Announcing the Take Over! 2020 artists

We’ve partnered with Arts Centre Melbourne to present the fourth year of the Take Over! Commission, supporting independent, visionary artists to push their creative boundaries and create unique works. This year, you guessed it, it’s a little different. The selected artists/companies will develop a work through an at-home residency, with a final event (online or in-person) presented in November at Melbourne Fringe Festival.

The two-week online residencies from July to September will be a chance for the artists to explore ideas and connect with their audiences through digital showings, while practicing within a Coronavirus landscape and its new-found ways of working. A sneak peek into the development of each work will be livestreamed weekly on Saturday afternoons at 2pm.

Then, all the commissioned works will be presented together as part of a one-off durational event during the Festival.

“The final program includes highly original, fearless and often deeply personal artistic explorations that demonstrate a vulnerability and fierce passion to understand more about humanity and the world we are living in,” says Daniel Clarke, Arts Centre Melbourne’s Creative Producer, Theatre and Contemporary Performance.

So… from an incredible pool of a really quite staggering 94 applicants, in no particular order, here they are:

1. Brian Lipson and Mark Wilson The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus
2. Marcus Ian McKenzie The Crying Room
3. Karma Dance – Govind Pillai and Raina Peterson: We’ve been here before
4. David Williams Smaller
5. Joel Bray Giraru Galing Ganhagirri (The Wind Will Bring Rain)
6. Jonathan Homsey with Maggie Zhu and Maggie Chen I Am Maggie
7. Moira Finucane I Miss You Antarctica
8. Soreti Kadir Namummaa fi Wantoota Namummaa Qancarson – Humanness And What It Took
9. Kate Hood Queen Esme of Collingwood