Adriane Daff's play uses YouTube tutorials to explore cult membership and the contemporary condition
Posted
Ara, the protagonist of Adriane Daff's play Era of New Paradise, is a YouTube sensation and a cult survivor.
These aspects of Ara's life might not seem related, but the one-person-show, premiering in Sydney this month, suggests that her upbringing and eventual success emanate from the same condition: we all want to belong, but at the same time we want to be special.
Daff, an actor, writer and theatre maker originally from Perth, wrote the work and also plays Ara. She says her latest project began with self reflection.
"I think that we are all fascinated with cults but my fascination went a little bit deeper, because I'm sure that, under different circumstances, I would have ended up in one," she says.
She doesn't think this trait is unique to her, however, or even that it is rare.
"It's a fundamental characteristic [of human beings] that we believe. It's what makes us the animal that we are, and it's why we've survived," she says.
"So I was really interested in presenting a piece where the audience might come in with one idea about cults, and then come out of it thinking: all people can be all things. It's possible that under different circumstances, we could all have ended up in cults."
To achieve this, Daff tapped into the greatest development in group behaviour in recent times: social media. The result is a play that draws uncomfortably close comparisons between our traditional ideas of cults (weird haircuts, smocks and compounds), and the digital collective that many of us accept as normal.
"All you need to have a cult is a charismatic leader who posits a problem and also offers you the solution," Daff says. "Social media is a charismatic leader."
YouTube speak and cult language
Era of New Paradise unfolds as a series of direct addresses from the character of Ara, in the form of YouTube-style vlogs (video blogs).
The YouTube format mimics the intimate and personalised way that cult leaders communicate with their followers. It also reflects the methodology by which cults are built.
"The problem that [social media] presents us is: 'Are you doing life well? Are you going to the right places on vacation? Do you look as good as you could? Is there another way you could be dressing?'" Daff says.
"And then the answer we're provided is the social media influencers that say 'I'm going to show you how to do makeup, this is how I do it, I'm charismatic, watch my video.'"
Daff watched hours of YouTube tutorials as research for her script, and conjures the energy and self-affirmation of the genre in Ara's initial addresses. Terms like 'GRWM' and 'favourite things videos', and exclamations like "Catch a vibe!" and "YAAAAAS", also lend authenticity to the text.
But as the show progresses, and the audience is given a growing insight into Ara's past, this digital dialect is placed in tight proximity with the esoteric and biblical language that she was surrounded with growing up. The suggestion seems clear: to the uninitiated, each of these speech forms is as mysterious as the other.
"Any subculture, any group or workplace, has its own language that you have to decipher, and in using it you're signifying to other people 'I'm in that group' … and that you have some sort of intellectual or [in the case of cults] spiritual advantage," Daff says.
Theatre time vs internet time
One of the challenges Daff and her creative team (director Eden Falk and dramaturg Mish Grigor) identified in producing Era of New Paradise was the distinct ways an audience consumes social videos and theatre.
"We talked about this tension between theatre time and internet time," Daff says.
"In internet time you can watch two minutes of a video and then turn it off. But I've got a captive audience in a theatre … how do you tease that out?
To tackle this, Era of New Paradise eschews a linear narrative in favour of a structure that more closely resembles the experience of discovering a YouTube personality.
The audience first meets Ara as an established YouTube 'star', with 200,000-followers. From there, the story unravels backwards, Ara's facade devolving along with it. Digging through her back-catalogue, we start with the most recent and polished work before reaching, eventually, the fragile and clumsy videos she produced when she first left cult life.
This structure also imitates the psychological methods sometimes used by cult leaders to break down their followers' sense of self, gradually stripping back layers of identity.
Mixing forms
While Era of New Paradise is structured around monologues, the show incorporates a number of visual elements: expect an automated ring light that doubles as a saint's halo, and dance.
Daff's polyphonic approach to stagecraft is a result of her work with Perth collective The Last Great Hunt, of which she was founding member.
"A question that people ask me all the time is: how on earth do you market that company?" she says.
"You've got stuff that's script-based (The Talk, which just finished a run at the Subiaco Theatre), visual theatre (Bruce, which showed at the Edinburgh Fringe last year) and you've got a show that's a one-on-one experience in a caravan (Monroe and Associates, which premiered in 2015). You're like a six-headed monster, how does it work?"
Daff says working on a solo show has revealed, more clearly, the role she plays within that mix. "It's been really great because its a combination of all the skills that I bring to any devising process, which is doing a bit of writing, doing a lot of stuff on the floor, [but] still having an eye on movement and image."
Ultimately, she says, the goal is to "try and make work that is of a really, really high quality that is in reaction to what's going on in contemporary Australia. That might mean taking a bit of a risk, but ultimately it's going to be really entertaining and hopefully accessible for lots and lots of people."
Era of New Paradise runs from April 25–28 as part of Batch Festival, an initiative of Griffin Theatre Company.
Topics: arts-and-entertainment, theatre, performance-art, cults, sydney-2000
