Message from the Artistic Director

Message from the Artistic Director

Another huge and exciting year kicks off at Western Edge Youth Arts.

The education program will continue to push boundaries in 2017 – our planned programs at Whittington Primary School and North Geelong Secondary College will engage huge numbers of young people in rich educational experiences leading to fabulous performances for their school communities. We are also continuing our partnership with Victoria University Secondary College where the students will embark on the development of another radical Shakespeare adaptation of Macbeth. Penny Harpham teams up with writer Casey Nichols for this exciting gig.

The Geelong Edge’s new work, Walking The Line, is in creative development and will show at Geelong Performing Arts Centre in October.  Concern over racism is on the march internationally and in Australia, and this uber-edgy drama explores the experience of people from diverse cultural backgrounds living in Geelong, with our trade mark mix of humour and complex drama. It’s great to have Reuben Zalme on board for this project both as a performer and as facilitator. Reuben is an amazing young artist with a long history with the company who has skills in circus, music and theatre.

Both of our community youth theatre groups have started the year with culturally diverse older teenagers collaborating with artists like Georgia Symons, Natalie Lucic, Rex Pelman and Ror Malongdout to make unique new works.

As I said, another huge year, but that’s what we pride ourselves on at WEYA – serving hundreds of young people and helping them to tell the stories that matter to them and their communities.