Announcing Arts House Developments 2026 – 2027
Arts House is a creative home nourishing artists’ agency and ambition.
We are a place where creative work is actively made – an engine room for artists to experiment and develop new work. Behind closed doors, our CultureLAB and The Warehouse Residency programs operate to enable fresh new ideas to be explored, tested and refined well before they’re shared with the world. With scaffolding from the Arts House team, these works-in-development are supported to break new ground and connect with new and established audiences.
Now, let us introduce you to the projects that have been selected for The Warehouse Residency and CultureLAB programs across 2026 – 2027. We’re proud to support this group of artists and companies with the space and time needed to create new works.
Read on to find out more about these artists and their projects.
The Warehouse Residency
The Warehouse Residency is Arts House’s main commissioning pathway for Deaf and Disability led projects from across Australia.
This is an Arts House DIAP Initiative.
HEAT BODY TERRAIN
Daniele Constance
HEAT BODY TERRAIN is a new multidisciplinary dance work exploring heat through the dual lens of disability and climate change. Blending movement, sound, and multi-sensory participation, the work draws on lived experience of disability to investigate parallels between inflamed bodies and an inflamed planet. Led by Daniele Constance, with collaborating artists Alex Craig, Liesel Zink, Anna Whitaker and Frances Robinson, this residency will support the works first-stage development.
Daniele Constance is a multidisciplinary independent artist with a focus on creating participatory, inclusive and socially driven works, currently working across the lands and waters of Kombumerri Country, Yugambeh Language Region on the Gold Coast and Bundjalung Country in northern NSW. She creates artistic works that draw from lived experience, site-responsive and community engaged practices; often using contemporary performance, dance, installation, sound, community and/or audience participation. Her work is informed and shaped by community engaged methodologies; and a deep questioning and reorienting of community and ecology; encompassing the complex natural environments, non-human relationships and dynamics we are inherently a part of. Daniele is the former Artistic Director of Sprung Dance Theatre, a disability-led arts organisation based on Bundjalung Country in NSW. Currently, she is focused on making new work in her independent practice.
Daniele Constance, Photo by Jorge Serra
Still Point, Turning World
Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts
Reframing the everyday gestures of Étienne-Jules Marey’s 19th-century human locomotion studies, Still Point, Turning World is a personal, participatory essay performance about movement and scientific empiricism, drawing from artist Ben Joseph Andrews’ experience of the world with vestibular migraine – a chronic processing disorder affecting how the brain makes sense of motion.
Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts are a new-media artist duo based on Wathaurong Country in regional Victoria. Their work – spanning installation/lecture-performance/projection/immersive theatre – explores the liminal space between physical and digital, and has shown at Sundance, the Venice Biennale of Cinema, Adelaide and Perth Festival, Now or Never, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, and ACMI, among others. Immersive audio performance Co(m)motion was part of 2024’s Venice Biennale College (Immersive) and is in development at Geelong Performing Arts Centre.
Andrews is a National Regional Arts fellow; Roberts won Screen Producers Australia’s 2023/4 Ones-to-Watch prize. They’ve spoken for NYU Tisch, Heide, Experimenta, and MIT and mentored for Expand Lab, Immersive Arts UK,CPH:LAB, and Screenwest.
Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts, Photo by Zan Wimberley
CultureLAB
CultureLAB is Arts House’s creative development program that supports independent artists, collectives, and small-medium organisations to create new work. This is one of the pathways through which we commission work for our presentation seasons.
Carbide Light
Glory Tuohy-Daniell
A dance theatre work about Aboriginal stockwomen, a collage of stories about my grandmother and aunty when they would drive cattle for weeks, from as early as 10 years old. Present stories of history and my journey of doing research about Aboriginal stockwomen online and with my Elders.
Glory Tuohy-Daniell is a descendant of Indjalandji-Dhidhanu and Alyewarre Aboriginal people, in the North West Queensland and Northern Territory. Glory Graduated from NAISDA Dance College, she then Joined Bangarra Dance Theatre in 2016 under the Russell Page Graduate Program, performing and traveling with them for 7 years. In February of 2023, Glory made her choreographic debut with Keeping Grounded for Bangarra’s production Dance Clan. Glory has toured with Karul Projects in their Show Silence, Performing Lines with Hide The Dog written by Nathan Maynard and Jamie McCaskill directed by Isaac Drandic, Baleen Moondjan directed by Stephen Page. Glory has worked with Bangarra’s Youth Program and taught workshops remotely with Co3 in WA. Glory was one of the winners of the 2023 Telstra emerging choreographic (TEC) competition, with her dance on film Deadly catch.
Glory Tuohy-Daniell, Photo supplied
Fish, Ghost, Goddess (working title)
Nikki Lam
On scent and myth-making, this sci-fi moving image and performance project travels across time to explore stories of migration, extraction and nostalgia in the diaspora. Seeded along the coastline of Hong Kong where the real/fictional legends of Lo Ting and agarwood trades began, the project reflects on the multiplicity of Hong Kong’s cultural and ecological histories, and expands the artist’s ongoing exploration of scent as a portal for storytelling, transformation and diasporic belonging.
