When you come to one of our shows, we want you to feel something important.
Something that you already know.
Something that lives in the base of your spine.
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Everything happening is happening right now, and here, and you are experiencing it.
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So What's Our Deal?
Conscript makes theatre designed to spark curiosity and fascination with the world.
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The universe is unbelievably interesting, and it is insane that anyone ever gets bored.
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Our work is a blending of reality and fiction, performed through physical action, poetic text, audio/visual installation, movement, music, technology, and occasionally puppetry.
We do also act. We are a theatre company, after all. It just might be a bit unclear when we are or arent doing it.
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We really like space and robots and rockets and stuff.
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We like making shows about big things. Cosmically huge. Like supernovas, or space stations, or crises of faith, or love.
Our mission is to figure out how you can experience these massive, magnificent things with us - in a small theatre, on a Tuesday night.
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The way we do this is by showing you something extremely real and material and true. (More on this on the next page, where I finally explain to you what on earth 'Hyper-material' means). We have a unique philosophy of performance, which we are constantly developing and changing. It's all very exciting.
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What is Hyper-Material Theatre?
Hyper-materialism is an Ontological philosophy based around complexity, interconnectivity, and pluraility of reality.
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It is the brainchild of Elia, our artistic director, and is the cause of many sleepless head scratching nights for her.
So what do any of those big words actually mean?
Basically, it means that everything is considered equally real, and connected to everything else, in an infinitely complicated mesh of all things.
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This includes things like abstract concepts, history, fiction, and individual experience.
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This has very large effects on Live Performance.
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Our performances aim to be aware of this mesh, and as such aren't trying crazy hard to be anything other than what they are:
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Some people in a room, operating an event, with the intention of showing an audience a bunch of fascinating things. This means focus might be on the movement, sound, the physical form of the set/props/costume, the lighting, speech, text, imagery - alongside any story or character.
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In our shows we don't want you to sit as a passive audience. We want to offer you a chance to become very interested in some cool things with us. No two shows will ever be alike because they will be on different days, in different places, with different people.
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Everything is very immediate and directly, personally, engaging. A lot of things are improvised. The line between 'performance' and 'operation' of the event is very blurry.
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Through this technique, stories and fictions are built with you. Our work usually has some kind of story or idea that we thought was interesting, but we don't want to hit you over the head with it. We want to give you the chance to discover what you might imagine when you're in this room with us.
Under hyper-materialism, your experience of the show is always a 'correct' interpretation. So is everyone elses.
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We have found that when it comes to expressing large and profound concepts, like those present in Sci-fi, this method can be extremely successful.
It's something that is easier to feel than to explain.
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If you are interested, Elia occasionaly writes about it on her Substack, which can be found here.
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She is working on some more robust, researched philosophical writing on the subject, which will probably come out after testing these methods in at least a few more of our projects.
