Program
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Spider Ant Sparrow
Iris Elgar
Showing
DATE
Friday 6 November, 2026
TIME
7pm
DURATION
40 minute showing followed by a post-show Q&A
LOCATION
Temperance Hall, Main Hall
199 Napier Street
South Melbourne
ACCESSIBILITY
Wheelchair accessible
TICKETS
Pay what you can here
All rushed about madly towards the end.
Spider Ant Sparrow is a new project drawing upon the loss of Iris' father, Mark, in 2025. Mark was a behavioural and evolutionary ecologist and left behind a trove of research and ephemera from his career. Haunting, seeking, foraging, agitating, regurgitating, releasing. In witnessing death, in witnessing a whole life in retrospect. Mark played the trumpet when he was a boy. Iris played with spiders in the fireplace.
CHOREOGRAPHY by Iris Elgar
PERFORMED by Iris Elgar, Val Emerald & Lucie Coffey
SOUND by Lucie Coffey
COSTUMES by Beccy Clarke
SET DESIGN by Beccy Clarke & Iris Elgar
LIGHTING by Chiara Wenban
Iris Elgar is a Temperance Hall Front Studio Resident for 2026.
Temperance Hall's Front Studio Residency offers six independent artists an artist stipend and two months of exclusive, unrestricted access to the Front Studio at Temperance Hall. At the conclusion of their residencies, artists present a public showing of their work in development, and receive professional photographic documentation.
The 2026 Front Studio Residency has been supported by the Neilson Foundation, the City of Port Phillip, and private donors.
Iris Elgar is an independent dance artist who works within choreographic and improvised durational modes. They are particularly interested in working with queerness, nature, failure, and the fantastical. Iris values sustainability in their practice, with the aim to responsibly and consciously source their costuming and set elements. In 2022, Iris completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance at the Victorian College of the Arts, and they were awarded the Phillip Adams VCA Mentorship Award the same year. Iris has performed in spaces including Temperance Hall, Dancehouse, Abbotsford Convent, Regent Theatre, Testing Grounds, Seventh Gallery, and Bus Projects. They dream of a never-ending dance surrounded by lesbians, fools, and primordial beings.
Beccy Clarke is a textile designer, ceramicist, and avid upcycler, Beccy Clarke works across knit, sculpture, print and embroidery to create work evocative of the natural world. Beccy enjoys designing for dance and collaborating with her partner, dance artist Iris Elgar. In particular she is inspired by mermaids, rockpools and marine life.
Lucie Coffey is a digital composer and trumpet player known for playing gigs around Melbourne and elsewhere as 'Shirkher'. Interested in extremities of experience, she often works with noise rock samples to create bombastic sound collages, attempting to capture the energy of live music in a digital context. Through overwhelming the listener with musical information she also reflects on the overwhelming presence of information and media in our lives, the difficulty in interpreting it all.
The 2026 Front Studio Residency has been supported by the Neilson Foundation, the City of Port Phillip, private donors and the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.