WEBVTT

1
00:00:01.367 --> 00:00:07.168
At the start of any project I like to have like
a very open ended question that will sit with me.

2
00:00:07.168 --> 00:00:14.203
I enjoy the idea of it as a research, or to frame
everything before it becomes a production.

3
00:00:14.203 --> 00:00:17.104
As a research, like what am I trying to understand?

4
00:00:17.104 --> 00:00:18.904
Or what am I asking?

5
00:00:18.904 --> 00:00:23.372
And then trying to find, I guess, other people
that are asking that same question.

6
00:00:23.372 --> 00:00:25.806
The identifying what's the question

7
00:00:25.806 --> 00:00:28.373
helps me get excited

8
00:00:28.373 --> 00:00:30.507
and get hungry to go into it.

9
00:00:48.245 --> 00:00:54.780
First I feel incredibly privileged to even call myself
a theater maker and practice art as what I do.

10
00:00:54.780 --> 00:00:56.614
Completely opens up my world,

11
00:00:56.614 --> 00:00:58.448
which I think, you know,

12
00:00:58.448 --> 00:01:06.216
in the Internet age we’re living in where everything is quite siloed
and you tend to only see your own opinion reflected back at you.

13
00:01:06.216 --> 00:01:09.984
And it's kind of horrifying that anyone
might see the world differently to you.

14
00:01:09.984 --> 00:01:13.285
For me art making has been

15
00:01:13.285 --> 00:01:19.219
an incredible opportunity to expand my world
and it just keeps expanding through the people I meet

16
00:01:19.219 --> 00:01:21.520
and that's something I really value.

17
00:01:21.520 --> 00:01:25.788
I feel like it's both an artistic practice
and also just a practice of being in the world.

18
00:01:28.755 --> 00:01:33.223
As I said I studied directing, theater directing,
so I've kind of inherited this name

19
00:01:33.223 --> 00:01:39.591
or this term but I don't really know what it means,
especially when you're dealing with power and hierarchies.

20
00:01:39.591 --> 00:01:41.658
Sort of seems a bit contradictory.

21
00:01:42.959 --> 00:01:45.659
I think in the end, it's like

22
00:01:45.659 --> 00:01:48.393
someone's obsessing over this a lot

23
00:01:48.393 --> 00:01:53.228
and holding, holding the responsibility or holding it
and that's kind of what I'm doing.

24
00:01:54.395 --> 00:02:01.563
I think it's a big responsibility to work with
people who aren't artists and especially, you know,

25
00:02:01.563 --> 00:02:08.065
you as a director, you have a lot of power,
irrespective of how much you try to diffuse it

26
00:02:08.065 --> 00:02:11.266
there is sort of these inherent power imbalances.

27
00:02:11.266 --> 00:02:17.034
So something I'm quite busy with is like how
to diffuse power in the way that I'm working.

28
00:02:18.501 --> 00:02:24.502
I suppose a part of that is how I engage the
people I work with and how to create space

29
00:02:24.502 --> 00:02:29.504
for them to have agency and ownership
of how they're presented.

30
00:02:31.171 --> 00:02:33.105
The people that I choose,

31
00:02:33.105 --> 00:02:38.173
I choose to work with them because
I trust them, their vision as an artist.

32
00:02:38.173 --> 00:02:43.374
I'm not so interested in micromanaging
people but creating a kind of context

33
00:02:43.374 --> 00:02:46.541
for them to do their thing together.

34
00:02:47.508 --> 00:02:54.110
What's the most exciting collaboration is when
everybody is caring towards this outcome.

35
00:02:54.110 --> 00:03:00.978
And that, I think, comes when people have put a bit of their own vision into it or their own ideas or their own risk

36
00:03:07.313 --> 00:03:11.281
At the moment I'm working a lot with conversation as material.

37
00:03:12.114 --> 00:03:19.750
The potential of conversation and also the kind of performance
of conversation, or conversation as a form of performance,

38
00:03:19.750 --> 00:03:25.684
particularly with people of mixed generations or across generations

39
00:03:25.684 --> 00:03:33.120
and practices of intimacy, how to create proximity between people

40
00:03:33.120 --> 00:03:35.320
and different strategies of doing that.

41
00:03:38.521 --> 00:03:44.422
I suppose I work a lot with nonprofessional
performers. And I have worked with actors but

42
00:03:44.422 --> 00:03:48.557
I became interested in working with
people who were not actors

43
00:03:48.557 --> 00:03:53.625
and then, I guess, trying to find strategies of creating frameworks

44
00:03:53.625 --> 00:03:59.726
for them to perform or to be visible on
the stage or in the performance space.

45
00:03:59.726 --> 00:04:05.228
That didn't mean they had to perform a character
or be someone that they're not.

