- Medieval Europe. Public executions always pulled a rowdy mosh
hungry for a flaying, live impalement, a good hang, draw and quartering
or a nasty heretic boiled in a pot of oil.
That's gotta be my favourite.
- One of the kind of beautiful things about puppets
is that when you bring them to life well,
it becomes this amazing shared experience.
You all know when you've done it right.
And it can be quite profoundly moving.
You believe 100 percent
that the puppet has done everything by itself.
- # An eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth
# Anyway, I told the truth
# I'm not afraid to die
- So these two puppets are kind of the Adam and Eve of murder.
They're the original concept.
This is Stagger and this is Nellie Brown.
And he rapes her
and kills her boyfriend.
And when we did that as a five-minute show,
we quite literally had people trying to tear our door down
to try and get in to see the show.
There would be a lot of people laughing
but then there'd be this uncomfortable silence.
And I think, for me, that's what cemented
the need for us to make the show.
- # He said, well, bartender, it's plain to see
# I'm the bad motherfucker called Stagger Lee
# Mr Stagger Lee
- With Murder, we're trying to take people
to places that are both erotic
and disturbing.
- # Just then, Billy Dilly rolls in
# He says, you must be the mad motherfucker called Stagger Lee
- As far as how Murder started,
it's obvious that I have something of an obsession with Nick Cave.
- Lights go down, instrumental comes up.
- We've rerecorded our own versions of the songs.
We've kind of lifted elements from songs.
We're using those as reprises or as tones
or as sympathetic oral accompaniments.
The company's name is Erth, E-R-T-H.
Erth started in 1990.
Steve Howarth is a sculptor.
All I wanted to do was climb inside his sculptures and bring them to life.
We started as straight performers.
Within the last decade, we've been telling the story of Australia
through natural history.
So we're well-known for making great dinosaurs.
- This structure here and this structure here
are two of four mobile projection screens.
They kind of go up and down like sails
so that all the projections in the show
can describe things like forests and cityscapes.
We've got quite a lot of different sets and places and states of mind
that we wanna represent.
- Point the gun right between his eyes
and he just sneers back at me with that same sneer
through all the blood and all the shit all over his face.
I can't describe how good I felt right then.
Years of pent-up fury roaring in my ears.
I understood then the joy of feeling nothing towards someone you could kill.
- (Scott) There are questions about,
is there good murder and is there bad murder?
Questions like, "Why do we so easily glorify or remember the murderers
but forget the victims?"
- I'm killing serial killers.
- (Scott) A tenth of the world's population is currently online
playing real-time, virtual killing games.
As far as how murder sits within our popular culture,
I'd like people to question whether or not they feed it
or whether they're fed by it.
Have we changed since the times of the Coliseum?
I don't think that we've changed at all.
- # You have a heart
# And I have the key
# Lie back and let me unlock you
# Those heathens you hang with
# Down by the sea
# All they wanna do is defrock you
# I know a river where we can dream
# It will swell up, burst its banks
# Baby, rock you
- (Scott) Freud has this thing called the uncanny valley
and it's a graph that measures
the way that we look at things that have human form.
And as things take on more and more realistic
or symmetrical elements of human,
we invest further and further into them.
Store mannequins and puppets exist very much in the uncanny valley
and our job, as puppeteers, is to try and keep them within the uncanny valley,
which means it's about keeping them alive.
- # But I'm glad you've come around here
- (Scott) Good puppeteers will find
that when they're operating a puppet together,
that their breathing and their heart rates
will actually sync in with each other.
- # Banging like a gong
- I have, for a lot of years, wanted to integrate choreographies
into the work that we do.
I started hounding Kate Champion,
"Can we get some of our puppets and your dances together?"
- Oh, yeah, roll his head round. Yeah.
- To pretend that death won't find us.
- That's gotta come out. - It's uncomfortable.
- We often do choreography
where we manipulate another person with other human beings,
so the step into manipulating puppetry feels very organic for me.
And also, the psychology behind what it means to manipulate someone
or when the manipulator turns on the people who are manipulating them,
those layers are what I'm interested in.
- Working with people and puppets,
it really allows you to create very new worlds.
- # If you're gonna die with them cannibals
- (Scott) It's been an amazing journey and now we're going full circle.
We're asking not just our audience but ourselves
really hard things
and trying to take an active participation in public conversations.
- It wasn't till a few years later I heard about the bodies found
on that stretch of road between Cann River and Orbost.
And I realised, that was Ivan Milat.
We'd wandered onto his training ground.
I made a fucking big mistake not pulling that trigger.
- Thanks, everyone.