THE successful applicants of The Street Theatre’s “Early Phase” program for 2021 have been announced today (October 13) by artistic director and CEO Caroline Stacey.

The artists chosen to work with The Street to develop ideas into concept treatments, are jazz star music, photographer and videographer Liam Budge and screen practitioner, video artist, and writer Farnoush Parsiavashi and writers Emily Clark and Maura Pierlot.

The program Street offers four artists a supported concept development process to take the glimmer of an idea, feeling, or impulse through to concept treatment with a professional theatre company. Each artist receives a payment of $5000, together with the development.

The theatre’s arts programs producer, Shelly Higgs, describes the selected participants as “all highly committed, curious and talented theatre makers who seek to create work that speaks to now; that question, that provoke, that plant the seeds for change.”

From October to January 2022, Budge, Clark, Parsiavashi and Pierlot will work with The Street to investigate, clarify and articulate their ideas, sharing their concept development process and individually work with a coach to prepare for pitching their work to a panel of Australian live theatre producers.

Building on their “Early Phase” work last year, playwrights Adam Broinowski and Dylan Van Den Berg will be entering into the second phase of development of their early concept works. The Street is also working in development with CJ Bowerbird on his play “Coward’s Punch” and with Anna Johnstone and Stefanie Lekkas on their development of a children’s theatre piece, “Mud.”

“You have to be ambitious. You need to take risks,” Stacey says.