NORPA

Northern Rivers Performing Arts (NORPA) based in Lismore New South Wales ,  is a not-for-profit arts organisation with a 30-year track record of making original Australian work from the ground up. Inspired by people and place, they make bold and vital theatre for everyone bringing homegrown stories to life. NORPA is proof small towns have big creative potential.

For 29 years, Lismore City Hall was NORPA’s office, making space and theatre. The ground-floor studio birthed a pipeline of new creative ideas and works and supported the region’s creative ecology. NORPA’s reputation for theatre making, community engagement and artist development grew from here.  

Dinner Party at the End of the World 

Dinner Party at the End of the World is a large-scale multi artform, creative community project inspired by community responses to a natural disaster in flood-ravaged Lismore.

Eight Creative Leads, alongside community groups and collaborators, will explore and develop creative responses to stimulus material and flood stories and come together in a large factory; as a creative take-over in the centre of Lismore. 

The concept  of a dinner party at the end of the world aims to acknowledge the threat of climate change while celebrating  the Lismore community’s spirit, bravery and resilience in the face of disaster. 

Visit NORPA website

Image Credit: Vanessa Kellas

Beaker Street

Beaker Street is a not-for-profit cultural organisation in lutruwita/Tasmania, with a core goal of building community through access to the sciences and arts. They host the annual Beaker Street Festival — a 10-day program of events, exhibitions, and excursions that explores the intersection of art and science. Beaker Street Festival invites locals and visitors  to experience nipaluna/Hobart and beyond in new and exciting ways, and discover the exceptional local artistic, cultural, culinary and natural offerings through a scientific lens.  

Hobartica

Hobartica to be sited on the nipaluna/Hobart waterfront, is an experimental and innovative cultural embassy — the first in the world that examines connection to a place while protecting it from the pressures of visitation. This development project will create an immersive multi-arts ‘embassy’, a public platform that brings Antarctica's stories to life through authentic station-life experiences, real-time research and experimental artworks. Collaborating with artists, including arts leader Travis Tiddy, and with the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS), CSIRO, Australian Antarctic Division, and Tasmanian Polar Network, creative development will occur through 2025, culminating in a public showing of works in development during the Beaker Street Festival in August 2025.

Visit Beaker Street website

Image credit: Beaker Street and Oi Studios.

Country Arts SA

Country Arts SA is an arts organisation with a regional focus. It has worksites across multiple Aboriginal countries. They are committed to supporting First Nations artists to tell their stories using both traditional and new art forms. Sharing culture through art encourages more people to connect with our history and celebrate our First Nations people. Country Arts SA’s vision is for both artists and communities of regional South Australia to thrive through engagement with the arts and be recognised as essential contributors to the nation’s cultural voice. Country Arts SA’s unique state-wide, multi-artform remit and 31 years’ experience puts us it in a singular position to make art and tell stories that can’t be made anywhere else in the world, and to contribute to a national cultural identity that embraces regional communities at its heart.  

Kumarangk

Kumarangk is a major new theatre work telling the true story of the Ngarrindjeri women who resisted the construction of the Hindmarsh Island Bridge, in Goolwa South Australia between 1994 and 2001.

Kumarangk will be experienced by audiences through a  performance on Country, as well as an exhibition, and a documentary film . 

The theatre production which is supported by Creative Australia's investment is led by First Nations creatives: Glenn Shea as  director with writer Tracey Rigney.

Importantly Kumarangk is guided and led by the cultural stewardship of the Ngarrindjeri mi:minar (Ngarrindjeri women), who led the community resistance. This story has never been told from their perspective.  

Visit Country Arts SA website

Image credit: 'Aunty Sandra Saunders, Aunty Margaret Brodie and Aunty Ellen Trevorrow', Colleen Strangways.

