What is dacting? | May, 2018
Dact
verb
to take action, speak without voice
“he chose the moment to Dact"
“you Dacted like a madman out there”
“I wish she wouldn’t Dact like that”
Dacting
noun
The art or occupation of dancing and acting at the same time
“I'd prefer her not to go into Dacting as it's such an insecure business”
2018 is The Farm’s "Year of Dacting", a term first coined when we made lawn under the banner of Splintergroup in 2004. It was further developed in roadkill, a show that took Dacting to the Venice Biennale, astounding audiences. At the opening night people were speechless. "Is this acting?" they asked out loud, "or dancing?"
No-one knew.
Then came Food Chain, Little Pig, Edgar, Cockfight, Frank Enstein, The Last Blast and TIDE. And now Dacting is a household word, children get teased in the playground with “you’re Dacting weird” or “Dact off theatre freak!” We’ve even heard that to Dact someone is a punishable offence in certain Berlin bilingual schools. While we certainly don’t endorse such misuse of the term, we are proud to have spread this amazing and mysterious performing art to the planet.
To celebrate The Year of Dacting we are embarking on our most ambitious Dacting experiment to date: a collaboration with La Boîte Theatre Company and Suzie Miller's The Uncertainty Principle. La Boite are a company renowned for creating incredible theatre works and for the quality of their Acting, but can they Dact? Well let’s find out…
At the same time The Farm is back in Berlin for a return season of Make Do, despite the new German public dacting clause that clearly state:
Bekannte Dacters müssen ordnungsgemäßes Verhalten in öffentlichen Räumen aufrechterhalten. Alle seltsamen Bewegungen (einschließlich, aber nicht beschränkt auf: unprovoziertes Lachen, Klatschen, Körperschlag) müssen in privaten Bereichen mit zustimmenden Erwachsenen stattfinden.
If you want to go just forget about it because it's already sold out...and it's in Berlin. So unless you are too...well you get the picture.
But before we Dact in earnest we just want to introduce our Greenhouse Youth Ensemble.
That's them performing with us in the Commonwealth Games. They're an important part of what we do and they are about to make a move to HOTA, that big Arts Centre on the Gold Coast that was called Arts Centre Gold Coast until they realised that was self evident. The Greenhouse are getting bigger and not just because they're young people who grow but because the youth ensemble is expanding. If you're interested to be a part of it all (or know someone who might be) go here.
The Commonwealth Games. Shit! That happened didn’t it? Did anyone apart from Borobi miss it?
We hope not because we did some pretty cool stuff. We had a 'blink and you’ll miss it' segment in the opening ceremony
That's a photo of a blink.
The next night we opened our end of the world rock fest as part of Bleach* Festival and Festival 18 with The Ninth Wave. Greenhouse were there, where were you?
That work was shortly followed by #dickheadsdoittwice TIDE, also part of Bleach.
And if you somehow missed the whole Games thing here's a wrap...
Basically a whole lot of stuff happened, people won medals with different colours depending on their hair styles, a city was transformed, the face of the arts was changed for eternity, no-one will ever again think hot chocolate is a viable substitute for coffee, somehow they forgot to acknowledge the athletes in the closing ceremony, Donald Trump didn't get thrown out of office and we came out of it all looking a lot like Chuck Norris...
ie. buff...
"It's amazing because people come up to me and say, 'Chuck, you're the luckiest guy in the world to be a world karate champion and a movie and TV star.' When they say this to me, I kind of smile because luck had nothing to do with it" - Chuck Norris