’Crazy Dave’-Who’s Holding My Dream 2009
She’s Landed at the Gatwick 2007
It began in 1980 when Maud Clark arranged to take a play into Fairlea Women’s Prison. The impact on the women inmates was so strong that one articulate woman Brenda, asked if drama could be provided on an ongoing basis.
The way we worked then is still very much how we work today. We took risks and learnt that the truth is what is really important; in a free atmosphere creating space with no power base, human beings meet equally, creating together.
What has evolved over the years is theatre that springs from the stories of the individuals we work with, their stories, their truth.
Since 2001, Somebody’s Daughter Theatre Company, in collaboration with Gateway Community Health Service and the Department of Early Childhood and Development has been working intensively in Albury/Wodonga, on a full-time creative arts-based education program with rural teenagers called, HighWater Theatre.
Creating a Company
In the 80’s there were a number of shows at Fairlea Women’s Prison and by the 90’s the work extended beyond the prison walls. Tracey Forward, had found that the arts worked for her in a way that nothing else had and wanted the same support she had received from the arts inside the prison outside of the prison walls.
Maud called a meeting of co-artists working in the prison - Sally Marsden, Carey Lai, Greg Sneddon and some of the now released women we had worked with throughout the 80’s in Fairlea - Marg, Helen, Tracey, Di, Rikki - the rest is history. Tracey’s story of leaving the prison and trying to establish a life beyond drugs, prison and crime became, Tell Her That I Love Her. It was a wonderful piece of theatre that found an audience hungry to understand issues to do with addiction. The play was placed on the schools list and had a return season.
The company has been operating full time since that time with shows and exhibitions. Thousands of lives have been touched and in many cases transformed by the shows; the lives of hundreds of the women and young people that we have worked with intensively have been positively and irrevocably changed, for some lives have been totally transformed. It has been an extraordinary testament to both the power and necessity of the arts to human existence. The work has nothing to do with ‘helping’ or changing people, it does not pathologise behaviour, and is not therapy - it is about creating fantastic theatre/art/music with individuals who are in the main excluded from the possibilities of such creation.
The work continues in the prison with a great team of artists, led by Kharen Harper, going weekly to Deer Park and Tarrengower prisons. They also hold regular post release art and drama workshops in Melbourne.