THIS IS IT Comes to Melbourne, 8/5

In a one-night only, red-carpet event, Arts House presents This Is It - from LiveWorks at Sydney's Performance Space and the Perth Insitute of Contemporary Arts, Team MESS bring their unique contemporary performance to Melbourne.

This Is It, set around a performed press conference for a film of the same name, investigates the space of the unknown and unseen and our propensity to create meaning. Through the format of the press conference, audiences are seduced into constructing the narrative themselves, piecing together a plot from the details offered and omitted.

Team MESS, a group of young Sydney based artists, play with contemporary methods of narrative production and audience engagement. Team MESS has become synonymous with Live-Art, producing interactive theatre that dissolves the barrier between audience and performer, creating a shared space of experience, exchange and possibility.

Team MESS member Malcolm Whittaker notes "The audience feels they have played a roll in the drama instead of being a passive observer. It makes for a richer theatrical experience. It gives you the feeling that it is happening for you or might not have happened at all."

No script and no rules; the audience are invited to ask questions, conjuring up storylines and calling for an examination of their own preconceptions and prejudices.

"The questions are rarely about the film itself," says Whittaker. "It seems to always be about the fictional personal lives of the fictional actors rather than the fictional film. They reveal an obsession with hot gossip and celebrity that is so reflective of the zeitgeist."

Venue: Arts House, Meat Market, 5 Blackwood St, North Melbourne
Dates: Friday 5 August 2011
Times: 8:30pm
Tickets: Free
Duration: 60 minutes, no interval
Bookings: 03 9322 3713 or www.artshouse.com.au.