Brighton - "US history as absurd, horrifying and deeply profound"

Tue Biering, director, writer and company artistic director, is promising something entertaining and fun with Dark Noon which heads to Sussex for the Brighton Festival.

Performances will be from Thursday, May 21–Saturday, May 23 at 8pm and also Saturday, May 23 and Sunday, May 24 at 2pm, transforming Brighton Dome Corn Exchange for a limited run as it pulls audiences into a raw, immersive ride through history that confronts power, race and displacement.

The show offers a brutal reimagining of the history of America, flipping the script on the Wild West, “envisioning US history as absurd, horrifying and deeply profound.”

In the piece, a pioneer town springs up in real time as an extraordinary cast of South African actors rebuild the frontier through an outsider’s lens, combining “slapstick humour, satire and breath-taking stagecraft.”

Tue explains: “It reminds me about my childhood where I was sitting in front of the television watching cowboy movies and being entertained by a binary narrative which was about good versus evil, and a narrative in which every problem could be solved by the gun and where there was a very very poignant narrative about the man on the edge of civilization.

“It was also about land quests, about expanding the frontier. But I was also interested in looking upon myself and my own culture in terms of how we were talking about migration towards Europe. I have been doing all kinds of performances about that but I was wondering about European migration during the 18th century. That's how I started thinking about it. I already knew about it but I was still stunned by the fact that it was something like 50 million Europeans that headed to the States. There was a huge famine in Europe at the time. Most of Sweden was dying. You have no idea about the huge numbers of people that died but also the huge amount of people that migrated.

“So I started by wanting to create a production about a narrative also but about the continent of Africa, the narrative about Africa that it was a wasteland of civilization, an uncivilised world. I start at the beginning with the famine in Europe and I'm trying to reproduce the media pictures of the starving regions of Africa and also about the continuous quest for gaining land. It becomes about violence and about colonialism but it's all done in a very humoristic and entertaining way.”