Flinders Drama Centre is bringing together internationally recognised and nationally significant artists across June and July, with students set to work alongside leading theatre-makers on two ambitious new performance projects.
The projects, Oranges and Lemons and Wrestling with Catastrophe, will see students collaborate directly with award-winning professionals including Glace Chase, Basil Hogios, Gerrard McArthur and Tony Award-winning lighting designer Nigel Levings.
Rather than keeping professional practice separate from training, the program places students inside the creative process, giving them the chance to develop their skills and artistic voices through real-world performance work.
“At Flinders, we are interested in creating conditions where learning and professional practice happen together. Students are not stepping out of training to encounter the industry later. They are already working alongside artists making ambitious new work,” Christopher Hurrell, Manager of Flinders Drama Centre, said.
“These projects allow students to experience how professional performance is actually made: collaboratively, experimentally and in dialogue with artists who bring deep professional experience and distinctive creative voices.”
Oranges and Lemons will be presented at Flinders University Drama Centre on Friday June 19, in collaboration with Assemblage Centre for Creative Practice Research. The new performance work has been created by acclaimed Australian playwright and performer Glace Chase with composer Basil Hogios, and developed within Assemblage’s creative practice infrastructure, The Cube.
The Cube is the only ambisonic studio in South Australia, using 32-speaker sound technology to capture and recreate sound from all directions. For Oranges and Lemons, The Cube has been relocated into the Flinders Drama Centre Rehearsal Room, allowing artists and students to explore how spatial sound and live performance can work together.
The piece follows three figures trapped in an increasingly unstable web of intimacy, memory and emotional dependency, shaped by the musical sensitivity of its central character, whose inner world begins to overwhelm the reality around them.
Oranges and Lemons will be performed by Chase, visiting UK actor Gerrard McArthur and third-year acting student Oscar Baldwin. The work explores how live composition, spatial sound and performance can shape audience experiences of character, intimacy and rupture.
McArthur’s return to Adelaide continues a long association with Flinders Drama Centre and local audiences, dating back to the 2000 Adelaide Festival production of Howard Barker’s The Ecstatic Bible.
Immediately after performing in Oranges and Lemons, McArthur will move into the director’s chair for Wrestling with Catastrophe, a major ensemble project marking Barker’s 80th birthday. The project brings together student performers and theatre-makers from across the Drama Centre to explore Barker’s theatrical language through image-making, heightened text and ensemble experimentation.
The production will also welcome two-time Tony Award-winning lighting designer Nigel Levings, whose international and Australian career will give students direct exposure to professional theatrical design and collaboration.
Together, the projects offer Flinders Drama Centre students the chance to work across contemporary writing, experimental sound, theatrical design and ensemble creation, while learning directly from artists at different stages of their careers and across multiple performance traditions.
Workshop showings and public outcomes will be presented across June and July.
Oranges and Lemons will be performed at Flinders University Drama Centre at 3.30pm and 6.30pm on Friday June 19. Tickets are available through the Flinders Assemblage website at www.flinders.edu.au/assemblage.
