Pathetic Fallacy

Canadian artist Anita Rochon is obsessed with the weather and a good challenge – so she created a show with a touring party of zero, finding local actors to perform centre stage in a factual and personal look at our changing relationship to weather.

By Tamara Howie

What was the inspiration to develop this show?
I come from a family of farmers, so weather’s always been deeply linked in my mind to survival.

I once had an art history teacher talk about how you could paint the sky any colour (except green) and it would look realistic.

I love how big and amorphous and eternal the weather is.

For the same reason, it seemed totally huge and daunting to create a piece about it – so I thought I’d try. 

Tropical Cyclone Marcus tore through Darwin in March – does local weather play a role in the show?
I’m in no way happy that Marcus hit Darwin, but I feel lucky to be doing a piece where its residents are in such immediate relationship with an extreme weather event.

Local weather does play a role, mostly through the local performer.

Why did you want a local performer in each location and what does having a local add to the show?

The piece is about existence and the impact of one person, which is all at once huge and tiny.

After years of getting on planes touring with shows, I wanted to see if I could upend that approach and create a really personal piece but have someone else perform it. The performer is reading instructions on a monitor but it’s really up to them to decide how they are going to perform the piece.

Fri 10 & Sat 11 Aug, 6pm | Sun 12 Aug, 1pm | Brown’s Mart Theatre | See the event listing