Orbiting the international space station
There’s an old junkyard
Where flowers grow through cracks
Forcing their way through
Making a home
Demanding to be heard.
Resistance
Despite all odds
Together.
We listen
We fight
We grow
How will we get through this?
Let’s hope
Together.
Conference on Hope. Photography by Sophie Minissale.
It’s hard to go online these days without being bombarded with violence, tragedy and bad news. The world feels increasingly impossible to look away from, whether it’s the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Macklemore being removed from Ed Sheeran’s tour, the mass rape culture of the Cornell 7 or the WA government’s complicity in Alcoa’s jarrah forest mining and the contamination of Boorloo’s drinking water supply.
After three years of development, Conference on Hope is the latest show from a collective of Boorloo’s experimental dance and theatre artists attempting to reckon with some of these global issues and closer to home stories. Co-created by movement artist and choreographer Zendra Giraudo, writer and theatre practitioner Eliza Smith, and composer and street dancer Cameron Park, the experimental dance-theatre work was created in direct response to current day violence happening around us.
The work touches on the genocide in Gaza, ecological collapse and flash flooding in Nepal, before bringing it closer to home with Alcoa’s bauxite strip mining here in Western Australia. Tackling issues on the global scale, they also interweave personal stories, movement and live sound mixing, delving into themes of grief, complicity and shared responsibility.
Conference on Hope. Photography by Sophie Minissale.
The Blue Room Theatre’s intimate studio space is yet again transformed, this time into the remnants of a littered wasteland, with the set co-designed by William Gammel and Cameron Park. Everlasting flowers force their way through cracks in the rocks, plastic litter engulfs a paddling pool and a bicycle sits on top, circling like the Earth’s orbit. In the junkyard, hope is something they are trying desperately to hold onto.
The Key Speaker is played by Eliza Smith, an astronaut from the International Space Station, where the sun rises and sets sixteen times a day. Smith delivers a personal monologue about the death of a loved one, which coincided with the beginning of the genocide in Gaza. Their grief and loss are physicalised through Smith holding a bag of water that gradually leaks, dripping down their body, perhaps signifying an act of comforting a child or simply their tears. Meanwhile, Giraudo and Park move in a frantic dance, weaving in and around the audience as they become the Ouroboros snake eating its own tail; an ancient symbol representing eternity, renewal and the cyclical nature of life and death.
On stage a small screen projects an array of videos from social media over the past few years, including footage of buildings being blown up, all the way to video games and makeup tutorials – the kind of endless scrolling we often get stuck in when we’re chronically online. It’s overwhelming, but you can’t look away. Otherwise, you’re bombarded with bright, flashing light from a moving bicycle operated by Giraudo. Later on, Park carries the TV screen on their back as it projects footage of Earth from outer space, as if carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. It’s shocking, but again, I can’t look away. The performance reckons with the all-too-common experience of being chronically online and witnessing violence and ecological crises, meanwhile feeling overwhelmed and powerless to stop it.
Conference on Hope. Photography by Sophie Minissale.
A standout moment was Giraudo delivering a powerful speech on their personal experience of being censored in the arts. This left me pondering a couple of different things, as Giraudo muttered: What’s it going to take?
What’s it going to take to be Heard?
What’s it going to take to be Understood?
What’s it going to take to be Free?
Conference on Hope doesn’t provide the answers because we already know them. The science is clear. But what this show does well is make a case for Hope.
It creates a special experience for an audience to gather in a theatre for an hour in 2026. Right now, for many people, it feels like the end of the world. We are witnessing so many global crises recorded and shared online instantly, it’s overwhelming and you can feel powerless.
But in experiencing theatre, dance or any performance, we come together for a brief moment to reflect.
Conference on Hope asks you not to look away, but to be in the room. To be present. To be alert to what’s happening in front of you. And to open your heart to the real stories. And have Hope.
Conference on Hope is on at The Blue Room Theatre from Sept 22-Oct 10.