The IKEA Project: Coloring in the Rooms - Thursdays at Four presentation by Talya Chalef and Kelly Ryall October 18, 2012

When you walk through an IKEA, you're moved through a series of rooms each designed to offer up suggestions for your compact, space savvy, dream home. Display tags with bar codes offer up options for your budget. Would you buy room A, B or C? Does A's couch ask you to sit in it? Does B's bed beg you to lie down? What about C's chest of drawers? Melbourne based composer Kelly Ryall in collaboration with New York based theater-maker Talya Chalef propose to color in these blank canvasses in an interactive sound-based performance experience designed to give the participant the experience that IKEA can't. What if instead of display tags, you were given license to listen in on a conversation, a secret, a memory or a story connected to that room's future? Traveling between New York, Melbourne and other possible cities, Talya and Kelly will begin to explore the idiosyncratic and individual ghosts that haunt our city's homes. This creative presentation will mark our initial findings in the project's early development phase.

Talya Chalef is an independent theatre-maker & director working in multidisciplinary visual performance work. She grew up in Cape Town and has lived in Melbourne for several years, where she devised and directed new performance works site (2006, nominated in the Victorian Green Room awards for outstanding direction), In Other Words (2007- Melbourne and 2009 Argentina, also nominated in the Victorian Green Room awards) and Eyton Rd (2009, Melbourne and Cape Town). In 2011 she took part in an artist residency at the Robert Wilson Watermill Center, directed Daniella Shoshan's An Improvised Explosive Device for the NYC International Fringe Festival. and began the first stage development of an international theater project port cities, which had an initial workshop showing aboard the Red Hook Museum barge. She has worked in Australia, South Africa, Argentina and Europe and is the biennial 2012 Dame Elizabeth Murdoch Travel Fellow. Talya is the recipient of a Besen Family Foundation arts award, the Australia Business Arts Foundation Cultural Trust award, the Dame Joan Sutherland Award, the Albert Nerkin Scholarship and is a Columbia University Dean's fellow.

Kelly Ryall is an award-winning composer and sound artist working in the realm of theatre, film and dance. His primary interest in music and sound is creating work that is immersive and visceral with the aim of taking listeners on a journey through their own internal and external landscapes. As a composer he also likes to perform his music live allowing the performer /audience relationship to enhance the compositions. Over the years he has played and toured with many different bands in Melbourne, but predominantly with High Pass Filter 1995-2004, as well as with bands such as Beastie Boys, Fugazi, Lee Scratch Perry and Tortoise. He has received Green Room awards for Love Monkey and Coop.

This event is organized by the Mapping Spectral Traces collaborative and is part of the University Symposium on Site and Incitement.

Official Website: http://ias.umn.edu/calendar/