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It’s Fringe Mania! Phil and I saw a whole bunch of shows at the best festival of the year and it felt good. Really good. We watched young people sweat and work and contemplate late capitalism from their treadmills in Ponycam’s Burnout Paradise. In intermission we chat the sublime A Dodgeball Named Desire by The Bloomshed and Fringe Theatre Winner Someday We’ll Find It. Our second act takes us to Meat Market where we saw the lyrical and accomplished work Staunch ASF. In Coming Soon we chat Little One’s Theatre swan song Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, (now over) Sydney Theatre Company’s The Visitors and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at Red Stitch. If you value our podcast please tell a friend and get them to add it! Our listens are now non-existent and we’re wondering if we still keep going? Love Carla, Phil and Ron.

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Credits

Carla: Hello and welcome to Across the Aisle, our monthly deep dive on the performing arts and anything else that piques our interest.

Today we’ll be decompressing Melbourne Fringe Festival, which has been exhausting, delightful, mind bending, sweaty, very sweaty, and a little bit dangerous or a lot dangerous. As always, I am joined by my first chair virtuoso, Philip Thiel. Happy Fringe!

Philip: Happy Fringe to all!

Carla: And you hit it quite hard this year, didn’t you?

Philip: Look, I think the verb to decompress is appropriate in this environment. We need to settle.

Carla: Yeah, I feel like I’m coming back to the surface and I need to do it very slowly. All right, so there’s so much to talk about today. I feel like this episode will actually be a bit longer, but let’s see. So strap yourself in with a can of your favourite Fringe Hub beverage and Phil, take it away with Burnout Paradise.

Philip: Yes. The Fringe Hub bar is really good. It has some niche offerings, including a lolly bag. But let’s go upstairs to Burnout Paradise. The latest from Ponycam describes itself thus, “Burnout Paradise is an escalating series of challenges performed on four Escalating Treadmills. A physical and cathartic celebration of the euphoric optimism that comes before burnout”.

An unravelling realisation that the system we participate in is not designed for us. So Ponycam has the current line-up of Claire Bird, Ava Campbell, William Strom, Dominic Weintraub and Hugo Williams. And they act as a role free, collaborative, collective and have produced some work that we have seen and enjoyed over the last few years.

They’re one of the groups in Melbourne that is really causing a stir, causing a buzz, getting everyone talking and selling out shows all over the place. So I was always going to see this and was also noticing a little Gen Z trend of doing sporty shows and we’ll get to dodgeball maybe at intermission, but that from another really exciting collective and this made me think, look, the kids just need to slow down and, and have some talk.

But when they say that the entire show is on treadmills. They really mean it. Even as you enter the environment, they’re in a warm up period, and then over a series of four acts each of the performers, rotating across these four treadmills, is, among other things, trying to rack up the kilometres.

Whether they are simultaneously doing calisthenics, making a meal, or performing a set of random tasks is partly up to us as an audience, but doesn’t interrupt the secondary goal of being continuously hyperactive. So, this was a deliberately chaotic show and was a show about chaos and offered us up these exhausted, sporty bodies to be exhausted and compelled by, not only physically by witnessing their extreme exertion but also mentally, because we also had a huge screen projecting the arts grant application that they were completing, which asked for a lot of verbal contributions from the audience that we needed to make over the shouts of other audience members and other performers engaged in completely disconnected tasks.

So one of the things that this show is about is… non-cooperation, in a way, because this highly collaborative group is, in a way, working against each other and showing that part of what’s wrong with the system as it is, is that we don’t just all step off, have a conversation, and collaboratively move forward or burn the whole thing down.

But as their show description indicates, they’re trying to capture that awful moment. That actually might excite us, that competitive drive when we’re part of the system that actually might be a kind of hormonal kick. During one phase of the performance a bingo round is enacted and pencils and sheets are distributed to the audience.

And at that moment when everybody perfectly happily played a round of bingo, two thirds of the way through a treadmill based performance. I thought Ponycam are really onto something around multitasking and our capacity to do a lot at once here. Because people were taking the bingo pretty seriously.

Yeah. And people were cooking pasta from scratch at the same time. Yeah. And so in a way, despite the chaos, It resembled some other aspects of our lives now where we are sort of constantly doing seven or eight things at the same time, even during our leisure periods. And the audience was perfectly up to scratch at, at taking all of this in and enjoying themselves.

How did you go Carla?

