Doors Shut

A modern day, contemporary dancer’s take on No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Three collaborators are stuck in a moment and they can't get out of it.

Alice, Will and Caroline have died. In Hell, they must take a long hard introspective look at themselves. Fed up with the Byzantine conflicts of their collaboration, these dance artists thought a pivot to modernist theatre might help them walk away from the troubles in their lives. They were wrong, and now they are stuck in a moment and they can’t get out of it.

Hell is a play acted by dancers with you in the audience.

Doors Shut (2019) was an experimental dance-theatre work by Melbourne performance collective Alice Will Caroline (Alice Dixon, William McBride and Caroline Meaden), created in collaboration with theatre-maker Mark Wilson. Presented at Temperance Hall as part of the 2019 Melbourne Fringe Festival, the work was a darkly comic, self-reflexive reimagining of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist play No Exit.

The work brought together contemporary dance, dramatic text, autobiographical material and absurdist humour to explore the tensions of artistic collaboration, the impossibility of escaping oneself and the uncomfortable ways we are defined by other people.

CREATIVE TEAM

Creators and Performers: Alice Dixon, Caroline Meaden, William McBride, Mark Wilson
Text: Jean-Paul Sartre, Alice Dixon, Caroline Meaden, William McBride, Mark Wilson
Lighting Designer: Alex Nguyen
Lighting Assistance: Sherwyn Spencer and Natalia Moreno

DOCUMENTATION

Video/Photography: Takeshi Kondo

Link to Video

PERFORMANCE HISTORY

Presented by Temperance Hall, South Melbourne, for Melbourne Fringe Festival, 2019

Winner of the Green Room Award for Ensemble Performance (Dance), 2020
Melbourne Fringe Trades Hall Residency recipient