The Green Room is a site specific performance installation incorporating original sound, light, found objects, solo performer and solo musician. The performance/installation will take place within the historic Gunpowder Magazine (built in 1850) situated on The Domain in Hobart. The clarity and purity of the acoustics of this chamber has inspired us to create a an immersive installation that incorporates: – a performance that takes place at dusk in late Spring in Hobart – an empty chamber save for a row of 20 seats for an audience – the primary source of light to be provided by designer Duncan Meerding’s Cracked Log Lamps, refuse logs, approximately 50 cm high. These Lamps are made from salvaged logs which would otherwise have been burnt. These lamps embrace rather than avoid the naturally occurring cracks in refuse logs. Approximately 20 Lamps will be installed throughout the performance space – a solo musician, violinist (Alexandra Hiew) – a fixed camera adjacent to the audience viewing row – a sound engineer/programmer (Dylan Sheridan ) – a solo performer (Jane Longhurst). A Green Room is the waiting room for a theatre. Our performance, The Green Room, is thus called because we wish to create a physical language, a choreography of gestures, that will evoke the sense of quiet waiting, the pause before performance, the waiting for something to happen. Beyond 2013: Though The Green Room is highly sensitised to the Gunpowder Magazine as the site specified, it is planned we will share this creative concept with Junction Arts Festival and Ten Days on the Island for future iterations in alternative sites around Tasmania.
Background to this collaboration: Dylan and Jane met in January 2012 when they both participated in Salamanca Arts Centre’s HyPe workshop. The central theme of the two weekends was collaboration; the central provocation informing our improvised and planned performances created throughout the workshop was the 2007 Myer fire in central Hobart. They were partnered to prepare a short performance inspired by the fire for the final day of the workshop. Working closely with workshop leaders, artists and creators, Deborah Pollard and Martyn Coutts, they found a tentative but abiding working collaboration based on our shared interest in investigating the human condition in non traditional performance spaces, via performance improvisation and digital technology. They applied for a further HyPe opportunity in August this year when they engaged with the Like HyPe pitch process in partnership with Junction Arts Festival. At stake was $5,000 towards a Creative Development period and through the novel and liberating process of a ‘live’ pitch they won the grant on offer through an audience vote. They engaged in this Creative Development in November 2012. Jane met furniture and lighting designer/maker Duncan Meerding at the Access to Disability Forum held at Arts Tasmania 12 November 2012. She was immediately struck by the beauty of Duncan’s signature Cracked Log Lamps, lamps made from salvaged logs which would otherwise have been burnt. Being legally blind, the fact Duncan works with the play of light emanating from the peripheries of these logs is intriguing and compelling. Jane immediately could see a literal ‘stage’ for these log lamps to inhabit that would resonate within the contexts we have been exploring throughout 2012.
Production is now complete on this project – with performances scheduled for late November 2013.
