Binge Fringe Magazine

INTERVIEW: A Digital Pint with… Eliza Sanders and Charley Allanah, on Expectations, Confusion and Christmas Work Meetings

Binge Fringe joins Eliza Sanders and Charley Allanah, sisters and creative duo of House of Sands in our Digital Pub to dive into Manage Your Expectations. Manage Your Expectations is a live performance event that combines dance, cine-theatre and clown to shed light on societal issues about how people try to control the way they are perceived and their own expectations.

You can catch Manage Your Expections @ The Courtyard of Curiosities at The State Library at 9pm March 11 – 15 and 4pm March 15 – 16. Tickets are available via the Adelaide Fringe Online Box Office.


Moss: Hi, Eliza and Charley. So you’ve described Manage Your Expectations as your most important sophisticated and nuanced piece of choreography. What was the creative process like putting it together?

Charley: I think that I described it as Eliza’s most nuanced piece of choreography and I think that’s because I’m not a choreographer. I’m a director. I don’t know the ins and outs of her process. She’s like AI to me. She’s not transparent. I don’t know how she works. But when I see her choreography, and I mean choreography in the dance sense, and then also in the stage picture sense, every moment, everything has a meaning, everything is there for a very specific purpose. 

Sometimes the purpose is to confuse but, like, it’s clear when it’s unclear. Eliza brought it to me almost formed, and we have just tweaked the edges and played with the framing and performance and it is one of the most well honed and refined pieces of theatre I’ve encountered in a long time. And I think that should be celebrated.

Eliza: This is my fourth solo show of this kind of ilk, which is like a combination deeply autobiographically inspired and then I kind of refract it out to look at like how, how my lived experiences might resonate with other people and look at it from a bunch of different angles and then kind of zoom it back in to bring it back into myself and really feel the emotion of it on a real sense, you know? 

And when you are acting as other people’s characters, you have to imagine all this backstory. I don’t have to do that. 

Imagining this is true. This is real. And my experience of the world is that I do metaphoricalize things, and abstractivize things, and creativize, new-word-devise things. So it feels like the right kind of form to be floating between comedy and abstraction. It is just an artifact of being a little bit older. When I first made my first solo shows, I think I was 21. And I turned 30 like a month before we premiered this and I think it’s really just as simple as me being more accepting of myself. I know myself more deeply and I’m more happy to put that in front of people. And the parts of the work that are informed by or inspired by traumas and hard things that have happened in my life, I have more of an ability to go like “This is hard and I’m having it and I’m holding it.” But I have a perspective on it, you know, it’s less kind of ripping at the edges of needing it to be seen in order for it to be validated. 

It’s just like, “This happened. If I didn’t show anyone about it, it would still be totally valid. It would still exist.” But I think there’s something interesting in here that other people can learn and grow from. So settling into my joy of making people laugh, which I think I was a bit shy about when I made my very first solo show. I genuinely didn’t expect people to laugh. And after the first show, people were like, “Is this going to go to the comedy festival?” I was like, “What? I’m just being sincere, guys.” Whereas now I’m kind of like, “OK, I’m a clown. Let’s lean into this a little bit more.” 

It was a really long process. I really slowly made it over, like, four years. We were working on a bunch of other stuff. So it was that beautiful thing of, like, we’re working on a different project and all the inspirations that came from that project that didn’t fit in that project, I was just putting away in my little bucket and going, I’m going to use this for me later.

Charley: That’s where all my ideas went for three whole years.

Eliza: We were doing a lot of ensemble works. And so it was like, oh, I’m going to perform that bit. 

I think actually it was a lucky thing that some really hard things happened in my life in those three years. The work is about how we learn to be with pain and how we learn to tolerate pain. So it was on a – don’t think that art should only function as therapy, but I do think it should be therapeutic. And I had a lot of stuff to be figuring out.


Moss: When you describe the show, you talk about all these different aspects, like it’s a comedy, it’s dance, it’s theatre… What can audiences expect from the show? It sounds like it’s a lot of different things.

