Endings by Tamara Saulwick, score by Peter Knight, songwriting Paddy Mann

Commissioned by Arts House & Performance Space.

2015 Green Room Award winner:'Design & Realisation'. Nominated for: 'Contemporary & Experimental Performance' Green Room Award.2015 Helpmann Award:'Best New Australian Work'

'Endings is an elegant, economical production that delivers on its promise to stay with you long after you leave.' ****4 stars Kate Hennessy, The Guardian

'It's not so much about grief or loss as death's strange intimacy'. ****4 stars, Rebecca Harkins-Cross, The Sydney Morning Herald.

Part chamber concert, part performance work, Endings is a meditation on cycles and the ending of things. Using portable turntables, reel-to-reel tape players and live performance, Endings finds form for experiences both ordinary and extraordinary that cluster around death, dying and afterlife.

Endings is built in part from one-on-one interviews: people's stories, reflections, and voices. These recordings are cut on to bespoke vinyl records and embedded within a richlytextured electro-acoustic sound design that is operated, accompanied, and extended through live performance and song. The performance also features the songs and vocals of acclaimed singer/songwriter Paddy Mann (Grand Salvo).

Voices of the living emerge ghost-like from records, performers converse live with the taped voices of past conversations, tape loops carve round and round through the space, and song floats across the familiar crackle of records ending.

ARTISTS

Concept/text/performance Tamara Saulwick

Set/lighting design: bluebottle - Ben Cobham

Sound composition/performance Peter Knight

Song/songwriting/performance Paddy Mann

Dramaturgy Margaret Trail

Technical Manager/ audio engineering/ operation Nick Roux

Costume design Harriet Oxley

Production managment/ lx op Emily O'Brien

UPCOMING

Push Festival Vancouver January 2018

On the Boards Festival Seattle February 2018

PRESENTATION HISTORY

Dublin Theatre Festival, October 2017

Canadian Stage's biennial Spotlight series in Toronto, April 2017

Sydney Festival- Performance Space at Carriageworks, Jan 2015

North Melbourne Town Hall, Arts House , Melbourne, May 2015

"Running at just an hour, Endings is an elegant, economical production that delivers on its promise to stay with you long after you leave. Its subject matter is difficult by default and impossible to hear without grafting onto it your own fears and faces. But it is uplifting too, and comforting, offering a sense that death is an experience shared with the living, even if only momentarily."