From Under The Bed
By Stuart Roberts

I still cover my feet before I go to sleep. Years of education and adulthood have not reduced the fear of a breath, a touch, a cold dripping muzzle pushed into the arch of my foot. It still sends a chill through me, as I walk the edge between waking and what-could-be.

“Gnat’s Nightmare” spends its whole time out on this edge. In the place when all the little fears that wormed into your waking mind now burst forth: warped, fantastic, foul and fully-formed. Nightmares. As suggested in the opening scenes of this latest Free Rain Theatre Company production, and as shown in the many vivid and insurgent scenes to follow, dreams are castles in the clouds with their foundations in solid earth – in reality. “I like the idea that the subconscious has its links in reality,” says George Huitker, devisor and director of “Gnat’s”, “that no matter how far apart they are, there is still this bizarre connection between them. They influence one another.”

The day you’ve had is taken in by your imagination and at night spewed back in a fluid, forcible ride. In this production, the audience is taken on Gnat’s ride, and Gnat has had a very bad day. “Gnat is ever boy,” Huitker continues. “There is a lot of him in me, a lot of (lead actor) Murray Clapham, a lot of the kids that we interviewed for their dreams. People recognize themselves here, and recognize the nature of nightmare, which is deep rooted in phobia.”

It is a difficult task to drag dreams from their own environment without them tearing into a handful of vague, incomplete memories. To create a receptive environment on stage, Free Rain has erected a dreamscape of videos, computer animation, manifold lighting and sound, warped set design, and movement. The cast consists of 18 players, only one of whom is constant: the dreamer Gnat, who is sometimes the main guest of this phantasmagoric feast, sometimes the dish. The remaining actors become the nightmares which form, shatter, and reform around him.

Despite their exaggerated or absurd roles, the actors are constantly told to invest by Huitker – “if the actor doesn’t invest, what you have is a picture book. If you bring your own sense, your own baggage to the work, then it becomes 3-dimensional, it becomes like a dream.” The investment of the cast is evidenced in the way the play was written. Huitker began rehearsals without a script, just an idea of what he wanted to see, and a swag of borrowed dreams. From these, a play was formed between himself, the crew, and the actors. Each rehearsal, the imagination would be fed with provocative music, poetry, videos and animation, excited with creative and fast-paced exercises, funneled into the basic structure of a scene and cut loose. The result is a production that is energetic, spontaneous and congruent.

“It’s very fluid,” says Huitker. “It appears to be spontaneous, but like any good movement piece, spontaneity is the result of pinpoint precision. Our first rehearsals were exploring the work, the final ones in presenting what we had found in a smooth, dreamlike manner. While you’re watching, you feel as if you’re caught up in it. The dreams move and flow together fast so that they almost fade from the mind by the time the next one comes along. It gives the feeling as you emerge that you’ve just woken up.” With all the sharp and sure movement, the dizzying number of the lighting and sound cues, actors working off each other and the multimedia up above them, the work flows too smoothly to be stopped and analysed. No dreamer does that until the dream is over.

It is a bizarre dream and there is much humour and imagination in its bizarreness. However, while the entertainment may come from how novel the dreams are, the chill that comes with it is how familiar they may be. You’ve been here before – you just don’t remember. To encourage this involvement, Free Rain is having a Worst Nightmare Night on Friday 27th. Any person who comes dressed as their worst nightmare receives the reduced ticket price of $10.

So go along, see it, talk about it afterwards as you drive home to bed. Just be sure to cover those toes before you turn out the light. It’s been a bizarre evening. And night’s still to come.

October 2000.

*

Gnat's Nightmares Story
by Marion Ramsay

The advent of technology has seen a marked rise in the eclectic nature of many art forms not least of all theatre and "Gnat's Nightmare", a new production from Free Rain Theatre Company harnesses technology by setting a movement piece against a backdrop of computer animated imagery. The story itself, that of a young boy's dream lends itself to the fluidity and ethereal quality that can be provided by animation.

Daniel Jobson of Problem Child Productions, a Year 9 student is the animator on the project and his animations will be projected onto a screen that looms above the stage. "There's a fair few scenes in it," says Daniel. "There's one that just like a streetfighter type scene and then there's another one with an alien news presenter that's like a cycle of a day." Rather than just addind animated elemts to the production, Daniel has been working fairly closely with the director and the performers over the course of the project. "another guy who also works with me in the company is in the actual play so we've both been sharing the workload."

While Daniel hopes to get involved in the film making side of animation in the future, he's also keen to remain involved in theatre. "With the theatre," he says, "I really like acting as well. I like anything in that field - acting, screenplay writing..."

"Gnat's Nightmare" is devised and directed by George Huitker, who has been behind movement pieces such as Sam Shepard's "Savage/Love" and "The War in Heaven" and his own "Cyberbia". The play itself combines strong visual elements provided by movement, warped set design and the animation to tell the story of a nightmare. And like all nightmares, it is a story suffused with menace, with the ordinary and the good turned horrible by the subconscious mind of a young boy. The piece has a cast of 17, featuring the young boy, and 16 cast members that form the constantly changing dreams around him aided by the visualisation of the animation.

