors for extensions in time and space, " he (Allan Kaprow) said of his shift from being an "action painter" to an "action artist."

I had a pretty obvious realisation just then. Ok. So I enjoy art which comes under the category raw and punky.. You know, stuff with the guts to be a stick in the mud. I think the biggest draw card for this kind of art is that it reflects the actions and interests of real people.
Now. Imagine somebody getting a tattoo of a rose, donning some steal-caps, shaving their hair into a mohawk and wearing a pleather jacket overnight - because they thought the look was cool. And on that note I'll draw a threw line to Sydney Fringe - Which our show Retinal Damage is happily a party. Can't wait. We're gonna rip it up!

The pavement is hard

2010-07-23T17:58:00.001+10:00

He comes to a standstill at the bottom of a tall skyscraper. He is looking up. The weather is cold and the buildings of the city are sleeted. Laying at the base of the building with his feet touching the wall, he stares up into a black void sky. The pavement is hard. Shoes dart by his head. He is memorised by the space. Vertical lines begin to burn into his retinas. He realises that if he lays there long enough he might just begin to fall! A cold shiver. A church bell rings. He gets up in a hurry and without knowing it his head skims the sky.

photo by Marianne Tankelevich

Moth Jam

2010-07-20T15:43:00.003+10:00

Naomi and I just had our first jam / training session with Mothlight. So far, this is what we've made!

Spearmint Leaf

2010-07-19T13:49:00.005+10:00

I know why.

Distractions.

"You don't remember in the morning as you kiss his closed eyes, watch them open, say how wonderful it is to watch somebody's eyes open, to be the first thing that they see. He says, Your mouth, Love, it's like a moth. A great soft moth thrumming against a windowpane in the house that I grew up in. But you swallow and ask what became of the boat. When you smile it is a boat, he says, and when you kiss it is a moth." (how a moth becomes a boat)

This. What kind of sweet? A Spearmint Leaf. Yummy but cutting. I don't think I've ever felt so satisfied. Slept so deeply. Woken so sad and unhinged. Other nights I'm more restless and we battle. "I love you Dear, but could you please move yonder."

Vertigo; Melbourne

2010-07-17T12:59:00.000+10:00

Spoons are the best!

2010-07-04T20:23:00.000+10:00

AGREED!

Buttons.. Bobs.. Blings.. Strings. Horns. Top hats. Skins of cats. Suitcase market, should be fun. Join in an hour. Button bum?

A change of location

2010-06-22T15:19:00.003+10:00

"There is a castle on a cloud.. Sometimes I go there in.."

No counter points, no counter points, all clouds. Laying on the floor. Underneath the certain I can see the morning sky. I can hear a jack hammer and somebody bumping around behind me in the kitchen. I roll over and check. It's 7:30am. A smile. A comment, and I'm asleep again.

Helps

2010-06-18T13:47:00.001+10:00

Distractions help.

Sun laps break my back

2010-06-16T02:57:00.005+10:00

Took this photo. The pool today at Spring Hill. Well.. It was yesterday. You see it's now after the witching hour and the Internet in all of QLD has crashed so I'm typing in Word.

I took this photo, and Liesel made me a cup of coffee better then you could get in Adelaide. After making the milk twice she still wasn't very happy with it, but I thought it was alright. This kind of light was rebounding off all the hard surfaces there. Sun is good for cheeks like us.

Three days ago I dreamt that I pin dived into a pool. And I kept going down down down. And I realised that the pool was much deeper then I expected it to be. And I started to get worried cause I was like 50 meters down and I didn't know if I was going to be able to get back up. Thought I was going to suffocate.

Now it's late. So exhausted. Overload mode. Still can feel choline in my eyes and I keep burping it cause I think I drank some too. Blockages tell me my ears got a good gulp. Body was freaking out from doing laps. So stressed. Kind of dyeing. Must look tough. Be a man. Think I'm still doing laps. Hope it works.

