“We’re really excited to have the opportunity to collaborate with these companies and to open the MTC up to Melbourne’s vibrant theatre community,” says Murray. The five companies developing work for Neon were initially approached by the MTC and invited to participate, based on their previous body of work. “It’s not curated beyond the choice of companies. Brett just developed a strong dialogue with Adena Jacobs through their work together, and through his time with her he got the cogs working about what could MTC do to engage the broader theatre community.” MTC brought in first Jacobs, Artistic Director of Fraught Outfit which is producing the workOn the Bodily Education of Young Girls for the festival, then others to nut out a model and Neon was the result.
“Ideally not all five companies would have the same aesthetic or develop the same kind of work,” says Murray of the selection of companies to be showcased in Neon. “But it’s hard to say what will be produced. Not everyone likes everything. I’m really excited, but we’re obviously a little nervous just like anyone who attempts something a little bit new. We haven’t even read a script, but I’ve got utter faith in all five of these companies and the model. I’m nervous with them, not about them. It’s an honour to be able to support these five companies to produce their work in this way.”
One of the companies approached by MTC was drag theatre troupe Sisters Grimm, whose founders Ash Flanders and Declan Greene accepted the invitation and are currently developing their work The Sovereign Wife for presentation at Neon in July. “Our practice has evolved into claiming these cinema genres and retelling them with resources that aren’t really appropriate to the task,” states Greene. “We do everything ourselves from the bottom up, casting both performers and non-performers. We take very familiar genres and ‘queer’ them in a way.”
The Sovereign Wife will aim to dissect the legend of the great Australian frontier with the story of a couple who head for a better life in the Australian goldfields only to find poverty and heartbreak in the harsh soil of Ballarat. “In the past we’ve only ever done pretty much American genres,” says Greene. “An American Civil War epic, a take on a Hollywood horror film…but we thought it would be really interesting this time to examine something that was culturally our own national territory and challenge ourselves to interrogate a genre of film we’re not naturally drawn to – one without those inherently arch-camp qualities. We really issued a challenge to ourselves.
“Our initial reaction was definitely to want to mock this genre,” remembers Greene. “We had to examine our feelings around that. One thing we were super keen to look at were the values which emanate from these kinds of films, The Man From Snowy River, A Town Called Alice and so on. They espouse these values which are very white, male, colonialist kind of values. What we’ve done is try and reclaim our national values in some way. We’ve got together a pretty large cast to do that, nine people from diverse backgrounds, different nationalities and sexual orientations, a real melting point.”
“We felt vastly conflicted emotions about these films. The values they espouse are ones which help to define our national consciousness and the rhetoric which surrounds our heritage. They don’t acknowledge the vastly diverse experiences which make up Australian life – there are no Indigenous stories, or queer stories, even women’s stories. We’re looking to highlight that.”
The other works featuring in Neon include By Their Own Hands from The Hayloft Project which will explore untold stories within ancient Greek mythology, Menagerie, presented by the Daniel Schlusser Ensemble and based on the life and work of Tennessee Williams, and Story of O, THE RABBLE’s festival of perversity which follows an anonymous woman as she submits to a series of ever-increasing sexual demands. As well as these a series of free events including panel conversations with leading Australians in the field, question and answer sessions, and workshops and master classes for directors, writers and other theatre makers.
“Our hope is that Neon will continue in the future,” says Murray. “We’re already getting quite a few expressions of interest in, we’re getting invited to shows and we’re having people engage from companies and groups who we normally wouldn’t hear from. We want to create a strong dialogue between all theatregoers and all theatre makers. It would be great to have new audiences come to the Southbank Theatre but we also hope that our regular audience come along and take part, and I think they will.”
BY JOSH FERGEUS
