Bundanon

Sally Sussman (Australian Performance Exchange) with Hung Pei-ching (Performosa Taiwan) and Chen Po-ting (TW), Betsy Lan (TW), Valerie Berry (SA), Michael Toisuta (NSW), and Nicole Pingon (NSW)

Sally Sussman is a director, theatre-maker and dramaturge and Artistic Director of Australian Performance Exchange, which creates intercultural performances responding to current and historic concerns of social justice, diplomacy and representation. She has been a recipient of the Rex Cramphorn Theatre Award and Asialink Residencies in Sulawesi, Shanghai and Taipei.

Sally trained as a performer in traditional Chinese theatre and directed her first works in Mandarin in Beijing. She has made over 30 works in collaboration with artists from China, Indonesia, Japan, Vietnam, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia and First Nations and Settler Australia at venues like the Sydney Opera House, Adelaide Festival Centre and sites around Western Sydney, Newcastle and Shanghai. Sally recently collaborated with Jiva Parthipan on The River Project for 23^rd Biennale of Sydney. She works across theatre, promenade, installation, documentary & physical theatre, and interactive performance and is reflexive to content and context and the creative contributions of collaborators.

In residence at Bundanon

The Island Project, an intercultural performance project with Australian Performance Exchange (Sydney) and Performosa 演摩莎劇團(Taipei). The Island Project speaks to acute climate and ecological issues in the Indo-Pacific. It reorients our gaze away from nationalistic perspectives towards thinking about shared underwater ecologies, fish-human mutations and the negotiation of creative collaborations between species and across borders.

The Residency is the beginning of our first face-to-face encounter,  to develop a distinct movement vocabulary, multi-lingual score and mix underwater sea sounds, interview material and animal sounds recorded near the rivers and creeks of Bundanon.