Juluwarlu

Since 2000 Juluwarlu Group Aboriginal Corporation has been a leading cultural and community organisation, preserving, promoting, and protecting Yindjibarndi culture. They are a collective of artists, cultural leaders, and community members based in Ngurrawaana, a small (and the only) community on the Yindjibarndi homelands in the Pilbara, WA. Juluwarlu maintains a nationally recognised cultural archive that informs all their work and is expanded through each of their projects. Juluwarlu Art Group is a successful art centre, with artists exhibiting in major institutions nationally and featuring in Telstra NATSIAA Awards. Juluwarlu utilises all forms and mediums of expression to capture and share their culture and stories. Since 2019 they have been exploring puppetry and theatre and this resulted in a successful pilot production of Ngurra Nyujunggamu at the Red Earth Arts Festival in 2023.  

Ngurra Nyujunggamu: When the World Was Soft

Juluwarlu will adapt and expand their production ‘Ngurra Nyujunggamu: When the World Was Soft’ for large-scale presentation, national tour and metropolitan take-overs.

Using theatre, puppetry, music, projections, promenade performance and visual art, they will bring foundational stories from Australia’s oldest culture to Australia’s contemporary cities, sharing the knowledge, values and culture of Yindjibarndi people with the nation.

Yindjibarndi Elders, cultural leaders and community members will partner with outstanding practitioners on the development of a tour-ready full-length production, accompanied by roving large-scale puppets, outdoor projected animations, and a visual art showcase extending the performance across public spaces in major cities and festivals.

Visit Juluwarlu website

Image credit:  '2023 production of Ngurra Nyujunggamu: When the World Was Soft, Red Earth Arts Festival, Karratha'. Courtesy of Juluwarlu.

Fremantle Biennale 

The Fremantle Biennale is a biennial festival of site-responsive contemporary art. Their mostly free program presents artworks from Western Australia, Australia, and the world, in a nationally recognised festival that reveals and celebrates the cultural, social, and historical distinctiveness of the Fremantle (Walyalup) region. The Fremantle Biennale collaborates with artists to commission remarkable and experimental site-responsive contemporary art, across art forms and practices.  

Night Rise

Night Rise is a new concept that will bring together contemporary art experiences, artists and cultural leaders with the dark sky places of Western Australia.

Over 80% of the world’s population now live in areas where they cannot see the stars. Across Australia the rise of protecting darkness and astrotourism is well documented, as ever-greater numbers seek out starlight and naturally occurring phenomena like eclipses, solstices and rare astral happenings.

WA is one of the most unique places worldwide to experience such sky phenomena. In the next 15 years WA will see more total solar eclipses than anywhere in the world.

NIGHT RISE is a project that brings together artists and creatives with astro, cultural tourism and environmental initiatives, and communities of WA.  

Visit Fremantle Biennale website

Image credit: Yabini Kickett, First Lights – Kooranup (Dyoondalup), 2023. Commissioned by Fremantle Biennale. Video still by Nic Montagu.

Perth Festival

Perth Festival exists to enrich life through art and has been celebrating Perth, its people, and its culture for more than 70 years as Australia’s longest-running arts festival. While presenting extraordinary cultural experiences from across the globe, we are equally passionate about nurturing the next generation of WA creative thinkers and fostering long-term, reciprocal relationships with our region — the Indian Ocean Rim and its many countries.

Tales from the Inner City by Shaun Tan

There are Crocodiles living on the 87th floor. Bears are taking the human race to court. No one knows how to get the baby Orca down from the sky. Welcome to 'Tales from the Inner City'.

Shaun Tan’s award-winning anthology of surreal short stories will be brought to life as a city-wide, site-responsive theatrical adventure for children and families. Part-performance, part-installation, and fully immersive, this project will transform Perth’s CBD into a visually arresting dreamscape.

Created by Western Australia’s leading theatre makers, visual artists, and collaborators from across the Asia Pacific region, this large-scale production will turn the city into a living, breathing stage for Shaun Tan’s extraordinary tales.  

Visit Perth Festival website

Image credit:  'Perth Festival, Tales from the Inner City'. Supplied by Perth Festival.

Ilbijerri 

Ilbijerri Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Theatre Co-op is Australia’s leading theatre company creating innovative works by First Peoples artists that gives voice to our cultures. They are the longest established First Peoples theatre company in Australia, creating, presenting, and touring, powerful and engaging theatre by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists.

