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This Is It

“…a cheeky show that delights in playing with art and artifice.” - Real Time.

This Is It takes the form of a premiere press conference for a new movie of the same name.

Team MESS uses the format of this press conference to construct the completely speculative narrative of the film. The film unfolds in the space between what is revealed and what is left to the imagination of the audience, whilst the performed press conference simultaneously questions and irreverently embraces the pretences of representation.

You are there. We are here. This is it.

Created and performed by Team MESS.

Featuring a special guest.

This Is It has been developed with the support of Performance Space, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Belvoir St. Theatre, the Creative Practice and Research Unit in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts, UNSW and the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts through its Artists Residency and Creative Hub (ARCH) program, which is funded by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

This Is It was shortlisted for the 2011 Phillip Parsons Playwright Award.

This Is It is presented at APAM with the support of the Hopscotch Touring Initiative from the Australia Council for the Arts.

Team MESS

“Team MESS are crafting an intriguing interrogative role in the contemporary performance world as fearless, funny and clever interpreters of our contemporary culture” - Chris Mead, PlayWriting Australia.

Team MESS is the collaborative output of a group of five young artists who work across the performing and visual arts. As a collective we use the conventions, rituals and spectacles of popular culture and the everyday to stage theatre events that close the critical distance between the work and the viewer and open up a shared space of experience, exchange and possibility. We then use this space to explore contemporary modes of narrative production and audience agency.

We are: Dara Gill, Sime Knezevic, Frank Mainoo, Natalie Randall and Malcolm Whittaker.

Our work together includes: This Is It (Brisbane Powerhouse, 2012; PICA & Arts House, 2011; Performance Space, 2010), a performed press-conference for a non-existent new film; I Think I Can Dance (Peats Ridge Festival, 2009), a Cartesian choreography dance competition; Killing Don: Evolution of a Memory (Performance Space, 2009), a party in celebration and lamentation of memory and nostalgia; You and Me and a Very Large Bottle (Performance Space 2008), a game of spin the bottle to fill a void in a young woman’s life.

Photo: Team MESS

CONTACT

Malcolm Whittaker
Team MESS

33 Winchester Rd
Clovelly NSW 2031

+61 403 925 392

malcolm@teammess.com.au

http://www.teammess.com.au