A Ridiculusmus virtual trilogy: grief, laughter and the performance.In Die! Die! Die! Old People Die!

Abstract

In May 2020, David Woods and Jon Haynes, performers and artistic directors of Ridiculusmus, presented the trilogy ‘Dialogue As The Embodiment of Love’ in the form of a three-day online seminar series, via the online conference platform Teams. It featured a live online ‘directors’ commentary’, of each of the productions in the trilogy, alongside a screening of extracts on Youtube with David Woods in Melbourne and Jon Haynes in London. This is a discussion paper highlighting themes in Day 3 of the seminar series On the final day of the series, Woods and Haynes discussed the content of four out of seven extracts in the above Youtube Playlist, taken from the 82 minute ‘epic’ performance of Die! Die! Die! Old People Die! (DDDOPD), the longest play in the trilogy. The item here is the documentation of the 3 day symposium. This is supporting document contains a summary list of points in the directors’ discussion around each clip. The reader will probably appreciate listening to the accounts of the creative process directly from the directors in the Vimeo seminar recording above. The video clips of the production that I edited are not available on the Vimeo link but have been released as evidence of the Trilogy format. The play is an appropriate focal point for the discussing the outcomes of trilogy as a whole, because it marks a shift in the preoccupations in the previous two works and in my commentary I argue that Ridiculusmus’ dramaturgical approach offers an important element in provoking affective responses as part of the ‘treatment’ of issues associated with death and bereavement