Holly Childs is a writer and artist based in Naarm Melbourne. Their work, across fiction, poetry, visual art, and performance focuses on the shifting mechanisms of storytelling in a contemporary world in which physical matter is constantly being reshaped, recontextualised, and rewritten by emerging crises and technologies.

Angela Goh is an artist who works with dance and choreography. Her work is presented in contemporary art contexts and traditional performance spaces in leading institutions around the world. She lives on Gadigal land in Sydney, Australia.

The cliffhanger format dates back to the tenth century Arabic classic One Thousand and One Nights. A King marries a new bride each night only to sentence her to death the next morning. But, when he marries Scheherazade, she begins to tell him a story, with no time to finish it before morning. Overcome with curiosity to know what happens next, the King spares her life until the next night. But the next night the same thing happens, and so it goes on for 1001 nights – mirroring the Netflix binge model but preceding it by at least 11 centuries. Sheharazade uses the cliffhanger as a strategy to save her own life. But who will save us?

As well as being a storytelling tool/device/metaphor, Cliffhanger also looks to formal elements of literal cliff hanging. Indoor rock-climbing holds are similar in size and shape to both smartphones, and biface axes, the first technology. Can we use technologies to climb out of hyperconnected disconnection? On the other hand, perhaps goats hold some clues on how to navigate cliffs, without technology. Goats possess an uncanny ability to locate supportive holds on cliff faces that appear, to humans, uncrossable without some form of climbing apparatus, like ropes or harnesses. Is there a way off the metaphorical cliff through understanding the environment and attributes of the cliff itself?

Co-creator: Holly Childs
Co-creator: Angela Goh
Composer: Gediminas Žygus
Costume Designer: Verity Mackey