| That Night Follows Day |
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 Melbourne International Arts Festival presents That Night Follows Day, a collaboration between Tim Etchells, acclaimed director and writer of the British company Forced Entertainment, and Belgian theatre company Victoria at The CUB Malthouse, Merlyn Theatre from Wednesday 22 to Saturday 25 October at 8pm.
Approached by Victoria to create a work performed entirely by children for an adult audience, Etchells has developed a daring, no-holds barred commentary on parent-child relations.
“That Night Follows Day … a text that tries to map the ways in which adults shape, frame, explain and define the world for children … the ways parents, teachers and the adult world in general construct the world for kids, seeing to effect how they interact with it, seeking to stress or hide certain parts of it, seeking to explain it, seeking to make the world safe, comprehensible, fun, interesting, or simply liveable.” Tim Etchells.
The cast comprises 16 children ranging between nine and 15 years of age. The stage is dressed as a school gym with plastic classroom chairs scattered about. The children walk on stage to a raucous soundtrack of playground noise, stack the chairs then dutifully line up in a row – ordered and disciplined: a chorus of young people who speak, alone and in unison, about the various ways in which adults define the world that they inhabit. The statements become increasingly accusatory.
You feed us. You dress us. You choose clothes for us. You bathe us. You lay down the law. You sing to us. You watch us sleep. You make us promises and sometimes hope we will not remember them. You tell us stories you hope will frighten us, but not too much. You try to tell us about the world. You explain to us what love is. You explain to us the meaning of war. You kiss us while we are asleep. You whisper when you think we can’t hear. You explain to us that night follows day.
One by one the kids fall out of line, and gradually they start misbehaving until the piece reaches a crescendo of anarchy.
Based on a text written by Etchells and developed through many workshops and conversations with the cast, That Night Flows Day catalogues the many ways the children’s world is determined by that of adults. With clarity and humour it examines the systems of parenthood, upbringing, discipline, care and welfare of children and adolescents. The relationship between children and adults is not only articulated through the text, it is also displayed in the physical relations and staging of the piece. Kids are arranged in a formal grouping – neat, tidy, contained by the structure of the line – as they are so often arranged and displayed for audiences of adults in school assemblies and concerts, recitals and for formal photographs.
Often exploring the relationship of performer to audience in his works, Etchells charts the highs and lows of all that the theatre situation itself seems to generate: need, voyeurism, desire and expectation. In That Night Follows Day he seeks to turn the spotlight on the actual situation, the expectations and the problems of performance itself. This revolves – painfully and provocatively – around the fact that adults will be watching and listening to children and adolescents while they talk about the way adults project their world onto them.
Tim Etchells is an artist, performance maker and writer based in Sheffield, UK who has toured widely with new works and installations. He is best known for his work with Forced Entertainment, the performance ensemble he has directed since its inception in 1984, which stages Bloody Mess as part of the Melbourne International Arts
Festival in 2005.
Etchells has collaborated extensively with photographer Hugo Glendinning on visual arts projects and has also created worked with a wide range of other artists including choreographers Vlatka Horvat, Wendy Houston (who brings two productions to this years Melbourne Festival, Desert Island Dancers and Happy Hour), Franko B and Meg Stuart among others.
He was Senior Research Fellow at The Nottingham Trent University Live Art Research Unit from 2000 – 01 and is currently a Creative Fellow in the Department of Theatre Studies at Lancaster University. Etchells’ essays have been included in numerous books and journals including Performance Research, Artpress and Frieze. As a teacher he has lectured, given workshops and run projects extensively in the UK, Europe and beyond. His published works include the collection of essays on contemporary performance and Forced Entertainment Certain Fragments (Routledge, 1999) and the fiction books England Stories (Pulp Books, 1999) and The Dream Dictionary for the Modern Dreamer (Duckworths, 2001).
Several years ago Victoria planned to make a trilogy of plays or performances which would see theatre-makers who had never previously worked with children invited to create something in which only children would appear. The first piece in this trilogy was Jose De Pauw’s üBUNG, which opened at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in May 2001 and over the next few years toured the world including to the 2004 Melbourne Festival. That Night Follows Day is the second production in the trilogy and has toured in Belgium, the Netherlands, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Switzerland, Austria, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Canada, Sweden and Denmark.
Established in 1992, Victoria creates and produces medium and large-scale theatre works. One of the main missions of Victoria is to shape, guide and support young artists on the road to artistic maturity and independence. Artists like Wayn Traub, Lies Pauwels, Mohamed ‘Ben' Benaouisse and Pol Heyvaert are but a few of the names that have emerged from the Victoria stable. Also experienced artists like Josse De Pauw, Jerome Bel, Roy Faudree, Alain Platel en Arne Sierens are challenged by Victoria to question their ‘virtuosity'.
For Victoria exploration and discovery are key notions: the beaten path is never taken twice. That’s why it prefers to work with artists who bypass evident forms of theatre to question the medium. In general Victoria has a penchant for ‘art brut’ – not streamlined but vulnerable and unpredictable.
“This show is witty, unsettling and sets up a highly charged
relationship with the audience. We give orders; we think we provide
order, kids stand to order – but its society in the dock.” Financial
Times.
Melbourne International Arts Festival presents
Tim Etchells & Victoria
That Night Follows Day
Performed in Flemish with English Subtitles.
Venue: The CUB Malthouse, Merlyn Theatre
When: Wed 22 – Sat 25 Oct at 8pm | Performance on Fri 24 Oct followed by post show Q&A
Duration: 1hr 10min no interval
Prices: Full $45 / Groups (8+) $40.50 / Conc $33.75 Student/MF-Y $25
Bookings: Ticketmaster 1300 136 166 / www.melbournefestival.com.au
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Saturday, 10 January 2009
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