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60 mins • Contemporary play • Drama / comedy
Chase the Feeling is fast, satirical, and unapologetically theatrical: by turns absurd, poignant, and deeply emotional. It draws on classic dramatic forms and genre conventions, then breaks them open — yes, including an inspirational sports montage.
At its centre is Tahlia, an autistic actor navigating a world of people, systems, and institutions determined to define her experience for her. She isn’t broken — the systems around her are. When support collapses, she decides the only way to be understood is to step onto the stage herself.
Guided by two figures drawn from her subconscious, Tahlia (and the audience) enters theatre’s strange machine of representation, projection, power, and longing — a space that is both critique and love letter. The work asks who theatre is really for, and who gets to speak.
Developed as part of Mik Allen’s Master’s research, Chase the Feeling operates as ethnodrama — treating lived experience and emotion as legitimate cultural knowledge, and using performance to surface insights that conventional analysis often misses.
“Multi-layered, genre-busting theatre.” — Stage Whispers (2016)
This work is distributed via Australian Plays Transform (APT).
$15 is APT’s fee to download an excerpt.
Performance rights are negotiated through APT via the same listing.
Available now from:
Chase the Feeling is a contemporary play developed through practice-led research and situated within the field of ethnodrama, using live performance as both creative output and analytical method. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, reflective practice, and lived experience, the work translates qualitative research into dramaturgical form, positioning embodiment and emotion as legitimate modes of cultural inquiry. Centred on an autistic actor navigating institutional and social systems that frame difference as deficit, the play employs satire, genre play, and reflexive theatrical devices to interrogate representation, power, and belonging. As research-in-practice, Chase the Feeling demonstrates how performance can generate and communicate anthropological insight in ways that conventional qualitative analysis may not, contributing to interdisciplinary conversations across performance studies, disability studies, and cultural anthropology.
Allen, Michael James, ‘Chase the Feeling: Making Meaning in an Autistic Theatre Company’ (Thesis (M.Phil.)--University of Adelaide, School of Social Sciences, 2016., 2015)
https://searchlibrary.adelaide.edu.au/permalink/61AU_INST/mfhv9t/alma99207308909071
60 mins • Contemporary play • Drama / comedy
Chase the Feeling is fast, satirical, and unapologetically theatrical: by turns absurd, poignant, and deeply emotional. It draws on classic dramatic forms and genre conventions, then breaks them open — yes, including an inspirational sports montage.
At its centre is Tahlia, an autistic actor navigating a world of people, systems, and institutions determined to define her experience for her. She isn’t broken — the systems around her are. When support collapses, she decides the only way to be understood is to step onto the stage herself.
Guided by two figures drawn from her subconscious, Tahlia (and the audience) enters theatre’s strange machine of representation, projection, power, and longing — a space that is both critique and love letter. The work asks who theatre is really for, and who gets to speak.
Developed as part of Mik Allen’s Master’s research, Chase the Feeling operates as ethnodrama — treating lived experience and emotion as legitimate cultural knowledge, and using performance to surface insights that conventional analysis often misses.
“Multi-layered, genre-busting theatre.” — Stage Whispers (2016)
This work is distributed via Australian Plays Transform (APT).
$15 is APT’s fee to download an excerpt.
Performance rights are negotiated through APT via the same listing.
Available now from:
Chase the Feeling is a contemporary play developed through practice-led research and situated within the field of ethnodrama, using live performance as both creative output and analytical method. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, reflective practice, and lived experience, the work translates qualitative research into dramaturgical form, positioning embodiment and emotion as legitimate modes of cultural inquiry. Centred on an autistic actor navigating institutional and social systems that frame difference as deficit, the play employs satire, genre play, and reflexive theatrical devices to interrogate representation, power, and belonging. As research-in-practice, Chase the Feeling demonstrates how performance can generate and communicate anthropological insight in ways that conventional qualitative analysis may not, contributing to interdisciplinary conversations across performance studies, disability studies, and cultural anthropology.
Allen, Michael James, ‘Chase the Feeling: Making Meaning in an Autistic Theatre Company’ (Thesis (M.Phil.)--University of Adelaide, School of Social Sciences, 2016., 2015)
https://searchlibrary.adelaide.edu.au/permalink/61AU_INST/mfhv9t/alma99207308909071