Image: Gerard Assi

Passenger

Jessica Wilson & Ian Pidd

Passenger is a theatre work, which places its audience inside a moving suburban bus. A conversation is heard between two fellow passengers and—as we gaze at the passing world outside—we are seduced into an altered understanding of the environment around us.

Exploring our relationship to screen media and how it influences our interpretation of the world, Passenger uses the windows of the bus as screens and frames the passing streets as a filmic landscape. Your city becomes the frontier of a market-driven economy – and the perfect setting for a modern-day Western.

    ABOUT THE PROJECT

    Passenger premiered in Melbourne and was remapped onto London for the 2019 Greenwich and Docklands International Festival.

    “magnificently surreal and gloriously cinematic” – Total Theatre UK

    “a tightly written and brilliantly executed piece that turns the London landscape into a thriller movie, framing the city so that we see it with the eye of a cinematographer.” – Total Theatre UK

    “the denouement makes sense of all that has gone before and the deus ex machina resolution is stunning. ” – Total Theatre UK

    “a final sequence so spectacular it seems almost unreal that you are witnessing it live.” – Australian Stage

    “Though there’s not a camera or projector in sight, it’s closer to live cinema than theatre.” – Realtime Arts

    “It is quite literally a dramatic departure from conventional theatre.” – The Age

    ABOUT THE ARTISTS

    Jessica is an artistic entrepreneur with a strong practice in image-based theatre and participative art. She has conceived and realised a myriad of artistic works, which respond to people and places and which draw on her strength is in marrying the strategic and the poetic.

    Jessica’s works are defined by rich imagery and strong sensory experiences. Her fascination with theatre which evolves whilst moving across landscape, led to her creation of multiple works on board buses including the acclaimed Passenger, which will played in the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival in 2019.

    In 2019 she was awarded a Victorian Creators grant and created The Narrator in Latvia, a work on board a bus for children.

    Jessica’s background is in large-scale site based spectacle writing and directing Dwelling for Big West and the iconic Dream Masons on the façade of the Salamanca Arts Centre.

    In recent years, she began creating experiences exploring the child / parent relationship and children’s relationship to landscape. Her work I See You Like This, where children create an artwork on their parents face for a photo-portrait, has played in Europe and is the only Australian work to showcase in IPAY 2020.

    Jessica has toured her work extensively in Australia and internationally sustaining herself as an independent self managing artist.

    CONTACT

    Jessica Wilson
    Independent Artist / Producer
    jess@jessicawilson.com.au
    +61 403 624 231

    jessicawilson.com.au