I am a D *cough* J living and working in Sydney and have been invited to bring my experimental performance piece ‘The Lord of Nonia’ to Alice Springs in September this year. With your help ‘The Lord of Nonia’ will be an all inclusive dance performance, which will see the audience mixing on the dance floor with costumed performers inspired by characters in the Narnia children’s book. The performers will have a choreographed routine that will force the audience to participate and ultimately choose sides. Who will prevail out of good and evil? Who will live and who will die? And which side will you dance for?

The festival, FREE BBQ CASH GIVEAWAY, has been created by the creative team Elephant Island and the Alice Springs based ARI, Watch This Space.



The festival looks to celebrate the Alice Springs art community, while at the same time draw in emerging artists from around Australia to take part in the festivities.

With your help, I will be one of the key emerging artists that participates in the festival and I will also take a lead role in helping to run the festival.

FREE BBQ CASH GIVEAWAY will run for three weeks, with the first two weeks looking to activate Watch This Space into an open-studio collaboration between the local and interstate artists all working together with a variety of different community groups, organisations and individuals to create a stage-space within the gallery. The last week of the festival will be a packed week of curated events using the created space.

During this time I will be taking part in the open studio collaboration, working as a co-lead in the creation of the sculpture space and assisting in the day to day efforts involved in running a festival.

In the final week of the festival I will be performing a new work called Lord Nonia. This performance piece will be part DJ set, part dance performance and part magical journey back through the wardrobe into a Narnia like land of fantastical creatures, turkish delight and synchronised dance against evil. The entire gallery and festival created sculpture space will e converted for one night only into a full gallery dance floor for the event. The costumed performers and the un-costumed public will have no choice but to dance side by side and pick a side, good or evil. For which side will you dance?

Our exciting funding situation

 The way in which the matched funds are being divided between the artists is very simple, the funds raised through the individual Pozible campaigns will go straight to the individual artists. Which means if I am fortunate to raise an amount over my funding target, these funds will go to me to assist in covering my costs associated with travel, development and time invested in the project. The funds that are to be matched, which is a maximum amount of $1,000 being matched for this campaign, will go towards covering some of the other costs of putting on the festival. 

The funds that I am trying to raise for my project will go towards covering some of the expenses involved in travelling to Alice Springs from Sydney, hiring costumes, developing props and also to pay other performers for their involvement in Lord Nonia.

The first and biggest challenge for me personally will be travelling from Sydney to Alice Springs. Tiger Airways has just announced that they are pulling out of Alice Springs, which means that airfares alone will cost around $600 just to get to FREE BBQ CASH GIVEAWAY. Of course there will be many other challenges involved in this project, that i will face once I (hopefully) arrive in Alice Springs. Before arrival, I will be working with performers over the phone/skype to rehearse and develop Lord Nonia, which will be a challenge in itself. Pulling together this development into a finished product once on the ground I feel will be my biggest challenge. However I feel as if i am in very safe hands, as the group of amazing Alice Springs performance community have such an amazing ability to make things work, no matter what the conditions.