Looking At The Photos Later I Love What I See.   Photographs of PaperBag’s performance at the 2006 Peat’s Ridge Festival inspired the troupe’s founder Sally Swain to create a series of artworks that now feature on our 2008 postcard. 

Sally recalls “Loud loud LOUD pumping music from at least three nearby tents. It is a music festival, after all. And, we’ve clearly been allocated a stage by someone who’s never seen Playback Theatre. It’s the size of a peanut, and so we range out over a grassy expanse. I am in musician’s role. The actors are required to be very large of sound and gesture - to work closely together in an exaggerated physical way. The show is successful, with enthusiastic tellers of personal stories. The crowd doesn’t come and go. It comes and stays, multiplying many times in size.

Looking at the photos later, I love what I see. Strong, alive, connected, organic shapes. A unified organism composed of distinctively individual facial and body expressions. The ever-changing shape of the PaperBag PlayBack beast.

I am inspired to paint several pictures”

Sally’s inspired artworks will be on display at PaperBag’s next public performance – 3pm on 30th March at the Lilyfield Community Centre – together with our postcards, so that you can take a little reminder of these images home with you.  And remember to grab some extra cards for your friends who may be interested in our performances.

Free Community Performances.  In keeping with its philosophies of service to the community and making performances accessible, each year PaperBag makes available up to three “free of charge” performances.  Community groups and organisations are invited to make application to receive one of these performances.  Each application will be considered on its merits, and will be assessed against a range of criteria that include (but are not limited to):

·         the values of the applicant’s organisation

·         the performance’s target audience

·         intended outcomes and benefits from the event

·         prior receipt of PaperBag’s free performances

·         the troupe’s prevailing operational and artistic demands.

So if you are part of, or know, a group who could make use of a playback performance but are not able to afford one due to limited resources, send your submission to us at: paperbagpb@hotmail.com

Meet Eddy.  Edwina Donald has always experienced an inexplicably deep love of, and freedom in, the sacred ritual space of performance, and from an early age has been captured by the potency of its transformative power, for both performers and audience.  In her younger years she grew up on a performance diet of Shakespeare, and followed the call of scripted theatre, which led her to study a Bachelor of Creative Arts in performance.  This study opened her to exploring other areas of performance, pursuing vocal development and the freedom of song, song writing, and nurturing a growing vision in working with communities and individuals to empower social change in creative ways, drawing on the rich wisdom of traditional roots with contemporary relevance.  In this vision she found her way to PaperBag PlayBack theatre, and in doing so, began the journey toward uncovering the incredible potential of a form which combines the freedom, humour and playful spontaneity of improvisation, with the profundity and realness of working with the audiences' and our own actual living stories.  Currently Edwina is studying for a postgraduate Diploma of Counselling, and pursues other performance ventures and anti-war and environmental activism.  She has been with PaperBag since early 2006.