High Performance Packing Tape
Branch Nebula
Branch Nebula is one of Australia’s most adventurous arts companies. For the past 23 years, our nimble ensemble of creators has forged bold new audience experiences at the intersection of theatre, dance, sport and street cultures. From the intimate to the large-scale, we make performances in regional skate parks, abandoned shopping malls, as well as for international festivals and contemporary art centres.
Our collaborative process embodies the constantly inquisitive and we are energised by bringing our audiences along for a daring contemporary ride. Our raw and brutalist aesthetic draws its dynamism from our long-term engagement with street culture and looks to the intelligence of emerging cultural forms and the subtext of contemporary art movements, from shopping malls, street protests, and community events to breaking and skate competitions. We shape ideas and make work at the point of friction between materials, phenomenon, experience, and human bodies, in whatever venue it requires, with whatever tools are thrown up.
Our maverick reputation and approach to performance leads us to atypical audiences in unconventional and surprising locations. It has also honed decades of expertise in risk taking and helped craft a nimble and resilient company structure.
In High Performance Packing Tape, Branch Nebula employs readymade materials—stationery and disposable hardware items—to place the performer in a series of mind-bending planes and predicaments.
The tension of cheap materials pushed to breaking point, inevitable equipment failure, and imminent physical demise lead to horrific scenarios. Safety and wellbeing are de-prioritised in new and liberating ways. High Performance Packing Tape faces fear, self preservation and risk management to create enthralling new possibilities for physical performance.
With the stage and objects miked up, and the live sound edited and layered live through a surround sound system, High Performance Packing Tape places the audience right into the action.
The tension builds from the moment the audience enters and takes their seats, with the performer lying on stage blowing up a large balloon way beyond its stated capacity, to the inevitable explosion. Each scene thereafter continues to build with further wind-ups and releases, all the while maintaining edge of the seat suspense, leavened with deadpan humour.
High Performance Packing Tape was commissioned by Performance Space and premiered in the 2018 Liveworks festival, toured to Homo Novus in Riga, Latvia, Sydney Opera House Unwrapped, Melbourne Festival (2019), Adelaide Festival (2021) and Cambridge Junction, UK (2022). It was nominated for a Green Room Award for Design.
High Performance Packing Tape is one of our most outstanding productions, demonstrated by its ongoing programming and regular enquiries from international presenters who seek contemporary circus that is out of the box. The work appeals to a wide range of audiences, from across experimental and contemporary performance, physical theatre and circus, but also for conventional narrative-driven theatre.