Sydney Theatre Company has announced its 2002 program: a diverse collection including European and American classics, new Australian works, tragedy, comedy and mystery. Maybe mayhem in the real world creates the conditions for expansion in the illusory world of theatre.
Robyn Nevin not only presides over all as Artistic Director, but she also acts - as the fading Southern Belle Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, directed by Jennifer Flowers - and directs: Hanging Man by Andrew Upton, a new study of Australian identity as the three sons of a legendary Australian painter come home for the funeral; and a new adaptation by STC's resident writer Beatrix Christian of A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen.
The choice of Nevin to run STC seems to work in all directions. After a strong showing this year, she announces not only 3 "artform development" productions in the Wharf 2 Blueprints season: Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman's The Seven Stages of Grieving (Aug-Sep), Benjamin Winspear's adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth (May-Jun), and the Australian premiere of David Tushingham's translation of Mr Kolpert by David Gieselmann (Feb); but also 11 mainstage productions, plus the presentation of Theatre de Soleil showing The Flood Drummers by Helene Cixous in the Sydney Festival (Jan); and the construction of a new theatre at Walsh Bay for 2003, with expanded commercial opportunities for the company; and the news that private sector support is growing to the point that in 2002 more funds will come from private sources than from Government for the first time in STC's history.
Even the website (www.sydneytheatre.com.au) is expanding, though chunks of it are still under construction at this stage. But you can now book tickets directly.
Productions are: A Man With Five Children by Nick Enright, a drama starring Steve Bisley (Jan-Feb); The Lady in the Van by British writer Alan Bennett, a poignant comedy starring Ruth Cracknell (Jan-Mar); A Doll's House by Ibsen who wrote "For me it has been a question of human rights ... my task has been the portrayal of human beings", starring Miranda Otto(Mar-Apr); Soulmates by David Williamson, a new comedy in "a world where, highbrow and lowbrow, the prizes of critical acclaim and literary immortality provoke greed, envy and competitive passions", starring Amanda Muggleton (Apr-Jun); the Australian premiere of Copenhagen by British playwright Michael Frayn, a play about loyalty in Nazi-occupied Denmark - to family, country and science's quest for knowledge - starring Colin Friels, John Gaden, Jane Harders (May-Jun).
And for the second half of the year: Volpone by Ben Jonson, the classic comedy of avarice, starring Barry Otto (Jun-Jul); The Virgin Mim, a new play by Tony McNamara commissioned by STC, a "tidal wave of comic mayhem" about a reconstructed virgin (Aug-Sep); Hanging Man by Andrew Upton (Aug-Oct); Life is a Dream by 17th Century Spanish writer Pedro Calderon de la Barca, a classic poetic study of a woman disguised as a man who falls in love with a prince who believes he's a slave (Sep-Oct); the 20th Century American classic The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, "an exquisite hymn to lost love and our need to believe in possibility", starring Robyn Nevin (Oct-Dec); Great Expectations by Charles Dickens adapted by Simon Phillips, a Melbourne Theatre Company production starring Angela Punch McGregor (Oct-Dec).
There is also the Sydney Theatre Company Education Program which includes Schoolsdays at mainstage productions, the Blueprints production of Macbeth, the Theatre-In-Practice program for teachers and students to access the professional resources and skills of STC, and the STC-The Sydney Morning Herald Young Playwrights' Award. Email education@sydneytheatre.com.au or phone the Education Manager (02) 9250 1700.
And finally, the Patrick White Playwrights' Award is a national competition which aims to encourage and reward the creation of new writing for the theatre of highest quality. The inaugural award, launched in July 2000, was shared by Bette Guy (The Other Side of the Lake), Ailsa Piper (Small Mercies) and Ben Ellis (Who Are You, Mr James?). The award is part of the STC Writer's Program which in 2002 has spawned The Virgin Mim, Hanging Man and the adaptations of Life is a Dream, A Doll's House and Macbeth.
What we are seeing from the Sydney Theatre Company is an integrated and well-directed offering to the whole community. The 2002 program is an intelligent mix which should make for an exciting theatrical year in Sydney.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday 28 September 2001
Wednesday 26 September 2001
2001: Eat Your Young
Eat Your Young. Arena Theatre Company directed by Rosemary Myers. The Playhouse September 25-29.
