The Crying Room
A Zoom performance about grief and the internet

Created by Marcus McKenzie in affiliation with Club Greg International

Commissioned by Arts Centre Melbourne & Melbourne Fringe for Take Over! 2020

“McKenzie’s practice continues to wangle language, performance, narrative and humour into intense and memorable feats I feel privileged to witness. It is extraordinary to me, since we’ve been able to meet people and leave our houses, that McKenzie created The Crying Room during a year of such repressive and strange circumstances—all in the confines of his apartment”

- Chelsea Hopper, MeMo Review

Awards:

  • Green Room Awards: Contemporary & Experimental Performance

  • Melbourne Fringe: Best Experimental Work

  • Melbourne Fringe: Best Adaptation to Screen, supported by Theatre Network Australia

  • Melbourne Fringe: Art Unbound Award, Supported by Experimenta

Crying rooms are the small, soundproof chambers at the back of theatre auditoriums and churches where a person can experience an event via one-way glass and live audio feed without disrupting the congregation.

As audience members in 2020, are we not now relegated to the privacy of our own isolated viewing chambers - our very own crying rooms? But what if a crying room was actually a space dedicated to emotionality? A place not to conceal tears, but to invoke them?

A deeply personal and form-breaking work by Marcus Ian McKenzie about cataclysmic events and the transformation that becomes of them.


This project is supported by the City Of Melbourne COVID-19 Arts Grants and by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.

 
 
5 minute extract from online showing of The Crying Room Development for Arts Centre Melbourne / Melbourne Fringe's "Take Over" commissions. Presented live over Zoom in August 2020. About this work: For a long time I have been fascinated with crying rooms. These are the small, soundproof chambers at the back of theatre auditoriums and churches where a crying person can experience an event via one-way glass and live audio feed without disrupting the congregation. But what if a crying room was actually a space dedicated to emotionality? A place not to conceal tears, but to invoke them? I’m taking the idea of a crying room, where the traditional theatrical experience of social interconnection is artificially suspended, as a point of departure into the unknown depths of my affective imagination. In December 2019 I was at Arts Centre Melbourne to see Turnadot for my birthday. I’d become obsessed with Puccini’s iconic rendition of Nessun Dorma at the 1990 FIFA World Cup and was excited to see the aria performed live. After ducking several calls from my mother over the course of the evening I finally called her back during second interval to be informed my brother was dead and I should fly home to Tasmania immediately. I’m not sure if I’ll ever see Act III of Turandot – I don’t know if there is a crying room strong enough to contain the sadness. This is a project about crying. It arrives amidst the surreal collision of international catastrophe and personal tragedy. During arguably the most universal, unifying experience of our epoch, we float in an ocean of ever-fragmenting individual identities. On a macro level, I’m interested in the concept of mental health as not only a humanist category, but a political one situated within the larger framework of individualist capitalism under renewed critique in a time of heightened civil unrest, ecological disaster and pandemic scourge. This project is supported by the City of Melbourne COVID-19 Arts Grants and by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.
The Crying Room Crying rooms are the small, soundproof chambers at the back of theatre auditoriums where a person can fully experience an event via one-way g...