Hailing from Ngunnawal and Ngambri country (Canberra), Linda is an actor and writer, working across Australia in theatre, film, interdisciplinary art and applied drama. Her work often explores immigrant stories and stories of displacement and identity; notions of family and home; relationships in a tech-driven world and coming into agency from youth or marginalisation. She is currently undertaking Sport for Jove’s 2020 Producer Mentorship and is a Shopfront Arts Co-op Artslab resident, developing her piece what is saudade isyuánfèn is longing. As an actor, recent credits on stage include: Fragments by Maura Pierlot (The Street Theatre); in performance art: Rear view by Anna Breckon and Nat Randall (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art), Love and Desire: Pre-Raphaelite Poetry (National Gallery of Australia). Linda holds a Bachelor of Arts(Hons.)/Commerce from the Australian National University, majoring in English and Finance and minoring in Film Studies and Human Rights.
THE STREET TALKED TO LINDA ABOUT ITS EARLY PHASE PROGRAM TAKING IDEA TO CONCEPT ALL WITHIN THE COMPANY CONTEXT OF THE STREET.
TELL US ABOUT THE IDEAS YOU ARE PURSUING WITH THE SUPPORT OF THE STREET?
I’ve been delving a lot into the core notion of coming of age vs. coming into agency through this program and this work. Essentially, this story is a bit of a play on the rabidly popular children’s fantasy books that come around every couple of decades or so – the Harry Potters, the Narnias – where there’s some young protagonist struggling with the trials of everyday life (and often the extremes of ‘reality’) and instead finds themselves on an adventure in a fantasy land that theoretically empowers them and triggers some metamorphosis whereupon they find themselves ‘better equipped’ to deal with life. I’m just shifting that protagonist age bracket upwards to look at a twenty-something character – on that strange cusp between feeling like a child and needing to be an adult – who’s saddled with the decision of whether she must stay to take care of her now-dependent mother or to leave and pursue the future she had in mind for herself after the death of her father. In this process, she finds that the fantasy world she dreamed of as a child has come to life and this acts as a vessel for her, her mother and – fingers crossed – the audience to explore ideas of what adulthood and agency are, how we find and navigate these ideas at different stages of life using what we already have, especially in the face of uncertain futures and to hopefully, to (re)discover how we equip and reequip ourselves to face those futures.
WHY NOW?
Aside from the fact that I feel like there’s still a bit of a dearth of interesting explorations of ‘life beyond’ for women (life beyond marriage, motherhood, beyond work) – particularly for women above a certain age and even more so if they come from culturally diverse backgrounds; and certainly fewer works that really centralise those experiences with extended nuance, I think there’s also a certain universality in the experience of growing up and of ageing and their navigation. Couple that with the current fear for an uncertain future and general feeling of precariousness and in that sense, I suppose to me this story feels both vastly overdue and coincidentally right on time.
WHAT ARE SOME OF THE THEMES, CONCERNS AND EXPERIENCES YOU ARE DRAWING ON TO DEVELOP YOUR CONCEPT?
A lot of the initial concept for this work stemmed from the personal – from me, or from people I knew. I suppose it started with the general sense of being both too young and ill-equipped for adulthood, and too old to feel ill-equipped, and having to grapple with my own choices between staying or leaving – which is a theme I’ve always been kind of fascinated by. What compels people to stay or leave in any situation? On a broader level I suppose underlying the deep dive into notions of agency there’s a lot of exploration of guilt and of regret, and how those two feelings can feed each other; as well as themes of expectation: how society pushes us to value ourselves by certain roles, or conversely the way we choose to identify ourselves triggering a totally different value structure in others, or in the society we live in or move to – and as a result how a lot of these processes of cultivating self-worth get conflated and confused. I guess in that there’s also inherently an element of exploring certain cultural differences, and the tension between what you can clearly identify as a specific cultural difference vs. what is tentatively ‘universal’, which to me is always interesting, albeit a bit sticky.
WHAT PROCESSES ARE YOU USING AND WHO ARE YOUR COLLABORATORS?
I’ve been working with two incredible designers to help me visualise and make more tangible both the ‘real’ and ‘fantasy’ worlds that will feature in this piece – The Street’s in-house designer Imogen Keen for the real world, and recent NIDA graduate Aislinn King for the fantasy. Their (stunning) work has effectively helped me develop something of a visual mind-map for the relationships and themes and the space in which those things will play out. I’ve also been working with the lovely PJ Williams, who directed an actors’ improv workshop with Maxine Beaumont and Noonee Doronila that’s helped draw out so many beautiful options and nuances for this mother-daughter relationship that I’m writing about. It was also a happy coincidence that they’re both fluent in Tagalog, so I got to have a bit of an external view to what a multilingual production might look/feel like and what challenges might present themselves there. I’m also still flicking through a range of children’s fiction to look at whether there are any conventions I can/should play on and am always having discussions here and there about growing up and relationships to adulthood and agency in general, so if anyone has any suggestions or thoughts they’d like to throw at me, feel free to get in touch!
WHAT HAVE BEEN SOME OF THE DISCOVERIES FROM CONVERSATIONS WITH PEERS ABOUT THE CREATIVE PROCESS, FROM AUDIENCES TO COMMUNITY TO PROGRAMMING, THAT ARE INFORMING YOUR THINKING?
