Don’t Talk to Strangers explores Carl Sagan’s 1977 NASA project The Voyager Golden Record interrogating humanity’s relationship with aliens and the arrogance of love. The show was shortlisted for the LET Awards 2019 and has been workshopped at The Yard and CLF Art Cafe (Bussey Building). Don’t Talk to Strangers was also included in Lyn Gardner’s pick of VAULT Festival shows. Don’t Talk to Strangers will make its full-length debut at the innovative venue The Forge as part of VAULT Festival from 27th February to 1st March 2020.
Don’t Talk to Strangers takes its inspiration from the Golden Record: an LP designed to sum up all of humanity and placed on space probes Voyager 1 and 2 in the 1970s for aliens to find. The show follows the relationship of Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, who made the record together and fell in love in the process. Using the transcript of an interview between Sagan and Druyan, the company recreates the interview live, stopping, starting, rewinding, slowing down and speeding up, until eventually the performers are babbling incoherently and their surroundings have been upended.
Don’t Talk to Strangers is a disruptive parody of revisionist history – a story made by men but retold by women; four women on a collision course with our own problematic history. It’s both a feminist retelling of this ground-breaking musical love letter and a trashy rom com about us and the aliens.
An extraterrestrial love story. A disco in a galaxy far far away. A rom-com set at warp speed.
Don’t Talk to Strangers is at VAULT Festival 27th February to 1st March.
