Wrecking Ball

Wrecking Ball portrays a male photographer doing a photoshoot with a female celebrity and the performance is about consent, power, authorship and putting words in other people’s mouths. As the audience files through the room and takes their seats, the female celebrity, with cropped, blonde hair, sits on a tall stool, disengaged with the audience. The male photographer, on the other hand, has just shaken up a cocktail for himself, and tells the audience to make themselves at home. ‘There’s no pressure from me’, he tells us.

The actress engages the photographer and a conversation ensues about what she is trying to achieve in this photoshoot. She says she wants to be ‘for real’, but at the same time, attempts to be what she thinks the photographer wants her to be, telling him, ‘I can do that.’ The interaction is uncomfortable to say the least.

As the performance goes on, the celebrity manages to achieve the ‘danger and destruction’ that the male photographer is telling her she needs to create. But as she follows his instruction to take a bite of the pink ice cream (read: mashed potato), the illusion is shattered. She confronts him, ‘I don’t believe any of the words you’re saying. I don’t believe any of the words I’m saying, either.’

She sits herself down in the middle of the audience — a seat the photographer himself had been occupying a short time ago — telling the audience to relax, take it easy. She pulls out a copy of the script, and ‘asks’ a member of the audience their thoughts of the performance. The audience member reads from the script, literally having words put in their mouth.

The discomfort felt at the start of the interaction doesn’t get any less as the play goes on. The celebrity ends up contradicting a lot of the answers she gave the photographer, and we get the sense that his responses are jeering and undermining. Like everything she says or does is some kind of joke to him. She says, ‘I just want to be myself’, and he says, ‘Right, the real you.’

Action Hero — the brains behind the production — position Wrecking Ball as a story that questions how much people are willing to ‘go with the flow’, in their attempt to be ‘real’ and their authentic self at the same time. It questions how the subtle abuses of power and the male gaze shape our relationships with each other, with art and with language. How much of the ‘real’ is the real deal?

Wrecking Ball by Action Hero 
Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall
Wednesday, 31 May to Saturday, 3 June 2017
http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/arts-and-culture/arts-house