Hotel Obscura, a collaboration between Australia, Austria, France and Greece, is a melding of audio experience and one-on-one encounters in hotel rooms and other spaces.

“Welcome to the city. Where will you find yourself? Lose yourself? Check in. Be led astray. Together. Alone. Across distances, time zones. Who are you? Who might you become? Welcome to Hotel Obscura.”

Conceived and developed by Triage Live Art Collective, Hotel Obscura has had seasons in Berlin, Linz, Marseille, Vienna and Athens, activating each city with performances and installations from the public to the radically intimate. Triage Live Art Collective’s Greek Australian artistic director Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy launched the interactive performance in 2013, which will continue its journey supported by Creative Europe until the end 2016.

Hotel Obscura is a unique experience for each audience member that lasts for over two hours. The audience at the Athens Biennale described it as a unique immersive event.

After booking their ticket, Hotel Obscura will require a contact mobile and email for each ticket holder to provide vital details about the work and to reveal the secret starting location within the Melbourne CBD.

Guests of Hotel Obscura will need to bring a fully charged mobile phone, wear comfortable shoes and dress for the weather as the intimate performance leads the audience through the city and into ‘secret parts’ of the hotel, featuring an impressive line-up of local live art makers and three European guest collaborators.

The audience’s role is essential as the way the work is built offers participants a great deal of freedom in terms of expressing themselves through the encounter and dialogue with the performer.

The performer becomes a facilitator of the audience’s experience rather than an expert via several improvisations, constantly adapting to the needs and capacities of the audience.

“We create live art and participatory theatre-based events which invite audiences into intimate encounters to explore their dreams, identities and alternate visions of the world,” the Triage Collective Team explains.

“We do this as curators, performers and event makers. We work with live performances and mediated, hyper-theatricality, video, costume, and site-specific design. Our works are disarming, playful and confronting.”

Artist Katerina Protonotariou from Greece will also be performing alongside Mario Sinnhofer from Austria and Julie Paule from France.

From Australia, Katie Sfetkidis, Zoe Scoglio, Christie Stott, Mark Wilson, Lauren Simmonds, Craig Peade, Xan Colman, Dan Koop, Will McBride, Carolyn Hanna, Rani Pramesti, Amelia McQueen and Julian Crotti will ensure visitors “experience eternal love, sacrifice, and torture, to reach their lucky escapes and final destinations”.

Hotel Obscura has been supported by the Victorian government through Creative Victoria; the Australian government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body; the European Cultural Commission Creative Europe EEAC Fund (2014-16); Bureau of Work; The Besen Family Foundation; Mezzanine Spectacles; and the City of Melbourne through Arts House.

There will be five 120 minute performances each day of the Festival of Live Art (Thursday 3 to Saturday 5 March 2016).

For more information and bookings go to www.fola.com.au
Warning: 18+, coarse language, adult themes.