The art collective Pony Cam has transformed burnout into art through its show, “Burnout Paradise.” This past Friday and Saturday evening, the collective took the stage at Colwell Playhouse.
Pony Cam established its collective in 2019. The members of Pony Cam met at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, Australia. After completing their studies at the university, they decided to start a company together. Performer Laura Aldous started to work with Pony Cam in 2024, by contributing to “Burnout Paradise.”
“We all went to a performing arts university and went through a crazy couple years of theater making and devising and clowning, and then came out the other side being like, ‘I think we need to stick together and make a company,’” said co-creator and performer Claire Bird.
The show featured four treadmills, each correlating to a different aspect of the performers’ lives. Signs mark them as “Survival,” “Admin,” “Performance” and “Leisure.” As the performers rotated through the treadmills, they tried to complete a series of tasks while simultaneously running. The endurance trials of constant multitasking while running capture the never-ending and overwhelming feelings of burnout.
The “Survival” treadmill was for making a three-course meal, the Admin treadmill for submitting an art grant, the Performance treadmill for each runner to complete a performance and the Leisure treadmill for completing an eccentric to-do list (applying lipstick, recreating a trick-or-treat scene and solving a Rubik’s cube).
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The treadmills and constant running added to the shock factor and sparked an interest in potential spectators.
“We thought it was really interesting because they are on treadmills the entire time, and we thought … it would be cool to come out,” said Grace Medendorp, senior in FAA.
Extending past the initial shock value, the work symbolizes the burnout that comes with trying to balance the different aspects of everyday life.
Because the performers were confined to their treadmills, they relied heavily on group interaction to complete the tasks. To emphasize audience engagement and connection, the show allowed spectators to come up onto the stage at any time.
“(The show is) very reliant on the audience being willing and prepared to help and be a part of the show themselves … the show builds community in a way that is satisfying to us as artists and exciting … also feels like quite full of hope, really, for what that symbolizes, perhaps in a broader context,” Aldous said.
On top of completing tasks, the performers also strived to set a new personal best running distance every show. If they fail, they reimburse the audience for their ticket price. Pony Cam has failed to beat their personal running distance in more than half of the shows performed.
“It speaks to how … a lot of people are working at the moment or just trying to make their way through the world on this kind of perpetual ride that we’re all on, juggling so many balls … and hopefully providing some antidote, collective antidote, to a very individual kind of burnout that everyone seems to be going through,” Bird said.
The crowd at the Playhouse on Saturday was a diverse mix from young children to elderly couples, and yet, the audience participation was strong. Pony Cam provides multiple ways for the audience to get involved, from sending emails to participating in creating a three-course meal.
The performers described the audience’s reactions as similar to sporting matches, noting that the spectators got more immersed in the performance as it went on.
“One of the moments that’s seared into my brain is maybe the first (performance) we had in Edinburgh,” Aldous said. “It was a room of 100 people, and people were just so invested in it … I’ve never seen theater energize people in the way that this show, at that moment, did to this room of people who just stood up and cheered like a football game. They were just a roaring crowd in that moment.”
With an energized audience behind them, Pony Cam successfully beat their running distance during the Saturday show. The performers will continue their North America tour, with Stanford, California, as their next stop.
