The Photo Box

The Photo Box description

Emma Beech’s art is both simple and hard to define. Labels like direct address performance, docu-drama, verbatim real-life portraiture, all seem to rob her storytelling of its straightforward warmth and worth.

Conversations with other people have always been central to her shows, but a few years back something happened that persuaded her to turn the lens on herself. Her mum and dad gave her a box of family snaps and, as she had a performance that night, she thought it might be fun to rummage through them for the first time in front of an audience of strangers.

Amongst all the embarrassing hilarity of hairdos and frocks was a shot of her mum, taken aged 40, holding her baby self, the little surprise born eight years after the last of her eight(!) brothers and sisters. Emma, at the time, was 40 herself and mother of 5-year-old triplets. Out of that instant electric connection between two very different women The Photo Box was born.

It’s about a town in regional South Australia where everyone knows you, and a girl left to make her own mistakes and grow herself up. Family, choices, memory and myth-making, and how the baby of a big Catholic brood became devoted to the search for unsentimental truths. Borrowing from cinematic installation, The Photo Box is a funny and heartfelt new work from one of our most gifted performers.

Event additional information

Credits

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The Photo Box is an Adelaide Festival presentation, and a commission and co-production by Vitalstatistix and Brink Productions, produced by Vitalstatistix. The Photo Box is supported by RISE an Australian Government Initiative, the Government of South Australia through Arts South Australia, the Australia Council for the Arts and Country Arts SA. 

The team acknowledge this work was made on Kaurna Country and on the Lands of the First Peoples of the River Murray and Mallee including the Ngawait, Nganguruku, Ngintait, Erawirung, Ngaralte, Ngarkat, Ngaiawang. We thank First Nations custodians of Country and Culture. We would like to thank Uncle Michael Kumatpi Marrutya O’Brien for his contribution to the performance, and for welcoming us and our audience to Kaurna Country each night.

The team would also like to thank: Alexis West, Angela Lee, Craig Behenna, Emma Luker, Heath Britton and Replay Creative, Joanne Mensforth and Revive Beauty, Maggie Oster, Michelle ‘Maddog’ Delaney, Ray Harris and Holy Rollers, Richard Higgins, RUMPUS, and Sam Roberts.

Creative team

Creator & Performer Emma Beech
Director Mish Grigor
Dramaturg Anne Thompson
Film Maker Shalom Almond
Production Designer Meg Wilson
Composer Jason Sweeney
Lighting & Projection Designer Chris Petridis
Costume Designer Renate Henschke 
Choreographer Larissa McGowan
Assistant Director Tim Overton
Welcome to Country Michael Kumatpi Marrutya O’Brien
Producer Jennifer Greer Holmes
Production Manager Emma O’Neill
Stage Manager Françoise Piron

FILM

Producer & Director Shalom Almond
Cinematographer Helen Carter
Editor Lauren Wells-Jones
Colourist Sam Matthews

Image Sam Roberts

Partners

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