Top director leads $20m WA stage spectacle
Tony Award-winning Broadway director Diane Paulus is working with Russell James' Nomad Two Worlds on a multi-million stage spectacular set to premiere in Perth before touring the world.
Paulus has led a big creative team from New York to join James and Aboriginal cultural leaders in the Kimberley this week as preparations gather pace for the show touted as a global entertainment showcase for indigenous Australia.
"We wanted to get (the visiting producers) really absorbed in what we mean by culture, collaboration and reconciliation so those aren't just words," James said.
The WA-raised photographer, now based in New York, said the $20 million-plus production was on the scale of a Cirque du Soleil show and was slated for a world-premiere season in Perth in January 2017.
"Currently it is scheduled to be here for six to eight weeks and then start a three-year tour," James said.
The show was the next step for the Nomad Two Worlds cross-cultural arts collective after it worked on a 2011 Broadway show with Hugh Jackman, who is a patron of the new enterprise.
"Hugh has been helping us incredibly to navigate through this," James said.
Paulus won back-to-back Tony Awards in 2012 and 2103, and this year was named among the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine, which hailed her as a Broadway genius who has reinvented such classics as Porgy and Bess and Pippin.
Before travelling to Broome and Derby this week, Paulus and several other visiting production experts ran master-classes for students at the WA Academy of Performing Arts.
WA Aboriginal consultants on the production include Donny Woolagoodja, Clifton Bieundurry, Richard Walley, and Tjyllyungoo Lance Chadd, whose exhibition Boorongurup was launched at the Perth Town Hall on Friday night.
James said the show would be an immersive, cross-cultural blend of theatre, music, dance, and multimedia art as audiences moved through a series of five connected, transportable theatres.
"It is a very big undertaking and it has to have a big tour life to make commercial sense," he said. "Over two years we have been hitting every financial and creative milestone. An enormous amount of the funding is in place."
"We are trying to make this a global story, wildly entertaining and to leave you not with a preachy sense of what you have seen but something wholly based on Western Australian concepts and ideas," James said.
"This forward-looking fusion of cultures is a dialogue about the identity of WA as a modern society sitting in an ancient, culturally rich, landscape."
Paulus and James joined Tjyllyungoo at the opening of Boorongurup, the Nyoongar artist's exhibition about the significant indigenous site of the Porongurup Ranges in the Great Southern.
The exhibition takes its name from the Bibbulmun Nyoongar word Boorongurup, which means "place of the totemic spirits".
Tjyllyungoo said his 15-painting exhibition and his wider work with Nomad Two Worlds was helping bridge the gap of understanding between cultures.
"I hope that these works will evoke intrigue and invite the audience to a deeper contemplation and understanding of our cultural and spiritual unity with this timeless land," he said. "When we have significant places, with significant meanings that are this important to our culture, then we have a responsibility to bring its spirit back to life in our people, in our community, for our youth, our future and strong cultural longevity."
Hi exhibition is supported by energy infrastructure company ATCO Australia, which has partnered with Nomad Two Worlds since the cultural festival associated with the 2011 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.
