Bundanon

Counterpilot is an award-winning collective of interdisciplinary artists directed by Nathan Sibthorpe and including Mike Willmett (sound designer), Christine Felmingham (technical designer), Sarah Winter (production designer), and Clinton Freeman (software designer).

Together, they create interactive performance works, activating audiences with new technology, rich design, and transmedia storytelling. Counterpilot seeks to transform the familiar, juxtaposing rich fictional worlds against a backdrop of the everyday. By subverting real social circumstances, they co-opt our participants as authentic performers. In this way they are harnessing what we believe to be the most exciting thing about theatre – the live audience. Their works enable participants to observe themselves responding in real ways to hyper-real situations.

Since 2015, they have produced seven major works, in partnership with organisations including Metro Arts, Brisbane Powerhouse, Next Wave Festival, Brisbane Festival, Sydney Festival, Darwin Festival, Horizon Festival, La Boite Theatre Company, and Adelaide Fringe.

While in residence, Counterpilot worked on the development of their project ‘ADRIFT’. ADRIFT explores themes of human loneliness, isolation, and our fraught relationship with nature in the face of a potential mass extinction event. Using a narrative structure that resembles platonic speed dating, strangers are guided to collaborate in order to uncover a series of true stories.