DIRECTOR Nadja Kostich and video artist Michael Carmody are about to unleash the “dogs of war” on to the backdrop of a play coming to The Street Theatre, with disturbing images of wild dogs to conjure up conflict. 

“Bare Witness” is playwright Mari Lourey’s take on what happens when an inexperienced, young journalist, Dannie, finds herself catapulted into a Balkan war zone.

Kostich hails from Canberra – Lyneham Primary, Lyneham High, Dickson College, the ANU, then moving to the Victorian College of the Arts.

An unconventional director, she co-founded the hybrid arts company, Paradigm Productions, staged the Green Room award-winner “Test Pattern” and embarked on a form of community-based theatre that integrates music, video, songs and movements.

“Sometimes there’s a script,” she says, “sometimes not.”

However, “Bare Witness” came with a well-researched script over 70 pages long, written by Lourey after years of conversations with experienced journalists.

“I was originally involved as an actor,” Kostich told “CityNews”. “Then Mari saw some of my work and said: ‘I think you’re the right person to direct this play’.”

Together with Carmody she got the piece down to a 30-page script with theatrical elements “not generally suggested in the script”.

The play follows the lives of several photographic journalists, particularly Dannie, played by Daniela Farinacci, who becomes addicted to the thrill and potency of war, but in a highly stylised approach, the director attempts to throw the audience into the world war zone, too.

ANU School of Music graduate, cellist Kristin Rule, binds the work together by creating “intricate and immediate sounds” live on stage that add to a “mystical” element.

The other journo-characters include Irishman Jack, brought up in a war zone, radio reporter Violette, partly modelled on the late Marie Colvin, and a hard-edged Slavic photographer.

Yes, there’s a climax, of which Kostich says: “It’s provocative, in a good way… we ask people to think twice from now on when they see an image in print.”

“Bare Witness”, The Street Theatre, November 6-10, bookings to 6247 1223 or www.thestreet.org.au