Crack to Kevin with #singsorrow

So last month the Paper Ensemble team packed up the car and headed off on the 15 hour drive to Newcastle for 4 days.

Paper Ensemble is made up of 4 young and emerging artists (in various disciplines) from the Riverland in South Australia and we were taking a new project called Sing Me Your Sorrow to the Crack Theatre Festival.

Sing Me Your Sorrow is a participatory installation/space exploration. Inspired by the PostSecret community and The Obliteration Room by artist Yayoi Kusama and the need we all have to share our hurts with someone who will listen.

Sing Me Your Sorrow invites the audience to write/draw their story of sorrow into the space our artistic team claims. Over the course of an afternoon/day/month, the artistic team then responds to those stories with a series of short films and a unique song of sorrow. We took Sing Me Your Sorrow to Crack Theatre Festival (as part of This Is Not Art)  to test the concept and define the boundaries before pitching Sing Me Your Sorrow across regional South Australia in 2014/2015.

You can read more about the impetus behind the work on ‘Inside Crack’ with a lovely article written by Cass Ramsay here.

The heart of the project is asking people to share their stories and then responding back to those stories musically and through film/photography. Fabulous young musician Jess Weidenhofer and I worked together on crafting a musical response which we presented in a casual share back on the Saturday of Crack alongside photographic response from Nic Tubb and Brianna Obst. We’re still in the process of capturing the footage and collating the digital responses from the weekend to share online but in the meantime, we bring you ‘Ode to Kevin’.

The Ode to Kevin was created on Sunday night at the conclusion of Crack before our team fell into bed for the 15 hour drive home. During the Sing Me Your Sorrow installation someone had written ‘Kevin is awesome’ on the table and we thought this was a fitting way to finish the weekend.

We had a fabulous time and learned a lot about ourselves as artists and the future of the project, which we are keen to develop for presentation across regional SA. If you’d like to support future presentation get in touch paperensemble AT gmail DOT com, we’d love to hear from you. We’re looking for spaces, local support to engage audiences, financial support to pay artists, accommodation and installation materials.

You can also see some photos from the project on the Paper Ensemble facebook here.