26 September 2024
By Hannah Wilcox
The Sydney Fringe Festival ventured northside last Sunday afternoon with Tom Avgenicos’ Ghosts Between Streams, leaving audiences mesmerised.
For 55 minutes, Avgenicos and his eight-piece band—featuring the jazz group Delay 45 and the Ensemble Apex String Quartet—redefined traditional performance in the carpark of Sub Base Platypus.
Located at the harbourside end of High Street, North Sydney, the torpedo factory-turned-community hub proved to be an ideal location, offering pristine acoustics and isolation.
The venue’s isolation provided near-perfect silence, occasionally interrupted by the calls of cicadas and birds, which only enhanced the ambience. Combined with the golden rays of a warm spring sunset, it created a captivating setting for the performance.
Avgenicos had previously expressed his enthusiasm for bringing the Fringe Festival to North Sydney, an area where he grew up. His performance was the only festival event on this side of the bridge.
“Ghosts Between Streams was inspired by daily walks through Stringybark Creek (Lane Cove), so it will be particularly special to perform just minutes down the road from its origin,” he told The Sun earlier.
The Sun was fortunate enough to witness Avgenicos, his ensemble, and contemporary dancers Reina Takeuchi and Gerard ‘Kid Tek’ Cabellon in action.
The atmosphere was extraordinary, with haunting melodies piercing through the silence. The music oscillated between slow, smouldering buildups and purposeful chaos, with snare drums and rapid strings. Moments of agitation would resolve into peaceful stillness, evoking a sense of being both lost and free.
Takeuchi and Cabellon were remarkable. They emerged from the back of the audience, writhing along the ground and across walls as they made their way through the crowd, before coming together in front of the ensemble.
Their movements took the audience on a melancholic journey of connection and creation, serenity and restlessness—mirroring nature’s rhythms. Their performance embodied the tension between urbanisation and nature, and the delicate balance between the two in community identity.
Throughout the performance, the dancers would softly intertwine, only to be violently torn apart and thrown erratically across the stage. They concluded by flitting around the audience in a childlike manner, darting through bannisters and around seating, holding hands as they disappeared towards the rear.
Avgenicos succeeded in creating an emotionally resonant experience. The audience was captivated by the dancers, following their every movement—even turning in their chairs to keep up. The dissonance in the music, brought to life by Avgenicos’ brilliance, only deepened this engagement.
The performance was a fusion of chamber music, jazz, and electronic music, blended with contemporary dance and breaking. It was a refreshing addition to the North Shore’s creative scene, as evidenced by the large turnout and clear appetite for similar events in the area.