Carla: Yeah, that’s such an interesting, I mean; I think it’s one of those kind of Rorschach’s, right? Like everybody, it’s a very individual, depending on your where you’re at and your relationship to hyper productivity post, you know, late capitalism everybody’s going to see something different in this and experience something different.

I really loved that each four of the treadmills, like the four horsemen of the apocalypse were all labelled different arenas of life. So one was survival, which was the cooking based one, because you know, we all got to eat. One was leisure. Which wasn’t really leisure it was all the other shit that we have to do that isn’t work so like preparing those just like a very kind of glib ones like drink wine or shave all the way up to like Christmas, like do Christmas or, you know, these huge tasks.

And then there was admin, which ended up being really about work applying for this grant live. And then there was performance, which for them as they are performers, it is about work, but that’s also about, I think you’re sort of deep joy of what actually drives you, because most of them did performances from their childhood, incidences from their childhood, or in the case of Claire, like literal performances that they did as children. So seeing all of these domains in competition and each one of those domains having more than enough work for one person to handle was cacophonous and pretty blunt in its meaning where really kind of came into sort of a three dimensional view for me was the audience’s, the audience’s reaction.

So I was going to say the participation, but it was equally the people who did not participate that created an atmosphere as well. So I noticed very quickly that archetypes emerged, like it was mostly, it was only women helping the admin. Sorry, the leisure side of things. So they were running around, you know, trying to help this person on the treadmill, do all of their admin tasks.

There was also that unhelpful woman in the audience yelling out lots of things that she thought was helping, but really wasn’t. And that was the one that stuck with me the most because our lives are littered with people who like fucking speed bumps that just get in the way of us. Actually trying to do the thing that we need to do that we tell very clearly that we want to do and yet, you know, they have this totally myopic view of you or the task and they just give the most unhelpful roadblocks possible. That cracked me the fuck up.

Philip: Well, she conflated Charles Sturt University and the local area of Charles Stewart continuously.

Carla: Oh my God.

Philip: And was shouting out stuff about getting kids from the uni to participate somehow in the grant application where the mayor would be present and then asking, and she was somehow uncorrectable.

Carla: And then asking the audience, like, how long should the performance be? And someone was like 12 hours and like, okay, great. And then someone was like six hours. And then the, the, the question of what’s the difference between a six hour and a 12 hour performance really stuck with me for a long time, you know?

And then I, I’m just reading my notes that just made me laugh so much. One note is, is this our generation Starlight Express? The Andrew Lloyd Weber musical on rollerskates. It’s about trains, about mass transit.

Aphorisms at the beginning, like greatness is a scary thing until it isn’t. It sounds like it’s just outside, out of a Silicon Valley kind of management book.

But again, back to the audience. I thought it was also super interesting because for someone like me who doesn’t want to participate, you feel prostrate in your own. You see a drowning man, but all you have is deflating lifesavers around you to throw them, you know. And Claire’s one is the thing that stuck with me the most from the performance.

So Claire did a recreation of her performances at Eisteddford’s, which is like a competition, school competition performance thing as you get for kids. And she did these perfect reconstructions of them, but it was just so melancholy. My note here says Claire, no less menacing than JonBenet, but that it was this performance of, it was this optimism of a child who wanted to be a performer, and you could see it on her face and in her performances.

And then you’ve got the reality of this adult as a performer, you know, and it really kind of drove home to me. It’s like, you know, as children, we play at being adults, but even as adults, we’re playing at being as adults because late capitalism has infantilized us to the point that we can’t have any of the trappings of adulthood.

People, you know, these, these guys want to be, you know, full time performers. They can’t, they can’t have full time careers in the things that they’ve trained so hard to do. Young people can’t live out of home anymore. So how can they start families? You know, that was the thing that I really took from it.

Oh, sorry, one more thing.

Philip: And there was a devastating moment.

Carla: No, you go for it. You go for it.

Philip: Oh, I was just going to concur that there’s a bleakness that goes beyond perhaps what is intended. And one of the moments that made our performance particular is that the form for the Charles Sturt local council arts grant application crashed at a PDF file upload moment, resetting the entire thing. Roughly halfway through the performance to the groans of the crowd, but in a way to a sort of nonplussed response from the performers who had to just get on with it, go back to the start. It was utterly nihilistic.

And to, to concur with you that the main thing that probably changes each performance as advertised is actually the crowd and the extent to which they are on their feet or not, feeling generous and connected or not, wanting to buy merch while a show is on or not. And in fact, those women helping with the leisure side of things, because they happen to sit in the front At one point, one of them turned around to the crowd and actually quite Aggressively said.

