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Two lives - one friendship - out in the open - meat and potatoes - all on a plate - nothing to hide... Authenticity and artifice collide as two men negotiate the hazardous boundary between performance and reality. Collaborators and friends for over 15 years, Thomas & Wells is the creative partnership of performer, musician and theatre director David Wells and creator of numerous national and international public performance events Neil Thomas. Feathers in their collective and individual caps include The Urban Dream Capsule, The Blue Thong Club, The Museum of Modern Oddities and Born in a Taxi. In Mantalk, the pair delights in plumbing the trivial depths and mining the profound superficialities of their friendship. This intimate, revealing and entertaining expose uniquely captures the free-ranging, confrontational, loving and honest talking of two friends with "a flow as natural as pub talk" (The Age). Episodic and constantly evolving, Mantalk is intimate, compelling and funny. Partly improvised, wholly real, Mantalk peels away the skin of 'staged performance' to reveal the creative process in action. Using varied styles of narration and story-telling, from the poetic to the conversational, Thomas & Wells interweave fact and fiction, with original music and song, to charm, disarm and entertain each other and their audience. Time is limited. Life is short. Now more than ever, it's time to talk. Thomas & Wells Neil Thomas and David Wells have been working together for 15 years. In the past 10 years they have spent 24 hours a day, for a combined time of almost six months, living behind windows together in the Urban Dream Capsule. This site-specific performance installation event premiered at the 1996 Melbourne International Arts Festival in the Myer department store windows. The performers lived there for 16 days, with the four windows transformed into a home. At no point were the blinds lowered, or did the actors leave the windows. They ate, slept, bathed and performed under non-stop public scrutiny, with over 250,000 people observing and communicating with the performers. The show was a huge success (winning the Age Critics Award and a Green Room Award) and has toured to Ghent, Perth, Montreal, Galway, Chicago, London, Wellington, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai since. Thomas has internationally toured his solo piece Blue Boys to Singapore Arts Festival, Galway International Arts Festival and Dublin International Theatre Festival. In 1998 he co-created the international installationists Museum of Modern Oddities (MoMO) with Katy Bowman. MoMO created three events for the Melbourne International Arts Festival (2000, 2003, 2004), including The Blue Thong Club and The Blue Rinse Club, with Wells performing with Thomas in 2003 and 2004. Wells has worked extensively as a performance artist in Australia and overseas with physical theatre company Born in a Taxi. In 2006 he performed his solo show The Corridor at Dancehouse to critical acclaim. Contact:
Jennifer Barry
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