HYPERSPIRIT
Created by Marcus McKenzie
Performed by Marcus McKenzie, Ryan Forbes & Maria Moles
Presented at Melbourne Fringe Hub - The Warehouse
September 24 - October 1 2016
NOMINATED: BEST PERFORMANCE, MELBOURNE FRINGE 2016
NOMINATED: BEST SOUND DESIGN, GREENROOM AWARDS 2016
...masterful...The work is a serious achievement and its performance is at times virtuosic... McKenzie demands attention, here and in the future. -John Bailey, RealTime
...firmly camped in the allusive maximalism of the postmodern author, sewing together genres including noir, the Gothic, Greek myth (Aristophanes' The Frogs appears as a significant intertext) and fable. As much as his role communicates with the spirits of the dead, McKenzie here seems possessed by Ginsberg and Kerouac, the TV mentalists who cold-read mourners and a pantheon of dark and declarative authors running from William Blake to Cormac McCarthy. - John Bailey, RealTime
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He's called the Hyperspiritualist. He knows your desires and your griefs, and will bring them into the light – for a nominal fee. His skillset is vast: hypnotist, clairvoyant, past-life regressionist, and conjuror of dead spirits. But some fortunes ought to remain untold, and even the dead are buried with their mobile phones.
Marcus McKenzie’s long-anticipated solo(ish) show delivers a psycho-mystical deluge of burgeoning realities: a stream-of-conscious eruption of body and tongue paired with the blistering accompaniment of fellow Tasmanian and VCA graduate Maria Moles.
Glibly comical and brutally personal, HYPERSPIRIT draws on experiences and imaginings of death and love: from the surreal to the tangible. Highlighting the human nature of the transcendent impulse, it simultaneously acknowledges the absurdities of supernatural practices and mystical thinking. This investigation is infused with musings on the nature of performance, presence and duration, drawing (often absurd) lines between the inherently performative and the inherently spiritual.
Photos Amelia J Dowd