Fascinatng, disturbing, engaging, thought-provoking and encouraging. These are some of the words I would use to describe my first Absolut Fringe Festival 2009 experience - Point Blank at the Project Arts Centre.
Point Blank - photo by Erin Baiano from www.fringefest.com
Upon finishing high school, Nada is faced with the challenge of deciding what she wants to do with her life. Despite the expectations of her peers, Nada doesn’t want to go to university. She finds the notion that she is expected to know what she wants to with her life at such a young age absurd and thus decides to leave home and head into the unknown to figure out her path.
She takes her camera (which has a powerful zoom lens) with her and begins to secretly photograph people from a distance observing the lives of others in an attempt to decide what kind of life she wants to lead.
From her travels she has so far collected over 200,000 photos. Along the way she has captured many different aspects of human behaviour, from the extreme to the bizarre to the completely mundane. She has started to categorise her photos as a means to help work out where her future lies & who she wants to be.
During the performance Nada presents and contemplates some of her photographs while engaging with the audience to try to reach some understanding that will allow her to make decisions about her life. Each performance is centred around one particular question which she sets about answering by the end of the show.
Point Blank is an intruiging, challenging and truly enjoyable piece of theatre and I highly recommend you try to catch one of the two remaining performances on Monday 7th or Tuesday 8th of September at the Project Arts Centre in Temple Bar. Tickets are available from www.fringefest.com or at the Absolut Fringe Box Office at Filmbase in Temple Bar.
