Urban Theatre Projects (UTP), originally founded as Death Defying Theatre (way back in the ‘80’s) is a professional theatre company based in Bankstown (Sydney, NSW). Their tag line is ‘Stories of Contemporary Life‘ and they make new theatre works that reflect such stories and images of contemporary Australian life, with a focus on people and cultures living in urban environments.
In just over a week their new show “The Fence” opens as part of the Sydney Festival 2010. I haven’t seen the show (yet) – but their method of work is interesting, reflecting a hybrid creative approach to developing works that reflect contemporary experiences, lives and stories and engage with the experiences and expertise of members of the communities they are representing without producing documentary per se.
The Fence is a story that takes place in the family home of Mel and Joy in Sydney’s western suburbs. It investigates the experiences and resilience of five middle-aged Australians, four of whom grew up in care as part of the Stolen Generations and Forgotten Australians. It will be performed in a purpose built house in Sydney’s Western Suburbs.
The process for developing The Fence has been a mixture of collaboratively-devised works by artists convened by the Urban Theatre Project and a process of dialogue with sites, ideas, people and organizations engaged in issues to do with out-of-home care.
Executive Producer Michelle Kotevski writes:
“In developing The Fence, we’ve established relationships with a number of individuals both Indigenous and non Indigenous, community leaders, advocacy and service organisations and industry professionals who have had direct experiences and/or understanding of care environments and the related impacts of out-of-home care.
During the creative development and rehearsal stages, the performers and artistic team improvised material to build scenes that make up the show. During this process we presented these scenes to community consultants who discussed the material with us and offered critical feedback. This would cause us to reconsider the material and look at ways of refining and developing the dramaturgical ideas and creative languages of the piece.
So, basically, the community consultants (people with life experiences of being part of the Stolen Generations and Forgotten Australians) are acknowledged as experts. They are paid for their time in rehearsals as they watch material and offer feedback and engage in discussion with the artistic team. Consultants are not asked to disclose their personal stories and the work created is not based on anyone’s personal story, but rather, from a body of research and material generated by performers in response to artistic questions and feedback and discussion.
The experiences of the community are a real guide to the authenticity – emotional and behavioural – of the work. Their insights, suggestions and offerings ground the story and the performance in terms of its believability and authenticity.”
The result is what Director Alicia Talbot calls ‘fictionalised-reality’, an interesting phrase that reflects strategies used in the creative process to represent real life issues, stories and experiences in forms that protect individuals, respect privacy, while still conjuring the complexities, subtleties and authenticity of lived experiences.
The Fence opens as part of the Sydney Festival 2010 on January 14th and runs for 2 weeks.
Hello to you all,
It is great to see that as a Forgotten Australian we are now considered as a performance art form.
From my experiences to date being an accredited professional visual artist and a Forgotten Australian is quite a different matter.People still cringe.
I hope you work is a success and introduces audiences to our world and what we continue to endure nor can we ever forget.
Kind regards,
Rozlyn de Bussey
Very cool process – I particularly like the acknowledgement of expertise in community members, something that would ‘seem’ obvious – but is difficult at times to remember when making work. I’m definitely going to see this.