Michelle Myers in And Then She Became A Chair A woman emerges from the darkness, head covered, moving slowly, weighted bags are attached to her dress and drag along the ground behind her. She is in a waiting room. A doctor’s office. A hospice. Inside a commercial begging her to start a new life in Queensland. This is purgatory. Michelle Myer’s one-woman performance, And Then She Became A Chair , is an unsettling, confronting and poetic study in grief. We watch as a woman deals with the inevitable death of her mother, remembering absurd moments of her life, of their lives, in the years, weeks and days leading up to… C.S. Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed , a reflection on the passing of his wife, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” And it’s this observation that Michelle explores in this work – grief being the fear of loss, the fear of the unknown and the fear of what comes next. It’s interesting that the first work of theatre I have seen this year is focused so mu
2020 is the year of Zoom, boxed people on your laptop screen, sometimes trying to talk all at once. Meetings and meet-ups. Lectures and lessons. And because Zoom has become so ubiquitous, it’s also being used more and more creatively. Riot Stage used it to chat to us and stream their short film. Brian Feldman is using it to create his show, day after day. Audience members are welcomed to Zoom and the show, and asked to keep their cameras and their microphones on but to change their onscreen name to “anonymous”. We are to wait until the character of “txt” appears and then we have to start typing. You see “txt” (performed by Brian Feldman) will perform whatever we type into the chat box. No one knows who is typing what and Brian doesn’t know what he’ll be saying until the text appears in the chat. It’s the quickest I’ve ever seen anything I’ve written be performed for an audience. Zoom has been used all year for work and for collaborations. #txtshow is an evolution of that – perhap