Intermedial: AREA X

“The border is advancing…a little bit more every year.”

The foreboding unruliness of the unknown natural world has always intrigued greater minds, but what is the cost of greater knowledge?
The greater minds of the Queensland University of Technology KRB221 Intermedial Theatre challenges you to explore Area X, an immerse performance in response to Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, in search of what you value most.
Is it your mundane life or is it the search for the sublime?
Through this interactive practical assessment, audiences are dared to engage with the world of Area X through a series of guided spaces and performances, that will fully immerse audiences and question all who enter: Will you stay unchanged, or will Area X change you?
“We had come to think of the border as this monolithic invisible wall, but if members of the eleventh expedition had been able to return … couldn’t other things have already gotten through?”

The creative work that I collaborated with Briana Clark to realise was the final chapter of Annihilation.
We named our section: The Exit

To finally exit Area X, our expedition had to journey through the horror dreamscape which entangles the biologist's memories of her own momentous experience with the Crawler. It is unknown to our expedition whether this creature is the enemy or a friend as they are metaphorically plunged into a pool of fiery emotion.
According to the research of Cate Petersen and Briana Clark, The Exit communicates the knots of thoughts and the void of feelings that are attached to the living organism breathing under the feet of our expedition members as they travel. As they left, expedition members were unclear how much of what they saw was a hallucination, or if they were still being watched. Did they really make it to the exit?

For the show, I was Head of Streaming.

I used Twitch to stream live camera footage of the room as audience members explored the space. There were also moments of interaction where I messaged the chat as an expedition member and was being messaged back by another team member (Meg Cohen) as a scientist - these exchanges could be viewed by the stream audience live.