Burnout Paradise
About the Cast
Laura Aldous
Claire Bird
Dans Marie Sheehan
William Strom
Dominic Weintraub
Hugo Williams
Laura (she/her) is an actor, theatre maker, puppeteer and creative facilitator working across artistic disciplines in Melbourne. Laura holds a Bachelor of Arts from Monash University’s Centre for Theatre and Performance. Laura is a core creative of Bloomshed, an award winning theatre collective, has been collaborating with multidisciplinary visual theatre/ puppetry/ installation company Barking Spider Creative since 2017, and is an associate artist and lead creative facilitator with participatory arts installation company Playable Streets. In her down time, Laura enjoys joining Pony Cam on international tours of the notoriously relaxing show, Burnout Paradise.
Claire (she/they) is the co-artistic director and a founding member of Pony Cam. Seemingly addicted to theatre, Claire holds dual performance degrees from VCA (Theatre) and UNSW (Theatre and Performance Studies; Dance). Their practice is highly physical, complicatedly collaborative, and unapologetically silly at its core.
Claire’s skill set includes — but is by no means limited to — theatre-making, dancing on any terrain at any time, smiling through the pain, telling every dog it’s a good one, crochet, challenging the status quo, creating anything out of cardboard, nude swimming, bedazzling, tearing calf muscles, breakin’ hearts, filling up on cheese before dinner, recounting dreams to the company (which they love), vocal excellence ie. yelling like there’s no tomorrow with her country-trained lungs, and — of course — doing their physio.
Dans (she/her) is a Melbourne-based independent creative producer. She has previously toured internationally with Elevator Repair Service, Back to Back Theatre, and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, among others.
Through Parrot Ox Productions she currently works with Circus Oz, Pony Cam, Lemony S Puppet Theatre, Half Straddle, and other independent companies, creating ambitious new work and tours that connect local projects to national and international stages. She’s currently in development with three shows and an ongoing battle with her indoor plants.
William (he/him) is a Theatre Maker. His practice is deeply physical, highly improvisational, and quietly playful, with at least a passing interest in music. His investigations are often directed towards the intersection of his own practice and the practices of others – whether they be artists or non-artists – and these collaborations are a constant source of interest and inspiration. He is trained in both circus and dance, and has a degree in Theatre, all of which he uses with great abandon.
Dominic (he/him) is a theatre maker, general manager, and tomato grower based in Melbourne, Australia. As General Manager of the Centre of Jewish Artists and co-founder of Pony Cam, he enjoys creating moments where the spectacular and the ordinary collide, while facilitating meaningful exchanges of ideas. In all his work, Dominic commits too much time to detailing things nobody will notice.
Hugo (he/they) is an artist who works in performance across a range of collaborative formats. Using autobiographical tools, humour, and fiction, he is intent on reducing things to fragments and then scrambling those fragments.
As an Executive Producer and Performance Artist on projects, Hugo searches for where the boundaries of making performance are and how those boundaries can be illustrated on stage. Encouraging transparency, authenticity, and dialogue as tools of enforced liveness.
Hugo started running before Burnout Paradise, not professionally, or even athletically - the only thing Hugo can remember about running technique is that it is best to hold your hands in a fist, but not so tightly that you would break a potato chip
Credits
Created by Pony Cam. Claire Bird, Ava Campbell, William Strom, Dominic Weintraub and Hugo Williams.
Performed by Claire Bird, William Strom, Laura Aldous, Dominic Weintraub and Hugo Williams.
Produced by Dans Maree Sheehan for Parrot Ox.
About Pony Cam
Pony Cam are an award winning experimental collective of five theatre makers from around Australia.
Our work is driven by a desire to bring people together to create experiences that could not otherwise be had. By subverting well-known forms, activating unexpected spaces, and inviting audiences into our work in unexpected ways, we create moments where audiences are challenged to question their assumptions, laugh at themselves, and reject habitual recourse.
As an ensemble we have trained together for over five years, and our practice is instinctive, physical, and highly playful. No two of our works are formally the same, but each is driven by a desire to reimagine our impact in the world, find joy in community, remain utterly silly and laugh in the face of tragedy.
About Burnout Paradise
Four performers mount four treadmills. What begins as a simple wager between performer and audience becomes a desperate attempt to complete a series of escalating tasks that confront the limitations of the performer’s bodies, spirits and minds.
This is not an endurance feat. Nor is it performance art. It is an unraveling realisation that the system we participate in is not designed for us.
A delusional and physical celebration of our collective struggle to establish clear boundaries in our lives.
Direct from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Scotland’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe takes place each August and draws daring, experimental, and genre-defying performances from around the world. A slice of that creative energy comes to Stanford Live this season, as Burnout Paradise and two other Fringe-acclaimed productions make their way to campus.
Spanning theater and performance art, these works address social issues and difficult topics—including burnout, female madness, and sexuality—with a healthy dose of artistic risk and bold humor.