Stay Bess Song Uploaded

2010-06-13T23:46:00.000+10:00

Just to show how that song turned out. The sound guy for our show just came over for a meeting and also recored it. This is the first take -
http://www.myspace.com/skyegellmann

Gonna try write a song for every place I stay in Brisbane.

Also, Jessica Tremp has some new photos on Redbubble. Fucking Amazing. Love.

Stay Bessie

2010-06-11T12:31:00.028+10:00

Asleep in my bed I look like a car crash.
Teal weatherboard house has an angry cat.
Feeling exhausted.
It's nice to hold a collapse.
Doors always unlocked and high ceilings hold. Us safe
smoking and drinking on the balcony.
I'm sad and missing the one who would write to me.
So I'm sitting with Bessie, good morning company.

Stay in stay Bess. Stay In bed half the day.
Stay in stay Bess. Keep me, I feel like a wonderful stray.

It's hard to be a sleep-in
when your rooms joined to the kitchen.
But it's nice being able to say good morning to a friend
while he's making his breakfast.
Something is coming, think I'll have to kill my darlings.
It's nice to hold a collapse. So I'm sitting with Bessie, Bessie, Bess.

Stay in stay Bess. Stay In bed half the day.
Stay in stay Bess. Keep me, I feel like a wonderful stray.

... All this and I should probably move on soon... All this and I have too much to do... All this and I'm forgetting my life, in limbo. A teal weather-board house.

Life at the moment

2010-06-04T00:22:00.000+10:00

From my notepad:

Leaning forward over the wet garden
i'm having a headspin. If you
read somebodys handwriting enough your
own starts to mold to theirs.
-Woman putting children in her
car in the rain. I held your baby
while blood came from your toddelers
head & you yelled at your husband
over the phone. You threw the phone
at the ground.

"I'm a connoisseur of roads. I've
been taisting rods my whole life.
This road will probably never end. It probably
goes all around the world."
- The Movie: My Own Private Idaho

Phone keeps beeping at me. "It
better be fucking good." I cannot
return it's mechanical enthusiasm.
The drizzel is nice though. I'm sitting.

Sk

Lovely Day

2010-05-18T14:52:00.001+10:00

The light in my backyard will always be stunning. I stay inside laying under the carpet where nothing right or wrong. I put on this song and things get better.

Mothlight Show Preview

2010-05-12T17:37:00.000+10:00

Hey looking for some advice for the show I'm making with one other for Brisbane Festival and Melbourne Fringe in September.

Here's the show description:

MOTHLIGHT
Award winning artist Skye Gellmann (graduate of the National Institute of Circus Arts), has created a new circus piece which tears at the essence of our primal dreams, desires, and inwardly destructive tendencies.

Mothlight is a collection of vignettes where the moth is used as a symbol for internal psychosis in relation to an industrial world gone astray. Here all extraneous elements have been removed to create a cold minimalism. Two acrobatic bodies are stripped by light, uninhibited, hyperventilating, dancing blindly, gleefully self-sabotaging, fleeting, lost, crumbed in smashed glass, flying backwards into the darkness whilst blind winged creatures emerge in their wake.

Here's the promo photo I'm thinking of using by Kat Ashworth:

What do you guys think?
Finger painters, theatre people, acrobats, urban monkeys, swamp dogs - I'm looking for a second person to perform in the show. Is anybody interested?
xSKYe

Brisbane Pilgrimage

2010-04-28T14:09:00.000+10:00

Going on a pilgrimage to Brisbane for 42 days from June to do the Theatre show Room 328.

Trying to drum up some attention for a bike and some places to stay.

X

ps. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Room-328/114783638544445 for Room 328
pps. Some photos from one of my last journeys into the sweat.

White weatherboard house on the hill

2010-04-21T18:47:00.000+10:00

I'm going to copy straight out of my last letter to Jorja!

There is a dog over the alleyway which howls. I hear him a lot.

