Devised theatre
Drowning Bird, Plummeting Fish
The beer is warm. The music is shit. And the world is ending
An end-of-the-world party, a marauding panda bear, and a whole stack of cardboard boxes. Our first ticketed show.
I’ve never been as obsessed with an artist as I was with Forced Entertainment during these years. Their raw, funny and relentless style sucked me in, and as a fledgling company we took apart their games and bootlegged them. It felt to me like we were figuring out what theatre could be – that I’d only seen its shadow up until then. Drowning Bird was derivative in a lot of ways – breathy microphone line-ups, cardboard signs and cities, game show sadism – but I remember it as a space where if felt like we were able to explore the potential of performance, its sense of volatile presence, to the point of exhilaration: really open the throttle and let it rip. Ralph, May 2023
Devised by the companyPerformed by Rachel Baker, Simon Haren, Joel Baxendale and Claire O’Loughlin
Directed by Ralph Upton
Produced by Fiona McNamara
Design by Rachel Marlow
Music by Hamish Upton
Wellington: BATS theatre (NZ Fringe), 11-19 February 2009
Dunedin: The Globe (Dunedin Fringe), 1-4 April 2009
Wellington: BATS Theatre (Elimination Rounds tour), 2010Auckland: The Basement (Elimination Rounds tour), 2010
Funded by Creative NZ through a Kakano grant, generously supported by the VUW theatre programme.
"theatre so brilliant it's important. A work about or growning apathy that refuses to succumb to itself. Almost perfect. 10/10."
SALIENT
"succeeds in being a rare instance of a sketch of apathy that is moving"
LUMIERE READER
"unmissable theatre"
THEATREVIEW
.jpg)
