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Canberra Today 14°/19° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Teens night of horror on Black Mountain

Rehearsing “The Initiation”… “Horror is all about fear”, says director Cathy Petocz.

A NIGHT of horror on Black Mountain is at the centre of a new play soon to be staged by Canberra Youth Theatre as part of its 50th anniversary season.

Written and directed by Cathy Petocz , “The Initiation” sees six teenagers psyching each other up in a dare to spend the night in the darkness of the mountain that overshadows central Canberra. As night thickens, so does the plot and they wonder if they’ll ever get out alive.

Black Mountain was also the location for the 2017 dystopian film, “Blue World Order”, but this, as Petocz is quick to point out when we catch up at Gorman Arts Centre, is theatre, not film and horror is rarely performed on stage.

Petocz is a well-known ACT theatre artist, but this is a “first” for her, as Currency Press will be publishing her script.

The play had its genesis in a Youth Theatre program where Petocz was devising a short performance showcase.

“To me being a teenager was completely horrifying,” she thought, then it occurred to her that horror as a genre might be worth exploring.

“I brought the idea to the kids and they were excited,” she reports, then the pandemic hit and workshops migrated to Zoom, where they needed a substantial goal.

She pitched a scenario to Youth Theatre director Luke Rogers, who went for it.

Supported by JobKeeper, Petocz wrote the first draft in 2020, showing it to friends, family and peers. Then in 2021, after a further draft, which developed the horror imagery, was given a showing, the adults who attended not only liked the blood and guts but wanted more, so she wrote it.

“Horror is all about fear,” she says, “about breaking taboos… teenagers have been known to slice each other… also it’s to do with sex and sexuality.”

“It’s dark, but it’s funny, too I’m not an artist to take people on a dark journey and spit them out. It gets to the heart and it’s a pandemic play.”

In the process of writing, she watched a lot of teenage horror movies and concluded genre does not treat teenagers well, but she also found herself walking more often on Black Mountain, close to her home, finding that it had an “interesting energy”.

To get the sense of country right, Ngunnawal poet Ethan Bell was engaged as dramaturg and cultural adviser.

“It’s my first chance to work with Ngunnawal people,” she says with some satisfaction and it taught the cast, who have walked on to Black Mountain to stick to the walking paths, respecting country.

Thinking about country led Petocz to working around the idea of teenagers finding something magical as well as terrifying in the mountain, and she called to mind American poet Langston Hughes’ words: “Let us take a knife / and cut the world in two – / and see what worms are eating / at the rind.”

Tara Saxena, who plays the character Chris, is on hand to confirm Petocz’s own apprehensions of teenage life, saying: “I’ve been imagining my future. I’ve been thinking I don’t want to have kids anymore, with all natural things endangered through climate change.”

Chris is a stubborn person, an amateur private detective, opinionated and adamant, Saxena says.

Another cast member, Juniper Potter, joins us to talk about the role of Amelia, a 14-year-old loner who pretends to be uncaring, but is struggling with an inner sense of self.

Then there’s Latsamy Carruthers, who plays Eris, “a mean, snarky girl” seen as a freak who, important to the play, proposes the idea of going up the mountain.

They’re not about to reveal too much, except to say that they find a knife in the forest and it keeps turning up.

Petocz is happy to call the play “a supernatural slasher with a restorative element” since, by going into the darkness, they also find themselves “moving through a liminal space to a new beginning”.

Parents are likely to enjoy the show, the cast chorus, “because it’s cool, you see characters go to extremes. It’s set in a place we know and there’s no ‘cringy romance’”.

But, Petocz hints mysteriously: “It gets a little bit gay.”

 

“The Initiation”, The Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre, June 15-19, book at canberratheatrecentre.com.au

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