Making holes in the walls: Q&A with Clare Britton and Matt Prest

Sydney artists Clare Britton and Matt Prest are at the perfect age to be settling down, buying a house and starting a family. With Gen Y hitting the property market, we're seeing a clash between old values, survival instincts and the rhetoric of a world built upon free-market choice. Do we need to own our home, or will renting suffice? Is it possible for non-trees to grow roots? These are questions constantly asked by 20-somethings, but what is often forgotten are the people behind the real estate statistics. In developing their new work, Hole in the Wall, Britton and Prest dug deep to find what else we need when trying to establish a home.

Concrete Playground: Hole in the Wall suggests a voyeur peeking into others' lives. How will your audience be invited into the world of your performance?

Clare and Matt: On entering the theatre, the audience will be stepping right into a small purpose-built room, domestic in feel with all the trimmings (suffocating wallpaper, skirting boards, architraves, oyster light) but with no clear function. No furniture or household appliances to suggest what the room may be; it could be a bedroom, living room, dining room or a cupboard. The important thing is that with nine audience members sharing the room it feels stuffy and cramped, which is how it feels for the couple at the centre of the performance. The walls and ceiling of the room start to move and the audience move with it. Then the rooms open up onto scenes of this couple, a man and a woman, and as they begin to play out the banalities of living together the audience will be very much placed in the position of the voyeur — but while that term suggests being able to watch from a safe distance, this show will place the audience right in the middle of it.

CP: The home is central to Hole in the Wall; from your own experience, how important has the home been beyond a source of shelter?

C&M: From our own experience, being a couple with a young child, home is something we have become more interested in since having a kid. There's definitely more of a need to feel grounded somehow, and to feel like you're creating a safe, loving, inspiring environment to live in ... It also takes a lot of time and most of us are busy elsewhere most of the time.

There's an ugly side to all this desire for 'home' which is the whole aspirational thing that seems so dominant in Australia — the whole 'dream home' thing where everyone wants more than they actually need and work their lives to get it. It's funny because a home does need to be more than just shelter but how much more, really? I guess then it's more getting at what home is beyond the material worth, comforts and pleasures of a 'house'. And that's the journey the couple are going on in the show. Getting to a place where they find a truer sense of home, with themselves and with each other. We describe the show as being about home, wanting to feel permanent in the world, and the fact that we're not. In this sense there's also real connection between ideas of death and home which is a bit of a thread through the show.

CP: It's quite clear that the collaborating artists behind Hole in the Wall possess a diverse range of skills and interests. What sort of devising process have you used to incorporate and honour such different disciplines?

C&M: The process of making was split mainly between the design and realisation of the spatial aspects of the show (namely the rooms, there are four in the show) and the creation of the performance material. We worked with Danny Egger (box design) initially on ideas for how the space would work, which is where we came up with the idea for the four movable rooms. We've worked closely with Hallie Shellam (director) to generate performance material and devise the story in the show. Halcyon Macleod (writer) has written text responding to our initial improvisations and ideas and these have been fed back into the show during final rehearsals as we finish the devising process. During this final stage James Brown (sound/animation) has been in the space the whole time and he works in a very responsive way to what we're doing, which is great. Same goes for Mirabelle Wouters (lights).

CP: What kinds of challenges did you encounter with this approach?

C&M: The main challenge has been the split focus between what the performance is and what the space is doing. The two are so intertwined in this project but require quite different headspaces. One minute you're on the rehearsal floor delivering text or choreographing a physical sequence, next you're working out how the doors will close on the boxes. It's a bit more separate than that, but it is a very technical show, which is why we've been working with so many of the elements in the room from day one of rehearsal.

CP: What was it like to work out at Campbelltown Arts Centre (CAC) rather than in one of the inner city spaces? Did this influence the resulting work?

C&M: I think that there was a subliminal influence that travelling to Campbelltown each day had on the themes we have decided to tackle in this work. Moving for an hour or so through the suburbs of Sydney each day makes this work seem like it could have a relevance to a lot of people.

CAC have been great in supporting this work from a very early stage. They, in fact, offered us a residency to develop a new work following on from The Tent, our last show, and that residency led to Hole in the Wall via a development from Performance Space, who have been the other big supporter of the work. I have to say there wasn't a huge difference to working at CAC as opposed to an inner city space. It's a well resourced, supportive place to make work.

Hole in the Wall will be returning to Sydney after its run during the Next Wave Festival down in Melbourne. It opens on Wednesday, May 26, at CarriageWorks' Performance Space.

Images by James Brown.