It’s a wintry Tuesday night in Melbourne – dark, damp – but Lara Thoms and Mish Grigor, co-artistic directors of APHIDS, are out and about. It’s a busy time: both currently have works on in the Rising festival, including an all-night performance called 8/8/8/: REST, the second part in a trilogy about the eight-hour work day. Lara Thoms, who is dramaturge on this production, is running late.

Thoms and Grigor are now celebrating 30 years of APHIDS, which launched in 1994 with an art party in a Northcote share house. The company is a bit of an anomaly: an artist-run organisation committed to cross-disciplinary collaboration. APHIDS funds collaborations with such a number and variety of artists that it essentially supports a whole ecosystem of experimental performance, ranging from sound and video art, to puppetry and, increasingly, conceptual food.

Grigor is warm, articulate and thoughtful – very different from her stage persona, which comes with clowning and a dash of bogan. While we’re waiting for Thoms, we compare notes on work-life balance. Where exactly are the eight hours of leisure supposed to slot in?

Thoms joins us just in time to chip in. She tells me APHIDS is heavily informed by loosely structured collectives, such as version 1.0 and Gravity Feed, that populated Sydney’s experimental performance scene in the 2000s. “We saw all these groups making work together that didn’t have the formality of theatre,” she says. Now they give names such as “dramaturgy” or “direction” to their work but, Thoms seems to suggest, this is outdated, hierarchical thinking. In their collegial world, authorship is not a prime concern.

Grigor and Thoms both came out of Sydney’s distinctive genre-bending live performance scene. “We are the children of people who, in the ’90s, were doing extremely interdisciplinary, extremely radical performances around Performance Space, cLUB bENT,” says Grigor. “Fiercely conceptual, in-yer-face, funny work.”

Melbourne in the 1990s still had a healthy ecology of mid-sized independent theatre ensembles that innovated within the frame of text-based theatre: Anthill, Keene/Taylor Theatre Project, Ranters and others. In contrast, Sydney had Stelarc, Sydney Front, Tega Brain – people working in radical ways with technology, the body, endurance, galleries. Where a relevant influence in Melbourne may have been Pina Bausch, in Sydney it was Marina Abramović.

“I remember talking to someone at Malthouse, and they had never been to ACCA – even though it was literally next door,” says Grigor. Such a firewall between theatre and visual art was unheard of in Sydney, she says, where performance-makers saw their work as belonging in the realm of contemporary art.

Grigor and Thoms graduated into the global financial crisis era, with its receding arts funding, political tensions and nascent housing crisis. The cost of living in Sydney was “enormous, eye-watering”. Grigor is self-deprecating and hilarious when she describes her first impressions of Melbourne. “As a 20-year-old, I really thought – I don’t think that anymore – that it’s easy in Melbourne. That everyone is drinking coffee, everyone has a guestroom in their share house. That it’s a cushy place.

“In Sydney, going for coffee just didn’t happen. You grabbed coffee on your way to rehearsal. If you caught up, it was to run an ARI [artist-run initiative]. That was how the community functioned: it was always work-based. It wasn’t community-based.”

Thoms chimes in: “I had very close friends in Sydney, but nobody had time to make dinner for us. Everyone stayed up all night writing grant applications.”

In an essay for Let’s Go Outside, a book on Australian art in public space, Grigor describes a generation in between. Big art institutions “seemed entirely out of reach”, independent theatre venues “felt like places for aspiring actors to impress movie directors”, and even the communities running independent ARIs “were all a few years ahead in their careers – Gen X. We were the as-yet-unnamed Millennials.”

At the time, Grigor was part of performance trio Post with Nat Rose and Zoë Coombs Marr. Post made clever works that deconstructed the conventions of theatre, packaged in a Kath & Kim aesthetic. It was brash, Aussie, funny, a bit rude. I was there for their first show at Melbourne Fringe in 2007: it was electric, brilliant.

In Sydney, Post were regulars at a weekly performance night at Lanfranchi’s Memorial Discotheque, an artist-run space in Chippendale. The weekly revues invited short, experimental performance numbers and fostered an intensely DIY, self-organised environment. When Lanfranchi’s closed in 2008 to make space for a property development, Grigor, Coombs Marr and a couple of other artists came together and organised a grassroots festival, Imperial Panda.

With no venues available to them, “our solution was to make stuff in public space”, Grigor writes in Let’s Go Outside. “Nobody could lock us out, we needn’t apply to participate and audiences would have no preconceived ideas about what art belonged there.” Artistically, it was a clean slate. Financially, it was free.

Imperial Panda was “the DIY festival that makes Laneway look like a serviced apartment”, quipped street press in 2011. It was a node for a growing community that travelled between Melbourne’s Last Tuesday Society and Newcastle’s This is Not Art, honing a bold style of performance that welcomed nudity, irreverent humour, feminist and queer aesthetics, pop culture send-ups, and a sort of Aussie mumblecore style of delivery. Writing in RealTime in 2008, Adam Jasper described Imperial Panda as “a barometer of a generation”: “All of the shows were comedies in one sense or another, but they were deflationary comedies, often building up and then consciously frustrating the desire of the audience for zingers, gags, the catharsis of laughter.”

Imperial Panda was followed by another Fringe-lookalike, Tiny Stadiums. The festivals were reviewed in British theatre press but at home they flew almost completely under the radar.

