How We Found What We Had Lost

Radical hope in a collapsing world

How We Found What We Had Lost is a ground-breaking collaboration between Terrapin and Aichi Prefectural Art Theater, marrying form and story in a radical reimagining of the theatrical model.

The production for intergenerational audiences evokes a futuristic, drowned world whose inhabitants are isolated in five fortresses. This work for intergenerational audiences engages in urgent conversations about what happens after the end of the world.

No two presentations of How We Found What We Had Lost will be the same: it does not travel with a set. Instead, the world is constructed afresh in every location, using the physical assets of the theatre – truss, rostra, lamps – in concert with the materials of disaster recovery unique to the place. A blue tarpaulin becomes a surging ocean; pallets of tinned food become battlements; bags of rice become sandbags to hold back a flood. All collected materials will be donated at the end of the season, working with community partners like Foodbank and the SES. This methodology was developed through extended cultural exchange between Tasmanian and Japanese artists and honed through field research in Nagoya and Hobart.