Mar 6, 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm

Centre for Stories

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Brought to you by Centre for Stories and Performing Lines WA as part of their Kolyang Program 2024, this interactive workshop is designed for emerging and curious writers to create pathways and opportunities to seed the development of universal stories for the stage.

Presented by Jay Emmanuel (Artistic Director of WA’s newest theatre company, Encounter) and poet, playwright, and artistic advisor, Karthika Nair, we will begin with a talk and presentation on becoming a playwright, followed by breakout group activities to engage participants and spark creative ideas for the stage.

While this event will be held in-person, we can help people to join online if there is enough interest. Please contact info@centreforstories.com if you would like to attend online.

Feature image photo of Jay Emmanuel by Mustafa Al-Mahdi.

Bio image of Karthika Nair by Koen Broos.

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  Jay Emmanuel

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  Jay is a theatre-maker, writer, director, creative producer and community advocate. He is committed to community development using participatory theatre making processes, actively engaging the CACD space to facilitate expression for communities to tell their stories. Engagement with moral dilemmas around race, identity, gender, sexuality, social exclusion has enabled communities, especially young people from migrant, refugee and queer communities to speak up in often hostile environments. Children of the Sea is one such collaborative project spanning four years of research and development.

  In 2020, Jay founded Encounter, WA’s new Theatre Company that champions stories from diverse cultures. Featuring a professional ensemble of emerging and established culturally diverse performers, it stages unique productions of excellence while exploring innovative and collaborative ways of making new theatre works.

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  Karthika Nair

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  Karthika Naïr is a poet, playwright, fabulist and dance scenarist. Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, her reworking of the foundational South Asian epic in multiple voices, won the 2015 Tata Literature Live Award for Book of the Year (India), and was highly commended at the 2016 Forward Prizes (UK). Les Oiseaux électriques de Pothakudi (Éditions Hélium/Actes-Sud, 2022) – her latest children’s book illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet – won the 2023 Prix Felipé for “ecological children’s literature”, and was shortlisted for the 2023 Prix Franco-Allemand de la littérature de jeunesse. Karthika’s play Beneath the Music, created and directed by Jay Emmanuel for Encounter Theatre, premiered at the Subiaco Arts Centre in Perth in May 2023. The dance performances she has scripted and co-scripted include Akram Khan’s multiple-award-winning DESH, and Until the Lions (adapted from a chapter of her eponymous book) and Carlos Pons Guerra’s Mariposa, a queer reimagining of Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly. She also scripted the updated spoken-word segments of Babel 7.16, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet site-responsive version for the Cour d’Honneur of the Palais des Papes at the 2016 Avignon Festival. Naïr is the co-founder of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Antwerp-based dance company, Eastman, and executive producer of several of his and Damien Jalet’s works (Les Médusés, Puz/zle, Babel(Words).

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