Social Media Experiment: Check out Rhinocerous in Love, have a Rhino sketch done by local artist Joelie Croser… and maybe win an IPAD 2 for your efforts!

Blinded By Love, by Joelie Croser

One of the highlights of the OzAsia Festival calendar this year is Rhinocerous in Love, the Australian debut of an experimental drama that has reinvented modern Chinese theatre. The director Meng Jinghui is a bit of a renegade, pushing boundaries of what contemporary Chinese theatre is all about, and is known as the Tarantino of Chinese theatre!

The Adelaide Festival Centre has asked young people like me to help spread the word about Rhinocerous in Love by becoming “Rhino Helpers”. The original idea is that the person who has the most tickets sold through BASS citing their promo code wins an IPAD 2 (with WI-FI + 3G + 32GB valued at $839) – but the AFC are happy for me to take a slightly different approach.

I’m more interested in being a Rhino Helper in terms of this being a great social media experiment. I thought I would give the incentive that if I am the most successful Rhino Helper, I will give one of my ticket buyers the IPAD 2 instead.

I’ve also enlisted the help of my favourite local artist, the lovely and talented Joelie Croser, who was behind the Handbook for Girls exhibition at Urban Cow Studio I blogged about last year, to help make this competition more fun.

If you buy tickets through BASS (in person/on phone 131 246/online http://bit.ly/ng88FI) to Rhinocerous in Love using my code (RHINOCHERIE), email me at cherie@figtreemarketing.com.au with a concept involving a Rhino, and Joelie will sketch this. I’ll post each sketch on my blog in the lead up to the competition closing date (tickets have to be purchased using the code by 9am, 13 September). Then, I’ll produce a final post on opening night of Rhinocerous in Love  (16 September) containing all sketches and asking you to vote for your favourite sketch.

The person who comes up with the concept for the most popular sketch will win the IPAD 2, if I end up being the most successful Rhino Helper.

For example, my first ticket buyer (love you Mum!) asked Joelie to sketch a Rhino blinded by love (see above). This Rhino is walking a tight rope with eyes firmly shut, and cheeks blushing with the flush of love. Can you think of something equally zany, creative and quirky?

In addition, if you buy tickets using my code, you save $5 off the normal adult price for viewing this show. So, get your creative juices flowing! Joelie and I can’t wait to see some of the Rhino ideas you come up with!

Below are the steps to follow in full to take part in this competition. If you have any questions about this process, email me at cherie@figtreemarketing.com.au

“It’s Damsel Sophie’s world, and we just live in it” – Nexus Review – The Damsel in Shining Armour

Sophie Walsh-Harrington has achieved the impossible and made Celine Dion a magnificent b**ch in The Damsel in Shining Armour.

Celine Dion songs are re-imagined as the shining armour of a melodrama queen with delusions of love grandeur in this hysterical flight of fancy, a one-woman show written and performed by the force of nature that is Walsh-Harrington.

Damsel in Shining Armour is one of the many small gems that Nexus Gallery has hosted throughout Adelaide Fringe. But Miss Sophie would not be satisfied with anything less than me saying that she is the jewel in the crown!

Sophie isn’t your typical fairytale damsel. Cartoon birds don’t fly around her head magically twisting her hair into braids like Cinderella. A Prince Charming doesn’t awaken her from a deep sleep with a gentle kiss.

Instead, she has a cheap fan that acts as a stand-by wind machine for her hair when she is getting her grrl on. And she is having far too much promiscuous fun with men, real and imaginary, to go to sleep in the first place.

Bouncing around with the energy I can only muster up after six shots of caffeine, our fair damsel rushes from one situation to the next, worried that if she has a chance to catch her breath, she’ll discover that her life has become her greatest fear: ordinary.

Her repeated catchcry: “One must create melodrama in one’s life.”

And with the panache of a tigress wrestling a mountain ox, she tries to strangle each little bit of reality she can out of her life, with Celine Dion songs as her soundtrack.

Skip Miller’s Hit Songs – Brink Productions

A picture tells a thousand words, but what about the stories that surround a photo?

Of the subject, the photographer, the land it was taken in?

At the start of Brink Productions’ Skip Miller’s Hit Songs, we are shown faces of strangers.

Images of African people are projected onto a blank wall, small and slightly out of focus, and then gradually growing larger and sharpening into high relief. Actors capture these images on white cards and bring these photos forward from the wall.

Each photo represents a different story to be told. Just like it would be impossible to learn the story of every person living in Africa, many of these people remain a mystery.

But through Sean Riley’s beautiful script some of these strangers become familiar to us; people who we could easily befriend, or see some of ourselves in, or in the very least come into sharper focus.

The Red Shoes – Kneehigh Theatre

Red shoes represent glamour, desire and danger, so it’s no surprise that they are a popular trope in stories with fantastical elements.

Most famously, we have Dorothy’s ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz.

And then there are The Red Shoes at the centre of Hans Christian Anderson’s dark fairytale of the same name, adapted for stage by acclaimed UK company Kneehigh Theatre.

The difference in the journey between Dorothy and Karen, the anti-heroine of Anderson’s tale?

“Dorothy is looking for home, Our Girl is looking for herself,” says Emma Rice, Kneehigh’s director.