Synopsis
Murder is the ultimate taboo – yet it’s slashed and splashed across every surface of our culture, in folklore, fantasy and fiction. The Bible, classical tragedy, Shakespeare, film noir, cop shows, murder ballads, multiplayer gaming environments… How will I kill thee? Let me count the ways.
Does this fascination betray some kind of death wish? Or a lust for life, a laughing in the face of death?
This is the territory explored in Murder: a visceral new work by visual theatre magicians Erth, inspired by and featuring Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads.
Welcome to the scene of the crime. A sinister yet compelling figure holds sway: interrogator, confessor and master of ceremonies, telling of The Curse of Millhaven, The Kindness of Strangers, of Stagger Lee and Nellie Brown and Billy Dilly – conjuring into life the figures of Cave’s dark world of love and lust and death, through puppetry, digital image, old carny tricks, and whisper-intimate performance.
Like the Ancient Mariner’s wedding guests, you can only listen, as he recounts the darkest secrets of his childhood, the death of his mother, and the cruelty of that murderer God. Or will you be judge? Jury? Executioner?
And I think my head is burning
And in a way I'm yearning
To be done with all this measuring of truth.
An eye for an eye
A tooth for a tooth
And anyway I told the truth
And I'm not afraid to die.
- Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Mercy Seat
Where the show comes from
Erth is a visual theatre company based in Sydney, that quite simply, brings the impossible to life. They tell big stories on a big canvas:
- Gondwana – the story of the evolution of life from microbes to mammals
- The Nargun and the Stars – based on Patricia Wrightson’s iconic novel – bringing together live performers, digital image, and puppets from the 5m tall living stone Nargun, to a delicate, lifesize moth
- Dinosaur Petting Zoo – still enchanting kids all over the world, five years on.
But Murder is a very different work, taking as its starting point, the Murder Ballads of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. This presentation inlcludes some of those songs, some early draft scenes showing puppetry, and a little of the key narrator figure we’re calling The Confessor, played by Graeme Rhodes… some ideas about the design vision… and some thoughts on the journey the Confessor will take the audience on, from our writer, Raimondo Cortese.
First though we’re off to Norwich, to hear about the origins of the project from a very jetlagged Scott Wright, who’s touring Dinosaur Petting Zoo to Norfolk & Norwich Festival.
Play Video of Scott talking about his vision (2:52)
Where we are going: a story
This is video of the Children on the Hill scene that Scott introduced. It's a very first draft version – we’ve already tightened the piece considerably, from 6.30 down to about 4.30, and the new miniature camera we trialled at the MFI pitch gives sharp high definition image.
Link to Children on the Hill YouTube Video
Where we are going: the team & making the show
Play video of Scott talking about the team (2:19)
Where we are going: some more draft scene ideas
Some of you will have seen Stagger Lee, which we’ve been performing for a while now. Then in March we had one week’s creative development to explore some more puppetry ideas, and also play a little with the Confessor figure, and other modes of storytelling.
These scenes are not to suggest the structure of the show. And we’re conscious that both song-based scenes use puppetry to enact the story in quite a literal way, but we’ll use other modes of story-telling and of performance through the show. It won’t be a song cycle broken up by monologue – we haven’t even begun to explore the choreography, or the puppeteers voicing their puppets.
These scenes are not to suggest the structure of the show. And we’re conscious that both song-based scenes use puppetry to enact the story in quite a literal way, but we’ll use other modes of story-telling and of performance through the show. It won’t be a song cycle broken up by monologue – we haven’t even begun to explore the choreography, or the puppeteers voicing their puppets.
The first video is an excerpt from a scene using the song Kindness of Strangers, and as Scott mentioned, the recording is a demo that our Musical Director Phil Downing made with Eileen Hodgkins, from the Perch Creek Family Jug Band, which really shifts the point of view of the song to that of the victim.
Play video of Kindness of Strangers excerpt (Eileen singing, 1:40)
Link to Stagger Lee Video
Link to Hitchhiker Story video
Link to Kindness of Strangers video (full scene, Nick Cave version)
Design & Venue
Murder will be an intimate show for adult audiences, of up to about 300 capacity. The puppets will mostly be around 80 to 100 cm tall – much bigger than the small prototype puppets used in the early version of Stagger Lee, seen in the video. We think that scale will work in a well designed medium sized venue.
We’ve been talking with some of you about making it for the Spiegeltent, or a similar context, possibly late night, possibly a rock’n’rolly sort of venue. But of course it will also have to work in a conventional theatre.
