I LIKE THIS
created by Antony Hamilton & Byron Perry
WORLD PREMIERE
20-29 November 2008
Chunky Move Studios
Melbourne, Australia
2011 TOURING
15-17 September, 2011
The Dublin Absolut Fringe Fetival
Samuel Beckett Theatre - Dublin, Ireland
MORE INFO
CONCEPT
A room of objects wait patiently in stasis for a purpose, a beginning. Byron Perry and Antony Hamilton's new work I Like This is a journey of two men who embark on an unusual creative project; to design an environment, attempt to make sense of it, and begin to control it. As these two director/choreographers appear on stage creating the work at the same time as it is being performed we watch a show and simultaneously, the making of it. Intimately engaging, I Like This balances between detailed sophistication and delightful mischief. It's often comic absurdity, reveals our limited capacity to be able to geniuinely communicate to one another and also control or even fully understand our surroundings.
CREATIVE TEAM
DIRECTION AND CHOREOGRAPHY Antony Hamilton and Byron Perry
LIGHTING AND SOUND Antony Hamilton and Byron Perry
COSTUME DESIGN Paula Levis
PERFORMERS
Antony Hamilton
Stephanie Lake
Alisdair Macindoe
Byron Perry
Lee Serle
Kristy Ayre
Josh Mu
Joseph Simons
DURATION 60 mins
WARNING Contains strobe lighting effects and mild coarse language
Directors Notes
Right from our first conversations we decided to record everything, these first sessions together were as you might expect, filled with ridiculously unachievable ideas of how the work might play out. Our excitement and interest peaked as long as we kept our dialogue firmly seated in the ridiculous. The minute we settled on an idea we began to lose interest in it. We very quickly became excited by the challenge of extrapolating this unbridled creative fascination and find ways in which these fantastically muscular and rhythmic conversations could somehow be transformed into the meat and body of the work. In order to somehow capture the sheer delight and mutability of thought our goal was to theatricalise these spontaneous articulations so we became very excited by the idea of creating a work that is essentially about itself, a work that didn't need a theme or a story as a catalyst for its creation but rather one that sprang from a sort of creative cannibalism. We began to like the idea of creating a work that would feed from itself in order to grow and these first recordings seemed like an appropriate food to start feeding it.
In terms of our working relationship we decided early on that the sense of relentless collaboration would be paramount to the success of the work as this was the essence of our original conversations. So we decided that we would work on everything together at the same time and that no matter the genesis or origin of the idea, once it was out it was open game. We have tried as much as possible to limit ourselves in terms of the theatrical topography of the work. It felt right considering the ego-centric nature of the concept that all of the theatrical elements i.e sound, lighting etc should be operated from on stage and by ourselves or the performers. This has left its own distinctive mark on the work and has in many ways dictated the mode of presentation purely through the limitations that it imposes.
Essentially the work is us; present, now and in the moment. Our conversations, interactions and general silliness, our heads emptied, unrestricted and untamed. We've taken whatever our minds threw up in the air and caught what pieces we could on the way down.
