DISTRACTION CAMP - ring (03) 365 3159 for bookings and information

EXTENDED SEASON: Thurs 10th, Friday 11th, Saturday 12th, 8pm. University Theatre (Rolleston Ave) $20/$15.

LISTEN: Distraction Camp segment on Radio NZ, Arts on Sunday, 22 Nov 2009

DISTRACTION CAMP preview story - The Press, 27 November 2009

Then What is Freedom? - Theatreview, reviewed by Whetu Fala

Play hard work, but worth the effort - The Press, reviewed by Alan Scott

DISTRACTION CAMP is Free Theatre's major new theatre and film work for 2009. It will premiere in Christchurch at the University Theatre on 27 November. This production builds on our production of Faust Chroma in that it explores the idea of acting in the theatre and everyday life. For Distraction Camp , we are basing the exploration around the theme of unfulfilled (and unfulfillable) desire - a central component in our exploration of the Faust myth - and the physical vocabulary of the Argentine tango.  

Here's a word from the Director about the production:

"At base, Distraction Camp is a performative enquiry into the nature of acting through theatre, opera, film and other media.  It takes inspiration from texts about acting such as Hamlet and Jean Genet's The Balcony , and incorporates texts, images and film pieces. As it sits conceptually in relation (not quite opposition) to the "concentration camp," Distraction Camp also draws on, and is responsive to, a number of Holocaust texts, films and images.   Whereas the experience of the concentration camp was one of scarcity and hunger, the current experience of late capitalism is one of obesity and obscenity, which ironically can be seen to lead to the same effect.  Forced endlessly to consume entertainments that revolve endlessly around distractions and commodities, audiences have become like the Muselman , resigned to a way of living without meaning, obese yet starved of real nourishment.  

In The Theatre and its Double , Antonin Artaud says, "We are not free... And the theatre teaches us that first of all."  Through the lens provided by the theatrical experience, Distraction Camp will explore the effects of late capitalism on the process of art-making and the function of art now.  It will make a play on the nature of acting in art and in life, and ask freshly what audiences want from theatre and film.  Genet says in The Balcony :  "The devil is the great Actor."  As with Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust and as with Gustav Gründgens in Fritsch's Chroma , the act of seduction is comparable to the act of performance, and the position of the audience as willing consumers and victims is questionable."

Work on this project has been two-pronged. We are taking tango lessons and have been exploring the dance as the basis for a new form of physical theatre.   We are also investigating the themes of The Balcony as they might be seen to translate to our lives here in New Zealand.

In addition, we are working under the guidance of Chris Reddington, who in his own work as a composer and musician has explored tango extensively. Using a number of sources from contemporary and traditional tango music, we are developing a musical score that will underpin the physical work. This lays a foundation for our own extended physical/musical improvisations, out of which will come the framework of this production.

Faustus

Faustus continues the ongoing collaboration with Fritsch that began with Faust Chroma which was presented to critical acclaim throughout 2008 and 2009. (Reviews can be found at http://www.freetheatre.org.nz/history/fc.shtml#reviews ).   In 2010, Free Theatre's work with Fritsch will be expanded to include an international exchange and possible tour with the prestigious Karlsruhe Landes-Theater.

Fritsch's play looks back through Goethe and Marlowe's famous Fausts to the original medieval folk story: the necromancer, magician and proto-scientist Faustus , who sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for knowledge, including the sexual variety.   From a time when the certainties of God and Nature were increasingly destabilised by the birth of science, Fritsch's Faust is both a folk hero and a villain, who speaks to a contemporary audience caught at a similar, destabilised social moment, when the success of science might lead to the destruction of nature and the human race.

Free Theatre's Faustus will be a multimedia production, incorporating film, music and magic. Award-winning playwright Fritsch will be visiting Christchurch to help develop the performance. Fritsch will also be shooting scenes for the filmic side of the production, which will be incorporated in a forthcoming Faust film. He will be happy to give talks as part of his visit to Christchurch.

This show represents the culmination of an ongoing collaboration between an internationally-recognised playwright/film-maker and the Free Theatre, perhaps New Zealand's foremost experimental theatre company. There is already international interest in this project.

Bring Me the Head of Kurt Cobain

Werner Fritsch has also offered us a new duologue in the vein of Enigma Emmy Göring and Nico Sphinx of Ice. We have yet to translate the text from German, but are tentatively planning a performance early in 2010.

Ella and Susn

After a successful tour in March/April, winning the Best Theatre Award at the 2009 Dunedin Fringe Festival, we are trying to organise a Wellington season of Ella and Susn.

Remake

Free Theatre invites you to the premiere of its film REMAKE. Audiences will have the chance to view this film at a public screening at the Christchurch Art Gallery on Sunday 8th November 1.30pm in the Philip Carter Auditorium.

It is a film about remaking the stories of Parker and Hulme and of Genet's The Maids, where the filmmakers act out and mix in their own life stories and in which the ensuing confusion leads to both comic and tragic results. It can be read as a murder mystery, a satire on Christchurch contemporary life or a DIY (do-it-yourself) attempt to make a New Zealand new wave art film.

Liz and Marian are two young students of film and theatre in Christchurch, New Zealand, who decide to make a film. They film each other when they talk to their boyfriends on the phone or re-enact "scenes" that they had with them. They place a hidden camera in their parents' living rooms to film "scenes" they have with them. They are also researching the fantasy lives of Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker who murdered Pauline's mother in Christchurch fifty years ago. They try to take on their roles and to (re)make a film about them (Heavenly Creatures). They follow their footsteps around Christchurch and, like Juliet and Pauline, search for a Fourth World, which is more exciting and meaningful than their lives at the bottom of the world, where nothing ever happens.

Together they try to find this hidden world: in the church, in Christchurch's witches scene, in the tapu places of Port Levy, in drugs and dreams, in each other, and above all, in film and theatre. Like Juliet and Pauline they role-play as film stars (Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth) and remake scenes from the Marx Brothers and Puccini's Tosca. But they also replay scenes from works that themselves investigate role-playing, such as Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating and Jean Genet's The Maids, or scenes from life, like a prominent New Zealand theatre director's public abduction and shaming. The theatrical games that they play with the scenes of the murderous maids increasingly mirror Parker and Hulme's as well as their own games in mixing the fake and the real.

To film all this they acquire the help of the cameraman Shahin and the musician Nick with whom they also play their own games. The question becomes whom they will "murder": themselves, each other, their mother or father, or their boyfriends. The murders that end the film come as surprises that are at the same time inescapable.