What is ADRIFT about?
ADRIFT is a very theatrical piece of theatre with no performers - just participants co-creating scenes and miniature worlds for each other. The work is about loneliness through togetherness. It's trying to find new peculiar intimacies to be shared between strangers.
This is Counterpilot's most ambitious project to date - full of tricksy tech and detailed design, all serving a participant experience that is whimsical, provocative, and unique. It's large in terms of spectacle and scale, but also very small in the way it zooms in on the space between you and someone else.
Tell us your origin story. How did your company/show/collaboration start?
Counterpilot started as a team of freelancers who were all interested in making the same kind of work - driven by new interactivities, postdramatic impulses and renegade applications of technology. Since 2014, we've made more than 15 projects together and over the past few years we've formalised what we do together as a proper company.
Adrift came out of a number of impulses we had in 2019, but the project properly emerged through a Bundanon Artist residency. Five of us got to live and work together for ten days of intensive creative development on Arthur Boyd's estate in NSW, surrounded by wombats and wallabies. We drove down together, stopping at half a dozen lighthouses and spreading out our ideas wider and wider. In the two years post residency, we slowly distilled and tested and eventually premiered the work in 2022.
What is your creative process like?
Highly collaborative and iterative. We don't always know what the next step in a process looks like - sometimes it's one thing at a time pushing forwards until a pathway starts to reveal itself. I have two mantras that go side-by-side: TRUST THE PROCESS! and THERE IS NO PROCESS!
Sometimes sitting in the uncertainty is where the stickiest ideas emerge from. That, and bad ideas. I love bad ideas. You can't get to great ideas without playing with the bad ideas.
What is something unexpected that people will be surprised by about your show?
There are no live performers. Sometimes that comes off as a surprise. We worked with some exceptional actors to build the work and in some cases put them into full environments and staged blocking - but their performances are only captured in 3D immersive sound. Binaural audio can be very surprising if you haven't experienced it much before - it's a really effective sensory illusion.
The show also trades on surprises in general - there are lots of secrets, a lot of little reveals and discoveries to be made. People who think about things technically may be quite surprised at how certain things happened - there are moments of light and water in places where you maybe don't expect them to happen. People who don't think about things technically at all may just be surprised at the effect of what happens.
How do you want people to feel after your show?
In our early creative development, one of my descriptions on our wall was "like the feeling of cuddling a one-night stand" - there's something about finding a gentle lovely intimacy with new people, when we let our defences down and allow it to come through. There's also something about sharing an experience with people that might be a bit ridiculous or outlandish. Hopefully the show gives you a moment that feels so unique and strange and yet shared with a stranger, that afterwards you share a sudden bond and you just want to unpack what just happened together. I'd like to think this is the kind of show where you need to get a drink afterwards. Not to calm your nerves, but because you'll want to talk about it...
