Tag: Interviews

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Michelle Miall (Interview 23)

Image: Elleni Toumpas

It’s a cold, wintery day as I speak with Michelle Miall, director and Matilda Award-winner about her work – her current production is Colder for the 2011 La Boite Theatre Indie season which opens next week.

Michelle is a QUT graduate with a BA Drama Hons (Theatre Studies). By her third year, she found herself focussing on directing and writing, and this prompted a decision to continue on to an Honours year in Popular Theatre. ‘I was (and still am) interested in bringing audiences to the theatre who don’t normally go, who feel excluded by it or like it is irrelevant to their lives.’

By the end of that Honours year Michelle confesses, ‘I was jaded, as though I had intellectualised everything I loved about theatre. It was as if I had this tiny view of the world from my little place in it. I wanted to go out and experience more.’ Feeling she needed a bigger palette from which to draw her passion and, like many Australian artists before her, she headed overseas to London.

After working on one production as a stage manager (from which, she adds,’ I got a very cool eyebrow scar from a falling lighting rig during bump out’) I moved outside theatre and got caught there for some time.’ She travelled, worked in fashion, then advertising, then investment banking.  The work funded her travel, and the travel fuelled her imagination. Continue reading “Michelle Miall (Interview 23)”

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Free Range 2011: Jo Thomas (Interview 22)

The last time I saw Jo Thomas was on stage a couple of months ago at the Darlinghurst Theatre in Sydney. She was on tour at the time with Jo&Co (her company’s) show Sometimes I Find That I Am Naked. That production is ‘resting’ currently as Jo gets stuck into something completely different at !Metro Arts month-long Free Range Festival in Brisbane. She and the Naked … team will be back on the road later this year as part of a national tour through the independent theatre champion Critical Stages.

I’m keen to hear what she will be doing as she takes time out from what is a successful tour for Jo&Co. A bit of well-earned R&R, perhaps? Perhaps Recreation, but not much Rest, it would seem from what she has planned for herself and what Free Range has planned for Jo and the other artists being incubated during the month of June.

Free Range is about giving artists time and space over an intensive period to develop their work. When I spoke with Jo it was early days for her and her collaborators – a brainstorming period. The project piece, which she has called Ukiyo-e: Tales From the Floating World ‘doesn’t yet exist,’ she tells me, and it’s very different in style from Sometimes I Find That I Am Naked, which she describes as ‘populist.’ Continue reading “Free Range 2011: Jo Thomas (Interview 22)”

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Free Range 2011: Steven Mitchell Wright (Interview 21)

Risky, avant-garde and experimental are not words that frighten Steven Mitchell Wright, Artistic Director and founder of The Danger Ensemble; he relishes them. ‘I believe in the power of words and using them to say what we mean,’ and so is happy, in fact, completely unapologetic when using them to position his work as an artist. We talk briefly about why people reject labels – especially ones that appear to take such strong positions like avant-garde or experimental. He’s matter of fact and sweetly tactful. ‘I think it’s just that some people are afraid of being deemed something in case they limit themselves,’ he responds.

Steven’s C-V lists work as performer and creator with Brisbane’s Zen Zen Zo and Frank theatres. Whilst his artistic background lies in dance and theatre, he tells me he has been interested for a long time in the space where music and theatre meet – but not the way they do in musical theatre. He’s appeared at the Edinburgh Festival and directed Amanda Palmer‘s world-tour where her fans experienced a high-end, eclectic theatre show rather than the usual rock-venue presentations they were used to. ‘I’m interested not just in innovation, but in creating new audiences and new experiences for them.’ He’s emphatic about eschewing innovation for innovation’s sake, however. ‘I’m not interested in tack-on gimmicks. It is essential that theatre makers take the time to consider how audiences are going to receive their work. There’s so much influence now from the web-based world and work trans-media,’ he adds, ‘but if the work is about the technology, I’m not interested. There must be humanity at the core.’

Steven’s enthusiastic not only for the work being enabled by !Metro Arts, ‘who provide a place where we can create work we want to do and to investigate the format in which to present,’ but also the wider culture in the south-east of Queensland. ‘We’re in a strong place here,’ he says.  I ask him why. He cites generational issues – a lot of young people, strong leadership in the arts, a real feel that change is in the air. ‘It’s a place of opportunity,’ he adds, ‘and there’s a rejuvenated spirit about. People are attempting to create work with a bigger, more confident voice.’ He also talks about local artists getting increased exposure to other theatre practices. He mentions WTF! ‘We’re engaged in creating a strong, sustainable culture right now.’

But right right now, Steven’s got curatorial charge of  CROSS-STITCH: WITHOUT APOLOGY (all caps but I’m not shouting) which opens the Free Range 2011 Festival tonight. I ask about his vision for the work. Continue reading “Free Range 2011: Steven Mitchell Wright (Interview 21)”

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Tim O’Connor (Interview 20)

Tim O’Connor is Brisbane-born and bred. It’s clear when you hear him talk that he loves this city. He tells me it’s the place he always wanted to be and to remain. When he was growing up he went to see shows at QPAC, La Boite, QTC and Harvest Rain where, in time, he would go to Saturday afternoon drama workshops at their Sydney Street Theatre premises in New Farm.

After school and done with study, he became Harvest Rain’s volunteer dogsbody, the box-office boy who ‘ … hung around until they gave me a job. I was an 18 year old bum who got work experience, bided my time and found myself in the right place at the right time.’ Eventually, he became Harvest Rain’s Artistic Director at the age of 22; it is the position he now holds.

During the first few years of the 2000s, Harvest Rain was in a period of transition. The Parkin Brothers had taken over the theatre arm from the church who owned it at the time. ‘It was one thing for them to run a church and another to run a complete separate business which had become bigger than the church itself. I don’t think they realised what they had taken on. They had to give up their ownership and I took over. I was the last man standing.’

I ask him what a very young, fledgling Artistic Director thought he could do with that particular company at the time. It turns out his ambitions for Harvest Rain then are pretty much a continuation of what they are for the present-day company: to continue the development which they have largely realised over the past 10 years – to make it a pro-am and eventually fully-professional company.

At the core we believe in doing theatre that is attractive to family and to creating theatre that anyone can come and enjoy – theatre for the masses if you like.

‘I came in and enhanced what was already there,’ but Tim wanted to expand from the old programming model of 3-4 shows a year. He began directing the company towards musical theatre because ‘… that is my clear, passionate love. I had a vision that the company could be big. I wanted to do lots of shows, to tour, to develop a training program and maybe even develop outside Brisbane. In the last 10 years I have taken the company that way.’ Continue reading “Tim O’Connor (Interview 20)”

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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)”