46
00:04:06.461 --> 00:04:10.996
I get really interested in what types of conversations
are being had and not being had

47
00:04:10.996 --> 00:04:19.731
and how to frame conversation in ways that enable different types of listening and different types of encounters to occur

48
00:04:19.731 --> 00:04:21.999
that don't happen

49
00:04:21.999 --> 00:04:25.066
just at a coffee table or just, you know, with a friend.

50
00:04:35.269 --> 00:04:41.337
How do you actually kind of really deconstruct what
is conversation and how could it happen in other ways?

51
00:04:45.638 --> 00:04:52.506
For me at the start of any project I like to have like
a very open ended question that will sit with me.

52
00:04:53.907 --> 00:05:00.442
I enjoy the idea of it as a research, or to frame
everything before it becomes a production,

53
00:05:00.442 --> 00:05:03.676
as a research, like what am I trying to understand?

54
00:05:03.676 --> 00:05:05.076
Or what am I asking?

55
00:05:06.343 --> 00:05:10.811
And then trying to find, I guess, other people
that are asking that same question

56
00:05:10.811 --> 00:05:16.979
and then trying to find a little community.
The identifying what's the question

57
00:05:16.979 --> 00:05:19.380
helps me get excited, I think.

58
00:05:19.380 --> 00:05:21.514
And get hungry to go into it.

59
00:05:26.848 --> 00:05:32.650
I guess each project is somehow connected to questions

60
00:05:32.650 --> 00:05:38.684
I have in terms of the world that I'm
living in, or what's affecting my world.

61
00:05:38.684 --> 00:05:40.852
Sometimes that can be deeply political.

62
00:05:40.852 --> 00:05:45.820
In the case of “We All Know What's Happening”,
which was very much about Australia's refugee policy,

63
00:05:47.920 --> 00:05:55.322
Or currently I'm working on a new work called “Please Stand”
that is interrogating nationalism and borders in dialog with youth

64
00:05:55.322 --> 00:06:04.291
activists and young people and also with a young woman
who was a refugee in Australia who's a writer and poet.

65
00:06:04.291 --> 00:06:11.026
So I guess there's a strand of my work that is
dealing kind of very explicitly with the political

66
00:06:11.026 --> 00:06:17.728
but then alongside that is a kind of ongoing curiosity
about the body, which I suppose is another border.

67
00:06:19.428 --> 00:06:24.763
The way that we talk about the body, what bodies
get talked about or don't get talked about,

68
00:06:24.763 --> 00:06:31.298
or how we negotiate our bodies in relation
to one another. With “Body of Knowledge” particularly

69
00:06:31.298 --> 00:06:34.265
and this next work I'm working on, called “It's going to get dark”

70
00:06:34.265 --> 00:06:39.033
I'm very much dealing with relational aesthetics
and how to work with people in space

71
00:06:39.033 --> 00:06:41.234
as another kind of material,

72
00:06:41.234 --> 00:06:42.200
that being the audience.

73
00:06:42.200 --> 00:06:44.001
But how do we be together?

74
00:06:44.001 --> 00:06:49.002
How do we behave together, how
could we behave differently together?

75
00:06:49.002 --> 00:06:58.104
And how could theater allow that possibility to happen
in ways that our everyday life denies us or inhibits.

76
00:07:04.973 --> 00:07:08.674
That particular work “Body of Knowledge” came from a provocation

77
00:07:08.674 --> 00:07:15.909
when I first started studying my master's and the
provocation was to come up with a short sketch

78
00:07:15.909 --> 00:07:18.676
from a significant moment from your childhood.

79
00:07:18.676 --> 00:07:25.111
The memory I had was just a lack of sex education
and that very awkward time in one's life

80
00:07:25.111 --> 00:07:31.846
when you're dealing with puberty and not having
many tools or clues as to how how things work.

81
00:07:34.314 --> 00:07:40.682
What would young people like to be talking about to adults
who they won’t meet and what can't they Google and what

82
00:07:40.682 --> 00:07:42.182
what aren’t they learning at school?

83
00:07:44.149 --> 00:07:50.584
It started off as a sketch but whereby
I made a list of questions that I had as a

84
00:07:50.584 --> 00:07:58.019
13 year old and then I thought, oh,
I should consult some actual teenagers and ask them.

85
00:07:58.019 --> 00:08:01.354
And then I began to have two sort of parts of research.

86
00:08:01.354 --> 00:08:08.289
One was with the teenagers where we would workshop questions like: what is a body, what does the body mean, what comes up?

87
00:08:08.289 --> 00:08:10.989
Or what is an adult or what is a child?

88
00:08:10.989 --> 00:08:17.691
Or what is, you know, kind of just free flowing associations
to generate a kind of freedom and a lack of shame.

