Address
Lawrences Lane
Canowindra NSW 2804

Venue
Homestead Theatre perform at a range of venues throughout Australia.

Company information

Homestead Theatre was formed in 1990 in Albany WA as a vehicle for classic and original theatre throughout the south coast. From 1998 to 200, the company was resident in Perth WA, and specialised in spoken word productions based on the techniques and aesthetics of oral improvisational poetry from around the world. Many of these productions were devised at the invitation of Festivals and other Arts Events, and many have been developed in collaboration with WA's leading composers and musicians.



Although some productions have been derived from existing texts - such as "The Gospel of Mark", "The Book of Thel", Smart's "Agnes Dei" and "The Unas Pyramid Texts" - the majority of the company's work has been devised by Noël Christian.



In 2001, XPress Magazine described Noël Christian's work as a 'verbalised Dali painting.' 



WA Critic Daniel Narbett said: "If Moses came down from the mountain with the tablets of the law and found himself in Australia, if he looked around, chucked the tablets away and told funny stories instead, then you would have Noël Christian's brand of theatre."



Since 2001, Homestead Theatre has practiced as a successful touring company performing to communities of all sizes throughout southern Australia. 



Homestead Theatre is changing. It has been reformatted as homestead: Theatre of Words, is developing a series of plein-air recordings, an online presence, and a fresh corporate personality.



Live performance and touring remain central to homestead: but the 200+ performances a year will shrink to more manageable proportions and the company will develop an electronic stage for new works.

This is the on-line future for homestead: Theatre of Words

Plein-Air Recordings

Plein-air means art done outside, on location, out of the studio and in the world that we all share.  

Think of the Heidleberg School, of Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin. These are our great plein-air painters. Their work is some of Australia’s most loved and trusted art.

homestead: makes recordings. They are not recordings of live shows.  They are recorded in paddocks and deserts, in creek beds and national forests, in stock yards and abandoned townships, in gullies, craters and at cliff faces. They are plein-air.

What do you get when you hear plein-air recording? The beautiful colour of the earth. The echoes of the voice from the ground beneath our feet. The shapes of valleys. The solidity of stone. Trees that embrace sound and whisper it back again. The different tones of a voice according to the heat and moisture of the air.

More, you get the world. The real, out-there world where theatre actually takes place. The world of birds singing, and dogs barking in the distance. The world of rustling grass and passing traffic. The world of buildings and clearings, of sudden surprises and the long, even tone of slow life.

You get theatre living in the places where living gets done. You get the environment. You get home.

You get a place to be at home. You get a Homestead.

homestead: is plein-air.

homestead: makes recordings of the world.


Plein-Shed Recordings

Australia is filled with sheds. Without sheds, Australia would be nothing but a Bridge, an Opera House, an Exhibition Building and a funny looking flagpole. Sheds are the guts and the skin of the place. You feel good in a shed. Sheds are a place to be yourself. Sheds know who you are.

Old sheds change according to the weather. The wood swells and shrinks, the metal clinks and ticks and rocks, the stone footings growl and the roof trusses expand and contract according to the time of day. Season by season, a shed grows in character, from day to day a shed is a different world.

A shed is a personality. Secretive and soft, abandoned and aggressive, rich in possible futures, clearly committed to fate or ever-evolving from one ramshackle present to the next. A shed is a Dreaming that happens as we speak.

homestead: puts poetry into sheds. The recordings made there come from  the dust and the boards and the junk. They reveal the weather upon built spaces. They are intimate. They are alive with the complexity of space. With the echoes and confessions of wood and corrugated iron Of lanolin soaked floors and sun blasted timber. Of rusted machines and artificial caverns lost  to the light. Sometimes there is the beauty of noise. Sometimes, the glamour of silence.   

This is plein-shed.

homestead: puts poetry back where men once turned bodies into work and  sweat into the measure of the day.  

The cities, the towns and the outback are filled with sheds.

homestead:  is there too, with them.


Prospectus

homestead: makes theatre that is Australian, Christian, Realist and Earthy. If you want to get a feel for it, think of Shearing the Rams painted by Heironymus Bosch or a gargoyle growing out of Wilpenna Pound or The Divine Comedy on a Slim Dusty album or a Choral Mass in a Strip Club - in fact, just think of The Turangalila Symphony with a few jokes and an Australian accent and you’ve got it.   

homestead: will launch its new site with a free audio download of Genesis: The First Seven Days.

There will also be a free audio and eText download of Tooborac, a new work about Love, an Echidna, a Car and the woman that comes between them.

And, for sale there will be:

An audio download of The Gospel of Mark, recorded in and around The Nangar. This is the text of the acclaimed touring production that has been traveling round Australia since 2002.
 
An audio download of Genesis: People on Earth, an adaptation of the first 10 chapters of Genesis based on the Tyndale and Douay-Rheims translations. and recorded at Dripping Rock in The Nangar.

Audio and eText downloads of:

Flat Madigan and the Fart from Warracknabeal - the story of an habitual thief and a famous fart, this is a gentle and popular satire on the Australian character.

Torrumbarry - a show about birds and a snake, but really an acclaimed satire on the super-powers presented first at the Corymbia Festival in Kalamunda just after the invasion of Iraq.

Granite Island - a tender love story between an artistic boy and a girl who becomes the lover of a Great White Shark.

My Landlady’s Garden in a Corner of the Kingdom of God - commissioned by Lifesauce in 2002, this is a light-hearted meditation on community, loneliness, and the spread of blessings from person to person until all the world is renewed.

Audio files will also be available on CD through mail order.

Recordings with be in the Plein-air and Plein-shed series.


New Projects

Anna Bay, downloadable in audio and eText - A bitter satire on the state of the nation and our obsession with making ourselves modern, fashionable and new.

Verses from the Bight downloadable in eText - A fantasia of money, sex and murder set on the Nullabor and in ballad style.

Printed books of Anna Bay and Verses from the Bight will be available through mail order.

The Psalms in downloadable audio, each recorded in different translations and in different locations.

The Dog Guard in downloadable audio - John Boyle O’Reilly’s invention of Western Australian history, twisted with wonderful malice from the real -life horrors of the detention of the Noongar on Rottnest.

A new recording series, Plein-ratbag, will present spoken texts as no one has heard them before. The mixer will be the stage. Trickery, jiggery-pokery, ratbaggery and lies will rule. It will be both real and surreal at the same time, a brilliant pandemonium of voices in extreme or unstageable plays. The series will include Cain: a Mystery by Byron, King Edward the Third by Blake and Ashtaroth by Adam Lindsay Gordon .  

Further information
Noel Christian
041 424 5509

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