bettybooke is a group of artists, based in Melbourne. Our hope is to create a rich and personalised experience of live theatre and lived relations.
Created works have an emphasis on the inter-relations between the art-work, the audience, and the specifics of site and space.
bettybooke works tend to fall into two (nearly) distinct categories: theatre works and audience works.
Theatre works are original new works and radical re-workings of classical texts. They fuse live music, visually arresting imagery, choreographic movement and poetic text, wielding these often disparate elements into a dynamic whole, intimate yet forceful, challenging yet engaging.
Audience works are site-based participatory events. Works are connective and often intimate in nature, and seek to engage and involve the audience in the creation and meaning of the work.
War Lounge (2008) allowed audience to ossillate between a lounge/bar (where they could relax, drink, and talk) and three small concrete bunkers in which performers examined the conflict between their own (sometimes embarrassingly) mediated experience of war and their desire to respond.
The Beast Banquet (2007) re-worked their previous show, The Belle, The Book, The Beast, into an invitation to join the performers at table to participate in a volatile pre-nuptial wedding party.
The Belle, the Book, the Beast (2005) is an original performance work blending text, image and movement, investigating the relationships between live presence and technology. The work blends text, choral movement and expressionistic lo-tech projection utilising performer-operated hand-held lighting.
2004’s All’s Well - remix fused a re-gendered Shakespeare text with a live techno DJ and harpsichordist in an immersive dance club scene.
The reinterpretation of the 1623 ‘tragedy of blood’ The Changeling (Green Room Award nomination for Outstanding Direction, 2003) assimilated classical text with a live Alice Cooper cover band, harmonic chant and '70s rock choreography.