89
00:08:17.691 --> 00:08:22.292
Because of course when you talk about a body,
often a lot of shame comes up.

90
00:08:24.593 --> 00:08:31.495
I very much didn't want to work with representation
of young people's bodies. I really wanted to

91
00:08:31.495 --> 00:08:35.529
just have the voices and just explore what it is to listen.

92
00:08:35.529 --> 00:08:43.064
So it's really more for young people who have a curiosity
in talking, or philosophizing, or trying to understand, or provoking.

93
00:08:46.098 --> 00:08:52.233
What became interesting working with young people was not just talking about the body, but also body politic, like

94
00:08:52.233 --> 00:08:57.768
climate crisis or racism or sexual identity or gender identity.

95
00:08:57.768 --> 00:09:02.436
You know, like actually how our bodies
are represented or how they affect other bodies

96
00:09:02.436 --> 00:09:04.503
or how they affect the planet or other species.

97
00:09:04.503 --> 00:09:13.405
So it becomes very broad but all very important and at the same time I was doing a lot of test runs with adults in a room with phones

98
00:09:13.405 --> 00:09:18.340
trying to understand these kind of relational aesthetics.
Like, how does tension build?

99
00:09:18.340 --> 00:09:23.774
What kind of strategies around transformation of space?
How can that work unfold?

100
00:09:33.343 --> 00:09:35.211
Whilst I'm interested in these encounters

101
00:09:35.211 --> 00:09:42.112
I'm also very interested in what theater can do
and theatrical language, for example,

102
00:09:42.112 --> 00:09:50.181
revelation of things or transformation of space
or elements of production, elements of sound and light

103
00:09:50.181 --> 00:09:53.482
and spatial design and scenography.

104
00:09:53.482 --> 00:09:56.849
I'm very interested in all these elements and excited by them.

105
00:09:56.849 --> 00:10:03.184
So the work that I make is as deeply in collaboration
with these other design teams or artists.

106
00:10:05.418 --> 00:10:08.586
You know, the people I work with,
I just, I'm constantly in touch with.

107
00:10:08.586 --> 00:10:15.621
These are ongoing relationships and they also kind of end up
in other projects and it becomes a sort of web of new friendships.

108
00:10:18.121 --> 00:10:24.723
I really love a few things about theater, so I sort of love
what it means to sit in the dark with a group of people.

109
00:10:24.723 --> 00:10:33.892
To be really conscious of who's around you, and for something
to happen in real time and kind of ancient, like I'm still interested in

110
00:10:33.892 --> 00:10:42.894
in the fact that we do that collectively all around the world
and the potential of what that can continue to offer.

111
00:12:40.557 --> 00:12:47.425
For me, at the start of any project, I like to have like
a very open ended question that will sit with me.

112
00:12:47.559 --> 00:12:54.094
I enjoy the idea of it as a research, or to frame
everything, before it becomes a production,

113
00:12:54.094 --> 00:12:57.328
as a research, like what am I trying to understand?

114
00:12:57.328 --> 00:12:59.128
Or what am I asking?

115
00:12:59.128 --> 00:13:03.596
And then trying to find, I guess, other people
that are asking that same question

116
00:13:03.596 --> 00:13:08.931
and then trying to find a little community.
The identifying what's the question,

117
00:13:09.764 --> 00:13:12.165
helps me get excited, I think.

118
00:13:12.165 --> 00:13:14.299
And get hungry to go into it.

119
00:15:47.337 --> 00:15:54.739
I am currently in Melbourne, Australia, (?),
which is the indigenous name of the land that I'm on.

120
00:15:54.739 --> 00:16:03.075
But I'm also, yes, constantly time and space traveling
to via WhatsApp or Facebook or Zoom

121
00:17:54.703 --> 00:17:57.870
You know, the people I work with, I just I'm constantly in touch with.

122
00:17:57.870 --> 00:18:04.905
These are ongoing relationships, and they also kind of end up
in other projects and it becomes a sort of web of new friendships.

123
00:18:06.105 --> 00:18:12.174
For me, art making has been an incredible opportunity
to expand my world, and it just keeps expanding.

124
00:18:13.341 --> 00:18:15.274
How do we behave together?

125
00:18:15.274 --> 00:18:20.842
How could we behave differently together,
and how could theater allow that?

126
00:20:17.472 --> 00:20:24.940
I'm trying very hard to connect to physical place
and I ride my bicycle a lot

127
00:20:25.107 --> 00:20:30.108
and I find these periods, or these
passages of moving between spaces

128
00:20:30.108 --> 00:20:36.243
and paying attention to light or the feeling of air very important

129
00:20:36.343 --> 00:20:42.611
just to remember that I'm a body in the world
and not a small face on a screen.