Post post-modern multimedia theatre for young people (15-19). Non-linear narrative. Techno decibel enlargement paralleling visual blasts on multichannel screens and speakers. Amazing stuff - but is it enuff?
Interesting that the printed program separates the live actors from the filmed actors, and again from the writer and technical production people - because Myers before the show explained how all the sound, imagery, lighting and design engineers were integrated into the workshops with actors and writer from the beginning to create a new theatrical form.
She also connected multimedia theatre to Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, which has recently developed to include "spiritual intelligence" - the human ability to experience the wonder of the universe (and usually invent a religion to explain it).
This spirit is the core of great art - when I become engrossed in the theatrical fiction which reflects on and helps me encompass the universe - but Eat Your Young did not do it for me. Perhaps teenagers are used to disjointed images coming at them from all directions at once and so do not seek any clear resolution - maybe all they need is stacks of questions - but I found the techno gadgetry becoming too fascinating to focus on the live characters' personal experiences.
The issues surrounding children placed in "care" which alienates them and compromises the adults charged with responsibility for them are certainly raised loudly in this production, and I imagine would stimulate a great deal of discussion in schools and youth groups - but loudly is not necessarily clearly, at least in this case.
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I fear that the non-sequitur imagery of the video clip is the modern popular development of the theatrical absurdism which became established after the terrible experience of World War II. Absurdist plays like Waiting for Godot said to a small coterie of adult theatre goers 40 years ago that there is no meaning in life. Now Eat Your Young takes the message to the young, and I am not sure they are resilient enough. Will they see through the techno imagery of September 11 in New York? Will this show help them do that? Amazing stuff - raising dust (like Ionesco's Rhinoceros) - but for me it's not enuff.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Post post-modern multimedia theatre for young people (15-19). Non-linear narrative. Techno decibel enlargement paralleling visual blasts on multichannel screens and speakers. Amazing stuff - but is it enuff?
Interesting that the printed program separates the live actors from the filmed actors, and again from the writer and technical production people - because Myers before the show explained how all the sound, imagery, lighting and design engineers were integrated into the workshops with actors and writer from the beginning to create a new theatrical form.
She also connected multimedia theatre to Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, which has recently developed to include "spiritual intelligence" - the human ability to experience the wonder of the universe (and usually invent a religion to explain it).
This spirit is the core of great art - when I become engrossed in the theatrical fiction which reflects on and helps me encompass the universe - but Eat Your Young did not do it for me. Perhaps teenagers are used to disjointed images coming at them from all directions at once and so do not seek any clear resolution - maybe all they need is stacks of questions - but I found the techno gadgetry becoming too fascinating to focus on the live characters' personal experiences.
The issues surrounding children placed in "care" which alienates them and compromises the adults charged with responsibility for them are certainly raised loudly in this production, and I imagine would stimulate a great deal of discussion in schools and youth groups - but loudly is not necessarily clearly, at least in this case.
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I fear that the non-sequitur imagery of the video clip is the modern popular development of the theatrical absurdism which became established after the terrible experience of World War II. Absurdist plays like Waiting for Godot said to a small coterie of adult theatre goers 40 years ago that there is no meaning in life. Now Eat Your Young takes the message to the young, and I am not sure they are resilient enough. Will they see through the techno imagery of September 11 in New York? Will this show help them do that? Amazing stuff - raising dust (like Ionesco's Rhinoceros) - but for me it's not enuff.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Sunday 23 September 2001
2001: Letters of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed - Dear Sun
Dear Sun. An adaptation of the letters of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed edited by Janine Burke. Melbourne Theatre Company directed by Sioban Tuke at the James O Fairfax Theatre, National Gallery of Australia, Sunday September 23.
In a setting that could be called Still Life in Artist's Studio, among seemingly breeze-scattered sheets of partially drawn-upon paper and deeply red delicious apples spilled from a country wicker basket, three performers were held in situ. The only movement was the bowing arm and slightly bowing body of Associate Principal Cellist of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Sarah Morse; the rising into the spotlights of Rosalind Hammond as Joy Hester and Catherine Wilkin as Sunday Reed; their occasional use respectively of a kitchen chair and a 1950's Scandinavian style sunroom armchair; Hester's hand movements describing lines drawn in a letter or two; and the looks that pass between these two extraordinary women as if their letters were a face-to-face conversation.
