LA MAMA 2023: CIRCUS AND PHYSICAL THEATRE PROJECTS
Artist Statements
2023 EXPLORATIONS: (Three-night Creative Development)
Clara Thornburn: The Thesis
Natalie Frijia and Matt Anderson: GO/NO GO
Mary Rose McLaren: Noise
Amy Nunn: Legends
Isabella Kourdoulos: Untitled
Erica Chestnut: Jenga Death
2023 PRIMARY PROGRAM (Two-week seasons):
Emilie Lumiere and Angelica Clunes: A Land Inside: (La Mama Kids)
Liv Satchell: Trilogy
Joachim Matschoss: Shadowfall
Xanthe Beesley: Death of a Statesman
Romi Kupfer: Flesh Disease
Domenico de Clario: Untitled
Tom Middleditch: VAST
Jennifer Monk: Slightly Scratched
Fiona Corke: A Language Older Than Words
Elnaz Sheshgelani and Scott Welsh: Moosh the Hobo Cat
Emma O’Brien: By Jane’s Hands
Suzie Jarmain: Non-Celebrity
Rosemary Johns: Fire in the Head
Rob Reid: Myth Propaganda and Disaster In America: The Sequel
Travis Cotton: Starfish
Mic Smith: Developers Make Bad Neighbours
Peter Murphy: Last Illuminations
Peter Green and Faye Bendrups: Our Half of the Sky
Barry Dickins: Works in Progress
Laurence Strangio: ADA
Bagryana Popov: The Seagull
Cathy Hunt: Ms Beige Brown Goes Beyond
Fifteen Minutes from Anywhere: POST
The World According to Dinosaurs: Belle Hansen
Radioactive Cockroach’s: Glynis Angel and Judy Dalziel
A SELECTION OF ARTIST STATEMENTS: EXPLORATIONS
THE THESIS: Ciara Thorburn: The Thesis is a fifty-minute voyeuristic glimpse into the life of an eccentric polymath, driven by accessibility, silent comedy and theatrical circus. A self-described cult clown comedy, the show is a peculiar reflection of the creative process as an academic navigates writers block, procrastination, and perfectionism, while writing their hallowed thesis. An intelligent integration of circus and comedy, The Theses embraces the mundane and makes it remarkable. Itis a subtle yet intelligent exploration of the human condition; both inspiring… and incredibly frustrating. There is minimal use of text/dialogue in the show, as a silent physical comedy emphasis as been made by the artist to create a ‘level playing field’ of accessibility for people with all abilities (including d/Deaf audiences). The use of live captioning has been integrated into the set via projection, and this text is displayed toward the end of the piece.
NO/NO GO: Natalie Frijia: GO/NO GO fuses circus, clown, physical theatre, and music, in a reimagining of the lives of the Mercury 13 – thirteen barrier-breaking pilots who, in 1961, petitioned NASA to become the first women astronauts. And it’s about why you don’t know their names. GO/NO GO is a theatrical piece that uses a contemporary circus lens to explore the experiences of astronaut testing.
NOISE: Mary Rose McLaren: Noise is written as a piece of choral speaking to explore the ways in which we have tried to make meaning of the pandemic. As a performance piece, we use movement to explore the sense of the sound of the words in physical form. I envisage using light and shadow, and clusters of movement, building on the power of stillness and physical dynamics, just as the voices build on vocal dynamics. The overall impression for the audience should be one of entering a chaotic world from which meaning is distilled across the course of the piece. I am looking for a sense of hope that crystallizes from the noise and movement.
LEGENDS: Amy Nunn: Beneath an arena, Bag, Moll and Runt are rehearsing for something highly physical, dangerous even. Lessons will be learned, generational steel will clash, and this rehearsal may prove deadlier than what awaits them above. Dirty Pennies Theatre Project presents ‘Legends or (the god killers), a brand-new heightened feminist fantasia exploring three generations of women, as they wrestle with ‘gods’ beneath a mysterious sporting arena. These gods are ancient, contemporary, formidable and ridiculous. Some of them will be very familiar and others brand new. This play is a wild, irreverent and epic theatrical feast exploring shared female myth-making and female driven violence.