Yesterday I was at a place which excited me so much I don’t know if I can describe it. It is a house in Belgrave. There was a party there the night before and I stayed in the trailer of a friends ute. Went to sleep as Kookaburras started singing and the sun was rising. 5 of the most crazy artists I know had just moved into a 2 story white weatherboard house which was once a brothel. It’s halfway up a hill in a forest of 50m high trees and ferns. Spent the day elevated on the top veranda with a few peeps. When you’re in a forest your senses really prick up. I’ve always felt like I was born in the wrong time. I’m a hunter, not a glassy or servant. Walking through the forest I strayed from the path and for a while flirted with the life I couldn’t have.

The city is so abstract. I’m lucky to have such a green remote street. But the city makes you breath shallow and unless you are fully convinced by it, you feel so alone in it. My friend Becky Bonnet did a tarot reading for me. I’m in a Hermit stage apparently, but I think it has more to do with my constant reaction against the city which can really remove me in social situations. I’m always looking in on my life.

In knowing this and after being in the forest I think I’m going to dream a new way of living, cause I realise this lifestyle is making me unhappy.

I’m not sure what I’m doing but what you said about culling things which make you unhappy is so true. First I’ll start by getting rid of stuff. I need less.

Lets become primitives! Hunters with internet addictions who live in roof cavities’ and put on shows of great strength and agility.

OK.. Now I’m loosing the plot.

Back at the white weatherboard house, my friend Tina said she was driving a van down Punt road, and in the middle of the highway engulfed in traffic were 3 colourful peeps with bikes (us). She said you guys were babes and the scene made her day.

That was a great day.

Bii, Skye

Chinese Pole - Through pain I'm born again

2010-04-01T18:22:00.003+11:00

I did a pole training day. I wish I could show you my scars. It feels quite good to be in physical pain again! There is something about circus and sex drives which i think are quite linked. Maybe it's the pain element.

I would like to splice in lots of exciting pictures in this post. So I'm going to advertise the talents of photographer Jessica Tremp. These are some of my favourite photos at the moment.

Ok.. So I think my post show depression is clearing up. The whole, 'what am i doing with my life' questions. Training with avan today helped get some perspective. He's very good. Very exciting seeing the first half of his new chinese pole ruitien. It's total world class. Totally blows everybody in Australia out of the water, and better then anything i've seen anybody else do on youtube. Very inspiring.

Good seeing Avan and the Caravan of Dooom people training and it all feels quite positive being back to zero on a number of levels.

Going to do a photo shoot for a brand new project with Jessica soon I hope.

Been writing letters again too!

Adelaide Fringe Report 2010

2010-03-07T23:00:00.002+11:00

I just had sensory overload in Adelaide. I’m running on literally 3 hours sleep at the moment. I'm mainly writing this to reduce the anxiety I've had since I've been back in Melbourne the last day, re-adjusting to the quiet life.

Saw 12 shows over 4 nights. Yuri Wells and Red Bastard were my favourites.

Yuri Wells is a cleverly scripted one and a half man show. I can’t really tell you what it’s about, but I’ll just say it’s sensibly head-fuckie, I like it.

Red Bastard. Oh god. This show truly hate-fucks the audience (I mean he picked on me, and it wasn’t fun, it was horrible.. Even still, somehow I loved him for it). It’s a Bouffon Clown show.

“In the world of Bouffon, the audience is the joke. Bouffons show no vulnerability. Their great joy is to parody the audience, its values and flaws. This pack of grotesque outsiders engage and parody the audience with great joy, intelligence and charm. To play as Bouffon, is to celebrate, contrast & paradox! They are disgusting, yet beautiful. They hate you, yet they flatter you. The Bouffons are the ultimate manipulators!” (From an email by David Berga who plays the Red Bastard) Speaking of which there is a Melbourne workshop in Bouffon coming up end of March by the Red Bastard himself. Email info@davidberga.cat for more info. I'm thinking of doing it.

Back to the Fringe. I had a fucking good time. It’s just really nice seeing a lot of shows, and bumping into heeeps of friends and feeling like a Fringe-go’er. Getting into big parties and bars where it’s wall to wall with people who are dancing like it’s their last day alive. At one point I remember Cat from the Caravan of Doom dragging me around the dance floor. We started a badly constructed conga line. After a few laps, it was quite large. I was quite surprised when she doubled back to try make the line collide with itself. It did. People flew everywhere.