Anyone else? Yeah. Which only made things worse. And I’ve heard of other staging’s of this show at Fringe from some of my friends who went. That there have been performances that were extremely engaged in terms of audience participation. Where there was a sense of collective goodwill empathy. Maybe when more artists were in the audience and absolutely feeling in a literal way, what was being depicted.

But at our afternoon performance, things had a bit of a tumbleweed quality at times which, which, which made things a little darker perhaps than intended.

Carla: Yeah, that’s really interesting because it was a relaxed performance. So there was, you know, just a lot of people who were sort of squeezing it in because it was a four o’clock show, but, you know, there would have also been people who wanted to go to a relaxed performance because they don’t want to participate.

Philip: Right.

Carla: So that was kind of the nature of the session that we went to. But like little kinds of things that struck me as I was walking out, like Fringe takes place at Trades Hall, which is like, you know, the epicentre of the trade union movement. In the world, actually, you know, it’s where we got the fucking 40 hour work week.

We were the first place in the world to legislate that. And so the hallowed halls of Trades Hall, you know, the worn stone steps, I always feel like I’m going to some kind of You know, worship place when I go there and this was performed in Solidarity Hall, right? So it was this perfect perfect alignment.

But I’ll just finish with saying I actually ended up going upstairs, to watch it from the top at the end and there was two other people up there with me and right at the end, I mean, this is constructed and it’s great for kind of what’s the word drama is that, you know, they, they go to like hit submit on the application just before the, the time is about to run out.

And then of course you get like a you’ve missed one document and the guy sitting next to me said, well, that’s what you get when you don’t, when you start things at the last minute, and I was like, well, okay, thanks for well, thanks for summing up the whole show to me in one sentence.

Philip: I guess you got it.

Amazing. I mean, it is one of those performances, like so many of the works of Ponycam, where there are so many simultaneous elements that it’s impossible. To coherently describe, you know, images that will stay with me include Hugo as Hamlet endlessly repeating to be or not to be while paint drips sweatily down his face and he walks backwards on a treadmill.

Yeah you know, in the same place where those childhood re-enactments of calisthenics and dancing had taken place. You know, they were, as always from this company, compelling moments where our instinctual connection and compassion are really aroused successfully by the performers with their naive faces and their little smiles and their desire to be loved and accepted and successful in this case.

There’s something haunting about what they’re making and, and I’m kind of addicted to it. Okay.

Carla: I was going to say that’s nice, but it’s not, but I get, I get what you’re saying.

Philip: Happy Halloween.

Carla: All right. Shall we go to the Fringe Hub and get our photo taken on the giant pony? Boom chick.

Philip: Yes, if we dare. There were many horses this festival.

Carla: All right, it’s intermission! This is..

Philip: What else did you see at Fringe?

Carla: Holy moly I saw quite a bit. I think I only saw eight shows, which isn’t a lot for me, but recently it’s a lot for me. So I don’t really want to rattle them off, but I would love to talk about Dodgeball Named Desire with you if you saw it.

Philip: Ah, good. Yes.

Carla: Blanche Dubois. The downfall of Blanche Dubois as told through the medium of dodgeball. Tell me your thoughts.

Philip: Fortyfivedownstairs is just kicking goals.

Carla: It’s a perfect venue for it.

Philip: Literally.

Carla: Oh, ha-ha. Yeah.

Philip: How did you find dodgeball? Did you have a good time?

Carla: I absolutely loved it. At first, like in the first ten minutes, I mean, shame on me because I should know that I’m in the hands of absolute experts. In the first ten minutes. I was like, how are they going to sustain this for 75 minutes? I’m going to get bored.

Well, reader, I did not get bored. So it’s kind of it’s sort of vertical slices running horizontally between dodge ball and Blanche Dubois. Not so much monologues, but one sided sort of dialogue from her, from Streetcar Named Desire. But horizontal cut through is, you’ve got Stanley representing sport, and you’ve got Blanche representing the arts, and duking it out in a dodgeball tournament.

 And as… There’s three Blanches and then you know, some audience participants come through and then eventually it’s just one and the Stanleys overpower her and as she’s doing her final speech I fucking cried. Phil, I cried my eyes out. It was so beautiful and poignant not only as a powerful performance by Elizabeth Brennan but also the downfall of the arts versus sports. What a metaphor, what an innovative show. Tell me what you thought.

