Digital theatre, artists at work, oversharing
Tanya Dickson and I ate at Crumbs. Well, I got her a muffin and a loaf of olive bread to pay her back for dinner. We had afternoon coffee/tea in there too. I declared that the bakery was cheap (for an inner city sourdough making bakery). I wondered about the lack of toilet, the one staff at a time rostering, the always near-empty shelves. It reminded me of corner shops where they spread things out tactically on the shelves so as to give the appearance of having more stuff to sell.
Tanya’s going to be my collaborator on the Arts House ‘In your hands’ project. I’m chuffed to have been asked to come on board. Didn’t have to write an arts grant… What’s the catch? Oh wait, the catch is it must be digital (open to interpretation on this), cannot be site specific, is part of a festival in 2016, needs to be able to tour, can’t have live performers, can only have minimal infrastructure/set, must have technology aspects that can be potentially shared by the other three artistic duos. And neither Tanya or I are techy. We like text. We like actors. We like site.
Can. Not. Be. Site. Specific. We abandoned ideas we had about the Crown Casino and the Melbourne International Airport. New ideas… Idea A might work but how is it digital, that idea B has a digital technique but what’s the point of it, no people don’t want to do a 20 minute show in the men’s toilet because frankly it smells – and by the Friday I was latching onto anything and thinking ‘Could I make a digital theatre experience about Crumbs?’ ‘Or in that parked car I just passed?’ ‘Or in a library? That library there, the one with its specific details that can’t be transposed onto a library in another town oh damn this sucks.’
No.
We have from now-ish until about October to bed down an idea. Our motto is to steer away from the fancy technology bits and just start with content/theme, then get around to working out the tech aspect.
Watch this space.
On Monday I’ll be speaking in a panel about diversi-teeeee in the arts. Because there isn’t much. Work and life in the creative economy.
In a coupe of weeks I’ll be getting my bits out. Bits from Banana Girl in a salon style reading in Oversharers Anonymous, a session in the Melbourne Writers’ Festival. Apparently baring all about my actual bits doing sexy time is oversharing. Ha ha. Actually, funny fact. I just googled ‘oversharers anonymous’ to find the link for the event so I could hyperlink to it in this post, and here I am thinking the first listing would be for the MWF event but, no, oversharing anonymously is a thing and there are plenty of other links to finding out what it is.