A co-production between the Perth Theatre Company and Sydney’s Griffin Theatre Company, Eight Gigabytes Of Hardcore Pornography charts the relationship between two miserable people who find each other in the online dating scene. Perth musician Rachael Dease provides the soundtrack.
“It’s essentially about two people meeting online,” Dease explains. “It sounds kind of like a simple concept but it’s very real – it’s definitely based in what’s going on in the dating scene at the moment. The main component is in confronting shame and what we feel about ourselves. It sounds really quite depressing and, look, parts of it are, but quite a lot of it is excellent comedy as well. It’s a little bit of everything, I guess.”
A veteran of the Perth music scene, Dease has been creating and performing music for some time now, but working in theatrical collaborations is a somewhat new experience for her. For Eight Gigabytes, she spent time in Sydney working with the creative team at the Griffin Theatre Company. “It’s a co-production between Perth Theatre Company and Griffin, so I was put forward from the Perth team to go over and work with Griffin. It’s a real collaboration between the cities, so there’s a real mixture of artists from Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. It’s probably becoming more of the future of theatremaking, now – for people to move cross-country and collaborate with different people more often. Because I’m based in Perth I’m really used to flying over east all the time – it’s like going to Bunbury or something, it’s nothing. I noticed there’s more of a block there for Eastern States artists; they’re like, ‘It’s so far away!’ and I’m like, ‘Pfft! Come on! It’s nothing!’ But it’s definitely happening a lot more. There’s FIFOs everywhere – we’re just artistic FIFOs.
“I guess haven’t been doing this long enough with the same people to really be able to just go with what normally happens,” she continues. “I have to very quickly get an idea of how the director wants to work, how they collaborate, how much input they want, dealing with how much input they want… it’s kind of like speed dating at the very beginning. You have to really quickly figure out the best trajectory. And music is so often the last thing to be added – not always, but often. With Eight Gigabytes I actually came on quite early, but it was still quite fast and furious to get it finished. It’s usually something that has to happen really fast. I go way and come up with something that I think is appropriate and then I hope to God that that’s what the director and the other creatives are after. And after that, it’s just a negotiation. The conversation is completely different with each project.”
TRAVIS JOHNSON
Eight Gigabytes Of Hardcore Pornography runs at the State theatre Centre’s Studio Underground from July 2 – 12. For tickets and session times, go to perththeatre.com.au.
