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    • UTP headquarters is a hub of activity at the moment, with a range of great projects currently in different stages of development.


      Read below to find out about all of them.


    • Urban Theatre Projects will co-produce a creative development process for a new performance, Posts in the Paddock with visual performance company My Darling Patricia (MDP). Harnessing My Darling Patricia’s poetically savage visual imagery and delicate performance making, Posts in the Paddock is collaboration with artists who have a direct family connection to the story of Jimmy Governor. Through the oral histories of two families, the work investigates broader questions around shared grief and shame and contemporary dialogues of reconciliation.


      This project was seeded by our 2008 Intersection program and undertook an initial creative development in 2009. This year will see a final creative development to storyboard the work and construct visual imagery in preparation for a 2011 premiere.

      The Project

      Posts in the Paddock is a sound and sculptural installation that is activated by a 60-minute performance created and performed through a process of intercultural collaboration and consultation. A key element of the work comprises of 13 large hardwood posts, replicas of the weathered homestead posts. Speakers are embedded in each of these posts and feature individual sound scapes and recorded interviews in Wiradjuri and English. At the base of each post is a wooden chair for individual listeners. At the very back of the space is a steeply raked seating bank. Within the 60 minute performance the audience can choose to locate themselves the show or observe from the seating bank.


      Throughout the 60-minute durational performance a large wooden fence is constructed by a solo male performer. This time-based activity is offset by conversations that take place around a large wooden table located amongst the house posts. These conversations around this table will be based on edited texts drawn from interviews conducted throughout the process. Throughout the performance the table will be dismantled and become part of the fence and playing board for some of the visual imagery developed through film and puppetry. In particular MDP are working with the key images of a dingo and crow, as they carry a strong symbolic resonance to the story of Jimmy Governor.

      Background to the work

      Jimmy Governor’s story has had several creative interpretations, including Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Fred Schepisi’s film of the same name, and Les Murray’s poem The Ballad of Jimmy Governor. Jimmy Governor killed the women and children at the Mawbey homestead where he was working in 1900.


      Clare Britton of My Darling Patricia has childhood memories of the site on her grandfather’s property where the murders of her relatives took place took place. A few weathered posts are all that remain of the house. The O’Brien’s stories of what occurred between Jimmy Governor and Mick O’Brien are part of Clare family’s history, passed down anecdotally since 1901. Nadeena and Rhonda Grovenor discovered their relationship to Jimmy Governor when a relative told them of their family connection to the story and encouraged them to visit Dubbo Gaol to continue the investigation.

      The Company

      Taking its name from a faded 46 year old love letter found hidden in a discarded vanity set, My Darling Patricia was founded in 2003 by Clare Britton, Bridget Dolan, Katrina Gill and Halcyon Macleod. The troupe has since been joined by Sam Routledge and the five artists approach theatre from backgrounds in dance, visual arts, circus, puppet making, film and spectacle performance. My Darling Patricia utilises puppetry, installation and performance to create arresting and redolent images, weaving intricate emotional narratives in a performance environment that enfolds their audience in an intimate experience.

      Key Artists

      My Darling Patricia

      Clare Britton, Halcyon Macleod, Sam Routledge

      Puppet Maker

      Byrony Anderson

      Performer & Consultant

      Rhonda Grovenor-Dixon

      Sound Designer

      Declan Kelly

      Performer & Puppeteer

      LeRoy Parsons

      Cultural Advisor

      Lily Shearer

      Consultant

      Alicia Talbot



    • Ama and Chan is a new performance work about the making of history, cultural roots, cultural perceptions and the alchemy of improbable fusion in food and love. Creators Alan Lao and Effie Nkrumah have created two larger than life personas who comment on the contemporary world with humour and satire and the work explores the unlikely relationship of and Ghanaian-Australian wife Ama and Chinese-Australian Chan. This relationship is unveiled through the device of TV cooking show, axed the night it goes to air.


      Key collaborators Alan Lao and Effie Nkrumah first developed these personas and a working relationship while studying at University of Western Sydney. Over the last they have continued to develop these personas through short performance works and short films. Ama & Chan is their first opportunity to develop a full length performance work in which comic material is explored within a conceptual framework


      The story follows Ama (a woman from Ghana) and Chan (her Chinese husband) who live in Western Sydney, putting a cooking show on stage out of spite, after having a deal with a television station retracted after filming had commenced. Both with thick accents and cultural attachments, the couple are on a quest to prove the worth of the show and their fusion Asian-African dishes.


      Alan Lao and Effie Nkrumah


      This work is supported by UTP Intersection 2010 and is scheduled to premiere in 2011.