This was all I needed to become entirely engrossed in their lives, and the terribly foreboding death of Joy Hester. There was a great tension between watching a theatrical performance yet knowing that each letter was real. I could not avoid feeling Hester's conflict over her new love and her responsibility for the child she left in the Reeds' care; the terror of Hodgkin's Disease and Hester's determination to be true to her feelings which she believed kept her alive for 10 years more than doctors predicted; the confusion over whether Sweeney should be adopted by Sunday and John Reed, against the possibility that his father Albert Tucker would demand his return to his care alone; the ill-feeling that seem to grow between the two women as words written at a distance for so many years failed to pass on true meaning, until they met again in the final dreadful year.
And the sadness of Hester's death was reinforced by large projections of her works, related to the people and experiences in her letters and poems, showing the variety and depths of feeling she created with no more than the necessary lines and shadings, while she continued to believe that she was not a major figure.
This performance illuminated my understanding of the art of Joy Hester, and I wonder if a film could be (or has been) made as a permanent record.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
In a setting that could be called Still Life in Artist's Studio, among seemingly breeze-scattered sheets of partially drawn-upon paper and deeply red delicious apples spilled from a country wicker basket, three performers were held in situ. The only movement was the bowing arm and slightly bowing body of Associate Principal Cellist of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Sarah Morse; the rising into the spotlights of Rosalind Hammond as Joy Hester and Catherine Wilkin as Sunday Reed; their occasional use respectively of a kitchen chair and a 1950's Scandinavian style sunroom armchair; Hester's hand movements describing lines drawn in a letter or two; and the looks that pass between these two extraordinary women as if their letters were a face-to-face conversation.
This was all I needed to become entirely engrossed in their lives, and the terribly foreboding death of Joy Hester. There was a great tension between watching a theatrical performance yet knowing that each letter was real. I could not avoid feeling Hester's conflict over her new love and her responsibility for the child she left in the Reeds' care; the terror of Hodgkin's Disease and Hester's determination to be true to her feelings which she believed kept her alive for 10 years more than doctors predicted; the confusion over whether Sweeney should be adopted by Sunday and John Reed, against the possibility that his father Albert Tucker would demand his return to his care alone; the ill-feeling that seem to grow between the two women as words written at a distance for so many years failed to pass on true meaning, until they met again in the final dreadful year.
And the sadness of Hester's death was reinforced by large projections of her works, related to the people and experiences in her letters and poems, showing the variety and depths of feeling she created with no more than the necessary lines and shadings, while she continued to believe that she was not a major figure.
This performance illuminated my understanding of the art of Joy Hester, and I wonder if a film could be (or has been) made as a permanent record.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Monday 17 September 2001
2001: The Clockwork Divide
The Clockwork Divide by Blaide Lallemand and Conan the Bubbleman. Music composed by Simon Linke. Festival of Contemporary Arts: Currong Theatre September 27-29, October 4-6, 7pm.
Lallemand is a student of sculpture who has contrasted the ways Aristotle and St Augustine viewed time, with reference to the French philosopher of intuition and 1927 Nobel prizewinner for literature, Henri Bergson. Her work begins with Aristotelian time in linear form, with 3 long pendulums swinging to clockwork music, constraining the movements of her 3 performers: Conan O'Brien, Caroline Huf and herself.
Change in the movement and music takes place in minimalist steps until bubble-making fluid runs down the pendulum strings, into the containers which form the weights. Each pendulum is a double fishing line, which when separated becomes the perimeter of a soap bubble - a flat vertical membrane until moved in air, sometimes with a performer's breath to assist. At times the membrane reflects light, almost hiding a performer from the audience; at others a performer is reflected and distorted. Large unpredictably shaped bubbles form, link performers and burst. A hand slowly moves through the membrane without breaking it.
And so we see time as an original experience of the moment, no longer part of a linear progression; we interpret each image in its own right for its own sake; and we cannot know when an apparently solid form will burst.
Bergson's ideas of "creative evolution" are problematical as New Age adherents use him unreasonably to criticise modern science, but as a source of art he has served Lallemand very well. This is a highly original development of fluid material to form abstract images (O'Brien had to experiment with a new formula to create a strong enough bubble membrane). I certainly felt the immediacy of communication with something universal outside the limits of time, which St Augustine tried to articulate. And, after all, this is what all art is about.
