Swell

A reimagined live music experience.

Swell (2014 – 2019) was a five-part body of site-responsive work exploring the capacity of live music to alter how we experience ourselves, each other and place.

Led by Janenne Willis and made with an evolving community of musicians, artists and collaborators, Swell brought live music, design, dance, poetry performance and installation into unexpected spaces — from secret rooms inside Melbourne’s Carlton Club and the basement of the derelict former Royal Women’s Hospital, to an abandoned military fort at Point Nepean, all five levels of The Espy, and finally the streets of Melbourne’s CBD for the opening night of Melbourne Music Week’s tenth anniversary.

Each iteration took its cues from place, exploring ideas embedded in its history, architecture and social life — the parallel histories of Point Nepean as sacred women’s place, military site and national park; music as medicine, inspired by Alfred Felton’s life at The Espy and his extraordinary legacy of arts philanthropy; and, in Melbourne’s city streets, frequency — the capacity of music and art to shift how we feel and move through busy, built landscapes.

Audiences moved through the work rather than sitting before it. Musicians performed at close range; rooms, tunnels, stairs, bathrooms and streets were transformed through design and installation, becoming part of the composition. Encounters were fleeting, sometimes strange, often deeply intimate. At its heart, Swell was an ongoing curiosity around our human need to gather — and the mysterious, visceral thing that happens when we gather and listen to live sound.