The Big Bruise

“It wasn’t that the rope wasn’t strong enough but that I was heavy enough to bring down the entire lighting fixture the last time I tried. Suddenly my only concern was cleaning up the mess  and setting things right in the eyes of my landlord. And ironically, for the first time in a while,  something in my life was fixable in the immediate future.”

There are no statistics that can adequately paint this picture. Tragically over 2000 Australians a  year can be firmly counted as fatal victims of suicide but there is no way to adequately  catalogue the countless attempts that go unrecorded. You cannot quantify the suicidal thoughts  and even the nagging sensation most “healthy” people get when standing above a precipice to  simply jump. Pathologising can only go so far. For those of us with scars we have to  strategically cover every time we get dressed; those of us with everyday objects in our house  that are tainted with bad memories yet ones we cannot afford to get rid of there is more to be  done than “surviving”. Our culture wallows in the destruction of human bodies, we fetishise it  every day and yet the urge to curtail our own existence is “sick”.

The Big Bruise is part one man performance, part macabre magic show. An honest and  frequently brutally hilarious portrait of a body thrashing against it’s own sense of self  preservation. Suicide is a brutal ender of lives that needs to be stopped at all costs but so does  the shame of so many people who will never leave behind the time, or times, they made a very  very stupid decision they fortunately didn’t plan very well. In retrospect it’s kind of a funny  story…

WARNING: The Bruise Contains nudity, simulation of various methods of suicide, smoking,  explicit discussion and instruction on various methods of suicide and explicit recorded material.

Shows on 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15th April.