ILBIJERRI is committed to growing a sustainable and vibrant First Peoples arts ecology and is investing in the next generation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander theatre makers and industry professionals.

The Line

The Line by award winning, Pakana/Palawa playwright, Nathan Maynard, is based on a quintessential Lutruwita/Tasmanian story from the Black War of the 1800’s that shocked, and continues to shape First Peoples today.

The Line is a dark, humorous, and absurd performance work which captures the devastating impact of The Black Line, a seven-week campaign designed to intimidate, capture, and displace Palawa people.

Integrating live film, puppetry, dance and text, this work explores the Palawa representation of time - past, present and always. It is both an act of cultural continuation and an evolution of storytelling aimed at creating a large-scale production for presentation within Major Arts Festivals across Australia.   

Visit Ilbijerri website

Image credit: 'The Line Development', 2024. Supplied by Ilbijerri.

All The Queens Men

All The Queens Men (ATQM) collaborate with communities of all shapes, sizes, and identities. They believe that artistic community collaboration, bound by strong partnerships and shared values, activates positive social change.  Led by artists Tristan Meecham and Bec Reid, ATQM has built meaningful and extensive relationships throughout the health, arts, equity, and community sectors to create a dynamic body of large-scale performance work, presented nationally and globally; consolidating their reputation as one of Australia’s most exciting, community-focused arts organisations.  

The Pageant

The Pageant is a breathtaking celebration of fashion and performance, honouring older lives living well.

Part pageant, part talent quest, part This Is Your Life, The Pageant prioritises our ageing population; showcasing older individuals (65+) who are thriving, brilliant and relevant.

The process matches older individuals with leading Fashion Designers to co-create bespoke Haute Couture reflecting and celebrating each of their unique identities and life stories.

The final outcome is a large-scale free ‘Pageant’ - an authentic and joyful reclamation of public space that challenges societal perceptions of ageing.

Visit All the Queens Men website

Image credit: 'LGBTIQ+ Elders Dance Club by All The Queens Men', Bryony Jackson.
 

Community Arts Network 

Community Arts Network Western Australia creates positive social change through the arts, building inclusion and understanding between people. For 40 years CAN has partnered with communities, sharing stories that are unwritten or unspoken. Their work breaks through the silence arising from systemic disempowerment.

Unfinished Business

Unfinished Business is a First Nations-led creative development to preserve, celebrate and share matriarchal traditions of Western Australia's Noongar culture, intertwined with a First Nations-led international exploration of matriarchal cultural practices in Indonesia.

Noongar-devised, this development is grounded in Elder-led knowledge and intergenerational skills transfer with a group of Aboriginal women artists, storytellers and documenters.

Cultural exchanges will springboard parallel explorations of matriarchal culture in Sumatra. The knowledge, stories and artefacts gathered and created during on-Country and cultural exchange workshops will become an interactive, multi-sensory exhibition, immersing visitors in sister matriarchal cultural practices, atthe 2027  Indian Ocean Craft Triennial  and touring to international venues.

Visit Community Arts Network website

 Image credit: 'Muriel Collard, Janet Colbung and Winnie McHenry', Michelle Troop.

Outer Urban Projects

Outer Urban Projects, founded in 2012, is a vital player in the Australian community arts and cultural development and performing arts sectors. They have forged a dynamic intergenerational performing arts company that collaborates with emerging artists and their communities in the “hardcore” outer northern suburbs of Melbourne. Their work reflects the complex face of contemporary Australia and challenges the architecture of access in the Australian arts industry.  

VIGIL

Based in Melbourne’s outer north, Outer Urban Projects is a dynamic force in community-engaged performance, collaborating with artists and their communities to reflect contemporary Australia in all its complexity. 

Their latest work, VIGIL, is a multidisciplinary and polyvocal work that explores the intersection of public and private safety with race, gender, and terror on the streets of Naarm.

VIGIL will unfold in site specific and theatre settings with plays, stories and dance set on trams, a suburban house, a bar and parklands.

