call

Background: 'Call' is a 40-minute solo live performance presented in the international 'Performing, Writing' program directed by Julieanna Preston. It was presented to the public at Bats Theatre, Wellington's home of independent theatre as part of The Performance Arcade, an annual festival of new performance work in Wellington curated by Sam Trubridge. 'Call' extends Douglas' performance installation works that have innovatively employed megaphones, to make a new work for a seated live interactive theatre experience. Contribution: The fields of contemporary art and live performance are increasingly exploring the format of the performance lecture. 'Call' contributes to research into performance lectures by building on the well know performance-making device of call and response, with the use of megaphone record, play and replay devices, to produce a new technique of producing an unpredictable live-event involving the interaction of performer calls and audience responses. A carefully crafted and 'called' text invokes a collective audience-performer live enquiry into creative risk, the ethics of invoking human lives and deaths across generations, and acts negotiating saying, the sayable, the sound and the heard. Using voice and sonic play and re-play devices, the work layers multiple voices and soundings evoking interconnections of the live and the said to be dead; of the human and the other than human. 'Call' generates a unique way to affect audience reverie upon relations between speech, listening, hearing, calling, responding, and the making and living of ethical judgement. Significance: Call was peer reviewed by both the 'Performing, Writing' program review process and The Performance Arcade festival curatorial selection process, that were funded by Creative New Zealand national government and the City of Wellington and commercial partners. It was presented alongside leading artistic researchers from USA, Europe, UK, Australia and New Zealand.