NOBODY'S OCEAN

NOBODY’S OCEAN is a transmedia performance game for smartphone based on Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’ that is played in the streets of Melbourne. The audience is invited to reimagine the City of Melbourne as the ancient world of this great epic poem of Odysseus’ attempt to return home from the Trojan War and the many challenges obstructing his journey. The performance game was first presented 13-22 October 2016 by the Board of Hospitality, directed by Misha Myers and produced by Monash Academy of Performing Arts and the Centre for Theatre and Performance, Monash University in partnership with The Greek Centre for Contemporary Culture.

Cast as the poem’s hero Odysseus, audience members are put to the test and at the centre of the action guided through the streets and alleyways of Melbourne’s CBD with the goddess Athena as their guide and champion. Using a range of applications and platforms available on their smartphone, they have to decipher omens and riddles, battle storms and the tests of the gods to get home to stop the crew of wreckers, Odysseus’ wife Penelope’s Suitors, from draining the city of its resources.

Nobody’s Ocean is not an app, but uses different platforms and apps available on a smartphone. In this way it's ‘out-of-the-box’ and engages the native behaviour of how people use mobile technology in their everyday lives – receiving SMS, voice mail, viewing and listening to different audio/visual media, searching for information, and interacting with social networks. We chose to work with it in this way to give the audience the sense that what they were experiencing was happening live, that they were sometimes interacting with live performers over the phone and via text message.

The smartphone has become more than just a way to communicate; amongst other things it has become a tool for telling stories and enables new platforms for transmedia performance. Through transmedia performance that is location-based the story-world of the performance is constructed through the audience's movement through the physical world on a journey to specific locations where they are guided by and interact with disperse media platforms. Each location resonates with an eclectic and associative web of media that the audience receives or is directed to via their phone: text and voice messages, You Tube videos, Soundcloud audio recordings, Instructable videos, National Library of Australia archive material, fictional Twitter feeds, etc. This media is facilitated and pushed out across mobile networks through a system hosted by the experience design platform Conducttr.

The project explores new ways of engaging with literature in specific everyday physical locations through this technology to discover how this immersive experience of the story changes the perception of the place and how the place changes the experience of the story. NOBODY’S OCEAN transforms Odysseus’ journey into a game that encourages the audience to explore the city in a novel way.

Imagine you have your headphones on and the phone rings from an unknown number. It is Poseidon the sea god calling and he is furious at you for blinding his son the Cyclops. He complains that humans always blame the gods for their own folly. Down the phone you hear waves crashing, a voice waling. At the same time, you are standing in Hosier lane, trapped between the walls of vibrant drawings of monsters with single eyes staring back at you. You don't know where to go. As he hangs up, you receive a text. If you want to make it out, you must complete a riddle.

A wrong answer sends you on a converging branch, a Twitter feed of posts from Penelope’s Suitor’s tweeting on their exploits while on a night out in the city’s casinos, men’s clubs and bars.

Later on in your journey while weaving in and out of Melbourne's alleyways, you receive a link to vodcasts of Penelope plotting to change her fate, stitching and unstitching the seams of a suit in the parlour of the tailor, Adriano Carbone, one of the last family operations of the city, and then later in the Seamstress restaurant on Lonsdale Street, formerly a Chinese textile factory and before that a brothel once frequented, it's said, by members of Parliament via secret passages running underground.

AUDIENCE RESPONSE

One audience member taking part in the first run of the performance in October 2016 suggest it was, “Novel, inclusive and educational”.

Other audience members said the following about what they enjoyed most about the experience:

“Walked down laneways that I had passed many times and never walked down.”

“It made me explore a part of the city I normally wouldn't walk around.”

“I enjoyed discovering the hidden graffiti and laneways of the city which did affect my impression of my knowledge of/familiarity with the city and the city's cultural expression.”

“I was surprised to find some of those locations, having grown up in Melbourne and visited the city many times. I knew the history of the sites, generally, although not all the exact locations. I think the city is a great place, even more now.”

CREDITS - THE BOARD OF HOSPITALITY

Misha Myers / Director & Script Writer

Chris Heywood / Technical Designer

Alice Stewart / Assistant Director

Fleur Kilpatrick / Artistic Coordinator - MAPA

Simonette Turner / Production Manager - MAPA

Kirstie Dinning / Assistant Script Writer & Dramaturge

Christina Gangemi / Sound Design & Songwriter

Brianna Horne / Video Production

Poppy Robinson / Social Media Designer

Emily Shelmerdine / Production Coordinator

Imogen Walsh / Sound, Installation and Graphic Design

Laura Young / Costume, Makeup, Social Media Coordinator & Website Designer

Alice Stewart, Kirstie Dinning and Poppy Robinson / Suitors Club Production Team

CAST

Athena / Brianna Horne

Calypso / Laura Young

Circe / Imogen Walsh

Naussica / Kirstie Dinning

Penelope / Emily Shelmerdine

Poseidon / Tom Middleditch

Sirens / Christina Gangemi

Suitors / Sam Barson, Tyrie Aspinall, Tim Banova, Conor Herbert, and Teddy Hookey

Locations: Adriano and Maria Carbone, Section 8, Seamstress Restaurant & Bar, The National Opal Collection, and Melina on the Rooftop.

Sound credits: Mark DiAngelo, Mike Koenig, Crash and Burn, Tony Phillips, Juskiddink, freesound.org, soundbible.com, Grant Evans, and Time Freeze by Deep Data Loops (further details available at nobodysocean.squarespace.com)

Music credits: 'Siren Song' (composed and performed by Christina Gangemi), and 'Back to You' (written, composed and performed by Christina Gangemi)

Website http://nobodysocean.squarespace.com/

Twitter https://twitter.com/Nobodys_Ocean

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/nobodys_ocean/

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/events/198359407242436

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