THEATRE: THE TENT
Made of old trucking canvas and scrap metal, The Tent is not your average pitched shelter, and nor is it your average performance. Pieced together with puppetry, live action and a pre-recorded Chautauqua or telling tale, 20 audience members are invited to step into the intimate space of the tent with two men, Brett and Michael. We caught up with the creator, Matt Prest, who explained that strange-sounding C-word, and The Tent’s frozen sojourn in a carpark in Melbourne …
Matt said, “we wanted to make a performance venue that did for contemporary performance what big tops do for circus. We were attracted to the idea of a show that could pack up and tour round, and set itself up in lots of different places. A show that was kind of self-sufficient. The tent we’ve made is a unique object in its own right, made of old trucking canvas and scrap metal. The atmosphere it creates is like another character in the show.
Chautauquas were travelling big top tents that used to travel around North America, popular in the late 19th, early 20th centuries. They used to be a platform for lectures, presentations, demonstrations on the latest ideas and innovations of the day. In a way they served the same function as radio and television and were one of the most popular forms of ‘infotainment’ before the new forms of media were introduced. We were interested in the idea of a space where people come together, in the flesh, and take the time to engage with something in a way that required a certain level of participation and reflection. I wouldn’t say what we’ve created is a Chautauqua as such, it’s a theatre show, but the Chautauqua was definitely a reference for the experience we are creating with The Tent.
As an artist I’m interested in making theatre and performance that places an emphasis on the live experience of the audience. I feel that with any live performance, space is a major consideration and with The Tent, I wanted to make that space feel like it was really lived in, and like the audience were inside someone’s home. The purpose of this is to give the audience an experience that they couldn’t get in another storytelling medium such as a film or book – to physically place them in the space of the story and to wholly create an atmosphere for the work. In Melbourne [as part of Next Wave festival] we were pitched in a ugly, disused gravel carpark adjacent to the railway tracks near Fed Square in the city centre. The security company tried to charge us twice as much as they’d said, so we ended up camping in the tent ourselves, in the middle of winter in Melbourne. It was great to be camping in the middle of the city, a novelty that actually didn’t wear off in the week we were there.
Hole in the Wall is the next project that we’ll be presenting at Campbelltown Arts Centre, Performance Space and Next Wave from May 2010. It will be set in a furniture warehouse and centre around an unconventional love story. It’s a work about materialism, beauty and destruction.”
July 15-18, Campbelltown Arts Centre, cnr Camden & Appin Roads Campbelltown, $20, 4645 4100 or email artscentre@campbelltown.nsw.gov.au
