FUTURE in the Melbourne Fringe Festival creates an exploratory safe container to speculate about the future in community – to dream, to worry and everything in between. Carefully crafted by Naarm/Melbourne-based independent theatre collective PIGEON PIGEON, FUTURE traverses many visions of the future sourced by hundreds of crowd predictions – from an open callout, previous FUTURE attendees and those around PIGEON PIGEON.
FUTURE is truly by community, for community – from the collective dreaming it fosters, to the gently participatory nature and the genuine care that is taken to meet a range of accessibility needs.
For 50 minutes, Emma and Geo invite us to future-dream together. The show contextualises our obsession with future-telling and stitches together verbatim predictions, exploratory dialogues and monologues, and tender scenes capturing the pulse of Gen Z existential angst and resilience. A few impactful props (papers, Jenga and even a toy crab!) pepper the performance and a screen is cleverly deployed for key visuals and to caption almost all lines – often in immersive ways.
Dystopia is perhaps easy to imagine in an age of ever-growing crises, with access to every horrifying world calamity on our phones – “global gossip machines in our pockets” as FUTURE describes them. The moments that invite us to lean into despair are compelling and raw, with imagined futures founded on real and valid present concerns: rising sea levels, worsening air quality and a lack of connection, to name a few.
They take care, however, not to leave us in despair and they don’t fall into the trap of offering a didactic solution either. We are gently reminded about all the positive predictions, the silly predictions, the simply OK predictions, and the little things we can do to move our lives along. Perhaps hope lies in the young generation, perhaps there’s greater space for queerness, perhaps a more sustainable way of living is possible…
As the entire show is rooted in collective visions and community dialogue, FUTURE is aptly participatory. Audience members are invited to join a massive Jenga game and read out predictions of the future. In a moment of nostalgia we read each other’s futures through the lore of chatterboxes (hand-made by PIGEON PIGEON) that are passed around – and towards the end – an audience member is invited onto the stage to engage in a speculative conversation about the future.
It’s a segment that can vary drastically in interest and insight depending on the selected audience member. That said, any meandering imperfection is real and speaks to the nature of the show. It’s the realness of literally being in dialogue with community and exploring potential pathways for the future.
Read: Book review: Travelling to Tomorrow, Yves Rees
As FUTURE unpacks, we have long been obsessed with predicting the future – from tarot, astrology and psychic readings, to science-backed predictions, we crave knowing what’s ahead. The uncertainty is often too much to bear. In a final round of audience participation, we are all invited to submit our own predictions of the future to be used in the following show. Despairing and hoping in solitude is hard, so why not have some company to ease the uncertainty, to find common dreams and concerns, and to discover potential futures you couldn’t have imagined on your own?
FUTURE
Trades Hall
PIGEON PIGEON Collective: Georgie Wolfe, Ryan Hamilton, Chelsea Jones, Seb Whitaker
Tickets: $34.50
FUTURE will be performed until 20 October as part of Melbourne Fringe Festival.
