The Melbourne Festival returned in October 2016, with a fantastic assortment of familiar and unknown, local and far-flung, large-scale and intimate productions.
We were delighted to support two fantastic UK shows from the British Council's biennial Edinburgh Showcase as part of the 2016 Festival.
In ‘Backstage at Biscuit Land’, Jess Thom took audiences on a walk through her life with Tourette's syndrome. The show is a comic tour-de-force that takes audiences deep inside the rabbit hole of the much-misunderstood condition. It embraces unpredictability; weaving comedy, puppetry, song together with Thom’s wonderfully spontaneous movements and vocal interventions to tell a powerful story about the nature of theatre and the etiquettes and prejudices that can sometimes lead to the exclusion of people who don’t or can’t conform.
We also supported Kaleider's 'The Money', a game and a show with a deceptively simple premise: there is cash on the table and the participant audience must decide how to spend it. Whether the audience decides to spend the money or not, the intense ‘invisibly curated’ experience has parallels with reality TV. Illuminating our relationship with money, why we spend it and how we place value on things, it is at its core a clever and fascinating exploration of group dynamics.
Since appearing in our Edinburgh Showcase 2015, The Money has toured to Australia, China, Italy and the USA. Read our Theatre and Dance blog to find out about Artistic Director Seth Honnor's experiences playing with different cultures.
The Edinburgh Showcase is the single biggest opportunity for contemporary UK artists and companies to introduce their work to international promoters. Since 1997, it has given 350 theatre and dance companies the opportunity to tour overseas, building new relationships and opening up new markets for the UK’s performing arts.