Australian Performing Arts Market

SEARCHLIGHT

<< Back to SEARCHLIGHT Pitch Sessions


Buried City
Urban Theatre Projects, Belvoir and Sydney Festival

  • Venue: Piano Bar
  • When: Tue 28 Feb 03:35 PM - 04:20 PM
  • Genre: Theatre
  • Main Audience: Adults (18+)
  • Producer: Michelle Kotevski
  • No. in touring party: 10

Buried City

Set in a gutted building primed for redevelopment, Buried City is an intimate show about the kindness of strangers and the brutality of old friends. Misunderstandings and a clash of values lead a group of security guards, night watchmen, labourers and a local teenager to draw a line in the sand about who’ll build this city and who owns its future.

Western Sydney’s celebrated Urban Theatre Projects (The Fence, The Last Highway, Back Home) joins forces with Belvoir for this timely, thought-provoking show about a city and society redefining itself. New songs by that troubador of Redfern-Waterloo, Perry Keyes, bring the stark and poetic images of the haunting city night to life.

Through the partnership with Belvoir, Buried City sees an exciting new collaboration between director Alicia Talbot and writer Raimondo Cortese. The show continues Talbot’s practice of portraying realtime action and events, with an emphasis on the emotional journeys of each of the characters. The mediated process of discussion with community members, which Talbot describes as “public dialogue”, grounds projects with an authencity that blurs the line between theatrical artifice and everyday life.

Urban Theatre Projects

Urban Theatre Projects is a company that explores new territory marked by pressing social concerns and cultural silences. It both provokes and responds to a hunger from audiences and artists to say and see something different.
UTP is renowned for generating unique contemporary theatre works and experiences in non-theatre sites and conventional spaces, attracting acclaim from presenters, critics and audiences.

Over the last 2 years, Artistic Director Alicia Talbot's most recent work The Fence premiered at Sydney Festival 2010 and went on to win the Sydney Theatre Award for Best Independent Production, Paschal Berry's collaboration with Phillippine collective Aninio The Folding Wife toured Australia and to the National Arts Festival, South Africa. Ama and Chan opened the new Bankstown Arts Centre and Roslyn Oades' Stories of Love and Hate was presented as part of Sydney Theatre Company's Education Program.

Over the last decade UTP has made over 20 new works, including Talbot's The Last Highway (Sydney Festival 2008) and trilogy The Cement Garage, The Longest Night (both part of Adelaide Festival 2002), and Back Home (Sydney Festival 2006). Back Home toured to The Dreaming Festival (2006) and Toronto's international arts festival Luminato in conjunction with a commission by Harbourfront Centre (2007).

UTP is a Sidney Myer Award recipient.

Photo: Prudence Upton


CONTACT

Michelle Kotevski
Executive Producer, Urban Theatre Projects
PO Box 707
Bankstown 1885 NSW