Skin

A new in-theatre work inspired by the monstrosity of becoming.

SKIN is a dark nightmare of monstrous sensuality reflecting on a complex phase in life: the transition into adulthood, when young adults are exploring risk, danger, drugs, and sexuality. In SKIN, the performers go through a progression from humans as cultural identities and social beings toward organisms, and physical matter. Through initiation, rituals, and physical trials that serve as a catalyst for change. The performers contract physical anomalies referencing internal struggles and feelings of the outsider, they become monsters.

SKIN is inspired by graphic novels like Charles Burns’ Black Hole, and Julie Maroh’s Blue Is The Warmest Colour. SKIN springboards off this source material, finding new performance and visual languages, with two significant new collaborations for Branch Nebula extending its on-going inquiry into task-based, endurance, and physical performance.

Six exceptional & diverse young professional performers (18-25) will create the world onstage, their bodies tranformed by prosthetics and masks by visual theatre magicians Erth. They inhabit a world of wet, watery, slippery skin, gashes and openings, aberrant anatomies evoked by internationally exhibited artist working at the nexus of art & science Helen Pynor.

SKIN shifts between realities, between fantasy, dreams, and altered states, conjuring a world rarely seen on our stages:  an exciting, terrifying world that defies logic, the logic of adulthood, anyhow.

First Creative Development July-August 2016.
Second creative development January-February 2017.