A hortative manifesto that boldly proclaims wasting waste is a waste

...a perfectly executed work that interrogated, at its heart, humans’ love of consumption and the ugly side to our consumerist addiction. ★★★★☆

- Jessi Lewis, www.artshub.com.au

Commissioned through Vitalstatistix’s Incubator program in 2019, Progress Report is a new solo performance about consumerism and waste. The work puts everyday decisions under the microscope to reveal seemingly contradictory, at times hilarious and often unbearable truths. A hortative manifesto that boldly proclaims wasting waste is a waste, Progress Report exemplifies the imperative need to transform the value of garbage.

Progress Report brings together long-time collaborators, dance makers and multidisciplinary artists Alison Currie and Alisdair Macindoe, and their mutual interest in the place of objects and subjects in performance.

Through their work they investigate human dependency on and intimacy with objects and how interactions between performer and object can convey tenderness, loneliness and isolation. The upcycled objects in Progress Report become friends, strangers, clothing, and environments, that can instantly be reduced back to packaging or rubbish.

Performed superbly by Macindoe on this occasion, and on alternate nights by Cazna Brass, Progress Report is riveting dance theatre that uses humour and whimsy to raise serious issues about our complicated relationship to waste. With its pared back staging, this is a work that could easily tour: indeed, it should be shown for as long as Styrofoam is with us.

- Maggie Tonkin, www.danceaustralia.com.au

Progress Report features several cubic metres of industrial plastics that have been intercepted midway through their recycling process. The work mirrors a dynamic state of change, reflecting this intercepted process, where objects, performer, text and choreography are in flux.

Co-direction, concept and choreography – Alison Currie and Alisdair Macindoe
Soloists – Alisdair Macindoe / Cazna Brass
Lighting, set and costume design – Meg Wilson
Sound design – Sascha Budimski
Sound design collaborator – Alisdair Macindoe
Creative producer – Jason Cross, Insite Arts
Choreographic development artists – Lewis Rankin and Kialea-Nadine Williams
Industrial foam waste supply and recycling – Cool Foam

Image credits Sam Roberts

Program Notes

Through Progress Report we are responding to climate change as a human problem, where human drivers and motives are wrapped up in social norms, convoluted and distorted by social histories and deeply embedded behaviour patterns. It’s like the work is a cornered beast trying to find its way out of an impending doom. It is crying out for help, envisioning preposterous and impossible alternate realities as a way to psychologically accept the situation we find ourselves in. Coming to terms with reality is presented as a kind of madness in this work, as it may well be, given how much as humans we love and accept story, fantasy and ambition as cultural guides.