a wake of vultures
A Wake of Vultures is an ongoing and dedicated collaboration with my best pals Nancy Tam + Daniel O’Shea. We collaborate, instigate dance parties, travel, eat, and finish each others’ sentences.
The proper lowdown:
Formed in 2013, A Wake of Vultures (WOV) is a project-based interdisciplinary performance collective. WOV is a research, development, and producing vehicle for the works of its three members: Nancy Tam (music, sound, theatre), Daniel O’Shea (film, theatre), and Conor Wylie (theatre, video games). Switching between individual and collective project leadership, we connect with local, national, and international communities through collaboration and touring.
We began collaborating and bonding as friends over our shared fascination in social rituals, science fiction, anime, and questions of reality and perception. Our work is marked by ritual, formal experimentation, perceptual trickery, and a mix of retro and new technologies. We blend lowbrow inspirations with high-concept ideas, creating surprising convergences and hybrid visions of the future. We create in a variety of forms, including audio walks, performative installations, audio-visual performance, and experimental plays.
Our core values and our work honour a spirit of rigorous deep questioning. We engage with unfamiliar presentational forms and stray from disciplinary conventions. We aim to inspire curiosity and unsettle our audience’s senses through experiential work contextualized within meticulously designed scenographic environments. Obsessively exploring the connection between form and content, we transpose visual, aural, performative, scenographic, and conceptual principles in devising new creation methodologies. We celebrate the feeling of the “mind-meld,” when our playfulness, curiosity, dramaturgy, and design all coalesce in an electric ‘aha’ moment. No two WOV creation processes are exactly the same, but patterns have emerged—WOV shows are spooky, trippy, late-night journeys that enliven your imagination.
WOV is an ongoing, evolving collaboration bonded by an intense friendship: we eat together, dance together, work together.