R&D at the End of the World: Part One takes place in a not so distant future of our planet that is post-human and post-climate crisis. The human performers of our global stage have been long since replaced by the ever present, non-human Atua; Time, Earth, and Rain. In this imagining of the future A scale model house sitting under the constant deluge of a rain machine will slowly be transformed over 4 evenings by the cast. Each will exert their slow but inexorable effects of erosion and decay, recreating the final days of the climate crisis on a micro scale.


A duration performance piece, centered on this interactive sculpture, which explores the interconnection of our flexible perceptions of time, the rapidly accelerating and immutable changes to our planet, fixed within linear time. Each hour, and even each minute, of the duration of this work will be unique and irrevocable.

Featuring a Taonga Puoro score by Ruby Solly, as well as poems and prose excerpts from writers and artists across the Motu, R&D offers up a thoroughly interconnected performance of cultural and linear time and of change, and destruction. Please join us to witness this decay, and to meditate on our own place within infinity.