BORNEO plus 3

PROGRAM NOTE

Directing BORNEO plus 3, taken from Raimondo Cortese’s Roulette series, takes me back over twenty years - when as an actor I was part of the text’s development and performance seasons in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, and Porto, Portugal. Back then, the work was produced with minimalistic design costume and props, the focus being solely on the two actors and their raw interaction. Raimondo’s Cortese’s inspiration for creating the collection was the Ancient Chinese cosmology chart called the Twelve Branches of Life: desire, travel, fortune, self-expression, marriage, responsibility, health, class and rank, law, business, children, friendship. The narrative of each piece centres around a chance meeting, and a possibility of change, and of a real, unique, human connection.

We have in this production focused on the truth, honesty, pain and vulnerabilities of each of the characters. They exchange ideas and opinions, lies and fabrications, truths and confessions and ultimately expose the deepest recesses of their soul to each other. The audience is positioned as voyeurs to this interchange, and are given a chance to peer into honest, authentic and often contradictory truths about humanity and the nature of connection.

The text is a challenging one, for both actors and designers. The actors are compelled to dive deep into nuanced and comprehensive character work by the incredible rawness of the plays naturalistic style. These plays are an almost interrogative character study of each figure that appears onstage, each piece demands an encyclopedic understanding of circumstances and biography in order for their engagement with one another to be authentic, honest and compelling. Similarly, the designers have worked immensely hard to centre the audience’s focus on the interactions. The challenge is in not embellishing the text with unnecessarily complex set changes or dynamics, rather simply drawing us into these worlds and helping us direct our full attention to each revelation of fear, hope, desperation, failure and appreciation.

- Program note from the director, Tony Nikolakopoulos

CAST

PRODUCTION TEAM

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