STEAL THIS PLAY

What is STEAL THIS PLAY?

An interactive theatre installation which uses visual art, physical performance and multimedia interactions to interrogate property and theft. It puts the audience in dream-like environments, forces them to be performance objects, and asks them to be unwilling subjects. It is currently a half-designed fantasy looking for a home.

An alpha test of STEAL THIS PLAY was performed at the Soho Theatre, Mon 12th Apr 2010, as part of Glue‘s Scratch Interact night. We are currently planning an expanded performance.

You can view video footage of the Soho performance here (embedded below), or download our report, which contains all sorts of information about the show: steal this play report 1. You can also watch this concept video, or read the current Steal This Production Proposal

Why does it exist?

We (the artists, most of the audience, the West) live in a world saturated by the media and ideologies of globalised late capitalism. It fills our social interactions, our sleeping and waking dreams. But we (the artists) have become fascinated by the everyday, popular and mucky resistances to that hegemony: shoplifting, fare-dodging, digital piracy, and the daily exchanges which sidestep the machinery of consumerism.

So we want to make art about that. We want to create spaces where the audience can explore its dreams about property and theft, where the borders of the minds and bodies of the performers and audiences can be crossed and redrawn, and in which we can fantasise seriously about new social relations.

Who is it by?

STEAL THIS PLAY is a collaboration between two emerging theatre artists:

Harry Giles is a theatre director and performance poet from Orkney, Scotland, currently based in Edinburgh and London. He has been directing political theatre and performance for four years, at the Byre Theatre and Barron Theatre (St Andrews) and on the Edinburgh Fringe. He currently directs Open Source Theatre. He has an MA in Sustainable Development from the University of St Andrews, and completed an MA in Theatre Directing at East 15 in May 2010. His website is http://harrygiles.wordpress.com.

Emma O’Rourke is an artist from an Irish background, currently working in London, centrally in installations and theatre design. She is interested in work which explores the darker and stranger parts of the mundane and everyday. She has a Diploma in Art & Design from Central St Martins, and is graduating (BA) in Design for Performance from Wimbledon College of Art this June. Her work has been showcased at theatres in London, and she has also worked extensively in design throughout the arts and design disciplines – at one point even working on the award-winning sitcom Gavin and Stacey.

What now?

If you’ve seen a production of STEAL THIS PLAY and would like to give us some feedback (please do! messages of love and hate gladly received!) then you can reply with your comments below or e-mail us at opensourcetheatrecompany[at]googlemail.com

If you’re interested in the future of STEAL THIS PLAY — would like to collaborate with us, offer us a home, or want to tell us to give up and get a job at McDonalds — then e-mail us at the above address. You might want to read our latest performance report (steal this report) or perhaps Steal This Production Proposal.

STEAL THIS PLAY is also part of the Property and Theft performance triptych, which will be next performed at the Tollcross Community Centre in March 2011.

We (the artists, most of the audience, the West) live in a world saturated by the media and ideologies of globalised late capitalism. It fills our social interactions, our sleeping and waking dreams. But we (the artists) have become fascinated by the everyday, popular and mucky resistances to that hegemony: shoplifting, fare-dodging, digital piracy, and the daily exchanges which sidestep the machinery of consumerism.

So we want to make art about that. We want to create spaces where the audience can explore its dreams about property and theft, where the borders of the minds and bodies of the performers and audiences can be crossed and redrawn, and in which we can fantasise seriously about new social relations.