In his excellent Supergods, Grant Morrison describes donning an “ink-suit” and entering the fictional world of his characters. It’s not a novel concept (though his use of it in mainstream comics was) – authors have been writing themselves into their stories since the beginning. A favourite example is the unexpected appearance midway through Martin Amis’ Money of “writer Martin Amis” (at whose introduction, Kingsley Amis allegedly gave up reading his son’s book).
I’m a sucker for these kinds of metatextual shenanigans (which explains my love of Borges and At Swim Two Birds), but in making The Real the opposite has occurred. Instead of inserting ourselves into a fictional world, we are bringing fictional objects into the real world. We’ve made ‘for sale’ signs for the make-believe Werner Real Estate.
There’s also a wood-and-glass (re: physical) award for our protagonist.
It’s as if we’ve journeyed across the divide (over to what Alan Moore dubbed a “unified field theory of fiction”) and returned with trophies. Like Coleridge’s paradisiac flower, they are tangible proof the fictional world exists. What I love most is how innocuous they appear, left propped against a wall or bookshelf, an incursion or seeping of the fictional into the actual.
It’s a mighty power, and we are accordingly judicious – I presume repeatedly bringing forth such artefacts would rip the fragile veil between the fiction-reality continuum and threaten widespread leakages. Because Fringe.
I was sitting in the bath, I think it was the day after You Are Here, exhausted in body and mind. My phone pinged with an e-mail (yes I have my phone with me in the bath). Dave Finnegan was looking for artists to join him in Manila in August, to work with the Sipat Lawin ensemble, creators of the internationally controversial Battalia Royale (alongside Dave himself and the Too Many Weapons crew- learn more here- http://www.au.timeout.com/melbourne/theatre/features/2932/david-finnigan-on-kids-killing-kids) I said for sure. I figured it was the sort of thing that probably wouldn’t actually happen.
Around four-and-a-half months later, I was standing in a pool in the middle of Quezon city watching a parade of actors, poets, dancers, fire-twirlers and actor-poet-dancer-fire-twirlers assay the concept of love in a myriad of ways both ingenious and chaotic. I was part of the show, and also part of the crowd, because with Sipat Lawin the line tends to get blurred. I should try and explain.
Dave invited about 20 of us on the trip, hoping that a few of us would say yes. 19 of us did. Sipat Lawin (it translates roughly to ‘bird’s eye view’), an independent experimental theater company that operates in make-shift spaces on threadbare resources, were politely informed that they would be hosting 19 Australian guests who were all keen to collaborate in their new show. 
I can’t speak for the others White Legs, but I hit the ground with no idea what was going on or what I was doing. Our first couple of days involved acting as a test audience for what already existed of LoveNOT (the show in question), as well as a special Mass Wedding event for which we were required to choose spouses and write vows. I tied the knot with our videographer Shane, under the auspice of Sipat company director JK Anicoche, who was ordained by an internet ministry days before.
After that I my friends NickMc and Sarah and I were put into a group with some of the company members and tasked to devise some pieces and performances for the show. I am NOT a devised theater guy. I was utterly out of my depth. LoveNOT was organised around an entirely original cosmology of god characters which was both fascinating and daunting (My group was in charge of the Memory god). For the first couple days I wasn’t sure that I would be able to add anything. I roped NickMc in and we wrote a song, just in case a song turned out to be useful.
Meanwhile, 19 Australians were crashing across three houses (I was at JK’s house) and dealing with the intensity of the situation the way that the You Are Here family always does: with a series of escalating creative dares. Dave wrote a radio play on the subject of Jess’s fraught encounters with Yuki, the highly-strung dog that lives at JK’s house, and next we knew there was a competitive table of radio play-offs being cast and recorded at Seattle’s Best Coffee and judged over dinner meals of Adobo and Yellow Cab Pizza. Something like eleven got made over the 10 days we were there, one of them was mine. Jordan and Sam (two of the Battalia Royale writers) challenged us all to be part of the Rizal Fountain Raps, a web series which involves some kind of solo performance to camera in an odd location. I did a performance poem, for the first time in my life, and it was hard to memorize. The guys busted me practicing it in the middle of a nightclub dance-floor at one stage.
Of most relevance to regular Lick-Nuke readers, I roped in Shane and a bunch of the others to shoot a Manila-set epilogue to Heartbroken Assassin. I was inspired by the recent Wolverine film, which leaned hard into the protagonist-exiles-himself-to-a-foreign-country-and-grows-a-pain-beard trope. I grew what face-hair I could in the allotted time, and we roped in a local dancer/actor named Josh to beat me mercilessly in the street.
Lick Nuke 