Helpline

Bron Batten and Gary Abrahams (VIC)

Helpline is a participatory live artwork that utilises the ubiquitous helpline and product assistance service to explore isolation, therapeutic outreach and community care.

Working across theatre and live art, comedy and drama, Bron Batten and Gary Abrahams are multi-award-winning and prolific performance makers. Drawing on practices of participation, improvisation, direct address and collaborative exchange with non-artists and audience members, their recent works include Onstage Dating and Waterloo.

From Melbourne in lockdown, this new project sees the artists investigate the culture of call-in services, the liveness and intimacy of the socially-distanced telephone conversation, and the modes this new and pertinent performance could take.

Creative Team: Co-creators – Bron Batten and Gary Abrahams

This project is supported by City of Melbourne, City of Yarra and Creative Victoria.
Image:

Published on

18 September

Live+Local

Adhocracy In Conversation panel: Radical care and community in the age of the wellness industrial complex
Friday September 11 at 8pm

Showing
Friday September 18 at 7pm

Residency Outcome

Helpline has been developed on unceded Wurundjeri land, across Melbourne Lockdown 1.0 and Melbourne Lockdown 2.0, in a mixture of (essentially illegal) in person and online developments. We NEVER wanted to make a piece explicitly about COVID-19, but have since realised how much the pandemic and the resulting restrictions has permeated our lives, both on a conscious and unconscious level.

Maintaining self-care has become a key consideration whilst negotiating these lockdown constraints so in constructing the work, we have started to play with the entrenched rhetoric of the ‘wellness industry’. We examined the mission statements of major corporations, discovering the linguistic overlaps in terms of how both industries relate to their customers/consumers. Working with this found text, we have appropriated this highly corporatised language in an attempt to find some core of meaning behind the vapid jargonistic façade.

The pandemic has instilled a sense of tension, helplessness and ennui for so many people. We’re trying to remember for ourselves and also for the audience that there are good forces at work in the world. Art goes a long way towards reminding us that practicing kindness, wonder and imagination can be a great defence against fear. It can help us to sustain individual and community connection during this time of extreme isolation.

We dream of a time when we can gather together once more, sharing art, physical intimacy and collective experiences.

In the meantime, please call our Helpline and leave a message at 0492 963 919.

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Vitalstatistix acknowledges that we, and our home Waterside, are on Kaurna Country, its sovereignty never ceded. We acknowledge Kaurna people as the continuing custodians of the Adelaide Plains who have a spiritual relationship with this land. We respect their cultural authority. We pay our respect to Kaurna Elders, past, present and emerging, and through them to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.