SYDNEY.- Underbelly Arts Festival 2017 has announced artistic program highlights for its 10th anniversary program being presented for the first time at the National Art School in Darlinghurst from 7-8 October.

Showcasing 21 ambitious new projects, the Festival will host 116 artists from around Australia for a two-week Lab period onsite at the National Art School from 25 September until 6 October as they develop their works for the Festival. Public tours will be offered at 6pm each evening during the Lab, allowing ticket holders the rare opportunity to see artists develop new work.

Festival Director Roslyn Helper has revealed five highlights, providing an insight into what to expect: “Our 2017 program highlights include an immersive dance performed in an enveloping pink membrane, a six-hour durational feminist performance work inspired by the internet, a waterfront seagull apocalypse that signifies the impending rising of the seas, a merch stand offering purchasable art collectables by Underbelly artist, and a public complaints service, where peoples’ complaints will be interpreted and performed by an orchestral ensemble.”

Underbelly Arts Festival celebrates experimental contemporary art and spans a diverse range of mediums including installation, performance, dance, sound, visual art, intervention, digital art, radical opera, activist and participatory practices. Highlights include:

· Collaborative duo, Pony Express, led by playwright and performance maker Ian Sinclair and transdisciplinary artist Loren Kronemyer will present Sixth Wave. This work reflects on themes of environment, apocalypse and the future. Each day of the Festival, the collective will perform a waterfront spectacle in the bay at Woolloomooloo, where they paddle a kayak into the water and cover themselves in hot chips, using the power of crowds and seagulls to create a chaotic ocean choreography. The work brings to light our inefficacy in dealing with the impending rising of the seas.

· Harriet Gillies and Natalie Abbott will present a six-hour performance titled WATERMELON that explores their experiences of the internet and the many ways it manifests aesthetically, emotionally and politically, both IRL and online. Expect an image-driven internet-inspired theatrical spectacle that embraces and ridicules our collective obsession with pop culture and the excesses of internet binge culture.

· Complaint Department is an interactive installation and performance in which members of the general public are invited to submit a complaint about anything to the Complaint Department via an online form. Created by musician Angela Garrick, founder of R.I.P Society Records, Nic Warnock and curator, writer and artist, Yarran Gatsby, the work will be performed during the Festival, with a group of musicians assembled as the Complaint Ensemble to respond to the complaints with a short, partially improvised composition. The Complaint Ensemble includes Andrew McLellan, Emma Ramsay, Nicola Morton, Maeve Parker, Daryl Prondoso and John Wilton. Anonymous complaints can be lodged here: complaintdepartment.org. au

· Amrita Hepi, a dancer, dance maker, writer and activist; a Bundjulung and Ngapuhi woman whose work and practice sits in the nexus between pop culture and contemporary dance is working with creative duo and multidisciplinary artists Prue Stent and Honey Long. Together they present the gentle, protective and expansive work, This _______ may not protect you but at times it’s enough to know it’s there. The work involves a soft, membranous structure to protect and hold their audience in an embrace and aims to invite viewers to enter the space of the dance and mingle with the dancers to discover the contradictions inherent in our ideas of utopia.

· Make or Break is an ongoing collaboration between Sydney artists Connie Anthes and Rebecca Gallo. For Underbelly Arts 2017, Make or Break will work with fellow Festival artists to produce souvenir items that will be sold to audiences from a roving Merch Stand during the Lab and Festival.