Prompter

Perth company Hydra Poesis' Prompter begins with a journalist (Brendan Ewing) reporting from the capital city of St Sulpice, a fictional island in the south Pacific. He robotically reads text that scrolls up a teleprompter – an unexplained disaster has struck the island, hordes of people are fleeing, there is a potential coup d'etat in the houses of Parliament. The disaster is reported as it is happening, everything is entirely speculative. We see the audience of these news reports on screens suspended above the playing space. They appear via web link from their actual bedrooms around the globe – as far away as Los Angeles and London. The online performers then begin to descend into states of, what the director calls, 'performative psychosis'.  They begin to perform actions of empathy in attempts to commune in some way with the disaster and the affected peoples. Prompter then follows the journalist in the days after the disaster and an Australian couple who have separated over differing reactions to the situation. There are a lot of ideas explored in this show: the frailties of a media that prizes speed of reporting above all else, the performativity of online identities, the first world's relation to the developing world and Australia's patronising international relations in the Pacific. The show also merges forms utilising the tropes of live art, naturalism, digital performance and dance. The effect, however, is often cacophonous and I felt myself becoming distanced from the work. It was most effective when it moved further from its conventional narrative structures into visceral displays of the psychotic performativity.      

Arts House (finished)