Just completed working on Arena Theatre Company’s interactive work House of Dreaming.
Because I was working on Visible City and then away in Sydney and Darwin, I was unable to commit fully to this stage, but was happy to come in and fill in a couple of gaps in the last week or two. The development took place at Digger’s Rest primary school on the outskirts of Melbourne (near Sunbury). The company had been resident out there for a number of months, working with Halcyon McLeod (writer), Jethro Woodward (Sound), Chris Kohn and Christian Leavesley (Directors). Danielle Brustman (Design) and Berney Sweeney (Production) then came in and constructed the mini-house in one of the schools unused rooms.
Even with a lot of thinking and testing it is impossible to understand how humans (and even more so children) will think and react to situations. The sort of interactivity we set up worked some times but not all the time. The engagement for them needs to capture their attention but not be so flashy that it is meaningless. This is a complex set of creation because everything impacts on the way that the participant views/experiences/sees/feels the work. The way a room feels, the colour, the architecture, where the door is to leave, how much sound bleed there is between rooms, how obvious the interaction is etc. etc. etc.
So then with this sort of complexity, the creation of the work needs to be very well thought through, as we move forward as a team we will consider all of these issues…