Philip: Well, just that Bloomshed is everything and appeals in a really specific way to nerdy readers in addition to theatre lovers. And yet there is also something universal about wanting to see who wins in some one on one contest.

I mean, there’s that ancient primal quality to piffing things at other people and seeing what sticks. I loved the satire of masculinity. On the Stanley side with all of these singleted beings sort of circling the arena and pumping each other up dementedly, you know, and good on Bloomshed they’ve hired a whole rotating cast of amateur sports people to join them as Stanley.

Carla: And they got a sports photographer to do their production stills, yeah.

Philip: Amazing. Like, when they go in, they go in. Yeah. And the, the sort of. capturing of the Tennessee Williams melodrama and extracting those moments of peak melancholy make your response to that dying version of the already repeated monologue completely understandable.

I mean, they are working with these most fundamental emotional trajectories of theatrical performance and making a desperate plea for their survival against the odds. So yeah, I just loved how they redesigned the entire space, how their approach to audience involvement was clearly entirely voluntary and very gentle on the performers.

And by performers I mean, you know, randoms who stood up and had a go. The costuming was just sort of good, but daggy enough to replicate and bring forward amateur sport and amateur theatre into the arena. Yeah, just an extremely memorable set of images as well to carry home.

Carla: Yeah. Yeah. And that was the last show I saw for Fringe, so it was a beautiful cap too.

Like everything I saw at Fringe was fantastic, so. What else what else would you recommend or sort of floated to the top of your list?

Philip: Well I saw lots of theatre, and one particular piece over in Footscray that ended up winning the prize for best theatre was called Someday We’ll Find It, and comprised exclusively questions that people ask Google, uh, performed it.

Existentially, with beautiful stagecraft on an extremely small platform, uh, performed by one person whose active memorization alone was phenomenal. But I will be looking out for the presenters, Karla Livingstone-Pardy and Zachary Sheridan. Maybe for a remount of this piece that was performed in the Bluestone complex over in Footscray, but also anything they do next.

I mean, they’re kids recently out of VCA just doing work that is thoughtful and ambitious and singular. But during the sequences where the line of questioning was about how to get out of the house, how to find a boyfriend, how to fix a leaky roof. etc., but performed deadpan, sped up, impulsively, convulsively.

The audience was collectively breathless in a way that was stunning. And, and the staging included toy dinosaurs in a meaningful way, right? So there was this marrying of stunning writing and inventive stagecraft that was perfection, really.

Carla: Wow, that sounds amazing. So, one to watch?

Philip: Yeah, loved it. Well, for sure it’ll come back. I mean, I agree with you that Fringe is back.

Carla: Oh. Yeah. It is crazy.

Philip: tShall we, shall we

Carla: see something else? Yes. Let’s, yes. Let’s grab a can of pale ale. What was your favourite Fringe Hub drink?

Philip: It’s the passionfruit infused beer that they seemingly are loyal to.

Carla: All right, let’s grab that. And actually we’re going to head over to Art House. To Meat Market in North Melbourne.

This new contemporary dance work, Staunch as Fuck or Staunch ASF, immerses itself in Amelia Jean O’Leary’s experience of growing up as Gamilaroi Yinarr in the suburbs and constantly having to reclaim her blackness. O’Leary reclaims her autonomy, agency and ancientness through healing and expression. What happens when you own all of you and nothing of you belongs to someone else?

When your body is your body, your time is your time, and your space is your space. So this last line here in the previous paragraph, O’Leary reclaims her autonomy, agency, and ancientness through healing and expression, can be a perfect summary of this incredibly beautiful meditative dance work. Amelia is the only performer.

Has an incredible stage design by Savannah Wegman which I’ll describe in a second, and this absolutely beautiful, dreamy, blue, white, dark lighting design by Giovanna Yate Gonzales. So it’s a short piece. The stage is set up with it’s, it’s almost all dark and you’ve got sort of hanging from the roof mid white or white looking material underneath the lights. So some of it is just fabric, others are sort of like, it looks like woven chenille or woven fibre, fibrous kind of fabric together. It almost looks like a circus set up or an aerial set up or also like a tent or a hut. It can also sort of, it sort of feels like an umbilical cord to the heavens.

