Blowback
Written and directed by David Pledger
Not Yet It's Difficult Productions
With Roslyn Oades, Todd MacDonald, Luciano Martucci
The Studio at the Sydney Opera House
Until April 29
PREVIEW BY CLAIRE VINCE
Award-winning, internationally acclaimed theatre company Not Yet It's Difficult Productions' latest presentation Blowback, is a darkly funny work about Australia's present political situation. This surreal story has its finger on the pulse of today's society.
Lifting the lid on an Australia rendered comatose by commercial television and complacent about the abuses being perpetrated in the name of democracy, freedom and safe borders, it tells the story of cultural activists who hack into "New Australia's" communications facility as a form of protest. Hoping to incite an uprising, they upload images from a banned Australian soap opera onto the organisation's system.
The performance follows the live-to-air filming of the last episode of a soapie, A World of Our Own — a comic and absurd take on Neighbours. Actions are scrutinised and distorted; people are always at risk of being accused of treason or subversion.
Not Yet It's Difficult Productions (NYID) has taken as reference the US neo-conservatives' Project for the New American Century. Employing various disciplines including comedy, dance, film, text and visual art Blowback investigates the dark and violent world of an Australia subject to a new imperial master, showing a disturbing possibility for our future.
Just as Quentin Tarentino famously transformed the Stealers Wheels song Stuck in the Middle with You from pop tune to perversity in Reservoir Dogs, so too does David Pledger, with the Seekers' A World of Our Own and Toni Basil's Mickey to chilling effect.
Created in response to an ever-increasing dependence by the Australian government on US foreign policy, particularly in the wake of the Australia-US free trade agreement, the war on Iraq and the establishment of training bases in northern Australia, NYID, explores what Australia would be like under a US occupation and what kinds of cultural resistance might emerge.
Blowback is a metaphor used by the CIA for the unintended consequences of the US government's international activities that have been kept a secret from the US people. First used in the 1953 operation to overthrow the government in Iran, the CIA's fears that there might ultimately be some "blowback" from its egregious interference were well founded.
Founded by Pledger in 1995, NYID has a unique presence in Australia's contemporary arts culture as a research unit, a producer of industry development programs and a contemporary events maker. Under Pledger, NYID has forged an international reputation for its rigorous, visceral, award winning productions and dynamic performances, receiving invitations to present work in Japan, Denmark, Germany and Ireland amongst others.
A graduate of the National Institute for the Dramatic Arts, Pledger had fused together narrative, movement, soundscapes and digital technology into sensory-assaulting theatrical productions. NYID has built a reputation for work that defies many established notions of theatre.
Accompanying the performance on April 29, will be an artist talk between David Pledger and Dr Edward Scheer, a senior lecturer in the School of Media, Film and Theatre at the University of New South Wales.
[Free double passes to the preview of Blowback at the Opera House on April 26 are available to the first three readers of Green Left Weekly who call the subscription line (1800 634 206) after 9am that morning.
From Green Left Weekly, April 26, 2006.
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