What's On
See what’s on from our base in Brunswick and beyond ↓
Winter Windows callout
Next Wave is calling for artists who live, work or study in Merri-bek to apply for our inaugural Winter Windows Series!
Radio Composite
Imagined as a contemporary theatre of sonic art, performance, experimental music, talks, criticism, audio workshops, and reading groups, Composite Radio is a platform supporting interdisciplinary, critical, and speculative work that attunes (to)/detunes (from) the currents of our time.
Winter Windows online information session
Join us online to learn more about the application process for Next Wave’s Winter Windows series.
Winter Windows artist drop-in session 1
Drop in to Brunswick Mechanics Institute to chat with the Next Wave team about the Winter Windows program, see our space and ask questions about the application process.
As we looked back, we saw the future
Referencing iconic Australian visual histories in Two Laws (1982) and state archives of the nuclear testing at Maralinga in the 1950s-60s, this screening engages with questions of representation, positionality, and ethical modes of image making involving vulnerable communities and the historical record.
Presented by Composite
Winter Windows artist drop-in session 2
Missed our first drop-in session? Don’t stress, you can still join us at Brunswick Mechanics Institute to talk about the Winter Windows program.
Divestment Dinner
A Climate For Art (ACFA) invites you to join their next Divestment Dinner, delivered in collaboration with Next Wave.
Divestment Dinners are a time to break bread and break ties with superannuation funds that don’t put our collective futures first.
Presented by Composite
Subversive Film x Hasib Hourani
Subversive Film and Hasib Hourani examine and enact narratives of solidarity in this speaking from the I eye program. A screening of four short films from Brussels and Ramallah based collective Subversive Film’s Tokyo Reels project, is accompanied by the reading of a newly commissioned poem by Lebanese-Palestinian writer Hasib Hourani who lives on unceded Wangal Country.
Presented by Composite
Archive
Production Management Seminar
Learn the ins and outs of production management in this free workshop led by some of Melbourne’s most experienced Production Managers.
This seminar are part of an ongoing series by Bronwyn Pringle, supported by Next Wave.
Next Wave Neighbours 2
Next Wave Neighbours returns for its first iteration of 2025!
Join us for drinks, snacks and chats at Brunswick Mechanics Institute.
SpringCity 43214
Next Wave Young Artistic Director MaggZ is presenting an interactive game-performance with street dance, sound, audio-visual installation for the Asian-diasporic community.
Played simultaneously across two spaces, audiences are invited to watch the game unfold from behind the scenes, or experience how their actions can change the rules of SpringCity 43214.
Residue
Residue is a 26-minute film centred around a series of domestic tableaux shot at different frame rates (including time-lapses shot over many months, and extreme slow-motion shooting at 1900 frames per second). Composited together, they form a single scene where Angela, played by Eora-based choreographer and dancer Angela Goh, interacts with decomposing still-lifes.
Presented by Composite
speaking from the I eye: Claire Lambe x Eleanor Ivory Weber
The abject body and the construction of a scene meet in this speaking from the I eye program. Two short films by Naarm (Melbourne) based artist Claire Lambe accompanied by the reading of a newly commissioned text by Brussels based artist Eleanor Ivory Weber.
[https://events.humanitix.com/speaking-from-the-i-eye-claire-lambe-x-eleanor-ivory-weber test: Tickets via Composite](https://events.humanitix.com/speaking-from-the-i-eye-claire-lambe-x-eleanor-ivory-weber test: Tickets via Composite)
Presented by Composite
Considering Practice
Next Wave is supporting artist and mentor Leisa Shelton to deliver her next iteration of ‘Considering Practice’ at Brunswick Mechanics Institute.
Considering Practice is a focused investigation into the core principles, values and intentions that underpin each individual’s independent arts practice.
This full-day workshop is $125. Places are limited.
To book, contact Leisa via email.
Neighbourhood Noise (BMF)
Neighbourhood Noise is an open invitation for the community to experience live music and experimental arts programming by Arts Merri-bek partners Next Wave, the Counihan Gallery and Composite.
Next Wave is collaborating with Speak Percussion to present ‘Percussion, Conversation, Degustation’.
