version 1.0 --

As we enter, the video screens present both a truth and a disclaimer: "Every word in this performance is true." In Version 1.0's artfully abridged version of the Cole Inquiry's 8500 pages of transcript, the spoken words are faithfully reanimated. It's the non-verbal performance, the stuff enacted and screened and represented while the lawyerly exchanges are accurately intoned, which provide the commentary that is the content. Just to remind you, as this piece urgently wants to: quite recently, AWB illegally and reprehensibly paid slush money poorly disguised as transportation fees to Saddam Hussein's government in order to sell Australian wheat to Iraq. This happened as our country was preparing to depose the dictatorship that we, via AWB, were financing. Hypocrisy on such a blatant scale is hard to represent in any form. Version 1.0 has recently specialised in a sub-genre of the verbatim - inquiry theatre - and this is its most assured work yet. While the "children overboard" controversy (A Certain Maritime Incident, 2004) or vanishing WMD (The Wages of Spin, 2005) are easier sells on the axis of outrage, the skills and environment here (more concise condensation of material into digestible nuggets, superb video from Sean Bacon, a more defined and coherent physical language) result in the tightest and most pointed work the company (Stephen Klinder, Jane Phegan, Yana Taylor, Kym Vercoe and David Williams) has mounted. Sacks of wheat are swung and spilled, the money trail is explicated with chairs and there's a massed chorus of desperate "I don't recalls". AWB's ignored internal ethics document is held to ridicule, a shirtless Trevor Flugge gesticulates impotently with a gun, and various only-following-orders bizoids are hoisted on their own testimony. Amid the suits and the recounted testimony and that ABC interview with the Foreign Minister, the work's big question is stronger for never being explicitly stated. They read the Cole report so you don't have to.
MORE

New review published in the Daily Telegraph.
MORE

The production stage of version 1.0's new show on the AWB kickback scandal have been confirmed! The show will open at Performance Space @ Carriage Works on August 24, and play through until September 8. Be sure to book early, as tickets will sell fast!
MORE

The Bougainville Photoplay Project is described by Paul as being a "slideshow with fireside chat", and interweaves an attempt to reclaim family history through photographs with the history of the civil unrest and armed conflict in Bougainville that followed the opening of the Panguna Copper Mine by CRA Rio Tinto, a conflict in which Australia under Bob Hawke's leadership provided arms and training to the PNG Defence Force, arms which were used in committing a number of atrocities. Far more stripped back and intimate than version 1.0's main stage pieces, it’s a gentle, intelligent, and powerfully moving monologue piece, deftly cross-examining personal and political stories. If you can't make this performance, don't worry, there will be other chances, as we're trying to negotiate a short season later in the year.
MORE

The version 1.0 team will be inresidence at Hothouse Theatre in Albury-Wodonga for two weeks as part of HotHouse's A Month in the Country program. During this residency the team will undertake Stage 2 of the creative development for their new work on the AWB scandal, provisionally titled 'certain Australian companies', building on the results of Stage 1 at Wharf 2 Loud in February.
MORE

version 1.0 kick off the new year with the first stage of development of their major 2007 project on the AWB scandal 'certain Australian companies'. Hosted by Wharf 2 Loud, version 1.0 will present three work-in-progress performances for 'Push #8' on the 8th, 9th and 10th of Feb. Stay tuned for more details about the August season of the completed work at Performance Space's new home, Carriage Works!
MORE

MORE

"In retrospect, some of the hand-on-heart assurances served up as 21st century political debate sound highly amusing when quoted back -- or would do if they didn't leave us feeling as though we'd been taken for suckers. With the advantage of hindsight, how did anyone believe that impoverished and weakened Iraq was stockpiling Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), under the very noses of UN inspectors, to the point of being a real and imminent threat to the rest of the world -- even though so many insiders (the inspectors included) were warning this was merely a convenient excuse being used to justify the invasion by the US and its compliant allies Britain and Australia? Was President George W. Bush being serious when, in front of a huge "Mission Accomplished" sign aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003 he proclaimed: "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." It would be a matter of amusement were it not for the tragedy of the subsequent death toll in Iraq."
MORE

The Wages of Spin is "clever, intelligent, important – and intensely manipulative." Jess Murphy, 9/9/2006
MORE

"The Wages of Spin is a very confident piece of theatre making, that has a polish and sophistication of storytelling language that is inspiring. It is bold, fresh and unique and just shows what a good devising team can create." Josephine Fisher, 9/9/2006
MORE

"To call Wages of Spin fast-paced is bald understatement. From an opening scene unrivalled in tension, to a subsequent bombardment of information, incident and contention, the production assaults the unsuspecting audience with aural and visual imagery, like a seizure on a remote control...Wages of Spin is a work of genius in its selectivity and creative transformation of reality’s material to performance imagery. As much as it amplifies the strategic ‘sexing-up’ of information or commentary – the media spin and political spin none of us are immune to, the performance spins the mind of the spectator. Deep within its topic-leaping, character-morphing, shape-shifting, mind-flipping fibre, the performance is saturated with physical imagery and symbolism."
MORE

"Sydney-Based Version 1.0 is an innovative and dynamic group of theatre-makers whose shows explore vexed issues in contemporary politics….powerfully subversive moments, and in its deployment of novel technologies it lights the way to the theatre of the future." Cameron Woodhead, The Age 4/9/06
MORE

"this superb work from Version 1.0 is concerned with some of the more consequential lies of our recent political history...a very careful and wonderfully effective work of contemporary political theatre providing a forensic investigation into the political and media discourses that both justified and produced the Iraq response." Stephen Dunne, SMH 12/8/2006
MORE

MORE

MORE

As CMI reaches the conclusion of its second Sydney season and prepares to transfer to Canberra, here's a video magazine piece on the performance to whet your appetite by the Sydney Morning Herald's Deb Shaw.
MORE

MORE