Most nights I was getting home when my parents were getting up to make breakfast. Then I’d sleep the boring Adelaide days away. There weren’t really heeps of high-lights.. Actually.. Fez in drag straddling me while I took photos during his act was pretty funny.. And I performed (quite terribly) in a cabaret act where I took off my clothes, got this guy to hit me in the stomach, and then sung a song on the guitar about my love of lan choo tea (doubled over on the ground). That was a rush. I think it’s mainly good just seeing shows and not having one. It makes things less egocentric and I feel like I have more fun at the festival. Although I did feel rather like a rockstar that night with my cabaret act, it was awesome :)

Will get a couple of rolls of photos developed tomorrow and then your eyes will bleed.

xskye

‘Inherently Scattered’ – Scattered Tacks - Article by Urszula Dawkins

2010-02-23T13:01:00.002+11:00

Urszula Dawkins spoke with Skye Gellmann about stripping back the genre to its bare bones, squatting in South Yarra, and conversing with the audience…

‘Inherently scattered’ is how Silvertree and Gellmann’s Skye Gellman describes the three creators of Scattered Tacks . But you can’t afford to be scattered as you spin on a bowling ball or do a handstand on it, or balance three juggling balls on your spine. Or perform complex acrobatics on a darkened stage with just a high-powered torch strapped onto your head. It’s long way from traditional circus – for the audience, the oohs, aahs and squeals of delight are replaced by silence on stage, held breath and a straining of all the senses. By focusing on exploring objects – on the performers’ relationships to ‘things’ – Silvertree and Gellmann have created a tense, tender and compelling vision: in Skye Gellmann’s words, “a twisted, weird circus”.

Terri Cat Silvertree, Alex Gellmann and Skye Gellmann go back a long way – Alex and Skye are brothers and all three began their circus training as children at Adelaide’s Cirkidz. Between them they’ve collected a swag of fringe festival and other awards: Skye’s Asleep in a Secret won the Best Circus (2009) and Village (2009) awards at the Melbourne Fringe; while Shuttlecock! by The Rambutan Circus Collective, of which Alex and Terri are both founders, won the Best Dance/Circus/Physical Theatre award at Adelaide Fringe 2007. Scattered Tacks , created when the three found themselves all living and working in Melbourne, won the Melbourne Fringe’s 2008 Village award, and in 2009 has toured to the Adelaide Fringe, Brisbane’s Powerhouse and the Noorderzon Performing Arts Festival in the Netherlands.

Circus it may be, but there’s no glitz and glam, no spangles or sequins – indeed, no lighting or artificial sound whatsoever. The whole point, says Skye Gellmann, is to take the form back to its essential elements: the bodies; the people performing.

“First idea,” says Gellmann: “The reality of what’s happening. Second idea: to create something that had the least amount of gratuitous elements; that was really refined back.”

“We don’t try to entertain…instead we draw attention to things other than presenting tricks as a spectacle. We’re presenting them as realities, and trying to break them down.”

Watching Scattered Tacks is less a narrative journey than an ‘experience’; a heightening of the senses that takes place often in near-total darkness. The tension that builds around the group’s ‘tricks as realities’, illuminated and fragmented by harsh beams of light, is matched by an ethereal beauty at times as the same harsh light renders skin almost translucent, glowing beneath the performers’ simple costumes.

“Scattered Tacks is about the audience’s experience more than trying to communicate a story,” says Gellmann. “It’s about the senses, it’s about sight and it’s about hearing all the little sounds and drawing attention to the tiny details, and finding the joy in those little things. It’s a very minimal show – I guess to shift perspectives is important… You have to use different senses that you don’t use in everyday life, but also your sense of what a show should be.”

This fierce reduction of theatre to bodies, objects and an intently focused audience grew out of a reaction to the ‘performing monkey’ syndrome experienced at times by individual members of the group – Skye in particular has a ‘second life’ as a corporate circus performer.

