"Totally full of wit and devastating in it's clarity."
Kristy Edmunds, Artistic Director, Melbourne International Festival 2008

"This Show asserts that life is full of complexities, connections, disjunctions and oppositions and that desolation and great beauty can walk hand in hand. Perhaps these ideas have been heard before but not in this way from such a splendid group of artists."
The Australian, 2007

A sly and probing investigation of our common wants and frailties This Show Is About People is a daring music-theatre-dance collaboration between dancer-choreographer Shaun Parker and the renowned musicians and vocalists Mara and Llew Kiek. Robust, high-impact dance layered with intricate gesture is fused with a sensitive array of live music. Drawing surprising connections between experiences both intense and peaceful, vigorous and gentle, This Show Is About People shows us how our sense of fun and capacity for joy depends as much on other people as on ourselves.

This Show is About People observes a group of strangers found in a transit lounge - a halfway house of sorts where the characters never actually depart for any place, but question and struggle with their belief systems and values surrounding such themes as death, love, the afterlife, religion, war, hypocrisy, power and greed.

The music and songs in This Show Is About People resonate with themes of community and belonging. Led by Mara and Llew Kiek, the spine tingling vocal music of Bulgaria collides with songs from medieval Europe, modern gospel, word art and popular songs of hope. The movement language is informed by highly physical contemporary dance, acrobatic and street dance styles, layered with intricate gesture and manipulative force. The result is Shaun Parker's most daring work to date.

"This Show is About People by the choreographer and performer Shaun Parker explores transitory lives and the weird and wonderful moments when paths cross, blur and repel. It's an intricate and expressive work manipulated by music and machinery, and features movements that are both sensuous and hard-edged. When the dancers hurl themselves against the floor or arch their bodies as though lifted by meat hooks, the fluorescent-lit spectacle is dangerous and daring. This Show is About People - part of next year's Sydney Festival - is stylistically refreshing in the way it marries humour, lyricism and urban grit to examine themes of isolation and belonging" (Bryce Hallet, Sydney Morning Herald, October 2008).

Shaun Parker
Shaun Parker has performed nationally and internationally as a dancer and counter-tenor over the past fifteen years with Meryl Tankard's Australian Dance Theatre, Kate Champion, The Song Company, Chunky Move, Sydney Theatre Company and State Theatre Company of SA. Overseas, he has worked with Sasha Waltz in Berlin, Meredith Monk in New York and Compagnie ALIAS in Switzerland.

His choreographic work includes Divine Harmonies for Tasdance and My Little Garden for the Barossa International Music Festival. He was subsequently awarded a Queen's Trust Award and an Emerging Artist of the Year Award to develop his work in directing, choreographing and performing. His collaborative work, Blue Love, has toured nationally and internationally, playing to sell out audiences at the Sydney Opera House, in New Zealand, regional Australia and the Singapore Arts Festival. His short dance films No and The Love Trilogy have been screened in film festivals in Athens, Buenos Aires, Monte Carlo, Krakow, Napoli, San Francisco, London and Sydney. Other works include man and Silo at Omeo Dance Space, and creative work with the Australian Theatre of the Deaf and the indigenous dancers at NAISDA.

Shaun is honoured to be the recipient of the biennial Robert Helpmann Scholarship 2006. His new work This Show Is About People world premiered at Melbourne Festival 2007 and Sydney Festival 2008.
Contact:
Marguerite Pepper Productions
91 Canal Road
Lilyfield NSW 2040
Tel + 61 2 9560 9257
Fax +61 2 9560 9397
Mob 0412 231 313
marguerite@mpproductions.com.au
www.mpproductions.com.au