Margi Brown Ash – December 16 2018

International Human Solidarity Day – December 20

A day to celebrate our unity in diversity and encourage new initiatives for poverty eradication.

Photo: Hannah Roche

Margi is an award-winning writer, theatre maker, educator and counsellor. She holds a BA DipEd; a Graduate Diploma Adolescent Health & Welfare; a Graduate Diploma Experiential & Creative Arts Therapy; a Master of Arts; a Master of Counselling and a PhD. Margi is currently bringing together 40 years’ experience as an artist and 17 years as a therapist in her latest publication based on a major outcome of her PhD, exploring what it means to belong. She describes her major stage work, ‘The Belonging Trilogy’, as “plays about belonging and un-belonging, home and un-home, connection and resilience.” The trilogy consists of Home, Eve and He Dreamed a Train. Margi’s other theatre works include co-authoring plays Joey the Mechanical Boy; The Paratrooper Project; co-devising The Knowing of Mary Poppins; Wizard of Oz; Coming Home (based on ‘The Belonging Trilogy’) and This Silent Thing. Her theatre career includes directing and acting and, together with Associate Professor Leah Mercer, she co-founded The Nest Ensemble, an intimate theatre company based on social constructionist values. Her academic career includes lecturing at QUT, Griffith and Curtin Universities, guest teaching at Queensland Academy of Creative Industries and facilitating at Arteles Creative Centre, Finland. Margi’s therapeutic work includes supervising counsellors, conducting wellness workshops and mentoring artists at 4change Coaching and Counselling which she founded in 2003.

Photo: Bev Jensen

Eve – music composed by Travis Ash
To be published by Playlab in 2019
60 minutes; 1 female; 1 narrator/musician
Original production: directed by Leah Mercer; writer played Eve
Part memoir, part fiction, part homage to the sacrifice of the artist, Eve has been described by Australian Stage as “a sublime, evocative, rich, disturbing and tightly woven piece that will leave you intellectually reeling and profoundly inspired”. Judged as insane by the standards of her day, Australian novelist and poet Eve Langley dressed as a man and changed her name to Oscar Wilde. She was committed to a mental institution by her husband and ended up poverty stricken, living as a recluse in a shack near Katoomba where she died alone, her body not found for three to four weeks after she died.
“The exquisite Margi Brown Ash gifts her audience an introduction with a beautiful and sensitive portrayal of Langley and the drive of the artist to create and to be free to do so.” – Sonny Clarke

Photo: Stephen Henry

He Dreamed a Train – co-written with Travis Ash
To be published by Playlab in 2019
60 minutes; 1 female; 1 male/musician
Original production: directed by Benjamin Knapton; writer played sister
He Dreamed a Train is a deeply personal story of a sister and her brother as they face his premature death. Inspired by the eponymous book by Margi’s brother, David Brown, it explores ruptures in family life, mortality and dreaming. The script is a play of suspension, reflection and anticipation. The unknown and antithetical landscapes of grief, fear, expectation and loss of control are explored through poetic and sometimes humorous insights. Liminal landscapes of memory and dreams are enriched by multiple voices from the canon of Western Literature. Essential to this vision is a visual dramaturgy that complements and amplifies the metaphors within the text, challenging expectations and so-called truths that sit around our perception of death and dying. Images come and go, dissolve and reappear. Voices and an original sound score complement the visual landscape as it deconstructs and re-constructs.