Aubergine Paint Proof

Black walls, a black ceiling and a chipping black floor. The layers of black paint could tell countless forgotten stories, but here is mine. 

Happy.

They called it the “Cement Box”, which is a fairly accurate description. The walls were made of those awful, crumbly besser bricks and the floor was hard and cold. Objectively, you couldn’t think of a worse place to perform in. Dancers and actors are meant to perform on sprung floorboards, not cement, and there was some rumour about someone getting haemorrhoids from sitting on the concrete too long. Though I don’t even know if that’s medically plausible.

The lighting rig was a nonsensical mess of wires, and we always ran out of light bulbs. One day I took an old light into a technical theatre supplier and asked the guy behind the counter what kind of bulb I would need. A look of fear flickered across his face as he told me that the light was about 50 years old and full of asbestos. We kept using them, of course, but we stopped opening them after that.

The audience sat in blue and red chairs, which always seemed to go missing between shows. You’d have to crawl through the storage spaces and into the orchestra pit in the upstairs theatre to find them, and I was always determined to get enough of each so we could alternate. Aesthetics, you know? Important stuff.

We staged old classics and student-written work, some of it was god-awful, some amazing. But the most impressive part of all was that we did it all ourselves. Every play was acted, directed, costumed, designed, marketed and managed by amateurs, students... kids really. The company was called “Underground”, which was meant to be a joke, I think, because the theatre was semi-subterranean.

Backstage was my favourite place. You could go hunting in the depths and find all sorts of magic: working lamps, foam walls, dodgy doors and an office chair papier-mâchéd to look like a villain’s high-backed seat. You’d find actors sitting on broken audience chairs or on moth-eaten couches, an Assistant Stage Manager doling out props and the director smoking with some of the actors, trying to be relaxed. And then, watching over them, my favourite part of all: the graffiti. The name of every show that had ever been performed in that cement box was immortalised on every square inch of space on the walls and ceiling. Everything was covered, crammed with the names of people I don’t even know, shows that happened 5, 10, 15 years ago. I spent enough time there to know that the oldest date was on the door. 1984. Before I was born.

The best graffiti by far though, was in the tech box. I spent countless hours sitting in there, so I would know. Every show, the stage managers and techies would leave their marks too. Though undated, they undoubtedly went back as far as some of the ones out the back did. But there were no names here, just an endless continuation of the same joke. “No actors in the tech box” one read, “no fuck ups in the tech box”, said another. “No farting in the tech box”, “No sleeping in the tech box”, “No scrub turkeys in the tech box” … “No holds barred in the tech box”. I wish I could remember more, because they were one of the first things to go.

The place was full of secrets, of doors you only discovered after a year of walking past them, of little-used rooms and unknown passages. It was full of fire hazards and broken things, full of dirt and possum shit. One night the resident possum made its theatrical debut, scaring the pants off actors and audience alike.

I became the keeper of the keys at the start of 2009. From the second I had stepped foot in there 3 years’ previously, I had wanted to know all those secrets. It was like knowing where the entrance to Narnia was, or how to get into the Lost Boys’ hideout. The guy with the keys in 2007 used to park his car out the back under the graffiti to save on university parking fees, and I had heard about people sleeping in the office, or having sex in the office, which was frankly disgusting. I knew where the good napping places were (NOT the office) and I often studied or ate my lunch in the foyer with friends.

Always start a relationship in a dirty, cement pit, would be my advice.

All my friends acted or teched in that place, I met my partner there, I had some of the best times of my life there. It was a safe space, a fun place, a filthy, grimy, ugly space. I wrote a third year paper about theatre spaces and how they impact on the theatre that is made in them. I researched theatre troupes in far off, exotic places like Melbourne. They all had whimsical, abandoned, amazing spaces, and it was only in writing about them that I realised I had one of my own all along.

And that’s when it got taken away.

Yes of course, the evil “man” came and ruined our bohemian dreams. That’s how this story always had to go. The union contacted us, and told us they were giving the Cement Box back to the uni, and then came a series of meetings with people in suits. I wanted protests, placards, fire, shouting, but what really happened is that we cut a fairly boring deal and got out of the way. They promised not to paint over the graffiti, and for the most part they kept their word, but they covered some of it with the same awful purple paint they covered the rest of the black with. Aubergine, a lecturer told me later, is the new colour for theatres. They renamed it after Geoffrey Rush and a couple of my friends stole the old Cement Box sign and hung it in their house.  Not to be outdone, I broke in one night with a tin of paint and in large blue letters proclaimed “No more Underground Productions in the tech box”. I thought I was very clever, but it was gone a month later.

