Our approach aims to create an immediate, embodied experience - for both the performers and the audience.
You're just as much a part of the work as we are. We're all participants in the event.
Remember, you have never done anything for the second time.
So What's Our Deal?
Wow. I'm out of breath. Exciting, isn't it.
Our work is a blending of reality and fiction, performed through physical action, audio/visual installation, creative technologies, poetic text, movement, music, 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.
We really like space and robots and rockets and stuff.
We like making shows about real things that are beautiful and fascinating.
Like supernovas, or space stations, or the mathematical modelling of groups of starlings, or memory, or crises of faith, or love.
Our mission is to figure out how you can experience these incredible and massive things with us - in a small theatre, on a Tuesday night.
We have a very unique philosophy of performance, which we are constantly developing and changing. It's all very exciting.
Experimental Dramaturgy!
Embodied Physical Performance!
Onstage Operation of Creative Tech!
Bold, New Science Fiction and Fact!
What is Hyper-Material Theatre?
Hyper-materialism is an Ontological philosophy based around complexity, interconnectivity, and plurality of reality.
Hyper-materialism considers everything to be equally real. This includes things like abstract concepts, history, fiction, and (crucially) individual experience.
Ideas, stories, and experience are all real things that emerge through interaction with eachother - and interaction with the actions and objects of the physical world.
All things are connected to - and contingent on - everything else, in an infinitely complicated mesh.
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:
Some people in a room, operating an event, with the intention of showing an audience a bunch of fascinating things.
We don't want you to sit as a passive audience. We want to offer you a chance to become very interested in some beautiful and strange and magical things with us.
Stories and fictions are built with you. Our work usually has some kind of story, or at least an idea that we thought was interesting, but we don't want to hit you over the head with it. It's in superposition - the moment it's observed, it is changed. The last thing we want to do is keep trying to insist that it hasn't.
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.
On a good day, if we manage to pull this off right, everything comes together in a bit of a magic trick -suddenly, large, complex, powerful and profound feelings and ideas become truthfully accessible.
(This is because they're already there. We're not really making anything up. All we're doing is showing you where to look.)
It's something that is easier to feel than to explain.
If you are interested, Elia occasionaly writes about it on their Substack, which can be found here.
They are 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.
Why " conscript " ?
We are an explicitly anti-war and anti-military organization.
There is no such thing as a war hero. Only killers and the dead.
Warfare is a poison that corrupts or destroys anyone it touches, no matter how valiant their aims may be.
(This is not to say that we are pacificts. Opressive and defensive violence are not equal, and fence sitting only works in favour of whoever is currently winning.)
We have chosen to call ourselves Conscript to reflect something very significant: we are all participants, willing or not, in the events that happen on this planet.
To pretend that there is such a thing as 'apolitical' action is a privilege only for those who aren't on the pointy end of policy.
This is reflected in our philosophy of performance - everyone involved in the event, performers and audience alike, are active participants, just by being there.
To observe something is to change it. You are here with us, right here, right now.