Four-year-old Italian greyhound Evie is sensitive to what humans are feeling, even when she barely knows the person. An accredited therapy dog, Evie sits in on most counselling sessions conducted by her owner, psychologist Amy Kate Isaacs.
If a patient is teary, Evie will pull a tissue from the box and place it on their lap or beside them.
“She isn’t a slobbery pup, so it is fairly cute,” says Isaacs. “She wasn’t trained to do it; she observed me handing tissues over and started doing it.”
Research last month found one in five Australians reported their mental health as worse or much worse than before Covid-19 – and an online survey last year of 384 Australians, which evaluated their loneliness, mindfulness and mood, found that the obligations of dog ownership – getting out of the house and walking – could be protective against loneliness and depression.
Isaacs is convinced the “unconditional love and acceptance” of owning a dog might help some people. “Dogs can be very helpful to people who have mental health concerns, who are lonely,” she says.
But our relationships with dogs runs even deeper, and is being explored by a new theatre work that brings dogs to the stage this September at Brisbane festival, whose full program was announced on Wednesday.
When Let’s Be Friends Furever, by theatre collective The Good Room, premieres at the Powerhouse, it will be a “theatrical mashup of talk show, TedX talk, dog park, dog show, performance installation and video documentary”, says troupe member Daniel Evans.
The stage will look like a dog park but will be lined with linoleum in case of any accidents by its dozen live dog stars. The cast is still being locked down, but will likely include crossbreeds, boxers, a great dane and an Afghan hound. The “military grade” logistical operation will keep the dogs separate backstage, to ensure there are no fights.
For the video component, Evans has travelled the country between pandemic lockdowns, interviewing 85 dog owners at real dog parks, via online referrals and a “lot of Instagram canvassing” of social media dog stars. Evans has met “so many beautiful rescue dogs” that have resulted in a “two-way transformation” of human and dog lives.
Evans isn’t a dog owner – but after meeting Evie (whose owner, Isaacs, is interviewed in the show), he’s considering adopting an Italian greyhound himself.
None of the interviewees in the show adopted a dog in response to the lockdown, but Evans notes the anecdotes of fallout from the phenomenon.
“We’re hearing a lot of these dogs are being abandoned,” he says. “Those dogs have been encased in so much need from their owners that now that the owners are detaching and going back to work, the dogs have developed high anxiety disorders.”
Several owners interviewed own psychiatric assistance dogs. One boy, Max, talks about how his dog alerts the family if Max starts to fit due to a potentially life-endangering medical disorder.
Every owner reported their dog gives unconditional love, and “everyone said their dog owns them”, Evans reports: “No one said that they own their dog.”
The show includes an interview with a vet about what it’s like to euthanise a dog, and screenwriter and author Marieke Hardy speaks about saying goodbye to her beloved female staffy, whom she named after the writer Bob Ellis.
Evans was inspired to create Let’s Be Friends Furever partly from the experience of his family having to put down their two dogs – toy poodles Oscar and Nelson, aged 12 and eight – when each succumbed simultaneously to different illnesses.
The only family member who could be present to farewell Oscar and Nelson was Evans’s mother, who had been a government undertaker and funeral director for several years.
“None of us could actually go through with it except her, and she said that’s one of the hardest experiences she’s ever had,” says Evans.
“They were her empty nest dogs; the dogs that outlasted her children’s teenage years and into all of us flying the coup. I think they became her stand-in children.
“This comes to the nucleus of the show, which is that dogs just engrave on us. Their entire survival, and their entire instinct for living, is shaped around you. That’s unique, and that bond is unlike any other.”
The biggest surprise for Evans in conducting his interviews was the discovery that dogs also grieve humans.
“I spoke to a couple of owners whose partners had passed, and how the dogs went through a real grieving process,” he says.
“A lot of barking at places where the partner had been, or looking at an empty chair, laying on the bed where the person had laid. That was really beautiful and surprising – or maybe not surprising, I guess.”
Brisbane festival: from art boat to circus by the river
The 2021 Brisbane festival will include many other premiere works, including an “art boat” barge that will transport visitors along the Brisbane river each evening, featuring light installations such as the multi-sensory Airship Orchestra and the dreamscape inflatable Sky Castle. Circus troupe Circa will present Silver City in a large chrome bubble structure by the river at South Bank. Queensland Theatre Company’s adaptation of Trent Dalton’s novel Boy Swallows Universe will premiere at the Playhouse, and Street Serenades returns for a second year, with 190 rock, pop, cabaret, circus, folk, jazz, classical, ballet and world music concerts across 190 suburbs.
This season, artists, dates, times and places for these free neighbourhood concerts will be advertised in advance.
Let’s Be Friends Furever runs at the Powerhouse in Brisbane on 16-18 and 21-25 September 2021. Brisbane festival is held 3 to 25 September
