Lisa O'Neill's Documentation Videos

Transact (Flesh/Skin/Bone) showcased the outcomes of a six-month research and development grant funded by the New Media Arts Board of the Australia Council. The project aimed to develop a new media installation form that would be experienced by interactors as evolving through an active, participative exchange. These interacting participants within the work would be located at a number of worldwide venues and on-line.

Project 'Transact' sought to do this through applying knowledges drawn from both philosophical and scientific ecologies, new media and new performance practices. It was the precursor to the Intimate Transactions project.

The work comprises the amalgamation of three solos created over a period of 5 years, following the journey of the Yeti, a small curious woman with heavy feet on an exploration through time and space.

Each solo was created in response to the walls and architecture of a particular performance space, with physical explorations through these varied environments determining the transition of moods and movement vocabulary.

Dressed in a long garment and fluffy bowed slippers, the Yeti stomps ferociously around the perimeter of the space in a ritual dance, marking out her territory.

With every stomp of her small fury slippered feet, the sweet yeti stamps her way around new spaces leaving imprints of past places.

Performance installation at the Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary Art, Brisbane, Queensland. Used live performance and peppers ghost video effects.

#14 (Project1 14) was a multimedia performance work, presented in Spring Hill Baths, Brisbane for the 1996 Brisbane Festival of the Arts. The work was presented in the winter-empty pool shell and enveloped and involved audience interaction in a unique cross-artform multimedia event that drew on elements of the pool's history to explore notions of space, boundaries, personal barriers, gender, display and observation.

Large scale computer projections on the pool floor, an audience situated high above in the balconies, shadow inspired movement and imagery, and state of the art visual and aural technology were some of the elements that immersed and confronted the viewers as they were drawn into a complex blend of sporadic, virtual interactive experiences and environments.

Through a sweetly macabre ritual of song and dance, a songstress and her accompanist are catapulted into an unexpected nasty little whirly-gig! Very quietly, just between us, the tall one says there’s something very familiar about the small one… and can’t help but notice a little more at play… play softly. It’s all fun and games until someone loses their marbles!

Well known for her birdcalls and architectural warblings. Pianissimo thrusts Christine Johnston into a world where Laurie Anderson meets the Prodigy.

Highly acclaimed for her individual works as well as her extensive performance repertoire with the prolific and renowned company Frank Theatre, Lisa O’Neill joins Christine in a meeting made in twisted heaven.

A woman enters an ice exhibition and allows herself to be drawn into the enigmatic appeal of the male figured seen in Auguste Rodin’s sculpture, ‘The Kiss’. His seductive appeal satisfies her need to be romanticized and pushes her to delve into unexplored feelings, which challenge her perceptions of what is real and what is imagined.

Rodin’s Kiss’ is about allowing the emotionality and physicality of the performance delivery to be an internalising experience, as dealt with by the performer. Hence the narrative movement lends an impassioned gaze on the feelings and perceptions of a woman caught in the grip of first love, illuminating our view into the human spirit. It is a performance piece that evokes our sense of the journeying soul.

All Tomorrow's Parties marked the first of many collaborations to come between Lisa and Christine Johnston. The work was inspired by the music of The Velvet Underground and the dramatic height difference between these two ladies!

Electric Herring was inspired by and performed to the music of Brisbane band 'Squelch' live at the Arena Nightclub.

Sweet Yeti I was the first solo work created and performed by Lisa. It marked the first of many Yeti reincarnations as she continued to develop this stage persona and character over the following 5 years.

Come in, sit down and relax and follow the fantastic voyages of 'Ling Change', our youthful heroine, as she journeys through a complex maze of alternate outcomes caused by you, the audience within the installation space.

transit_lounge, a multimedia installation opened onMay 26, 1998 in the new foyer space of Metro Art. It was later shown at Artspace in Sydney.

Lisa performed all of the nine cartoon-like characters in the show, which were digitally composited into dynamic, computer-generated landscapes. The way in which all of these characters relate to one another was designed to adapt and change in real time, based upon different participant activity and changing atmospheric conditions within the exhibition space (detected by sensors).