TENDERNESS
Tenderness is a play based on the combined texts of two Australian playwrights - SLUT by Patricia
Cornelius and UGLY Christos Tsiolkas’s. Ugly is a study of frustration through the lens of a high-school drop out (Slim), who commits a seemingly senseless act of violence. Patricia’s SLUT takes its cue from a horrific real-life teen shooting spree incident. It generates a fictionalised history of the killer’s ‘lover’, dubbing her ‘Lolita’, and speculates on what kind of personal story might lie behind the tabloid label of a ‘party girl’.
The play opens a disturbing and macabre world of the teenage playground where notions of gender, sexuality, love, aspirations and hate create a world of disorder and chaos. Does being a Youth necessarily mean to be 'volatile"? Is it to be read alongside normative notions of childhood development where we go from being child, teenager to adult in some kind of ahistorical vacuum?
The Set-Design of the play is the undulated expanse of a skatepark, populated primarily by the city’s ‘undesirable elements’, which provides endless lines to ride through, fabricating and discarding notions of identity and selfhood. Inside, characters perform the slippery turf that is adolescence,an intensely contested territory between locations of childhood and adulthood. Here, the teen image contains not only agreement and commonality but the antagonism and contradiction buried within a common experience of becoming an adult. Tenderness explores the labyrinth that is the contemporary teenage mind. “We were trying to get to this place—it was me and you, I think, and some other people—and it was a little like my house … Although, well, it was my house, but it didn’t look like my house, somehow. And we were trying not to be seen.”
Concept and Direction - Amitesh Grover
Performance Tutor & Associate Direction - Tushar Pandey
Production Design - Anagram Architects
Set & Electronic Design - Vishnu Barve
Hip Hop Training - Rajan Rathore
Grafitti - Anpu Varkey
Sculptures - Rishu Shankar
Tenderness is a play based on the combined texts of two Australian playwrights - SLUT by Patricia
Cornelius and UGLY Christos Tsiolkas’s. Ugly is a study of frustration through the lens of a high-school drop out (Slim), who commits a seemingly senseless act of violence. Patricia’s SLUT takes its cue from a horrific real-life teen shooting spree incident. It generates a fictionalised history of the killer’s ‘lover’, dubbing her ‘Lolita’, and speculates on what kind of personal story might lie behind the tabloid label of a ‘party girl’.
The play opens a disturbing and macabre world of the teenage playground where notions of gender, sexuality, love, aspirations and hate create a world of disorder and chaos. Does being a Youth necessarily mean to be 'volatile"? Is it to be read alongside normative notions of childhood development where we go from being child, teenager to adult in some kind of ahistorical vacuum?
The Set-Design of the play is the undulated expanse of a skatepark, populated primarily by the city’s ‘undesirable elements’, which provides endless lines to ride through, fabricating and discarding notions of identity and selfhood. Inside, characters perform the slippery turf that is adolescence,an intensely contested territory between locations of childhood and adulthood. Here, the teen image contains not only agreement and commonality but the antagonism and contradiction buried within a common experience of becoming an adult. Tenderness explores the labyrinth that is the contemporary teenage mind. “We were trying to get to this place—it was me and you, I think, and some other people—and it was a little like my house … Although, well, it was my house, but it didn’t look like my house, somehow. And we were trying not to be seen.”
Concept and Direction - Amitesh Grover
Performance Tutor & Associate Direction - Tushar Pandey
Production Design - Anagram Architects
Set & Electronic Design - Vishnu Barve
Hip Hop Training - Rajan Rathore
Grafitti - Anpu Varkey
Sculptures - Rishu Shankar