Drowning Bird, Plummeting Fish
written by Rachel Baker, Simon Haren, Joel Baxendale, Claire O’Loughlin (performers) and Ralph Upton (director)
produced by Fiona McNamara, designed by Rachel Marlow, with music composed by Hamish Upton
Performances were 11-19 February 2009 at BATS theatre in Wellington, and 1-4 April 2009 at The Globe in Dunedin. It was reworked and restaged as part of Elimination Rounds in 2010.
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The beer is warm
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Director’s notes (from the programme):
Down on the waterfront, there is a metal man standing facing the ocean. He’s leaning out from the edge of the wharf, his centre of gravity way too far out, his arms back. It’s impossible to stand like that, but he’s not falling. One observer might say he’s balanced, held up by the sea wind. Someone else might say that time has frozen at a moment of weightlessness, and when it unfreezes he’ll just fall into the water.
We think of this show as being like that strange tipping point; an edge or peak where the rules are suspended and nothing is stable. We know something is happening but we don’t know what it is. Something strange is happening tonight on Wall Street, in the Middle East, and down the road at Shooters.
Our broad provocation was this: What does it mean to be part of a generation which is constantly being told it doesn’t have a future? It seems like we're bombarded with this idea every day, to the point of numbness. The image of a polar bear on a tiny piece of ice, the steep graph by an oil barrel, that shot of a last, lonely, mangy panda bear. When you get to that point in the game, that glass too many in the drinking session, that peak on the graph, that point which means no going back, how do you behave? Do you conserve what’s left or consume it while you can?
We wondered what versions of the performers’ selves would emerge when watched by an audience of strangers in an atmosphere of desperation. As both theatre makers and Facebook users, we enjoyed contrasting the impersonality and license of the internet, where you can carefully construct a persona so that nobody knows you're a dog, with the immediacy of the theatre, where people look at and judge you silently. Onstage, you can't control the way you're "read" or how you come across. Especially if the structure of the show itself is conspiring against you…
I hope you enjoy the performance.
-Ralph
Down on the waterfront, there is a metal man standing facing the ocean. He’s leaning out from the edge of the wharf, his centre of gravity way too far out, his arms back. It’s impossible to stand like that, but he’s not falling. One observer might say he’s balanced, held up by the sea wind. Someone else might say that time has frozen at a moment of weightlessness, and when it unfreezes he’ll just fall into the water.
We think of this show as being like that strange tipping point; an edge or peak where the rules are suspended and nothing is stable. We know something is happening but we don’t know what it is. Something strange is happening tonight on Wall Street, in the Middle East, and down the road at Shooters.
Our broad provocation was this: What does it mean to be part of a generation which is constantly being told it doesn’t have a future? It seems like we're bombarded with this idea every day, to the point of numbness. The image of a polar bear on a tiny piece of ice, the steep graph by an oil barrel, that shot of a last, lonely, mangy panda bear. When you get to that point in the game, that glass too many in the drinking session, that peak on the graph, that point which means no going back, how do you behave? Do you conserve what’s left or consume it while you can?
We wondered what versions of the performers’ selves would emerge when watched by an audience of strangers in an atmosphere of desperation. As both theatre makers and Facebook users, we enjoyed contrasting the impersonality and license of the internet, where you can carefully construct a persona so that nobody knows you're a dog, with the immediacy of the theatre, where people look at and judge you silently. Onstage, you can't control the way you're "read" or how you come across. Especially if the structure of the show itself is conspiring against you…
I hope you enjoy the performance.
-Ralph
Drowning Bird Plummeting Fish was developed for BATS theatre, generously funded by Creative NZ through a Kakano grant, and strongly supported by the VUW theatre programme.