UMBER productions

water wars
by Elaine Acworth

The early stages of development on water wars has been carried with the assistance of a grant from Creative Sparks, a joint initiative of Brisbane City Council and Arts Queensland.

It has enabled a team of theatre professionals to contribute valuable insight and advice to the writing/creating process.  Shaun Charles as director, David Walters as lighting designer, Bruce McKinven as designer and Kathryn Kelly as dramatug have all given responses to initial concepts I outlined, and participated in an exchange of ideas around these. 

Our discussions began around the challenges of performance in various kinds of spaces, but quickly moved to encompass the character of the piece, audience engagement,  the requirements of text-based theatre and of physicalized work, and the kind of story, and story-telling, that might best reveal these human relationships,  and serve the developing story.

Despite it’s existence in “the outdoors”, water wars is an intimate story.  It is a study of impulse, and consideration, of the nature of community, and of the worth of an individual’s efforts in the face of great odds.  It’s also a story of jealousy, rage, “melting moments that were NOT made with butter”, chooks, and what happens within a marriage when one partner changes, but the other cannot.

water wars will undergo the final component of this early developmental work in early July 2009.  We’ll have a very short workshop on the piece – two days of reading and discussion, culminating in a reading to an invited audience.

The development of Water Wars has been proudly supported by Creative Sparks - a joint initiative of Brisbane City Council and the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.