Erth's Designer and co-founder Steve Howarth is really excited to be going indoors. Previous Erth shows have very much featured exterior locations: rocks and caves and trees, environments for animals and mythological creatures.
Murder is indoors, it’s claustrophobic, it’s spooky, it’s creepy. It’s an internalised psychological space. And an urban space.
You can see here Steve is thinking stark, contrasty, lots of lines and angles and shadows. The inspirations being de Chirico, Chuck Jones and that Warner Brothers animation look, which is really a hand-drawn Noir, and William Kentridge.
The stage itself is a stark space: The Confessor’s room, with bed, table, lamp, not much more. It might be a prison cell, or a hospital ward, but it’s a space that shifts, that transforms into other spaces, and takes us to other places… transported by The Confessor’s imagination, and by the design team’s projection.
So we see layer upon layer of image, from digital video to lighting effects from gobos cut out of soft drink cans. There is still image and moving image, there is photographic clarity, and scratchy hand-drawn animation. And while these first images are quite retro, you can also see contemporary resonances in that sterile sort of TV crime drama, that CSI Miami look.What isn’t shown in the design video is that we can use realtime live video to bring our media-saturated world into the world of the show. That little wireless high definition spy camera, can be wielded by a puppet. So as Nellie Brown screams at horror as Stagger Lee shoots her boyfriend, a TV reporter can capture her grief or dispute her account of events, broadcast live via puppetcam.
This is the world conjured by the Confessor, and inhabited by the puppets. You know, with Erth, that the puppets will be fantastic. In every sense of the word. And awful, in every sense of the word.
Play Design video package (1:52)
The writer's vision
So. That’s the look. Now we’re going to get a sense of the journey, for the Confessor and for the audience. We’re really thrilled to be working with Raimondo Cortese as writer. It’s very early days yet – the scene ideas in this presentation were all made before Raimondo joined the team. This is Raimondo’s take:
Why do a show about Murder? – isn’t the news, internet already overloaded with it? Our interest in making this show stems from asking why this is so? What are we fascinated with violence? Why does murder, in all its various forms, dominate so much of our entertainment, not just film and television, but also crime fiction sells more than any other category, not to mention interactive online gaming, or even apps like Angry Birds – it seems we can’t get enough to fill our minds with the worst excesses of human cruelty. In our desperate quest to escape our mortality, we merely feed our fear of the inevitable. Death lurks behind our need to satisfy our material cravings, like a junkie hankering for the next fit. Avoiding the question of death only feeds it further, causing it to burgeon, a shadow forever stalking us, until it overwhelms us in its most gruesome forms. The horror of death is merely the gulf that separates us, with our multiple identities, our futile aspirations, our ephemeral goods and chattels, from the very infinite, the un-nameable, from our eternal resting place as dust of the earth. It could even be said, the more sanitised our existence becomes, the more likely we will rely on the media to dredge up whatever desperate, recycled forms of horror it can find.What excites me about working with Erth, apart from the fact they are an extraordinary team of artists, is that they know how to personalise this kind of material – it deals with what frightens us, haunts our memories since childhood, secretly causes us anxiety, confronts the nightmares and fears that we carry round inside us – it deals with these things in a ritualistic way – in a way you can only do through puppetry. Violence, as the Greeks would have it, should be kept of stage – an actor representing sex and murder very often forces us to stretch our disbelief beyond a limit that allows us to be affected by what we see. But puppetry is different – they already take us back to a mythical time, a mindset where the images and fantasies of childhood overwhelm us. Puppetry can do what actors can’t do – defy gravity, the laws of nature, take us into a dream world that has no biological limits.
This show presents a world that is not about social manners or the world of petty politics, but about things that we fear the most. It will take us, gently like a fairytale, into a place that is difficult to talk about or express to your friends, or even loved ones. It deals with things we keep close to ourselves, our secret terrors, the thoughts that keep us awake at night. Murder of course is extremely unlikely to happen to anyone in our society – so why do we fear it? Perhaps we don’t fear it, but rather we live in a world where we’re not allowed to fail, to express our doubts, to give ourselves free reign – the frustration, anxiety, anger wells up and releases itself in ways we don’t understand. As a society we have no way of dealing with death – we just pretend it doesn’t exist – we get rid of the body quickly and efficiently – we lack the rituals, the ways of sharing death as a society – and so we seek it out in our entertainment – the very way we exercise our free will most readily.Murder does not glorify violence – it seeks to personalise it. To create a show where we can go right to the heart of what we fear without being trite, or neat, or expedient.The show will present 12 different types of murder in an imaginative, and ritualistic way, from sex crimes, thrill kills, murder though indifference, random kills, and cannibalism to name a few – all told in various ways by the Confessor – using the Murder Ballads of Nick Cave, narration, voice over, projected text and dialogue, but mainly puppetry and video projection. The Confessor will take us through this journey, beginning with a recurring childhood dream and continuing with his own personal experiences with death. He is the person to whom we can confess our secrets, allowing us to humanise our fears. He will contextualise the show, take us through from beginning to end and offer a personal, heart-felt link to the darkest, wildest parts of our imaginations.
