In the playground we remember the games we used to play, the worlds we imagined we would inhabit and the people we imagined we would be. With a childish sense of abandon, we attempt to go back to simpler times, a heroic place where we only exist for each other, and the world only exists for us.

Site – Inside and Out

Anti Playground, a new world order was originally commissioned as a site responsive tour of a children’s playground as part of Anti Contemporary Arts Festival in Kuopio, Finland. The research for this work was collected in over many months in numerous playgrounds across Melbourne and Europe and it was then performed outside in the Uppo Nalle children’s park. In this time we discovered that playgrounds are busy places; children play endlessly; enacting stories, encountering conquests and teetering on the edge of disaster. In the playground amongst the tumbling, falling, colliding narratives they are the heroes and this is their world.

For Playground a new world order we have brought the playground inside to the cobble stoned floors of the Meat Market. This is a place of fiction, summoned from our earliest memories of tyre castles, old wooden bridges and seas of tan bark. In bringing the playground into the world of the performance the work has taken on a new dimension. We cannot ask you to return to the playgrounds you once knew, you are different now, and so under these artificial lights, in this silent room together we will create another world with new beginnings and complex possibilities. In this world we have redefined the boundaries of the games we used to play and in changing the rules ever so slightly we are unravelling a heroic quest in an attempt to grab hold of the past while we rush into the future.

“Once more unto the breech dear friends….”

In increasingly uncertain times Exercises in Happiness explores our restless need for a good feeling.

Panther investigated happiness, in two residencies and a lot of research for over a year. We worked across two cities, we interviewed people in shopping centres, on the streets and in art spaces. For one week we walked for two hours a day, thinking and talking about happiness. We read histories, articles and economic reports. We made maps of the worlds happiest places, we thought about the romans, the christians and the greeks, all striving for happiness from the beginning of time and then after contemplating the subject for some time we invited you in to make up your own minds.

In the gallery we built a series of small intimate activities for you. Sleeping, reading, eating, drinking, talking, pornography and party games.

In the gallery, you participate in these tasks and in conversations, in reading to each other, in pouring milk and smashing a pinata and a little crisis happiness happens.

But still, after its all over, we wonder what do we do now, now that we are happy?

“we at the agency for collective action are interested in the decisions we make as individuals and the way in which individual interests can inform and empower events. we are interested in the way individuals come together, make decisions, and unite to make affirmative decisions for a collective future. we take action to make decisions. we find common cause among strangers; we create small communities out of larger ones and in doing so highlight the many tensions and triumphs of individualism in a global collective.” the beginnings of a manifesto – the agency of collective action, sept 08.

As the event unfolds, the complexities, the risks, and our failure to consider all the possibilities begins to bear down on us. We begin to believe that actually escapes are really hard, that goodbyes are difficult and that perhaps we don’t want to leave after all.

Borrowing from the language of political campaigns and armed with minimal resources Panther examine the need to get away and the struggle to survive.

Tech Specs

The work was developed in Essen in 2007 and in Doncaster in 2009.

Thanks to Tim Webster and Michael Prior for their amazing support and wizardry.

“We have ascribed you, our expert friend, an area of human life to which to respond. We imagine that your prediction will be a few lines, no more than a paragraph and not time consuming. You may respond however you see fit, it could be based on scientific facts or founded in fictitious, anecdotal, or incidental imaginings. We will be delighted with any contribution you choose to make.”

Strangers and Intimacy was an international exchange between Australia and Britain, with members of Panther and performance group Reader.

The project began in September 2004 when eight artists were assigned a pen pal living in a city on the other side of the world. On the first day of September we all wrote a four line letter of introduction to our foreign friends. Over four months, between September and December we continued writing one letter to each other each week.

The eight of us then met up in Melbourne at the beginning of January where we established a working relationship; sharing skills, reading letters and playing getting to know you games leading to a performance installation at West Space Galleries.

We then traveled together to Glasgow where the temperature dropped, the poles shifted and new intimacies were explored in a studio performance at the CCA.