An Incomplete Encyclopedia of Hugs

An Incomplete Encyclopedia of Hugs is a semi-auto/biographical one person play about hugs, grief and love. Woven between anecdotal stories of the best and the worst of hugs, Juno shares three memories of being the last person someone spoke to before they died. Through practice-led research I am interrogating the dramaturgy of writing complex relational stories based on personal experience into solo performances. How do playwrights dramaturgically communicate entire worlds and multiple characters and relationships through the body of the single actor? What care is taken (for the playwright, the audience, their collaborators) when writing the self into performance, and how is this evident in the form/structure/dramaturgy of the play in performance?

The development of this work began in 2022 with a short 10min reading for South Australian Playwrights Theatre. In early 2023 I had written 20mins of the script for an Assemblage organised Fringe event. Later in 2023 I spent a week in Singapore at Conundrum Theatre on a creative development as part of OSP, and interviewed 9 other theatre makers about their solo performance practice. With our successful Arts SA grant in 2024 we were able to fund the original season of the play in November that year (produced by South Australian Playwrights Theatre), and then remounted the production in Feb 2025 for the Adelaide Fringe, this time produced by Conundrum Theatre.