Witness Podcasts

Moira Finucane, ‘the patron saint of magpies’, digs into her creative practice in Part 2 of her interview with Ben Keene

In Part 2 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, her processes, and her work around the world, including her work in China.

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 1

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‘We’re pulling people out, half dead, half alive…’

The collapse of the West Gate Bridge in 1970 is the worst modern industrial accident in Australian history. Two years into its construction, a 2000 ton span of the bridge crashed 50 meters into the mud of the Yarra River, killing 35 men and injuring 18.

The Bridge is the first Spotlight Podcast, a new series of investigative podcasts produced by Witness podcast producer Ben Keene. A collaboration between the Art + Industry Festival, Overland Journal and Witness, this podcast, co-produced with Overland editor Jacinda Woodhead, explores the remount late last year of The Bridge, Vicki Reynolds’ verbatim play about the disaster, at the SubStation in Newport, in the context of accounts of the disaster that it recorded from those who were there, and other creative responses.

The Bridge is about class, labour and art, and explores questions around memory and memorialisation. How do communities process trauma? What place can theatre play in remembering the dead? What implications can we draw now from this terrible event, when last year 95 workers died in workplace accidents?

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Many thanks to the West Gate Bridge Memorial Committee, the CFMEU, everyone who spoke at the ‘How to build bridges’ symposium and/or gave their time in interviews, James Henry, Bindi Cole Chocka, Mark Seymour, local community singers (led by Jennifer Lund), Donna Jackson, Elizabeth Humphrys, Enza Gandolfo, Tara Goldstein, the Art + Industry Festival, Witness Performance, Jacinda Woodhead and Rachael McGuirk.

A special thanks to the bridge workers – Tom Watson, Danny Gardiner, Pat Preston, Paddy Hanaphy and Ian Domoney – who were so generous with their thoughts and experiences, and to the trade union movement as a whole.

The Art & Industry Festival commissioned this podcast, The Bridge. It has been produced by Overland magazine and Witness Performance, in collaboration with the 2018 Art + Industry Festival, which was themed around bridges..

 

 

 

‘I’m 37 years old, it’s time I was an evil witch’

For our last Witness Interview of 2018, Robert Reid talks to Ming-Zhu Hii about many things, including artistic risk, the commodification of the arts, racial representation and the early days of blogging. Ming-Zhu is a director, writer and multidisciplinary artist working across film, theatre, video, and installation. She is the 2018-19 Female Director in Residence at Malthouse Theatre. Among her projects is the award-winning short film Intrusion, recent installation Dead Drop, short film Close Observations of a Single Subject, multimedia and performance hybrids Until Then, Then and This is Beautiful, and the critically acclaimed theatre and installation piece Attract/Repel. She helms Find & Replace Films whose projects explore the female body as symbol and object; observed and observer through the re-imagination of myth, canon and classical artwork, and mystery and thriller genres.

Podcast producers: Ben Keene

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In our eighth Witness Podcast, Carissa Lee and Alison Croggon discuss the importance of diversity in arts criticism: why we need it, and why the lack of it contributes to inequalities in the arts.

Further reading: Carissa Lee on the importance of informed reviewers

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‘I wanted to be in a place where I was treated as an adult human as an artist’

For this month’s Witness Interview, Robert Reid talks to Australian playwright Amelia Roper about making a career in the United States and all things writing, including guineapigs. Roper, who describes herself as “Gay. Funny. Writer. Activist”, has had her plays produced n in London, Moscow, Australia and around the US, and recently by a Kin Collective at 45 Downstairs. She writes for for Yale Rep, Colt Coeur at New York Theatre Workshop, OSF and The RoseShe’s won some awards, works for Gloria Steinem and Time’sUp with Jill Soloway, and has an MFA in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama.

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‘There are gods walking through performance’

Is there a new energy sweeping through our theatres? It’s been six months since Witness launched, so founders Robert Reid and Alison Croggon take the opportunity to look back over the performances they’ve seen. And the good news is that there’s a lot of great work out there, notably from women and people of colour, that is responding to the anxieties of our time.

Works mentioned:

Blackie Blackie Brown

Contest

Overture

Lone

The Nose

My Sister Feather

The Bleeding Tree

A Caltex Spectrum

The Barbershop Chronicles

You can subscribe to The Witness Podcast via an RSS feed. If you want to subscribe, you need to copy and paste the link below into your podcasting application.https://witnessperformance.com/category/witness/podcasts/witnesspodcast/feed/

You can subscribe to the podcast directly through iTunes at this link https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/the-witness-podcast/id1363297769

“We keep reinventing the wheel”

In this wide-ranging interview with Robert Reid, director, actor, teacher and dramaturge Melanie Beddie looks over a lifetime working in theatre, from her beginning at the Victorian College of the Arts through the birth of the current independent theatre scene in Melbourne in the 1980s and ’90s, to now.

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

“It’s really important to me that my work is generative”

For this month’s interview, Alison Croggon talks to choreographer Lucy Guerin, artistic director of Lucy Guerin Inc, about her early career as a dancer, her years in New York, her transformation from dancer to choreographer, and the profound importance of community to an artform like dance. Like many of Australia’s independent performance companies, as well as working at home, Lucy Guerin Inc tours widely overseas, playing top venues in Europe and the United States, and has established itself as one of Australia’s most important and well known independent dance companies.

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

“Are we going to be having the same conversations again in ten years?”

In this month’s Witness Podcast, Carissa Lee, Robert Reid and Alison Croggon look at the mechanisms of discourse. How do we manage conversations about the problems we face in our community, such as the revelations around #MeToo. Does any of this conversation actually change things, and if not, why not?

You can subscribe to The Witness Podcast via an RSS feed. If you want to subscribe, you need to copy and paste the link below into your podcasting application. https://witnessperformance.com/category/witness/podcasts/witnesspodcast/feed/

You can subscribe to the podcast directly through iTunes at this link https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/the-witness-podcast/id1363297769

On The Witness Podcast this month, Carissa Lee and Alison Croggon discuss the recent controversy around the VCA dance work Where We Stand, which caught the attention of right wing commentators and faced calls for it to be banned. What is the problem with questioning whiteness? What does it mean to be white? What does it mean to be black? How do we negotiate these constructions in our cultural spaces?

Further reading:

Safe White Spaces, by Andy Butler

Diversity is a white word: Tania Canas on ArtsHub

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