“We have things to say about the world other than ‘look at my handstand’,” he says. “So we started pulling apart circus and seeing what else it could mean, other than ‘I’m going to show you this trick’.”

The high-powered flashlights and bare staging also reflect the location in which Scattered Tacks was created: a squatted apartment block in South Yarra where the group lived, worked and rehearsed for several months – initially with no electricity, and developing a necessary affinity to “sneaking around in the dark”. Surrounded by wealthy neighbours and squeezed between a high-rise parking station and a luxury car dealer, Skye says squatting was both liberating and alienating, and bred a sense of isolation that inevitably found its way into the show.

“I see it as a kind of blessing more than anything, because we actually had a lot of space… We had a whole apartment we were using as a workshop, so we could make stuff there; we had multiple rooms that were studios.”

“It’s hard to make a show in a room though, because a room is still a room, it’s small and restricting. But because we had restrictions as well as new freedoms, it just gave us new options, and it brought new discoveries.”

Even in a traditional theatre space, there’s a strongly intimate feel to Scattered Tacks, and although ‘audience involvement’ is not an overt intention, for Skye especially, it’s a crucial, if indefinable, relationship.

“I feel like I’m having a conversation with the audience sometimes about what I think, instead of trying to just impose how the audience feels… I let them feel things…”

Silvertree and Gellmann’s manipulations of teapots, bowling balls and an onion, among other things, reflect life in the darkened apartment block, but more tellingly, the curiosity of three humans about the objects they encounter. Their relationship with the viewer is a focused and absorbing collaboration that ranges from breathtaking tension to a shared understanding of human fragility, to joy and delight. As one reviewer has commented – it will be unlike anything you’ve seen before.

Scattered Tacks
by Silvertree and Gellmann
Arts House, Meat Market
Tue 16 to Sun 21 March

For information or tickets for all Arts House shows, go to the Arts House website

SOOo, a Big Month..

2010-02-11T11:28:00.002+11:00

I haven’t posted for a while, so I have lots to tell you about. I've just moved into a lovely house in Northcote. My housemates are really cool, and we have very loud conversations at 4 in the morning all the time. I really like them. I'm not manic anymore and feeling much more mentally stable. Still stressed about where the money is going to come from though. I would like to find a way that the world works for me! Not me working for the world. I'm thinking at the moment I would like to run my circus company more like a business.

Also, my court case went well for Burglary and Theft (of a small bag of buttons from an abandoned warehouse). My brother and I got a diversion which means no criminal record! YAY! But a big fine instead! I’ve honestly been scared off being dodgy. It was quite funning having a Magistrate call us stupid though, and almost worth it for this.

Apart from this, I have a nice girl (who is very cute), and while relationships do my head in, I've been finding more independence in them and this one has definitely shaken up my reality (in a good way). Hmm.. I really wish I had more unravelling thoughts on things, but I guess I’d rather just keep all that stuff a secret for a while. It will come out in our next work, which I have begun planning for.

Please come over for a cup of tea soon and we can share stories about all the trouble we’ve been in!

Skye

Cool,

First Promo:

SCATTERED TACKS at Artshouse, March 16 - 22

We received $20,000 dollars from the City of Melbourne to play in this season. It's probably the last time you'll see Scattered Tacks in Melbourne (Sad), so come!

http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/ArtsHouse/Program/Pages/ScatteredTacks.aspx

Second Promo:

UNENLIGHTENED & ALONE at Adelaide Fringe, Feb/Mar

This is my friend James's first solo show. It's very good! :D

Desk Head Bed

2010-01-09T22:30:00.001+11:00

Found a nice desk today on the side of the road with many white and black keys inside, then I went swimming in a river. Now I'm in the house alone. It's getting dark and moths fly about. It's nice but so is company.

I have this song stuck in my head:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFmfncE-jD0

This place and time.

