Three lonely, dirty ‘brothers’ meet on an abandoned platform somewhere and embark upon a dark disjointed journey.
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So begins the loose, silent narrative of The Dark Party, a gothic sideshow theatre piece that is part Waiting for Godot, part surreal stunt show and terribly funny.
The Dirty Brothers Sideshow consists of Dirty Shep, Dirty Pat and Dirty Gordo. Their show premiered at the Fringe Festival in Melbourne in 2008, and has since played around the world to acclaim.
Co-creator Shep Huntly, who is responsible for bringing the world sideshow festival to Ballarat in the past, says he and his fellow performers have theatre backgrounds and The Dark Party is a product of their desire to tell a story as well as perform sideshow skills.
“We had sideshow skills to begin with,” says Mr Huntly, “but we came from theatrical backgrounds.
“So we were thinking about making beautiful images and then inserting sideshow stunts into them. The imagery, artistry and poetry come first, and the stunts then season it.”
“It’s a whole lot of vignettes, skits, little pieces between two and five minutes long, and they chop and change. If there’s an overarching theme, it’s mostly imposed by the people watching it,” said Mr Huntly.
The three performers have worked together since the late 1980s and early 1990s, performing as Theatre in a Suitcase in Ballarat, before taking on the world.
He says when the piece was first performed, he was excited to read reviews and discover what people had found as the story within the show.
People seem to empathise with his ‘hopeless, homeless hobo clowns’ who struggle to stagger through a series of increasingly weird worlds, hoping to find a party to attend. They find themselves wandering in an arctic blizzard, a tropical island and through a field of painful traps, encountering joy and sorrow in equal draughts.
They speak no words during the performance, which is instead driven by a powerful soundtrack and will be produced by Ballarat local Rex Hardware.
“Somebody said somewhere that this is the show Samuel Beckett would have written if he had run away with the circus,” Mr Huntly told The Courier.
”Because there is no language, because the hobos don’t speak, the show is accessible to everyone, across the world. It’s speaks all languages, because it has no words at all.”
The Dark Party will be performed on Australian soil for the first time in three years at the Ballaarat Mechanics’ Institute on December 15. Tickets available from trybooking.com
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