Dinner, theatre and disagreement, Darebin Arts Speakeasy presents Peacemongers by The People this April.
Melbourne-based independent theatre company The People make experimental, personal, politically current, accessible and deeply moving performances that celebrate our collective humanity.
The latest offering from this unconventional collective is a real-life attempt at Utopia. Peacemongers is documentary theatre at its most absurd, and an act of rebellious and delusional hope.
Witness a group of ordinary people who set out to write a play about an ideal society – one in which bigotry doesn’t exist. With the show’s focus on societal polarisation, they’ve made it a musical to lighten the mood.
The action all happens over dinner, with audiences served a family-style meal as part of the experience. Dinner will be hearty yet simple, prepared by Moon Rabbit, an environmentally innovative social-enterprise café by not-for profit organisation Bridge Darebin.
Bringing this show to life are the creatives behind The People, director and co-creator Katrina Cornwell (La Mama, Malthouse Theatre) and writer and co-creator Morgan Rose (Melbourne Theatre Company, Red Stitch).
Driven by a shared queer lens, Cornwell and Rose use theatre to deconstruct systems of power and expose the inner worlds of individuals, beckoning the audience to look within. Self-professed pop-culture fanatics, they are fascinated by the collision of theatricality, mass-media and everyday life.
This attempt to create Utopia started as an exercise in rehearsal, spiralling into a years-long endeavour, ending with this seminal piece. Featuring an extraordinary cast of co-creators including Sonya Suares, Samuel Gaskin, Ibrahim Halaçoglu, Kate Hood and Zachary Pidd, the show brings together some of Melbourne theatre’s finest independent artists to imagine a way forward from this critical cultural moment.
“Peacemongers was born from deep conversations about the world we live in, how we inhabit it, and how we endeavour to improve it,” said writer and co-creator Morgan Rose.
“We, as a group of artists, have extraordinarily different artistic practices: from musicals, to storytelling, to community practice, to contemporary theatre experiments. This show is the collision of this varied expertise and our hope for a better world.”
The People welcome you to dinner, and the final stage of this quixotic undertaking, in which a powerful, integral and unexpected company of artists attempt to answer: What do we do with people we disagree with?
Peacemongers
Darebin Arts Centre, 401 Bell Street, Preston
Season: 24 April – 5 May 2024
Bookings: www.darebin.vic.gov.au
For more information, visit: www.thepeoplemaketheatre.com for details.
Image: Peacemongers by The People – photo by Pia Johnson