The “fourth wall” – a term popularised by philosopher and critic Denis Diderot to describe the imaginary barrier between audience and stage – is often broken by performers, usually by directly acknowledging the presence of the audience. This technique consciously addresses the fictional device and penetrates the boundaries drawn by traditional theatre. But what happens when the audience isn’t just acknowledged, but invited inside the work?
While breaking the fourth wall isn’t new, some recent Australian works in both theatre and visual arts have been shattering conventional narratives and asking audiences to physically enter the space where the work is taking place.
Pier 2/3 at Walsh Bay in Sydney is a hotbed of activity for this kind of work. The sheer size of the venue means that artists can create a sizeable enough “stage” for audiences to enter, creating an immersive and elaborate space for audiences to wander through.
I Love Todd Sampson by the Living Room Theatre Company is one such piece. Opening this week at Pier 2/3, the work is an Australian first and integrates architecture, art, installation, music, film, light and performance to take audiences through a space representing the mind of a middle-aged woman with mental illness.
Audiences will explore the thoughts of central protagonist Laura who, after a suicide attempt, finds comfort in an obsession with The Gruen Transfer’s Todd Sampson. As the project examines a mind in trauma, the audiences are invited inside, infiltrating beyond the fourth wall to undertake their own journey and create unique experiences.
‘It’s about them physically negotiating something and I think what I want to do is disarm them mentally so that they can open themselves out to something that might speak to them on a different level… It’s not about sitting down and understanding language and a couple of beautiful images, you’re actually immersed in it,’ says Living Room Theatre founder Michelle St. Ann, who wrote, directed and performs in the piece.
The creators of I Love Todd Sampson have also decided to take away a traditional story arc and have also enlisted the help of architects instead of stage designers to help them create the space.
‘The narrative line doesn’t really exist, or it’s kind of played with and dissected and it’s just a different kind of storytelling,’ says St. Ann.
Internationally companies are also doing interesting things with this type of theatre. For example, the work Sleep No More by British theatre Company Punchdrunk, in its New York incarnation takes place in a five floor location in a block of Manhattan warehouses. When audiences step inside the piece they immediately enter the McKittrick Hotel, a location that is a mix of an antiquated mental asylum, a cemetery, a padded cell, a ball room and a taxidermist’s menagerie among others.
Filled with performers decked out in outfits inspired by film noir, audiences are asked to wear a Venetian style mask and take a journey through the space, choosing their own path for up to three hours.
Sleep No More uses this method to tell the story of Macbeth, with the The New York Times calling it a ‘voyeur’s delight, with all the creepy, shameful pleasures that entails’. This element of the ‘voyeur’ is something that is consistently played with in this type of ‘wall breaking’ theatre.
But breaking the fourth wall and disseminating traditional narrative structure also forces us to question the difference between theatre and visual art using live performers.
Also at Pier 2/3 in April, Kaldor Public Art Project will present 13 Rooms, drawing together 13 renowned visual artists and more than 70 performers in a group exhibition of living sculpture within 13 purpose built rooms. These works stride the precipice between performance and live sculpture and audiences are able to enter some of these rooms, physically placing themselves inside the piece.
Take Brazilian visual artist Laura Lima for example. Her work Flat asks audiences to actively engage with the piece by getting down on the floor to see the performer. She has lowered the roof of her room to about half a metre from the ground, and inside is a performer with a physical disability, forcing people to question the notion of taboo and to confront their own prejudices.
‘It’s like a sensation of oppression somehow with this person that is participating. The public must somehow lay down on the floor to see the piece, so I also change a little bit the behaviour of the public, the viewer, when they come to the exhibition, the normal behaviour is just to walk around,’ says Lima.
By doing this, says Lima, ‘I think that the public shall understand art not only as a passive thing. When you change the behaviour of the place you are letting the public get lots of information about space or behaviour of meanings.’
Lima is also involved in another Australian project with Ranters Theatre called Song. Artistic Director of Ranters and Concept /Director of Song, Adriano Cortese describes the work more as theatre, but again there is no narrative structure. In the work, the audience is invited into another large space, this time in the North Melbourne Town Hall, where Ranters has created an interactive landscape, complete with rain and wind machine, with audiences invited within to explore the multi-sensory environment.
‘For me it’s actually about creating a space where the audience has the possibility, and it’s their choice, a possibility of just letting go for a moment and taking in a different kind of experience,’ says Adriano.
‘A lot of our ways of making work or thinking about work are taken from the way we experience our lives and it is much more democratic in that sense, we all have our own experiences and we want to make this work reflect that.’
I Love Todd Sampson is now showing at Pier 2/3 Walsh Bay. For information and tickets visit Moshtix.
Kaldor Public Art Project’s 13 Rooms will take place at Pier 2/3 from 11-21 April. For more information visit Kaldor’s website
Song will take place at Arts House at the Melbourne Town Hall from 12-21 April. For more information visit the Ranters website.
