Performance Art

Margaret Davis Director, Playwright, Teaching Artist Margaret has had a long career in the performing arts, principally as a director and playwright but also as an actor, dancer, choreographer and lecturer. She was the first woman appointed as a director with an Australian mainstage theatre company (1981 Assistant Director of the State Theatre Company of South Australia) and also built the Riverina Theatre Company to professional touring status in the mid-1980s. She has directed more than 50 productions for leading theatres around Australia (including Griffin, Belvoir and Malthouse) and with her own company, Two Planks and a Passion. Her particular interest in physical theatre is reflected in her original works Isis Dreaming and Spilling Bodies and the gothic horror novel adaptation, The Monk. Other produced works as a playwright include Mad Before Midday and The Woman on the Twenty Dollar Note, for which she received an AWGIE nomination for best play for young audiences. In May 2017 Margaret created and directed a production of a new work about food and memory, Breaking Bread, which featured a team of 16 writers and actors from the Blue Mountains area and had a sell-out season. Margaret has staged a second new work, Eating Pomegranates, with a successful season at Wentworth Falls School of Arts in March 2019. The work, which celebrates bodies through all stages of life and death, was developed through a QLab residency at the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre and the support of the Blue Mountains Cultural Trust. Since 2018 Margaret has been a resident artist with the Annual Youth Theatre Festival at the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, devising and directing physical theatre pieces with Year 11 students from Blue Mountains High Schools. In 2019 she was the Guest Director on the Originate project at the Joan, working with a group of emerging theatre artists and an astronomer from Western Sydney University to produce Push Me Away Pull Me Closer as a response to the concept of black holes and gravitational forces both in space and in human relationships. Margaret lectured in Contextual Studies for the BA in Performing Arts at AIM for ten years and also freelances as a dramaturge and script assessor (principally with the Australian Writers’ Guild.) During the Covid 19 crisis Margaret wrote The Angel Code as part of Q Theatre’s Short Message Service and an autobiographical piece for Come to Where I Am – Australia: a joint initiative of Critical Stages (AUS) and Paines Plough (U.K.) and also began developing a third Blue Mountains work, Lookout/Look Out! with the assistance of a Rapid Response grant from Blue Mountains City of the Arts Trust and further funding from CreateNSW. Her play Sanctuary was a finalist for the Silver Gull Award in 2021. In development: Lookout/Look Out! (collaboration as Writer/Director with Dharug Elder Chris Tobin, Performers Shane Porteous and Georgia Adamson, Dharug Visual artist/Storyteller Jessica Tobin, Video Artist Sean O'Keeffe and Dramaturg Danielle Maas. In development: full length play script Did You Tell Anyone Where You Were Going? Margaret also freelances as a Mentor, Script Assessor and Acting Coach.

I am an interdisciplinary artist working across performance and visual art based in the Blue Mountains, Australia. Growing up in the former Soviet Union during the turbulent 1990s shaped my critical approach to narratives about the status quo. My work explores alternative forms of knowledge and modes of existence. Through performance and visual art, I examine expanded ways of perceiving and engaging with the world and the environment. My approach to performance art is strongly influenced by my visual arts background and my research in more-than-human choreographies. I work with objects as collaborators and my body as both medium and tool, generating 'living images' that transform the known into the unknown. Everyday objects, often overlooked, become active participants, revealing their own performative agency. This expanded practice seeks to explore ecological entanglements and non-human intelligence. I am currently undertaking a PhD in performance art and interdisciplinary practice at Macquarie University, Sydney, where my research focuses on more-than-human choreographies and extended mind theory. I investigate how human and non-human entities co-create within performative environments, expanding notions of agency and collaboration. My current artistic research includes developing performances in collaboration with weaver ants, working alongside Macquarie University researchers studying natural complex systems. These investigations have deepened my inquiry into interspecies co-creation and ecological intelligence in performance-making.

Blue Mountains Musical Society was founded by music lovers Heather Gwilliam, Jenny Edwards, Barry McNicol, and pianist Phyllis Huthnance, who all agreed that a musical society would be just the place for stage folk and musos alike to get together and produce good music and lasting friendships. A public meeting was called and with an enthusiastic group of 45 people the very first BMMS production of Trial by Jury at Springwood Uniting Church was in full swing. For just $3 a ticket the audience packed into the church hall. So positive was the response that members decided to go full steam ahead and form a committee. This all happened in 1981! Not that long ago really, when one considers how far BMMS has come since those early days. Since 1981 BMMS has been rehearsing and proudly presenting operetta, musical comedy, concerts and youth programs at the Springwood Civic Centre. In 2012, BMMS performed their last musical in the centre before it closed for renovations, allowing BMMS the opportunity to travel to new audiences at new venues, performing Sweeney Todd in 2013 at the Q Theatre, Monty Python’s Spamalot at the EVAN Theatre Penrith Panthers in June 2014, CATS at The Lighthouse Theatre, Orchard Hills in November 2014 and back for one last show at EVAN Theatre with The Who’s Tommy in May 2015. We returned to the Blue Mountains Theatre and Community Hub, previously known as the Springwood Civic Centre in late 2015 with The Phantom of the Opera. In 2025, BMMS will be staging a new production of the Broadway smash hit, Come From Away, in May, followed by Legally Blonde in October.

