With hopes of enriching the Canberra theatre scene with original and innovative productions, the budding A-Z Theatre company is receiving professional development support through a year-long residency at The Street Theatre.

While the company may be new, co-founders Anna Johnstone and Cathy Petőcz have been active members of the theatre scene locally, nationally and abroad for years. First meeting when they were both involved in Canberra Youth Theatre, the pair have followed each other’s careers as they have progressed.

“We were excited about each other as artists and decided that we needed to make work together that would contribute to the Canberra landscape of youth theatre or theatre for young people,” says Anna.

“We were sort of feeling like we needed to combine our forces and make work that was a bit weirder, a bit more complex or using processes that were out of the ordinary and so we thought our own little experiment,” adds Cathy.

Their focus for the productions is theatre for young people, though they won’t be ruling out adult cast members in their productions. They are still ironing out all the finer details but expect that casting will be production dependent, as in their work in progress, Mud.

Featuring two adult actors, the show is for the youngest of theatregoers, around preschool age, and explores the concepts of difference, friendship and the negotiation of relationships. While the work is still in development, director, leading artist and educator Anna explains it’s the story of conflicting personalities.

“It’s the story of ‘clean’ who lives in their own special world, all alone, quite happy, and then ‘mud’ lands in their life and mud has a jungle inside them. When they burp, hiccup, sneeze, fart and poop, the jungle falls out. I guess that’s a metaphor for dealing with difference; how do you deal with somebody’s jungle?” says Anna.

Reflecting on how the pandemic has affected young people, their agency, and their level of comfort in social situations, the duo wanted to explore the concept of how to be a friend. Their second development explores another kind of relationship – humanity’s connection to the world around us.

“A play for teenagers called The Anthropocene Must End, it’s looking at basically post-anthropocentric thinking for teenagers; looking to nature to take inspiration of how we can reorganise ourselves as humans to live better in and with nature,” saysCathy,the lead artist behind the project.

Diversity, not competition, is what the pair want to bring to the theatre scene in Canberra. They recently brought The People’s House to life at the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House during the Enlighten Festival.

“Our work is quite experimental. Often when we develop something, there is a set of almost scientific experimental questions that we sort of bring into the space to test. Whereas, I think, other of the theatre ecology is about celebrating the ancestry of theatre and the conventions that are important to the art form,” says Cathy.

Both creatives say that as audience members they are drawn to unusual, weird and surprising, and that’s what they want to bring to their stage. Hoping to attract the weirdest, most fun-loving, obscure or monster-loving art lovers to their productions, they are excited to work with emerging talent on projects.

Not focusing so much on the training side of youth theatre, they aim to work with developing artists and provide more opportunities for young people in the region. They say the training comes with professional practice and hashing out ideas on projects collaboratively. They believe this process of experimentation and input will help those involved feel more of a multi-faceted artist rather than just an actor.

“The most exciting thing for me is to cultivate their amazing imaginations; my imagination doesn’t have superiority over theirs. It’s about deep critical thinking and analysis,” says Anna. “Having said that, part of the process of creating a piece of work is an actor needs to be heard. So, you might step aside and work on voice for a bit, but I think it becomes more organically part of the process.”

“I’m quite interested in writing text that leaves space for future young actors to write their own sort of monologues within the dignity of a sound play structure,” says Cathy.

With her playwriting practice, Cathy wants to create opportunities for young actors. She is interested in writing pieces with space for performers to create monologues within the structure of a play.

“Young people need to be taken seriously by adults; we want to do that as collaborators with them. We want our audiences to really understand how smart, compassionate and intelligent, they’re so adept at thinking,” says Cathy.

They plan to bring entirely original works to the stage, saying they have way too many of their own ideas to do an established work.

“We want to make work that only we can make and then that’s going to speak to other people that also feel a sense of weirdness,” says Cathy.

“It is also taking risks. We’re both a bit addicted to pushing the limits and taking risks on a moment,” says Anna.

To get involved or to stay up to date with their progress, visit a-ztheatre.com

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