For over a decade Perth-based writers Jo Pollitt and Maitland Schnaars quietly scripted an accumulating narrative of unsettling and overlapping stories on Facebook. Taking the form of an intimate dance poem, The Simmering tussles with immediate binaries toward an abstract kind of coupling, one that is both tender and violent, relentless and forgiving, present and already long lived.
Featuring acclaimed performers in a duet of propelling text and choreography, the work spotlights complex relations and repair within the systemic simmer of lives under pressure. A duel autofiction where the borders of truth telling and time are slippery, the work unfolds in an arena that is simultaneously suburban kitchen, outback footy field and underground internal terrain. The Simmering is an unrelenting immersion into the deeply felt states of love and conflict embedded in familial relations within the simmering violence of our times.
