Orpheus Turns

Performed as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival in 2017, this immersive and site-specific promenade performance invited audience members to walk with the mythic figure of Orpheus through the underworld, in his grief-stricken search for his lost love Eurydice.

 

Devised collaboratively by the cast and directors, and featuring original music and video projections by James Gales and Declan Mulcahy, Orpheus Turns crafted a series of dream-like, gothic vignettes, each of them reimagining a figure from Greek mythology.

 

With its circular form and reiterative structure, the piece ultimately became a quietly aching meditation on the cyclical nature of loss and memory, drawing out a cruel tension at the heart of the grieving process: a conflict between moving forward and looking back.