Too Many Weapons are a Melbourne based ensemble made up of four writers, Sam Burns-Warr, David Finnigan, Georgie McAuley and Jordan Prosser. Interested in new approaches to performance texts, they are exploring interactive, immersive and documentary forms and making works that weave together existing and found texts with new writing, video and audio.

Since 2012, TMW have had an ongoing collaboration with Filipino Theatre Company, The Sipat Lawin Ensemble. Sipat are a small theatre collective of ten performers, graduates of the Philippines High School for the Arts. Formed in 2008, the collective produces site-specific work in theatres, cafes, galleries, abandoned schools, stadiums, living rooms and car parks around Manila. Sipat aims to develop a contemporary community theatre experience shared among artists and audiences outside a theatre setting.

The two companies collaborated in 2012 on the immersive spectacle, Battalia Royale and members from TMW were involved in Sipat’s 2013 work, Love: This is not yet a musical. In A Wake: Kids Killing Kids, as part of Next Wave Festival 2014, five members of the Sipat Lawin Ensemble will join Too Many Weapons onstage, under the direction of Bridget Balodis, to examine more closely the issues of cross-cultural communication, artistic responsibility and onstage violence that have arisen during their ongoing collaboration.