The title of Binge Culture Collective’s production Drowning Bird, Plummeting Fish signals their intention to challenge and disturb. Savagely comic and at times difficult to watch, at shows end we leave with indelible shadows of provocative imagery embedded in our memory.

The collective is another group arising from Victoria University’s Theatre Programme. They are inspired by the work of UK based Forced Entertainment to explore contemporary experience through immediate and surprising encounters with the audience. This production tests and expands our expectations of the physical form and possibilities of performance. We are driven out of our anonymous darkness as the distance between audience and performer is twisted and subverted, and the dangerous edge and barely contained chaos of street theatre explodes into the conventional black box theatre space of The Globe.

The boundaries between reality and fiction are subverted. The performance exists in real time, the arc of the show is marked in chalk on the wall. We, the audience, are addressed directly and involved with the performance in a pantomime-like way. However in the hands of this collective this harmless tradition is used to re-invent reality using metaphors adopted from Facebook. By replacing characterization with the impersonality of the created internet persona they pitilessly expose the banality and reductive nature of human interaction in our contemporary world.

It opens with plastic bags driven by a leaf blower across the stage and performers noisily compete for our attention. Characters tell us their real names and seem to engage us in confessional dialogue. We cannot tell what is true or false and as soon as we relax into a state of watching, the actors explode into a flurry of energy. Cardboard boxes with labels describing random states of experience are opened, used, discarded. Identity is transformed to create a personal order to the "various sets of rules, games and structures that comprise our reality."

Games and game shows. The most unforgettable comic image of this production must be that of a naked man with a plastic bag of water over his genitals. When he gets a wrong answer in the game show this bag is punctured and water pisses into a metal bucket. As we laugh his answers to questions are re-worked and scribbled on the theatre wall. Cultural icons like the movie Casablanca become reduced to the phrase "WW II". However this scene becomes a queasy scene of torture, where our inert observation implies a collaboration in this inhumanity.

We are rescued from our discomfort by a series of stories about a downtown Wellington built from empty cardboard boxes, crafted from a transportable recyclable element of street theatre that becomes a metaphor for transience and disposability of modern urban life. As part of the continuously unsettling and shifting nature of the dialogue, gently comedic stories about sitting at Chow with eight girlfriends become increasingly brutally sexual and physically revolting anecdotes, culminating with an actress left speechless among the debris.

How ironic to be struck dumb in a world where we tell our eight hundred best friends on Facebook grotesquely intimate details of our lives.

One final puzzling image: an actor in a manky panda suit tells a riddle about albatross soup. The theatre goes dark and another actor exits through the foyer waving goodbye. Wondrous, exciting, demanding, unfathomable …

If this is our immediate future I want no part of this. However this is unmissable theatre. Their winning of the Best Newcomer Award at the Wellington Fringe Festival is totally deserved, this is an exploration of contemporary themes and the limitations of performability that is genuinely aiming to extend and challenge the audience in new ways.

I would urge everyone to come and watch, either at the Globe in Dunedin (until Sat) or as they crash the Pick of the Fringe at Downstage.
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What does it mean to be a part of a generation that is constantly being told it doesn’t have a future? This is the question Binge Culture sets out to explore in their Fringe Show Drowning Bird, Plummeting Fish. Such a question inspires a kind of cynical cringe in anyone worth talking to, but I’ll be darned if Drowning Bird Plummeting Fish (and its earned its italicised capitals) didn’t make me feel a little cynical.

But you know what? It’s cynicism that elected Obama.

Oh-bama. Elected via Facebook. Not really. But that’s the kind of world weary, sardonic, over-exposed, generation Xhibtion, pop culture that is being simultaneously jabbed and jumped by the ever so earnest and energetic performers of Binge Culture … [More]

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Drowning Bird, Plummeting Fish succeeds in being a rare instance of a sketch of apathy that is moving. (I would say unlike The Intricate Art of Actually Caring, currently playing in another part of the Fringe, which is very moving but is not so much about apathy as fear and the overcoming of fear – two quite separate forms  of stasis.) Plummeting Fish taps into the zeitgeist of the disenfranchised teenage spirit, sets this in Wellington, and finds there ambivalence, hopelessness and a barren narcissism. Deciding who or what is to blame for that narcissism and hopelessness is left up to the audience.

