Image credit: REVELLING, Director & Choreographer Gülşen Özer, Videographer & Editor, Vanessa White, Associate Choreographer, Vivienne Rogis, Assistant Choreographer, Sara Di Segna, Composer & Musician, Matt Stonehouse, Collaborators & Dancers, Ann Maree Billings, James Dalton, Gem DeMarco, Sara Di Segna, Fran Dishon, Liliana Flood, Bronwyn Gardner, Ellise Peart, Christine Phillips, Laure Pradier, Vivienne Rogis, Juliet Sironi, Desrae Ukena, Danni Vitalich
As Winter gradually comes to an end, we wrap up the 2025 ART AFTER DARK program with the beautiful dance video work REVELLING, by Gülşen Özer.
Bunjil Place Outdoor Screen
1 – 31 August 2025
5.00pm - 6.00pm (daily)
REVELLING
In the best of times—and in the most urgent—we ask: how do we gather, as we are, and move together? REVELLING begins with this question. It is an invitation to dance with the bodies we have today, to locate ourselves through movement, memory, and place. This work asks how art might help us think and feel in the face of crisis—how cinema, choreography, and site-responsive practice can offer ways to remember, reimagine, and relate.
Rooted in care, reciprocity, and a striving for right relationship with Country, REVELLING is a socially engaged dance film shaped by collective process. Across generations, cultural identities, and levels of dance experience, participants came together to explore their ancestral threads and personal stories through embodied practice. Their presence is the work—their gestures, silences, hesitations, and offerings shaped the choreography as much as any formal structure.
Filmed on Bunurong Country at Mt Cannibal Flora and Fauna Reserve—where granite boulders over 350 million years old rise from the earth—the land itself became a collaborator. The site’s ecological and cultural significance shaped our process, challenging us to move with humility, attentiveness, and respect.
REVELLING is both a celebration and a call: to honour where we come from, to deepen how we relate, and to imagine how we might move forward—together.
Gülsen Özer is a multidisciplinary artist, choreographer, and curator whose socially engaged and participatory practice spans performance, sound, visual art, and public installations. She creates intergenerational works that bring art into civic and community spaces, exploring themes of power, identity, connection, and place. Deeply responsive to cultural and ecological contexts, Özer’s projects invite audiences into sensorial experiences that re-enchant embodiment, relationship, and presence.
Her creative output includes installations (object, sound, and screen), live performance, and public art. She has produced two internationally acclaimed short films, Cascade and Split Rock, in collaboration with Vanessa White and Ania Reynolds. Her work has been presented at MOMA, CLIMARTE Gallery, Yarra Ranges Regional Museum, TWMA, Arts House, Dancehouse, Temperance Hall, Theatreworks, CATI Dans (Istanbul), and Bunjil Place. From participatory installations to site-based events, her practice engages diverse publics through layered, socially resonant forms.
Özer’s work is grounded in values of equity, cultural safety, and art as a public health imperative. Recent roles include Lead Artist on It Takes A Town (Yarra Ranges Council), Project Leader for Resounding – Meeting Places (Cardinia Shire) with the Creative Recovery Network, and Facilitator of the Queer Art Collective at Burrinja Cultural Centre, supported by VicHealth. She holds a BA (Hons) in Visual Culture from Monash University and is an alumna of the Culturally Safe Leadership Program led by Veronica Pardo & Associates.
@missgulsen
gulsenozer.com
Vanessa White is an award-winning cinematographer, contemporary artist, painter and video artist. Vanessa explores the gestures of the body through physicality and performance as ways of making meaning. Her video works have been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Australian Dance Theatre Screen Dance Festival, Ottawa Arts Centre (Canada), Kunsthalle Kosice Art Hall (Slovakia), Espoo City Theatre (Finland), and Ebeltoft Glass Museum (Denmark). She was awarded Best Cinematography at ALTFF Spring '19 for '23°WEST'.
Collaboration has been integral to Vanessa's practice. She created video projections for Crossing Latitudes, a Finland performance with choreographer Favela Vera Ortiz exploring dual realities through live and filmed elements. With Gülsen Özer, she co-created site-responsive video works, Cascade and Split Rock. Her productions work in concert with landscape imagery to explore the uncanny effects produced through the reformulation of bodies in motion, which perform and narrate new, visceral possibilities of meaning. All aspects of her practice are connected by deep engagement with materiality, visual language, and the search for meaning through abstraction.
@vanessawhitevideo
vanessawhiteart.com
Vivienne Rogis is a dancer, choreographer, educator, and producer with over 25 years of experience in the Australian and international dance sectors. A movement artist and clinical Pilates practitioner, her career is driven by a passionate belief in the power of dance as a medium of communication & expression that facilitates the self-reflexive growth of individuals and communities.
Her independent creative work focuses on non-traditional venues and contexts for dance, developing short dance installations, site-specific dance films and full-length works in diverse places and spaces.
Viv is a graduate of the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (1994 - Dance), and also has a Bachelor of Arts (Sociology/Italian Language) 2006, a Masters in Visual Culture Research Methods from the Australian National University, 2011 and a Diploma in Contemporary Pilates. Vivienne performs, teaches and choreographs for a variety of companies, artists, groups & festivals locally, nationally and internationally. Vivienne founded Mirramu Dance Company with Elizabeth Cameron Dalman (one of Australia’s modern dance pioneers) in 2000 and has been training in Elizabeth’s movement technique for more than 20 years.
@viviennerogis
Sara Di Segna is a dancer and choreographer with a strong interest in cross-cultural collaborative processes. An alumna of the National Dance Academy of Rome, her artistic journey has been rooted in Contemporary dance, with a deep engagement in improvisational techniques. Identifying as an independent artist, Sara has worked across diverse artistic landscapes, collaborating with both local and international creatives. Her notable partnerships include working with Gülsen Özer on THIS IS WHERE IT HAPPENED and Tamara Cubas on MULTITUD, among several others. She has previously danced with Blink Dance Theatre and Dancebourne Arts, and is currently involved with Ethnodanceology Dance Company and Icastica Coreography. Additionally, she teaches creative movement classes, bringing dance to her local community and encouraging self-expression through physical movement.
Sara’s artistic practice is defined by a deep curiosity and commitment to exploring how dance intersects with emotion, identity, and cultural heritage. Through her cross-cultural collaborations and improvisational work, she creates performances that offer meaningful reflections on the shared human experience, emphasising inclusivity, diversity, and emotional resonance.
@saradisegna_
Matt Stonehouse is a Naarm/Melbourne-based percussionist, composer, and instrument maker. With over 30 years immersed in rhythm and sound, his practice draws on Middle Eastern and Turkish percussion traditions, blended with an experimental and deeply expressive style.
Widely recognised for his percussive expertise and ability to weave acoustic and electronic textures into emotionally resonant soundscapes, Matt has performed and studied extensively across Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, and Iran. He has appeared on more than forty albums and collaborated with artists worldwide, including The Ross Daly Quartet (Crete), The Tea Party (Canada), and Coleman Barks (USA). In Australia, he has contributed to ARIA-nominated recordings such as Empires by Latitude 37. His 2016 solo album Rosie’s Point of View showcases his skills as a composer. He teaches frame drum workshops nationally and is the author of Percussion of the Arabic World and Beyond. He also founded Fingers of Fury, a global online school and community for darbuka and frame drumming.
mattstonehouse.com
steamandlumber.com
@steamandlumber
