ART PROJECTS

"Thingamabobs" was developed for the Darebin Fuse Festival 2023. It invites locals from various demographics to co-create content involving contraptions and projections. Designed to be highly adaptive and iterative, the project adjusts to each new environment and community it encounters. After its initial run, the project was renamed "The Things We Do for Love" to better reflect its continuous theme: love! It's a flexible, interactive, and open-ended performanc that involves community- specific engagement. The project features multiple stations and culminates in two evenings of public presentations, where audio and video recording, as well as co-build elements will be presented.

Working with all the students of the Yea Primary School in a two months audio-visual project with a big public outcome, ME...YOU...US celebrated community after two years of Covid. The goods shed at the old station got transformed through students’ voices and films, stunning projections, input from local people and exciting live performances.

WUNDERKAMMER or 'Chamber of Wonders' shows 10 of Jens' eccentric and unpredictable machines he uses in his theatre productions. Part installation, part animated show- and-tell, it is a highly interactive and playful exhibition. In the weeks prior to the opening, content for some exhibits was created in workshops with children and adults.

MOVE ON was a large scale kinetic and performative installation project for the Art is...festival in Horsham. Over five weeks, Jens developed with more than a hundred people from all different local communities a huge 83 metre long outdoor chain-reaction installation. People telling their stories in the mix with lambs, agricultural machinery, a crane, local performers and lots of humor and enthusiasm.

Cross-generational project with Darebin primary students and senior citizen from diverse cultural backgrounds. Using kinetic contraptions as a catalyst for movement and change, memories and stories of a larger community were triggered, in a final live event that also introduced live music, performance, acrobatics and wacky machines.

CIRCUS WA invited Jens to be guest artistic director with their youth troupes on a new production for 2020. The development was planned as a multi-residency process in Fremantle and Melbourne. After the first residency took place, Covid 19 shut borders. Instead of cancelling the project, they decided to venture into new and unexplored territory and continued creating online over the year. Towards the end of the creation Jens was allowed to travel, quarantine for two weeks and finish the show face to face.

Two days of intensive building with a group of 16 children between 9 and 12 resulted in a breath-taking chain- reaction structure that took 12 minutes to run from one end to the other.

Well, sometimes also a bit longer.

Flying golf clubs, falling lockers, expanding popcorn, fire and sewing machines just to name a few...a truly impressive way to find the most over-engineered way possible to uncover the big Artplay signage. Public demonstration runs for the general audience turned out to be very popular over the following days.

In collaboration with the Primary School in Elmore near Bendigo (huge school with 23 students), the Perfect Moment was an three month long exploration of the concept of dynamic balance as a shaping experience of our existence: life is a perpetual falling and catching yourself again. It was a powerful hinge for students to develop their own reflections about all forms of balance and un-balalnce. The final outcome of mixing performance and built contraptions was an extraordinary event at the overfilled memorial hall at show time night. The program was funded through the Extended School Residency programs of Arts Victoria,

Theatre Kimberley was running a three years program to teach circus and performance at some remote communities 200 kms north of Broome. Over the years, I was invited to teach there and direct the final performances of two communities: Beagle Bay and Lombadina. Fantastic nights for everyone to come and see their kids doing great stuff with a lot of confidence! And for us to have shared the experience with those beautiful people!

Over 2 days, children at ArtPlay worked with Jens Altheimer and Carl Polke to create the Super Sonic Sound Structure - a large bamboo dome filled with all manner of kooky sound making contraptions made from discarded household appliances and other up-cycled objects, mixed with electronically triggered sound landscapes and recordings. The second week end saw a group of younger children and their families exploring the existing sound structure and objects, adding their own creations to the lot.

​THE WACKANICAL CARDBOARD GAME ARCADE
The Village Festival in Melbourne invited me to develop and build with students from the Fitzroy Community School cardboard games. I challenged them with the introduction of an additional component to the games: electric and other house appliances. At the end of the project, we ended up with six very original games, that were sent up at 'The Village Festival' at the Edinburgh Gardens and turned into a big popular success with people all ages playing them during two days.