Charley: It’s kind of everything and also very sparse and nothing. Unlike our previous show that was everything, which was everything and everything and lots of people and three and a half hours long. This one is everything but, it’s not “baroque – lots and lots of things all at the same time” aesthetic. Because it’s one performer, it’s all filmed on one screen and one camera and they’re the only three things in the space pretty much. There are a couple of little props. So it’s quite lean in that respect.

Eliza: I mean, I love the question of what to expect in a show called Manage Your Expectations and I never know how to answer it. 

I love contradiction. I love confusion. And I have a kind of quest to validate what it is to be in confusion and to look at the beautifulness of what confusion is, to look at the beautifulness of what contradiction is, and actually to go, well, you think that’s contradiction, but it’s not. Because everything is existing within itself, you know? 

So I think what audiences can expect is a kind of sense of, like, a clusterfuck that’s also a hug somehow. Like, you’re kind of getting hit all over the face, but you like it. But it’s like a comedy hit in the face. It’s not full kink. It’s kind of like somebody’s wobbling you around and somehow in the end of being wobbled around, you feel like you’ve had a delightful massage. It’s not that spiritual fuck boy like “Oh hey, I’m gonna make you feel so good.” 

It’s like, “Hello, I’m going to come and be a bit weird, but afterwards you have the feeling of, oh, I’ve been gently, tenderly caressed and my emotions have been put out on a little platter to have a bath.” 

Charley: And to maybe bring that back down to earth for those who are a little less able to go with Eliza’s freewheeling-ness. I think one of the things that she’s doing is that the show makes itself feel confusing because she’s seeded a lot of stuff and then the payoffs are a long way down. So there’s a whole lot of the show where you’re like, why is she talking about whoever And what does that mean? Why does that come into it? And then kind of in the second half, all of these things just go plop, plop, plop, plop, plop, and you’re like, oh, okay. And so it’s this full 75-minute arc of getting more and more and more and more confused for 40 minutes and then less and less and less confused for 40 minutes. And getting to the end of that and you’ve climbed a whole mountain and come down the other side and you’re back where you started but you know, fundamentally changed from the experience. That might not be everyone’s experience. This has been my experience until this very day and I’ve seen it about a million times now.

Moss: You’ve changed a lot.

Charley:  I’ve changed so much. I’m not even the same person at all that I was when she started doing this show.


Moss: What was the starting point for Manage Your Expectations?

Eliza: I had a residency which was just a week and I had absolutely no expectation, no outcome, no anything. And I was in a space on my own, desperate for a collaborator. I just started writing everything I was thinking on the wall as a way to get it out of me. Like, usually I work in conversation and I didn’t have someone to converse with, so I just started writing on the wall – on paper, on the wall.

I just began to kind of see this neurotic over clarification of my thoughts. 

I’ve like studied a lot of non-violent communication and I’m really passionate about how we communicate really diligently with a lot of care and a lot of self-responsibility and I realized I was doing that even to the wall, like “I just need to make sure that you know exactly where I’m coming from so I don’t hurt your feelings and so that you understand everything that’s going on.” 

I’m essentially having a conversation with myself here and I’m doing all of this extra work to kind of manage my own expectations and make sure that I really understand where I’m coming from. And it kind of made me zoom out to realise how often we’re in conversation with people and we have this worry about all the things that could be misinterpreted. And there’s the possibility of being cancelled, you know. So we’re like, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! I must be interpreted exactly as I mean to be.” 

And the fear of being misunderstood is such a deep human thing. 

And then it was like I was scared of being misunderstood by myself, so I was going into this, like, intense detail. And I actually found the intense detail to be really kind of meditative or rhythmic in a way that then it was like all of everything expanded into a new metaphor, which expanded into a new thing that needed to be clarified, which expanded into a new thing that needed to be clarified, which expanded into a new thing that needs to be clarified, and just the kind of exponential impossibility of that. 

And I love the idea of managing your expectations because essentially, that got so exponential and so exponential that it came right back in to be this really pure, really singular thing, which is we don’t know what the future holds. 

We can try to figure it out, but ultimately we can’t ever completely manage our expectations. We never know what’s going to happen in the future. 