2010-01-06T18:10:00.000+11:00

It is important for me to have some kind of basis of inspirations for my art. So. New house, new year, blah! What’s this place and time about?

Last year was about pressure. It was about homelessness. Hopelessness. Absurdity and insanity. It was about a sickening success. It was about excess and reduction.

This year perhaps is about:

I’m not focusing on “acts” this year. Acts are so boring. I would like to just make shows. A show can be 2 minutes, 8 mins (like an average act), it can be 2 hours. It’s just the way you treat the performance which is different.

I find the structure of performance pieces interesting. Not really interested in rehashing new versions of tired storylines and their structures though. I would like to make work which is quite structurally experimental / diverse. I would like to take into consideration different show formats for this.

I like fantasies. I particularly like the fantasies we create in our everyday lives. The problems which are built up to be bigger then they really are. The lies we tell without noticing because we believe them. The characters we play everyday and characters we want to become. The way different people change our character. The daydream within a mundane action. Small stories. The idea that every moment is a performance and we all play rolls given to us and created by us. Life is the performance, and our art is what we have to show for it. I’m interested to see how messing with structure can create and destroy fantasies.

Circus skills I'm working on are advanced hanstands, flex and stumbling. Financially useless (yet unique) tricks like a handstand on a bowling ball, or plank-of-wood stacking and face manipulation. Also some ridicules tricks like no-arm headstand on wood and solo-pole. Circus tricks still get me off. It’s good to be enthusiastic to play that character again.

I like matters of the heart. So I guess a lot of my art will be about people. Learning guitar and singing.. I like to write about girls lol.

My things still are going to be inaccessible and we’re going to get excellent audiences!

I would like to work on a few other peoples theatre shows, but I’m going to be more selective with the projects I get involved in. I’m going to create a lot of works with different people.

Slide Projection Night, will become a regular experiment at Medium Artsspace.

I would like to work from time to time with a photographer to create work for them to exhibit.

OH! AND I like sending letters. I like getting letters. I’ll create an address book. What’s your address? I’ll send you a letter.

Smell you later.. Skye

Email to Raph (Dawa)

2009-12-30T17:25:00.004+11:00

An email I just wrote to my friend Raph in France.
---
At the moment I feel lost in the size of the world. I too have made a list of people to work with and you are on that list. Scattered Tacks has one big show next year. I found some funding to put it on at north melbourne town hall in an independent 6 night season.

Not sure whats next though. Think I'll make a few new things.

I'm drinking again. I constantly have a few beers every day. Must feel like I deserve it, or maybe just to relax a little. I'm a manic head sometimes. Oh and I'm single. I did meet this girl who I like but she went away for a few weeks. And I’m stuck in an ambiguity. I'm still writing music. It's dried up romanitc stuff. I would like to do a show with Ivan soon called mothballs. It'll be a very strange show. Ivan will control lots of puppets of moths and i want to break lots of glass in it.
I'm still trying to be good at circus but most my interest is in learning skills which are useless and impractical. I'm disappointed with how my recent works have been received. They push ideas I think are important but people don't see the new ideas - they only see how the old ideas are absent (this isn't always the case, but still).
I'm working towards a more freeform style of show without any acts at all, and with hardly any moments the audience can grab onto as something impressive. I more want to hate fuck them, then corress them into a beautiful fantasy.
I would like to invent some new apparatus too. Ivan's thinking of doing his manipulation research lab. Which would be fun to do. He want's to come overseas with it. maybe you can join!

I'm a little lost (but excited about it) - out of clues for now. Are you enjoying your school lots?

sk(lov)e

ps. i just moved into a beautiful house in northcote this week. back on the rails again.

The All New Adventures Of Us

2009-12-29T14:32:00.000+11:00

Art is the show,

Life is the performance.

xskye

Moving out of Studio

2009-12-21T16:45:00.000+11:00

Moving out of my studio this month. Pulling it apart is like sorting through parts of myself. Come visit my new haus in northcote and we can have tea! Skye

Bye bye Brisbane

2009-12-12T12:48:00.000+11:00

Things i wish I could keep from Brisbane:

Staying in so many beds and couches.
Late night drinking with new faces.
Morning tea and coffee on lofty balconies writing things in my notebook.
Walking around late at night for hours completely lost.
So many beautiful peoples.
Getting in trouble.
Laying outside a seven eleven at 1am unable to move.

