“Don’t walk alone, don’t leave your house,” Melbourne playwright and poet Izzy Roberts-Orr cautions. “But also, don’t stay inside because your partner’s the one most likely to kill you.”
It’s these sorts of contradictions, filtering through to women in public, that Roberts-Orr hopes to explore in her latest offering for the Melbourne Fringe Festival. Her sound installation, aptly titled How to Behave, will be accessible to participants via their smartphone as they move freely about Grattan Gardens in Prahran, beginning August 11. The piece is one of 18 location-specific installations by emerging artists in response to the theme of ‘instruction’, created for Melbourne Fringe Festival’s Uncommon Places.
“Whether someone’s actually saying ‘take off that short skirt, wear something more appropriate’, or whether you’re suddenly thinking it in your own mind, there’s an element of conditioning, of fear,” she explains.
Roberts-Orr has cut her teeth as an artist at a time when conversations about violence and women have been prominent in the public discourse. She recalls living as a student in a share house in the Brunswick area when ABC journalist Jill Meagher was raped and murdered in 2012, an experience which she drew on for her 2013 Fringe Festival play It’s Happening in the Space Between My Face and Yours. This new project will be a continuation on the same theme.
“Generally all of my work is concerned with feminism,” she explains. Her thinking around How to Behave was strongly influenced by the murder of Doncaster schoolgirl Masa Vukotic earlier this year.
Returning to the same intellectual project “a bit more developed and with a bit more experience”, Roberts-Orr hopes to cultivate a design that speaks to the audience experience.
Location-wise, the choice of Grattan Gardens, a narrow parkway, seeks to expose the conflicting expectations of women: as mothers and family members, signified by the playground and supermarkets at one end of the park, and as sexual commodities as the audience are funnelled closer to the Chapel Street shopping and nightlife precinct at the other end.
The audio design of the artwork is calculated, too, intended to heighten the participant’s senses. As Roberts-Orr explains, there’s an “awareness of space” that she’d like to tap into – that feeling of walking alone late at night, “where you have a heightened sense of sound”.
Roberts-Orr will relinquish control of the experience to the participant, allowing them to access SoundCloud clips on their smartphone while they move freely throughout the space.
“You can do things with sound art, like placing someone as the protagonist in the narrative, as opposed to just showing them something,” she says. “It’s quite literally like walking in someone’s shoes.”
The motivation behind Roberts-Orr’s return to the theme is to reinvigorate the discourse around women in public spaces. “There’s a lot of conversation about this in the media, particularly this year, in terms of violence against women, and it’s something that can be really hard to connect with in a way that’s meaningful. It can be really disempowering.”
“I want to give people tools and ways of looking and seeing and being in space that are positive,” she says.
How To Behave will run from 11 August until 4 October in Grattan Gardens, Prahran. For more information visit: http://uncommonplaces.melbournefringe.com.au/
