Author: Kate Foy

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We Sat In the Dark: 100 Voices Needed

Empire Theatre Construction
Image via Wikipedia

Toowoomba’s wonderfully restored Empire Theatre is celebrating its centenary this year. Built in 1911 as a silent-movie theatre, it burned down in 1933, was rebuilt and re-opened the same year in the art-deco style which it retains today.

The Empire flourished over the following decades until it fell into disrepair during the 1970s. It came close to being razed to the ground but, due to the foresight of concerned city residents and then-Mayor Ross Miller, the theatre was saved from destruction and re-opened in 1997.

The Empire Theatre precinct contains the beautiful 1600 seater ‘main-room’ with the famed ‘bomber-light’, a flexible studio and the adjoining Church theatre. It is the largest regional theatre in Australia, and is known and admired especially by visiting artists from around the world. The home-made biscuits and fresh flowers in dressing-rooms and foyer spaces are touches provided by the Friends of the Empire, an entirely voluntary group totalling nearly 700. The Empire really is a community hub for the performing arts on the Darling Downs in southern Queensland and a source of great civic pride.

As part of the Centenary celebrations the Empire Theatre Projects Company is collecting audio, video and photographic memories of the theatre from people of all ages for a project called We Sat In the Dark.

The curated project – a visual and oral history – will then be exhibited and shared with the wider community as part of the Theatre’s Centenary Celebrations.

Members of the public are now invited to submit their memories of the Empire Theatre by Friday 3 June to be considered for inclusion. Click here to submit your memory. The Empire will be in touch if yours is selected for inclusion.

If you are in the city do get along to the TRAG (Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery) where the theatre is exhibiting memoranda – programmes, photographs, posters and costumes – from across the years.

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Life’s Good: Nelle Lee (Interview 19)

Life is very good right now for Nelle Lee,  producer-actor, writer and one of the artistic director triumvirate of the very successful independent theatre company, Shake and Stir.

She and the rest of the company are on the first leg of their national tour of Statespeare and, earlier this week in a special ceremony, she was awarded the University of Southern Queensland‘s Young Alumnus of the Year Award and Faculty of Arts Prize. We catch up at Jilly’s coffee shop, just round the corner from Toowoomba’s Empire Theatre where Statespeare is playing this week.

Nelle arrives in a flurry, a bit late from an interview with a local television crew. It’s good to see her so energised and happy and confident. We eschew the contents of Jilly’s famous wicked-cake case, settle on coffee and start to talk. It’s been a while since we did this – apart from quick ‘hellos’ in theatre foyers across the years since her graduation from the Theatre program at USQ in 2004. It seems there hasn’t been a spare moment for her since then. Shake and Stir started (in a part-time way) in 2006, but has been going flat out since 2008-09, she tells me – not bad going. She’s modest about her achievements: ‘I have a lot of people to thank.’ She’s not yet 30, I think, and she can already claim to have a huge career hit on her hands with the theatrical start-up company that is Shake and Stir. The company gets no government subsidy or philanthropic money, and is entirely self-supporting.

Shake and Stir employ over 20 actors a year with 8 full-time positions. All actors are paid at above-Equity rates.

In addition to their mainstage performances in Brisbane and on tour – they do not have a home theatre base – Shake and Stir also run teacher professional-development workshops and after-school and holiday classes for kids either in-school or at Brisbane’s Old Museum. Whilst the focus of their performance work is on introducing young people to Shakespeare, they are also keen to do the same for other classic works. Their production of Animal Farm (another school syllabus favourite) is programmed for production later this year. But for now and for the next four months as they tour Australia, it’s Statespeare which was commissioned by the Festival of Cairns in 2008 and which has been hugely successful for the company ever since. Continue reading “Life’s Good: Nelle Lee (Interview 19)”

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Niki-J Price (Interview 18)

As I Skype with Niki-J Price she tells me she is enjoying a little stillness in the Brisbane rain –  ‘a bit of a homesick moment,’ she says – she’s Welsh by birth. Niki-J’s taking a short break from rehearsals as part of the Empire Burning company. There’s a run-through that night, ‘and it will be my first ever appearance on the Sue Benner stage.’ Niki-J is one of the cast in Eugene Gilfedder’s new play which opens on Friday at !Metro Arts as part of their Independents’ season for 2011. ‘I’m more than thrilled to be working with such an amazing cast. What a gift it is to be sharing the stage with some of Queensland’s finest male actors – including young Finn (Gilfedder-Cooney) who is not afraid to take such bold steps.’ I think to myself that she is probably going to be right at home in this company. Niki-J herself is a fine actor – on stage as bold and courageous as they come.

I’m keen to find out more about her and to find out what feeds her artist’s imagination. I begin by asking her a question that’s been puzzling me for ages. What’s the ‘J’ in Niki-J stand for?  She tells me it’s for ‘Jayne’ but she only added it when she was 18. ‘At the time I thought a second name would be nice,’ and so she became Nicola Jayne Price – a good Welsh name, I note and one that morphed over time into Niki-J.

As a child, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. ‘It was a small, mid-Wales country town – all a bit incestuous; you’d walk down the street and see someone you were related to.’ When she was 13 she discovered the local youth theatre, and that was it. It was there that her eyes were opened to a wider world, and where, she confesses, she learned to drink and smoke. The first play she appeared in happened to be Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, the same play, incidentally, in which she appeared in December last year for Fractal Productions in Ipswich and at the Old Museum in Brisbane. Continue reading “Niki-J Price (Interview 18)”