There’s been a lot of warmth and diversity in these peer-to-peer salons. I think, particularly for writers, that we can sometimes forget how much easier-faster-richer things can be when there are other, excellent people to bounce ideas off of. It’s been particularly interesting to hear how everyone has been utilising their strengths and ways of working that they love and balancing those with ways to shake up their habits of thinking, from embodied ways of working to interview processes to drawings that I’ve been able to mull over and shore away for future development processes. This Early Phase group also acts as a great gauge on audience and finding out about, for example, their enthusiasm for multilingual theatre has pushed me to lean into a direction I might’ve been approaching more with a sense of ‘working around’ previously.
WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO GET OUT OF THE EARLY PHASE PROCESS?
Aside from a clear, fleshed out concept and a full story? I guess a clearer, more structured sense of process – and an opening up to other options and tools for future creative process. There’s a part of me that wants to say, ‘a feeling that I know what I’m doing’ – in the sense of ‘next time I make something I’ll know exactly how to go about it,’ but we all know that that isn’t going to happen so I’ll settle with ‘feeling like I know where to go next with this project.’
And friends. Always friends and future collaborators.
WHAT KIND OF THEATRE DO YOU WANT TO MAKE WITH THE STREET IN A POST-COVID WORLD?
I mean, the core of what I seek to make hasn’t necessarily changed all that much – I still want to make work for and tell stories that center around people and faces and bodies and tales that we maybe don’t see enough of in the Australian arts and media landscape. I’m still going to want to continue to experiment with and find points of innovation with the form and to create theatre-specific, connected, collective experiences, but maybe in the immediate post-COVID future I’m looking at work that has a bit more of a sense of the reparative or, as a counterpoint to that, work that is more critical of the status quo that I might not have been bold enough to latch onto in the past.
WHAT HAVE BEEN AND CONTINUE TO BE THE CHALLENGES OF WORKING DURING COVID-19?
I think outside of the immediate fears for health and safety, one of the biggest things for me has just been the abject instability and uncertainty of what is coming next – the next paycheck, the next place to live, next plan, next step. There’s just been a reluctance and inability to make any plans and so it’s felt a bit like constantly hopping onto moving platforms while juggling and hoping you don’t fall off of the edge. I will admit however that this time hasn’t been entirely void of upsides – there have been a whole host of events and opportunities that have been made available to me by the pure virtue of the virtual, and so I think having questions of accessibility be brought to the forefront has been an unintended and overdue benefit. There’s a great article in ArtsHub about this by Jamila Main – she’s a young, South Australian theatremaker – that details her lived experience of being an artist with a disability pre- and during-COVID, and the fear that comes with potentially being ‘left behind’ once again as things go back to ‘normal’. Not to get too off topic, but I suppose the considerations beyond what has been specifically challenging this year are more what the challenges of working pre-COVID were that have either facilitated further challenges trying to work during COVID or have revealed ways of working during COVID that have eased some of those challenges for parts of our community.
WHAT DO YOU SEE ARE THE POSSIBILITIES OF LIVE-DIGITAL SETTINGS FOR THEATRE WORKS?
It’s been a strange and difficult year for most theatregoers, theatremakers, theatrelovers on this front: I know a lot of people who work in this space who are champing at the bit to get back into the space with live audiences and corporeal beings, and maybe believe that fundamentally theatre just can’t exist in a digital space. I don’t necessarily disagree – I think that collective, live experience is central to the very idea of theatre, but again I’d be lying if I said that I haven’t been able to access more ‘theatre’ through livestream (whether because of location, timing, or price) and make it to more ‘events’ than I ever have. I’m also a pretty big believer in and admirer of interdisciplinary art and to me, the idea of mixing live and digital formats within performances, as dual-experience performances or two-part hybrid performances, or even just leaning further into digital for more bonus/behind the scenes or in-progress content to accompany theatre work presents a lot of opportunity to innovate and interrogate why audience come to (or haven’t been coming to) the theatre, and how we can enrichen, diversify and make more accessible these experiences.
WHAT’S INSPIRING YOU CREATIVELY AT THE MOMENT?
Unexpectedly, a lot of my creative energies have been fuelled by a sense of frustration with a range of issues this year, partly from seeing so much frustration from others. In a way, it’s pushed me more strongly towards a sense of feeling like I have something to say (and enough to override the sense that maybe I’m not the most qualified one to say it), and this year some of the time as given me the space to work out how to say it. More generally, I’m being inspired by the ingenuity and fortitude so much of this year has bred, the people I’m working with, my own exploration of memory and learning to be a little more open and vulnerable with that and underpinning all that – the constant questioning of who is being included and who is being left behind.
WHAT ARE YOU READING/WATCHING CURRENTLY?
I can be a very scattered reader/watcher/listener of things, especially if I’m using them to generate inspiration for my own work (or to procrastinate on making it), so currently I’m in a space of a lot of flicking through things or only watching bits of them. I’m a couple of episodes into The Queen’s Gambit (I love chess, I love Anya Taylor-Joy and period pieces, so can’t really go wrong there), the criminally underrated and sadly cancelled Vinyl and past First Seen writer Michele Lee’s fictional podcast BROTH BITCH. I’m also about halfway through the US edition of The Good Immigrant, a collection of essays from writers identified by others as ‘immigrants’ in the United States. I’ve also been skimming through Arthur Koestler’s The Art of Creation and am about to order former Canberran Shu-Ling Chua’s essay collection Echoes. So, many things begun or that I have yet to begin, and nothing finished yet – not the worst metaphor for the state of my work right now.
STREET TALK 