2012 SELECTED WORKS & IN THE WORKS

Theatre Works has been proudly supporting the independent arts since 2004 with our signature support programs.

Submission Deadlines 

Applications have now closed. We would like to thanks all of the wonderful artists who applied to be part of Selected Works and In the Works for 2012.  The calibre and diversity of projects were inspiring.  Successful applicants will be notified by mid-October.

Melbourne Fringe Award: Best Original Australian Work - in memoriam of Caz Howard and supported by Theatre Works

In 2010 Theatre Works established a new award in partnership with the Melbourne Fringe Festival to further our charter as a national hub for independent theatre. Theatre Works has decided to rename the award for 2011 and the future.  It will now be known as

Best Original Australian Work – in memoriam of Caz Howard and supported by Theatre Works

This title is in memory of. Carolyn Lee "CAZ" HOWARD 1952 – 1990

Caz was born in Brisbane. She studied Economics at the Queensland of University but soon abandoned banking and computers for the uncertain, wandering and frequently impoverished life of an actor and theatre maker. Her early experience included touring school shows for the Queensland Theatre Company where a manager did a runner with the box office and the car. In 1974 she starred in the Sunshine State's first colour feature, Surrender in Paradise directed by Peter Cox, before moving to Melbourne with the poet Eric Beach. She worked occasionally on the fringes of the Pram Factory, joining Soapbox Circus for their East Timor show, then formally trained as an actor at the Victorian College of the Arts where she graduated in 1980 with the founding members of Theatre Works.

Caz was a vital force, steering Theatre Works through its first 10 years as one of Victoria's leading 'Next Wave' community theatre companies. Apart from her considerable performing skills Caz provided the robust accounting and managerial oomph that kept Theatre Works afloat in an often difficult funding environment. She performed in and helped develop and produce all of Theatre Works' original and innovative 'location plays’ throughout the 1980s, including Storming Mont Albert/St Kilda by Tram, Breaking Up in Balwyn, and Living Rooms, written in collaboration with her partner Paul Davies. With Paul and Pat Laughren, Caz co-produced and co-directed the experimental feature Exits (1980). She was part of the original cast of Hannie Rayson’s Room to Move and with Paul, Peter Sommerfeld and Susie Fraser developed one of Theatre Works’ most successful plays, Herstory (1983); its revival as Hairpin Bends in 1989 marked her last appearance at the theatre. Caz also acted for the Playbox Theatre company and in numerous short experimental films made in Melbourne in the 1980s, her film credits include Cathy Mueller’s award winning short film Everyday Everynight, and the central role in a number of John Hughes’ 'speculative documentaries’, including Traps and All That Is Solid. After a final, eighteen month battle against cancer, Caz passed away at her home in Byron Bay on the 14th May 1990.

By dedicating its Melbourne Fringe Award to Caz Howard, Theatre Works honours and remembers a woman of remarkable artistry and courage. Caz made a huge contribution to the development of Melbourne’s independent theatre and other art forms. Theatre Works is delighted to offer a place in its Selected Works program to the new generation of performance makers and welcomes the successful recipients to the theatre she helped create. The 2010 Award was won by Mutation Theatre for their body of work in the 2010 Melbourne Fringe resulting in the 2011 remount of their highly acclaimed these are the isolate.

The award enables the recipient to use the Theatre Works space free of charge for a remount of their successful Fringe production. Other use of the space is by negotiation. The winners receive access to 20 hours of technical support, production advice, front of house services, booking facilities and inclusion in all Theatre Works brochure and website information as well as the services of a professional publicist.

THE CAZ HOWARD AWARD supports innovative and original Australian theatre work that celebrates and disturbs Australian Culture.

2011 IN THE WORKS program.

In 2011 three local independent companies and one Tasmanian/Melbourne collaboration have each been granted a week long creative development period in the Theatre Works space. 

Our development stream begins with Theatre Works regular, Nicola Gunn followed by a collaborative development between Forty Forty Home and The Hayloft Project of a classic work by Dostoyevsky.  Then dance theatre company DRILL and their new work GRIMRA, finishing with an exciting new company of established artists exploring work with an Asian edge, Gadfly. In The Works participants are encouraged to include an informal showing and feedback session at the end of their creative development.

Details of how your project could become part of our future In The Works programs can be found at here

This year's successful recipients are:

HELLO MY NAME IS

Nicola Gunn borrows stories from her own life and other people's lives to make work that strays into the grey area of truth and fiction, memory and imagination, documentary detail and fantasy. HELLO MY NAME IS began in April 2009 during a 2 week creative development at Belvoir with Luke Mullins.  The project was documented on a website inviting participation from an online audience. The performance HELLO MY NAME IS  will be technically simple, emotionally evocative and about nothing but the everyday.  It is set in a community centre and reminiscent of the work 'An Oak Tree' by Tim Crouch in style but whereas Crouch worked with a different celebrity actor each night to make his performance anew, Gunn is interested in performing with an unknowing audience, a group of strangers who become co-creators in a work that unfolds around them.

Creator/Perfomer/Maker: Nicola Gunn
Collaborator/Performer: Carlee Mellow
Sound Designer: Chris Wenn
Video Artist: Daniel Agdag

Dates: 16th to 20th May

ANNA - postponed

Forty Forty Home is a theatre company aimed at providing development opportunities for female theatre makers. This collaboration between two of Melbourne's leading independent theatre companies, Forty Forty Home and The Hayloft Project, arose from a conversation between the two principle collaborators following on from a conversation on the way to the Australia Council Women in Theatre  forum, when both discovered each other were reading Tolstoy's classic Anna Karenin. The two began imagining the creation of a new piece of theatre centred completely on Anna's journey. ANNA is a new telling of one of  humankind's most enduring and influential stories about the search for happiness and the destructive force of desire.

Co Writers: Erin Kelly and Anne-Louise Sarks
Director: Anne-Louise Sarks

Dates:  23 – 27 May

GRIMRA 

Grimra [Drill Performance Company] will explore a wild and undefined world that exists for the briefest of moments, in the form of an abstract narrative. This world will be brought to life by ethereal characters and creatures that will be created by fusing intriguing costume designs and quirky, alien-like movement and vocals.

Based in Launceston, Tasmania, DRILL performance company works with both emerging professional artists and young local performers to create new and exciting works and is known for its high energy and visually spectacular contemporary dance theatre projects.

Choregrapher/Producer: Joshua Lowe
Choreographic Mentor: Adam Wheeler
Costume Designer: Debra Hallam
Lighting Designer: Nicola Andrews
Dancers: Alexandra Andrews, Kelly Beneforti, David Huggins, Alya Manzart
Vocalists: Charlea Edwards, Tess Hansen

Dates:  11 – 17 July

THE YELLOW WAVE

Gadfly Theatre is developing a performance script based on an 1895 novel "The Yellow Wave", a rare piece of 19th Century Australian speculative fiction set in the futuristic 1940's about an Asian invasion of Australia.  They plan to mash up this work with some contemporary writing.

Gadfly Theatre is a dash of soy on the plain white rice of Australian narratives. It is kecap manis, nuoc cham, a light sprinkling of bonito.  Gadfly is committed to creating interesting and as yet untold Asian-Australian stories, to overtly and covertly hurling a bit of yellow at the white canvas of Australian film, television and theatre.

Collaborators: Beng Oh, Miki Brotzler, Keith Brockett & Christie Nieman

Dates:  5th to 9th September