What's On
See what’s on from our base in Brunswick and beyond ↓
Deaf Culture and Auslan workshop
Join us for a free workshop celebrating the richness of Deaf culture and language, led by Deaf artist Luke D King.
Luke will share an introduction to Deaf histories and give participants the opportunity to learn and use some basic Australian Sign Language (Auslan).
Screening: 'Anak'
Next up from Composite:
Masculinity, race and boyhood simmer in this stylish slow-cinema debut about a Filipino-Australian father and his six-year-old son, who are navigating a family divorce.
Presented in partnership with Sunburnt.
Triangle by Flow Festival
Flow Festival presents ‘Triangle’—a unique series of lighting design workshops led by Bronwyn Pringle (Deaf Kitchen, SPIN, and Flow Festival). Bronwyn is diving into how lighting design can be more inclusive for the Deaf community.
‘Triangle’ is for the Deaf community, including Deaf, hard of hearing, CODAs, and interpreters.
Next Wave Neighbours
Join us for a drink, explore our venue, hear about what we have planned and help shape our priorities for 2025 and beyond.
Archive
Homing Instinct
See a special screening of commissioned works from Homing Instinct—a collaborative moving image project featuring artist commissions related to housing, home and belonging.
This screening includes an artist talk by Ari Angkasa.
'Web Working Bee'
Join our working bee with WORLDWIDEWORMS.NET, an online space for peer-led publishing. In this event, collaborators and contributors to WORLDWIDEWORMS.NET share work in progress, including video screenings, readings, and a garden tour of the back-end of the website.
Contributing artists are Alrey Batol, Eric Jong, Jacina Leong, Ella Peck and Emily Simek.
Nosferatu with live score
‘Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror’ is widely regarded to be the first and best vampire film ever made. Join us for a Halloween screening of this silent cinematic masterpiece with an original score performed live by Edwin Montgomery.
DAMP video anthology
This selection of short video works made between 1997 and 2008, range from quickly captured playful scenarios to elaborately constructed narratives. Established in Naarm Melbourne in 1995, DAMP’s multidisciplinary practice over three decades has consistently addressed the relationship between artist and audience and examined individual and collective notions of value and desire.
Snap! (You Have Nothing to Reconnect But Your Chains)
Join us for the premiere of a new experimental performance lecture by Catherine Ryan. This ambitious, research-based work tells the tragicomic story of one of the neoclassical statues adorning the interior of Victoria’s Legislative Council in Parliament House. The work draws on the comedic travails of this political decor to critically examine the idea of connection to tradition and the telling of origin stories about the settler-colonial society of Victoria.
'ShareHouse: Studio Day + Exhibition'
ShareHouse invites you into Next Wave’s home, Brunswick Mechanics Institute, for community-led workshops, performances, and conversations.
Curated by our Young Artistic Directorate - Banda
Get Tickets
↳ Saturday | Studio Day: Workshop 1 (Charlie Taylor) + Lunch & Panel
↳ Saturday | Studio Day: Workshop 2 (Adele D’Souza) + Lunch & Panel
↳ Sunday | Exhibition
MEga Yoga: A counternarrative experience
Bus Projects, Engages, MEga Yoga is a participatory embodied performance that uses the structure of a yoga class inviting participants to move their bodies slowly and their minds critically.
New North Concert 17
Guest curator Rachael Archibald (Meanjin/Brisbane) has gathered lineup of artists pushing boundaries in their music-making for the next New North concert.
Alexandra Spence ~ Ode2Joy ~ ANNIHA
THINKING GROUND
Next Wave is supporting the THINKING GROUND workshop series, a pilot artist-development program by theatre-makers The Voice in My Hands. Workshops are free but places are limited.
Learn more about THINKING GROUND and register for the next workshop
New North Concert 16
Guest curator Dale Gorfinkel brings lineup of Narrm/Melbourne-based musicians pushing boundaries in their areas of practice to Brunswick Mechanics:
Sounds Like Movement [Peter Fraser/Dale Gorfinkel] ~ Shh! [Anja Füsti/Rosalind Crisp] ~ Peter Blamey
Get tickets to New North Concert 16
Get tickets to New North Concert 15
New North Concert 15
Xiaole Zhan ~ Jassy Robertson ~ Tilman Robinson
Xiaole will present a ‘live anthology’ for narrator, percussion, violin, electronics and narrator—a musical setting of a collection of poems exploring the collision between music and language.
Sonic Travellers: Opening Performance
Sonic Travellers seeks to discover shared connections between sonic pasts and presents, exploring regional affinities between Australia and Southeast Asia.
