AUDIENCE WORKS
War Lounge was first presented at City Tiler, in October 2008.
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Suzanne wanted to
make a show about war.
The result is a collection of rooms - balloon diplomacy,
poetry-for-horror deal, slide & popcorn show, "what would you
like to tell me about your country" museum...
Public watch, lounge, engage or relax with a drink as the performers
confess and present their private reservations and public interventions
in an effort to come to grips with the conflict between their own
(sometimes embarrassingly) mediated experience of war and the desire to
respond.
SUZANNE
: At a certain point it became obvious that the subject of this work
demanded a more authentic, personal, response from each of us. Our individual responses to war
and its relation to us were giving rise to increasingly idiosyncratic,
and divergent, performative responses. This led in turn to the notion of
individual 'war rooms, shaped in part by each individual performers
interests and proclivities. One of my challenges was to draw these
seperate rooms, spiralling away from each other by the creativity of
individual artists, together into a whole.
So I set a number of of
pre-conditions, rules, to which each room had to conform.
They were :
(1) each room must become a personal odyssey, a project
which lived in each performer as an on-going endeavour beyond the
immediate goals of the season;
(2) each project must have an aspect of
impossibility, something which extends it beyond its simple completion;
and
(3) the performers and the performance must incorporate failures
and blocks to their success.
These rules generated a loose
gravitational pull which sought to draw these diverse rooms together
not on the level of content, but on the level of
form.
