Somebody’s Daughter Theatre Company

Bring down the walls of difference and indifference through the arts. An equal meeting ground for all. Transcending class, money, power. -SDT Mission

 

For nearly three decades Somebody’s Daughter Theatre (SDT) has been working with communities of the disadvantaged to produce high quality theatre, music and art. Working with women in prison and after they have been released and marginalised young people, this unique company has been using the arts as a driver to break intergenerational cycles of abuse, addiction and institutionalisation of the most disenfranchised in our society.

The Company regularly works in collaboration with education, health and welfare agencies to establish strong community partnerships. In 2000 the Company’s first ‘official offspring’ HighWater Theatre – a creatively led education program for young people outside the mainstream school system - was developed in Albury/Wodonga.

Somebody’s Daughter Theatre has, between 2000 and 2009, devised and performed 19 original plays, staged 296 performances to more than 50,000 people, presented at 42 conferences, guided 416 community workshops, and prepared and mounted 19 art exhibitions!
A signature of the company is that it works intensively with communities for the long-term. SDT has proven itself a national leader in community arts and an outstanding model of effective social change:
The creative model working - where often all else has failed.

Current Programmes and Partnerships

Women In Prison
Drama, Art, Music
for women at Deer Park Prison, Melbourne and Tarrengower Prison, Maldon

Women Post Release
Art, Drama & Music
St.Kilda, Melbourne

Young People in Secure Welfare
for young women at Bloomfield Secure Welfare and young men at Ascot Vale
Secure Welfare

Marginalised Young People ‘HighWater Theatre’

for young women and young men in North East Victoria in partnership with Gateway Community Health and the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development For Detail view: Partnership Report 2007

Community, Arts and Cultural Development
In 2007, SDT was chosen as one of 11 leading arts companies to receive Key Producer support from the Australia Council through its Community Partnerships section.

Links:

Gateway Community Health

Dept of Education and Early Childhood Development D.E.E.C.D (Hume Region)

Australia Council for the Arts-Key Producers

Community, Arts and Cultural Development

 

History

From the Artistic Director

Somebody’s Daughter works in theatre, art and music with women while in prison and after they have been released and since 2000 with young men and women in Albury/Wodonga who are out side of the school system and in the main have been for many years. Nearly all, from all generations, come from lives steeped in abuse, poverty, neglect and violence.  
We work with those who have been excluded from the cultural and social life of this society. But it is through the arts that new pathways are discovered.  
Somebody’s Daughter Theatre began when I was a drama student in 1980 and I arranged to take a play I was performing in, into the prison. It was a play about women being brought over to Australia in the hulks.
A very articulate English woman, Brenda, who was wont to quote the Geneva Convention to prison officers, asked for drama. So we started.  The way we worked then is still very much how we work today.
We played; we played in an ironically “free” atmosphere with a number of other women who wanted to play also. These women happened to be prisoners and it was through the play that we met equally. 
That has been the beginning and the end - the arts make for an equal meeting ground, dissect everything and that has been the strength of our work. In a world where so much is unequal, we create a space where there is no power base - meeting equally to create - human beings creating together.
It was in the prison that we took risks, that we learnt that the truth is what is really important - find the heart, the essence and it shines like a diamond. And in this place there was truth – here, where everything had been stripped away - what was left was truth.
What has evolved over the years is that the theatre we create is centred and springs from the stories of the individuals we work with, their stories, their truth.  
In the 80’s there were a number of shows at Fairlea Women’s Prison and in the 90’s the work extended beyond the prison walls, again in response to one woman, Tracey Forward, who found that the arts worked for her in a way that nothing else had; Tracey wanted the same support she had received from the arts inside the prison outside of the prison walls. Due to considerable urging from her friend Di, I called a meeting of co-artists working in the prison Sally Marsden, Carey Lai, Greg Sneddon and women we had worked with throughout the 80’s in Fairlea who were now released - 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’.
”Tell Her That I Love Her,” was the first production outside of the prison walls, based on the struggle that Tracey was living, even as she rehearsed and performed, to overcome addiction and prison.  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 a return season was necessary. 
The company has been operating full time since that time with shows and exhibitions both inside and outside of the prison, post release workshops, community performances and workshops and an intensive programme for young men and women in regional Victoria. Thousands of lives have been touched and in many cases transformed by the shows –hundreds of lives of women and youth that we have worked with intensively have been irrevocably changed positively and in some cases transformed totally. It has been an extraordinary testament to both the power and necessity of the arts to human existence.  
While the company has evolved it still operates on the same principle as when we began many years ago. The work has nothing to do with helping or changing people, it is not to pathologise behaviour, and it is not therapy - it is to create. There might be some wondrous things that happen to individuals along the way but what we are about is creating fantastic theatre/art/music with individuals who are in the main excluded from the possibilities of such creation.
Now Somebody’s Daughter works intensively with a group of kids in Wodonga, HighWater Theatre.
The work still continues in the prison. There is a great team of artists led by Kharen Harper who go in every week to Deer Park and to Tarrengower prison. There are also regular post release art and drama workshops. Some of these women choose to do their community work with the company working intensively with the young men and women in Wodonga. These women are committed to breaking the cycles of violence that permeate the lives of these individuals. 
The HighWater Theatre young people are totally outside of the school system, they have been expelled, taken knives to teachers, or as one individual, had locked herself in a room for 3 years and would only come out at irregular intervals and cause havoc. All of them have missed not days but years of school – they are seen as the most difficult. Nothing has worked for them except the arts. I find it wonderful that all of them have been totally disconnected, have found sitting in a classroom or being in a group impossible, yet they come every day. It is the creative work that connects them.  We work with about 10 in a core group, on days when the Daughters are rehearsing there are up to 16 of us.  
These young men and women who supposedly have no discipline, work in a group – breathing exercises, articulation, movement, improvisation.
 These are not random sessions but regular. Every day they rehearse - they go over things, over and over, even though their lives are usually in chaos and violence is a constant. We work with a teacher, and a young persons advocate but it is the creative that drives the group.  While there is much that involves health i.e. pregnancy, housing, many are on JJ orders, in foster care, in refuges - the connection is the creative. Coming together in the circle, massaging, humming, singing, working together to create a new performance work that will connect with audiences all over Victoria and beyond.
Calling our souls, singing our spirits back home.

Maud Clark AM