Each night in Onstage Dating, Melbourne-based performer Bron Batten has asked someone she's met on Tinder recently to come and spend some time with her on the Basement Studio stage.
On opening night, Casey from Tinder didn't show, so to Plan B: audience surveys filled out pre-show. As Jess Bates found out, this resulted in a wonderful Fantasia of Awkward. By Jess Bates Read Time: 18 mins. In preparation for each performance of her show Onstage Dating, Melbourne-based performer Bron Batten asks someone she's met on dating app Tinder to come and spend some time with her on the Basement Studio stage. On opening night Casey from Tinder didn't show, so to Plan B: audience surveys filled out in the bar beforehand.
As Jess Bates found out, this resulted in an Ode to Awkward. The questions were published in The New York Times , and are now available as a podcast and an app. Both dating shows made for sometimes deliciously uncomfortable viewing. Interestingly, Bron Batten's show utilises the same 36 questions, but in the discomfort stakes, the opening night of Onstage Dating was in a class of its own.
Taking her previous work into account, this should come as no surprise. Bewildered reviewer John Smythe told audiences that they would 'cringe' and found her Dad's performance 'anti-theatrical'. I take that to mean Batten fires herself headlong into intentionally clunky situations, and this rub makes me all the more excited. The show opens with a neon promise: we meet a booty-popping futurist bird-girl, with a soundscape that makes me think someone has installed a synth and a drum machine in the Waitakere Ranges.
We are then treated to some brilliantly crappy vox-pop footage of Melbourne passers-by giving their first impressions of Bron from looking at a photograph of her. There is something fitting about this deflationary, vague drum roll to introducing our host for the night. According to the responders she could be 25, or 45, or work in HR, or should be less unkempt, or could be the kind of girl who recycles.
