Kellerman: expanded: a live audio-visual performance in the Whitsundays

‘Kellerman: EXPANDED’ was a live audio-visual performance and improvisation, specially produced for the Seventh International Small island Cultures Conference in the Whitsundays (June 2011). It was a ‘live cinema’ remix project, in which footage from films featuring and about Australian champion swimmer and silent film star Annette Kellerman was mixed live against a soundtrack made up of songs about the Whitsundays and tracks by sound artist Mike Cooper. Annette Kellerman was an Australian performer who achieved fame as a synchronised swimmer in the London and New York Hippodromes in the 1910s and, later, as a silent film star. She spent a year in the Whitsundays in 1933/34, performing at resorts and appearing as a mermaid in a series of quasi-documentary films about coral reefs. In this performance, undersea footage was mixed in with the Kellerman films to produce an undersea fantasia, a meditation on the expanded temporality and fantasy of the island paradise. Audience members were invited to interact live with the performance, by submitting silent-film inter-titles as blog comments, which were mixed into the performance via RSS feeds.