Join Artist Panel with Jamie Bucirde talking with Joel Bray, Maude Davey, Nadja Kostich, Kimberley Twiner and Frankie Van Kan to delve into the realms of intimacy, power, consent in both content and processes. How we create with sexual themes and navigate power structures, pushing boundaries, breaking taboos within respectful and safe theatre practice.
Presenters: Jamie Bucirde (chair) with Joel Bray, Maude Davey, Nadja Kostich, Kimberley Twiner & Frankie Van Kan
Sessions may include Q&A from both live and livestream audiences. Livestream audiences are encouraged to submit comments and questions in the live chat. Livestream playback will be available until Sunday Jul 14.
Joel Bray
A Naarm-based performer and maker, Joel Bray is a proud Wiradjuri man and Artistic Director of Joel Bray Dance. Joel danced in Europe with Kolben Dance, FRESCO Dance Company, Roy Assaf and Niv Sheinfeld & Oren Laor, and in Australia with CHUNKY MOVE.
Joel’s dance-theatre encounters in unorthodox spaces spring from his Wiradjuri heritage, and use humour to engage audiences in rituals about sex, history, trauma and healing. His experimental work challenges white audience expectations of Aboriginal performance and blur the colonial genres
His works Biladurang (2017), Dharawungara (CHUNKY MOVE, 2018), Daddy (Yirramboi Festival 2019), Considerable Sexual License (Yirramboi 2021), I Liked It, BUT (2021), Garabari (Artshouse 2022) and Homo Pentecostus (Malthouse 2024) have toured to the Brisbane, Sydney, Darwin, Midsumma, Auckland, LiveWorks, World Pride and Dance Massive Festivals, and to PICA, the Arts Centre Melbourne and Canberra Theatre Centre. Joel’s seven-channel video installation called Giraru Galing Ganhagirri (The Wind Will Bring the Rain) was presented at the National Gallery of Australia, and Storage Unit (2023) was commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria.
Joel was the 2019 National Library of Australia Creative Arts Fellow, a 2020 Sydney Dance Company New Breed choreographer and the 2021-22 CHUNKY MOVE Choreographer-in-Residence, and a member of the Melbourne Fringe Board.
Jamie Bucirde
Jamie Bucirde is an Adelaide-based qualified Sexologist. She has worked as a consultant with the Adelaide City Council on sexual harassment prevention for city safety and nightlife, aswell as currently working with the University of Melbourne on Australia’s first case study on sexual harassment culture within Hospitality. She writes a fortnightly column with Adelaide based magazine CityMag on all things human sexuality. She also runs On the Cusp, an independant, female led business that delivers sexual violence awarness and respectful relationships consulting and training for the workplace. She specialises in hospitality, festivals/events and the arts, and speaks to respectful relationships, human sexuality and primary prevention of sexual violence.
Maude Davey
Maude Davey trained as an actor at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) and has worked as an actor, director and writer for more than thirty years, with her primary focus being the creation of new work. Recent directing credits include: Frankie van Kan’s A Body at Work at La Mama , 2024; the acclaimed Gender Euphoria: Mighty Real, as a part of Sydney WorldPride, and then presented by Arts Centre Melbourne in May 2023; Acting includes: My Sister Jill by Patricia Cornelius for MTC 2023; Blessed Union by Maeve Marsden for Belvoir St Theatre 2023; K-BOX by Ra Chapman for Malthouse Theatre 2022; The Heartbreak Choir, by Aiden Fennessey for MTC 2022. Television and Film include The News Reader; Five Bedrooms; Offspring; Summer Heights High; My Year Without Sex. She has worked extensively in variety, as member of Finucane & Smith’s Glory Box/Burlesque Hour ensemble and recently in her own award-winning outfit, Retro Futurismus. She has also been the Artistic Director of two small theatre companies (Vitalstatistix Theatre Company in Adelaide and Melbourne Workers Theatre). She received a Masters in Writing for Performance from VCA in 2016 and is currently undertaking a PhD at La Trobe University.
Nadja Kostich
Nadja Kostich is the Artistic Director and CEO of St Martins Youth Arts Centre. Over the past seven years, the works she has created here with our young people and amazing creative teams have garnered an extraordinary number of industry awards and nominations: five Green Room Awards, ten Green Room Award nominations, a Melbourne Fringe Best Live Art Award, a GLOBE Award nomination for Outstanding Community Advocacy, as well as five-star and four-star reviews. An interdisciplinary artist working in an inimitably collaborative style, Nadja’s integration of physical score, text, video, music, installation and digital components arising from deep community engagement has produced powerful and moving experiences for participants and audiences in theatres, public spaces and festivals for over two decades.
Kimberley Twiner
Kimberley (she/they) is a theatre performer, director, teacher and producer based in Naarm. She is Director of Melbourne Physical Theatre School – a training platform grounded in the Lecoq methodology of mask and movement training. She works collaboratively in a number of award-winning ensembles: The Beaks, The Wholesome Hour, PO PO MO CO, Brunswick East Entertainment Festival and The Travelling Sisters. An area of interest in her practise is the ‘archetypal female trickster’ and the ’embodied naivety’ through a queer feminist clown lens.
Kimberley’s speciality areas of performance are Clown, Bouffon, Character, Mask, Collaboration Analysis, Devising Process and Ensemble Development, practiced through the Lecoq pedagogy and Gestalt approach. Kimberley is currently in her second year studies of Gestalt Psychotherapy at Gestalt Therapy Australia. She has studied extensively with Giovanni Fusetti at Helikos Theatre School (Italy). She has also studied at Ecole Philippe Gaulier and John Bolton Theatre School. Kimberley graduated from Drama Studies at QUT, Brisbane in 2009 and has been working in Melbourne since 2016.
Frankie Van Kan
Frankie van Kan, aka Frankie Valentine, is an interdisciplinary queer artist working with live performance, costume, the written word and dance. Writer, sex worker and parent living in Naarm, she is devoted to spreading the gospel of pleasure through her work both onstage and off. Her practise explores the liberation of the female body, sex/uality, and queerness.
Her debut solo show, A Body at Work, directed by Maude Davey, recently completed it’s sold out premier season at La Mama Theatre. Performance highlights include working with Briefs and the award winning Seen and Heard cabaret, starring in and co-producing Baby Got Back and currently producing Stripped Queer. She has performed all over Australia and Europe including Paris Burlesque Festival, Edinburgh, Adelaide, Perth and Melbourne fringe festivals, Berlin, The National Gallery of Victoria, Sydney World Pride and Melbourne Writers Festival. She has written for Archer magazine, Lip Magazine and Bowen Street Press.
Access Information:
Auslan Interpreted: All evening sessions (Session 1, Session 4, Session 7, Session 10, Session 13).