Unreasonable Adults

We tried being reasonable. It didn’t work out.

Unreasonable Adults evolved from over a decade of various individual and independent performance practices. In 2002, Jason Sweeney, as the nodal point, instigated the teaming up of various artists with diverse practices. The collective started to form its mission, fuelled by self-instigated collaborations and residencies nationally and internationally.

Unreasonable Adults, is a name that encompasses far more than artistic practice, it speaks of a desire to be sudden, difficult and lost for words in a complex, unstable and deranged contemporary world. Creating work and generating ideas for new and varied spaces the collective of artists work within an international cultural landscape and lineage of makers and thinkers. Unreasonable Adults are interested in the way audiences see artists and how artists see audiences.

The core collective active between 2002 – 2009 were:
Caroline Daish Kerrin Rowlands, Jason Sweeney, Julie Vulcan.

associates: Fiona Sprott, Stephen Noonan, Ingrid Voorendt.

Softness is an admirable aspect of the artistry of Unreasonable Adults. Unlike so much that is robust and loud, performance at low-level intensities can evoke in an audience a desire to lean in, to make an approach, to attend and make contact on their own ground. Quiet suspicion and seduction by stealth drew me towards this work.

The Last to See them Alive – Jonathan Bollen RealTime 78 2007

The Unreasonable Adults’ genius is in the material they coax from their audience. As many media as they are toying with and as dispersed the crowd, the Adults still work the Electrofringe audience with a captivating mix of childishness and wryness.

Giftback – Dan MacKinlay RealTime 76 2006

The ‘live’ here was strictly ‘alive’, wrapping up with welcome low-tech absurdity from Unreasonable Adults’ The End of Romance. Their deadpan mock competitiveness in obsessively detailed descriptions of technical apparatus (various redundant laptops and a mini-cassette recorder) was a refreshing reminder that the technological is most productively linked to the social context of its use, and there’s no reason to take it all so seriously.

Out-of-body performance: e-performance and Plug-ins – David Williams – RealTime 71 2006

…the blood flow is slow and painful from a couple of wounded hearts drunk in the kitchen at a party now trapped in time.

The End of Romance – Tony Reck RealTime 69 2005

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