A site Specific work for winter

in three parts

Gold Satino is known for making site specific work that is radically intimate and visually grand. Sibling explodes this sensibility into a three-part epic. Where our previous work has explored the aesthetic and thematic depths of one ‘hero’ site that is supported by a collection of smaller ones, Sibling is a journey through three hero sites.

The first part is Hannah and Ross, a small-scale performance about a trans woman leaving the country to live with her brother in the city. The second is HEARTH, a huge, loud, noisy eruption into an uninviting world (we won’t say dystopian, I think we’re a bit beyond that). And the third is Tong/Uprising – where we discover that Tong and Ross have been planting seeds for a new world behind the audience. We turn and find a sea of green.

We can’t be sure yet if these performances should sit together or apart, if they happen at the same time or on different nights. Probably they sit together – an epic performance about a new and old world. Not utopia or dystopia, rather about disruption and reform. About the hope we yearn for.

Part one – Hannah and Ross

Viewed from cars, in an adjoining car park, a woman stands at an apartment window looking out. Her brother is in the background, ironing her dress. Two dogs are barking. Their home looks warm, clean, well-kept. The sister is sewing something. A person delivers some food. We watch them eat it. It’s the beginning of something we want to spend time with: it’s a quiet investment. The story is told through movement and a sound score delivered to the car stereos. It has both live and pre-recorded elements.

Sibling explores the often quiet and connected relationships between siblings. What do we share? Where does it fall apart? Gold Satino have wanted to create a show around the bodies of two company members and siblings, Ross De Winter and Hannah Tappy, for years.

Part TWO – Hearth

The audience leaves Hannah and Ross. Their cars drive to a nearby warehouse. They go through a small door (or a wall falls down). They put on masks and dust suits. Then they come out into a huge unfinished space, vast and industrial. There is someone (the Deliveroo driver from before) working a small fire, a wok burner perhaps, very small in the enormous space but sort of glamorous in the way the fire in the pan is managed.

A woman is making some wings. Sewing them together to escape. Fires. Red clouds rising, settling on cities – revenge/smog/smoke/repression. What if there is no escape?

Stawell, 2006. A man and his daughter were burnt alive in their car driving down the Wimmera highway when the fires hit. I overheard my parents’ friend, who was a cop, talking about the smell of it.

The sound of fire traveling and the sudden enveloping dark.

There is an escalation, a squad of leaf blowers, running, a mighty sound and then the back doors open on an earth mover digging a hole. To bury someone/something.

Part Three – TONG/uprising

Tong/Uprising begins in an aching for a new world, one that isn’t about escape, one that is grounded here. At first we wanted to make the escape about the wings – about leaving upwards or downwards. But maybe we need to arch sideways and forwards too.

When the COVID crisis hit, Tong had to decide whether to go to China, where he grew up but can’t be himself, or to stay here, where he’s only partly welcome. He decided to stay. Not because it’s home, but because he’s never really had a home and he wants to stop running.

AUDIENCE EXPERIENCE

We want our audiences to be transported, moved, gob-smacked, to be blown away or gently engaged, intrigued, absorbed and other things we haven’t imagined for them yet.

We don’t know how we’ll be this time next year. We might be free to gather or we might still be huddled in isolation, sheltering from an invisible but shockingly intimate virus. Gold Satino will make the work to be experienced in a safe way – in private cars and hazmat suits – but we still want our audience to experience it in real time and beside other live bodies. We want them to leave having looked closely at small intimate moments, to have been made afraid perhaps, and then to have experienced chest-tearing ecstasy.

We have made bleak work before but, in these anxious times, the task for performance is to look at the dark and find the light. We're not saying that it's every art makers task – but it feels like ours. So we want audiences to leave with more space in their hearts and a little lightness in their bodies and (since we're reaching) a sense of being seen by the work.

But maybe you want to hear something more like “The audience gathers here and is shown this. Then they travel here and this happens….”? We can’t tell you that yet. That’s what we’d find out in a creative development.

You can get a flavour of how our audiences usually experience our work by looking at this documentation page for our show This is Grayson.

FAQS

How do you find your sites?

Our producer is a bloodhound. It’s partly finding locations and then trying to track down the owners; partly cold-calling councils, developers, theatres, art organisations, and anyone else who’ll take the call; and partly grinding down people’s objections with an unfailing passion for making art happen.

What we do know is that there are always dormant buildings and sites. And 8 times out of 10 the owners are thrilled to have their site used for something unusual. Or used at all. And most of them are willing to sponsor us with free or cheap rent.

The tricky part is getting onto an owner.

What will the audience capacity be for Sibling?

We’re not sure yet. As a guide, our previous works have had capacities ranging for 3–10. It’s important to us to keep the experience intimate, but we’re excited about exploring ways to do that while increasing the season capacity.

Xavier is very keen to find a way to scale up our box office takings while protecting the integrity of the work.

about gold satino

Gold Satino is an award winning queer performance collective that has been pushing the boundaries and risking arrest since 2011. Our mission is to re-imagine what theatre is and can be. As W. H Auden said; 'For the miraculous birth, there always must be / Children who did not specially want it to happen'. Gold Satino makes work for the those still discovering whether they wanted it to happen. Those aching for silence and violence and torchlights on dark nights.

In 2015 we won the Innovation Award with Suburbia at that year’s Melbourne Fringe Festival. Our next show, Dion, won Best Production and the Live Works Live Art Award at the 2016 Melbourne Fringe and the John Chataway Innovation Award and a Weekly Award for Best Theatre at the 2018 Adelaide Fringe.

This is Grayson was commissioned by Melbourne Fringe Festival in 2018 and won the Green Room Awards for Innovation in Site Responsive Theatre and Best Work for Young Audiences. The show was also nominated for Best Production and Best Performance (Ensemble). Seduction was nominated for the Green Room Award for Visual Design at the 2020 awards.

We make site specific, nonlinear, experimental, and immersive theatre. We devise original works that move audiences outside of traditional performance spaces and encourage spectators to explore suburban landscapes with fresh eyes—those places you walk past on you lunch break but don't notice anymore.

The suburbs are their own theatre, surreal, creepy, heart warming, cold, we just make you look. Gold Satino eats up bystanders and throws them into their shows. Someone putting their bins out in their slippers, a couple walking their dogs, a woman riding home.  

We want to occupy forgotten spaces with queer art and show audiences work that is bold in its intimacy and vulnerability.

Need to get in touch?

Davina Wright is our creative visionary, you can reach her on 0433 995 521.

Xavier O’Shannessy is our producer, you can reach him on 0406 581 438.

Our company email address is goldsatino@gmail.com