Body Fiction is a live performance work by gender-diverse artists Skye Gellmann and Yolanda Frost. The piece activates surrealist imagery through experimental percussion, choreographed movement, and the use of objects. Working across disciplines, the artists draw on their shared experience as queer life models to interrogate embodiment, visibility, and the unstable line of the creative process. The performance unfolds as an exploratory field in which elements enter and recede, oscillating between meditative states and abstract gestures. Tech Specs: 1 hour performance. Traverse stage setup. (Tech specs and support documentation/video available upon request).
Created and performed by: Skye Gellmann and Yolanda Frost
First 6 images by Seda Guc.
Last 8 images by Struthers Murray.
Subjective Spectacle 2019 - 2020
Subjective Spectacle is a durational, interdisciplinary project that considers spectacle not as a singular event but as a condition shaped by attention, framing, and viewpoint. Working across performance, installation, visual art, and moving image, the project unfolds over one hour, creating a layered environment in which multiple forms of engagement coexist.
Live performances by Naomi Francis, Skye Gellmann, and Rockie Stone are presented in dialogue with visual works by Kimberley Brewster, Lowana Davies, and Mindy Davies. The work distributes focus across bodies, objects, images, and intervals of silence. Spectacle is treated as unstable and subjective, emerging through the viewer’s shifting relationship to what is in the spotlight, overlooked or anticipated.
Through its durational structure, Subjective Spectacle asks how meaning accrues over time and how spectatorship itself becomes an active, performative act. The work invites audiences to reflect on their own habits of attention and the subtle mechanisms through which spectacle is continually produced.
Curated by Skye Gellmann.First hosted by Sidesault Festival.
End Grain is a practice-based work that unfolds through an ongoing negotiation between body, material, and site. At its core are three lengths of wood, cut unevenly and positioned as a sculptural anchor. Rather than functioning as props or symbols, these objects operate as collaborators—shaping movement, attention, and spatial relationships as the work develops.
Grounded in improvisation, the piece emerges through touch, weight, balance, and listening. Actions are not predetermined but arise in response to the physical logic of the materials and the conditions of the environment. Meaning accumulates slowly, through repetition and variation, as a quiet dialogue takes place between human and non-human bodies.
End Grain exists as a mutable framework rather than a fixed form. It has been realized across performance, installation, video, walking-based works, and gallery contexts, adapting its duration, scale, and structure to each setting while maintaining a consistent attention to material presence and embodied perception.
Seasons:
Awagi Art Circus Festival.
Melbourne Fringe Festival.
PACT
Hillscene Live Festival.
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Bodies Over Bitumen 2015 - 2017
A site-specific piece about time spent with a road, its ghosts and shadows.
Set within the urban landscape, the piece unfolds as a 60-minute guided walk in which three interdisciplinary performers lead audiences through spaces shaped by movement, utility, and neglect.
Drawing on lived experiences of squatting, the creators of Bodies Over Bitumen approach the street not as a backdrop but as an active collaborator.Their embodied knowledge informs how the work listens to the site, highlighting new surfaces to the mundane, unspoken thresholds, and overlooked gestures of occupation.
Through a slow, attentive progression, the piece cultivates a shared encounter between performers, audience, and environment. This quiet collaboration opens space for reflection, allowing new relationships to emerge between bodies and the urban terrain they inhabit.
"No spangles or frills… Even the best of 'new circus' often boils down to a sequence of thematically related 'acts,' failing to create emotional immersion. By contrast, Bodies Over Bitumen places us in direct relationship to the surface of the road, making the space of the streets subtly dangerous, but also a place to play… —Gellmann, Francis and Gellmann, with off-stage creative collaborator Kieran Law, have created something quietly extraordinary." - Realtime Arts Magazine
INNOVATION IN CONTEMPORARY CIRCUS, 2016 Green Room Awards.
BEST EXPERIMENTAL PERFORMANCE, 2015 Melbourne Fringe Festival.
Seasons Melbourne Fringe Festival.
Darwin Festival.
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Snow 2014
The Melba Speigel Tent is transformed into a non-whimsical landscape that 'mines' the imagination.
"Snow's high point is the 'snowball fight' that Gellmann orchestrates: the audience balls up paper into rounded clumps and goes for it with the abandon of several dozen primary school kids let loose in their thermals and mittens. Faint giggles, ripping paper and the thud of feet on the polished floor seep through the earplugs." - Realtime Arts Magazine.
