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Why I Made is a fortnightly feature in which artists and writers share the behind-the-scenes stories of their creations with listener.co.nz
The theatre company A Slightly Isolated Dog makes plays that use improvisation, humour, farce and a whole lot of audience participation. They’ve toured New Zealand with such shows as Don Juan and Jekyll & Hyde, but their latest is a little different.
For starters, it’s not often you find cognitive neuroscientists credited among the crew of a theatre show, but two have been instrumental in the making of Our Own Little Mess.
The scientists – Drs David Carmel and Gina Grimshaw – have helped the company “explore the inner realities” of the mind for a show that is about what we really think, but rarely share.
Company founder Leo Gene Peters says there’s not so much active audience participation. Instead, playgoers stay in their seats, wearing headphones so they can hear, in real-time, the thoughts of each character.
Peters says it’s a celebration of the beauty of the mundane “as well as the unknowable mysteries of the human inner voice” following five seemingly unconnected characters.
Leo Gene Peters, why did A Slightly Isolated Dog make Our Own Little Mess?
LGP: That’s a question I ask myself every single day. Jane Yonge [ASID co-founder and show director] and I envisioned it around late 2018. We were playing around with different ways to use technology in the theatre – like headphones and devices – along with questions about travelling and loneliness, and places where we feel most ourselves and alive.
We pitched the show to a few places, but couldn’t get the funding for it, so we went on with other things. Then Covid hit, and those ideas about technology and movement and loneliness suddenly seemed much more relevant. We pitched it to the Aotearoa NZ Festival of the Arts [in Wellington] and got accepted. Unfortunately, though, we had to cancel some performances when cast members got Covid, so we’re excited to bring it to Auckland now.
Have you seen other shows that use headphones in a similar way?
LGP: Yes, and they were cool, but I felt companies weren’t really playing with the technology as much as they could. We went to the Edinburgh Festival in 2023 and saw a bunch of things, but, again, I really felt like they didn’t utilise all the different aspects of headphones and how we use them in our everyday lives.
We were curious about playing with questions of loneliness and belonging, and headphones kind of fit into that in a really perfect way. They’re a thing we literally use to isolate ourselves while we’re in public, but they’re also within the community.
How have you made it?
LGP: We started by telling each other a lot of stories around different things from our lives and talked through some questions. We brought in other resources from different media, such as books and films. We got inspiration from cultural critic Olivia Laing (The Lonely City), novelist Haruki Murakami (The Wind-up Bird Chronicles), and film-makers the Daniels (Everything, Everywhere, All at Once).
We’d just collide a lot of stuff together to see how it could feed into the story and build characters around it. It’s been a process of collision, testing, iterating, and revising.
Because we started in 2018, we’ve had more time to understand what we’re trying to do and make. It has allowed the work to simmer and develop, but there have been times when we’ve had to reschedule things like workshops because of lockdowns, so it’s been both a blessing and a curse.
You kept the headphones, so they must work.
LGP: They help to create a really amazing kind of immersive experience in the theatre. You can’t help but notice that we’re all in our own little worlds, but the show is kind of cinematic in that it draws people in, so to experience that alongside a whole audience of other people is a fantastic experience. It’s a beautiful, sort of strange feeling.
We play with a lot of the ways that we use headphones, like listening to podcasts or meditations and music, Zoom calls. All those things are really familiar to us, so we’ve been able to play with them and theatrically transform them.
And where do the neuroscientists come into it?
LGP: We did a talk about science and the brain, and how we were trying to make a show from that. Gina Grimshaw was there, we got chatting and became friends, so we started to think about meaningful ways we could work together on an art science collaboration.
We realised we were exploring and experimenting in the same kind of realm, so Gina and David came in and talked about how the mind works and inner speech. They’ve managed to make a study out of the show, so we’ll have performed it and then there’s a brief questionnaire to fill out – initial data gathering – for what might become a study perhaps using some performance material.
And then we’re also working with them on developing what a study would look like and potentially versions of this work that might involve some performance material, like audio that you might have from the show, or we might film some things from the show and show those to people in their lab, and then they can ask questions based on that.
How different is this to your other shows?
LGP: There’s a desire to shift things up a bit. We’ve never wanted an audience to just sit and watch us do what looks like a TV show or film on stage. There’s a desire to give an audience a different kind of experience, one that they can get only in a live form and by being in the room together. Then we take advantage of the fact that we’re in the room together!
Shows like Don Juan or Jekyll and Hyde or Trojan War have a more explosive theatrical French comedy kind of feel. They’re about playing together and about getting people to have a bit of a party together.
Our Own Little Mess is more about giving them the headphones and using those to play with the experience of community and the individual.
Who’s in it?
LGP: Laurel Devenie, Maaka Pohatu, Andrew Paterson, Jack Buchanan, and Isla Mayo, with compositions by Dr Jeremy Mayall and dramaturgy by Nathan Joe. There’s a range of characters whose inner voices we hear – a ventriloquist having an existential crisis in the desert, a stressed-out mum yearning for her partner, an academic wrestling with rejection, a young woman grieving with her mother, and an art gallery attendant navigating the gay scene in NYC.
Our Own Little Mess is at Auckland’s Q Theatre until August 3.
