Willa O’Neill Cameron, MDanS (they/her) (b. 1973, Hamilton, Aotearoa, New Zealand) is a live/performance artist based in Te Tai Tokerau, Aotearoa, New Zealand.
Willa’s performance career started in TV at age 17, as a core cast member on the Billy T James Show, providing Willa with an extraordinary foundation for creating entertainment for New Zealand audiences.
Over her screen career, Willa won numerous New Zealand Film and TV awards, including Best Actress for TV for True Life Stories; Best Actress for Film for Scarfies; Best Supporting Actress for TV for Hercules, and Best Actress for Topless Women Talk About Their Lives.
For stage, Willa co-founded Auckland's original Basement Theatre, acting in, directing, and producing a stream of plays around this incubator of Auckland’s 90’s theatre culture.
Recently, Willa has brought these embodied experiences into her artistic research, gaining a Master's with first-class honours in Dance Studies at the University of Auckland with her works Urban Tumbleweed and Enrolment Aunties — exploring themes of social justice through an ecological lens.
Web-pages: Willa O’Neill Cameron
https://www.splore.net/willa
Organisation/Company
URBAN TUMBLEWEED
Artform: Perfromance Art/Live Art
Development Status: Tour Ready
Pitch Video
Media Uploads
Trailer
Synopsis
URBAN TUMBLEWEED
The DNA of our dinosaur friends has been mined and sucked from their resting places to be regenerated and formed into plastic food wrapping for the twenty-first century. This aeons-old energy is seeking community. Moving again to its own rhythm, the tumbleweed travels toward the sea. The wind and the oceanic currents conspire, helping to plot the course to the final destination, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – the new Land Of The Dinosaur.
These amorphous blobs of soft plastic are made from soft plastic recycling collected from households and workspaces. The soft plastic recycling collection is then taped together, forming a fabric from which the Urban Tumbleweed costume, a hand-me-down, is made. A performer wearing the hand-me-down embodies the pace and agency of the materials. In this form, we observe these ancient particles' journey as they come together, harnessing nature's gentle currents, including many moments of stillness.
Urban Tumbleweed is a durational and site-situated performance artwork. Utilising any rooms, doors, pathways, stairwells, hallways, streets, malls or gardens in or around festival venues, the Tumbleweeds find a pathway towards a gutter or drain, or towards any bodies of water.
Each tumbleweed is a duo of a performer and a guide. The performer improvises along a choreographed movement score as they are triggered by the dynamics of the site, the hand-me-down costume, the audience and any natural phenomenon. The movement is low and slow, creating a mesmerising undulation of the soft plastic fabric. There is beauty and excitement in the sheen of the plastics as they catch the light, and the rustle and scratch of the materials against the site also bring a dynamic aural experience to the audience.
The guide keeps a gentle distance and communicates with the performer through their voice, body, or both to keep the performer, audience, and site safe from harm. Multiple costumes can be positioned around the site, secured for wind, to be inhabited during the performance, creating the illusion of more performers as the Tumbleweeds home in on each other.
This live artwork can be programmed to run in 30 to 60 minute blocks. This work cannot be performed in a wet site.
Creative Team and Crew
CREATIVE TEAM
Creator – Willa O'Neill
Performer/Guide – Willa O'Neill
Performer/Guide – Cleve Cameron
Number of People in the Touring Party
Two
Previous Seasons
PREVIOUS SEASONS
Development of Urban Tumbleweed has included performances at First Thursdays on Karangahape Road, Tāmaki Makaurau (2022); The Unshackled Image/Te Whakaahua Whakawātea in Whangārei (2023); Garbage Fest AKL (2023); ANZAC Parade at The Auckland Domain (2024), and The Earth is My Bed, My Stage, and My Altar at Enjoy Contemporary Artspace in Te Whanganui-a-Tara (2024). Performance Arcade Te Whanganui-a-Tara, (2025) and Cuba Dupa, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, (2025). These iterations allow Urban Tumbleweed to evolve continuously, emphasising its adaptability and the shifting relationships between site, audience, materiality, and ecological consciousness.
Technical Rider & International Touring Info (if applicable)
- View/download document #1 here