UNTITLED: Bella Kourdoulos: This piece will be an exploration of hyper-femininity. Due to its separation from feminism around the 1970s, we want to reclaim hyper-femininity and question its ‘polluting’ and ‘shallow’ reputation. In dissecting these ideas, we hope to continue the current push for women’s agency and autonomy over their bodies, interests and pursuits. The vilification of hyper-femininity is widely accepted and is often perpetuated by Hollywood tropes and other forms of media. We will use these parts of pop culture to fuel our content, whether that be stylistically, allegorically or literally. This would include art from the Renaissance era, in contrast with1990s-2000s ‘chick flick’ films, to question and exhibit how the ‘ideal’ image of women has progressed, and how beauty has gone from something that was cherished, to demonised. Therefore, our contention for the performance is to celebrate the feminine as truly equal to the masculine, as it’s often regarded as inferior. Through an eclectic mix of styles (such as physical theatre and expressionism), this piece will be camp and satirical, and at other times, resolute and unapologetic. The piece will not be narrative based, but instead, a devised work that is broken up into ‘acts’ or (perhaps) vignettes, to mirror the different eras of the feminine that we explore.
JENGA DEATH: Erica Chestnut: Jenga Death explores female characters from Jacobean Revenge Tragedies. Using Meisner’s repetition exercise and independent activities as a way to explore this text afresh we will apply text from sources such as The Changeling and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore to physical tasks completed as an ensemble (6 women) while weaving in and out of the repetition exercises. We will develop a text and movement piece, combining elements from different revenge tragedies written in the Jacobean period through the explorations of the main themes – vengeance, death, lust, greed and the questions around corruption and morality in society (relevant both then and now).
A SELECTION OF ARTIST STATEMENTS: PRIMARY SEASONS
A LAND INSIDE: Emilie Lumiere and Angelica Clunes: Using the children’s book ‘Windows’ by Patrick Guest as our initial inspiration point, A Land Inside (working title) is a magical show for small people which gathers collective experiences from across the past two years and unpacks and explores them from within a child focused and pragmatic framework. Using an unconventional and brave lighthouse keeper as protagonist and the time spent in social isolation as the lens, we explore the world of a funny, boots first lighthouse keeper and their year spent socially isolating within their magical and wonderfully weird lighthouse home. We share birthdays and celebrations from within the confines.
OUR HALF OF THE SKY: Faye Bendrups: Our Half of the Sky tracks the lives of 6 women using movement and physical theatre as a primary element to show their tensions, passions and desires. Director Faye Bendrups and Physical Theatre Coordinator Lisa Petty collaborate to create a mix of movement styles inspired by quadrille, tango and whirling dervishes; a series of characters sculptured into static freeze-frames; and a horse-head masked character physically manipulated as a human puppet. The La Mama Courthouse Theatre is integral to the physical enunciation of the work, with its opportunity to intimately involve the audience, and to use the internal built environment as the actual set; a turn of the century artists’ salon.
LAST ILLUMINATIONS: Peter Murphy: In a recent reading of my play, Last Illuminations, the most revealing moment was when the audience witnessed two actors not touching but almost locked in each other’s arms, neither character capable of coming to terms with the other’s existence nor passing and negating it entirely. This worked powerfully in the intimate space of La Mama HQ where some of the audience were so close to the actors they may have felt their presence as sharply that of their nearest and dearest. A TV close-up could add little to what they saw. In this piece I aimed to engage all the audience’s senses and used digital slides and the music of Melbourne composer, Peter Graham, to take them into the mind of the main character and this worked only because La Mama made available their excellent facilities and an accomplished technician who could work imaginatively and creatively with my unusual project.
FLESH DISEASE: Rumi Kupfer: Flesh Disease physically explores the worlds of five women. These worlds explore themes of identity, belonging, body/mind relationships and realities through the lens of mental illness. Bringing together a diverse cast of five women to physically challenge and explore how mental illness may affect someone’s internal life, bringing the internal and further exploring it externally. Flesh Disease offers an exciting space to play and experiment with physical theatre within the incredible space of La Mama. As Flesh Disease is a new physically devised performance piece, La Mama is the perfect place to premiere this contemporary work.
SLIGHTLY CRACKED: Jennifer Monk: Slightly Cracked is an immersive theatre experience looking at unveiling the grotesque nature of mental health treatments for women and exploring their resilience in such circumstances, shedding shame and stigma for the future. Using real stories, interviews and research, this new Australian Play hopes to inspire change through conversations initiated by the very people who see it. Girls Act Good (GAG) are no strangers to immersing their audiences into the world of the characters, and with this piece, they hope to create unique spaces utilising the actor’s body, set pieces and ensemble choreographed movement. These elements, merged with traditional and modern production design as well as GAG’s quirky creative flavour, will ensure that Slightly Cracked not only entertains, but also encourages the audience to consider their own realities and perspectives when it comes to mental ill-health, its treatment and the dialogue surrounding it – where we’ve been, where we are and where we’re going.
FIRE IN THE HEAD: Rosemary Johns: Theatremaker Rosemary Johns has a strong background in physical theatre, as she came out of the MRPG with its affiliation to the Flying Fruit Fly Circus. This influenced her preference for actor driven/ gestural storytelling. Her most recent work for 2023 is Fire in the Head (about Ned Kelly’s sister, Kate) and directed by Rodney Hall. This work has a detailed vocabulary of choreographic gestures. Three of the cast—who represent Kate Kelly’s memories—are both stylised and abstract. The whole piece is threaded together by a fiddler who weaves his way among the actors playing traditional Irish tunes. Essential to this are the choreographed movements, as the three weave abstract shapes with strips of black material around the central character to become patterns of repetition that underscore the repetitive hardships of her life as she tells it.
UNTITLED: Domenico de Clario: I cannot conceive of any improvised or script-based performance not being described as physical theatre, when presented either in La Mama HQ or La Mama Courthouse, where the audience has since the 1960’s experienced richly transformative creative offerings whilst seated in such close proximity to the performers, consequently taking in prima facie each breath, each expressive body movement and even each eloquent silence all manifesting as physical theatre; my own work scheduled for 2023 at La Mama includes an improvised sound, spoken word and dance (body art) collaboration which only in La Mama’s spaces (both because of its dimensions and its dynamic set up) could challenge audiences to directly experience physical theatre.
NON-CELEBRITY: Susie Jarmain: A tiny black box can make a big idea seem small. As an artistically motivated, academically driven female-identifying theatre artist originating from a regional New South Wales town, this is true. Tiny black boxes are placed around differences in identity as judgements, and rejections, responses to difference by many irrespective of talent, capability or personal choice. My practice focuses on the subjects of identity and acting, and how these two elements of human existence manufacture ‘black boxes’ around ourselves, in between each other and on things we do not yet understand or fear. Acting, in a traditional sense, is also my area of expertise, fastly followed by theatre making. I have four academic qualifications in my field gained with the support of La Mama. With La Mama’s support, I evolved my formal conservatoire training into an artistic hybrid of performance that won recognition in scholarly fields and with audiences. La Mama makes a black box space, such as we see with Faraday street, into a BIG space that feeds my ideas. I write, direct and perform new work as character, the storyteller, the observer and the social-cultural ‘reviewer’ – each aspect involving a dramatic physicalising of each element. My complex work includes a highly crafted and engaging character explorations needing no set and rarely props but relies imperatively on the technical skill of acting, physicality, and the physicalising of the story in the space. There is no other theatrical space in Melbourne, Sydney or in Edinburgh (UK) where I have been supported to explore the technical and inherent abilities my craft and artform provide me with. The company, including a direct relationship with Caitlin Dullard and the artistic leadership and support of Liz Jones contributed to my master’s and doctorate works and their success. Now, I am award-winning practice-based research on acting and solo theatrical performance. My career in this aspect of performance: creating a hybrid between physical theatre and traditional ‘acting’ including the research elements of it, directly emerged as a result my work at La Mama and it could only have flourished in the way it has and is, influenced by what the theatre offers. This is a small, black box I write is indicative of a bigger contribution I continuously receive.
SHADOWFALL: Joachim Matchoss: BackYardTheatreEnsemble (BYTE) is an independent theatre company, creating original work both nationally and internationally. We are very grateful for La Mama’s continued support in creating new work In Australia. We and La Mama as a crucial supporter of the Arts in Australia know just how important a role is that theatre plays in society. We very much appreciate how difficult it is to put on performance pieces when funds are tight. It is for these reasons that we are so happy to be offered the physical support that La Mama gives to the creating of new work, such as our cross-arts (Film, Music, Physical Theatre) piece Shadowfall, be shown at La Mama HQ in early 2023. This support includes not only the use of the iconic theatre-space for rehearsals and the season proper but also technical support in the areas of Sound, Lighting and in our case audio-visual support, as well as box office, marketing, and administrative support in general. For BYTE the creation of new work is foremost about the blank canvas. We enjoy the freedom to be able to create anything, with virtually limitless possibilities. Our original theatre is usually a response to the world around us. For BYTE it is always about something uniquely ours, as opposed to sometimes commonly produced plays. We like to live ‘outside’ of the social restrictions of the “game” of the entertainment business and like to carve out our own path, our own process. Without La Mama’s dedication and expertise, the creating of new work would not be possible as it provides with the scaffold to be able to fly.
MOOSH THE HOBO CAT: Scott Welsh: Scott Welsh’s anti-Labanian Outcaste Weakly Poet difficult, uncomfortable physical movements and Elnaz Sheshgelani’s fusion of the ancient and the contemporary in her exquisite interpretation of the ancient performance practice of Naghali theatre is combined in a contradictory collaboration and a hope that it will advance the discursive nature of performance. Sheshgelani’s movement is a linguistic practice that makes meaning and constructs a physical language for audiences, whilst Welsh is somewhat notorious for exploring transgressive instances of habitus from the fringes of Australian society. In Welsh, characters are physicalized through sound and speech rhythms, that prompt and guide the physical movement of a character or collection of characters. La Mama theatre houses this work: practically, ideologically, and physically, facilitating its public presentation through the Carlton Courthouse and La Mama HQ spaces, with the support and encouragement of the excellent staff. In 2023, La Mama will present ‘Moosh the Hobo cat’, a detailed analysis of contemporary homelessness through a physical and poetic embodiment of the desperation and nihilism of life on the fringes of society.
SHIT NEIGHBOURS: Mic Smith: The nature of my work, Shit Neighbours is strongly physical and requires the intimate setting that La Mama facilitates between the audience, the actors and the stage. The set will be built high to give the audience the impression of tall buildings, which make them feel small in comparison and encourage them to physically look up. The taxi at the centre of the stage will give the audience only a few meters away the impression that they are on the road in front of it. There will be some interplay between the production and the audience and the space they occupy to create a sense of coming along and support one of the themes of the play. In short, the room at La Mama supports the physical nature of my play in a way that no other theatre that I know does.
STARFISH: Travis Cotton: Starfish ruminates on the importance of art in Australian culture. A culture that glorifies sport and the outdoors, yet often overlooks art or fails to recognise its relevance. If the characters in Starfish are caught making art, they are forced into a box, only to come out 20 years later as the core idea of their artwork. For example, Connie writes a poem about a starfish, so, 20 years later, she emerges from her box as a starfish – in a complete starfish costume. From this point on, she embodies the starfish, she moves as a starfish. The play descends under water as she explores the coral, and the ocean floor in her new body. In this idea, Starfish explores the body as an artform, it uses dynamic physicality to express the character’s emotional journey. It shows the audience how much can be said through movement without any words at all. With Starfish being my third show at La Mama I can safely say that their two spaces offer a unique vantage point as an audience member. Due to its urgent intimacy, every movement, every physical expression, every bead of sweat can be witnessed by the audience. There is no other stage like La Mama HQ in Australia in regards to spatial closeness and this being coupled with their reach-for-the-stars ideology, it drives me, as an artist, to deliver something bold, bombastic, and physically urgent to my audience. I cannot recommend this company enough. The work they do in Melbourne is vital and is a springboard for all major companies around Australia. This is not just textually, because La Mama also helps plays find their feet – quite literally. They are the ground zero of plays finding their physicality.
POST: 15 Minutes from Anywhere: As a company we work with heightened texts with strong rhythms that provoke a response from us as theatre makers beyond the quotidian. A hallmark of our recent work is performers embodying multiple roles, and the specific physicality associated with characterisations is a critical element of our ability to render these choices effectively. In The Yellow Wave (La Mama 2017), two actors played 20 roles and in our newest work [post] (La Mama 2023) six actors will play in excess of 18 roles. At all times we’ve had to find physical responses and frames that accommodate and best serve the moment, often working closely with sound, lighting and set designers to achieve our aims within the space. Our productions have encompassed putting actors’ bodies under stress including limiting their physicality, repetitive movement, dance and extended stillness. The physical dramaturgy we develop is as important as the verbal and textual. La Mama has a culture that embraces experimentation and has at all times been supportive of our efforts to craft our own vocabulary and leverage our performers’ skills as shapeshifters. The nature of La Mama both in terms of this ethos and the space itself has enabled us to extend our physical practice in ways that we may not have imagined when we established the company almost 10 years ago. This has been incredibly important to us.
ADA: Laurence Strangio: La Mama theatre is a unique physical space that has challenged my approach to creating theatre. As a director who began with a text-based focus, my work at La Mama over the past 35 years has become more physically attuned, playing off the specific spatial elements of La Mama HQ and La Mama Courthouse – their very bricks-and-mortar. With the encouragement of its artistic leadership La Mama has been instrumental in me developing works that are essentially site-specific, weaving the texts into the physical fabric of these spaces. This has been evident in past productions (Six characters in search of an author, Waiting for Godot, The Yellow Wallpaper) and forthcoming works such as TRAPS at La Mama HQ this year, and next year’s new work Hedda [alone]. These works not only occupy the La Mama spaces but immersively inhabit them. For me the physicality of theatre is more than simply corporeal, it is also spatial and experiential – for audience and performers alike – and La Mama is a distinctive and ideal production venue for this.
MS BEIGE BROWN GOES BEYOND: Cathy Hunt: My work is highly charged, experiential and an imaginative encounter between performers and audience occurring in a human, risky and finite space. La Mama provides a crucial safe place and rare platform where without judgement this series of exchanges can happen whilst sharing physical space. Works La Mama spaces have enabled me as director & theatre maker to let audiences enter, include that of a writer with schizophrenia revealing his alternate perspectives and how his sister (also his carer) grounds him in the collective real. Recently I presented a new play She Wrote the Letter that used the intimate renewed space of La Mama HQ to effect a warm exchange between audiences who travelled not just from as far as Regional Victoria but from their own past experiences of penpals to contemplate friendship, trust and how distances between people and times can be bridged, through a real story of teenage penpals from East Germany and New Zealand. The physical presence of the actors, their imperfect bodies as the conduit for telling these stories about vulnerable human subjectivities are what lets La Mama audiences of all ages connect so deeply.
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO DINOSAURS: Belle Hansen: Frenzy Theatre Co’s methodology and foundation is in physical theatre. All of our works are highly choreographic, physically ambitious and spectacles of human ability. From intricate nuanced movement to transformative animal work – our new work, premiering at La Mama Courthouse in 2023, The World According to Dinosaurs has it all. La Mama was our first choice of venue for this work for a multitude of reasons, one of them being that we were sure they wouldn’t tell us that our vision was not possible. La Mama flawlessly facilitates space for emerging to established artists to achieve big. We came to them with our vision and they have been behind it every step of the way. With their Courthouse venue boasting ample space and adaptability, we are beyond certain that our show will have the freedom it needs to go bold with our choreography, partnering and movement score.
THE SEAGULL: Bagryana Popov: All my theatre work – as director and as actor- is highly physical. I begin each process with the body as driver of the story, performance language, expressive self. As a director I am influenced by my dance, movement and choreographic training and practice. I work with actors and dancers to create theatre that explores human experience and burning issues – the experience of war, displacement, environmental degradation – through and communicate by the body. My first work at La Mama (1992) was Woman in the Wall: integrated traditional Bulgarian dance and song. My work is influenced by training in diverse forms: contemporary dance, choreography, improvisation dance theatre, Grotowski, Michael Chekhov, Stanislavski’s psychological gesture and Bulgarian folk dance. In 2009 I directed Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (Progress and Melancholy) as a theatre/ dance work. I have made physical theatre investigating the experience of political repression in the totalitarian regime in Bulgaria with dancer Simon Ellis (He is not here 2011). My solo show ANNA (La Mama 2019, director John Bolton) involved multiple characters, defined and inhabited through the body. My site-specific Uncle Vanya (Adelaide Festival 2019. Co-produced with La Mama) was essentially physical: the actors and audience experienced site, landscape, weather, in our bodies and senses in place and time. It was physical theatre in the deepest sense. THEM by Samah Sabawi (La Mama 2019, tour 2022) tells the story of lives in a war zone through the actors’ bodies and qualities of confinement, urgency and fight for survival.
I recently played the role of Mother Courage (by Brecht, translation Kushner: La Mama 2022). Feedback from peers: ‘(the) work had the hallmark of beautifully choreographed movement with the concomitant sense of energy that that entails. It provided the actors with that extra kinetic energy…the acting was superb. Diana Richardson
‘a performance shaped by perpetual physical motion, from her first powerful strides on to the stage, to her final gesture of straining to pull the cart, while desperately pleading with the others to take her with them… a moving and memorable performance.’ Noel Maloney
La Mama supports work that explores performance languages grounded in presence and in the work with actors’ bodies. Supported by La Mama, I can develop my work in physical theatre in a deep way, expanding and deepening the possibilities of what it means to work with the body.
TRILOGY: Liv Satchell: La Mama’s unwavering support has allowed me to develop a unique practice of text-based theatre-making. Sitting in-between playwriting and directing, I work with an ensemble of artists to create work about how people occupy public space together physically, and how we impact each other’s internal landscapes in doing so. This is a process and practice that we have only been able to discover and develop through trial and error in the generous and risk-supporting environment that is completely unique to La Mama. I have travelled from a university student to an award-winning theatre-maker under their auspices, and still they continue to make space for me and my creative team to continually grow and challenge ourselves.
BY JANE’S HAND: Emma O’Brien: A new work from old – is proud to be part of La Mama’s diverse programming in 2023. The work has been created and curated through a feminist lens. All spoken text in this work in by Austen. The music is taken from Jane Austen’s favourite music transcriptions, By Jane’s Hand embodies the subtext of her writing with three performers (of diverse genders) all playing Jane. Co-creative Olivia O’Brien is playing one of the three Janes and utilising their circus and performing skills, alongside two other performers, all using raw physical theatre to challenge the contemporary myths of Austen. The Courthouse at La Mama is an ideal space with its flexible configuration and its ability to enhance the true embodiment of the physicality of a theatre, creating a dynamic dialogue between artist and audience member. This rich environment with its history and reputation for supporting diverse emerging art and artists is a perfect partnership for our piece which will be directed by Draf Draffin, a renowned director and expert in physicality and liminality.
MOOSH THE HOBO CAT: Elnaz Sheshgelani: I migrated to Australia in 2007 to escape oppression in Iran. Since then, La Mama has enabled me to develop my art, which is an endangered (UNESCO, 2011) and ancient form of Persian dramatic storytelling (Naghali). Pre-Islamic Naghali is primarily physical in nature and uses ancient gestures and body movement to communicate directly and viscerally with the audience; narrative is only used as a minor adjunct to the performance. This embodied artform completely relies on the physical space provided by La Mama Theatre. I have been involved in at least 25 productions during this time and 5 major productions in direct relation to my practice. I have now taken this practice around the world, although La Mama remains my base and inspiration. La Mama has not only provided a space for me but has offered care and love towards my mission to resurrect an almost extinct art form which, with the political, sociological and religious forces of its birthplace, has become homeless. La Mama is hope and a home for the authenticity of physical theatre, and my practice is a living confirmation of this.
RADIOACTIVE COCKROACH: Glynis Angel and Judy Dalziel: Radioactive Cockroach, (scheduled for La Mama Faraday St, March 2023) is a contemporary comedy of one woman’s epic journey of recovery following their decision to make a formal complaint about an historic rape. The work appropriates the feminist 1970’s circus solo show trope with irony, wit, dynamic physical artistry, tender choreography, and a rich visual and sound design. A cross-examination is presented as a knockout standup routine, with cathartic heckling. A rich humour permeates the text and performance style. Stories of rape are held deep in the body, and the physical intimacy of the La Mama Faraday Street performance space draws the audience safely into this story of its aftermath. This unspeakable story has become tell-able and hear-able. It is a story of what happens to thousands of women’s bodies – there are already 1000 subscribers to the Radioactive Cockroach podcast – and we need a safe space to share the impact with respect, authenticity, gentleness and hope.
Because it’s La Mama, I am supported by a generous community, and am emotionally safe.
Because it’s La Mama, talented people have felt safe to engage with this play and its challenging subject matter, and I have been able to gather a fabulous production team. The discerning support of La Mama means something. I came to La Mama with a shattered sense of self having endured some of the worst our systems throw at women who speak up. That has turned around! Radioactive Cockroach’s message of tender self-care and humour is timely, and without La Mama’s support, I would not be delivering it.