Scott-Patrick Mitchell has signed himself up for a challenge. The performance poet is heading to Crack Theatre Festival in Newcastle in early October where he’s agreed to perform a 24 hour long improvisational work.
While this will be Mitchell’s longest ever live performance he’s not sure what his current record is.
“I remember back when I first began performing there was a performance space called 6A NICA, the non-institute of contemporary art.
“Alan Boyd – the anti-poet and I put on Perth’s first ever emerging writers festival there. We had that stage for about two or three days and it became this constant morph of people performing and getting on stage and doing whatever they wanted. I can’t say how long I was on stage that time.” Mitchell wonders, “I know in private I have done seven and half hours of improvised spoken word performance.”
Mitchell reassures me that his seven and half hour performance wasn’t just him hanging out at home for day talking to the cat.
“No, I was a writer is residence at the Fellowship of Australian Writers. I got to spend a month living in Mattie Furphy house, this beautiful heritage listed cottage. The space had such fantastic energy, all of a sudden I just started performing.” Mitchell explained.
“I had lots of characters I played throughout the piece,” Mitchells said. “By the end of it I’d reached this point where I was a barstardised Lady Gaga with a German accent singing nursery rhymes. At that point I thought, ‘Yeah, I’m doing my own head in now.”
Mitchell said he was confident that he wouldn’t run out of things to talk about during his marathon performance.
“I have a wealth of characters inside of me…I’ve got twenty four characters that I can all upon if I need to and I’ve divided the time into thee eight hour long acts and it’ll be a shamanic ritual of me descending into my own personal hell.” Mitchell said.
Crack Theatre Festival is held in Newcastle NSW and runs from October 1st – 4th. Visit cracktheatrefestival.com for more information.
