HOW do you make a theatre piece about a suburb? Easy, say, installation artist Louise Morris and theatre director/writer Pip Buining – just engage with the locals.
In planning a site-specific “theatrical journey”, “Anthology”, Morris and Buining have set their sights on Westlake, the suburb once located in Stirling Park between the lake and the Mexican Embassy, now earmarked to be the Prime Minister’s new Lodge.
They promise performance, installation, sound art, video, live music, song, dance and tea for Canberrans game enough to don their bushwalking gear and enjoy the experience.
Inspired by the self-published stories and prodigious photo-snapping of historian Ann Gugler, they honour a suburb which was from 1922-1965 home to 700 people, now almost totally erased.
Indeed, in an almost Monty Pythonesque twist, had it not been for the presence of the endangered Button Wrinklewort flower, the area might have been overtaken by developers long ago.
Buining has been burying herself in Gugler’s stories, from which she selected several focal tales, also inventing the character of Bob Rolland (played by “CityNews” reviewer Joe Woodward), the fictional great-nephew of HM Rolland, the SA architect of 61 temporary workers’ cottages built in 1923 and long since taken away on the backs of trucks.
“Bob” is a real estate developer, a natural antagonist to Gugler, who also appears as a character, played by Caroline O’Brien.
While working on the show, Buining says: “We found a strong narrative element that we didn’t anticipate… the two central characters Ann and Bob have a cathartic moment, it’s an emotional journey.”
Buining, a former director of Canberra Youth Theatre and the brains behind a night-time theatrical venture into the National Library called “Retrieval”, has found tremendous support among ACT artists, not least from sound engineer Kimmo Vennonen and local band The Cashews, who have created a theme song, “Buying into the Dream”, written by Alison Procter.
“It’s the story of a little suburb that wants to be visible,” Buining says, “but that’s exactly what the Government didn’t want… the kids had to walk to State Circle to get buses to school and the houses were painted green to disappear into the environment… yet for 50 years people were born there, grew up there and died there.”
“Anthology: a theatrical journey through the vanished suburb of Westlake”, 6pm, Nov 26-29 & December 3-6. Ticketing and the performance will begin from the small car park at corner of Empire Circuit and Forster Crescent, Yarralumla. Bookings to anthology.net.au
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