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Marcus Whale
Variety Night | 2024
bio:
Marcus Whale (b. 1990) lives and works on Gadigal land. Releasing music since the 2000s with groups Collarbones and BV and under his own name, his recorded output primarily forms an electronic world around his singing, taking an agnostic approach to genre. Solo albums create a conceptual world around this music: 2024 album Ecstasy draws a line between rave music and St. Teresa of Avila’s masochistic encounters with the divine. Live shows, influenced by religious ritual, often move into the room and off the stage, with costumes by Calli Comical, Megan Hanson, Chloe Corkran and Athena Thebus. Recently, his work has turned towards contemporary performance, including works Needlemouth for Soft Centre, Praise! (with Eugene Choi) for Asia Topa, the Lucifer series (with Athena Thebus & Chloe Corkran), In the Mood (with Rainbow Chan and Eugene Choi) for Sydney Opera House and Possession for Next Wave.
statement:
My work across music and performance explores the feeling of the unknowable, rituals of devotion, and the desperate compulsion of desire, incorporating the excessive dramatics of Christian liturgy, homosexual camp, horror, diva worship and the rave. As a life-long musician, I’m fascinated by performance as slippery, unrepeatable, open-ended and impossible to articulate after the fact. Years spent attempting to control inattentive audiences as a pop singer have led me to ways of performing that disorient and arrest the experience of the audience, making a crack into ordinary time. My strategies include using music and singing as a tactile, sculptural and spatial force, the segmentation and alienation of the moving body, improvisational and site-specific approaches to moving through, in and on a performance space, as well as the use of light to create a sense of enigma: dazzling and overexposed, or opaque and hidden.
