🔮 FUTURE
Co-creator — 2024 | Melbourne Fringe
An exhilarating crowd-sourced vision of the future assembled by award-winning theatre-makers.
We asked hundreds of people just like you to predict the future, and we got hundreds of different answers. Some prophesied desolate wastelands while others saw a world which “looks bright… and gay. bright and gay."
FUTURE is a devised verbatim work built from real predictions about the future, combining utopian aesthetics, visual poetry, and a lofty vision—to create a map for how to navigate the future.
FUTURE creates a space to consider our fate on our own terms and imagine a future which might just turn out ok.Join us for an evening of fears, dreams, hopes, and laments as we chart a universal destiny. The future’s calling, and we need you to pick up.
Created by Geo Valentine, Em Batty, Chelsea Jones, Seb Whitaker, Georgie Wolfe, Mads Lou, and Ryan Hamilton
Monique Nair
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ from ArtsHub
⭐️⭐️⭐️ from The Age
The zoomers are terrified by what the future might bring, and they have every reason to be.
Growing up as digital natives with the omnipresent shadow of Big Tech, amid ongoing climate catastrophe, the burgeoning resurrection of the far-right, rising cost of living and other horrors, this generation rightly can’t see a steady future.
Responding to this is the queer theatre collective PIGEONPIGEON, whose experimental play FUTURE invites the audience to think through and about the future alongside them. In this devised verbatim work that incorporates visual poetry, performers Geo and Em begin the show by laying out their worries; but how will they get an unpredictable audience to emphatically engage and speculate about an equally unpredictable future?
That’s the challenge. Through activities that are at first softly encouraging, FUTURE culminates in selecting a random (but consenting) audience member to enter the performance to chat about their thoughts.
This is a performance that’s clearly still in development; its format may very well serve as a preliminary act towards more. Still, PIGEONPIGEON’s attention to accessibility should be applauded – as perhaps it’s one of the first things many like them would like to see made commonplace in the future.
Reviewed by Cher Tan
