Melissa Cantwell

Writer and Director

Melissa is an independent artist with a background in writing, directing and programming. Her recent directorial works include Mary Stuart for Perth Festival and Performing Lines WA and The Arsonists (WAAPA). For her independent company The Kabuki Drop: Whale Fall (Perth Festival and PICA); Nocturna; Slap and Tickle (Adelaide Cabaret Festival); The Average Joe (Fringeworld) and Blink (Winter Arts Festival). As curator: The Elders Project (Fremantle Festival / Art on the Move).  

Her previous roles in the sector include Artistic Director of Perth Theatre Company, Associate Director (PTC) and Program Manager of The Blue Room. She received an Emerging Leader’s fellowship from the International Society for Performing Arts and has been a guest artist and speaker for numerous national organisations and institutions. She has a BA (Film, ECU) and post-graduate Bachelor of Performing Arts (Directing, WAAPA).

Bruno Booth

Contemporary Artist

Bruno has used a wheelchair for most of his life, interrupted by a short and unsuccessful career as an amateur stilt walker when he used prosthetic legs as a child. In his memory these leather and metal devices would not have been out of place on the set of some dystopian, apocalyptic epic – not in a cool and attractive Fury Road sort of way, more like the zombies in the original Walking Dead. The experience of wearing restrictive equipment left him with a dislike of tight fitting clothing, a love of speed and a need to reach over his head in supermarkets – as a child he made the decision to use a wheelchair as his primary mode of transport – and he’s never looked back (probably because he’s too busy looking out for sand pits on dark footpaths).

Having a disability has been a constant background hum throughout Bruno’s life. Kind of like a social tinnitus – you know it’s there but you try not to talk about it. It was only when he started to call himself an artist, without cringing too much, that he began to engage critically with what it meant to be categorised as disabled.

Janine Oxenham

Performer

Janine Oxenham is a Malgana Yamatji woman from the Shark Bay area in WA. She has studied dance at both NAISDA college, NSW and WAAPA, WA. She has choreographed and performed as a freelance contemporary Indigenous dancer for numerous festivals in regional WA. In 2015 she mounted the work Willy Willy as part of the Ausdance’s Future Landings project. She has facilitated community dance groups and performed as part of the core crew for the traveling festival Gascoyne In May for the past 9 years.

More Recently, Janine has worked as Movement Director and choreographer for Yirra Yaakin (YY) and Perth Festival productions of Hecate and Panawathi Girl. She is currently working on various independent projects including working on telling stories of the Gondwana link with Annette Carmichael Projects, Josh Pether’s experimental durational work The Reckoning and her own 7-week series Contours, created from traveling and experiencing the country of the Gascoyne. 

Daisy Sanders

Dance and Multidisciplinary Artist

Daisy Sanders is a Boorloo (Perth) based independent artist, a proud senior company member of Sensorium Theatre and a WAAPA graduate (2013 BA Dance with 2017 First Class Honours). She devises immersive choreographic works and is a uniquely joyful multidisciplinary artist working across a variety of roles – performer, creator, director, dramaturg, researcher and teacher. Recent projects include Patch’s Lighthouse (Perth Festival), The Last Great Hunt’s inaugural Gatherer’s Collective, Mám by Teac Damsa (Ireland), GuiShu/BELONG by Steamworks Arts (WA) and HOME by Geoff Sobelle (USA). In 2022 Daisy will be a core artist in Contours – a new work by Janine Oxenham dancing songlines through remote communities in WA’s Gascoyne Region. Daisy’s experience of chronic illness (2015-20) enabled her to develop a unique rest-focused dance practice and a deeply considered approach to building creative ecologies. She draws on this in her work as a passionate emerging arts advocate, facilitator and leader.

Ella Hetherington

Theatre-maker, Director and Performer

Ella Hetherington has worked extensively as an actor, physical performer and contemporary performance maker across a range of performance disciplines. As an actor, devisor and collaborator she has worked with all the major Western Australian theatre companies, The Last Great Hunt, Sensorium, aMoment, Steamworks, littleY, Emma Fishwick, Renegade Productions, Encounter and kdm Industries. She has toured internationally as a physical performer with her own projects and created works with companies such as Patch, La Fura Del Baus, Erth, Legs on the Wall and Force Majeure. Ella has received several Equity nominations for her theatre roles and a Helpmann nomination for The Red Tree.

As a writer she has had works commissioned by WASO, Bizircus, The WA Museum with her first major work ShadowBoxing being commissioned, produced and toured by Black Swan State Theatre Company.

Ella is a casual lecturer in devising at WAAPA.