It was interesting, though, to note the need for theatrical closure as we witnessed an effective climax and denouement. Aha, I thought. Unity of action in space and time: we've come full circle back to linearity. So Aristotle wins out in the end. What philosophy from a soap bubble!
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Lallemand is a student of sculpture who has contrasted the ways Aristotle and St Augustine viewed time, with reference to the French philosopher of intuition and 1927 Nobel prizewinner for literature, Henri Bergson. Her work begins with Aristotelian time in linear form, with 3 long pendulums swinging to clockwork music, constraining the movements of her 3 performers: Conan O'Brien, Caroline Huf and herself.
Change in the movement and music takes place in minimalist steps until bubble-making fluid runs down the pendulum strings, into the containers which form the weights. Each pendulum is a double fishing line, which when separated becomes the perimeter of a soap bubble - a flat vertical membrane until moved in air, sometimes with a performer's breath to assist. At times the membrane reflects light, almost hiding a performer from the audience; at others a performer is reflected and distorted. Large unpredictably shaped bubbles form, link performers and burst. A hand slowly moves through the membrane without breaking it.
And so we see time as an original experience of the moment, no longer part of a linear progression; we interpret each image in its own right for its own sake; and we cannot know when an apparently solid form will burst.
Bergson's ideas of "creative evolution" are problematical as New Age adherents use him unreasonably to criticise modern science, but as a source of art he has served Lallemand very well. This is a highly original development of fluid material to form abstract images (O'Brien had to experiment with a new formula to create a strong enough bubble membrane). I certainly felt the immediacy of communication with something universal outside the limits of time, which St Augustine tried to articulate. And, after all, this is what all art is about.
It was interesting, though, to note the need for theatrical closure as we witnessed an effective climax and denouement. Aha, I thought. Unity of action in space and time: we've come full circle back to linearity. So Aristotle wins out in the end. What philosophy from a soap bubble!
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday 6 September 2001
2001: Eulea Kiraly - feature article
Eulea Kiraly, Theatre Program Director, Tuggeranong Arts Centre.
Sounds simple enough - just another dogsbody arts practitioner. Well, not quite. Since she and her colleagues, the whole Drama Department, resigned from a well-known school back in 1989 when the principal banned a stage production shortly before opening night, Ms Kiraly has become a central figure in Canberra theatre. Only this year however - since she left the Rolls-Royce company (yes, the one which made the cars, or in her case the aeroplane engines) - is she properly recognised as the professional independent theatre director she has long known she needed to be.
Knowing the continual flow of her work directing productions and play readings over many years, I was amused and not a little amazed to imagine her in straight skirts and shoulder pads 9 to 5 as an executive assistant to an aeroplane engine. But this turned out to be the last of a long line of part-time jobs, a "proper day job, nothing to do with real life". Real life began, significantly, on April 1 as Eulea Kiraly, Community Theatre Director, gained employment for 2.5 days per week funded by artsACT, 0.5 days from Healthpact and, from July 1, the rest of the 7 days per week (or more if she fails the executive time management test) at Tuggeranong, funded by Urban Services.
Urban Services? I hear you cry. What are they doing funding a theatre program? The answer reveals the complexity behind the theatre scene in this city.
When I began teaching drama 30 years ago, the wisdom was that in "primitive" societies drama was an integral part of ordinary life, but in "sophisticated" societies - beginning with the Ancient Greeks - drama became separated from ordinary life, as plays were written to reflect on society: and thus began Theatre.
Well, I guess I have to treat Canberra as an example of a modern sophisticated society - yet in the last 30 years "community" theatre has regained status. The Australia Council, for example, has a Major Performing Arts Board, but also a Board for Community Cultural Development which funds theatre work.
The distinction on the ground in Canberra has long been between "community" and "professional" theatre. We have never succeeded in maintaining for long a professional theatre company, yet there are professional productions and much community theatre. Local professional productions attract very small audiences in competition with Sydney only 3 hours away, or imports to the Playhouse.
And then there are amateur companies, which are not community theatres. So we have among others Canberra Rep (amateur, sometimes with pro input, and essentially social rather than community); Free Rain (amateur, but offering opportunities for young people to work on pro style productions); Women on a Shoestring (pro, yet with community theatre themes); Elbow (pro, but so small it almost looks like a community theatre).
