It is one of the most challenging and important tasks in art to engage the community. So often are works of art hung on white walls, and left to become stagnant coffins. Ideas are locked away in ivory cages, pure and abstract, making no effort to make themselves accessible. It is up to the viewer to find their own way into the piece.
Such an experience can be alienating for audiences who aren’t well versed in the art world, leaving many to avoid gallery spaces, and art pieces all together. One group looking to challenge these ideas are performance duo Deep Soulful Sweats, who, as part of Heart Of Randwick’s Winter Wednesdays Art Series, created and performed Cinema Piece in the Ritz Cinemas.
The duo transformed the Ritz’s Cinema Two into a one-night interactive performance venue, inviting the public to take up roles and act out a 45 minute-long meta-commentary on art, the climate crisis, and how we view the world around us. The piece itself was performed in five chapters, all framed around a ‘film’ we were simultaneously watching on screen, and acting out in the theatre.
The work was framed around the idea that we were all there to watch a documentary being played about climate change. As we took our seats, the lights dimmed and a screen began to play the intro sequence to the film. Yet, this went awry as scripts began to be handed out throughout the darkened theatre, and audience members began reading out the lines. More people were pulled up to the front, as a roving camera filmed them acting out the script being read out.
In this manner, the piece divided itself into three continuously moving parts. Those performing, the images on the screen, and those watching on. These constantly rotated as audience members were swapped in and out of roles, whilst the camera cut between what was happening on stage, and pre-prepared footage to help advance the narrative of the story.
This fracturing created a really interesting way to approach the work. Each person will leave the theatre with a completely different idea of the piece. There was no change; we could all engage with it as a homogenous collective. The narrator, situated at the front of the theatre, would have an indelibly different memory of the work than someone playing the role of a performer in the back seats. The surface of the work was splintered and refracted through the differing gazes and roles of each audience member in turn.
It also raised questions about my role as a reviewer within the performance. The only way I could have witnessed the entirety of the piece (as is the reviewer’s expected purview) would be to have stood to the side and hunch on a wall abutment like an oversized crow. Had I attempted to witness the complete work, I would have been the only theatre member to not engage with the piece as the artists desired. In attempting to view the whole, I would have been alienated from the experience entirely. To engage, I was inherently forced into a space of partial blindness, which both reduced and heightened the themes of the work as a whole.
A standout moment came in the form of an incredible conversation that occurred in the first chapter. Four audience members, A, B, C, and D read out a series of seemingly unconnected quotes, as they appeared on the screen with their references accompanying. Soon however, we figured out this was a commentary on the climate crisis, held through the statements of key players. It was an incredibly witty pastiche of politicians, scientists, gas lobbyists, and cultural touchstones, setting in place an hour-long story which charted humanity’s failure to address the climate crisis.
There was, however, a general disjunct between performance tone and audience engagement that emerged throughout the play. As we were assigned our first task of the evening, to pretend to die as dramatically as possible, everyone paused awkwardly for a second. This was a natural experience; it is a hard thing to step out of yourself, to play a role, especially in front of other people. There was a marked self consciousness in the way audience members engaged with the work, which was completely natural and expected.
However, it made executing some of the more deft points of this incredibly well-balanced narrative difficult to pull off. For many, they were too focused on how they were doing it to understand what they were doing. As one of the audience members who was handed a script, I found myself so focused on saying the right words at the right time that I missed those moments of the story entirely.
This aside, it was a genuinely joyous experience to sit down with a group of strangers and engage in a piece of art that really felt like it drew us together as a community. It was grounded in place and people, creating a unique experience centred around one of Randwick’s iconic locations. For a program designed at fostering art in community, Cinema Piece knocked it out of the park.
Cinema Piece performed at the Ritz Cinemas on 18th & 25th June as part of the Heart of Randwick Winter Wednesdays Art Series.