Daniel is confident that the production will be a worthwhile experience, having been present at many of the rehearsals. "It looks really good actually," he says. With his part completed, he can just sit back and enjoy the show.

BMA, October 2000.

*

A Visual Feast of Dreams
by Kathryn Favelle

"At the back of my mind, 'Dedale' has lingered like a big brother," says George Huitker. He's referring to the Compagnie Philippe Genty production that wowed audiences earlier this year. With its unique blend of movement, puppetry, illusion and music, the show took audiences into a world where anything was possible. It's a theatrical style that has inspired Huitker's latest production, "Gnat's Nightmare", which has "a lovely, younger feel but the spirit is Genty's."

Not that Huitker has aimed for a pale imitation of 'Dedale'. Rather, he's been inspired to draw on text, movement, video, animation, lighting and design to create on stage the subconscious of a boy who's had a very bad day and, simultaneously, to promote movement-based theatre in Canberra. "I think it's new for most people. I think movement theatre is not explored much in this town."

"Gnat's Nightmare", which opened at the Canberra Theatre Courtyard Studio last week and plays until Saturday, is the latest production from Free Rain Theatre Company. For a company that has built its reputation on strong interpretations of classic text-based theatre, movement theatre such as this seems an immense departure. Huitker, though, doesn't see the leap as being that great. "Our production of Sam Shepard's 'The War in Heaven' last year was already an indication of Free Rain's preparedness to try something diffeerent," he says. "And our productions of both 'Macbeth' and 'Equus' earlier this year were exploring movement."

Huitker has devised "Gnat's Nightmare" with his cast of 18. Although the original concept was his, some of the best bits came from others. He has drawn on his own research into dreams and the dreams and nightmares of his cast members to create a piece that evokes our night-time minds. "It began as a sequence of dreams bvut we quickly realised that would have ended up as a chaotic necklace of nothing. So we looked for a through-line."

That through-line is a young boy, Gnat, who's had a bad day but is unprepared for the night to come. Like any dream, Huitker says, the play is fluid, unpredictable, very visual and enveloping. "Some of it is disturbing," he admits. "But the dream language stays with you and I think the images we've created will stay inb people's memories. Whether people find the play experimental or wanky, they'll certainly get a visual feast."

The Canberra Times, 23/10/2000

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The arc of experience that fashion a child into an adult must pass through many conflicts. But perhaps the most telling are those that take place within - the pivotal battles around identity, authority and self-regard. This is perhaps best embodied in our relationship with the subconscious. When we experience the unacceptable, our emotional response is most often played out in our dreams. But often recalling the detail of a dream can be like trying to hold smoke in your hand. The insight dissolves like fog in the white heat of daylight.

In this splendidly realised piece of theatre, Director George Huitker and his young cast have brought that other world to spectacular, tangible life. Using an interesting mix of movement, dialogue and multimedia, the company creates a day and night in the life of Gnat, a young boy whose troubled school day of putdowns seeps into his mind to flood his nocturnal imaginings.

The classroom, the schoolyard, sport practice and the home come to refracted and fluid life as Gnat’s subconscious puzzles over the emotions of the day’s events. The warped and insistent world of the nightmare suddenly arrives. Tossing oceans and plummeting planes, unexpected nakedness and sour-minded clowns loom and shadow the youngster, buffeting Gnat’s attempts to make sense of his surroundings.

The story is so richly presented and produced that it is a credit to the set design and props teams. But the standout qualities of this production must be the 18-member cast made up of high school and college students. This is as cohesive, focused and consistent ensemble as I’ve witnessed in Canberra this year.

Dominic Buchanan, Citysearch

*

And book you should, especially considering how small the Courtyard Theatre is. It’s an intimate space for a nightmare, and you ought not to miss Huitker’s work.

It’s original, whimsical and telling - at times a light, humorous drama-movement workshop, and then something else again as a young boy’s image of himself is shattered with twists and turns of incomprehensible flashes of reality from the world of other children and adults.

Fortunately, as he real little boy on the video tells us, you can end the nightmare: “You just open your eyes”. And indeed that’s what Huitker does for us all - opens our eyes to the way the news and the fictions of adult society become mixed, refracted and reflected in the minds of our children.

Huitker’s young Gnat (pronounce the G, if you please) even has to face the nightmare of his own parents - in a house of carpets which eat you, taps which deliberately spray you with hot water and other unplesantries - failing him when he calls for help.

Though we are relieved when Gnat at last finds peace in slumber, and Huitker allows us a happy ending, his surreal pictures of computer games, war games, aliens from somewhere else in the universe, the classroom “blah blah”, playground hate and rejection, a shadow which turns against us, mysterious physical sensations and the mother of all red-back spiders, leave us knowing that it is not just little Gnat who faces terror every night. Too often we humans create worse terrors in such real places as the Middle East, and replay them nightly on TV.

For a small-scale theatre company in a tiny performance space, I was amazed by the high-quality production values in a piece which welds soundscapes and videos with complex lighting, colours and lots of movement by a cast of 18. Everything fitted together, everything worked, every detail was right.

Even if you feel dubious about nightmares, just go for the theatricality. It’s worth it.

Frank McKone, The Canberra Times