CAST Book Launch—Art and Memorialisation
RMIT’s CAST research group and Next Wave invite you to the launch of ‘Art and Memorialisation: Truth-Telling Through Creative Practice in Settler Colonial Australia (2024)’. This event will be convened by oral historian, Genevieve Grieves, and artist and researcher, Amy Spiers.
MESS Presents: New Waveforms (BMF)
Brought to you by Brunswick Music Festival, MESS (Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio) takes over the Brunswick Mechanics Institute for the first time with New Waveforms.
Place Made After the Story
The artists in Place Made After the Story exhibit a tenderness in approach, bringing a poetic logic to their critical engagement with place. By revisiting public histories or familial memory, these works deal with the intricate relationships between locality, ecology, narrative, belonging and not belonging.
Presented by Composite in collaboration with KADIST.
Next Wave, Industry Discovery Day
Curious about how leading arts organisations operate and envision the future of creative practice?
Join our industry discovery day to hear from Platform Arts, Westspace, Arts House, Rising, Asia TOPA and Footscray Community Arts.
This program is designed for early-career creative practitioners (including our Kickstart artists, who’ll be joining us) to build their knowledge and connections.
Recompositions Screenings
Part of a series of discursive and performative events accompanying the exhibition ‘The place we do not know is the place we are looking for’ at West Space and
Liquid Architecture.
Amplifying the mode of the gathering, the program assembles and attends to resonant practices that are intent on inventing languages to be able to hold ineffable dreams, desires and encounters, unfixed from the discretisation of time, bodies, and sensing.
Presented by Composite.
ACFA Symposium
Next Wave is partnering with A Climate for Art (ACFA) to deliver the ACFA Symposium.
The symposium aims to build relationships and extend a vocabulary around how culture underpins the climate crisis—and how culture is in turn affected by environmental imbalance.
Over two days, ACFA will relay what they have learnt so far and bring together a range of speakers.
Public Grief, Public Space (Composite)
Esther Carlin and Adalya Nash Hussein explore the psychogeography of grief in the first Melbourne speaking from the I eye program.
Presented by Composite
Finite Eyes screening (Composite)
Finite Eyes brings together live performance, pre-recorded sound and moving image to explore the emotive pull and mobilising force of utopian visions.
By anorak and Ora Clementi in collaboration with Debris Facility and Melody Woodnutt and featuring work by Basma al-Sharif, Tolia Astakhishvili and James Richards, Charles Bernstein, Marguerite Duras, and Dani ReStack.
Presented by Composite
Below The Surface presents — 2025 Vision Board & Networking Event
Young Artistic Director Lydia Tesema is bringing her annual Below The Surface (BTS) vision board and networking event to Brunswick Mechanics Institute.
Connect with likeminded local creatives while creating visual representation of your goals, dreams and aspirations.
Reading: 'Inheritance'
Next Wave is supporting the development of ‘Inheritance’, a new production by Ryan Enniss and Robert Lewis.
Inheritance stems from a project investigating neurodiversity in Australian performing arts. It explores themes of toxic masculinity, relationships and anxiety through a kaleidoscopic journey of interconnected monologues.
Contact Persona Collective for more information.
Activating Truth
Convened by CAST leader Dr Amy Spiers, ‘Activating Truth’ brings together artists and researchers from across Naarm/Melbourne, other parts of so-called ‘Australia’, as well as Turtle Island/Canada, to share and deepen knowledge on ways that the truth about settler colonial violence can be activated responsibly and impactfully in community and localised contexts through creative practice.
Screening: 'Anak'
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 by Composite in partnership with Sunburnt.
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).
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.
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.
Presented by Composite.
'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.
Presented by Composite
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.
Presented by Composite
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.