VIGIL is developed in collaboration with visionary communities and creatives with something to say and ask of Australia - Do our lives matter? What lives matter?

Visit Outer Urban Projects website

Image credit: 'Vigil Development, Georiga Rudd, Jenni Large, Tara Jade-Samaya and Michaela Tancheff', Pippa Samaya.

The Substation

Amplifying artworks that transcend form, The Substation's multi-artform spaces are illuminated with the most urgent contemporary arts to inspire us to refigure problematic histories, imagine possible futures, & forge new connections. The Substation is the nation’s leader in multi-arts & experimental practice. They connect our continent’s most diverse communities in Naarm/ Melbourne’s west to the world through a program of international, national & local presentation, development & engagement opportunities.

The Street Dance Exchange

The Street Dance Exchange is a fresh collaboration between The Substation (Western Melbourne) and PYT Fairfield (Western Sydney). Supported by Creative Australia’s Creative Futures Fund, this exchange brings together Efren Pamilacan, Eliam Royalness, Feras Shaheen, Gusta Mara, Jamaica Moana and Troi-Saraih Ilsley with producing partner Intimate Spectacle. The Street Dance Exchange builds a foundation for a major new work, sharing the collective and individual experiences from the lead artists and their communities.

Visit The Substation website

Image credit: Feras Shaheen

The Wired Lab

The Wired Lab connects artists and communities in new ways. Based on Wiradyuri Country in south-west NSW and founded by life-long rural resident Sarah Last, our mission is to cultivate creative continuums by providing a rurally centered platform for exploration. These experimental & conceptually rigorous cultural experiences give agency to the broad spectrum of communities. Their work exemplifies a commitment to re-centering cultural experiences.  

Winhangadhurinya

Winhangadhurinya is more than a word—it's a profound philosophy of deep listening and cultural interconnectedness. In 2025, The Wired Lab will transform a deconsecrated church in rural New South Wales into an ambisonics deep listening space—the only one of its kind in Australia, marking a pivotal shift for the organisation and a deepening of their collaboration with the Wiradjuri community.

Creative Australia's investment will support the development of two major works to launch the space..This strategic cultural infrastructure project, will enable truly immersive audience experiences, and provide the opportunity for world class artists to present exceptional sound work to Australian audiences. 

Visit The Wired Lab website

Image credit: 'Frame from capital works plan to revive the deconsecrated church in Muttama for community cultural purposes'. Provided by The Wired Lab.

Red Room Poetry

Red Room Poetry is Australia’s largest commissioner of new poetry. While they publish some books, Red Room Company primarily find innovative ways to advance poetry in society and build creative opportunities & audiences for poets.

Youth Poet Laureate

Youth Poet Laureate program is a nationwide project of scale and reach to fire the creativity of young Australians and build Australia’s international reputation for creative innovation.

A Youth Poet Laureate from every state/territory will be chosen to join a curated mentoring program, and an expert panel will select one of these as National Youth Poet Laureate.

Visit Red Room Poetry website

Image credit: 'Tamara Shelton at Poetry Month', 2022, Brendan Bonsack.

Riverside’s National Theatre of Parramatta

Riverside’s National Theatre of Parramatta creates bold, contemporary theatre. Their core focus is creating critically acclaimed work that amplifies all Australian voices, ensuring representation with stories celebrating a diverse and inclusive country. Based in Western Sydney, a traditional heartland for the working class and new Australians, their stories resonate, relate and engage with diverse audiences.

From Darwin to Dixon Street: Dumpling Dynasties

Despite anti-Chinese immigration laws that spanned over 70 years, Chinese immigrants sit alongside English immigrants as one of the core pillars of Australia's population. Riverside's National Theatre of Parramatta aims to create an epic and expansive theatrical event, with multi layered family stories, entwining tales of ingenuity, innovation and a loyalty to their new country, peppered with heartbreak, deception and racism.

Visit National Theatre of Parramatta's website

Image credit: Image supplied by artist.

Erth Visual & Physical Inc.

Erth Visual and Physical Incorporated is a company fuelled by beautiful accidents; a team of creators, makers and performers pushing the limits of design, content and experience. 

For over thirty years Erth’s puppetry-based theatrical productions and innovative community projects have challenged and inspired audiences around the world, driven by a special interest in natural history, indigenous folklore, sociology and urban mythology. Today the company is recognised internationally as an innovator of physical and visual theatre, and a creator of brave, unbridled work for children. 

Erth's Shark Dive

Erth’s Shark Dive is an interactive theatrical experience that brings audiences up close and personal with the much-maligned predator of the sea. 

By adapting the work for theatre spaces they will welcome larger audiences expanding Shark Dive's capacity to initiate debate about shark and marine conservation and allow a space for audiences to reflect on their role in the endangerment and protection of sharks. With a revitalised delivery platform, they will bring the story of Australian sharks, whose reputation has slandered their species as ferocious killers, to the international stage.

Visit the Erth Visual & Physical Inc. website

Image credit: 'Erth's Shark Dive', Jade Ellis

Windmill Theatre Company

Windmill Theatre Company has a global reputation as a leading producer of contemporary theatrical work for children, teenagers and families.

Each year the company delivers a season of performances in South Australia, tours extensively around the country and presents its unique works across the world. Over the last 23 years Windmill has created 65 works for children and families and performed in 190 cities and towns across 15 countries.

Windmill also has a screen producing arm, Windmill Pictures, that creates unique film and television projects, positioning the company as a powerhouse of work for young audiences across both stage and screen.

Windmill shows have won several prestigious awards including multiple Helpmann, Greenroom, and Australian Writer’s Guild Awards, an AACTA, Kidscreen, Australian Director’s Guild and Australian Production Design Guild Award (to name just a few).

Mama Does Derby

Mama Does Derby is a hilarious and heartfelt new Australian comedy co-created by Clare Watson and Virginia Gay for teenagers and families.

Staged on a circular track, the cast of actors are joined by a team of locally engaged, Roller Derby athletes who perform in the work as a community chorus. And throw in live music, just for good measure.

We follow the story of a single mum (played by Amber McMahon) and daughter who arrive in a regional town to ‘settle down’. Mum is delightfully adolescent while her creative and anxious teenager plays the parenting role in the duo. Small-town life is smothering Mum. That is, until she discovers Roller Derby.

Concept and direction by Clare Watson, knife-edge writing by Virginia Gay, design by Jonathon Oxlade, choreography by Larissa McGowan and lighting by Lucy Birkinshaw come together to create a truly epic, immersive and unmissable live experience

Visit Windmill Theatre Company website

Image credit: Supplied by Windmill Theatre Company

Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra

Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra is proud to be one of Australia’s leading performing arts companies and part of the DNA of Tasmanian cultural life – they have been inspiring, invigorating, and delighting audiences through music since 1948. TSO are recognised across the island and throughout the world for their distinctive artistic identity that is forged from people and place.  

palawa kani – songs and stories of Lutruwita/Tasmania

palawa kani – songs and stories of lutruwita/Tasmania is a collaboration between proud palawa artist Dewayne Everettsmith, Erkki Veltheim (conductor/arranger), Darwin based Skinnyfish Music and the TSO. Dewayne will perform original songs in palawa kani, the reconstructed and restored language of the palawa people of lutruwita/Tasmania. This is the first major musical work in this language and involves a studio recording; regional tour; performance for indigenous communities; performances for the general public; & educational resources for schools.

Dewayne is a collaborator with the palawa kani language centre & prominent elders who are in support of this project.

Dewayne is artistic lead and visionary, with Veltheim & TSO supporting his vision through our expertise.

Visit Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra website

Image credit: 'Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra Songs of Ceremony and Dewayne Everettsmith documentation', Ben Raynor.

The Cad Factory

The Cad Factory is an artist led organisation committed to ethical collaboration with communities and environments. They deliver a ground-breaking program of experimental projects that engage with complex social realities at local, national and international levels. They create unique and impactful artistic outcomes, generate innovative partnerships, provide professional development for artists, produce sector resources and educate publics about the value of the arts through talks and conferences.  

