With every project we risk things blowing up in our faces. For Branch Nebula, that’s just the beginning.

High Performance Packing Tape is the OH&S nightmare that transforms everyday stationery and office consumables into the infrastructure of one person’s physical ruin. Performer Lee Wilson scales collapsing towers, hangs precariously from bridges unable to carry their weight and asks more of cheap materials than they’re ever able to give.

Pivoting deftly between visceral terror and the ridiculous, this masterclass in contemporary performance needles at our desire for self-preservation and material wellbeing with a series of scenarios that each ratchet up the tension another notch. The sterile language of workplace safety, risk assessment and best practice is thrown to the wind, and though the suspense might be killing you, it’s Wilson’s neck that’s on the line.

Branch Nebula’s innovative, category-defying works have defined the bleeding edge of Australian contemporary performance for years, and High Performance Packing Tape showcases the high levels of collaboration, invention and technique that make this possible. Wilson and Branch Nebula’s co-director Mirabelle Wouters are joined by visual artist Mickie Quick and sound artist Phil Downing to create an immersive sensory world that places audiences deep in the action.

“Lee Wilson’s worker is indefatigably industrious, skilled, inventive and risk-taking, facially expressionless, never a clown in this serious circus of the working life.” Realtime

“Danger lies in the show’s seeming recklessness, yet everything is executed with total conviction.” Sydney Morning Herald on Whelping Box

Read the interview High Performance Packing Tape: What you see is what you get with artists Lee Wilson and Mickie Quick, conducted by John Bailey.