Leading artists join Flinders Drama Centre for new performance development

During June and July, Flinders Drama Centre is bringing together internationally recognised and nationally significant artists to work alongside students for two ambitious new performance projects: Oranges and Lemons and Wrestling with Catastrophe.

With both projects, students have the opportunity to sharpen their expertise and unique voices by collaborating directly with outstanding professional artists, including Glace Chase (2025 Drama Centre Playwright in Residence), Basil Hogios (2025 Assemblage Artist-in-Residence) and Gerrard McArthur (2026 Drama Centre International Visiting Artist).

These projects highlight the Flinders Drama Centre’s approach: integrating professional artistic activity into teaching, so that students learn through participation in contemporary creative work rather than through simulation alone.

Oranges and Lemons – which will be presented in the Flinders University Drama Centre on June 19, in collaboration with Assemblage Centre for Creative Practice Research – is a new performance work by renowned Australian playwright and performer Glace Chase with composer Basil Hogios. The production has been developed within Assemblage’s creative practice infrastructure, The Cube – a 32-speaker ambisonic performance environment.

In Oranges and Lemons, three figures are trapped in an increasingly unstable web of intimacy, memory, and emotional dependency, shaped by the extraordinary musical sensitivity of its central character, whose inner world gradually begins to overwhelm the reality around them.

This will be performed by Chase and visiting UK actor Gerrard McArthur, along with third-year acting student Oscar Baldwin. The work explores how live composition, spatial sound and performance can shape audience experiences of character, intimacy and rupture.

McArthur returns to Adelaide, continuing a long association with Flinders’ Drama Centre and Adelaide audiences, that dates back to the 2000 Adelaide Festival production of The Ecstatic Bible by Howard Barker.

Immediately after his performance in Oranges and Lemons, McArthur steps into the director’s chair to lead the creation of Wrestling with Catastrophe, a major ensemble project marking Barker’s 80th birthday.

Bringing together student performers and theatre-makers from across the Drama Centre, the project explores the influence of Barker’s unique theatrical language through an ambitious process of image-making, heightened text and ensemble experimentation.

The production also welcomes two-time Tony-award winning lighting designer Nigel Levings, whose experience from an extensive international and Australian career will provide students with direct exposure to professional theatrical design and collaboration.

Together, these projects create opportunities for Flinders Drama students to work alongside artists at different stages of their careers and across multiple performance traditions – from contemporary writing and experimental sound practice to large-scale theatrical design and ensemble creation.

Christopher Hurrell, Manager of Flinders Drama Centre:

At Flinders, we are interested in creating conditions where learning and professional practice happen together. Students are not stepping out of training to encounter the industry later. They are already working alongside artists making ambitious new work.

These projects allow students to experience how professional performance is actually made: collaboratively, experimentally and in dialogue with artists who bring deep professional experience and distinctive creative voices.

Workshop showings and public outcomes will be presented across June and July.

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