So you’ve got an arts degree, emblazoned on an A4 page signed by people you’ve never met, a massive student loan to be repaid from your future earnings and now you’re out in the ‘real world’ in search of your dream job. This is the potent premise for Now Face The World, billed as “an irreverent fever dream of our greatest artistic career hopes and heartbreaks, and those nasty bits in between”.

It’s economically instructive that the Curve Box devising ensemble, directed by Shawn Keil, presents their show in the small Meanwhile art gallery space two-floors up in Willis Street, seating the audience around the wall on a random selection of chairs. Borrowed bed lamps, on the floor between chairs, provide most of the lighting (designed by Kirsten Grant). Apart from Luke Duncan’s sound design, which resonates in the brick-and-plaster space, along with Keil’s richly-toned voice-over, sardonically lauding the graduates for their achievements, the onus is entirely on the five actors to engage our interest with what they do in an empty space.

‘Fever dream’ is an apt description for the surging ensemble that flutters forth and swirls about (choreography by Emma Maguire) in search of ways to realise their vocations. Each variation of this theme comes into focus with fictional scenarios which may be sourced from personal experiences and certainly touch on abiding truths. By dramatising these individual examples, Now Face The World comments on wider socio-political issues that counterpoint self-aware send-ups of unrealistic expectations.

The resoundingly sonorous “What are you?” (referencing Greg McGee’s Foreskin’s Lament?) and the laughter that greets the answer, “An artist,” establishes the context for the quests. Thankfully what follows is not simplistic and our inclination to side with the Artist is often tested.

An audition sequence that plunders well-know lines from the big and small screens, is both a metaphor and literal, in that it scores Luke Burke’s Actor a role – another in a long line that exploits his ‘look’ and keeps casting him as a cultural stereotype he now rails against on behalf of his people. Having spent three years exploring and honouring his tangata whenua heritage, and being a gentle, intelligent chap, of course it’s an insult to be reduced to this repeatedly. But protesting in the middle of the actual shoot rather than at the audition, where he delivered the cliché the director (Annica Lewis) now expects him to repeat, raises serious questions of professional ethics, which the scene acknowledges.  

Aishani Pole’s Writer traverses self-doubt, writer’s block and the torment of feedback from friends in the process of trying to get her central character, Jacob (Haydn Carter) to fly. She’s clearly the sort of writer who starts with an image then writes in the hope a structured story will evolve – which audience members will respond to according to their own belief systems. Manifesting her struggling creative imagination through the ensemble works well.

The Jack of all Trades portrayed by Annica Lewis creates the opportunity to comment on the ubiquitous expectation that well qualified and debt-burdened practitioners will happily work for free to gain EXPERIENCE and EXPOSURE. It’s an ever-present problem well-worth exposing. Her need for time out is a syndrome I have often observed.

Emma Maguire’s Dancer, along with three others, is subjected to a style of teaching and choreography we’d like to think was long gone but the idea of crushing egos then building the artist back up – to be emotionally dependent of their tormentor – certainly prevailed within living memory. As Burke’s East European teacher abuses the eager-to-please and stay-out-of-trouble dancers with withering put-downs, we witness an array of very credible responses before Maguire’s Dancer at last takes a stand.

The Painter is the last artist to be portrayed. Haydn Carter explores emotional extremes in the process of exploring their vocation. Using the ensemble to manifest the painting they work on and rework is especially effective. The Artist’s inability to cope with praise and selfie-seeking fans at the exhibition opening is tellingly contrasted with their happy place being in the studio working on another painting.

Having worked with the actors and the crew to bring this devised work to fruition, Director Shauwn Keil’s voiceover pre-empts critical reaction by expressing dismay at the lack of success stories in this play. But the fact that a group of disparate colleagues has collaborated creatively to conjure up this ‘fever dream’ out of thin air, in a way that stimulates our imaginations, compels our empathy and prompts us to consider real world issues, is a success story in itself.  

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