“We were both part of creating the scene in Sydney, and then we moved to Melbourne,” Thoms summarises. Then she adds. “When I look back, I’m kinda embarrassed for us. We took ourselves very seriously for 20-year-olds. We had a work ethic that mimicked corporate structure. There was no time for gentleness.”

Lara Thoms moved to Melbourne in 2009 to work for Next Wave. From there, she was invited into a series of projects, making work solo, in collaborations and within collectives. A cohesive, recognisable body of work accrued: art projects that married intimate, almost intrusive subject matter with a nearly epic scale.

In 2012, Willoh S. Weiland invited Thoms into APHIDS as artistic associate. By then, APHIDS had built a reputation for exquisite postmodern Gesamtkunstwerk that blended music, sound, architecture, puppetry and performance. Weiland took over APHIDS in 2010 and pivoted it towards live art. What Thoms was doing fitted right in with Weiland’s aesthetic: epic community performance events.

With the resources of APHIDS, Thoms’s work grew to assume a monumental quality. HOWL (2016), for example, was a parade of controversial artworks, with performers embodying everything from L’Origine du Monde, via Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds, to Casey Jenkins’ Casting Off My Womb (better known on YouTube as “vaginal knitting”). It was basically “a Christmas pageant, only with people dressed as vaginas rather than Santas”, says David Sefton, artistic director of Adelaide’s RCC Fringe. Thoms also worked with Snapcat and Hannah Gadsby – then just a local queer comedian – to fill up Fremantle Oval with a procession of women’s organisations, from the CWA to AFLW, for Perth Festival 2017.

In 2019, Weiland handed over APHIDS to Thoms and Grigor, together with Eugenia Lim, who left after three years. In an email, Weiland told me the choice was a deliberate statement about the direction of the company. “Being focused on female and non-binary artists’ voices was also an important factor.” For Grigor, APHIDS was an intriguing “experiment in how an institution might work. It was very different from the radical anti-establishment thinking I had carried with me from the DIY scene in Sydney.”

There has been a real mainstreaming of feminist and queer aesthetics and concerns, I suggest to Thoms and Grigor. This has happened through their work and the work of their closest peers. At first, they seem unsure. Then Grigor mentions a panel discussion she was part of in 2014, with Coombs Marr, The Rabble and Adena Jacobs. “One guy put up his hand and asked, ‘How many of you are lesbians?’, because we were talking about making feminist art. I kind of forget that this is where culture was in my own living memory. Things have changed so much.”

The distinct Australian Millennial aesthetic has now conquered the world. This is most obvious in the global reach of Josh Thomas’s series Please Like Me, or Hannah Gadsby’s shake-up of comedy with Nanette, which has clear parallels with Post’s send-up of, say, Oedipus. Or with Grigor’s ex-Post colleague Coombs Marr, whose own brand of goofy arthouse queer comedy has its own Amazon special. Another veteran of Sydney’s experimental performance, Nat Randall, has toured globally with her 24-hour theatre show The Second Woman, becoming a kind of high-art franchise worthy of Marina Abramović.

Beyond formalism and humour, there is a larger ethical project that unites these shows, something Joey Soloway described in 2017 as an attempt to make art that deconstructs conventions in order to tell the story that isn’t told. In Soloway’s words, this is art as “a conscious effort to create empathy as a political tool. Perhaps a wrestling away of the point of view.”

In Melbourne, Grigor and Thoms are now working with institutions from ACMI to Rising, making things such as a suite of Bambi-themed works that explore our culture’s strange obsession with orphaned children, and a clowning send-up of My Fair Lady. Their works are touring Europe, Britain and Asia.

In a sense, they have achieved a privileged position within the arts industry. This was obvious during the pandemic, when they were able to access JobKeeper. But, Grigor notes, they are not safe from precarity. “Half the time I’m pinching myself. But I also can’t afford to go to the dentist.” Grigor describes being a working artist in Australia as “a choice that gets harder with age, not easier”. Both Grigor and Thoms are intimately aware of the challenges facing younger artists. Seventy per cent of APHIDS’ budget is spent on artist fees, a conscious decision.

The global rise of their generation was nurtured in free, underground spaces, in the gift economy of a disappearing independent arts community. The exceptional freedom of the Millennial underground was fuelled by hundreds of hours of unpaid labour. Testing your radical performance idea in a nightclub? “That stuff,” Grigor says pointedly, “you’ll get paid $50 and a drink voucher. It’s unsustainable.”

The current cost-of-living crisis, says Thoms, makes it hard for an emerging artist to do any unpaid work at all. “There is not enough hours in the day to work, and survive, and experiment, and dream.” They both worry that financial pressure will crush the vitality of Australian art. “If there is no time for deep focus to imagine a new methodology or aesthetic,” Grigor says, “artists may just end up pumping out the same types of shows.”

More worryingly, Australian art may increasingly only be made by the type of person who can count on “investments, family money, a partner that supports them”. Without that support, Grigor says, you may be able to make art, but “you will not be able to participate in other parts of adulthood”, such as having a family or owning your home. Getting ill could undo you.

Perhaps we have too much faith in the ability of Australian artists to triumph over increasingly tough circumstances. “I want an art world filled with different types of people with different lives,” Grigor says, noting it may soon not be possible. “We lose so many talented artists [just] because they want to be able to afford their heating bills.”

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