The Creative:

Black Swan Artistic Director Kate Cherry

October 16, 2012 who are equally passionate and bringing a story to life visually, emotionally through soundscape, creating what I see and hear when I read a script in collaboration with others. Being taken by surprise constantly by the ideas that collaborators have in response. I love being taken by surprise by a fresh, exciting idea.

At Black Swan you have just released your 2013 Season Program. What’s your top pick/s that we can look forward to next year?

Well, you are asking me to choose between my babies which is always hard. This year is a smorgasbord of great narratives. The classics speak for themselves. Death of a Salesman and The Importance of Being Earnest have engaged and astonished audiences around the world. The two contemporary works on the mainstage that will have profound dramatic impact are Shrine by Tim Winton starring John Howard. This play arose out of the countless little shrines we see by the side of the road all over regional Australia. When a man loses his son in a dreadful road accident, his road to salvation starts with a perplexing encounter at a roadside shrine. The second is Other Desert Cities. This is an extraordinary story about a young woman pursuing the truth when she is surrounded by fantasy makers.

Can you tell us a bit about how you compile a season? Who is involved, and how do you choose what’s included?

It’s exciting and complicated. I talk to other Artistic Directors because as the state flagship we need to have collaborations that reach across states and countries. I investigate what work is being done interstate and overseas. I listen to ideas that patrons and artists have. I do a lot of reading. I think about what roles various artists are ready to play, and what productions would work in the Heath Ledger Theatre, I see who is available, but most of all I think about the audience. I can get as much feedback as possible, do as many risk assessments as necessary, collaborate with the General Manager and the Marketing Manager, as well as the Board, but at the end of the day, after a lot of hard analytical work done by a myriad of people, I make many of my decisions based on gut instinct. We also have to take into account the availability of rights. I am very keen for Black Swan to do a production of a particular American classic, but the world wide rights have been taken up for over a year. Once one idea about a play goes down the drain, we often have to rethink the season. We also keep a close eye on what theatre texts are in the school curriculum as that is our future audience.

Take us through a typical day of your work in the lead up to an Opening Night. There isn’t one really. I rehearse right up until we open for 6 days a week, and somewhere in there I try to squeeze in a visit to the hair dresser for opening night. Every show is different in its demands although new work is the most demanding. I try to spend some quality time with my son, and I thank my husband and friends a lot for their understanding and their support of our family unit. I love my job. I am always jazzed to be in the rehearsal room, and I am highly engaged about strategizing into the future, but I also need reflection time so that I continue to evolve as a director and leader.

What has been your proudest achievement?

I hope that is to come, but I am very proud of the fact that I have been able to work in a field I am passionate about, and that I have continued to evolve as a leader. I think in the last few years I have been exposed to brilliant business people, and I can see very clearly where our interests in creativity and collaboration intersect in ways that could make the future of theatre in WA very exciting.

Personally, I am very proud of being in the theatre and having maintained a relationship with my husband for over 20 years. Two artists in the same house can make for interesting times, but fortunately despite the fact that our careers and lives are in constant motion, (as is our 7 year-old boy) we share the same values.

Professionally, I have highlights in theatre and opera, but I am most proud of my role as Artistic Director of Black Swan. We have a great team, and we are very proud of our commitment to developing Australian work and Australian artists.

Which local artists/musicians/creatives do you admire?

I admire anyone who is prepared to place freedom of expression over material gain— very few artists in WA make money, but they recognize an imperative in themselves to communicate with their community through whatever art form they choose. I am always drawn to daring creatives who show us another way to look, listen or open our hearts.

The acclaimed author Christos Tsiolkas and UNSW academic and filmmaker Mary Zournazi are crafting a play that digs deeply into key challenges accompanying our ageing population.

Christos Tsiolkas and Mary Zournazi: “A play only really begins to breathe in rehearsals, in workshops with actors. We will be able to hear the world we have created.”

A simpatico moment over a casual meal sparked an artistic collaboration between Christos Tsiolkas and Mary Zournazi that has spanned more than seven years.

