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| Joe Woodward… “Theatre is a silent space which every so often will come alive and distill the human spirit.” Photo: Peter Hislop |
by Helen Musa
There are very few school teachers who live to see themselves immortalised in bricks and mortar, but Joe Woodward, director of The Daramalan Theatre Company (and CityNews theatre critic), is one of them.
On October 25, the state-of-the-art Joe Woodward Theatre will be formally opened at the college in Dickson run by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart as part of the new Issoudun Performing Arts Centre, named after the place in France, where Jules Chevalier founded the MSC order in 1854.
The 180-seat theatre features a safe lighting grid, two drama rooms, a drama staffroom, make-up rooms with fancy lights, a green room and separate dressing rooms. There are also two music classrooms, 12 soundproof music practice rooms and a band room.
Almost scaringly experimental to some people, Woodward has under the aegis of his private company Shadow House PITS, run Theatre in the Car for the Multicultural Fringe, staged plays at theatres all around town, co-produced shows with the Actors Company and taken part in the Come Alive! museum theatre festival, also writing many plays.
Educated at Villanova College in Brisbane, Woodward went to Mt Gravatt Teachers’ College, then saw himself posted for two years to a one-teacher school in Teelba in the Maranoa region, where “everyone had guns, which was kind of scary, but they were very cultured.”
Back in Brisbane, he returned to university then got a job as a professional actor and educational officer at the edgy La Boite Theatre.
In 1980 Woodward was offered the position of artistic director of Jigsaw Theatre Company in Canberra and found himself catapulted into the midst of an exciting scene.
He quickly met David Bates, who now owns The Famous Spiegeltent, with whom he founded and ran Pie In The Sky Theatre and Bar (PITS) from 1981 to 1984.
Woodward estimates more than 50,000 people came to late-night gigs and 20,000 people to theatre shows.
After teaching at Stirling College, he was offered a job as director and executive officer of StageCoach Theatre School, where he stayed from 1985 to 1994, often raising eyebrows with provocative productions such as The Silent Scream and Blindfold.
All the while he continued professional connections with Human Veins Dance Company and One Extra Dance Company.
In 1994 he and his wife decided they’d make a documentary about indigenous culture, so bought a bus in which they planned to live, but the starter motor never worked.
In 1995 he set up his own performance company and staged 15 shows, but with their two children growing fast, he applied for a job at Daramalan College, which he knew regularly hosted workshops run by the National Institute of Dramatic Art.
The interviewing principal, Father Denis Uhr, knew that Woodward had little secondary teaching, but said: “I’m going to take a risk”.
He’s been there for nearly 17 years, 14 of them as co-ordinator of performing arts.
Woodward’s timing was perfect. Canberra had one of the most advanced education systems in the country.
He found that the school had a distinguished history of staging musicals, but really wanted to look at straight theatre.
Using Daramalan Football Club as a model, he set up Daramalan Theatre Company, which meant the school could carry public liability and that they could roll any surplus through to the next year.
A deluge of Western theatre classics followed, including a lot of re-interpreted Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Bertolt Brecht and Euripides, all involving preparatory school camps. Several school-leavers have got straight into NIDA.
Daramalan has been consistently supportive of Woodward’s radical approach to the theatre and he praises the humanitarian values on which MSC was founded. A deputy principal once told him that people should be allowed to fall down, but that there should always be someone there to pick them up.
When he wanted to stage his 2002 play, Cathedral Song, which included drug abuse and the concept of slaughter at the altar, the principal and brothers came back saying it was okay and that “the students need to look into themselves”.
It fascinates former altar boy Woodward that a Catholic order is more tolerant than the state system he once knew, encouraging different cultures and viewpoints.
To Joe Woodward, theatre has a place on that humanitarian spectrum, providing “the liminal relationship between the actor, the self and the character.”
“Theatre is a silent space which every so often will come alive and distill the human spirit,” he says.
First published at Canberra City News, October 23, 2024
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