Goat Town, the bush and Bill Henson
Have you ever been surrounded by the bush at night – to be engulfed by the extreme darkness of the night sky? It can’t be denied that there is something deeply unnerving and uncanny about it.
As part of the Post Graduate Directors season at the VCA, I’m currently directing Goat Town.
Developed through a process of storytelling and improvisation, Goat Town follows a group of old friends on a camping trip to scatter the ashes of a mate. Grief and nostalgia mix with guilt and tension as they discover how much, yet how little, between them has changed.
It’s an original play by Alexandra Burgess and Loren de Jong and this is the first time it’s been performed outside of the original group of collaborators. The writers have said that they use their theatre to capture the natural rhythms of a distinctly Australian voice.
“We hold a tiny mirror up to the world and hope that audiences will recognise their own words, their own conversations, in our work. There is a certain thrill in that.”
In preparing for this production I’m working with an exceptionally talented third year design student from the college. We are using the work of Australian artist Bill Henson as the starting point for our design collaboration.
There’s something incredibly interesting when you think of the Australian bush as a place of disorientation and death. In many ways I believe that white Australia has actively fought against embracing it’s natural surrounds and has tried desperately to suburbanise as much of our inhabited places as possible. Is this because we think the Australian bush is a scary place?
The bush is untidy. It seems that most Australians would prefer something neat, something edged, raked – something with concrete. I’ve heard people say our obsession with suburbia has something to do with our white convict heritage… something like suburbia gives white Australians status and control.
Maybe this is why people often find Hensons images of Australia disturbing:
“the ambiguity between day and night, nature and civilisation, youth and adulthood, male and female.”
His art lives somewhere that isn’t real and isn’t imagined. He also has an interest in youth isand that transition between child and adult.
This is what we want to start to achieve with our design for Goat Town:
