Sue Rider – June 25 2017

2017: 50th anniversary of the referendum to change the constitution

to allow the Commonwealth to create laws regarding Aboriginal people and include them in the census.

Sue works as a director, writer and dramaturge across mainstream theatre, chamber theatre, opera, community theatre, theatre for young people and theatre in galleries. She has been Artistic Director of La Boite Theatre, an Adjunct Professor at the University of Queensland, and has received an Arts Queensland Creative Fellowship. Sue has received eleven writing commissions and has won many awards for her writing and directing. Her writing credits include the plays Federation Ragtime, Meeting Karpovsky (co-authors Helen Moulder and Jon Trimmer), Playing Miss Havisham (co-author Helen Moulder); the youth operas Sid the Serpent Who Wanted to Sing, The Iron Man, Zoggy the Time Traveller (co-librettist Jim Vile) and The Silence Tree (composer Malcolm Fox). She has developed two plays with students from Brisbane’s Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts (ACPA) for Artslink Queensland: Deadly Eh?! and My Story, Your Story. Sue’s other plays include Bumpy Angels, set in a 1954 home for pregnant and wayward girls, and The Matilda Women, which celebrates the lives of nine extraordinary women from Queensland’s past.

Sample image

Freedom Ride … I Have a Dream
Australian Script Centre, 1993
120 minutes; 3 female, 5 male
Cast age: 16 to 18, 18+; Audience age: young adult, adult
A play in two parts on the subject of racism. Part One presents the story of the Montgomery bus boycott arising from the refusal of Rosa Parkes to give up her seat on a bus and leading to the rise of Martin Luther King Jr. Part Two is set in contemporary Australia, in the household of a group of young people who re-create the sixties’ Freedom Ride in order to heal the spirit of Auntie, an Aboriginal woman, who is the centre of their world.

Sample image: Toulouse Lautrec

Dancing on the Walls of Paris
Australian Script Centre, 1991
75 minutes; 2 female, 3 male
Cast age: 16 to 18, 18+; Audience age: young adult, adult
A group of performers leads an audience through a series of moments where ideas, forms and images of the artist Toulouse Lautrec, and Paris in the 1890s connect and clash with the dynamism of contemporary art. Set in a circus, the action roughly follows Lautrec’s life from birth and childhood through his development as an artist and his increasing ‘insanity’ until his eventual death.