In 2008, I produced a series of events at The Blue Room Theatre based on my memorabilia collection.
I've been an avid collector since the 80's hitting op-shops swap meets and garage sales on the weekends. Over the years I accumulated a significant amount of cool vintage items from movies, books, records, board games, toys and other weird and wonderful stuff people have discarded.
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I collect purely to be pleasantly surprised by the unpredictable reward of the scavenger hunt and haggle for the satisfaction of reviving and displaying the item proudly amongst my collection. I prefer going on a journey, not online. Collecting in the modern age has streamlined the purchasing process and removed the element of surprise. But in a way, evolution has kind of compensated for this by enabling new generation collectors to produce homemade online unboxing videos for their viewers.
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Borgworld was a two hour show over four nights of a series of short obscure themed episodes inspired by whacky UK and US children's tv shows I grew up watching in the 70's and 80's. I thought up new concepts for each night and improvised along the way glueing it all together, tastefully, somehow.
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I set up a kooky control panel containing analogue equipment. I operated two VHS players through a vision mixer with a tiny monitor to mix the video content projected on the screen. A cassette tape and record player sat amongst random kooky things which I controlled from a vintage cane Peacock Chair.
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Control room sound effects bleeped and blooped along to a looping cruise through the stars providing the atmosphere as I winged my way around this silly idea. I took a photo of my eye, printed a sheet of stickers and wore it as a third eye. I gave out kooky prizes for winning made up kooky games. I found The Book of Answers working on a building site so I turned it into a game. Contestants asked the book a question before opening to a random page revealing their answer. It worked out about half the time.
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I produced a no budget commercial for a board game with a friend's family using pre smartphone technology, a Canon Digi-8 camera and an early version of iMovie on a white E-Mac computer.
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My assistant Vanessa provided a ladies touch classically presenting items and escorting contestants on stage. One evening she performed her highly anticipated debut burlesque act, Vanessa the Undresser! But she got stage fright and canned the stripping and just waved about for a few minutes.
A local magician offered to perform a magic card trick, but it was more of a tragic card trick. Comedy!
Opening and closing nights were the most popular but the spontaneity and stupidity enraged the newly appointed theatre manager at the time that she stormed out upset making her opinion known on her way out. She even drilled me at my next show about not being theatery enough or something.
Never the less people knew not to take it too seriously and mostly enjoyed themselves anyway. $15 got ya a couple of hours of time spent more interestingly than whatever else you had planned, or not. On closing night I ended this ridiculousness by performing a version of Sid Vicious' My Way, my way.
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Borgworld was a semi successful experiment and not a bad little earner for having a bit of fun. It led me on to develop other similar concepts to hold in a theatre environment with an engaging audience.
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I photographed this collection at home on a lit kitchen table and sloped on purpose just to be different. Much of the collection was sold, traded or donated but I still have enough collectables to satisfy me.
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Enjoy the show and remember, collect responsibly and don't hoard coz it's only stuff you don't need.
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