Shot in the Dark : a requiem for content
(a work in development, 2016-2017)
Artists: Nigel Kellaway, Nikki Heywood, Amanda Stewart
Supported by the Department of Performance Studies, University of Sydney, and the Bundanon Trust
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Hey, you wanna a drink? Come on over … the bar’s open.
Two vaudeville actors hovering in their separate dressing rooms, waiting for their “call”, their “moment”, phoning each other, whilst protecting their personal space.
… reflection and vivid invention, appropriate for an ensemble of “senior” artists.
Touching upon a recollected output of creative work covering several decades, Nigel Kellaway (director, performer, composer), Nikki Heywood (performer, co-creator) and Amanda Stewart (consulting writer/dramaturg) contemplate the richness that accrues in the minds, bodies, experiences, skills and memories of mature artists with a shared, embodied theatre and dance training, extensive experience of contemporary performance culture and practices, and individual and complementary concerns. This is a truly hybrid performance work exploring alternative means of staging and delivery.
It’s initial inspiration was two-fold: remembering a 240 hour (10 day) durational work Nigel Kellaway performed in 1994, THIS MOST WICKED BODY, and his more recent reimagining for two pianists of Mozart’s monumental REQUIEM (a work he first performed in 1968). But this is NOT a “remounting”. It is a distanced and discrete theatrical exploration, rigorously reimagining seminal works in relationship to subsequent experience, a trove of new material, and continuing to challenge contemporary theatrical structures and presentational habits.
SHOT IN THE DARK sees two performers “of a certain age” (Kellaway and Heywood) waiting, wandering in a Beckett-like landscape, recalling snippets of content, searching for context – that “landscape” that comes into view to reveal …
A collision of short grabs from an extraordinary array of writers concerning maturity and its attendant neuroses. A wild jangle of bluntness and arch poetics: Samuel Beckett, John Cassavetes, Heiner Muller, Oscar Wilde, Rainer Maria Rilke, Neil Bartlett, Paul Auster, Mickey Furuya. Nikki Heywood, Amanda Stewart and Nigel Kellaway.