In my essay that semester, I wrote thousands of academic words about art and space, about the impact of both on each other. I waffled on about creative safe-spaces, about the value of found spaces and designed spaces alike. I desperately tried to fit our little space into the essay, and I slipped it in there towards the end. But it’s only now that I realise that the Cement Box didn’t just influence the art we made, it was a crucial element of the people we became. The filthy, badly built Cement Box made us the loud, crude, funny, dirty, clever, self-made people that we were, that we are still. It lives on in the friendships around me today, in the life I share with my partner, in the terrible jokes we still tell. They painted over 30 years of stories, but this is mine, and it is aubergine paint proof. 

Thanks to Emily Rowe and Amy Randall for photos.

Lizzy King, Human - A Study. Box 4, Part 1.

2004 – the fourth box, better known as the ‘Why the Fuck did I Keep this Shit Box?”

(If you're wondering what the flip is going on, start here).

For the most part, this box is kind of boring. NO WAIT, DON’T LEAVE. I will try to pick out some of the more interesting bits for you. I think by this stage of the hoarding adventure I was thinking more along the lines of “accurately representing my life” like some kind of time capsule, rather than “keeping things that are of genuine or significant value” like some kind of interesting blog fuel.

There are bus tickets and receipts, RECEIPTS for fuck’s sake. There’re programs for music concerts I wasn’t even involved in, and a giant plastic bag for no reason. So this is just a smattering, a hand picked few, a small selection of vaguely interesting things from my life circa 2004.

Item – Notes taken in Study of Religion – 2004

So we are fast approaching what I have suddenly decided to call the “Atheist Event Horizon”. At this point I was still a Christian, but damn was that faith wavering. I had a lot of questions, and Christianity was quickly failing to answer them. I was studying other religions and belief systems and some of them were answering them, and some of them weren’t, but they sure as hell were convincing me that just one religion couldn’t be the be all and end all. I was also, *obsessed* with death. I don’t even know why. I know that somewhere, possibly in this box, or possibly not, there is a list of things I wanted said at my funeral. I was afraid of missing out on life, afraid that cool things would happen without me, afraid that heaven would be a sap-fest; full of happy stupid people.

These notes are quotes from my textbook. I think they sum up how I was feeling at the time quite nicely:

Item – Headbands – 2004

I wasn’t even that into sport, but for some reason I kept two headbands bearing the name of my sports house, “Cawley”. Our house was named after Evonne Goolagong Cawley, the famous tennis player. Of course, Cawley is her husband’s name, but it would be a cold day in hell before my fancy private school will name the house, “Goolagong”.

woo sport

Photo – Semi-formal group shot – 2004

I won’t include any of the other peeps in this photo, because I can’t be bothered to ask them all permission (or actually track them down in some cases) but damn, look at those shoes. The flower in my hair is also in this box.

Claw hand?

Item – Signed Poster – 2004

VaPar was a pretty awesome thing I was involved in. I got a main role in the play much to everybody’s surprise including my own. We did our own telling of the King Arthur story in a physical theatre piece. It was actually not anywhere as awful as that sounds. I played the lady of the lake and had bells in my costume, it was fucking awesome. This is the poster for the thing, everyone signed it.

The whole poster didn't fit in my scanner but you get the gist.

Item – School Diary – 2004

Grade 11 was probably the first time I was properly comfortable in my friendship groups. That’s not to suggest I had bad friends before that, but things did shift a bit in grade 11 and a number of the people I became friends with that year are still my friends to this day. Most notably my friend Mim. I don’t know why I mention that, it’s not relevant to the diary, I just thought you all might like to know. Hi Mim.

No but what I’m getting at is that this diary (which is just like a daily planner by the way, not a “ow my feelings” thing) kind of reflects my own development into the person I am today. I mean, I still had a long way to go. But here we find evidence of my love of planning and studying (yeah, nerd 4 lyf). Things are colour coded and here and there you’ll find ideas for essay paragraphs or notes to self about assessment. (Oh there’s a cute one here about Darcy’s pride and Lizzy’s Prejudice). My friends birthdays are all written in by them, happily and amusingly. No one is crossed out, there’s no snipy little comments from yours truly, and there are fun things cut out of magazines.

There’s no real evidence of the 5-week derailment of my life that was Glandular Fever at the end. Not unless you’re looking closely. There is less daily homework written in (because I wasn’t going to school) but all the assessment and exam stuff is still there because I was frighteningly (and fairly stupidly) determined to get it all done in spite of the fact that my spleen was four times its usual size. I spent most of my time in bed, waking up every four hours for medicine and bizarre juices my mother had made. I had tonsillitis, laryngitis and the aforementioned giant spleen. I still managed to do those exams, though, and I remember being almost hysterical by the last one. Which was biology. I drew a smiley face for the final answer and left with my shoes around my neck. Good times.

Item – Creaming Soda wrapper – 2004

Here’s a perfect example of the random shit I kept in this box. Why, why, why, would I keep something like this? I have a vague recollection that we thought it was funny how giant the creaming soda is compared to the dude holding it, but even still. Just what. Juuust what. 

I mean I guess it is kinda funny...