Production -Available for touring
“The Dictionary of Imaginary Places” vibrates a collection of humanity within a vital and effervescent theatrical form by capturing the complexity of urban life as it hurtles down the track. It gives expression to the everyday intersection of the mundane and the exceptional in a theatrically original and evocative work that brings into question a reliance on the artist as any sort of truth maker.
The work is created from exact transcriptions of conversations recorded on the metropolitan train system. These collected, public words are un-amended but shaped and edited into poetically ‘built’ theatre which combines them with startling visuals, extended physicality in a roughly hewn aesthetic.
With a sound world that suggests the act of eaves dropping the audience is both invited to empathise with and to recognise themselves as cocooned from others. Imaginary creatures are created simply but startlingly with the performer’s bodies and simple costuming and props.
While the pretence of this dressing is overt and beyond an obvious realty audience members who catch trains relate immediately to the moments created. By mixing the reality of a daily commute with the fantastical realm this performance piece expresses not just the imagination of the stage but the imagination that dwells in every individual.
What people said:...
“The Dictionary of Imaginary Places uses the direct transcripts of overheard conversations and turns them into something remarkably surprising, unexpectedly funny and curiously beautiful. …… Like “Black” (Tregloan, 2007), The Dictionary of Imaginary Places combines performance art with design, but this time she doesn’t deconstruct an existing narrative, but starts with the most disparate mass of words. The conversations people have on trains are mundane. They are filtered because they can be heard, but unfiltered because people assume that no one is listening. In this dictionary, these stolen words mean nothing or everything. The words are just sounds and glimpses of what could be. They don’t belong to the characters or the space and tell their own stories away from what we are witnessing, and Franze’s sound design ensures that we also hear them in unexpected ways.
Four passengers (Heather Bolton, Christopher Brown, Rita Kalnejais and James Wardlow) recreate what the overheard conversations could have been like. Well, make that what you could never have imagined them to be like. Unless you close your eyes and imagine a red-gowned women stuffing MX’s in her dress to give her a large arse or a jazz hands dancer in a blue sequined jacket prancing among the old coffee cups.”
AussieTheatre.com
Reviewer: Anne Marie Peard
“…..Characters emerge and disappear, and threads of discourse connect and unravel, as the absurdity of everyday life is subjected to an instant of examination. Part of the attraction of verbatim theatre is its ability to embody Bertolt Brecht's "distancing effect", offering the audience an objective point of view. At the same time, however, there is a disconcerting sense of voyeurism in the way this serves up other people's private thoughts and words for our aesthetic consumption. It makes one wonder how comfortable we would be to find our own foibles laid out for laughs. Perhaps this is the point of the chaos in the performance: it's a violent reaction to the intrusive surveillance that pervades contemporary society.”
The Age October 17, 2009
Private words, public laughter
Reviewer: Martin Ball
“This transcendent work was a piece of verbatim theatre, a collage mapped out through a series of real life conversations on trains. Violence and threat rubbed shoulders with comedy and surrealism, and expressions of age and difference, hope and desire played out over the course of an hour…. this was a simple but sublime work that allowed the audience to find their own meaning in the text.”
Man About Town
Reviewer: Richard Watts
“There are Australian theatre artists like Benedict Andrews, Michael Kantor, Barrie Kosky, Jenny Kemp, Matthew Lutton, Chris Kohn and Anna Tregloan whose work has cultural immediacy —each has a distinctive stage language but in dialogue with a wide range of practices from the world beyond.”
Real Time Arts.
Who we are:
“The Dictionary of Imaginary Places” involves four performers (Heather Bolton, Christopher Brown, Rita Kalnejais and James Wardlaw), sound designer and composer David Franzke and the design and direction of Anna Tregloan. Todd Macdonald is the producer and Artistic Director of Store Room Theatre.
Anna Tregloan is a well-known and acclaimed theatre designer/maker who has garnered a strong reputation as devisor and director of innovative performances that challenge the accepted codes of narrative and performance. Her works have a record of admirable public attendance and critical response. She has collaborated with a large number and eclectic mix of companies and artists and works in a combination of physical, visual, cross media and text based performance. Her design work has toured to all Australian Capitals, shown in six Melbourne Festivals, three Adelaide Festivals and the Perth International Festival along with work showing in Edinburgh, Paris, New York, Prague, London, Kyoto, Glasgow, Malaysia and other international stages. Thirteen of her designs have been nominated for Victorian Green Room Association awards and five have been awarded. In 2006 she was awarded the prestigious John Truscott Award for Excellence in Design along with Greenroom Association awards and a Helpman Award for design. Her devised works have been nominated for “Best Production, New Work” and innovation in form at GRAA. Previously, she was Resident Artist at the Malthouse Theatre and is an Associate Artist of Store Room Theatre.
David Franzke - Sound composer/designer and recordist
David collaborates with numerous independent companies including ongoing work with Anna Tregloan generating site-specific theatrical work. (He is a Green Room Award Winner for outstanding work in with Anna Tregloan’s “Skinflick”). His practice involves ongoing collaborations with visual artists such as David Jolly, Daniel Crooks, Andrew Hazewinkel and David Rosetzky on various projects. The underlying principle in his work is that sound lives in both the dramatic action as well as being a scenic element, he is creating ‘text’ and driving narrative with sound. Sound is conceived as a kinaesthetic intelligence in complete alliance and real time “play” with the performer and performance.
Performers - Christopher Brown – Heather Bolton – Rita Kalnejai – James Wardlaw.
These performers are highly accomplished and have performed with Australian companies of the likes of Back to Back, Sydney Theatre Company, Malthouse Melbourne, Eleventh Hour, Ranters Theatre, Bell Shakespeare and many others. Their experience encompasses a large variety of performance style. For this production they undertook physical training with Steven Burton (Circus Oz, NICA).
Technical Specifications click HERE
The original production of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places was made possible throught the support of:
