Griffin Theatre Company will be putting on its first ever Batch Festival this month.
Associate Artistic Director and Festival Curator, Phil Spencer, says, “[Artistic Director Lee Lewis] and I are constantly looking for new and interesting ways to find out who that next generation of Australian writers is. And the reason we called it Batch Festival is because we viewed it as an opportunity to find that next batch of artists. We started the festival to try and get hold of artists whose work we were interested in, who we thought were having vital, engaging, contemporary, important conversations with audiences; but who maybe weren’t writing plays, or weren't seeing the Griffin Theatre as the framework in which they could be telling those stories.”
Griffin Theatre Company puts shows on at the 105-seat Stables Theatre in Darlinghurst. “I hate going to the Opera House. For me, what's important about live performance is that you can get up close and personal with live performance artists. And what's brutal and brilliant about small theatre spaces, is that there's nowhere to hide. This is a festival with new, exciting and experimental work, and you really can't hide behind the props and costumes,” Phil says.
Batch Festival aims to showcase the “freshest, edgiest and most inventive new shows”. “We made it an open call-out for submissions.”
“Rather than me as the Festival Director dictating what I thought the tone and colour of the festival should be, we took submissions. We got over 130 submissions, and we chose 12 projects. And those 12 projects are getting a lot of support from us to either premiere their work for the first time, or certainly the first time in Sydney.”
Omar Musa
Phil gives us a sneak peek of what to expect from the shows. “Omar Musa is a Malaysian-Australian rapper, novelist, poet and performer. He's probably the most mesmerising live performer I've ever seen, and one of the country’s finest writers. His show is going to be a mix of spoken word, some of the songs off his new album and a visual component. It's going to be a bare bones, bare knuckles evening in the theatre with a very articulate and angry man.”
“There's a spoken word event called 'Unspoken Word'. Spoken word, theatre and poetry are really all interwoven into a genre. 'Unspoken Word' has a fantastic line-up. It's a stripped back appreciation of just how many fierce and intelligent writers we've got here in Sydney.”
“Betty Grumble is a sex-clown-burlesque-activist. She's probably one of the most politically engaged performance makers in Australia and it's sort of inexplicable. There's no reason that Griffin Theatre should put Betty Grumble on the stage, other than to just set a bomb off and show an audience how visceral and passionate and confronting making work about tearing down the systems can be. And the thing about Betty is that she's the most fabulous and grotesque performer you'll ever come across. It's messy and important and political. And there's lots of glitter.”
