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Container or music series
Sense of a Stranger
Wellington 2018
Olivia Mahood, Poppy Serano
A wall of many openings, where arms reach, eyes peer, or mouths whisper. By approaching this surface, audience members lean in to the touch of fingertips, gently spoken words, and the gaze of a stranger’s eye.
Sense of a Stranger is a participatory performance installation that offers a held space for members of the public to be courageous, to share a small moment of touch with a stranger, a moment of vulnerability, to hear another person’s story whispered in their ear, to remind each other of their own human-ness.
Olivia Mahood is an actor, filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist, currently working out of Auckland, New Zealand. She holds a BPA from Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School and received the Museum Art Hotel Scholarship in 2015. She has been strongly influenced by her training with Joan Scheckel in Los Angeles in 2015, and her ongoing working relationship with Brita McVeigh. She also spent two years training with Long Cloud Youth Theatre company under Willem Wassenaar and Aaron Cortesi with a focus on devised theatre and immersive promenade performance.
Olivia works across film, television and live performance. Previous performance art projects include Boss of an Office, Open for Business in collaboration with Two Productions, and most recently a development presentation of The Ball Never Stops. She most recently directed Today’s the Day, My Wedding Day a short film produced by 2113 Creatives and has two short films in post production.
Poppy Serano is an emerging performance designer and recent graduate of
Toi Whakaari: New Zealand drama school. Working on projects spanning live art,
music videos, dance, films and most recently theatre.
Within 3 years Poppy has been worked with companies such as Red Leap Theatre, Touch Compass, Atamira Dance Company and Barbarian Productions.
Poppy is a 2016 recipient of Wellington Theatre Award for Set Designer of the year. She has been strongly supported through artistic mentorship from Jo Randerson and design mentorship from local designers such as Elizabeth Whiting, John Verryt, Andrew Foster and Stephen Bain.
Passionate about live experiences, Poppy is most interested in projects that allow
her to break rules, experiment and play to build immediate engaging environments.
