Witness Podcasts

Team Witness – Alison Croggon, Carissa Lee, Robert Reid and Ben Keene – got together for a final podcast yarn about criticism, funding, Australian theatre history, Ibsen, Blak voices, inclusion and exclusion, accessibility, digital theatre, revolution, why we closed and what we loved about making Witness.

Farewell music composed by Ben Keene.

Thanks so much, everyone. It’s been so much fun. And that’s a wrap!

Ben Keene talks to Asia TOPA creative director Stephen Armstrong and director of design studio Sandpit and Asia TOPA digital dramaturg Dan Koerner about the innovation across digital platforms that followed when Covid-19 hit a major performing arts festival.

‘I’m absolutely one for watching a performance that is held by a beautifully written play … but if it’s the only thing you’re eating, it’s horrifically dangerous to your system.’

Ben Keene talks to director, performer and dramaturg Daniel Schlusser about his practice, his thinking about theatre, and his continually shifting relationship to reading, writing and performance. Schlusser’s work encompasses many approaches to theatre making and traverses opera and installation as well as a wide range of work for companies ranging from the Melbourne Theatre Company to Chunky Move to the exploratory work of his own company, Daniel Schlusser Ensemble. Over the past few decade he has created some groundbreaking work, including memorable interrogations of classics such as Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Peer Gynt, and has worked with writers from Jack Hibberd to Falk Richter.

He formed the Daniel Schlusser Ensemble in 2009, creating works such as They Divided the Sky (Belvoir), M+M (adapted from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita for Melbourne Festival), Menagerie (Melbourne Theatre Company), Ophelia doesn’t live here anymore (Chamber Made Opera), Poet #7, Life is a Dream, The Dollhouse, and Peer Gynt. Outside his own company, directing highlights include two works Thomas Bernhard’s The Histrionic for Malthouse/Sydney Theatre Company and Euripides’ Medea for the 2002 Melbourne Festival. Premiere productions of new Australian work including Ben Ellis’ Zombie State for Melbourne Workers Theatre/Union House Theatre, Angus Cerini’s The Barbeque for La Mama, and many works by Jack Hibberd including the premiere productions of The Death of Ivan Ilych, Legacy, Long Time No See and Slam Dunk (all La Mama) as well as his plays The Overcoat, Odyssey of a Prostitute and The Prodigal Son for Playbox.

As a performer Schlusser’s work includes Trustees with Belarus Free Theatre and Malthouse, which he also co-wrote, Trapper directed by Christian Leavesley and Jolyon James (Arena Theatre Company at the Victorian Arts Centre and the Sydney Opera House) which was nominated for a Green Room Award for Best Ensemble, The Judgement directed by Samara Hersch (La Mama), the role of ‘Husband’ in Adena Jacob’s multi-award winning production of Persona (TheatreWorks/ Malthouse/Belvoir), and Laius in Matthew Lutton’s production On the Misconception of Oedipus (Malthouse/Perth TC) which won a Green Room Award for Best Ensemble. With THE RABBLE he created the role of Herod in Salome (Carriageworks) and the role of Bernarda Alba in Cageling (fortyfive downstairs/Carriageworks) for which he was nominated for a Green Room Award for Best Male Actor.

Further reading:

Daniel Schlusser: Official websiteReview: Alison Croggon on Peer Gynt (2009)Review: Alison Croggon on The Dollhouse (2011)

Six months into the pandemic, Team Witness meets online to chew the fat on art, life and making meaning now

In an age of pandemic, social isolation and increasing crisis, what does it mean to make live performance? What does it mean to critique it? Could the connections offered by art be the technology we need to combat disinformation and conspiracy theories? Robert Reid, Carissa Lee and Alison Croggon ask these questions and more. Produced by Ben Keene.

Further reading:

All the web’s a stage – Robert ReidNext Wave: Rest – Carissa LeeAbsurd pleasures: Caca-capitalismo – Olivia MuscatArt in a time of emergency – Alison Croggon

Ben Keene investigates how BLEED 2020 pivoted to existing entirely online after Covid-19 hit in March this year

What happens when you have to change everything? As the pandemic drags on through 2020, we’re all finding out

BLEED – a performance festival co-produced by Arts House in Melbourne and Sydney’s Campbelltown Arts Centre – was originally envisioned as a two-week event that explored the connections between digital life and the everyday, with a mixture of online and staged works. When Australian theatre went dark in March, plans that had been in train for more than a year had to be completely re-imagined.

For this Spotlight special, Witness podcast producer Ben Keene talks to Arts House artistic director Emily Sexton, radio artist and BLEED advisor Miyuki Jokiranta, Arts House associate producer Samira Farah and dancer and choreographer Angela Goh about how BLEED 2020 transformed from futuristic speculation into a meditation on the immediate present, and what the pandemic has meant for their work and their lives.

This Witness Performance podcast was commissioned by Arts House, City of Melbourne and Campbelltown Arts Centre and forms part of BLEED 2020, presented in partnership with Campbelltown Arts Centre.

BLEED is a biennial festival of live digital events curated by Arts House and Campbelltown Arts Centre from June 22 to August 30. Check out the program here.