Seasons:
Melbourne Fringe Festival.
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Blindscape 2012 - 2013
Our personal technologies have become an extension of ourselves.
Blindscape looks to exploit that connection to engage its audience in a visceral environment that collapses real and imagined boundaries. Using a provided iPhone, pre-loaded with the specially designed Blindscape App, you enter the virtual world as you enter the performance space. The Blindscape App is a 3D audio-virtual reality. Coloured in by an unseen hand, perception and reality fold over as you explore corridors, doorways and landscapes – four unique stages of discovery moving to a final place of reflection. The light from your phone helps you to view fragments of circus which are spectacular but elusive, in this performance experience.
"The work itself is by turns lyrical, powerful and humorous.. this was an incredibly fun experience!" - Artshub.
"Blindscape is a truly remarkable piece of theatre.. Many times I found myself watching a performer, then being distracted by the stunning soundscape that would lead me to another mini performance only a few steps away." Four and half stars - After Dark Theatre.
"Innovation and excellence in Circus." Nomination: Green Room Awards 2012.
Time Out Magazines 2012 Theatre Awards "Honourable Mention" to Blindscape, in Hybrid and Experimental Theatre.
Seasons
Blindscape premiered at the 2012 Next Wave Festival.
La Boite Indie.
PACT Center for Emerging Artists.
Junction Arts Festival.
Melbourne Fringe Festival.
The audience is led one by one into a spider-web landscape.
Within this world, an electric performance of physical extremes and dangerous intimacy takes place. Acrobats Skye Gellmann and Naomi Francis take us out of our comfort zones and reveal the essence of our primal dreams, desires and destructive tendencies. Mothlight is an on going collaboration between Skye Gellmann and Naomi Francis.
Since 2010, they have toured to 7 venues around Australia and overseas including the Stockholm Fringe Festival.
"Illuminated by a mere light bulb and buried within a labyrinth of strained plastic reeds lies Skye Gellmann's Mothlight world: a constructed space within which physical prowess is tested and the inner psyche investigated. Mothlight quickly descends into an intense and captivating performance, made up of just the right amount of elusiveness and directness so that the end result is a piece that encourages discussion rather than denies it." - Beat Magazine.
BEST CIRCUS, 2011 Adelaide Fringe Festival.
Specifications
40min circus show and installation
120 Audience Max. (Audience varies depending on space size)
Seasons
Brisbane Festivals 'Under the Radar.'
Melbourne Fringe Festival.
Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary Art.
Adelaide Fringe Festival.
Stockholm Fringe Festival.
Crack Theatre Festival.
Hoopla Festival.
Metro Arts with Love Festival. (10 year anniversary show)
Artists: Skye Gellmann & Naomi Francis.
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Retinal Damage 2009 - 2010
A body moves acrobatically in syncronisation with the shutter of a slide projector.
Tricks are concealed, reveled and distorted in this hypnotic performance that is as much about what you don't see as what you do.
BEST CIRCUS, PHYSICAL THEATRE OR BURLESQUE PERFORMANCE, 2010 Sydney Fringe.
Seasons Melbourne Fringe Festival.
Sydney Fringe Festival.
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Scattered Tacks 2008 - 2010
An anarchic vision of circus.
Far from the sensory-overload of much contemporary performance, Scattered Tacks leads audiences into an anarchic and absurd vision of circus. Award winning trio (Terri Cat Silvertree, Alex Gellmann and Skye Gellmann) take us back to the very essence of the circus; the circus behind the popcorn, the frills and the grand gestures.
"The Gellmann's and Silvertree bring Australian circus, traditionally rough and bawdy, closer to its conceptual and elegant French sibling, but in a way that is absolutely authentic." Jana Perkovi, Realtime Arts Magazine
"One of the most challenging and significant pieces of New Circus to emerge in years." Advocate and Artistic Director of Circa, Yaron Lifschitz.
AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING PRODUCTION, 2008 Melbourne Fringe Festival.
Seasons Melbourne Fringe Festival.
Village Festival, Melbourne.
'New Circus Now' at Judith Write Center for Contemporary Art.
Brisbane Powerhouse, Visi Theatre.
Noorderzon Performing Arts Festival, Netherlands.
Artshouse, Melbourne.
Artists: Skye Gellmann, Terry Cat Silvertree & Alex Gellmann
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All text, images and content (c) Skye Gellmann 2007 to 2023
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