SHORTS!! Oh how are they!?

2009-11-29T19:30:00.002+11:00

On the 25th Scattered Tacks flew up to brisbane to do a 3 night season and it has been a success! Not only did we invite audiences into an alienating show and they actually like it, BUT I have been brandishing some very short shorts! It's quite exciting for me. I have not worn shorts for over 6 years, and never which show this much leg! At first it was weird because my knee caps were cold, but now the exhibitionist in me in love with showing off my milky whites! I have 2 more weeks in brisbane. Working on a creative development for a theatre show called The Story of Lost Children. Still learning :) x skye

La Fura Dels Baus Workshop Showing

2009-11-17T11:33:00.001+11:00

This is a video of Spanish company La Fura Dels Baus. Terri Cat recently did a 2 week intensive workshop with them. Last Saturday the participants from the workshop performed a showing directed by La Fura Dels Baus's director and staged in a massive shed in the docklands. It was a scary and primeval experience. For much of the performance the 100 odd audience didn't know what to do. The nature of this showing was a bit mashed together to cater for the different skill levels of performer but still I loved what they made! This video of another of there works will give you an idea of what i mean.

Scattered Tacks - Courier Mail Article

2009-11-16T13:02:00.002+11:00

PUBLISHED:

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,26339858-5003423,00.html

----

Tonya Turner

November 13, 2009 11:00pm

LIVING in a squat is a lifestyle choice for circus performer Skye Gellmann.

It was while squatting in an abandoned apartment block in an upmarket suburb of Melbourne that Skye, his younger brother, Aelx, and their childhood friend, Terri Cat Silvertree, found the freedom and time to create a unique circus show attracting critical and audience acclaim.

"It was a really beautiful place in a rich part of town," Skye, 24, says. "We had a circus space in the squat where we worked on the show and the influence of having very little came into it."

Named Scattered Tacks, the 45-minute production premiered at the Melbourne Fringe Festival last year and won the Village Award for Most Outstanding Production.

The trio, originally from Adelaide, lived in the squat for a year and went without electricity for about two months while developing the piece.

In this darkened environment they put their creativity to work using headlamps and handheld torches to light the room.

"We wanted to make a show that didn't need any power that we could put into any space. We reduced everything to a minimalist state," says Skye, a National Institute of Circus Arts graduate.

As well as no technical lighting, the show has no sound.

The stark set brings the action into focus, with bowling balls, teabags, cups and juggling balls manipulated in mysterious ways.

"There's kind of a cold reality that comes through our work," he says.

"It can be cold and off-putting but at the same time enthralling and highly engaging. We just want to get to the bones of things."

In one scene, Silvertree takes a bite into an onion and doesn't stop until it is devoured.

"She's crying but she keeps on going. It's part of that thing where if you just take a bite out of an onion, it could be a trick and you could present it like a trick, but because we want to present the reality, we take it past the point of being a trick and that can be confronting," he says.

In another scene he gets creative with a bowling ball, getting dizzier and dizzier as the act progresses.

"It brings to the surface it's not actually about the trick but the exhaustion and relationship," he says.

"It's actually happening, someone is getting dizzy and could hurt themselves."

On stage and in life, danger plays a big role in Skye's world.

"You get used to the element of danger living in a squat and it's great," he says.

"It can be a bit nerve-racking knowing you might be caught living in a space you're not supposed to be, so at first you can have some uneasy nights where you hear every sound but you kind of get used to it.

"You don't need to be a renter to be able to live, which is pretty empowering in a lot of ways."

He was drawn to the squatter's life after a particular gig got the better of him.

"At the time me and Terri were having this big reaction against stuff," he says.

"I'd just finished a really horrible stint at the tennis as a mascot and I was feeling pretty down on the world of performing and life.