River Stories

River Stories is an innovative and ambitious multi-sector arts project that responds to one of Australia’s ongoing problems – how to care better for the Murray-Darling waterways and the peoples, plants and animals of the river system’s communities. Moving beyond the politics of conflict that so often define this issue, River Stories will bring together artists, scientists, community, Indigenous leaders and local/national water managers in a series of projects that reconfigure sites of water conflict as places of exchange, connection and shared purpose.

Building on their extensive record of collaborative practice, we will create large scale art outcomes in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, generating shared understandings that honour and connect the diverse cultural and ecological meanings of rivers.

Visit The Cad Factory website

Image credit: 'Wirramarri: Long Way from Home at Koori Beach'. Provided by The Cad Factory.

Merrigong Theatre Company

Australia’s largest regional theatre company, Merrigong is widely recognised as one of our most progressive and dynamic arts organisations. The company manages one of Australia’s most important regional venues, Illawarra Performing Arts Centre, on unceded Dharawal land in Wollongong.

Since 2005, under Artistic Director Simon Hinton, Merrigong has created 63 new Australian works - 20 mainstage productions, and 43 co-produced with local independent artists. Highlights include site-specific works in iconic local settings such as Wollongong Botanic Garden and Port Kembla Pool, and national tours of works like Kay Proudlove’s Dear Diary, and Alana Valentine’s Letters to Lindy.

Merrigong plays a key role in the national theatre sector through its industry-leading programs of presentation, artist development and production, including the MerrigongX Artists’ Program (since 2017 giving 400+ local artists opportunities to develop their practice), First Nations Program, Artist Wellbeing Program, and The Strangeways Ensemble, Merrigong’s permanent ensemble of seven neurodiverse actors.

Storyland

Merrigong Theatre Company’s Storyland by Catherine McKinnon and Aunty Barbara Nicholson, directed by Leland Kean, is a large-scale, site-specific adaptation of Catherine McKinnon’s novel, shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.

Five interconnected First Nations and multi-cultural stories chart the relationship between people and the land in the Illawarra region. From the region’s first contact between European settlers and First Nations people at the mouth of Lake Illawarra in 1796, to an airship in 2717, floating high above an environmentally ravaged landscape, Storyland is an epic, uniquely Australian work.

Commissioned by Merrigong, and in creative development since 2018, Storyland will be presented ‘on country’, at the foot of Wollongong’s escarpment as part of Merrigong’s highly regarded annual subscription season. Through partnerships with other arts organisations, Sydney audiences will be invited to experience this extraordinary event, with a special audio prologue to listen to while travelling the short distance down to the region.

Visit Merrigong Theatre Company website

Image credit: 'Aunty Barbara Nicholson, Leland Kean, and Catherine McKinnon', Children of the Revolution.

Brisbane Festival

Major Brisbane Festivals is Queensland’s largest and premiere major event organisation and the states leading experts in creating works of scale and spectacle. The festival is fast becoming a national leader creating groundbreaking new work and establishing new partnerships. Given their experience and trajectory, they are thrilled to be leading this collective of premiere arts organisations - Trish Wadley Productions and Sydney Theatre Company - in the creation of a new state of the nation theatre work. 

Strong is the New Pretty

Strong is the New Pretty is a groundbreaking State of the Nation play by Suzie Miller, one of Australia’s most acclaimed contemporary playwrights.

This compelling story explores how a nation transforms a "no" into a resounding "yes," capturing the rise of women's professional sport in Australia, with a focus on the creation of the AFL Women’s League.

Directed by the renowned Lee Lewis, Strong is the New Pretty celebrates the collective power of women uniting for change. It’s a work that examines family dynamics, relationships, the courage to face the unknown, and the shifting politics of our time.

With an ensemble cast of up to 10 actors in multiple roles, this is Suzie Miller’s first State of the Nation play—a powerful exploration of Australia’s social and cultural evolution to have its world premiere in the 2026 Brisbane Festival.

Visit Brisbane Festival website

Image credit: Graphic supplied by Brisbane Festival.