In the eye of the performance: Cyclone Ita and I by Helen Ramoutsaki

My Wet: an appetite for the tropics project has grown to include a 60-minute script with the working title (well, it works for me) Click!

Like the original half-hour performance, the Click! script embeds feature poems with narrative but now the narrative is in the form of sonnets rather than prose.

The script grew during a creative development under the JUTE Theatre’s 2015 New Works Department program, when I worked with David Fenton, Timothy Wynn and Kathryn Ash. By the end of the week the collection of connecting or ‘coupling’ sonnets was complete and I was so immersed in the form, I was dreaming in sonnets.

In November 2016, I had another week with David, this time with support from the Douglas Shire’s Regional Arts Development Fund and the Douglas Theatre Arts Group. We had the run of the delightful Clink Theatre in Port Douglas, experimenting with staging and exploring ways of making the projected images come alive in space. I brought along some objects I’d thought of using and David, with his expert spatial sense, twisted and tweaked, pushed and prodded until it had worked its way into place.

I’m not going to say more about the creative development for now because the performance still needs time to grow. In the meantime, I’m sharing one image from a sequence I have performed elsewhere: the ‘cycloem’ or cyclonic suite of poems Cyclone Ita and I.

The second creative development of Click! with David Fenton in 2016 was supported by a Regional Arts Development Fund grant from the Douglas Shire Council and the Queensland Government with in-kind contributions from the Douglas Theatre Arts Group

The Regional Arts Development Fund is a partnership between the Queensland Government and The Douglas Shire Council to support local arts and culture in regional Queensland.