So all of that work is beautiful and dense and tells us so much about ourselves and each other and the human experience, and it’s also totally fucking futile. And I love the density and the sparseness of that idea.

This was like four or five years ago. And then I just started seeing it in everything. I was like, everyone is just always trying to manage their expectations on this level that some people are like desperately trying to control and mitigate the future and desperately trying to control and define other people’s experiences so that they can feel safe and I just had this sort of zoomed out thing of like, you’re all failing over and over again in all these beautiful tiny little ways. 

And then probably two years into that process of chipping away and knowing that that’s what I was interested in, I did a massive interpersonal failure. I really hurt someone that I really cared about and they completely removed themselves from my life. And it was like, “Here are the consequences.” 

This is the consequence of when we fail on a bigger level. Then I was watching all these micromanagements and going, we get so hung up on these and actually sometimes you really fuck up, you know? For the next two years it was a process of going how to love myself after I’d made that failure, how to love myself after I’d made that mistake and how to go, hey, you know, that person still doesn’t talk to me and that’s okay. For someone who really put so much value on interpersonal communication and how much that was just such a deep failure of interpersonal communication but that it taught me so much.


Moss: The two of you are a creative duo as part of House of Sand but you’re also sisters, how has your relationship evolved working together creatively?

Charley: How has it evolved? I’ve just been listening to the audiobook of Polywise, which is the newest book out on polyamory. They talk a lot about how romantic relationships, and obviously sisterhood is not that, nor is running a company together. But they talk about how you go through an initial fusing phase where you become exactly the same as each other, and then you go through a phase of re-separating and not liking each other very much, and then coming back into a synergy where you’re supporting each other, but you can feel each other’s clear differences and things that are unique to you. 

I think we’re just getting to that phase. So the last three or four years have been hell. But the first few were great. And I think the next few are going to be great. So, yeah, I think you’ve got to do it. You think that you know each other and you’re starting from a long way in, but you’re actually just starting with more ammo to throw at each other because you’ve got, you know, old wounds. But you actually have to start the relationship at the beginning of the thing because it’s not the other thing. It’s not being sisters or colleagues. And that’s made more complex by that, not less. But it’s also more rewarding because of that in the end.

Eliza: I think that’s a really beautiful explanation. It’s putting the difficulty of separation of life and work that all artists have, into a fucking hellfire of intensity because, like, your Christmas dinner is also in a weird way a work meeting, sometimes explicitly and always implicitly, do you know? And the navigation of all of the tricky resentments and competitiveness and deep, deep love and care that often manifests as very hard things in any lifelong relationship. 

There’s been times when it’s like, “Oh, there’s no way out.” So we’ve learned how to go deeper and deeper and also have our autonomy within that in the last couple of years. I think that arc that Charley’s described from Polywise is pretty apt, but I think a lot of good creative product comes from a really healthy tension and the work of creating a healthy tension is a full-time job.

Charley: It’s more than full-time. That’s the really considered way of saying we are the drama. We are consciously working to bring the drama here.

Moss: That’s what the Christmas work meeting’s about, I’m assuming.

Charley: Yeah. Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes it’s just singing Mariah Carey.

Eliza: It’s that too. But even then, Charley will give me notes on how I could do it more interestingly. Our sister is also an artist and a theatre maker, and our parents are very invested and interested in the arts, so we’re lucky that there’s a kind of ecosystem that can surround and support that. And we’re also unlucky that there’s an ecosystem that surrounds and supports that because you can’t get away.


Moss: Manage Your Expectations has already had some success. You won the outstanding solo performance at the New Zealand fringe and Best Performer at the Wharangarei Fringe. What do those achievements mean to you?

Eliza: So much. Performing, and particularly solo performing, is something that I’ve just been really diligently chipping away at for 10 years. And even just in this casual conversation, it kind of brings tears to my eyes to be like, thank you for seeing that. I think about it so much and it feels very deep in who I am. 

Like if I really think back to being a kid and like practicing stuff in the mirror, you know, I’m fascinated by the craft of it. I think that that mastery has come from years and years of investigating and trying and failing and trying again and it’s a recognition that my passion has paid off and actually on another level, it kind of doesn’t matter because it’s such a pure, true passion that I would have done it anyway. 

