The Lost and Found Office is a performance installation about loss, memory and the everyday experience of slippage, woven together from real-life interviews with South Australian communities.

Early career playwright Georgi Paech and emerging director Elizabeth Hay are collaborating on an ambitious project, bringing together a stellar team of South Australian theatre-makers to realise their vision and the magic of Georgi’s interviews with diverse local people.

Conceived as an immersive installation and whimsical promenade performance experience, the work explores the many types of loss we can encounter – the profound and the heartbreaking, the comical and the careless, and the liberating – and how loss shapes our lives.

Creative Team: Co-creator, interviews and script, producer – Georgi Paech; Co-creator and director – Elizabeth Hay; Designer – Bianka Kennedy; Lighting designer – Chris Petridis; Performers – Ashton Malcolm, James Smith and Jacqy Phillips

Takatāpui is an expansive performance work unearthing the transgenerational and collective trauma of colonisation, and the relentless journey to reclaiming sovereignty of body, mind and soul.

Daley Rangi (Te Āti Awa) is an eclectic, award-winning multidisciplinary artist. Raised on Whadjuk Noongar boodja, Daley was born in Aotearoa, with Māori whakapapa. They are neurodiverse and genderqueer, and use these lenses to explore the outer limits of humanity, generating unpredictable and uncomfortable works in a celebration of chaos, queerness and decolonisation.

Working from a deeply personal text, Daley is exploring what it means to be a Takatāpui, a queer Māori human, and what it takes to move through the world in their body, in a grounded, revealing work.

Creative Team: Creator and Performer – Daley Rangi; Video Art Director and Editor – Elham Haakansson-Eshraghian; Video Art Cinematographer – Elliott Nieves

Sincere Apologies is a performance work constructed entirely from apologies – the famous, the obscure, the imagined, the speculative or forth-coming and those that begin every second email in our inboxes.

Working from lockdown in Melbourne, two artists well known for their separate documentary and verbatim theatre practices join two other artists well known for their solo and collaborative participatory works for unexpected places. Together they are making an automatic performance, an apology for their absence.

This fascinating collaboration is exploring the many types of apologies experienced in public and private life, every day. The work will test the limits of the act of apology, and perhaps move through the core of our collective regret into a place where healing and repair might become possible.

Creative Team: Co-creators – Dan Koop, Jamie Lewis, Roslyn Oades and David Williams

Screen Me is a performance project exploring representation on screen, inspired by the lead artist’s experience as the only visible person of colour on an Australian police procedural in the late 90s.

Sapidah Kian is a director, actor, theatre maker and dramaturg, working across theatre, film, television and radio. She is joined by a powerhouse team of collaborators, artists who all work in screen media and live performance but whose bodies and narratives we are still not used to seeing.

The project explores how television, the most ubiquitous of contemporary cultural artefacts, has represented what it means to be Australian and asks where we are now. This participatory performance will be a vengeful autopsy of a dying medium, a citizens’ action to seize the means of pop-cultural production; part sinister-panto, part grim-reality programming.

Creative Team: Director, collaborative writer and performer – Sapidah Kian; Dramaturg, collaborative writer and performer – Georgina Naidu; AV dramaturg and consultant – Amos Gebhardt; Visual/editing collaborator and consultant – Kelli Jean Drinkwater; Producer – Toby Sullivan

Scomodo is a durational performance work where two dance artists obsessively deconstruct and reconstruct a wheelchair, exploring the boundaries between humans and their machines.

Cinzia Schincariol is an independent artist based in South Australia and currently Berlin, working across performance, community and health through mediums such as dance, voice, drawing, photography and film. Her practice is grounded in embodiment, instant composition, accessibility, compassion and a relationship with the natural environment. Matt Shilcock is a South Australian choreographer, dancer, actor and creative producer. He has developed a choreographic methodology and movement language, Osteogenuine, that combines his interests in dance, alchemy, and holistic healing.

Both artists are interested in the body as a political landscape, cyborg theory, and discomposure, all themes for exploration in this performance work named after the Italian word for ‘uncomfortable’.

Creative Team: Co-creators and performers – Cinzia Schincariol and Matt Shilcock

Plant Notes is an ephemeral art tour investigating the remnant flora on Kaurna Yerta/ the Adelaide Plains, and in this iteration the mangroves (Avicennia marina) which inhabit the Yerta Bulti/Port Adelaide region. 

