NIDA Digital Theatre Festival 2020

NIDA Digital Theatre Festival 2020

NIDA's Digital Theatre Festival is an ambitious reimagining of the storytelling landscape

This event has now passed

The Digital Theatre Festival comprises six world premieres of works created specifically for the online space. 

These often transmedia works will evoke age-old wonder and surprise through farce, horror, sci-fi adventure, love stories, classic characters, and multi-media collage while anticipating what new times might bring as theatre continues to journey into digital realms. More info about each work is highlighted below. 

This is a digital festival which requires the audience to watch and sometimes participate online. All instructions for digital access will be forwarded on ticket purchase.

Tickets from $0–$25. Book your tickets HERE. 

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Roundabout 

6 characters. 3 bodies. 1 meddlesome audience. So many things could go wrong. 

Science fiction meets comedy as three young school leavers in an awkward love triangle meet on the video platform Twitch. In the chat channel are three skylarking digital humans who yearn to be made flesh for the first time in 13,000 years. With the help of the audience they possess the actors.

Roundabout is live streamed on Twitch. It’s a collaborative piece of storytelling and a brand-new way of doing theatre, a trapeze act that courts chaos.

Begin your journey into Roundabout on the show's Twitch, Facebook and Twitter pages.

Dates and times
8pm AEST, 4, 5 and 8 August 2020
11am AEST, 7, 8 and 9 August 2020

Tickets from $0–$25. Indicative running time: 100 minutes including three intervals. Content warning – M15+ (adult themes, flashing lights). Read more about the event here. 

 

Ghost Lights

Don’t miss the powerful concluding performance of this international participative project, connecting audiences around the world in a celebration of the importance of theatre.

Join us as some of theatre's great characters perform iconic monologues, and newly minted words. Untethered from their plays and plots, they have broken out. They roam the empty theatres, trying to connect once again. But being lost, they are also free… and appear in guises that might surprise as they speak their new-found truths.

Begin your journey into Ghost Lights on the show's Facebook or Instagram pages.

Dates and times
7.30pm AEST, 6, 8 and 9 August 2020
11am AEST, 8 and 9 August 2020

Tickets from $0–$25. Indicative running time: 45–60 minutes. Suitable for all audiences. Read more about the event here.

 

A Pox on Both Your Houses

Take your seat at home over three nights as three love stories, each set in a world of separation, gradually connect then resolve in a wondrous moment of connection with the online audience.

On the first night, ‘Tis a Zoom Bomber Juliet! revisits the plot of Romeo and Juliet with a tech twist. The world’s most famous lovers use contemporary technology to interact, but it keeps failing and they lose contact. Juliet goes in search of Romeo on various social media platforms.

On night two, Dear Betty transports us to 1918 to follow Betty and Allan in a vivid, sometimes surreal depiction of the impact of the Spanish Flu and the horrors of WW1 on a young Sydney couple.

On the final night, A Dinner for Two is your invitation to join a virtual dinner date with two young men, Conor and Ryan, who have just met online. Audience members are invited to cook the same meal before the show and to enjoy it while they watch the date unfold… Download the menu and recipes here and get cooking!

Written and directed by leading experimental Australian performance, theatre and installation artist Deborah Pollard.

Dates and times
Live streams
Part 1: ‘Tis a Zoom Bomber Juliet! – 7pm AEST, 4 August 2020 
Part 2: Dear Betty – 7pm AEST, 5 August 2020
Part 3: A Dinner for Two – 7pm AEST, 6 August 2020 DOWNLOAD MENU AND RECIPES

Broadcasts of all three parts
7pm AEST, 7, 8 and 9 August 2020
11am AEST, 9 August 2020

Tickets from $0–$25. Indicative running time for each part: 30 minutes. Content warning – M15+. Read more about the event here.

 

Lunacy

Immerse yourself in this epic 1960s pulp sci-fi adventure. A scientist has uncovered a mysterious alien artefact on the surface of the Moon. A daredevil explorer is the only one brave enough to conquer its impossible depths. A driven team race to understand the artefact before it kills them – or they tear each other apart ...

Begin your journey into Lunacy by investigating the mystery of Project Eclipse at the Archive, where you can unlock footage and images that will help you prepare for the culminative experience of this extraordinary project: a live mission to the Moon.

Dates and times
9pm AEST, 4, 6 and 7 August 2020
1pm and 7pm AEST, 8 August 2020
11am AEST, 9 August 2020

Tickets from $0–$25. Indicative running time: 90 minutes. Content warning – M15+. Read more about the event here.

 

Six

It’s Saturday night during lockdown. A group of strangers somehow end up in the same Zoom meeting. Mysteriously, one participant’s window is completely black. While the characters speculate about who is behind the window, their grasp on normality gradually crumbles as a series of strange and frightening phenomena unfolds.

Why is the room suddenly so cold? Is something hiding in the closet? Is that a child crying? The audience watches the paranormal forces unleash – anything is possible.

 

Dates and times
9.30pm AEST, 5 and 6 August 2020
11pm AEST, 7 August 2020
7pm AEST, 8 August 2020
1pm AEST, 9 August 2020

Tickets from $0–$25. Indicative running time: 50–65 minutes. Content warning – M15+. Read more about the event here.

 

Lockdown: Love and Death in the Age of COVID

It’s March 2020 and Australia joins the world in lockdown. Five fictitious, final-year acting students meet on Zoom as their worlds and lives fall apart and they make increasingly unsuccessful attempts to hold it all together.

Highlighting a sense of the absurd, the story takes us on an unexpected journey encompassing a virus-filled Ruby Princess, the boot of a car traveling across the Nullarbor, the dark web, an ICU unit, and a myriad of digital and virtual worlds. It looks at the rise of racism and anti-Asian rhetoric, deception, separation, the merging of virtual and real worlds, and love and loss. Begin your journey at the Lockdown website.

Dates and times
8pm AEST, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 August 2020
11am AEST, 8 August 2020

Tickets from $0–$25. Indicative running time: 90–100 minutes. Content warning – M15+. Read more about the event here.

 

This event is presented by the National Institute of Dramatic Art 

Details

  • 04 Aug - 09 Aug, 20
  • Regular price $25.00 Playwave Price

  • Audiences 15+
  • NIDA

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