You know the set up. The party’s over and it’s time to leave. If you don’t, things may get ugly. Instead, you stay on, trying to recapture the spirit of an event as it diminishes. One too many pills, a bottle or 2 of vodka, and the party just gets uglier…

THE END OF ROMANCE is a passionate, hybrid and self-playable live performance event investigating performative possibilities surrounding the culture of forgetting, of endings and of loss in contemporary
Australian culture through the realisation of a durational live performance installation work.

The concepts of failure (as people, as artists, as cultural providers); the culture of forgettings and endings
(when we live in a world where selective memory, often mediated and technologically filtered/influenced, continues to stifle the possibility of change); and the loss of romance (where the possibility of dreaming a future is challenged and potentially diminished). This work will address these concepts without despair, by finding ways to confront the hard questions in order to work towards a live event that will instill some semblance of hope in our audiences (and ourselves).

The live event will be a fluid performance-installation where all media is played back by the artists in the space – machines and cd, mini-discs, radios, monitors and laptops... scattered on one long table. The audience will be invited, for a period of 30 minutes per night, to traverse an intimate space with the artists, as if walking into a technological storage vault populated by artists scouring through the media like archivists or excavators of a media-library with a vast catalogue of publicly or privately offered sounds, images and floating signals. There will also be moments where individual spectators will be taken out of the space for one-on-one interactions (inside a car for a sinister drive with audio instructions); to follow the trail of a lost artist in the gutters surrounding the venue, transmitting video material wirelessly back into the space; to sit at an isolated laptop or mobile phone terminal to chat with an ensemble performer based in Brussels.