There's something about a story set in a crematorium that instantly captures your attention, without needing to know the nitty-gritty of the plot.
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It's a feeling that playwright Katie Pollock knows all too well.
She also experienced that same desire to know more when she found some old news stories about Australian crematoriums and was inspired to write her latest play, People Inside Me.
It follows one woman's mission to return ashes that have been left unclaimed at the crematorium where she works.
"I have a box that I fill with clippings of stuff that's interesting and I was going through the box looking for things to write about and this leapt out at me. There were about three or four stories about crematoriums," Pollock says.
"One of them was about this young woman who worked in a crematorium and she talked about how the dust of the ashes tends to get in your hair and skin. She would go home at the end of the day, and would kind of look at her face and think 'I've got a bunch of people inside me'.
"That was sort of the starting point, this woman who has people inside her and then once I started to think about who she was, or what might have happened to her, and explore that concept of what it means to have people inside us, it expanded to all the different levels of that metaphor."
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It's a concept that hasn't really been seen in theatre before, so it's not surprising that People Inside Me was awarded the 2018 Rodney Seaborn Playwrights Award - which includes $20,000 to go towards the development of a play.
And the development continues here in Canberra, with the production one of three in this year's First Seen program at The Street.
Now in its 10th year, First Seen promotes the creation of high quality, original performance work, encouraging debate on issues and relationships central to the reality of Canberran lives.
Through what Pollock says is an intense but rewarding process, First Seen allows playwrights to progress their works to a production-ready product, through workshopping is with directors, dramaturgs and actors, and ending with a performance to gain audience feedback.
For the second year, the First Seen performances will be live-streamed, with Pollock's performance first off the ranks this Friday.
"It's very different from being in rehearsal for an opening night, because in a normal rehearsal if something doesn't work straight away, it can be very tempting to just cut it or rewrite it to make it work because you've got the opening night and people are already buying tickets," she says.
"In this development process, there's much more space to really wrestle with something and go well, is it not working because of the line? Is it not working because of what came before? Is it in the wrong spot in the play? You can really tackle it."
- People Inside Me will be live-streamed on Friday by 5pm. Registrations by donation from thestreet.org.au. The First Seen program continues in the coming months with works from David Atfield and Rebecca Duke.
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