Matthew Prest

THE TENT was an hour-long theatre show for a sit down audience of 25, which incorporated installation, performance, puppetry and video under a purpose-built tent.  It premiered at the Next Wave Festival in 2008 and then toured to Performance Space, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Darwin Festival and PICA, Perth.

 

The show told the story of a friendship between an older man, Brett, a nomadic bush philosopher whose home is the tent,  and a younger man, Michael, who is going through some kind of prolonged adolescence and at a loss as to what to do with himself. Viewed through the frame of this awkward friendship, The Tent was a an immersive 'coming of age' story, that addressed questions of responsibility and accountability 

 

For this show, we built the tent ourselves out of old trucking canvas and scrap metal.  Its raw, dirty feel helped to feed the atmosphere of the performance. It was very much a character in the story and helped to implicate the audience in the story of the two men. The show has adapted to a variety of environments, from a cold, gravelly, disused carpark next to the railway tracks in Melbourne’s CBD, to a piece of crown land on Darwin Harbour in the tropical dry season.

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