Ranters Theatre Company Intimacy

Drawing upon encounters with passers-by in a Melbourne street, Intimacy builds up an unsettling, humorous portrait of our lives in today’s world. From out of it emerges a muted sense of unease or disquiet. The piece looks at the paradoxical intimacy arising between two strangers, and its parallels with the audience-performer relationship.

For more than twenty years now, the Australian company, with Adriano Cortese at the helm, has been producing experimental nature which probes into our everyday rituals and the strange personal details which reveal themselves beneath the veneer of social convention. How do we experience the worlds that we inhabit? Similar to an actor, how do we ‘perform our lives? ’ In Intimacy, these questions lying at the heart of their work take on a new intensity. It all starts on a Melbourne street, when one of the members of the company steps out into the night air and strikes up conversations with complete strangers. The conversations that he records go from the deeply trivial to the existential, and together they provide an intricately detailed partition of the false pretences underlying our relations with others. The pared-down staging plays upon the gap that exists between this textual raw material and the moving bodies on the stage, and examines the ambiguity and uncertainty of our everyday exchanges. In doing so, it reveals the incoherencies which pepper the accounts of ourselves that we give to others and to ourselves. Little by little, social ritual and the habits of language become disentangled, giving rise to a reflection on our condition as a member of the audience and the possibility of intimacy in theatre.
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Running time : 1h05
Performed in English with French subtitles