Louise Flaherty and Laura Wills are collaborating South Australian visual artists, both with drawing and installation backgrounds alongside strong interests in creating site responsive and participatory works. Their practices reflect and generate curiosity with the natural environment. They have invited two acclaimed South Australian composers and musicians, Belinda Gehlert (violinist) and Naomi Keyte (singer songwriter) to collaborate on engaging social-distancing publics through creating an audible experience of their work.

The project riffs from the history of botanical illustrations as a way to record science and knowledge, to a contemporary and explorative process conveying feelings, loss, the unsaid and the underrepresented.

Creative Team: Co-creators – Louise Flaherty and Laura Wills with Belinda Gehlert and Naomi Keyte

Of Stubborn Songs and Unequal Wars* is an intercultural theatre work and living repository of research about domestic violence, the micro-personal and macro-political landscapes of female bodies, and women’s cultural resistance practices.

Nithya Nagarajan is an artist and curator whose practice adopts movement as a system of inquiry into the sacred, the sensual and the decolonial, underpinned by a strong feminist sensibility. Liv Satchell is a theatre maker, writer and dramaturg. She is interested in how loss and grief are embodied, and in feminine dramaturgies that seek value outside of traditional narrative paradigms.

Inspired by written accounts and lived experience of intimate partner violence, the artists and their collaborating team are forging this project at an intersection of their practices, exploring how language and the body can both submit to and resist control.

*Working title borrowed from ‘When I hit you’ by Meena Kandasamy

Creative Team: Co-creator – Nithya Nagarajan; Co-creator – Liv Satchell; Sound designer – Marco Cher-Gibard; Producer – Zainab Syed; Digital archive – H Mur

In Nevermore, a group of cross punks take aim at rapists through an exploration of how to incorporate comedy, fantasy and punk politics into an artistic response to sexual violence.

Jennifer Greer Holmes is a creative producer, a creative documenter and a curator of contemporary performance, music and live art. Teddy Dunn is a theatre director who works with playwrights, screen writers, devisors and directors with particular focus on queer and feminist dramaturgies.

In this collaboration they begin a process of interrogating in what way artists, and artists who are rape victims, can depict and explore not only the experience of sexual violation itself, but also revenge, rape jokes, and complex trauma.

Creative Team: Writer, performer and creative producer – Jennifer Greer Holmes; Dramaturg – Teddy Dunn; Video artist – Heath Britton; Outside eye – Lee Wilson

Nature is Healing is a performance work about the relationships between human and non-human animals sharing urban environments, based on the story of the gweela/Australian bush turkey.

Too Rude is a collaboration born from artists Emma McManus and Maria White’s participation in the infamous Earlwood Farm Christmas Climate Change Variety Hour and named after the Daily Telegraph’s response to this event. They make hilarious, researched and political performances about themes such as living in cities, cultural policy, and ecologies.

In their latest work-in-development, the hero is the gweela and its fight against gentrification in urban areas, particularly North Sydney. The work also unpacks the eponymous meme that has emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, based on a misguided idea of the environment returning to a more ‘natural’ state as humans self-isolate.

Creative Team: Co-creators and performers – Emma McManus and Maria White; Protest Patch designer – Romanie Harper; Sound composer and designer – Angus McGrath

Mother’s Blood is a contemporary urban drama played out online and IRL about three generations of an Aboriginal family, exploring political change across decades, online identities and technology in dramatic storytelling.

Jacob Boehme is a Melbourne born and raised artist of the Narungga and Kaurna Nations, South Australia. He is a multidisciplinary theatre maker and choreographer for stage, screen, large-scale events and festivals.

This project is the second in a series of works around the theme of blood. Mother’s Blood highlights the experiences of Aboriginal women living with HIV, alongside themes of contemporary Aboriginal identities, sexuality, family loyalty and community. The process brings Jacob back together with artists Isaac Drandic and Keith Deverell, extending their artistic collaboration seeded during the making of acclaimed performance work, Blood on the Dance Floor.

Creative Team: Writer and creator – Jacob Boehme; Dramaturg and director – Isaac Dandric; Video artist – Keith Deverell; Performers – Kamarra Bell-Wykes, Chenoa Deemal, Kiah Cruse (image)