So there’s this centerpiece of which Amelia mostly performs around but does interact with at some points. I very much got that narrative from the show around the labor of feeling like you’re on a single person mission to uphold your culture, to uphold visible blackness. She was really able to communicate that quite clearly around the daily, the daily heavy burden that she feels in order to even just be seen and then be representing, to be proud, to be staunch.

That process. was very beautifully described through dance. Also her connection with country, country was felt. It was always present in the work. It was always being referred to gesturally along with the electronic music, it was deep, slow, rhythmic, rhythm, like heartbeats. It was. incredibly bassy and really created this whole environment of, I won’t say like a dreamy type, more like a subliminal, subterranean kind of feeling.

I find it very difficult to talk about these kinds of works because they are so expressive and so you kind of just have to be there and see it. But what I will say like in terms of promoting the work and Going to see these kinds of dance works is, it’s very difficult for a single performer to hold these kinds of spaces and to do it well.

There’s a lot of, you know, there’s a lot of contemporary dance stuff that we see that is, you know, you feel like it would have been more improved with a collaborator or some kind of, some kind of difference in the performance, but this was so realized and so grounded. I felt really under its spell, like it was very, I was captivated immediately.

And the, the performance ends with A bit of a spoken word piece. And I’ve not, I didn’t take down the details of who wrote it, unfortunately. But it ended with Too deadly for your own living. Which… I just really loved, I think it really summed up her complex thoughts and feelings around being an incredibly proud First Nations woman.

Phil, what did you think, feel, experience?

Philip: Thank you, Carla, for taking me back to that enormous space at Meat Market, which was another element, both of the challenge of the performance and the success of the performance. I mean, that gigantic hanging object in all of its complexity and fibrousness and clankiness, um, was in a way the partner of the performer or the collaborator in some sense.

Great point. With what was going on, another choice that was made that was successful came later on when the dancer moved into the audience bearing these small gifts to bring us into the kind of sonic experience and tactile experience that was being explored. This was a dance work that was very much about the sense of touch for me.

And you really felt, along with the performer, the different textures of costumes as they were placed on or removed. The way that she would lift objects with her toes up to her hands kept reconnecting us with a sense of our own bodies and what it meant for her to be moving in the way that she did.

But then also the, the sense of sight, a mirror on the ground was presented as a sort of water hole that then at a pivotal moment became, you know, more literally about narcissists and seeing the self or wondering about the self or doubting the self fairly closely chronologically connected to those actual words that then circulated through the audio about being too deadly.

You know, maybe crossing lines or offending people precisely because you’re seeking to express yourself. Among everything else, for this to be such an aesthetically beautiful offering was incredible. It reminded me a lot of the sounds of the outdoors in this country. There were sort of scurrying animal elements and early dawn soundscapes that went with that tent like environment to just take me back to times when I have been alone outdoors noticing things differently, and maybe that’s what turned me on to these sensory elements that came to really define my experience of this show. The crackling of fire and the almost sort of ASMR style experiences that one has when things are really softened, but your attention is heightened.

And I think that kind of attentiveness is what was being required from us as audience members here, but also rewarded by the way that this generous performer rose to the occasion or was so vulnerable in her offering. That again, this enormous space that also comprises the entrance area sonically that was only curtained off behind us.

So yeah, Amelia Jean O’Leary is, is wonderful. I’m conscious of what it means to praise a work that is partly about disclaiming or annoyance in the face of the response of other people. But, but I find all of those questions productive and have been reflecting very closely on this ever since. It won a First Nations Award from Fringe.

So that recognition hopefully, you know, extends what this creator can do and the kinds of people who can access this really beautiful work. So yeah, thank you for uncovering it. It was in the, the, the part of Fringe that I might not turn to first and, and serves as yet another reminder that, I mean, there’s this, there’s a whole section of Fringe called Deadly Fringe.

That warrants attention, but that these works made by individuals that are often early career reflective pieces can be some of the most rewarding and effective parts of this festival.

Carla: Yeah, totally agree. Amelia won, I’m just reading it now, Best Emerging Indigenous Artist Award, um, which is thrilling.

And yeah, it’s, we can probably chat about it a bit later, but it’s also a part of my process of choosing Fringe shows, like I always prioritize seeing Indigenous work because it’s so easy to just kind of get swept away with whatever’s easiest or whatever is just at the Fringe hub or whatever will fit in between 8pm and 10pm, you know.

