My House is a Wild World
A collaboration between The Finger Players (SG) and Gold Satino (AUS).
A woman, a wild animal, and her lover try living in a house together. They try, and fail, and try again, through seismic and galactic shifts. This is a story about how our house breaks our hearts, and how we let it.
My House is a Wild World is interested in how both our island homes are strange / wild in their own way, and is a multidisciplinary site-responsive performance work.
Dec 2022 Singapore
Creative and Production Team
Co-Directors: Davina Wright & Myra Loke
Co-Playwrights: Davina Wright & Ellison Tan
Co-produced by Xavier O’Shannessy and The Finger Players
Performers: Ellison Tan, Myra Loke, Xavier O’Shannessy
Spatial Designer: Moses Tan
Costume Designer: Max Tan
Lighting Designer: Genevieve Peck
Sound Designer, Live Musician and Animator: Glynn Urquhart
Production Engineer: Lee Yew Jin (Ctrl Fre@k)
Production Manager: Celestine Wong
Stage Manager: Ng Siaw Hui
Assistant Stage Manager: Gillian Ong
Technical Coordinator: Zamier A Bakar
Technical Crew: Huang Xiangbin, Melvin Lee, Raymond Goei
Key Visual Designer: Sim Xin Feng
Key Photographer: Juliana Tan
Photography Archival: Crispian Chan
Videography Archival: Jai Rafferty
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
RUTHLESS
A guided mediation through the dark undertow of the Mornington Peninsula for Front Beach Back Beach.
RUTHLESS is interested in the dark undertow of a sunny beachside suburb. It is a guided meditation through the dark. A journey through a psychosocial hinterland. A queer horror on the beach.
Meet someone at a kind-of paradise. Get onto a bus. Drive along the beach road. Past the new cars, and the new houses and the picture window scenes of families playing board games. Something more sinister is brewing in the man-made inlets and the dank undergrowth of the territory between. You are alone at night in a place you don't recognise, even though it's your home.
RUTHLESS is about being well, being afraid, being “relaxed and comfortable” in the face of threats or fears we can’t see or name. It’s about the pressure to be OKAY.
Gold Satino invites you to look underneath the Peninsula’s sunny, primary-coloured holiday branding, its comfort and self-confidence, to find a more unsettled topography.
RUTHLESS
November 2022, Martha’s Cove
Writer/Director Meredith Rogers & Davina Wright
Composer & Sound Designer Glynn Urquhart
Performers James Baxter, Meredith Rogers, Claudia Nugent, Glynn Urquhart, Xavier O’Shannessy, Shell O’Meara and Hannah Tappy with Dan Koop.
Producer Xavier O’Shannessy
Curated by Dan Koop
Commissioned by Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery and Public Art Commission
Appearing in Front Beach Back Beach
Produced by Bureau of Works
SEDUCTION
Seduction is a drive-in/drive-by performance of excruciating intimacy set in a landscape of bleak urban grandeur. It is about friendship. About sex. And bodies. And how women who aren’t dancers dance. It’s about reverse parking. Falling over in carparks. Tinder dates. Believing you’ll never have sex (with another person) again. Silence.
Two women navigate the world, the violence of making performance and the seduction of art, friendship, and how their feminisms are different and the same.
Seduction has been nominated for the Green Room Award in Visual Design in Contemporary and Experimental Performance.
September 2019, Docklands and West Melbourne
Writers/Directors Davina Wright and Meredith Rogers
Performers Cazz Bainbridge, Ross de Winter, Claudia Nugent, Shelley O’Meara, Xavior O’Shannessy, Meredith Rogers, Glynn Urquhart, and Davina Wright
Composer Glynn Urquhart
Costume Designer Cazz Bainbridge
Stage Managers Mikayla Kelly and Grace Vestuto
Marketing/Publicity Cazz Bainbridge and Xavier O’Shannessy
Producer Xavier O’Shannessy
Photo Credit Pier Carthew
THIS IS GRAYSON
Grayson has been in this carpark for ten thousand two hundred and sixty-one years. She’s been waiting for you. So she can show you the gaps. Between her world and yours.
This is Grayson is the story of a little girl who lives between worlds. She wants to show you who she meets and what she sees. She wants you to know what it’s like to live in the in-between. Not just for kids and not just for adults. Gold Satino made the show that they needed when they were young queers, awkward outsiders yearning for someone to see them. An intimate, surreal and immersive journey through Newport’s forgotten lands.
This is Grayson received four Green Room Award Nominations in the Contemporary and Experimental Performance panel and received the awards for Innovation in Site Responsive Performance and Performance for Young Audiences.
September 2018, Newport
April 2021, Newport
Writer/Director Davina Wright
Performers Ross de Winter, Cazz Bainbridge, Meredith Rogers, Claudia Nugent, Lachlan Motti, Glynn Urquhart, and Xavier O’Shannessy, Shell, with Hannah Cuthburtson
Composer Glynn Urquhart
Dramaturg Meredith Rogers
Stage Manager Bryce Ward
Producer Xavier O’Shannessy
This project was supported by Melbourne Fringe, Hobsons Bay City Council and Australia Council for the Arts.
Photo Credit Pier Carthew
DION
You leave the house. You get into a stranger’s car. You go for a drive. It’s not real though, because you met them online. Part simulated drive, part actual drive, part love song to being left alone. Or driving away. Or accidentally being hit by a car. Dion is an ode to fitness, heartbreak and the things you see when you choose to look.
Winner of Liveworks Experimental Arts Award, supported by Performance Space, and Best Performance, Melbourne Fringe Festival Awards 2016.
Winner Weekly Award for Best Theatre and the John Chataway Innovation Award, Adelaide Fringe Festival Awards 2018.
September 2016, North Melbourne
March 2018, Adelaide
Writer/Director Davina Wright
Devised by Gold Satino
Performers (North Melbourne) Cazz Bainbridge, Ross de Winter, Xavier O'Shannessy, Lachlan Motti, Tamiah Bantum, and Davina Wright, with Eben Rojter, and Carolyn Butler
Performers (Adelaide) Cazz Bainbridge, Ross de Winter, Xavier O'Shannessy, Lachlan Motti, Claudia Nugent, and Davina Wright, with Conor Wakefield
Design Ross de Winter
Sound Design Tom Davies
Lighting Consultantion Tom Willis
Producer Xavier O’Shannessy
Dion was developed with assistance from Arts House. Gold Satino would like to thank them for their generous support.
"A fringe lesbian revenge art grenade." The Age
Photo Credit Pier Carthew