‘You are asking someone from the field into the house, and we are going to fight. Because I will always fight to decentralise the white patriarchy’

Candy Bowers is an auteur – in her work, she is a playwright, producer, director, performer and an activist. In this wide-rangng conversation she talks to Alison Croggon about her hiphop show for young people, One the Bear. Co-written with her sister, composer Kim Busty Beatz Bowers, it’s latest in a long history of activist collaboration. Candy discusses her history as an independent activist theatre maker, and how she brings her vision of decolonisation to her audiences. “A lot of time in the theatre space it’s felt like war,” she says.  But, she tell us, things are changing.

One the Bear opens next week at Arts Centre Melbourne as part of the Big World Up Close series. Bookings

Further reading: Candy Bowers’ production of Susan Lori-Parks Fucking A

You can subscribe to Witness podcasts through iTunes or an RSS feed. Click here for instructions on how to subscribe.

‘I don’t have a process… What I do is put things that interest me on stage.’

In this month’s podcast, Robert Reid talks to the unclassifiable Nicola Gunn, one of Australia’s most important and intriguing theatre makers, about her practice. They discuss her practice, from her early “Edward Gorey phase” to her most recent work, including Working with Children, which she considers her “disaster” to what she’s making now, a “live pedadogical exercise”.

Gunn works as a performer, writer, director, producer and dramaturg. She makes live performances, videos, objects, site-specific installations and books that borrow from theatrical, choreographic, literary, comedic and visual art languages to create a mode of contemporary performance that plays with form and pursues a narrative, working across theatre and dance. Her solo work has been shown in Australia, New Zealand, Chile, the US, Canada, France, Austria, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Italy, Finland and Belgium.

Producer: Ben Keene

Further reading:

Review of Working with Children

You can subscribe to Witness podcasts through iTunes or an RSS feed. Click here for instructions on how to subscribe.

‘There’s something fundamentally wrong with young men…that they gravitate to war, that they gravitate to violence, that they gravitate to self destruction…I’ve always felt compelled to wrestle with that.’

In this wide-ranging conversation, writer, director and performer Thomas M Wright talks to Alison Croggon about his new film Acute Misfortune, his background as a theatre artist as one of the founding members of Black Lung during the Australian theatre renaissance of the early Noughties, the construction of masculinity and what’s wrong with maleness today, and the formal conventions of film.

Thomas M Wright came to international notice when he was cast in Jane Campion’s series The Top of the Lake and has starred in many series and film since. His most recent film Acute Misfortune, which he directed and co-wrote, is a biopic about the controversial visual artist Adam Cullen, explores the destructive masculinity that runs through Australian culture. Based on the biography by journalist Erik Jensen, it won the Age Critics Prize at the Melbourne International Film Festival and is now showing in cinemas Australia-wide.

Further reading

Lauren Carroll-Harris in Kill Your Darlings on Acute Misfortune

Alison Croggon on Oscar Redding’s Hamlet

Alison Croggon on Black Lung’s Avast

You can subscribe to Witness podcasts through iTunes or an RSS feed. Click here for instructions on how to subscribe.

‘We still tend to overlook and ignore the remarkable work of Australians’

Robert Reid talks to broadcaster, writer and general arts stalwart Richard Watts, discussing his background as a poet, activist and advocate, and his passionate and abiding connection to Australian arts. The conversation looks at the need for cultural change, the need to combat cultural imperialism and white supremacy, and the persistence of the cultural cringe.

Richard is a Melbourne-based arts writer and broadcaster. The founder of the Emerging Writers’ Festival and a Life Member of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, he has worked for a wide array of arts organisations and sat on numerous boards. He currently is chair of the Board of La Mama Theatre and is a member of the Green Room Awards Independent Theatre panel. In addition to writing for ArtsHub as Performing Arts Editor, Richard presents the weekly program SmartArts on 3RRR.

You can subscribe to Witness podcasts through iTunes or an RSS feed. Click here for instructions on how to subscribe.

‘When I think about art, I think: what raises the hair on your arms’

In the first part of this funny, fabulous and very candid two-part episode of The Witness Interview, Ben Keene talks to the seductive and subversive Moira Finucane. With Jackie Smith, Moira is half of the powerhouse that is Finucane and Smith. Their variety-style performance art has become a staple of our performance landscape, and generated a loyal worldwide following. Here she talks candidly about the passions and struggles informing her work and how she began to create her unique form of queer performance.

Finucane and Smith have won 15 theatre awards, including The Patrick White Playwright Award, Cuba’s National Theatre Award, the CHAMACO for the most outstanding International Presentation of 2015, 7 Green Room Awards, the Outstanding Contribution to Cabaret Award, Scotland on Sunday’s “Hottest Temptation of the Festival”, the Australia Council for the Arts Theatre Fellowship.  Finucane was also a Creative Fellow of the National Gallery of Victoria, the first ever appointed.

The Witness Interview Moira Finucane: Part 2

You can subscribe to Witness podcasts through iTunes or an RSS feed. Click here for instructions on how to subscribe.