Oh, won't you please take me home?
When you think of BMX, skateboarding and B-boying all on stage at the one time do you think "paradise"? Paradise City is for you. Bianca O'Neill speaks to co-creator and director Lee Wilson about making the stage 'street'. Word
The folks in Paradise City haven't quite nailed the concept of "the dinkie"
To all those girls who have been trying to get their partner to come to a theatre production and to all those guys out there who think that theatre is boring, Paradise City is your answer. Not sure what the question is? It's this: How do you get a theatre company to commission a production where a skateboarder and BMX rider ‘battle' it out on stage and call it art?
A project born out of the gap in the theatre world for representing street culture, Paradise City attempts to combine traditional theatre with urban expression art forms like break dancing, BMX and skateboarding. Sounds all modern now, doesn't it - like the theatre equivalent of a canvas painted blue and titled "Red"? But Lee Wilson, director and co-creator, assures us it's important to theatre, as well as urban culture.
"It's important for a whole lot of levels, really. It's about pushing the boundaries of perception about the culture - perceptions about dance and theatre, and what that can mean. I think that there is still a bit of a backward attitude that breakdancing is not really dance, so my idea is that some of these forms are incredibly virtuosic and beautiful and expressive, so I like to put it in that context and challenge that. But also to challenge audiences that might be expecting a spectacle or a circus - to show that it can actually be incredibly moving, this work; it can be slow and powerful and deep."
And what else would you expect from a production commissioned by Sydney Opera House, and premiering at The Studio back in 2006? In fact, it's been so successful that in 2007 it toured to four Brazilian cities, including international dance festivals in Rio de Janeiro, Recife and Belo Horizonte, as well as the prestigious Teatro SESC Pinheiros in Sao Paulo.
So how does one approach the certain conundrum with balancing egos and directing them in such a traditional environment?
"It's an interesting process and I really love it," Wilson says earnestly. "I adore being in the space with so many different performers - you know we all come from such different backgrounds and disciplines that you really have to be very patient with the different kinds of performers. For example, B-Boying is such a different world to theatre, and doing a battle which lasts for two minutes is very different to being on stage for 55 minutes in that kind of discipline. So in the show they demand a level of professionalism that perhaps the skateboarder or the BMX rider have never experienced before - even though they have been professional in their own field. So it's difficult to negotiate all the different fields and how to bring them together.
"I don't try to represent [street culture]; what I try to do is embody it so that what you see on stage is completely authentic," Wilson emphasises. "I feel like [the performers] are a kind of extension of street culture, but it's just taking it into the theatre as an exploration of forms - and how these forms can be expressive and poetic. And it's not because they're blowing you away with spectacle, it's just the intention that they both have, and what they are doing to one another - you've just never seen a skater and a BMX rider battling it out with each other before."
Paradise City plays at the Performance Space, CarriageWorks, from 28 May-7 June, and the Casula Powerhouse from 10-11 June.