The award-winning author and the academic and filmmaker met at a Greek authors’ event 20 years ago where Tsiolkas was discussing the work that would become Dead Europe.

Tsiolkas is known for his raw depiction of the Australian psyche, from the disenfranchised anger and sexualised violence of youth in Loaded to his vampiric exploration of antiSemitism in Dead Europe and the hypocrisy of middle-class Australia in the international bestseller The Slap.

Zournazi was struck by the power and sensitivity of his writing and they stayed in touch.

“He really does capture families and dysfunction really, really well. But also, in a very tender way – he’s a very tender writer, I think,” the associate professor says.

‘He really does capture families and dysfunction really, really well. But also, in a very tender way – he’s a very tender writer.’

Dramatic Exploration Of Dementia Gives Voice To Family Dilemmas

Kay Harrison, 13 Sep 2018

Years later, Zournazi, whose research in social sciences aligns closely with creative practice, discussed with Tsiolkas ideas for a play on family and dementia and the ethics of care. Tsiolkas was interested in the effect of inheritance on family. The ideas married well.

“I think the questions and complications around family are always fascinating and can often provide strong material for drama,” Tsiolkas says.

“The struggles that families go through with dementia is something that we are increasingly enduring as we live longer.”

They began exploring characters and situations in 2011, meeting in Melbourne and Sydney and, when their schedules allowed, for week-long workshops in the quiet of Tsiolkas’ house at Narooma in the Southern Highlands.

“Originally, we would write separately and come back together and talk about who the characters were and how they were sitting, but eventually we started writing together,” Zournazi says.

“The plot built slowly and it’s still developing. The first draft is quite different to the third.”

The play centres on Augie, a father with dementia, and his relationship with his carer, as well as issues of care, responsibility and inheritance that arise within his family.

‘A play only really begins to breathe in rehearsals, in workshops with actors. We will be able to hear the world we have created.’

Augie’s voice is “quite powerful, quite strong. It’s actually the motor behind the play,” Zournazi says.

“By making the parental figure in the play [the one] with dementia we were able to add further complexity to what we were doing,” Tsiolkas says.

Augie’s dialogue is fragmented and poetic, based on Tsiolkas and Zournazi’s real-life observations of people with the disease.

“He speaks in his own language which is his language. But it’s the language of dementia, it’s the language of memory as well,” Zournazi says.

“We have to see how that will translate with an actor, whether it does work efficiently, but I think it will. I think it should.”

Actor Lex Marinos, a UNSW alumnus, is reading the role of Augie in a workshop of the play at NIDA Theatre running from September 11 to 15, with Camilla Ah Kin reading the role of his carer, Yuli. The workshop is exploring different elements of the three drafts under the dramaturgy of acclaimed Australian playwright and screenwriter Stephen Sewell (The Boys, True Love and Chaos, and Chopper), with senior NIDA acting students Emma Kew, Yerin Ha and Timothy Walker reading the supporting roles.

Timothy Walker, Christos Tsiolkas and Mary Zournazi at the workshop.

“We’ve been the actors, now we actually have to have other people embody the roles so we can start to see the characters, start to see the language, and what’s working and not working,” Zournazi says.

“A play only really begins to breathe in rehearsals, in workshops with actors. We will be able to hear the world we have created,” says Tsiolkas.

The collaboration is a less of a departure from Zournazi’s previous work than it might first appear. The play’s themes of identity, memory and storytelling are intrinsic to her research.

“I’ve been thinking a lot and working a lot on ideas of what memory is and how it functions,” she says.

“But also, questions of care – how do we care for people with dementia as well and what are the issues at stake?”

In 2014, she published Inventing Peace – A Dialogue on Perception with filmmaker Wim Wenders, the culmination of nearly a decade of conversations on the nature of peace and how we imagine it.

In 2015, she explored issues of care in her award-winning documentary Dogs of Democracy on the stray dogs of Athens and the people who took care of them during the austerity measures in Greece following the global financial crisis.

The creative expression of philosophical issues and social criticism has increasingly become a focus in her research and teaching at UNSW School of Social Sciences.

“Even though Dogs is nonfiction, the form and the medium allow a certain play,” she says.