An accomplished musician, photographer and videographer, Canberra artist Liam Budge has turned his hand to playwriting to develop a multi-disciplinary theatre work surveying fatherhood.

Utilising his creative skillset, Budge aims to bring the three elements together to tell the stories of eight dads, each from different cultural or experiential backgrounds.

“It’s the first time I’ve combined all my different creative elements into one project,” he said.

Conceived as a documentary theatre piece with live music, he plans to ultimately document eight fathers, with two already in the can.

“The final project will be a very broad range of views on fatherhood, on experiences of fatherhood, and a creative response to that,” he said.

“I thought it was a really interesting, universal topic I could jump into and explore in a different way I haven’t seen done before.”

The idea for the project was spurred on by time spent at home with his young son during the pandemic.

Having lived in New York for over six years, Budge and his family moved back to Australia just before the 2019-20 summer bushfires.

“During COVID, we spent a lot of time together hanging out, and I was really keen to keep creating, and how that manifested was really taking a lot of very high production home movies of Julian [his son].

“Also getting into film photography, and really focusing that on the family environment, and it made me start thinking about what I wanted to do creatively next.”

With a clear idea for the project, Budge went to The Street’s Early Phase development program – a collaborative concept development process that takes the seed of an idea and progresses it toward a concept treatment.

The program helped Budge organise his thoughts and think through the logistics of his project’s grand scope and scale.

“I love the collaborative nature of theatre, and I see the work as too cerebral to be presented in a stereotypical gig environment where everyone’s talking, it’s really a work that I hope will focus the attention on it,” he said.

The program included mentor sessions with photographer, Jarrad Seng, and Sydney playwright and dramaturg, Campion Decent, who does a lot of a work in verbatim theatre – the process of interviewing subjects and compiling the product from the responses.

“I was really interested in how he (Decent) could help me, because this was the first time I had embarked on profiling a lot of different people,” Budge said.

“That really helped before I’d started to film on how to construct interviewing to get some interesting responses from the subjects.”

Liam Budge is still on the lookout for subjects. To find out more or to register your interest, visit creswickcollective.com/fathers

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