And now Urban Services and Health seem to have picked up on the 1980's idea of the "healthy city" in which the arts are re-integrated with daily life. Healthpact has supported work at The Street Theatre for several years, and Urban Services' recently introduced Community Renewal Program supports projects from the Narrabundah community garden to the Tuggeranong theatre program, in recognition that where local people are engaged in professionally managed creative activities, the community benefits from a sense of cohesion, stability and purpose: the heart which Canberra is supposed not to have.
Eulea Kiraly's work is to create theatre in, with and for the community.
At Tuggeranong, following work with Maude Clark of Melbourne's Somebody's Daughter Theatre earlier in the year, her Thursday evening group of some 28 people - indigenous and multicultural, from teenage to senior - are working on "Fam-ill-ease", expected to open on October 26.
A play by Jay Bannister working with the Karralaika drug rehabilitation community and WIREDD (Womens Information Referral and Education on Drugs and Dependency), "White Track Miracle", will be presented as a reading at CMAG Theatre 8pm September 29 in the upcoming Festival of Contemporary Arts (FOCA). This script has already been critically evaluated by the National Playwrights Centre: Bannister and Kiraly plan to take it on to full production after further development work.
Also for FOCA Kiraly plays her dogsbody role as the organiser of the Australian premiere of David Hare's "Via Dolorosa", with Sydney director Moira Blumenthal, at Tuggeranong October 3-6. Performed by Patrick Dickson, the play is about "the volatile passions of faith" set in Israel and Palestine.
In December there will be a reading of a new play, "Coming to Canberra", by Sri Lankan-Australian Siri Ipalawatte, directed by Kiraly for the Canberra Multicultural Theatre Association.
And, finally, Kiraly is working with "Alphabet Soup", a women's group on a long-term theatrical exploration of their experiences living in the Allawa, Bega and Currong Flats, ranging from the 1950's memories of the Snowy Mountains Scheme era, through the public servant period, to inner city life today. Though no date has been set, this work will be performed, probably within the context of the ABC Flats.
So this is Eulea Kiraly, Canberra's Rolls-Royce of integrated community theatre. She can be contacted at TCA on 6293 1443 or by email: eulea@spirit.com.au
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Sounds simple enough - just another dogsbody arts practitioner. Well, not quite. Since she and her colleagues, the whole Drama Department, resigned from a well-known school back in 1989 when the principal banned a stage production shortly before opening night, Ms Kiraly has become a central figure in Canberra theatre. Only this year however - since she left the Rolls-Royce company (yes, the one which made the cars, or in her case the aeroplane engines) - is she properly recognised as the professional independent theatre director she has long known she needed to be.
Knowing the continual flow of her work directing productions and play readings over many years, I was amused and not a little amazed to imagine her in straight skirts and shoulder pads 9 to 5 as an executive assistant to an aeroplane engine. But this turned out to be the last of a long line of part-time jobs, a "proper day job, nothing to do with real life". Real life began, significantly, on April 1 as Eulea Kiraly, Community Theatre Director, gained employment for 2.5 days per week funded by artsACT, 0.5 days from Healthpact and, from July 1, the rest of the 7 days per week (or more if she fails the executive time management test) at Tuggeranong, funded by Urban Services.
Urban Services? I hear you cry. What are they doing funding a theatre program? The answer reveals the complexity behind the theatre scene in this city.
When I began teaching drama 30 years ago, the wisdom was that in "primitive" societies drama was an integral part of ordinary life, but in "sophisticated" societies - beginning with the Ancient Greeks - drama became separated from ordinary life, as plays were written to reflect on society: and thus began Theatre.
Well, I guess I have to treat Canberra as an example of a modern sophisticated society - yet in the last 30 years "community" theatre has regained status. The Australia Council, for example, has a Major Performing Arts Board, but also a Board for Community Cultural Development which funds theatre work.
The distinction on the ground in Canberra has long been between "community" and "professional" theatre. We have never succeeded in maintaining for long a professional theatre company, yet there are professional productions and much community theatre. Local professional productions attract very small audiences in competition with Sydney only 3 hours away, or imports to the Playhouse.
