AustLit

'Gelder describes the Australian Gothic as 'a shadow ... fallen over the colonial ego'.5 This shadow and its oft-acknowledged associations with the uncanny aspects of the colonial experience6 are perhaps most widely recognised in Picnic at Hanging Rock, be it Joan Lindsay's original novel (1967), Peter Weir's film version (1975), Matthew Lutton's Malthouse stage adaptation (2016) or the Foxtel-produced television serial (2018). With this description, people seem to understand that, broadly speaking, the Australian Gothic is a genre concerned with the terror-inducing effect of vast landscapes, the lurking dread of the natural world, the loss of sanity experienced by colonial settlers in the face of natural and human-generated adversity (fire, famine, drought), and the framing of the landscape as mysterious, malevolent and threatening to immigrant European cultures.7 As Turcotte notes, the Gothic mode, a 'form which emphasises the horror, uncertainty and desperation of the human experience', was a perfect genre to articulate the uncanny aspects of the colonial period.8 As a playwright and performer with my theatre company Suitcase Royale, I have created the Australian Gothic plays Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon (2006), The Ghosts of Ricketts Hill (2008), The Ballad of Backbone Joe (2009) and Zombatland (2011). For the best part of fifteen years, I have toured these works nationally and internationally - from staging The Ballad of Backbone Joe at the Sydney Theatre Company to touring Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon at London's Soho Theatre - and have faithfully spread the Gothic myth: rural Australian towns at best are not to be trusted and at worst exist as claustrophobic prisons filled with murderous villains. Since 2016, I have also regularly toured Victoria, and been generously supported by Regional Arts Victoria (RAV) and their 'Home Is Where the Hall Is' and 'Connecting Places' initiatives, for both regional centres and small communities. To analyse the development of the rural Australian town as Gothic location par excellence is therefore to contrast it with my experience of touring to such towns where, post-performance, locals are set mainly on plying me with homemade sponge cakes, Mars Bar slices, and sausage rolls the size of my head.' (Publication abstract)

'Described by Robert Reid as 'one of the most unforgettable actors we've seen',1 Yoni Prior has been a performance-maker and champion of the Australian independent theatre scene for over thirty years. After Gilgul disbanded, Yoni took up the helm as Head of the Drama Department at Deakin University (then Rusden State College), working as an actor trainer, director, researcher, and creating a number of digital theatre collaborations between Deakin University, the University of Amsterdam, the British Museum and Cambridge University. Matt Delbridge, Head of Theatre at VCA and funnily also a student of Yoni's and a member of Gilgul, was kind enough to lend us his office to do this interview as it was too noisy in the staff room and too cold out in the park. [...]that was an amazing time where Lyndal Jones had just started as director of student theatre, and introduced experimental work, street theatre, political theatre to the existing mix of plays and musicals. [...]there was this amazing collision of dance and impulse-based training that kept returning me to my body, back to my impulses in spaces where thinking was just not going to cut it.' (Publication abstract)

'With Pin Drop, Saulwick cemented her reputation as an acclaimed performance-maker, creating sound-centred works across a variety of mediums - live performance (Pin Drop 2010, PUBLIC 2013, Endings 2015, Permission to Speak 2016); installation (Alter 2014); and audio walks (The Archives Project 2016) - all of which utilise dramaturgies of sound as a key creative feature in both their development and final production. Reviewers particularly noted Saulwick's ability to 'call up your memories of fear or threat',4 making 'the hairs on the back of your neck stand up'5 in 'a tour de force of fear'.6 It was a one-woman performance piece, created collaboratively between Saulwick and Knight and performed by Saulwick herself, supported sonically by a combination of live voice, pre-recorded voices, and live and pre-recorded sounds. Saulwick constructed part of the sound design through the manipulation of objects positioned in close proximity to two microphones and then further manipulated through different sonic processing tools by Knight, who was situated behind the audience at the operator desk. If performance is a summoning of other worlds, as Marvin Carlson has famously asserted,9 both real and imaginary, and for Saulwick, perhaps also worlds of spiritual and deathly import, then Saulwick needs to be understood as part of a neo-Gothic revival.10 Saulwick's mysterious and transfixing sonic innovations challenge orthodox ideas of the single voice in theatre and go far beyond English constructions of the received theatrical voice and the emphasis on the actress who can project up into the gods in the service of a conventional playtext.' (Publication abstract)

'Zoe Coombs Marr is a multi-award-winning standup comedian, writer, director and theatre-maker. Since Trigger Warning, Zoe has retired Dave and returned to standup as herself. Whereas Trigger Warning was about public shaming, which again is a lot about the audience: how do you manifest that idea in the space through the framework the jokes hang off? Even when I'm making theatre, I'm aiming to making the audience laugh.' (Publication abstract)