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FCA performance presents

Elephant People

19 – 21 November 2009

Written by Daniel Keene
Directed by Mark Rogers (BCA Dean’s Scholar)
Featuring 2nd year FCA Performance students

Freaks
are an act of god;
whatever a person might mean by god.
Freaks
are also made by men;
whatever a person might mean by men,
or mean by made.

Elephant People is a circus, a carnival sideshow where chaos, perception and the power of the imaginary collide. In Elephant People the Elephant Man philosophises with the Liberra Twins; the Dog Boy mauls Josephine Joseph the hermaphrodite; and the Bearded Lady serves drinks. These so-called freaks – or prodigies - confront each other, and the audience with questions around the very fact of their very existence, the cruelty of the world, as well as good taste and political correctness.

Roll up, Roll up!

“[Elephant People] is a project about perception, how we are perceived and how we perceive.” says playwright Daniel Keene; “How the notion about how we look determines how we are treated.”

Daniel Keene is one of Australia’s foremost playwrights. Renowned both nationally and internationally for the quality of his writing and the visceral intensity of his work for theatre, his writing cuts hard into society’s moral fissures and ethical blind spots exposing a sparse lyricism in the language of decay, dissent and depravity.

Keene has written for the theatre for thirty years, however despite winning the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Drama twice, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Drama twice, the South Australian Literary Award for Drama, the Wal Cherry Play of the Year Award, and the Sumner Locke Elliot Prize (New York), his work has rarely been produced by Australia’s main-stage. Much loved by Australia’s independent theatre sector, it is only in recent times has his work been programmed into seasons at Sydney Theatre Company (2008) and Melbourne Theatre Company (2010).

Since 2000, however, more than 75 productions of his work have been presented in Europe, predominately in France, including the Avignon Festival, the Theatre de la Commune in Paris, the National Theatre of Toulouse and at The Theatre de la Ville in Paris.

Originally written as the libretto for a multi-million dollar multimedia production at The National Theatre of Bordeaux in France, Elephant People is now given its Australian premiere in far grubbier fashion. Under the direction of Mark Rogers, second year FCA Performance students utilise a raw physicality to play out Keene’s highly poetic text in a landscape of sweat, excretion and dirt. Here there are no striped tents, no flashing light bulbs and no fairy floss - just the space of performance and the performers’ bodies - in all their uncanniness.

Season: Thursday 19– Saturday 21 November @ 8pm
Venue: Performance Space, 25.168, Faculty of Creative Arts UoW
Bookings: 02 4221 4889
Tickets: $20 full, $12 Conc & $8 FCA

Parking: Pay and Display parking is available in the Western and South Western Carparks or free parking on weekends or from 6.30pm weekdays. View Maps

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For further information contact the
School of Music & Drama, Faculty of Creative Arts
Phone: 02 4221 3996
Email: mandd@uow.edu.au