V-Effekt: Death, Mortality, and the Melbourne International Arts Festival

Abstract

On 16 October 2009, a friend died. He was the first person I knew of my generation to die. That night, I saw a play in the Melbourne International Arts Festival (MIAF), one which dealt with the messy realities of sudden death. Almost a year to the day later, I saw another MIAF production about the dangers of holding onto ghosts. They were chaotic, transcendent, heart-stopping experiences. In this paper, I use them to explore my personal engagements with death, grief, and release. Part criticism, part exorcism, it is my attempt to understand what happened to me in the same theater across two very different Octobers. This paper further engages with the limits of semiosis, presenting a recount and analysis of 'Pornography' and 'Opening Night' drawing on both the semiotics of the productions and my own very particular embodied experience of them. How do we make sense of what it is to die? Even with that knowledge, how do we comprehend someone's actual death? And what might theater have to do with it?