THE PROPHET: REMIXED
2014 & 2016
My First work as a Director in Sydney in March 2014; this was in partnership with BYDS and performed as a promenade performance at Bankstown Arts centre, Nitro's new home in Sydney. We commissioned 27 artists to each respond to one of the 27 chapters in Kahlil Gibran's famous book, The Prophet. The results were amazing, with poets, musicians. choreographers, filmmakers, visual artists, installation/live artists, all contributing their remarkable talents to this epic piece.
In 2016 we revived the show in a single performance space in Bankstown. The 27 artists were joined by a local choir and other community participants
Bankstown in Western Sydney, is the home of BYDS, a small yet perfectly formed young people’s arts company. It is also home to significant Vietnamese and Lebanese populations, resulting in a fabulous mix of food stalls and bakeries. The Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran is celebrated there with a statue in the grounds of Bankstown’s library and I was asked to be involved in an adaptation of his most famous work, The Prophet.
Staging a series of poems theatrically is always going to be a challenge, but I was to discover one of Bankstown hidden secrets: living within its boundaries are some incredibly talented artists. So when I proposed that we give each of the 28 chapters of Gibran’s book to a different local artist to interpret in any way they wanted, I was inundated with responses. The artists could do anything they wanted, the only rule was that the performance must not be longer than three minutes. I assembled a group of poets, choreographers, storytellers, songwriters, painters and filmmakers who delivered some extraordinary results. We used the whole of Bankstown Arts Centre, which included several rehearsal rooms, a theatre, galleries and studios, corridors, foyers and a lapidary (Google it…) workshop to create a promenade production involving three groups of audiences taking three different routes that converged for a grand finale in the Arts Centre’s courtyard.
We called it The Prophet: Remix.
THE PROPHET 1
The production was very successful so the next year we revisited the idea. There had been one space in the first year’s show that had worked particularly well; a mock Arab-style café, complete with menus and waiters. The items on the menus were chapters from The Prophet and audiences could choose, say, the chapter on Love. The waiter would then go off and bring back a poet to perform his or her response to that chapter. Once performed, the waiter would “clear away the finished” poet and the audience around that particular table could choose their next “dish”.
So in its second iteration, we made the whole show a restaurant – called The Tower in the Sky Café. 20 tables, each with its own waiter, were visited by different artists in turn who performed just to the 5-6 around the table before moving on – a 28 course degustation menu. There were occasional ‘cabaret’ performances to the whole room to bring the audience together. Many of the first year’s artists returned and we added more musicians, a choir and a close-hand magician (who interpreted the chapter on Love with some beautiful card tricks…).
THE PROPHET 2
From my director’s perspective, the evening was about clockwork timing, if one table’s performance was delayed by just a few seconds it would create a bottleneck that would kill the flow of the whole room. Thankfully all went well and I even found a bit of space to perform myself…