Presented by Composite
'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
Under My Tongue
Tue 18 ⏤ Sat 29 Jul
📍 Brunswick Mechanics, 270 Sydney Road, Brunswick
Performance at Brunswick Mechanics Theatre
7:30pm, Tues (preview) 18 July – Sat 22 July
• The Wed 19 July performance is an invite only opening night
• The Sun 23 July performance will be audio described
• This is a movement based performance with vibrational sound and no spoken word. There will be Auslan interpretation for pre and post show socialising on 19 and 22 July (please note that the 19 July performance is an invite only opening event)
• ON-DEMAND EXTENDED until 31 Aug
Exhibition
Tues 18 July – Fri 21 July: 12 – 9pm
Sat 22 July: 6 – 9pm
Sun 23 July: 2 –5pm
Mon 24 July – Fri 28 July: 12 – 5pm
Sat 29 July: 2 – 5pm
Public Programs
Sat 29 July, 2 – 5pm
• You can read about Public Programs for Under My Tongue here
Director Belinda Locke uses performance to unearth invisible challenges that people face in their lives every day. Drawing from anonymous submissions about real-life experiences, Under My Tongue delves into the politics of connection, the aesthetics of access, and the unseen aspects of people’s identities, histories, and emotional lives.
Two performers make the invisible visible with deep empathy, exposing vulnerabilities and desires. Personal and unseen moments are expressed through movement and vibrational sound design. Specifically designed to increase access for the artists and audiences, particularly those who are d/Deaf or hard of hearing, this work is brutally honest but fundamentally gentle, opening up conversation about fears, longing for connection and intimacy.
Belinda Locke – Lead Artist and Director
Julian Dibley-Hall – Dramaturg
Amanda Lever – Performer
Joseph Stewart – Performer
Emah Fox – Sound Designer & Composer
Claudia Mirabello - Set & Costume Designer
Bronwyn Pringle - Lighting Designer
Celina Mack - Stage Manager
Co-devised by Belinda Locke, Joseph Stewart and Amanda Lever with Anna Seymour (creative development 2019-2020).
The performance season (18 —23 July) is complemented by a full takeover of Brunswick Mechanics Institute curated by Belinda Locke in celebration of Disability Pride Month.
From 18 — 30 July, drop in to experience an exhibition in the studio featuring work by Elvin Lam, Andy Jackson and Rachael Guy and Gemma Mahadeo, view Larissa MacFarlane’s disability pride artworks beaming out of our Sydney Road windows or take some time out in the quiet space developed by artist Prue Stevenson.
We invite you to join us throughout Disability Pride Month to watch, listen, explore and contemplate your own relationship to the invisible challenges that surround us and those you experience yourself.
What to Expect
Getting to Brunswick Mechanics
We’re gathering at Next Wave’s home at Brunswick Mechanics, located at 270 Sydney Road in Brunswick. You can read about public transport and getting to our venue here.
Visiting Brunswick Mechanics
— The venue is wheelchair accessible.
— Assistance Animals are welcome throughout the building
— There are gender neutral and accessible toilets.
— We will have staff available on the day to ensure everyone can attend.
— We encourage masking at Brunswick Mechanics Institute and will have face masks available at all Under My Tongue programs
— Visual Guide-Brunswick Mechanics.
Performance
— This is a movement based performance with vibrational sound and no spoken word.
— There will be Auslan interpretation for pre and post show socialising on 19 and 22 July (please note that the 19 July performance is an invite only opening event).
— There will be audio description for the performance on 23 July.
— The performance is 50 min long with no break.
— There will be a quiet room which you can use at anytime during the performance.
— Content warning: references to medical settings and mental health challenges
Public Programs
— There will be Auslan interpretation for the Artists in Conversation program
Under My Tongue has been generously supported by:
Special thanks to Berlinklusion, Arts Access Australia, Incite Arts, Foundation for Young Australians, Charter Hall, Arts House and Malthouse Theatre for their support during the project’s conception and development.
Image: Under My Tongue by Zan Wimberley
Image description: Colour photograph of Joseph Stewart and Anna Seymour. Joseph has his eyes closed and is leaning backwards with his bare chest exposed. Anna leans her head against his shoulder and is facing the opposite direction. Anna’s dark curls frame her face and she looks out into the distance. Their arms are entwined and the background is a pink tongue colour.Image: Accessible toilet, audio description, Auslan, quiet space and wheelchair access symbol.
Image: Besen Family Foundation, Robert Salzer Foundation, Merri-bek City Council, Auspicious Arts Projects, Creative Partnerships Australia, Australia Council for the Arts and Regional Arts Victoria logo.