A multi-media project curated by the Media Resource Centre involving Adelaide film makers, writers, musicians and performance artists. Breaking the Toy has been developed with the aim of investigating the differences and relationships between live performance and cinema - with respect to the audience. The ideas behind this project have been influenced by the writings of French film theorist Christian Metz. Metz describes the cinema as "the loophole in the social cloth," meaning that the nature of cinema permits forms of taboo pleasures (such as exhibitionism and voyeurism) to become socially acceptable while spectators sit in a picture theatre. Breaking the Toy investigates the hows and whys of these pleasures in a general understanding of what effect they have on culture and personal identity. This investigation intends that the audience of Breaking the Toy should: 1) ponder concepts of how meaning is created in images and 2) experience the forces that operate between their own space and the space of the performance. Breaking the Toy will be a highly entertaining visual and aural event, which aims to promote critical debate on new ways of thinking about the cinema. Participating artists are: Dean Farrow, James Kalisch, Tony Kastanos, Barbara Lloyd, Jenni Robertson, Todd Smart with Deb Mauer and Jyanni Stefensen with Ros Prosser.

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