Stolen Time 1986

Stolen Time 1986

Stolen Time was the first experimental theatre commission offered by Performance Space (under Artistic Director Alan Vizents) in 1986, with funding from the Australia Council for the Arts.

Inspired by the musical term tempo rubato—Italian for “stolen time”—the piece granted performers the freedom to speed up or slow down their timing across music, movement, and speech. The production seamlessly merged physical movement, imagery, text, and sound. For the most part, it was built around live tableaux accompanied by live music and spoken word.

These elements could expand or collapse into movement to form new tableaux, embedding small compositions within a larger narrative framework to transition between scenes. Rhetorically, the work used “stolen time” as a literal analogy to address environmental issues threatening to steal our future, such as agricultural chemical use, water degradation, and land clearing.
 

Performers:

Sarah Blacklock
Nellie Grundel
Lucy Guerin
Sue-Ellen Kohler
Vineta Lagzdina
Reto Oechslin
Jenny Plumstead
Annette Tesoriero

Angela Zivkovics

Photographer Ruby Davies
Direction and staging Derek Kreckler
Musical development Vineta Lagzdina, Annette Tesoriero, Nellie Grundel, Caroline Wilkins.