A NEW production of a new play coming to Belconnen Arts Centre this week is equally theatre and dance.

“That was Friday” has been scripted by US playwright Jack Sullivan, from Brooklyn, collaborating with sibling co-directors Charley and Eliza Sanders from the House of Sands production company and was based on a thematic provocation dreamt up by the Sanders sisters of “what it’s like to be a stranger at home, and at home in strange places”.

They’ve been joined in the process by Amrit Tohari Agamemnoian and the entire ensemble of five dancers and three actors, and the professional production at Belco Arts, supported by funded Arts ACT, the Australia Council and supported by Ausdance and QL2, will also feature a large upstage video backing designed by Laura Turner as part of the action.

Sullivan, who was in fresh from New York, and a bit jetlagged when I caught up with him late last week, (November 18) says it will be a new exploratory work, one he hopes will be “visceral.”

In a preview showing, we saw first the brother and sister a having a Zoom catch-up with their mum in Orange, NSW, where she lives (that’s also where the Sanders sisters come from) but in fact, Sullivan says, the play begins with the death of the mother.

The mother character, Charley says, “is a bit of our mum, a bit of our grandma and a bit of Jack’s mum,” and although there are flashbacks in time, in her directing she has conceived it as a contemporary work.

Jack’s job has been to focus on the script while Eliza has been looking after the dance.

The two met back in 2015 at an upstate New York State theatre conference run by American theatre and opera director Anne Bogart.

“We used to go dancing when we were there and few years later, Eliza contacted me,” Sullivan said, leading to the long-distance play development that followed.

The play, he explains, “is about an Australian family dispersed across the globe for jobs and looking out for themselves”.

It’s no spoiler to say that right at the beginning, the mother dies, and the two siblings, a brother living in London and a sister who works for Google Maps in NYC, come back for a funeral and are forced to confront choices… they have made to understand sacrifices that their mother has made for them”.

As for the seamlessly blended dance element, that, Eliza says, reflects “emotional states, the flux and changes”.

“That Was Friday,” Belconnen Arts Centre, November 23-26.