Bundanon

Lives / works:

Talya Rubin (Co-devisor/Writer/Performer) is a Perth based performer, writer and teacher and one half of the theatre company Too Close to the Sun. Her work with the company has toured to Arts House, Performance Space, Brisbane Powerhouse, Brisbane Festival, Metro Arts, and Vitalstatistix. Developments include KISSClub PICA, Fremantle Arts Centre, Spare Parts, Live Dreams Performance Space, Adhocracy at Vitalstatistix, Terrapin Puppet Theatre,The Banff Centre, Sydney University, and Metro Arts. As a writer, Talya won the National Bronwen Wallace award in Canada for the most promising poet under 35, and a poetry slam at Harbourfront, Toronto. She has taught drama at NIDA, AFTRS, and The Darlinghurst Theatre and worked at Performance Space under Fiona Winning and Daniel Brine. She holds a BA in Theatre and Dance from Bard College, New York and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her second book of poetry, Iceland is Melting and So Are You was published in October 2021.

Natalie Allen is a Boorloo (Perth) based artist, with an extensive and award-winning professional dance career; that embodies research, collaboration, performing and touring work by many leading choreographers and companies from Australia and Internationally. Her own choreographic work has been performed locally in Perth, regional Western Australia, Adelaide, Taipei, Jakarta and Singapore. 

Due to Covid, Natalie returned to Perth in 2020 from performing Lady Macbeth in Punchdrunk International’s, Sleep No More, Shanghai. In the years that have followed Natalie premiered a solo show, ‘JULIA’, co-created with Sally Richardson, returned to ADT for ‘G’, returned to Sydney Dance Company to perform in Ohad Naharin’s, ‘Decadance’ for Sydney Festival 2022 and ‘Ab Intra’ to France, Movement Directed WAAPA 3^rd year actors in Caress/Ache and premiered a new immersive dance theatre work ‘IN CRIMSON’ at All Saints’ College, Bullcreek, W.A. Natalie will present JULIA for SDC’s INDance Festival this August.

Too Close to the Sun is an interdisciplinary theatre company making work at the cross section of performance, visual arts, video and sound. The two key collaborators, Talya Rubin and Nick James are based under the same roof on Wadjuk Noongar boodja. Together we devise dark and provocative works that ask challenging questions about our current reality. We use multi-layered storytelling, incorporating objects, projection, live film and installation to create worlds that are inescapable, unsettling and dream-like. Our key collaborators are Sam James (video), Hayley Forward (sound) and Richard Vabre (lighting).

We are interested in the edges, the odd, the unknown, and the uncanny and often pursue a series of seemingly unrelated threads in our work, weaving performances together into a non-linear totality. We are always pursuing transformative and unexpected experiences for audiences.

Our work has toured to Performance Space, Brisbane Festival, Arts House, Brisbane Powerhouse, Vitalstatistix, and Metro Arts. Curated residencies include CultureLAB Arts House, Contemporary Puppetry Residency at Terrapin Theatre, The Banff Centre for the Arts, Adhocracy and KISS Club.

In residence at Bundanon

Zoology is a subverted performance lecture about extinction and wildness. Inspired by found slides taken at the Bronx Zoo in the 1980s and Margaret Thatcher’s refusal to transport a Panda from London to Washington, on a Concorde flight to visit Ronald Reagan.

The work will consist of a series of zoo anecdotes told in a lecture style and also incorporate childhood stories about New York City, tangential associations with the Wizard of Oz, and the history of menageries in Europe. While the lecture unfolds two children are on stage unpacking, stacking and arranging a large box of animal figurines across the space. The lecture format will continuously be broken with as the performer enacts several different animals using latex masks and the body. These enactments begin as a series of failures in wildness, continuously getting closer to the true animal.