NEWS
Club House invited to Pitch It’s A Secret! at the Major Festivals Commissioning Site
8 NOVEMBER 2022
NEWS
In September, Bec Massey pitched in BrisbaneI for creative development money for IT’S A SECRET! at the Major Festivals Initiative (MFI) Commissioning site.
The MFI Commissioning Site (C-Site) is an annual conference of CAIAF member festivals, that brings together festival curators, artists, their producing companies and other commissioners of work. They meet together in a single space across two and a bit days to observe, listen and learn about the ideas, concepts and visions of Australian artists, collectives and companies.
The festivals mingle, with each other and with the artists they advocate for, to invest funds in news works. It was an extraordinary 2 days among incredible artists cooking up some breathtaking works.
IT'S A SECRET! received MFI seed funding from Perth Festival and is being supported by Rising Festival and Adelaide Festival, who hope to premiere the work in 2024. Fingers crossed we get the money.
Watch this space!
Sheridan Harbridge hits the high notes with
musical theatre fellowship
17 APRIL 2022
ARTICLE
Sheridan Harbridge has been awarded the 2022 Hayes – NSW Musical Theatre (Established) Fellowship, a career accelerating musical theatre initiative delivered in partnership with Create NSW and Hayes Theatre Co.
The Hayes – NSW Musical Theatre (Established) Fellowship, valued at $30,000, consisting of $25,000 in financial support from Create NSW, and in-kind support of up to $5,000 from Hayes Theatre Co, will support Ms Harbridge to write and produce new musical theatre piece The Flash Mob.
Create NSW Interim Chief Executive Annette Pitman said the Fellowship will provide Ms Harbridge with a valuable career pipeline and professional mentorship as she brings the new production to life.
“Create NSW is proud to partner with Hayes Theatre Co. to award Sheridan Harbridge this significant Musical Theatre Fellowship,” said Ms Pitman.
4 STAR REVIEW FOR DAVID FINNIGAN
4 AUGUST 2022
REVIEW - THE STAGE, UK
Photograph: Leanne Dixon
REVIEW:
"Passion and facts in David Finnigan’s performance-lecture show on the climate emergency.
Artists like to think that their art will change the world. Australian theatremaker David Finnigan believed that. Until he didn’t. That moment was 2019 when Australian wildfires ripped across the Australian coast and, for the first time, the climate emergency that Finnigan has spent his career making theatre around became up close and very personal.
What Finnigan proves in his performance-lecture-style show You’re Safe Til 2024: Deep History, a personal drama driven both by passion and a low-key but effective theatrical verve, is that theatre may not change the world, but it can present often unpalatable facts in a storytelling format. Those facts can help us understand the stark realities of climate emergency. It’s not a yet-to-occur apocalyptic event that will happen in the future to someone else; we are already in the climate era. Just as we were once in the Ice Age.
To illustrate this, Finnigan utilises grains of sugar, compulsively watchable video and his own climate scientist father’s research, taking us back over 75,000 years and identifying a series of turning-point moments in the history of humankind and making unexpected connections. Finnigan suggests that human beings are still an adolescent species, and teenagers often don’t make sensible decisions.
What’s clever about the show is that it humanises deep history and, through Finnigan’s messaging with a close friend caught up in the wildfire, it demonstrates how climate change impacts all, never swerving its harsh realities. Maybe now is the time to all grow up." - THE STAGE
Sheridan Harbridge talks
with City Hub about 44 Sex Acts
JANUARY 2022
INTERVIEW
Sheridan Harbridge has a glass of champagne in her hand two days before rehearsals for 44 Sex Acts In One Week takes a 10-day break.
This is the third attempt to stage the play after COVID stopped the earlier seasons.
The play was written as a play by Ngunnawal writer David Finnigan, but during a Zoom reading, Harbridge thought it would be a good radio play to record during the pandemic.
Priscilla Douiehy spoke to
Sydney Sentinel about fruity sex
2 JANUARY 2022
INTERVIEW
A radio play on stage – and then some. David Finnigan’s 44 Sex Acts in One Week is insightful, witty, probing and a little bit messy. Priscilla Douiehy spoke with the Sentinel about reprising her role and simulating sex with fruit.
The promotional images and blurb might lead you to believe this is a bawdy, mischievous romp through a grocery aisle, but Douiehy asserts there’s more to this play than meets the eye – even if what meets the eye is a grapefruit pip.
Guardian journalist Steve Dow talks about 44 Sex Acts with Massey, Harbridge & Finnigan
1 JANUARY 2022
INTERVIEW
A juicy watermelon is made to sound like cunnilingus while banana and rockmelon make a potent visual and aural connection. Director Sheridan Harbridge wryly recalls the early challenges of using fresh produce to simulate sex on stage: “How do you find a classy way to smack fruit together?”
In a new production of “apocalyptic romcom” 44 Sex Acts in One Week, written by playwright David Finnigan, the humble tomato makes its debut “to simulate the sound of a jade yoni egg going into my vagina”, reveals Rebecca Massey, who plays both sex coach author Malaine Gutierrez and Devil Wears Prada-style editor Irene Gamerman.
Using fruit on stage as a live radio play is “messy, so messy”, muses Harbridge. “How do you protect the actors and the audience from so much fruit and juice and stickiness?
Top Picks for Sydney Festival 2022:
44 Sex Acts In One Week
JANUARY 2022
ARTICLE
With a bold ambition to reimagine how we experience and interact with the city itself, Sydney Festival’s 2022 line-up is set to explode onto (and into) the city’s parks, pools, streets, stages and screens this summer.
Across its most revered venues and storied public spaces, amongst its iconic beaches and hidden boat sheds, Sydney will come alive with an array of free and family focussed events, illuminating public art installations, intimate provocations and large-scale performances that will mark, interrogate and celebrate the rituals of summer in the city.
