EDINBURGH 2023: The Life Sporadic of Jess Wildgoose Q&A

BWW caught up with Olivia Zerphy to chat about bringing The Life Sporadic of Jess Wildgoose to the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Tell us a bit about The Life Sporadic of Jess Wildgoose.

Pixar meets Tarantino is this electrifying absurdist thriller that explores the universal themes of ambition, failure, self-help literature, and of course, high-risk equity trading. Jess has it all - until she doesn’t. After a meteoric rise and devastating fall in corporate America, Jess embarks on a brutal quest for revenge. With physical theatre and original musical underscoring, The Life Sporadic of Jess Wildgoose is as poignant as it is silly.

Where else might we have seen your work?

Our debut show, The Man Who Thought He Knew Too Much, enjoyed a sold-out run at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe. We also toured The Man Who throughout the UK in 2021 and performed a French translation (L’homme Qui Pensait en Savoir Trop) at Théâtre Les Déchargeurs in Paris this May. We made a short film, America that played off-broadway in NY at Ars Nova Theatre, and we’ve just finished a preview run of The Life Sporadic Of Jess Wildgoose at The Pleasance London.

What makes the presentation of this show so special?

In The Life Sporadic, Voloz collective is delving into new territory. We want to push the boundaries of physical theatre and call into question the idea that stories need to sit firmly within one genre or style in order to be cohesive. In this show, we draw on Tarantino’s historical revisionism, Kwan and Scheinert’s unrelenting speed, Wes Anderson’s quirky symmetry, and the emotionally motivated absurdity of films like Mr. Nobody, Fight Club, and The Matrix. We are excited to push the limits of both our style and our scripting by treating a more serious topic without sacrificing our trademark cinematic comedic approach. We are also working to create and refine a theatrical language that can both represent concrete locations and objects ( such as using the briefcases to make a bar, a bridge, a wall, a security checkpoint) and can also take advantage of the performers’ bodies in order to represent emotional states of a character.

Who would you like to come and see it?

Everyone! For me, The Life Sporadic is a show about how it feels to inhabit a space that lies somewhere between the infinite possibilities of who we could be and what we could do, and the reality of our finite and always imperfect lives. I think this particular breed of existential panic is something that everyone experiences on some level. This show is eclectic, it’s chaotic, it’s moving. It’s the highest highs and lowest lows of a lifetime packed into one hour.

Because of this, there really is something for everyone. Audiences will be with Jess Wildgoose through it all, from the dusty plains of Kansas, to the crowded subways of New York City, from seductive vegas slot machines to a mythic and perilous journey across an unnamed ocean, from the depths of despair to unlikely redemption.

What message would you like audiences to take away from it?

Anyone who saw The Man Who Thought He Knew Too Much will know that Voloz likes to playfully resist wrapping our shows too tightly into one message. Our hope is that we can evoke a visceral and emotional response rather than a purely intellectual one. We want audiences to leave the theatre having recognized something of themselves in Jess’s journey, and above all, we want audiences to leave the theatre having had an exceptionally good time.

Tickets are available here: 

Photo credit: Paul Lofferon 

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