8 / 8 / 8
(8 Hours Work, 8 Hours Rest, 8 Hours Play:
A Capitalist Phantasm in Three Parts)
Part One: REST
Arts Centre Melbourne
Rising 2024
Created by Marcus McKenzie & Harriet Gillies
Fasten your PJs and desyncopate your circadian polyrhythms. It’s time to unsettle in for eight hours of experimental performance about the commodification of rest.
In 2022 we clocked on for 8/8/8: WORK—the first in Marcus McKenzie and Harriet Gillies’ triptych about work, rest and play. It was eight straight hours of life-coach gurus, micro-dosing techbros, office politics and piss. We laughed, we clapped, we shaved Jeff Bezos until he was smooth and ready for atmospheric re-entry.
Now the band’s back together. WORK is over. It's time to wade through the wasteland of REST. From 9pm until 5am, the plush backrooms of Arts Centre Melbourne will cushion our collective unconscious.
Spend the night with us, as we sprawl into an ambient meditation on care and control, digital detoxing, and the commodification of relaxation by the neoliberal machine. Also, paradoxically, the immense labour required to create a work about rest.
Clock off and roam.
It’s in the witching hours when things get real squelchy.
8/8/8: REST is the second in a trilogy examining the industrialised split of our lives into neat, equal slivers of work, rest and play.
Co-Creators: Harriet Gillies and Marcus McKenzie
Created and performed by: Harriet Gillies, Marcus McKenzie, Rebecca Jensen, DD Duan, Emma McMannus, Amrita Hepi, Brian Fuata, Patrick Durnan Silva
Producers: Thom Smyth & Bron Belcher / Unfunded Empathy
Dramaturg: Lara Thoms / Aphids
Production Design: Romanie Harper
Lighting Design: Dual Flow
Composer/Musician: Nina Buchanan
Audio Support: Matt Spisbah
Parafictional Trust Engineer: Derrick Duan
Production Manager: Harrison Grindle
Photos: Amelia J Dowd
This project was commissioned through RISING’s A Call to Artists initiative, a program supported by Creative Victoria and City of Melbourne. It is supported by the Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body.