More things to look at and listen to
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| Still image of larger size (90cm) puppets for Stagger Lee |
Creative Team
Concept & Direction Scott Wright
Writer Raimondo Cortese
Featuring songs by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Design Steve Howarth & Erth
Sound & Image Design Phil Downing
Choreographer Kate Champion
Musicians including Eileen Hodgkins
Performers Michelle Robin Anderson, Alice Osborne, Graeme Rhodes, Rod Primrose, one TBA
Producer Harley Stumm
Production Notes
Duration approx 70-75 minutes
Venue
up to 300 seats, must have intimate feel due to content and size of
puppets (up to 1m tall). Black box, spiegeltent, thrust &
non-traditional spaces all possible provided seating does not extend too
far upstage.
Stage Small stage footprint, approx 8m W x 4m D
Touring Company 8 once opened (5 performers, AV/SX/LX operator, PM/SM, Director)
Development Timeline
Completed to date Research & Development (draft scene ideas)
May 2012 Treatment complete
July – Sep Script Development, Set & Puppet Build
Sep – Nov Creative Development (4 weeks)
Dec – Feb 2013 Final Development & Rehearsal (4 weeks, immediately prior to premiere)
Company Bio: Erth Visual & Physical Inc.
ERTH bring the impossible to life. Over 21 years, the company has developed a truly fantastic aesthetic and an extraordinary box of tricks, the foundations of its unique visual theatre works. The company regularly tours internationally, to every major Australian festival, and to regional and major city venues around the country. More than a million people have seen its dinosaurs in performance works such as Dinosaur Petting Zoo, and in museums.
Erth’s works range from large scale interactive environments, such as The Garden, a prehistoric landscape inhabited by giant insects which premiered at the Melbourne International Festival of Arts, to more intimate in-theatre works. Dinosaur Petting Zoo has toured through Australia and overseas for four years and is now joined by I, Bunyip, and its cast of Australian Indigenous spirit creatures and their stories, touring nationally June to September 2012. The Nargun and the Stars, an adaptation of Patricia Wrightson’s novel, was commissioned by Sydney and Perth Festivals in 2009.
The company has also been commissioned by major museums including The Australian Museum, Auckland War Memorial Museum, Powerhouse Museum (Sydney), The Field Museum in Chicago and the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, since its 2005 collaboration with the National Museum of Australia to make Gondwana. Its design studio has built for a huge range of cultural institutions and commercial clients, from Sydney Opera House and City of Sydney, to the primetime Spanish television program, El Hormiguero.
Erth was founded in 1990 in Ballarat, Victoria and is now based at Sydney’s CarriageWorks contemporary arts centre.
Bio: Writer, Raimondo Cortese
Raimondo Cortese graduated from VCA School of Drama in 1993. He was a founding member of Ranters Theatre, serving as Artistic Director from 1994 - 2001. Ranters have been regularly programmed in international performing arts festivals and venues since 1999, including developments and residencies. He has written over thirty plays and texts for theatre, including Features of Blown Youth, Roulette, St Kilda Tales and The Wall. His most recent works are, Holiday, which won a 2007 Green Room Award for Best Australian Writing, The Dream Life of Butterflies for MTC and Intimacy, which premiered at the Malthouse Theatre for the 2010 Melbourne International Festival of the Arts. He was the recipient of a 2010 Australian Leadership Award, and was awarded the inaugural Patrick White Fellowship by the STC in 2011. His most recent work was Buried City, an Urban Theatre Projects, Belvoir St, 2012 Sydney Festival co-production. He has also written for film, television and radio, as well as visual and experimental texts. His fiction includes a collection of short stories - The Indestructible Corpse (Text Publishing 1998)He teaches script writing master classes both here and overseas, and is a part-time lecturer in performance writing at VCA School of Performing Arts, Melbourne University.
