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No fears for tears

An award winning experience is on its way to Newport.

The Crying Room: Exhumed is showing at The Substation at 7.30pm every night from February 20 to February 24.

A crying room is typically a small, soundproof chamber at the back of a theatre auditorium.

As the name suggests, it’s a place you can go if you are crying so as not to disturb the audience.

This show, created by Marcus Ian McKenzie with Anna Nalpantidis, Derrick Duan, Maria Moles, Romanie Harper and Richard Vabre, is a deeply personal and form-bending performance that shows the crying room as a site dedicated to emotional extraction, a place to essentially let it all out.

Lead artist Marcus Ian McKenzie said The Substation is the perfect place to stage the show, due to its gritty, old feel.

“I have wanted to create a work for The Substation for many years. It’s a striking and inspiring building, laden with character,” he said.

“I see this piece as a collaboration with not just The Substation as one of Melbourne’s most iconic arts institutions, but with The Substation as a physical entity: the brick, the mortar, the graffiti, the dirt, the ghosts, the sounds of freight trains passing in the night.”

“The Crying Room: Exhumed is about the immanent relationship between ecstasy and grief.

“It’s also a furious, psychedelic, absurd affirmation of life; a meditation on the absence of ritual in the contemporary world.

“Yes, it’s dark, but I promise it is very entertaining too.”

Gerald Lynch

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