Find ways to engage younger audiences in particular. Some of the stuff I’ve done with this company, The Border Project, has been about using other mediums. We did a show in the Adelaide Fringe which was a choose your own adventure show, where the audience got a controller a bit like a Nintendo Wii and they used that to control the direction of the narrative. There were 24 endings to the show and we as actors learnt about eight hours of stuff to do a show that went for an hour. So what you get there is you get interactivity, which is good in theatre. Audience participation can be really shit but we tried to do it in a very sophisticated way where they had this kind of new technology, which we had built from the ground up – these guys in Melbourne helped us out and designed and built this thing called a zig-zag controller that basically changes colour as you rotate it. So we’d say, “if you want to make the character follow this path and go down into the woods, make sure your controller glows green”. Majority rules and so it meant that there was kind of this interesting democracy thing happening as well where people were aware that say, “I was the only one who voted blue, everyone else voted red.” So we’re just looking at ways to make it really engaging and about the live experience. I think theatre needs to separate itself from other mediums like film and TV more and that’s one way of doing it.

 

We did another show just recently kind of like a series of film clips which we performed on stage from new songs that we’d written. The show was kind of subtitled “Rage on Stage”. So just looking at mediums which we are already familiar with, like a film clip or (we did another show on board games) and crossing them with theatre. Theatre ultimately I think it’s a story-telling medium and it is about the live experience and tapping back into that is the right thing.

 

A company that tries to make theatre that engages a young audience that traditional theatre leaves cold. So we do that in the kind of way that I described where we use other mediums and cross them with theatre. There’s eight of us, performers with different skills. We’re a pretty strange bunch of people, who all met at Uni and started making work together.

 

Way beyond a character. He’s something deep, deep, deep in our mythology. He’s everybody’s adolescence in a way, he’s a terminal adolescent. I really tried to make him a bit quirkier and open up a bit of the comedy that I thought was in there, which I don’t think is that common for people who generally play him but I loved the experience.

 

It’s all about the energy you get from the audience. It’s why I love music as well. It’s the buzz I get from telling a story or performing something for an audience live where there’s this two-way street going on. I’m generally always aware of the audience. In theatre I think it’s about the fact that the audience is there. I think to deny that they’re there, is more the realm of film. For theatre to survive it needs to engage with what’s different about it.

 

Look out for The Border Project’s next, ahem, project: Metro Street next year.