At Home With Dick and Jane title

Originally produced during HIVE at The Chapel Arts Centre, Vancouver - 2006
Reworked and Remounted at HIVE3 in 2010 at the Centre for Digital Media, Vancouver

At Home with Dick and Jane was first produced for HIVE, a landmark Canadian theatre event at Vancouver's Chapel Arts Centre, 2006. HIVE represented the collective coming-out party of a number of British Columbia's most innovative performance creation companies, including Radix, Boca del Lupo, Neworld Theatre, Theatre SKAM, Rumble Productions, Theatre Replacement, Felix Culpa, Leaky Heaven, The Only Animal, and Theatre Conspiracy.

 

Audience members are led into a tiny, custom-designed screening room to watch a sparring pair of talking heads – a male theatre director and a female film director – argue the importance of their own work. Each has made a piece about the two most human, universal examples of real people: Dick and Jane. As their rant continues in a never-ending loop of narcissistic art-speak, spectators are guided one by one into a second chamber – this is the live portion of the piece. Here, they become a kind of camera operator 'shooting' a live 'tracking shot' through a tiny viewfinder that is both miniature theatre and antique camera. The experience is immersive on a very physical level as they are rolled along on a loop of dolly track through the home of Dick and Jane. In this creation, the subjects are creating portraits of each other in a selfless exchange of creativity.

 

Created by Marianne Otterstrom, Kim Collier, and Jonathon Young

 

“The Electric Company’s installation, At Home With Dick and Jane, is so intense I still haven’t recovered. I can’t tell you how intimate, how intense the glimpses seen through the slit in that box are. Dick pursues Jane with scissors. It’s scary. Then he cuts off a lock of her hair, which he uses to make a doll of her. He puts that doll on a tiny stage. On the back wall of that stage, Jane’s film about Dick is running. This piece is so sensual and so full of ideas about the nature and interactivity of media that I felt like my brains were all over the room by the time it was over.” - Colin Thomas, Georgia Straight

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The film version of the 2010 production of At Home with Dick and Jane

Tech Specs:

Touring company: 5 (2 actors, 1 technical director/operator, 1 stage manager, 1 designer).
Minimum floor space required: 26'X25'. It is preferred if 6'X25 of this is in a separate/adjacent space from the rest, though the two spaces can be divided by masking flats if need be.
Blackouts must be possible in performing space.
Minimum room height required: 12'.
Minimum set-up time in space: 2-week residency.
Producer provides all production materials (set, costumes, props, technical equipment).
Presenter provides 1 technician for 20 hours of set-up, and 1 usher during all performances (can be volunteer). The technician is no longer required to run the show after the set-up is complete, but on-call technical support is required for venue issues that may arise from time to time.
Power requirements: At Home with Dick and Jane requires sufficient power for 2 projectors, 2 DVD players, 1 iMac computer, 1 TV, 2 audiofire sound mixers, 2 powered PA speakers, 8 practical 60w lights, and 1 kitchen hotplate. All units operate on standard 110 v cabling. Audience Capacity: Appx 30/day over 3 hours of performance. Duration: 10 minutes. It is possible to increase the daily capacity by employing a second, local company of 4.
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