Paper planes

We are the Ghosts of the Future is up and running, and as you can see from the production shot below the show features paper aeroplanes.

You don't have to be Smithy to make your own paper plane. This WikiHow shows you how to do it.

Cody Ross as travelling brush salesman Brian Macansh

Photography by Phyllis Wong. www.phyllisphotography.com

The house is live...

WE ARE THE GHOSTS OF THE FUTURE opened last night to two sets of willing and courageous audiences, happy to be taken by the hand and led into the lives of strangers.

Here's our first review, written by Glenn Saunders of The Spell Of Waking Hours:

Our place: 7-ON’s We Are the Ghosts of the Future

We’re all familiar with digital content being present with us wherever we go, of being able to lose ourselves to the point of oblivion in a hand-held screen as real life happens around us, but the possibilities of immersive theatre are still relatively untapped in Australia. Sitting somewhere between art installation, theatre, and real-life do-it-yourself adventure storytelling, immersive theatre can be created on as large or as intimate a scale as the space and resources allow, with the intention that no two experiences are identical. British theatre company Punchdrunk are game-changing pioneers in this scene, and their work is nothing short of phenomenal, bringing “cinematic [levels] of detail” to large-scale installations in often unexpected locations.

Part of this year’s Village Bizarre festival in The Rocks, 7-ON’s We Are the Ghosts of the Future is a home-grown piece of immersive theatre set in The Rocks in 1935, on the day of Charles Kingsford-Smith’s disappearance. Whilst roaming around the Rocks Discovery Museum, the audience is given relative autonomy to wander in and out of rooms, building the (a?) world from the fragments and scenes we glimpse, the people we meet. Particularly memorable and powerful are the cross-dressing policeman, the abortionist (or ‘kind gentleman,’ to use the period’s euphemism), and the artist and the idiot savant (or ‘holy fool’). Street urchin children run throughout the building, trying to steal hats or delivering letters, and they are kind of like a ball of red string which connects each of the characters in this labyrinth.

Being staged in the Rocks Discovery Museum brings its own challenges – display cases and didactic panels are expertly covered up with clothing or sheets, cloth stitched together in a patchwork fashion to simulate washing on a line or small hastily erected rooms in a larger space. Production designer Hugh O’Connor has navigated the already pokey and finite space, and created a world from the past that feels relatively lived in. Alex Berlage’s lighting is similarly creative and inventive, and lends a crepuscular mood to some rooms, with light glowing through curtains or drapes, shadows flickering on walls. The voices of the characters, the feet on the stairs, the creaking floorboards, all combine to create the feel of a boarding house which is very much alive.

Originally inspired by City of Shadows, Peter Doyle’s book of crime photographs from the early 20th century, the 7-ON playwrights group set about devising an immersive theatrical experience to be staged in the former Darlinghurst Gaol. After revisiting the idea and changing its focus and intention, the group created We Are the Ghosts of the Future, about the lives, loves, losses, and secrets of the inhabitants of a boarding house. Structurally, the piece contains seven isolated stories or small scenes, each for one or two characters; these scenes run in a continual loop for approximately forty minutes, before  we are ushered downstairs (and, weather permitting, outside) for the finale, where we receive the news about Charles Kingsford-Smith’s disappearance. For the most part, the play – as much as you can call the immersive experience a play – works, and it is to director Harriet Gillies’ credit that each story or fragment is as engrossing and fascinating in its own slice of the world, and that we are drawn into these characters’ lives for a brief glimmer of time. It is an enormous challenge to keep seven self-contained looped scenes fascinating for forty minutes simultaneously and, as an experience, it works rather well.

If the 7-ON group wanted to explore the idea further, or if other theatre-makers feel inspired to take up the daunting challenge of creating an immersive theatrical event, there are perhaps a few little things which could make the experience not only more involving, but make the adventure come alive a little more. Perhaps if the characters’ stories intertwined more, if we saw the interactions between them as they moved about and through the house, going about their daily routine – washing, cleaning, ironing, sewing, mending, cooking, painting… Taking a lead from Punchdrunk’s example, where audiences are actively invited to follow a character (or characters, if you’d prefer) for the evening, there is the potential here for seven completely different journeys through the house, and it is up to the individual audience members to piece the house together, to try and work out where the characters all fit with regards to each others’ lives. There are a couple of characters who appear in the hallways, in the back of scenes, but have no lines or are not visibly part of any scene – could they have more to do, or more of a part to play in the story of the house?

While similar in idea to Mongrel Mouth’s The Age of Entitlement at last year’s Rocks Bizarre Village Market, We Are the Ghosts of the Future is more cohesive, more clearly thought out, and executed in a much more thorough manner. There are several quite moving glimpses of joy and emotion, quiet tender pockets of private despair and pain, which we are privy to for mere seconds, but they give us a window into a time where there were still parts of the world unknown and unchartered, where the streets were rougher and harder and crueller than we’d care to imagine, and where life was eked out by sheer determination and courage.