And then there are amateur companies, which are not community theatres. So we have among others Canberra Rep (amateur, sometimes with pro input, and essentially social rather than community); Free Rain (amateur, but offering opportunities for young people to work on pro style productions); Women on a Shoestring (pro, yet with community theatre themes); Elbow (pro, but so small it almost looks like a community theatre).
And now Urban Services and Health seem to have picked up on the 1980's idea of the "healthy city" in which the arts are re-integrated with daily life. Healthpact has supported work at The Street Theatre for several years, and Urban Services' recently introduced Community Renewal Program supports projects from the Narrabundah community garden to the Tuggeranong theatre program, in recognition that where local people are engaged in professionally managed creative activities, the community benefits from a sense of cohesion, stability and purpose: the heart which Canberra is supposed not to have.
Eulea Kiraly's work is to create theatre in, with and for the community.
At Tuggeranong, following work with Maude Clark of Melbourne's Somebody's Daughter Theatre earlier in the year, her Thursday evening group of some 28 people - indigenous and multicultural, from teenage to senior - are working on "Fam-ill-ease", expected to open on October 26.
A play by Jay Bannister working with the Karralaika drug rehabilitation community and WIREDD (Womens Information Referral and Education on Drugs and Dependency), "White Track Miracle", will be presented as a reading at CMAG Theatre 8pm September 29 in the upcoming Festival of Contemporary Arts (FOCA). This script has already been critically evaluated by the National Playwrights Centre: Bannister and Kiraly plan to take it on to full production after further development work.
Also for FOCA Kiraly plays her dogsbody role as the organiser of the Australian premiere of David Hare's "Via Dolorosa", with Sydney director Moira Blumenthal, at Tuggeranong October 3-6. Performed by Patrick Dickson, the play is about "the volatile passions of faith" set in Israel and Palestine.
In December there will be a reading of a new play, "Coming to Canberra", by Sri Lankan-Australian Siri Ipalawatte, directed by Kiraly for the Canberra Multicultural Theatre Association.
And, finally, Kiraly is working with "Alphabet Soup", a women's group on a long-term theatrical exploration of their experiences living in the Allawa, Bega and Currong Flats, ranging from the 1950's memories of the Snowy Mountains Scheme era, through the public servant period, to inner city life today. Though no date has been set, this work will be performed, probably within the context of the ABC Flats.
So this is Eulea Kiraly, Canberra's Rolls-Royce of integrated community theatre. She can be contacted at TCA on 6293 1443 or by email: eulea@spirit.com.au
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Sunday 2 September 2001
2001: Tuggeranong Community Arts Association Open Day. Feature article.
Tuggeranong Community Arts Association Open Day, Saturday September 1.
Maybe it seemed a gamble a decade or so ago to force the Canberra Casino to compensate the community for the privilege of profiteering from people's weakness in imagining winning an easy wealth from blackjack.
Political imagination worked wonders a year or two later to split the ACT into 3 electorates before the money was pigeonholed, so it became politically correct to spend some in Belconnen (Murranji Theatre at Hawker College), some at CIT Woden (recording studio) and most in Nappy Valley: the Tuggeranong Arts Centre.
It wasn't Black Jack but Domenic Mico, the now famous Festival Director, who had become Tuggeranong's Community Arts Officer in 1992 - with the gall to follow through the construction of an oddly exciting building by architect May Flannery in pursuit of a brilliant vision of community and professional arts working together, despite rumblings from many that the money should have gone to Civic.
Mico moved on to one festival after another and back again, and Evol McLeod became the General Manager who has made the vision brighter in reality than anyone could imagine when the angles and planes of architecture were bare of technical equipment. But the art of the architect worked to create light and air, with stunning lakeside views, which have stimulated excitement in the artists, the administrators, the Tuggeranong community and especially the young people - no longer in nappies but finishing college, like the cast of Lockie Leonard Scumbuster, adapted by Messengers Project Officer Garry Fry from the novel by Tim Winton.
The Messengers Project is just one of many at TCA. It's about helping young people to be resilient in the face of the pressures of hormones and society which lead so many to depression and even suicide. Josh Broomfield, Elizabeth Fitzgerald, Tess MacDonald and Matt Friend - all previous Drama students with Fry at Lake Tuggeranong College - have stayed together after Year 12 to perform Winton's vigorous take on environmental pollution, with resilience as its theme, in primary and high schools. The show is an energetic piece of theatre-in-education which works at both the intellectual level on the environment issue, while middle school students especially also pick up on how Lockie's friend Egg's problems affect him. In post-show discussion they find themselves focussed invariably on positive suggestions for resolution. Winton/Fry's art and the youth of these performers works well indeed.