I think that’s what people say often when they get awards. It’s like, “Oh, you don’t do it for the awards.” I remember listening to the award speeches and stuff and being like, “But everybody wants awards!” Like, they’re really great. They’re so lovely to have, of course, and it has nothing to do with whether or not I would have done it. 

There’s a lot in the show about how much people just want to be seen. And essentially it’s just an artifact of really being seen in something that I have really committed a lot of time and care and energy to. So it just warms my heart and makes me feel weepy and wobbly and grateful.

Charley: The other award that it was nominated for in New Zealand and which we have won once before is most innovative show. And that one’s come up a couple of times for us. And that’s always one where I go, aww. Because I’m not deeply invested in originality as a thing. We don’t set out to make original or cutting-edge work necessarily. We just set out to make work. 

But when it gets noticed as something that is, by virtue of its kind of integrity, doing something kind of new and putting it at the edges of something. For me, that one’s always really been really uplifting to go, “That’s being recognised.” Those things are a reminder that actually, you know, the work is good work and we should be taking it around for people to see because there’s value in it. So we’re keeping on doing that. 

We’ve got four seasons locked in this year and a couple more in the works. So, yeah, it’s not just Adelaide. It might even come to France. 


Moss: What can audiences expect to take away from the show?

Eliza: I think I want audiences to take away a sense of love and compassion for themselves and others. And I want that to come from having moved through the process of amusement and frustration and confusion to come to a landing place of understanding and sometimes understanding in the parts that you can’t understand, but an acceptance. 

And that can help them to arrive at a place of a tenderness towards self and a tenderness towards each other. The world is scary and I think the more we can do to make our own heads less scary to ourselves, is maybe the most important first step to being able to handle what’s out there.


Moss: What are you looking forward to most of the Adelaide Fringe?

Eliza: I am looking forward to chatting with other artists and just connecting with people who know that fucked up challenging balance of being an artist and loving it and also finding the whole hard work of it so fucking intense.

Talking to people who are passionate things that are weird and kooky and inventive and left of field and sometimes completely incompatible with my interests. I just love the passion in their eyes, and I love feeling amazed that they’re passionate about that thing, which to me just seems like absolute nonsense and opening up my brain to how different types of nonsense can be just as profound as the kind of nonsense that I think is profound. 

I’m really looking forward to meeting other artists and getting to kind of land and ground in that feeling of shared experience. Cause I think we all really toil away in our little worlds feeling insecure and unsure if what we’ve got to offer the world is good or interesting. And festivals, particularly fringe festivals, are the place where we get to see that we’re not alone and connect with our tribe a little bit.

And then on another level I just love doing this work, you know? I’ve toured all those shows before and I’ve been like, “Oh, I’m tired.”

But now I’m just like “Get me on stage!” It’s fun just doing it.

Moss: If your show was a drink, alcoholic, caffeinated, non-caffeinated, it could be anything, what drink would it be?


Eliza: In the interest of contradiction I feel I should say that I don’t drink caffeine or alcohol but the drink that this show is is a Kahlua-cocaine-coffee combo because it’s a gift to my friends who do like stimulants. So yeah, that’s it. It’s a cocaine coffee Kahlua combo special.

It probably has like a weed chocolate chaser, you know, a nice cookie come down.


You can catch Manage Your Expections @ The Courtyard of Curiosities at The State Library at 9pm March 11 – 15 and 4pm March 15 – 16. Tickets are available via the Adelaide Fringe Online Box Office.

Moss Meunier

Our Adelaide Fringe Editor. Moss is a bit of a globetrotter and struggles to stay in one country for long. They first fell in love with fringe theatre in Prague in 2014 and first performed at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2018 as an improv comedian. They’re interested in a broad range of genres but are particularly excited by themes of neurodiversity and immigration. Their favourite drink is a foamy pint of Pilsner Urquell - it was their first beer and tastes of teenage freedom.

Festivals: Adelaide Fringe (2025), EdFringe (2023-24), Prague Fringe (2024)
Pronouns: They/Them
Contact: moss@bingefringe.com