'Cardboard Box' Theatre by ONIZ

We have had to recently become very versitile with the performances we make, moving from different location to location and inhabiting unusual and interesting spaces. We present suitcase theatre.

Horseplay 14/9/10 Save Our Relatives

We had our first performance last night at Horseplay Arts Club for a while. We are working towards developing the flood piece that we began to work on in February. We have decided to build the piece through performances at Horseplay monthly that will gradually build to form the finished piece. Each performance at Horseplay will look at a particular element of the idea and simply explore it through performance.

Last night we were looking at how people deal with natural disasters and we were exploring the idea that people feel more comfortable helping other countries and animals before helping people in their own country. However, we didn't want to make a statement about this, we simply wanted to explore the idea in a performative way.

Liz and I both have the same Gorilla T shirt and it was this that really began our process. We decided to set up an event/performance where the audience could adopt a fictional Gorilla from Save Our Relatives, a fictional organisation set up to save Gorilla's. The audience were led into the stall and given information about Gorillas. They were then asked if they wanted to partake in an auction for a Gorilla. They were informed that it wasn't a proper auction and all they had to do was give their love and belief in the animal and organisation.

The audience were shown some pictures of Gorillas and told a little fictional story about them. They were told that afterwards they could write down the name of the Gorilla they wanted to adopt on a bit of paper and put it in the adoption box. However after they were shown the Gorillas they were also shown pictures of flooded towns in Pakistan and flooded streets in Cumbria and told they could also adopt people from there. We wanted to question if people felt more for animals and other places rather than something in their own country. Obviously it is a problematic subject as the floods in Pakistan were on a larger scale and many people lost their lives, which was not the case in Cumbria. Pakistan is also still in the news whereas the Cumbria floods were a year ago and have long since gone from the headlines.

The piece was really an experiment to gage how an audience would perhaps feel about this subject. Our piece will mainly use the floods in Cumbria in 2009 as an influence for the piece. Although we feel the piece will mainly be about water and the effect it has on us.

I noticed that the piece was quite playful and relaxed, which is good when dealing with serious issues. The Gorillas did get the largest adoption votes and many people were confused about why we used Cumbria and its relevance to the subject. I don't think this makes any kind of statement about the subject and the idea we were exploring, however as practitioners it did give us insight into how you can take an idea or argument and turn it into something performative. I feel this will be a large part of our process in the coming months.