Open Day saw some 16 activities, among which were the Pet Parade judged by ALP MP Annette Ellis (Most Theatrical Pet was a ferret) and the Official Opening of the Shorelines Public Art Project by Lib ACT Minister for the Arts and Other Things, Brendan Smyth. Shorelines is a mosaic footpath with street banners and flags by the lake, leading to the Arts Centre, aiming to reflect the cultural identity of Tuggeranong. The Minister claimed to be a local identity and thanked all the dozens of people involved in the project, including the Australia Council and ACT Urban Services for funds and construction work.
ALP MLA Bill Wood, who hopes to be Minister for Education after the October 20 election, was there and says he will want the Arts in his portfolio rather than with Other Things. Domenic Mico couldn't not be there especially since he seeks election as a Democrat with a strong arts agenda: he is rethinking the way the Arts should be placed as the key to cultural and community renewal.
Just the buzz on Open Day was enough to justify that decade-old gamble. Imagination is certainly a winner at the TCA.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
Maybe it seemed a gamble a decade or so ago to force the Canberra Casino to compensate the community for the privilege of profiteering from people's weakness in imagining winning an easy wealth from blackjack.
Political imagination worked wonders a year or two later to split the ACT into 3 electorates before the money was pigeonholed, so it became politically correct to spend some in Belconnen (Murranji Theatre at Hawker College), some at CIT Woden (recording studio) and most in Nappy Valley: the Tuggeranong Arts Centre.
It wasn't Black Jack but Domenic Mico, the now famous Festival Director, who had become Tuggeranong's Community Arts Officer in 1992 - with the gall to follow through the construction of an oddly exciting building by architect May Flannery in pursuit of a brilliant vision of community and professional arts working together, despite rumblings from many that the money should have gone to Civic.
Mico moved on to one festival after another and back again, and Evol McLeod became the General Manager who has made the vision brighter in reality than anyone could imagine when the angles and planes of architecture were bare of technical equipment. But the art of the architect worked to create light and air, with stunning lakeside views, which have stimulated excitement in the artists, the administrators, the Tuggeranong community and especially the young people - no longer in nappies but finishing college, like the cast of Lockie Leonard Scumbuster, adapted by Messengers Project Officer Garry Fry from the novel by Tim Winton.
The Messengers Project is just one of many at TCA. It's about helping young people to be resilient in the face of the pressures of hormones and society which lead so many to depression and even suicide. Josh Broomfield, Elizabeth Fitzgerald, Tess MacDonald and Matt Friend - all previous Drama students with Fry at Lake Tuggeranong College - have stayed together after Year 12 to perform Winton's vigorous take on environmental pollution, with resilience as its theme, in primary and high schools. The show is an energetic piece of theatre-in-education which works at both the intellectual level on the environment issue, while middle school students especially also pick up on how Lockie's friend Egg's problems affect him. In post-show discussion they find themselves focussed invariably on positive suggestions for resolution. Winton/Fry's art and the youth of these performers works well indeed.
Open Day saw some 16 activities, among which were the Pet Parade judged by ALP MP Annette Ellis (Most Theatrical Pet was a ferret) and the Official Opening of the Shorelines Public Art Project by Lib ACT Minister for the Arts and Other Things, Brendan Smyth. Shorelines is a mosaic footpath with street banners and flags by the lake, leading to the Arts Centre, aiming to reflect the cultural identity of Tuggeranong. The Minister claimed to be a local identity and thanked all the dozens of people involved in the project, including the Australia Council and ACT Urban Services for funds and construction work.
ALP MLA Bill Wood, who hopes to be Minister for Education after the October 20 election, was there and says he will want the Arts in his portfolio rather than with Other Things. Domenic Mico couldn't not be there especially since he seeks election as a Democrat with a strong arts agenda: he is rethinking the way the Arts should be placed as the key to cultural and community renewal.
Just the buzz on Open Day was enough to justify that decade-old gamble. Imagination is certainly a winner at the TCA.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
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