En Route at the Darwin Festival

Standing amongst the shops and luxury hotels of the resort-like Darwin waterfront you imagine hearing the wail of sirens, the crashing of bombs, the distant voices reporting death and destruction in this very place, 19 February 1942, almost 70 years ago.

Then you’re brought dizzyingly back to contemporary Darwin, walking up through the CBD's modern buildings hearing new ambient sounds, through little alleyways and to areas that juxtapose the old porcelanite English-style architecture with thirty and forty storey apartment blocks. From the roof of a car park you reflect, looking out on a panoramic view of the whole city. This is theatre for one, En Route, which is part of the Darwin Festival this week.

En Route starts with a text message. You receive instructions on where to meet your guide, who gives you an iPod with 13 specially programmed tracks on it. You then make your way on your own through the city following the instructions sent to your mobile phone telling you where to walk and which track to listen to. It not only takes you to places you might otherwise never visit but also makes you interact with your environment, at some points it tells you to ring a friend, or to say a word out loud.

‘Everybody has a different perspective on it afterwards, of what they noticed about the city that they’ve never noticed before,’ says Jo Duffy, Darwin Festival Artistic Director.

Duffy, first saw En Route in Melbourne and was intrigued. ‘I was really interested in getting them up to Darwin to do something similar but to work with four local artists.’ And the feedback has been great so far, particularly from long term Darwin residents.

En Route matches an aural soundscape to a visual landscape of stimulus crafted as a walk through a series of reflective spaces in an urban environment. It thereby creates an emotional journey that is different every time, and for every participant.

In a sense En Route is a script finding its way in a city. The creators, Melbourne based theatre company One Step at a Time Like This have an idea of what they’re looking for but must still adapt the work to match the unique characteristics of each new city they take it too. For example in Adelaide they found a carpark, then in Brisbane they found a carpark with a view, so in Darwin that was something they were hunting for.

‘The city is like a dramaturge,’ says Julian Rickert, one of the creators of En Route Darwin. ‘If you’re writing a play or directing it, you say I want the opening there and then … an idyllic section there and a big climax at the end. But here, it depends on the city. The city landscape affects the dramaturgy or the peaks and flows of the work.’ I’ve only just realised that as a concept, how much [the city]’s another worker, another person on the team.

But so is the audience. Bringing the audience intimately into the work has long been an interest of the One Step At A Time Like This collaborators (formerly known as Bettybooke). We’re interested in how much imaginative work the audience does to create their own resonances and meanings, says Rickert. They were inspired by considering how art is made and what art is. ‘Joseph Beuys was interested in, where the art event happens, says Rickert and his notion that everyone has the artistic imaginative capacity to make something artistic is an idea that has guided the show.’

The soundscape of specially commissioned and sourced tracks is also an intrinsic part of the journey. Local musician Kris Keogh worked as a special guest artist with One at a Time Like This on Darwin’s En Route. ‘The music for every city is gathered from local independent, often unsigned musicians,’ Rickett says. ‘The music needs to match the city and …his music is, I think, a great asset to En Route in Darwin.’

At En Route’s first outing for the Melbourne Fringe in 2009 it won the Best Live Art Award and the Freshest of the Fresh award, that prize took them to Adelaide Fringe where it won the Best Theatre award. They also took En Route to the Brisbane St Jeromes Laneways Festival earlier this year. Darwin invited En Route to the Festival after seeing the original production in Melbourne and the team have now adapted their fifth version of En Route to Edinburgh as part of the Festival there.

UK producer Richard Jordan, also known for his work with Ontroerend Goed, saw En Route in Adelaide and suggested taking it to Edinburgh. His support got the show on the bill of the Traverse Theatre, beside Martin Creed and Tim Crouch. This gave En Route immediate profile and enabled them to sell out their season despite the 2,453 shows on at the Edinburgh Festival.

‘Edinburgh has been another experience of adapting En Route. Rather than trying to find the small spots of beauty in an urban environment, beauty’s coming at you all the time. We have to try to lift up the underskirts of Edinburgh and find the uninteresting places, the shopping malls and things like that, because otherwise it just becomes a tour of Edinburgh and there’re hundreds of those. We reworked it in one way for Darwin and in another way for Edinburgh.’

‘When we started it, people were saying, ‘Oh its so Melbourne,’ and we were going, ‘Oh no, we think it’s workable for other cities’. says Julian Rickert. ‘That was always our intention. And it was a bit of a relief, really to take it to other cities and find that it was!’

DARWIN FESTIVAL
12 – 29 August, 2010
Further information: www.darwinfestival.org.au