The sky’s gone black. The ground is toxic. Clean water is contraband and ransom. Survivors gather for a final argument on good and evil, the madness of love, and the future of the soul…

PREVIOUSLY BLUE is created by seven artists who have trained and influenced artists all over the world. Devised from unconventional choreodirection, speak-singing tragic “songlines”, hand percussion, and scenic presence, PREVIOUSLY BLUE translates catastrophe into the soul's hunger to find beauty in the face of tragedy. Surreal survivors try to defy a mysterious eclipse of distress and distraction with patterns of water and a longing for skies that were previously blue. They seek to preserve a special kind of integrity that emerges from disaster in the interests of common good. They long for what they have lost – beauty – and a world that can sustain beauty.

Director: Dijana Milosevic; Text: Ruth Margraff; Music: Nikos Brisco; Design: Nesa Paripovic; Performed by Maja Vujovic, Del Hamilton, Faye Allen, Ruth Margraff and Nikos Brisco

Local playwright Ruth Margraff admires how nature endures her tragedies: “I fell in love with Plato’s Phaedrus and the way he argues the madness of love on a walk out of the city into nature. Like Plato I’m using the form of the tragic poem but I disrupt it with water and sometimes fire. I’m reading Rebecca Solnitʼs Paradise Built in Hell, Leszek Kolakowskiʼs Conversations with the Devil. I’m looking at Henryk Fantazos’ harvest paintings, peacebuilding and water, and the craze for the color of indigo which once ruled the world. And this is where I am in my present soul.”

The harvest of a collaboration that has borne fruit for decades is rare, manifold and endangered. PREVIOUSLY BLUE exhibits an urgency to find abundance and reflection in astounding moments of presence, no matter how small.