Samsara: ENTER THE VORTEX

Australia is spinning out of control. The population is shell-shocked and confused. News media is swirling all around us sending conflicting messages – it is no wonder elections are a farce! How on earth did we end up with Tony Abbott as Prime Minister? Are women really meant to spend their lives ironing? Samsara has written two new plays asking these questions and more. Bold, confronting, and angry – Entropia and Vocx are two plays which do not hold back on the state of contemporary Australian politics which will have their first public staged readings at The Owl and the Pussycat in February.

Entropia is a short play focussing on the election of Tony Abbott to office. Using Humpty Dumpty as the unifying metaphor and looking at Shakespearean precedent (Richard III), Samsara asks whether a government built on lies can hold up a political leader, or will it all shatter leaving nothing but chaos in its wake.

Vocx takes Julia Gillard’s famous misogyny speech and places it at the eye of the vortex. Swirling around her is a history of goddesses and pop culture super heroines. They all question and critique each other as domestic violence and play ground peer pressure go on in the everyday world of the mere mortal.

WRITER’S NOTES

I wrote these two plays – Entropia and Vocx - whilst undertaking an artist residency at Victoria University last year. I used that time to investigate a fascinating but short lived art movement from the turn of the century called Vorticism. Extensive examining the art works and reading of the philosophies of the main proponents, including Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis – as well as a range of workshops with performance industry creatives, led me to develop a style of play writing which mirrors the energy and intentions of those times, whilst also echoing the social media information processing we experience today.

The key focus of vorticism is a style which incorporates imagism, expressionism and cubism. It has the energy and force of a whirlpool, and there is an ‘eye’ (or central image). The force of the vortex is the expressionism, and all of the elements feeding in to the chaos –swirling madly – is the cubism. Unlike futurism however, Vorticism does not destroy its past, it acknowledges it, and the idea is to take what was and use the energy of that to clear the ground and make something new.

ENTROPIA:

Jalen Lyle-Holmes - Tony Abbott

Chris Lawson - Joe Hockey

Suzanne Brimley - Reporter 1/King Richard III

Christina Marks - Reporter 3

Charlotte Righetti - Reporter 2

Sara Caputo - Little Tony

Saskia Stengele - Mother

Jasmine Mente-Cammerano - Professor