Well ... that's a wrap on 2021! 

As we look towards 2022 in whatever form it now takes, I wanted to pass on a massive THANK YOU for your support this year. Many of you stood by us through a year none of us expected, and we felt your presence and generosity across our digital and in-person performances. I am proud and grateful for what has been achieved under very difficult circumstances and I am emerging from 2021 feeling tired but still inspired!

 Last year we navigated the many ups and downs of one of the most surreal years on record — one distinctly marked by our tentative return to live performance. At the end of 2020, TOBY was reprogrammed at La Mama Theatre for March 2021. I must admit to feeling some trepidation about casting, rehearsing, and presenting a 2-hour work in quite a short time frame and also during a pandemic (!) However, having beaten back the Covid cases to zero in Melbourne, we set out armed with our masks, shields, abundant Glen 20, handsan, and rehearsed industriously until lockdown #3 got us and we had to move online.

This was a brave new world we were exploring but, for a time, rehearsals felt almost vaguely normal as we headed to bump-in, preview, and opening night. In the end, TOBY was very well received and we were so fortunate to have been able to perform all 7 shows to sold-out full capacity audiences. I would like to thank the cast, crew, creatives and, of course, La Mama Theatre for being so accommodating, big-hearted and kind. They made our time in the theatre so easy and their support really allowed us to focus on presenting the work in its best possible light. 

If you would like to see a full digital performance of TOBY, you can watch it here.

Looking to the future, we are excited to share new partnerships and projects with you in 2022 and to bring you up to date with the latest on our immersive theatre work Secret of the Raft.

In March 2022, ReAction Theatre will be collaborating with Cardinia Cultural Centre to undertake our next creative development of Secret of the Raft in CCC's brand new 360-degree digital gallery. 

For the first time, we will be building 3-D projection-mapped scenes with a groundbreaking gaming platform called Unreal Engine. Homie, our digital artist, has been working on the scenes throughout 2021, and the time-lapse footage here showcases some work in progress for a scene entitled ‘A valley in the Hautes Alpes region of France.’ What you'll see is Homie creating the landscape, building the foliage, and creating the environmental visual effects taking his inspiration from the pre-production images developed during the big lockdown of 2020.  You’ll be able to follow our progress on the Secret of the Raft’s Facebook page.

In other exciting news, the script for a short film that took its creativity from Melbourne’s first long lockdown will have an American remake! The original short, called Isolation in Lockdown, was a collaboration that celebrated the imagination of youth. It was written by recent AWGIE winner, Donna Hughes, directed by myself over Zoom, and performed and edited by Hannah Ruthven, who was at the time a recent graduate of Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School. The American version will be remade with Amelia Wray (Sophia in Disney Channel’s ‘Sydney to the Max’) in the lead role and will form part of twelve individual short films to create a 60-minute film entitled Voices of Women – Entanglement 2021. This will be launched in 2022, however, in the meantime, you can watch the Aussie version we made here.

Finally… there is no doubt that performing arts organisations have taken a cruel pummeling during the past 2 years, with many venues remaining shut down for long periods of time. As I write this, a number of high-profile musicals have just canceled shows in both Melbourne and Sydney. With each passing day, it now seems unlikely that the effects of the pandemic will dissipate anytime soon. However, I have faith that artists will rise to the challenge because they know how to thrive in the grey areas and the in-between spaces. This year, I'm looking forward to a time of inventiveness and consolidation as we figure out how to adapt and accommodate the pandemic’s demands on our way of life. 

Louise and the ReAction team