THE RABBLE is a group of visionary women who have consistently produced bold, provocative and visually stunning theatrical experiences. The company has forged an unrivalled reputation for producing experimental theatre (Unwoman, Lone, Joan, Story of O) of the highest quality – theatre that interrogates the human condition through a combination of surreal and visceral aesthetics, and a feminist sensibility.

YES asks an audience to investigate their relationship to truth in a post-traumatic world. People all over the world are trying to tell the story of the last two years. What happened? What are the facts? We are each having to contend with how to make meaning from collective trauma. The bushfires, COVID-19, The Black Lives Matters protests, transphobia, and never-ending conspiracy theories. The chasm between world views is literally and metaphorically widening.

During COVID, as we are separated from physical truths and experiences, we are ever more reliant on other sources for understanding: journalists, politicians, scientists, medical professionals, fire fighters, the police. But we know these institutions are easily corruptible; by money, power, elections or notions of “trying to protect the public” or “doing the right thing”. So what happens if we abandon the structures of authority? Is it possible to understand the world where multiple conflicting ideas are all true at once? Where meaning is shaped not by single experts and authorities, but by communities of ideas?

This piece seeks to investigate systems of knowledge, their biases and their strengths in order to understand how we might tell stories in a post-traumatic world where the most basic of facts are contested. We want to disempower the makers of meaning (the leaders of patriarchal structures – medicine, science, politics, media) that filter and decide how trauma is portrayed. Instead, we want to create a more communal process of searching.

THE RABBLE aren’t experts. We are not seeking answers to these massive problems. Just methods to disrupt structures and ways to ask questions.

Co-Creators and Co-Directors: Emma Valente & Kate Davis
Set and Costume Design: Kate Davis
Lighting and Sound Design / Composition: Emma Valente
Performers: Dana Miltins & Mary Helen Sassman
Stage Manager: Cassandra Fumi
Production Manager: Kate Cameron
Production Manager (Development & Pre-production): Rebecca Etchell
Understudy: Eva Seymour
Produced by Performing Lines
Associate Designer: Emma Lockhart-Wilson
Set Construction: Jim Stenson

Co-commissioned by Vitalstatistix, RISING and Arts House.

YES is produced by Performing Lines and supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, and the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, as well as the Besen Family Foundation and the City of Melbourne through Arts House.