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“Games are just agreed sets of temporary behaviour out of which sequences of individual choices and lived experience emerge and become stories of tragic loss and heroic triumph,” says Robert Reid, co-founder of Pop Up Playground. Together with Theatre Works, Pop Up Playground is staging a “social, reactive and immersive” new production this coming weekend – one that harnesses the power of games to help the audience learn something about themselves.Read More
This is a Door | Pop Up Playground
Written by Nick Spunde
Sunday, 29 July 2012 12:20
For the next two weeks, when someone mentions the word “games”, you know they’ll be talking about all the faster, higher, stronger stuff going on in London. The games that have been happening at Theatreworks this weekend however have been an altogether different affair. For starters, the audience have got to play too.
This Is A Door is the work of Pop Up Playground, a collaboration between comedian Ben McKenzie (Dungeon Crawl), fringe theatre maker Robert Reid (Theatre in Decay) and artist Sayraphim Lothian. It takes its inspiration from the New Games Movement, a 70s counter-culturalist drive to involve people in entertainment that was active and participatory, rather than placing them in the passive role of spectators.Read More
Pop Up Playground – This is a Door
Posted by Taryn Hunter
When was the last time you played freely, without limits, like a carefree youngster? For me it had been years, so the chance to tap into that inner child for a couple of hours was too good to refuse.
My physical therapy could be found within the doors of St Kilda’s Theatre Works playhouse, guided by the skilled hands of the team from Pop Up Playground.
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This is a Door
Pop up Playground, Theatre Works
27 July 2012
Theatre Works
to 29 July
There are rumours that Cameron Woodhead and I tried to exchange a pash last night.
I’m not confirming or denying anything because what happens at Play Club, stays at Play Club.
But I know that it was the most fun I’ve had in a theatre and I want to go back and do it all again.Read More
AN EAGLEMONT performer will ask audience members to become part of the show during a unique three-day carnival this weekend.
Robert Reid, who has joined forces with fellow Eaglemont resident Sayraphim Lothian, will run This is a Door at St Kilda’s Theatre Works from Friday to Sunday.
The 35-year-old said the concept swapped actors and scripts for social games and play, using them to engage people within a group.Read More
The play’s the thing: let the adult games begin
July 23, 2012
ROBIN USHER
Melbourne is set to host its first games carnival.
AN EMERGING art form comes into the spotlight next weekend when the public is invited to take part in Melbourne’s first games carnival, This is a Door, at St Kilda’s Theatre Works.
”It is difficult to describe because people immediately think of video games or perhaps board games if they can imagine adults playing games at all,” says comedian and actor Ben McKenzie, one of three people who created Pop Up Playground which is organising the three-day event (the others are Sayraphim Lothian and her fiancee, playwright Robert Reid). ”There really isn’t a proper term for it yet.”
The theatre’s large space will be turned into a festive arena with bunting, lighting and sound for people to join in playing a series of games that include trying to stop someone jumping off a building, putting out the great fire of London and inventing ways to disrupt a wedding ceremony.
McKenzie says in contrast to the anonymity of conventional theatre audiences, the aim is to get people to participate.Read More
For three days and nights This Is A Door will take over St Kilda’s Theatre Works, transforming the performance space into a “public playground” – a carnival of interactive, large scale games to encourage the playfulness, creativity and curiosity that come to us so naturally when we’re young, but that we tend to lose as we get older.Read More
by Bernie DeKoven on July 17, 2012
Everything we know about Lemon Jousting was provided by Sayraphim Lothian and Robert Reid. Sayraphim and Robert are with an organization, in Australia, called Pop Up Playground, the most recent recipients of the coveted Defender of the Playful award.
by Bernie DeKoven on July 16, 2012
“Lemon Jousting,” explains Sayraphim Lothian of Popup Playground, is a game that came to them courtesy of Tassos Stevens from the UK company Coney. “The rules,” she continues,
“are pretty simple, you have two wooden spoons and a lemon, the object of the game is to bat other people’s lemons off their spoons while keeping yours on. You can steady your lemon with your other spoon, but you can’t clamp down with both spoons and run about, if you are clamping you have to stand still. The players can have three lives, or it can be a round robin, but usually it’s just played til everyone is wrecked.Read More
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