Filming at Abbotsford Hall in Collingwood
Fuguestate - April 2012
Fuguestate was an arts project which occupied the Hall for a month, combining technology, music, and photography in an arts installation using the building as an important component of the project. Below is a video made documenting Fuguestate - click on the image to watch
Documentation sequence from the first realisation of the project in a Masonic Hall in Melbourne.
Fuguestate is a hybrid artwork that combines musical composition with location sensitive technologies, video installation and participatory performance. The project explores an individual’s transformation from confusion to complicity within a responsive system by relating the fugue as a musical form to the psychological condition known as a fugue state.
The work is a spatially arranged composition that is installed in multiple rooms within a building and integrates seven participants shifting presence with a collection of individually transmitted piano gestures.
Participants arrived at the location without any knowledge of what they were engaging in. They had acted out of curiosity based on this text:
In rural England in 2005 police found a man wearing a dinner suit, wandering alone at night in pouring rain. All the labels in his clothing were torn out and he would not answer any questions. He was admitted to hospital where he continued to remain silent. Staff presented him with a pencil and paper in the hope he would write his name. Instead, he drew a detailed sketch of a grand piano. Eventually he was led to a piano where he reportedly played nonstop until he was exhausted. Nobody could remember what it was he played.
A fugue is commonly described as a composition in counterpoint, more a procedure than a musical form in which different parts, or voices enter successively in imitation of a generating theme, as if in pursuit of each other. The term fugue is derived from fuga, the latin word for ‘flight’.
A dissociative fugue or ‘fuguestate’ is a sudden, unplanned excursion away from ones planned itinerary accompanied by either memory loss or confusion. This can result in an assumption of a new identity. It can also be considered a disturbed state of consciousness in which the person affected seems to perform acts in full awareness but upon recovery cannot recollect what it was they did.
A significant number of organisations have now made videos and films at the Collingwood Masonic Centre’s Hall in Abbotsford.
Types of filming have included television shows and advertisements, music videos, arts projects and student films.
Several music videos have been filed in the building including “Trouble Somehow” by the Aria Award winning Melbourne band, The Audreys. An advertisement for the community has also been filmed by “Litterers Anonymous” while several Australian films have used the space for auditions, to rehearse and also script development.
Below is a collection of projects filmed at Abbotsford Hall.
For feature films, access can be arranged to the whole building. Click here for images
Dr Blake Mysteries (ABC) - Filmed November 2014
An episode of Dr Blake Mysteries was filmed at the Centre. This was the final episode of Season 3 and was title "Darkness Visible" directed by Declan Eames and which aired on the ABC for the first time on Friday 3 April 2015.
To the left is a scene from the episode in our period kitchen. I think they are even our regular tea towels hanging up. It was perfect as a post WW2 set of the 1950's, but also would be perfect for anything 1920 to a dated 1970's look .
litterers anonymous
Derryn Hinch, Lara Bingle, John Jarratt, Nick Giannopoulos, Tania Zaetta and Russell Gilbert star in Litterers Anonymous commercials filmed at Gipps St
The Audreys - Troubles Somehow
Aria Award winning Melbourne Bank, The Audreys filmed at Abbotsford Hall
LA BASTARD - It's not like I'm telling a lie
Another Melbourne Band records their music video at Abbotsford Hall