Five minutes with multi-award-winning maverick of the stage, Eliza Sanders
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“Theatre opens up a place for our emotions that simply isn’t possible alone at home through a screen.”
This is what performance artist Eliza Sanders is most excited for as she brings her new show, Manage Your Expectations, to Canberra Theatre Centre on Friday 2 August.
The show uses Eliza’s unique blend of dance, clown, and absurd philosophising to take the “trigger warning” to the extreme and make audiences question what ‘informed’ consent really means.
Ahead of the award-winning show’s Australian premiere, we caught up with Eliza to get the lowdown on her upcoming show, and how the arts scene in Canberra has taken her to where she is today.
Photo credit: Stephen A’Court.
Tell us about your new show, Manage Your Expectations?
Manage Your Expectations started from a very personal place – I was looking at my own vulnerabilities in intimate and romantic relationships. I was observing how much time and effort I spent trying to manage my expectations, trying to communicate my expectations and hopes to my partner and trying to really understand where they were coming from. As I became more and more fascinated with this constant dance of imperfect communication, the little slippages of consent and boundaries, and the consequences of getting it wrong I started to see how it plays out in broader society. How much time we spend in work, politics, and art trying to manage people’s expectations, essentially trying to tell the future and mitigate risk. Seeing it so much in so many everyday encounters it became absurd and deeply amusing. I was so drawn to the beauty of the intention, the sincerity of the act to try to care mingled with the almost inevitable failure because the future is so very rarely what we expect.
It filled me with compassion for myself and for the people around me. All of the messy attempts to care are perfectly doomed to fail.
The show’s premise begins by explaining every little thing that will happen in incredibly absurdly complex details to manage the audience’s expectations of what’s to come……And that intention has to comically crumble to dust under the weight of its own impossibility. So ultimately, we realise that we don’t know what’s coming, we may fail, and things may be hard. I suppose the question, or the message of the work is how to be kind to yourself or others within those failures. Then stretching those failures out onto broader more existential landscapes in terms of reconciling yourself with your history, with the actions of your ancestors and colonisation, reconciling your relationships with children and parenting.
For me, the show is about what it means to be coming to terms with the choices you have made and the world has made, that maybe weren’t what you expected.
What has been the reception so far?
More than I could have possibly expected! I did not successfully manage my expectations of how this show would resonate with people. People have come to me in tears after the show and held me in the most tender embraces. They have thanked me for expressing something they didn’t know they needed to hear, and for holding them in their vulnerabilities. It feels so meaningful that audiences want to connect with me in these ways after the show. I think the magic of live theatre is that the performer and audience are there together breathing the same air, that our nervous systems are sensing each other. I think it opens up a place for our emotions that simply isn’t possible alone at home through a screen. I really wanted to create a show that made audiences feel connected with the people in the room with them, including with me as a performer. It’s not an immersive work, the audience doesn’t have to ‘do’ anything, but it is an exchange. Our care, energy, and attention go both ways.
How did you first get involved in the performing arts?
When I was five my mum enrolled me in ballet classes because my sister loved them. I hated them. Each week Mum would bribe me to go with 10c worth of lollies (quite a haul in those days). At the end of the year was the annual ballet concert. This year was ‘Peter and the Wolf’ and I was in the starring role of ‘baby duckling number 30’. The moment I stepped on stage something awakened in me! I felt all those eyes on me, the rush of performance, the thrill of the stage lights, the gentle itch of the stage makeup, and the playful chaos of the dressing room antics …. I WAS HOOKED! From that moment on it was ‘Mum can I do more classes please, please, please?! Can I join the performance group please, please, please?!’
How did you get to where you are today at House of Sand?
We launched House of Sand in 2015 with my first solo show ‘Pedal.Peddle’. I had just graduated from the New Zealand School of Dance, and I hadn’t yet landed myself a job as a dancer, so I thought ‘How about I put all my best moves and ideas into a show?’.
It was kind of like my audition for the world, doing all the things I didn’t feel like I had been able to get out of my system at UNI. The soundtrack for the whole work was my nonsense poetry, I sewed a patchwork dress with a five metre long train that unravelled from a cocoon around my body, I sang standing on my head, barked like a dog, and danced an orgasm. The whole thing was kind of an absurdist biography of my secret personal life up until that point, full of puns and silly physical comedy that wound their way into sincere moments of my confusion and angst. I had never seen anything like it so I had no idea if it was ‘real art’ or if anyone would like it but I needed to get it out of my system and I wanted to share it with people. And they really liked it! We premiered in Wellington and then brought it to Canberra. The following year I made a follow-up show ‘Castles’ which won a bunch of awards at the NZ Fringe. We ended up touring those two should around Australia and New Zealand for two years.
My sister Charley directed and produced those shows. She comes from a background in theatre and had just finished her master’s in directing at NIDA. We were so excited by the combination of dance and theatre, and we wanted to keep creating works which combined them in ways we felt like we weren’t seeing in Australia. We created House of Sand as a way to make shows together and share them with the world. Our shows always have some element of theatre and some of dance and we like to explore how we can combine them in strange and exciting ways.
We’ve spent ten years making opportunities to get in the studio and create – writing endless grant applications, bringing teams of amazing artists together, and figuring out how to pay them and so we can explore and create then partner with festivals and venues to share our shows with audiences. Basically we’ve supported each other to work BLOODY HARD to scratch together opportunities for ourselves and others to make art. Often for very little and often alongside other jobs. It’s been arduous, confusing and deeply taxing at times but when we come together in creative space, somehow the energy of connecting and creating with a group of people replenishes the motivation to keep figuring it out.
What do you love most about Canberra’s performing arts scene?
I love how age-diverse it is! I’ve worked all around Australia and Aotearoa and when I’m in Canberra I spend so much time working with people so much older and so much younger than me (and everything in between). I love the way it means that students, professional artists and hobby artists can all come together, respecting each other’s joys, passions and expertise. There is a capacity to draw from how the different perspectives and motivations can feed creative inspiration. I think it’s truly something special! Making the art connected, meaningful, and inclusive.
Also, I grew up in Canberra, so it feels personal and spiritually meaningful to return here to share and create. I can gain deeper insight into my psychology by seeing the place again and again. The capacity to return is something I’m endlessly grateful for. What I love so much about the scene is that I always feel welcomed home as a local, received with care and curiosity.
Tell us a core memory about growing up in Canberra.
My Mum used to say the car has ‘a mind of its own’. We’d jump the car with the intention of driving to the shops or a friend’s house or something and somehow the car would end up taking us to ballet at the old Ukrainian Church Hall. We drove from home to ballet so much, that route just became the default. I love the idea of the car having a mind of its own and that its favourite place was ballet class too.
It’s a special memory because it reminds me how much my Mum did to support us and encourage our connection to our dancing community. I like to think of all the parents diligently driving their kids to art classes and musical rehearsals over and over again throughout the years in Canberra. The arts education in Canberra is strong and I think it makes it such a wonderful place to grow up!
