Super Duper Close Up is the ambitious and adventurous new multimedia show from acclaimed UK company Made In China that will premiere at The Yard Theatre this winter.

Photo: John Hunter

An explosion of live film-making, hypnotic movement and memoir fiction, Super Duper Close Up is the story of a woman’s journey through a labyrinth of click-bait and pop cliché that asks: what’s a girl to do when everything is so perfect yet coming apart at the seams?

Using a green screen to create each shot, an epic movie is filmed live every night by a camera operator on stage. As an unsettlingly ordinary woman’s monologue of intensely everyday anxiety unfolds, dewy-eyed close-ups in exotic locations are projected via live-feed. The airbrushed online world snags against the mess of reality as the different strands of film and text, of on-stage action and green-screen creations, comically and unnervingly swerve away from and into each other. With Made In China’s hallmark barbed wit and looping narratives, Super Duper Close Up is a surreal and cinematic odyssey drenched in the fake light of a thousand insta-filters.

Creator and performer, Jessica Latowicki says, We want to put our finger on the gender politics of information overload: asking ‘what does it do to women if the culture of overload seems strongest in spaces owned by them, yet is aggressively sold to them and filtered through the male gaze along the way?’ And we’re asking this in innovative ways: taking an electrifying avalanche of words and exploding them against choreography and a movie filmed live each night. It feels intensely different to anything we’ve ever done. Now is the time to go beyond simplistic arguments around feminism and capitalism, and beyond familiar cultural forms. We’re interested in pushing and prodding and moving things to make something at once horrifically every day and nightmarishly otherworldly. We hope to question as many preconceptions as possible and ask how we might be complicit in problems.

From anxiety to memory, Super Duper Close Up interrogates the female experience of a hyper-mediatised society: the implications of being looked at, represented, refracted in an infinite stream of frozen pouts and desperate smiles. This ultra-modern exploration of the line between fact and fiction in the stories we tell about ourselves is performed in a startling innovative style. In an image-overloaded society where we frequently document our most intimate experiences, how do we separate the public from the private, the real from the staged?

Artistic Director of The Yard Theatre, Jay Miller comments, Made In China were the very first company to ever perform at The Yard Theatre. We're delighted to have commissioned this new show from them, and I can't wait to have them back on our stage.

Super Duper Close Up will play at the Yard Theatre from 13 - 24 November 2019.

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