Contagion’s Kiss: Lepers' Story Inspires Play

Northern Territory physical theatre company Business Unusual draws on stories from Darwin’s history to create its theatre. Its latest work Contagion’s Kiss is inspired by stories from Darwin’s Channel Island Leprosarium. Nicola Fearn, the co-founder of the company, is also the co-director and co-writer of the work. She spoke to Neil Litchfield from Bordertown, on her road-trip from Melbourne to Darwin, in a fully laden car, complete with dog and a pair of crutches strapped to the roof-rack.

I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that I know very little about the theatre scene in Darwin, I confessed to Nicola Fearn.

“Darwin has gone through some highs and lows in relation to theatre,” she tells me, “and there isn’t a great deal happening, which means there are openings for independent producers.”

Where did the inspiration for Contagion’s Kiss spring from?

“I’d just finished another piece based on stories around displacement and Cyclone Tracy. Sarah Cathcart (co-writer and co-director) and I were in the museum and saw an exhibition on the Catholic nuns working in the remote communities. We came across the Channel Island Leprosarium. It was an incredible, little known, story about this little barren island in the middle of Darwin Harbour, that had nothing at all, not even fresh water. In the 1930s and 40s people were forcibly placed on this island and everything was taken across to them from Darwin by boat.

“We found a story about a young white girl, a beautiful pianist, who was hoping to make a career out of it. She got diagnosed with leprosy and was put on this island, the only white girl amongst predominantly aboriginal people. That led us to the stories of the people on the island, including this young woman, whose piano ended up being shipped out on the barge, and the story of her friendship with an indigenous woman.

“When we met this old, old lady we discovered that she was one of the first indigenous health workers. We’re not slavishly devoted to documentary style theatre. Basically we’ve taken these incredibly rich stories about people, and survival, and the strength which is inside us. That was our leaping off point to create a piece of visual theatre.

“Business Unusual is a visual theatre company, not driven by text, but working with visual image and mask and puppetry. We’re exploring how to tell this quite complex story through visual imagery, and get a resonance from it, and spark something in the audience from that.

“We’re working with a combination of core creatives from Melbourne and Darwin. Marg Horwell has created this installation-like set for us to play in and we’ve got a film animator collaborating with us. I get excited by theatre when actors keep their mouths shut, basically (she laughs). Too often I go to the theatre and I’m intrigued, and I love it, then people begin to speak and it goes all wrong. So this time we’re not using any text at all.

“We’re working with a fine puppeteer, Conor Fox, who trained at the VCA, is actually from Darwin originally and works in remote communities, and an indigenous woman, Samantha Chalmers, who is the cultural consultant. If you’re telling local Darwin stories, of course it’s going to be cross-cultural because it’s such a melting pot of different groups of people.

“We also have a live, on-stage musician, Biddy Connor, who plays with Missie Higgins, and does music for films.”

Where has the music sprung from?

“Originally from the white girl who was a pianist, which started me thinking, great, let’s have her play on stage. From there it became, well you can’t really have piano the whole way through this piece; we want a soundscape. That led us to Biddy, who’s done both.

“I really relish the opportunity to work with live music because when you’re working without text the silence and the sound is so important. That’s what’s audibly in the space.”

Where does the passion for actors who don’t talk come from?

“I found myself in Europe travelling and living in Amsterdam and Italy, where I fell into mask work, and I just developed a passion for it. I worked for a UK company called Trestle for many years and the stories they were managing to tell were just so powerful, without using any language at all.

“We did lots of touring to South America and all through Europe and our work could go everywhere because we had no language. We went to tiny places in Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, and it was fantastic to offer some theatre that could communicate immediately, cross-culturally, without any language issues. I just think it’s beautiful and magical and powerful, that world of the mask and the puppet, and how that is able to touch people in different ways.

They tend to understand the general narrative, but people will hopefully be touched in different ways by the images which we offer them.”

It’s a long way from Europe to the Northern Territory. How do you find yourself producing theatre in Darwin?

“I went there as a teenager, just after the cyclone, so I’ve had quite a long connection with Darwin over the years. We actually lived on the old ship that was brought in because there was no housing after the cyclone. It was a pretty interesting time to be there.

“I come and go. It is remote and it’s extraordinary when you first go there. When I go back, initially I’m quite horrified, but after two weeks I think, yes, this is an extraordinary place because of the different people that live here, the land, and the stuff that goes on. You need to leave there – you need to go and get fed from other parts of Australia and the globe, just because it is so remote.”

You’ve obviously found a rich vein for theatrical storytelling in the Northern Territory, though.

“It’s really rich. The stories are interesting because it’s a meeting point for so many different cultures and people. They’re the springboard, so it doesn’t always have to be rooted in historical stuff, but I find it an incredibly rich starting point, because all the stories always have a contemporary relevance and theme in them.”

Contagion’s Kiss, co-presented by Business Unusual and Brown’s Mart Productions, premieres at Brown’s Mart Theatre, Darwin, from Tuesday 4 – Sunday 16 June, 2013.

Images from previous Business Unusual Productions.

Originlly published in the May / June 2013 edition of Stage Whispers.

Link to ABC News Story