DISCHARGE (2012) RETURN TO PERFORMANCE MENU

“A tormenting thought: as of a certain point, history was no longer real. Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality; everything happening since then was supposedly not true; but we supposedly didn’t notice. Our task would now be to find that point, and as long as we didn’t have it, we would be forced to abide in our present destruction.”
– Elias Canetti

DISCHARGE was site-specific, collaborative, immersive ,and interactive performance produced by Gavin Krastin, Alan Parker, and Rat Western in association with First Physical Theatre Company for the Main Programme of the National Arts Festival (Grahamstown, South Africa) in 2012.

Playing off of the popular culture apocalyptic hype of 2012 and the Mayan Calendar Doomsday prophesy, DISCHARGE took its starting point from an imagined catastrophe that has left the performers and audience to play out a post-apocalyptic narrative.

The audience/’survivors’ were transported in army trucks to the First Grahamstown Army Base where the performance was situated in a military hangar – the last quarantined outpost. Here, the performers used the post apocalyptic narrative to examine the post apartheid/post-colonial/post-modern cultural zeitgeist. Through a series of borrowed, mixed up ,and mutated cultural archetypes and references, the cast attempted to make something ‘new’ from the ashes of ‘It’s all been done.’

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