There is compassion and heart here, if you step inside the door on Kendall Lane …

Photography: Phyllis Wong

Till November 28: Book now.

Monday's rehearsal

The countdown to our first audience begins ... We are the Ghosts of the Future opens this Friday, 13 November, at The Rocks Discovery Museum in Kendall Lane. Yesterday evening we did our first run, or as much of a 'run' as you do in a non-linear, immersive show where the audience are able to create their own story logic as they move from one part of the boarding house to another.

These are photos of our director, Harriet, designer, Hugh, and some of the cast and crew at the pre-run briefing. The 3 boys on the left, Flynn, Sam and Robbie are roatating the role of 11-year-old Archie.

An actor's diary part 3

Here is the third and final part of We are the Ghosts of the Future actor Darcy Brown's diary.

Biggles

We are the Ghosts of the Future contains several references to the fictional pilot and adventurer, Biggles. An echo of the by-then mythic status of the recently vanished Charles Kingsford Smith. Here are a few fascinating titbits about Biggles and The Cruise of the Condor, along with the colour plates and illustrations featured in the first edition:

Images from: http://www.biggles.info/Details/02/

The second Biggles adventure to be published, The Cruise of the Condor appeared in 1933. Written by Captain W. E. Johns, a former World War One pilot, the series about James Bigglesworth and his mates Algy and Ginger eventually ran to almost a hundred volumes.

The Cruise of the Condor is Biggles on the trail of Inca gold deep in the heart of the Amazon. Following a surprise visit to his Uncle Dickpa’s house, Biggles and Algy find Dickpa held hostage by a group of thieves. Returning with a rented aircraft, Biggles rescues his uncle, and together with Algy and Flight Sergeant Smyth, they all travel to South America on a treasure hunt.

For Biggles fans ... When The Cruise of the Condor was (re)printed in the Boys’ Friend Library in 1938, there was an additional passage:

‘[Biggles] dropped into a deck-chair and lit a cigarette. “I was only thinking of some of the wonders we saw, and of those we did not see. There are a few. And, personally, I want to have another go—I don’t know when, or how. It’s like having a magic forest at the end of the garden with a fence placarded with notices, ‘verboten,’ ‘defense de passer’ all the lingos—don’t seem in nature to hold back. And, what’s more to the point, I feel convinced in my own mind that, apart from the beauty of it, the giddy transformation scenes of all the rainbow hues, there’s locked up away there in those majestic vastnesses a something—a something—” 

      “Yes,” murmured Dickpa eagerly, as he leaned forward, a new light in his eyes ...

      Biggles flicked the ash off his cigarette. “I mean,” he said dreamily, “that there may be something there which would act as the key to lots of our old problems— something that’s been lost in the limbo of the past; something so much worth having that even to dwell on it may well make one feel a bit squizzly about the eyes. I mean something of splendour which was swept away when some of the ancient civilisations went down to the dust. But ideas don’t perish, you know, any more than thought itself. It is merely a matter of finding the way back and retrieving the treasure, picking up a thread, as it were, resuming work on jobs left unfinished by some of the grand old fellows who had made something of their beautiful country and were doing very well.’

A Few Thoughts

The ‘Ghost Story’ feeling that runs through this; the terrace house as time-machine, séance, memory palace, whatever. Spirit theatre ...

A wonderful thing about the promenade format is that so much of the work of creating the world is facilitated, given ease, simply by the audience inhabiting that shared space, and it not being one into which meaning has to be projected (simple things: it’s a real house, it has a ready-made history, we don’t have to imagine the Rocks outside, etc.) Instantly conjures atmosphere and removes some of the imaginative gap between character and spectator. Its tactile reality, and existing detail, provide an imaginative web.

Also just very, blackly, funny. Appeals to my morbid side. Shades of The Innocents? Picnic at Hanging Rock? The War of the Buttons? David Lynch? Peter Pan? The Sound and the Fury? ...

Intensification of the theatrical exchange: repetitions, the illusion of the first time, being everything. Actually, the illusion of the first and only time. Here, opportunity to change, experiment, respond uniquely, improvise, remake the piece anew multiple times in a single evening! Monopolising on the intimacy of the ‘one room’ circumstance ...

Permanence/Impermanence ...

‘It is not uncommon to still hear people express the view that people with disability would be better off in institutions with other of their own kind. There also appears to be a common belief that people with disability are not able to make a significant contribution to the community.’ (Verick) Echoes/parallels the contribution of the artist?—fighting for the value of an artistic output, devotion of one’s time to a creative pursuit; struggle for validation, comprehension ... Seeing with ‘the eyes of a child’ a noble, miraculous thing ...

From https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Camera_obscura_Prague.jpg

There are exciting possibilities for the presence of the audience to be acknowledged and openly included in the scene. Bridget and Tommy are not necessarily relegated or tied-down to the past, but rather able to ‘see’ these onlookers.

Alternate perceptions, the confusion between reality and dreaming, time as one great continuous, looping design ...