The 2024 LAB program considers Next Wave’s past, present and future – with a focus on intergenerational knowledge sharing and creative responses to notions of collectivism, preservation and care – culminating in a future-focused 40th birthday party.
Across the Ocean: Viet Thanh Nguyen in Conversation with Nam Le
The Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network is thrilled to host an evening with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen in conversation with Nam Le.
Next Wave x (nexus)
Next Wave x (nexus) is a multi-sensory Radical hospitality event of experimental dance battles, cuisines and a party.
International Women's Day Performance
Our Young Artistic Directorate are co-curating a party in partnership with Brunswick Music Festival
Radical Hospitality: 剉冰 + equatorial fruit-opening party
Dead Ends and Detours - Bruno Booth
Leisuretime I — Aaron Claringbold & Rebecca Mccauley
You're invited Home.
In 2021 Next Wave made Brunswick Mechanics our home, and then the lockdowns kept us away.
We invite you to join us in warming our space with an evening of performances, art and music from our friends and community.
Home
Sat 26 Feb from 4pm
Welcome to Country from 5pm
Speeches 5.30pm
Performances 5.45pm
Brunswick Mechanics Institute
Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions, including accessibility requirements. Reach us via nextwave@nextwave.org.au
We understand attending public events might not be for everyone right now and look forward to seeing you sometime soon.
Home
Welcome to Country and Smoking Ceremony with Uncle Ringo Terrik.
Here We Have It, Excerpt choreographed by Amrita Hepi and performed by Sarah Kosoof, Ruby English, Caitlin Mewett, Molly McKenzie and Gemma Sattler.
Duet performances with Marco Cher-Gibard and Raina Peterson.
Operatic Performance by Shauntai Batzke.
‘Kirrip’ performance by Djirri Djirri.
Sound by Next Wave Kickstart 2021 artist Delali Zevon-Aniakwah.
Retreat by Next Wave Festival 2016 artist Ben Landau.
Curated by Amaara Raheem, Next Wave Victorian Artistic Directorate.
Here We Have It. Excerpt
Performed by Ruby English, Sarah Kosoof, Caitlin Mewett, Molly McKenzie and Gemma Sattler. Choreographed by Amrita Hepi. Costume design by Jessica Johnston.
*This work massages through the absurdity of being in the arts, the kind of love and multitudes of approach, code switching and humour it infuses in you, the dedication and highly specialized skill set that is needed, the required “training” for professionalism and the hope to come out of an institution on the other side prepared for a work force that is haptic.
Using the voice, ferociously specific monologue and an acute sense of humour and pacing within dance, this work hopes that it can culminate a deserving “hurrah” of skill and dance before an audience.*
-Amrita Hepi
Amrita Hepi (b. 1989, Townsville of Bundjulung/Ngapuhi territories) is an award-winning artist. Her practice is concerned with dance as a social function performed within galleries, performance spaces, video art and digital technologies. She engages in forms of historical fiction and hybridity—especially those that arise under empire—to investigate the bodies’ relationship to personal histories and archive. She was on the Forbes Asia list of 30 under 30, has won the People’s Choice Award twice as part of the prestigious Keir Choreographic Award, and won FBi radio’s Best Artist of the year in 2019. Amrita is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery, is a current artist in residence at Gertrude Contemporary and lecturer in Dance and Visual Arts at VCA. She studied dance at NAISDA and Alvin Ailey New York.
This work is supported by VCA Dance, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne.
Wiradjuri soprano, composer and writer; Shauntai Batzke is a principal artist with Short Black Opera and an Alumna of the Melba Opera Trust. Shauntai holds a BMus at the Melbourne Conservatorium UniMelb. Has spent two summers in New York in vocal and performance training at Belle Arti Center of the Arts and in 2019 gave a world premier of her original chamber and orchestral compositions at the Port Fairy Spring Music Festival ‘19. Shauntai made her debut as a solo artist with Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2020 singing ‘Long Time Living Here’, A musical Acknowledgement of Country composed by Deborah Cheetham AO and sang this same piece for the opening of each performance of MSO’s 2021 season of Peter and the Wolf at Hamer Hall. In June 2021, Shauntai made her debut performance with Victorian Opera in Deborah Cheetham AO’s new opera ‘Parrwang Lifts the Sky’. Noted productions include; Pecan Summer (Short Black Opera), Ragtime, Showboat (The Production Company), Beginning of Nature (Australian Dance Theatre), RICERCAR (Present Tense Ensemble), Fidelio (Melbourne Opera) and Corrugation Road (Black Swan Theatre)
Improvised performance with Raina Peterson (body) and Marco Cher-Gibard (guitar)
Here We Have It by Amrita Hepi, 2021, VCA Dance, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne. Image by Gregory Lorenzutti.