DEAD HORSE GAP @ the Cobargo Showground

Dead Horse Gap_Cobargo Dec 2024_David Rogers Photography-3036 copy-min

Sunday 1 December 2024 was a celebration of firsts for Crimson Rosella. We welcomed our very first audience to our very first public event, a proof-of-concept showing for our very first project, Dead Horse Gap! The showing was the culmination of a two week creative development period at the Cobargo Showground, during which our brilliant Dead Horse Gap team – creative artists, actors, musicians and technicians – made about 40 minutes of the action and music, which we shared with a small gathering of Cobargo locals, friends, family and guests.

Dead Horse Gap might seem like a new work, but it has been a long time in the making. It began life as ‘The Candelo Project’ at a workshop in Kameruka Hall near Candelo at the end of 2017. Since then its journey has been interrupted by fires, floods and Covid, and its story has seen many twists and turns. But it has always stayed true to songwriter Heath Cullen’s original vision for a ‘dark trippy Western’ set on the South Coast, with musical roots in Candelo; and an analogue-meets-digital aesthetic clash we call ‘Antipodean Noir’, a place where edges are left deliberately rough and stitched-together, where C19^th photography meets Victorian vaudeville, illusion and magic realism, with digital imagery, contemporary rock, quirky Gothic and even a little psychedelia.

One of the most important things about Dead Horse Gap is its connection to local community. Earlier this year we held a series of skills-development community workshops and on Sunday, four locals from those workshops played the residents of Dead Horse Gap. Many of the colonial-era props, furniture and decorations were locally sourced by generous Cobargo residents, then carefully curated by designer Katja Handt into a charming entrance installation and into the performance itself.

We were also interested to test our rather eccentric approach to the storytelling. It’s a bit like a collage. Some of the characters and events in Dead Horse Gap are real and historically accurate. We used original sources like colonial newspapers, advertisements, documentation of actual events and people; then rearranged these real things, real people and real colonial obsessions in a particular order, to make a story that – like a ballad – may or may not be true. It’s fiction, but there is some truth behind every scene. For example, Addy the petty criminal played by Tamlyn Magee, is based on a colonial con artist called Amy Bock, who had dozens of aliases including a male alter ego called Percival Redmond, who married a woman in Otago New Zealand. And Charlie Chaste is based on the colonial photographer Charles Baylis.