“A beautiful atmosphere which is very anarchic,” Lee Wilson, Co-Artist at Branch Nebula says.
One of the many beauties of art is its unlimited form, coming in all shapes, sizes, and colours. Art can be anything imaginable, no matter how overlooked or understated it becomes by the majority.
Sydney company Branch Nebula aims to bring performances to people who don't normally go to the theatre or engage in art and they will be doing just that with 'Snake Sessions', a street style performance where the company work to share an experience of urban culture as a powerfully dramatic and artistic experience. One of the people behind the creative piece is Lee Wilson, a co-artist at Branch Nebula.
“'Snake Sessions' is what we call a residency. We spend a week in a skate park and the idea is to sort of infiltrate the skate park. We don't go in there and say 'hey everybody we are gonna do such and such,' we kind of work amongst the crowd at the skate park doing our artistic explorations and the people at the skate park observe us as we observe them, we start conversations and get to know people and then there is a natural exchange of skills that happens and you get to know people and get to know a bit about who they are.”
The company have been exploring street styles since 2004 and are constantly looking for new ways to bring creativity to every nook and cranny they can squeeze themselves into. “We try to approach each project as something completely new and different. I guess one of our main goals is to bring performance to people who don't normally go to the theatre or engage with art. Our work has a social bend to it, wanting to break out of the box of being a little bit elitist.”
Branch Nebula are always looking for new places across Australia to take their anarchic performance, their next location being Alexandra Headlands as part of Horizon Festival.
“The problem with having a choreographed show in the skate park is that people can drop in on you and disrupt your flow and it sort of becomes risky, but at the same time you don't want to shut down the skate park either and take over because people use it every day and it's a public space.
“So we came up with the 'Snake Sessions' model as a way of being more fluid in the skate park and using the skate park much more how skaters and BMXers use that space and scooters as well. We've been able to do this piece now in 14 skate parks all over Australia, we've been to so many places.”
As our cities grow and our lives change with it, urban culture also continues to expand and adjust and so does the way in which art must be presented.
“We want it to feel like whatever you do in that space becomes creative in a way you haven't thought of before. We're looking at skating and BMX and those forms as art forms, whereas often they're highly commodified to sell products and part of that is to really push the idea of them as a sport and what we're really doing is countering that and saying you don't have to be the best, you don't have to be number one to win, you can actually do a whole bunch of things that are creative and interesting, and contribute to the culture without having to be the best.”