      Key Artists

      Devisors & Performers Alan Lao and Effie Nkrumah


    • State We Are In: Negotiate Bankstown will transform public space into a fluid zone of creation and connection. The artistic team of Rosie Dennis, Paul Gazzola and Jeff Stein will set up ‘shop’ in the Old Town Plaza and other locations throughout Bankstown. Producing the public realm as a mobile site of discourse, activation and innovation. Their office is a van. Their doors open to any and everyone.


      Paul, Rosie and Jeff are friendly and well dressed. They set up chairs, tables - an awning to protect people from the sun. Conversations are established as people become inquisitive. They are invited to make YouTube videos about their location and themselves. Walks and journeys are planned, maps are designed and produced, areas discussed. Texts are written. Lunch is served. Questions to the city past and present are negotiated - exposing spaces of familiarity, everyday routine and the unknown that guides and dictates ones personal interaction within the urban. People’s backgrounds and futures revealed. The streets become novellas. We write as they talk. We film as they walk. Movies are made. An out-door cinema is established. Mobile creativity in response to mobile activity.


      State We Are In was supported by the UTP Intersection 2009.


      In 2010, Negotiate Bankstown will take place over 14 days, as the artists will accompany 10 different people as they negotiate their specific and undefined routes through Bankstown. A series of 15-minute video interviews/ visual mappings of their trajectories and pathways through their daily environment will be created.


      In the creation of these short video documentary styled works the team of Paul, Rosie and Jeff seek to explore and reveal how one’s physical relationship to the urban, impacts and defines place and its sense of. We understand ones negotiation of the environment as the continuous movement through fluid and transitional zones, in the generation of unique physical topographies that co-exist within the architectural/urban framing.


      Utilising the concept of "locals as experts" when it comes to understanding the site of Bankstown as a place for unravelling the issues of the production of space and the relation between public and private use we seek a broad cross section of the local community to participate.

      Key Artists

      Paul Gazzola, Rosie Dennis & Jeff Stein


    • A research and development process to be undertaken by key artists from Company B and Urban Theatre Projects.

      The Project

      The Quarry is a new performance work that will explore notions of old land and new territories. This initial idea for this work was first developed through an extensive research phase working in residence at Habourfront Centre, Toronto. Created in a city that is undergoing major redevelopment and reconsidered in the context of Sydney, this new work will examine ideas around some of the complex issues of urban regeneration, dispossesion and belonging, contested territory and reconciliation.


      The Quarry will take the form of a construction site on which work has stalled and will follow the relationships of five characters whose lives intersect during the course of a night. This work will investigate some of the broader conflicting tensions and social hierarchies that exist in a city that is experiencing change, exhuming the layers of history, occupation, ownership and spirituality that exist simultaneously in and on the land. It asks, in a city of redevelopment who is building the new city and who inhabits it?

      Background

      This research and development process is designed to facilitate collaboration between a leading major organisation and key organisation theatre company capitalising on the strengths of each company and extending their artistic practice. UTP and Company B are intending to create a new work that is developed through a process of collaboration. Building on UTP’s expertise in devising new works and Company’s B’s experience with text driven performances we will engage in a unique process which extends both companies artistic practice and scope of invention.


      Directed by Alicia Talbot this work will also engage in a process of public dialogue that position community members an industry professionals as experts within a creative process. The public dialogue process extends all artists’ creative capacity and brokers new artistic territory throughout the process.


    • On Saturday May 15th we held our first In-View group presentation of works in progress and 'ideas in incubation'. An appreciative and very jolly crowd joined us in the UTP rehearsal studio to watch a program of short new ideas developed by In-View emerging artists Josipa Knezevic, Frank Mainoo, Teik Kim Pok, Peter Polites, Ahilan Ratnamohan, Georgie Read and Stephanie Son. Congratulations to all these hardworking artists and our best wishes to all our other In-View artists who were unable to be present on the day due to interstate or other project commitments. It was a terrific success that proved the appeal and ‘do-ability’ of short performance events in Bankstown.

      In-View is a long term development program where emerging artists meet on a fortnightly basis to exchange artistic processes and ideas with support from UTP. In-View is both a social and critical forum where participants have time and space to discuss a range of topics and ideas that lead to both  their development as artists and our regions' capacity to support future works and collaborations in Bankstown and beyond.

      UTP Artistic Associate, lina Kastoumis, is presently talking to and working with members of the first In-View group as well as some newly interested emerging artists - to resume a regular 'open studio' fortnightly session in August. For more information, please contact lina@urbantheatre.com.au