The wind machine that opens Plummeting Fish, and immediately identifies the scene as the capital, also makes it a little hard to hear what cast Claire O’Loughlin, Simon Haren and Rachel Baker are saying. The strange and chaotic riot of wasted plastic and shrieking disorientates even the most patient viewer. But this is the way it is supposed to be. The insight production group Binge Culture wants to bring is not tied up neatly in a careful package (unlike the cardboard boxes which are opened and closed on stage and which, incidentally, are frustratingly difficult to read). Rather, Binge Culture is spontaneous and brazen, and seems intent on pushing the audience to reach insight through visceral feeling and emotion, not cerebral analysis – much in the same way as people on drunken nights in Courtney place could be seen to be seeking self-expression and epiphany through feelings of inebriation.

The theatre of cruelty presented in the second scene, “rising water,” (which portentously applies not only to climate change but the torture method Shawn (Simon Haren) is subjected to in this scene) points out that we, the adults/audience, are partly responsible for the ‘suffering’ of the narcissistic generation Y. We condone Facebook “isms” by not stopping them, just as we are shown to condone the abuse of the individual Shawn by not stopping that. We watch as Shawn – just like planet Earth – is destroyed by an apparently pointless raft of human experiences.

Overall the play seems – albeit pleasantly – random and sporadic, until images and words begin to repeat in the final scenes. The sad albatross riddle in the penultimate scene brings together the interwoven mix of themes, feelings and semiotics which form the structural net of the play. The link with the ‘bird’ and ‘drowning’ again points toward environmental themes of rising sea levels and loss of diversification, while the actual content of the riddle, its sadness and despair, builds upon the sense of desolation for which we are encouraged to, and do, feel partly responsible.

Although it presents only a snapshot of a certain, limited time in the lives of most Wellingtonians, or perhaps even most Western teenagers, Drowing Bird, Plummeting Fish brings to the forefront of our minds the pain, seriousness and importance of getting those teenage years ‘right’ – and the conundrum of how this might be achieved when the state of the world, as it is presently perceived to be, is so very uncertain.

Originally published in The Lumière Reader.

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More a performance art installation than a play, Drowning Bird, Plummeting Fish evokes the ‘consuming society’. It focuses not so much on what we consume as how we are consumed by ourselves, our expectations, the expectations of others, labels and judgements, the pressure to know, the desire to be known to know … And the economy, of course.

Accompanied by an horrendous noise (a leaf-blower, actually), tangled tapes – the entrails of capitalism? – are read by one performer as another, blindfolded and voicing his delight or horror, chalks the ups and downs of the stocks … That’s just the start. Over the next 50 minutes the black walls of BATS become chalked with random words provoked by the onstage action, which becomes increasingly bizarre …

If the blurb in the Fringe online listings is anything to go by, it’s party games they – Rachel Barker, Claire O’Loughlin, Joel Baxendale and Simon Haren – are playing out, but more the inexorable party of life at large, and deep within each individual, than a literal one at someone’s place. (My guess is it has moved on from the rationale they were obliged to write by the Fringe deadline.)

"Our broad provocation was this," writes director Ralph Upton in the programme: "What does it mean to be part of a generation which is constantly being told it doesn’t have a future?" Hence the final image of a Panda, posing the riddle of the albatross soup, which is something else again … Or maybe it’s the same thing from a different angle.

En route, abetted by Rachel Marlow’s design elements, we witness a parade of consumer product cartons with felt-pen labels encapsulating human characteristics and states of being …

And Simon is subjected to an increasingly harrowing quiz game by Joel. This image is the most memorable: stark naked man holds a plastic bag bulging with water over his privates above a tin bath; every time he gives a wrong answer, the bag is punctured … until it pisses from multiple points … What starts off as fun becomes dark, demeaning and dangerous.

Curiously fascinating little insights into personal experiences located in the Cuba-Courtenay-Waterfront-Oriental sectors of Wellington City offer a welcome change of pace …

In all it is an engaging, compelling, provoking and confronting challenge to each of us relate to it as we choose, according to where we see ourselves – and each other – in this all-consuming world.

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