So I always prioritize Indigenous work or First Nations work, I should say First Nations performers. So yeah agreed. Getting to see these kinds of beautiful works, emerging works, it’s almost like you know, when you see younger people or emerging artists or people who are emerging in their careers they’re so pure isn’t the right word, but driven and bristling with inspiration, ideas and energy and there’s just something so beautiful to connect with there especially because of how, you know, difficult the arts landscape is in Melbourne, as we saw in Burnout Paradise and how that can sort of change an artist’s practice as they grow and get more experienced. So yeah, it’s really important, I think, to, to connect with artists of all ages.

Philip: And the simplicity of the metaphorical gestures means that this is just powerful storytelling. At the end of the performance, she is getting dressed, putting on her clothes or her costume, right? Like, bringing… The fullness, or maybe just the temporariness of a persona to life in front of us. And so the idea that she’s going to walk on or walk away with, with some transformed understanding and that that offer is made to us by having witnessed it is just beautiful artist. Yay, Amelia.

Carla: Yeah. Thanks for coming. Oh, and that Meat Market was like a it was the sort of Blakout, quote unquote, wasn’t it? I think it was the hub for a lot of the first nations performers. So that was great. Remember when we stumbled in there looking for a drink and didn’t realize that performance was happening.

So, yeah, we’ll have to look into that more in the future. All right. Coming soon. It’s the, almost the end of the year. So not a lot.

Philip: Coming soon. Yeah. What’s on your radar? I’ll jump in with another fortyfivedownstairs performance since they are just the venue for everything. Little Ones Theatre reunited.

Carla: Oh my goodness.

Philip: For one final. Shindig. Hurrah. Namely, Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. I’m laughing already at the title. So Stephen Nicolazzo is getting the band back together, essentially and it’s all stars, all queer, um, get your tickets quickly. I’m really looking forward to that one.

Carla: Very much looking forward to that one. It’s going to be a nice little. What’s the word? I’m losing all my words these days. Nightcap. Nightcap for the year.

Philip: Oh, true. Yes. And, and to a beautiful company.

Carla: A little sherry, a little sherry for the end of the year. My coming soon is hilariously very similar to my previous coming soon, but different.

So last episode, I promoted the Victorian Operas performance or production of The Visitors, which you then a lot, you know, helped me understand that The Visitors is also a play, which was on in Sydney, but is now coming to Geelong. So The Visitors, the play touring will be at Geelong Arts Centre very soon.

Check it out. Phil and I are going to go. Can’t wait to talk about it.

Philip: I love that Sydney Theatre Company is touring the Victorian regions.

Carla: Yeah, it happens a lot. We also get a lot of Sydney Dance Company and lots of other LaBoite. Any other coming soons?

Philip: Well, I will confess my dorky excitement about yet another Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at Redstitch Theatre. Why am I excited? Because it doesn’t matter who’s doing it, I will be there. But, in addition, Emily Goddard, friend of the pod.

Carla: Hey Emily.

Philip: Is going to be, I guess, like that ditzy younger guest? The younger couple, yeah. In any case, Emily Goddard, Cat Stewart, David Whiteley, Harvey Zielinski, what a cast.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to Red Stitch, so Edward Albee is gonna get me there.

Carla: That is an absolutely phenomenal cast.

Philip: That’s a sort of pre Christmas season, yeah.

Carla: It’s going to be like watching virtuoso Quartet. It doesn’t matter what they play. It’s going to be absolutely phenomenal.

Philip: I love that analogy. It’s like going to see a Beethoven quartet to see an Albee four hander. Absolutely.

Carla: Yeah. Okay. Well, it’s almost the end of the year, so there’s not much else on, but yeah, we’ll, we’ll do a wrap up of 2024 soon, I reckon. So, yeah.

Philip: We can do a foreshadowing, an extended coming soon.

Carla: Yes. We’ll do a whole episode of coming soon, I think. Because there’s a lot to talk about, actually. Yes. All right. Thank you. And that is that for us today. Thank you for listening. If you would like to get in touch with us, we are only on Instagram and email. So Instagram is @acrossaisle, email is us@across aisle.com. We also have a website at the same domain. Production and recording is by us, Carla and Phil, edited and polished by ShackWest Productions. Our amazing theme song is composed by Mark Barrage. Across the Aisle is recorded in Naam and Djilang on the stolen lands of the Wurundjeri, Woiwurrung, and Wadawurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation.

Sovereignty has never been ceded. We pay our respects to their elders and are so grateful for their custodianship of the land, waterways, and skies we enjoy every day. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. And thank you, dearest Phil. Until next time.

Philip: See ya.