Bringing magic into the world. Performing as Mx Robert Frost (Exploratory experiential sound focused on harsh noise and modified hearing through cognitive practice), and as part of Atunement with Panos Couros (exploratory, musique concrète, ambient). Designing and building electronic musical instrument equipment as MxRF. Building creative community and sharing synthesis knowledge as Mid Mountains Modular (Mmm).

Selection of different entertainment offerings. -Hula Hoop Performers (Day time + LED roving or stage shows) -Silk Fans Dance Performers (Flowing silk fans roving entertainment) -Fire Entertainment (single performer show or multiple performers, hula hoops, fan, swords) -Facilitated play space and workshops (For hula hoops only, all ages) For more information please visit my website: www.talztwirlz.com

Fusion Boutique is an independent, multi-award-winning producer, promoter and event management business presenting premier live music in a range of venues. It is driven by owner Charity Mirow's passion for sourcing, presenting, and promoting national and international artists and unique events, also with a focus on local talent. Special attention has been placed on regional development, the reinvigoration of existing venues, as well as the creation of new live entertainment spaces and community events. Taking into consideration the whole experience, an inviting environment is created, the standard of music presented is of the highest level and audiences can be assured of quality every time.

Blackheath based Kyle Walmsley is a theatre maker who specialises in voice over work, workshop facilitation and as an event MC. Reach out and let's chat about how we can work together.

With an international performance and production career, Anthony Albrecht has developed a reputation as an impresario of world-class events characterised by generosity, outreach and connection to issues of social justice, conservation and sustainability. He is co-founder and CEO of the Bowerbird Collective, an organisation devoted to forging stronger connections to the natural world through the arts. With Bowerbird, Anthony has co-produced numerous award-winning multimedia productions, described as "spectacular" by Limelight Magazine, and self-presented and performed in hundreds of events throughout regional Australia. In 2021 and 2022, their albums of endangered bird and frog calls, 'Songs of Disappearance', beat ABBA, Ed Sheeran and Adele on the ARIA charts. A musician known for his “dramatic flair” and “fluent and virtuosic” performances (Seen and Heard International, Sydney Morning Herald), he has frequently appeared with Pinchgut Opera, Van Diemen's Band, the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra, the Australian Haydn Ensemble, il Pomo d’Oro and New Vintage Baroque (NYC). Solo engagements include an appearance in the woods of East Sussex as a guest of Sam Lee’s ‘Singing with Nightingales’ project, a recital at the Handel and Hendrix House in London, a performance of Haydn’s Concerto in D at the Newcastle Music Festival, and as concerto soloist with Adelaide Baroque. Committed to musical outreach, Anthony self-produced a solo tour of over 80 concerts in regional Australia called ‘Bach to the Bush’. He is founder and director of three regional festivals, the Lapwing Music Festival in the UK, the Moonbird Festival on King Island, TAS, and the Lyrebird Festival in the Megalong Valley, NSW. Anthony was the first Australian graduate of The Juilliard School’s Historical Performance program, earning a Master of Music on full scholarship in 2014. To develop his arts business and management skills, he earned an MBA in 2022.

WeiZen Ho has been devising and presenting open-disciplinary performances since 1999. Her practice has expanded through music-visual concerts, into solo and participatory works to occupy spaces of uncertainty between performance, ritual and installation. These works employ significant accoutrements and deep imagery to shift and coalesce relationships between body, voice, sound and site. In this process she investigates methods for accessing the memory-body through vocal-bodywork, improvisational techniques and re-imagined psycho-physical states of spirit possession. These are informed by Southeast Asian rituals and animistic practices she has witnessed in her ongoing research processes. WeiZen is increasingly drawn to performance interventions in public places, experiencing and inhabiting time in a more nuanced manner through long-duration works. She spent a month in September 2023 devising and presenting public space performance interventions in New York as part of a 'Live Art Tour 8' with other international artists. In November 2023, she adapted 'Stories from the Body (SFTB) #1', with a performance trajectory from the park, public footpath, pools and Louise Bourgeois’ 34 ft 'Maman' sculpture on Art Gallery Rd, to the new North Wing site. This was part of a 2-day opening programme, 'Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day' exhibition, Art Gallery NSW.

Veronica is one of the very few flamenco dancers in this country who has an extensive history as a professional flamenco dancer working in Spain alongside many of the most famous dancers, singers and musicians at the time. In Australia Veronica was the flamenco dancer in Graeme Murphy’s Nutcracker in 2000. She created “exotic choreography” for the stage version of Strictly Ballroom for Baz Luhrmann. Veronica also choreographed the dance sequences for Carmen and La Traviata for Opera Australia on several occasions. She conducts weekly flamenco classes in Katoomba from beginners to advanced and also organises classes via Zoom from well-known teachers.