Brink Productions Announces LAND & SEA for May, Adelaide

Brink Productions will present the world premiere of a new collaborative work entitled Land & Sea, written by local award-winning playwright Nicki Bloom, from 12 - 26 May in The Queen's Theatre at 8pm with special performances on Saturdays at 4pm.

Directed by Chris Drummond with designs by Wendy Todd, music direction by Hilary Kleinig (Zephyr Quartet) and lighting by Geoff Cobham, Land & Sea is inspired by concepts of strange loops and optical illusions.

Strange loops are phenomena in which an ascending or descending cycle appears to grow unhindered in a single direction, only to end where it began. Strange loops can be seen in the art of Escher, heard in the music of Bach (Canon per Tonos) or experienced in word/mind puzzles such as: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

The cast for Land & Sea comprises Danielle Catanzariti, Thomas Conroy, Jacqy Phillips and Rory Walker.

Chris Drummond said, 'Nicki Bloom's writing is brilliant, sharp and economical. Strongly character driven and surreal, it is a rich and intoxicating combination of lyricism, brutality and absurdist anarchy. But underneath it all is a clear and compelling vision.'

Intimate and immersive, the play is structured like a babushka doll. Land & Sea is set in the round and plays with notions of identity, time, memory, abandonment, regret and the resilience of love, taking the audience through an ever expanding universe of fading memories and searches for those loved and lost.

'Land & Sea is a meditation on the nature of existence – both in a Darwinian sense: the brutality and arbitrariness of survival, and in the sense that a single life is an ever-changing and transformative journey. It suggests that as we look back over the course of our lives we will wonder at the strange paths taken and the even stranger people we, ourselves, have become,' said Chris Drummond.

Land & Sea employs multiple performance languages including text, choreography, sprechgesang, song and installation design. It incorporates original and found music, drawing on classical piano music, baroque, opera and folk songs with bespoke arrangements and harmonies performed by actor/singers. Sprechgesang is the manner of singing in which pitches are sung, but the articulation is rapid and loose, like speech.

Brink Productions' previous work include Skip Miller's Hit Songs, Harbinger and When The Rain Stops Falling.

Tickets are now on sale through BASS and www.TryBooking.com/BFRU.

Photo Credit: Slipperyfish.