Nikki Lam is an artist-curator and filmmaker based in Naarm/Melbourne and Hong Kong. Working primarily with moving images, their work contemplates time, memory and its impermanence. Their latest work The Unshakable Destiny (2021-2025) is an award-winning moving image trilogy on Hong Kong cinema, history and its spectres, witnessing the slippery political context of a homeland from afar. Their work has been shown at Brent Biennial (London), Sydney Film Festival, Whitechapel Gallery (London), MCA Sydney, NGV, ACMI, and Pier 2 Art Center (Taiwan). Nikki is currently the co-director of Hyphenated Projects and Slow Burn Books. Nikki was previously a curator at The Substation and artistic director at Channels video art festival, amongst other leadership and production roles in the arts. Nikki is a PhD (Art) candidate at RMIT.
Nikki Lam, Photo by Before Sunset Studio
Mating Dance
Emma McManus
A performance lecture that combines lesbian flagging histories, neuroqueer theory, personal storytelling and recreations of dances of bird mating rituals to explore how we might create a queer mating dance and find a mate (maybe right now onstage tonight).
Emma McManus (they/she) is a theatre-maker, performer and nuisance who usually lives and works on Wurundjeri country. Emma creates live and video works that use humour and openness to challenge social norms and invite audiences to discover alternative ways of being. A founding member of performance collectives Applespiel and Too Rude (with Maria White), Emma has made work for Next Wave, Sydney Festival, Rising, Performance Space, Vitalstatistix and for Performance Studies International 2019 in Canada; and has interned with THE RABBLE, Sisters Grimm and Mammalian Diving Reflex. Emma’s work centres on interactions between humans and animals in urban ecologies. Currently Emma is embarking on a new body of work examining queer archives and collaborating with gravitational waves physicist David McManus, on a project that unfolds layers of blood and found family.
Emma McManus, Photo supplied
HOMECOMING
Kush Kuiy
HOMECOMING, a new script based on lived experience, is being developed into a theatre work. It explores the push-pull between longing for an unknown homeland, and the reality of being shaped by multiple, sometimes conflicting, cultural inheritances. HOMECOMING pushes theatrical form, blending traditional oral and aural storytelling with contemporary artforms.
Kush Kuiy is an independent producer and multidisciplinary storyteller whose practice draws on her third-culture experience, cultural heritage, different meanings of home, and the natural world. A genre-bending artist with a background in community development, Kush brings a unique and fearless approach to storytelling, experimenting with form to find ‘the right way to tell a story’, whilst bringing people into dialogue and connecting local stories to global contexts. Her work includes large-scale screen-printed visual works for Viv’s Place, a social housing project in South-East Melbourne, and writing for the dance-theatre work Vigil with Outer Urban Projects. She is also co-founder and producer of the bi-annual Rise of South Sudan Music and Arts Festival in South-East Melbourne. Her leadership has been recognised by the Australia Council for the Arts Future Leaders program (2022), the Lindsay King Arts Award (2021), and the Victorian Independent Producers Initiative (2020).
Kush Kuiy, Photo supplied
When Death Popped By
Jodee Mundy Collaborations
When Death Popped By is a conversation between Life, Death and Jodee Mundy, an artist living with advanced lung cancer.
Part contemporary performance, multimedia and conversation, this piece invites us to reflect on death and to share our thoughts and feelings with a performer diagnosed with a life-shortening illness.
Jodee Mundy Collaborations is an award-winning independent creative producing company formed in 2012 whose work has played a critical role in shaping and contributing to the Last Avant Garde movement of Deaf and Disability Contemporary Arts across Australia. Their practice spans live performance, installation and documentary, with works that have been presented nationally and internationally, including: The Carers Project – a sanctuary in Melbourne city created with primary carers; Imagined Touch, a live show, installation and documentary created with Deafblind artists; Personal, a multimedia solo performance; Deaf Heart, an audio documentary about growing up in a Deaf Family; Killing Time, a film about being in lock down; and CAMP CODA, a documentary about Asian American Deaf community and codas. Jodee Mundy OAM was the Creative Lead of Alter State Festival 2024, Australia’s largest Disability- led festival engaging eight venues presented by Arts Access Victoria and Arts Centre Melbourne.
Jodee Mundy, Photo by Pia Johnson
If Someone Falls We All Fall
Rawcus
If Someone Falls We All Fall is an ambitious new performance by the award-winning Rawcus Ensemble, delving into the physical, symbolic and emotional act of falling and the strength required to rise. Created with Rawcus’ acclaimed design team, ISFWAF is a kaleidoscopic portrait of uncertainty, collapse, resilience and what we owe to each other.
Rawcus is an award-winning and critically acclaimed ensemble of artists with diverse minds, bodies and imaginations. Rawcus devises new work that expresses the imaginative world of the Ensemble. Drawing on dance, theatre and visual art disciplines, the work is crafted with a precision that supports the performers, but allows space for their inherent sense of anarchy. Rawcus’ performance aesthetic is characterised by a marriage of intense physicality, arresting visual imagery and devised text. For 25 years, Rawcus’ work has featured as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival, Dance Massive, Next Wave, Melbourne Fringe and more. Rawcus is known for adventurous and unexpected collaborations. Company collaborations include Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, The Invenio Singers, Fast Fashun, and Restless Dance. Rawcus has been nominated for and won numerous awards including a 2019 Helpmann Award Nomination for Best Production for Song for a Weary Throat. Most recently the company won the Green Room Award for Best Production for Interior.
Rawcus, Photo by Darren Gill