One Hour Wedding – Get the confetti ready because tradition is getting a joyful, chaotic shake-up. Forget the presents, your presence is required at One Hour Wedding, the high-stakes, crowd-built ceremony where the audience becomes the wedding planners and the clock is already ticking. Sixty minutes. One couple. Endless possibilities. What could possibly go wrong?
Underbelly (The Friesian), from 5th – 23rd August (not 18th) at 21:50
What inspired you to turn a wedding into a live, audience-built performance, and what does that format reveal about collective decision-making?
The idea was born from the skill sets Roz and I have built as artists. Between us, we’ve been florists, MCs, wedding coordinators, dance teachers, and Roz is even a qualified marriage celebrant. We realised we had all the professional qualifications to run a wedding, so we decided to weaponise those skills into a show. It turns out that when you strip away the months of stress and politics, a collective of strangers is surprisingly intuitive—they almost always prioritise joy over perfection.
How do you balance the chaos of real-time audience input with ensuring the emotional arc of the ceremony still lands?
It’s a total tightrope walk, but we rely on a rock-solid structure. That framework is our “fall-back” position; it’s the skeleton of the show that stays steady no matter how much madness the audience throws at us. Because the structure is so firm, we have the freedom to let the chaos breathe without losing the heart of the ceremony.
What has surprised you most about the kinds of choices audiences make when given creative control over such a personal event?
Love seems to always win.
Even when people are given the power to be absolute “chaos agents,” they generally want the couple to have a win. It’s been heartening to see that audiences take their roles as “wedding planners” seriously—they’d rather be part of a success story than a stitch-up.
In what ways does the show play with the tension between sincerity and spectacle that already exists in real weddings?
Time is our tension builder. Most of the decisions we make in life we could make in a short amount of time but humans do tend to over complicate things… ultimately if you want to be joined to this person for life, does it really matter whether you have bubbles, confetti or rice??
How did your backgrounds in music, performance and event production shape the structure of the experience?
We love a good musical opening and closing and beside that the structure really does follow that of a wedding… decision making, ceremony, reception
What do you hope audiences take away about connection and collaboration after essentially “co-authoring” a wedding together?
That perfection is the enemy of connection. By “co-authoring” the night, the audience moves from being spectators to collaborators. We want them to leave feeling that building a community (or a wedding!) doesn’t have to be complicated—it just requires a bit of collective “yes, and.”