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CRISIS ACTOR

Vidya Rajan

CRISIS ACTOR

1. An actor in a staged drill to prepare
first responders for emergency
2. (recent use, alt-right conspiracy
theory) Person faking as victim in a
crisis event

CRISIS ACTOR is a live art performance work for two actors and an audience, created by experimental theatre-maker Vidya Rajan with new media artists and technologists Sam McGilp and Mohamed Chamas.

Playful, probing and emotive, CRISIS ACTOR explores what it means to live in our current time of increasing emergency and increasing reality collapse – and the intrinsic link between the two.

Over 70 minutes each night, an audience witnesses and guides two actors as they audition for the role of a victim in a future emergency – chosen and shaped live by the crowd.

Constructed in real time CRISIS ACTOR utilises live mo-cap and avatars of the actors, simulated virtual environments, and a custom app for mobile. The show blends narrative fiction with live art, role-playing and social game design principles to plunge us into an alternate reality of our collective making.

As the show progresses, we are asked to re-evaluate this chosen reality, as choices become suspect, underlying games are revealed and the established visual rules of the work change. Audiences and actors are ultimately offered a choice between the overwhelm and stasis of reality denial and the potentially sublime action of rebuilding a sense of each other together.

Structured to hold new actors each night and developed specifically for performers from minoritised backgrounds, CRISIS ACTOR asks questions and excavates feelings that are increasingly relevant as we hurtle through this century:

Whose bodies are disproportionately affected by disaster and spectacle? 

Does future scarcity and fear cause us to extend inwards or outwards? 

And how will accelerating technologies of reality capture and visual replication play into this all?

Credits

Vidya Rajan
Creator, Director

Mohamed Chamas, Henry Lai Pyne, Sam Mcgilp, Ruby Quail
Technologists

Joe Paradise Lui
Lighting and Sound Design

Andrew Sutherland
Dramaturg

Information for Presenters

CRISIS ACTOR has undergone 2 of 3 creative developments, with the final slated for early 2025 – ready for final rehearsals and presentation late August 2025. It has been part- commissioned by Arts House, with additional financial support from Creative Victoria.

Haneen Mahmood Martin Producer

Project Partners & Acknowledgements

In everything we do, we acknowledge that we live on Aboriginal land and constantly learn from the wisdom of First Peoples.

Where we are and the history that precedes us informs how we work and how we move forward.