Unbecoming. Written by Cathy Petocz. Directed by Gin Savage. Headline act March 6 and 8. Hyperspace. Conceived, choreographed and performed by James Batchelor. Headline act March 7 and 9. The Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre. Happy hour 6pm, support act 7pm, headline act 8pm. canberratheatrecentre.com.au or 62752700.
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The human body. Death. The afterlife. The universe.
These are some of the subjects to be explored at the Courtyard Studio in March as part of the Canberra Theatre Centre's ETCETERA program.
Independent Canberra artists from the worlds of theatre, original live music and dance will be performing over four nights.
The headline acts are two one-performer shows: playwright Cathy Petocz's Unbecoming and dancer-choreographer James Batchelor's Hyperspace.
Petocz, whose last play staged in Canberra was Where I End and You Begin in 2014, says her one-woman show, performed by Isabel Burton, is about Ado, a young woman who wakes up dead.
She has to understand "the process of unbecoming - the absence of being".
Ado is deceased and starting to decompose but on the plus side, she discovers she has some new abilities: walking through walls, reading people's minds, time travel.
Petocz says, "Before she passes she's entitled to one haunting and she has to figure out how to use it."
Ado decides she wants to solve the mystery of her own death before she disappears completely.
Petocz says, "This is the first time I've written a one-woman play and I'm really enjoying the challenge."
She likes playing with the conventions of the form - "I'm finding it very fun" - and as "a very spiritual person" she's enjoying the exploration of the subject matter.
Petocz is a fan of TV detective shows such as Twin Peaks and says the hero image of the play is based on the image of the murdered Laura Palmer wrapped in plastic in that David Lynch series.
Another inspiration came from Alice Bolin's book Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession, a book that explores issues surrounding the depictions of dead girls in popular culture.
Petocz says there are, for example, a lot of detective shows that centre on the "dead girl": apart from Twin Peaks they include Veronica Mars, True Detective and American Crime Story. In all of them, she says, the girl is stripped of voice and power as well as life.
In Unbecoming, she says, the dead girl is finally able to speak for herself.
James Batchelor's Hyperspace is the third in a series of works - following Deep Space (performed in Canberra in 2017) and Redshift (which has not come to Canberra yet).
They arose from an expedition Batchelor made with scientists to the sub-Antarctic in 2016.
"I spent two months exploring what it means to be mapping space with my body."
Batchelor focused on the process of mapping the ship itself and relating it to the scale of his 176-centimetre body.
From there he began exploring his body and movement, drawing on his discoveries and inquiries.
Hyperspace, he says, is "an inquiry into the metrics we use to measure the deep unknowns of the universe".
The human body is seen through the prism of cosmology, mapping the universe in and around it and deconstructing these landscapes, producing a self-critique of the masculine body and its dominance in space exploration.
In Hyperspace, Batchelor will have 200 tattoos on his torso, making it appear he is undergoing alien transmutation as he stretches and moves.
He is working with composer and sound designer Morgan Hickinbotham, designer and illustrator Amber McCartney and lighting designer HØV (Matthew Adey) to create Hyperspace.
Happy Axe, the support act on March 6, is multi-instrumentalist Emma Kelly, who is inspired by the sonic landscapes of artists like Björk and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, and the brooding string-laden film scores of David Lynch and Hollywood noir. She creates ambient pop music using layers of vocals, violin and musical saw.
On March 7, Pheno (aka Jess Green) will perform her art-pop, combining vocals, electric guitar, and synths and samples.
On March 8, the support act is Aphir. This vocally-driven electronic pop is the solo electronic project of songwriter/producer/engineer, Becki Whitton.
Finally, on March 9, Reuben Ingall will perform using home-made software patches, algorithmically mangling his guitar and voice with found sound and field recordings.