What would your black box recording sound like? PASCALLE BURTON, co-creator, co-writer and co-performer of the diverse performance art piece FLIGHT tells SIMON TOPPER that nobody screams the same.

You’re on a plane. It’s not a big deal, you’ve done this before. In fact this is quite a pleasant trip – you’ve found a station on your headphones playing the music of local indie troubadour The Stress Of Leisure.

You glimpse out the window, then do a double take. The hairs stand up on the back of your neck, even though you’re sure you didn’t just see what you saw. You look again. Of course David Byrne, eccentric lead singer with Talking Heads, isn’t out there sitting on the wing. The chances of that are very low. It was probably just a lookalike. The plane shakes. It shudders. The seatbelt lights flash on, a hostie falls over and the more predictable passengers scream. You’re scared.

As well you might be. Flying is not something humans traditionally do terribly well, and it is one of the most prevalent fears in our society. Which is one of the reasons that Brisbane artists Ghostboy and Pascalle Burton wrote Flight, a performance art creation that takes in many of the themes, historical details and music mentioned above, combining them and others into an interactive, evolving theatre piece.

Burton is the hostess of an evening that examines “the heights of psychological terror and QLD’s hidden aviation history”. It’s a richly intriguing premise that I doubt has been pitched too many times before, so I ask the creator, writer and actor what people tend to take from the show.

“There’s a lot that we use so everyone gets something different out of it,” she says. “There’s the diary entries of Charles Ulm written in the Southern Cross as it was flown by Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith, a piece on the flight of imagination, and do you know The Stress of Leisure? We were really lucky to get him for the music, he’s fantastic.

“Then there’s songs we use which all relate to flight, like Talking Heads’ Air. We’ve got some people who come to more than one show, and we make sure we give them something different to take away each time.

“We’ve had people record their own black box recordings. If you were about to die, what would your last thoughts be? Everyone’s is so different. Some people talk to their loved ones, some people swear and scream. We’ve heard some lovely stories too. We had one person who sang Kylie Minogue.”

Flight has played for audiences at the Brisbane’s Writer’s Festival, Woodford Folk Festival and QLD Poetry Festival amongst others, as well as performances for general audiences and schools. The one Burton is most looking forward to is a free show at the Judith Wright Centre Shopfront on Dec 4, the culmination of a series of performances funded by the State Government’s Q150 project.

“It does feel a bit out of place being on the Q150 roster, like we might look out in the audience and see Anna Bligh there watching, but it’s really good that the government is open to getting behind performance art and the creative arts.”

FLIGHT takes off at the Judith Wright Centre Shopfront on Friday Dec 4. www.myspace.com/flighthq / www.myspace.com/thestressofleisure

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