Taking place in the lead up to the AFL Grand Final, a team of Melbourne-based performers, trained by Public Movement, will undertake a daily drill devised for the city of Melbourne.
Entitled, Training Ground, this new action will commence at the edge of Melbourne’s CBD at a site marked for a future memorial on the corner of Franklin and Victoria streets. Here the team will signal the beginning of the drill by embodying a temporary physical structure at the site, before continuing on foot past several Melbourne institutions to Melbourne’s City Square.
At 5.30pm the team will arrive at the City Square, marking out a temporary playing field and activating a series of gestures of conflict rooted in the rules of the AFL game and performed in its stadiums. This new choreography will combine moments of confrontation, acts of appropriation and the passion of physical rivalry. Training Ground will make its mark daily, leaving its footprints in the granitic sand of the City Square.
Public Movement is a performative research body that investigates and stages political actions in public spaces. It studies and creates public choreographies, forms of social order, overt and covert rituals. Public Movement’s actions in the past and in the future include: manifestations of presence, fictional acts of hatred, new folk dances, synchronized procedures of movement, spectacles, marches, inventing and reenacting moments in the life of individuals, communities, social institutions, peoples, states, and of humanity. In the last eight years, Public Movement has explored the regulations, forces, agents, policies and formations of identity and systems of ritual that govern the dynamics of public life and public space.
Public Movement was founded in December 2006 by Omer Krieger and Dana Yahalomi, the latter became sole director in 2011. Public Movement has taken responsibility for the following actions: National Collection, Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2015); Cross Section, Future Generation Art Prize, Kiev (2014); Make Art Policy! Summit, Baltic Circle, Helsinki (2014); Honor Guard, Asian Art Biennial, Taipei (2013); Civil Fast, Jerusalem (2012); Rebranding European Muslims, Berlin Biennial (2012) and Steirischer Herbst, Graz (2012); SALONS: Birthright Palestine?, New Museum Triennial, New York (2012); Debriefing Session, New Museum Triennial, New York (2012); University Exercise, Heidelberg Theater (2010); First of May Riots, Hebble Am Ufer, Berlin (2010); Positions, Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (2009); Performing Politics for Germany, Hebble Am Ufer, Berlin (2009); Spring in Warsaw, Nowy Teatr, Warsaw (2009); The 86th Anniversary of the Assassination of President Gabriel Narutowicz by the painter Eligiusz Niewiadomski, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2008); Emergency, Acco Festival (2008); Public Movement House, Bat Yam Museum (2008); Operation Free Holon, The Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon (2007); The Israel Museum, Independence Hall, Tel- Aviv (2007); Also Thus!, Acco Festival (2007); and Accident, Tel- Aviv (2006)
Public Movement delegate to Melbourne: Hagar Ophir
Local performers: Rebecca Jensen, Andre Jessop-Smith, Klara Kelvey, Lilian Steiner
Local volunteers: Ewa A. Bogatek, Rebecca Poynton, Eitan Ritz, Adva Weinstein, Carol Que
Project co-ordinator: Frances Wilkinson with Zoe Theodore
Conceived by Public Movement agents: Hagar Ophir and Ma’ayan Choresh
Public Movement director: Dana Yahalomi