"I was a character called The Super Ball Kid and it inspired me to want to make a show. It was a reaction against that kind of instant gratification in entertainment.

"I felt like such an object being this character. I wanted to be a person on stage and to try and communicate what it is to be human."

Since its premiere in Melbourne, Scattered Tacks has played the Adelaide Fringe Festival and, with the help of Brisbane contemporary circus company Circa, the Noorderzon Performing Arts Festival in the Netherlands.

Although Skye also does more cash-friendly corporate work as a circus entertainer, he has no plans to quit squatting just yet.

"I personally just like different ways and experiences of living," he says.

"A lot of people think squatters have no respect for property but I think squatters actually have a bigger sense of home and a lot more respect for the environment around them, because they might not be there the next day. It makes you appreciate the friendships and the spaces around you a lot more."

Scattered Tacks by Silvertree and Gellmann, Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, November 26-28. Tickets $22-$26. Info 3358 8600 or brisbanepowerhouse.org

Scattered Tacks - Brisbane Powerhouse NOV 2009

2009-11-02T11:23:00.005+11:00

Scattered Tacks is a reduction of circus. Once everything has been taken away what do you have left? From the cracks of Melbourne emerge three enchanting artists with an absurd and anarchic vision of circus. Shaped by their personal stories and stamped by the cold reality of prolonged violence, self-harm, reckless disregard for the audiences entertainment and own safety, Scattered Tacks isn't "everyone’s cup of tea, but doubtless to say it will be unlike anything you’ve seen before, ever." Realtime Magazine

So, the whole of Adelaide hated the show, YOU BRISBANE will love the show!

"Profoundly Empty" Independent Weekly (2009 Adelaide Fringe)

-------------------------------
BOOKINGS ESSENTIAL:
http://www.brisbanepowerhouse.org/events/view/scattered-tacks/

FOLLOW SCATTERED TACKS Facebook

Dear O'Dear by Amos Duggan

2009-10-30T19:00:00.003+11:00

I love this!

My brain isn't working so I thought of you

2009-10-25T14:47:00.003+11:00

Some places. Some people. Friends, and my studio. I think the biggest thing which has come from this transient lifestyle is that people and places have become very important to me. I think this is because being transient forces you to become conscious of where you're staying, and the people you're around (who keep you sane). I feel like a lone wolf at the moment.

New Website

2009-10-22T17:02:00.002+11:00

WWW.SKYEGELLMANN.COM

is now active! It's simple but I like it.

Asleep in a Secret - Melbourne Fringe

2009-10-12T10:13:00.008+11:00

On the 24th of September 2009, Asleep in a Secret premièred in the 2009 Melbourne Fringe Festivals hub, Errol’s Upstairs. The show was an experiment in story telling but about a topic I'd rather not speak of. Tricks play a big part in this kind of un-communication. Pushed, pulled, broken, obscured, drowned. When the rules are broken what else can tricks say beond the mechanical action, or is it everything else which then talks ten times as loud?

"There's a cold purity to Asleep in a Secret that some may find offputting, but which I found enthralling" Richard Watts

"Calling this show circus themed is a stretch of the imagination." Artshub

"It was a credit to the men that by the end of the performance they seemed likeable, seeing they alienated the audience so completely so many times." Express Media

"Gellmann’s skill in is showing just how hard even the most typical of circus acts actually are, and making you feel that danger. Even if he’s just standing on a block a foot off the ground." John Bailey

Devised and performed: SKYE GELLMANN
Performer and Projector operator: PAUL BONGIORNO
Artistic consultant: TERRI CAT SILVERTREE, OWEN ELVIN

Photos by John Robb

Haven't I been here before?

2009-10-12T09:21:00.000+11:00

A new blog, a new day. Seem to be writing alot of non-sense lately. I generally come up with 5 new names for a blogs everyday. Hungover and listening to Alex Lloyd from the 90s. I have alot of trouble writing well. Well. I will try be good. I hope you follow.
Skye