The Nargun and the Stars - 2009 - Perth International Arts Festival

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Company Biography: ERTH-Visual & Physical Inc ERTH brings the impossible to life. ERTH is dedicated to creating original new Australian visual performance works, providing audiences with eye-popping visual experiences. Giant puppetry, stilt-walkers, inflatable environments and aerial and flying creatures – ERTH is all these things and more. Founded in 1990 in Ballarat, Victoria, and now housed in Sydney’s newest contemporary arts complex, Carriageworks, the Company builds its own repertoire while also generating work for other resident performance companies and commissions for external organisations. Their work spans from roving-style street theatre to larger scale, site-specific productions and theatre shows. These include Incubator, Gargoyles, Waterheads, Caution, Bushfire, The Garden and most recently Gondwana and The Petting Zoo. Their new work is an adaptation of Patricia Wrightson’s classic novel The Nargun and the Stars, written by Verity Laughton and co-directed by acclaimed Indigenous director Wesley Enoch. Nargun was commissioned by Sydney Festival and Perth International Arts Festival and premiered at the Sydney Festival in January 2009. ERTH has built a national and international reputation for its work, regularly touring to major Australian and international festivals. These have included the Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide festivals, Hong Kong Fringe, Galway Arts Festival, Stockton Riverside Festival in the UK, Singapore Arts Festival and the Festival of Arts and Ideas in Connecticut, USA. ERTH undertakes community workshops, cultural development projects and mentorships and its workshop studio custom-builds for many clients. Past clients include the Sydney Opera House, Sydney Olympic Organising Committee, Centenary of Federation and Opera Australia. Increasingly ERTH is bridging the gap between cultural and theatrical institutions by bringing physical theatre and puppetry to museum environments. Successful roving and aerial performances at Melbourne Museum, Old Parliament House in Canberra and Auckland Museum have led to commissioned design, construction and performance programs that span several years each. This list also includes Powerhouse Museum and Australian Museum in Sydney and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, California. A small core team of artists manage dozens of freelancers. They come from diverse disciplines such as sculpture, painting, costume design and mechanical engineering and the performance arts of musical, physical, circus and aerial theatre. ERTH provides valuable development opportunities for established and emerging artists. ERTH is a non-profit organisation – an association incorporated in NSW – and receives project funding from Arts NSW and the Australia Council for the Arts. ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Scott Wright CO-DIRECTOR / MANAGER Sharon Kerr CO-DIRECTOR / DESIGN COORDINATOR Steve Howarth MUSICAL DIRECTOR Phil Downing artist Biographies Patricia Wrightson AUTHOR Patricia Wrightson has written more than 15 books for children and a novel for adults and has edited several collections of stories for children. She uses Aboriginal folk-spirits to enrich her children’s fiction, which she categorises as contemporary Australian fantasy. She believes that fantasy can be used as a means of exploring the ‘other’ point of view, which, in turn, she hopes will stretch the reader’s understanding and facilitate independent thinking. Patricia Wrightson has received many honours and awards for her fiction over four decades, including the Australian Children’s Book Council Book of the Year Award for The Crooked Snake, The Nargun and the Stars, The Ice is Coming and A Little Fear, which also won the Boston Globe Horn Book Award. She was awarded the Dromkeen Children’s Literature Foundation Medal in 1984 for overall excellence in her field. In 1986 she became the only Australian writer to win the Hans Christian Andersen Medal. Verity Laughton WRITER Verity Laughton writes for most forms of theatre. Her work includes main-stage adult drama, a promenade community event, a musical, adaptations, plays for child and family audiences, work for dance, puppets and theatre of image and a ‘neutral script’. Her plays include The Lightkeeper (AWGIE for Community Theatre, 2004) (Mainstreet Theatre and national tour), The Snow Queen (Windmill Performing Arts), Burning (Griffin Prize, 2001), Carrying Light (STSA and Vitalstatistix) and The Mourning After (three productions: Playbox Theatre Company and national tour, Riverina Theatre Company and Interplay Productions, NZ). Verity’s radio play Fox, created for ABC Radio National, won the 2004 AWGIE for Best Radio Play. Recent work includes Gondwana for ERTH-Visual & Physical and Davy and Moon Door for ABC Audio Arts. Sweet Thing, her latest play for adults, was shortlisted for the Griffin Award, Croydon Warehouse Theatre (London) International Playwriting Award and the Rodney Seaborn Prize. She is a member of the 7-ON group of playwrights, with whom she is writing a stage adaptation of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. Scott Wright CO-DIRECTOR Scott Wright is the Artistic Director and co-founder of ERTH-Visual & Physical Inc and trained as a dancer and choreographer in Victoria for three years prior. He is a multi-skilled artist incorporating puppetry (one of his greatest loves), movement, acting, aerial, stilts and pyrotechnics. He has directed most of ERTH’s successful touring shows, including Gargoyles, Garden, Bushfire, the infamous Waterheads and the epic Gondwana. Scott has worked with a large variety of professional companies and institutions, individual artists and community groups both nationally and internationally. Over the years he has been a mentor to numerous young emerging artists throughout the country and has freelanced as a director and performer to broaden his experience and enhance his professional credentials. Personal highlights include a sell-out season with 42nd Street on Broadway, acting as a research and development consultant for the Sydney Olympics, performing for the Japanese royal family and recently directing a show with over 200 community participants in which an aria was performed by six hotrod cars and three opera singers. Wesley Enoch CO-DIRECTOR Wesley Enoch is the eldest son of Doug and Lyn Enoch, who hail from Stradbroke Island in Queensland. He is Nuccual Nuugi. Wesley has written and directed extensively for the stage, working with most of Australia’s state theatre companies and major festivals. He has been artistic director of Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Performing Arts and Ilbijerri Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Theatre, an associate artist with the Queensland Theatre Company, resident director at the Sydney Theatre Company and director of the Indigenous section of the opening ceremony of the 2006 Commonwealth Games. He is currently an associate artist at Company B and a trustee of the Sydney Opera House. In 2008 he was the artistic director of Australia’s delegation to the Festival of Pacific Arts in American Samoa and directed Dallas Winmar’s Yibiyung for Company B Belvoir. In 2007 his The Story of the Miracles at Cookie’s Table was directed by Marion Potts for the Griffin Theatre Company, having won the 2005 Patrick White Playwright’s Award. In 2003 Wesley directed Eora Crossing, a spectacular outdoor event for Legs on the Wall, Museum of Sydney and the Sydney Festival. He directed Riverland in 2004 for Windmill Performing Arts and the Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane 7
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The Nargun and the Stars - 2009 - Perth International Arts Festival

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