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Theatre and Performance Productions

The Centre presents an exciting and varied 2012 season, with undergraduates working with both experienced and early-career directors and performance makers. All performances will be staged at The Drama Theatre, Building 68, Monash University Clayton campus.

The Flayed

Centre for Theatre and Performance 3rd Year Students
Guest Director: Robert Draffin

We are excited to be bringing one of Australian theatre’s most experienced and diverse directors, Myer Medallion recipient, Robert Draffin, to Monash to work with our 3rd Year Bachelor of Performing Arts Students. Robert Draffin has directed for Australia’s mainstream companies, such as Belvoir St, Playbox and the State Theatre of South Australia, and internationally in China, Indonesia, Japan and Singapore. Draffin’s award winning adaptations of classic texts have ranged from works by Dostoevsky to Verdi to Mishima. He has also worked with some of this country’s most respected alternative and experimental theatre companies including The Mill Community Theatre Company, Whistling in the Theatre and his own Liminal Theatre.

This year Robert Draffin will work with graduating performing arts students on a classic text written for the theatre to build what is bound to be the most engaging of shows.

Loose Threads

Centre for Theatre and Performance 2nd Year students
Guest Director: Hallie Shellam

Acclaimed director and theatre maker Hallie Shellam will create an extraordinary new performance piece in collaboration with MUMA. Shellam will work with 2nd Year performing arts students and postgraduate visual arts students to create a performance exploring the seminal text The Poetics of Space, and the concepts and ideas explored in the forthcoming MUMA exhibition entitled Liquid Archive. What is memory? How do we record it? How do objects, spaces and digital data influence our understanding of information carried through time?

Last year Shellam created The Rooms for the Centre for Theatre and Performance, a beguiling and wonderful work in which the audience experienced an extraordinary journey inside rooms that constantly changed size and dimensions. This year, in response to MUMA’s exhibition Liquid Archive, Shellam will create another new work, this time based upon the recording of the details of crime scenes. Audiences will be invited inside a series of carefully detailed performance spaces in a theatrical production that promises to bend the concepts of space, time, and what we perceive as concrete memory.

Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief

Centre for Theatre and Performance 1st year students
Guest Directors: Fleur Kilpatrick, Daniel Lammin, Andrea Mina, Mark Wilson

The Monash University Centre for Theatre and Performance has long been one of the most important first steps for many students into a deep immersion into the world of performance. For some this becomes a life-long passion, for others it becomes their profession.

This year the Centre has invited four of its recent graduates who are still early in their careers to return to Monash as professional directors. They will direct the first year Bachelor of Performing Arts students in scenes from some of the most famous plays and playwrights in the history of theatre. Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief will provide a springboard for these emerging directors to choose their favourite scenes based upon one of those four themes. Four acts of scene studies will be presented over two nights. Whether you see Rich Man, Poor Man on one of the nights, Beggar Man, Thief on the other night, or come along to all four, you are promised theatre that is unadorned and brilliant.

All performances are free.

By Your Pupils You’ll Be Taught

Centre for Theatre and Performance 2nd year students
Guest Director: Matthew Lockitt

Stephen Sondheim is considered by many to be the Shakespeare of the American Musical Theatre. Oscar Hammerstein II is a pivotal figure in the maturation of the musical theatre as an art form. When they met, Hammerstein the mentor took the young Sondheim as his pupil and set the budding writer four homework tasks to be completed over four years:

Centre for Theatre and Performance students, working in groups, tackle one of these assignments and write outlines, characters, songs and segments of dialogue for a musical as their final assessment in first semester. In second semester they compile their work, performing a revue of scenes and songs of their own devising.

Exit Mundi

Centre for Theatre and Performance 2nd Year students
Guest Director: Robert Reid

Taking inspiration from some of the most exciting innovators in world theatre, such as performance makers Coney and Punchdrunk, the brilliant Robert Reid will work with 2nd year performing arts students to construct a hybrid performance piece that is part theatre, part virtual reality game. Actors will mingle with audience to construct an interactive performance work that blurs all the lines of contemporary performance. In this form of theatre it is not enough to turn up and watch. You must participate, engage, commit and immerse yourself in a reality game with stakes as high as the room is prepared to make them. Incredibly fun, and often surprisingly intoxicating for first timers, this is theatre that is definitively active for all of its participants.

Frank Sparrow

by Angela Betzien
Centre for Theatre and Performance 3rd Year Students
Guest Director: Leticia Caceres

Leticia Caceres, the acclaimed director of last year’s Random (MTC) and The Dark Room (Belvoir St) will direct 3rd Year Bachelor of Performing Arts students in a new play written by her long time collaborator Angela Betzien. Caceres and Betzien have built up an impressive body of work through their company Real TV, whose work has toured all over Australia and overseas.

Frank Sparrow is yet another brilliant and provocative play by one of Australia’s most exciting playwrights. An allegorical piece about young people growing up in a dark world, Frank Sparrow is a darkly poetic and beautiful new play. Caceres and Betzien have built their reputations on giving young Australians an honest voice on the Australian stage, and Frank Sparrow is bound to be the most rewarding of productions.

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