Stories from inside life’s big top.

Posts tagged “community

Scenes from real life: Cuttings

Posted on February 8, 2023

Cuttings is a dynamic new play that grew out COVID and the beating red desert heart of Mparntwe/Alice Springs. It’s about to have its South Australian premiere at the 2023 Adelaide Fringe Festival.   In 2020, long-time Alice resident, novelist Jo Dutton (From Alice With Love), received a Creative Fellowship from Arts NT. She had a lot going on that year. Diagnosed with degenerative neurological condition Parkinson’s eight years earlier, she’d recently had brain surgery, travelling to and from Adelaide for treatment and recovery. Keen to discover new opportunities for her writing in lived, collaborative settings, Jo turned her hand from prose to play writing, and books to theatre.   A mother of daughters, Jo had watched the rise of the #MeToo movement with…

A Podcast about Precious Objects

Posted on May 15, 2017

“Objects should not ‘touch’ [us] because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts.” – Jean-Paul Sartre Auspicious Plastic is a monthly podcast about ‘things’ that bring meaning to our lives, and even make us happy.   When using my Mum’s old Tupperware containers as “grief therapy” after she passed away, I discovered how such simple ‘pieces of plastic’ could hold so much meaning – and emotion. And how these objects touched me so profoundly, as if animated by something deeply mystical…   I wondered how my use of…