Tribe
The story of a teenage outsider trying to find a place among her peers. Featuring a rock-pop score; TRIBE is a non-narrative, surreal theatre work that uses a combination of puppetry, film, text, music, dance and movement to weaves its dream. TRIBE has played to over three thousand Victorian School Children and its 2004 regional tour concluded with a sell-out season at the Victorian Arts Centre.
cast size - 9 to 20 + suitable for upsized ensemble + small band
“There’ s this refugee. Two years trapped on an island in Papua New Guinea. We have a strange connection that refugee and me. On a clear night when there’ s no wind and the stars are perfect, I can see his sky and he can see mine. Two kindred souls staring into heaven. Universal freaks on the outside looking in.”
“...Wham bam slam,squealing, laughing, little bird bodies dropping like bad apples, feather, beaks, blood... what? They’ re only birds. It’ s not like they’ve got feelings. Well okay yeah maybe they do but not important ones. Not like us yeah. ”
TRIBE was written gradually over a period of four months. For those interested in the process of writing a devised show like this – a writer spends a lot of time listening to people. Then you spend a lot of time watching the world around you and waiting. Writing a little. Feeling lost. Feeling hopeless. And waiting. And then some more waiting. Until slowly a connection between all the things you’ve been discussing start to connect and form a fabric. In the case of TRIBE we always knew it would be about the choices you start to make in your teens. How you go about surviving what is both a wonderful –yet ruthless and potentially cruel time in your life, where the need to belong becomes magnified. And then one day I read about an Asylum Seeker who had been kept in detention on Manus Island for fifteen months – with no company other than a cat.